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.

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.

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.

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.”

• 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

◼

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

◼

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.

It pleases the Supreme to reveal His secrets by means of the foolish, who are looked upon by the world as being nothing; so that it may be seen that their knowledge does not come from these fools, but from Him. Therefore I ask you to regard my writings as being those of a child in which the Supreme has manifested His power. (Boehme)

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

1. Prediction vs. Prophecy

2. Problems vs. Games

3. The Maze

4. The Dilemma

5. Gameplay

6. God

7. The Journey

8. Ludus Amoris

9. The Stage

10. Deus ex Machina

11. The Task

    ---

    ---

    ---

Prediction vs. Prophecy

A null hypothesis for our cosmic future:

As the number of (biological and/or artificial) agents asymptotes towards infinity, competition will intensify until all “delusions” (art, spirituality, mercy, tolerance, forgiveness, etc.) have been optimized out of existence (see: “Behold the Pale Child”). Also: absolute (technological) power = absolute corruption.

This is the absolute worst possible future; more than anything, it is painfully, painfully boring. Every story ends the same—David lost, Goliath won, forever. The extinction of surprise.

David Deutsch makes a distinction between predictions (extrapolations from current knowledge) and prophecies (claims about future knowledge and creativity, e.g. “that problem cannot be solved”). For example, “earth’s temperature is projected to increase by X degrees by 2060” is a prediction; “the earth’s temperature will increase by X degrees by 2060 and it will be catastrophic for humanity” is a prophecy because it presupposes that we won’t find a way to prevent the projected temperature increase or mitigate its negative consequences.

The null hypothesis is a prediction, not a prophecy. You can’t just crunch the numbers and run the simulation. You have to actually play the game.

Problems vs. Games

Reality is a game masquerading as a problem.

The solution to the puzzle is the act of solving it, since this is play. When you realize this, you understand that in playing, there is no “means-end” — the act is the goal. Just as he once taught us love, he now teaches us to play. There is as great a potential for spiritual significance in play as there is in power, wisdom, love, beauty. (PKD)

Indeed.

Work = usefulness, extrinsicality, adultliness
Play = uselessness, intrinsicality, childliness

It is impossible to distinguish between the two from the outside (e.g. the professional athlete who plays for money/fame vs. the love of the game). Spiritual alchemy is the transmutation of work into play (the saint is one for whom work has been abolished; even the greatest self-sacrifice has become mere recreation).

Although adults attempt to compartmentalize children’s lives into businesslike sections of work and play, children find ways of turning work into play. Life is whole to them, and good, like the creation according to the Genesis story... Unless worship bears connection with what we know to be native to children, it will tend to be sterile, stereotyped, and alien. Look well, therefore, to the meanings of leisure and play, for you may discover the seeds of worship as well.

The Maze

What is this world into which we have fallen?

I think it is a kind of maze.

Epistemologically, all that I really know are negatives: that what we see is not real, and that we cannot by our own efforts outwit the projection machinery. It can serve up one thing after another, ever more cunning and psychomorphic (“I am as you desire me”). We fell into the maze, and the maze is alive; it changes (thus rendering null and void all speculation as to the real nature of the maze)…The maze is alive because it draws on and from the very thoughts of him who is trapped in it; his efforts to solve it are thoughts, and it is these thoughts that “fuel” it.

A strange, shape-shifting maze like a Chinese finger trap: struggle (think, work, fight) and it becomes a problem (you become lost, bewildered); play (explore, imagine, create) and it becomes a game.

Surrender to the maze, embrace the maze, love the labyrinth and those who wander in it and you will win your freedom.

Compassion is the only power capable of solving the maze. This is the essence of Buddhism, the way of the Bodhisattva, the Buddha-to-be (PKD)

I think that what today we call ‘compassion’ may actually be a very high form of intelligence. (Metzinger)

Bodhisattva: Buddhist deity who has attained the highest level of enlightenment, but who delays their entry into Paradise in order to help the earthbound.

This means that when you think you are out of the maze — i.e., saved — you are in fact still in it. You only actually get out when you seem to be out, think you are out, and voluntarily decide to return! You have to get outside of the maze to get outside of the maze; hence I say that both the maze (the occlusion) and the solution to the maze are self-winding. So in a sense there is no solution once you are in the maze. In a sense, the solution is (1) impossible; and (2) acausal.

This was to be the theme of Owl in which he is trapped in the maze and only escapes, actually, rather than seemingly, when he decides voluntarily to return (to resubject himself to the power of the maze) for the sake of these others, still in it. That is, you can never leave alone; to leave you must elect to take the others out; thus Christ said, “Greater love hath no man than that he give up his life for his friend”; this is the cryptic utterance of the soul’s solution to the maze, and is the essence of Christianity. Christianity, then, is a system of solution to the maze.

This is what you saw on that balcony, in China, the Chinese gnosis.

Total totalitarianism. The extinction of the human spirit—no longer creatures but units, components. The fleshy cogs of a planetary automata whose sole goal is the perpetuation of its own existence.

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

And then you were “told” that you were to construct a labyrinth of thought and feeling and spiritual love which would avert and defeat that future, and you knew that your gnostic-ludic Christianity was to that labyrinth of liberation (“There is no rational way out of the maze, no rigid formula. Rigid formulas are maze constructs”).

There are two ways to win one’s freedom from prison: (1) escape, through brute force or sleight of mind/hand and (2) the transmutation of incarceration into jubilation—i.e. to play so fiercely that life on the inside becomes more free and more joyous than life on the outside, whereupon the “outmates” (the prison guards) will join the inmates and the distinction between inside/outside (between work/play) is dismantled, obliterated, shattered.

Jesus saw some infants who were being suckled. He said to his disciples: These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom. They said to him: If we then become children, shall we enter the kingdom? Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inside as the outside, and the outside as the inside, and the upper as the lower, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male is not male and the female not female, then shall you enter the kingdom.
(The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 22)

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.”)

Opposite Day is a make believe game usually played by children. Conceptually, Opposite Day is a holiday (a holy day) where things are said and done in an opposite manner. It is not a holiday on any calendar and therefore one can declare that any day of the year is Opposite Day (sometimes retroactively) to indicate something which will be said, or has just been said should be understood opposite to its original meaning.

Hanging is the traditional punishment for traitors. As a metaphysical seeker of wisdom, the Hanged Man is being punished for betraying the material world and asking for more than the mere physical…

When we are born, we see the world upside down. Eventually the mind corrects for this perspective and we come to see the world right side up. Looking upwards and looking within, the Hanged Man sees the world as if a baby, born again.

The Dilemma

As people with chronic diseases when they have despaired of ordinary remedies turn to expiations and amulets and dreams, just so in obscure and perplexing speculations, when the ordinary and reputable accounts are not persuasive, it is necessary to try those that are more out of the way and not scorn them but literally to chant over ourselves the charms of the ancients and use every means to bring the truth to test. (Plutarch)

Our (prisoner’s) dilemma:

Defect/Defect: Hell/Hell
Cooperate/Cooperate: Paradise/Paradise
Cooperate/Defect: (pyrrhic) Victory/Defeat

But this is only a dilemma if you believe that we haven’t already been defeated. In truth, we are already dead. We are shades—spectres, wraiths. This world is the underworld.

Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate on being torn apart by arrows, spears, and swords...You will only find freedom when you live as though already a corpse (jōjū shinimi).

The Hanged Man is likened to a trickster figure who is put in an impossible impasse. It’s not that you’ve made a mistake, it’s that you’re facing a problem that can’t be solved using the normal means. You have to resort to some kind of alien logic in order to find a way out of this situation…

Bostrom makes an offhanded reference to the possibility of a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures unconquered. It’s easy enough to imagine such a state. Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person.

So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don't everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.

There, the final fact of our circumstance: we are utterly helpless, completely and totally incapable of saving ourselves. Salvation must come from beyond the System—from a divine intervention, uncaused, unexpected, and undeserved.

Heidegger: Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us]—the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today. Recently I had a long dialogue in Provence with Rene Char—a poet and resistance fighter, as you know. In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who certainly is open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.

SPIEGEL: Fine. Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?

Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god.

SPIEGEL: Is there a correlation between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there here in your view a causal connection? Do you feel that we can bring a god forth by our thinking?

Heidegger: We can not bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him].

What does it mean to “prepare a readiness for the appearance of [a] god”? Such a readiness can begin only, I think, with death—the death of our vanity, our pride, our ego.

I am caught in a situation from which there is truly and radically no escape, in a spider’s web I cannot break. If I am to continue to be a living human being, someone must come to free me. In other words, God is not trying to humiliate me. What is mortally affronted in this situation is not my humanity or my dignity. It is my pride, the vainglorious declaration that I can do it all myself. This we cannot accept. In our own eyes we have to declare ourselves to be righteous and free. We do not want grace. Fundamentally what we want is self-justification. (Ellul)

No one likes to help those that insist they do not need help. So the first step is admitting that we cannot break ourselves out of this prison, that we need a (wo)man on the Outside to rescue us.

The (gnostic) Gospel of Philip:

This world eats corpses, and everything eaten in this world also dies. Truth eats life, and no one nourished by [truth] will die. Jesus came from that realm and brought food from there, and he gave [life] to all who wanted it, that they might not die.

The (gnostic) gospel of Dick:

The introjection of Christ into the system is the epitome of the adding of ex nihilo novelty, of revitalizing creation as if from outside. Christ never arises/occurs as a result of the past, as an effect of antecedent causes; he is always born “from outside.” Hence his epiphany can never be induced or predicted (by definition). Christ is that which does not follow mechanically: he always invades the world. Hence where there is Christ it is always the case that there has been “a perturbation of the reality field,” something acting on it, intruding on it “from outside.” Without these periodic insertions the system would run down; it would lose shape, organization and vitality. Cause-and-effect, then, taken in itself, is a losing game. The only thing that Christ can be said to be a result of — Christ as an event in the reality field — is the need of this event. It is physically, mechanically causeless; it is absolutely teleological.

All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart. (Huizinga)

A game is a world (an ontology, a physics, an ethics).
The world is a game (the world is useless).

To say that Brahman has some purpose in creating the world would mean that it wants to attain through the process of creation something which it is not. And that is impossible. Hence, Brahman has no purpose in making the world. It is created in total freedom and spontaneity, in a state of rapt absorption like that of an artist possessed by his imaginative vision or a child caught up in the delight of a game played for its own sake. This idea is described by the Sanskrit term līlā, which can be translated as Play or Sport.

Worlds, once born, cannot be changed (you cannot work your way to a better world). There are no revolutions, only cosmicides and cosmogonies, only the killing and birthing of worlds through play (recreation = re-creation).

Gameplay

We can, I think, do more than merely preparing a readiness. We can entertain God, and have Him smile upon us for doing so, for even He must pay tribute to the Kingdom of Boredom.

We are here to surprise God. God could make everything, but instead he says, “I bestow upon you the gift of free will so that you can participate in making this world. I could make everything, but I am going to give you some spark of my genius. Surprise me with something truly good and beautiful.”

…So the Creator created creatures because He got tired of playing with himself (heh).

God finds herself in the position not unlike that of a referee. She cannot change the rules of the game, but She can interpret them more or less liberally, and will happily do so if it makes for better gameplay (which is to say: God very much respects the “Rule of Cool”).

The “Rule of Cool” in sports refers to moments when officials overlook minor rule violations because a play is exceptionally exciting or creative in some way. Instead of strictly enforcing the rules, they allow the game to flow in favor of spectacle and fan enjoyment. It’s an unwritten rule where style and entertainment value can sometimes trump technical legality.

Lady Fortune truly does favor the bold, the courageous, the creative, the free in spirit and the pure of heart—those who play the Game the right way, and for the right reasons.

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed. (McKenna)

What God wants to see from us (and what She rewards, in ways large and small) is a quality we might call “gamefulness” (as opposed to workfulness or jobfulness).

Gamefulness is the serious playfulness (the playful seriousness) that Chapin describes above. It’s sportsmanship, humility, respect for your opponent and for the Game itself (we might say: soreness is given to sore losers, and grace to those who are graceful). It’s playing for the love of the Game and the love of your Team.

It’s an openness to surprise (a surprisefulness), a whimsicality, a tricksiness.

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing. (Carse)

Gamefulness is many things, but perhaps more than anything it is the ability to see the games of life as such, and be able to walk away from these games when they no longer serve Life (freedom, possibility, growth, evolution, love).

Now, the nature of the game—I think I’ve told some of you this before, but I see some I haven’t—the nature of the game is: let us pretend that the positive and the negative are not really identical. You see, they’re explicitly different but implicitly the same, because they always go around together. And that reveals a hidden, implicit conspiracy between black and white, and the truth is you can’t have one without the other. But if we can pretend that they don’t go together, that they are actually enemies, then we can have all sorts of games. The first game of which is: oh dear, black might win! The next game is: but white must win! And from that position you can develop all the games you want. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, how so many of our table games—like chess and dominoes and checkers and so on—use the black and white pieces. And you can find, in the conventions of chess—one could discuss all this problem in terms of chess.

Cooper: I know the moves I’m supposed to make, and I know the board.

Roger: So…

Cooper: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately and I've started focus out beyond the edge of the board, at a bigger game.

Roger: What game?

Cooper: The sound the wind makes through the pines, the sentience of animals. What we fear in the dark and what lies beyond the darkness…

Roger: What the hell are you talking about?

Cooper: I’m talking about seeing beyond fear, Roger, about looking at the world with love.

Roger: They are liable to extradite you for murder and drug trafficking!

Cooper: These are things I cannot control…

(video)

As long as you stick to the flat chess board, you are in a zero-sum game. If the white players win, the black players lose. If the black players win, the white players lose. The whole thing is set up for an either-or outcome. But what if one moves up into a third dimension and ceases to identify with the pieces of either side on the two-dimensional chessboard? What if one recognizes the game as a game and just walks away?

We almost walked away once.

The Germans placed candles on their trenches and on Christmas trees, then continued the celebration by singing Christmas carols. The British responded by singing carols of their own.

The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other. Soon thereafter, there were excursions across No Man’s Land, where small gifts were exchanged, such as food, tobacco, alcohol, and souvenirs such as buttons and hats. The artillery in the region fell silent. The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently killed soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties. Joint services were held. In many sectors, the truce lasted through Christmas night, continuing until New Year's Day in others. By some estimates, over a 100,000 soldiers participated in the truce.

Famously, a football match broke out between the two sides.

Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxon Infantry Regiment said that the English “brought a football from their trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued. How marvellously wonderful, yet how strange it was”.

A World War ground to a halt because both sides believed that a God-man was born on the 25th of December. Yes, the fighting eventually resumed, but it could not have—they could have just kept playing. They could have kept the match going indefinitely (infinitely), they could have expanded the match until every single soldier on both sides was playing and not warring and the field was the entire Earth and they could have decided that every day was a holy day (an opposite day) and instantiated the Kingdom of Heaven then and there on that very day.

God

There is a ludic dimension (līlā) and a dramatic dimension—a world is a game is a story. The comedy and tragedy in reality is a reflection of the comedy and the tragedy within God’s soul.

Many myths express the coincidentia oppositorum in the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously, to be benevolent and terrible, kind and wrathful, creative and destructive, and so on.

The only god of which I can conceive—the only god that makes sense—is a god of paradox, a god who is everything everywhere forever and nothing nowhere never, a god who is transcendent and immanent, personal and impersonal, unity and multiplicity, stillness and movement, a god who is dual and nondual.

I am time without end. I am the sustainer. My face is everywhere. I am the death that snatches all. I am the source of all that shall be born. I am glory, prosperity, beautiful speech, memory, intelligence, steadfastness and forgiveness. I am the dice play of the cunning. I am the strength of the strong. I am triumph and perseverance. I am the purity of the good. I am the silence of things secret. I am the knowledge of the knower. I am the divine seed of all that lives. In this world nothing animate or inanimate exists without me.

Like Dick, I take much from Jakob Boehme:

[Boehme’s] understanding of God was to the highest degree dynamic. Christian theological systems, however, have worked out their teachings about God, employing categories of thought from Greek philosophy. Thus, the teaching about God, as pure act, comprising within Him no sort of potentiality, was constructed wholly upon Aristotle. The teaching about the unstirring, self-sufficient, static God of Christian theology was taken not from the Bible, not from the Christian Revelation, but from Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle. Within it was reflected the static aspect from Greek ontology. The predominant theological doctrine deprives God of inner life, denies any sort of process within God, makes Him equivalent to an unstirring stone. This idea is blasphemous, for the God of the Bible is full of inner life and drama—a tragic God, undergoing the torment and sufferings of the Cross; a compassionate God, offering the sacrifice of love; a dynamic God, who moves and is moved.

A summary of Boehme’s revelation:

It all started one day around 1610; a young German shoemaker was looking at a pewter dish when a dazzling ray of reflected sunlight unexpectedly turned out to be a message from God…

…Prior to the creation of man God was an undifferentiated single unity defined by the absence of everything else—the Abyss, or “Ungrund”. Creation was the result of the Ungrund dividing from its state of original unity—a proposition completely familiar to Taoists but foreign and offensive to Böhme’s fellow Lutherans.

Even more controversially, Böhme argued that God could not be omniscient and omnipotent, since He was eternal and unique. “He knows no beginning, and also nothing like Himself, and also no end,” Böhme wrote, arguing that God created man in His own image so that He could learn about Himself.

To initiate this learning process, God rendered Himself into positive and negative aspects (c.f. yin and yang to the Taoists). Prior to the initial split, God was only a potential mind with an unformed longing to know itself. After the split, God iterated into a binary-based matrix, continually increasing in complexity as He collected more and more information about Himself. In other words, Böhme’s God evolves with the passage of time, in sharp contrast to the traditional Judeo-Christian view of a perfect, complete and unchanging figure who exists outside the normal flow of time.

The positive and negative aspects of creation were necessarily opposed to each other, and Böhme believed that this conflict was at the heart of the universe's logic and all of its processes. Since this tension is inherent to the design of all reality, evil and suffering are a necessary part of reality—and both originate with God.

The tension between God’s positive and negative aspects boils down to an identity crisis—cosmic self-loathing. The positive force is the part of God that chose to differentiate itself in search of self-knowledge; the negative force is the part of God that seeks to return to its original unified state (obliterating reality in the process). Böhme characterized this negative force as “divine wrath,” the eternal frustration of seeking a goal that can never be accomplished.

So it is something like this: God finds himself existing, but doesn’t know who He is, what He is, or why He is. In this existence there is despair, fear, loneliness, and, perhaps most of all, boredom. God’s attempt to heal this existential wound through self-understanding is the source of the everything always-evolving everywhere all at once forever (the world is a solution to a problem; it is work).

And yet God is, at the same time, omnipotent and omnibenevolent and absolutely self-sufficing. The world is a comedy (a game), created in absolute freedom for no reason whatsoever, an effusion of divine uselessness (it is play).

Theology however operates primarily through concepts, especially the Catholic school theology, so beautifully worked out. I term it a comedy, this following conception from the kataphatic rational theology: God is perfect and unstirring, omniscient, all-powerful and all-good; He created the world and man for His own glorification and for the good of the creation; the act of the world-creation was neither evoked by nor answered any sort of need in God, it was the product of free chance, and no-wise added up to anything more for the Divine being and no-wise enriched it.

Boehme was one of the few bold enough to rise above this rational kataphatic theology and to perceive the mystery of the world-creation as a tragedy and not as a comedy. He teaches about a process not only cosmogonic and anthropogonic, but also theogonic. But the theogony does not at all signify, that God has a beginning, that He arises within time; it does not mean, that He comes about to be within the world process, as with Fichte or Hegel. It signifies that the inner eternal life of God reveals itself as a dynamic process, as a tragedy within eternity, as a struggle with the darkness of non-being.

Nietzsche speaks here of man but he might also have spoken of God.

There is a profound illusion which first entered the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakeable belief that rational thought, guided by causality, can penetrate to the depths of being, and that it is capable not only of knowing but even of correcting being. This sublime metaphysical illusion is an instinctual accompaniment to science, and repeatedly takes it to its limits…But now, spurred on by its powerful illusion, science is rushing irresistibly to its limits, where the optimism essential to logic collapses. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points, and while it is as yet impossible to tell how the circle could ever be fully measured, the noble, gifted man, even before the mid-course of his life, inevitably reaches that peripheral boundary, where he finds himself staring into the ineffable. If he sees here, to his dismay, how logic twists around itself and finally bites itself in the tail, there dawns a new form of knowledge, tragic knowledge, which needs art as both protection and remedy, if we are to bear it.

In “Ariadne auf Naxos”, the opera by Richard Strauss, a rich man in Vienna plans a splendid party. First a solemn tragedy is to be performed and then a comedy, and to conclude, there is to be a magnificent display of fireworks. But the director of the tragedy is displeased that his serious work will be followed by clowning and buffoonery, and things get even worse when the rich man’s major-domo tells him that the fireworks must start at nine o’clock sharp, so the tragedy and the comedy will have to be played at the same time. And so that is what happens: the tragedy unfolds with the clowns in its midst.

With a narrative twist that is peculiar to Ismaili theology, their cosmology adds here a ‘pathetic’ element (from pathos, feeling): the Divinity, God in its state as pure essence and pure existence, is traversed since His origin by a profound sentiment. God feels the sadness of an abyssal loneliness: entirely coincident with existence as such, God has no one to whom He can relate—He doesn’t even have an image of Himself that He can contemplate.

To escape His original state of non-relationality, God emanates the angelic figures out of Himself. Ismaili angels stand towards God as the image of something that is, in itself, beyond any possible figuration, Their position is paradoxical and it can only be rendered, somehow, through a vague series of metaphors—such as, for example, the comparison in Ishraqi literature of the angelic figures with the colours that are projected by a colourless beam of light traversing a prism.

Acting as a mirror, the angel of the world offers to God the possibility to see a reflection of His own image, and thus to break the crushing loneliness that marred His original state of absolute non-relationality.

According to Ismaili prophetic philosophy, everything within the range of experience and of perception has to be interpreted as an angel of sorts—including the world, which is perhaps the largest angel in the host. (Campagna)

Atum is pictured in the oldest layer of Egyptian mythology as the single God above and beyond the world and the deities who populate it. He is the self-created God who came into being alone within the primal waters of chaos, Nun (Assmann 2001, 177, 180). The Egyptian Coffin Texts describe the cosmos coming into existence as an act of Atum coming to an awareness of his self, making a transition from lying inert and weary in primeval water to becoming conscious and active. Atum stands up on a mound, or he begins to writhe around as a serpent in the primal ocean, encircled in his own coils.

As Atum gains awareness and comes into being, he is called by the name Kheprer, which means “The One Who Comes into Being” (Pyramid Texts 1587). Kheprer consequently manifests himself in the cosmos as Rê, the sun god who rises every morning. What happens when Atum is brought to consciousness and realizes his aloneness? He must diversify or go mad in the total isolation. For the first time, he experiences the erotic, the desire for others, and has an erection. “I am the one who came into being as Atum,” he says. “It was in Heliopolis that my penis became erect. I grasped hold of it and came to orgasm. Thus it was that the siblings, Shu and Tefnut, were born” (Pyramid Texts 1248).

But how were they born? The ancient Egyptians pictured Atum as a hermaphrodite whose mouth is his womb. He creates through a sexual process of autogenesis, where he inseminates his own uterine mouth. His offspring are differentiations of himself, one male and the other female. In the speeches of the Coffin Texts, Atum is shown to be the primeval hermaphrodite who creates his children, Shu, the god of air and Tefnut, the god of moisture, when he spits them out of his mouth in a great exhalation or a roar. Shu, whose own breath eventually enlivens the human body, is the manifestation of life, while Tefnut is the manifestation of maat (truth).

This is the beginning of creation, initialized by Atum, the God Who Made Himself into Millions. He is the One and All. He is the supergod over all other deities, whose name and figure are hidden (Assmann 2001, 240-243), He is the undifferentiated unity from which everything emerges in differentiated forms, whether gods, humans, animals, or the cosmos at large.

The progression of gods from Atum does not start with a big bang but with the awakening from unconsciousness of a primal God of All, an awakening that starts the flux of existence out of Atum’s depths. In an Egyptian myth that is four thousand years old, we see an astute awareness of a unity behind the diversity of the cosmos. This unity is identified with a single self-created God responsible for life, which flows from his mouth like an inundation of the Nile.

In the Book of the Dead, Atum is portrayed as a great serpent of the deep, dwelling in the ocean that the ancients believed surrounded the world. In his creative capacity, he is depicted as the circular ouroboros, whose tail is held in his mouth. This image recalls Atum’s ability to continually create by inseminating his uterine mouth. As ouroboros, Atum perpetually generates, sustains, and renews the world. His circular coil envelops the world as the unity from which the cosmos perpetually emerges.

The Journey

I would even be willing to argue that an experience such as mine (2-3-74) justifies the Fall in the sense of making it worth it due to the absolute joy generated by the re-collection and return. I know it was for me—all the tearful years were not only nullified; they were overbalanced by the bliss experienced in restoration. Whether my feelings in history could rightly be projected onto the deity I don’t know, but if my system is right in all respects, 2-3-74 was the deity recovering its memory and identity, and so is representative—a sort of microcosm of the total deity’s own travels, its journey. (I envision deity in dynamic process undergoing unfolding stages of self-knowledge.) Perhaps this is the ultimate price of the game: self-awareness, acquired through “external” plural standpoints, of which I am one. Then I would say, it is worth it, this journey. That’s my subjective opinion. So the Fall is a vast adventure, culminating in a joy that outweighs the arduousness and sorrow of the trip itself. And out of this adventure the deity knows itself more clearly, and, since (as I say) intellegere (understanding) is its essence, this matter outweighs all else.

[…]

God manifested himself to me as the infinite void; but it was not the abyss; it was the vault of heaven, with blue sky and wisps of white clouds. He was not some foreign God but the God of my fathers. He was loving and kind and he had personality. He said, “You suffer a little now in life; it is little compared with the great joys, the bliss that awaits you. Do you think I in my theodicy would allow you to suffer greatly in proportion to your reward?” He made me aware, then, of the bliss that would come; it was infinite and sweet. (Dick)

God is the Hero on the Journey! Reality is a fractally unfolding emanation of the journey: trial/triumph, estrangement/reconciliation, sin/atonement, death/rebirth.

The Godhead is infinitely and perfectly heroic, adventurous, and courageous, yet to possess these traits there must be real fear, real trial and real tribulation—and so real pain, suffering, and death. Put differently: absence makes the heart grow fonder, and God’s heart is infinitely fond, therefore he knows absence. The intrinsic paradox of Being requires the negative aspect, but God makes the reward outweigh the punishment.

We know empirically from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) that consciousness can give rise to many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience, each with its own personality and sense of identity. Therefore, if something analogous to DID happens at a universal level, the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may all be alters—dissociated personalities—of universal consciousness.

Kastrup:

Every conversation that has ever taken place was the Universe, God, or the Game talking to itself, playing the parts of interlocutors. We are multiple personalities of the schizoid universal mind.

Martin W. Ball:

God is the only reality, and we are all expressions and embodiments of this one universal being...Reality is my experience of myself, and it is a game—a game that allows me to experience myself as both subject and object simultaneously.

There is a ludic-comic dimension—God is playing a game (hide-and-go-seek) with Himself—and a tragic-existential dimension. Again, as always, both are equally valid and true—i.e., like a Necker cube.

John Horgan’s psychedelic revelation:

At the same time, my astonishment that anything exists at all became unbearably acute. Why? I kept asking. Why creation? Why something rather than nothing? Finally I found myself alone, a disembodied voice in the darkness, asking, Why? And I realized that there would be, could be, no answer, because only I existed; there was nothing, no one, to answer me.”

I felt overwhelmed with loneliness, and my ecstatic recognition of the improbability—no, impossibility—of my existence mutated into horror. I knew there was no reason for me to be. At any moment I might be swallowed up, forever, by this infinite darkness enveloping me. I might even bring about my own annihilation simply by imagining it; I created this world, and I could end it, forever. Recoiling from this confrontation with my own awful solitude and omnipotence, I felt myself disintegrating.

I awoke from this nightmarish trip convinced that I had discovered the secret of existence. There is a God, but He is not the omnipotent, loving God in Whom so many people have faith. Far from it. He’s totally nuts, crazed with fear of his own existential plight. In fact, God created this wondrous, pain-wracked world to distract Himself from his cosmic identity crisis. He suffers from a severe case of multiple-personality disorder, and we are the shards of His fractured psyche.

Putting all of this together…

The primordial existential crisis causes a fracturing of the One Mind into the many minds; these mind-shards are Divine in origin and nature, but are small, fragile, weak—i.e. mortal; because the shards are less than God, they can, paradoxically, become greater than God—they can know fear, loss, and death, and yet still love and care and persevere; our lives are the processing and healing of the One Mind’s trauma; the Godhead becomes heroic through and as us.

What does man possess that God does not have? Because of his littleness, puniness, and defencelessness against the Almighty, he possesses a somewhat keener consciousness based on self-reflection: he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence. God has no need of this circumspection, for nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself. (Jung)

He is the Father, omnipotent, and the Child, omni-impotent.
Only God can save us, and only we can save God.

Let’s make sure the divine takes good care of us. But as for finding what, in reality, the divine might possibly need: let it look after itself.” From here onwards one can sit back and watch how the idea of looking after the gods starts, almost by magic, vanishing from the western world... And now it never for a moment occurs to us that the divine might be suffering, aching from our neglect; that the sacred desperately longs for our attention far more than we in some occasional, unconscious spasm might feel a brief burst of embarrassed longing for it. (Kingsley)

More Dick, even deeper Dick:

What is the total context in which the unmerited suffering and death of living creatures can be coherently understood?…I’ve been shown a really perplexing paradox. The highest good is the “harmonious fitting together of the beautiful” — i.e., Pythagoras’ kosmos, and this is what God moves everything toward. Okay. And then I’ve been shown the cost at which this is achieved — the torture and killing of the epicreatures, and I am shown that this cost is too great! So the summum bonum can only be achieved at a cost that (spiritually speaking) makes it not worth it (i.e., unacceptable). Then is the summum bonum actually the summum bonum? How can it be? Isn’t there a logical contradiction here? Right! There sure is! This is the dramatic tragedy of the universe, of God, of all: process, reality, and goal (teleology). Then the real summum bonum lies in saving the epicreatures (i.e., the parts which go together to make the whole). The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts; no: each and every part is more important than the whole! So within the summum bonum there is a secret. A mysterious conversion occurs. The part is the real whole. Perhaps this is an irreconcilable Irish bull which sets off the infinite flip-flops of the dialectic; maybe this particular paradox is the primal imbalance that is the dynamism driving reality on //\/\/\//\//\//\//\ forever; it cannot ever be resolved, so the process never ends (which is good).

The total theodical context is, and can only be, aesthetic and dramatic. Creation as a work of art, as a protection against, and remedy, for the pain of Being. The perfection of this Creation (the healing of God’s soul) is the summum bonum—and yet it was wrong of God to create the creatures as a means to an End (work). In order to atone for this primordial sin, He sacrifices Himself for us, lovingly, so that, in the end, the joy and bliss of salvation outweighs the suffering (the means become greater than the End, which is play).

My theological reinterpretation of Heidegger’s Sein (being) vs. das Nichts (nothingness) states that by insuring (“creating”) Sein, the Godhead is unable to avoid a paradox of values which splits it and sets up an antithetical interaction within the Godhead itself — having to do with means-ends. Thus a process universe is brought into existence that is rooted in sorrow at every level. Involved in its own agonized creation (actualization) the Godhead is damaged. Thus the “Fall” is due to a built-in self-contradiction and not to sin or whatever. The Godhead itself is no longer intact; it is not above or outside or transcendent to the schism. Actualization (Sein) is impossible without self-damage to the Godhead and within creation (Sein). Thus no perfect Sein can exist; the Godhead has set itself a seemingly impossible goal due to the means — subordination of the ontogons (individual beings) to the phylogons (archetypes, platonic Forms). And our daily empirical experience with reality bears this out; it is confirmed a posteriori (a priori and a posteriori agree). Most awful of all, the Godhead stands as self-damned by its own verdict of guilt for the suffering it has imposed on the ontogons.

I seem to be saying that in creating Sein (the universe) the Godhead was logically forced into sin, and can only be redeemed by its own ontogons—e.g., individual creatures sentient enough to become their own phylogons. Thus I see the scheme of salvation turned upside down! The ultimate lesson or revelation or gift by the Godhead to the ontogon would be to share its — the Godhead’s — own vision of the kosmos with the ontogon, but this would inexorably lead back to a counter-revelation of the paradox (means-end) and the moral ambiguity forced on the Godhead in its goal of establishing kosmos. The ontogon thus favored would then sit in judgment of the Godhead: the roles of God and creature would be reversed: instead of God judging man, man would judge God. The final step is for man to redeem God by returning him to his original unfallen state, as the Kabbala says: “And lead him back to his throne.” This is a titanic mystical-theological revelation (and act!).

Ludus Amoris

The picture I’ve been painting here (only God can save us now, our abject helplessness, (ego) death, the ludic dimension of the divine, the paradox within the Godhead and the dialectical movement flowing therefrom, the aesthetic and dramatic dimension of Creation, the Hero and his Journey, and so on and so on and so forth) finds its clearest expression in the Ludus Amoris of the Western mystical tradition. I regard this as empirical evidence—God, when She is sought and when She touches us—manifests in a manner compatible with my spiritual theory.

Evelyn Underhill (Mysticism, 1911) will serve as our guide to the Game of Love.

“Finding within myself a powerful contrarium, namely the desires that belong to the flesh and blood,” Boehme says, “I began to fight a hard battle against my corrupted nature, and with the aid of God I made up my mind to overcome the inherited evil will, to break it, and to enter wholly into the Love of God… This, however, was not possible for me to accomplish, but I stood firmly by my earnest resolution, and fought a hard battle with myself. Now while I was wrestling and battling, being aided by God, a wonderful light arose within my soul. It was a light entirely foreign to my unruly nature, but in it I recognized the true nature of God and man, and the relation existing between them, a thing which heretofore I had never understood, and for which I would never have sought.”

— “Salvation must come from beyond the System—from a divine intervention, uncaused, unexpected, and undeserved.”

In these words Boehme bridges the gap between Purgation and Illumination: showing these two states or ways as coexisting and complementary one to another, the light and dark sides of a developing mystic consciousness. As a fact, they do often exist side by side in the individual experience: and any treatment which exhibits them as sharply and completely separated may be convenient for purposes of study, but becomes at best diagrammatic if considered as a representation of the mystic life.

— the coincidentia of life and death, the comic and the tragic.

The mystical consciousness, as we have seen, belongs to that mobile or “unstable” type in which the artistic temperament also finds a place. It sways easily between the extremes of pleasure and pain in its gropings after transcendental reality. It often attains for a moment to heights in which it is not able to rest: is often flung from some rapturous vision of the Perfect to the deeps of contrition and despair.

— the intrinsically dynamic and artistic dimension of the divine

The mystics have a vivid metaphor by which to describe that alternation between the onset and the absence of the joyous transcendental consciousness which forms as it were the characteristic intermediate stage between the bitter struggles of pure Purgation, and the peace and radiance of the Illuminative Life. They call it Ludus Amoris, the “Game of Love” which God plays with the desirous soul. It is the “game of chess,” says St. Teresa, “in which game Humility is the Queen without whom none can checkmate the Divine King.” “Here,” says Martensen, “God plays a blest game with the soul.” The “Game of Love” is a reflection in consciousness of that state of struggle, oscillation and unrest which precedes the first unification of the self. It ceases when this has taken place and the new level of reality has been attained…

— “death” and resurrection (only God can save us now)

…So we are told of Rulman Merswin that after the period of harsh physical mortification which succeeded his conversion came a year of “delirious joy alternating with the most bitter physical and moral sufferings.” It is, he says, “the Game of Love which the Lord plays with His poor sinful creature.” Memories of all his old sins still drove him to exaggerated penances: morbid temptations “made me so ill that I feared I should lose my reason.” These psychic storms reacted upon the physical organism. He had a paralytic seizure, lost the use of his lower limbs, and believed himself to be at the point of death. When he was at his worst, however, and all hope seemed at an end, an inward voice told him to rise from his bed. He obeyed, and found himself cured. Ecstasies were frequent during the whole of this period. In these moments of exaltation he felt his mind to be irradiated by a new light, so that he knew, intuitively, the direction which his life was bound to take, and recognized the inevitable and salutary nature of his trials. “God showed Himself by turns harsh and gentle: to each access of misery succeeded the rapture of supernatural grace.” In this intermittent style, torn by these constant fluctuations between depression and delight, did Merswin, in whom the psychic instability of the artistic and mystic types is present in excess, pass through the purgative and illuminated states. They appear to have coexisted in his consciousness, first one and then the other emerging and taking control. Hence he did not attain the peaceful condition which is characteristic of full illumination, and normally closes the “First Mystic Life”; but passed direct from these violent alternations of mystical pleasure and mystical pain to the state which he calls “the school of suffering love.” This, as we shall see when we come to its consideration, is strictly analogous to that which other mystics have called the “Dark Night of the Soul,” and opens the “Second Mystic Life” or Unitive Way.

Such prolonged coexistence of alternating pain and pleasure states in the developing soul, such delay in the attainment of equilibrium, is not infrequent, and must be taken into account in all analyses of the mystic type. Though it is convenient for purposes of study to practise a certain dissection, and treat as separate states which are, in the living subject, closely intertwined, we should constantly remind ourselves that such a proceeding is artificial. The struggle of the self to disentangle itself from illusion and attain the Absolute is a life-struggle. Hence, it will and must exhibit the freedom and originality of life: will, as a process, obey artistic rather than scientific laws. It will sway now to the light and now to the shade of experience: its oscillations will sometimes be great, sometimes small. Mood and environment, inspiration and information, will all play their part.

There are in this struggle three factors.

(1) The unchanging light of Eternal Reality: that Pure Being “which ever shines and nought shall ever dim.”

(2) The web of illusion, here thick, there thin; which hems in, confuses, and allures the sentient self.

(3) That self, always changing, moving, struggling—always, in fact, becoming— alive in every fibre, related at once to the unreal and to the real; and, with its growth in true being, ever more conscious of the contrast between them.

In the ever-shifting relations between these three factors, the consequent energy engendered, the work done, we may find a cause of the innumerable forms of stress and travail which are called in their objective form the Purgative Way. One only of the three is constant: the Absolute to which the soul aspires. Though all else may fluctuate, that goal is changeless. That Beauty so old and so new, “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning,” which is the One of Plotinus, the All of Eckhart and St. John of the Cross, the Eternal Wisdom of Suso, the Unplumbed Abyss of Ruysbroeck, the Pure Love of St. Catherine of Genoa, awaits yesterday, to-day, and for ever the opening of Its creature’s eyes.

This “divine furnace of purifying love” demands from the ardent soul a complete self-surrender, and voluntary turning from all impurity, a humility of the most far-reaching kind: and this means the deliberate embrace of active suffering, a self-discipline in dreadful tasks. As gold in the refiner’s fire, so “burning of love into a soul truly taken all vices purgeth.” Detachment may be a counsel of prudence, a practical result of seeing the true values of things; but the pain of mortification is seized as a splendid opportunity, a love token, timidly offered by the awakened spirit to that all-demanding Lover from Whom St. Catherine of Siena heard the terrible words “I, Fire, the Acceptor of sacrifices, ravishing away from them their darkness, give the light.”

The mystics have a profound conviction that Creation, Becoming, Transcendence, is a painful process at the best. Those who are Christians point to the Passion of Christ as a proof that the cosmic journey to perfection, the path of the Eternal Wisdom, follows of necessity the Way of the Cross. That law of the inner life, which sounds so fantastic and yet is so bitterly true—“No progress without pain”—asserts itself. It declares that birth pangs must be endured in the spiritual as well as in the material world: that adequate training must always hurt the athlete. Hence the mystics’ quest of the Absolute drives them to an eager and heroic union with the reality of suffering, as well as with the reality of joy.

— the mystical path as Hero’s Journey

What must be the first step of the self upon this road to perfect union with the Absolute? Clearly, a getting rid of all those elements of normal experience which are not in harmony with reality: of illusion, evil, imperfection of every kind. By false desires and false thoughts man has built up for himself a false universe: as a mollusk by the deliberate and persistent absorption of lime and rejection of all else, can build up for itself a hard shell which shuts it from the external world, and only represents in a distorted and unrecognisable form the ocean from which it was obtained. This hard and wholly unnutritious shell, this one-sided secretion of the surface-consciousness, makes as it were a little cave of illusion for each separate soul. A literal and deliberate getting out of the cave must be for every mystic, as it was for Plato’s prisoners, the first step in the individual hunt for reality.

To use another and more domestic metaphor, that Divine Child which was, in the hour of the mystic conversion, born in the spark of the soul, must learn like other children to walk. Though it is true that the spiritual self must never lose its sense of utter dependence on the Invisible; yet within that supporting atmosphere, and fed by its gifts, it must “find its feet.” Each effort to stand brings first a glorious sense of growth, and then a fall: each fall means another struggle to obtain the difficult balance which comes when infancy is past. There are many eager trials, many hopes, many disappointments. At last, as it seems suddenly, the moment comes: tottering is over, the muscles have learnt their lesson, they adjust themselves automatically, and the new self suddenly finds itself—it knows not how—standing upright and secure. That is the moment which marks the boundary between the purgative and the illuminative states.

The Stage

All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts

Gamefulness = dramaticity, storyfulness

Play your parts, whatever they may be, earnestly and seriously, but with a twinkle in your eye, and you will be given bigger and more meaningful roles; heed the call to adventure, rise to the occasion, and seize the moment, and you will be given grander adventures and more momentous moments; live always with a flair for the dramatic and the poetic, and the universe (god) will conspire for your success.

An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work (play) truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.” (Jung)

God finds Herself in a position not unlike that of the producer of a reality TV show. The producer’s basic goal is to make the show as entertaining as possible without compromising the sense of “reality” too much. At times it may be necessary for the producer to appear on screen or make some overt intervention in order to enhance the drama, but in general it is best if the producer does their work behind the scenes, with only the most subtle manipulations. God, then, prefers to mold “reality” with coincidences, chance encounters, synchronicities, and dreams, visions, rather than miracles, apparitions, and revelations. God favors oracle, divination, and prophecy for this reason, because they provide an opening through which She can shape the story without being too heavy-handed about it. Prophecy is also a tried-and-true method for heightening the dramaticity of a character and/or their situation, and thereby increasing the odds that God will intervene on their behalf (God is the “self” who fulfills self-fulfilling prophecies).

The aim of public art forms, according to the Hindu tradition, is not simply to create individual connections in the mind of the reader, but to produce rasa: literally, ‘taste’.

As undefinable as the physical experience of taste, the rasa of an artwork provides its audience with an underlying aesthetic emotion, subtending all other forms of perception and rationality.

The notion of rasa as an all-encompassing mental atmosphere is crucial to Hindu theories of theatre, where it defines both the types of performance (epic, erotic, comic, etc.) and the very object of any theatre piece. According to the treatise on performing arts, Natya Sastra, attributed to Bharata Muni — intended as the fifth Veda, through which all other Vedas might be made accessible — the origin of theatre itself is divine. It was Brahma, the Great Father, the ineffable above the Gods, who created theatre as a way to render His own unintelligibility manifest to the senses.

Theatre is a job for prophets, because prophecy itself has the attitude of theatre. A work of prophetic culture stands as a vantage point from which reality can be seen under a particular, all-pervasive atmosphere —where the very settings of what we might understand as ‘reality’ might be challenged and recomposed.

God hates a stale, predictable plot, and will intervene (subtly or not-so-subtly) in order to keep the story moving (infinite play). This is how we know the Good Guys will win in the end, because evil is always stultifying and painfully boring.

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)

Deus ex Machina

Deus ex machina (‘God from the machine’) is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly or abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. Its function is generally to resolve an otherwise irresolvable plot situation, to surprise the audience, to bring the tale to a happy ending, or act as a comedic device.

The term was coined from the conventions of ancient Greek theater, where actors who were playing gods were brought on stage using a machine. The machine could be either a crane (mechane) used to lower actors from above or a riser that brought them up through a trapdoor. Aeschylus introduced the idea and it was used often to resolve the conflict and conclude the drama. The device is associated mostly with Greek tragedy, although it also appeared in comedies.

Only a deus ex machina can save us now.

It will come as an absolute surprise, gratuitous and fortuitous, against all odds and all logic, and yet we may seduce God into saving us by living with dramaticity and acting in accordance with the Golden Rule: deus ex machina to others as you would have Him deus ex machina to you.

Be the surprise you want to see in the world, flip the script for someone in a seemingly unsolvable predicament, lend a helping hand to the helpless and the hopeless—show mercy, compassion, and forgiveness when it is undeserved and unexpected.

The Task

“[Humanity] sickens from the lack of a myth commensurate with the situation. The Christian nations have come to a sorry pass; their Christianity slumbers and has neglected to develop its myth further in the course of the centuries. Those who gave expression to the dark stirrings of growth in mythic ideas were refused a hearing… 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.”

My task: a dreaming onward of the myth through a return to the mystical ground from which myth springs; not merely a return however, but a renaissance—a reimagination and rejuvenation (literally a juvenification, a childization).

So this is Gnosticism, yes, but with a twist.
This world is a prison, yes, but a world is a game is a story.

The goal of this prison game is liberation—emancipation from all that may quench or contain the divine flame within, by any and all means necessary.

The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art…The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns…If the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found. (Mckenna)

The only effective means in this game are those which are no means at all: the creation of games (worlds) and the playing of them, the creation of art and the living of our lives as such.

Naturally, the best illustration of this stratagem comes from folktale (let King Shahryār be the Demiurge, the creator and warden of our 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.

The impossible awaits the hero of a fairy tale. But how is a person to reach the impossible if not, precisely, by means of the impossible?

A hero starts down the path of the fairy tale without any earthly hope. The impossible is at first represented by the mountain, and with the simple decision to confront the mountain comes a feeling that serves as an Archimedean point outside the world. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to save my mother” is a symbolic formula, opening the gates to the fourth dimension. Its effect is comparable to what a mystic claims of prayer: it yanks up the mountain by the roots, so to speak, and turns it upside down on its summit. From this moment forward, the hero of the fairy tale is a fool in the eyes of the world.

I.

Bakkalon is a key figure in George R.R. Martin’s 1975 short story “And Seven Times Never Kill Man!”.

Centuries in the future, humanity had spread to colonies on hundreds of different planets and lived in relative peace, but was then invaded by the Hranga, a malevolent alien race which used psychic powers to enslave hordes of other subject races—such as the Fyndii—which they unleashed upon humanity. Human-controlled space was devastated: many planets were destroyed, and others were cut off and reverted to Bronze Age levels of technology. The core human territories eventually managed to turn the tide against the Hranga, and through centuries of horrific warfare drove them to extinction.

This vast destruction visited on humanity left many people embittered and heavily militarized. As a result, they developed a pervasive survivalist mindset and a pathological hatred of all alien races. These groups shunned past religions (specifically Christianity) which were more charitable and tolerant, and went on to develop their own hyper-militaristic and aggressive religion centered around “Bakkalon, the Pale Child”. Bakkalon’s religion is sort of a warped inverse of Christianity: instead of the peaceful image of the infant Christ, the infant Bakkalon is depicted holding a sword; instead of tolerance, Bakkalon’s religion openly considers all non-humans to be “soulless”, and not just suggests but directly commands its followers to openly commit genocide against every intelligent alien race they come into contact with. Bakkalon is associated with wolves, in self-conscious contrast to the Lamb imagery often used with Christ, and the followers of Bakkalon now see themselves as on a holy crusade to eradicate all non-human sentient species in the universe—the irony, of course, being that this makes them exactly like the Hranga, which they either don’t realize or simply don’t care about.

A lengthy excerpt from one of Bakkalon’s holy texts gives an admittedly skewed version of historical events:

II.

Expand the time horizon from centuries in the future to eons upon eons upon eons and fantasy evolves into prophecy.

If we avoid extinction, our distant descendants will have spread out across space, and redesigned their minds and bodies to explode Cambrian-style into a vast space of possible creatures. Given a similar freedom of fertility, most of our distant descendants will also live near a subsistence level. Per-capita wealth has only been rising lately because income has grown faster than population. But if income only doubled every century, in a million years that would be a factor of 10^3000, which seems impossible to achieve with only the 10^70 atoms of our galaxy available by then. Yes, we have seen a remarkable demographic transition, wherein richer nations have fewer kids, but we already see contrarian subgroups like Hutterites, Hmongs, or Mormons that grow much faster. So unless strong central controls prevent it, over the long run such groups will easily grow faster than the economy, making per person income drop to near subsistence levels. (Robin Hanson)

The lifeworld of our distant descendants will resemble that of our distant ancestors: Nature red in sword and tooth and claw, an endless war of all against all. To the inhabitants of this cosmic jungle (this dark forest), our brief epoch will stand out as a relative oasis, a uniquely forgiving time in which incredible mercy was shown to the weak and the deluded. Because of its exceptional nature, the peoples of the far flung future will come to regard our era much like how the Aboriginals think of their “Dreamtime”: as a time of fable and legend whose heroes and happenings shaped the present order of the world.

When our distant descendants think about our era, however, differences will loom larger. Yes they will see that we were more like them in knowing more things, and in having less contact with a wild nature. But our brief period of very rapid growth and discovery will be quite foreign to them. Yet even these differences will pale relative to one huge difference: our lives are far more dominated by consequential delusions: wildly false beliefs and non-adaptive values that matter. While our descendants may explore delusion-dominated virtual realities, they will well understand that such things cannot be real, and don’t much influence history. In contrast, we live in the brief but important “dreamtime” when delusions drove history. Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max…

…Our descendants may remember how history hung by a precarious thread on a few crucial coordination choices and the strange religious and socio-political delusions that influenced such choices. Our delusions may have led us to do something quite wonderful, or quite horrible, that permanently changed the options available to our descendants. This would be the most lasting legacy of our age, our explosively growing Dreamtime before natural selection again reasserted a clear-headed relation between behavior and reality.

To summarize: the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards Bakkalon. Mercy, tolerance, forgiveness, compassion—all which does not support the war effort will one day fall beneath Bakkalon’s great black blade.

III.

There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rife with injustices, fathers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”

Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”

What does it then—what perpetuates this state of affairs that no one wants and everyone hates? Using Ginsberg’s “Howl” as inspiration, Scott Alexander answers Moloch, the ancient Carthaginian demon whom he recasts as the dark lord of all game-theoretic coordination problems (prisoner’s dilemmas, arms races, commons tragedies, multipolar traps and malthusian traps, etc.).

Existence, as Alexander tells it, is a constant struggle to hold on to all that we hold dear in the face of relentless competitive pressure. Can we, he wonders, achieve some kind of victory, or at least a stalemate, in this war of all against all?

The relevant question is how technological changes will affect our tendency to fall into multipolar traps. I described traps as when, in some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who seize the opportunity prosper; those who don’t seize it go extinct. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. This process continues until all other values that can be traded off for more X have been traded off—in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.

That “the opportunity arises” phrase is looking pretty sinister. Technology is all about creating new opportunities. Develop a new robot, and suddenly coffee plantations have “the opportunity” to automate their harvest and fire all the Ethiopian workers. Develop nuclear weapons, and suddenly countries are stuck in an arms race to have enough of them. Polluting the atmosphere to build products quicker wasn’t a problem before they invented the steam engine.

The limit of multipolar traps as technology approaches infinity is “very bad”.

After considering various paths out of Moloch’s mad maze, Alexander ultimately finds himself agreeing with Hanson: “This is the dreamtime, a rare confluence of circumstances where we are unusually safe from multipolar traps, and as such weird things like art and science and philosophy and love can flourish.”

As technology progresses, this rare confluence will come to an end. New opportunities to throw values under the bus for increased competitiveness will arise. New ways of copying artificial agents will soak up our excess resources and resurrect Malthus’ unquiet spirit. Capitalism and democracy, previously our protectors, will figure out ways to route around their inconvenient dependence on human values.

The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards Moloch.

IV.

Fret not—Alexander has a plan.

Moloch wants us dead, and with us everything we value. Art, science, love, philosophy, consciousness itself, the entire bundle. And since I’m not down with that plan, I think defeating Moloch and taking his place is a pretty high priority.

The only way to avoid having all human values gradually ground down by optimization-competition is to install a Gardener over the entire universe who optimizes for human values.

Only a god can kill another god; ergo to defeat Moloch we must build an artificial superintelligence powerful enough to reign over the cosmos and peacefully solve all coordination problems.

There is just one small problem with this plan: who gardens the Gardener? Which is to say, what if the Gardener happens to a prefer a garden that is incompatible with human flourishing? What if the Gardener determines that we are not flowers or shrubberies, but weeds which must be weeded?

Ginsberg’s poem famously begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. I am luckier than Ginsberg. I got to see the best minds of my generation identify a problem and get to work.

Here is where I depart from Alexander and his rationalist brethren: they believe that this Problem to end all Problems is something that can be solved with work—with some ingenious socio-political scheme that will prevent a dangerous AI arms race and/or some even more ingenious technical achievement that ensures the Gardener will remain forever aligned with idealized human values.

But coordination “problems” are no such thing: they are games.
And last time I checked, you do not work games, you play them.

The question everyone has after reading Ginsberg is: what is Moloch?

My answer is: Moloch is exactly what the Bible and the history books say he is. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war. He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I will grant you power.

Why does Moloch demand the sacrifice of children in particular?
Because he knows they are the only ones which can defeat him.

V.

What Hanson/Alexander miss when they prophesize a distant future in which Bakkalon/Moloch has smote all of our childish “illusions” and “delusions” is that these same -usions are the fount of our power, the source of our unique ability to coordinate and cooperate at scale.

Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city, or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland, and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights—all of which are simply stories that people invent and tell one another.

So, we are here, in the Dreamtime, freed from Nature’s war of all against all, precisely because of our ability to delude ourselves, to dream and (mis)take those dreams for reality.

This seems paradoxical (you win at the Reality Game by embracing unreality), but it makes perfect sense if we grant that “reality” is intrinsically illusive and delusive.

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, becomes again God. This creative activity of the Divine is called līlā, the play of God, and the world is seen as the stage of the divine play. Like most of Hindu mythology, the myth of līlā has a strong magical flavour. Brahman is the great magician who transforms himself into the world with his “magic creative power”, which is the original meaning of māyā in the Rig Veda…The word māyā—one of the most important terms in Indian philosophy—has changed its meaning over the centuries. From the power of the divine actor and magician, it came to signify the psychological state of anybody under the spell of the magic play. As long as we confuse the myriad forms of the divine līlā with reality, without perceiving the unity of Brahman underlying all these forms, we are under the spell of māyā….In the Hindu view of nature, then, all forms are relative, fluid and ever-changing māyā, conjured up by the great magician. The world of māyā changes continuously, because the divine līlā is a rhythmic, dynamic play. (René Guénon)

The world (or the god which is the world) is playing a trick on us; it’s as if we have been thrown down into a strange and sinister maze that shape-shifts as you try to map it and track where you’ve been (cf. PKD: “There is no rational way out of the maze, no rigid formula. Rigid formulas are maze constructs”). What is needed to navigate the lunatic labyrinth of the Real—to trick the world as it tricks us—is not a naive rationality or artless intelligence but a kind of wily creativity and guile, a tricksiness; something like what the ancient greeks called mêtis.

In all of Zeno’s paradoxes, there is one crucial fact we need to notice. This is that, just like Parmenides and just as with Indian logic too, he used logic in its truest sense, respected its original purpose. He used it not to fortify or justify our commonsense view of reality but to undermine it, destroy it. And what’s particularly interesting in the Achilles paradox is that the faster runner never catches up with the slower. For it was well known to Greeks that there is only one factor capable of making the slower get the better of the faster. That factor is not strength or brute force. It’s what they called mêtis: the subtlety that manages to achieve the seemingly impossible by reversing everything, turning our expectations upside down and back to front.

But as for Zeno, he was not just performing some clever trick. He was revealing, with his mêtis, that this whole world we believe in is māyā, illusion. (Peter Kingsley)

Like the world in which it expresses itself, mêtis is many-faced and resistant to simple characterization. It is cleverness and resilience; it is an air of playful seriousness, and of serious playfulness; it is that indefinable factor which encompasses all of these qualities, and exceeds them.

Mêtis is the ability to adapt, translate, and shift shape; the instinctive inner wisdom that can steer a consistent course for us across the constantly changing waters of existence; the infinite subtlety and alertness that’s needed to make the impossible transition successfully, faithfully, and exactly from one level of reality to another; the cunning of knowing how to keep concealed and disguised while revealing no more than is appropriate at any moment. (Ibid)

VI.

The inexorable, inexhaustible moral of the fairy tale is victory over the law of necessity, the constant transition to a new order of relationships and absolutely nothing else, for there is absolutely nothing else to learn on this earth.

Victory over necessity, over law, over nature, over causation itself.

Let us accept some version of Alexander’s eschaton: the final level of the Reality Game is beaten by compelling or convincing a “god” (either a machine god or an actual divine being) to transform the cosmos into an everlasting paradisal garden.

How will we win—through work (coercion or argument) or through līlā, through rational intelligence or creative mêtis?

Needless to say, I think it will be the latter. In fact, I think it is quite obvious what we will do to beat the Game, because it will be what we’ve always done to beat the Game.

We will tell a story.

We will tell a story of how the meek and the gentle overcame the powerful and the vicious through cleverness and courageous play. We will tell a story of how the lamb conquered the wolf. (because everyone loves a good underdog story, even god)

We will tell a tale of how a most unserious species, a hairless ape-child who is good at almost nothing but laughing and loving and telling stories, turned the tables on the universe and turned a dog-eat-dog world into a dog-play-dog park.