V.2

ARVO

Ethnology and the “Perils of the Soul”

Sometimes today one comes across scholars who venture into the supersensible field, coming to it from the profane point of view and thus lacking any authentic principle, yet here and there they arrive at insights that are not totally banal, although they themselves are unable to coordinate and develop them adequately. To use an image from Aristotle, they are like someone trying to wrestle who succeeds with some lucky hold, even though he is ignorant of the art of wrestling.

Ernesto De Martino’s book Il mondo magico (Turin, 1st ed., 1948) is a case in point. I think it will be interesting to review the arguments it contains, and to see how they might be considered from the esoteric point of view.

De Martino is an “ethnologist,” i.e., one who collects data gathered by explorers and observers among savage peoples. This particular case treats everything of such peoples that concerns the “extra-normal” and that De Martino simply identifies as the “magical world.” Beside being an ethnologist, he is a follower of “historicism”: the philosophy that reduces all truth to that which gradually takes shape in the historical development of the human spirit (known in the jargon as “spirit’s becoming”).

This already shows the limitations of De Martino’s conception. In the first place, he speaks of a “magical world,” whereas he should really be speaking of a “sorcerous world.” Secondly, he assumes, like many of his colleagues, that savage peoples are “primitive” peoples, i.e., remainders of what all humanity was at its origins, left behind by the progress of “civilization.” Our readers know that the truth is otherwise: most of the presumed “primitives” are nothing but extreme forms of involution and degeneration of prior civilizations and races, sometimes so ancient that any trace of their memory is lost. The “material” on which De Martino’s work is based comes almost exclusively from that twilight zone lying under a sort of anathema, where one finds only degraded fragments, faint echoes and distortions of structures that, in themselves, once belonged to a very different plane. De Martino deliberately ignores everything to do with the sacred sciences of antiquity, the heritage of the greatest traditional civilizations of East and West, and which alone could provide a proper orientation to what is not just ordinary human experience. Likewise, he does not suspect that any milieu could exist today which possesses these sciences on the basis of an uninterrupted transmission. He only seems to know about the “scanty troop of sensitives, mediums, dowsers, pendulum users, etc., which forms the little archaic republic within the great republic of our civilization” (p. 262). Thus he only knows about one order of things, whose level is even lower than that of the savage world.

Despite such limited horizons, De Martino arrives at views that are partially correct. Here is his basic thesis: Nowadays we possess a concept of the Self, the non-Self, nature, space, and reality that we tend to consider as absolute, never suspecting that it is “historically conditioned,” that it has arisen and become evident only within modern Western civilization, whence we extend it to every possible civilization, including what De Martino calls “magical civilization” (p. 190). On the contrary, the latter has completely different concepts of a Self, a non-Self, a type of relationship between them, an environment, and a spiritual condition.

Thus when one raises the question of the reality of certain abnormal phenomena, it is wrongly put: they are real, but their reality is not what is understood by that word today (p. 192). The common modern concept of reality is a historical formation; outside or prior to today’s civilization and humanity it is meaningless.

So long as the argument is expressed thus, we can accept it. These pages have repeatedly pointed out the error of those who claim to understand something of ancient or non-Western civilization by applying concepts which are only valid for modern man. Also from the practical point of view, it has often been emphasized that to obtain results in the field of initiation and magic, one must know another Self, another nature, and in general another modality of experience that have been almost entirely lost. Magical and traditional man lived and moved in a world essentially different from our own.

De Martino writes specifically: “The experimental science of nature is built upon the idea of a nature purified of all the psychic projections of magic; yet paranormal phenomena bear witness precisely to a nature still interwoven by these projections, and not only at the level of mere belief, but in reality itself. . . . Science was born from removing the psychic quality from nature, first gradually, then ever more deliberately. The possibility of paranormal phenomena signified for science a veritable ‘sign of contradiction,’ a ‘scandal,’ inasmuch as the paranormal generally represents a psychic quality that returns to nature, and a nature recharged with psychic qualities” (p. 69). This observation is equally true. One can also formulate it as follows: reality, or “nature,” is not indifferent to man’s attitude and interpretation; both have an effective power over it. The so-called scientific knowledge of nature has been an active process of disensouling and petrifying it. There is an intimate solidarity between the spiritual condition and the way in which nature or reality appears. It is through the materialization of the spirit that a nature has become real in which materialism can be true, and the methods of materialistic and positivist science very largely applicable. But this petrification has not been sufficiently complete to exclude residues or traces of a different condition; hence the zones where paranormal phenomena still occur, which are like spoilsports in the orderly world of materialistic science. Naturally these phenomena have become ever more insignificant and infrequent, the more that the collective milieu is completely dominated by the views of science and technology, while this milieu reacts objectively on reality in a deterministic sense.

One of De Martino’s true deductions is as follows: “The naturalistic procedure falls into a strange contradiction: the very attitude that most closely follows the rules of (scientific) observation can influence the phenomena observed and make them vanish, while on the other hand, the phenomena can easily appear if the observer somehow abandons this attitude” (p. 160). The phenomena in question are of a lower order, but the principle is valid. There is an attitude that by itself paralyzes everything to do with the subtle and spiritual aspect of reality.¹

Returning to the principal point, we see how De Martino understands the difference between today’s experience and that which he calls “magical.” In the former, the sense of Self appears as something given, guaranteed, and defined, and confronting it is a non-Self, a nature with the attributes of a given and defined reality completely independent of us. This character of “being given” (De Martino uses the term datità [givenness]) is not found in the magical world. There the duality of I and non-I is not yet so definite; an independent objective world does not exist, the frontiers between soul and nature are labile, so that irruptions can occur from the one to the other. “Reality as independence of the given, as the presentation of an observable world as decisive and guaranteed alterity, is a historical² formation specific to our civilization, hence correlative to the decisive and guaranteed presence [of the Self to itself]³ which characterizes it” (p. 155).

But from this point on, De Martino’s views call for reservations. According to him, the magical experience stems from the anguish of a Self that cannot maintain itself in the face of a nature experienced as a world of psychic forces; in this situation, the soul finds itself exposed “to an extreme and definitive risk, in comparison to which all life’s other hazards lose their significance and importance” (p. 141). Sir James Frazer, also referring to the world of savages, already spoke of “perils of the soul,” due to a permanent possibility of the soul’s losing itself, being dissolved, possessed, invaded; and he interpreted a series of primitive magical rituals as techniques for defence against such dangers, substantial dangers no longer known to the Self of today’s man.

But this is not all. “Necessarily connected to the magical risk of losing the soul is the other magical risk of losing the world.” When one feels the secret forces acting behind things, a certain sensible and tangible horizon enters into crisis, and one actually feels the risk of every limit collapsing. “But magic, which in a sense signals the risk, intervenes at the same time to stem the insurgent chaos and restore it to order” (p. 149), which is that of nature resubjugated to the given laws and brought back within its limits.

The first point to be made here is that the labile state of soul, unindividuated and exposed to a fundamental risk, does not correspond at all to the “magical world,” or to whatever one could truly consider as the world of origins. On the contrary, it corresponds to a sorcerous world, to a human type at the extreme of decadence and degradation, where indeed it is possible for the spiritual unity to break apart and easy for “psychic” influences of every sort to break in. As said, this is the case for most savage peoples, whose rituals are, so to speak, intended to save what can be saved. But it is not the case for vast zones of ancient civilizations, although they were very much aware of the “paranormal.”

De Martino, with his “historicism,” believes in an imaginary process of emancipation that supposedly consolidated and guaranteed the “soul,” leading to a stable and definitive form, safe and established, which is common property today. He is deluding himself. In regard to modern humanity, one should not speak of evolution, but of involution and regression; of a process of spiritual barbarization, even though it took a different direction from the involution of savage peoples. In fact, if a man was ever internally unstable and inconsistent, it is certainly the man of today. Without exaggerating, one can say that the human personality has never been so threatened as it is today, and never so vulnerable to “perils of the soul”—for the very fact that it takes no account of these perils. Whereas primitive man felt invisible forces and demons in a quasi-physical way and was thus able to arm himself against them, modern man is subject to similar influences that now act in more subtle ways, such as thoughts, suggestions, ideologies, and collective psychic currents that enslave him without his ever noticing the constraint. It is very different from the “discovery of the autonomy of the spirit” and “man’s freedom of creation and action,” that the development of Western civilization is supposed to have brought about! (pp. 186, 121). It is astonishing that a so-called critical spirit can be fooled by such “historicist” fancies.

Things are a little different regarding the unstable world order in primordial consciousness. This cannot concern only the experiences of savages, but reflects a far higher level. The traditional world recognized in man the function of a “center,” of a “third power beside Heaven and Earth.” This function qualified him for helping to maintain the universal order, and even controlling natural phenomena up to a point. A whole complex of rituals and sacrifices, not only among savages but also in great civilizations such as the Chinese and Hindu, had no other purpose. Our readers may know the particular case of Far Eastern views on the action attributed to the Sovereign’s presence, not only on the order of his realm but also on natural phenomena. Of course to modern man, for whom all such contact is broken and who feels himself nothing more than an insignificant phenomenon on one of the infinite bodies populating cosmic space, this all appears as mere superstition; but that matters little to us.

We find in De Martino a similar confusion between degraded elements of the savages and elements of a higher order, when he speaks of those who take on the role of magus. The latter, through various procedures, entering into trance, and so forth, seems to intensify the state of peril and risk felt by primitive man. He deliberately weakens the sense of self-presence and provokes an upsurge of psychic realities that seem to submerge it, yet he is not lost. The ultimate purpose is a reaffirmation of the self, a mastery of the forces of this supersensible world which he has thus penetrated. He maintains the trance without falling into possession or uncontrolled ecstasy (pp. 113–15). “The shaman is the hero who can go to the very brink of chaos and make a pact with it, while others find themselves in an unstable condition [of self] that is vulnerable at any moment” (p. 118). “Loss of self, which for others can be permanent, is transformed by the magus into a moment of process leading to salvation . . . . There is only one way to arrest the dissolution: to bring oneself deliberately to the limit of one’s own presence [of self-awareness as a person], and through a special vocation and initiation to put off one’s own Self in order to remake it in a second birth, descending to the limit of one’s own presence in order to return in a newly defined form” (p. 121). In brief: the being “is unmade to be remade.” “The magus is the one who can go beyond himself not just in the ideal sense, but in the existential sense” (p. 122).

I hardly need to highlight everything here that refers to the scheme of authentic initiation, well known to our readers, and not to the twilight world of savages. Again, we need only to discard all De Martino’s “historicist” fancies and to say that initiatic realization, integration, and the supernatural consolidation of the Self were the same yesterday as they are today, and have nothing whatever to do with any historical epoch—though the task may meet with greater or lesser difficulties and require different methods according to the predominant type of civilization. Being a “person” in the higher sense today is hardly a given condition; it is essentially a task and a problem—almost as much as in De Martino’s presumed “magical world.”

I would point out, moreover, that with his historicism De Martino pulls the ground from under his own feet. He is forced to admit that according to the historiographical point of view, it is absurd to pretend to understand “what magic is in itself ” as a former historical state; one can only know how it appears “according to our modern perspective, or what it is for our consciousness” (p. 198). That creates a vicious circle from which there is no exit. The only material available for study is the “residues” of “marginal situations of our civilization,” where “existential states that characterized the magical epoch persist or are reproduced more or less authentically.”⁴ I have already mentioned that beside savages, the author only knows about spiritualists, mediums, dowsers, and the like, supplemented by neurotics and schizophrenics⁵ who belong more or less in the same spiritual bag. Is this not an explicit confession of incompetence in the matter he is supposed to be treating? With a superior air he mentions “the romantic yearnings of the arcane wisdom of the ancients” (p. 210). He might have done better not to mention things of which he is fundamentally ignorant.

I will not go into detailed objections. One could, for example, ask whether the phenomena testified in the lives of many saints are also due to “regression” to the state of an unstable soul that has not yet acquired the definitive self-awareness claimed for modern man; or whether that is how to explain the body of rituals of positive religions that still exist, including Catholicism, which always have a “magical” presupposition. Lastly, how blind does one have to be not to notice all those figures of the traditional world, the world of true origins, whose unequalled spiritual superiority and integrity certainly did not await the “evolution of modern critical consciousness”?

Yet we have seen that despite all De Martino’s prejudices and his use of very dubious material, some benign spirit has led him, here and there, to recognize the truth of things. The most interesting point is his recognition of a magic unique to modern man: a veritable sorcery by which he has given real existence to a soulless, “objective” nature, following mechanical laws: a nature that was nonexistent in former epochs. It is true up to a point that, as a counterpart, this has resulted in a bastion against the “perils of the soul” and a consolidation of the Self’s consciousness. The perils still exist, as we have said, only clothed in other forms.⁶ Admittedly, we must recognize the existence of a sort of barrier that encloses the modern soul with respect to the “psychic,” to a perhaps unprecedented degree. But within this enclosure, which is in one sense protective, the spiritual substance is more inconsistent and formless today than it ever was. For this very reason, anyone who, despite the unfavorable conditions of the environment, reestablishes psychic contacts and reawakens states that are not a “past” but a permanent possibility of the spirit should also consider that the risks are greater than they have ever been.