3

Body Doubles

Soul and body are not two substances that act one upon another, but two functions which pass into one another. The soul is not so fleeting as the wandering consciousness, the body is not as stiff as a corpse. The soul is formed in this transition, in transition the body becomes alive.

—KARL JOEL ¹

That the soul and body are formed or structured in transition, that they are constituted by a process or movement rather than composed of discrete substances, is a key aspect of ideas I hold to be central to Hermetic thinking. As outlined in the previous chapter, the notion that mind (soul, psyche) is part of a process (a “pattern that perpetuates itself,” as Wiener says) rather than a material structure is also a key concern of certain cybernetic thinkers. This demonstrates a recrudescence of concepts that one first apprehends within Hermetic thought and, conceptually at least, represents a significant shift away from the dominant quantitative methods of modern science. Furthermore the determinations of the cybernetic thinkers, and the relationship of their ideas to Hermetic concepts and figuration, take the form of an imaginal entailment, a logic inherent in the continuing imaginary of Hermeticicsm that impels one to hypothesize that they form the outlines of a single ideal object known first to Hermetic thinkers as the anima mundi.

The Hermetic notion of the subtle, pneumatic body was constructed over a great period of time. It was a complex syncretic process drawing on Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and folk-astrological ideas that would ultimately create a unified conception of a pneumatic economy inclusive of the “bodies” of the stars, animals, humankind, and inorganic nature. What is significant about this syncretic construction is that bodies are imagined not as machines or dull substance but rather as the product of mutual influence, a set of relationships. Just as any geometrical figure is ultimately reliant on a set of precisely defined relationships rather than any particular figure inscribed for the eye, so Hermetic corporeity becomes a series of relationships and processes only recognized within an inclusive economy: not the intellectual economy of plane geometry, but the pneumatic economy of Hermeticism.

The long-lived idea of the subtle body is a rich alternative to modernist conceptions of the body as machine. In fact one can say that one of the most important (yet overlooked) battles waged in the seventeenth century was a battle between the ancient view of corporeity as composed of several interacting “envelopes” and processes and the newly emerging Cartesian view that saw the body as a sophisticated clockwork device.

As is well known, both Descartes and Hobbes thought that the human body was basically a sophisticated machine. This machinic imagery would eventually overtake the province of the mind as well (in sharp contradiction to the strict Cartesian division between ethereal mind and machinic body) when Freud used hydraulic and “steamage” imagery of the buildup of internal pressures and release valves (the steam engine) in his descriptions of the mind. This imagery would in turn be transmogrified into the figurations of the cybernetic era, as examined in chapter 2.

When we imagine the (human) body today, we more than likely conjure up an image consisting of its objective appearance and machinic articulations: its four limbs and their possible movements, its head and torso. We see its objective shape and imagine its interior articulations in terms, perhaps, of a Hollywood cyborg: partly machine, partly “organic”—a cybernetic organism. This manner of imagining the body in terms of its objective shape plus the imaginary of its mechanical workings would have been quite alien to ancient thinkers, and not only because of the comparative lack of references for a mechanized body. They were certainly aware of the objective form of the body, as any number of ancient frescoes and sculptures will attest, but for many thinkers this aspect of human corporeity was of comparatively little importance. Along with the objective form of the body we also possessed one (or more) subtle bodies, but these certainly were not imagined as being “humanlike.” When Plutarch describes the luciform bodies of the dead in his On the Delay of Divine Justice, he describes them as being surrounded by a “flame-like bubble,” and he proceeds to describe their many-hued coruscations.² For Plutarch and others following the Neoplatonic tradition, the human body was suspended within a subtle, scintillating sphere.

This subtle sphere was primarily a vehicle; that is, over and above its figure (its shape) there operated the important concept of its function as a medium of transmission and passage. The subtle body was an important part of the “spiritual technology” of pan-communication that constituted the Hermetic pneumatic worldview.

As a consequence of this conception of a pneumatic communicative economy it becomes possible to read the figuration of the subtle body as the intermediary that unites mind, nous, with the greater world. It is proposed that the subtle body’s functioning within the micro/macrocosmic couplet of Alexandrian/Hermetic thought is a logical “connective” figuration that naturally follows from the characterization of nous, or mind, as the virtual simulacrum of a greater hyperintelligence, the anima mundi. It follows therefore that its full significance within the history of ideas may only be properly explicated by taking into account its functioning within the domain of signs and signifying activity.

VERTIGRAL ARCHITECTONICS: AN INTRODUCTION

To further clarify the use of the notion of ideal objects as a hermeneutic tool, a neologism needs to be introduced and defined—vertigral architectonics. Vertigral is a descriptive that enfolds two words: vertical and integral. The term vertigral was introduced in chapter 1. It was first suggested by Eugene Jolas in his magazine Transition in the 1930s. In his essay “Vertigralist Workshop” Jolas attempts to describe a “new kind of creator” who anticipates that the “horizontal consciousness which, through naturalism, has dominated the past hundred years, will be followed by a psychic revolution, through which the creative man [sic] will look at life in terms of high and low, in terms of antinomies in fluctuation, in terms of a systole and diastole between the irrational and the super-consciousness.”³

Furthermore, this individual

re-develops in himself ancient and mutilated sensibilities that have an analogy with those used in the mythological-magical mode of thought . . . with prophetic revelations, with Orphic mysteries, with mystic theology such as that of Dionysis Areopagita, with the Kaballa, Tao, Hindoo philosophy, with Egyptian wisdom, with gnostic rapture, with mantic experiences.⁴

By shifting the emphasis from the horizontal trajectory (to which he ascribes the “flattening” effect of naturalism in human discourse) to that of the vertical, Jolas is proposing a return to premodernist sensibilities. What may be called “vertigral architectonics” is an expansion of the structure of the Alexandrian mentalité, explicated by Hans Jonas and other scholars, into a hermeneutic tool by which certain manifestations of consciousness may be seen to be operating within an imaginary that integrates human beings and the cosmic through the instrumentality of the body considered as a pneumatic communication device. Concerning the fundamental vertical orientation of Alexandrian and Gnostic thought, Jonas has noted, “[The Gnostics considered] the existing system of the universe as a power structure which determines the actual condition of man. The emphasis here is on its stratification along a vertical axis, on the antithesis of the heights and the depths, on the distance between the terrestrial and the divine world, and the plurality of worlds in between.”⁵

As he has stated elsewhere, Jonas considers that the hierarchical ordering of the Alexandrian/Gnostic kosmos is a necessary concomitant within an imaginary that views existence as an essentially abstract, continuing “power struggle” between human beings and the demiurgically created world.⁶ Unlike Jonas, the notion of vertigrality in this book does not necessarily imply a relationship between competing “powers,” but rather implies a set of relationships in a state of perpetual and oscillating communication.

Most importantly, the concept of “body” within the vertigral scheme is a greatly expanded notion to that of the post-Galenic, Cartesian corpus that has so dominated Western thought throughout the modern period. Jolas’s call to examine the premodernist vertical trajectory central to certain ideas and practices of ancient and non-European cultures seems to be an early twentieth-century call for the reintegration of these ideas and practices into contemporary discourse. This constitutes what one may now recognize as a “postmodern move” that attempts to revitalize certain epistemological and ontological questions by advocating a reexamination of premodern ideas within the context of the postmodern era. This strategy can be characterized as a “postmodern move” as it is an active, conscious displacement of the grand récits (in particular the sustaining narratives associated with the modern scientific project) in an effort to discover something of value in knowledges that have been suppressed or abandoned by modernity. As a consequence certain discourses may perhaps then be rejuvenated through what might be characterized as a process of deliberate “derailment” before the speeding train of mechanism crashes into its inevitable dead end. It is simultaneously a call to recognize the plurality of knowledges and the means whereby such new epistemic systems may be formulated.

In her paper “Desire, the Body and Recent French Feminisms”⁷ Elizabeth Grosz states that the body is “central to the understanding of materiality, spatiality and corporeality [and that] the human body is the implicit object and norm of all scientific and philosophical discourse, whether or not the sciences recognise and acknowledge this.”

While the sciences of the modern period may not recognize this, certainly individual scientists were persuaded of it. Ernst Mach for example considered that the visual, tactile, and auditory modes each defined a particular “space” and that these spaces furthermore were the physiological origin of conceptions of geometrical and phenomenal space.⁸ Mach considered that the notion of “surface” has a similar source: our own skin. He wrote, “The space of the skin is the analog of a two-dimensional, finite, unbounded and closed Riemannian space.”⁹ For Mach, all symmetry was derived from the left and right orientation of the human body. Even the Cartesian coordinates (x, y) had their origin in this corporeal schema.

It is the idea of symmetry that is one of the sustaining, ordering principles behind the continuing influence of the Hermetic imaginary. Absolutely central to the modern scientific project,¹⁰ the concept of symmetry is the modern equivalent of the Pythagorean harmonia. Originally referring to a carpenter’s joint (recalling ideas of integrated structure and stability), Pythagoras and his followers expanded on this idea to formulate some of the earliest ideas of harmony and balance in the cosmos—in fact the word cosmos (kosmos) itself was coined by the Pythagoreans for this very notion.

The notion of the subtle body is a logical figuration the function of which serves to unite intelligential and human cognition, the terrestrial and the cosmic. As such it is a necesssary part of an imaginary that pictures the kosmos as a vast symmetrical arrangement of intercommunicating forces. No matter how it was pictured or imaged in the “mind’s eye,” it is the functional relationships that this figuration supports that are a key to understanding its symmetrical functioning within the Hermetic imaginary.

THE VERTIGRAL INDEX OF THE SUBTLE BODY

Mircea Eliade once reflected, “It is as if the gods had created the world in such a way that it could not but reflect their existence; for no world is possible without verticality, and that dimension alone is enough to evoke transcendence.”¹¹

This verticality is also integral to an extended conception of human physiology found within a Hermetic imaginary that constellates around the “subtle” equivalent of the human central nervous system, another system similarly constituted for reception and communication.

The imagery and ideas associated with a pneumatically mediated communicative economy and its attendant concept of the subtle body were a mainstay of the Western corporeal imaginary up until the late seventeenth century. Couliano has noted that the concept of a subtle corporeity, refined into the notion of the sensus interior (that which Aristotelians called the “common sense”), has had a truly remarkable longevity. Conceived of as the intermediary instrument between the body and the soul, and composed of a sidereal pneumatic substance, the sensus interior was rediscovered by Scholastic philosophy and continued as an important concept up until the eighteenth century where it perhaps saw its last appearance in the opening passages of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.¹²

It was the explanatory power of the concept of the subtle body that made it such an enduring concept. It at once explained the constancy of the soul, its origins and destination, and its place within a world imagined as being suffused with similar subtle essences. For the last couple of centuries the idea of a subtle essence that enables human beings to communicate with all other bodies has disappeared from serious consideration, yet, considering the remarkably long history of the concept, this may yet prove to be merely a temporary hiatus. Contemporary science would certainly view the idea of a subtle essence as but one more aspect of the animistic worldview that was successfully rejected in favor of the mechanical worldview of modern science. Contra the opinion that both applauds and hypostatizes the notion of a disjunctive scientific/materialist break with the animistic past, I regard the imagery of the pneumatic economy as fundamental to a project that would reexamine the bases of contemporary natural science. In this reexamination the pneumatic economy would no longer be predicated on the interactions of a “subtle” material medium; rather it would be predicated on what it so closely resembles: the communicative/cybernetic notion of a world constituted by information exchange.

Esoteric, Hermetic conceptions of the body/mind duality tend to be non-reductionist. Unlike the materialist/mechanical thesis of modern science in which all observed phenomena are the result of the ultimate constituents of the world remaining at rest until impelled to move under the impact of contiguous ultimate constituents, esoteric thought relies on an imagery of intercession and transmission. The Tibetan Bardo Thödol, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, is careful to note that the various demons and apparitions that the deceased may expect to encounter following exitus are projections of the mind itself, yet this equivocal ontological density should not mislead one accustomed to think in terms of an opposition between “reality” and the “mental” into thinking that, therefore, these are just psychic representations or “projections.” The care with which the notion of “substantiality” is avoided in discussions of the Real in Tibetan Buddhist psychology can be assimilated with contemporary cybernetic notions of difference and the consequent differential constitution of the phenomenal. By this I mean that phenomena become meaningful not because of any difference in material constituents, but because meaning is the result of the nonmaterial apprehension of dif-ference. A logic gate in a computer operates because of voltage differential. The gate “opens” or “closes” according to whether voltage is encountered or not.^*32 The meaning of this activity is not to be found in the presence or absence of voltage, but in the fact that meaning is implicit in the differential constitution of the logic gate. In using the term differential to describe the constitution of the phenomenal, I am suggesting the idea that phenomena are the result of the intersection of two communicative orders: consciousness and the Real. If human beings are indeed “patterns that perpetuate themselves,” then the Real may be similarly constituted as λογοζ or “pattern,” and the intersection of both is what constitutes the phenomenal world.

This idea of the differential constitution of the phenomenal should be seen as an alternative to the naive realism most of us carry around in our heads, the inevitable result of over three hundred years of the dissemination of the worldview of materialist/mechanical science. Yet not all contemporary scientists were/are committed to the naive realist viewpoint. Albert Einstein was well aware of the “differential” alternative; in fact he was responsible for according the idea a certain rigor in the form of Einsteinian “field theory.”

From the relativity theory we know that matter represents vast stores of energy and energy represents matter. We cannot, in this way, distinguish qualitatively between matter and field . . . matter is where the concentration of energy is great, field where the concentration of energy is small. . . . There is no sense in regarding matter and field as two qualities quite different from each other. We cannot imagine a definite surface separating distinctly field and matter.¹³

In the newly emerging jargon of the twentieth-century physicist (a jargon that he was instrumental in both conceiving and promulgating), Einstein clearly saw that a sharp division between “matter” and (nonmaterial) “energy” or “field” was an inadequate description of reality: there is no “definite surface” that divides them, as he says. Yet it is the difference between “matter” and “energy” that makes all the difference in the world in terms of scientific formulae. Again, it is the differential constitution of Einstein’s conception that is important here. If he had thought in terms of the later-developing “information” or “communication” sciences, he would perhaps have formed his remarks in a similar manner to that outlined above. Following the vertigral schema, one suggests that Einstein’s conception of the “field organization” of the phenomenal world in which there can be no clear distinction between the “material” and the “immaterial” is akin to Tibetan Buddhist accounts of the world that also reject the (immaterial) subject and (material) object reification seemingly so pervasive within late Western thinking. The Hermetic idea of the subtle body similarly maintained a rarefaction of what has become the modern notion of matter and corporeality. This rarefaction, or perhaps more appositely, liquefaction of substance (“matter”) is a distinguishing mark of the Western esoteric tradition in which Neoplatonic and Hermetic ideas have generated such a profound effect.

ORIGINS OF THE PNEUMATIC ECONOMY

Aristotle’s attempt to reconcile the extreme separation of mind and body advanced by his teacher Plato led him to define a tertium quid, a third substance that could mediate the seemingly insuperable metaphysical divide between the two kinds of ousia, body (soma or physis) and soul (psyche). With Aristotle the soul’s relationship to the body is still one of superior faculty to its inferior, but the problem of communication between the two ontic categories is reconciled. Aristotle proposes the existence of a proton organon (primary instrument) of the soul located in the heart. It is composed of the same substance as the stars,^*33 fiery spirit (pneuma), yet it is so subtle as to approximate the condition of the soul, while still being a “material” as such so that it may have contact with the corporeal world as well. The soul transmits its vital activities to the body by means of this pneumatic organ, and the body communicates sensory information to the soul by means of the phantasmata produced by this same proton organon. Pneuma, then, was conceived of as an intermediary principle, halfway between the material world and the immaterial soul. It was the principle of communication between the two most fundamental ousia, soul and body.

It is significant that Aristotle regarded the pneumatic organ as the primary or original instrument. Aristotle seems to be implicitly privileging the function of communication above all others in his conception of the proton organon as the instrument that transported and ordered the phantasms. The phantasms transmitted by the proton organon may be regarded as representations of sense data that could be understood by the soul as, owing to the total ontological abyss between the two orders of being, the soul would be quite unaware of the activities of the body without this phantasmic language. As a consequence, Couliano notes, “The phantasm has absolute primacy over the word.”¹⁴ The phantasm, then, is the very condition of cognition itself, over and above the physical production of speech. Consequently there exists what may be regarded as two “grammars”: a grammar of speech and a grammar of phantasms, a strict order with contemporary parallels in Jerry Fodor’s conception of a “grammar of thought,” for example. What is interesting about this model is that the phantasms were conceived of as being a sort of image, constituting what Fodor would call the basic elements of the “mentalese” of cognition. The Epicureans called these images eidola, linking their conception with the Ionian/Platonic notion of eidos. Lucretius speaks of the eidola (often translated rather cumbersomely as “idols”) specifically as images, and the word image is etymologically connected with eidos. Importantly Lucretius regarded these eidola as material bodies, even if “extremely thin,” as he says.¹⁵

The Stoic philosophers replaced the concept of the proton organon with that of the hegemonikon, which also resided in the heart. Couliano characterizes this concept as that of a “cardiac synthesizer,” referring to Galen’s later description of the function of the hegemonikon as synaisthesis or synthesizer of pneumatic currents.¹⁶ The hegemonikon receives all the pneumatically transmitted information from the five senses, all the “comprehensible phantasms” (phantasia kataleptike) that can be understood by the intellect, and produces typosis en psyche, “impressions in the soul.”¹⁷ The process of perception was this: a current from the pneumatic circulatory system would travel to, say, the pupil of the eye from where it would enter into contact with the air itself (according to the Stoic philosophers the pneuma was composed of the same stuff as the air, i.e., “like knows like”) creating a “certain tension”¹⁸ that widens into a cone, the eye being at the apex and the base of the cone constituting the field of vision.

We know that Aristotle did not himself create the theory of the phantasmic pneuma, but was himself indebted (as was Plato) to both the sixth-century BCE physician Alcemaeon of Croton and Empedocles of Agrigentum of the fifth century BCE.¹⁹ These two Sicilian physicians both held that the pneuma was a subtle vapor that traveled in the arterial system, while the blood was relegated to the venous system. We observe here the earliest intimation in the West that sensory data were transmitted through a complex system—the primitive forebear of the eighteenth-century recognition of the functioning of the nervous system.

It is interesting that the Stoic thinkers very early realized that a communicative system composed of phantasms received by the senses required some sort of supervenient principle in order to organize the phantasms into the coherent picture of the world human beings ordinarily perceive. Galen later proposed that the hegemonikon’s synthesizing of the pneumatic phantasmata occurred in the brain rather than the heart, a theory still held, mutatis mutandis, today. The Galenic and Stoic need for a “central processor,” a hegemonikon, is paralleled in contemporary neuroscience where one of the most pressing problems facing the mind/brain identity hypothesis is to solve the so-called binding problem. Since the late nineteenth century neuroscience has made strong progress in discovering and mapping some of the brain sites responsible for such faculties as sight, hearing, taste, depth perception, and a host of other fine discriminatory abilities. Yet what the cognitive neurosciences have not yet found is a physical brain “site” where all these multifarious faculties and abilities are put together to form overall perception, or even an explanation as to how this is achieved. There exists no explanation, in other words, of how sense data are bound together to form the coherent perceptions of the world we ordinarily share. We observe here the reappearance of a very old problem, a problem with a transhistorical logical and ideal dimension that has periodically and necessarily engaged thinkers from ancient times up until the present.

THE SUBTLE BODY AS PSYCHONAUT

The ancient (most likely Babylonian) idea that the position of the (then known) seven planets had a direct influence on the lives of human beings at the time of birth had an important corollary: that of the descent of the soul through the heavenly spheres. The most important development of this idea is found in the Neoplatonic concept of the okhema, the vehicle of the soul, which seems to be a combination of three elements: suggestive passages in Plato’s Timaeus, Stoic conceptions of the pneuma as mediating perceptions in general, and Aristotle’s conviction that the sensitive and nutritive aspects of the soul had their seat in the pneuma, which was itself “analogous to that element of which the stars are made.”²⁰ Aristotle thought this element to be fire. Later interpretations of Aristotelian hylomorphic theory (influenced by Neoplatonic ideas) would posit the existence of a fifth element in addition to Aristotle’s four. In medieval Europe the stars and planets were thought to be composed of this subtle aether: it is the origin of our term quintessence, which literally means the “fifth essence.”

In Alexandrian thought the necessity of finding a tertium quiddity that mediated the Platonic division of the intelligential and corporeal realms led syncretically minded Neoplatonists to propose a number of pneumatic envelopes for the rational soul. Proclus’s account²¹ of the descent of the okhema, (“chariot” or “vehicle”) in company with its soul describes how it acquires vestments (chitones), increasingly material, of which it must divest itself if it is to reascend and recover its “proper form, after the analogy of the soul which makes use of it.”²² That is, just as the soul needs the vehicle for its transport, acquiring the “irrational principles of life” and “faculties tending to temporal process” on its way down, so the vehicle must accrue material encrustations in its accompanying downward journey, shrugging them off on the return trip.²³ Unlike the negative accounts of ensomatosis of the Gnostics (in which evil Archons—“rulers”—transfer some of their corrupt aspect to the weary psychonaut, endeavoring to prevent the soul from returning whence it came^*34), Neoplatonic renditions attribute certain qualities only to the intellect in its descent: the faculty of contemplation and practical intelligence (which, having its origin in another world altogether, the intellect would surely need) and the ability to stimulate procreation of children and the growth of the body—in other words to instill the Aristotelian dynamis during its earthly existence.^*35

In fact Proclus noted the existence of two “vehicles,” one lesser, one higher. These two vehicles were a response to two traditions concerning the subtle body, one of which saw the sidereal body as being an essential element always accompanying the soul, the other (as in Gnosticism) seeing it as an acquired element during the soul’s descent through the Spheres or Aeons (as described, for example, in the Gnostic/Hermetic Pymander) and which would be subsequently jettisoned on the soul’s reascent. The original, congenital^†36okhema is the soma augoeides (“luciform body”) or astroeides (“star born”), the proton soma (“original body”) that is demiurgically besouled. Incorruptible and eternal, it corresponds, according to E. R. Dodds, “to the enduring root of unreason in the human soul which survives every purgation.”²⁴ The lesser okhema pneumatikon is composed of the four elements, “vehicle of the irrational soul proper.”²⁵ It survives bodily decomposition but is destined to be recombined with the ouranos, the celestial spheres.

It is clear that this systemic topology adheres to the logical necessities of the micro/macrocosmic couplet, which is characterized by its double movement, a “dual projection that leads to the cosmization of man and to the anthropomorphization of the universe” as Couliano observes.²⁶ It is clear too that the idea of a subtle body logically followed from a world envisioned as a network of interpenetrating subtle influences, a world that was in its essentials composed of various gradations of psyche or mind stuff.

A CHALLENGE TO CARTESIAN CORPOREALITY

Many of the ideas concerning the pneumatic economy were transmitted to Europe during the period of the “twelfth-century Renaissance” mainly through Latin translations of Arabic versions of the work of Galen and other writers. The great college of translators working under the eye of the archbishop Raymond in Toledo also produced translations of the works of Avicenna, who was perhaps the major source of the Aristotelian ideas of phantasmic synthesis in the early medieval period. The idea of the subtle or star-born pneumatic body was revived and elaborated by Renaissance scholars as well, principally by Marsilio Ficino, who one can say without too much exaggeration was almost single-handedly responsible for the efflorescence of pagan ideas we call the Renaissance.

Just at the time when the Western world was transforming from a worldview structured by the micro/macrocosmic couplet to that determined by the results of empirical science, the concept of the subtle corporeity saw a renewal in the work of the “spiritual contemporary” of Ficino,²⁷ Henry More, and his fellow Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. It is the ideas of these two thinkers, and their debates with their contemporaries, that allow one to note that early on in the transition from premodern to modern science there was a struggle between opposing imaginaries, and the very idea of subtle bodies was at stake. The new, impending imaginary of corporiety was the machinic imaginary of Descartes, Newton, and Laplace, the contested imaginary was that inclusive of the Hermetic subtle body and its natural environment of a pneumatically constituted world.

This battle between two imaginaries and two ways of describing the world is paralleled in our own times when one considers that the Cartesian/Newtonian view of bodies and forces is no longer adequate to explain the paradoxical activities of subatomic particles. If this is indeed the most fundamental level of physical description (and it is currently held to be by most physicists), then we assuredly know that a purely mechanical explanation of phenomena is inadequate. We too face a crisis that surrounds the inadequacy of referring to physical bodies that are subject purely to mechanical interactions with other physical bodies. The impoverishment of this level of description was very early realized in the seventeenth century by both More and Cudworth.

Both Henry More and Ralph Cudworth seem to have clearly perceived the impending struggle between two opposing worldviews, and each attempted to revalidate aspects of the Hermetic worldview within the transition between imaginaries. Dean Ralph Cudworth published his True Intellectual System of the Universe in 1678. In this work Cudworth attempted to systematize Hellenic and Platonic concepts of the pneumatic and sidereal bodies in a manner never accomplished (and perhaps never intended) by their originators. Cudworth was caught up in that newly emerging trend to present systematic expositions of a philosophy, a trend that is best illustrated in the work of Descartes, Leibniz (who was strongly influenced by both the ideas and the attempts at systematicity of the Cambridge Platonists), and Kant, and which is in contradistinction to Scholastic works that operate on a rhetorical model best characterized as “Aristotelian.”^*37 While his work was much admired in its time, by the early eighteenth century it was disparagingly characterized as superstitious and credulous. This change in attitude toward Cudworth’s ideas was not only the result of the increasing persuasiveness of Newtonian mechanics in the early eighteenth century, but also because Cudworth’s attempt to develop a comprehensive system out of Neoplatonic notions and to reconcile these with Christian beliefs was regarded as deluded. Cudworth’s detractors, clearly possessing a short historical memory, seemed to have forgotten that Saint Augustine had attempted the very same project centuries earlier, and that it was this attempt that furnished the greater part of the Christian West’s philosophic outlook.

Cudworth’s work was partly an attempt to discredit the new Cartesian, mechanistic ideas that were particularly championed in England by Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan had been a bestseller. Hobbes’s idea that everything in the world—including human perceptions and passions—could be explained with recourse to only two concepts, motion and atoms, left both Cudworth and Henry More considerably underwelmed. Both thinkers attempted to resuscitate ancient ideas and systematically synthesize these with the emerging “new world” of natural science.

As Descartes was responsible for the reintroduction of the Platonic extreme separation of psyche and body into European thinking, it is not surprising that More was one of Descartes’s first champions in England. And it was the nature of “spirits” that was the central point of contention in the extended correspondence between More and Descartes. More believed that Descartes’s definition of matter as simple extension was too limited, for according to More both spirit and matter were possessed of extension. For More, matter should be defined as the ability of bodies to be in mutual contact with each other with the additional distinction of its impenetrability, while spirit, on the other hand, is penetrable and cannot be touched. Spirit then, is a substance such that it cannot be apprehended by the senses, and which can occupy any number of loci, unlike bodies that can only occupy one locus at a time.

Following Plato, More believed that, unlike matter, spirit was indivisible: “Spirit can be no more separable, though they be dilated, than you can cut off the Rayes of the Sun by a pair of Scissors made of pellucid Crystall.”²⁸

The property of dilation was an innovation on More’s part: dilation and contraction were related to what he called the “essential spissitude” of the spirit, a property entirely missing from matter. More called this “spissitude,” or spiritual density, the fourth mode or dimension of the spiritual substance. It was this fourth-dimensional property that allowed spirit to pass through bodies, or allowed several “spirits” to occupy the one body at the same time. As examples he used the varying intensity of light, or the semi-occult “magnetic forces” that William Gilbert had discerned at the turn of the century in his On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies, and finally there was “attraction” (soon to become the “universal law of attraction” of Newton) that seemed to pass through bodies unimpeded, as Galileo had recently demonstrated.

What is notable about this characterization of spirit is that it not only includes the Cartesian definition of matter within its properties, but it also extends the primary properties of spiritual substance, thereby dismantling the inverse relationship between res cogitans and res extensa advocated by Descartes. More’s “spissitude” makes spirit a material substance (in the Cartesian sense of extension) that extends into four dimensions, an interesting advancement of the Hermetic notion of the refined “material” nature of pneuma that combines ancient ideas with the seventeenth-century obsession with geometrical demonstration.

More’s imagery of the spirit clearly invokes the Neoplatonic conception of the pneuma as being a unitary substance that links the four elements of which bodies are composed, yet which is itself, to use More’s vocabulary, “indiscerpable.” Its spissitude allows it to be part of the geometry of the phenomenal world, yet undetectable by the ordinary sensory apparatus. More, in using the notion of an unseen fourth-dimensional extension to matter, was clearly siding against Aristotle (who explicitly denied the possibility in his On the Heavens) and mathematicians like John Wallis, who still regarded the concept of a fourth dimension as a “Monster in Nature, less possible than a Chimera or Centaure,”²⁹ while simultaneously invoking a geometrical argument after the manner of Descartes to shore up his ideas. Having thus combined Neoplatonic ideas of the subtle body with geometrical demonstration, Henry More may perhaps be regarded as the first thinker to initiate the beginnings of what would become the non-euclidean geometry that would so radically undermine the Newtonian worldview in the late nineteenth century.

Lest the foregoing discussion of Henry More’s ideas seem totally absurd in terms of contemporary sensibility, I would recall the initial general scientific response to Newton’s theory of universal attraction, the majority of which was of a similar tenor to that of Georg M. Bose, professor of philosophy at the University of Wittenburg: “Shall action at a distance be granted? Will you then prevent a star from acting as a talisman at a distance? Rejoice Melanchthon, the horoscope returns. . . . Soon the Thelassian witch, horrid with wrinkles and bristles, raging, shall return!”³⁰

Professor Bose was of course referring to the Hermetic pneumatic economy that, among other things, explained such things as “action at a distance.” As the new philosophy sought to rid the world of such occult qualities, how could Newton’s conception of universal gravitation possibly be correct? We see here the inadvertent recognition by Professor Bose of the morphology of an ideal object that includes in its fourth-dimensional entirety such notions as the Stoic pneuma, the communicative entity of the subtle body, and Newtonian universal gravitation as it unfolds over recent history.

CORPOREALITY AND SEMIOSIS

We observe the formal structuring principal of the vertigral schema first emerging within the canon of Western thought with the emergence of the principle of the micro/macrocosmic couplet. Contemporary schol-arship suggests that the idea that a reciprocality obtains between the individual psyche or soul and the heavens predates both Platonic and later Aristotelian conceptions considerably. The idea that the soul is a “spark of sidereal essence” was known to Heraclitus. That its origins lay in the heavens and that it will one day re-ascend was a generally held belief among the earliest Ionian iatromantes,^*38 who held that at the moment of exitus, following the most primary of logical relationships in Hellenic thought, “like returns to like.” This early problematizing of the soul’s relationship to the body is often treated as one of the greatest intellectual catastrophes that was bequeathed to the West. No doubt this is true in many respects. Yet what is continually overlooked in contemporary critiques^†39 of these early conceptions is that they are embedded within a rich imaginary that sees embodied perception as just part of a wholistic set of figurations that unite humankind directly with the essential nature of the world.

It was in the Socratic period that the concept of psyche achieved a degree of sophistication that was lacking in earlier periods. Plato’s innovation in this developing psycho-cosmography was primarily a negative one. The Phaedrus recounts the fall of the soul from the heavens to the prison of the flesh below. Implicit in this scenario is a “correspondence between essence, value and direction in space”³¹ such that what is highest—beyond the ninth sphere—is superlative: subtle, essential, eternal, and at rest, while that which lies below is dense, accidental, corruptible, and restless. The critical determinations of what would become the Western philosophical tradition—substance, accident, form, and matter among others—are thus aligned within an imaginary that privileges the vertical trajectory of the human psyche, this vector determining the value and ground of future philosophic discourses.

Undoubtedly this developing psycho-cosmography drew much of its substance from the astrological arts, a fact that significantly expands any characterization of the premodern corporeal imaginary. Popular Hellenistic astrological texts first emerged in the third century BCE, and while many of these texts were only concerned with the “dross of vulgar horoscopy” as G. R. S. Mead puts it, many reified the philosophic notion that the “relative positions of the celestial bodies in the aether at any moment were . . . indices of the harmonious interaction of invisible spheres, with appropriate fields of vital energy,” all this conceived of as an “interior economy of the world-soul.”³² We observe here consolidation of the Hellenic view of the strong affinities between psyche, pneumatic substance (the “quintessence”), and the stars. We also observe the notion that all these affinities may be “mapped” in some manner, after the model of an astrological chart.

The influence of iatromathematics (medical arts concerned with the influence of the stars^*40) on Plato’s thought has been little commented on in recent scholarship. One finds, for instance, Voegelin noting that the term eidos (one of the terms Plato used for his concept of the Ideal Forms or archetypes behind phenomena) had a general currency in Plato’s time and that there is no reason to think that Plato would have used it in any other way than the Athenian norm. For Plato the eidos or idea was the name for the combination of symptoms that characterizes a disease, and which later would be called the syndrome, the clinical picture.

Originally the terminology was used by the Ionian iatromantes of the fifth century BCE to describe the successive stages of illness: eidos were the first signs of the onset of disease that would then reach the point of crisis, whereupon the illness would “turn” one way or the other. The Parmenidean and Hippocratic use of the term semeion and its synonym tekmerion were both first used to mean “clue” or “symptom.” These terms were not applied to (spoken or written) words: the names of things were referred to as onoma, and the distinction between sign and referent had to wait for its first exploration in the work of Plato and Aristotle.³³ Particularly in Hippocrates’s case, “signs” were evidence of corporeal balance or imbalance; they denoted the physical/spiritual health of an individual. Evidently, then, the earliest uses of the notion of “sign” in the West were directly connected with the body.

What Voegelin and other classical scholars fail to note, however, is the iatromantic notion of the interconnection between an individual’s health and the disposition of the planets and stars. The Ionian crisis^*41 was the point where the influence of the stars finally determined the patient’s illness for better or worse; it was an astral event, or more precisely, an event that could only be described in a language that mediated two interpenetrating orders of being: the sidereal and the corporeal, macrocosmic and microcosmic. This concept of the sign as a vertigral index confirmed the parallel operations of the two orders in the minds of the Ionian physicians. For Plato these ideas confirmed the vertical orientation of his ontology and epistemology.^†42

Plato was also well aware of the Pythagorean usage of the word theory (theoria) to denote the contemplation of the intelligential world that was at a far remove from that of sensual experience. He was quite aware that this term had its origins in the Pythagorean practice of contemplating the heavens for “signs”—indications of changes in the relationship of the stars to human beings that determined the inconstant nature of physis. It was this specialized shift in the meaning of the terms eidos and idea, initiated by Pythagoras but made more explicit particularly by Plato, that would allow the later Stoic philosophers to announce a general semiosis operating in the phenomenal world. This naturally and logically followed from the conception of the world as a vast living mind, an anima mundi. This general semiosis would later be confirmed in the Christian West by Saint Paul when he stated, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being clearly understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20). Here Paul gives scriptural authority to what would later become the late-medieval, prescientific concept of the “Book of Nature”: the idea that God’s signs are immanent in the world. We should note, then, that this early confluence of the observance of astrological events, sidereal medicine, and the beginnings of the idea of the sign, of semiosis, are all—in a nontrivial manner—intimately connected. The sense of this intimate confluence would eventually be carried through, centuries later, to the beginnings of modernist science with Francis Bacon’s announcement of his “new organon,” which he himself characterized as the ars indicii or “art of indications.”

It seems that this early Western notion of the interpenetration of the two orders of the celestial and the corporeal (this liminal site of interpenetration being the original domain of the semiotic) is not unique to the Mediterranean origins of Western thought. Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhism also holds to the idea of what Alex Wayman has called an “inner zodiac” where celestial bodies are equally held to reside in the body (or its subtle equivalent, as Wayman notes³⁴) as well as the heavens. Furthermore the Buddha’s “glorious body,” sambhoga-kaya (equated with the concept of the subtle body by many scholars including Conze and Waddell), is noted for bearing thirty-two “marks of a superman,” eighty subsidiary marks, and to radiate light on all sides.³⁵ It is this luciform body, rather than the Buddha’s earthly body that is generally depicted in all forms of Buddhist iconography.³⁶

The foregoing observations regarding the imaginary of Vajrayana Buddhism are not intended to be tangential. The logic of vertigrality would insist that similar conceptions of a subtle body must be gener-ated in non-Western cultures, and these similar figurations would follow a similar logic of development to that of Western conceptions. A vertigral reading of conceptions of corporeity would suggest that at the beginnings of both the Western and Buddhist canons corporeity existed as a complex notion in which the “physical” was ineluctably bound up with the realm of signification and communication, and that this latter was represented by the pneumatic medium of celestial influx and/or the notion of a subtle body attendant on the physical corpus. “Meaning,” then, must somehow be connected to the experience of embodiment, or perhaps more exactly, embodiment must be the condition of meaning. This problematizing of the body by way of its relationship to celestial influence (and thereby signifying activity) is one of the keys to understanding the premodernist corporeal imaginary in its vertigral dimension.

Is there indeed a vertigrality or similarity of conceptions regarding the subtle body between Vajrayana Buddhist and Western cultures? It is the task of the last section of this chapter to demonstrate just such a similarity and vertigral connection, and to demonstrate that the Vajrayana Buddhist subtle corporeity holds a similar position as a figure of communication within Tantric thought.

TANTRIC LUCIFORM CORPOREITY

The general problematics of the body discussed in the early Western tradition and revived by the Cambridge Platonists are echoed in Buddhist belief systems, and the manner in which corporeity and the subtle economy are regarded in the culture of Vajrayana Buddhism in particular provides certain useful tools for reevaluating and revitalizing these notions for the development of a postmodern hermeneutics.

The Mahayana Buddhist tradition maintains that the birth of the Buddha, his life and death—even his enlightenment—were not real, but a “show” to awaken people. The Buddha’s body on Earth was a phantom body, as the being(s) known as the Buddha (the historical Buddha was the fourth in a succession of Buddhas; according to the Vajrayana system there are one thousand Buddhas for this millennium) is actually composed of several interconnected bodies or kayas.

Classical Buddhism admits of three bodies (tri-kaya): the dharmakaya, the “law body,” “formless and self-existent”;³⁷ the nirmana-kaya, or “transformed body” (i.e., the form of the historical Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha); and the sambhoga-kaya, the “compensation body,” “usually named lochana or ‘glorious.’”³⁸ Of this last, the early lamaism researcher L. Austine Waddell notes, “It is singular to find these Buddhist speculations bearing so close a resemblance to the later Greek theories on the same subject, especially in the plain resemblance to the σωμα αυγοειδεS^*43 or luciform body, to the Lochana (Rajana) or ‘Glorious Body’ of the Buddhists.”³⁹

Waddell is curiously unforthcoming with details when he ascribes theories of the luciform body to “later Greeks theories” (he neglects to mention whether this refers to the Socratic period or later Neoplatonic thought), but suggests that one should “refer to Cudworth” for a full exposition on the subject.⁴⁰ With the contemporary efflorescence of research into the Tibetan Vajrayana system, we no longer need to refer to the syncretic ideas of Dean Ralph Cudworth to help us grasp the concept of the luciform body, but can instead rely on direct expositions of the system. Yet it should not be forgotten that Waddell’s reference to Cudworth is essential if one hopes to trace a vertigral history of the subtle body.

In Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhism the path of Tantra is that of, among other things, the practice of certain psychosomatic exercises the aim of which is to attain the “clear light of bliss.” These practices are known as mahamudra, usually translated as “great seal.” In the original Sanskrit, the word mudra has several possible meanings: the hand/foot/body gestures of dance; symbolic language in general (including iconographic representations); and ritual activity. Concerning the latter, mudra play a very important part in the rituals and practices of Tantric Buddhism, particularly the Vajrayana path and the esoteric (in Japanese, mikkyo; in Chinese, mizong) Tendai and Shingon sects of Japanese Chan (or Zen) Buddhism. Even the most austere of mystical regimens followed by Zen sects use at least one essential physical mudra: that of zazen (Chinese qing zuo) or “quiet sitting,” the actual structure^*44 of which is also used in Vedic yoga where the posture is called vajrasana, or “diamond-thunderbolt posture.”

Regarding the importance of the concept of mudra in esoteric Buddhist practice, Mircea Eliade notes the “symbolical valorization of ritual gestures” in the most “highly evolved mysticisms,” pointing out the significance of gesture in Persian (Iranian) mysticism as well.⁴¹ Eliade points out that the trade and cultural relationship between China and Iran is quite ancient, and at least one Buddhist scholar who visited China in the second century CE was also well aquainted with Iranian magic and astrology.⁴² Eliade’s point is to suggest a direct link between Iranian dualism, Gnosticism, and Buddhism. According to the notion of the ideal object, a vertigral tracing of the concept of the subtle body implies that such historical validation is unnecessary. Esoteric practices should, even without any “physical” contact between cultures, produce a similar imaginal logic in regard to corporeity and, in particular, the subtle corporeity.

But what is the nature of these gestures, of mudra? Are they merely “symbolic” in the contemporary Western sense of an economy of arbitrary assignations (the Saussurian concept of the sign), or does the role of mudra in certain Eastern practices portend something quite different? I propose that an attentive examination of this one signifier—mudra—will provide a greater insight into the subtle corporeity as (a) an ideal object that demonstrates the Eastern imaginary of the body to be a dynamic and expansive construct in contrast to the Western modern imaginary of the body, and (b) that in a similar manner to that operating within the Hermetic imaginary, this dynamic and expansive imaginary suggests an as yet untapped resource for developing an alternative hermeneutic in regard to the very notion of embodiment.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, a contemporary Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhist) scholar, states that the “great seal [mahamudra] refers to emptiness,” and quotes the statement of the Buddha in the King of Concentrations Sutra: “The nature of all phenomena is the great seal.”⁴³ Gyatso explains, “Here, ‘nature’ refers to the ultimate nature of all things: their emptiness, or lack of inherent existence. Such emptiness is called the great seal because phenomena never move or change from the state of lacking inherent existence.”⁴⁴

Meditation on the “seal,” that is, the “immobilization” of all dependent things, is for the purpose of liberation from the cycle of existence. The notion of “emptiness” (Tibetan: stong pa nid) is central to Vajrayana Buddhism (as indeed it is to many schools of Buddhist thought) and is derived from Nagarjuna’s teaching that the essential nature of all dharmas (phenomenal existents) is sunyata, void or empty. As Tibetan scholar Herbert V. Guenther translates the term, sunyata or stong pa nid means “no-thing-ness,” all existents being inherently insubstantial.⁴⁵ The sense of “seal” (mudra) in Gyatso’s commentary is clearly the sense of being sealed in to this state of inherent “no-thing-ness.”

Yet there are further elucidations of the nature of mudra in the mahamudra path: Gyatso relates that, to attain the “clear light of bliss,” the practitioner must “penetrate the vital points of another’s body” through the practice of the “action seal” (karmamudra) and the “wisdom seal” ( jñanamudra). The “action seal” is the designation of the partner in this form of meditation, a meditation that involves two meditators—male and female. Gyatso explains that, at a certain stage of accomplishment, the practitioner should engage in this practice that “more forcefully” encourages the “winds” to enter the “central channel” (vide infra) of the subtle body. The “wisdom seal” is also a (female) partner, but not a physical one; rather it is a visualized female “consort.” According to Gyatso, “The embrace of a consort is very helpful in bringing about a complete loosening of the channel knot at the heart-channel wheel.”⁴⁶

Elsewhere Gyatso notes that the heart-wheel channel is the precise location of the mind. This is the “root mind” or “resident mind,” the “very subtle mind” that survives discorporation and is distinguished from the “gross” and “subtle” minds.⁴⁷ We observe here a gradation of “mind stuff ” similar to the Hermetic view that holds to a similar gradation between gross physical bodies and less material, more “subtle” vehicles of the mind or psyche.

Even at first glance these Tantric conceptualizations appear to be inextricably bound to conceptions of corporeality much greater than those of the West, and which constitute a “thread” or “continuity” (one of the etymological derivations of the term tantra) throughout the system. The scholar and Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa explains that all Vajrayana practices accept the body as the “basic being” that is “highly workable and full of all kinds of potentialities”⁴⁸ and that the mudra of mahamudra does not indicate a “symbol” (a sign, writing) as such, but a certain ontological level of realization.

Eyes are the mudra of vision and nose is the mudra of smell. So it is not a symbol in the sense of representing something or being an analogy for something. In this case, mudra is the actualization of itself. The idea is that physical activity has been seen as something workable; it is something very definite and at the same time highly charged with energy.⁴⁹

Within Tantric Buddhism (and indeed, the Hindu Tantric systems) we can discern a certain constellation of meanings that accrue around this one signifier, mudra. We know that it is a “seal” in the sense of “sealing up”; it is a “sign” of something, a form of inscription that somehow has an ontological weight much greater than what we in the West would normally ascribe signs in general; and it is the technical designation of the female consort in Vajrayana practices. To a Western scholar unfamiliar with certain Eastern ideas this would appear to be a very paradoxical term indeed. On the one hand it refers to nothing—the “emptiness” of the universe, sunyata—and at the same time it alludes to sets of physical practices and the body itself (including its total “occult” or esoteric corporeity.)

Yet the sense of paradox in these determinations is the fault of the Western mind alone, the result of just over three hundred years of thinking predicated on an imaginary of the body imperiously inserted within the imaginary of the machine. It is the continuing force of this historical admixture of one imaginary with another that must be reanalyzed if one is to avoid a sense of contradiction and paradox in regard to Buddhist conceptions. Speaking of an early eighteenth-century Japanese text that elaborates the relationship between Zen and the “ways” by which enlightenment may be accomplished, Trevor Leggett notes that in the text one and the same word may have many and varying meanings. “For instance, the changes of the seasons are said to be the Way of Heaven, to be changes in the universal ki, to be alterations of yin and yang, manifestations of the heavenly principle, or finally transformations of the heart.”⁵⁰ He then notes, “To a Japanese thinker of the time these transformations would not have been felt as necessarily contradictory; they might all be true on different levels.”⁵¹

In a similar manner, this “modal” manner of regarding certain ideas pervades Tantric Buddhist literature and practices; the question of ontological and/or logical paradoxes surrounding the various senses of the word mudra would be regarded as “low level” thinking indeed.

One of the main reasons that Western scholars find certain Eastern ideas so paradoxical, and therefore so difficult to accept, is that the West has an abiding concern with substantiality, with the idea that there must be a “material,” substantial ground to phenomena and all talk of phenomena. This is of course a historically contingent condition, but the mere recognition of its contingency does nothing to alleviate the concern. Toshihiko Izutzu notes that Western conceptions of the nature of substance (and hence, corporeality) are central to discussions of both the nature of identity and the logical principle of contradiction. In contrast, he says, “Eastern philosophy combats such a conception of the empirical world by trying to ‘liquefy,’ so to speak, the ‘essential’ solidity of things.”⁵²

The ontological implications of the principle of contradiction are deliberately rejected in much of Buddhist philosophy. This perspective adumbrates Nicholas of Cusa’s stand (in the fifteenth century) against “the present predominance of the Aristotelian sect, which considers the coincidence of opposites a heresy, whereas its admission is the starting point of the ascension to mystical theology.”⁵³ The rejection of the principle of contradiction leads not only to a “mystical theology,” but also to a greater facilitation of contemporary theoretical physical ideas, as the experimental confirmation of Bell’s theorem (of non-locality) in quantum mechanics fully attests. Perhaps the greatest import of the experimental validation of Bell’s theorem is that the “last stand” of classical Newtonian physics in support of local causality (expressed so succinctly in the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper⁵⁴) has been conclusively undermined, forcing a reassessment of the entire edifice of Newtonian mechanics. Consideration of the implications of quantum theory has led at least one contemporary physicist to bluntly declare that while Newtonian physics may provide “excellent approximations of the truth,” this is of comparatively trivial moment in face of the fact that “classical physics is false.”⁵⁵ But it is the historical ascendancy of this mechanical philosophy, and its continuing hold on the popular imagination, that makes it so difficult for anyone educated in the West to accept any explanation that does not ultimately rely on a description of discrete entities coming into mechanical contact with each other and of the operation of simple forces on equally simple ultimate constituents (“atoms”).

Within Buddhist conceptions effects are attributed to the confluence of certain relationships rather than the hypostatization of (material) entities. Trungpa therefore uses the term mudra in the sense of inferring the ontic potentialities (refer to the previous quotation: “The idea is that physical activity has been seen as something workable; it is something very definite and at the same time highly charged with energy”) within the sense faculties, the question of signifying activity ultimately possessing a corporeal ground or origin. If we compare the earlier quotation of Trungpa’s with one drawn from the work of Gyatso, we find, I think, confirmation of this conception: “The direct valid perception by an eye consciousness only arises in dependence upon (1) a visual object and (2) the visual sense faculty, or eye-sensor. If there is a visual object present but no eye sense faculty, then an eye consciousness cannot arise.”⁵⁶

In other words, without referent and sense faculty (and this clearly should not only be construed as its physical embodiment), there is no mind or consciousness. The structure becomes that of a field of potentialities as opposed to the Cartesian disjunctive ontic categories of res extensa and res cogitans. We observe here, one suggests, conceptions strikingly similar to those of Bateson discussed in the previous chapter. In both Bateson’s cybernetic ideas and Tantric conceptions, observer and observed become nodal points of the one extended field of “informationexchange” activity. There is envisioned an overall ecology of information in which bodies do not logically exist as substances and neither do minds: everything is continuously in process and everything becomes potential for “input.” In Western jargon this ecology of information might be seen as a process of entailment, yet one that is not burdened by the Aristotelian law of contradiction. In a similar manner Michel Serres’s image of the observed as that of a “dispatcher” or transmitting machine intends to clearly stress the active nature of the Real rather than the traditional passivity ascribed to classical Newtonian/Laplacian objects.

In both early Western thinking and contemporary Vajrayana Buddhist thought the notion of corporeality is evidently of central importance, and this corpus is a site of complex systems of energy/sign interchange. For Tantric Buddhists, the body is much more than l’homme machine of Descartes’s famous successor, La Mettrie: it is a subtle system composed of “channels, winds and drops.” There are three channels: a central channel that runs from the root of the genitals to the top of the head, and two channels on either side of it that follow the same path. These channels demonstrate a vertigral correspondence with those of Vedic yoga, where the twin channels (Sanskrit: nadi) on either side of the central are known as the “sun” and “moon” channels. During their course they intersect with a series of energy centers or “wheels” called in Sanskrit cakras (wheels). As previously noted, Gyatso locates the “very subtle” mind in the heart chakra. This location is by no means culturally specific to Tibet. From Aristotle onward—indeed, up until medieval times—the mind was thought to reside in the heart. Mystical Islam locates consciousness in the same place, and classical Chinese culture used the ideogram xin () to mean both “heart” and “mind.”

At various places in the Vajrayana subtle corporeity the twin channels weave in front of the chakras, forming “knots.” At each of these places a single knot is formed, but at the heart chakra three interlinked knots are formed, which is why the meditator needs the “added power” of the consort to dissolve this particular impediment. The heart chakra is particularly important as it is the source for a vast system of channels (72,000 in all) that permeate the body and transport the wind and the “red drops of the speech” and the “white drops of the body”^*45 throughout.⁵⁷ The “winds” consist of five “root” winds and five “branch winds.” As Gyatso himself notes, these winds are equivalent to the prana of Vedic culture. In addition to Vedic conceptions it also shows definite similarities with the qi of traditional Chinese medicine, the “winds” of Kebatinan mystical Islam, and the psyche (the word derives from the Greek, meaning “to breathe” ψυχειν) of ancient Greece. Each of these traditions holds that the air we breathe is the substrate of a much more subtle energy. Each culture also proposes that certain practices using control of the breath—pranayama in Vedic yoga, qigong in Chinese yoga, dhikr in mystical Islam^*46—will lead the practitioner to at least a greater understanding of the ontic potentialities of the human form.

Guenther has carefully attended to the Vajrayana use of such ideas as “channels” (Sanskrit: nadi), “winds” (vayu) and “drops” (bindi). Unlike more literal-minded translators and scholars he realizes that these terms operate, as I have indicated, on several modal levels. He notes:

Linguistic translations render these operational terms by “veins,” “vital air” and “seminal drop.” In so doing they fail to understand the intentional meaning of these highly technical terms. I do not deny that these terms may sometimes mean what the quantitative language of the physical world point to, but this reduction of technical terms to physical (and physiological) counters overlooks the fact that terms have no meaning in themselves . . . (nadi) indicates “structure” rather than anatomical sections . . . (vayu) relates to the vibrations that pass along the structured paths . . . (bindi) is rather a feeling of expanding and of seeing in a new light and order.”⁵⁸

In other words, there is a systematic ambiguity that orders a varied yet coherent set of objects within Tantric Buddhist thought. Channels are simultaneously abstract structures—coherent patterns—and the “wind” or “breath” is the vibratory data traveling within these structures. I use the word data in the hope of drawing an analogy between Guenther’s reading of Vajrayana imagery and the ideas of Shannon and Bateson. Both of these latter thinkers had a concern with the overall pattern of communication, drawing attention to the level where the abstract structure of data is privileged over the individual constitution of senders and receivers. In a similar manner the centrality of meditative practice in Tantric Buddhism is regarded as both representing and eliciting the overall abstract structure of the Real; in this way it must be seen as a “metaphysical” system distinct from any individual meditators employing such psycho-physical practices. Buddhist meditation provides the metaphysical system of Buddhism because it is grounded in an ontology that views the corpus as a site of activity, of “cosmic” activity, if you will: it is similar in conception to the metaphysics of the Hermetic field of interpenetration of the microcosmic with the macrocosmic.

In observing the simultaneous understanding/usage of images (wind, drops, channels) and their “intellectual” equivalents (data, expansion, structure) within the Tibetan Buddhist imaginary, one must be careful not to artificially separate the “intellectual” content from the imagistic. The vast system of Tibetan iconography should be regarded as a text that in itself is covalent with any “intellectual” exposition of the subject, and to ignore or remove the imagery from the system would be regarded by Buddhists as an act of intellectual violence. Unlike in the West, where in the seventeenth century we may observe the struggle of competing imaginaries, in the Vajrayana tradition we see a coherent, uninterrupted imaginary such that its imagery and its intellectual content become one systemic structure.

THE CELESTIAL NERVOUS SYSTEM

The image of the “central channel” of esoteric Buddhism is common to Vedic yoga physiology and certain esoteric practices associated with Eastern Orthodox Christianity.^*47 It is the analogue, in terms of subtle physiology, of what I have called the “vertigral schema.” In fact, so many cultures and attendant mythologies constellate around this figure that it would be impossible to enumerate them here. To give one example, however, I will draw attention to the fact that in traditional Chinese medicine, the spine is called tiangun, or “celestial stem.” This celestial stem appears to be the same object that is referred to in Vajrayana physiology as the “central channel,” and it is also the channel within which the pneumatic essence known as kundalini is said to ascend according to the corporeal imaginary of Vedic yoga.

Each of these conceptions seems to imagistically invoke a variant of the worldview expressed in the micro/macrocosmic couplet. Human physiology is not closed but open (usually at the top of the head^†48), the “celestial stem” pointing directly to the Pole Star, which in ancient times (ca. 3000 BCE) was the star Thuban in the constellation Draco. The precession of the equinoxes installed Polaris as the Pole Star within the province of Ursa Minor, about a thousand years ago. Around the year 21,000 CE Thuban will once again become the Pole Star. According to the vertigral schema it is more than likely that an archaic mythologem equating the polar orientation of the Dragon or Serpent constellation (Draco) with the “polar” orientation of the central nervous system accounts for the symbolism of the “serpent power” (kundalini) of Indian yoga and myths of the serpent as purveyor of gnosis in several Gnostic mythologies. It is also interesting to note that the symbol of Asclepius, patron god of medicine in ancient Greece (and the subject of a principal text of the Corpus Hermeticum), was that of the serpent, and that the modern medical symbol of the caduceus still clearly reflects this symbolism.^*49 Rather than a tube for eating and shitting, as Saint Augustine famously described the human body, the esoteric corpus is seen as a conduit of celestial and phenomenal energy.

CONCLUSION

The idea that human perception and, indeed, consciousness, may not be constricted to the confines of the human encephalon is a notion held by several cultures outside the European tradition, and, as outlined in this chapter, similar notions lie behind the very beginnings of Western thought. In these conceptions consciousness is imagined as a kind of pneumatic “receiver” of pneumatic “information” that is constantly transmitted by the phenomenal world. Non-Western pneumatological medicine (primarily Chinese, Tibetan, and Vedic) still proposes and operates within a somatopological imaginary that is quite removed from the post-Galenic descriptive codes of modern Western medicine. Much more importantly, these pneumatic systems provide an alternative explanation for somatic processes and illness, with these explanations often (in contemporary times) complementing Western diagnoses,^†50 and just as often working in contradistinction to them. For example, Western medicine still has no adequate explanation as to how appendectomies are regularly and effectively performed in the People’s Republic of China without any Western form of anaesthesia—only the use of acupuncture. The theoretical explanation of the efficacy of acupuncture, based as it is on the flow of qi and the subtle channels of the body, the jingluo, has absolutely no counterpart in the modern West, yet medical operations using the procedure have been demonstrated to be as effective as those using chemical anaesthetics, and without the post-operative side effects that often attend Western surgery.

The significance of the effectiveness of alternative corporeal imaginaries in the medical practices of other cultures is by no means the only fact that should impel us to further explore the implications of these imaginaries. The deliquescence of materiality inherent in both the concept of the subtle body and the pneumatic economy provide starting points for a critique of modern science and its reification of the subject/object dichotomy. While Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s cat gedankenexperiment have challenged the utility of upholding such a distinction in comparatively recent times, the grounds from which such a critique should be pursued are usually thoroughly embedded in the terminology and concepts of the Western modernist project. The recognition that other cultural traditions—including most importantly the rejected Western tradition of Hermeticism—have developed complex systems that very early linked conceptions of semiosis or significance with a “quasi-material” concept of corporeity is further evidence in support of the proposition that the liminal cybernetic “realm of difference” may well be the research area where a thorough critique of Western science can most effectively be pursued. More than this, the cybernetic project needs to recognize its own precedents in systems of thought found in both the Hermetic tradition and Tantric Buddhism.

Contemporary historian of science Donna Haraway has called for a “successor science” that can account for the “radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects . . . and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world.”⁵⁹ Haraway is of course aware that “no-nonsense commitments to faithful accounts” of reality are themselves historically contingent propositions, subject to the same ideological constraints as all knowledge practices, so it may well be that holding on to such accounts would in effect be continuing to sustain (if in modified form) the ideological hegemony of modern science. Moreover, her insistence on the necessity for some sort of trans-historical, generally acceptable description of the “real” world (admittedly her bracketing of the word within quotation marks signals her recognition of the problematic, constructed nature of a “real” world) prompts the question as to whose real world would be recognized as authentic. Haraway’s “real” and the Real are clearly two different propositions, the one socially constructed, the other the metaphysical assumption behind the pursuit of modernist science, yet the breadth by which such a reality may be construed is by no means clear.

Haraway states, “We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future.”⁶⁰ It is quite likely that “modern critical theories” that can analyze the construction of bodies and meanings within an “earth-wide network of connections”⁶¹ would seek to minimize the importance of the vertigral dimension in human experience (as Haraway’s deliberate use of the words “earth-wide” would seem to suggest, and in accordance with much of post-structuralist critical theory). It was partly the task of this chapter to excavate an imaginary that might be used to facilitate just such a critique of the mechanical/materialist reifications of contemporary science, but admittedly this imaginary is not in itself enough to announce a “successor science,” nor should it be. Nonetheless I suggest that a critical reappraisal of the early Occidental/Oriental idea of the pneumatic economy may take the form of an initial problematizing gambit such as Haraway and others are seeking. Both the Hermetic corporeal imaginary and the Tantric Buddhist imaginary of the interior pneumatic economy are, after all, models that provide

• the idea/image of the radical interconnectedness of all bodies;
• the idea/image of an essentially “open” relationship to the Real;
• the idea/image of the “self ” as a radical heterogeneity of structures both corporeal and “incorporeal.”

There is also inherent within the Hermetic and Tantric imaginaries the idea of a radical^*51 community, a harmony of souls, predicated on the very fact of the pneumatic economy, that makes these conceptions powerful counters to the technological rationalism that has so divided nations and peoples in modern times. Both the contemporary “deep ecology” movement and the concept of Gaia demonstrate, I suggest, resonances with the Hermetic tradition begun by Ficino’s fifteenth-century promulgation of a pneumatic economy. Admittedly the resonances are not exact: contemporary deep ecology actively seeks to minimize the significance of human beings within the overall dynamics of planetary ecological processes, whereas Hermeticism, of course, seeks to uphold human beings’ place near the summit of the Great Chain of Being.

Traditionally humankind’s place within the Great Chain of Being was based on the sophistication of its pneumatic constitution; in the late twentieth century this had begun to be cybernetically reconceptualized (as suggested in the previous chapter) by the idea of the Great Chain of Information. It is this latest morphological shift in the post-seventeenthcentury machinic/corporeal imaginary that has allowed proponents of “artificial life” to suggest that computer viruses, for example, are alive in just the same way as organic life. Just as with the proponents of AI, “a-life” prophets suggest that the material base of living organisms is of little consequence when looked at in terms of information exchange. A-life scientist Christopher Langton states:

The leap you have to make is to think about machineness as being the logic of organization. It’s not the material. There’s nothing implicit about the material of anything—if you can capture its logical organization in some other medium you can have the same “machine” because it’s the organization that constitutes the machine, not the stuff it’s made of. ⁶²

As with the functionalist conceptions of AI, this is the “strong claim” of artificial life; simulation is not at issue, when one understands the “logic of the living,” then life is artificially reproducible. “Any definition or list of criteria broad enough to include all known biological life will also include certain classes of computer processes, which, therefore, will have to be considered ‘actually’ alive.”⁶³

Criteria that support the notion that computer viruses are alive include the fact that computer viruses are patterns—we should recall again Wiener’s notion that we are but “patterns” reproducing ourselves—that can replicate themselves within any number of computers; these viruses modify the computer environment in which they are stored to suit their own “needs,” and a computer virus “senses” changes within its computer environment and “reacts” to them appropriately.⁶⁴

In the world of artificial life there is no need for a Paracelsian Archaeus, no need for a quintessence that binds all other processes together—it is the geometry of functions that determines that which is alive or “dead.” Clearly the significance of this last category is considerably diminished, perhaps elided altogether, in the emerging imaginary of artificial life. But it is this latter possibility that sharply contrasts these new scientific conceptualizations with their pneumatological forebears, for the reality of death only strengthened an imaginary that sought to articulate the panpsychic hypothesis. That which is missing from a-life imaginings, but which is of salutary importance in the corporeal imaginaries of Hermeticism and Tantric Buddhism, is the vertigral dimension. There is no suggestion that the process of life has a purpose, a telos, in the developing imaginary of artifical life. The same criticism may also be made of the deep ecology movement. Again the vertigral dimension, the dimension in which the “vertical,” pneumatic trajectory becomes integral to any understanding of phenomenal processes is missing: human beings become “flattened” into the horizontal mapping of ecological connections.

The figure of the subtle body is part of an imaginary that privileges the vertigral dimension of life; this figure is in itself a sign or indicator of an imaginary that may well include within its morphology the informatic notions of cybernetics and a-life, but would always qualify them by adding the missing notion of a (vertical) direction within all life processes. It is for this reason that ancient ideas of vital energies and the subtle body must not be neglected in the history of ideas. Quite apart from the fact that Aristotle, the Stoics, later Neoplatonic philosophers, and Hermeticists made of these ideas the basis for their respective theories of psyche, the figure of the subtle body provided key notions that would inform and ultimately serve to construct the medieval Christian idea of the soul and hence provide much of the morphology of what would come to be known as “psychology.”

In the final analysis, the ultimate origin of the figure of the subtle body, whether Occidental or Oriental, is immaterial: a concern with “historical transmission” avoids the far more important fact that these ideas are found across several cultures and for quite dramatic periods of time. This leads one to the conclusion that they are most likely analyses and determinations of constants of human experience, these taking the form of an ideal object operating across varying cultures and epochs. The nature and purpose of these constants is outside the domain of this book; it is enough, however, to recognize their development within an imaginary that sought to integrate signification, celestial influence, and a common subtle corporeity within the Real and to suggest that this neglected economy is perhaps one more critical tool in promoting a constructive critique of twentieth-/early twenty-first-century natural science.