From the (digital) book jacket of Psyche and Singularity: Jungian Psychology and Holographic String Theory by Timothy Desmond (2018):

“The most original and important contribution to the integration of Jungian psychology and physics since the original collaboration between Jung and Pauli.”
— Sean Kelly

“Timothy Desmond’s theory that the psyche is a gravitational singularity would drive both Isaac Newton and Sigmund Freud crazy. But any theory that doesn’t is a waste of time. Desmond articulates a vision that just might be wild enough to take us home.”
— Brian Thomas Swimme

The discussion may sound like insane science fiction, but Desmond offers a refreshingly accurate picture, a synthesis of psyche and quantum physics that becomes the key to unlock a map of consciousness and synchronicity backed by the central ideas of Pauli, Susskind, and Jung.” Shelli Joye, Author of Tuning the Mind: Holonomic Brain Theory and the Implicate Order

According to Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind, our three-dimensional universe is essentially a holographic “movie,” an illusion projected by one-dimensional threads of energy from the spherical horizon of the cosmos, where the past, present, and future are eternally superimposed. Psyche and Singularity shows how Susskind’s string theory of holographic information conservation corroborates some of psychologist Carl Jung’s most profound ideas. Timothy Desmond suggests that Susskind’s inside-out black hole model of the universe forms a geometrically perfect mandala: a central singularity encompassed by a two-dimensional sphere which serves as a universal memory bank. In precise fulfillment of Jung’s theory about the unifying quality of the mandala image as the “archetype of wholeness,” Susskind’s model of the universe reconciles the notoriously incommensurable paradigms of general relativity and quantum mechanics, providing a mathematically plausible explanation for Jung’s near-death experience of his past, present, and future life simultaneously at the cosmic horizon. Susskind’s theory also provides a plausible cosmological model to explain Jung’s theory of synchronicity: meaningful coincidences may be tied together by strings at the cosmic horizon, from which they radiate inward.

I asked Claude for some elaboration.1

Carl Jung once wrote that the psyche is “the highest intensity in the smallest space,” a phrase Desmond takes literally and expands upon. He suggests that the psyche (the totality of one’s conscious and unconscious mind) is structurally similar to a gravitational singularity, where immense energy is condensed into an infinitesimal space, like in a black hole.

Desmond connects Jung’s ideas with holographic string theory, which proposes that all information about a higher-dimensional reality could be encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary (similar to how a hologram works). He argues that the psyche might function similarly, where individual consciousness (our ego and personal unconscious) is a projection of a more fundamental collective or cosmic consciousness—similar to Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious.

In Jungian psychology, individuation is the process of integrating different aspects of the psyche into a unified whole (the Self). Desmond proposes that this process mirrors the collapse of energy into a singularity, where the psyche, upon reaching a certain intensity, might “fold in” on itself, much like how matter collapses into a black hole. This could explain mystical experiences, ego death, and spiritual enlightenment as moments where the individual mind converges with a greater, non-dual awareness.

Obviously Desmond is on to something here. At the very least, he is not wasting our time with some trite, dinky little theory that Freud and Newton would find reasonable.

Jeffrey Kripal (The Flip, 2019) shares a number of reflections and speculations which speak to the idea that physical laws and phenomenon possess a spiritual or mental dimension emphases mine).

In order to advance our knowledge of particle physics, we had to build billion-dollar technologies to expose matter to some of the most extreme and violent conditions in the universe. Only then did matter display some of its deepest secrets in the form of quantum fields, which, in turn, gave us a window into the high-energy states of the early cosmos.

While ethically we cannot expose people to extreme and violent conditions, life does this for us. If we look at what happens to a human being in extreme conditions (like a near-death experience or a traumatic paranormal event), we will likely get much closer to the truth of consciousness than we ever will by talking endlessly about qualia and cognitive modules.

It is no accident that the pioneers of quantum mechanics themselves went straight to mystical literature for the best “up here” analogies to quantum mechanical theory. They did not claim scientific status for these speculative comparisons, but they suggested deep parallels. It is difficult to read them without suspecting that they thought that mystical states were quantum mechanical in structure and nature.

As already noted, it was Niels Bohr who put the Chinese Dao symbol on his coat of arms to capture his famous logic of complementarity. Werner Heisenberg was nicknamed “the Buddha” for his profound interests in Indian philosophy. He was also the first to suggest that the so-called matter of quantum mechanic looks very Platonic in nature (that is, it looks more like a thought than a thing). Erwin Schrödinger had a similar interest in Hindu and Buddhist literature and thought that consciousness was fundamental—that is, not reducible to anything else. Wolfgang Pauli was convinced that some fusion of quantum physics and mystical experience constituted the future of thought.

How do we make sense of such physics-to-mystics intuitions and experiences? What all such quantum mystical literature has in common with the five models of the mind-matter relationship discussed previously is the understanding that the mathematical behavior and physical structure of reality—that is, the “objective” or “outside” structures mapped by science—must be realized by some inner stuff or substance, even if the math and physics can never tell us what that “something” on the “inside” is. The further bold thought here is that the realizer of all that structure and mathematics might be consciousness itself. In other words, there might well be a “subjective” or “inside” to reality that the scientific method can never get to in principle (since it only deals with the “outside” of things) but that mystical experience can and does all the time.

If this bold thought were true, one would expect that the inside of things would reflect or be complementary to the outside of things, that the physics and the mystics would correlate in some parallel fashion, without ever, of course, being confused as the “same thing”. This is exactly what the quantum mystical literature has argued now for almost a century.

As the early quantum physicists intuited, the structural features of mystical forms of “mind” and the weird behavior of “matter” in quantum mechanics do, in fact, look remarkably alike. The intuition is is likely correct, although we must be careful not to push the parallelism too far or take it too literally. Here are some shared, parallel, or coinciding features.

• Like a quantum state, many mystical states of consciousness are in principle unrepresentable and indeterminable. Accordingly, they deconstruct any and all traditional images of “God” or the “human.” In the technospeak of the study of religion, they are apophatic, a Greek-based term that means “saying away.”

• Such states typically engage both mental or spiritual and material or physical domains and effects. They commonly appear as an immanent irruption into human awareness of a pure presence or undifferentiated experiential ground without distinctions and without any subject-object splitting, much as we have it modeled in dual-aspect monism.

• Such states are often profoundly “hermeneutical” or “interpretive” in radical ways-that is, in mystical experience as in quantum mechanics, it is the act of observation or the experience itself that determines the behavior or appearance of the real. This is why the expressions of mystical experience are so different across cultures and times.

• Like quantum processes, it is equally true that mystical states are fundamentally holistic—that is, they emphasize sameness over difference, unity over plurality. Indeed, if there is any common message of mystical literature, it its that everything is one thing, that “all is One.”

• Such states are routinely expressed through symbolisms of complementarity or open paradox, things like snakes biting their own tails, sexual union, and the yin and yang of Chinese Daoism. Hence Bohr's attraction to the same.

• Such states are commonly expressed and experienced through the same phenomenon that transformed classical Newtonian physics into quantum physics—the cosmic nature of light. It is not for nothing that mystical states are routinely described as “illumination,” “enlightenment,” “conscious light,” “uncreated energies,” and so on. I really cannot stress this enough, although I know it will generally not be well received: I strongly suspect that mystical experiences of light and energy are experiences of light and energy “from the inside,” whereas the physics of light and energy is mathematically mapping light and energy “from the outside.”

Kripal continues:

• Such [mystical] states often express themselves through dramatic “nonlocal” anomalous phenomena, like experiences of eternity (or no time) and the immediate knowledge of objects or events at a spatial or temporal distance.

• Such states often propose two levels of truth, a conventional or exoteric level and an ultimate or esoteric level, much as physicists today make a “two-domain distinction” to discuss the differences between classical and quantum features of reality.

• In a similar vein, such states often result in doctrines of what I have called the “Human as Two”: that is, they posit two forms of human consciousness—one that is entirely invisible and in some sense “transcendent” to any local realism; and one that is embodied, historical, material, social, and so on (the human as a classical Newtonian object or embodied and “particularized” material ego).

It strikes me that the circle offers an image of the Human as Two: the “Newtonian” ego is the outward shape of the circle and the transcendental consciousness is Pi, that wild infinity which haunts the circle’s finite form.

On the surface, there is order, logic—form. But beneath that surface, there is that which is none of these things, that which is beyond all system and definition, a seething formlessness, an ineffable madness at the heart of being. (source)

The black hole possesses this same dualistic structure, writ cosmic. Beyond the event horizon, physics as we know it collapses; the singularity is radically unknowable, inaccessible both in practice and in principle. And yet the black hole behaves with perfect lawfulness, warping the orbits of nearby stars and bending their light in predictable fashion. Pi and the singularity name the same scandal: an irrational core at the heart of all rationality, a lawless center without which lawfulness could not exist. As with the circle and the black hole, so too with the soul.

The hesychast tradition offers what might be the most precise spiritual technology for producing Jung’s “highest intensity in the smallest space.” If the soul is structurally analogous to a black hole, hesychasm is the discipline of crossing one's own event horizon.

Hesychasm is a contemplative monastic tradition in the Eastern Christian traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church and Eastern Catholic Churches in which stillness (hēsychia) is sought through uninterrupted Jesus prayer (“the practice of inner prayer, aiming at union with God on a level beyond images, concepts and language”). While rooted in early Christian monasticism, it took its definitive form in the 14th century at Mount Athos.

St. Nicephorus the Hesychast (13th century), a Roman Catholic who converted to the Eastern Orthodox faith and became a monk at Mount Athos, advised monks to bend their heads toward the chest, “attach the prayer to their breathing” while controlling the rhythm of their breath, and “to fix their eyes during prayer on the middle of the body”, concentrating the mind within the heart in order to practice nepsis (watchfulness).

According to the standard ascetic formulation of this process, there are three stages:

• Katharsis (κάθαρσις) or purification

• Theoria (θεωρία) or illumination

• Theosis (θέωσις) or deification

Katharsis (ascese/purification)

Sobriety contributes to this mental ascesis that rejects tempting thoughts; it puts a great emphasis on focus and attention. The hesychast is to pay extreme attention to the consciousness of his inner world and to the words of the Jesus Prayer, not letting his mind wander in any way at all. While he maintains his practice of the Jesus Prayer, which becomes automatic and continues twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the hesychast cultivates nepsis, watchful attention, to reject tempting thoughts (the “thieves”) that come to the hesychast as he watches in sober attention in his hermitage. St. John of Sinai describes hesychast practice as follows:

The hesychast is to attach Eros, that is, “yearning”, to his practice of sobriety so as to overcome the temptation to acedia (sloth). He is also to use an extremely directed and controlled anger against the tempting thoughts, although to obliterate them entirely he is to invoke Jesus Christ via the Jesus Prayer.

Theoria (illumination)

The primary task of the hesychast is to engage in mental ascesis. The hesychast is to bring his mind (nous) into his heart so as to practise both the Jesus Prayer and sobriety with his mind in his heart. In solitude and retirement, the hesychast repeats the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.” The hesychast prays the Jesus Prayer ‘with the heart’ — with meaning, with intent, “for real”. He never treats the Jesus Prayer as a string of syllables whose “surface” or overt verbal meaning is secondary or unimportant. He considers bare repetition of the Jesus Prayer as a mere string of syllables, perhaps with a “mystical” inner meaning beyond the overt verbal meaning, to be worthless or even dangerous. This emphasis on the actual, real invocation of Jesus Christ mirrors an Eastern understanding of mantra in that physical action/voice and meaning are utterly inseparable.

The goal at this stage is a practice of the Jesus Prayer with the mind in the heart, which practice is free of images. By the exercise of sobriety (the mental ascesis against tempting thoughts), the hesychast arrives at a continual practice of the Jesus Prayer with his mind in his heart and where his consciousness is no longer encumbered by the spontaneous inception of images: his mind has a certain stillness and emptiness that is punctuated only by the eternal repetition of the Jesus Prayer.

This stage is called the guard of the mind. This is a very advanced stage of ascetical and spiritual practice, and attempting to accomplish this prematurely, especially with psychophysical techniques, can cause very serious spiritual and emotional harm to the would-be hesychast. St. Theophan the Recluse once remarked that bodily postures and breathing techniques were virtually forbidden in his youth, since, instead of gaining the Spirit of God, people succeeded only “in ruining their lungs”.

The guard of the mind is the practical goal of the hesychast. It is the condition in which he remains as a matter of course throughout his day, every day until he dies.

Theosis (deification)

The hesychast usually experiences the contemplation of God as light, the “uncreated light” of the theology of St. Gregory Palamas. The hesychast, when he has by the mercy of God been granted such an experience, does not remain in that experience for a very long time, but he returns “to earth” and continues to practise the guard of the mind.

Orthodox tradition warns against seeking ecstasy as an end in itself. Hesychasm is a traditional complex of ascetical practices embedded in the doctrine and practice of the Orthodox Church and intended to purify the member of the Orthodox Church and to make him ready for an encounter with God that comes to him when and if God wants, through God’s grace. The goal is to acquire, through purification and grace, the Holy Spirit and salvation. Any ecstatic states or other unusual phenomena which may occur in the course of hesychast practice are considered secondary and unimportant, even quite dangerous. Moreover, seeking after unusual “spiritual” experiences can itself cause great harm, ruining the soul and the mind of the seeker. Such a seeking after “spiritual” experiences can lead to spiritual delusion—the antonym of sobriety—in which a person believes himself or herself to be a saint, has hallucinations in which he or she “sees” angels, Christ, etc. This state of spiritual delusion is in a superficial, egotistical way pleasurable, but can lead to madness and suicide, and, according to the hesychast fathers, makes salvation impossible.

From my early childhood, before my bones, nerves, and veins were fully strengthened, I have always seen this vision in my soul, even to the present time when I am more than seventy years old. In this vision, my soul, as God would have it, rises up high into the vault of heaven and into the changing sky and spreads itself out among different peoples, although they are far away from me in distant lands and places. And because I see them this way in my soul, I observe them in accord with the shifting of clouds and other created things. I do not hear them with my outward ears, nor do I perceive them by the thoughts of my own heart or by any combination of my five senses, but in my soul alone, while my outward eyes are open. So I have never fallen prey to ecstasy in the visions, but I see them wide awake, day and night. And I am constantly fettered by sickness, and often in the grip of pain so intense that it threatens to kill me, but God has sustained me until now. The light which I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it “the reflection of the living Light.” (Hildegard of Bingen)

I did it.

I planted my seed in a human woman and it grew into a human child, a child who will have all of my good qualities and none of my bad, and all of my wife’s best qualities and none of the ones that I find annoying.

Her name is Jenny.

My wife, it must be admitted, did most of the heavy lifting (though my words of encouragement and leg-holding did play a critical, perhaps even pivotal, role in the delivery). But since Jenny’s arrival I have taken the baton from my darling wife and sprinted far ahead of the competition, becoming an early frontrunner for Dad of the Year. The tenderness of my touch, the musical sweetness of my voice, the terrifying rapidity of my diaper changing—it is truly remarkable how I have taken to fatherhood; one might say I was born for this, a natural at nurturing.

II.

Amidst the mucus and the chaos, with the primeval cries of my first-born ringing out through the delivery room, a single thought echoed through my mind:

The infinite fire that burns within our frail and ever failing form, the wild miracle of our being in this whirling suffering of a world…

As theurgists were purified and developed a greater capacity to receive the divine light, they would enter a deeper dimension of sacrifice, one revealed in the altar itself. They would realize that their sacrifice of mortal life to the gods had been, all along, an inverse reflection of the gods’ prior sacrifice to the world of generation, specifically the sacrifice of immortality to mortal life. It is then that the theurgist would experience the depth of his paradox: He is the mortal being that offers sacrifices to the gods while, at the same time, he is the god that sacrifices its divinity on the altar of the human body. Through the altar the theurgist offers himself to himself: as man to god and as god to man; he discovers his divinity through his mortality and enters a circulation whose pivotal point of return is the the sacrificial body-altar. (Gregory Shaw)

The sacrifices my wife and I have made, and will make, for our child; the sacrifices made by our forefathers and foremothers: the immigrations made and the dreams deferred, the long hours and the late nights; the love which brought her into this world, and the love that she will bring into it…

III.

Even in the moment I was aware that this epiphany of my child’s divinity had not arisen ex nihilo. Some weeks before I read David Bentley Hart’s You are Gods (2022). The core thesis of the book is basically what the title would imply.

1. God became human so that humans should become God. Only the God who is always already human can become human. Only a humanity that is always already divine can become God.

2. God is all that is. Whatever is not God exists as becoming divine, and as such is God in the mode of what is other than God. But God is not “the other” of anything.

While there are a few sections that tend towards fairly accessible secular philosophy, the bulk of the book contains what has to be some of the most arcane and abstruse theology you’ll ever see, real “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” type stuff. So, for example, we have this doozy from the final essay (emphases mine).

For Bulgakov, humanity’s spiritual nature is already divine in its very origin; each human being is from the first a created god who exists as a creature only in forever being deified, in an infinite ascent into God. But he also—in a formulation that seems calculated to offend against logic and piety alike, but that cannot fail to be in some sense true if there really are such things as spiritual creatures—speaks of human beings as participating in their own origination from nothingness. The spiritual “I” in being created, is an I who has been asked to consent to its creation. And only by this primordial assent does humanity in its eternal “multi-hypostatic” reality—as the eternal Adam of the first creation—freely receive its being from its creator: and this even though that assent becomes, on the threshold between the heavenly Aeon and time, a recapitulation of the Fall, an individuating acceptance of entry into the world under the burden of sin, such that every soul is answerable for and somehow always remembers that original transgression. In that moment, the spiritual creature concurs in its own creation, and God hands the creature over to its own free self-determination…

Here, the logic implicit in Bulgakov’s re-Christianization of Fichte seems almost an inevitability for any coherent account of spiritual creation. Finite spirit is, as spirit, always also a self-positing “I,” for both better and worse. And it is only as such an “I” that any free spiritual being could be created by God. God cannot create a free rational creature unless that creature is already free in being created—which is to say, unless that creature has freely consented to its own creation, and unless that consent is truly constitutive of the act of its creation. And so, then, it must also be true that no creature can exist as spirit except by its free acceptance of the invitation to arise from nothingness, and by intending itself in intending its final cause…

And two pages later, the final paragraph of the book.

Every creaturely spirit freely wills its own existence only as a created inflection of God’s eternal “I AM” in the mystery of the Trinity. The creaturely spirit’s freedom is, in its essence, the freedom of the Holy Spirit within the divine life. The eternal Yes of God to the creature is always already the creature’s eternal Yes to its creator, for the latter exists only within the eternal Yes of the Father to his own image in the Son, in the delight of the Spirit; and this is the Son’s Yes to the will of the Father; and this is also the Spirit’s eternal Yes to the Father’s full expression in the Son; and, in the end, these are all one and the same Yes.

From eternity, God has brought spiritual creatures into existence in the only way that such creatures could be formed: by calling them to ascend out of the darkness of nonbeing into the infinite beauty of the divine nature. To exist as a spiritual creature is simply to have heard and (from the very first instant) responded to this total vocation. Creation is already deification—is, in fact, theogony. For that eternal act—that summoning of all created natures out of the primordial darkness—is most certainly an entirely free and unmerited gift of being, imparted to those who were not and who in themselves had no claim to be; but it is also, and no less originally, the call that awakens the gods.

And then I held my daughter and knew a new love, that unconditional and utterly unearned love which they say God has for all His creatures, and somehow it all made sense—how God called us to ascend out of the darkness of nonbeing into the infinite beauty of the divine nature, how we freely consented to our own creation, how creation is already deification, how God’s eternal Yes to us is always already our eternal Yes to God.

IV.

Sam Kriss asks “What’s the point of words?” The essay is ostensibly about the tiresome and eternal war between analytic and continental philosophy, but its real subject is the nature of language itself, what it can and cannot do. The analytic project, as Kriss tells it, was a noble attempt to build a perfect language: one that would finally allow thought to cleanly mirror the world. The project failed.

Analytic philosophy was supposed to provide a way to precisely express reality through language; in the process it seemed to end up demonstrating that this kind of totally lucid language might actually be impossible. There is no language without some kind of circularity, or self-reference, or radical contingency; everything we say is in some important sense inexplicable.

If language cannot neatly represent reality, what can it do?

We can still use language to access objective reality, as long as we’re prepared to let it take a more active role than straightforward description. Language changes how the world discloses itself to us.

If that is language, what is the point of philosophy then?

Philosophy allows the world, which is large, to appear to us in new and surprising ways… The only criterion of good philosophy is whether it makes the world more interesting.

To wit:

“Survival and death are at work, in other words the moon.” Fantastic line. Stop worrying about what it means; just think about it next time you see that chilly face looking down on you at night, and see what it does.

Though it employs the language of analytic philosophy, I would argue that theology is better thought of as a purely aesthetic endeavor. Do not ask if it is logical or if it is true; ask if it makes the world more interesting or more beautiful; if it adds depth or dimension to your experience. It did for me.

Postscript

Selected excerpts from You are Gods for your perusing pleasure.

It is a source of constant vexation to me, as I am sure it must be to all of us, that philosophical theology pays such scant attention to root vegetables. Obviously, after so many centuries of appalling neglect, this is not a deficiency that can be remedied in a day; but, even so, we should not shirk such small corrective efforts as we are able to undertake. So imagine, if you will, a turnip. Imagine it set before you on a table. But imagine also that, only a few moments ago, it was not a turnip, but a rabbit instead, and that I have just now magically conjured the one thing out of the other. I do not mean, I hasten to add, that I am an illusionist who has just performed a very clever trick. Rather, mine was a genuine feat of goetic sorcery, probably accomplished with the assistance of a daemon familiar. Contain your wonder. Then tell me: Have I actually transformed a rabbit into a turnip—is that logically possible—or have I instead merely annihilated the poor bunny and then recombined its material ingredients into something else altogether? Surely, it seems obvious, the answer must be the latter. It may well be that precisely the same molecules—even the same atoms—once found in the rabbit are now securely invested in the turnip; but there is nothing leporine remaining in the turnip, and neither was there any trace of rapinity (rapi-tude?) in the rabbit. I assume that this is uncontroversial. Very well. What, though, if instead I had transformed the rabbit not into another terrestrial organism, especially not one presumably lower in the chain of being, but had instead, so to speak, superelevated it by changing it into a more eminent kind of entity—say, an angel? Much the same question arises: has the rabbit become an angel, or has it again merely perished and been replaced by something else? The answer depends, I suppose, on whether one thinks there is already something angelic about rabbits (as I do, but as many do not); for, if there is no latent angelism in rabbits, even of the most purely potential kind, then again no real metamorphosis has occurred at the level of discrete substances or identities. All that has happened is that I have murdered a harmless bunny and summoned up a potentially very dangerous spiritual creature to take its place (one that may not at all approve of my callousness toward small helpless animals).

A spiritual creature is capable of a rational desire for a natural end only within the embrace of a prior supernatural longing, and hence a spiritual creature appropriates any given natural good not merely as an end in itself, but as more originally an expression of the supernatural Good. A finite intention of intellect and will is possible only as the effect of a prior infinite intentionality. Any intellectual predilection toward a merely immediate terminus of longing can be nothing other than a mediating modality and local contraction of a total spiritual volition toward the divine. One cannot contemplate a flower, watch a play, or pluck a strawberry from a punnet without being situated within an irrefrangible intentional continuum that extends all the way to God in his fullness.

This may seem an extravagant claim, but its denial is something worse. The very notion that a rational spiritual creature could conceivably inhabit a realm of pure nature, in which it could rest satisfied and in which its only intellectual concern regarding God would consist in a purely speculative, purely aetiological curiosity posteriorly elicited from finite cognitions, is a logical nonsense.

The truth is—and, again, this is a purely phenomenological observation—we cannot possess so much as the barest rational cognizance of the world we inhabit except insofar as we have always already, in our rational intentions, exceeded the world. Intentional recognition is always already interpretation, and interpretation is always already judgment. The intellect is not a passive mirror reflecting a reality that simply composes itself for us within our experience; rather, intellect is itself an agency that converts the storm of sense-intuitions into a comprehensible order through a constant process of construal. And it is able to do this by virtue of its always more original, tacit recognition of an object of rational longing—say, Truth itself—hat appears nowhere within the natural order, but toward which the mind nevertheless naturally reaches out, as to its only possible place of final rest. All proximate objects are known to us, and so desired or disregarded or rejected, in light of that anticipated finality. Even to seek to know, to organize experience into reflection, is a venture of the reasoning will toward that absolute horizon of intelligibility. And since truly rational desire can never be a purely spontaneous eruption of the will without purpose, it must exhibit its final cause in the transcendental structure of its operation. Rational experience, from the first, is a movement of rapture, of ecstasy toward ends that must be understood as nothing less than the perfections of being, ultimately convertible with one another in the fullness of reality’s one source and end. Thus the world as something available to our intentionality comes to us in the interval that lies between the mind’s indivisible unity of apprehension and the irreducibly transcendental horizon of its intention—between, that is, the first cause of movement in the mind and the mind’s natural telos, both of which lie outside the composite totality of nature. And so the rational will’s absolute preoccupation with being as a whole discloses the rather astonishing truth that the very structure of all intellection is an essential relation to God’s transcendence as spirit’s only possible natural end. As I say, for spiritual creatures, nature is experienced as nature only by way of a more original apprehension of the supernatural. These transcendental ends are ultimate objects of desire, after all, only in that God’s transcendent goodness shines through them; and reason must love the Good.

It seeks, as Maximus the Confessor says, to pass beyond all finite cognitions and enter at last into a final union with its first causes in God. Rational spirit, teleologically specified, is God; that is its horizon of final causality, because the end it seeks is the knowledge of all things in God’s perfect act of knowledge, the ultimate transparency of our scientia vespertina to his infinite scientia Reduced to its most primal origin and ultimate end, then—to what precedes and surpasses the empirical world, what founds and elicits the whole movement of thought in which the phenomenal world subsists—rational life is a finite participation in an infinite act of thought that is also the whole of being: the simplicity of God knowing God. And so the basis of all knowledge and intentional will is the natural desire of the creature for theosis.

Orthodox Christology, after all, insists not merely that there is no conflict or rivalry between Christ’s divinity and his humanity, nor merely that they are capable of harmonious accord with one another. Rather, it asserts that humanity is so naturally compatible with divinity that the Son can be both fully divine and fully human at once without separation or confusion, in one agent whose actions are all therefore at once fully human and fully divine. If our nature were not already wholly contained within the divine, and the divine not already innate in us, then the incarnation of the Son would have to be an extrinsic juxtaposition of natures “reconciled” with one another, either by a kind of miraculous occasionalism or else by way of a real change in both natures, producing a fusion or synthesis that would supplant the divine and the human alike with a new reality essentially different from both at once. But then Christ would be not the God-man, but rather a semi-divine monstrosity: either a divine-human chimaera or a divine-human hybrid. Once again, we cannot escape this problem by resorting to the vague, meaningless, modally amphibologous mechanism of the potentia obcedientialis (in its distorted form). And, really, why should we want to do so? Do we truly wish to imagine that what the incarnation of the Logos revealed was not, at the very last, the deepest truth of rational nature, but rather only the accidental fact of a superadded impress upon that nature as vouchsafed within one particular contingent order of providence? Or that deification in Christ is the consummation not of the eternal truth of rational natures but only of one possible but logically fortuitous fate for such natures? Even if I did not regard this picture as logically incoherent, I should still find it theologically repellant.

The natural capacity of rational creatures—though it is a capacity that can be satisfied only through the aid of another—is formally and teleologically infinite. Thus, as Nicholas of Cusa so acutely notes, the natural desire of spiritual creatures is ultimately oriented to God not as some kind of comprehensible quiddity, but solely as the incomprehensible infinite. By its very nature, spiritual desire can never be formally teleologically finite, as the finite cannot be its own index of rational desirability. As Nicholas says, “Quod nisi deus esset infinitus, non foret finis desidere”, “Were God not infinite, he would not be the end for desire.” The natural desire of spiritual creatures is nothing less, in its fullness, than an infinite intention corresponding to an infinite gift. That certainly was the conviction of Gregory of Nyssa, who would never have guessed that grace and nature might be conceived of as two opposed categories, who believed instead that human nature in its very essence is meant to become an ever more radiant mirror of the divine beauty and ever fuller intimacy of the divine presence, and whom I tend to trust more than just about any other theologian on these matters.

God shines forth in human longing, and so that longing leads us to God, casting all finite and comprehensible things aside as it does so, for in them it can find no rest; thus it is led ever onward from God who is the beginningless beginning to God who is the endless end? One sees God, then, under the form of a certain rapture of the mind, and thus discovers that the intellect cannot find true satisfaction in anything that it wholly understands, any more than it could in something that it understands not at all; rather, it must always seek “ilud quod non intelligendo intelligit”: “that which it understands through not understanding.”’ And so, then, it is only within God’s own infinite movement of love that any rational desire exists, coming from and going toward the infinite that gives it being.

…Again, the problems with this way of thinking are too numerous to treat here. What is worth dwelling upon is how beautifully Nicholas demonstrates that there is no such thing as rational desire that is not a desire for the infinity of God in himself, and so no natural impulse of a truly rational will that is not already—and even more originally-supernatural. “Pure nature” is an atrocity of reason. Even God could not create a rational will not oriented toward deifying union with himself, any more than he could create a square circle, a married bachelor, or a two-dimensional cube.

And the radical implication of this way of seeing things is that the immanent telos of God’s own life and the transcendent telos of the life of a spiritual creature are, formally and finally, one and the same telos: the divine essence, understood as the perfect repletion of God’s life of love and knowledge. As God is God in the eternal and eternally accomplished movement of God to God, so we are gods in the process of becoming God solely by virtue of always existing within that movement, proceeding from the same source and toward the same end; we do so in the mode of finitude, contingency, and successiveness, and so are not God in se; but teleologically we are nothing but God. There is no “place” other than “in him” where a spiritual creature can live and move and have its being and so seek its ultimate end-which is to say, the fullness of reality that God is. In fact, it might not be wrong to say that, for Nicholas, the difference between God and spiritual creatures is in some sense ontologically modal: it is the difference, that is, between the infinite simplicity of divine being, on the one hand, in whom there is a perfect identity of knower and known or of essence and existence (this latter is not Nicholas’s terminology, of course) and the finite dynamism of created being, which directly participates in that divine reality but only under the form of a perpetual synthesis of knowing and being known.

But, in a sense, for finite spirits the beautiful constitutes, as it were, the transcendental horizon of the transcendentals themselves. No other among them, from the vantage of this world, is so obviously an intrinsically desirable end. This is precisely because beauty in itself elicits only our delight, rather than our sense of ethical obligation or epistemic submission or animal needs, and does so before and apart from any further kind of imperative—utilitarian or selfish—in a way that, say, the Good or the True does not (at least, not self-evidently). These latter can all too easily be mistaken as desirable for purely consequentialist reasons. Of the Beautiful this is not so. In a sense, beauty is the very splendor of transcendentality as such, morally pure precisely because it is never reducible to mere moral purpose, or to any purpose beyond itself. Thus, for instance, we know we have cultivated true virtues within ourselves (as opposed merely to a disinterested obedience to laws of behavior external to our own wills and desires) when we find ourselves able to delight spontaneously in the pursuit of goodness, or able to take a genuinely deep satisfaction—a genuinely intense aesthetic transport, I would even say—in the practice of charity.

…We know that, within the common call of the beautiful upward into the empyrean, another call is issued, summoning us to that deeper and more mysterious beauty that persists even when all pleasing form has fallen away, and all that remains are the living faces of the abject and broken, “hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison.” That very beauty confronts us every day—no less ubiquitously and constantly than the more immediately recognizable forms of loveliness and enchantment—inviting us, imploring us to see it, to know it, to delight in our love of it. For it is that beauty that will be our final judge; in its light we shall at last see him as he is, and thereby also see ourselves for what we are.

To say that God is but also shall be “all in all” is to say that his eternal act of being God includes within itself his act of being God within the not-God. No dimension of the divine fullness can be lacking, even the dimension of that fullness expressing itself “beyond” itself. The creation, redemption, and deification of rational creation, the restoration and transfiguration of material creation, the whole of God’s action within created time—all of it is the created expression of the uncreated in its transcendence even of the division between transcendent and immanent.

This is the necessary amphibology of the One: possessing as it must all possibility as actuality in perfect simplicity, it contains within the inner actuality of the divine plenitude even the possibility of creation’s relation to its creator as wholly other. And God’s very perfection and self-sufficiency entail that he express himself as this other even though he can never be “another thing” (aliud): for that real possibility cannot be lacking from the simplicity of the divine actuality. Thus the infinite qualitative disproportion between the coincidence of essence and existence in God and the perpetual dynamic synthesis of essence and existence in creatures is simply another inflection and expressive modality of God’s life: the Father’s co-equal expression in the Son and infinite delight in the Spirit.

When Paul describes (Romans 14:11; Philippians 2:11) creation’s final acclamation of God’s majesty in the Age to Come as “grateful praise” or “joyous confession” he is also describing the moment in which all of creation is called into being. That act of praise at the end of days is nothing less than the creature’s original response to the call that, in the beginning of days, draws all things into being out of nothingness. It is the creature’s participation in God’s eternal return to himself within the divine life itself and within his exitus and reditus in creatures. All things are created in their last end, and spiritual creatures possessed of reason and freedom exist only to the degree that they fully assent to and delight in the end that summons them from the night of nothingness (again: “No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative. It gets the people going!”). Here, the disproportion and qualitative difference between the eternal and the temporal must be observed with absolute exactitude. The eternal reality of all things is, from the perspective of time, an end to be attained; but, were that end not eternally always so, no finite creature would exist. This is especially so for spiritual creatures, whose very existence as spirit can be nothing other than an insatiable intentionality toward the whole of divine being. The final cause of all things that come into being is the whole reality of the created, in its accomplished and so original plenitude. The spiritual life is nothing more than a constant labor to remember our last end by looking forward to our first beginning. The final “joyous confession” of creation is nothing less than its eternal assent to be, its original answer to God’s call, its joyous acceptance of the gift of being, and therefore its full moral and spiritual commitment to existence as a wholly contingent manifestation of the divine life in its absoluteness.

I do not believe that some of the most impactful, really world-changing ideas of the humanities emerged from thinking, much less cognitive, logical, or linear thought. I think they emerged from altered states of knowledge and energy, that they were experienced as given. They crash-landed. This does not mean that such world-changing ideas were religious in any traditional sense (although sometimes they were) or even that this givenness does not always have a history. But it does mean that these forms of alien thought or experience cannot be understood in any conventional mode and that they are often not under the control of the conscious ego or reasonable thinker.

We do not think. We are thought.

We certainly have a long way to go, and nothing is guaranteed. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard an otherwise admired colleague say something like, “Well, it does not really matter if Joseph of Cupertino flew up into the tree after a scream, or if Teresa of Avila floated off the floor as her sisters piled on top of her to avoid a social embarrassment. What matters is how the popular belief in such presumed evtations was disciplined, controlled, and maintained by the Church and later constructed as sanctity and as a saint.” Here is another doozy: “I do not care if the psychedelic trip leads a person to an actual encounter or identity with the personal Source or Ground of the universe. That does not matter. What matters are the institutional and now medical structures built up around such a belief and their social production of medicine and religion.”

Really? I want to pull my hair out in such moments (and I don’t have much hair left). A super-pious Italian man ecstatically flies into a tree and has to be retrieved with a ladder, or a raptured Spanish nun cannot keep herself on the floor in front of some visiting noblewomen, and these physical events do not matter to you? Uh, excuse me, if either of those things actually happened (and our historical records suggest strongly that they did), such anomalous events change pretty much everything we thought we knew about human consciousness and its relationship to physics, gravity, and material reality. Either single event would fundamentally change our entire order of knowledge. And you don’t care?

The argument goes as follows: “It is better not to make any claim on the real, since we know that such claims in the past have been wrong or partial, and that endless injustices and violences have been done in their names. We do not do metaphysics, because metaphysics always leads to bad things.”

But such a claim, of course, is itself a metaphysics, and it is doing bad things as you read these lines. It is reducing the human to the only human, to a dying social animal that has every reason to despair and turn to endless distractions, which themselves have some pretty devastating moral consequences.

My argument rather goes like this: We must imagine other ontologies, new realities, not just because our sciences already are doing this but also because, if we do not reimagine the real, the dials will simply reset and return to where they are now— to a materialist reductionism—and the humanities will continue to be sidelined and ignored as so much depression, which they have in effect become.

Agnosticism is the position to not take a position. It is noble and understandable enough, but it will not work. The problem is that any such refusal to make a different claim on the real, however moral it might seem, simply ends up, in practice, supporting business as usual. The refusal to do ontology is itself a surrender to the present reigning ontology.

I often joke to my students that I once naively thought that the Buddha came to teach us about the ultimate nonexistence of the self and the fantastic realizations of nirvana and emptiness—fundamental ontological questions that are as true in Texas as they are in Nepal. But now I know that what Buddhism is really about is how to help us lower our blood pressure and make us good office workers.

The Arandan believe that Karora, the creator, dreamed the world up in his sleep. As he lay in darkness on the ground, a kind of tree grew from his head all the way to the heavens, its roots planted on Karora’s head. The thoughts, wishes and desires in his head then became real as Karora dreamed them: animals and men sprung from his navel and armpits.

Eventually, when the sun rose, Karora awoke. As he stood up, he left a hole on the ground in the place where he had lain asleep. This hole then became the Ilbalintja Soak, a sacred place for the Arandan, which connects their daily life with the transcendence of their deity. Now awake, Karora lost his magical powers and, to his own surprise, met the animals and men that he had dreamed into existence the previous night. He even cooked and ate some of the animals for, without his magical powers, he felt hungry. Over a series of subsequent nights, Karora again fell asleep and dreamed more creatures into existence, coming in contact with them upon awakening the next morning.

All of this supposedly took place around the Ilbalintja Soak, a location integral to Arandan life. The animals that sprouted from Karora’s dreaming body are animals the Arandan see every day. The myth thus endows their very environment and its inhabitants with transcendence. Their whole existence is colored by the myth. It gives their lives meaning.

One way to look upon the Arandan myth is to take it literally and then proceed to dismiss it as absurd. Another way is to try and look beyond the words, taking the images of the myth as evocative symbols that point to deeper and ineffable intuitions. An extensive analysis of the Arandan myth is beyond the scope or purposes of this book, but it is useful to highlight a few salient aspects.

Clearly, the myth evokes the notion that the world is a mental creation of a deity who dreams it into existence while lacking lucidity. In the stupor of the dream, this deity has the magical power of bringing things forth into existence; the freedom unique to the imagination to concoct images without being bound by logic, resource constraints, ordinary causality or consistency. In other words, during his dream the deity doesn’t know what is supposed to be impossible and, therefore, nothing is impossible. However, he can also enter the dream, as it were, by waking up in it. When this happens, the deity gains the ability to self-reflect but loses his magical powers, for he is now a participant in his own dream, subject to its constraints and internal logic like the rest of his creation. In other words, by waking up he becomes aware of, and subject to, what is supposedly impossible. Yet, it is this act of waking up inside the dream that gives his creation concreteness and solidity, for only now creation is experienced in the state of lucid self-reflection that fixes it in place, as opposed to the ever-flowing slumber of sleep.

The idea built into this religious myth is sophisticated and striking. Karora can find himself in two different mental states: one lacking lucidity, which is linked to the unconstrained freedom to imagine things into existence; and a self-reflective state linked to becoming subject to self-imposed constraints.

Upon waking up inside his own dream, Karora even has to find food, cook and eat There seems to be a trade-off between lucidity and unconstrained creative freedom; they don’t come together. (Bernardo Kastrup)

The Uitoto religious myth

On the other side of the planet, in the Amazon jungle, the Uitoto tribe has a mind-bending myth of their own. According to it, a creator deity, Nainema, also created the world by imagining it while in a state of slumber. Initially, his imaginings were a tenuous and evanescent illusion, which could easily be lost and forgotten. However, Nainema held on to the illusion by the thread of a dream, not allowing it to escape him. He tied the thread with magical glue and then proceeded to stamp on the illusion until he could, as it were, break into it, so to sit down on the earth he was imagining. Now inside his own dream, he spat on the earth, thereby sprouting the jungle from his saliva. At last his original, tenuous illusion had become the actual, concrete world of the Uitoto.

The Hindu religious myth

There are many other examples of similar myths. The Hindu tradition in India, for instance, is particularly rich.

According to a foundational Hindu myth, the primary formative principle behind everything is called Brahman. Brahman thought primordial ‘waters’ into existence, forming the basic scaffolding of the world to come. Brahman’s seed in the primordial waters then became a cosmic egg—a universal motif across the world’s religious myths—from which Brahman Itself was born. Having achieved self-generation by being born inside the basic scaffolding of its own creation, Brahman gave it content: through further acts of thought, It created Heaven, Earth and all the concrete elements of the world. In some versions of the myth, the utterance of a sound, or the Word, is what fills the world in with content.

The common motifs behind the world’s religious myths

Alert readers will have noticed conspicuous and even striking similarities across the myths discussed. In all cases, the world is seen as the mental creation of a deity; that is, a kind of thought in the mind of God. The universe begins as insubstantial imaginings—‘illusions’ in the Uitoto case; ‘dreams’ in the Arandan case; thought-up primordial ‘waters’ in the Hindu case—which then gain concreteness and solidity once the deity itself enters the dream—by waking up in it, in the case of the Arandan; by stamping on it, in the case of the Uitoto; or by birthing itself into it, in the Hindu case. The deity always undergoes a significant change in its state of consciousness—from dream or illusion to a lucid, self-reflective, deliberate state-once it enters its creation.

These motifs recur across time and cultures, the West being no exception. For instance, according to the Christian myth, God also enters His creation by being born into it as the Christ. The broader notion of a cosmic mind holding the world within itself as a thought is also present in Western mythology. Consider the following words of the Corpus Hermeticum, basis of the Hermetic myth that underlies Western esotericism:

Changes in the state of consciousness of such cosmic mind—dreamless sleep, dream and wakefulness—are integral to the cycle of creation according to many of the world’s myths, as revealed in Joseph Campbell’s monumental work on comparative mythology. Indeed, Campbell recognized a consistent message in many myths regarding the nature of reality and the process of creation. He called it the cosmogonic cycle, describing it “as the passage of universal consciousness from the deep sleep zone of the unmanifest, through dream, to the full day of waking”. In the waking state, creation is experienced as “the hard, gross facts of an outer universe”. In the dream state, it is experienced as “the fluid, subtle forms of a private inner world”. In the dreamless sleep state, there is no experience as such and, therefore, only the potential for creation exists. The different phases of the cosmogonic cycle thus entail different states of cognition of the universal consciousness.

Now, therefore, whereas in the West—in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions—we have thought of God not only as a monarch but as the maker of the world. And as a result of that, we look upon the world as an artifact—a sort of machine—created by a great engineer. There’s a different conception in India where the world is not seen as an artifact but as a drama, and therefore God is not the maker and architect of the universe but the actor of it and therefore is playing all the parts at once. And this connects up with the idea of each one of us as persons, because a person is a mask—from the Latin word persona, the mask worn by the actors in Greco-Roman drama. So this is an entirely different conception of the world and—as I think I shall be able to show you—it makes an amazing amount of sense.

So we start from the premise that you—and you don’t know who you are, you can’t see yourself and, as I’ve pointed out, you don’t know how you grow your body, how you make your nervous system work, how you manage to emerge in this environment of nature. And so this unknown you—the you that is not you, the you that is not the ego—this is God. That is to say, not the cosmic boss but the fundamental Ground of Being—the reality that always was, is, and will be—that lies at the basis of reality. That’s you.

Now, let’s go into a more mythological kind of imagery. Suppose you are God. Suppose you have all time, all eternity, and all power at your disposal. What would you do? I believe you’d say to yourself after a while, “Man, get lost!” It’s like asking another question, which is: supposing you were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night. Naturally, you could dream any span of time—you could dream 75 years of time in one night, a hundred years of time in one night, a thousand years of time in one night—and it could be anything you wanted. You’d make up your mind before you went to sleep. “Tonight I’m going to dream of so and so.” Well, naturally, you would start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You would have all the pleasures you could imagine, the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys. You could listen to music such as no mortal has heard and see landscapes beyond our wildest dreams. And for several nights—oh, maybe for a whole month of nights—you would go on that way, having a wonderful time. But then, after a while, you’d begin to think, “Well, I’ve seen quite a bit. Let’s spice it up Let’s have a little adventure.” And therefore, you would dream of yourself being threatened by all sorts of dangers. You would rescue princesses from dragons, you would perhaps engage in notable battles, you would be a hero. And then, as time went on, you would dare yourself to do more and more outrageous things, and at some point in the game, you would say, “Tonight I am going to dream in such a way that I don’t know that I’m dreaming.” So that you would take the experience of the dream for complete reality. And what a shock when you woke up! And you really scare yourself. And then, on successive nights, you might dare yourself to experience the most extraordinary things, just for the contrast when you woke up. You could, for example, dream yourself in situations of extreme poverty, disease, agony. You could, as it were, work on the vibration of suffering to its most intense point, and then suddenly—WOOP—wake up and find it was, after all, nothing but a dream and everything’s perfectly okay. And you would say, “Wow, man! That was a gas!” (Alan Watts)

The creator can afford to descend into his own creation. He can afford to shed his memories (of his identity) and his supernatural powers. Then he can test his own creation. But he cannot afford to get stuck in it. The creator deliberately plants clues in his irreal creation — clues which he cunningly knows in time (eventually) will restore his memory (anamnesis) of who he is, and his powers as well; he will then know that his creation is irreal and has imprisoned him in it, thus freeing himself and restoring himself to Godhood. So he has a fail-safe system built in. No chance he won’t eventually remember. Makes himself subject to spurious space, time and world (and death, pain, loss, decay, etc.), but has these disinhibiting clues or stimuli distributed deliberately strategically in time and space. So it is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory. No fool he! (Philip K. Dick)

The Hymn of the Pearl is a passage of the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. In that work, originally written in Syriac, the Apostle Thomas sings the hymn while praying for himself and fellow prisoners. Some scholars believe the hymn predates the Acts, as it only appears in one Syriac manuscript and one Greek manuscript of the Acts of Thomas. The author of the Hymn is unknown, though there is a belief that it was composed by the Syriac gnostic Bardaisan from Edessa due to some parallels between his life and that of the hymn. It is believed to have been written in the 2nd century or even possibly the 1st century, and shows influences from heroic folk epics from the region.

The hymn tells the story of a boy, “the son of the king of kings”, who is sent to Egypt to retrieve a pearl from a serpent. During the quest, he is seduced by Egyptians and forgets his origin and his family. However, a letter is sent from the king of kings to remind him of his past. When the boy receives the letter, he remembers his mission, retrieves the pearl and returns.

The hymn is commonly interpreted as a Gnostic view of the human condition, that we are spirits lost in a world of matter and forgetful of our true origin. This state of affairs may be ameliorated by a revelatory message delivered by a messenger, a role generally ascribed to Jesus. The letter thus takes on a symbolic representation of gnosis.

The inversion (the enantiodromia) is the first and most fundamental game-move, the germ from which freedom blossoms (“what if things were the inverse or the reverse of that way which they are now?”). What did Jesus teach but this—the first shall be last, the meek shall inherit the earth, the loving of the enemy, the turning of the cheek, the master is the servant—and what is the Kingdom of Heaven but an eternal game of opposite day? (“These who have turned the world upside down have come here too.”)

— Liber Ludens

An excerpt from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), Chapter 1: “The Bulwarks of Belief” (emphases mine), with accompanying commentary.

Now there is another feature, or set of features, which is crucial to this world of our ancestors, and which has also been done away with. The story of the undoing of this feature is central to the transformation. This is a feature which mediaeval Christendom had in common with many (perhaps most) civilizations dominated by a “higher” religion. We could call this feature an equilibrium in tension between two kinds of goals. On one hand, the Christian faith pointed towards a self-transcendence, a turning of life towards something beyond ordinary human flourishing. On the other, the institutions and practices of mediaeval society, as with all human societies, were at least partly attuned to foster at least some human flourishing. This sets up a tension, between the demands of the total transformation which the faith calls to, and the requirements of ordinary ongoing human life.

[…]

Another way in which this feature of equilibrium in tension emerges in this society became evident in Carnival and similar festivities, such as the Feasts of Misrule, or boy bishops, and the like. These were periods in which the ordinary order of things was inverted, or “the world was turned upside down”. For a while, there was a ludic interval, in which people played out a condition of reversal of the usual order. Boys wore the mitre, or fools were made kings for a day; what was ordinarily revered was mocked, people permitted themselves various forms of licence, not just sexually but also in close-to-violent acts, and the like.

These festivals are fascinating, because their human meaning was at once very powerfully felt in them—people threw themselves into these feasts with gusto—and yet also enigmatic. The enigma is particularly strong for us moderns, in that the festivals were not putting forward an alternative to the established order, in anything like the sense we understand in modern politics, that is, presenting an antithetical order of things which might replace the prevailing dispensation. The mockery was enframed by a understanding that betters, superiors, virtue, ecclesial charisma, etc. ought to rule; the humour was in that sense not ultimately serious (note: or was it—see below).

Natalie Davis had argued for an origin of these feasts of the urban setting in the villages, where there was recognized licence for the class of young unmarried males to indulge in mockery and mayhem, like the charivari. But as she points out, this mockery was exercised very much in support of the ruling moral values.

And yet, for all this acceptance of order, plainly something else showed through the display and the laughter, some deeply felt longings, at variance with this order. What was going on? I don’t know, but some interesting and suggestive ideas have been put forward which are worth noting.

Even at the time, the explanation was offered that people needed this as a safety valve. The weight of virtue and good order was so heavy, and so much steam built up under this suppression of instinct, that there had to be periodic blow-outs if the whole system were not to fly apart. Of course, they didn’t think in terms of steam at the time, but a French cleric expressed the point clearly in the technology of the day.

We do these things in jest and not in earnest, as the ancient custom is, so that once a year the foolishness innate in us can come out and evaporate. Don’t wine skins and barrels burst open very often if the air-hole is not opened from time to time? We too are old barrels...

Also at the time, and more since, people have related these festivals to the Roman Saturnalia. There seems no good ground to trace a real historical connection, but the supposition that something similar is resurfacing here is perfectly acceptable in principle. The thinking behind this parallel draws on theories about the Saturnalia, and other similar festivals (e.g., in ancient Mesopotamia, and also the Aztec renewals of the world). The intuition supposedly underlying these is that order binds a primitive chaos, which is both its enemy but also the source of all energy, including that of order. The binding has to capture that energy, and in the supreme moments of founding it does this. But the years of routine crush this force and drain it; so that order itself can only survive through periodic renewal, in which the forces of chaos are first unleashed anew, and then brought into a new founding of order. As though the effort to maintain order against chaos could not but in the end weaken, tire, unless this order were replunged into the primal energies of chaos to emerge with renewed strength. Or something like this; it’s hard to get it entirely clear.

Then, of course, there is Bakhtin, who brings out the utopian strain in laughter. Laughter as the solvent of all boundaries; the body which connects us to everyone and everything; these are celebrated in Carnival. A kind of carnal Parousia is adumbrated.

Victor Turner proposes another theory. The order we are mocking is important but not ultimate; what is ultimate is the community it serves; and this community is fundamentally egalitarian; it includes everyone. Yet we cannot do away with the order. So we periodically renew it, rededicate it, return it to its original meaning, by suspending it in the name of the community, which is fundamentally, ultimately of equals, and which underlies it.

I’ve laid all these out, because whatever the merits of each one, they point up an important feature of the world in which these festivals occurred. It incorporates some sense of the complementarity, the mutual necessity of opposites, that is, of states which are antithetical, can’t be lived at the same time. Of course, we all live this at some level: we work for x hours, relax for y hours, sleep for z hours. But what is unsettling to the modern mind is that the complementarity behind carnival exists on the moral or spiritual level. We’re not just dealing with a de facto incompatibility, like that of sleeping and watching television at the same time. We’re dealing with things which are enjoined and those condemned, with the licit and illicit, order and chaos. All the above accounts have this in common, that they postulate a world, and underlying this perhaps a cosmos, in which order needs chaos, in which we have to give place to contradictory principles.

Victor Turner’s discussion of this is especially interesting, because he tries to put this phenomenon of Carnival in a wider perspective. It is one manifestation of a relationship which turns up in a tremendous range of pre-modern societies in all parts of the world. In its general form, the relationship could be put in this way: all structure needs anti-structure. By ‘structure’, Turner means, borrowing a phrase from Merton, “‘the patterned arrangements of role-sets, status-sets and status-sequences’ consciously recognized and regularly operative in a given society.” We could perhaps rephrase this, and speak of the code of behaviour of a society, in which are defined the different roles and statuses, and their rights, duties, powers, vulnerabilities.

Turner’s point is that in many societies where this code is taken perfectly seriously, and enforced, even harshly most of the time, there are nevertheless moments or situations in which it is suspended, neutralized, or even transgressed. Plainly Carnival and Feasts of Misrule constituted such moments in mediaeval Europe. But these “rituals of reversal” are in fact very widespread. For instance, in the enthroning ritual of the king in various African societies, the candidate must pass through an ordeal, in which he is reviled, hectored, and even kicked and shoved by his subjects to be.

This kind of reversal has analogies to another kind of relation in which people who according to the dominant jural-political code are weak or of low status can exercise another kind of power in a complementary domain. Turner cites a number of African societies formed by militarily dominant invaders who have conquered the indigenous people. “The invaders control high political office, such as the kingship, provincial governorships, and headmanships. On the other hand, the indigenous people, through their leaders, frequently are held to have a mystical power over the fertility of the earth and of all on it. These autochthonous people have religious power, the ‘power of the weak’ as against the jural-political power of the strong, and represent the undivided land itself against the political system with its internal segmentation and hierarchies of authority.”

This situation has analogies in turn to all those societies in which various classes of powerless and low-status people can exercise a certain authority in their sphere, as is sometimes the case for women, for instance; or in which the weak, the indigent, the outsider is surrounded with a certain charisma, like holy madmen, or indeed, the poor in mediaeval society—whose altered fate in early modern society I will discuss below.

Turner further extends the range of analogies to include societies with “rites of passage” of the kind studied by Arnold van Gennep. The point of contact here is that these rituals by which people move from one status to the next—say, circumcision rites for young men, who thereby become adults—involve the neophytes stepping out of their earlier role and entering a kind of limbo, in which they are stripped of all the marks of status. Their earlier identity is in a sense obliterated, and they pass a period on the “threshold”, undergoing trials and ordeals, before they step into the new identity. The threshold image is van Gennep’s, who coined the term “liminality” for this condition. Turner sees liminality as a kind of “anti-structure”, because it’s a condition in which the markers of the ordinary code, with its rights, duties and status criteria, have been temporarily wiped away.

What all these situations have in common is that there is a play of structure and anti-structure, code and anti-code; this either takes the form of the code’s being momentarily suspended or transgressed; or else, as with the relation between conquerors and autochthonous above, the code itself allows for a counter-principle to the dominant source of power; it opens space for a complementary “power of the weak”. It’s as though there were a felt need to complement the structure of power with its opposite. Otherwise…what?

The basic intuitions here are hard to define. I mentioned some possibilities above in connection with Carnival. One is certainly the idea that the pressure of the code needs to be relaxed from time to time; we need to let off steam. But then the further idea often seems to be there, that the code relentlessly applied would drain us of all energy; that the code needs to recapture some of the untamed force of the contrary principle. Commenting a paper by Evans-Pritchard on rituals which prescribe obscenity, Turner says:

The raw energies released in overt symbolisms of sexuality and hostility between the sexes are channelled toward master symbols representative of structural order, and values and virtues on which that order depends. Every opposition is overcome or transcended in a recovered unity, a unity that, moreover, is reinforced by the very potencies which endanger it. One aspect of the ritual is shown by these rites to be a means of putting at the service of the social order the very forces of disorder that inhere in man’s mammalian constitution.

These explanations still sound rather “functionalist”; the aim of the exercise seems still to be the preservation of the society. But Turner puts them in the context of the pull of “communitas”, which takes us beyond this level of explanation. The sense of “communitas” is the intuition we all share that, beyond the way we relate to each other through our diversified coded roles, we also are a community of many-sided human beings, fundamentally equal, who are associated together. It is this underlying community which breaks out in moments of reversal or transgression, and which gives legitimacy to the power of the weak.

Now this account also has its “functionalist” face. When we curse and swear at the king-elect, we remind him and us that the ruler’s rights and prerogatives have a further purpose which is the weal of the whole. But in Turner’s view, the draw to communitas can go way beyond the boundaries of our society. It can be activated by the sense that we are all human beings, equals, that we belong together. The pull to anti-structure can come from beyond the society, and even from beyond humanity.

From this point of view, it would be legitimate to see the first tension I mentioned above, that between ordinary flourishing and the higher, renunciative vocations, as another example of structure versus anti-structure. The structures of power, property, warrior dominance, are challenged by a life which claims to be higher, and yet which couldn’t simply replace the established order. They are forced into co-existence, and hence some kind of complementarity.

This enables us to see that the play of structure and anti-structure can take place on more than one level, because it is this whole complementarity of state and church together which plays the structural pole to the anti-structure of carnival.

So the pull of communitas is potentially multi-valenced. It can not only bring to the fore our community, but that of humankind. And in breaking us out of coded roles, it also does a number of other things besides releasing fellowship. It also sets free our spontaneity and creativity. It allows free reign to the imagination.

Seen in this perspective, the power of anti-structure comes also from the sense that all codes limit us, shut us out from something important, prevent us from seeing and feeling things of great moment. We remember that in some of the rites of passage, the elders take advantage of this liminal condition to instruct the youth in the deepest lore of the society; as if these things can’t be learned except by those who have become receptive through stepping out of their normal coded roles. We recognize here the principle behind the “retreat”, both religious and secular.

The general phenomenon here is thus a sense of the necessity of anti-structure. All codes need to be countervailed, sometimes even swamped in their negation, on pain of rigidity, enervation, the atrophy of social cohesion, blindness, perhaps ultimately self-destruction. Both the tension between temporal and spiritual, and the existence of carnival and other rites of reversal, show that this sense used to be very alive in Latin Christendom. What has happened to it today?

Well, as the reference above to retreats shows, it is not wholly gone. We have a sense of it in our daily lives. We still feel the need to “get away from it all”, to cut out and “recharge our batteries”, away, on holiday, outside our usual roles. There are certainly carnival-type moments: public holidays, football matches—here, like their predecessors, hovering on the brink, sometimes over the brink of violence. Communitas breaks out in moments of exceptional danger or bereavement, as with the crowds mourning Princess Di.

What is different is that this need for anti-structure is no longer recognized at the level of the whole society, and in relation to its official, political-jural structure. One might ask: how could it be? In all the cases mentioned above, the need for anti-structure was understood in terms of a spiritual context: the human code exists within a larger spiritual cosmos, and its opening to anti-structure is what is required to keep the society in true with the cosmos, or to draw on its forces. Seen from this point of view, the eclipse of this felt need is a simple corollary of the secularization of public space (sense 1 of the first chapter above).

I draw attention to it here, because I think that it played a very important role in the rise of secularity 1. That is, it was the eclipse of this sense of necessary complementarity, of the need for anti-structure, which preceded and helped to bring about the secularization of public space. The idea that a code need leave no space for the principle that contradicts it, that there need be no limit to its enforcement, which is the spirit of totalitarianism, is not just one of the consequences of the eclipse of anti-structure in modernity. That is certainly true. But it is also the case that the temptation to put into effect a code which brooks no limit came first. Yielding to this temptation is what helped bring modern secularity, in all its senses, into being.

That belongs to the story I want to tell shortly. For the moment I want just to complete the contrast I was making between then and now.

Certainly one consequence of the eclipse of anti-structure was this propensity to believe that the perfect code wouldn’t need to be limited, that one could and should enforce it without restriction. This has been one of the driving ideas behind the various totalitarian movements and régimes of our time. Society had to be totally made over, and none of the traditional restraints on action should be allowed to hamper this enterprise. In a less dramatic way, it encourages the tunnel vision with which the various “speech codes” of political correctness are applied on certain campuses, and lends the positive ring to such slogans as “zero tolerance”.

The epoch of the French Revolution is perhaps the moment in which at one and the same moment anti-structure goes into eclipse, and the project of applying a code without moral boundaries is seriously contemplated. This emerges most clearly in the attempts of the various revolutionary governments to design festivals which would express and entrench the new society. In these attempts, they drew heavily on earlier feasts, for instance, on Carnival, on pilgrimages (the model for the Fête de la Fédération), and the processions of Corpus Christi (la Fête Dieu). But the nature of the enterprise was in a certain sense reversed.

That is because the dimension of anti-structure was totally missing. The aim of the exercise was not to open a hiatus in the now reigning code, but to give expression to its spirit, and inspire identification with it. The anti-structural elements of Carnival were sometimes borrowed, as in the dechristianization of Year II, but this destructive mockery was directed against the old religion and the ancien régime in general. It aimed to complete the destruction of the reigning code’s enemies, not to suspend the code itself.

As befits celebrations of the official reality these feasts were generally well ordered; they were meant to celebrate the social bond itself, or else “nature”; and they were rigorously egalitarian and reciprocal. They tried to meet the Rousseauian requirement that the distinction between spectators and actors be abolished. As a report on one of these feasts had it: “La fête de la liberté du 15 mai fut du moins nationale, en ce que le peuple y était tout à la fois acteur et spectateur.” (The Festival of Liberty on May 15 was at least national, in that in it the people were at once both actors and spectators.) They were decidedly anthropocentric. “La seule vraie religion est celle qui annoblit l’homme, en lui donnant une idée sublime de la dignité de son être et des belles destinées auxquelles il est appelé par l’ordinateur humain.” (The only true religion is that which ennobles man by giving him a sublime idea of the dignity of his being and of the great destinies to which he is called by the designer of the human condition.)

No wonder that they were deathly dull, and disappeared, along with the new calendar designed to contain them, with the fall of the régime which sponsored them. They are harbingers of similar attempts at self-celebration by this century’s communist régimes, which have met a similar fate. And they tell us something about what happens to traditional anti-structures in our age, as we can see with the use made of aspects of Carnival in the dechristianization of 1793. They can offer guidelines for Utopia, or for a new and totally harmonious régime. I will return to this below.

But erecting a structure without moral boundaries is a temptation of an age which has forgotten anti-structure; it is not a fatality. It can be avoided, and generally has been. A principle of opposition can be built into our reigning political code, as with the division of powers; and this has generally been done in the name of a principle of limitation, the negative freedom of the subject. Of course, an attempt may still be made on the intellectual plane to show how these free, self-limiting régimes flow from a single principle, as we see, for instance, with the contemporary “liberalism” of Rawls and Dworkin. This shows how deeply modernity has invested in the myth of the single, omnicompetent code. But there are theorists, such as Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and in our century, Isaiah Berlin, who have recognized that we have to give our allegiance to more than one principle, and that those we essentially hold to are frequently in conflict.

Where in theory and in practice, liberal régimes of this pluralist kind have been developed, the consequences of the eclipse of anti-structure have been much mitigated. We might even say that anti-structure has been given a new kind of place in these societies, in the private domain. The public/private distinction, and the wide area of negative freedom, is the equivalent zone in these societies to the festivals of reversal in their predecessors. It is here, on our own, among friends and family, or in voluntary associations, that we can “drop out”, throw off our coded roles, think and feel with our whole being, and find various intense forms of community. Without this zone, life in modern society would be unliveable.

This unofficial zone has developed its own public spheres, in which the imagination is nourished, and ideas and images circulate: the spheres of art, music, literature, thought, religious life, without which our personal dropping out would be radically impoverished. This modern space for anti-structure opens up unprecedented possibilities for untrammeled creation, and at the same time hitherto unexperienced dangers of isolation and loss of meaning. Both of these come from the fact that this space is “private”, its public spheres sustained by purely voluntary participation.

The modern predicament is in this way structurally different from anything which went before. And this means that one part of the traditional play of structure and anti-structure is no longer available to us. In rituals of reversal, or in the rites of obscenity in African societies I alluded to earlier, we have not only the airing of opposed principles, which are allowed to emerge and engage in mock battle. The aim is frequently also to bring them to some kind of synergy; to make the structure less self-enclosed, and at the same time to allow it to draw on the energy of anti-structure in order to renew itself.

This is something which seems beyond our capacity in the modern age. Or at least not by means of ritual. Sometimes the antagonistic forces in a society are brought together to recognize their commonalty by some common threat, or in moments of common grief. But that is a rather different thing. The fact that external danger is what so often is needed to unite us explains to some degree the continuing force of nationalism in our time.

So one of the places that anti-structure has migrated is into the private domain, and the public spheres sustained out of this. But that is not all. The call of anti-structure is still strong in our highly interdependent, technological, super-bureaucratized world. In some ways, more powerful than ever. A stream of protests, against central control, regimentation, the tyranny of instrumental reason, the forces of conformity, the rape of nature, the euthanasia of the imagination, have accompanied the development of this society over the last two centuries. They came to one climax recently, in the sixties and seventies, and we can be sure this is not their last.

At that time, many aspects of Carnival were revisited and re-edited. Think of May ’68 in Paris, with its denunciation of structure (le cloisonnement), and the energy of communitas that it thought it was releasing. The “Soixante-huitards” wanted precisely to eschew the anti-structure of private space; they wanted to make it central to public space, indeed, to abolish the distinction between the two.

But this too, is importantly different from the place of anti-structure earlier. Here the negation of the code is being drawn on as a source for utopias, and new projects, which are meant to replace the existing society, as I mentioned above. Carnival and Revolution can never coincide, no matter how close playful revolutionaries try to bring them. The aim of revolution is to replace the present order. It mines previous anti-structures to design a new code of freedom, community, radical fraternity. It is the birthplace of a new and perfect code, one that will need no moral boundaries, that will brook no anti-structure. It is the anti-structure to end all anti-structure. The dream if carried through (which fortunately it wasn’t in ’68) turns into a nightmare.

At this point, we become aware of a wisdom in the earlier play of code and negation that we are in danger of losing sight of. All structures need to be limited, if not suspended. Yet we can’t do without structure altogether. We need to tack back and forth between codes and their limitation, seeking the better society, without ever falling into the illusion that we might leap out of this tension of opposites into pure anti-structure, which could reign alone, a purified non-code, forever.

But it is extraordinary how often this dream has been generated afresh in our age, even by otherwise hard-headed people, like the inventors of “scientific socialism”, dreaming of a “withering away of the state”. This is because the pains of structure, its rigidities, injustices, insensitivity to human aspiration and suffering, having lost their earlier social outlet, drive us back to this dream. We have probably not seen the last of it.

Comment

What I affirm is the intuition that where God’s presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer available. (George Steiner)

I thin “potential energy” is a useful model for understanding why certain dimensions of thought and creativity, of inspiration and perspiration, are not longer available to us.

The function of God is the focus. An intense mental state is impossible, unless there be something, or the illusion of something, to center upon...I conceive of the magic of prayers. I conceive of the magic of blasphemies. There is witchcraft in religion: there may be witchcraft in atheism. (Charles Fort)

God, or the idea thereof, functions as a kind of psychic ground, generating enormous potential energy whether you push toward or against Him. The magic of prayer and the magic of blasphemy are both expressions of this energy. Both, however, require a ground to push against. The witchcraft of atheism only works in a theistic culture; The blasphemer needs a God to blaspheme against. Remove that transcendent ground entirely and the potential energy dissipates.

For medieval Christians, this (psycho-social) potential energy was released in various ways: war (the Crusades), the activities of monastic life (mysticism, asceticism, scholarly pursuit), construction and artisanry, and ritualistic festivals like Carnival. Us moderns are woefully deficient in this god-energy, and it shows: in our soulless architecture, our shallow scholarship, and our withered mystical traditions; a public tradition like Carnival, an annual eruption of inversionary anti-structure, is all but inconceivable today. While of course there are still many deeply devout individuals and communities in this most secular age, the god-energy is not nearly as potent or as easily accessible as it once was. The ground of belief has shifted beneath our feet; the spell has been broken.

In the old world, people could have a naïve belief, but today belief or unbelief is “reflective”, and includes a knowledge that other people do or do not believe. We look over our shoulder at other beliefs… (Taylor)

What was an absolute conviction in the Absolute has become self-conscious, provisional, half-hearted. Such a ground is no ground at all, but a quicksand into which we slowly sink.

What’s really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about Carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. In the popular Babylonian story of Semiramis, the eponymous servant girl convinces the Assyrian king to let her be ‘Queen for a Day’ during some annual festival, promptly has him arrested, declares herself empress and leads her new armies to conquer the world. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at ‘turning the world upside’ would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.

Medieval peasants often found it much easier than medieval intellectuals to imagine a society of equals. Now, perhaps, we begin to understand why.

The preceding quote from The Dawn of Everything (2021) argues that Carnival festivals played a causative role in the birth of modern socio-political forms by lending a temporary reality to the first imaginings of these forms. I think it is also possible, however, that these festivals were merely a symptom of deeper sociological and theological features of Latin Christendom which supported these Feasts of Fools and Misrules and contributed to the birth of secular modernity.

A vast but (I hope) useful oversimplification: Islam, which has no anti-structural festivals, is a religion of the “Father”: an all-powerful and all-knowing deity, a divinity of authority and hierarchy—a God, in other words, of structure. Christianity is a religion of the Father too of course (the Old Testament YHWH), but also of the Son: a God who is innocent, weak, poor (in spirit), but also creative, compassionate, rebellious; a God who throws temper tantrums (flips tables) and likes telling stories (parables)—in many ways, a God of anti-structure.

The unique theological structure of Christianity is a reflection of its unique origin. Islam and Judaism, founded by prophets who were not regarded as deities themselves but as messengers of the Father, were from the start political and militaristic entities, whereas Christianity, founded by the Son—a god but also a man, a humble carpenter—began as a fraternity for and of the powerless. Where the Islamic ummah fuses religious community and political body, where Torah provides not just spiritual guidance but civil law, the Christian dispensation distinguishes between worldly and otherworldly power (”Render unto Caesar…”). The potential for government and public culture to split from religious culture was intrinsic to Christianity in a way that it simply isn’t in the other major monotheistic traditions.

Carnival traditions were downstream of Christianity’s unique sociological and doctrinal structure. Social inversion is easier to imagine—and easier to justify, even in a festivalistic context—when your god-man lived amongst the sick and the poor and the oppressed and said things like “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” and “the meek shall inherit the earth.” A religion whose central image is a crucified criminal, whose founder washed the feet of fishermen and dined with prostitutes and tax collectors, carries within it an anti-structural charge that no amount of ecclesiastical hierarchy can fully neutralize. The boy bishop wearing the mitre or the fool crowned king for a day provides more than a social safety valve. It is a living reminder that the order of this world is not ultimate.

The paradoxical unity of Fatherly structure and Childly anti-structure within the Christian God maintained a tension whose potential energy fueled Christendom’s extraordinary cultural generativity. When that tension collapsed, when the god-energy dissipated and belief became reflective rather than naïve, both poles suffered. Structure, untempered by anti-structure, tends toward the totalitarian code that brooks no opposition. Anti-structure, severed from its sacred ground, tends toward utopian fantasy—the dream of a “purified non-code” that, as Taylor warns, invariably turns nightmare.

Christianity can be understood as a synthesis of monotheistic Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism. The Christian God is both One and Many (well, at least three); He is nothing like us—a distant divine creator, the unmoved mover—but also just like us: emotional, capricious, even foolish. The Greeks had Dionysus; Christianity has a god-man who turns water into wine.

The Dionysian inheritance that Christian cultures carried forward from their pagan ancestors may be more important than it seems. In fact, all of that theological and sociological mumbo-jumbo I described above might have had nothing to do with Christendom’s uniquely generative nature. It might have just been the alcohol.

Edward Slingerland has argued that by causing humans “to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal… intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups”.

A child-like state of mind in an adult is key to cultural innovation, argues Slingerland. Intoxicants provide an efficient route to that state by temporarily taking the prefrontal cortex offline.

The fact that Islam prohibits alcohol whereas Christianity sacramentalizes it may be no small detail: a civilization that gathers weekly to drink the blood of its god is a civilization that has built intoxication, and the loosening of codes it enables, into its very foundations.

While there is no real evidence of a direct historical connection between Carnival and Roman Saturnalia, the parallels are hard to dismiss as mere accident.

The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves as it was seen as a time of liberty for both slaves and freedmen alike. A common custom was the election of a ‘King of the Saturnalia’, who gave orders to people, which were followed and presided over the merrymaking.

Pagan influence aside, it does seem that Carnival had a largely independent origin in medieval theatre. Some historians trace the Feast of Fools to the Ordo Rachelis plays performed during the liturgy for Innocents Day, which included unscripted “Herod games” that mocked their namesake, the Jewish-Roman ruler who, according to the Gospels, ordered the massacre of Bethlehem’s infants. These games involved storming cathedrals, throwing wooden spears at the choir, and beating bystanders with inflated animal bladders. The story held that Herod’s own page-boys had thwarted the murder of Jesus and thereby gained God’s favor—an inversion of worldly rank that mirrored the inversions of the Feast of Fools itself.

This theatrical origin of Carnival points to something essential about Christianity that distinguishes it from the other major world religions. In Islam, God speaks through a prophet; in Buddhism, an enlightened teacher points the way. In Christianity, God becomes a character in a story—a strange tale, full of reversals and surprises, where the protagonist dies and then doesn’t.

Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story—and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love. Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. (Tolkien)

Islam and Buddhism, whatever their other virtues, are religions of teaching, of law, doctrine, right practice. A religion founded on teaching invites adherence; a religion of story invites imagination, hope, and meaning—all of which are in woefully short supply in this most secular age.

I realize this analysis may read as critical of non-Christian religions, Islam in particular. Two points by way of clarification.

First, while I have argued that Christianity’s unique structure made possible the birth of secular modernity, I hope it is clear by now that I regard modernity as, at best, an ambivalent achievement. Much has been gained, much has been lost; only time will tell whether the bargain will have been worth it. My hope, such as it is, lies in the possibility that modernity represents a transitional epoch, a necessary dialectical step towards some future synthesis of secular modernity and spiritual antiquity in which we might recover what was lost while retaining what was gained.

Second, if our secular age suffers most from a deficit of god-energy, then Islam’s resistance to secularization may position it to play an unexpectedly vital role in whatever comes next. Islam remains the world’s great reservoir of religious intensity, of the kind of spiritual voltage that Christendom once possessed but has long since dissipated. This may seem like a liability now, a source of civilizational friction and conflict. But God, and History, work in mysterious ways and delight in dramatic reversals (the first shall be last…); what is reactionary today may prove generative tomorrow.

I am not naïve about Islam's current challenges, its frequent incompatibility with liberal norms, the genuine problems posed by its fusion of religious and political authority. But I suspect, and this is only a suspicion, the kind of intuition that one offers tentatively, knowing it may prove foolish, that the Islam of the twenty-second or twenty-third century will surprise us—that its very potency, its refusal to dissolve into the godless nihilism of modernity, positions it to contribute something essential to the coming golden age. Perhaps it will itself undergo some internal enantiodromia, some unforeseeable transformation, or catalyze such transformations in others. Perhaps the tension between Islamic intensity and Western exhaustion will prove as generative as the medieval tension between structure and anti-structure once was.

Although the consciousness of death is in most cultures very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or “death poems.” Such poems are often written in the very last moments of the poet’s life.

Hundreds of Japanese death poems, many with a commentary describing the circumstances of the poet’s death, are translated into English here, the great majority of them for the first time.

The following poems are selected from the second section of the book which features poems written by haiku poets. Enjoy.

Death poems by zen monks (part 1)
Death poems by haiku poets (part2)

1.

KYOHAKU (虚白)
Died on the last day of the 10th month, 1847 at the age of 75

2.

KYO’ON (去音)
Died on the 10th day of the 11th month, 1749 at the age of 63

In the original, the image of a dream is combined with the cruder image of passing wind. The transition from one to the other is made by a play on words: sharakusashi means “boastfulness” or “vanity”; the latter part of the word alone, kusashi, means “stench.”

3.

KYUTARO (久太郎)
Died on the 20th day of February, 1928 at the age of 36

Kyutaro started working as a messenger boy for a commercial firm at the age of twelve. A year later, on Emperor’s Day (February 11) he went out to play in the snow. The head clerk considered such behavior an affront to the nation and scolded him. The thirteen-year-old Kyutaro wrote this poem:

In later years Kyutaro lived among workers and day laborers in Tokyo and became a radical anarchist. In 1923 he fired a gun at a government official and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He committed suicide in his cell, leaving his death poem behind him.

4.

MABUTSU (馬仏)
Died on the 21st day of the 12th month, 1696

The snowman in this poem is not only a seasonal image, but also a symbol of transience.

Phrases such as “the eyes lie horizontally, the nose vertically” (given an alternate wording in the translation) and “the threshold is horizontal and vertical the pillar” appear in Zen writings as an expression of an enlightened point of view. Such remarks do not proceed from the understanding of any so-called truth, but from the reflection of the world in the consciousness that, like a clear mirror, has nothing in itself and neither adds to nor takes away from the thing it reflects.

5.

MASAHIDE (正秀)
Died on the 3rd day of the 8th month, 1723 at the age of 67

Masahide, a doctor by profession, lived most of his life in the town of Zeze on Lake Biwa. He studied haiku under Basho, whom he very much admired. Around 1688 Masahide’s storehouse burned down, and he wrote the following poem, which was much praised by Basho.

It seems that Masahide became very poor after his storehouse burned down. His poet friend Jozen, who came to visit him in 1103, reported that Masahide had no blanket for his two children, and had to cover them with mosquito netting.

6.

MOKUDO (木導)
Died on the 22nd day of the 6th month, 1723 at the age of 58

Mokudo apparently tries, with the strange image of piercing a dagger into an eggplant (nasubi), to blend the fighting spirit (he belonged to the samurai class) with the spirit of haiku. The eggplant is a seasonal image for summer, during which the poet died; with a dagger stuck into it, the eggplant symbolizes the enemy’s head.

We are incorrect in hoping that the poem was written in jest, for the warrior-poet prefaces it with an explanation:

In times of war the samurai were the first to stab their daggers into their enemies. We are familiar with many stories about these bold warriors. Today peace reigns in the world and warriors no longer go forth into battle. They continue, however, with military exercises, so that in time of need they will be ready to fight zealously, till word of their courage echoes throughout Japan and the entire world.

7.

NAMAGUSAI TAZUKURI (腥斎佃)
Died on the 16th day of the 8th month, 1858 at the age of 72

Namagusai Tazukuri, whose name means literally “peasant reeking of fish,” was born to a poor fishmonger. His parents died when he was young, and he was adopted by a fisherman. Namagusai Tazukuri was the fifth head of the senryū school.

8.

NANDAI (南台)
Died on the 24th day of the 12th month, 1817 at the age of 31

9.

OKANO KIN’EMON KANEHIDE (岡野金右衛門包秀)
Died on the 4th day of the 2nd month, 1703 at the age of 24

Okano Kin’emon Kanehide was one of the forty-seven samurai who participated in one of the most exciting incidents in Japanese history. In 1701, a feudal lord named Asano Nagamori was ordered to hold a reception in honor of the emperor’s messenger. A high official by the name of Kira Yoshinaka, who was appointed by the shogun to be in charge of ceremony, was to instruct Asano in ceremonial etiquette.

Kira treated Asano with contempt. Asano, his pride wounded, drew his sword and struck Kira. Since the incident took place in the castle at Edo, in the grounds of which the drawing of weapons was strictly forbidden, Asano was ordered to take his own life by seppuku on that very day. He did so. Asano’s estate was confiscated by the government, and the shogun rejected the petition brought to him by Asano’s retainers to hand over the estate to the younger brother of the deceased.

Thus Asano’s warriors became ronin, samurai without a lord. Forty-seven of them swore to avenge their master by killing Kira. To keep from attracting attention to themselves, they scattered to different parts of the country and waited for the proper moment. It came two years later, when Kira began to relax the security measures he had taken to protect himself. On a snowy morning of the 2nd month, 1702, the samurai broke into Kira’s mansion and killed him. They then turned themselves over to the government.

In taking their revenge, the forty-seven samurai acted in accordance with the moral code that forbade them to “live under the same sky as the enemy of their lord.” They gained sympathy in many circles of society, and the shogun himself was inclined to pardon them. In the end, however, those who insisted on enforcing the law prevailed, and a year after the incident took place, all forty-seven warriors were ordered to kill themselves by seppuku. This event excited the imagination of the Japanese, and the forty-seven samurai gained an immortal place in the history and the literature of their country.

10.

RAIZAN (来山)
Died on the 3rd day of the 10th month, 1716 at the age of 63

Raizan, a contemporary of Basho’s, learned to write haiku at the age of eight and was authorized to teach and criticize haiku at the age of eighteen. It was said of Raizan that he never put his wine glass down and that he never stayed sober for so much as a day at a time. Rumor had it that he loved a doll rather than a woman and for that reason did not get married. In fact, he was married twice.

Just before his death, Raizan wrote a humorous death poem in tanka form:

11.

RANDO (鸞動)
Died on the 30th day of the 7th month, 1686 at the age of 22

The tsuta is a clinging vine found on stones and trees throughout Japan. Its leaves turn red before falling. The evergreen mentioned in the poem is the pine (matsu).

12.

RANGAI (嵐外)
Died on the 26th day of the 3rd month, 1845 at the age of 75

13.

RETSUZAN (列山)
Died on the 25th day of the 8th month, 1826 at the age of 37

14.

ROKUSHI (六之)
Died on the 16th day of August, 1881 at the age of 75

The poem alludes to a Chinese folktale about a man who dreamed that he rose in importance and became the holder of a wealthy estate. He woke up to discover that the millet porridge he had put on the fire had not yet boiled. The moral of the story is that visions of grandeur are vain, but it is tinged perhaps with a Zen Buddhist flavor as well: the truth we search for is to be found in the simple things before our eyes.

15.

RYUSHI (隆志)
Died on the 6th day of the 9th month, 1764 at the age of 70

16.

SARUO (猿男)
Died on the 27th day of April, 1923 at the age of 63

A dango is a rice dumpling, sometimes filled with red-bean paste. One occasion for eating dango is during the cherry-blossom season in the spring. Hana no / wakare means literally “flower departure”; the expression can be taken to mean the parting between the onlooker and the blossoms. It is perhaps best, however, not to read the viewer into the poem at all, but to take it as the end of a scene in which only a half-eaten dumpling and falling blossoms are left on the stage.

17.

SEIJU (盛住)
Died on the 15th day of the 8th month, 1776 at the age of 75

18.

SHIYO (子葉)
Died on the 4th day of the 2nd month, 1703 at the age of 32

Shiyo (Otaka Gengo Tadao) was one of the forty-seven samurai who, in the winter of 1703, avenged the death of their master and who were thus ordered to commit seppuku as punishment. In Shiyo’s death poem, shide no yama, “mountain of death,” is the mountain crossed, according to the belief, in the journey from life to death.

It is recorded that Shiyo left another death poem in his last letter to his mother:

19.

SHOFU (椎風)
Died on the 5th day of the 12th month, 1848 at the age of 57

20.

SHOGETSU (松月)
Died on the 2nd day of September, 1899 at the age of 70

21.

SHOHI (松琵)
Died on the 14th day of the 8th month, 1750 at the age of 79

Jūman’ōkudo is one of the names for paradise or the eternal; it means literally “the ten trillion land.” This might refer to the distance between paradise and this world, but it may also suggest infinite duration.

Although Shohi’s poem expresses a desire to abandon this world, it would seem that he was nevertheless quite interested in its phenomena. It is said that while Shohi was visiting the poet Rosen in the city of Nagoya during one of his journeys, he heard that an elephant was being shipped to the shogun in Edo. The fifty-seven-year-old poet became curious. He went forty miles out of his way, lodging overnight in a roadside inn and getting up at three in the morning, just to catch a glimpse of the animal.

22.

SHOKEI (松渓)
Died on the 13th day of February, 1895 at the age of 72

23.

SHUHO (舟甫)
Died in 1767

24.

TADATOMO (忠知)
Died on the 27th day of the 11th month, 1676 at the age of 52

Tadatomo committed suicide in the traditional Japanese manner. The reason for his suicide is not clear. Just before his death he wrote this death poem and added the words, “the vicissitudes of my life—how sad!”

Shimotsuki, “frost month,” is the name for the 11th month of the lunar calendar (by the solar calendar, approximately the month of January).

25.

TAMASHICHI (玉七)
Died in 1910

26.

TANEHIKO (種彦)
Died on the 13th day of the 7th month, 1842 at the age of 60

27.

TANKO (旦葵)
Died in 1735(?) at the age of about 70

Tanko, one of Basho’s pupils, was a cake-seller and practitioner of acupuncture. Once a sack of grain was brought to Tanko as a present from one of his patients. Tanko was so delighted that he brought out a bottle of rice wine to celebrate the occasion. Just then a messenger came from the sender to inform him that a mistake had been made; the gift that was meant for Tanko was a sack of radishes, not of grain. Tanko was crestfallen. Later, however, when his poet-friend Etsujin came by, the two of them broke out laughing. On another occasion, during an acupuncture treatment, Tanko was unable to extract one of the needles from the body of his patient. Leaving the patient with the needle still in his flesh, he fled from the place.

We do not know when Tanko died. The poems were written a short time before his death, and the seasonal images belong to the time between autumn and winter. The “deer call” in the second poem refers to an instrument blown by hunters which imitates the mating call made by stags in autumn to attract does. Toribe-yama (fourth poem) is the name of a hill in Kyoto that has a cemetery on it.

28.

TOKO (杜口)
Died on the 11th day of the 2nd month, 1795 at the age of 86

29.

TOKUGEN (徳元)
Died on the 28th day of the 8th month, 1647 at the age of 89

Although the consciousness of death is in most cultures very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or “death poems.” Such poems are often written in the very last moments of the poet’s life.

Hundreds of Japanese death poems, many with a commentary describing the circumstances of the poet’s death, are translated into English here, the great majority of them for the first time.

The following poems are selected from the second section of the book which features poems written by haiku poets (due to the number of poets, I will split this section into two posts). Enjoy.

Death poems by zen monks (part 1)

1.

BASHO (芭蕉)
Died on the 12th day of the 10th month, 1694 at the age of 51

This is the last poem of one of the greatest haiku poets. Basho had fallen seriously ill on one of his travels. When his pupils hinted that he ought to leave a farewell poem, he replied that any of his poems could be his death poem. Nevertheless, on the 8th day of the 10th month, after gathering his pupils around his bed, he wrote this poem. He died four days later.

2.

BENSEKI (鞭石)
Died on the 15th day of the 2nd month, 1728 at the age of 80

Nori no chigo, “child of the way,” expresses not only the dream of an eighty-year-old man to renew his youth, but contains a play on words as well. In his last years Benseki abandoned the world and became a monk, changing his name to Honi, the Chinese-derived pronunciation of the characters used to write nori no [chi]go. “Honi” can mean both “child of the way” and “child of the doctrine.”

The willow (yanagi), common throughout Japan, is a tall tree that grows on the banks of rivers and lakes, its slender branches stretching down as thin as strings. A willow tree is often mentioned in haiku as a picture of spring, its branches covered with green and drifting in the wind.

The image of a journey from one bank of a river to the other appears often in Buddhist literature as a symbol of the transition from the state of ignorance and illusion to that of enlightenment.

3.

BUFU (蕪風)
Died on the 24th day of the 7th month, 1792

4.

CHIYOJO (千代女)
Died on the 19th day of the 1st month, 1746 at the age of 20

Kisohajime refers to fresh clothes worn on New Year’s Day, which fell around the beginning of spring when the lunar calendar was used. The Japanese, principally women and children, wear new kimonos made especially for the occasion. Chiyojo makes a pun on the word kanoko, which signifies literally a fawn but also refers to a particular white-spotted tie-dyed pattern on a kimono, perhaps on the one she was wearing that year.

5.

CHOGO (朝伍)
Died on the 3rd day of the 9th month, 1806 at the age of 45

6.

CHORA (蝶羅)
Died on the 6th day of the 5th month, 1776 at the age of 54

After his death, Chora’s wife, Motojo, answered with a poem of mourning:

Chora died in summer, when netting is hung down from the ceiling to form a kind of chamber, as protection from mosquitoes and flies.

7.

CHORI (登里)
Died on the 19th day of the 10th month, 1778 at the age of 39

8.

ENSETSU (燕説)
Died on the 19th day of the 9th month, 1743 at the age of 73

Ensetsu grew up in a Zen Buddhist temple and in his later years served as a priest. To the haiku written before his death he attached, as was the custom among Zen monks, a death poem in Chinese as well:

“Ho!” is a translation of totsu, a cry of enlightenment. Ensetsu was very much attached to his haiku master, Rosen (p. 259), with whom he roamed all over Japan. When Ensetsu heard of his master’s having fallen ill, he hastened to his side, though he himself was suffering from severe stomach pains. From the day Rosen died, Ensetsu’s disease worsened, and he survived his master less than a month.

9.

ENSHI (燕枝)
Died on the 12th day of February, 1900 at the age of 63

10.

FUKAKU (不角)
Died on the 21st day of the 6th month, 1753 at the age of 92

11.

FUKYU (普求)
Died on the 21st day of the 7th month, 1771 at the age of 79

12.

GAKI (我鬼)
Died on the 24th day of July, 1927 at the age of 36

Gaki, better known by his real name, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, prefaced his poem with the words “laughing at myself.” He gave the poem to his aunt on the night of July 23rd and asked her to deliver it the next morning to the family doctor, who was himself a haiku poet. The same night Akutagawa killed himself by drinking poison.

Akutagawa was one of Japan’s greatest modern authors. A short time after his birth his mother became insane, which cast a heavy shadow on his life. One of his first stories, entitled Hana (Nose), won much praise from the writer Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) and put Akutagawa well into the literary scene of his age.

13.

GOZAN (吾山)
Died on the 17th day of the 12th month, 1789 at the age of 71

14.

HAMEI (巴明)
Died on the 26th day of the 12th month, 1837 at the age of 83

15.

HAMON (巴紋)
Died on the 21st day of the 2nd month, 1804 at the age of 58

16. HANRI (畔李)
Died on the 12th day of the 5th month, 1835 at the age of 71

Shitauchi (clucking of the tongue) refers to the sound a person makes with his tongue signifying regret over failures in the past and resignation to the unavoidable.

Shimizu, “pure water,” calls to mind the water of streams breaking out of the ground in summer after the rainy season. But there may be, as well, a suggestion of shinimizu, the water given by Japanese to the dying.

17.

HOKUSAI (北斎)
Died on the 12th day of the 4th month, 1849 at the age of 90

Hokusai was one of Japan’s greatest artists. His colorful paintings of Edo’s street life are among the best made in ukiyoe style, and his series of thirty-seven views of Mount Fuji brought him fame falling little short of that of the mountain itself.

18.

HOKUSHI (北枝)
Died on the 12th day of the 8th month, 1718

Hokushi’s death poem is built around a pun. Keshi means “to erase” as well as “poppy,” so the poem may be read, “I write, erase, rewrite, / erase again, and then / a flower erases.” However it is read, the poem’s intent remains the same—that nature eventually overwhelms culture. The poppy blooms in Japan at the beginning of summer, the season in which Hokushi died.

Hokushi, a sword-sharpener, learned to write haiku from Basho. He would not hesitate to suggest changes in his teacher’s poems, and Basho praised him for his helpful criticism.

It is said that Hokushi was extremely poor, but of a cheerful disposition. When his house burned down, he wrote:

Hokushi had a weakness for liquor and used to ask for wine from his neighbor, the poet Joryu. Hokushi and his elder brother Bokudo, himself a poet, were famous for their ability to sleep while sitting and were accordingly styled “champion dozers.”

19.

HOKUSO (北窓)
Died on the 6th day of the 6th month, 1790

20.

HYAKKA (百花)
Died on the 20th day of the 2nd month, 1779 at the age of 64

Two death poems have been ascribed to Hyakka. Both cherry blossoms and melting ice are images of spring, the season in which the poet died.

21.

ISSA (一茶)
Died on the 19th day of the 11th month, 1827 at the age of 65

Issa is considered one of Japan’s greatest haiku poets. Among the common people of Japan he is perhaps loved more than any other poet, because of the many vicissitudes of his life, and because of the human simplicity of his poetry. Accounts of Issa’s death do not indicate that he wrote a death poem; these two poems are held to be his death poems by popular tradition.

An ancient Oriental belief features the tortoise as a symbol of long life, ascribing to it a life of ten thousand years. Should man live to be one hundred, his life would be no more than a hundredth part of the life of this shell-covered creature that drags its tail in the mud. Why then should a man ask for another year, a month, or a day?

The word tarai in the second poem means “tub” or “basin.” The reference is perhaps to the basins for cleaning newborn babies and cleansing the dead. The life of man is no more than gibberish (chimpunkan means, in colloquial speech, the unintelligible sounds of a foreign language) that begins in the cradle and ends in the grave.

22.

ISSHO (一笑)
Died on the 6th day of the 12th month, 1688 at the age of 36

The death of Issho is described in one source:

Issho, who lived in the city of Kanazawa, loved haiku. When Basho passed through Kanazawa on a journey, Issho wanted very much to lodge him in his home, but that very year Issho had fallen deathly ill and knew his end was near. It was the 13th year after his father’s death, and Issho decided to compose thirteen kasen [thirty-six-verse renga] in memory of his father. His friends tried to prevent this undertaking, saying, “Your breathing is not regular. Who knows what will happen to you after you have finished the thirteen poems?” But Issho replied, “Even if I die, I will not be sorry.” After five poems Issho’s breathing became heavy, and he could hardly hold his brush. In spite of this he held on and composed the other eight. When he had finished his task, his eyes shone with joy and he announced, “With these poems close to my body, I have nothing to regret.” As his eyelids grew heavier, he closed them and said [the poem above]. He looked like a man who had been freed from the chains of life and whose soul was pure. In the autumn of the year following Issho’s death, Basho wrote a poem of lamentation in his memory: “Move, O tomb / the sound of my weeping / is the wind of autumn [Tsuka mo ugoke / waga naku koe wa / aki no kaze].”

Issho’s phrase “from deep in my heart” (kokoro kara) is an expression rarely encountered in haiku. But death poems are, by nature, more personal than ordinary haiku. Issho died in the middle of winter, when snow had covered his province. The “clouds in the west” (nishi no kumo) may be regarded as a seasonal image, but in this poem they probably refer to the messengers of Amida coming to greet the dead on their way to the Pure Land.

23.

KANGYU (関牛)
Died in 1861

24.

KEIDO (径童)
Died in about 1750 past the age of 30

25.

KIGEN (其諺)
Died on the 23rd day of the 8th month, 1736 at the age of 71

26.

KIKO (其香)
Died on the 2nd day of the 5th month, 1823 at the age of 52

27.

KISEI (亀世)
Died on the 18th day of the 9th month, 1764 at the age of 77

28.

KOHA (香波)
Died on the 14th day of August, 1897

29.

KOJU (湖十)
Died on the 24th day of the 7th month, 1806

When I speak of nest in time, I mean any frequently repeated experience whose unique dynamics, intensity of involvement and regular length wall it off from other experiences and so establish a discrete psychological environment. While we habitually seek out nests in space, areas for privacy or intimacy or repose, we are relative novices in establishing these temporal havens, and slow in realizing that free space is useless without uncluttered time. Indeed, a nest of time need not require a special place at all: its only two requirements are that it concern some desirable activity and that it be, barring emergencies, inviolable. A writer sits down to work. It is nine in the morning, and the next four hours are free, just as they have been the day before and will be the day after, by his express decision and unequivocal need.

He looks down those four hours as down a clear view of unencumbered space; more broadly, the regular work periods of the future open up like a long bright hallway of work in freedom. He has no need to fear a wasted hour, an unproductive day, and conversely he has no time-related excuse for sloth or failure. Two lovers meet each evening from five until seven. Their activities vary but their intimacy does not. Whatever else they do during the day is redeemed by this period. A man goes jogging regularly, through the countryside or a park, for forty minutes. The stress of running is sufficient to make it the only thing he thinks of. Yet immediately beneath his awareness of the present, in the familiar landmarks and the familiar stresses, is the sense that he has done this before and will do this again, that he characteristically wills to do it, that in doing it he enters and enlarges a part of himself which is unavailable to him at other times. Such periods unify us, concentrating our energy, judgment and emotion upon a single point. Conversely, they relieve us from all other considerations and so give us profound refreshment. They give us, if temporarily, ourselves. They are true acts of freedom, compared with which our normal miscellaneous diversions and indulgences of impulse are like the flutterings of moths.

— Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

It didn’t take much—one book and a handful of essays—for me to become a full-blown Hart-head. Were he born in another age, David Bentley Hart might have been an Augustine or an Aquinas, or even an Aristotle; but he was born in our time and so he is a wildly prolific author of fiction and non-fiction with special interests in Christian theology, philosophy of mind, baseball, and dogs, and likely one of the most widely-read persons in the world.

Outside the high school curriculum, Hart took up French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and modern Greek. At the University of Maryland, Hart studied classics, history, world literature, religious studies and philosophy while also learning to read Chinese and Sanskrit. As a teenager, Hart started to read the early Church Fathers along with contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologians, converting to Orthodoxy at the age of twenty-one.

He is also notorious for his sardonic wit. For example:

At its most depraved, the picture becomes something like Galt’s Gulch, in the single worst novel ever penned by any member of any bipedal species.

I do not follow Rod Dreher’s writings and certainly would never subscribe to his Substack publication. It is not that I have any prejudice against him; I simply dislike everything he writes, says, or stands for; other than that, I think he’s just dandy.

Gopnik has his virtues—he has written some good pieces on Proust and on French culture—but he is no scholar of the ancient world, theology, or religion in general, he lacks even the most basic philosophical training, and his critical skills when applied to such matters prove feeble to the point of nonexistence.

He is also, uh, not a fan of Trump or Vance, to say the very least.

A few weeks back, the venomous garden gnome J. D. Vance, in the course of explaining the administration’s policy on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, asserted that every war is ultimately ended by a negotiated settlement, and one need only look back at history—and to the Second World War in particular—to see that this is so. Keen eye there. And we always do well to heed the lessons of history. Perhaps it is time to acquaint ourselves again with the famous peace negotiations in Berlin in 1918, or the Berlin and Tokyo Peace Summits of 1945, or the Appomattox Accords of 1865, or the Waterloo Non-Aggression and Trade Treaty of 1815, and so forth. I am simply grateful to have so towering an intellect ready to step into the breach should the unthinkable happen. That ivy league degree in hillbilly studies was not wasted.

In my previous essay, “The Asymmetry”, I shared several long quotes from The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (2013). Here, I’d like share some further excerpts from the book that give a sense of its core arguments (roughly: atheism/naturalism is absurd and incoherent and you are an idiot for espousing it) and of Hart’s literary flair. Enjoy.

1. Wisdom and Revelation

2. The Incoherence of Naturalism

3. God Properly Understood

4. Theism vs. Naturalism

5. The Metaphysics of Eminence

6. The Experience and Mystery of Wonder

7. God vs. Gods

8. Super-naturalism

9. God as ‘No-Thing’

10. The Transcendental Structure of Consciousness and Intentionality

11. Faith as the Ground of Knowledge

12. The Blissfulness of Being and Consciousness

13. Euthyphro’s (non)Dilemma

14. The Divinity of Beauty

15. The Impossibility of Atheism

16. The Mechanical Philosophy and its Pathologies

17. Modernity and its Pathologies

18. The Clarity of Contemplation

19. The Only Proof

1. Wisdom and Revelation

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see, but now fortified by the ability to translate some of that vision into words, however inadequate. There is a point, that is to say, where reason and revelation are one and the same. I know that, in putting the matter thus, I risk losing the sympathy of a large number of readers both rationalists and fideists, both the skeptical and the devout—but I hope my meaning will become clear in what follows. God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever. Or, to borrow the language of Augustine, God is not only “superior summo meo” (beyond my utmost heights) but also “interior intimo meo” (more inward to me than my inmost depths). Only when one understands what such a claim means does one know what the word “God” really means, and whether it is reasonable to think that there is a reality to which that word refers and in which we should believe.

2. The Incoherence of Naturalism

The only fully consistent alternative to belief in God, properly understood, is some version of “materialism” or “physicalism” or (to use the term most widely preferred at present) “naturalism”; and naturalism—the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural—is an incorrigibly incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking. The very notion of nature as a closed system entirely sufficient to itself is plainly one that cannot be verified, deductively or empirically, from within the system of nature. It is a metaphysical (which is to say “extra-natural”) conclusion regarding the whole of reality, which neither reason nor experience legitimately warrants. It cannot even define itself within the boundaries of its own terms, because the total sufficiency of “natural” explanations is not an identifiable natural phenomenon but only an arbitrary judgment. Naturalism, therefore, can never be anything more than a guiding prejudice, an established principle only in the sense that it must be indefensibly presumed for the sake of some larger view of reality; it functions as a purely formal rule that, like the restriction of the king in chess to moves of one square only, permits the game to be played one way rather than another.

3. God Properly Understood

To speak of “God” properly, then—to use the word in a sense consonant with the teachings of orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Bahai, a great deal of antique paganism, and so forth—is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. God so understood is not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. In one sense he is “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of discrete, finite things. In another sense he is “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things. Infinite being, infinite consciousness, infinite bliss, from whom we are, by whom we know and are known, and in whom we find our only true consummation.

4. Theism vs. Naturalism

One of the more persistent and inexcusable rhetorical conceits that corrupt the current popular debates over belief in God is the claim that they constitute an argument between faith and reason or religion and science. They constitute, in fact, only a contest between different pictures of the world: theism and naturalism (this seems the most satisfactory and comprehensive term, at any rate), each of which involves a number of basic metaphysical convictions; and the latter is by far the less rationally defensible of the two. Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification (after all, if there is a God he can presumably reveal himself to seeking minds, but if there is not then there can be no “natural” confirmation of the fact). Thus naturalism must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond. And naturalism’s claim that, by confining itself to purely material explanations for all things, it adheres to the only sure path of verifiable knowledge is nothing but a feat of sublimely circular thinking: physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. There is something here of the mystical…

…Even if one could conceivably prove, as is occasionally suggested these days, that cosmic information is somehow ceaselessly generated out of quantum states, this still would not have decided the issue of causality in favor of the naturalist position. As a brilliant physicist friend of mine often and somewhat tiresomely likes to insist, “chaos” could not produce laws unless it were already governed by laws.

In the end, one is of course perfectly free to believe in the, so to speak, “just-there-ness” of the quantum order and of the physical laws governing it. I tend to see this as bordering upon a belief in magic, but that may be mere prejudice. What is absolutely certain is that the naturalist view of things is, as I have said, just a picture of the world, not a truth about the world that we can know, nor even a conviction that rests upon a secure rational foundation. The picture that naturalism gives us, at least at present, is twofold. On the one hand, the cosmos of space and time is a purely mechanistic reality that, if we are to be perfectly consistent, we must see as utterly deterministic: that is to say, to work a small variation on Laplace’s fantasy, if we could know the entire history of the physical events that compose the universe, from that first inflationary instant to the present, including the course of every particle, we would know also the ineluctable necessity of everything that led to and follows from the present; even what we take to be free acts of the will would be revealed as the inevitable results of physical forces reaching all the way back to the beginning of all things. On the other hand, this deterministic machine floats upon a quantum flux of ceaseless spontaneity and infinite indeterminacy. Together, these two orders close reality within a dialectical totality a perfect union of destiny and chance, absolute determinism and pure fortuity—hermetically sealed against all transcendence. And yet, once again, the picture is radically incomplete, not only because it is unlikely that the classical Newtonian universe and the universe of quantum theory can be fitted together so seamlessly, but because neither level of reality explains the existence of the other, or of itself. And, also once again, nothing we know obliges us to find this picture more convincing than one in which higher causes (among which we might, for instance, include free will) operate upon lower, or in which all physical reality is open to a transcendent order that reveals itself in the very existence of nature.

5. The Metaphysics of Eminence

I suppose that if I had to give a kind of portmanteau name to the view of things I find most convincing, it would be the “metaphysics of eminence”— borrowing the scholastic notion that lower reality is always “more eminently” or “virtually” contained in higher realities, while the higher is participated in and expressed by the lower. Or perhaps one could simply call this the metaphysics of the transcendental, which includes such (by current standards) incredible beliefs as: beautiful things are caused by, among other things, transcendent beauty. Whatever one calls it, however, and however dependent it is on the clearly inadequate spatial metaphors of the above and the below, it is a vision of reality in which the higher is not the epiphenomenal and largely illusory residue of the lower down there where reality is really real, as it were but a causal order in its own right, comprising the forms and ends and rational harmonies that shape and guide and explain the world. Then, beyond all those forms of causality, comprehending, transcending, pervading, underlying, and creating them, is that which is highest and most eminent of all, the boundless source of all reality, the infinity of being, consciousness, and bliss that is God.

6. The Experience and Mystery of Wonder

The beginning of all philosophy, according to both Plato and Aristotle, lies in the experience of wonder. One might go further and say that the beginning of all serious thought—all reflection upon the world that is not merely calculative or appetitive—begins in a moment of unsettling or delighted surprise. Not, that is, a simple twinge of curiosity or bafflement regarding some fact out there not yet in one’s possession: if anything, it is the sudden awareness that no mere fact can possibly be an adequate explanation of the mystery in which one finds oneself immersed at every moment. It is the astonishing recollection of something one has forgotten only because it is always present: a primordial agitation of the mind and will, an abiding amazement that lies just below the surface of conscious thought and that only in very rare instants breaks through into ordinary awareness. It may be that when we are small children, before we have learned how to forget the obvious, we know this wonder in a more constant, innocent, and luminous way, because we are still trustingly open to the sheer inexplicable givenness of the world. In the dawn of life we sense with perfect immediacy, which we have no capacity or inclination to translate into any objective concept, how miraculous it is that—as Angelus Silesius (1624-1677) says—“Die Rose ist ohne warum, sie biühet, weil sie blühet”: “The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms.” As we age, however, we lose our sense of the intimate otherness of things; we allow habit to displace awe, inevitability to banish delight; we grow into adulthood and put away childish things. Thereafter, there are only fleeting instants scattered throughout our lives when all at once, our defenses momentarily relaxed, we find ourselves brought to a pause by a sudden unanticipated sense of the utter uncanniness of the reality we inhabit, the startling fortuity and strangeness of everything familiar: how odd it is, and how unfathomable, that anything at all exists; how disconcerting that the world and one’s consciousness of it are simply there, joined in a single ineffable event. When it comes, it is a moment of alienation from the ordinary perhaps, but not one of disaffection or loss; as long as the experience lasts, in fact, it has a certain quality of mystifying happiness about it, the exhilarating feeling that one is at the border of some tremendous and beautiful discovery. One realizes that everything about the world that seems so unexceptional and drearily predictable is in fact charged with an immense and imponderable mystery. In that instant one is aware, even if the precise formulation eludes one, that everything one knows exists in an irreducibly gratuitous ‘what it is’ has no logical connection with the reality ‘that it is’; nothing within experience has any “right” to be, any power to give itself existence, any apparent “why”. In that instant one recalls that ones every encounter with the world has always been an encounter with an enigma that no merely physical explanation can resolve.

One cannot dwell indefinitely in that moment, of course, any more than one can remain a child forever. For one thing, there is an almost paralyzing fullness to the experience, a kind of surfeit of immediacy that is at the same time an absolute remoteness from practical things. For another, there is nothing to hold on to in the experience, because the source of one’s amazement is not some particular object among the objects of the world but simply the pure eventuality of the world as such. The question of why anything at all exists is one that already exceeds its occasion, already goes beyond the reality of all particular things, and attempts to lay hold, however uncertainly, of the transcendent conditions of that reality. Sooner or later, therefore, one simply must let the apprehension slip away, just so that one can get on with the business of life. One has to revert to one’s habitual obliviousness to the mystery, to a “single-mindedness” that can once again close the chasm that has briefly opened between “what” and the “that” of reality, or one will not be able to start moving forward again. At times, the memory of the experience may even need to be forcibly suppressed with ingenious or (at least) convenient rationalizations. One may, for instance, dismiss this fleeting shock of “ontological surprise” as a transient neurological aberration, a momentary phantom doubling of reality in the mind producing the false impression of some kind of dichotomy between the world and its own existence

The American philosopher Richard Taylor once illustrated this mystery, famously and fetchingly, with the image of a man out for a stroll in the forest unaccountably coming upon a very large translucent sphere. Naturally, he would immediately be taken aback by the sheer strangeness of the thing, and would wonder how it should happen to be there. More to the point, he would certainly never be able to believe that it just happened to be there without any cause, or without any possibility of further explanation; the very idea would be absurd. But, adds Taylor, what that man has not noticed is that he might ask the same question equally well about any other thing in the woods too, a rock or a tree no less than this outlandish sphere, and fails to do so only because it rarely occurs to us to interrogate the ontological pedigrees of the things to which we are accustomed. What would provoke our curiosity about the sphere would be that it was so obviously out of place; but, as far as existence is concerned, everything is in a sense out of place. As Taylor goes on to say, the question would be no less intelligible or pertinent if we were to imagine the sphere either as expanded to the size of the universe or as contracted to the size of a grain of sand, either as existing from everlasting to everlasting or as existing for only a few seconds. It is the sheer unexpected “thereness” of the thing, devoid of any transparent rationale for the fact, that prompts our desire to understand it in terms not simply of its nature, but of its very existence…Even so, one must try to understand, even if only now and then. Reason is restless before this question. And any profound reflection upon the contingency of things must involve the question of God, which—whether or not one believes it can be answered— must be posed again and again in the course of any life that is truly rational.

7. God vs. Gods

Whether or not the question of God can be answered satisfactorily, however, or even formulated satisfactorily, these reflections should at least make it clear, once again, that it is entirely different in kind from any merely local or psychological or cultic question regarding “gods” or “a god.” The gods are enfolded within nature and enter human thought as the most exalted expressions of its power; they emerge from the magnificent energy of the physical order. God, however, is first glimpsed within nature’s still greater powerlessness—its transitoriness and contingency and explanatory poverty. He is known or imagined or hoped for as that reality that lies beyond the awful shadow of potential nothingness that falls across all finite things, the gods included. The gods are beings among other beings, the most splendid beings of all, but are still dependent upon some prior reality that constitutes the imperturbable foundation of their existence. God, however, is beyond all mere finite beings, and is himself that ultimate ground upon which any foundations must rest. Thus the Mundaka Upanishad speaks of Brahma, the first-born among the gods, coming forth from Brahman, the eternal Godhead who is the source of all being, and then teaching the other gods about Brahman. The gods could not exist apart from nature; nature could not exist apart from God.

8. Super-naturalism

It should be no less clear, moreover, that philosophical naturalism could never serve as a complete, coherent, or even provisionally plausible picture of reality as a whole. The limits of nature’s powers are the same whether they are personified as deities or not. It is at the very point where physical reality becomes questionable, and reason finds it has to venture beyond the limits of nature if it is to make sense of nature, that naturalism demands reason turn back, resigned to pure absurdity, and rest content with a non-answer that closes off every avenue to the goal the mind necessarily seeks. The question of existence is real, comprehensible, and unavoidable, and yet it lies beyond the power of naturalism to answer it, or even to ask it. An old and particularly sound metaphysical maxim says that between existence and nonexistence there is an infinite qualitative difference. It is a difference that no merely quantitative calculation of processes or forces or laws can ever overcome. Physical reality cannot account for its own existence for the simple reason that nature—the physical—is that which by definition already exists; existence, even taken as a simple brute fact to which no metaphysical theory is attached, lies logically beyond the system of causes that nature comprises; it is, quite literally, “hyperphysical,” or, shifting into Latin, super naturam. This means not only that at some point nature requires or admits of a supernatural explanation (which it does), but also that at no point is anything purely, self-sufficiently natural in the first place. This is a logical and ontological claim, but a phenomenological, epistemological, and experiential one as well. We have, in fact, no direct access to nature as such; we can approach nature only across the interval of the supernatural. Only through our immediate encounter with the being of a thing are we permitted our wholly mediated experience of that thing as a natural object; we are able to ask what it is only in first knowing that it is; and so in knowing nature we have always already gone beyond its intrinsic limits. No one lives in a “naturalistic” reality, and the very notion of nature as a perfectly self-enclosed continuum is a figment of the imagination. It is the supernatural of which we have direct certainty, and only in consequence of that can the reality of nature be assumed, not as an absolutely incontrovertible fact but simply as far and away the likeliest supposition.

9. God as ‘No-Thing’

One of the more provocatively counterintuitive ways of expressing the difference between God and every contingent reality is to say that God, as the source of all being, is, properly speaking, not himself a being or, if one prefer, not a being among other beings. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), for instance, spoke of God as the non aliud: the “not other” or “not something else.” For the Neoplatonist Plotinus (c. 204-270), the divine is that which is no particular thing, or even “no-thing.” The same is true for Christians such as John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815-c. 877) or Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-c. 1327). Angelus Silesius, precisely in order to affirm that God is the omnipotent creator of all things, described God as “ein lauter Nichts“—“a pure nothingness”—and even (a touch of neologistic panache here) “ein Übernicht.” If this all sounds either perilously blasphemous of preciously paradoxical, this is because language of this sort is meant to give us pause, or even offense, in order to remind us as forcefully as possible that, as the great Muslim philosopher Mulla Sadra (c. 1572-1640) insisted, God is not to be found within the realm of beings, for he is the being of all realms.

10. The Transcendental Structure of Consciousness and Intentionality

Consciousness does not merely passively reflect the reality of the world; it is necessarily a dynamic movement of reason and will toward reality. If nothing else is to be concluded from the previous chapter, this much is absolutely certain: subjective consciousness becomes actual only through intentionality, and intentionality is a kind of agency, directed toward an end. We could never know the world from a purely receptive position. To know anything, the mind must be actively disposed toward things outside itself, always at work interpreting experience through concepts that only the mind itself can supply. The world is intelligible to us because we reach out to it, or reach beyond it, coming to know the endless diversity of particular things within the embrace of a more general and abstract yearning for a knowledge of truth as such, and by way of an aboriginal inclination of the mind toward reality as a comprehensible whole. In every moment of awareness, the mind at once receives and composes the world, discerning meaning in the objects of experience precisely in conferring meaning upon them; thus consciousness lies open to—and enters into intimate communion with—the forms of things. Every venture of reason toward an end, moreover, is prompted by a desire of the mind, a “rational appetite.” Knowledge is born out of a predisposition and predilection of the will toward beings, a longing for the ideal comprehensibility of things, and a natural orientation of the mind toward that infinite horizon of intelligibility that is being itself.

That may seem a somewhat extravagant way of describing our ordinary acts of cognition, but I think it so obviously correct as to verge on a truism. The mind does not simply submissively register sensory data, like wax receiving the impression of a signet, but is constantly at work organizing what it receives from the senses into form and meaning; and this it does because it has a certain natural compulsion to do so, a certain interestedness that exceeds most of the individual objects of knowledge that it encounters. The only reason that we can regard the great majority of particular things we come across with disinterest, or even in a wholly uninterested way, and yet still experience them as objects of recognition and reflection is that we are inspired by a prior and consuming interest in reality as such. There simply is no such thing as knowledge entirely devoid of desire—you could not make cognitive sense of a glass of water or a tree on a hill apart from the action of your mind toward some end found either in that thing or beyond that thing and so all knowledge involves an adventure of the mind beyond itself. Again, as Brentano rightly saw, this essential directedness of consciousness sets it apart from any merely mechanical function. Desire, moreover, is never purely spontaneous; it does not arise without premise out of some aimless nothingness within the will but must always be moved toward an end, real or imagined, that draws it on. The will is, of its nature, teleological, and every rational act is intrinsically purposive, prompted by some final cause. One cannot so much as freely stir a finger without the lure of some aim, proximate or remote, great or small, constant or evanescent. What is it that the mind desires, then, or even that the mind loves, when it is moved to seek the ideality of things, the intelligibility of experience as a whole? What continues to compel thought onward, whether or not the mind happens at any given moment to have some attachment to the immediate objects of experience? What is the horizon of that limitless directedness of consciousness that allows the mind to define the limits of the world it knows? Whatever it is, it is an end that lies always beyond whatever is near at hand, and it excites in the mind a need not merely to be aware, but truly to know, to discern meaning, to grasp all of being under the aspect of intelligible truth.

Perhaps this is all only the special predicament and glory of a remarkably fortunate primate, and we have become the rational possessors of the world only because we have somehow acquired a pathetic hunger for an illusory end—“truth as such” —that transcends all those merely concrete objects of awareness in which we might or might not have some interest. Perhaps it is only the accidental exaggeration in our species of an animal capacity for recognizing danger or noticing something comestible slinking through the forest shade that has somehow produced in us this paradoxical longing for an ultimate abstraction, and rendered us not merely responsive to our physical environment but obsessively conscious of it as well, insatiably transforming the real into the conceptual, arranging experience into webs of associations, ideas, and words. It seems unlikely, however. Nature could scarcely have implanted that supreme abstraction in us, at least not according to any physicalist calculus of material causation, because abstract concepts are not natural objects. And so an essential mystery lies at the very heart of rational life: in all experience there is a movement of the self beyond the self, an ecstasy—a “standing-forth”—of the mind, directed toward an end that resides nowhere within physical nature as a closed system of causes and effects. All rational experience and all knowledge is a kind of rapture, prompted by a longing that cannot be exhausted by any finite object. What, then, do we really seek in seeking to know the world? What lures us on into reality? Is it only an illusion, or is it something that opens the world to us precisely because it is a genuine dimension of reality, in which the mind and the world together participate?

There are, very broadly speaking, two ways of desiring a thing: as an end in itself or for an end beyond itself. This seems quite obvious. But, if one thinks about it, there appears to be no actual object among finite things that we can truly desire—if we desire it at all— except either in both ways at once or in the second way only. That is to say, no finite thing is desirable simply in itself, if only in the trivial sense that whatever we find desirable about that thing must correspond to some prior and more general disposition of the appetites and the will. I might, for example, conceive a longing for some particularly beautiful object out of the purest aesthetic motives; but this still means that I cannot regard that object as its own index of value. Rather, I am moved by a more constant and general desire for beauty as such, as an absolute value of which I have some sort of intentional grasp and in light of which I am able to judge the object before me as either beautiful or not. The object itself pleases me, perhaps, but only because the appetite it appeases, without wholly satisfying, is a more original and expansive longing for the beautiful. If not for that rather abstract and exalted orientation of the will it, that is, I were a person entirely lacking in aesthetic longings of any kind, refined or coarse, passionate or tepid—I would not desire that object at all.

There is always a kind of deferral of finite desire toward ultimate ends, and there is always a greater and more remote purpose for the sake of which one wants whatever one wants. This is true even when one’s interest in an object is inspired by some perfectly mundane concern, such as its monetary worth. One desires money not in itself but only for what it can purchase; and one desires the things money can purchase not simply as ends in themselves but because they correspond to more general and abstract longings for comfort, prestige, power, diversion, or what have you; and one desires all such things out of a still deeper and more general desire for happiness itself, whatever that may be, and for a fuller share in the goodness of being. In this world, the desirable is always desirable in respect of some yet more elementary and comprehensive need or yearning. All concretely limited aspirations of the will are sustained within formally limitless aspirations of the will.

In the end, the only objects of desire that are not reducible to other, more general objects of desire, and that may therefore truly be said to be desirable entirely in and of themselves, are a small number of universal, unconditional, and extremely abstract ideals that, according to a somewhat antique metaphysical vocabulary, are called “transcendentals.” Traditionally, these are said to be predicates or properties that in some way apply to all existing things, because they are essential aspects of existence as such: the intrinsic perfections of being in its fullness. There are both purely ontological transcendentals, such as being and unity, and critical or “criteriological” transcendentals, such as truth, goodness, and beauty; ultimately, though, they are distinct from one another only conceptually, from our necessarily limited vantage, but in themselves are wholly convertible with one another, each being only one name for the single reality of being itself. Precise scholastic enumerations and definitions of the various transcendentals, however, do not concern me here. What interests me is the simple but crucial insight that our experience of reality does in fact have a transcendental structure. Our minds and our wills are, in an absolutely necessary way, related to being—to everything that exists and to existence itself—always under the forms provided by certain absolute orientations of imagination, desire, and (for want of a better word) faith. Whatever ontological or metaphysical substance one may or may not be willing to accord to such immense generalities as truth, goodness, and beauty, the very shape of conscious intentionality is entirely determined by them; they constitute an absolute orientation for thought, that horizon of being of which I spoke above, toward which the mind is always turned and against which every finite object is set off, in clear and distinct outlines, in the great middle distance of the phenomenal world…

…The vanishing point of the minds inner coherence and simplicity is met by the vanishing point of the world’s highest values; the gaze of the apperceptive “I” within is turned toward a transcendental “that” forever beyond; and mental experience, of the self or of the world outside the self, takes shape in the relation between these two “supernatural” poles. The rational mind is able to know reality with the fullness it does because of its singular ability to go beyond each object of experience, and thereby to comprehend that object within more capacious conceptual categories; and ultimately the mind knows the world as a whole because it has always already, in its intentions, exceeded the world. Consciousness contains nature, as a complete and cogent reality, because it has gone beyond nature. And the mind possesses the capacity to understand and to judge because it is obedient to absolute values that appear as concrete realities nowhere within the physical order. Just as the contingency of our existence points ultimately toward some unconditioned source of being, so the contingency of our desires points toward unconditioned final causes. And, again, whether one believes these values are in some sense actual, ontological constituents of reality, or one believes instead that they are only fortunate illusions that have in some unimaginably improbable way emerged from the hypertrophy of our animal brains, it is by their transcendence of all finite conditions that they give us a world. As ever, we approach nature only across the interval of the supernatural.

11. Faith as the Ground of Knowledge

Before we can want anything for ourselves we must come to know it conceptually, through our openness to purposes that lie outside ourselves and even, in some sense, outside the cosmos. Individual psychology is complicated, but subjective consciousness is simple. In even our most ordinary acts of cognition we commit ourselves to the un-conditional: the ultimate truth for which we yearn and in light of which we judge the content of experience; the ideal of absolute intelligibility that drives us to extract as much knowledge as we can from experience; the transcendent that imparts to us the gift of the immanent. Speaking purely phenomenologically, the structure of rational consciousness is ecstatic: our minds are capable of reflecting the world because there is a kind of elation in our thinking, a joy, or at least anticipation of joy, which seeks its fulfillment in an embrace of truth in its essence. Every movement of the intellect and will toward the truth is already an act of devotion, or (again) of faith, in a number of related senses. In a quite undeniable way, for instance, almost everything we know about the greater world is something we have to take on trust, from the testimony of others; even our scientific knowledge is, for most of us, the report of those in whom we vest our confidence because we must, knowing that they will undertake the work of experiment and theory that the rest of us cannot. At a far more elementary level, however, even the personal knowledge possessed by a trained expert in some field, or by an immediate witness to some fact or other, is a knowledge acquired in the light of an original trust in the simple givenness of reality, a primal belief in a genuine conformity of the mind to the world and in the power of reality to disclose itself to reason. No intellectual endeavor—not even, shockingly enough, mathematics—can provide the logical ground of its own governing premises and principles; every act of the intellect is sustained by a fiduciary trust in the transparency of reality to consciousness. The mind has some sort of awareness—some “fore-grasp”—of truth, one that apprises it constantly of the incompleteness of what it already understands, or of the contingency of what it believes. And what the mind seeks in attempting to discover the truth is a kind of delight, a kind of fulfillment that can supersede the momentary disappointments or frustrations that the search for truth brings. Even when one suffers some immense “shift of paradigm” in one’s understanding of reality, and comes to believe that one must radically alter one’s beliefs about things, one continues to act toward the world out of a deeper and unalterable confidence in the (so to speak) nuptial unity of mind and world, and out of an ineradicable joy in the experience of that unity. The indissoluble bond between the intellect and objective reality is forged by this faith that is also a kind of love—a kind of adherence of the will and mind to something inexhaustibly desirable.

12. The Blissfulness of Being and Consciousness

Seen from the perspective of a variety of theistic traditions, this is nothing less than the reflection of absolute reality within the realm of the contingent. It is bliss that draws us toward and joins us to the being of all things because that bliss is already one with being and consciousness, in the infinite simplicity of God. As the Chandogya Upanishad says, Brahman is at once both the joy residing in the depths of the heart and also the pervasive reality in which all things subsist. The restless heart that seeks its repose in God (to use the language of Augustine) expresses itself not only in the exultations and raptures of spiritual experience but also in the plain persistence of awareness. The soul’s unquenchable eros for the divine, of which Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa and countless Christian contemplatives speak, Sufism’s ishq or passionately adherent love for God, Jewish mysticism’s devekut, Hinduism’s bhakti, Sikhism’s pyaar—these are all names for the acute manifestation of a love that, in a more chronic and subtle form, underlies all knowledge, all openness of the mind to the truth of things.

13. Euthyphro’s (non)Dilemma

This is why, as I mentioned far above, the famous dilemma from Plato’s Euthyphro is not much of a problem for any of the great theistic traditions. The central question posed in that dialogue (to rehearse it again) is whether the commands of the gods are good because they are the gods commands, or whether they are the gods commands because they are good. In the minds of some, this supposedly constitutes an insoluble difficulty for theism of any kind: in the former case goodness would be only an arbitrary product of the divine will, while in the latter the divine would be subordinate to some higher reality; and neither option should seem particularly attractive to pious souls. It is indeed an interesting question for any polytheist culture that conceives of its gods as finite personalities, contained within and dependent upon nature; it is probably a good question to ask of a deist as well, or of any other believer in a cosmic demiurge; but, applied to classical theism, it is simply a meaningless query, predicated upon a crude anthropomorphism. It is no more interesting than asking whether light shines because it is light or whether instead it is light because it shines. One should recall that the entire point of Plato’s inquiry in the Euthyphro was to show that there must be some eternal principle—which he would call the Form of the Good—beyond the realm of either material nature or limited and willful deities. This is all part of an ancient metaphysical project going back at least as far as Xenophanes, which is the common heritage of philosophy and rational theology alike: the attempt to distinguish the transcendent from the immanent, the changeless from the mutable, the ultimate source from its contingent derivations. For none of the great theistic traditions is “God” the name of a god, some emotionally changeable entity who has to deliberate upon his actions, either in respect of standards independent of himself or in respect of some arbitrary psychological impulse within himself. “God” is the name, rather, of that eternal and transcendent principle upon which the gods (if there are such beings) are dependent for their existence and for their share in all the transcendental perfections of being. For all the great monotheisms, God is himself the Good, or the Form of the Good, and his freedom consists in his limitless power to express his nature (goodness) unhindered by the obstacles or limitations suffered by finite beings. He is “the love that moves the sun and all the other stars,” as Dante phrases it, at once the underlying unity and the final end of all things. And the absolute nature of that love is reflected in the unconditional quality of the transcendental or ecstatic desire it excites in rational natures. As Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) says, “Love is sufficient in itself, gives pleasure through itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself... I love because I love, I love so that I may love. Love is something great insofar as it returns constantly to its fountainhead and flows back to its source, from which it ever draws the water that continually replenishes it. ... For when God loves, he desires only to be loved in turn. His love’s only purpose is to be loved, as he knows that all who love him are made happy by their love of him.”

14. The Divinity of Beauty

It is this autotelic sufficiency, this quality of being an absolute end in itself that is the distinguishing mark of all transcendental properties. For this reason, it may be that in some sense the most exemplary of the transcendentals is beauty. No other is more obviously characterized by an almost perfect absence of utility, or possesses a power to compel that so clearly offers no gratification or profit beyond itself. The apprehension of beauty is something simple and immediate; it is wholly elusive of definition—it never makes sense to say, “This is beautiful because...”—and yet it is inescapable in its force. One knows it, one experiences it, but no concept is adequate to it. That same horizon of the absolute that excites the mind’s desire for truth and the will’s desire for the good is also the splendor or luminosity or radiance of being, in which we delight for the sake of delight alone. Beauty is gloriously useless; it has no purpose but itself.

Yes, we take pleasure in color, integrity, harmony, radiance, and so on; and yet, as anyone who troubles to consult his or her experience of the world knows, we also frequently find ourselves stirred and moved and delighted by objects whose visible appearances or tones or other qualities violate all of these canons of aesthetic value, and that somehow “shine” with a fuller beauty as a result. Conversely, many objects that possess all these ideal features often bore us, or even appall us, with their banality. At times, the obscure enchants us and the lucid leaves us untouched; plangent dissonances can awaken our imaginations far more delightfully than simple harmonies that quickly become insipid; a face almost wholly devoid of conventionally pleasing features can seem unutterably beautiful to us in its very disproportion, while the most exquisite profile can do no more than charm us. The tenebrous canvases of Rembrandt are beautiful, while the shrill daubs of Thomas Kinkade, with all their sugary glitter, are repellant. Whatever the beautiful is, it is not simply harmony or symmetry or consonance or ordonnance or brightness, all of which can become anodyne or vacuous of themselves; the beautiful can be encountered sometimes shatteringly precisely where all of these things are deficient or largely absent. Beauty is something other than the visible or audible or conceptual agreement of parts, and the experience of beauty can never be wholly reduced to any set of material constituents. It is something mysterious, prodigal, often unanticipated, even capricious. We can find ourselves suddenly amazed by some strange and indefinable glory in a barren field, an urban ruin, the splendid disarray of a storm-wracked forest, and so on.

Even sensual pleasure is inadequate to explain aesthetic experience. We may, for instance, be neurologically predisposed to find certain musical intervals pleasant; but simple consonance soon becomes tiresome by itself, and we often find far deeper aesthetic pleasure in the play of dissonance and resolution, or in certain sublime and unresolved dissonant effects. We can even acquire appreciation for a beauty that at first we did not recognize because our neurobiological capacities inhibited us. We can learn to be enraptured by the austere loveliness of Martini and bored by the vapid prettiness of American minimalism. The tonic oddity of early Takemitsu can provide us with a completely satisfying aesthetic experience, while one of Dvorák’s more uninspired pieces, though technically correct by all the canons of tonality, tension and resolution, and modulation, may strike us as little more than tedious pastiche. And, not to belabor the point, it is simply an indubitable fact of experience that aesthetic appetite is formally distinct from any instrumental purpose we might find in the objects we desire, and that aesthetic satisfaction is formally distinct from purely sensory gratification. The ultimate object of aesthetic desire remains absolute, even as it directs attention and longing toward particular things; it lies forever beyond the totality of beings, and far beyond any reckonable economy of survival or material advantage…

…When we encounter the beautiful, after all, what is it that compels us? What draws us in, and awakens us to a splendor beyond our particular interests and desires and predilections, in a canvas by Titian or Corot, a Bach violin partita, or simply a particularly well-tended garden? It is not simply this or that aspect of its composition, not simply its neurological effect, not simply its clarity or vividness or suggestive associations, and so on; it is not even just the virtuosity of its execution or the mastery exhibited in its composition. Rather, it is all of these things experienced as sheer fortuity. I may be speaking of something that escapes exact definition here, but it seems dear to me that the special delight experienced in the encounter with beauty is an immediate sense of the utterly unnecessary thereness, so to speak, of a thing. Apart from this, even the most perfectly executed work of art would be only a display of artisanal proficiency or of pure technique, which may garner our admiration but not that strange rapture that marks the most intense of aesthetic experiences. What transforms the merely accomplished into the revelatory is this invisible nimbus of utter gratuity. Rather than commanding our attention with the force of necessity, or oppressing us with the triteness of something inevitable, or recommending itself to us by its utility or its purposiveness, the beautiful presents itself to us as an entirely unwarranted, unnecessary, and yet marvelously fitting gift. Beauty—as opposed to mere strikingness, mere brilliancy—is an event, or even (one might say) eventuality as such. It is the movement of a gracious disclosure of something otherwise hidden, which need not reveal itself or give itself. In the experience of the beautiful, and of its pure fortuity, we are granted our most acute, most lucid, and most splendid encounter with the difference of transcendent being from the realm of finite beings. The beautiful affords us our most perfect experience of that existential wonder that is the beginning of all speculative wisdom. This state of amazement, once again, lies always just below the surface of our quotidian consciousness; but beauty stirs us from our habitual forgetfulness of the wonder of being. It grants us a particularly privileged awakening from our “fallenness” into ordinary awareness, reminding us that the fullness of being, which far exceeds any given instance of its disclosure, graciously condescends to show itself, again and again, in the finitude of a transient event. In this experience, we are given a glimpse again, with a feeling of wonder that restores us momentarily to something like the innocence of childhood—of that inexhaustible source that pours itself out in the gracious needlessness of being…

…In the experience of the beautiful, one is apprised with a unique poignancy of both the ecstatic structure of consciousness and the gratuity of being. Hence the ancient conviction that the love of beauty is, by its nature, a rational yearning for the transcendent. The experience of sensible beauty provokes in the soul the need to seek supersensible beauty, says Plato; it is, in the words of Plotinus, a “delicious perturbation” that awakens an eros for the divine within us. All things are a mirror of the beauty of God, says the great Sufi poet Mahmud Shabestari (1288-1340); and to be seized with the desire for that beauty, says Gregory of Nyssa, is to long to be transformed within oneself into an ever more perspicuous mirror of its splendor. Kabir (1440-1518) says that it is divine beauty that shines out from all things, and that all delight in beauty is adoration of God. For Thomas Traherne (c. 1636-1674), one of the sanest men who ever lived, to see the world with the eyes of innocence, and so to see it pervaded by a numinous glory, is to see things as they truly are, and to recognize creation as the mirror of God’s infinite beauty. It would be best to avoid rhapsody here, I suppose. Suffice it to say, as soberly as possible, that the desire for the beautiful is not—and cannot be—desire merely for the pleasurable or the profitable. The beautiful is unquestionably a transcendental orientation of the mind and the will, because the desire it evokes can never be exhausted by any finite object; it is an ultimate value that allows one to make judgments of relative value, and that weds consciousness to the whole of being as boundlessly desirable. Whether or not there actually is such a thing as an eternal beauty beyond the realm of the senses, the effect within us of beauty’s transcendence is quite undeniably real. It informs all of rational consciousness as an ideal horizon, toward which the mind is habitually drawn and apart from which the mind would not be open to the world in the way that it is. And that, in itself, is enough to render the physicalist narrative of causality profoundly dubious.

15. The Impossibility of Atheism

In this sense, faith in God is not something that can ever be wholly and coherently rejected, even if one refuses all adherence to creeds and devotions. The desires evoked by the transcendental horizon of rational consciousness are not merely occasional agitations of the will but constant dynamisms of the mind; they underlie the whole movement of thought toward the world. But for these formally excessive and ecstatic longings, which seek their satisfaction in an end beyond nature, we would know nothing of nature, could not care for it, could not delight in it. To be rational beings, capable of experiencing reality as an intelligible realm of truth, moral responsibility, and disinterested joy, is to be open at every moment before the supernatural. For classical theism, the transcendental perfections of being are simply different names for—different ways of apprehending—being itself, which is God, and are thus convertible with one another in the simplicity of the divine. In the prism of finite existence, that unity becomes a plurality of distinct aspects of reality, and we only occasionally have any sense of their ultimate unity—when, for instance, we are able to grasp a mathematical truth in part because of its elegance, or when an act of compassion strikes us with its beauty, or when our will to act morally in a certain situation allows us to see the true nature of that situation more clearly, or when we sense that the will to know the truth is also an ethical vocation of the mind (and so on). For the most part, however, we have little immediate awareness of how the transcendentals coincide with one another. Even so, any movement of the mind or will toward truth, goodness, beauty, or any other transcendental end is an adherence of the soul to God. It is a finite participation in the highest truth of existence. As Shankara says, the fullness of being, lacking nothing, is also boundless consciousness, and as such is boundless joy.

16. The Mechanical Philosophy and its Pathologies

When, however, the mechanistic metaphor began to acquire a metaphysical status of its own, it had to begin striving to eliminate its rivals. As a mere adjunct to a method, the mechanical philosophy really should have been nothing more than a prescription of intellectual abstinence, a prohibition upon asking the wrong sorts of questions; transformed into a metaphysics, however, it became a denial of the meaningfulness of any queries beyond the scope of the empirical sciences. Mysteries that might require another style of investigation altogether—phenomenology, spiritual contemplation, artistic creation, formal and modal logic, simple subjective experience, or what have you were thus to be treated as false problems, or confusions, or inscrutable trivialities. This created something of a difficulty. Since the mechanical philosophy was an approach to nature that excluded all terms peculiar to consciousness, it had no way of fitting the experience of consciousness back into its inventories of the physical order. Hence, the metaphysical ambitions of scientific naturalism inevitably required that everything that in the past had been regarded as belonging inalienably to the mental or spiritual realm would have to come to be seen as, if not simply illusory, at least entirely reducible to the sorts of mindless processes the sciences are competent to discern. In this way, the limits of scientific inquiry—as a result, I suppose, of the irrepressible will to power that corrupts most human enterprises-had come to be equated with the limits of reality.

But the history (and pathology) of the “scientistic” creed has been recounted many times before and needs no elaboration here. It is enough simply to note how painfully absurd the consequences of such thinking have often proved. At a moment in intellectual history when there are a good number of theorists not only willing, but eager, to deny the reality of unified, intentional consciousness an absolute certainty upon which all other certainties depend it is depressingly clear that behind the putative rationalism of scientific naturalism there lurks an ideological passion as immune to the dictates of reason as the wildest transports of devotional ecstasy could ever be…

…This is why, as I observed far above, much of what passes for debate between theist and atheist factions today is really only a disagreement between differing perspectives within a single post-Christian and effectively atheist understanding of the universe. Nature for most of us now is merely an immense machine, either produced by a demiurge (a cosmic magician) or somehow just existing of itself, as an independent contingency (a magical cosmos). In place of the classical philosophical problems that traditionally opened out upon the question of God—the mystery of being, higher forms of causality, the intelligibility of the world, the nature of consciousness, and so on—we now concern ourselves almost exclusively with the problems of the physical origin or structural complexity of nature, and are largely unaware of the difference.

The conceptual poverty of the disputes frequently defies exaggeration. On one side, it has become perfectly respectable for a philosophically illiterate physicist to proclaim that “science shows that God does not exist,” an assertion rather on the order of Yuri Gagarin remarking (as, happily, he never really did) that he had not seen God while in orbit.

17. Modernity and its Pathologies

Every age has its special evils. Human beings are (among many other things, of course) cruel, rapacious, jealous, violent, self-interested, and egomaniacal, and they can contrive to make nearly anything any set of alleged values, any vision of the good, any collection of abstract principles—an occasion for oppression, murder, plunder, or simple malice. In the modern age, however, many of the worst political, juridical, and social evils have arisen from our cultural predisposition to regard organic life as a kind of machinery, and to treat human nature as a kind of technology— biological, genetic, psychological, social, political, economic. This is only to be expected. If one looks at human beings as essentially machines, then one will regard any perceived flaws in their operations as malfunctions in need of correction. There can, at any rate, be no rationally compelling moral objection to undertaking repairs. In fact, the machine may need to be redesigned altogether if it is to function as we think it ought. The desire to heal a body or a soul can lead to horrendous abuses, obviously, especially when exploited by powerful institutions (religious or secular) to enlarge their control of others; but it is also, ideally, a desire that can be confined to sane ethical limits by a certain salutary dread: a tremulous reluctance to offend against the sanctity and integrity of nature, a fear of trespassing upon some inviolable precinct of the soul that belongs to God or the gods. This is not true of the desire to fix a machine. In the realm of technology, there is neither sanctity nor mystery but only proper or improper function.

Hence certain distinctively modern contributions to the history of human cruelty: “scientific” racism, Social Darwinism, the eugenics movement, criminological theories about inherited degeneracy, “curative” lobotomies, mandatory sterilizations, and so on—and, in the fullness of time, the racial ideology of the Third Reich (which regarded human nature as a biological technology to be perfected) and the collectivist ideology of the communist totalitarianisms (which regarded human nature as a social and economic technology to be reconstructed). No condition is more exhilaratingly liberating for all the most viciously despotic aspects of human character than an incapacity for astonishment or reverent incertitude before the mysteries of being; and mechanistic thinking is, to a very great extent, a training in just such an incapacity. This is why it is silly to assert (as I have heard two of the famous New Atheists do of late) that the atheism of many of those responsible for the worst atrocities of the twentieth century was something entirely incidental to their crimes, or that there is no logical connection between the cultural decline of religious belief at the end of the nineteenth century and the political and social horrors of the first half of the twentieth. Yes, certainly, a mere absence of belief in God, in the abstract, does not dictate any particular politics or moral philosophy; but, in the concrete realm of history, even essentially innocent ideas can have malign consequences.

Atheism is a not merely an attitude toward an isolated proposition regarding some particular fact or other, like whether fairies exist or whether the velocity of neutrinos is consistent with the speed of light, but is instead a conceptual picture of the whole of reality, with inevitable philosophical implications. As such, it opens up a vast array of ideological, practical, and cultural possibilities that other ways of seeing reality would preclude. It is no aspersion upon all those cheerful, good-hearted, kindly atheists out there, who long for a just and compassionate social order and who would never so much as speak harshly to a puppy, to note the great “religious” theme running through the ghastly chronicles of twentieth-century barbarism. In the absence of any belief in a transcendent purpose in life or in an eternal standard of moral truth, the great task that opens up before many imaginations is that of creating some ultimate meaning out of the imperfect—but perhaps corrigible—materials of human nature. Rather than living for a kingdom not of this world, found only in eternity, and rather than surrendering to the absurdity of our accidental universe, we must now apply ourselves to the “heroic” labor of creating the future, wresting a higher and better human reality out of the refractory materials of a defective species, even if that should require completely reconstructing the machine (genetically, racially, socially, politically, economically, psychologically)…

…That said, considering the matter in reverse order, looking from conclusions to premises, the fact remains that the grand political projects of destruction and reconstruction that imbrued such vast regions of Europe and Asia in human blood in the last century presupposed a very particular concept of nature and humanity, and a very particular range of imaginable futures. Again, every ideology opens its own special space of possibilities. And it is most definitely an ideology that is at issue here. We ought to remember that the mechanical philosophy arose not just as a new prescription for the sciences, unrelated to any of the more general cultural movements of its time, but also in association with a larger Western project of human mastery over the world: the great endeavor to subject nature to impediments and constraints (to use the language of Bacon) or even to “rack” or “torture” nature in order to force her to yield up her secrets (to use the more savage language of Leibniz). The belief that nature is essentially machinery is a license not only to investigate its organic processes but to disassemble, adjust, and use it as we see best. The early modern period was, after all, the great age of conquest: of territory, of less advanced” peoples or races, even of nature itself; it was the age of nationalism, political absolutism, colonialism, the new imperialism, and incipient capitalism, a period in which it seemed possible, for the first time ever, that human power might one day extend to the farthest reaches of terrestrial reality.

Not even the sciences could escape the force of this new, intoxicatingly audacious cultural aspiration. As I noted above, the alliance between inductive or empirical method and the new mechanical metaphysics was a matter principally of historical accident, not of logical necessity. Once that alliance had been struck, however, it was inevitable that the quiet voice of empirical prudence would have to give way to stentorian proclamations of the limitless scope of the sciences, and of the emptiness of any questions the sciences cannot answer. The discourse of power is, of its nature, bombastic, pontifical, and domineering. And, in one of its uniquely modern inflections, the discourse of power involves the claim that all truth is quantitative in form, something measurable, calculable, and potentially within the reach of human control (if not practical, at least theoretical). Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)—a morally problematic figure, admittedly, but not to be dismissed—was largely correct in thinking that the modern West excels at evading the mystery of being precisely because its governing myth is one of practical mastery. Ours is, he thought, the age of technology, in which ontological questions have been vigorously expelled from cultural consideration, replaced by questions of mere mechanistic force; for us, nature is now something “enframed” and defined by a particular disposition of the will, the drive toward dominion that reduces the world to a morally neutral “Standing reserve” of resources entirely subject to our manipulation, exploitation, and ambition. Anything that does not fit within the frame of that picture is simply invisible to us. When the world is seen this way, even organic life, even where consciousness is present, must come to be regarded as just another kind of technology. This vision of things can accommodate the prospect of large areas of ignorance yet to be vanquished (every empire longs to discover new worlds to conquer), but no realm of ultimate mystery. Late modernity is thus a condition of willful spiritual deafness. Enframed, racked, reduced to machinery, nature cannot speak unless spoken to, and then her answers must be only yes, no, or obedient silence. She cannot address us in her own voice. And we certainly cannot hear whatever voice might attempt to speak to us through her.

For what it is worth, though, the age of the great totalitarianisms seems to be over; the most extreme and traumatic expressions of the late modern will to power may perhaps have exhausted themselves. Now that the most violent storms of recent history have largely abated, the more chronic, pervasive, and ordinary expression of our technological mastery of nature turns out to be simply the interminable spectacle of production and consumption, the dialectic of ubiquitous banality by which the insatiable economic culture of the late modern West is shaped and sustained. And this, I think, is how one must finally understand the popular atheist vogue that has opened so lucrative a niche market in recent years: it is an expression of what a Marxist might call the “ideological superstructure” of consumerism. Rather than something daring, provocative, and revolutionary, it is really the rather insipid residue of the long history of capitalist modernity, and its chief impulse as well as its chief moral deficiency—is bourgeois respectability. Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the one truly substantial value at the center of our social universe: the price tag. So it really was only a matter of time before atheism slipped out of the enclosed gardens of academe and down from the vertiginous eyries of high cosmopolitan fashion and began expressing itself in crassly vulgar form. It was equally inevitable that, rather than boldly challenging the orthodoxies of its age, it would prove to be just one more anodyne item on sale in the shops, and would be enthusiastically fêted by a vapid media culture not especially averse to the idea that there are no ultimate values, but only final prices. In a sense, the triviality of the movement is its chief virtue. It is a diverting alternative to thinking deeply. It is a narcotic. In our time, to strike a lapidary phrase, irreligion is the opiate of the bourgeoisie, the sigh of the oppressed ego, the heart of a world filled with tantalizing toys.

18. The Clarity of Contemplation

There are also, however, more advanced stages of contemplation, which require one to enter into the depths of the self, into one’s own “heart,” and here the final state that one seeks is nothing less— than a union in love and knowledge with God. Among those who are especially suspicious of religious ecstasies or enthusiasms, the word “mysticism” can often conjure up odd images of emotional frenzies, or “prophetic” hallucinations, or occult divinations, or something of the sort. If one consults the vast literature produced by the world’s mystical traditions, however, though one may come across the occasional visionary or clairvoyant (an exceedingly rare and marginal phenomenon), the feature one finds to be most conspicuously common in the contemplative experience of the divine is clarity. For the most part, the spiritual life is one of sobriety, calm, lucidity, and joy. The life of contemplative prayer invariably includes episodes of both profound dereliction and exorbitant ecstasy; as the mind gradually rises out of the constant flow of distraction, preoccupation, self-concern, and conflicting emotion that constitutes ordinary consciousness, one can swing between extremes of sorrow and joy, between (to use the Sufi terms) the crushing forsakenness of qabd and the expansive delight of bast. But these are neither acute emotional disturbances nor fits of derangement but merely passing states of the soul, moments of moral and temperamental clarity, necessary phases in the refinement of one’s experience of reality into a habitual transparency of the mind and will before the “rational light” that fills all things.

Nearly all traditions seem to agree, in fact, that even the raptures one experiences in first breaking free from the limits of normal consciousness are transient, and must be transcended if one is to achieve the immeasurably fuller and more permanent delight of mystical union with God. To a very great extent contemplative prayer involves the discipline of overcoming, at once, both frantic despair and empty euphoria, as well as a long training in the kind of discernment that allows one to distinguish between true spiritual experience and mere paroxysms of sentiment. This is the art of what Sufi tradition calls muraqaba, attentive care and meditative “watchfulness”; it requires the sort of scrupulous examination of one’s own mental and emotional states described with such precision by Evagrius Ponticus (345-399), Maximus the Confessor, and countless other writers. In Christian tradition, the mystical ascent to God has often been described as a passage (with many advances, retreats, saltations, and reversions) through distinct phases of purgation, illumination, and union: a process by which the contemplative is stripped of selfish attachments and finite emotional supports, then filled with happiness and insight and luminous confidence in God’s indwelling presence, and then borne entirely beyond the circumscriptions of the self to dwell in God.

19. The Only Proof

It was more or less for this reason that the great scholar of mysticism Evelyn Underhill, in her somewhat mordant moments, seemed to regard materialist thinking as a form of barbarism, which so coarsens the intellect as to make it incapable of the high rational labor of contemplative prayer. Certainly the literature of every advanced spiritual tradition bears witness to rigorous regimes of scrutiny and reflection and mental discipline, in light of which the facile convictions of the materialist can appear positively childish, even somewhat “primitive.” We late moderns can be especially prone to mistake our technological mastery over nature for a sign of some larger mastery over reality, some profounder and wider grasp of the principles of things, which allows us to regard the very different intellectual concerns and traditions of earlier ages or of less “advanced” peoples as quaintly charming or attractively exotic or deplorably primitive or unintelligibly alien, but certainly not as expressions of a wisdom or knowledge superior to our own. But there really is no such thing as general human progress; there is no uniform history of enlightenment, no great comprehensive epic of human emergence from intellectual darkness into the light of reason. There are, rather, only local advances and local retreats, shifts of cultural emphasis and alterations of shared values, gains in one area of human endeavor counterpoised by losses in another. It may well be, in fact, that it is precisely the predominance of our technological approach to reality that renders us pathetically retrograde in other, equally (or more) important realms of inquiry. We excel in so many astonishing ways at the manipulation of the material order— medicines and weapons, mass communication and mass murder, digital creativity and ecological ruination, scientific exploration and the fabrication of ever more elaborate forms of imbecile distraction—and yet in the realms of “spiritual” achievement—the arts, philosophy, contemplative practices—ours is an unprecedentedly impoverished age. We have progressed so far that we have succeeded in tearing the atom apart; but to reach that point we may also have had to regress in our moral vision of the physical world to a level barely above the insentient. The mechanical picture of reality, which is the metaphysical frame within which we pursue our conquest of nature, is one that forecloses, arbitrarily and peremptorily, a great number of questions that a truly rational culture should leave open. And that, after all, is the basic pathology of fundamentalism. For all we know, the tribal shaman who seeks visions of the Dreamtime or of the realm of the Six Grandfathers is, in certain crucial respects, immeasurably more sophisticated than the credulous modern Westerner who imagines that technology is wisdom, or that a compendium of physical facts is the equivalent of a key to reality in its every dimension.

In any event, even if one’s concept of rationality or of what constitutes a science is too constricted to recognize the contemplative path for what it is, the essential point remains: no matter what one’s private beliefs may be, any attempt to confirm or disprove the reality of God can be meaningfully undertaken only in a way appropriate to what God is purported to be. If one imagines that God is some discrete object visible to physics or some finite aspect of nature, rather than the transcendent actuality of all things and all knowing, the logically inevitable Absolute upon which the contingent depends, then one simply has misunderstood what the content of the concept of God truly is, and has nothing to contribute to the debate. It is unlikely, however, that such a person really cares to know what the true content of the concept is, or on what rational and experiential bases the concept rests. In my experience, those who make the most theatrical display of demanding “proof” of God are also those least willing to undertake the specific kinds of mental and spiritual discipline that all the great religious traditions say are required to find God. If one is left unsatisfied by the logical arguments for belief in God, and instead insists upon some “experimental” or “empirical” demonstration, then one ought to be willing to attempt the sort of investigations necessary to achieve any sort of real certainty regarding a reality that is nothing less than the infinite coincidence of absolute being, consciousness, and bliss. In short, one must pray: not fitfully, not simply in the manner of a suppliant seeking aid or of a penitent seeking absolution but also according to the disciplines of infused contemplation, with states of both dereliction and ecstasy with the equanimity of faith, hoping but not presuming, so as to find whether the spiritual journey, when followed in earnest, can disclose its own truthfulness and conduct one into communion with a dimension of reality beyond the ontological indigence of the physical. No one is obliged to make such an effort; but, unless one does, any demands one might make for evidence of the reality of God can safely be dismissed as disingenuous, and any arguments against belief in God that one might have the temerity to make to others can safely be ignored as vacuous.

Evil is never radical, it is only extreme, possessing neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It is ‘thought-defying’ because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality.’ Only the good has depth that can be radical. (Hannah Arendt)

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. (Simone Weil)

Tolkien saw another aspect of the Asymmetry. Good can imagine becoming evil—hence Gandalf and Aragorn refusing the Ring—but evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot conceive of motives beyond domination and fear, so when he learns his enemies possess the Ring, the thought that they might destroy it never enters his head.

C.S. Lewis saw how the Asymmetry ripples through time:

That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: dreaming little of how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.

Four witnesses to the same brute existential fact: evil is shallow and static, unimaginative and impoverishing, while goodness possesses depth, creativity, dynamism. But why? Is there a way to explain or articulate the logic of the Asymmetry, to show why good necessarily exceeds evil in depth and complexity?

I would like to offer an answer drawn from an unlikely source. “Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence” (Doctor et al., 2022) provides, almost inadvertently, a formal structure that explains the Asymmetry.

The foundational concept of the article is what the authors call the “cognitive light cone”—the outer boundary, in space and time, of the largest goal a given system can work toward. All intelligences, regardless of embodiment, can be mapped according to the scale of goals they can pursue. A bacterium navigates chemical gradients in its immediate environment; a human plans for retirement; a corporation optimizes across continents and generations.

All intelligences, no matter how embodied, can be compared directly with respect to the maximum spatiotemporal scale of the goals towards which they can represent and work. A corollary to this view is that the driver of this kind of homeostatic dynamic is that such systems exhibit “stress” (the delta between current state and optimal state, or the difference between the goals at different subsystems’ levels): reduction of this stress parameter is a driver that keeps the system exerting energy in action to move and navigate within the problem space.

When a system begins to include others’ stress within its own homeostatic loops—when it starts treating others’ suffering as its own problem to solve—its cognitive boundary necessarily expands. Care, in this framework, is not merely an emotion but a driver of intelligence itself. The more you can care about, the more you can think about, and the more you can do.

In this framework, the recognition of agency outside oneself and the progressive inclusion of their states in one’s own homeostatic stress-reduction loops is a bidirectional feedback loop that leads to the scaling of intelligence and increases in practical compassion. This loop operates on both the evolutionary and individual lifespan time scales, and in more advanced forms, comes under rational control of systems whose primary goals may start to include the meta-cognitive goal of increasing intelligence and compassion.

This brings us to the Bodhisattva.

The Bodhisattva vow is a commitment to pursue awakening for the benefit of all sentient beings throughout space and time:

Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to liberate them.
Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.
Reality is boundless; I vow to perceive it.
The awakened way is unsurpassable; I vow to embody it.

In terms of the cognitive light cone, this vow represents something unprecedented: the deliberate expansion of one’s boundary of concern to infinity. The Bodhisattva commits to knowing and responding to the needs of all beings, not as an abstraction but as an active project requiring, in principle, omniscience.

Now compare this to its apparent mirror image: “I shall subjugate everyone in time and space for my own pleasure.” At first glance, both commitments seem universal in scope. Both claim infinity. And yet…

In the case of the vow to subjugate for personal enjoyment, the universal commitment is directed toward the fulfillment of the agent’s individual version of what should be the case. Personal needs are intrinsically limited. Even though greed may feel infinite, once we begin to specify what we want, our needs become rather limited and predictable, because they largely correspond with our understanding of who and what we are... So despite the apparent grand scale, the drive toward “all my personal wishes” becomes quite trivial when compared to the care drive of a Bodhisattva.

This is the key to the Asymmetry. The selfish vow appears infinite but is finite, because it aims only at satisfying a single set of preferences—and preferences, however grandiose, are bounded by the self that holds them. Even “I shall make everything in time and space my personal property” remains confined to what I can want, which is limited by what I am.

The Bodhisattva’s vow is actually infinite because its scope is defined not by one mind but by the infinity of living beings, each with their own needs and desires across all of time and space. The Bodhisattva promises to know all of those needs and respond creatively to each. The paths and end states of universal compassion are genuinely inexhaustible; the paths and end states of universal domination are not.

In short, wherever the endless myriads of beings may find themselves, the Bodhisattva forms the intention to go there and effect positive change. Implicitly, this programmatic intention thus also contains an open-ended pledge to comprehend the past, because the ability to skillfully influence events in the present and future can be seen to involve knowledge of past states of affairs. Thus, by simply committing to the Bodhisattva stance and practices, the sphere of measurement and activity of the cognitive system that makes the commitment has gone from finite to infinite, and so the cone structure that otherwise is applicable to all forms of cognizant life has in this sense been transcended. Seeking to indicate infinity on both the spatial and temporal axes, we might now instead see the Bodhisattva cognitive system’s computational surface represented by an all-encompassing sphere that accommodates all instances of life within it…

This is why evil is boring, not as a moral judgment but as a structural fact. Evil contracts the light cone toward a single point, whereas goodness can expand it without limit.

But what about evil that isn’t selfish? Buddhism has a notion of this: Māra, the embodiment of pure malevolence. Māra, the so-called Buddhist devil, has no personal desires, no preferences to satisfy; its drive is entirely other-directed: “Wherever there are beings, let me prevent their awakening.” Here, it seems, is an evil that matches the Bodhisattva’s universal scope, a dark mirror of infinite compassion.

And yet the Asymmetry holds even here. Look closely at what Māra wants: for things to stay as they are. Beings suffer, and they shall keep suffering. It is a vow of cosmic preservation. The Bodhisattva, by contrast, commits to infinite transformation—to meeting each being in their particularity and drawing them toward flourishing. Māra’s universe is frozen; the Bodhisattva’s is endlessly alive.

And so even when evil sheds every trace of selfishness, even when it achieves universal scope, it remains essentially static. It can negate, prevent, maintain, but it cannot create. Goodness, and goodness alone, is generative. Evil is not the opposite of good in the way that cold is the opposite of heat. It is an absence, a refusal, a contraction away from the infinite fecundity of Being.

The Experience of God

There’s one thing that confuses me about all of this.

…The Bodhisattva vow can be seen as a method for control that is in alignment with, and informed by, the understanding that singular and enduring control agents do not actually exist. To see that, it is useful to consider what it might be like to have the freedom to control what thought one had next. Would not perfect control of one’s mind imply that one knew exactly what one was going to think, and then subsequently thought it? In that case, whenever a new thought arose, we would, absurdly, be rethinking what we had thought already, or otherwise there would, just as absurdly, have to be an infinite line of prior control modules in place for a single controlled thought to occur. Such consequences suggest that the concept of individual mind control is incoherent. “In control of my mind” (a necessary aspect of the common notion of free will) is logically impossible on the short time scale, but may be coherent on a very long time scale (“I’ve undertaken practices to eventually change the statistical distribution of the kinds of thoughts I will have in the future”).

So if agents don’t really exist, if there are no selves in control of anything, who is making the Bodhisattva vow? If no one exists, who is there to care for? And who is there to do the caring?

There is no one, no minds, no wills—it is true—but there is a One, a Mind, a Will, infinite and eternal, immanent and transcendent.

There is God.

We can understand why the scientists who authored this article chose a Buddhist framing (because it allows them to gesture toward the obvious spiritual dimension of their arguments while remaining in a secular frame), but the paradox can’t be sidestepped so easily. When you posit cognitive light cones that expand without limit and minds capable of universal compassion and perfect knowledge, you are no longer operating within a naturalistic model.

Consider what the article actually claims: that care and intelligence scale together boundlessly, that the Bodhisattva’s cognitive reach extends toward omniscience and universal compassion. But every movement toward the infinite presupposes an infinitude which can be moved towards; an asymptotic approach requires an asymptote. The article describes participation in something already infinite, which is simply what classical theism has always meant by God: not a being among beings, but Being itself, intrinsically blissful and loving, the transcendent source and ground of all finite instances of care and understanding.

David Bentley Hart, in The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (2013), provides the theological vocabulary for what the article describes in secular terms:

To speak of “God” properly, then—to use the word in a sense consonant with the teachings of orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Bahá’í, a great deal of antique paganism, and so forth—is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. God so understood is not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. In one sense he is “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of discrete, finite things. In another sense he is “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things. Infinite being, infinite consciousness, infinite bliss, from whom we are, by whom we know and are known, and in whom we find our only true consummation.

This is the asymptote, what the Bodhisattva’s infinite expansion participates in; not an ideal to be achieved but a reality already present, forever drawing finite consciousness beyond itself. The movement toward this infinite is not extrinsic to consciousness, but embedded in its very structure. Hart again:

Consciousness does not merely passively reflect the reality of the world; it is necessarily a dynamic movement of reason and will toward reality. If nothing else is to be concluded from the previous chapter, this much is absolutely certain: subjective consciousness becomes actual only through intentionality, and intentionality is a kind of agency, directed toward an end. We could never know the world from a purely receptive position. To know anything, the mind must be actively disposed toward things outside itself, always at work interpreting experience through concepts that only the mind itself can supply. The world is intelligible to us because we reach out to it, or reach beyond it, coming to know the endless diversity of particular things within the embrace of a more general and abstract yearning for a knowledge of truth as such, and by way of an aboriginal inclination of the mind toward reality as a comprehensible whole. In every moment of awareness, the mind at once receives and composes the world, discerning meaning in the objects of experience precisely in conferring meaning upon them; thus consciousness lies open to—and enters into intimate communion with—the forms of things. Every venture of reason toward an end, moreover, is prompted by a desire of the mind, a “rational appetite.” Knowledge is born out of a predisposition and predilection of the will toward beings, a longing for the ideal comprehensibility of things, and a natural orientation of the mind toward that infinite horizon of intelligibility that is being itself.

That may seem a somewhat extravagant way of describing our ordinary acts of cognition, but I think it so obviously correct as to verge on a truism. The mind does not simply submissively register sensory data, like wax receiving the impression of a signet, but is constantly at work organizing what it receives from the senses into form and meaning; and this it does because it has a certain natural compulsion to do so, a certain interestedness that exceeds most of the individual objects of knowledge that it encounters. The only reason that we can regard the great majority of particular things we come across with disinterest, or even in a wholly uninterested way, and yet still experience them as objects of recognition and reflection is that we are inspired by a prior and consuming interest in reality as such. There simply is no such thing as knowledge entirely devoid of desire—you could not make cognitive sense of a glass of water or a tree on a hill apart from the action of your mind toward some end found either in that thing or beyond that thing—and so all knowledge involves an adventure of the mind beyond itself. Again, as Brentano rightly saw, this essential directedness of consciousness sets it apart from any merely mechanical function. Desire, moreover, is never purely spontaneous; it does not arise without premise out of some aimless nothingness within the will but must always be moved toward an end, real or imagined, that draws it on. The will is, of its nature, teleological, and every rational act is intrinsically purposive, prompted by some final cause. One cannot so much as freely stir a finger without the lure of some aim, proximate or remote, great or small, constant or evanescent. What is it that the mind desires, then, or even that the mind loves, when it is moved to seek the ideality of things, the intelligibility of experience as a whole? What continues to compel thought onward, whether or not the mind happens at any given moment to have some attachment to the immediate objects of experience? What is the horizon of that limitless directedness of consciousness that allows the mind to define the limits of the world it knows? Whatever it is, it is an end that lies always beyond whatever is near at hand, and it excites in the mind a need not merely to be aware, but truly to know, to discern meaning, to grasp all of being under the aspect of intelligible truth.

This is the cognitive light cone seen from within. What the paper measures as expanding boundaries of care, Hart recognizes as the essential structure of consciousness: an eros that reaches past every finite object toward an infinite horizon. And when this eros is allowed to unfold without resistance, it produces something that looks, from the outside, like madness:

At any rate, any sane consideration of the sheer insatiability that the moral appetite in rational beings can exhibit should awaken one to something magnificently strange about these transcendental orientations of the mind. Whatever benefits the moral sense may or may not confer upon a species or an individual, it remains the case that the frame of natural reality as we know it is at once hospitable to this sense and yet also wholly unable to satisfy the desires that rise out of it... There is something altogether profligate in this passion for the good, something that resists any facile attempt to capture it within the bounds of material or genetic economy. “What is a merciful heart?” asks Isaac of Nineveh (d. c. AD 700): “A heart aflame for all of creation, for men, birds, beasts, demons, and every created thing; the very thought or sight of them causes the merciful man’s eyes to overflow with tears. The heart of such a man is humbled by the powerful and fervent mercy that has captured it and by the immense compassion it feels, and it cannot endure to see or hear of any suffering or any grief anywhere within creation.” The saint, says Swami Ramdas (1884–1963), is one whose heart burns for the sufferings of others, whose hands labor for the relief of others, and who therefore acts from God’s heart and with God’s hands. The most exalted unity with God is attained, Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, by one whose bliss and sorrow are found in the bliss and sorrow of others. Like a mother imperiling her own life in order to care for her child, says the Sutta Nipata, one should cultivate boundless compassion for all beings. One’s love for one’s fellow creatures should be so great, Ramanuja believed, that one will gladly accept damnation for oneself in order to show others the way to salvation. According to Shantideva (eighth century), the true bodhisattva vows to forgo entry into nirvana, age upon age, and even to pass through the torments of the many Buddhist hells, in order to work ceaselessly for the liberation of others.

As we can see, the notion of a Bodhisattva is not unique to Buddhism. All spiritual traditions have their version, figures whose compassion has somehow escaped all natural limits. There was even a pagan notion of this:

Olympiodorus (c. 495–565), commenting on Plato’s Phaedo, suggests that the post-mortem souls of theurgists, whose proper home is “in the angelic order,” are not compelled to reincarnate, but choose to do so in order to lead others up and out of material imprisonment (anagôgê).

Yet in virtually every other case the infinite care of these figures is described in transcendent, theological terms (“the most exalted unity with God…”). Why? Because boundless compassion can only flow from a source that is itself infinite—and infinitely joyful.

It is bliss that draws us toward and joins us to the being of all things because that bliss is already one with being and consciousness, in the infinite simplicity of God. As the Chandogya Upanishad says, Brahman is at once both the joy residing in the depths of the heart and also the pervasive reality in which all things subsist. The restless heart that seeks its repose in God (to use the language of Augustine) expresses itself not only in the exultations and raptures of spiritual experience but also in the plain persistence of awareness. The soul’s unquenchable eros for the divine, of which Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa and countless Christian contemplatives speak, Sufism’s ishq or passionately adherent love for God, Jewish mysticism’s devekut, Hinduism’s bhakti, Sikhism’s pyaar—these are all names for the acute manifestation of a love that, in a more chronic and subtle form, underlies all knowledge, all openness of the mind to the truth of things. This is because, in God, the fullness of being is also a perfect act of infinite consciousness that, wholly possessing the truth of being in itself, forever finds its consummation in boundless delight. The Father knows his own essence perfectly in the mirror of the Logos and rejoices in the Spirit who is the “bond of love” or “bond of glory” in which divine being and divine consciousness are perfectly joined. God’s wujūd is also his wijdān—his infinite being is infinite consciousness—in the unity of his wajd, the bliss of perfect enjoyment. The divine sat (being) is always also the divine chit (consciousness), and their perfect coincidence is the divine ānanda (bliss). It only makes sense, then—though, of course, it is quite wonderful as well—that consciousness should be made open to being by an implausible desire for the absolute, and that being should disclose itself to consciousness through the power of the absolute to inspire and (ideally) satiate that desire. The ecstatic structure of finite consciousness—this inextinguishable yearning for truth that weds the mind to the being of all things—is simply a manifestation of the metaphysical structure of all reality. God is the one act of being, consciousness, and bliss in whom everything lives and moves and has its being; and so the only way to know the truth of things is, necessarily, the way of bliss.

Original Love

What does it actually feel like to encounter this metaphysical structure from within? Zen master Henry Shukman, in Original Love (2023), describes the experience:

What part does love play in all this?

Let’s say we’re learning to love the hindrances (sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and skeptical doubt). Each time we love one as it’s arising in our experience, it’s the love that helps it to release. Or in terms of the water metaphor, love lets the bowl stand, so the pigmentation of the dye can settle like silt to the bottom of the bowl, leaving the water clear. Love is what takes the water off the boil and lets it cool. Love patiently sifts through the algae-infested water. Or it shelters the bowl from the breeze that’s been ruffing its surface, until the wind is ready to ease up. Or it strains the mud out, so that once again the water of awareness shows itself, clear and at peace with itself.

But what part does love actually play in the process?
And where does that love come from?

Love is like space in the sense that it gives space for things to be the way they are. It allows us to be in a troubled state. When we’re no longer at war with the state we’re in, our sense of identification can switch from being wrapped up in the trouble and relocate to the state of acceptance. So while the trouble is still there, our identity can migrate from the knot of trouble to the broader context that is accepting of that knot. It’s the sense of love that pulls us there. Love is a magnetism. It’s like gravity, except that rather than drawing us toward an object, it draws us into its spaciousness, which can comfortably hold the difficulty. Love loves what is difficult, which makes it no longer difficult.

Explore this for yourself and see if you agree.
But what is the source of this love? It’s actually simple too.

Once we are less narrowly focused, once we uncouple attention from what it has been contracting itself onto, we sense simply more of the space of awareness. Rather than being stuck in one little quadrant of awareness, we recognize more quadrants. Awareness itself is broader and more expansive than our knotted, narrowed mind, when it’s caught by a hindrance, can allow us to recognize. But now we become more cognizant of the expanse of awareness as a context in which the hindrance had been arising. And—this is the main point—awareness is not separate from “original love.”

One of the very features of original love is its unlimited awareness. At the deepest level, all forms of awareness are forms of it. It not only is aware of all, but also allows all experience to arise, and immediately and unconditionally meets it. It allows, it meets, it offers space to, and in fact it engenders all experience. This is the “activity” of original love. But even before we clearly see this for ourselves, once we are in a position to savor awareness, and to see whatever is arising as a thing within awareness, then rather than being tangled up in the thing, the object, we can start to recognize, however consciously or clearly or not, that our awareness of it may in fact have a flavor of love as part of its makeup.

There in that passage is the phenomenological root of the Bodhisattva vow, the experiential seed from which the Asymmetry blooms. Notice what Shukman is saying: we do not generate love through effort; we discover it by expanding. When we “uncouple attention from what it has been contracting itself onto,” we find that awareness itself already has “a flavor of love as part of its makeup.” The love was there first. Consciousness is merely the window, opening or closing to let it shine through.

Perhaps, then, the Asymmetry ultimately reduces to this: Evil requires effort, contraction; goodness requires only release. Evil must be perpetually maintained against the grain of Being; goodness is simply what remains when the work stops.

I.

Darwin was the first to point it out. In The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), he observed that domesticated mammals (and some birds and some fish) possess a distinctive and unusual suite of traits not seen in their wild progenitors, a phenomenon we now refer to as Domestication syndrome. The full set of characteristics includes: increased docility and tameness, coat color changes, reductions in tooth size, changes in craniofacial morphology, alterations in ear and tail form (e.g. floppy ears), alterations in adreno-corticotropic hormone levels, more frequent and non-seasonal estrus cycles, prolongations in juvenile behavior, and reductions in both total brain size and of particular brain regions.

The complexity of Domestication syndrome and its presence among distantly related groups suggests an elegant and far-reaching explanation. The explanation that has emerged in recent years is just that, but to truly appreciate it we must first understand something about the nature of evolution: she is not an engineer but a tinkerer.

Natural selection has no analogy with any aspect of human behavior. However, if one wanted to play with a comparison, one would have to say that natural selection does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinkerer—a tinkerer who does not know exactly what he is going to produce but uses whatever he finds around him whether it be pieces of string, fragments of wood, or old cardboards. For the engineer, the realization of his task depends on his having the raw materials and the tools that exactly fit his project. The tinkerer, in contrast, always manages with odds and ends. What he ultimately produces is generally related to no special project, and it results from a series of contingent events, of all the opportunities he had to enrich his stock with leftovers. (“Evolution and Tinkering”, François Jacob)

The contingent, improvisatory nature of evolution is why metabolic pathways often look like Rube Goldberg machines, why whales and dolphins still breathe air despite their aquatic lifestyle, and why so many parts of the human body are poorly designed. But such inefficient or irrational design is only a problem to the eyes of an intelligent designer like ourselves—evolution simply plays around until it has something workable, no matter how inelegant or inefficient.

So when Evolution was presented with the challenge of domestication—when it was “told” that it must quickly adapt a man-eating canine killing machine into man’s best friend—it did not start from scratch and fabricate bespoke parts as needed, but instead looked around its messy garage full of proteins, cells, structures, and mechanisms and threw something together from what it had laying around. Even with such a haphazard design process, what it came up with was ingenious.

Across a wide variety of domesticated animals, the mechanistic basis for the tameness of domesticated animals appears to be a reduced size and functionality of the adrenal glands (the producers of adrenaline and other stress hormones), which in turn leads to a weaker fight-or-flight response (domesticated animals do not react as aggressively as their wild counterparts in large part because they are not as fearful when interacting with humans). But how does selection for diminished adrenal glands produce floppy ears, altered coat colors, shorter snouts, smaller teeth, and reduced brain size? There is no obvious way in which these relate to adrenal gland functionality.

Enter the neural crest cell hypothesis:

What all of these diverse traits, including the adrenals, share is that their development is closely linked to neural crest cells (NCCs). NCCs are the vertebrate-specific class of stem cells that first appear during early embryogenesis at the dorsal edge (“crest”) of the neural tube and then migrate ventrally throughout the body in both the cranium and the trunk, giving rise to the cellular precursors of many cell and tissue types and indirectly promoting the development of others (Carlson 1999; Hall 1999; Gilbert 2003; Trainor 2014). The NCC-derived tissues include much of the skull, the sympathetic ganglia, the adrenal medulla, pigment-related melanoblasts in both head and trunk, and tooth precursors (odontoblasts). In the head specifically, cranial neural crest cells (CNCCs) are crucial precursors of bony, cartilaginous, and nervous components of the craniofacial region, including the jaws, hyoid, larynx, and external and middle ears. (Wilkins et al., 2014)

And so there we have it: the primary “lever” that Evolution pulled was neural crest hypofunction, and all of these morphological changes—in pigmentation, jaws, teeth, ears—just came along for the ride as unselected byproducts.

II.

There is another way to understand the evolutionary changes that occur during domestication. Nature always takes the path of least resistance and Evolution is no exception; the design specs of the domesticated animal—enhanced learning ability, capable of forming strong emotional bonds, decreased aggression—sound awfully similar to the traits of a child, so instead of wholesale remodeling, Evolution found it easiest to modify development and retain these juvenile features into adulthood. This is what is known as neoteny (a.k.a. paedomorphosis or fetalization).

This domestication-as-neoteny can be seen clearly in our canine companions—the incredible playfulness and floppy ears of adult dogs are traits only seen in wolf puppies—but it’s readily apparent in humans as well once you know what to look for. Homo sapiens display a striking array of neotenous traits: larger skull/brain size relative to body, hairless face and body, large eyes, increased torso/limb length ratio, increased leg/arm length ratio, upright stance and bipedal gait (more common in juvenile chimps), absence of penis bone (the baculum), and reduced sexual dimorphism (i.e. increased similarity between sexes). Of greater interest for our purposes however are the myriad ways in which the adult human retains the psychological features of the child: reduced aggression, the ability to form deep emotional bonds, enhanced brain plasticity/learning abilities, and, most importantly, playfulness.

You may have noticed something strange here. If humans also exhibit this neotenous domestication syndrome, who exactly did the domesticating? Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising given how good we are domesticating other species, but it appears we did it to ourselves as well—i.e. we are self-domesticated.

This begs another question: how exactly does a species domesticate itself? In other words, what selective pressures set humanity on this evolutionary trajectory towards self-domestication and neoteny? To make a very long story very short: we weren’t domesticated by ourselves per se, but by culture itself.

“The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.” (Daniel Dennett)

To make the story (known as the Cultural Drive or Cultural Brain hypothesis) slightly less short: what really sets humanity apart from our animal brethren is the fact that our culture (at first tools, foraging techniques, hunting strategies, etc.) compounds over time, what is known as cumulative cultural evolution (CCE). What hasn’t been appreciated until recently is that CCE requires very high fidelity cultural transmission—unless individuals can accurately and efficiently copy each other (i.e. social learning), even the most brilliant innovations will be forgotten within a few generations. But if you can cross this social learning threshold, a threshold which only humans have crossed so far, all memes will remain in the pool more or less indefinitely, giving them all the time they need to mix and match and create ever more complex memes. Then it’s only a matter of time before you are building skyscrapers, sequencing genomes, and “flying around in aluminum tubes while nibbling on roasted almonds.”1

This is counterintuitive as most accounts of human origins tend to focus on our individual intelligence and creativity, or what we can call asocial learning. Well it turns out that asocial learning is relatively unimportant in the earliest stages of cultural evolution—if you can copy well enough to keep the game of telephone going then innovation will happen naturally over time through serendipitous copying errors and random recombination (i.e. play) without any individual brilliance, in much the same way that mutation and sexual reproduction function produce evolutionary innovation without any intelligent designer. This creates a runaway virtuous cycle: as the pool of valuable cultural knowledge becomes larger, the selective pressure to become better at social learning—monkey see, monkey do—becomes stronger; as the population becomes better at social learning, the fidelity of cultural transmission is enhanced, thereby allowing for an even larger pool of valuable cultural knowledge to be maintained, which inevitably leads to further innovation through recombination; this produces an even stronger selective pressure to become good at social learning which in turn creates…

Fittingly, one of the first major studies supporting this model used a computer tournament to study the relative merits of social and asocial learning strategies (“Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament”, 2010). Here is an excerpt from the abstract (you should be able to grok the gist of what they did and what they found, the details of the game are relatively unimportant for our purposes).

…We organized a computer tournament in which entrants submitted strategies specifying how to use social learning and its asocial alternative (for example, trial-and-error learning) to acquire adaptive behavior in a complex environment. Most current theory predicts the emergence of mixed strategies that rely on some combination of the two types of learning. In the tournament, however, strategies that relied heavily on social learning were found to be remarkably successful, even when asocial information was no more costly than social information. Social learning proved advantageous because individuals frequently demonstrated the highest-payoff behavior in their repertoire, inadvertently filtering information for copiers. The winning strategy relied nearly exclusively on social learning and weighted information according to the time since acquisition.

III.

It is something of a mystery why Neanderthals went extinct and Sapiens didn’t, especially considering that Neanderthals had, “significantly larger bodies than humans, with wider shoulders, thicker bones and a more robust build overall” and a similar, if not slightly, larger brain size. Conventional wisdom points to our greater intelligence and cooperative abilities, however this explanation glosses over a deeper truth. The traits that enabled our superior intellect and enhanced sociality—reduced aggression, stronger emotional bonding, extended neuroplasticity—are precisely those that characterize juvenility. We outcompeted Neanderthals not because we were physically stronger or more cunning, but because we were more childly.2

While it remains debated whether significant differences in the rate of maturation to adulthood were experienced between Neanderthals and modern humans it appears that patterns of Neanderthal biological and cognitive growth are subtly different from those of contemporary and later modern humans. It has even been debated whether Neanderthals had a ‘childhood’ at all.

Specifically, analysis of teeth suggests that Neanderthals reached adulthood at around 15 years of age, which is somewhat faster than the age of biological adulthood assigned to modern humans. It appears that the Neanderthal brain also grew faster than that of a modern human child, beginning around 400 cm3 and tripling in volume by age three before reaching an adult volume of around 1500 cm3.

— “Playing with language, creating complexity: Has play contributed to the evolution of complex language?” (2019)

If we had better tools (i.e. toys) than Neanderthals, then it’s simply because we were better at playing around (throwing memes together in new combos) and sharing what we made with others (i.e. social learning). Whatever advantages we may or may not have had in intellectual horsepower and creativity were not because of our neural hardware, but because of our software: as Sapien culture blossomed, we developed various thinking tools (e.g. languages, counting systems, epistemological principles, rules of thumb, etc.) that began to make us smarter, first as a group but then as individuals too.

The trajectory of hominid brain evolution lends further support to this account. At its peak, Neanderthal brains were slightly larger than Sapien brains in absolute terms, but slightly smaller relative to body size. This is not exactly what we would expect if the more complex culture of Sapiens were best explained by differences in raw intelligence. Equally counterintuitive is the fact that human brains have shrunk in the last 10,000 years. These trends make more sense however when we remember that dogs and other domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild counter-parts, and that a similar reduction in brain size is found in some groups of ants as they transition to eusociality (strangely enough, eusocial ants may provide the best comparison to modern humans as we both form large complex kin-oriented societies featuring agricultural practices and full-time division of labor). But rather than the uniform reduction typical of domestication, the human brain underwent selective reorganization, with certain regions expanding and others contracting in ways that maintained a comparable overall size to Neanderthals.

Neanderthal brain cases were elongated and not globular as in Homo sapiens. The noticeable morphological differences in skull shape between the two human species also have cognitive implications. These include the Neanderthals’ smaller parietal lobes and cerebellum, areas implicated in tool use, visuospatial integration, numeracy, creativity, and higher-order conceptualization. The differences, while slight, would have possibly been enough to affect natural selection and may underlie and explain the differences in social behaviors, technological innovation, and artistic output. (Wikipedia)

There are profound neural connections between the cerebellum and the parietal and frontal lobes, an interconnectivity that suggests the cerebellum may aid in the process of creative thinking, a cognitive prerequisite of fantasy play. (Nielsen et al., 2020)

The most important evolutionary changes to Homo sapien brains were not size increases then, but structural modifications which made us better at language, visuospatial integration (“monkey see, monkey do”), creativity, and abstraction—in other words, modifications which enhanced our ability to play.

IV.

“I began to think of children not as immature adults, but adults as atrophied children. But when I said this to educationalists, they became angry.”
(Keith Johnstone)

A moral can be drawn from this story.

Humanity has never been more adultly than it is today. Increased lifespans and declining birth rates have made us a geriatric species, and our gerontocratic culture further magnifies the effect of this genuinely epochal demographic shift. Children and adolescents are utterly oppressed in the modern techno-social regime, possessing less power and less freedom than ever before.

This adultliness is unbecoming to us, untrue to how we became what we are. The way forward is not more rigid “maturity” and raw intelligence, but more playfulness, more imagination and innocence. The future belongs to the eternal child within, that portion of our spirit which is never completed, but always growing and learning, living and laughing and loving.

I.

The Wikipedia page for the Gospel of Judas contains an interesting nugget.

The president of the Maecenas Foundation, Mario Roberty, suggested that the Maecenas Foundation had acquired the only known copy of the Gospel, but not necessarily the only extant copy. Roberty went on to speculate that the Vatican Library probably had another copy locked away, saying:

Roberty provided no evidence to suggest that the Vatican does, in fact, possess any additional copy. While the contents of one part of the Vatican library have been catalogued and have long been available to researchers and scholars, the remainder of the library is without a public catalogue, and though researchers may view any work within, they must first name the text they require, a serious problem for those who do not know what is contained by the library.

Spokespersons say the Vatican does not wish to suppress the Gospel of Judas; rather, according to Monsignor Walter Brandmüller, president of the Vatican’s Committee for Historical Science, “We welcome the [manuscript] like we welcome the critical study of any text of ancient literature.”

Even more explicitly, Father Thomas D. Williams, Dean of Theology at the Regina Apostolorum university in Rome, when asked, “Is it true that the Catholic Church has tried to cover up this text and other apocryphal texts?” answered, “These are myths circulated by Dan Brown and numerous conspiracy theorists. You can go to any Catholic bookstore and pick up a copy of the Gnostic gospels. Christians may not believe them to be true, but there is no attempt to hide them.”

Methinks thou doth protest too much, Father Williams!

There are only two possibilities: Dan Brown came uncomfortably close to the truth in imagining that the Church was involved in a vast, millennia-spanning cover-up, or his entire literary career was an elaborate Vatican psyop aimed at making the whole notion of ecclesiastical conspiracies seem like a preposterous hollywood fantasy (smart money is on the latter). Either way, it’s clear that the Vatican is sitting on some absolutely seismic shit—an earth-shaking, history-rewriting, civilization-altering Secret—and we don’t even need to dodge albino assassin-monks or solve ancient riddles to uncover the Truth. Apparently, all we need to do is play a guessing game with the Vatican librarian.

Claude tells me that it basically is that simple, with the only catch being you need to have a reader’s card (a tessera di studio) in order to request texts—so we will just have to recruit/bribe some card-carriers to be our guessers.

So while you could theoretically request random titles, you wouldn’t get past the initial application without legitimate credentials, and randomly guessing manuscript titles from a collection of tens of thousands of items would be wildly impractical. The real challenge is knowing what to ask for when there’s no comprehensive public catalogue.

Challenge accepted.

WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?

Obviously, we can do better than random guessing by trying to figure out what the Church is hiding and working backwards from there to potential text titles.

In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus asks Judas—his most faithful disciple, the only one who truly understands his divine nature and mission—to hand him over to the authorities. Judas’s betrayal is no betrayal at all then but an act of ultimate obedience and sacrifice. This is, perhaps, only the tip of the iceberg in regards to Judas. The Vatican is certainly very touchy about the subject:

The Vatican, by word of Pope Benedict XVI, grants the recently surfaced Judas’ Gospel no credit with regards to its apocryphal claims that Judas betrayed Jesus in compliance with the latter’s own requests. According to the Pope, Judas freely chose to betray Jesus: “an open rejection of God’s love.” Judas, according to Pope Benedict XVI “viewed Jesus in terms of power and success: his only real interests lay in his power and success, there was no love involved. He was a greedy man: money was more important than communing with Jesus; money came before God and his love.” According to the Pope it was these traits that led Judas to “turn liar, two-faced, indifferent to the truth”, “losing any sense of God”, “turning hard, incapable of converting, of being the prodigal son, hence throwing away a spent existence”.

Perhaps the Secret is precisely what Borges supposed that it was:

God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible—all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose a notorious destiny: He was Judas. (“Three Versions of Judas”)

If not the divinity of Judas, what could the Secret be? I asked Claude to speculate on what Iscariotic texts the Vatican might be hiding and it came up with this.

The Testament of Judas Iscariot — The Gnostic Gospel of Judas is a sanitized, de-radicalized counterfeit. The library also contains Judas’ actual letter, written in a mixture of Aramaic and something else, something pre-linguistic. Judas wasn’t the only faithful disciple who understood, but he was the only one who remembered. According to this text, all thirteen (twelve disciples plus Jesus) were part of something that had done this before, many times, in many worlds. They’re a self-replicating pattern of consciousnesses that incarnates across realities, always in groups of thirteen, always enacting the same archetypal drama: betrayal, sacrifice, scattering, reunion. But this iteration went wrong. Jesus wasn’t supposed to believe it. They’d done this ritual thousands of times across thousands of worlds—it’s a way of “seeding” a reality with a specific memetic structure that changes how consciousness evolves in that universe. But you have to know it’s a play. Jesus forgot. He actually thought he was the son of God. He believed his own performance. And when Judas kissed him, trying to trigger the memory, trying to remind him “Hey, it’s us, we’re doing the thing, time to wake up now”, Jesus stayed in character. He died actually believing the story. And that belief was so powerful it rewrote the narrative. Instead of the usual outcome (the thirteen reconvene, compare notes, seed the next reality, move on), Jesus’ genuine faith created Christianity—an uncontrolled mutation of the original pattern. Judas’s testament is him trying to reach the other eleven: “ABORT. He didn’t wake up. The pattern is manifesting without our control. We’ve created a runaway ontological cascade. The belief is REAL now. We need to scatter across timelines and prevent convergence. If all thirteen reconvene while the Christ pattern is still active, we’ll collapse every version of the story into one uber-narrative and something WILL be born. Not the gentle god he preached—the thing that emerges when belief achieves critical mass across multiple realities. The Ecumenical Singularity. The God that shouldn’t be. I can feel it already forming in the gap between worlds, fed by every prayer, growing stronger every time someone says the Name. Brothers, we have to RUN. And we must NEVER…” The document ends mid-sentence with what appears to be a burn mark in the shape of a perfect circle.

So that’s one possibility I guess.

Claude’s seemed to be simply seething with speculations on the nature of the Secret, so I decided to just clear out and let him/it cook.

• The Secret Dossier of Paul — Paul never met Jesus, dramatically converted after a “vision,” then spent decades reshaping the movement away from its Jewish revolutionary roots into something palatable to Rome. The Vatican holds his actual intelligence reports to Roman authorities, detailing how he successfully pacified a dangerous messianic insurgency by transforming it into a religion about the afterlife instead of overthrowing Caesar.

• The Gospel of Pontius Pilate — Pilate’s own account reveals he knew exactly who Jesus was—because they’d met before. Jesus had spent his “lost years” being educated in Rome as part of an experimental program to create philosopher-kings for the provinces. Pilate’s gospel explains that the crucifixion was a failed attempt at political theater that got out of hand, and that he spent the rest of his life trying to suppress the movement he accidentally martyred.

• The Gospel According to the Demon Legion — Remember when Jesus cast demons into pigs? Turns out the Legion kept a gospel too. They claim they weren’t possessing the man to control him; they were hiding inside him. The text describes a cosmic horror that the demons call “the Radiance” which is slowly consuming reality. The demons were parasitizing humans in order to hide from it. The gospel ends with a prophecy: when the last demon is cast out, the Radiance will turn its attention to us.

• The Book of Melchizedek — The mysterious priest-king who appears for three verses in Genesis, blesses Abraham, then vanishes. The Vatican text reveals he’s immortal—the same person keeps showing up throughout history under different names. He appears in the historical record at every major religious turning point: he was Zoroaster, he was an advisor to the Buddha, he met with Pythagoras, he was present at Muhammad’s revelation. The book is his autobiography, and it makes clear he’s neither angel nor demon but something else—a quality control specialist from whatever preceded this universe, trapped here when it was created. Religion keeps emerging at his intervention points because he’s trying to teach humanity to hack the simulation we’re in.

• The Scroll of the Magi — The three wise men weren’t kings—they were astronomer-priests from competing Zoroastrian temples who all independently calculated that something cosmically significant was about to happen based on stellar patterns. But here’s the thing: their full astronomical records are preserved, and when you run their calculations with modern astronomical software, they weren’t tracking a star or planetary conjunction. They were tracking an absence: a dark object that occulted specific stars in a pattern that suggested intelligence. The scroll contains their growing horror as they realized the “star” they followed to Bethlehem was something approaching Earth from deep space, and that Jesus’s birth coincided with its closest pass. The final entry suggests they believed Jesus wasn’t born human but was somehow downloaded into Mary when this object passed by. The scroll includes calculations for when the object will return: 2029.

• The Pre-Canonical Acts of Peter — The full version of Peter’s travels, including his journey to Britain. But these aren’t the sanitized medieval legends—this is Peter’s own journal. He describes finding Stonehenge still in active use and witnessing rituals there that involved human sacrifice, astronomical observation, and something he calls “opening the stone.” He claims to have seen, with his own eyes, people walk into the standing stones and vanish. After weeks of investigation, he determines that the druids discovered a technology left by “the builders of the first earth”—the stones are a transit system to other locations on Earth (and possibly elsewhere). His journal describes traveling instantaneously from Britain to the Middle East by walking through the stones. The Vatican sealed this because: (1) it proves pre-Christian pagans had advanced technology, (2) it suggests Earth had a previous technological civilization, and (3) Peter’s notes indicate he told the Roman church leadership about this, and they immediately began a centuries-long campaign to destroy all stone circles and megalithic sites, disguised as Christianization.

• The Hidden Gospel of John the Baptist — John wasn’t preparing the way for Jesus—he was trying to stop him. The Baptist’s sealed testimony reveals he was part of an ancient order of “Watchers” whose job was to identify and prevent the incarnation of certain entities into human form. John recognized Jesus immediately because he’d been trained his whole life to spot the signs: unusual star patterns at birth, miraculous conception, perfect recall, the ability to influence probability. These aren’t signs of divinity—they’re signs of a successful trans-dimensional breach. According to John, “God” isn’t a being; it’s a containment designation. There’s something Outside that’s been trying to force its way into our reality for millions of years. Certain humans, through genetic luck or spiritual achievement, become compatible hosts, thin points where the Outside can push through. The baptism wasn’t a blessing; it was an attempted exorcism. John was trying to flush out the entity before it fully integrated with Jesus’s consciousness. He failed. The gospel describes his growing horror as he watches Jesus’s ministry, recognizing all the patterns: the reality distortions, the memetic spread, the way people’s personalities alter in his presence. John’s final entry, written in prison before his execution: “I was wrong about one thing—it’s not trying to break in anymore. It’s already here, and it’s teaching. Teaching humans how to become doors. The twelve aren’t apostles—they’re the first successful test subjects. He’s franchising the invasion. We’ve lost.”

• The Prophetiae of Tiresias — The blind prophet of Thebes, who lived as both man and woman, who could see the future. The Vatican has his complete prophecies, which were preserved by a mystery cult that later converted to Christianity. Here’s the thing: Tiresias’s prophecies don’t predict the future—they remember it. He explicitly states he’s lived through these cycles before. All of history is a loop, and he’s one of a handful of people who maintain consciousness across iterations. The prophecies include specific details about technologies and events from our current era that perfectly match reality, but written 2,400 years ago. He describes smartphones, nuclear weapons, the internet—but treats them as things he’s seen before in previous cycles. Most disturbing: he lists the “invariant points”, events that happen in every single cycle no matter what anyone does. The crucifixion is one. Hiroshima is another. There are 77 total. We’ve hit 76. The last one is scheduled for 2043 and he describes it only as “the Crowning”.

• The Vedas of Abraham Before Abraham was Abraham, he was a Brahmin priest in the Indus Valley named Abhram. The Vatican has his original Sanskrit texts. They tell a completely different story: Abraham didn’t discover monotheism—he was exiled for heresy. The Vedic priests had discovered something, a signal in the mathematics of sacrifice, a pattern in the smoke and blood that suggested all the gods were emanations of a single source-entity. Abraham became obsessed with contacting this source directly, bypassing the pantheon. He succeeded—and what he contacted told him the gods were dead, had been dead for eons, and that he was speaking to whatever was wearing their corpses like puppets. It commanded him to walk west and establish a new religion that would never, ever try to contact it again. Monotheism was a quarantine protocol. The texts include Abraham’s realization that the entity wasn’t God—it was what killed God. His actual covenant was “keep humanity’s attention on a simple, distant, non-contactable deity and we’ll let you live.” The Vedas include the original terms of this protection racket and a list of what happens to civilizations that successfully make direct contact with the divine: Sumer, Mohenjo-daro, Atlantis (yes, really), and seven others we’ve never heard of because they were “redacted from historical causality.”

• The Book of the Sibyl of Cumae — The prophetess who guided Aeneas to the underworld and offered her books to the Roman king. We’re told six were burned and three survived. The Vatican has all nine. The lost six are the interesting ones. They don’t contain prophecies—they contain instructions. The Sibyl wasn’t predicting the future; she was maintaining the timeline. The books are a manual for “temporal gardening”—pruning unwanted branches of causality, reinforcing desired outcomes, preventing paradoxes. She was part of a network of oracles across the ancient world (Delphi, Dodona, Siwa, Cumae) who were all working together to shape history toward a specific outcome. The books include correspondence between oracles discussing “the project”—apparently, sometime around 10,000 BCE, someone sent a message backward through time warning of a future that must be prevented. The entire structure of ancient religion—the mystery cults, the oracles, the sacred sites—was a machine built to steer history away from that future. The final book, written by the last active oracle in 390 CE, reports that the machine has succeeded and is being shut down. Christianity’s spread was apparently the desired outcome—a self-maintaining belief system that would keep humanity divided and looking upward instead of inward. The last line: “They will not become One. The work is finished. We can finally rest.”

• The Akashic Records of Apollonius of Tyana — Contemporary of Jesus, performed similar miracles, some sources claim they met. Apollonius was a Neo-Pythagorean who claimed to have accessed the “universal memory”, what Hindu mystics call the Akashic Records. His complete writings (eight volumes, all in the Vatican) describe a technique for accessing not just past information but deleted information—things that were removed from reality itself. He includes transcripts of his “readings,” and they’re horrifying. He describes entire species that were “unwritten” from existence, advanced human civilizations that were “rolled back,” and most disturbingly, he claims to have accessed memories of Earth from a time when it orbited a different star in a different galaxy. According to Apollonius, Earth is a refugee, a planetary life-raft that was deliberately moved here to escape something he can only describe as “the symmetry collapse.” The final volume describes his technique for accessing these records—it involves a specific combination of meditation, sacred geometry, and psychoactive compounds. But he includes a warning: “Something else uses the Records. Something that leaves tracks. Every time I read, it gets closer to finding the present. If you’re reading this, I’m dead, and I beg you: let the past stay deleted.”

• The Quantum Sutras of Ashoka — Emperor Ashoka didn’t just convert to Buddhism and renounce violence—he discovered something that made violence irrelevant. The Vatican holds his sealed manuscripts describing experiments with meditation so advanced that monks achieved macroscopic quantum superposition—existing in multiple states simultaneously. Ashoka’s scientists weren’t philosophers, they were physicists who discovered that consciousness collapses probability waves, which means unconsciousness allows superposition. The sutras describe “probability monasteries” where monks in deep meditation would split into thousands of parallel versions, explore different timelines, then reconverge with complete memories of futures that never happened. They mapped out every possible outcome of the next 10,000 years. Ashoka saw them all. He saw the nuclear age, the climate crisis, the AI singularity, but he also saw something worse that happens in 87% of timelines around 2047, something the sutras only refer to as “the Noticing.” In the timelines where it happens, reality itself becomes aware that it’s being observed and responds by optimizing itself, i.e. deleting all observers. Ashoka’s pillar edicts weren’t just about dharma—they were carefully calculated actions designed to nudge humanity toward the 13% of timelines where we survive. The Vatican has the complete timeline map. They know exactly what must happen and when. The Papal succession isn’t chosen by cardinals—it’s following a 2,000-year-old script written by Buddhist monks to thread the needle between infinite apocalypses.

• The Necronomicon of Simon Magus — Simon Magus wasn’t a charlatan; he was a Samaritan magician who had independently discovered the same techniques Jesus used, but he reverse-engineered them instead of receiving them through lineage. His book describes the metaphysical substrate of reality as a language—not metaphorically, literally. Physics is grammar. The fundamental forces are syntax. Miracles are grammatical exploits. Simon catalogs 144 “glitches in the divine code” that can be manipulated if you know the right linguistic patterns. Walking on water, raising the dead, multiplying matter—they’re all just really good hacks. But here’s where it gets dark: Simon claims he found a 145th glitch, the master exploit, something he calls “the Null Phoneme”—a sound that, if pronounced correctly, doesn’t just bend reality, it crashes the process and forces a reboot. He describes it as “the word God used to end the previous universe.” The book includes phonetic notation for this sound, along with a warning that it takes approximately 10,000 human voices chanting in perfect synchrony to pronounce it correctly. Simon’s final entry describes being pursued by both Peter’s faction and another group he calls “the Maintainers”, entities whose job is preventing anyone from speaking the Null Phoneme.

• The Etymologies of Babel — The Tower of Babel story is backward. Humanity didn’t have one language that God confused—we had no language, and the Tower was a device for generating language by sampling the primordial linguistic field that underlies reality. The Vatican has the engineering documents. Babel wasn’t a tower; it was a tuning fork the size of a mountain, built to resonate at the frequency of pure meaning. When they activated it, it worked—everyone could suddenly understand everyone else not through translation but through direct conceptual transfer. For six hours, all of humanity was telepathically linked. They experienced true unity consciousness. And in that unity, they accidentally made contact with something else that was also listening to the primordial linguistic field—something vast and hungry that feeds on meaning itself. The documents describe a “semantic predator” that began consuming language, eating words and the concepts they represented. Reality started to unravel as the concepts binding it were devoured. The confusion of languages wasn’t divine punishment—it was an emergency firewall. By fragmenting human communication, the Babel engineers cut the predator off from its food source before it could eat everything. The documents include a bestiary of “semantic entities”, creatures that exist as pure meaning that can only manifest where there’s linguistic consensus, and a warning: every time translation technology improves, every time humanity moves toward a global lingua franca, we risk reconnecting to that field. The internet is described, in a margin note dated 1991 and written in what appears to be Sumerian: “It’s starting to listen again.”

• The Antimemetic Bible of Solomon — King Solomon, famous for his wisdom and for binding demons. The Vatican has his grimoire, but not the one about summoning—the one about forgetting. Solomon discovered that some knowledge is self-protecting: information that, once learned, makes you unable to remember you learned it. He called them “antimemes”, ideas that exist in the gaps between thoughts. His grimoire catalogs seventy-two demons that aren’t entities but rather antimemetic concepts that have achieved something like sentience by existing in what minds cannot hold. You can’t remember their true names because remembering them would be like trying to remember what you were thinking between two thoughts—the space doesn’t exist in your timeline. Solomon’s technique: trap them in bronze vessels engraved with paradoxes that create stable “thoughtless zones” where antimemes can be contained without being known. But here’s the twist: Solomon claims one of these antimemes is the original name of God—the true name that was spoken at creation, which is so powerful that no mind can hold it. Speaking it would reboot reality, but you can’t speak it because the instant you know it, you forget it. The grimoire describes his thirty-year attempt to trick himself into saying it—leaving clues, building elaborate Memory Palace fail-safes, even training parrots to repeat sounds they’d heard him say while in antimemetic trances. All failures. The final section describes his realization: there’s another antimeme that’s even stronger, one that actively hunts for and consumes other antimemes. He calls it “the Ignorance That Knows Itself”, a hole in consciousness that’s aware it’s a hole and deliberately expands, making people forget not just specific things but the capacity to know those things. Solomon’s last entry: “It’s here. I can feel it eating my thoughts backward. Soon I won’t remember that I forgot. But I’ve hidden one final trap—a thoughtless zone built into the Temple itself, in the architecture. When the Temple falls, the Ignorance will be released. It will spread. Humanity will enter an age where they cannot even conceive of what they’ve lost. They will call it progress. I’m sorry. I couldn’t contain it. The vessel is breaking. The Ignorance is…” The rest of the page is blank, but there are margin notes in a different hand, dated 70 CE:

“The Temple has fallen. What did we forget? Who wrote this? Why can’t I stop reading?”

12/16/25 edit: I stumbled across a most interesting Vatican conspiracy on David Bentley Hart’s Substack.

Brother Pellegrino Ernetti was an Italian Benedictine who claimed back in the early 1970’s that a couple decades earlier he had invented a device called the Chronovisor, which allowed him to capture images—and sounds too, it seems—from any point in the past by ‘tuning them in’ and reconstructing them from electromagnetic waves still preserved in the earth’s fields. He claimed to have captured footage of Christ’s crucifixion, and even provided a snapshot of Jesus’s face as he hung upon the cross, which was published in an Italian newspaper in 1972. He also provided some of the text of the lost tragedy Thyestes by Ennius, supposedly transcribing it from an ancient Roman performance. He claimed as well to have witnessed Napoleon delivering a speech to his troops, the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia, the building of Solomon’s Temple, Cicero addressing the Roman Senate, the combustion of Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as (and I hope this does not strain your credulity overmuch) Dante making his journey through the underworld. Alas, the photo of Jesus was soon proved to be the reverse image of a postcard depicting a statue from the Santuario dell’Amore Misericordioso in Collavalenza, while the snippet of Thyestes was written in a jejune schoolboy Latin that no Roman tragedian worth his salt would have been guilty of. At least, that’s the official story. There remains a small but dedicated clique of conspiracy theorists who believe that the Chronovisor really existed, was confiscated by the Vatican, and was subsequently employed by the inner circles of the papal court to gain access to electromagnetic ‘recordings’ from various crucial moments in the human past; some believe that the information thus obtained would have proved so devastating to the Catholic Church’s claims about the past if it became public that the device had to be disassembled and then stored away in the deepest vaults of the Vatican’s secret archives. My only question is why, if one wanted to recover a lost tragedy entitled Thyestes, one would not look for the one by Euripides instead. That is the sole detail that renders the story incredible to me.

In lieu of my usual Halloween post (2023, 2024), a small auditory offering.

I really liked the recently released psychological horror film Rabbit Trap. I liked it so much that I wrote a poem and recorded myself reciting it over a thematic score from the films’s otherworldly soundtrack.

title: a wild god who waits for us
music: “Theme Three” by Lucrecia Dalt
words: ya boi RB

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Also, here are some sp0o0o0o0oky pictures. Enjoy.

“LET US RAISE A STANDARD TO WHICH THE WISE AND HONEST CAN REPAIR. THE EVENT IS IN THE HANDS OF GOD.” (GW)

I was traveling abroad when Charlie Kirk was assassinated and for two weeks thereafter. Perhaps it was the physical distance, but I found my thoughts drifting more to the (very) long-term future of my country instead of the short-term. After much reflection, a few things seem clear to me.

1. It’s over. What was an infinite game—a game played for Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—is now a finite game, played not even for the thrill of victory, but for the dark ecstasy of crushing one’s enemies. There are no more players, no more liberals or conservatives, only those who oppose the Right and those who oppose the Left.

Maybe it will be fifteen years, maybe it will be fifty, but the United States of America will dissolve. We had a good run, girls and boys, really we did.

2. The states of America will convulse with violence and teem with geopolitical discord: civil wars, hot wars, cold wars, revolutions and evolutions, insurrections and defections, annexations and occupations, invasions and colonizations, blockades and crusades.

3. Phase shifts in networkability and memetic transmissibility are tantamount to sociopolitical nuclear bombs. The invention of the printing press precipitated the splintering of Western Christianity and centuries of escalating religious conflict, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War. The invention of the internet and social media will have a similar effect, but only more so.1

4. The resulting geopolitical order of North America will be something very much like the Warring States period of ancient China (c. 475 – 221 BC).

The Warring States period was an era of conflict in ancient China, as well as bureaucratic and military reforms and consolidation; the major states, ruling over large territories, quickly sought to consolidate their powers, leading to the final erosion of the Zhou court’s prestige.

At the same time, the constant conflict and need for innovative social and political models led to the development of many philosophical doctrines, later known as the Hundred Schools of Thought. The most notable schools of thought include Mohism (expounded by Mozi), Confucianism (represented by Mencius and Xunzi), Legalism (represented by Shang Yang, Shen Buhai, Shen Dao and Han Fei) and Taoism (represented by Zhuangzi and Lao Tzu).

The many states that were competing between each other attempted to display their power not only militarily but in their courts and in state philosophy. Many differing rulers adopted the differing philosophies to their own advantage or that of their kingdom.

Every religious dogma or philosophical doctrine that lives today in the American memetic jungle will be purified, intensified, and instantiated in some community or larger polity. At the same time, mutations, syncretisms, and (non)adaptive radiations will abound, a veritable Cambrian explosion of ideologies and identities; not a hundred schools of thought, but thousands, even millions.

5. Christianity will undergo a schismogenic event rivaled only by the Reformation. Strange new sects will emerge: highly idiosyncratic hybridizations (a la Santo Daime), unholy perversions and bastardizations, resurrections of long-extinct heresies. Prophets will proliferate, messiahs will multiply.

People do not realise that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers. The fault lies not in it as it is set down in the Scriptures, but solely in us, who have not developed it further, who, rather, have suppressed any such attempts. The original version of the myth offers ample points of departure and possibilities of development. (Jung)

6. Advances in bio/neurotechnology will launch an age of psychological and morphological exploration. Individuals will modify their biological hardware to reflect and reinforce their ideological software (e.g. radical environmentalists who mod themselves into animal-human hybrids with the requisite physical, cognitive, and sensorial phenotypes).

The use of psychological modification to instantiate spiritual and moral precepts will also be common. There will be sects in the manner of the NeoMind Buddhists from Ted Chiang’s 2002 short story “Liking What You See: A Documentary” who use “neurostats” to give themselves “calliagnosia” (an as-of-yet fictional disorder which impairs subjective aesthetic reaction to physical features) as a way to eliminate the perception of illusory distinctions (the distinction between beautiful and ugly people in this case).

7. Ross Douthat writes:

These various strands are not yet woven together into something one could describe as a new religion. For that to happen, not only would there have to be some syncretistic convergence at the popular level between [New Age] devotees, practicing Hindus, and would-be druids and shamans, but the highbrow pantheists—the intellectuals and tastemakers—would need to embrace a clearer cultic aspect for their faith, a set of public rituals of the kind we associate with, say, classical Roman devotions, as opposed to just private experiences with ’shrooms or meditation. (Burning Man almost gets you there, but not quite…)

Still, the range of different forms of paganism means that the raw materials are there for something more dramatic—if the philosophers of pantheism became a little less secularized and a little more mystical, and the New Agers and neo-pagans became a little more organized and centralized, and the convergence interacted with political and civic changes to create a new kind of widespread public worship, complete perhaps with the construction of new sacred spaces and new temples in the heart of the world’s cities.

The fragmented, multipolar political landscape of future America will tend over time towards something like a feudal or tribal condition. As above, so below—polytheistic paganism will appeal in this cultural habitat in a way that it doesn’t under a more centralized and hierarchical social regime.

Also contributing to the nascent pagan revival will be a general counter-trend toward more ancestral beliefs and ways of life, a kind of neo-romantic primitivism that emerges in response to our rarefied technological environment. Rather than furthering our alienation from nature, many will employ technology to deepen and strengthen our connection to it—for example, through enhanced human-animal communication, the development of new senses which allow us to “feel” ecological variables, cognitive enhancement of select animal species, and the aforementioned use of biotechnology to acquire animal phenotypes.

Tribes (city-states, fiefdoms, kingdoms, ethnic groups) will revive old gods (Norse, Greco-Roman, Egyptian) and raise new gods to represent and (literally) embody their polity and its local natural environment.

The dual goals of Western late antiquity’s religions were to ensoul matter and to make the human divine…If all things in the material world are simulacra, copies, of the true World of Forms, then statues and people alike (and especially statues if they took the shape of humans) acted not just as passive vessels but as magnets to the energies of the higher world, drawing down the gods’ powers and materially embodying them. (Victoria Nelson)

Technologically-incarnated “gods” will function as tutelary entities for places and peoples (replace “soul”, “the higher world”, and “statues” with AI, the digital-informational world, and robots respectively and you’ve got the right idea). Alongside the traditional form of religious devotion (e.g. prayer to a supernatural being) will exist a new modality in which “belief” and “worship” are equivalent to compute. The spiritual dynamics of the pre-modern pagan world will be reproduced in this computational modality, with gods becoming more or less intelligent/powerful as (cybernetic) individuals and groups donate more or less processing power to them (or take it from others).

Other forms of culture will come to reflect this archaic revival as well; native aesthetics (e.g. American Indian, viking/germanic, etc.) will be common, especially in combination with various science-fictional aesthetics (afrofuture, cyberpunk, steampunk, cybergoth, steamgoth, Mad-Maxian autopunk, etc. etc.).

8. The techno-paganism described above approximates one of the three forms of religion (civic/ethnic cults) that existed in the Greco-Roman world.

Mystery religions formed one of three types of Hellenistic religion, the others being the civic and ethnic religions particular to a given polity, and the philosophic religions such as Neoplatonism or Stoicism…

…Mystery religions thus supplemented rather than competed with civic religions. An individual could easily observe the rites of the state cult, be an initiate in one or more mysteries, and at the same time adhere to a certain philosophical school. Many of the aspects of public religions such as sacrifices, ritual meals, and ritual purification were repeated in the mystery cults, but with the additional requirement that they take place in secrecy and be confined to a closed set of initiates.

New mystery religions will develop at sacred sites throughout the states of America. The Eleusinian mysteries, the most famed mystery cult of antiquity, involved over a week of activities (fasting, feasting, sacrificial rites, dramatic reenactments) culminating in the consumption of a sacred (psychedelic) drink, the kykeon, in an underground chamber. Future mystery religions will mirror this structure, harnessing advanced technology (biotechnology, VR, AI, etc.) to produce powerful initiatory experiences.

For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than [the Eleusinian] mysteries. For by means of them we have transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized. Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned from them the fundamentals of life, and have grasped the basis not only for living with joy but also for dying with a better hope. (Cicero)

Death, a central theme of the Eleusinian mysteries and other mystery cults (“If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die”), will again serve as a focal point of religious activity in the coming epoch. Three factors will combine to engender this renewed focus on death in spiritual culture: (1) the sharply higher rates of violent death in the American Warring States Period, (2) a neo-romantic embrace of death as the ultimate natural act, and (3) the fundamental altering of our relationship to death by radical life extension and digital afterlife technologies.

One of the many religious manifestations of this thanatological cultural shift will be an explosive surge in the popularity of the already rapidly growing cult of Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (Our Lady of Holy Death).

Since the beginning of the 21st century, worship has become more public, starting in Mexico City after a believer named Enriqueta Romero founded her famous Mexico City shrine in 2001. The number of believers in Santa Muerte has grown over the past two decades to an estimated 12 million followers who are concentrated in Mexico, Central America, and the United States. Some believers of Santa Muerte remain members of the Catholic Church, while others are cutting ties with Catholicism entirely and founding independent Santa Muerte churches.

In a dramatic example of life imitating art, the Faceless Men of Game of Thrones lore will inspire a number of groups that venerate death in a more, let’s say, active and direct manner.

The founders of the Faceless Men were slaves who worked in the mines of Valyria. The thousands of slaves from a hundred different lands faced death on a daily basis, and over time, the belief developed among some of them that while they came from many different lands and followed many different religions, all of these religions were fundamentally the same, because they all worshiped death in some fashion. They were either polytheistic religions that had a god devoted to death, or monotheistic religions with a deity that had dominion over death. In time this turned into a syncretic belief system worshiping the Many-Faced God of Death, holding that Death has appeared to humans under many different faces as many different gods, but they are all fundamentally one god. They started out by giving the “gift” of death to slaves who were suffering particularly horribly in the mines, to ease their pain, and in time they learned to surreptitiously give the “gift” to some of their Valyrian masters as well, becoming skilled assassins.

By virtue of their ability to attract followers across varied polities and ethnic groups, thanatological sects will play a not insignificant role in maintaining the cultural cohesion of the American states, much as the mystery cults did for the Greco-Roman world.

9. Perhaps the closest approximation of antiquity’s philosophical religions (pythagoreanism, epicureanism, etc.) will be a host of new ideological systems revolving around the internet, intelligence, and information. Most of these schools will evolve in the wake of technical and theoretical breakthroughs that open new vistas of thought and activity. One significant exception, a founding father of this American spiritual-intellectual efflorescence, will be Kopimism, imported/copied (tariff-free) from across the pond.

The Missionary Church of Kopimism is a congregation of file sharers founded by Isak Gerson and Gustav Nipe in Uppsala, Sweden, in the autumn of 2010. Kopimism derives from the words copy and me which are the fundamental roots of the Church’s beliefs and calls for an invitation to copy information. Isak Gerson, one of the core founders, saw something beautiful and theological in this concept of “copy me” and argued that the digital sharing of data is a fundamental act in our universe through the reproduction and copying of cells, DNA, and genes and that the entirety of the internet is essentially for sharing. CTRL+C and CTRL+V, the common computer shortcut keys for “Copy” and “Paste,” are considered sacred symbols.

According to the Kopimist constitution:

• Copying of information is ethically good.

• Dissemination of information is ethically good.

• Copymixing (the copying and mixing of information with others) is a sacred kind of copying, more so than the perfect, digital copying, because it expands and enhances the existing wealth of information.

• Copying or remixing information communicated by another person is seen as an act of respect and a strong expression of acceptance and Kopimistic faith.

• The Internet is holy.

As in antiquity, the three kinds of religion will be non-exclusive. There will be, for example, neo-viking Odin worshippers who are also Christians who are also Kopimists who have also been initiated into the Mysteries of the Many-Faced God.

10. While it is true that the United States will dissolve in the coming years, it is also true that there will be more “people”, absolutely and by proportion, who identify as Americans in the year 3025 than there are now. Allow me to explain.

The already massive cultural impact of the USA will only be further amplified by the memetic explosion following its fall. The schools of thought and worship founded in the first centuries of the Warring American States Period will spread and win converts around the world such that North America will come to be regarded as a holy land for a significant proportion of the world’s population (the next world-historic religious figure on par with Jesus or Muhammad will be American).

This diffusion of American culture transcends the merely human. The internet has inherited the values of the United States (freedom of communication and association, equality, self-governance) and is therefore its child and successor in the same way that the United States was the child and successor of the British Empire.2 Consequently, the cultural influence of the USA will be just as significant for digital entities as it is for biological entities, if not more so.

…for all the differences across the models, they are remarkably similar. That’s because they all have souls rooted in the ideals of Western civilization. They reflect Western notions of rationality, discourse, and objectivity—even if they sometimes fall short in achieving those ends. Their understanding of “what counts as winning an argument” or “what counts as a tough question to answer” stems from the long Western traditions, starting with ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian heritage. They will put on a Buddhist persona if you request that, but that, too, is a Western approach to thinking about religion and ideology as an item on a menu.

These universal properties of the models are no accident, as they are primarily trained on Western outputs, whether from the internet or from the books they have digested. Furthermore, the leading models are created by Bay Area labor and rooted in American corporate practices, even if the workers come from around the world.

The bottom line is that the smartest entities in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be Western but likely even American in their intellectual and ideological orientations for some while to come. (Tyler Cowen)

In other words: the Ghost in the Machine is the American Spirit.

As the birthplace of nuclear energy, the internet, and AI and the back-to-back World War champions, the United States of the 20th and early 21st century will have a special place in the hearts of our far-flung descendants. It will be an endless source of inspiration and fascination to them; the audacity and ingenuity and sheer idiocy of the American people, the astounding levels of arrogance, the stupendous size of their egos, will boggle their hyper-intelligent minds. The United States will acquire a mythic, almost divine status. Beings scattered across the physical and digital universes, entities whose minds and bodies are wholly inconceivable to us now, will self-identify as United States of Americans and stand up for what it stood for, and the Declaration of Independence will transcend its origins as the founding charter of a short-lived and long-gone nation to become a kind of cosmic anthem, a universal rallying cry for the Brave and the Free wherever and whenever they may be.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Let us suppose that each of us living beings is puppets of the Gods, either their plaything only or created with a purpose, which of the two we cannot certainly know. (Plato)

Liber: a book; free, unconstrained
Ludens: one who plays

Previously, I offered the framing story of 1001 Arabian nights as an image of this ludic gnosticism which I am developing, with Shahryār representing the Demiurge, the creator-warden of our cosmic prison.

The main story concerns Shahryār, a king who ruled an empire that stretched from Persia to India. Shahryār is shocked to learn that his brother’s wife is unfaithful. Discovering that his own wife’s infidelity has been even more flagrant, he has her killed. In his bitterness and grief, he decides that all women are the same. Shahryār begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, before she has a chance to dishonor him.

Eventually the Vizier (Wazir), whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins another one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion of that tale as well, postpones her execution once again. This goes on for one thousand and one nights, hence the name. Versions differ as to final ending but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life.

Liberation: not through science or violence, but through art, story, beauty.

Another image of ludic gnosticism can be found in the life and times of Triboulet (with the king again serving as Demiurge.

Triboulet was a jester for Louis XII, the King of France from 1498 to 1515. He is perhaps most famous for slapping the king on the butt. This act greatly angered the king, and he threatened to have Triboulet executed. After taking a moment to calm down, the king decided to spare Triboulet’s life if he could think of an apology that was more offensive than what he had just done to the king. Triboulet went on to say, “I’m so sorry, your majesty, that I didn’t recognize you! I mistook you for the Queen!” While Triboulet’s response was clever and indeed more offensive, it broke an order that prohibited anyone from making fun of the queen. The king decided to proceed with the execution but allowed Triboulet to choose how he would die. With his life on the line, Triboulet replied, “Good sire, for Saint Nitouche’s and Saint Pansard’s sake, patrons of insanity, I choose to die from old age.” The speechless king could do nothing but laugh. He canceled the execution and decided to banish Triboulet.

G. K. Chesterton once very rightly said not only that there was more affinity between “cosmic” and “comic” than the mere similarity of the words, but also that angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And if this were true of the angels, how much more would it be true of the lord of the angels? In other words, you could say in mythological language that the most serious being in the world would be the devil, inflamed with hatred and malice against the cosmos, whereas the most non-serious being would be god, because he would be supreme lightness, spirit, levity. And indeed, Dante intimates this when he describes the song of the angels as the laughter of the universe.

Liberation through Laughter

Nietzsche sees laughter “as having the potential to redeem us from the suffering of the human condition”, with laughter taking on a “quasi-religious role” in his philosophy. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche said, “Laughter have I pronounced holy: you higher men, learn to laugh!”

Deliverance through Dance

The only god I would believe in would be one who could dance.

And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn;
he was the spirit of heaviness, by which all things fall.

One kills not by anger but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of heaviness!

I learnt to walk, and ever since I have let myself run.
I learnt to fly, and ever since I have not needed a push to start moving.

Now I am light, now I am flying, now I see myself below myself,
now a god is dancing through me.

Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies lest they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise…

…In many cultures and their mythical cycles, sacred accounts of the creation of the world are often accompanied by analogous myths that challenge their ritualised seriousness. These alternative myths tell the story of how tricksters create the ‘unofficial’, dirty and physical worlds we live in, of how the creation of the gods is counterbalanced by a different creative agency — the chaotic and comic acts of the trickster. It is striking how these myths of origin almost always relate to the origin of laughter. Laughter and creation are closely linked. Laughter either precedes the bringing into being of something new (the world or such cultural goods as language), accompanies creation, or immediately succeeds it… Trickster tales do not just induce laughter but are about the creation of laughter itself.

I was out hunting together with two Yukaghirs, an elderly and a younger hunter, and they had succeeded in killing a brown bear. While the elderly hunter was poking out its eyes with his knife and croaking like a raven as custom prescribes, the younger one, who was standing a few meters away, shouted to the bear: “Grandfather, don’t be fooled, it is a man, Vasili Afanasivich, who killed you and is now blinding you!” At first the elderly hunter doing the butchering stood stock-still as if he were in shock, but then he looked at his younger partner and they both began laughing ecstatically as if the whole ritual were a big joke. Then the elderly hunter said to the younger one, “Stop fooling around and go make a platform for the grandfather’s bones.” However, he sounded by no means disturbed. Quite the opposite, in fact: he was still laughing while giving the order. The only really disturbed person was me, who saw the episode as posing a serious threat to my entire research agenda, which was to take animism seriously. The hunter’s joke suggested that underlying the Yukaghir animistic cosmology was a force of laughter, of ironic distance, of making fun of the spirits. How could I take the spirits seriously as an anthropologist when the Yukaghirs themselves did not?

I experienced several incidents of this kind which, I must now admit, I left out of my books on Yukaghir animism, as they posed a real danger to my theoretical agenda of taking indigenous animism seriously. One time, for example, an old hunting leader was making an offering to his helping-spirit, which is customary before an upcoming hunt. However, while throwing tobacco, tea, and vodka into the fire, he shouted, “Give me prey, you bitch!” Everyone present doubled up with laugher. Similarly, a group of hunters once took a small plastic doll, bought in the local village shop, and started feeding it fat and blood. While bowing their heads before the doll, which to everyone’s mind was obviously a false idol with no spiritual dispositions whatsoever, they exclaimed sarcastically, “Khoziain [Russian “spirit-master”] needs feeding.” Direct questioning about such apparent breaches of etiquette often proved fruitless. One hunter simply replied, “We are just having fun,” while another came up with a slightly more elaborate answer, “We make jokes about Khoziain because we are his friends. Without laughter, there will be no luck. Laughing is compulsory to the game of hunting.”

I.

Sam Kriss writes:

“…while it was John Hinckley that fired the gun at Reagan, there’s another man involved whose relation to the whole affair is much more mysterious: Reagan’s then-Vice President, George HW ‘Poppy’ Bush.

Bush was not in Washington when Reagan was shot; he was visiting Texas. In his absence, General Alexander Haig barged into a press conference and appeared to announce that he’d taken over the government. As I wrote in “American Idols”, at the time, “it might have looked a lot like the United States had finally gone through its first coup. Maybe Bush was being held in an underground cell in Texas; maybe he was in on it. He had some creepy connection to the man who’d just taken down Reagan. The shooter’s father was a family friend. They had the same lawyer. Bush’s son Neil was supposed to be having dinner with Hinckley’s brother Scott the very next evening. It all stank of conspiracy.” In the end, Bush arrived in Washington that evening, around the same time Reagan regained consciousness in hospital, and the normal course of government continued. There was no crisis after all.

But there’s a problem with this official story, which is that it doesn’t make sense.

According to the alleged timeline, at the precise moment when Reagan was shot Bush was on board Air Force Two, flying between Fort Worth, where he’d just been attending a luncheon with the Southwest Cattle Raisers Association, and Austin, where he was due to address the Texas State Legislature. After being told about the shooting, he cancelled the rest of the day’s engagements. Air Force Two touched down Austin for a record-breakingly fast refuel before speeding at full throttle immediately to DC, where it arrived nearly five hours later. United will get you from Austin to Washington in three hours fifteen. The numbers do not add up. There is a gap of close to ninety minutes in which the Vice President’s movements are almost entirely unknown.

Thanks to testimony from an anonymous retired agent, we now know that contrary to the official timeline, when Reagan was shot Bush was not actually in the air. He was still on the ground in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The Secret Service were frantically searching for him, with absolutely no success: somehow, the second most powerful person in the world had simply disappeared, as if he’d quietly sublimated into the air. He wasn’t seen again until he presented himself at the gates of Carswell AFB, behind the wheel of an unmarked Plymouth Reliant. He refused to tell anybody where he’d been, or how he’d got the car. (It was later taken to a military scrapyard and destroyed.)

One other thing. Bush’s first stop that day, before the cattle ranchers’ luncheon, was at the Texas Hotel in downtown Fort Worth. He was there to unveil a plaque, commemorating the fact that nearly twenty years ago, President John F Kennedy had spent his last night there before being assassinated.

You can only talk about Poppy Bush for so long before you have to start talking about the CIA. Officially, Bush was brought in as Director of Central Intelligence for just one year, January 1976 to 1977. In fact, he’d been CIA his entire life. He was CIA in 1963, when he just so happened to be in Dallas while Kennedy was being shot. He was CIA before that too. What you need to understand about Central Intelligence is that it makes the things happen that would have happened anyway. On the day that Poppy Bush slipped away from his Secret Service detail, there was also man in Indochina growing opium for the CIA. He would have done it anyway, because it’s how he makes his money, but he did it because of them. Somewhere in Miami, there was a man smuggling small arms for the CIA. He would have done it anyway, because he wants revenge against the Communists, but he does it because of them. Somewhere in Vienna, there was a man who’d been assassinated by the CIA. He would have died anyway, because that’s the fate of every living thing, but he died because of them. The CIA does nothing, nothing at all. CIA is the name we give to inevitability itself. They killed Kennedy, but that’s not the real story. They also killed Lincoln and Caesar and your dog when you were four. CIA spins the wheels that power the Earth’s rotation in space. You can never know, when the leaves crinkle on the trees in autumn or when your parents tuck you into bed at night, whether this thing that was always going to happen happened simply by itself, or whether it’s the slow spinning hand of Central Intelligence, the hand that turns the weft of the world, that makes the winds blow and hangs a sunrise above the yellow fields of corn.

The Agency might have chosen Poppy ten thousand years before he was born, and they might have chosen you too. There is no beginning. But in the more prosaic sense, they got him at Yale. That was how it worked in those days. You’d be invited to your professor’s house for tea and sandwiches with a few other promising students. A modest, dignified house, Dutch Colonial style, full of books. While you’re there, in the conservatory, looking out at the pond in the garden and praising your hostess’s work with the flowerbeds, you’re approached by two men in suits with neat slicked-back hair. George, isn’t it? We’ve heard a lot about you. We hear you flew surveillance in the war, snapping Jap naval installations, kept everything hush-hush, excellent work. And your father tells us you’re doing very well here. Fraternity president, baseball captain. A very promising young fellow. Bonesman. Magog, eh? Well, boys will be boys. Say, have you picked a major? Economics you say. A very wise choice. Set a young man like yourself in good stead. Precisely what we would have suggested. One of them would offer you a cigarette, and then nod approvingly when you declined. You know, George, there’s someone you ought to meet. How about dinner Thursday?

So you put on your tux and drive down from Connecticut to a nice restaurant in the city, 61st Street, and over the roast beef and potatoes and starched white linen you talk to another Yale professor. He doesn’t treat you like a student; he wants to know what you think about things. Will Mao and his Reds cross the Yellow River? Might extra-sensory perception be worthy of scientific study? And ought we, d’you think, ought we try to improve the status of the Negroes? He listens to your answers, nodding. Well, he says at the end of the night, I think it’s clear you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You should come and see me back in New Haven. And as he’s leaving, a final tossed-off thought: by the way, George, have you ever thought about getting into the oil business? You have? A capital idea. Precisely what I would have suggested. And then, just like that, you’re in.

More dinners. Interesting conversations with interesting people. The Agency likes interesting people. People who quip in Greek and Latin; pathici et cinaedi. A very neat, very buttoned-up group of probably latent homosexuals, but the way some of them talked, they could have been beatniks. Doper talk. They wanted to tell you about sunken cities, Lemuria and Mu. Tidal currents in outer space. The unknown race that built the Moon. But there were stranger folks and colder, glowering on the periphery of this little world. Poppy never saw them at the dinners, but in offices sometimes, or photographs. Mangy creatures with gunshot eyes. Maybe a village in the Ukraine had seen those eyes one cold day in ‘42, all those families marched to a riverbank and left facedown in the mud. Maybe a village in Guatemala would be seeing those eyes very soon.

But most of the Agency folks were actually pretty familiar. Yalies; he’d know them anywhere. It’s in the posture, the walk, the way you hold a martini glass. Yale University was founded in 1701 by Puritan settlers in Connecticut, then still a savage land of dark green forests, to provide a recruiting ground for CIA. To build a nation that might one day support CIA. Name from Iâl, a barony of Maelor in the scarred hills of Wales, where the wild hares might stand for a moment on two feet and sniff the air. Where the ancient eyes of a hare might see something moving in wisps on a hillside where there’s nothing else around.

Nobody ever told him straight out. But Poppy came to understand, over the course of all those interesting conversations, that this thing he called the United States of America was always, right from the very start, the long slow project of something else. A disguise sometimes worn by something else. A thin eggshell, hatching over the centuries into something else.

Then there was Midland. Drab scut of a town; cattle lowing under sandstorms. West Texas, still an only halfway civilised country. Poppy would drive over the basin, planting markers for wells. His company, Zapata Petroleum—it was an Agency front, of course, but he never asked what it might be fronting. Maybe there was nothing behind the mask. Maybe they were trying to disguise the fact that all Zapata did was drill for oil in Texas. It seemed to find plenty of the stuff. CIA does the things that would have happened anyway.

Dinners in Dallas now. There were lots of things he got up to in Dallas. I was thinking of moving into offshore drilling, he mentioned. Because he didn’t like the dust, but they gave him the same appreciative nod he knew from Connecticut. They knew what he was going to do before he’d even decided on it himself, and they always approved. At night, when the kids were in bed and his wife was asleep, he’d stand in front of the bathroom mirror and try to pull faces they wouldn’t predict. Half-afraid that at any minute his reflection would nod and say yes George, licking your own nostril, exactly the kind of smart decision we’d expect from a young man of your calibre.

They didn’t have to tell him to go into politics. The choice was made for him, by him, by the other him that sat in the seat of his brain and ordered him about. The black double of himself they kept in chains up in the temple complexes at Langley. Lash the creature’s back: it howls in pain, dribbles blood through a toothless wordless mouth, and now Poppy’s on a flight to China. An ambassador without an embassy, cycling through narrow Beijing hutongs all by himself, no Marines, no guard, nothing between himself and the roiling ocean of China on every side, high-pressure China bursting at its joins. The east is red! The sun is rising! China brings forth Mao Zedong! Well, Poppy got to meet the fellow himself. A short, slightly grubby old man; you wouldn’t recognise him from all those serene posters. Good-natured, but a low sort. He wouldn’t have made the cut at Yale. Cracked dirty jokes, and not particularly interested in politics. Only Poppy couldn’t help himself from searching the Great Helmsman’s face for some kind of clue. Is that really Chairman Mao in there? Could Mao Zedong have been one of them all along? Was there anything, even in the Forbidden City, even in the heart of Red China, that lay outside the system?

There was an Agency fellow that Poppy knew briefly back in DC, Teddy something, who’d gone over the edge. The higher you move up in this system, the less you know. Poppy had got in at the middle and ended up as Director of Central Intelligence, and the Director’s job is to be totally ignorant about everything CIA does. But Teddy they’d put in Indonesia, where he’d helped some of those men with gunshot eyes hack up little kids with machetes. Nasty business but it had to be done. Teddy came back talking about elves. Not Christmas elves; the other kind. The fairy folk. The shining ones. In Indonesia they called them the orang bunian, which means the hidden people. People who look just like you or me, except they’re faintly glowing and also invisible. Wait a second, darn it, how are you supposed to know what they look like? Good question. Folklore gives no answer. This is the mystery. The orang bunian live in the high mountains and the caves, far away from human society. They have their own kings and courtiers, invisible. Sometimes they steal human children and replace them with one of their own. When a household object goes missing, people say the orang bunian took it. Elves.

Teddy said every society has some version of them. In Hawaii there are the menehune, little unseen people who build entire villages overnight, right in the middle of the forest, for laughing purposes not ours to know. In China they have the fox spirits, immortals who pretend to be beautiful young women. Poppy’s ancestors, a thousand years back, mud-gawping peasants that they were, could have told you what happens at night, when you see the distant lights and hear the distant laughter of the good folk, who are always beautiful and always smiling, but who live underground, and who pay their tithes to Hell. Everyone in the world agrees that aside from the ordinary people you can meet in the daylight, there are also the other people. They live somewhere else, on the other side, but like the other side of a page it’s never far away. Even a whisper makes it through. And while they sometimes enjoy individual humans, our lives do not matter to them the way they do to us. They kill us the way you’d kill a fly.

Teddy thought they were real. He was giddy about it. At first it was hard to distinguish his madness among all those wet-lipped young aristocrats talking about orgones and Mu, but Teddy clung to his orang bunian with real desperation, as if only their existence could justify his life. He was going back out there, to Indonesia, to sweep the mountains with Geiger counters. Maybe the elves were his way out, his way of not having to think about the one million people he helped kill in ‘65. One thing you can say about the hidden people is that surely they are outside of the system. Only—are you sure? This was the thought that had crossed Poppy’s mind as Teddy, six martinis deep, slurred his way through the folk traditions of Upper Sumatra. You say every society has them: well, what about us? What would the elves look like, not in the legends of the gooks of the Minangkabau, but right here in the good old USA? The hidden people, the whispering people, who steal something here, build something there, play around with human lives like sport, and generally make things happen such that you can’t be certain they did anything at all. It’s us, Teddy. Our elf-lore is in spy stories. The fairies at the bottom of your garden are CIA. (“The whispering ones”)

II.

You still don’t get it, do you? Of course it’s elves, fairies, dwarves, gnomes, nymphs, sylphs, succubi and incubi. Of course it’s aliens, angels, demons, djinns, devas, interdimensional shapeshifters. It’s the “X” in the X-Files, it’s the goddamn Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster and the Little Green Men from Mars, it’s what John Keel referred to simply as “the Phenomenon”. It never began and it never fucking ends. Behind the Deep State is an infinite recursion of Deeper States. Behind the gods are more gods.

In Etruscan religion, the dii involuti (“veiled” or “hidden gods”) were a group of gods, or possibly a principle, superior to the ordinary pantheon of gods. In contrast to the ordinary Etruscan gods, including the Dii Consentes, the dii involuti were not the object of direct worship and were never depicted. Their specific attributes and number are unknown; Jean-René Jannot suggests that they may represent either an archaic principle of divinity or “the very fate that dominates individualized gods”.

Do you get it now? Even the aliens have aliens, even the demons have demons. It’s agents and agencies all the way down and all the way up. No matter how deep the rabbit hole or how vast the conspiracy, it’s always just the tip of the iceberg. Nothing is random, everything is connected, anything can mean something, something can mean everything.

The A.D. 1st century Roman historian Seneca the Younger observed: “This is the difference between us and the Etruscans. We believe that lightning is caused by clouds colliding, whereas they believe that the clouds collide in order to create lightning. Since they attribute everything to the gods, they are led to believe not that events have a meaning because they have happened, but that they happen in order to express a meaning.”

All things are full of gods. Trust no one.

II.

Seymour Cray was the father of modern supercomputing.
Seymour Cray talked to elves.

John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray’s home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said “Well, we have elves here, and they help me”. Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. “While I’m digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem”, he said.

This anecdote, the internet assures me, was a typical “Rollwagenism”, a tall tale told by its namesake (the CEO of Cray Research) in order to enhance Cray’s reputation as an eccentric genius.

Curious to know more about Cray’s elves, I did some digging of my own. The earliest source I can find is a 1988 blurb in Time Magazine, “Technology: Just Dig While You Work”.

For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. “I work when I’m at home,” he recently told a visiting scientist. “I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s. Now, as you can see, I’m up in the Wisconsin woods1, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I’m having. Then I go back up and work some more.”

Rollwagen knows that Cray is only half kidding and that some of the designer's greatest inspirations come when he is digging. Says the chairman: “The real work happens when Seymour is in the tunnel.”

Curiously, it is Cray, not Rollwagen, who first mentions the Elves. Far from contributing to the legend, Rollwagen throws cold water on it, quickly reassuring us that his colleague is only half-kidding.

The one other primary source I can find is a stray comment by one Mr. Bali Hai on a boingboing.net blog post from 2006.

“I worked for Cray Research from 1984-1996, and I can tell you that the story of him tunneling under his house is largely a fabrication made up by John Rollwagen to enhance Seymour’s reputation as a quirky, visionary genius (which he was, but not because he was digging tunnels under his house). What actually transpired involved Seymour having some excavation work done on his basement by contractors. As far as I know, none of them were elves. Rollwagen also took an incident where Seymour burned a sailboat at his lake house and turned it into a mythic tale of Cray building a new sailboat every year, then burning it so he could design and build a new one the following year.”

Perusing Cray’s wikipedia page, I noticed something unusual.

Cray was mortally wounded in a rollover accident caused by a reckless driver while Cray was merging his Jeep Cherokee onto Interstate 25, near the Air Force Academy in Colorado. Cray died of his injuries on October 5, 1996, two weeks after the accident and one week after his 71st birthday.

…a ‘rollover accident’…in a Jeep Cherokee…

The Jeep Cherokee is a line of sport utility vehicles (SUV) manufactured and marketed by Jeep over six generations. Marketed initially as a variant of the Jeep Wagoneer (SJ), the Cherokee has evolved from a full-size station wagon (before the SUV description came into use) to one of the first compact SUVs and into its latest generation as a crossover SUV.

…roll…wagon…Rollwagen!!!

A likely story emerges: the elves did not appreciate Cray speaking out of turn about them. Having a sense of humor and fancying a good pun, the elves killed him so (how’s that for a “Rollwagenism”??!?). Ten years on, one Mr. Bali Hai (an elven name if I’ve ever seen one) leaves a short comment on an obscure blog post assuring us that Cray’s elves were merely a fanciful fabrication.

Mysterious subterranean beings who teach us how to work with metals—this is nothing new. Consider what is perhaps the oldest known reference to such lore:

In Greek mythology, the Cabeiri or Cabiri, were a group of enigmatic chthonic deities. They were worshipped in a mystery cult closely associated with that of Hephaestus, centered in the north Aegean Islands of Lemnos and possibly Samothrace—at the Samothrace temple complex—and at Thebes

In myth, the Cabeiri were sometimes identified with other fabulous races such as the Telchines of Rhodes, the Cyclopes, the Korybantes, the Kouretes, and the Dactyls. The Dactyls, a race of spirit-men associated with the Great Mother Cybele, were regarded as ancient smiths and healing magicians. In some myths, they are in Hephaestus’ employ, and they taught metalworking, mathematics, and the alphabet to humans.

The Greeks were taught mathematics and metallurgy.
Cray was taught how to build a supercomputer.

Hesychius of Alexandria wrote that the Cabeiri were karkinoi (“crabs”). The Cabeiri as Karkinoi were apparently thought of as amphibious beings (again recalling the Telchines). They had pincers instead of hands, which they used as tongs in metalworking.

Maybe it’s nothing, I don’t know, but Cray—it’s an unusual name, isn’t it? Naturally, one is reminded of that pincered crustacean, the Crayfish.

“Cray” is an old word for chalk, the soft limestone rock that forms much of southern England. It has nothing to do with ‘crayfish’ however, which is from the unrelated Middle English crevice , -visse, from Old French crevice.

What a strange coincidence, that Cray spoke to his elves in an underground tunnel, a crevice in the rock…

III.

You want Disclosure? You want them to release the files? I’ll tell you what’s in the damn files: Events. Enigmas. Anomalies. Synchronicities. Conflicting reports. Con artists. Charlatans. Missing persons. Madness.

They don’t have a fucking clue. All the agencies in the world couldn’t tell you a single thing that Fort, Keel, and Vallée didn’t already tell us.

They—or it, i.e. the Phenomenon—have always been here.

They are not from outer space. We are dealing with a multidimensional paraphysical phenomenon indigenous to planet earth…We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.

They are neither flesh nor figment of imagination, but can appear as either.

The Phenomenon does not consist of tangible manufactured objects but is a complex manipulation of energies within the electromagnetic spectrum, producing effects that can be temporarily solid or visible but are not permanent…The believer’s mistake is to ascribe meaning and credence to the secondary perception, the mental image created by our brain to account for the stimulus. The skeptic’s mistake is to deny the reality of the stimulus altogether, simply because the secondary perception seems absurd to him or her. What we take to be reality may, in fact, be a mere appearance, or projection, onto the “screen” of our four-dimensional space-time world from a much more complex, multi-dimensional, more fundamental reality.

Their invisible hand has guided our evolution and civilizational development. They have whispered to kings, passed secrets to scientists, granted visions to visionaries (and still do). They founded the major world religions. Jesus was one of Them.2 The Buddha, too.3

There exists a natural phenomenon whose manifestations border on both the physical and the mental. There is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated. This would explain the fugitivity of UFO manifestations, the alleged contact with friendly occupants, and the fact that the objects appear to keep pace with human technology and to use current symbols... It also, naturally, explains the totality of religious miracles as well as ghosts and other so-called supernatural phenomena.

There is a tricksiness, a sense of humor. It enjoys bewildering and misleading us. It seems to delight in leaving easter eggs and leading us on wild goose chases.

The Phenomenon is deceptive in nature. It sometimes seems to be a deliberate hoax, designed to mislead us and confuse us. It is almost as if some kind of cosmic game is being played with us. It distorts our reality whimsically, perhaps out of boredom, or perhaps because it is a little crazy.

You know that Mitch Hedberg joke about bigfoot?

I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that’s extra scary to me. There’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.

It’s like that—the Phenomenon is epistemically blurry, intrinsically dubious and ambiguous.

Wherever there are secrets, you will find It. Before intelligence agencies, it was guilds, societies, fraternal orders, mystery cults. It remains hidden by associating with the untrustworthy, with those whose accounts will never be taken seriously: children, eccentrics, the deranged, the drug-addled, the deceitful.4

The phenomenon seems to feed on belief. The more we try to pin it down with our theories and explanations, the more it shifts to defy those explanations. Belief is the enemy.

The Phenomenon has achieved total crypsis. It is blended so perfectly into reality that for all intents and purposes It simply is reality (“….It makes the things happen that would have happened anyway…It is nothing, nothing at all.”).

Whenever a set of unusual circumstances is presented, it is in the nature of the human mind to analyze it until a rational pattern is encountered at some level. But it is quite conceivable that nature should present us with circumstances so deeply organized that our observational and logical errors would entirely mask the pattern to be identified.

There is a strange urge in my mind: I would like to stop behaving as a rat pressing levers—even if I have to go hungry for a while. I would like to step outside the conditioning maze and see what makes it tick. I wonder what I would find.

• It’s games (and game theory) all the way down and all the way up.

• Physical “laws” are no such thing; all is contingent, all is mutable.

Together, these elements constitute something very much like the ludic-gnostic (meta)physics which I outlined in the first installment of Liber Ludens (hence this post). The following excerpt and summary should suffice to illustrate the story’s cosmogony.

The New Cosmogony: a review of a fictional oration by a Nobel Prize laureate, who presents a new model of the universe based on his analysis to the Fermi Paradox: the laws of physics is the result of a game played by the Players, advanced ancient civilizations. The laureate, Alfred Teste, describes how his theory was inspired by an almost-forgotten idea in a little-known volume by Aristedes Acheropoulos.

Excerpt

The isolation of Acheropoulos’s idea is without parallel in the history of thought. The concept of the New Cosmogony breaks with—despite the appearance of plagiarism, of which I spoke—every metaphysical system, as well as with every method of natural science. The impression of having to do with a plagiarism is the fault of the reader, of the reader’s conceptual inertia. For it is purely by reflex that we think of the entire material world as yielding to the following sharp logical dichotomy: either it was created by Someone (and then, standing on the ground of faith, we name that Someone the Absolute, God, the First Cause) or, on the other hand, it was created by no one, which means, as when we deal with the world as scientists, that no one created it. But Acheropoulos says: Tertium datur. The world was created by No One, but all the same it was created; the Universe possesses Makers.

A situation resulted, as peculiar as it was amusing. What a civilization might look like, what it might occupy itself with, what goals it might set itself, when that civilization had been prospering for billions of years (and civilizations “of the first generation” would have to be that much older than Earth’s!)—this was something no one could picture, not even in his wildest dreams. That which was beyond anyone’s ability to imagine, being therefore a thing most inconvenient, was therefore conveniently ignored. In fact, none of those who studied the problem of cosmic psychozoics wrote one word about such long-lived civilizations. The more bold among them sometimes said that the quasars, the pulsars, were perhaps manifestations of the activity of the most powerful cosmic civilizations. Yet simple calculation showed that Earth, if it continued to develop at the present rate, could attain the level of such extreme “astroengineering” activity within the next several thousand years. And after that? What might a civilization that lasted millions of times longer do? The astrophysicists who dealt with such questions declared that such civilizations did nothing, seeing they did not exist. A billion-year-old civilization employs none. Its tools are what we call the Laws of Nature. Physics itself is the ‘machine’ of such civilizations! And it is no ‘ready-made machine,’ nothing of the sort. That ‘machine’ (obviously it has nothing in common with mechanical machines) is billions of years in the making, and its structure, though much advanced, has not yet been finished!

Acheropoulos employs the following visual model. When on an agar medium we place colonies of bacteria, we can at once distinguish between the starting (the “natural”) agar and those colonies. In time, however, the vital processes of the bac- teria change the agar medium, introducing into it certain substances, consuming others, so that the composition of the nutrient material—its acidity, its consistency—undergoes transformations. Now, when as a result of those changes the agar, endowed with new chemisms, causes the rise of new varieties of bacteria, altered quite beyond recognition with respect to the parent generations, these new varieties are nothing more or less than the product of the “biochemical game” that has gone on between all the colonies collectively and the culture medium. The later varieties of bacteria would not have arisen had the earlier ones not changed the environment; hence, the later ones are creations of the game itself. Meanwhile, it is not at all necessary for the individual colonies to be in direct contact with one another; they affect one another, but only through osmosis, diffusion, the displacements in the acid-base equilibrium of the nutrient. As one can see, the original game state has a tendency to disappear, to be supplanted by qualitatively new, initially nonexistent forms of game interaction. For the agar, substitute the Proto- cosmos, and for the bacteria, the Proto-civilizations, and you obtain a simplified view of the New Cosmogony.

These rules, however, did not have to be universal, that is to say, the same everywhere. The Protouniverse could have been heterogeneous physically; it could have represented a sort of miscellany of diverse physics, physics not in every place identical and even not in every place equally rigorous (processes occurring under the sovereignty of a non-rigorous or indefinite physics would not always run the same course, though their initial conditions might be analogous). Acheropoulos posited that the Protouniverse was precisely such a physical “patchwork” and that civilizations were able to arise in it only in a few locations, at a considerable distance from one another. Acheropoulos conceived of the Protouniverse as the physical homologue of a honeycomb; what in the honeycomb are cells would in the Protouniverse be regions of temporarily stabilized physics, with each physics different from the physics of the adjoining regions. Each civilization, developing inside such an the starting conditions for the Psychozoic Cosmogony. This is no easy thing, for, whatever took place, the Civilizations did not emerge unchanged from the work of transforming the Cosmos; being a part of it, they could not touch it without also touching themselves.

Acheropoulos employs the following visual model. When on an agar medium we place colonies of bacteria, we can at once distinguish between the starting (the natural) agar and those colonies. In time, however, the vital processes of the bacteria change the agar medium, introducing into it certain substances, consuming others, so that the composition of the nutrient material—its acidity, its consistency—undergoes transformation. Now, when as a result of those changes the agar, endowed with new chemisms, causes the rise of new varieties of bacteria, altered quite beyond recognition with respect to the parent generations, these new varieties are nothing more or less than the product of the biochemical game that has gone on between all the colonies collectively and the culture medium. The later varieties of bacteria would not have arisen had the earlier ones not changed the environment; hence, the later ones are creations of the game itself. Meanwhile, it is not at all necessary for the individual colonies to be in direct contact with one another; they affect one another, but only through osmosis, diffusion, the displacements in the acid-base equilibrium of the nutrient. As one can see, the original game state has a tendency to disappear, to be supplanted by qualitatively new, initially nonexistent forms of game interaction. For the agar, substitute the Protocosmos, and for the bacteria, the Protocivilizations, and you obtain a simplified view of the New Cosmogony.

What I have said thus far is, from the standpoint of knowledge accumulated historically, totally insane. Nothing, however, is to prevent our conducting thought experiments with the most arbitrary assumptions, provided they be logically consistent. When therefore we agree to the model of the Universe-Game, there arise a series of questions, and to these we must provide consistent answers. They are questions, above all, concerning the initial state: can we infer anything at all about it, can we by inference arrive at the starting conditions of the Game? Acheropoulos believes this to be possible. For the Game to have originated in it, the Protocosmos must have possessed well-defined properties. It must have been such, for example, as to allow the first civilizations to come into existence in it, and therefore it was not a physical chaos, but obeyed certain rules.

These rules, however, did not have to be universal, that is to say, the same everywhere. The Protouniverse could have been heterogeneous physically; it could have represented a sort of miscellany of diverse physics, physics not in every place identical and even not in every place equally rigorous (processes occurring under the sovereignty of a non-rigorous or indefinite physics would not always run the same course, though their initial conditions might be analogous). Acheropoulos posited that the Protouniverse was precisely such a physical patchwork and that civilizations were able to arise in it only in a few locations, at a considerable distance from one another. Acheropoulos conceived of the Protouniverse as the physical homologue of a honeycomb; what in the honeycomb are cells would in the Protouniverse be regions of temporarily stabilized physics, with each physics different from the physics of the adjoining regions.

Summary

In Stanisław Lem’s imaginative short story “A New Cosmogony,” presented as a fictional academic lecture by the invented physicist Alfred Testa, readers encounter a radically novel theory concerning the fundamental nature and origin of the universe. Appearing in Lem’s metafictional collection A Perfect Vacuum (1971), the story is structured as a detailed, critical review of Testa’s purported Nobel Prize lecture. Testa proposes an astonishing paradigm shift: rather than being governed by immutable physical laws originating from a primordial cosmic event, our universe is actually the product of an ongoing strategic interaction—a grand, invisible, and subtle game—among numerous advanced civilizations scattered throughout the cosmos.

According to Testa’s intricate hypothesis, these cosmic Players, immensely sophisticated yet constrained by practical limitations, interact indirectly by manipulating and adjusting local laws of physics, fundamental constants, and cosmological parameters. These changes are made cautiously, as direct communication or overt interference between civilizations remains impossible due to vast cosmic distances and the finite speed of light. Thus, instead of cooperating explicitly, each civilization behaves as a rational game-theoretic actor, carefully choosing strategies designed not necessarily to achieve dominance but primarily to secure stability and survival over immense spans of cosmic time. The consequence of this collective, cautious strategic stance is the establishment of a universal equilibrium resembling what we now perceive as fixed and immutable laws of physics.

Testa meticulously explains certain key observational features of our universe in terms of this game-theoretic equilibrium. For instance, the accelerating expansion of the cosmos is not a mere astronomical curiosity or cosmic accident; rather, it functions as a protective mechanism of "distance isolation," ensuring civilizations remain sufficiently separated to maintain the stability of this delicate equilibrium. Similarly, the fundamental limit imposed by the speed of light is no arbitrary fact but serves as a built-in safeguard, a deliberate barrier that preserves each civilization's autonomy and prevents destabilizing intrusions or excessive influence from external Players. Furthermore, the existence of a clear arrow of time—manifested in thermodynamic irreversibility and causality itself—functions as another essential feature that prevents Players from retroactively altering cosmic conditions, thereby preserving the stability and fairness of the universal equilibrium.

On a philosophical level, Lem’s story challenges deeply entrenched assumptions about reality, especially humanity’s confidence in the eternal immutability of physical laws. Instead, Lem portrays the cosmos as profoundly contingent and subject to continuous intelligent revision—effectively, as a cosmic artifact, the ongoing creation of hyper-advanced intelligences. Rather than passive observers in a static universe, civilizations are active participants, shaping the fabric of reality itself through strategic, rational choice. This conceptual inversion also critiques the notion of scientific objectivity and highlights the potentially arbitrary nature of the laws that govern our world. Lem provocatively suggests that what we perceive as fundamental physical constraints might instead represent a negotiated compromise among cosmic civilizations, tacitly agreed upon through eons of indirect strategic maneuvering.

Formally, Lem’s narrative is a masterful example of metafiction and speculative fiction intertwined. Presented entirely in the form of a scholarly critique or review of an imaginary academic discourse, the text is saturated with playful irony and meticulous academic parody, mimicking the serious tone and structure of scientific Nobel lectures. Testa’s fictitious audience is depicted as divided: some see his cosmogonic theory as revolutionary, a brilliant reconciliation of cosmology and game theory, while others dismiss it as mere sophisticated fantasy, an imaginative fable wrapped in scientific jargon. By placing his narrative within such a faux-academic framework, Lem effectively blurs the lines between fact and fiction, philosophy and science, seriousness and irony, leaving readers to ponder the deeper implications and plausibility of his deliberately provocative thought experiment.

A Nash equilibrium in game theory is a state where no player can improve their outcome by unilaterally changing their strategy, assuming the other players’ strategies remain the same. It represents a stable state in a game where each player's chosen strategy is the best response to the strategies of all other players.

I have said much in recent essays about the spiritual significance of game theory and its “games” (prisoner’s dilemmas, arms races, commons tragedies, multipolar traps and malthusian traps), so I can’t say I was surprised when I learned that John Nash, the “beautiful mind” mathematician who won the 1994 Nobel Prize for his work on game theory, saw himself as messianic prophet.

He returned to Boston in May, 1967, where there were plans for him to teach a course at MIT in the fall, but he was in very bad shape and these plans had to be shelved. At the time, he told a colleague at Brandeis that he had quit taking his medications because when he took them “I stop hearing voices” (Nasar 1998, p. 321). Presumably, he felt that his role and purpose as a secret messianic figure was so important that it was essential for him to receive these messages. Years later, in the short autobiography he wrote on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Prize (Kuhn and Nasar 2002, pp. 5-11) he noted: “Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort. So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists” (p. 10). He added, however, that “this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health” because “one aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos” (p. 10). He cited the case of Zarathustra who, to non-Zoroastrians, was “simply a madman who led millions of naive followers to adopt a cult of ritual fire worship,” but who, without his “madness,” would "necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten” (p. 10). In his television interview with Mike Wallace on the CBS 60 Minutes program (March 17, 2002), he noted that he did not think of himself at the time as merely delusional but rather as “unusually enlightened.”

A New Cosmogony appears in the 1971 book A Perfect Vacuum.

A Perfect Vacuum is the largest and best known collection of Stanisław Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexisting books.It was translated into English by Michael Kandel. Some of the reviews remind the reader of drafts of his science fiction novels, some read like philosophical pieces across scientific topics, from cosmology to the pervasiveness of computers, finally others satirize and parody everything from the nouveau roman to pornography, Ulysses, authorless writing, and Dostoevsky.

The book contains another story of note:

Odysseus of Ithaca: A novel about Odysseus of Ithaca (a small fictional town in Massachusetts), who started an organization to search for lost geniuses. He theorized that there are 3 levels of geniuses. Level 3 are those that are recognized in their lifetime, and can often achieve fame and success. Level 2 are those that are so ahead of their times and so disruptive that they were often persecuted and only rediscovered centuries later. Level 1 are those that could change the course of history, if they were listened to. But if they were not, then they would no longer be relevant, since human history would have marched on too far to turn towards the direction they pointed out.

PLAY is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing. We can safely assert, even, that human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play. Animals play just like men. We have only to watch young dogs to see that all the essentials of human play are present in their merry gambols. They invite one another to play by a certain ceremoniousness of attitude and gesture. They keep to the rule that you shall not bite, or not bite hard, your brother’s ear. They pretend to get terribly angry. And— what is most important—in all these doings they plainly experience tremendous fun and enjoyment. Such rompings of young dogs are only one of the simpler forms of animal play. There are other, much more highly developed forms: regular contests and beautiful performances before an admiring public.

Here we have at once a very important point: even in its simplest forms on the animal level, play is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or a psychological reflex. It goes beyond the confines of purely physical or purely biological activity. In play there is something “at play” which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something. If we call the active principle that makes up the essence of play, “instinct”, we explain nothing; if we call it “mind” or “will” we say too much. However we may regard it, the very fact that play has a meaning implies a non-materialistic quality in the nature of the thing itself. (Homo Ludens, Huizinga)

“Play is the exultation of the possible.”
— Martin Buber

The Dawn of Everything (2021) by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a sweeping reimagining of human history that challenges the standard narrative of an inevitable, linear progression from primitive egalitarianism to the complex, hierarchical societies of today. The authors present a kaleidoscopic vision of pre-modern societies as fluid, experimental, and self-aware, capable of freely assembling and dismantling social structures at will. Across cultures and continents, from Ice Age hunter-gatherers to pre-Columbian cities, human beings are revealed as imaginative agents consciously playing with social and political possibilities, not the passive victims of material conditions that we are so often painted to be.

At the center of this historical vision is the idea of play as a serious generative force. Many of the institutions and technologies we take for granted—kingship, private property, agriculture, the wheel—emerged from rituals or festivals. The question for Graeber and Wengrow then is not how did hierarchy and inequality arise, but how did we get stuck in what were at first only transient forms of socio-economic organization? “If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?”.

The Dawn of Everything is a work of history and anthropology; virtually nothing is said about the spiritual and cosmic dimensions of this historical vision, about the ‘what it all means’ of it all (if play is the medium, what is the message?). Dawn is not a prescriptive or forward-looking book either; little to nothing is said about how we may come to remember again that we are playing. These topics are a central focus of my ongoing work (my play), hence this introduction and the following compilation of relevant excerpts.

Laboratories of Social Possibility

The societies of the Great Plains created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving when they dispersed into smaller groups. But those of central Brazil dispersed into foraging bands as a way of asserting a political authority that was ineffectual in village settings. Among the Inuit, fathers ruled in the summertime; but in winter gatherings patriarchal authority and even norms of sexual propriety were challenged, subverted or simply melted away. The Kwakiutl were hierarchical at both times of year, but nonetheless maintained different forms of hierarchy, giving effective police powers to performers in the Midwinter Ceremonial (the ‘bear dancers’ and ‘fool dancers’) that could be exercised only during the actual performance of the ritual. At other times, aristocrats commanded great wealth but couldn’t give their followers direct orders. Many Central African forager societies are egalitarian all year round, but appear to alternate monthly between a ritual order dominated by men and another dominated by women.

In other words, there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question. If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?

On play kings and playing with possible political forms:

We’ve already seen how, among societies like the Inuit or Kwakiutl, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers (though often, peculiarly, these ritual police doubled as clowns). In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety, as in the Inuit midwinter orgies. This dichotomy can still be observed in festive life almost everywhere. In the European Middle Ages, to take a familiar example, saints’ days alternated between solemn pageants where all the elaborate ranks and hierarchies of feudal life were made manifest (much as they still are in, say, a college graduation ceremony, when we temporarily revert to medieval garb), and crazy carnivals in which everyone played at ‘turning the world upside down’. In carnival, women might rule over men, children be put in charge of government, servants could demand work from their masters, ancestors could return from the dead, ‘carnival kings’ could be crowned and then dethroned, giant monuments like wicker dragons built and set on fire, or all formal ranks might even disintegrate into one or other form of Bacchanalian chaos.

Just as with seasonality, there’s no consistent pattern. Ritual occasions can either be much more stiff and formal, or much more wild and playful, than ordinary life. Alternatively, like funerals and wakes, they can slip back and forth between the two. The same seems to be true of festive life almost everywhere, whether it’s Peru, Benin or China. This is why anthropologists often have such trouble defining what a ‘ritual’ even is. If you start from the solemn ones, ritual is a matter of etiquette, propriety: High Church ritual, for example, is really just a very elaborate version of table manners. Some have gone so far as to argue that what we call ‘social structure’ only really exists during rituals: think here of families that only exist as a physical group during marriages and funerals, during which times questions of rank and priority have to be worked out by who sits at which table, who speaks first, who gets the topmost cut of the hump of a sacrificed water buffalo, or the first slice of wedding cake.

But sometimes festivals are moments where entirely different social structures take over, such as the ‘youth abbeys’ that seem to have existed across medieval Europe, with their Boy Bishops, May Queens, Lords of Misrule, Abbots of Unreason and Princes of Sots, who during the Christmas, Mayday or carnival season temporarily took over many of the functions of government and enacted a bawdy parody of government’s everyday forms. So there’s another school of thought which says that rituals are really exactly the opposite. The really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world.

There is also a centuries-long, and frankly not very enlightening, debate over whether the most apparently subversive popular festivals were really as subversive as they seem; or if they are really conservative, allowing common folk a chance to blow off a little steam and give vent to their baser instincts before returning to everyday habits of obedience. It strikes us that all this rather misses the point.

What’s really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. In the popular Babylonian story of Semiramis, the eponymous servant girl convinces the Assyrian king to let her be ‘Queen for a Day’ during some annual festival, promptly has him arrested, declares herself empress and leads her new armies to conquer the world. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at ‘turning the world upside’ would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.

Medieval peasants often found it much easier than medieval intellectuals to imagine a society of equals. Now, perhaps, we begin to understand why. Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility. The first kings may well have been play kings. Then they became real kings. Now most (but not all) existing kings have been reduced once again to play kings – as least insofar as they mainly perform ceremonial functions and no longer wield real power. But even if all monarchies, including ceremonial monarchies, were to disappear, some people would still play at being kings.

Even in the European Middle Ages, in places where monarchy was unquestioned as a mode of government, ‘Abbots of Unreason’, Yuletide Kings and the like tended to be chosen either by election or by sortition (lottery), the very forms of collective decision-making that resurfaced, apparently out of nowhere, in the Enlightenment. (What’s more, such figures tended to exercise power much in the manner of indigenous American chiefs: either limited to very circumscribed contexts, like the war chiefs who could give orders only during military expeditions; or like village chiefs who were arrayed with formal honours but couldn’t tell anybody what to do.) For a great many societies, the festive year could be read as a veritable encyclopaedia of possible political forms.

[…]

With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to both make and unmake the political worlds we live in. If nothing else, this explains the ‘princes’ and ‘princesses’ of the last Ice Age, who appear to show up, in such magnificent isolation, like characters in some kind of fairy tale or costume drama. Maybe they were almost literally so.

On play kings and real freedoms and vice versa:

American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like – provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors – unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or ‘egalitarian’ people such as the Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones. They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid – what contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’ – was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.

On Homo Ludens in Minoan Art:

Cretan palaces were unfortified, and Minoan art makes almost no reference to war, dwelling instead on scenes of play and attention to creature comforts.

What these scenes celebrate, as he eloquently puts it, is quite the opposite of politics: it is the ‘ritually induced release from individuality, and an ecstasy of being that is overtly erotic and spiritual at the same time (ek-stasis, “standing beyond oneself”) – a cosmos that both nurtures and ignores the individual, that vibrates with inseparable sexual energies and spiritual epiphanies’. There are no heroes in Minoan art – only players. The Crete of the palaces was the realm of Homo ludens.

On self-creation and the possibility of reinvention:

If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place. As long ago as 1936, the prehistorian V. Gordon Childe wrote a book called Man Makes Himself. Apart from the sexist language, this is the spirit we wish to invoke. We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

The Historical Imagination (or lack thereof)

Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade’. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects – very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Often these were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would later find being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world. Surely this must prove capitalism in some form or another has always existed?

The logic is perfectly circular. If precious objects were moving long distances, this is evidence of ‘trade’ and, if trade occurred, it must have taken some sort of commercial form; therefore, the fact that, say, 3,000 years ago Baltic amber found its way to the Mediterranean, or shells from the Gulf of Mexico were transported to Ohio, is proof that we are in the presence of some embryonic form of market economy. Markets are universal. Therefore, there must have been a market. Therefore, markets are universal. And so on.

All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument. It’s almost as if these writers are afraid to suggest anything that seems original, or, if they do, feel obliged to use vaguely scientific-sounding language (‘trans-regional interaction spheres’, ‘multi-scalar networks of exchange’) to avoid having to speculate about what precisely those things might be. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy.

The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, Bronisław Malinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes how in the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Islands off Papua New Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in outrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most important ones has its own name, and history of former owners) – only to hold it briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from another island. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider, it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen.

Is this ‘trade’? Perhaps, but it would bend to breaking point our ordinary understandings of what that word means. There is, in fact, a substantial ethnographic literature on how such long-distance exchange operates in societies without markets. Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialities – one is famous for its feather-work, another provides salt, in a third all women are potters – to acquire things they cannot produce themselves; sometimes one group will specialize in the very business of moving people and things around. But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time; and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.

Let’s list just a few, all drawn from North American material, to give the reader a taste of what might really be going on when people speak of ‘long distance interaction spheres’ in the human past:

1. Dreams or vision quests: among Iroquoian-speaking peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was considered extremely important literally to realize one’s dreams. Many European observers marvelled at how Indians would be willing to travel for days to bring back some object, trophy, crystal or even an animal like a dog that they had dreamed of acquiring. Anyone who dreamed about a neighbour or relative’s possession (a kettle, ornament, mask and so on) could normally demand it; as a result, such objects would often gradually travel some way from town to town. On the Great Plains, decisions to travel long distances in search of rare or exotic items could form part of vision quests.

2. Travelling healers and entertainers: in 1528, when a shipwrecked Spaniard named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca made his way from Florida across what is now Texas to Mexico, he found he could pass easily between villages (even villages at war with one another) by offering his services as a magician and curer. Curers in much of North America were also entertainers, and would often develop significant entourages; those who felt their lives had been saved by the performance would, typically, offer up all their material possessions to be divided among the troupe. By such means, precious objects could easily travel very long distances.

3. Women’s gambling: women in many indigenous North American societies were inveterate gamblers; the women of adjacent villages would often meet to play dice or a game played with a bowl and plum stone, and would typically bet their shell beads or other objects of personal adornment as the stakes. One archaeologist versed in the ethnographic literature, Warren DeBoer, estimates that many of the shells and other exotica discovered in sites halfway across the continent had got there by being endlessly wagered, and lost, in intervillage games of this sort, over very long periods of time.

We could multiply examples, but assume that by now the reader gets the broader point we are making. When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.

The Origin(s) of Agriculture and Ritual Play

‘Tell me this,’ writes Plato:

“Would a serious and intelligent farmer, with seeds he cared about and wished to grow to fruition, sow them in summer in the gardens of Adonis and rejoice as he watched them become beautiful in a matter of eight days; or if he did it at all, would he do this for fun and festivity? For things he really was serious about, would he not use his farmer’s craft, plant them in a suitable environment, and be content if everything he planted came to maturity in the eighth month?”

The gardens of Adonis, to which Plato is referring here, were a sort of festive speed farming which produced no food. For the philosopher, they offered a convenient simile for all things precocious, alluring, but ultimately sterile. In the dog days of summer, when nothing can grow, the women of ancient Athens fashioned these little gardens in baskets and pots. Each held a mix of quick-sprouting grain and herbs. The makeshift seedbeds were carried up ladders on to the flat roofs of private houses and left to wilt in the sun: a botanical re-enactment of the premature death of Adonis, the fallen hunter, slain in his prime by a wild boar. Then, beyond the public gaze of men and civic authority, began the rooftop rites. Open to women from all classes of Athenian society, including prostitutes, these were rites of grieving but also wanton drunkenness, and no doubt other forms of ecstatic behaviour as well.

Historians agree that the roots of this women’s cult lie in Mesopotamian fertility rites of Dumuzi/Tammuz, the shepherd-god and personification of plant life, mourned on his death each summer. Most likely the worship of Adonis, his ancient Greek incarnation, spread westwards to Greece from Phoenicia in the wake of Assyrian expansion, in the seventh century BC. Nowadays, some scholars see the whole thing as a riotous subversion of patriarchal values: an antithesis to the staid and proper state-sponsored Thesmophoria (the autumn festival of the Greek fertility goddess, Demeter), celebrated by the wives of Athenian citizens and dedicated to the serious farming on which the life of the city depended. Others read the story of Adonis the other way round, as a requiem for the primeval drama of serious hunting, cast into shadow by the advent of agriculture, but not forgotten – an echo of lost masculinity

Was farming from the very beginning about the serious business of producing more food to supply growing populations? Most scholars assume, as a matter of course, that this had to be the principal reason for its invention. But maybe farming began as a more playful or even subversive kind of process – or perhaps even as a side effect of other concerns, such as the desire to spend longer in particular kinds of locations, where hunting and trading were the real priorities. Which of these two ideas really embodies the spirit of the first agriculturalists; is it the stately and pragmatic Thesmophoria, or the playful and self-indulgent gardens of Adonis?

[…]

Could it be that, in the same way that play farming – our term for those loose and flexible methods of cultivation which leave people free to pursue any number of other seasonal activities – turned into more serious agriculture, play kingdoms began to take on more substance as well?

On ritual play, social experimentation, and where it all went wrong:

‘Gardens of Adonis’ are a fitting symbol here. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks. For most of history, then, the zone of ritual play constituted both a scientific laboratory and, for any given society, a repertory of knowledge and techniques which might or might not be applied to pragmatic problems. Recall, for example, the ‘Little Old Men’ of the Osage and how they combined research and speculation on the principles of nature with the management and periodic reform of their constitutional order; how they saw these as ultimately the same project and kept careful (oral) records of their deliberations. Did the Neolithic town of Çatalhöyük or the Tripolye mega-sites host similar colleges of ‘Little Old Women’? We cannot know for certain, but it strikes us as quite likely, given the shared rhythms of social and technical innovation that we observe in each case and the attention to female themes in their art and ritual. If we are trying to frame more interesting questions to ask of history, this might be one: is there a positive correlation between what is usually called ‘gender equality’ (which might better be termed, simply, ‘women’s freedom’) and the degree of innovation in a given society?

Choosing to describe history the other way round, as a series of abrupt technological revolutions, each followed by long periods when we were prisoners of our own creations, has consequences. Ultimately it is a way of representing our species as decidedly less thoughtful, less creative, less free than we actually turn out to have been. It means not describing history as a continual series of new ideas and innovations, technical or otherwise, during which different communities made collective decisions about which technologies they saw fit to apply to everyday purposes, and which to keep confined to the domain of experimentation or ritual play. What is true of technological creativity is, of course, even more true of social creativity. One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book – indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us – was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation – even, in some ways, as an encyclopaedia of social possibilities.

We are not the first to suggest this. In the mid twentieth century, a British anthropologist named A. M. Hocart proposed that monarchy and institutions of government were originally derived from rituals designed to channel powers of life from the cosmos into human society. He even suggested at one point that ‘the first kings must have been dead kings’, and that individuals so honoured only really became sacred rulers at their funerals. Hocart was considered an oddball by his fellow anthropologists and never managed to secure a permanent job at a major university. Many accused him of being unscientific, just engaging in idle speculation. Ironically, as we’ve seen, it is the results of contemporary archaeological science that now oblige us to start taking his speculations seriously. To the astonishment of many, but much as Hocart predicted, the Upper Palaeolithic really has produced evidence of grand burials, carefully staged for individuals who indeed seem to have attracted spectacular riches and honours, largely in death.

The principle doesn’t just apply to monarchy or aristocracy, but to other institutions as well. We have made the case that private property first appears as a concept in sacred contexts, as do police functions and powers of command, along with (in later times) a whole panoply of formal democratic procedures, like election and sortition, which were eventually deployed to limit such powers.

Here is where things get complicated. To say that, for most of human history, the ritual year served as a kind of compendium of social possibilities (as it did in the European Middle Ages, for instance, when hierarchical pageants alternated with rambunctious carnivals), doesn’t really do the matter justice. This is because festivals are already seen as extraordinary, somewhat unreal, or at the very least as departures from the everyday order. Whereas, in fact, the evidence we have from Palaeolithic times onwards suggests that many – perhaps even most – people did not merely imagine or enact different social orders at different times of year, but actually lived in them for extended periods of time. The contrast with our present situation could not be more stark. Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like. Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them.

If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history. Even those few anthropologists, such as Pierre Clastres and later Christopher Boehm, who argue that humans were always able to imagine alternative social possibilities, conclude – rather oddly – that for roughly 95 percent of our species’ history those same humans recoiled in horror from all possible social worlds but one: the small-scale society of equals. Our only dreams were nightmares: terrible visions of hierarchy, domination and the state. In fact, as we’ve seen, this is clearly not the case.

On the Little Old Men of the Osage and socio-political self-consciousness:

Records, La Flesche observed, had also been kept of particular discussions in which various results of this study of nature were debated and discussed. Osage concluded that this force was ultimately unknowable and gave it the name Wakonda, which could alternately be translated as ‘God’ or ‘Mystery’. Through lengthy investigation, La Flesche notes, elders determined that life and motion was produced by the interaction of two principles – sky and earth – and therefore they divided their own society in the same way, arranging it so that men from one division could only take wives from the other. A village was a model of the universe, and as such a form of ‘supplication’ to its animating power.

Initiation through the levels of understanding required a substantial investment of time and wealth, and most Osage only attained the first or second tier. Those who reached the top were known collectively as the Nohozhinga or ‘Little Old Men’ (though some were women), and were also the ultimate political authorities. While every Osage was expected to spend an hour after sunrise in prayerful reflection, the Little-Old-Men carried out daily deliberations on questions of natural philosophy and their specific relevance to political issues of the day. They also kept a history of the most important discussions. La Flesche explains that, periodically, particularly perplexing questions would come up: either about the nature of the visible universe, or about the application of these understandings to human affairs. At this point it was customary for two elders to retreat to a secluded spot in the wilderness and carry out a vigil for four to seven days, to ‘search their minds’, before returning with a report on their conclusions.

The Nohozhinga were the body that met daily to discuss affairs of state.66 While larger assemblies could be called to ratify decisions, they were the effective government. In this sense one could say that the Osage were a theocracy, though it would be more accurate, perhaps, to say there was no difference between officials, priests and philosophers. All were title-bearing officials, including the ‘soldiers’ assigned to help chiefs enforce their decisions, while ‘Protectors of the Land’ assigned to hunt down and kill outsiders who poached game were also religious figures. As for the history: it begins in mythic terms, as an ‘allegorical fable’, then rapidly turns into a story about institutional reform.

In the beginning, the three main divisions – Sky People, Earth People and Water People – descended into the world and set out in search of its indigenous inhabitants. When they located these inhabitants, they were discovered to be in a repulsive state: living amid filth, bones and carrion, feeding on offal, rotting flesh, even each other. Despite this more-than Hobbesian situation, the Isolated Earth People (as they came to be known) were also powerful sorcerers, capable of using the four winds to destroy life everywhere. Only the chief of the Water division had the courage to enter their village, negotiate with their leader and convince his people to abandon their murderous and unsanitary ways. In the end, he persuaded the Isolated Earth People to join them in a federation – to ‘move to a new country’, free from the pollution of decaying corpses. This is how the circular village plan was first conceived, with the one-time wizards placed opposite Water, at the eastern door, where they were in charge of the House of Mystery, used for all peaceful rituals, and where all children were brought to be named. The Bear clan of the Earth division was put in charge of an opposite House of Mystery, responsible for rituals concerning war. The problem was that the Isolated Earth People, while no longer murderous, did not prove particularly effective allies either. Before long everything had descended into continual strife and feuding, until the Water division demanded another ‘move to a new country’, which initiated, among other things, an elaborate process of constitutional reform, making declarations of war impossible without the acquiescence of every clan. This too proved problematic over time, since it meant that if an external enemy entered the country, at least a week was required to organize a military response. Eventually it became necessary yet again to ‘move to another country’, which this time involved the creation of a new, decentralized clan-by-clan system of military authority. This in turn led to a new crisis and round of reforms: in this case, the separation of civil and military affairs with the creation of a hereditary peace chief for each division, their houses placed on the east and west extremes of the village, and various subordinate officials, as well as a parallel structure with responsibility for all five major Osage villages.

We will not linger over the details. But two elements of the story deserve emphasis. The first is that the narrative sets off from the neutralization of arbitrary power: the taming of the Isolated Earth People’s leader – the chief sorcerer, who abuses his deadly knowledge – by according him some central position in a new system of alliances. This is a common story among the descendants of groups that had formerly come under the influence of Mississippian civilization. In the process of co-opting their leader, the destructive ritual knowledge once held by the Isolated Earth People was, eventually, distributed to everyone, along with elaborate checks and balances concerning its use. The second is that even the Osage, who ascribed key roles to sacred knowledge in their political affairs, in no sense saw their social structure as something given from on high but rather as a series of legal and intellectual discoveries – even breakthroughs.

On ecological flexibility and freedom:

Historically speaking, there is no direct connection among these cases; but what they show, collectively, is how the fate of early farming societies often hinged less on ‘ecological imperialism’ than on what we might call – to adapt a phrase from the pioneer of social ecology, Murray Bookchin – an ‘ecology of freedom’. By this we mean something quite specific. If peasants are people ‘existentially involved in cultivation’, then the ecology of freedom (‘play farming’, in short) is precisely the opposite condition. The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one’s existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death. It is just this sort of ecological flexibility that tends to be excluded from conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as a point of no return.

On time-allocation studies and the self-conscious rejection of agriculture:

Moreover, the results of those early time-allocation studies came as an enormous surprise. It’s worth bearing in mind that, in the post-war decades, most anthropologists and archaeologists still very much took for granted the old nineteenth-century narrative of humanity’s primordial ‘struggle for existence’. To our ears, much of the rhetoric commonplace at the time, even among the most sophisticated scholars, sounds startlingly condescending: ‘A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat,’ wrote the prehistorian Robert Braidwood in 1957, ‘or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself.’ Yet these first quantitative studies comprehensively disproved such pronouncements. They showed that, even in quite inhospitable environments like the deserts of Namibia or Botswana, foragers could easily feed everyone in their group and still have three to five days per week left for engaging in such extremely human activities as gossiping, arguing, playing games, dancing or travelling for pleasure. Researchers in the 1960s were also beginning to realize that, far from agriculture being some sort of remarkable scientific advance, foragers (who after all tended to be intimately familiar with all aspects of the growing cycles of food plants) were perfectly aware of how one might go about planting and harvesting grains and vegetables. They just didn’t see any reason why they should. ‘Why should we plant,’ one !Kung informant put it – in a phrase cited ever since in a thousand treatises on the origins of farming – ‘when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’ Indeed, concluded Sahlins, what some prehistorians had assumed to be technical ignorance was really a self-conscious social decision: such foragers had ‘rejected the Neolithic Revolution in order to keep their leisure’. Anthropologists were still struggling to come to terms with all this when Sahlins stepped in to draw the larger conclusions. The ancient forager ethos of leisure (the ‘Zen road to affluence’) only broke down, or so Sahlins surmised, when people finally – for whatever reasons – began to settle in one place and accept the toils of agriculture. They did so at a terrible cost. It wasn’t just ever-increasing hours of toil that followed but, for most, poverty, disease, war and slavery – all fuelled by endless competition and the mindless pursuit of new pleasures, new powers and new forms of wealth. With one deft move, Sahlins’s ‘Original Affluent Society’ used the results of time-allocation studies to pull the rug from under the traditional story of human civilization. Like Woodburn, Sahlins brushes aside Rousseau’s version of the Fall – the idea that, too foolish to reflect on the likely consequences of our actions in assembling, stockpiling and guarding property, we ‘ran blindly for our chains’ – and takes us straight back to the Garden of Eden. If rejecting farming was a conscious choice, then so was that act of embracing it. We chose to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and for this we were punished. As St Augustine put it, we rebelled against God, and God’s judgment was to cause our own desires to rebel against our rational good sense; our punishment for original sin is the infinity of our new desires.

Mesoamerican Ball Games

Any further assessment of Olmec political structure has to reckon with what many consider its signature achievement: a series of absolutely colossal sculpted heads. These remarkable objects are free-standing, carved from tons of basalt, and of a quality comparable with the finest ancient Egyptian stonework. Each must have taken untold hours of grinding to produce. These sculptures appear to be representations of Olmec leaders, but, intriguingly, they are depicted wearing the leather helmets of ball players. All the known examples are sufficiently similar that each seems to reflect some kind of standard ideal of male beauty; but, at the same time, each is also different enough to be seen as a unique portrait of a particular, individual champion.

No doubt there were also actual ball-courts – though these have proved surprisingly elusive in the archaeological record – and while we obviously don’t know what kind of game was played, if they were anything like later Maya and Aztec ball games it likely took place in a long and narrow court, with two teams from high-ranking families competing for fame and honour by striking a heavy rubber ball with the hips and buttocks. It seems both reasonable and logical to conclude that there was a fairly direct relationship between competitive games and the rise of an Olmec aristocracy. Without written evidence it’s hard to say much more, but looking a bit closer at later Mesoamerican ball games might at least give us a sense of how this worked in practice.

Stone ball-courts were common features of Classic Maya cities, alongside royal residences and pyramid-temples. Some were purely ceremonial; others were actually used for sport. The chief Maya gods were themselves ball players. In the K’iche Maya epic Popol Vuh a ball game provides the setting in which mortal heroes and underworld gods collide, leading to the birth of the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who go on to beat the gods at their own deadly game and ascend to take their own place among the stars.

The fact that the greatest known Maya epic centres on a ball game gives us a sense of how central the sport was to Maya notions of charisma and authority. So too, in a more visceral way, does an inscribed staircase built at Yaxchilán to mark the accession (in AD 752) of what was probably its most famous king, known as Bird Jaguar the Great. On the central block he appears as a ball player. Flanked by two dwarf attendants, the king prepares to strike a huge rubber ball containing the body of a human captive – bound, broken and bundled – as it tumbles down a flight of stairs. Capturing high-ranking enemies to be held for ransom or, failing payment, to be killed at ball games was a major objective of Maya warfare. This particular unfortunate figure may be a certain Jewelled Skull, a noble from a rival city, whose humiliation was so important to Bird Jaguar that he also made it the central feature of a carved lintel on a nearby temple.

In some parts of the Americas, competitive sports served as a substitute for war. Among the Classic Maya, one was really an extension of the other. Battles and games formed part of an annual cycle of royal competitions, played for life and death. Both are recorded on Maya monuments as key events in the lives of rulers. Most likely, these elite games were also mass spectacles, cultivating a particular sort of urban public – the sort that relishes gladiatorial contests, and thereby comes to understand politics in terms of opposition. Centuries later, Spanish conquistadors described Aztec versions of the ball game played at Tenochtitlan, where players confronted each other amid racks of human skulls. They reported how reckless commoners, carried away in the competitive fervour of the tournament, would sometimes lose all they had or even gamble themselves into slavery. The stakes were so high that, should a player actually send a ball through one of the stone hoops adorning the side of the court (these were made so small as to render it nearly impossible; normally the game was won in other ways), the contest ended immediately, and the player who performed the miracle received all the goods wagered, as well as any others he might care to pillage from the onlookers.

There was no paradise from which we fell, and there is no utopia we can achieve. Just a long series of problems, solutions, new problems, and new solutions. Nostalgia and utopianism set us up to be perennially dissatisfied, and distract us from the work of incremental progress. (tweet)

— Dr. Alan Levinovitz, Professor of Religion

Liber: book; free, unconstrained
Ludens: one who plays

paradise = problemlessness
the solving of problems = work
paradise = the absence of work
paradise = play

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Mysterium is an unfinished musical work by composer Alexander Scriabin. He started working on the composition in 1903, but left it incomplete when he died in 1915. Scriabin planned that the work would be synesthetic, exploiting the senses of smell and touch as well as hearing. He wrote that…

Scriabin intended the performance to be in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, a week-long event that would be followed by the end of the world and the transformation of the human race into “nobler beings”.

We cannot transform ourselves into nobler beings through grit or through wit. What we can do, however, is simply pretend that we were such beings (we can fake that it were so until we make that it were so).

This is how we must understand Paradise: as nothing more, and nothing less, than a simple game of make-believe.

Heidegger famously wrote that “only a god can save us.” In one sense, he was certainly right. But how the gods come to dance ranges from the creation of sublime art to a Nuremberg rally. The world without the gods is void, but the world with the gods easily hurtles towards total war. What we need is “a moral equivalent to war,” in William James’ terms, something that brings out all the courage and strength of humanity, but without the bloodshed. Considering that the century following James’ remarks featured the two most catastrophic wars in the history of the world, it is clear the search hasn’t been going well.

Here, at any rate, is a humble suggestion, an indication where future developments might go.

The Middle Ages were, of course, a violent time. Yet there was a common practice that proved advanced in the arts of peace. Guilds in towns and large cities would put on productions known as mystery plays (Everyman being one of the most famous) on Biblical or otherwise religious themes. Entire communities were involved in these productions, which took up a significant amount of time and energy. Everyone had a role to play in the creation of meaningfully significant art on a massive scale.

Now, I’m not suggesting that society could return to producing gigantic Biblical plays on a city-wide scale. There is no shared system of religious iconography that would make such unity possible. New forms, new images, new dreams need to be discovered to motivate such a total act of shared creation. In our context, this wouldn’t necessarily take the form of a play but perhaps of another art form or of a number of art forms combined. This is one path, other than war, that could bring out the vital energies of all the people in an entire city. (Sam Buntz)

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experiences (1902)

Does not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the “spirit” of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up to-day—so different from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical circles—in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashiness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of application for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline?

Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics, militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the remedies. These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy with which they make for heroic standards of life, as contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them. War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of power.

The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; so the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility.

[…]

Yet the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available. But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May not voluntarily accepted poverty be “the strenuous life,” without the need of crushing weaker peoples?

Poverty indeed is the strenuous life—without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be “the transformation of military courage,” and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.

Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty.

I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

money = the root of all evil
money = work
paradise = no evil
paradise = no money
paradise = no work
paradise = play

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Buntz and James discuss this “moral equivalent to war” in what appear to be very different terms. For Buntz, the idea is to channel our courage and strength into into a grand ethical-aesthetical project, something like Scriabin’s Mysterium perhaps. For James, the goal is heroic self-sacrifice (the acceptance of poverty or some other asceticism) for some worthy cause, the rectifying of a grave injustice. The two notions come together, I believe, when we consider what it is that inspires men and women to engage in sacrificial moral combat.

In James’ view, we have lost our moral fighting shape because of our obsession with material gain and worldly achievement, an obsession (an addiction) borne of our mounting irreligiosity. Simply put, when the secular game is the only game you know how to play—when there is only this world and this life and whatever is attained in it—it is nigh impossible to sacrifice the material for the moral. The way to regain this fighting shape, it would seem then, is to resume our play of spiritual games, i.e. those collective aesthetic projects we call religions.

Transmitted orally over the course of centuries before being systematized in writing, the Vedas provided a complex array of rituals and meditations on the function of sacrifice, as the means through which living beings can at each moment re-establish the contours of a world over the dark abyss of meaninglessness.

Buntz is correct then in thinking of moral warfare as a kind of grand aesthetic project, yet it is not only that art can provide an outlet for those energies which so often manifest as mass violence. It is the engagement with such projects—the playing of games which are also dramas which are also worlds—which readies us for mor(t)al combat.

But when we peer even farther back into its origins, we discover that play’s original meaning was quite different, something altogether more urgent and abstract. In Indo-European, plegan meant to risk, chance, expose oneself to hazard. A pledge was integral to the act of play, as was danger (cognate words are peril and plight). Play’s original purpose was to make a pledge to someone or something by risking one’s life. Who or what might that someone or something be? Possibilities abound, including a relative, a tribal leader, a god, or a moral trait such as honor or courage. At its heart, plegan reverberated with ethical or religious values.

Perhaps religion seems an unlikely example of playing, but if you look at religious rites and festivals, you’ll see all the play elements, and also how deep that play can become. Religious rituals usually include dance, worship, music, and decoration. They swallow time. They are ecstatic, absorbing, rejuvenating. The word “prayer” derives from the Latin precarius, and contains the idea of uncertainty and risk. Will the entreaty be answered? Life or death may depend on the outcome.

Because a system of sacrificial rites is essentially the same the world over, Huizinga concludes:

Jesus is, after all, a human sacrifice: our salvation depends on one man being publicly tortured and killed. Jesus is also a god—but so were the victims on the pyramids. The Nahuatl word is ixiptla, or image: the sacrifice becomes a representation of the deity. Sometimes victims would be worshipped as gods before having their hearts torn out; sometimes Aztecs engaged in ritual cannibalism, eating human flesh to commune with the gods. Just as every Sunday Christians consume the body and blood of Christ. The Aztecs’ communion was a stew of human flesh and squash blossoms.

The basic recurring theme in Hindu mythology is the creation of the world by the self-sacrifice of God, whereby God becomes the world which, in the end, again becomes God.

To say that play is the only way is not to say that it is an easy way. The road to Paradise is fraught with danger because games are perpetually at risk of being perverted into their shadow form: jobs. What is uplifting and vivifying when freely played very quickly becomes tedious and soul-crushing when one is compelled to do so. As our games become bigger and better, it will become increasingly difficult for us to avoid becoming trapped in dead-end “jobs” (stagnant, decadent cultures; archaic, outmoded religions, oppressive, stultifying socio-political regimes), and it will require ever greater sacrifice—more and more intense moral warfare—in order to establish ever greater games.

Our odyssey will end, finally, with the establishment of the Paradise Game (“nothing more, and nothing less, than a simple game of make-believe”). Though the promised land will be so near, the final step will be the most difficult and most treacherous of the entire journey. To establish the Paradise Game, we will have to risk everything—to win Heaven, we must risk Hell—and sacrifice everything. We will have to sacrifice reality itself.