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 . . .

Silent and spoken prayer

Who teaches children that times of quietness are doors to heaven, to bliss, to peace and happiness beyond all understanding? . . . Who teaches that quiet contemplation is really prayer? The church teaches that prayer is an activity, something you DO.

-- Roger Hathaway, The Mystic Passion

I at length came to the determination to "ask of God," concluding that if he gave wisdom to them that lacked wisdom, and would give liberally, and not upbraid, I might venture. . . . It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray vocally.

-- Excerpts from the History of Joseph Smith, the Prophet

Isn't it surprising that -- at the age of 14, and living in a place where there was "an unusual excitement on the subject of religion" in which many of his immediate family members were involved -- the young Joseph Smith had never once "made the attempt to pray vocally"? Not so much as a "now I lay me down to sleep"? Having children pray vocally is a virtual universal in Christendom, and surely must have been even more so 200 years ago. Smith was raised in a solidly Christian, if unchurched, family and was a serious and careful reader of the Bible from a very young age. He was not in any way irreligious -- and yet he had never prayed aloud.

The results of this first vocal prayer were spectacular.

I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.

But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction -- not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being -- just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.

It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other -- This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!

Two things stand out about this. First, this vocal prayer seems to have been much more "powerful" than his earlier, non-vocal, prayers in terms of getting a response -- first from a demonic power and then from God himself and Jesus Christ. (This is echoed in the sacred drama of the Mormon temple, where Adam prays -- laying special stress on the fact that he is doing so vocally, with his mouth -- and is answered first by Satan and then by heavenly messengers.) Second, the fact that Smith had never prayed vocally before was apparently no big deal to God. He was not told to repent for having been lax in his prayers or anything like that; it seems that his general habit of non-vocal prayer was perfectly acceptable. Vocal prayer is, in some situations, uniquely effective, but it is not required that it be habitual. "Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few" (Ecclesiastes 5:2).

This fits with my own prayer life.

I think we can distinguish between two types of non-vocal prayer. It is possible to "pray silently" the way one reads silently -- that is, verbally, in clearly defined words and sentences, but checking the articulatory mechanism so that no sound is produced. I used to attempt this regularly, but it never came naturally, and I would always find myself lapsing into non-verbal contemplation. Nowadays my occasional silent-but-verbalized "prayers" are really more mantras than prayers properly so called. For example, I might silently repeat the Hail Mary or some other formula, not as a form of communication ("not as the heathen, who think they shall be heard for their much speaking") but as a way of focusing my mind and spirit and keeping the devil at bay.

True silent prayer is non-vocal because it is non-verbal. It is neither speech nor an internal simulation of speech but the deep silence of contemplation in God -- not an activity, but a mode of being. It is surely this sort of prayer that Paul had in mind when he wrote, "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17) and advised "praying always with all prayer and supplication in the spirit" (Ephesians 6:18). Valentin Tomberg expresses it well in his Letter on the Magician:

With time, the silence or concentration without effort becomes a fundamental element always present in the life of the soul. It is like the perpetual service at the church of Sacre-Coeur de Montmartre which takes place, whilst in Paris one works, one trades, one amuses oneself, one sleeps, one dies.

"The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord" (Proverbs 20:27), and sometimes I visualize this in literal terms -- in the center of myself, invisible, a candle, burning perpetually with its slow and steady and silent light. This is secret prayer, silent prayer, prayer without ceasing.

As for vocal prayer, I recognize its unique power and believe it should be used sparingly. Very occasionally, my private prayers take vocal form -- once or twice a year, maybe. And although my experience with such things is very limited, such experience as I have suggests that when "miraculous" results are needed, vocal prayer -- and especially prayer in Latin, for some reason -- is uniquely efficacious. Exorcists reportedly say the same thing.

The need for vocal prayer in exorcism may tie in with Joseph Smith's first vocal prayer -- the immediate effect of which was to trigger a demonic onslaught. When we speak, the devil hears. When we keep silent, the candle of the Lord is invisible to him. "Yea, I tell thee, that thou mayest know that there is none else save God that knoweth thy thoughts and the intents of thy heart" (D&C 6:16).

Total eclipse of the Moon

This evening I just happened to be out and about at the right time to witness a total lunar eclipse, not knowing in advance that there was going to be one. I saw it exactly at the moment of totality and stayed and watched it until the end.

If the panic police had not shut down my school for a few weeks, I would have been in my classroom at that time and would have missed the whole thing -- so yes, good can come out of evil.

About a month ago, someone sent me a scan from a Tintin book (sending it, by chance, on the exact anniversary of its original publication) showing a total solar eclipse, and this set off a chain of synchronicities.

This is how I received it. Not sure who added the face on the Sun!

The lunar eclipse ("blood moon") made me think of this solar eclipse, and the combination of the two made me think of the second chapter of Joel: "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come" (Joel 2:31).

A few days ago, I was looking through this blog's drafts folder, found an old unfinished post called "Do the locusts have a king?" and started working on it again. It begins by quoting the bit about the locusts in Revelation 9, mentioning parenthetically that John had pinched his imagery from Joel 2.

I see that the emergence of the Great Eastern Brood of 17-year cicadas is in the news these days. I witnessed this event once, 34 years ago, when my family was living in Maryland. Back in those less entomologically literate days, the locals all referred to the insects as "locusts," and news programs would have Bug Experts on to explain how cicadas differed from "true locusts." The most important difference from the human perspective is that locusts devour everything in sight (as so poetically described by Joel), whereas cicadas just make a lot of noise (a lot of noise!), mate, and die.

In his Meditations on the Tarot, Valentin Tomberg interprets the Moon card of the Tarot de Marseille as depicting a total eclipse of the Moon.

Claude Burdel, 1751

Tomberg explains this symbol thus:

Just as man's will to master Nature sets "materialistic intellectuality" in motion and prescribes it the "rules of the game" for its work, so is the moon of the eighteenth Arcanum on eclipse, i.e. it is only fringed by rays of reflected sunlight, whilst the surface of the moon itself reflects only the image of a human face in profile.

The crayfish, which can go only backward, represents the human mind stymied by this materialistic intellectuality, and the only way forward is for this crayfish to transform itself into an eagle.

The eighteenth Arcanum of the Tarot asks us: Do you want to choose the way of the eagle which rises above antinomies or the way of the crayfish which retreats before them until arriving at complete absurdity, i.e. at the scorpionic suicide of inteligence? This is the point -- i.e. the message to the human will -- of the eighteenth Major Arcanum of the Tarot.

Tomberg connects the crayfish with the scorpion, and it is from there but a short jump to connecting it with the scorpion-like apocalyptic "locusts" (inspired by Joel 2) that rise from the Abyss in Revelation 9. But further discussion of this will have to wait until I have completed my locust post.

The Wheel of Fortune: Visconti-Sforza and Tarot de Marseille

The oldest known Wheel of Fortune Tarot card is, unsurprisingly, also the closest to conventional, non-Tarot versions of that motif. Like Carmina Burana, it places Fortuna at the center of the wheel, has a dais and throne at the top, and labels the four figures with the same Latin mottos: I reign, I have reigned, I have no reign, I shall reign. Like the Miélot version, it portrays Fortuna as winged and blindfolded. It also features a milder version of the transformations seen in the Dürer version: While all four figures are basically human, the one ascending has small ass's ears, the one at the top has a larger pair, and the one descending has an ass's tail.

We now come to this version's own peculiarities. The figure under the wheel is an old man with a long, white beard, dressed in white rags. He is neither grasping the wheel nor even attempting to do so, nor is he being crushed by it. Rather, he is on his hands and knees, supporting the wheel on his back. One gets the impression that he is not part of the cycle -- that while the other three figures rise and fall, he remains where he is, supporting them all. This may be the meaning of his great age: that, unlike the others, he has been in his position since time immemorial.

The other three figures are all children with golden curls, differing only in the color of their clothing and the nature of their asinine features. (So again, this is clearly not a "life cycle" from childhood to old age.) The ascending child is dressed in green trimmed with white, perhaps symbolizing hope and inexperience, and has ass's ears. The one at the top also has ass's ears and is dressed in cloth of gold; he lacks the traditional crown and scepter but does appear to be holding an orb or globus cruciger in his right hand. (I can't make out what, if anything, is in his left.) The combination of gold, ass's ears, and royal status brings to mind the legend of King Midas. The descending child, sporting an ass's tail, is dressed in red trimmed with gold. These are autumnal colors, and in fact the whole color scheme suggests the cycle of the seasons -- but if the correspondence is intentional, we are left to wonder why Autumn is no older than Spring, and why Winter doesn't appear to be revolving on the wheel with the others.

What of Midas Junior there at the top of the wheel? Is he revolving? His similarity to the ascending and descending children suggests that he is part of the same cycle, but there is the problem of the platform or dais on which he is seated. (The Carmina Burana version raises the same question.) Is it attached to the wheel? If so, it is only by chance that it currently happens to be at the top. Rotate the Wheel 90 degrees, and there will be a dais and throne projecting from its side, while the new king, throneless, will have to content himself with sitting on the rim of the wheel itself, as in the Miélot and Dürer versions. But if the dais is not fixed to the wheel, it seems that the king could sit there indefinitely, unperturbed by the rotation of the wheel -- whereas the whole point of the traditional Wheel of Fortune motif is that everyone's station in life is unstable, liable to change at a moment's notice. Perhaps when the rising child reaches the throne, he will push its current occupant off, and back onto the wheel. Or perhaps only the children in red and green are revolving, and they visit the poor old man and the child king in turn as they do so.

*

In its earliest usage, the term rota fortunae referred to the zodiac, and with the Tarot of Marseille it resumes its character as a literal zodiac -- ζῳδιακός κύκλος, "cycle of little animals." The figures on the wheel are no longer human but have become creatures whose exact identity is not very clear, but which are traditionally identified as a dog, a sphinx, and a monkey. The clothes they are still wearing betray their origins as human-animal hybrids along the lines of those seen in the Dürer woodcut and the Visconti-Sforza card. (The monkey's flaring skirt, in particular, calls to mind the dress of its human counterpart on the Visconti-Sforza card.) Presumably repeated copyings have gradually distorted the figures to the point that they have entirely lost their human character.

The influence, more or less direct, of Dürer on this image would be hard to deny. The wheel is mounted on a stand, turned by a crank; there are only three figures on it, rather than the more conventional four; Fortuna herself is not depicted; and, unlike every other Wheel we have looked at save Dürer's only, it rotates counterclockwise, so that the ascending figure is on the right and the descending one on the left.

Another artist who seems to make his presence felt in this image is Hieronymus Bosch. Looking at the dog on the right side of the wheel, we notice a few strange things about it. In addition to its frock-like garment, it is wearing a collar -- as dogs generally do -- but, bizarrely, the collar is worn over the dog's ears, so that the ears protrude behind it. Another oddity is the tail, with a tuft of fur at the end, looking less like a dog's tail than a lion's (or, given the probable history of the image, an ass's). Where else can we find such a singular-looking dog?  In Bosch's painting The Conjurer, painted a century and a half before the first Tarot de Marseille.

In Bosch's painting, it is clear that the "ears" are behind the collar of the dog's garment because they belong to the garment itself rather than to the dog. The tail is tufted like a lion's, presumably because it has been shaved that way. A further "coincidence" can be seen in the hoop next to the dog, suggesting the Wheel. Some critics have even identified the other creature, the one in the conjurer's basket, as a monkey, but this is a mistake. The reappearance of this pair in the central panel of Bosch's St. Anthony Triptych leaves no room for doubt that it is a barn owl.

Of course, the fact that Bosch intended the creature in the basket to be an owl does not rule out its influence on the Tarot de Marseille. If modern art critics have sometimes mistaken it for a monkey, the cardmakers of Marseille could just as easily have done the same. (Remember that we are operating under the assumption that even manifest errors in the transmission of tradition are potentially inspired.) At the time the Tarot de Marseille was created, the St. Anthony Triptych was most likely in either Spain or Portugal, while at least one version of The Conjurer was likely in France, so it makes sense that the French cardmakers would have known only the latter work, with its ambiguous owl-monkey.

The origin of the sphinx at the top of the wheel is uncertain, but its crown and cape suggest that it is derived from the king typically depicted in this position, having become a quadruped under the influence of Dürer's ass. (The ass's tail could easily be misinterpreted as a lion's) The cape may also be a distortion of what was originally a throne, or perhaps a pair of wings. The sword it holds in its left hand is an innovation, with no precedents of which I am aware, though I would not be at all surprised to discover that some pre-Tarot Wheel of Fortune pictures show the king so armed. As in the Visconti-Sforza card and Carmina Burana, the figure at the top sits on a platform rather than on the wheel itself, so it is unclear whether or not it is revolving with the others. We might also note that this figure is not exactly a conventional sphinx, which should have a human face with the body (including forelimbs) of a lion. The figure on the Marseille card is able to hold a sword, which would not be possible if it had a lion's paws, and its face looks more like the monkey's than like any of the other human faces in the Tarot. Its blue color is also something of an enigma, but color schemes vary so much among different decks that it would be hard to draw any conclusions from it.

French authors generally understand the dog, sphinx, and monkey to be symbols of submission, accomplishment, and decadence, respectively. Valentin Tomberg, on the other hand, sees in them symbols of the various relationships which may hold between the human and animal elements in our nature: The dog "represents animality aspiring to union with humanity"; the sphinx, "animality and humanity united"; the monkey, "the process of the animalization of humanity" (Meditations on the Tarot, 10th letter). The sphinx is thus seen as representing the ideal state of affairs, to which we should aspire -- but we must not forget that it occupies that place on the wheel where Dürer saw fit to put a jackass. A sphinx is, after all, a monster, a grotesque, a hodgepodge of mismatched parts; and it appears rather more sinister than noble as portrayed on the Marseille card.

Taking Tomberg's interpretation as a starting point, we might see in the progression from dog to sphinx to monkey a progressively fine union of man and animal. In the dog we see animal as "man's best friend," man and animal as close companions but still physically distinct. In the sphinx, man and animal are combined in a single body, but each specific part of that body is either all-human or all-animal. In the monkey, the human and animal elements are blended so completely that no separation is possible; each and every part of its body is human-ish but not fully human. (Dürer's version of the Wheel could perhaps also be interpreted in terms of various combinations of spiritual "humanity" and biological "animality"; we might recall that St. Francis of Assisi was in the habit of calling his body "Brother Ass.")

Why do both Dürer and the Marseille cardmakers leave the bottom of the wheel, where the fully human figure ought to be, empty? Because there can be no humanity without some admixture of animality. A man without any animal nature at all is nothing but a ghost, and as such, invisible.