There is little doubt that choosing ‘Magic’ as the overall term to define one’s philosophical proposal, sounds immediately like a foolish idea. Nowadays, anything called ‘Magic’ has a cheap ring to it, bringing to mind the misuse of this word in TV series and perfume commercials, or the confused notion of witchcraft entertained by some teenage subcultures. Nonetheless, there are important elements to the term ‘Magic’ that perhaps no other word can convey in such an evocative form. Before starting our exploration of a system of reality that I wish to present as a possible alternative to that of Technic, we should begin by casting a closer look at the term that defines it. What does ‘magic’ stand for in the context of this volume? And how is its meaning, here, different from its general understanding?
Throughout Western history, magic has acted as the silent shadow of most hegemonic cultural forms, from philosophy to theology to modern science. Yet, any attempt to provide a complete and detailed history of magic is necessarily destined to fail. This is partly because magic doesn’t recognize ‘history’ as its own temporal category,1 and partly because this branch of practical knowledge has always veiled itself in mystery and secrecy – both on account of the peculiarity of its horizon, and due to its marginal place within society. Unsurprisingly, then, the prevailing Western understanding of magic throughout the centuries has been plagued by gross inaccuracies, that have at times entirely distorted not only the factual history, but also the meaning and the spirit of magic’s work. As it is usually presented today – most notably in films and literature – magic amounts to little more than a set of spectacular technical skills, reducible to the equivalent of as-yet undiscovered scientific advancements in the field of technology. Magic is thus considered as merely another, possibly more exotic way to exploit the world as a stockpiling of standing-reserves, which the magician is able to mobilize through his/her individual powers. As we shall see in the next and final chapter of this book, this understanding of magic is exactly opposite to that which characterized the late ancient practice of theurgy and, more generally, the tradition of ‘true magic’ spanning from late antiquity to the end of the Renaissance era.2 The present conception of magic is the shadow of its own time; like medieval ‘black magic’ was often presented as the demonic equivalent of then prevailing forms of orthodox Christian theology, magic today is seen as the phantasmagorical equivalent of the currently prevailing techno-scientific forms. And indeed, since its earliest definition as such, magic has been bound to be understood as the shadow of whatever society knows and calls its own.
The very origin of the word magic, points towards a form of ‘otherness’ that is constructed purely through a negative relation to what is already known and familiar. The first instance in which the word appears in its present meaning is in Greek language as Magike Techne, which refers to the art (techne) of the Persian Magi. In his Histories,3 Herodotus explains how the term ‘Magi’, originally the name of one of the six tribes of the Medes, had come to indicate the members of the priestly cast of the Zoroastrian religion throughout the Persian Empire. Perhaps few other cases of enmity are as notorious as that between the Greeks before Alexander, and Zoroastrian Persia at the time of the Magi. Even more than the barbarians to Rome, the Persian were truly, for the classical Greeks, their own troubling shadow. And if we consider how in non-modern societies, religion syntheses in ritualistic forms the specific ways in which a social group deals with the world – acting as a vessel for their cultural identity – we can understand why the Magi were considered by the Greeks to embody the most peculiar characters of their people. To the Greeks, the Magi represented that very ‘shadowy otherness’ that was the quintessence of the Persians and of their power. Yet at the same time, the otherness of the Persians was understood only in terms of a relative alterity to the Greeks’ own identity. Magike techne was literally the art of the Greeks’ own shadow, that is, the art of shadows themselves. For those who see themselves as external to it, magic appears, since the earliest use of the terms, as the embodiment of what can be defined only in relation to the identity of ‘our’ power and of ‘our normal’ way of dealing with things and with the world.
The notion of magic that is proposed in this volume goes against this conception, stretching from the times of Herodotus to this very day. When we talk of magic in this book, we don’t mean anything to do with a dark, exotic equivalent of the very same technical regime that rules over our present age. In fact, by this term we mean a reality-system that is fundamentally alternative to that of Technic: an alternative cosmology originating from an alternative cosmogonic force. A different reality, based on a different fundamental metaphysics – though still following the rules of metaphysics and of cosmogony. The specular opposite of Technic, rather than its shadow. Nonetheless, an aspect of the common notion of magic still colours this book. Magic has always been something disquieting to the hegemonic community of a certain age. Even in the case of our cosmogonic experiment, proposing a reality-system based on Magic means pushing forward a proposal that might seem troubling (if not downright ridiculous) to those who hold dear the cosmology derived from Technic’s principles. In this sense, the troubling otherness that has always characterized the usual understanding of ‘magic’ remains relevant also to our own interpretation of this term as the name of a cosmogonic project.
Yet, the relationship between Magic and Technic, isn’t just one of fundamental alterity. From a certain perspective, Magic can also be considered as a form of therapy to Technic’s brutal regime over that world, which it built in its own image. When we began looking at Technic, our earliest observations concerned the present paralysis of our ability to act and to imagine, and the crisis of our very sense of reality. To explain this condition, we borrowed the words of Ernesto de Martino, who defined such a state of crisis as a situation in which everything turns into everything and nothingness emerges. However, when we quoted de Martino we didn’t mention the original context of his original definition of a crisis of reality. For de Martino, this disintegration of reality, and particularly of the presence of the individual and of his/her world, is a recurrent state of ‘crisis’, that is, etymologically, a moment which calls for prompt judgement (krisis, from the Greek krinein, to judge) and intervention. The essence of magic, concludes de Martino, consists exactly in this form of intervention, aiming to restore the conditions in which both the individual and his/her world can regain their presence, and thus can continue in their mutually active and imaginative relationship.
Under certain circumstances, the loss of horizon undergone by presence reaches the point where it becomes an echo of the world, that is, one becomes possessed, prey to uncontrolled impulses. There is a dangerous ‘beyond’ to presence, an anguishing crumbling of its horizon in-the-making: correlatively, also the world enters continuous crises of horizon, and endlessly exceeds into such anguishing ‘beyond’. At its peak, this situation entails that every relationship between [individual] presence and the world becomes a source of risk, a loss of horizon … akin to the situation that forces a schizophrenic person to a state of statuary immobility and catatonic stupor. … Magic attempts to move back towards the top of this edge, while resolutely opposing this process of disintegration. Magic sets up a system of institutions through which this risk is signalled and fought against … so as to make possible a ransoming of presence. Thanks to this cultural moulding and to the creation of such institutions, the existential tragedy undergone by each person ceases to be isolated and unresolved; rather, it enters a tradition and becomes capable of using to its own advantage the experiences that such tradition preserves and hands down. 4
Shamans or magicians employ their magic powers with the primary aim of overcoming this state of crisis. While tracing back the symptoms of the malaise to their originating cause, they seek to offer an immediately workable alternative to the reality-conditions that produced them in the first place. In other words, a magician can be understood as a reality-therapist,5 acting not merely on the symptoms of an individual’s illness, but also on the reality-conditions that allowed the state of illness to take place. Similar to de Martino’s interpretation, this section of the book wishes to propose Magic not just as alternative to Technic, but specifically as that cosmogonic system that is capable of tackling therapeutically the state of annihilation in which Technic has reduced the contemporary individual, their world and their claim to a liveable reality. As we shall see in the following pages, Magic’s first principle can be traced back to that pain which we found at the bottom of Technic’s chain of emanations, and which in turn Magic assumes as the symptom of its own cosmogonic beginning.
In this sense Magic, as the name of our experimental cosmogonic architecture of reality, takes up another typical element of the mainstream understanding of the term. As it is usually connoted, magic has to do with that realm of forces that fall into the category of the mysterious and the invisible. Superficially, we could read this association just as an easy metaphor for that relatively ‘dark’ otherness that is moulded on the cast of the same: the mysterious and invisible forces that populate, say, Harry Potter’s world, as the weird equivalent of the microscopic forces of a scientist’s lab. But in fact, this element of mystery and invisibility is not lost to the understanding of the term ‘magic’ that is proposed by this book. As we saw in earlier pages, Technic’s founding movement consists in making a thing’s legitimate claim to existence entirely dependent on its detectability and classification by the system of seriality and by absolute language – to the point that a thing is liquefied into its very classification. Conversely, Magic’s cosmogonic process originates precisely from that dimension of existence which can never be reduced to any linguistic classification. In the perspective of Technic, we identified this dimension as that ‘something’ whose resistance to annihilation gave rise to the symptom of pain. Within the perspective of Magic, we shall define this dimension as that of the Ineffable.
Proposing Magic as a cosmogonic system that proceeds from the Ineffable, immediately positions our projects in the line of a very long tradition of magical thinking and practice, stretching into the mist of pre-classical antiquity. Although several forms of magic (let us think of the Kabbalah, for example), saw in the ‘word’ the prime object both of their practice and of cosmogony at large, we should not assume that their understanding of the term ‘word’ coincides with the common notion nowadays. In an age such as ours, governed as it is by the principle of total language, any semantic sign denotes merely a position in a series. Their function is allegorical, in that they are deemed capable of conveying precisely and entirely the object of their signification – which ultimately coincides with the position itself. This allegorical exhaustion and precision is a fundamental aspect of Technic’s cosmology, and it has seeped into our everyday experience since the times of modernity – or, to say it with the philosopher of science Alexander Koyré:6 since the passage from the world of the ‘more-or-less’ to the universe of ‘precision’. Conversely, the language of magic is that of symbols, where a symbol stands for a semiotic sign which in no way attempts to fully convey and exhaust the object of its signifi cation. As Henry Corbin, pointed out:
Every allegorical interpretation is harmless; the allegory is a sheathing, or, rather, a disguising, of something that is already known or knowable otherwise, while the appearance of an Image having the quality of a symbol is a primary phenomenon (Urphanomen), unconditional and irreducible, the appearance of something that cannot manifest itself otherwise to the world where we are.7
We shall soon look in further depth at the difference between the allegorical and the symbolic notion of language, particularly through their differentiation operated by Goethe. For now, let us limit ourselves to observe how the ‘word’, understood symbolically, is compatible with magic’s focus on the ineffable dimension of existence. This notion of words as symbols, and of magic as a theory and practice that deals with the ineffable, has informed virtually every instance of what we called ‘true magic’ – following Marsilio Ficino’s distinction – in the Mediterranean world and beyond. We can find it as a tradition running uninterrupted from the religion of the Old Kingdom Egypt, through Greek Orphism and Pythagoreanism, to Ramon Lull and the Islamic and Hebrew alchemists of his age, to the Neoplatonic circles of the Italian Renaissance, through the Iranian cultural Renaissance of the seventeenth century, all the way to the more recent magical theories of thinkers like Pavel Florensky, René Guénon aka ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥyá and Elemire Zolla.8 A number of references to this tradition will be made explicit in the following chapters, although the remainder of this volume doesn’t wish to be a scholarly recollection of past theories and writings on magic. The focus of what will follow is as experimental in its nature, as it is practical in its aims. By suggesting a cosmologic architecture built according to the form of Magic, instead than to that of Technic, we would like to show how it is possible (if not opportune, or even necessary) to think of reality-systems that are alternative to the current system of unreality, whose metaphysical nihilism we call today ‘our world’.
Our examination of the structures and workings of Magic’s cosmogony, will follow a similar path to that employed during our discussion of Technic in the previous chapter. Magic’s internal architecture will be divided into five hypostatic levels, each acting as a principle of Magic’s cosmogony and a dimension of its cosmology – that is, of Magic’s accomplished reality-system. We shall proceed from the first principle of ‘The Ineffable as Life’, to the second hypostasis ‘Person’, the third ‘Symbol’, the fourth ‘Meaning’ and finally the fifth hypostasis ‘Paradox’, where the original force of the first principle is exhausted or, as we shall see, where it is resolved and relaunched. As with Technic, each hypostatic level will be paired up with an archetypal incarnation, so that the first hypostasis will have the ‘Miracle’ as its archetypal incarnation, the second will have ‘Apollo and the Imam’, the third the ‘Mythologem’, the fourth the ‘Centre’ and the fifth the ‘Self’. As shown in the diagram that accompanies and precedes this text, Magic’s hypostases are placed in exact specular opposition to those of Technic. Equally, the lower and upper limits that shape and define the cosmogonic architecture of Magic, are in specular opposition to those of Technic, as it is evident in their very definitions as ‘Double negation’ (opposed to Technic’s ‘Double affirmation’) and ‘Deus absconditus’ (opposed to Technic’s ‘Ego absconditus’).
First hypostasis: The ineffable as life
At the end of the chain of emanations that constitutes Technic’s cosmologic architecture, we encountered ‘something’, an obstacle to the unfolding of the principle of absolute language. That something, as we saw, obstinately refused to be translated into any form of grammatical measure, or to be reduced to an instrument in a serial chain of production.9 With an acrobatic twist, which we defined as ‘resolution through simulation’, we witnessed how Technic attempted to bypass this obstacle by turning it into an opportunity for the renewal of its own cosmogonic process. Like the ‘enemy’ in Carl Schmitt’s antagonistic conception of politics,10 this irreducible obstacle was integrated by Technic as the hostile ‘other’, which implicitly justifies Technic’s regime and its endless war on the world.
In the context of Magic’s alternative reality-system, we encounter again this ‘something’ – though this time under a new light and in a completely different perspective. No longer a marginal residue or a scapegoat, it is here suddenly ennobled to the position of first principle – and first hypostasis – of Magic’s entire reality-system. As such, that stubborn obstacle to Technic deserves now a new and positive name – a name that is capable of presenting it in its productive aspect. But even this seemingly basic task is made extremely difficult by the very nature of the ‘thing-beyond-thingness’ in question. As the unbreakable residue of any attempt at linguistic translation, this ‘thing’ still escapes any form of definition that attempts to capture its essence. If we still wish to somehow define it, we can only do so negatively, while remaining mindful to the insufficiency of any definition, however negative. We can name it only as ‘the ineffable’ – that which cannot be captured by language in any form. However, this humbly negative definition should not lead us to think that negation is the only productive mode of the ineffable. While unavailable to take part as a tidy cog in the great machinery of absolute language, the ineffable is still capable of acting productively as the emanating centre of Magic’s alternative reality-system.
Before considering its productive dimension – that is, as a first principle emanating a new cosmogonic chain – we shall observe the ineffable in its own right, as it stands in itself. Indeed, this exploration will be plagued by the impossibility of exhaustively describing and categorizing its object. But even within such constraints, we can manage to approach the ineffable as it is ‘in itself’ by moving towards its location within our world. What is invisible to the cartographer might be revealed to the traveller. The path towards the ineffable will be a form of walking while asking questions, in a typically philosophical fashion. This won’t be just a general, abstract questioning, though. Since we are at the level of the very ground on which an entire reality-system is built, we shall address our questions to the most fundamental level of enquiry. Here, in this most philosophical of tasks, we can start by seeking help from what would be commonly considered as a religious, if not downright mythological, text: the story of Indra’s apprenticeship with Prajapati, as recounted in the Chandogya Upanishad, one of the oldest in the Upanishadic section of the Vedas.
‘When someone discovers that atman (true self) and perceives it, he obtains all the worlds, and all his desires are fulfilled,’ so said Prajapati.
Both the gods and the demons became aware of this and, and each talked it over: ‘Come, let’s discover that atman by discovering which one obtains all the worlds.’ … Then Indra set out from among the gods, and Virocana, from among the demons. … The two arrived in the presence of Prajapati carrying firewood in their hands. They lived the life of celibate students for thirty-two years. Then Prajapati asked them: ‘Why have you lived here? What do you want?’11
So the story begins, proceeding to cover a temporal arch of 101 years, during which Indra is repeatedly given false answers by his teacher Prajapati over the nature of this atman which, alone, constitutes the true self of a person and the key to obtaining ‘all the worlds’. Initially, Prajapati tries to trick Indra into believing that his true self was ‘the one that’s seen here in the water and here in a mirror’ that is the physical body. Then, following Indra’s relentless questioning, Prajapati proposes alternative, fraudulent definitions of the atman as ‘the one that goes happily about in a dream’, then again as the state of one who is ‘fast asleep, totally collected and serene and sees no dreams’. Finally, over a century after Indra’s initial attempt at learning the true nature of the atman, that is of the true self, Prajapati agrees to provide a final, truthful answer.
The one who is aware: ‘Let me smell this’ – that is the atman; the faculty of smell enables him to smell. The one who is aware: ‘let me say this’ – that is the atman; the faculty of speech enables him to speak. The one who is aware: ‘Let me listen to this’ – that is the atman; the faculty of hearing enables him to hear. The one who is aware: ‘Let me think about this’ – that is the atman; the mind is his divine faculty of sight. This very atman rejoices as it perceives with his mind, with that divine sight, these objects of desire found in the world of brahman.12
There have been many commentaries on this section of the Upanishad over the course of the millennia – we must not forget that these lines date back to a time between the eighth and the sixth centuries BCE. Without delving too deep into the various interpretations of this story, we can understand, however superficially, the atman to be somehow ‘located’ behind any form of individual subjectivity that depends on a physical, sensorial, linguistic and even rational dimension. The atman – the kernel of one’s self which truly is, which truly exists in itself – stands before all possibilities of objectification. When I call myself ‘I’, it is not ‘I’, but something before my ‘I’ that does so. If I think of myself, it is not my thinking but something before that thinking – something behind and beyond it – that does so. That is the atman, at once the greatest secret and the most blatant reality. That is, according to Prajapati and to a great part of the religious and philosophical schools of Hinduism, your true self.13
Thus, we find a kernel of ineffability at the heart of our own individual existence; an undetectable yet powerful ‘thing-beyond-thingness’, constituting the very existence which ultimately animates every aspect of our life. But should we limit the localization of the ineffable to the realm of our individual selves? Looking at the world, we can attempt to embark on a similar questioning walk as that heroically undertaken by Indra. What is the heart of a thing, of everything? Is it its name, its qualities, its physical body? Once again, if we strip a thing of all its disposable dimensions, we reach a state of ineffability. It is as if we could detect – albeit only intuitively, as words eventually fail us – at the very heart of existence, something ineffable that does the job of ‘being that thing’; the receptacle of each and every name, itself standing before names. It is as if, at the centre of every existing thing, there was an atman of sorts, undetectable by our sensorial and rational apparatus, yet detectable more negativo, through a relentless questioning that seeps through the cracks of every ontological definition. Existence cannot be reduced to any of its dimensions, not even to the mere sum of its dimensions – yet, somehow existents still exist! The manifest mystery of existence, glares like a blinding light within each and every existent.
One particular strand of Hindu theology and philosophy, the so-called Advaita (non-dualistic, or monistic) Vedanta14 school proceeded to identify the atman, as the ultimate being of a person, with the brahman, as the ultimate existing dimension of the entire world. According to thinkers in the lineage of the eighth–ninth-century philosopher and theologian Adi Shankara,15 we can’t truly speak of anything actually existing, unless we refer to the binomial atman/brahman, where the two terms are in fact to be understood as one undividable unit. For Shankara and his followers, only the atman/brahman truly exists, while the appearances of individual existents – whether material or immaterial – are but illusions (maya) produced by ignorance (avidya). Such ultimate reality escapes all attempts at linguistic definition, while at the same time constituting the necessary substance sustaining all appearing existents, including those in the field of language. The non-dualistic schools thus found an ineffable dimension at the heart of existence, to the point of denying the legitimacy of any other form of existence but that which is ineffable.
If we were to follow the strict monism of Advaita Vedanta, however, we would encounter serious troubles in our attempt at creating a new reality-system. On the basis of our initial definition of reality as that weave of existence and essence capable to act as background through which the world emerges, such absolute monism wouldn’t allow for any reality as such to take place. If existence is reduced purely to its ineffable dimension, while all that falls within language constitutes maya and avidya, the end result is, once again, a collapse of the background of reality onto the stage of the world. The seamless, all-encompassing unity of existence proposed by a strictly monist vision, perversely mimics the annihilating void produced by the system of Technic. In both cases, the room required by reality – the however minimal distance and difference between essence and existence – is dramatically lacking. For this reason, we will have to look for an alternative and more moderate vision, to be able to articulate our proposal of an alternative reality-system stemming from the first principle of the ineffable.
To this aim, we shall retain some of the crucial intuitions of the Vedantic approach while moving westwards in our enquiry. Geographically, this will entail moving from beyond the easternmost borders of the Hellenized world, to its westernmost edges: from Shankara’s ninth-century India, to the twelfth–thirteenth-century Andalusia of the great Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi – one of the sharpest metaphysical minds crowning the lineage of European philosophy. This movement from India to Islamic Andalusia shouldn’t be too surprising. To a certain extent, it is a centuries-old movement, akin to those attempted by Plato in his Timaeus (at a time when Egypt was to Greece, the equivalent of what India constituted to the post-classical West16 ) or by Avicenna and Suhrawardi in their respective formulations of a project of ‘oriental philosophy’, or again in Mulla Sadra’s synthesis of distant philosophical traditions. As argued in recent decades by the Japanese philosopher and historian of religions Toshihiko Izutsu,17 as well as by thinkers in the Perennialist tradition,18 it is possible to trace an uninterrupted meta-philosophical debate on the metaphysics of the ineffable, that crosses the geopolitical barriers between the East and the West, while orbiting around the area of the Mediterranean Sea as its symbolic ‘centre’.
Ibn Arabi’s sophisticated philosophical system might aid us to counteract some of the most problematic aspects of Vedanta philosophy, within the framework of the present attempt at devising an alternative reality-system to that imposed by Technic. In his major work Fusus al-Hikam (The Ringstones of Wisdom),19 Ibn Arabi summarizes the main tenets of his metaphysical vision,20 centred around the notion of the Absolute (al-Haqq) as the origin of the chain of emanations that is ultimately responsible for the existence and structure of the world. According to the great Sufi thinker, we can understand the innermost architecture of reality as a form of self-manifestation (tajalli) of the principle of the Absolute through a fivefold series of levels (hadrah), each acting as a specific ontological level (or hypostasis) of reality. Firstly, the ineffable Absolute stands in its utterly mysterious, non-manifest state. This most profound of the levels of reality, Ibn Arabi remarks, is beyond any possible human attempt at understanding, however intuitive or mystical it may be. The ultimate source of reality, Ibn Arabi says, is so completely ineffable, to transcend even the human notion of transcendence. It is existence beyond existence, in a state of non-tajalli. Yet, he continues, it is exactly this unfathomably transcendent dimension of being, that constitutes the innermost kernel of the existence of every single thing in the world – either material or immaterial. At a second stage, the ineffable Absolute manifests itself, however partially, as ‘something’ understandable by humans – though with great mystical effort – only in the form of a divinity. Here begins the tajalli proper. In accordance to his faith, this stage of emanation or self-manifestation of the absolute is described by Ibn Arabi with the name of Allah. From a non-confessional perspective, we can rename this stage as that in which the ineffable mystery of existence presents itself in the challenging yet approachable form of ‘Being’. Interestingly, we can note in passing how for one of the highest theologians of Islam, the ineffable Absolute precedes ontologically even the figure of the Godhead. In the following stage of his self-manifestation, the Absolute takes on the form of the Lord, as it is usually understood by most religious people, regardless of their specific faith. In the two final stages of tajalli, the Absolute manifests itself first as the Divine Names (permanent archetypes not too dissimilar to Platonic ideas, in their function as universal models of individual things, though infinite in number inasmuch as each possible existent derives from a unique Name), and finally as the plethora of concrete particulars that populate the sensible world and ultimately make up the ‘world’ as such.
Looking at the philosophy of Ibn Arabi allows us to glimpse at a nuanced structure of reality that is capable of keeping together, however problematically, a dimension of pure ineffability and one open to the play of language. In Ibn Arabi’s vision,21 the relationship between the ineffable Absolute and the world of linguistically defined things is not merely one-way, as it is typically the case in strictly monistic systems. The Absolute and the world are bound to each other in an endless process of reciprocal ‘constriction’ (taskhir): just as the world is entirely dependent on the Absolute in terms of its existence (of which the Absolute is the ultimate source and ground), so the Absolute, via the permanent archetypes of its Divine Names, depends on the world for its self-manifestation. Attempting once again to translate Ibn Arabi’s theosophical language (as in, at once theological and philosophical) into more secular Western terms, we can say that the relationship between existence (as the limit-concept verging towards the ineffable Absolute) and essence (as the limit-concept verging towards pure language) is marked by a state of reciprocity. This is a theme of great importance in Ibn Arabi’s thought (and likewise, in Magic), returning also in his claim that the correct intellectual attitude towards both God and the world, must be marked by the coexistence of tanzih,22 the ineffable and secret dimension in which everything is One, and tashbih,23 the empirically and rationally approachable dimension in which each concrete particular retains its linguistic individuality. To explain the importance of the coexistence of tanzih and tashbih, of ineffable unity and linguistic plurality, Ibn Arabi contrasts the teaching of Mohammed with those of Noah, on the one hand, and of the idolaters on the other. Noah, in chastising the idolaters in the name of the absolute unity of the divine, placed all the weight of divinity on the principle of tanzih, while discounting the tashbih as a crass mistake. Conversely, the idolaters refused the idea of an unnameable and invisible Absolute principle running through existence, thus rejecting the tanzih in favour of a pure tashbih. According to Ibn Arabi, both Noah and the idolaters were right in a way, and wrong in another. They were right to find divinity respectively in the ineffable and in the linguistically definable realm, yet they were wrong to pick only one dimension while rejecting the other. Who finally managed to achieve this combination, this coincidence of opposites (to use a standard esoteric parlance) was Mohammed, who explained the world, as a self-manifestation of God, at once as tanzih and tashbih, at once hidden and manifest, at once interior (batin) and exterior (zahir). For Ibn Arabi, Mohammed represents the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) exactly because he hosts within himself the simultaneous presence of both dimensions.
Unlike Adi Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta, Ibn Arabi doesn’t negate the legitimate existence of the linguistic dimension of the world, but he envisions a coexistence between language and ineffability. Coexistence, yes, though hierarchically ordered. As with the system of Magic that is currently being proposed, Ibn Arabi considers the relative independence of the world of language from its ineffable origin, to be understood in terms of a hierarchically infe rior position. Both Ibn Arabi and the reality-system of Magic propose the ineffable (in Ibn Arabi’s parlance, the ineffable Absolute, al-Haqq) as the ultimate source from which language (in Ibn Arabi’s vision, both the Divine Names, as universal forms of the possible, and the world of concrete particulars that derives from them) gains the necessary supply of existence to assert its own, relatively separate presence. Precisely, while the Ineffable’s claim to existence can be absolute, that of language only reaches the level of ‘presence’. However, as it shall become apparent in the following hypostases, while Ibn Arabi insists on the utter ontological dependence of language on ineffability, in the present proposal for an alternative reality-system built around Magic, this relationship shall be played more loosely.
Before proceeding to consider an archetypal ‘incarnation’ of our notion of the ineffable, let us cast a final glance at another thinker, who could help us to qualify the ineffable as a first principle in a cosmogonic chain of emanations. In particular, we will see with his aid how the ineffable, as life, constitutes a dimension that is internal to the principle of existence. Moving again forward chronologically, while moving back geographically to the East, we shall seek inspiration from the writings of one of the greatest philosophers and theologians of Shia Islam: the seventeenth-century Persian thinker Mulla Sadra. Writing in a period of decline of the tradition of Islamic philosophy, Mulla Sadra aimed to salvage metaphysical speculations from their state of apparent irrelevance, stuck as they were in the dogmatism of academic debates. Crucial to Mulla Sadra’s project was the desire to present philosophy as a tool for the redemption of human life on Earth24 – and to this aim, he didn’t hesitate to incorporate within his system elements from intellectual traditions that were culturally and geographically distant from his own.
Mulla Sadra is credited by contemporary scholars25 as one of the earliest proponents of existentialism, though we should understand this term differently from its current meaning in the West. Sadra’s existentialism is of a metaphysical nature, in that he preached the fundamental primacy of existence over essence – while not negating the legitimacy of the latter. Not unlike the claim from which this book departed, Sadra built his system partly as a response to what he perceived as a crisis of the notion of existence in the Islamic world of his age. According to Sadra, the principle of essence had seemingly annihilated the space for existence, thus reducing the philosophical debate to a remastication of trite dogmatic positions in adherence to the dictates of Kalam, and to a literal interpretation of the sacred texts.
Conversely, within Mulla Sadra’s cosmologic system, existence is the first and foremost principle from which everything else originates. In this sense, Sadra creates an equivalence between existence and God, in that we can consider pure existence as God, and God as pure existence. It is difficult to miss the subtle influence that the great Iranian thinker received – wittingly or unwittingly – from the strains of Indian philosophy in the Upanishadic tradition. However, differently from monistic schools such as the Advaita Vedanta, Sadra is careful not to dismiss essential differences as mere illusion. Although everything is fundamentally made of existence (which in itself is one and undifferentiated), there are still real differences between individual things – differences that can be appreciated and described both sensorially and conceptually, that is linguistically. But how are we to understand the relationship between undifferentiated existence, and linguistic differentiations? How can it be that all things are at the same time ineffably one, and linguistically many? Mulla Sadra answers this question with certainty: differences between things should be considered as functions of the varying intensity with which existence shines through each of them.26 Borrowing a metaphor that was dear also to the Sufis, we could say that the realm of essence is like a slate of glass (though this glass should be imagined at a near-liquid state) varying in colour and thickness at different points. As the light of existence traverses it, individual things appear as the catalogue of detectable modulations in the colour and intensity of the light. Although the boundaries between individual things are somewhat fuzzy, it is possible to appreciate the difference between various modulations of the light, as functions of the varying intensity and colour taken on by the first emanating principle. Yet, all things are at the same time in perfect seamless unity with each other, inasmuch as they are all made of one and the same light, that is, of emanated existence. A similar point was presented more recently in a particularly evocative form, by nineteenth–twentieth-century Algerian Sufi thinker Sheikh Ahmed Ben Mustafa Ben Alliwa. According to Sheikh Ben Alliwa, we can understand this relationship between unity and multiplicity, or existence and essence, as that between the ink and the letters that it goes to compose on a page.
In truth, letters are symbols of the ink, because there are no letters outside of the ink. Their non-manifestation is in the mystery of the ink, and their manifestation is ultimately relying on the ink. They are its determinations and its stages of actualisation, and truly there is nothing but the ink – understand this symbol! And yet, letters are different from the ink, and the ink is different from the letters. Because the ink existed before the letters came to being, and it will still exist when the letters will have vanished. … A letter neither adds nor takes anything away from the ink, but it manifests through distinctions that which in itself is integral. The ink is not changed by the presence of the letter. … You must understand that, for those who understand, there is no existence outside of the existence of the ink. Wherever there is a letter, the ink is not separated from it – understand these parables!27
Mulla Sadra’s reality thus seemingly explodes over myriad different grades, according to the ever-finer differences in the intensity of existence (tashkik al-wujud , ‘gradation of existence’) that constitute the luminous continuum of the world.28 The world is composed both of completely ineffable dimensions of extremely intense existence, and linguistically approachable dimensions of existence at a lower grade of intensity. But Mulla Sadra didn’t stop here. Considering that existence is ontologically superior to essence and that essential differences are just measures of the varying intensity of existence, Mulla Sadra proceeded to claim the instability and temporality of essences themselves. His claim was starkly opposed to the position of most of his contemporaries who, following Aristotle, saw essence and substance as permanent and solid categories. Conversely, Mulla Sadra envisioned a state of continuous ‘substantial motion’: everything in the universe, every single thing and category, undergoes a process of continuous transformation, depending on the varying ‘penetration of being’ (sarayan al-wujud) that endows every concrete entity with its own share of being. Such transformation doesn’t only affect the accidental qualities of a thing, but also its very substance and essence. The light that traverses the slate of glass liquefies it with its heat, and in turn the glass moves and recombines itself endlessly, thus changing the way in which each portion filters the light and allows it to shine through. Language has a legitimate place in the cosmology, but it is one of subjection and dependence on the ineffable.
Mulla Sadra’s complex system of ever-changing essences and countless gradations of existence, allows us to consider a particular place that ineffability can occupy within a cosmological architecture. As we saw earlier, Advaita Vedanta considered the ineffable atman/brahman as the metaphysical equivalent of a tyrannical autocrat, who clears the stage of any possible competitors by throwing them into the Tartar of ‘illusion’. Conversely, Ibn Arabi proposed the permanent archetypes of the Divine Names as dependent though relatively separate categories, capable of adding a linguistic dimension to the ineffability of the Absolute. A combination of these two approaches and a resolution of their apparent contradictions was attempted by a near-contemporary of Mulla Sadra, the Indian Mughal prince Darah Shikoh. In his 1654 book, evocatively titled Majma ul-Bahrain (The Mingling of the Two Oceans),29 Darah Shikoh tried to tame the Vedantic message in favour of an interpretation that found in Sufism its centre of gravity. However, Darah Shikoh’s heroic attempt at a mystical unification of seemingly distant doctrines relied more on a skilful game of interpretation than on the creation of a metaphysical system capable of overcoming the difficulties that are peculiar to each tradition. Unlike his princely near-contemporary, Mulla Sadra intervened exactly on this level, combining the Sufism of Ibn Arabi with a number of other influences, through the creation of a new metaphysical architecture and, thus, of a new possibility of reality. In Mulla Sadra’s system, existence and essence coexist as limit-concepts along the same continuum: the former tending towards perfect unity and ineffability (the point at which God hides itself from the searching eyes of dogmatic theologians and of logical enquirers), and the latter towards the linguistically clear but fundamentally opaque field of precise formal cataloguing. Mulla Sadra’s system thus privileges continuity between opposite poles, rather than a rupture between them or a proliferation of different fundamental principles within one system.
We can now attempt to unify elements from the various metaphysical approaches outlined above, into our own vision of the principle of the ineffable, not only as a first cosmogonic principle, but also as ‘life’. What do we mean by ‘the ineffable as life’? Defining as such the first principle of Magic’s cosmogony and cosmology, intends to present Magic’s reality as a continuum between the two poles of ineffability and language, existence and essence, where the former pole is understandable as akin to our common notion of ‘life’, and the former as close to our common notion of ‘objecthood’. Every single thing that exists, whether material of immaterial, contains both these aspects: a living dimension of ineffable existence, and an object-like dimension that is susceptible to linguistic analysis. In this sense, we can say that every existent is at the same time animated, inasmuch as it is traversed by a dimension of ineffable life, and inanimate, as it also carries to a greater or lesser extent a dimension that is reducible to linguistic categories. Things may differ from each other in terms of the proportions of ineffability and language that compose them. For example, existents such as monetary units in the current financial structure of the economy, might strike us as almost entirely opaque objects, whose linguistic dimension appears to smother any glimmer of ineffability that nonetheless necessarily traverses it. On the opposite hand, as we will see in the next hypostases, we have other existents whose object-like texture is so thin and transparent to the ineffable that it is almost imperceptible. In any case, this living dimension that traverses and sustains the entire catalogue of existents, runs ontologically uninterrupted through all things, thus providing a level in which they can be said to all be one and the same ‘thing-beyond-thingness’. Inasmuch as it is ineffably existing, every existent is alive and truly one with all others, while in terms of their varying essences as this or that specific object, every existent negotiates its own identity and difference from the others on the basis of a historically determined linguistic syntax. This perspective proposes a sort of two-level animism, so to say – in which everything is at once partly alive and partly dead, as Object Oriented Ontology has also recently claimed30 – but one in which the ineffable, and thus life, retains its prime and hierarchically superior position to all other forms in which the existent can be considered.
Before closing this section on the first hypostasis in Magic’s cosmogonic chain, let us consider what we called an ‘archetypal incarnation’ of the ineffable, as we did for the five hypostases in our analysis of Technic’s cosmology. The first time we encountered the ineffable in Technic’s chain of emanations, it was as the painful limit that gave rise to the archetypal incarnation of the notion of ‘possibility’. Here, in a specular opposite position to Technic’s last hypostasis, we find it again represented by an archetypal incarnation that has something to do with possibility: the miracle. While Technic’s notion of possibility had to do with the attempt to restart the chain by a frantic acti vity of ‘resolution through simulation’, the possibility of a miracle here assumes primarily a contemplative aspect.
When talking of miracles, we usually refer to events that seem to break from the normal course of ‘natural’ events. Even the nineteenth-century English mathematician, Charles Babbage, in his defence of miracles against Hume, referred to miracles as apparently aberrant occurrences within God’s world-making ‘calculation’.31 According to Babbage, miracles are calculated occurrences like any other, appearing strange to us humans only because of our ignorance over the entirety of God’s universal equation. Miracles have maintained this sort of colouring also in our contemporary parlance. Typically, they indicate occurrences in the field of the sensible that do not have in themselves anything exceptional, apart from their apparent misplacement in what we understand as the ‘natural’ order of things.
If we wish to look at miracles as the ineffable’s archetypal incarnation, we have to abandon such common understanding of the term. If the metaphysics of the ‘ineffable as life’ is built around our epistemological limits, then the miraculous also has to do with such limits – namely, with their loosening. It would otherwise be impossible to talk about an incarnation of the ineffable: by definition, the ineffable in its purest form transcends any possibility of incarnation – and at this stage we are indeed considering it in such an absolute state. So, if we want to consider what the ineffable as life might ‘look like’ – and in this, we shall claim, consists the essence of a miracle – we have to somehow distance ourselves from it. We have to place the ineffable at a however minimal distance, form which the epistemological limits that it imposes on our understanding are slightly loosened. The question at this point is what the ineffable might look like, to the gaze that is cast back upon it by the emanations that it pours out of itself.
Seeking an answer to this question, we will have to continue our intellectual journey, this time far to the northwest of Iran, where we left it with Mullah Sadra. We shall go to nineteenth-century Germany, more precisely to 1844 Berlin, the year of publication of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own. Max Stirner, the first individualist anarchist philosopher and the object of Karl Marx’s rivalry, had developed his ideas through an intellectual path that combined studies in philosophy and in theology. It shouldn’t seem inappropriate, then, that to appreciate his contribution to our analysis of miracles in the context of Magic’s cosmology, we shall introduce him with the words as ninth-century Neoplatonist negative-theologian John Scotus Eriugena, from his Periphyseon (The Division of Nature)32 : ‘We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is, because He is not anything [i.e. not any created thing]. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.’ As if replying to statements of this kind, the fiercely atheistic Max Stirner claims: ‘They say of God, “names name thee not”. That holds good of me: no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me; they are only names.’33 And then he continues, in mystical polemic against any attempt to tame the ineffable: ‘To step out beyond it [i.e. the domain of religion] leads into the unspeakable. For me paltry language has no word, and “the Word”, the Logos, is to me a “mere word”.’34 Max Stirner’s entire work could be read as the philosophical account of a miraculous experience, in which the author describes – with a fiery and passionate language reminiscent of certain examples of Sufi ‘drunkenness’ – the sudden revelation of his own ineffable dimension (what Stirner calls the irreducible ‘Unique One’, Der Einzige) to his own linguistic dimension (i.e. the ‘I’, as vulnerable to linguistic and societal classifications).
As this miracle takes place, the linguistic dimension appears to enter a state of extreme fragility, and it seemingly disintegrates. On the one hand, my own linguistically definable dimension stinks of that repressive idolatry of concepts which is imposed over it by society. Society calls me ‘man’, yet every description with which they want me to identify, is but an annihilating cage where I am forced to give up myself. Yet on the other hand, if my truest part is this ineffable dimension that resists any form of description and classification, this seems to make me more of a ‘nothing’ than a ‘something’. Am I really nothing, then? At this point, Stirner reacts to what Ibn Arabi called the ‘metaphysical perplexity’ (hayrah) that accompanies every miraculous experience. He shakes himself out of the terrified stupor of recognizing an abyss of ineffability within himself, by reclaiming to that very abyss the ultimate productive power: ‘I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing [schopftrische Niclzts], the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.’35 With this twist, Stirner implicitly suggests an ontological hierarchy between the first, ineffable principle, and all the linguistic categories that it might pour out of itself. This becomes even more apparent when Stirner describes the particular relationship that he envisages as taking place between the Unique One and the linguistic categories through which s/he necessarily has to navigate society. As we know it, society is essentially – or in the case of Technic, exclusively – composed of linguistic categories, which, as Stirner vehemently points out, are typically waved by the ruling power of the time as ‘spooks’ to whom the individual should submit completely. Yet, it would be unthinkable to live in society while giving up language in its entirety. So, how can we think of our social life after a miraculous experience of unveiling of the ineffable? Stirner has a clear take on this issue:
If the point is to have myself understood and to make communications, then assuredly I can make use only of human means, which are at my command because I am at the same time man. And really, I have thoughts only as man; as I, I am at the same time thoughtless. He who cannot get rid of a thought is so far only man, is a thrall of language, this human institution, this treasury of human thoughts. Language or ‘t he word’ tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas. Just observe yourself in the act of reflection, right now, and you will find how you make progress only by becoming thoughtless and speechless every moment. You are not thoughtless and speechless merely in (say) sleep, but even in the deepest reflection; yes, precisely then most so. And only by this thoughtlessness, this unrecognized ‘freedom of thought’ or freedom from the thought, are you your own. Only from it do you arrive at putting language to use as your property.36
With a further step in the progression of his argument, Stirner proposes to turn the relationship between the ineffable and language into one of property. The ineffable Unique One maintains its ontological primacy and independence, while reducing language into a vessel through which it can – however partially – manifest itself in everyday social life. The relationship between the ineffable as life, and all that falls under the capture of language – and indeed, language itself – is a relationship of property, since the legitimacy of linguistic categories (such as social institutions) is measured against its utility in terms of the self-manifestation of the ineffable. Needless to say, this is a very different relationship to the one we saw in the cosmology of Technic, where every residue of existence was reduced to its function as an activator of linguistic positions.
The experience of the miraculous thus inaugurates the ‘discovery’ of the ineffable by ourselves as linguistic entities. In doing so, it also begins to transmit the rhythm which the ineffable imposes over the realm of language. Moving on to the next hypostasis in Magic’s cosmogonic chain of emanations, we shall see how this rhythm goes on to profoundly influence every single aspect of reality, from its epistemological to its ethical dimensions.
The first principle of the ineffable as life emanates the second hypostasis in Magic’s cosmogonic chain: the person. This is the first instance of the ineffable dimension of existence, pouring out of itself a linguistic entity. Until this point, language existed only potentially within the ineffable – here, for the first time, the ineffable speaks. The unspeakable speaks, while remaining unspeakable.37 By speaking, ineffable life creates a distance from itself. What used to be the absolute localization of an ineffable ‘here’, becomes the first displacement of a ‘there’ that can be grasped linguistically.38 The ineffable speaks, and the first word that it utters is ‘this’ – the linguistic edge of its first distance. In our own individual experience, we hear the ineffable dimension pronouncing such original words as ‘I’ – but we shouldn’t think that we are now entering a ‘psychological’ phase in Magic’s cosmogony. We remain firmly grounded on a metaphysical and cosmological level – though a form of metaphysics whose roots are entangled with those of epistemology.
In the Vedas, this original word is described as Ka (who). Ka is the first name through which the original god Prajapati first recognizes himself, thus creating a distinction within himself – him, who was the origin of everything, who was everything and who contained everything in a state of perfect unity.
In the beginning, Prajapati didn’t know who he was. Only when the gods issued from him, when they took on their qualities, their profiles, when Prajapati himself had seared their shapes, forgetting none, sovereignty and splendour included, only then did the question present itself. Indra had just killed Vrta. He was still shaken by the terror of it, but he knew he was sovereign of the gods. He came to Prajapati and said: ‘Make me what you are, make me great.’ Prajapati answered: ‘Then who, ka, am I?’ ‘Exactly what you just said,’ said Indra. In that moment Prajapati became Ka. In that moment he understood, understood it all. He would never know the joys of limitation, the repose in a straightforward name. Even when they had recomposed him, in the ten thousand, eight hundred bricks of the altar of fire, he would always be a shape shot through by the shapeless.39
At this stage in the chain of emanations, we witness a double movement, at once ontological and epistemological. Ontologically, the ineffable pours out of itself the first word, ‘this’ (or ‘I’), and then retreats into itself. The relationship between the ineffable and its first word remains asymmetrical: the former can utter the name of the latter, but not vice versa.40 At the same time, we have an opposite epistemological movement, as the first word – the first linguistically defined entity, ‘this’ or ‘I’ – looks back at its own ineffable source and then looks again at itself. This is a continuation of the experience of the miraculous, once the ‘I’ has acquired sufficient metaphysical stability to be able to look back at itself. But if ‘this’ or ‘I’ is the name issued by the ineffable, how is this new entity supposed to call itself? How is it to understand its own position and role in Magic’s cosmos?
When the ‘I’ looks back towards the ineffable life that originally uttered it, and then looks again at itself as a linguistic entity, the only way in which it can define its own position, is as a ‘person’. This term might seem misleading at first, since in our common parlance – though with notable philosophical exceptions41 – a person is, by definition a human. Yet, in the perspective of Magic’s cosmology the term ‘person’ has little to it that is specifically human. Every non-human ‘this’, like every human ‘I’, is merely the first instance of a linguistic ground to which attributes and properties can be conceptually attributed, and, whether attached to humans or non-humans, it is equally suitable to enable the emergence of a ‘person’. Drawing on its Latin etymology, per-sonar, a ‘person’ is just the first point through which the ineffable resounds. A person is defined as such, exactly on the basis of its ability to be traversed by the light or sound of the ineffable dimension of existence – that is, by life. By understanding itself as a person, the ‘I’ acknowledges its own proper position within Magic’s cosmology, and proclaims the primacy of ineffable ontology over the ontology of names. In other words, the first principle of the ineffable emanates out of itself an entity (‘this’, or ‘I’) which, however detached from its origin, is very much a function of the ineffable itself (that is, it understands itself as a ‘person’). By uttering its first word, the ineffable creates enough of a distance from itself to allow reality to take place, as per our earlier definition of reality. Yet, the newly created border of reality verging towards language (‘this’, ‘I’), is ontologically dependent and hierarchically subjected to its own ineffable source. Magic’s cosmology thus immediately declares what kind of reality it wishes to make possible. This is a form of reality that isn’t entirely flattened on the principle of the ineffable – if it was so, it would replicate the apocalypse of reality produced by Technic – but that sees the space between existence and essence as hierarchically ordered.
The peculiar character of this second hypostasis makes it so that the archetypal incarnation of the person is necessarily double. Two seemingly very distant figures represent two complementary aspects of the person as a cosmogonic hypostasis: Apollo and the Imam. The former looks forward towards the emanation and moulding of the following hypostases in the chain of emanations. The latter looks back at the preceding principle while seeking guidance for its own productive action.
Let us begin with Apollo, granting a divinity right of way in the course of our exposition. As it is known, Apollo is one of the most complex deities in the Greek pantheon, endowed with a number of different and at times contradictory attributes such as health and plague, sunlight and destruction, archery, music, poetry, colonization and so on. What particularly interests us here – also in part following a Nietzschean characterization of Apollo’s figure42 – is his close relation to the realm of harmony in aesthetics, and more generally of limit-setting. Even in his negative attributes such as the bearer of plague and destruction, Apollo is the god who is capable of bringing order to chaos by binding it within form, or to bring back chaos by removing form and limits from the world. Apollo naturally fits a discussion on cosmology, since his sphere of influence has to do exactly with the transformation of chaos into a ‘world’ which is cosmos (adorned and ordered, and thus beautiful) and, in Latin, mundus (adorned and ordered, and thus clean). Apollo represents an important aspect of the ‘person’: it embodies the process through which the first linguistic entity, having recognized itself as a function of the ineffable, ‘orders’ itself and makes itself ‘clean’ and ‘beautiful’, so as to be able to bring forward the light of the ineffable that shines through it. Symbolically, it will be Apollo’s world-making hand that will accompany a person throughout the rest of Magic’s cosmology, as the rest of Magic’s world slowly emerges one hypostasis after the other. The Apollonian process of cosmos-making or mundus-making, on which an ‘I’ embarks as it first recognizes itself as a person, resembles the work of a poet imposing metric onto his/her verses, to allow rhythm and sound to shine through the text, over and above semantics.
Consistently with Apollo’s attributes as the god of medicine, this process through which an ‘I’ first shapes itself as a person, also corresponds to a form of self-healing. In Magic’s cosmology, the ‘healthy’ form is that which is best suited to be traversed by the light of the ineffable – that is, by life. The order of language, the health and beauty of a linguistic entity, is fundamentally defined by the relationship between its linguistic ‘glass’ and the ineffable ‘light’ that traverses it. This particular notion of health points again to an important feature of language, as it takes place within Magic. Unlike Technic, Magic’s language is never closed onto itself. It is not a means to the expansion of its own linguistic order, on the contrary, it is always turned backwards, seeking guidance outside itself.
This aspect leads us to the second half of a person’s archetypal incarnation: the figure of the Imam. With Apollo, we looked at the active aspect of the person: its imposition of form and limits over language – firstly, over itself – as part of its relationship with its own ineffable source. But we haven’t yet investigated how a person decides what type of form wo uld be best suited to allow the ineffable to shine through it. Here comes the figure of the Imam, etymologically ‘the one who walks ahead’, that is the ‘guide’ who is capable of directing one’s actions. The peculiarity of the Imam’s work is best appreciated if we consider it through the lens of Islamic Shia thought – particularly in its Twelvers and Ismaili43 declinations – whose philosophical and theological system is largely built around this figure. According to the Shia vision,44 the Imam has to be placed in a complementary relationship with the Prophet (or the prophets). While the Prophet is responsible for receiving from God the letter of the revelation and passing it on to humanity, the Imam is assigned the equally crucial role of interpreting that letter, in order to reveal its real meaning. The Imam is thus capable of detecting behind the exterior, literal dimension of the word (the exoteric, zahir), an inner dimension which is ineffable and fundamental (the esoteric, batin). In the context of Magic’s cosmology, the Imam represents the necessary complement to Apollo: the prerequisite of any form of ordering of the linguistic world is an understanding of the ineffable that it is meant to host. What is more, the Imam is concerned directly not only with the ineffable, but also with the ways in which the ineffable can be disentangled from language, or can be ‘hidden’ underneath it. The work of the Imam thus consists of a spiral movement between the ineffable and the first linguistic entity. On the one hand, the Imam, like a mystic, looks back directly at the ineffable and uses its findings as a compass to direct the ordering of the linguistic form. On the other, his work of constant interpretation (ta’wil) of language in the light of the ineffable, allows him to continuously reshape and bring back the linguistic entity to its function as a vessel for the manifestation of its ineffable source. While Apollo represents the power to build linguistic constructs, the Imam stands for the supremely architectural function of directing such building works, and to constantly check them against the requirements of that ineffable life which will ultimately inhabit the house of language.
It is important to stress again that Apollo and the Imam are complementary figures, and that both of them are internal to the second hypostasis in Magic’s cosmogonic chain. As soon as the ineffable’s first word, ‘this’ or ‘I’, becomes aware of its own position as a ‘person’, the processes symbolized by Apollo and the Imam take place simultaneously. They are two aspects of the endless construction of a ‘person’, as a suitable place for the epiphany (mazhar) of the ineffable. This notion of the Imam as an internal function of the person, finds its theoretical elaboration in the Twelver Shia doctrine of the Hidden Imam. Let us briefly look at this doctrine, to appreciate its relevance at this stage of our exposition. According to Islamic theology, the revelation brought to the world by Mohammed was the final seal that closed the cycle of revelation, which had started with Adam (considered as the first prophet). After Mohammed, the world won’t be given any more prophets. However, according to Shia theology, the closure of the cycle of the revelation opens a new cycle: the cycle of the ‘esoteric interpretation’, of the ‘initiation’ and of the Imam (all these meanings are contained in the complex term walayat). A crucial role in such effort to produce an esoteric interpretation of the revelation was played by the early Imams in the lineage starting from the first Imam Ali. However, according to Twelver Shia theology, once the lineage reached its twelfth generation with the Imam Muhammad al Mahdi, something exceptional happened. At a certain point of his troubled life, the Mahdi, the twelfth Imam, decided to go into ‘occultation’.45 First, he disappeared from geography. He entered a stage of ‘minor occultation’ (ghaybat soghra), withdrawing to an impenetrable hideout, from which he would convey his messages to a number of chosen ‘deputies’. Finally, he disappeared from history. The Mahdi underwent a ‘great occultation’ (ghaybat kobra), during which he would no longer appoint any deputies. The great occultation lasts to this day, and until the Hidden Imam’s final return to our world, at the end of time. During the present period of great occultation, however, the Hidden Imam has not vanished entirely. His place now is within each faithful’s heart, and as their very ‘heart’ (to use a terminology shared also by Sufism). As we shall see in detail in the course of our discussion of the next hypostasis, the ontological location of the Hidden Imam is not to be considered merely in metaphorical terms. His existence is not just that of a case of evocative fantasy; rather, it is an ontologically legitimate figure, inhabiting the ‘imaginal world’ (alam al-mithal, or mundus imagnalis) that lies between the ineffable and the linguistic dimensions of existence. But more on this later.
The Hidden Imam, understood as the Imam of This Time (Sahib al-zaman, ‘he who rules over this time’) resides within each person who seeks his guidance. He is the force responsible for leading an individual human to a state of proper ‘personhood’, that is to a state in which one’s own linguistic dimension is rendered into a mirror that reflects one’s own ineffable dimension (which, as we saw, runs unitary and uninterrupted through all existents). We can now appreciate the typical assimilation, within the Twelver Shia thought, between the figure of the Hidden Imam and that of the Perfect Man (al-Insan al-Kamil). As discussed also by Sufi thinkers like Ibn Arabi, the figure of the Perfect Man symbolizes the state in which a human – whether considered as a unique individual or as a representative of its species – is able to reflect the light of the Absolute in its greatest possible fullness. As Henry Corbin remarked, the Hidden Imam is: ‘the Perfect Man, the Integral Man, “for it is he who enables all things to speak, and, in becoming alive, each thing becomes a threshold of the spiritual world”’.46 It should be clear by now how the combination of the figures of Apollo and of the Imam – as read through its Twelver Shia interpretation – constitutes an archetypal incarnation of Magic’s second hypostasis, in which the first linguistic entity tries to build itself as a ‘person’. Whereas Apollo is the power to mould language to create a person, the Hidden Imam is the guidance that directs such power. It is here, that we witness the earliest appearance of ethics within Magic’s reality.
As the movement of Magic’s hypostases unfolds, we can see how its progression resembles that of any cosmogony based on a central form, including Technic – although, of course, the two differ completely in terms of their respective principles and overall architecture. From the first hypostasis, the following ones are emanated and, together with them, a normative direction also emerges, traversing them until its original energy is finally exhausted. Before approaching the third step in Magic’s cosmogonic chain, ‘symbol’, let us briefly run through the two preceding ones, to better appreciate the nature of their inner movement.
With the first hypostasis, we tried to look at the first principle of Magic’s cosmogony, as it is in itself. The ineffable as life stood there in its mysterious majesty, barely touched by the potential of its revelation as a miracle. We defined life, as the ineffable dimension at the heart of existence, and we considered it as a flow that runs uninterrupted throughout the whole existent – thus also adopting a claim about the life of apparently non-living entities, that is close to the position of contemporary Object Oriented philosopher Timothy Morton. Through repeated references to the philosophies of the Advaita Vedanta school, to Ibn Arabi and to Mulla Sadra, we presented the ineffable both as the life of an individual existent – and in this respect, we called to our aid also Max Stirner – but also as the principle of existence considered in itself. The atman is the brahman.
In the second hypostasis, we witnessed the moment in which the ineffable, that is life, utters its first word: ‘this’ or ‘I’. We explored in greater depth the instance of ‘I’ as its first name, since it refers to its reception by a human – but we also pointed out that, as ‘this’, it equally applies to non-human entities. This first word, in turn, looks back at its ineffable source and then at itself, and understands its own position as that of the ‘person’: the linguistic vessel through which the ineffable resounds. Once again, we made it clear that the figure of the person is not exclusive to humans, but it can apply to non-humans as well – although, us being human, we explored it from our own particular perspective. At that level, the person also realizes its two faces as Apollo and the Imam. That is to say, the person is capable of shaping linguistic constructs (first of all, itself) in such a way that allows the ineffable to shine through them. This level inaugurated in an embryonic form the ethical aspect of Magic’s reality.
With the third hypostasis in Magic’s cosmogony – ‘symbol’47 – the linguistic realm takes a further step away from its ineffable source, while still following its normative directions. Whereas in the second hypostasis the person was only potentially a subject, in this third one it begins to act as such. From this point onwards one acts no longer as an ‘I’ or a ‘this’, but as a ‘person’. It is now the moment for the person to use its ability to mould language beyond its own self-creation, and to develop it into a process of creative interaction with linguistic constructs other than itself. The person here begins its construction of the world and of the things that populate it: a world that, like the person itself, has to always be capable of letting the ineffable traverse it. If we understand the ineffable as life, and life as the ineffable, this means that the person’s work consists primarily in shaping dead linguistic constructs, to render them alive. Or, more correctly, to render them at once alive and dead, coherently with the fact that such a world is at once an emanation of the (living) ineffable, and a (dead) linguistic construct.
‘Symbol’ thus stands both for the name of the third hypostasis within Magic’s cosmogony, but also, more generally, for a particular way of structuring language vis-à-vis the question of the ineffable. As a hypostasis, the symbol goes to define the inner quality of Magic’s world – while as a way of structuring language its methodology can be traced back to the process that brought about the figure of the person. A symbol is thus an exceptionally complex notion, and to proceed with our exploration we shall begin by looking at it from two particular angles: its definition, and its productive potential. We will try to answer two main questions. Firstly, what is a symbol? And secondly, what kind of world emerges at this stage of Magic’s cosmogony? Let us begin by tackling the first, gargantuan question.
We can start to appreciate the peculiar character of a symbol, if we compare it with another form of language that is often mistakenly associated with it: the allegory. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe provides a brief but poignant characterization of the fundamental differences between the two.
There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter [symbolic] procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.
Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept, the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept always remains bounded in the image, and is entirely to be kept and held in it, and to be expressed by it.
Symbolism [however] transforms the phenomenon into idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and even if expressed in all languages, still would remain inexpressible.48
Symbol and allegory aren’t just different semantic devices. Taken as cosmogonic principles in themselves (leading respectively to allegorical reality versus symbolic reality), they represent different conceptions of the ‘stuff’ that makes up reality. The allegorical method, as a cosmogonic principle, is closely connected to Technic’s renunciation to reality in favour of a plain of essence without existence. Allegory’s first and overt claim is of language’s ability to properly and exhaustively capture the existent: if there are things in the world, they can be properly and exhaustively expressed by allegorical (i.e. descriptive) language. Secondly, but more importantly, allegory’s implicit claim is about the supposed coincidence between the range of language’s capture and the range of what is ontologically possible. Since allegorical language is able to capture everything, can whatever escapes its capture really claim a legitimate ontological status? As we know, this is the heart of Technic’s cosmogony.
Conversely, a symbol doesn’t capture or exhaust its object. Rather, it ‘points’ towards it. In the words of Joseph Campbell:
A symbol, like everything else, shows a double aspect. We must distinguish, therefore between the ‘sense’ and the ‘meaning’ of the symbol. It seems to me perfectly clear that all the great and little symbolical systems of the past functioned simultaneously on three levels: the corporeal of waking consciousness, the spiritual of dream, and the ineffable of the absolutely unknowable. The term ‘meaning’ can refer only to the first two but these, today, are in the charge of science – which is the province as we have said, not of symbols but of signs. The ineffable, the absolutely unknowable, can be only sensed. It is the province of art which is not ‘expression’ merely, or even primarily, but a quest for, and formulation of, experience evoking, energy-waking images: yielding what Sir Herbert Read has aptly termed a ‘sensuous apprehension of being’.49
We will have a chance to look in further depth at the idea of a direct ‘apprehension of being’ in the next chapter, as we will consider the epistemological theories developed by Mulla Sadra on the basis of the work of twelfth-century Persian philosopher Suhrawardi. For now, let’s remain focused on the particular form of a symbol. A symbol is at once a semiotic sign, existing within linguistic reality, and something that exceeds both semiosis (since it is impossible to fully communicate the object of its signification) and productive language (since it resists any absolute reduction to instrumentality). An example of this paradoxical condition of the symbol can be found in the figure of a ‘sacred object’, particularly as it is conceived in traditional cultures: a sacred rock, for example, is at the same time merely a normal rock and the manifestation of ineffable forces. This aspect has been described by the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade as the ‘dialectic of the sacred’, wherein the piercing movement of the ineffable through the linguistic realm, gives rise to manifestations of the sacred or hierophanies:
Apparently, nothing distinguishes any moment of profane time from the timeless instant stained by enlightenment. Rightly to understand the structure and function of such an image, one must remember the dialectic of the sacred: any object whatever may paradoxically become a hierophany, a receptacle of the sacred, while still participating in its own cosmic environment (a sacred stone, e.g., remains nevertheless a stone along with other stones).50
This close relationship between symbols and the sacred is a recurrent topic in their use and analysis throughout history. Of particular interest in this respect, is the attempt by German philosopher Ernst Cassirer to create an entire philosophical system, based on the notion of symbolic forms as the basic structure of human understanding – to the point that Cassirer defines the human as an ‘animal symbolicum’. According to Cassirer, any cultural system, spanning from art to science, finds its primary source in the uniquely human way of thinking through symbols. Among all these systems, however, one in particular seems to retain some of the earliest and most fundamental qualities of the symbolic function: the mythological system. Cassirer dedicates the entire second volume of his trilogy on The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 51 to an exploration of ‘mythical thought’, which however more primitive than contemporary science and less susceptible to the development of rational argumentation, is alone capable of offering to us a unique frame through which the world emerges to our experience. Cassirer went on to summarize some of his main findings in his volume Language and Myth, where he juxtaposed these two forms of conceptualization (language and myth) in a manner that is not entirely alien to the perspective offered by Magic. Unlike language – to which, however, it is closely related – mythic thinking perceives within the world a field of force, ‘which permeates all things and events, and may be present now in objects, now in persons, yet it is never bound exclusively to any single and individual subject or object as its host’.52 Such a mythic field of force is well exemplified by the Melanesian notion of mana – an ever-present yet irreducible divine energy that traverses all things – but it can equally be found in forms of mythic thinking from all over the world. In all authentic instances of mythic thinking – which is, according to Cassirer, the original form of symbolic thinking – meaning emerges not as the product of semiotic conventions, but rather as something that dwells within mythic structures like life dwells in a body. The ineffable that myths are able to summon through their symbols, animates them and turns them into all-too-real ‘things’, that are often considered by archaic societies as actual and concrete particulars. It is thus, concludes Cassirer, that they are considered to be ‘holy’ objects – material or immaterial that they may be, stones or formulas alike – and their ability to convey the ineffable is deemed to be an inherent supernatural power.
Cassirer finds the same process still at work today in the field of poetry, although in a form that is almost entirely ethereal and liberated from the association with material objects.
The spirit lives in the word of language and in the mythical image without falling under the control of either. What poetry expresses is neither the mythic word – picture of gods and daemons, nor the logical truth of abstract determinations and relations. The world of poetry stands apart from both, as a world of illusion and fantasy – but it is just in this mode of illusion that the realm of pure feeling can find utterance, and can therewith attain its full and concrete actualization. Word and mythic image, which once confronted the human mind as hard realistic powers, have now cast off all reality and effectuality; they have become a light, bright ether in which the spirit can move without let or hindrance. This liberation is achieved not because the mind throws aside the sensuous forms of word and image, but in that it uses them both as organs of its own, and thereby recognizes them for what they really are: forms of its own self-revelation.53
Despite coming from a very distant place, Cassirer’s conclusions seem to point to the same notion of self-revelation of that ‘mind’ which, in his conception, is implicitly not distant from a notion of ‘atman as brahman’. The ‘spirit’ – in Cassirer’s parlance – is summoned by symbolic, poetic language, so that it is able to reveal itself while remaining free from capture. It is worth noting, at least in passing, how Cassirer’s brief mention of poetry could equally apply to the presently developed system of Magic. To paraphrase Heidegger, if we can understand Technic as the essence of technology, so we can understand Magic as the essence of poetry. But, saving a discussion on the relationship between Magic and poetry to a later occasion, let us continue to look at the way in which symbolic expression finds a natural home in the field of mythology. Following Cassirer, we shall seek a clearer understanding of the symbolic form, by focusing on its productive dimension in the field of mythology.
As with all preceding hypostases, we can find an archetypal incarnation also of this third hypostasis: in this case, in the form of a mythologem. The term ‘mythologem’ has been borrowed directly from the lexicon of the Hungarian scholar of mythology Karl Kerenyi. In his Prolegomena to a volume co-authored with Carl Gustav Jung, Kerenyi defined the mythologem as the basic core element, motif or theme of a myth.
A particular kind of material determines the art of mythology, an immemorial and traditional body of material contained in tales about gods and god-like beings, heroic battles and journeys to the Underworld – ‘mythologem’ is the best Greek word for them . … Mythology is the movement of this material54
Similarly, Levi Strauss says of a mythologem (precisely, in Strauss’ terminology, a ‘mytheme’) that it reflects ‘the kind of language in which an entire myth can be expressed in a single word’.55 A mythologem is thus the fundamental unit of a mythological narration, containing in itself not only a synthesis of the unfolding of a particular myth, but also a distilled miniature of all the essential structures of mythical thought as such. A mythologem is to mythical thinking, what a microcosm is to a macrocosm.
The role of mythologems as incarnations of the symbol (understood as a cosmogonic hypostasis), can be better appreciated if we consider them in terms of their ‘archetypal’ function within the psychological realm. According to the perspective of Depth Psychology, as developed by Jung, myths can be read as structures through which a buried, unspeakable dimension is allowed to emerge – however partially – without being subjected to capture or exploitation. This ineffable dimension, according to Jung, is the kaleidoscope of primordial psychic forces that populate the collective unconscious. While lying at once within and beyond the linguistic rationality of waking humans, such unconscious forces also provide the necessary preconditions for rational language to take place. In a manner that is not dissimilar to Magic’s perspective, those unconscious forces that Jung sees emerging through myths, are in fact the earliest manifestations of the ineffable fact of life itself surfacing through the mesh of language. The way in which they surface, again according to Jung, is as a set of fundamental archetypes – highly symbolic figures that already, in themselves, contain entire mythical narrations. A mythologem, seen as a Jungian archetype, is a symbol caught midway through the process of its actual functioning.
At this point, though, we have to address an issue that is becoming evermore urgent. According to Cassirer, symbols and myths refer primarily to a human’s emotional apprehension of the world, and thus are essentially a function of epistemology. For Jung, they have to do with the deepest foundations of the collective unconscious, and thus are to be considered essentially as psychological elements. For Eliade, on the contrary, as for most archaic societies, their origin is extra-mental and can be found in a divine dimension that actually animates the world – and thus, their proper location is within metaphysics. How are we to reconcile these different positions, if at all possible? In other words, within the architecture of Magic’s cosmos, should we consider mythologems and symbols as purely mental entities, or as things that enjoy an autonomous form of existence?
Here, once again, we shall call to our aid the Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi, though this time through the sophisticated – and at times, admittedly, inventive – interpretation of his mystical philosophy proposed by Henry Corbin in two of his texts.56 Corbin develops Ibn Arabi’s notion of an ‘imaginal world’ (alam al-mithal or, in Corbin’s terminology, mundus imagnalis) as an ontologically real ‘place-beyond-geography’, lying between the most inaccessible dimension of the universe and the dimension that can be apprehended through discursive rationality and the senses. As an in-between realm, the mundus imaginalis hosts archetypes that are produced by the ineffable spirit inhabiting symbolic linguistic forms, while also offering an ontological ground to symbolic forms themselves. The mundus imaginalis is thus at the same time a function of the psyche, of human epistemology, and an ontologically legitimate element within a specific cosmology.
To clarify the ontology and unique function of this intermediate world, Corbin looks at The Crimson Archangel,57 a Gnostic tale of initiation by twelfth-century Persian philosopher Suhrawardi. This tale recounts a voyage towards and beyond Mount Qâf, ‘the cosmic mountain, which, summit after summit and valley after valley, is built up of celestial spheres, all enveloping one another’.58 Mount Qâf is not a place existing within common geography, but neither is it pure fancy; this cosmic mountain exists – and truly so – in Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd, ‘the country of non-where’, a neologism coined by Suhrawardi himself. The voyage through Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd thus takes place at the level of the mundus imaginalis; it is a real voyage, at once occurring outside geography while remaining solidly grounded within ontology.
Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd does not denote something that is shaped like a point, not having extension in space. In fact, the Persian word abâd stands for a city, a cultivated region that is inhabited and consequently an expanse. … Topographically this region starts at the ‘convex surface’ of the ninth Sphere, the Sphere of Spheres, or the Sphere that envelops the Cosmos as a whole. This means it begins at the very moment one leaves the Supreme Sphere, which defines all the types of orientation possible in our world (or on our side of the world). … It becomes obvious that, once this border has been crossed, the question ‘where’ (ubi, kojâ) becomes meaningless at least in terms of the meaning it has in the realm of sensible experience. … Undoubtedly what is involved is not a movement from one locality to another, a bodily transfer from one place to another, as would occur in the case of places in the same homogenous space. … It is essentially to go inward, to penetrate to the interior. Yet, having reached the interior, one finds oneself paradoxically on the outside, or, in the language of our authors, ‘on the convex surface’ of the ninth Sphere, in other words ‘beyond Mount Qâf’. Essentially the relationship involved is that of the outer, the visible, the exoteric (in Greek ta exo, in Arabic zahir) to the inner, the invisible, the esoteric (in Greek ta eso, in Arabic batin), or the relationship of the natural to the spiritual world. Leaving the where, the ubi category, is equivalent to leaving the outer or natural appearances that cloak the hidden inner realities, just as the almond is concealed in its shell. For the Stranger, the Gnostic, this step represents a return home, or at least a striving in this direction.59
Corbin’s understanding of the location of the ‘country of non-where’ and of its being a ‘home’ to which one can return, further clarifies our present description of the third hypostasis in Magic’s cosmogony. In particular, it helps us to understand the dimension of the symbol as a real ‘place’ that remains active at all subsequent levels in Magic’s cosmology. Within Magic’s reality-system, mythologems cannot be dismissed as mere epistemological or psychic functions, but they are the actually existing inhabitants of the mundus imaginalis, itself being an ontologically legitimate dimension lying midway between language and ineffability. Its resistance to being apprehended by allegorical language, and its simultaneous availability to host the entire dimension of symbolic forms, constitutes its particular character. At this level in the development of Magic’s reality, the world is still at an intermediate stage in which, to say it with the fourth-century pagan philosopher Sallustius, ‘one may call the world a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden.’60 Importantly, as Magic’s cosmogony progresses, the world reaches a more defined state, akin to what we know as our everyday reality – yet these intermediate stages are not denied or overcome, but simply complemented by other, more ‘external’ (zahir) layers. This means that, at any later stage of Magic’s world-making, and at any point in Magic’s reality, the dimension of the mundus imaginalis remains fully active and powerful, and fully existing. This is, of course, something well known by those poets described by Ernst Cassirer in a previously mentioned quote. Yet, Magic’s reality appears to generalize the exceptional position of the poet to a state of full normality – precisely, as the most accurate position to apprehend the world within this particular reality-system. Although in the following hypostases we shall move further away from the original cosmogonic source of the ineffable as life, every ‘linguistic’ existent – that is, everything that can be comfortably apprehended and communicated through language – will nonetheless still maintain within itself an intermediate dimension in which it functions as a symbol of the ineffable. Every layer in the construction of Magic’s reality-system survives within all subsequent ones, just like it lies dormant within the earlier ones.
In the previous hypostasis, we saw how the ineffable’s linguistic emanations are structured according to a symbolic form, so that the ineffable is able to coexist with language, while enlivening it and shining through it. We also looked at the archetypal incarnation of the hypostasis ‘symbol’ in the form of a mythologem: the minimal linguistic construct that is capable of conveying an entire myth in the compressed space of a single symbol.
The fourth hyposta sis continues this process of emanation of an increasingly linguistic world, out of the original principle of the ineffable as life. This cosmogonic flow proceeds according to the normative injunction of preserving life within each linguistic construct, to craft words in the guise of windows through which the ineffable can shine. As we reach this level, however, we move beyond the atomic units of individual linguistic constructs, to focus instead on their syntactic connection within accomplished ‘sentences’. When language takes place, syntax inevitably follows. The issue at this point is no longer just that of the relationship between language and ineffability, but the more complicated equation that includes meaning, as it emerges at the level of larger syntactic compounds. Yet, it might be surprising to see the question of meaning raised here, as if it didn’t apply to earlier hypostases. Doesn’t an individual symbol ‘mean’ something, namely the ineffable that it reflects? Doesn’t meaning apply at all to levels of language?
We can tackle this question by looking at a particular theory of language, which resonates – although with some caveats – with our present discussion of Magic’s own reality-system. As we did in the first hypostasis, when we looked at Adi Shankara’s monistic system of Advaita Vedanta, we are moving back to India, though this time to a period between the fifth and sixth centuries CE. The thinker who will come to our aid here is the grammarian Bhartrhari,61 one of the greatest philosophers of language in the Indian tradition, in the lineage of grammarians such as Panini (circa fifth century BCE) and Patanjali (second century BCE).62 As in the case of his two illustrious predecessors, the details of Bhartrhari’s biography are shrouded in uncertainty, though his intellectual legacy has survived intact in his magnum opus Vakyapadiya. Bhartrhari’s philosophy and lexicon are particularly complex, and it would be impossible to sketch a comprehensive picture of his entire system in such a short space. Nonetheless, it is still possible to address a number of his key concepts that might clarify the problem of ‘meaning’ at the present stage of Magic’s construction of reality and of the world. Central to Bhartrhari’s thought, is the idea that, if we wish to grasp the essence of language, we have to look at the way it functions at the level of sentences, rather than focusing on individual words or on particles within words. Behind this idea, lies the wish to understand language not so much in terms of its internal functioning, but more importantly in its relationship with meaning. According to Bhartrhari, it is at the level of the sentence that language truly expresses meaning, while individual words or particles are only abstract ways of fragmenting the semantic unit of a sentence. A sentence is composed by words, yet it is not reducible to any of them, in the same way that a word is not reducible to any of its individual composing sounds. Bhartrhari defines the meaning expressed by a sentence as sphota, a complex term around which the grammarian builds a great part of his system of thought. Sphota here stands for what contemporary scholar Bimal Krishna Matilal describes as:
The real substratum, proper linguistic unit, which is identical also with its meaning. Language is not the vehicle of meaning or the conveyor-belt of thought. Thought anchors language and language anchors thought. Shabdana, ‘languageing’, is thinking; and thought ‘vibrates’ through language. In this way of looking at things, there cannot be any essential difference between a linguistic unit and its meaning or the thought it conveys. Sphota refers to this non-differentiated language-principle.63
For Bhartrhari, the meaning expressed by a sentence, the sphota, manifests itself to our mental perception as an instantaneous flash of awareness (pratibha) triggered by the sounds or characters that compose the actual utterance of sequential words (what Bhartrhari calls nada). Thus, it might appear that meaning and actual language, sphota and nada, are two distinct things. Yet, for Bhartrhari this isn’t so. At their most fundamental level, language and meaning are inextricably bound, to the point of coinciding with each other. Not only the very act of perception is, according to Bhartrhari, a quintessentially linguistic act, but the very constitution of the world is the product of the language-principle. Bhartrhari is quick to develop this thesis to its metaphysical conclusions, particularly in the light of the Hinduist character of his philosophy. Although Bhartrhari wasn’t an adherent of the Advaita Vedanta school, he shared with them a similar monistic (that is, non-dualistic) attitude. He agrees with the likes of Shankara that the world is essentially Brahman and that Brahman is essentially consciousness. Yet, he adds that consciousness and thought are in fact, in themselves, nothing but language, and that the world itself is just an all-encompassing linguistic construct. It follows that, according to Bhartrhari, Brahman and language must be one and the same thing. Bhartrhari defines this notion of Brahman-as-language, Shabda-Brahman, the ‘eternal word’, or eternum verbum. Hence the monistic character of his philosophy of language.
Stepping back for a moment from Bhartrhari’s system, we can compare his metaphysical creation with the differentiation in the stages of tajalli (self-manifestation of the Absolute) proposed by Ibn Arabi and discussed in the first hypostasis of Magic’s reality-system. As the reader might remember, Ibn Arabi pointed out how, at the earliest stage of the Absolute’s chain of emanations that gives origin to the whole of reality and of the world, the first ineffable principle stands before any form of manifestation (tajalli) whatsoever. This is what we called ‘non-tajalli’, borrowing a term from Toshihiko Izutsu’s scholarship on Ibn Arabi. It is only at the following level (hadrah) that the Absolute begins to manifest itself, thus startin g the chain of tajalli proper. Likewise, in our description of Magic’s cosmogony, we placed the appearance of language at the level of the second hypostasis, while the first one, considered in itself, is completely immune from language. Even just to be able to talk about a form of incarnation of the ineffable at the level of its first hypostasis, we had to bring in the notion of the miracle: the event of a gaze that is cast back upon the ineffable by later hypostasis. In the light of these qualifications, we can see how Bhartrhari’s notion of sphota and of the semiotic primacy of sentences has particular resonance within the current hypostasis. Like Bhartrhari, Magic’s system also agrees that the world and language have a symbiotic relationship. Without language, the world as such wouldn’t come into existence, and the ‘things’ that compose it (including the world itself as the largest ‘thing’, as well as each individual existent) wouldn’t be able to emerge in their difference and uniqueness. Against Advaita Vedanta, Magic reclaims the legitimacy of language, which can’t be discounted as mere ‘illusion’ (maya) or ‘ignorance’ (avidya). However, both Ibn Arabi and the system of Magic would point out that this is true only from the second hypostasis onwards, that is, from the point at which tajalli begins. As soon as the ineffable speaks, language emerges as the essence of the world. Yet, in line with Mulla Sadra’s notion of the primacy of existence, before this act of speaking, existence stands in itself, untouched by language. Also in Magic, the world emerges as language – yet it isn’t reducible to language. Magic rejects both forms of monism: the ineffable monism of Advaita Vedanta, as well as the linguistic monism of Bhartrhari. Bhartrhari’s theory of sentence-meaning fits comfortably within Magic’s reality-system (and actually manages to explain the functioning of its fourth hypostasis), but on condition that it leaves untouched the first and original hypostasis of the ineffable as life.
Applied to Magic’s fourth hypostasis (‘meaning’), this qualified adoption of aspects of Bhartrhari’s philosophy amounts to a characterization of the place and role of symbolic syntax. As Bhartrhari pointed out, meaning is not expressed by any single, atomic linguistic unit – word or particle that it may be. It takes the frame of a sentence to allow the ineffable to emerge as sphota. For this reason, we identified the building-unit of Magic’s world with the figure of the symbol and, particularly, with the mythologem as its incarnation. Both the symbol and the mythologem are, in themselves, compressed sentences, in that they exceed that function of atomic classification that belongs instead to the figure of the allegory (following Goethe’s interpretation, among others). A symbol functions as a particular framework that is irreducible to its constituent atomic elements; it is irreducible to its sign, verbal or non-verbal as it may be, as well as to its immediate signification. As such, it is closer to Bhartrhari’s notion of a sentence, than to that of a word. Indeed, symbols have their own internal syntax, although at such a level of complexity that renders it exceptionally difficult to detect. But this forth hypostasis wishes to push the scope of symbolic language one step further. Although symbols already act like micro-sentences, capable of manifesting the ineffable as their sphota, it is also possible to conceive of ampler syntaxes, made of the combination of a plurality of symbols, just like narratives result from the combination of a plurality of sentences. Needless to say, this particular conception of symbolic syntax bears important consequences also in terms of a theory of poetry – though this is not a topic that we shall consider in-depth at this point of our exploration.
The fourth hypostasis thus investigates how particular combinations of symbols can give rise to meaning, in the same way that combinations of mythologems can give rise to broader myths. Since we are moving towards the twilight of Magic’s chain of emanations, this passage to a broader meaning and a broader narrative also coincides with a weakening of the ineffable light that is transmitted through an increasingly opaque linguistic framework. To use again the Sufi metaphor of glass, as we proceed towards the fifth and last hypostasis, the slate of glass through which the ineffable shines, becomes increasingly thick. The ineffable itself, which until this point was considered largely in its own right, is here transformed into a form of ‘meaning’: a sphota that reveals the Brahman. Because of this decline in the energy of the first principle, a new set of preoccupations enters now Magic’s reality. On the one hand, the danger of mistaking the literal dimension of the world for the ‘truth’ about it; on the other, and consequent to it, the importance of bringing back these increasingly thick and more complex linguistic constructs to their fundamental nature as symbols. Both these preoccupations are expressed in two main characteristics of the fourth hypostasis, ‘meaning’: firstly, the ‘law of correspondence’ that regulates it; and secondly, but not less importantly, the notion of the ‘centre’, which here assumes the role of the archetypal incarnation of this hypostasis.
The idea of the law of correspondence is a centuries-old Hermetic concept that was first properly expressed and theorized in the Emerald Tablet, an extremely succinct treaty attributed by tradition to Hermes Trismegistus.64 Nowhere, more than in the case of Hermes Trismegistus, does history and tradition intertwine in a fashion that is appropriately unfathomable. The earliest textual evidence of the Emerald Tablet dates back to a tenth-century Arabic text, Kitab Sirr al-Asrar (The Secret Book of Secrets, or Secretum Secretorum) – itself presented as a translation by renowned ninth-century Syrian scholar Abu Yahya Ibn al-Batriq of an earlier text in Syriac, which in turn was supposed to be the translation of a Greek original. Yet, the figure of Hermes Trismegistus itself is a product of the Hellenistic syncretism between Greek and Egyptian religions, amounting to the fusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian divinity Thoth. Interestingly, it is to the god Thoth that a number of inventions and practices are traditionally assigned, which would find a suitable location at the current stage of development of Magic’s reality-system; especially the art of writing (as recounted in Plato’s Phaedrus) and the ritualistic praxis of magical arts. Of the fourteen brief sections that compose the Emerald Tablet, the first two are of particular interest here. In the translation of Sir Isaac Newton, as found in his alchemical papers, the law of correspondence recites:
1 – Tis true without err or, certain & most true.
2 – That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like [est sicut] that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.65
The interpretation of these cryptic lines has engaged philosophers, theologians and alchemists for centuries. Instead of entering this tireless dispute, we can limit ourselves to consider this passage from the point of view of Magic’s cosmogony. In particular, we can consider how the law of correspondence set by Hermes Trismegistus, might help us to clarify the connection between the fourth hypostasis, ‘meaning’, and the three preceding ones. The law of correspondence states the possibility of interpreting the evermore distant products of linguistic construction (‘that which is below’) as essentially related to their earliest forms, resting closer to the original ineffable source (‘that which is above’), and vice versa. As we saw, within Magic’s perspective a person is a symbol, and a symbol is a person. Likewise, a symbol counts as a sentence (as described by Bhartrhari), and a sentence counts as a symbol. Again, the ineffable presents itself as the meaning of language, and meaning presents itself as the ineffable of language.
In the next chapter, particularly in the section on the idea of salvation, we shall see in further depth how a crucial part of this principle lies in the way in which such correspondence entails the relationship of ‘being like’ (est sicut, in the Latin translation of the Emerald Tablet). For now, we shall focus instead on the normative aspect that the law of correspondence brings within the construction of Magic’s reality. As the strength of the original principle of the ineffable weakens, its emanating power is increasingly supplemented and also supplanted by an overtly normative dimension – which was unnecessary until this point. We noticed a similar process in the case of Technic’s reality-system; as we move further away from the original force of a cosmological system, what used to be the direct emanation of the first principle progressively turns into the crystallized form of a set of normative directions. The law of correspondence thus acts within Magic’s reality as an ordering principle, according to which the proliferation of linguistic constructs that goes to create Magic’s world (that is, the world as such), has to maintain a form of ‘servitude’ to the ineffable that animates it. In other words, as the dead element of language wraps itself evermore tightly around the original life that animates it, it becomes all the more important to tailor such linguistic clothing in a way that safeguards the living element within it. The same relationship of ‘property’ that, according to Max Stirner, characterizes the relationship between the ‘Unique One’ and its ‘names’, returns throughout Magic’s chain of emanations as the property that each hypostasis has of the following one, back to the ineffable as life, the original proprietor of all.
Translated in less abstract terms, this means that within Magic’s reality, the ineffable traverses both the individual as a ‘person’, his/her immediate creation of objects in the world as ‘symbols’, but also the complex linguistic structures that s/he goes to create within the social world as places of ‘meaning’ (sphota). Ultimately, everything within Magic’s reality-system is a symbol: both oneself as an individual entity, and every single object defined as such, but also – importantly – broader narrative aggregates spanning from one’s own existential narrative to societal structures and institutions. The fourth hypostasis thus oversees a process of proliferation of the symbolic form throughout the world, in every single aspect of its constitution. Faithful to its notion of the ineffable as life, Magic’s reality-system thus declares the imperative to keep life flowing through the narrowest capillaries of the cultural and social body. Even in the kaleidoscopic freedom to create all sorts of possible linguistic constructions, that befalls every person in their linguistic construction of the world, the imperative remains that of never closing language onto itself. Never reducing a ‘thing’ to its linguistic dimension, but keeping it always open to its own ineffable dimension, which is, after all, the same ‘ineffable as life’, that traverses all things.
To express this concept with a more succinct formula, we could say that the product of every level of Magic’ cosmogony (so far, the person, the symbol and meaning – since the ineffable itself is in a state of non-tajalli) is always structured as a ‘centre of the world’. And we could add that this process of turning all entities into ‘centres’, is perhaps what is most characteristic of Magic’s creation of its own reality and of its own world. Indeed, the figure of the centre can be considered as the archetypal incarnation of this present hypostasis.
But what does it mean exactly, to say that everything within Magic’s reality-system is a ‘centre of the world’? We owe to Mircea Eliade66 a particularly in-depth analysis of the symbolism of the ‘centre’, and his interpretation of this notion will aid us to appreciate this crucial aspect of Magic’s cosmologic architecture. In several of his works,67 Eliade explores the religious, philosophical and cultural importance of the idea of ‘centre’ in archaic societies. In doing so, he proceeds by carefully unfolding the main constitutive aspects of this notion, and its most typical realizations in fields spanning from metaphysics, through liturgy to architecture. In The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade offers a useful summary of his conclusions about the symbolism of the centre.
The architectonic symbolism of the Center may be formulated as follows:
1 The Sacred Mountain – where heaven and earth meet – is situated at the centre of the world
2 Every temple or palace – and by extension every sacred city or royal residence – is a Sacred Mountain, thus becoming a Center
3 Being an axis mund i (that is, a cosmic axis or axis of the world), the sacred city or temple is regarded as the meeting point of heaven, earth, and hell. …
The summit of the cosmic mountain is not only the highest point of earth, it is also the earth’s navel, the point at which the Creation began. … In the Rg-Veda (for example X,149), the universe is conceived as spreading from a central point. The creation of man, which answers to the cosmogony, likewise took place at a central point, at the centre of the world.68
Again, in his magnum opus Patterns in Comparative Religion, Eliade further characterizes the idea of the ‘centre’ as follows:
The symbolism of the ‘centre’ embraces a number of different ideas: the point of intersection of the cosmic spheres (the channel joining hell and earth; cf. the bethel of Jacob § 79 f.); a place that is hierophanic and therefore real, a supremely ‘creational’ place, because the source of all reality and consequently of energy and life is to be found there. Indeed, cosmological traditions even express the symbolism of the centre in terms borrowed from embryology.69
One of the things that make Eliade’s work particularly fascinating is its extreme wealth of citations and examples taken from a vast array of traditions throughout the world. Unfortunately, due to reasons of space, it won’t be possible within the present volume to complement Eliade’s conclusion with a recollection of his extensive anthropological material. What we can do, however, is to unpack at least the relevant metaphysical aspects of the idea of the ‘centre’, both in terms of Eliade’s analysis and in reference to the present task of developing a general architecture of Magic’s cosmogony and cosmology. In line with most archaic forms of thinking, the idea of the centre combines ritualistic, metaphysical and architectural aspects. A temple or sacred building is built specifically in a place that is supposed to be the centre of the world (for example, around the omphalos stone in Delphi, considered to be the navel of the world), yet at the same time it is exactly its definition as sacred, that singles out a certain place as a ‘centre’. This circularity returns in the apparently contradictory fact that there is not one, but countless and potentially infinite ‘centres’. Every sacred space, according to Eliade’s analysis, is a centre, precisely because its sacredness endows it with the quality that is essential to every ‘centre’: being the place traversed by the axis of the world (axis mundi), that is, by the axis that connects the dimensions of heaven, earth and hell. Consecration and ‘centring’ thus appear to go hand in hand, to the point that every house or city built according to proper ritual can and should be considered in itself as another centre of the world.70 The notion of centre is thus rooted in that of sacredness, which, in turn, is embodied by the figure of an axis connecting the world’s multiple dimensions. In terms of our present work on Magic, Eliade’s intuition expresses the fundamental quality of the normative imperative traversing the whole of Magic’s reality. Every hypostasis, and everything that exists in Magic’s world, is structured as a centre, in that it is always necessarily traversed by an ‘axis’ connecting the ineffable with the linguistic dimensions of existence. While in the case of Technic’s reality this connection was made unnecessary by the absence of any actual multiplicity in its reality – to the point, as we said earlier, that Technic abolishes reality tout court – in Magic’s fourth hypostasis it is revealed how the imperative of ‘centring’ runs through the entire reality-system as its organizational and architectural principle.
References to the sacred are equally appropriate, especially if the sacred is understood in terms of what the German theologian Rudolf Otto defined as the ‘numinous’. According to Otto,71 the sacred as numinous, is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans (‘a terrifying and fascinating mystery’). A force that at once attracts and repels its witness, while remaining shielded in its own ineffable dimension. Within Magic’s reality, however, the space of the sacred imposes itself as the space par excellence. As noted by Eliade, a centre, that is a sacred space, is ‘a place that is hierophanic and therefore real’. Likewise, within Magic, full ontological legitimacy – the possibility of being fully ‘real’ – is granted only to entities that are built as centres, that is, that are traversed by the life of the ineffable. For this reason, most of the creations of Technic’s cosmology, inasmuch as they embody the structuring principle of absolute language, do not find any ontological legitimacy within Magic’s reality. The notion of the individual as a processor, for example, or of an entity as pure ‘stockpiling of productive reserves’, are deemed by Magic as mere – and deadly – fantasy. The normative aspect of any reality-system accounts both for creation and for destruction: the basis, on which certain things are made to emerge within it, is the same upon which others are denied existence. In the case of Magic, the line between ‘meaning’ and ‘noise’ is drawn in reference to the ‘liveliness’ of an entity: hence the fact that most of Technic’s ontological creations don’t find any room in Magic’s reality-system. For individuals currently living within Technic’s regime, this constitutes a call for the reconstruction of their reality that is as tremendum as it is fascinans. Not everything will be able to move from one system to the other, and the sudden discovery of a living dimension in non-human entities and in inanimate objects as well as in immaterial symbols, for example, would bring forward an unfathomable mysterium that might be difficult to approach at first. Likewise, suddenly facing the absolute unreality (as in, their unreality even as conventions) of commonly accepted social institutions, might repel those who invested in them their whole presence in the world. Every sacred space is surrounded by a limit – as the guardians or the labyrinth surrounding a treasure, in several mythological traditions – and not everything will be able to pass this threshold.
We have now reached the last hypostasis in Magic’s cosmogonic chain of emanations. At this point, Magic’s reality finds its final shape, while the original force of its first principle – the ineffable as life – is ultimately exhausted. As it was the case with Technic’s last hypostasis, this is effectively the sunset of a cosmogonic force, yet it is also presented as the moment of its perfection – with a view to relaunch the entire process all over again.
Over the course of the preceding three hypostases, we have considered the cosmogonic spectacle before us as a progressive emanation out of the first ineffable principle, of an ever-thicker linguistic dimension. As the emanated flow became stronger, its original source started to appear increasingly feeble. Thus, our notion of the process of emanation resembled that of a fountain, whose nozzle is eventually occluded by the limescale left by the water flowing out of it. Yet, at the level of the fifth hypostasis, this understanding of Magic’s cosmogonic emanation is suddenly overturned. While the living force of the ineffable finally sinks under an ocean of language, Magic resolves its cosmogonic exhaustion by presenting what appeared to be a process emanation, as in fact a form of self-manifestation. Rather than a stream flowing out of an original source, the development of Magic’s cosmogony is revealed at this stage as a progressive self-manifestation of the original principle – hypostasis after hypostasis, unveiling after unveiling. In other words, the fifth hypostasis presents its own twilight, not as the consequence of language smothering its ineffable source, but as a manifestation of the fullness of the ineffable – which always-already included language as a part of itself. According to the perspective offered at this level, language always lay dormant within the ineffable, but only at this stage it is finally revealed in its true cosmological place. As it was the case with Technic, where the principle of absolute language re-appropriated its final obstacle by turning it into the very justification of the entire process – in the form of ‘possibility’ – so Magic’s system uses its cosmogonic swansong to reclaim language as an internal dimension to ineffability. Likewise, death is proclaimed to take place within life, so that what appears to be life’s asphyxiation under its own dead product is in fact a dynamic internal to life itself. This sudden and final twist accounts for the definition of Magic’s fifth and last hypostasis, as that of the Paradox.
In the preceding hypostasis, we looked at how ‘meaning’ was regulated by the principle of the ‘law of correspondence’. In the present case of the ‘paradox’, we can identify its constitutive principle as that coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites – a term first coined by the fifteenth-century German theologian Nicholas of Cusa in his 1440 book De Docta Ignorantia 72 ) which so often recurs in alchemical theory and virtually in all esoteric traditions. Reaching an understanding of the coincidence of opposite, typically constitutes the pinnacle of the esoteric and alchemical opus: it is the accomplishment of the ‘work’ undertaken by those who trace the ineffable within the world of language, or the indistinct within the world’s myriad distinctions, only to realize that ultimately the ineffable was always-already present within language itself. From this perspective, Bhartrhari’s theory of the Shabda-Brahama also acquires a more complete and clearer sense. The paradox functions as a form of ‘resolution through integration’, like the notion of possibility functioned within Technic as a form of ‘resolution through simulation’.
But how can it be that two opposite principles can exist in a state of compresence and integration? Wouldn’t this amount to a blatant infringement of the law of non-contradiction? And, in the interest of preserving reality, wouldn’t a coincidence of opposites (such as existence and essence), lead to yet another collapse of the very possibility of reality as such? The answer to these questions is itself paradoxical. Para-doxa: unlike the commonly held opinion – that is to say, unlike whatever can be communicated in the way in which opinions are communicated.73 As we shall see in the next chapter (in the section on initiation), paradoxical understanding can be achieved through a form of ‘direct apprehension’ that only in part falls within the grasp of descriptive language. Nonetheless, as with anything ineffable, while allegorical language fails to convey such an incommunicable object, it is still possible to ‘point’ towards it through symbolic language. Continuing with the same line of architectural metaphors presented in the previous hypostases, we can hint towards the nature of this metaphysical paradox, by pointing towards the architectural feat of the Roman arch. One of the key developments in the architectural revolution of the age, the Roman arch consists in a series of heavy blocks of solid stone that are placed in a semicircular pattern, so to be able, not only to balance each other, but to sustain the weight of further architecture above them. Each stone, by itself, would require firm support to sustain its own weight. Yet, when placed together in the form of the semicircular Roman arch, it is exactly the weight of each stone that counter-balances that of all others. Lightness is achieved through a combination of weights. A principl e is achieved through its opposite, as if the opposite was already contained within the same. Such is the structure of the paradox presented as the principle of Magic’s fifth and final hypostasis.74
The crucial point here is that opposing forces and principles can coexist paradoxically, not by annihilating each other, but by combining together. Of course, this is not an instance of pluralism, but rather a case of coincidence of opposites – where the keyword is ‘coincidence’, which is unlike both ‘difference’ and ‘identity’. Within the structure of the Roman arch, opposing weights achieve an overall lightness, not because they are all identical (if that was so, they would only add to each other), or merely different from each other (in that case, each of them would require special support), but because they ‘fall together’, as per the Latin co-incidere. Their ‘fall’ – in Gnosticism, a frequent term to refer to existence in the world75 – is simultaneous, thus constituting a single event. Yet, their singularity as one event doesn’t do without their respective singularities as individual entities. Within Magic’s reality, happening and existing are not identical concepts, although they ‘fall together’: linguistic presence and ineffable existence are distinct facets of integral existence, yet they ‘fall together’ to compose it. This appropriately paradoxical statement finds its typical example in ‘hierophanic’ situations that, according to Eliade, open up a sacred dimension within the profane world. It is worth repeating this brief quote from Eliade:
Any object whatever may paradoxically become a hierophany, a receptacle of the sacred, while still participating in its own cosmic environment (a sacred stone, e.g., remains nevertheless a stone along with other stones).76
Hierophanies make apparent the coincidence of opposites that is at the heart of Magic’s fifth hypostasis, that is, of the complete form of Magic’s world. A sacred stone is at the same time sacred and profane, just like Jesus Christ is at the same time God and Man. Applied to the metaphysics and ethics of Magic’s world this entails the ontological legitimacy of both the world’s ineffable dimension, and of its linguistic one. In the Roman arch, one side of the semicircle achieves lightness thanks to the coincident weight of the opposing side, with the central keystone regulating their interaction. Likewise, ineffability achieves lightness through the coincident impact of language, with the overarching form of Magic acting as the keystone. ‘Lightness’, within this perspective, amounts to the very emergence of ‘reality’ as such – that is, as a space where worldly existence, action and imagination are both possible and authentic. If we compare the paradoxical lightness of Magic’s world, with the unbearable weight of Technic’s world of ‘possibility’, we can appreciate the therapeutic quality of Magic’s entire cosmogonic project. Whereas Technic’s ‘possibility’ attempts to relieve its own weight through an endless extension of its limits – hence its lust for infinite growth – Magic’s ‘paradox’ seeks to resolve this issue through intensive harmony. As we discussed earlier in the book, the therapeutic dimension of Magic’s reconstruction of reality is at the basis of the entire project presented in this book – that is, imagining and detailing a reality-system that is alternative to the annihilating one which is currently enforced onto the world by the regime of Technic. It is more than fitting, then, to conclude the cycle of hypostasis in Magic’s cosmogony, by presenting as its final archetypal incarnation (though with a few caveats), the figure of the Self as it is understood by Carl Gustav Jung.
The idea of the Self recurs throughout Jung’s entire written legacy. In the present context, however, we shall look at it primarily through the angle developed in his alchemical texts, contained in the thirteenth volume of his collected works. In the last fifteen years of his life, Jung engaged in a careful study of the symbolism and philosophy associated with the Hermetic and alchemical traditions. At the heart of his interpretation of the alchemical opus, lay the unshakeable belief that the materials discussed in the alchemical texts should be understood as symbols, or archetypes of the ineffable populations living in the depths of the individual and collective unconscious. As we briefly mentioned in the section ‘What is Reality?’, Jung’s exclusive focus on the psyche differs importantly from the perspective of our analysis of Magic’s reality-system. Nonetheless, it is inevitable that metaphysical terminology shall differ (even substantially) when discussing ineffable objects. While Jung understands the objects of alchemy as psychic archetypes, and a Perennialist thinker like Titus Burkhardt sees them in Neoplatonic terms as functions of a cosmic consciousness, the present volume wishes to put forward an interpretation of the symbolic forms of alchemy (including their re-elaboration by Jung) within Magic’s particular metaphysics. While Jung interpreted symbols belonging to the esoteric tradition as pointing towards the psychic archetype of the self, here we shall look at the psychic construct of the self, as an archetype pointing towards the forms of Magic cosmogony. Thus, we shall approach the notion of the Self as the archetypal incarnation of Magic’s fifth hypostasis, that is as a figure in which the coincidence between the opposites of ineffability and language, existence and essence, is finally realized – and, at the same time, as the place in which Magic’s cosmogonic force dies and restarts anew.
Having clarified these distinctions, let us see how we can interpret the Self as the archetypal incarnation of Par adox. According to Jung’s theory, the Self represents the state of psychic totality and integration, in which both conscious and unconscious functions ‘fall together’, co-incidere. Far from being a ‘given’ with which every person is naturally endowed, the Self is thus to be understood as a difficult and precious conquest, that can be brought about only through a strenuous work at the deepest level of one’s psyche. The work of bringing about the self passes through a number of stages, and crucially through a confrontation with the archetypes that populate a person’s psyche. Archetypes, according to Jung, are ‘the introspectively recognizable form[s] of a priori psychic orderedness’;77 furthermore, ‘as a priori ideal forms, [they] are as much found as invented: they are discovered inasmuch as one did not know about their unconscious autonomous existence, and invented inasmuch as their presence was inferred from analogous conceptual structures’.78 The Self itself can be understood as an archetype, which is in turn symbolized by a number of symbolic figures, spanning from the mandala to alchemy’s ‘philosophical tree’: ‘if a mandala may be described as a symbol of the self, seen in cross section, then the tree would represent a profile view of it: the self, depicted as a process of growth.’79
Read through the lens of Magic’s cosmology, the Self stands for a state of metaphysical integration, in which both language and ineffability ‘fall together’. Of course, it is always the case throughout Magic’s system that whenever there is language, there is also ineffability: what really changes here is that these two principles are found at the level of the worldly event (hence our reference to ‘falling’, in a Gnostic sense as the way to enter the world). At this final stage in Magic’s cosmogony, the ineffable has already produced a complete, linguistic world – a world that can be easily navigated through the classificatory and descriptive means of allegorical language. Nonetheless, thanks to the normative streak that structured every linguistic utterance as symbolic – while also allowing for a subaltern allegorical dimension – the ineffable is able to inhabit every small portion of that world that it has created. Indeed, from the perspective of this final hypostasis, it can do so because the world of language is always-already internal to the ineffable dimension of existence – so that the also rigid normativity enforced so far should be seen as the structure of the ineffable’s own inner architecture.
If this was a book written by a Romantic or Decadent writer, we could now claim that the world, as it emerges at this stage, is simply the world as it is seen through the eyes of a poet: truly, a forêt de symboles 80 (forest of symbols). While at the first stage of Magic’s cosmology, language lay dormant at the heart of the ineffable, here it is the ineffable that inhabits the heart of every single linguistic construct – not merely as its potential, but as the force of which every possibility is a form of actualization. This is indeed a forest, but it could be equally described as a garden – following a tradition that stretches from Babylonian and Persian antiquity, through Shia Islam, all the way to Renaissance garden architecture. To close this final hypostasis in the series, and to cast a final glance at the world of Magic, as it stands in its finished form, let us consider for a moment in what sense we can call this kind of world, a ‘garden’.
As it is known, garden high-culture dates back at least to the age of the Chaldean Empire (7th–6th BCE), and underwent its first spectacular flourishing at the time of the Achaemenid Empire (6th–4th BCE). In these Babylonian/Persian cultures, the garden enjoyed a cultural status that far exceeded the field of hedonism, entertainment or agriculture. A Persian garden was a Paradeisos, to follow Xenophon’s first Greek transliteration of the original Persian term Pairidaeza.81 As such, a garden was closer to an earthly ‘Paradise’, than to a park. A Babylonian/Persian garden reproduced the structure of the universe, with its four rivers and its exact ordering of the primordial elements. It was a living picture of the cosmos, and thus an active fragment of the original cosmogony. Together with the word Paradeisos, this notion of garden entered the Greek world and, through it, also Roman culture. As we see in surviving Roman villas such as that of Hadrian in Tivoli, the garden remains through the centuries a place in which the sacred meets the profane, or, more accurately, in which the profane is sacralized through a particular mixing of nature and art. The arrangement of artefacts and a delicate architectural balance – holding together what is ‘artificial’ and what is ‘natural’, without sacrificing either force – allowed for the sacred to shine through a space that would otherwise be merely profane. A garden revealed the sacredness that always lies dormant at the heart of every material compound – but which requires a specific symbolic form to be perceptible to human eyes and heart. This same structure surfaced again in Italy at the time of the Renaissance, when gardens were designed as miniature cosmoi (plural of cosmos, the universe).82 A garden of the age typically contained a part that was farmed for fruit and vegetables, a part that was shaped by the geometry of rational architecture and a final part, the bosco, which was left in a state of wilderness, dotted by statues of pagan gods. We can interpret the first of these three parts as the allegory of the applied reason, the second as that of pure reason, and the latter, the bosco, as the symbol of the ineffable in its earliest stages of manifestation. There, it was precisely the combination of ineffable wilderness and perfectly crafted artistic objects that allowed the integral universe to em erge. The similarity between this cosmological view and that discussed in the current section of this book won’t be lost on the reader.
But it is the Shia literature of early Islam that offers us what is possibly the most accurate interpretation of gardens as the mirror of a particular type of cosmology. In a hadith (saying) attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, it is written: ‘Between my pulpit [minbar] and my tomb, there opens a garden from the gardens of Paradise.’83 This hadith of the Prophet presents the ‘garden’ as that space that opens up between the ‘pulpit’ and the ‘tomb’ – yet, as Henry Corbin warned us, ‘needless to say, this saying is not to be understood in a literal, exoteric sense (zahir)’.84 The pulpit (minbar) typically represents the place of the law, that is, the most dogmatic aspects of religion. In the parlance of this volume, it represents the linguistic realm, in which things fall obediently into communicable and productive categories – to borrow Heidegger’s language, the realm where things are ready-to-hand. Conversely, the ‘tomb’, as a place of darkness, stands for the realm in which things withdraw into their original darkness, becoming unavailable for any instrumental use. In the parlance of this volume, the tomb symbolizes the impenetrably ineffable dimension of life – or, to say it in the words of Ibn Arabi, the first stage (hadrah) of non-manifestation (non-tajalli) in which the Absolute (al-Haqq) stands before any possibility of conceptualization. But what is this ‘garden’ that stretches between pure ineffability and perfectly functional language, between existence and essence? This space in-between, this ‘garden’, is nothing less than ‘reality’ itself – reality precisely as it is produced through Magic’s cosmogony.
This claim might strike the attentive reader as circular to our earlier definition of reality, from the section ‘What is reality?’ immediately before this chapter. Indeed, this should not be seen as a mere mistake or coincidence. Magic builds its world precisely so to allow reality to emerge – a form of reality in which linguistic entities can exist and flourish on the basis of the ineffable life that traverses them. Yet, this particular form of reality hints back towards its original principle as the necessary precondition to take place. There are two aspects to this situation that should be noted here. First is the aspect of circularity within the book. At the beginning of this volume and also of this chapter, it was made clear how the project that we were about to undertake was essentially therapeutic in its nature. Our primary concern was to show how it is possible to imagine an alternative reality-system that was capable of reactivating that space in which living individuals can live, act and flourish, free from any annihilating reduction to their linguistic dimension (and thus, to their economic, productive, ethnic or identitarian dimension). Magic’s system was built with this aim in mind, and the apparent circularity between the endpoint of Magic’s cosmogony and the premises that lead to its very imagination, is to be considered as revealing of the projectual nature of our thought experiment. Second, we should address the circularity that takes place within Magic’s cosmogony itself. Already in the section on Technic, we encountered this movement that leads the final hypostasis to look back towards the first one and to reignite the cosmogonic process. Magic is not different in this respect. Just as it finally fades, the original cosmogonic force lays down the conditions that will lead to its resurrection – in a fashion that presents the first principle as ‘necessary’. The dying light of the ineffable creates a world which is able to remain alive, only inasmuch as it continuously brings back to life its original principle.
Upper and lower limits: Double negation and Deus absconditus
As with every cosmology, Magic’s architecture is also defined by its overall limits, particularly by those that shape its first and last hypostasis. We shall encounter these two limits as the Deus Absconditus at its lowermost edge, and Double Negation at its uppermost.
Let us begin with Double Negation, defining what lies ‘behind’ or ‘before’ the first hypostasis of the ineffable as life. It might strike the reader as a little surprising that there might be something limiting from ‘behind’ even the apparently primordial field of ineffability. Yet, we should take this limit as referring specifically to the ineffable in its position of principle of a reality-system, rather than to the ineffable in its entirely autonomous form. In other words, Double Negation here defines the point before which the ineffable as life does not stretch – but only if we consider it, as we’re doing here, in its function as the first hypostasis of Magic’s cosmogony. Double Negation refers to a glitch within our (human) concept of ineffability, which presents the roots of the absolute ‘something’ of the atman/brahman, as if they edged on a field of pure nothingness. Mentioning the ineffable as life here in terms of atman/brahman is not a just a shorthand, since this distinction between pure existence and pure nothingness, has been a point of endless contention between the Hinduist schools – to whom we owe the notion of atman and brahman – and the Mahayana Buddhist schools of the Great Vehicle, who denounced the apparent existence of something as an illusory veil cast over the ‘emptiness’ (sunyata) that constitutes the ultimate ‘reality body’ (Dharmakaya).85 However, rather than looking at this issue through the angle of Indian metaphysics, we shall consider it through the lens of a particular epistemological concept proposed by the already mentioned twelfth-century Persian philosopher Suhrawardi.
Suhrawardi intervened in the debate of his age over the nature of God, stating a position that differed both from that of the so-called apophatic (or negative) theologians, and to that of their cataphatic (or positive) opponents. According to apophatic theology, it is impossible to capture God’s essence through the means of language. Whatever we say about God, even attributing to him the most exalted and triumphant attributes, constitutes a form of blasphemy in the eyes of apophatic theologians. To them, saying that God is ‘great’ or ‘good’ – or even that He ‘exists’ – is a crass attempt at reducing His absolutely transcendent nature. We have already briefly encountered this form of negative theology in the words of Scotus Eriugena, mentioned earlier as an introduction to the thought of Max Stirner. Conversely, cataphatic theologians claimed that what is truly blasphemous is their opponents’ attempt to rob God of His attributes. How can we say that God is not good, not great and even that He does not exist? Cataphatic theology insists that God indeed possesses all positive attributes, though to such an extreme degree that they are incomparable with what we can appreciate from our merely human perspective. Suhrawardi’s position came to break this apparent dichotomy between negative and positive theology. According to Suhrawardi, both positions were partly right and partly wrong. Negative theologians were correct to stress the absolutely transcendent nature of God: He truly is behind the grasp of language or the limited reach of attributes. Nonetheless, positive theologians were also correct to state that, if attributes belong to anybody, they certainly do all the more so to God. Suhrawardi thus proposed Double Negation as a way to characterize God in such a way that He wouldn’t be robbed of His transcendence nor of His immanence.86 All we can truly say about God, so claimed Suhrawradi, is that He is not-not good, not-not great, that He does not-not exist and so on. By adding a second negation to the one proposed by apophatic theology, we limit the hybris of thinking that negation is capable of conveying God’s essence, while also safeguarding His claim over the field of language. God’s essence is at such a level of transcendence, that it goes beyond transcendence itself.
We have, of course, already encountered a similar claim in our earlier discussion of Magic’s first hypostasis, particularly when we mentioned Ibn Arabi’s notion of a stage of the Absolute that is before any possibility of manifestation. What is different here, however, is how this notion constitutes an epistemological glitch, within an understanding of the roots of the ineffable (and thus of life) as stretching into Double Negation. In what way is it possible to distinguish the absolute ‘something’ of ineffable life, from a radical form of nothingness? Suhrawardi’s Double Negation is a paradoxical construct that would fit well at the level of the fifth hypostasis – that is at the level of Magic’s accomplished ‘world’ – yet if we apply it to the original principle of the cosmogony, it risks shattering our already feeble understanding of it. It is as if, before existence, and even before ineffable absolute existence, there was an original kernel that is radically different from any understanding of existence whatsoever. In other words, it is as if the first hypostasis itself was the product of a previous and entirely undetectable one that somehow ‘uttered’ it – in the same way that the first hypostasis utters the second. If the ineffable as life is the original silence from which the first word emerges, it seems that there is something even before it that, so to say, utters silence. This is the uppermost limit of Magic’s chain of emanations – a disquieting limit to be sure, since it exceeds into a field that cannot be apprehended, not even negatively.87
This form of extreme escape even from negative reason – in psychological terms, something akin to an unconscious of the unconscious – returns in a different guise at the lowermost edge of Magic’s reality-system, this time in the form of a Deus Absconditus, a ‘hidden God’. The figure of the hidden God (or ‘lazy God’, Deus otiosus) recurs throughout the history of religion and mythology, since the time of the earliest surviving records of the belief system of archaic societies. A number of ‘ascension myths’ found in regions stretching from Siberia to the Amazon forest, tell the story of an original divinity who at some point decided to abandon the world, cutting the access path that used to connect Earth to the Heavens. Ever since that rupture, only a small number of exceptionally gifted spiritual people (typically, the shamans or those belonging to the priestly caste) have been able through complex ritual to climb to the top of the ‘cosmic tree’ and to converse again with the gods. In the case of our present analysis, of course, the figure of the hidden God has to be understood philosophically rather than religiously. At the end of Magic’s cosmogony, we encountered the stage in which the world finally emerges in its complete form – as a paradoxical combination of language and ineffability. We briefly hinted at the circularity of Magic’s cosmogony – and of all philosophical cosmogonies – and at how, having reached the final point of exhaustion of the first principle, the whole reality-system leaps back to its original source. Yet, this process is far from being automatic. Nestled within language, ineffable life always threatens to disappear entirely and to leave the world as ‘dead’. Its pre sence is never fully granted once and for all, and the world itself has to constantly revive its own internal life – in the same way that a body has to continue breathing in the oxygen that keeps dissolving in its lungs. Like breathed-in air, the most apparent movement of the ineffable at the level of the fifth hypostasis, is one of constant disappearance. ‘God’ keeps leaving the world, and the world has to endlessly attempt to bring it back within itself. If it was ever to stop seeking its life, the world itself would turn into a stockpiling of dead stuff – into the sort of compound that is ‘actualised chaos’, devoid both of order and of potential. Under this light, the alchemical notion of opus (work) acquires a clearer quality, as it refers to the interminability of the process through which a world is constantly made to emerge. The world as a Self requires the same level of constant work attention as that demanded by a cosmological garden. The cosmogony of Magic is thus never concluded, it’s never closed onto itself.
The work of constant maintenance that it requires follows the same relentless rhythm of ritual action. The particular conception of ritual and sacrifice presented in the Vedas will help us to grasp the nature of this endless work through which the world keeps reconstructing its own reality – and it will also allow us to conclude this chapter. Roberto Calasso’s book Ardor, a magisterial work on the role of sacrifice in the Vedas, can guide us through this brief exploration. In a section dedicated to analysing why, in the Vedas, the Gods themselves have to perform rituals and sacrifices, Calasso discusses the ultimate function that all rituals and sacrifices have in Vedic culture. Rituals allow the world to start afresh each time, by reintegrating within it all necessary forces and principles – visible or invisible, linguistic or ineffable. Following the Vedas, Calasso identifies the minimal ritualistic unit in the gesture of the ‘libation’, which is capable of synthesizing in the simplest possible form the same essence of the most complex rituals.
There is one gesture that inextricably unites the whole Indo-European world. It is the gesture of the libation. The pouring of a liquid into a fire that flares up, destroying a valuable or an ordinary substance in the flame. … Violence – which always leaves some mark, however much one tries to hide it – is absent here. But destruction is present, the irreversible yielding of something to an invisible presence. This action of abandoning something is called tyaga – and is often presented as the essence of sacrifice, of every sacrifice. Or otherwise: as its prerequisite. It is the gesture that indicates someone is approaching an invisible presence – showing submission or at least the willingness to give way.88
Calasso then proceeds to identify exactly what a libation ‘does’, that is in what sense we can understand ritualistic action to be effective.
‘For whichever divinity a person draws this libation, that divinity, being seized by this libation, fulfils the wish for which he draws it’. This sentence appears in the passage that most clearly expresses the acrobatic play on the word graha throughout the Shatapatha Brahmana. Usually translated as ‘libation’, graha is always related to the verb grah-, ‘to grasp’ – in a similar way as the German word begreifen, ‘comprehend’ (from which Begriff, concept), is related to greifen, ‘grasp’. … The libation is a way of grasping (of understanding) the divinity. And from it the divinity feels bound, grasped. This also happens with names: they are our libations to reality. They are used to grasp it.89
Rituals, as read by Calasso, thus bear a striking resemblance with the endless reconstruction of reality that takes place at the lowermost border of Magic’s fifth and final hypostasis. As the original reality-making force of the ineffable exhausts its energy, in the task of creating an actual ‘world’, this world and the entities that populate it start to engage in endless ritual action geared to rekindle the ineffable emanation that produced them in the first place. Beyond magic’s world and reality, so to say at its southernmost border, lies the looping movement of the ineffable being breathed in and out of the world. This movement bears a certain similarity to so-called ‘occasionalist’ positions, according to whom any occurrence taking place in the world is ultimately to be attributed to God’s direct intervention. An occasionalist philosopher such as the eleventh-century Iranian thinker Al-Gahazali,90 for example, claimed that the world itself and each of its most minute details, are constantly recreated by God at every instant. If such endless creation was ever to stop, concludes Al-Ghazali, the entire world would suddenly vanish. Likewise, at the southernmost edge of Magic’s cosmology we find an abyss of precariousness, in which the life of the world – that is, its being ‘alive’ – depends on a relentless work, aimed firstly at ‘remembering’ the ineffable, and then at reinforcing the symbolic form of the world of language, to allow the ineffable to shine through it. Magic’s reality, understood as the all-encompassing ‘Self’ of the world, is thus akin to the ‘gold’ (aurum) sought by Hermetic alchemists; unlike the aurum vulgaris (‘vulgar gold’) that is exchanged on the market, this aurum philosophorum (‘gold of the philosopher’) is never created once and for all, but needs constant work to be created over and over again.91 Within this perspective, metaphysics itself becomes a form of gardening.
In the course of this chapter, we have seen Magic’s cosmogony unfold through five hypostatic levels. As with Technic, Magic’s creation of reality began with a first p rinciple, the ineffable as life, and ended with the accomplished form of its world, the paradox. The passage from the first to the last level in Magic’s cosmogony, marked a passage from a state of utter ineffability, absolute existence and pure life, to one in which ineffability and language, existence and essence, life and death are deeply intertwined. This passage took the form of an emanation of symbolic language out the ineffable that affirmed the primacy of ineffable existence over linguistic essence, while not denying legitimacy to the latter. It is precisely through this affirmation of the compresence of existence and essence – though hierarchically ordered – that Magic’s cosmogony allows ‘reality’ to take place once again. As discussed in the intermissions that preceded this chapter, reality always emerges as that world-making space which stretches between the limit-concepts of existence and essence; while Technic entirely denied the former principle, thus leading to a collapse of reality, Magic is capable of retaining both. In this, consists Magic’s ‘reconstruction of reality’ – while the particular modulations of these two parameters (i.e. the hierarchical order between existence and essence) constitute the specific brand of reality that characterizes Magic’s reality-system and its world.
In the following chapter, we shall look at Magic’s world, no longer in its cosmological dimension, but through the eyes of an individual inhabiting it – just like we did in Chapter 1, in reference to Technic’s world. As we approach the next step in our analysis of the reality-making force of Magic, let us consider one final issue that connects like a bridge our reading so far of Magic’s cosmogony, with the existential reading that shall follow. This is the issue of the relationship between the fundamental principles of Magic’s reality-system, and the ‘world’ that they go to create. Particularly, it is the question of whether Magic considers its core reality-principle, ineffable existence, as transcendent or immanent to its world as it is existentially experienced by an individual. We shall begin by briefly considering an alternative (though close in many other respects) interpretation of ‘magic’, as it was put forward by the great Russian theologian and philosopher, Pavel Florensky.92
In his 1908 address to the Moscow Academy of Theology, Pavel Florensky put forward the claim that the roots of Platonism are to be found in the realm of magic.
Asking ourselves ‘where does Platonism come from?’, we are not seeking to trace the historical influences that have determined its birth. … Rather, we should interpret the question ‘from where?’ in the sense of: ‘from what elements of consciousness?’ … If you agree with me to pose the problem in these terms, my answer will be clear and simple: ‘it comes from magic.’93
He then proceeded to argue his claim, by lyrically describing the magic experience of nature that Russian peasants – supposedly – still entertained at his time. According to Florenksy, their experience coincided with the founding existential experience that was at the origin of Platonism.
Anything over which the eye rests, everything has its own hidden meaning; it has a double life, a substance that is ‘other’ and over-empirical. Everything partakes to another world, and such other world leaves its mark on everything.94
Here, perhaps, lies the greatest difference between a Platonic understanding of magic as a means to transcend the world, and the understanding of Magic that is developed in this volume. While Florensky presents magic in reference to ‘another world’ with which magic can connect us, this volume suggests instead that Magic is a world-making force that allows us to be at the same time inside the world, and outside from any world. Magic, as it is described in this book, differs from Platonism in that it doesn’t suggest a hyperuranean ‘world beyond this world’, where the ‘truth’ authentically lies. More Neoplatonically, it suggests instead that within the world, there lies a dimension that altogether escapes both worldliness and truth, thus transcending the very notion of transcendence.
Yet, this presence of ineffable existence within the world, shouldn’t be taken as the sign of a merely immanentist position. Magic’s cosmology cannot be reduced to the formula Deus Sive Natura (God or Nature).95 According to Magic, although ineffable existence (that is, life) can be found within the linguistically built world, such linguistic world is ultimately distinct from its ineffable source. Ineffable existence precedes linguistic essence,96 and the question of whether the former can be truly located within the latter (i.e. if ineffable life is entirely within the linguistic world), is upturned by Magic’s claim that the ultimate form of localization, ‘here’, belongs to ineffable existence alone. To essence, belongs the relative form of localization, ‘there’. The two concepts produce different forms of metaphysical geography, and thus are irreducible to one common geographical denomination. Both ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ are elements of descriptive language that can only in part find a home in Magic’s reality-system. As it surpasses the notion of transcendence, so Magic also surpasses that of immanence. Its world is at the same time a world and no world at all, it is both language and silence, unmeasurable existence and limited presence, indistinctness and essence. It is unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity, where the two terms are simultaneously fused and irreducible to each other. In other words , it is reality in the form of a paradox.
Notes
1 For a critical appraisal of the common notions of history and of temporality, from a perspective that is largely close to that adopted in the present volume, see A. Coomaraswamy, Time and Eternity, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2014.
2 For an interesting introduction to this particular notion of magic in the Renaissance era, and an overview of the main (Anglophone) scholarship on the topic, see J. S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
3 See Herodotus, The Histories, London: Penguin, 2003, pp. 48–9.
4 E. de Martino, Il Mondo Magico (1948), Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2010, p. 165 – my translation from the original Italian.
5 With particular reference to shamans in the Amazon forest, it is interesting to follow Eduardo Viveiro de Castro’s analysis of their function as ‘reality-therapists’ also in reference to the relationship between humans and non-humans. ‘On account of their capacity to see other species as the humans that these species see themselves as, Amazonian shamans play the role of cosmopolitical diplomats in an arena where diverse socionatural interests are forced to confront each other. In this sense, the function of the shaman is not entirely different from that of a warrior. Both are “commuters” or conductors of perspective, the first operating in a zone of interspecificity and the second in an interhuman or intersocietal one. … Amazonian shamanism, as is often remarked, is the continuation of war by other means. This has nothing to do, however, with violence as such but with communication, a transversal communication between incommunicables, a dangerous, delicate comparison between perspectives in which the position of the human is in constant dispute.’ In E. V. de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2014, p. 151.
6 See A. Koyré, Etudes sur l’histoire de la pensée philosophiques en Russie, J. Vrin, 1950 – particularly the section published in Italian as a separate volume, A. Koyré, Dal mondo del pressappoco all’universo della precisione, Torino: Einaudi, 2000.
7 H. Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis or The Imaginary and the Imaginal, Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1976, p. 10.
8 While Florensky and Guénon will return in the following pages, Elemire Zolla’s thought could not be investigated in further depth within the scope of this volume. His work, however, remains of great relevance for anybody interested in the philosophy and aesthetics of Magic. The interested reader might want to see in particular: E. Zolla, Che Cos’e’ la Tradizione, Milano: Adelphi, 2011; and E. Zolla, Uscite dal Mondo, Venezia: Marsilio, 2012.
9 ‘The name moves further away, / grows pale, / poor white nothingness / I look at you, / snow of nothing / now.’ Francesco Scarabicchi, Congedo (Farewell), in F. Scarabicchi, Il Prato Bianco, Torino: Einaudi, 2017, p. 42 – my translation from the Italian original.
10 See in particular his analysis of the distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ and of its role in the construction of the political field, in C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 26–43.
11 Chandogya Upanishad, 8.7.1-3, translated by Patrick Olivelle, Upanisads, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 171.
12 Chandogya Upanishad, 8.12.4-5, translated by Patrick Olivelle, Upanisads, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 175.
13 On the notion of self in Hindu philosophy, and particularly on the meaning of the story of Indra’s apprenticeship with Prajapati, see J. Ganeri, The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories Of The Self And Practices Of Truth In Indian Ethics And Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 13–38.
14 For an overview of the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, see A. Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity, Albany, NY: SUNY, 2006.
15 The unsurpassed ‘perennialist’ exposition of Vedantic theories is R. Guenon, Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004. For a more academic discussion of Shankara’s philosophical and religious message, see N. Isayeva, Shankara and Indian Philosophy, Albany, NY: SUNY, 1992; and J. G. Suthren-Hirst, Samkara’s Advaita Vedanta: A Way of Teaching, London: Routledge, 2005. A fascinating parallel reading of Adi Shankara’s and Meister Eckhart’s metaphysics can be found in R. Otto, Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism, translated by B. L. Bracey and R. C. Payne, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016.
16 The Greek fascination with the mysterious wisdom of ancient Egypt is a recurrent theme throughout ancient Greek literature and culture. A good example is the treatment of Egyptian cosmology and cosmogonic theories in the first part of the first book of Diodorus Siculus’s Library of History (see D. Siculus, Library of History, vol. 1, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). This is particularly true in the case of (Neo)Pythagorean and (Neo)Platonic thinkers and authors – a paradigmatic example in this sense is Iamblichus’s book On the Mysteries (see Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, Atlanta, GE: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003.)
17 T. Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2016, pp. 1–2.
18 In particular, by thinkers who are part of the ‘traditionalist school’ of Perennialism, such as Réne Guénon, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon and, more recently, Alberto Ventura among others. Paradigmatic in this direction is, for example, A. Coomaraswamy’s Author’s Note to his volume Hindiusm and Buddhism: ‘Some notable Platonic and Christian parallels have been cited in order … to emphasize that the Philosophia Perennis, Sanatana Dharma, Akāliko Dhammo, is always and everywhere consistent with itself’ (in A. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, Mountain View, CA: Golden Elixir Press, 2011, p. 111). An in-depth ‘traditionalist’ exposition of this notion can be found in F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1984.
19 Ibn Arabi, The Ringstones of Wisdom (Fusus Al-Hikam), translated by C. K. Dagli, Chicago, IL: Kazi Publications, 2004. An earlier and more sprawling account of his religious and philosophical views is the collected volume Al-Futuḥat al-Makkiyya (see Ibn Arabi, The Meccan Revelations, 2 vols., translated by M. Chodkiewicz, New York, NY: Pir Press, 2002).
20 A good scholarly overview of Ibn Arabi’s metaphysics, with emphasis on epistemological aspects that are particularly relevant to the present analysis, can be found in W. C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn Al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, Albany, NY: SUNY, 1989. For a more passionately evocative, but possibly also more freely ‘interpretative’ account, see H. Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’Arabi, Princeton, NJ: Princeton and Bollingen, 1998.
21 The following account of Ibn Arabi’s metaphysics will largely follow Toshihiko Izutsu’s reading, from the first part of T. Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2016, pp. 6–285.
22 From the verb nazzaha meaning literally ‘to keep something away from contamination’, that is absolute transcendence.
23 From the verb shabbaha meaning ‘to make or consider something similar to some other thing’, that is in theology ‘to liken God to created things’ or immanence.
24 See, for example, his presentation of knowledge and self-knowledge as crucial tools for redemption, in the texts collected in M. Sadra, The Elixir of the Gnostics, translated, introduced and annotated by W. C. Chittick, Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 2003.
25 See for example, I. Kalin, Mulla Sadra, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014; and M. Kamal, From Essence to Being: The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra and Martin Heidegger, London: ICAS Press, 2010.
26 Mulla Sadra’s theories on existence, and particularly his notion of the ‘modulation of being’, are well discussed in S. H. Rizvi, Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics, London: Routledge, 2013.
27 Sheikh Ahmed Ben Mustafa Ben Alliwa, The Unique Prototype, as translated by T. Burckhardt – my translation from the Italian edition of T. Burckhardt, Considerazioni sulla Conoscenza Sacra, Milano: SE, 1997, p. 93.
28 Mulla Sadra’s texts on ‘gradational ontology’ can be found collected in M. Sadra, Metaphysical Penetrations, translated by S. H. Nasr, edited and with an introduction by I. Kalin, Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 2014.
29 Prince M. D. Shikoh, Majma-Ul-Bahrain or The Mingling Of The Two Oceans, Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1998.
30 See for example T. Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People, Verso, 2017, pp. 43–50.
31 C. Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864, pp. 404–5.
32 J. S. Eriugena, Periphyseon: The Division of Nature, translated by I.-P. Sheldon-Williams and J. J. O’Meara, Montreal: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987.
33 Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 324.
34 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 164.
35 Ibid., p. 7.
36 Ibid., pp. 305–6.
37 ‘The intellect cannot measure the divine, / azure is hidden from the intellect, / but seraphim sometimes bring a sign’, from Aleksandr Blok, The Intellect Cannot Measure the Divine, in A. Blok, Selected Poems, translated by J. Stallworthy and P. France, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000, p. 25.
38 The progression from Magic’s first hypostasis ‘the ineffable as life’ all the way to the last hypostasis ‘the paradox’, might at first appear as the exact reverse of the traditional Sufi path towards fana (annihilation) – where ‘[fana is] the total nullification of the ego-consciousness, where there remains only the absolute Unity of Reality in its purity as an absolute Awareness prior to bifurcation into subject and object’ (T. Izutsu, The Basic Structure of Metaphysical Thinking in Islam, in M. Mohaghegh and H. Landolt (eds.), Collected Papers on Islamic Philosophy and Mysticism, Tehran: Iranian Institute of McGill University and Tehran University, 1971, p. 39). While the Sufi mystic moves from the accomplished form of the world, back towards its originating principle, the present discussion of Magic’s cosmogony declares to move from the first cosmogonic principle towards the accomplished form of Magic world – hence this apparent reverse movement. However, as it will become clearer later and as it is discussed in a note to the Magic’s fifth hypostasis, the movement between ‘the ineffable as life’ and ‘the paradox’, is in fact more akin to the passage from fana to baqa – with all that it entails.
39 R. Calasso, Ka, London: Vintage Books, 1999, pp. 36–7.
40 ‘With the daylight come / the words / when the garden falls silent / and in him, on the branches, / the unsuspected birds.’ Francesco Scarabicchi, Sui Rami (On the Branches), in F. Scarabicchi, Il Prato Bianco, Torino: Einaudi, 2017, p. 27.
41 Most recently Timothy Morton; see T. Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People, London and New York: Verso, 2017.
42 To be more precise, following in part Giorgio Colli’s reading of the notion of the ‘apollonian’ in Nietzsche (see G. Colli, Apollineo e Dionisiaco, Milano: Adelphi, 2010, pp. 75–120). Like Colli, we are now considering Apollo’s quintessence in terms of his ability to set limit and to bring a layer of ‘representational’ language into the world. Unlike Colli, however, the present interpretation of the figure of Apollo doesn’t confine it to the realm of the phenomenon and of a ‘word’ that is ‘closed onto itself’, but puts it in direct connection with the Ineffable (though at a distance from it). For an interpretation of the figure of Apollo that is closer to that suggested in the present volume, see James Hillman’s text Apollo, Dream, Reality, in J. Hillman, Mythic Figures, Washington, DC: Spring Publications, 2012.
43 An excellent discussion of Imamology in Ismaili thought can be found in: H. Corbin, Cyclical Time & Ismaili Gnosis, London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 103–50.
44 See Shiism and Prophetic Philosophy, in H. Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 23–104.
45 The following reading is largely based on Henry Corbin’s account. See H. Corbin, L’Imam cache’, Paris: L’Herne, 2003. I consulted the Italian edition: H. Corbin, L’Imam Nascosto, Milano: SE, 2008.
46 H. Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, London: Routledge, 2014, p. 72.
47 For a fascinating and relevant discussion of the notion of symbol in Mediterranean thought (and India), with particular reference to its religious interpretations, see J. Ries (ed.), I Simboli, Milano: Jaca Book, 2016. For an understanding of symbols that is broadly sympathetic to that presented in this volume, see in particular E. Wind, The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
48 J. W. von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Nos. 279, 1112, 1113 – in M. H. Abrahams and G. G. Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015, p. 394.
49 J. Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander, New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1990, p. 188.
50 M. Eliade, Images and Symbols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 84–5.
51 E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2: Mythical Thought, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955.
52 E. Cassirer, Language and Myth, New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1953, p. 63.
53 Cassirer, Language and Myth, p. 99.
54 C. Kerenyi, Prolegomena, in C. G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, The Science of Mythology, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 3.
55 See Levi Strauss’s discussion of the mytheme in L. Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, translated by Monique Layton, New York: Basic Books, 1976, p. 144.
56 H. Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’Arabi, Princeton, NJ: Princeton and Bollingen, 1998; Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, in Spring 1972 (Zürich) pp. 1–13, originally in Cahiers Internationaux de Symbolisme 6, Brussels, 1964, pp. 3–26.
57 See The Red Intellect, in Sheikh S. Suhrawardi, The Mystical and Visionary Treatises, translated by W. M. Trackston Jr., London: Octogon Press, 1982, pp. 35–43. For an in-depth exegesis of this tale, see Il ‘Racconto dell’Angelo Imporporato’ e le Gesta Mistiche Iraniche, in H. Corbin, Nell’Islam Iranico: Sohrawardi e I Platonici di Persia, Milano: Mimesis, 2015, pp. 237–84.
58 H. Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, in Spring 1972 (Zürich) p. 2.
59 H. Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, in Spring 1972 (Zürich) pp. 3–4.
60 Sallustius, On the Gods and the Cosmos, III, Concerning Myths, translated by G. Murray, in G. Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion, New York, NY: Dover Publications, 2003, p. 192. Sallustius was a fourth-century CE Roman pagan philosopher and theologian, a friend of Emperor Julian (later known as ‘The Apostate’) and the author of the treatise On the Gods and the Cosmos. Not to be confused with the homonymous first-century BCE Roman historian.
61 For a multi-voice discussion of possible interpretations of Bhartrhari’s thought, in the light both of traditional and of contemporary philosophy, see M. Chaturvedi, Bhartrhari: Language, Thought, and Reality, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2009. The interpretation adopted in the present volume is mainly based on that provided in B. K. Matilal, The Word and the World: India’s Contribution to the Study of Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
62 For an overview of the tradition of Sanskrit grammarian/philosophers, see J. F. Staal, A Reader on the Sanskrit Grammarians, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
63 B. K. Matilal, The Word and the World: India’s Contribution to the Study of Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 85.
64 For a collection of all the texts attributed by tradition to Hermes Trismegistus, see VVAA, Corpus Hermeticum, edited by A. D. Nock and A. J. Festugiere, Milano: Bompiani, 2005.
65 Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Tablet, translated by Sir I. Newton, CreateSpace, 2017.
66 Though we should equally mention René Guénon’s work on the symbolism of the centre, especially in his volumes Symbols of Sacred Science, Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004, pp. 8–17, and The Symbolism of the Cross, Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1996, pp. 127–32.
67 See for example, M. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996; The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991; Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
68 M. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: or, Cosmos and History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 12 and 16.
69 M. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, p. 377.
70 See The ‘Construction’ of the Sacred Space, in M. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, pp. 371–4.
71 See R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958.
72 Nicholas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, New York, NY: Hyperion Press, 1979.
73 On the peculiar value of the paradoxical form, see Pavel Florensky’s comments on Origen’s theory of the Second Coming (in which even the damned are eventually saved): ‘If you ask me: will there be eternal torments? I will answer: yes. But if you ask me: will there be a universal reintegration in blessedness? I will answer again: yes. … In the face of antinomy faith is necessary, given that it is impossible to submit it to reason. It’s a yes and a no, and this is the best proof of it religious significance’ (P. Florensky, La Colonna e il Fondamento della Verita’, Milano: Rusconi, 1974, p. 309 – my translation from the Italian edition). See also Massimo Cacciari’s comment to these lines: ‘That the eschaton should have to be thought antinomically, much more than a sign, … perhaps represents the sign of the profoundly ir-religious form of this “religion.” The redemption it promises cannot be attained through any method or any univocal and clearly predictable path. Its truth cannot be defined nomothetically. … Any attempt to rationalize it – that is, to render it univocal – betrays it. It remains concealed in the pure possible of the gratuitous communicating-participating of all dimensions of being – a harmony that is, like the Platonic Good, beyond every determination of being’ (M. Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, translated by M. E. Vatter, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994, p. 82).
74 Compare this with the final stage in the Sufi path, baqa (permanence). As explained well by Toshihiko Izutsu: ‘At the stage of fana the pseudo-ego or the relative self has completely dissolved into nothingness. At the next stage [baqa], man resuscitated out of nothingness, completely transformed into an absolute Self. What is resuscitated outwardly is the same old man, but he is a man who has once transcended his own determination … the world of multiplicity appears again with all its infinitely rich colors. Since, however, he has already cast off his own determination, the world of multiplicity he perceives is also beyond all determinations. The new worldview is comparable to the worldview which a drop of water might have if it could suddenly awaken to the fact that being an individual self-subsistent drop of water has been but a pseudo-determination which it has imposed upon itself’ (T. Izutsu, The Concept and Reality of Existence, Petaling Jaya: Islamic Book Trust, 2007, pp. 16–17).
75 For an analysis of the Gnostic religion and philosophy, see the as-yet-unsurpassed H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1963.
76 M. Eliade, Images and Symbols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 84–5.
77 C. G. Jung, Synchronicity, London: Routledge 2008, p. 140.
78 Jung, Synchronicity, p. 59.
79 C. G. Jung, The Philosophical Tree, in The Collected Works, vol. XIII, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 253.
80 Charles Baudelaire, Correspondances: ‘La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; / L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles / Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.’
81 See Xenophon, Cyropaedia, I, iii, 14, in Xenophon, Cyropaedia, Books 5–8, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
82 See J. Godwin, The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, Boston, MA: Weiser Books, 2005, pp. 153–80.
83 As reported in W. Diem and M. Schöller, The Living and the Dead in Islam: Studies in Arabic Epitaphs, vol. 3, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004, p. 49, and H. Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, London: Routledge, 2014, p. 78.
84 H. Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, London: Routledge, 2014, p. 78.
85 With regard to the notion of ultimate ontological emptiness, see in particular the second/thirdcentury CE, Mahayana/Madhyamaka, Indian philosopher Nagarjuna’s considered by some as the inventor of the concept of sunyata (see C. W. Huntington, The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian Madhyamaka, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989). For the differences between the ontology of Advaita Vedanta and of Mahayana Buddhism, see R. D. Karmarkar’s introduction to the Gaudapada Karika, one of the founding texts of Advaita Vedanta (see R. D. Karmarkar, Introduction, in Gaudapada, Gaudapada Karika, edited and translated by R. D. Karmarkar, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1953, pp. XXXIX–XL).
86 Suhrawardi’s notion of Double Negation should be distinguished from the Sufi notion of fana’ al-fana (‘double annihilation’), which is a form of Double Negation applied to a person’s own self-identification (see M. H. Yazdi, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by Presence, Albany, NY: SUNY, 1992, pp. 156–8).
87 We could liken the relationship between these two aspects of the ineffable dimension of existence – one utterly transcendent, one immanent to the world at work within it – to the relationship between God and Mohammad in its cosmic function, as first conceptualized by the eleventh–twelfth-century Persian mystic Al-Ghazali. According to Ghazali (in Al-Ghazali, The Niche of Lights, Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1998) – and to most Sufi schools since – Muhammad’s cosmic function is to be the muta’ (‘the one who is obeyed’) and to act as God’s working principle in the world – while God’s absolute transcendence has removed Him altogether, so to speak, from the world and from ontology. Whenever a mystically inclined person experiences God’s presence and action in the world, it is not God directly that they experience, but God’s manifestation through Mohammad’s cosmic function as the muta’ (see A. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975, p. 223).
88 R. Calasso, Ardor, London: Penguin, 2014, page unspecified from the kindle edition – equivalent to pp. 243–4 in the original Italian first edition.
89 Calasso, Ardor, page unspecified from the kindle edition – equivalent to pp. 247–8 in the original Italian first edition.
90 See Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahâfut al-falâsifa), Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2002.
91 See T. Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2006, pp. 82–3, 182–95.
92 Merely for reasons of space, in the present volume we shall not properly engage with the wealth of Florensky’s thought. It is nonetheless certainly worth exploring it in depth, since it represents one of the pinnacles of twentieth-century philosophy. Unfortunately, very little of his work has been translated into English. The interested (anglophone) reader might want to see in particular P. Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004; and P. Florenksy, Iconostasis, Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996.
93 P. Florensky, The Universal Roots of Idealism – my translation from the Italian edition, P. Florenskij, Realtà e Mistero, Milano: SE, 2013, p. 19.
94 Florensky, The Universal Roots of Idealism.
95 B. Spinoza, Ethics, London: Penguin, 1996, p. 118.
96 In this sense, the present account can be interpreted as broadly part of the ‘existentialist’ tradition – particularly in its ancient, Islamic version.