Sync: Archaic Revival and the serpents and birds of paradise

I'm normally reading several books at once. I'm still in the middle of Valentin Tomberg's Lazarus, Come Forth! but last night I randomly decided to start reading a book I'd picked up some time ago but never opened: Terence McKenna's The Archaic Revival (1992). I only read a few pages. Between the table of contents and the foreword was this full-page illustration by the German collage artist Wilfried Sätty.

A naked couple in a jungle with a huge snake -- a pretty obvious Garden of Eden reference, presumably chosen by McKenna because of the forbidden fruit's character as a "mind-altering plant." There are also a lot of birds in the picture -- vultures or cormorants or something, but also, by virtue of the setting in which they appear, "birds of paradise."

I didn't really think much about it until today, when I picked up Lazarus, Come Forth! again and read this:

The madness in which Nietzsche's great adventure ended was not personally deserved; nor was it brought about by addiction to a personal lust for power, position, and greatness. Nietzshce was a sacrifice to the superhuman force of the collective all-human subconscious, which came to a kind of volcanic eruption in him. And what broke through there was the archaic evolutionary drive itself, belonging to the most archaic layer of humanity's subconscious. Here lies the most general and most hidden drive working in the subconscious of man: this is the impulse and promise given by the serpent in Paradise.

Here again the word archaic and the idea of revival (one of the main themes of the book, as indicated by its title) are paired with the serpent in Paradise.

My decision to start reading a book by a drug guru was probably inspired in part by the experience recounted in my recent post "Nutmeg is a drug." In that post, I mentioned that nutmeg belongs to the same class of drugs as datura, and I told how I had tried in vain to track down a novel I had read as a child in which a bird became intoxicated by eating nutmegs. I had reached the tentative conclusion that it must be one of the many English versions of The Swiss Family Robinson, but Kevin McCall has discovered that it was actually 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. (Oddly, in the post I had mentioned dreams of the sort "where you wake up feeling as if you've been underwater.") Check out the context:

Some inoffensive serpents glided away from us. The birds of paradise fled at our approach, and truly I despaired of getting near one, when Conseil, who was walking in front, suddenly bent down, uttered a triumphant cry, and came back to me bringing a magnificent specimen.

"Ah! bravo, Conseil!"

"Master is very good."

"No, my boy; you have made an excellent stroke. Take one of these living birds, and carry it in your hand."

"If master will examine it, he will see that I have not deserved great merit."

"Why, Conseil?"

"Because this bird is as drunk as a quail."

"Drunk!"

"Yes, sir; drunk with the nutmegs that it devoured under the nutmeg-tree under which I found it. See, friend Ned, see the monstrous effects of intemperance!"

Another book I am reading at the moment is Divination in Ancient Israel by Frederick H. Cryer, a lot of which is devoted to preliminaries. (Not until p. 229 does the actual discussion of ancient Israel begin.) In a passage I read a few days ago, Cryer is commenting on the book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by E. E. Evans-Pritchard and cites, of all the things to cite in this rather pedantic book, The Teachings of Don Juan.

[Evans-Pritchard's] distinction between "empirical reality" and "Zande explanations" of the same cannot ultimately be maintained. Just how meaningless the distinction in question can be may be illustrated by an event in the course of Carlos Castaneda's initiation at the hands of a Yaqui "man of power", Don Juan. Having been taught how to prepare the datura plant for a psychic excursion, Castaneda has an experience of being transformed into a bird and soaring above and away from his mentor. . . .

I've posted about this business of transforming into a bird before -- and no prizes for guessing what specific kind of bird! See my 2020 post "Whitley Strieber and the thing that turned into a bird of paradise."

I also note in passing that the Spanish don derives from Latin dominus, while Juan is the Spanish form of Iohannes. Both Latin words featured prominently in my recent post "What does 'do-re-mi' mean?" as they are the reason the scale begins with do and ends with si.

Forests of symbols in Cryer and Tomberg

In my November 18 post "Generalizing and Genesis," I noted a synchronicity that resulted from reading Valetin Tomberg's Lazarus, Come Forth! at the same time as Frederick H. Cryer's Divination in Ancient Israel., and I ended by saying it was time for me to "move on from the 'botanical' stage of simply cataloguing individual syncs" -- but here I am still botanizing, thanks to the same two books! These little syncs keep turning up, and I guess I feel a sort of duty to note them all. I had just read this in Cryer's book:

[French sociologists Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert] sense that the individual engaged in magic either does not reason or is unconscious of his reasoning, that is of the processes by which he apprehends magical symbolism. [. . .] One wonders, of course, whether this is not simple a quality inherent in all symbolism, i.e., that symbols are supercharged with meaning.

At the end of the last sentence quoted above was a footnote, which I read:

Cf. e.g. Turner, The Forest of Symbols, pp. 27-30.

Although the note was nothing but the rather opaque name of a book, and although the sentence it was annotating was a rather vague one, the title nevertheless caught my fancy, and I made a mental note to look up Turner's Forest of Symbols in case it should turn out to be worth reading.

I then put down Cryer and picked up Tomberg. There I read this:

So there is in Anthroposophy a magnificent achievement of thought and will -- which is, however, unmystical and unmagical, i.e., in want of Life. [. . .] The search for the Grail, now become legend -- together with Rosicrucianism, which is surrounded by a forest of symbolism -- both testify that there has always existed a striving for a conscious participation in the logic of the Logos, a quest for a Christian initiation.

Just after taking note of The Forest of Symbols -- juxtaposed with the word magical and the idea of being unconscious of one's reasoning -- I encounter the nearly identical expression forest of symbolism -- this time juxtaposed with the word unmagical and the idea of conscious participation in logic.

Sync: Generalizing and Genesis

I had just read this in Valentin Tomberg’s Lazarus Come Forth:

Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St. Augustine . . . also saw no other possibility than either to stop short at Genesis without further thought, or to form thoughts about it—and to think about Genesis other than “platonically” is hardly possible.

when, setting it down and opening another book I am reading, I read this in Frederick C. Cryer’s Divination in Ancient Israel:

Of what use is a lot of disparate information if we cannot generalise it in some fashion? Having progressed from comparative studies which understood meaning as genesis . . .

I read these two passages literally one after the other. The sync resonates with my thoughts about synchronicity itself recently: that it’s time for me to move on from the “botanical” stage of simply cataloguing individual syncs and begin thinking about the phenomenon as a whole in a synthetic manner.

Not in this post, though. Honestly, I’m feeling a bit sleepy now. But when I wake up . . .

Aleister Crowley on Joseph Smith; and a minor sync about "soci-owl-ogy" and vampires

Today I read Massimo Introvigne's paper "The Beast and the Prophet: Aleister Crowley's Fascination with Joseph Smith," which I ran into the other day while searching for any link between Joseph Smith and the mandrake. (This paper was a hit because it mentions Crowley's Mandrake Press.) It was moderately interesting; Crowley had, as may be expected, no very deep understanding of the Mormon Prophet, but he does allude unmistakably to him in Moonchild:

All gave way to a most enigmatic figure. It was an insignificant face and form; but the attribution of him filled all heaven. In his sphere was primarily a mist which Iliel instinctively recognized as malarious; and she got an impression, rather than a vision, of an immense muddy river rushing through swamps. And then she saw that from this man's brain issued phantoms like pigeons. They were neither Red Indians nor Israelites, yet they had something of each in their bearing. And these poured like smoke from the head of this little man. In his hand was a book, and he held it over his head. And the book was guarded by an angelic figure whose face was extraordinarily stern and unbeautiful, but who scattered with wide hands the wealth of life, children, and corn, and gold. And behind all these things was a great multitude; and about them were the symbolic forms of exile and death and every persecution, and the hideous laughter of triumphant enemies. All this seemed to weigh heavily upon the little man that had created it.

After finishing the paper, I fell to wondering who this Massimo Introvigne was. Google summarized him as "Italian sociologist" and sent me to his Wikipedia page. I noted that he was born on June 14, that he has written about various "new religious movements" including Mormonism, and that there is a whole section of the entry called "Popular culture and vampires":

He was the Italian director of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, which included the leading academic scholars in the field of the literary and historical study of the vampire myth. In 1997, J. Gordon Melton and Introvigne organized an event at the Westin Hotel in Los Angeles where 1,500 attendees came dressed as vampires for "creative writing contest, Gothic rock music and theatrical performances".

After browsing that, I began reading a new book: Frederick H. Cryer's Divination in Ancient Israel and its Near Eastern Environment: A Socio-Historical Investigation, beginning with the unpromisingly jokey Introduction. One of the headings in the Introduction is "Soci-owl-ogy?" -- which caught my eye because of its possible relation to recent owl syncs, but it turned out to be nothing but a sniggering reference to an American graduate student who, with his provincial accent, "spoke unceasingly of 'soci-owl-ogy,' and was so enthusiastic in his advocacy of the science that he once" employed a stupidly inept mixed metaphor in singing its praises. Har-har. Anyway, it still counts as an owl reference in the eyes of the sync fairies.

A couple of pages later, still under the "Soci-owl-ogy?" heading, we read this:

Ultimately, structural functionalism relies on a species of teleological argumentation in which the telos in question is the equilibrium presupposed by the researcher. One is reminded of the old joke in which a passerby, seeing a hippy walking along snapping his fingers, asks him why he does so. "Man, it keeps the vampires away!" he is told; and when he asks if the hippy really believe that finger-snapping repels vampires, the other replies, 'You seen any vampires lately, have you?'"

Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin' daddies! Not off to a great start, this book. If this cat blows any more of this bad jazz, I don't think I can be arsed to stick around for whatever groovy might be stashed with his frame.

Anyway, sociology and vampires: not a juxtaposition you run into every day.