Oh, Queen Viper— Medusa of all these saints, Mother of four and many, many more, A cross for countless snakes...
In prophetess and pageantry, In abstinence and insolence, In god dreams sprung by winter kings, An insult to intelligence...
In parlor tricks and fire, An apple rotting from the core. In burning wood—birthing pyre, A funeral now fully blank and bore...
A gift to kings, A curse to peasants, And still this fire brings another stone, A boulder rolling—so we must push, A piper piping—a burning bush, A faint breeze blowing between willows and whispers...
And now the encore— These horsemen, these four and many-more wandering mystics... These flat-earth and failed riders and all the serpent's oil they mixed us... For now we must do 'this' all ourselves, All the killing, spilling, cooking and cleaning, All the willing and prime-cut selective breeding, All the things that bring the master to knees, The servant to feet, The child to god— Becoming more than just one with below and above...
Yes— This is and was never about love, Nor about hate or any other gesture of intent, solace or meaning. For love is merely the servant of time—now moving out of season... Our most genuine, yet impassionate source of irony for any thought that attempts to breathe or induce purpose to implication, Mountains of words—no real conversation. Attempts to dream, bleed and become... Oh Yes, 'this and that' is and was never about love...
Now burning down the spine of every predator and prey, Now banking and dodging, prying and prodding to get these eyes to look in a certain way, Get these ears to hear in a very specific and well-tuned spectrum, Get this nose and tongue knowing right amongst all the wrong direction, Get these hands wrapped around the hilt of a well-balanced and fully suppressed oppressor, The equalizer, The undresser, The object of our centerfold—the breast of all this obsession. The fully pardoned and self-righteous possessor, Now claiming even the least of all our possession...
For there is only one thing that this path of fury was driven across the face of countless tower and topple for... Not miles of shores now scattering cinder morning, noon, and night, By the lightly trodden path of stray bullets, bribes and candle light. Not mounds of mothers burning into daughters and sons of men and more, The feeling of reluctance as we slowly back ourselves through the door. Out the way we came and much more sure about the reason why. Unfortunately here... the game isn't really ever played this way...
For the rules are less vague and the consequences far more clear. In here, Do what thou wilt—just don't get caught, There's no backing out now—no ought or ought naught, No should or shouldn't—no could or couldn't, No failed reunions in the confines of this more-than-merry and bizarre distortion now enfolding and holding us under full extortion. Not much left to do but fall into the madness and anger of medusa. Not much left to say as we kneel before the Queen of Vipers. Climbing the limbs of her body and sash, Gracing her prism and kissing her ass. Now on all fours—hands clenching and breaking, Never on top in this bed that we're making... Always behind—vain to keep up. Now lying down as we kiss and make up...
"The story of Medusa can be interpreted as a personification of the harvest of grain. Medusa can be interpreted as a sheaf of grain whose head is cut of to harvest the grain. from the body of the grain comes the golden grain (Chrysaor) and the chaff (Pegasus) which flies to heaven. The ripe grain results from the marriage of the grain plant with water (Poseidon). The kibisis is the bag that holds the gran until it is ground. The hag's tooth is the hoe that cultivates the grain. the hag's eye that the Gaaeae share is not their literal eye but a prophetic eye that allows the grain to be planted and harvested at the proper time. The immortal gogons may be interpred as the symbols of life everlasting while the mortal goddess symbolizes the cycles of life and death that are common in the agricultural year."
Medusa translates directly into guardian. She is death, snakes symbolize both life and death, immortality. The Serpant is the symbol of Wisdom. Lightbringer takes a new form, of all these Saints. All powerful woman with ledgendary beauty, whose gaze can't be averted, who sees right through you. The hero mainly kills her through looking at his shield which serves as a mirror. The mirror is always a liar, its main purpose.
Quote :
I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."
— Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."
— Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore
Excellent quote. That was so valuable to something else I was working on.
So now do look up Klossowski on Nietzsche where he weaves in the trope of the Medusa with the Eternal Recurrence; a fascinating book: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
If you are further interested; [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
I interpret it this way.
Man [Perseus] is a rebel.
He wants to destroy the "Real", the "Truth" that is set for him, that he is "forced to see" [Medusa].
The "Hammer" and "The Twilight of the Idols".
The mirror is an extension or reflection of one's sub/un-conscious, and so the purity of oneself, his "innocence of becoming"... and so when he looks at Medusa using the mirror and severes her head, he re-fashions and creates the world in his own image.
The playful sheen of the mirror prevents petrifaction. The playful sheen in Greek was called a kind of Metis (cunning intelligence) that etymologically relates to Medusa and Maya - all from the same root.
Quote :
"Odysseus is the hero who is polumetis as well as polutropos and polumechanos. He is an expert in tricks of all kinds (pantoious dolous), polumechanos in the sense that he is never at a loss, never without expedients (poroi) to get himself out of any kind of trouble (aporia). When taught by Athena and Hephaestus, the deities of mêtis the artist also possesses a techne pantoie, an art of many facets, knowledge of general application. The polumetis is also known by the name of poikilometis or aiolometis. The term poikilos is used to refer to the sheen of a material or the glittering of a weapon, the dappled hide of a fawn, or the shining back of a snake mottled with darker patches. This many-coloured sheen or complex of appearances produces an effect of irridescence, shimmering, an interplay of reflections which the Greeks perceived as the ceaseless vibrations of light. In this sense, what is poikilos, many-coloured, is close to what is aiolos, which refers to fast movement. Thus it is that the changing surface of liver which is sometimes propitious and sometimes the reverse is called poikilos just as are good fortune which is so inconstant and changing and also the deity which endlessly guides the destinies of men from one side to the other, first in one direction and then in the other. Plato associates what is poikilos with what is never the same as itself, oudepote tauton and, similarly, elsewhere opposes it to that which is simple, haplous." [Detienne-Vernant, Cunning Intelligence]
The playful design of the ER [the innocence of becoming] - the "Maya-lie", metis - is how one could look at the petrifying gravity of Life - the Medusa.
Let Ares doze, that other war Is instantly declared once more 'Twixt those who follow Precocious Hermes all the way And those who without qualms obey Pompous Apollo. --W. H. Auden, "Under Which Lyre"
To cite an earlier injunction to the same effect, "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury: Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to in the land whither thou goest to possess it" (Deut. 23:19-20). This meant--among other things--that if thou set thine hand to credit operations, thou had to play the trespasser (or submit to domestication through various "clientelization" and "blood brotherhood" techniques).
In the eyes of the rural majority, all craftsmen were crafty, and all merchants, mercenary (both--as was Mercury himself--derived from merx, "goods"). And of course Hermes was a thief. Accordingly, European traders and artisans were usually segregated in special urban communities; in some Andean villages in today's Ecuador, store owners are often Protestants; and one Chinese shopkeeper observed by L. A. Peter Gosling in a Malay village "appeared to be considerably acculturated to Malay culture, and was scrupulously sensitive to Malays in every way, including the normal wearing of sarong, quiet and polite Malay speech, and a humble and affable manner. However, at harvest time when he would go to the field to collect crops on which he had advanced credit, he would put on his Chinese costume of shorts and under-shirt, and speak in a much more abrupt fashion, acting, as one Malay farmer put it, 'just like a Chinese.' "8
Noblesse oblige, and so most mercurial strangers make a point--and perhaps a virtue--of not doing as the Romans do. The Chinese unsettle the Malays by being kasar (crude); the Inadan make a mockery of the Tuareg notions of dignified behavior (takarakayt); the Japanese Burakumin claim to be unable to control their emotions; and Jewish shopkeepers in Europe rarely failed to impress the Gentiles with their unseemly urgency and volubility ("the wife, the daughter, the servant, the dog, all howl in your ears," as Sombart quotes approvingly). Gypsies, in particular, seem to offend against business rationality by offending the sensibilities of their customers. They can "pass" when they find it expedient to do so, but much more often they choose to play up their foreignness by preferring bold speech, bold manners, and bold colors--sometimes as part of elaborate public displays of defiant impropriety.9
What makes such spectacles especially offensive to host populations is that so many of the offenders are women. In traditional societies, foreigners are dangerous, disgusting, or ridiculous because they break the rules, and no rules are more important in the breach than the ones regulating sexual life and the sexual division of labor. Foreign women, in particular, are either promiscuous or downtrodden, and often "beautiful" (by virtue of being promiscuous or downtrodden and because foreign women are both cause and prize of much warrior activity). But of course some foreigners are more foreign than others, and the internal ones are very foreign indeed because they are full-time, professional, and ideologically committed rule breakers. Traders among sharers, nomads among peasants, or tribes among nations, they frequently appear as mirror images of their hosts--sometimes quite brazenly and deliberately so, as many of them are professional jesters, fortune-tellers, and carnival performers. This means, as far as the hosts are concerned, that their women and men have a tendency to change places--a perception that is partly a variation on the "perversity of strangers" theme but mostly a function of occupational differences. Traders and nomads assign more visible and economically important roles to women than do peasants or warriors, and some trading nomads depend primarily on women's labor (while remaining patriarchal in political organization). The Kanjar of Pakistan, who specialize in toy making, singing, dancing, begging, and prostitution, derive most of their annual income from female work, as do many European Gypsy groups that emphasize begging and fortune-telling. In both of these cases, and in some merchant communities such as the Eastern European Jewish market traders, women are vital links to the outside world (as performers, stall attendants, or negotiators) and are often considered sexually provocative or socially aggressive--a perception they occasionally reinforce by deliberate displays.10
The same purpose is served by demonstrative male nonbelligerence, which is both a necessary condition for the pursuit of stranger occupations and an important indication of continued strangeness (a refusal to fight, like a refusal to accept hospitality, is an effective way of setting oneself apart from the usual conventions of cross-cultural interaction). The Burakumin, Inadan, and Gypsies may be seen as "passionate" or "spontaneous" in the way children and pranksters are; what matters is that they are not expected to have warrior honor. To be competitive as functional eunuchs, monks, confessors, or jesters, they cannot be seen as complete men. And so they were not. According to Vasilii Rozanov, one of Russia's most articulate fin de sie `cle anti-Semites, all Jewish qualities stemmed from "their femininity--their devotion, cleaving, their almost erotic attachment, to the particular person each one of them is dealing with, as well as to the tribe, atmosphere, landscape, and everyday life that they are surrounded by (as witness both the prophets' reproaches and the obvious facts)."11 Hermes was as physically weak as he was clever (with cleverness serving as compensation for weakness); Hephaestus was lame, ugly, and comically inept at everything except prodigious handicraft; the clairvoyant metalworkers of Germanic myths were hunchbacked dwarves with oversized heads; and all of them--along with the tradesmen they patronized--were associated with dissolute, dangerous, and adulterous sexuality. The three images--bloodless neutrality, female eroticism, and Don Juan rakishness--were combined in various proportions and applied in different degrees, but what they all shared was the glaring absence of dignified manliness."
"It is not only images, however, that make strangers--it is also actions; and of all human actions, two are universally seen as defining humanity and community: eating and procreating. Strangers (enemies) are people with whom one does not eat or intermarry; radical strangers (savages) are people who eat filth and fornicate like wild animals. The most common way to convert a foreigner into a friend is to partake of his food and "blood"; the surest way to remain a foreigner is to refuse to do so.12
All service nomads are endogamous, and many of them observe dietary restrictions that make fraternizing with their neighbors/ clients impossible (and thus service occupations conceivable). Only Phinehas's act of atonement could save the children of Israel from the Lord's wrath when "the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab," and one man in particular brought "a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses." For he (Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest) "took a javelin in his hand, and he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly. So the plague was stayed from the children of Israel" (Num. 25:1-18). Elsewhere, men had a reasonable chance of escaping punishment, but in most traditional Jewish and Gypsy communities, a woman's marriage to an outsider signified irredeemable defilement and resulted in excommunication and symbolic death. There was nothing unusual about Phinehas's act at a time when all gods were jealous; there was something peculiar about a continued commitment to endogamy amid the divinely sanctioned whoredom of religious universalism.
Food taboos are less lethal but more evident as everyday boundary markers. No Jew could accept non-Jewish hospitality or retain his ritual purity in an alien environment; the craftsmen and minstrels living among the Margi of the western Sudan were readily recognizable by the distinctive drinking baskets they carried around to avoid pollution; and the English Travelers, who obtained most of their food from the dominant society, lived in constant fear of contagion (preferring canned, packaged, or bottled food not visibly contaminated by non-Travelers, and eating with their hands to avoid using cafeteria silverware). The Jains, who along with the Parsis became colonial India's most successful entrepreneurs, were, like the Parsis, formally outside the Hindu caste system, but what made them truly "peculiar people" was their strict adherence to ahimsa, the doctrine of nonviolence toward all living things. This meant, besides strict vegetarianism, a ban on all food that might be contaminated by small insects or worms, such as potatoes and radishes, and a prohibition on eating after sunset, when the danger of causing injury was especially great. It also meant that most kinds of manual labor, especially agriculture, were potentially polluting. Whatever came first--the change in professional specialization or the ascetic challenge to Hinduism--the fact remains that the Jains, who started out as members of the Kshatriya warrior caste, became mostly Baniyas specializing in moneylending, jewelry making, shopkeeping, and eventually banking and industry. What emigration accomplished in East Africa, the pursuit of ritual purity did back home in India.13
The opposition between purity and pollution lies at the heart of all moral order, be it in the form of traditional distinctions (between body parts, parts of the world, natural realms, supernatural forces, species of humanity) or of various quests for salvation, religious or secular. In any case, "dirt" and "foreignness" tend to be synonymous--and dangerous--with regard to both objects and people. Universalist egalitarian religions attempted to banish foreignness by reinterpreting it (even proclaiming, in one case, that it is "not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man" [Matt. 15:11]). They were not totally successful (the world was still full of old-fashioned, filth-eating foreigners, including many converted ones), but they did make filth and foreignness appear less formidable and ultimately conquerable--except in the case of those whose fate and faith seemed inseparable from foreignness and thus unreformable and irredeemable. Most of the time, the Jews, Gypsies, and other service nomads seemed to share this view; largely unpersuaded by universalist rhetoric, they retained the traditional division of the world into two separate entities, one associated with purity (maintained through ritual observance), the other with pollution. Whereas in the Christian and Muslim realms, words representing foreigners, savages, strangers, the heathen, and the infidel competed with each other, did not fully overlap, and could no longer be subsumed under one heading, the Jewish and Gypsy concepts of "Goy" and "Gajo" (among other terms and spellings) allowed one to conceive of all non-Jews or non-Gypsies as one alien tribe, with individual Goyim or Gajos as members. Even the Christians and Muslims who specialized in service nomadism tended to belong to endogamous, nonproselytizing, "national" churches, such as the Gregorian (the Armenian word for non-Armenians, odar, is probably a cognate of the English "other"), Nestorian, Maronite, Melchite, Coptic, Ibadi, and Ismaili.
They were all chosen people, in other words, all "tribal" and "traditional" insofar as they worshiped themselves openly and separated themselves as a matter of principle. There were others like them, but few were as consistent. Most agrarian nobilities, for example, routinely (and sometimes convincingly) traced their descent from nomadic warriors, stressed their foreignness as a matter of honor, practiced endogamy, and performed complex distancing rituals. Priests, too, removed themselves from important modes of social exchange by forming self-reproducing castes or refraining from reproduction altogether. Both groups, however, usually shared a name, a place, or a god (and perhaps an occasional meal or a wife) with others, whose labor they appropriated by virtue of controlling access to land or salvation. Besides, many of them subscribed to universalist creeds that set limits to particularism and imposed commitments that might prompt crusades, deportations, and concerted missionary endeavors aiming at the abolition of difference.
The "Mercurians" had no such commitments, and the most uncompromising among them, such as the Gypsies and the Jews, retained radical dualism and strict pollution taboos through many centuries of preaching and persecution. The black silk cord that pious Jews wore around their waists to separate the upper and lower body might be reincarnated as the "fence" (eyruv) that converted an entire shtetl into one home for the purpose of Sabbath purity, and, at the outer limits, as the invisible but ritually all-important barrier that demarcated the Jew-Gentile border. Gypsy defenses against impurity were similar, if much more rigid and numerous, because in the absence of a scriptural tradition, they had to bear the full burden of ethnic differentiation. Just being Gypsy involved a desperate struggle against marime (contagion)--a task all the more daunting because Gypsies had no choice but to live among the Gajo, who were the principal source and embodiment of that contagion. (Perhaps ironically, they also had no choice but to have Gajos live among them--as slaves or servants employed to do the unclean work.) When religious injunctions appeared to weaken, the "hygienic" ones took their place--or so it might seem when observant Gypsies bleached their dwellings or used paper towels to turn on taps or open bathroom doors. The Jews, considered dirty in a variety of contexts, could also arouse the suspicion or admiration of their neighbors because of their preoccupation with bodily cleanliness. And even on the Indian subcontinent, where all ethnosocial groups surrounded themselves with elaborate pollution taboos, the Parsis were remarkable for the strictness of their constraints on menstruating women and the intensity of their concern for personal hygiene."
"Next to purity and pollution, and closely related to them as a sign of difference, is language. "Barbarian" originally meant a "babbler" or "stutterer," and the Slavic word for "foreigner" (later "German") is nemec, "the mute one." Most "Mercurian" peoples are barbarians and "Germans" wherever they go, sometimes by dint of considerable effort. If they do not speak a language that is foreign to the surrounding majority (as a result of recent immigration or long-term language maintenance), they create one.
What seems clear is that when service nomads possessed no vernaculars foreign to their hosts, they created new ones in ways that resembled neither genetic change (transmission from generation to generation) nor pidginization (simplification and role restriction). These languages are--like their speakers--mercurial and Promethean. They do not fit into existing "families," however defined. Their raison d'&etilde;tre is the maintenance of difference, the conscious preservation of the self and thus of strangeness. They are special secret languages in the service of Mercury's precarious artistry. For example, the argot of German Jewish cattle traders (like that of the rabbis) contained a much higher proportion of Hebrew words than the speech of their kinsmen whose communication needs were less esoteric. With considerable insight as well as irony, they called it Loshen-Koudesh, or "sacred language" / "cow language," and used it, as a kind of Yiddish in miniature, across large territories. (Beyond the Jewish world, Yiddish was, along with Romani, a major source of European underworld vocabularies.)25 But mostly it was religion, which is to say "culture," which is to say service nomadism writ large, that made Mercurian languages special. As Max Weinreich put it, " 'Ours differs from theirs' reaches much further than mere disgust words or distinction words." Or rather, it was not just the filthy and the sublime that uncleansed "Gentile" words could not be allowed to express; it was charity, family, childbirth, death, and indeed most of life. One Sabbath benediction begins with "He who distinguishes between the sacred and the profane" and ends with "He who distinguishes between the sacred and the sacred." Within the Jewish--and Gypsy--world, "all nooks of life are sacred, some more, some less," and so secret words multiplied and metamorphosed, until the language itself became secret, like the people it served and celebrated.26
In addition to more or less secret vernaculars, some service nomads possess formally sacred languages and alphabets that preserve their scriptural connection to their gods, past, home, and salvation (Hebrew and Aramaic for the Jews, Avestan and Pahlavi for the Parsis, Grabar for the Armenians, Syriac for the Nestorians). Indeed, all literate service nomads (including the Overseas Chinese and Eastern European Germans, for example) can be said to possess such languages, for all modern "national" languages are sacred to the extent that they preserve their speakers' connection to their (new) gods, past, home, and salvation. All Mercurians are multilingual, in other words (Hermes was the god of eloquence). As professional internal strangers equally dependent on cultural difference and economic interdependence, they speak at least one internal language (sacred, secret, or both) and at least one external one. They are all trained linguists, negotiators, translators, and mystifiers, and the literate groups among them tend to be much more literate than their hosts--because literacy, like language generally, is a key to both the maintenance of their separate identity and the fulfillment of their commercial (conjoining) function.
Once again, however, difference is primary. The continued fulfillment of their conjoining function (like all acts of mediating, negotiating, and translating) hinges on the perpetuation of difference, and difference makes for strange bedfellows: wherever Mercurians live, their relations with their clients are those of mutual hostility, suspicion, and contempt. Even in India, where the entire society consists of endogamous, economically specialized, pollution-fearing strangers, the Parsis tend to feel, and may be made to feel, stranger and cleaner than most.27 Elsewhere, there was little doubt about a mutual antipathy based ultimately on the fear of pollution. "They" always eat filth, smell funny, live in squalor, breed like rabbits, and otherwise mix the pure and the impure so as to contaminate themselves beyond redemption (and thus become the object of intense sexual curiosity). All contact with them, especially through food (hospitality) and blood (marriage), is dangerous, and therefore forbidden--and therefore desirable. And therefore forbidden. Such fears are rarely symmetrical: border crossers are always interlopers and outcasts and thus more contagious, more difficult to contain and domesticate. In complex societies with well-established universalist religions the nature of the relationship may change: the border crossers retain their preoccupation with everyday pollution and intermarriage (shiksa means "filthy"), and the host majorities profess to fear certain religious practices and political conspiracies. Still, much of the anti-Mercurian rhetoric has to do with contagion/infestation and, in cases of particular resonance, specifically with food and blood: casting spells to destroy the harvest, using the blood of infants to prepare ritual meals, and jeopardizing Christian Spain's limpieza de sangre ("blood purity")--in addition to basic untidiness.
The asymmetry goes much further, of course. The host societies have numbers, weapons, and warrior values, and sometimes the state, on their side. Economically, too, they are generally self-sufficient--not as comfortably as Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain may have believed, but incomparably more so than the service nomads, who are fully dependent on their customers for survival. Finally, beyond the basic fear of pollution, the actual views that the two parties hold of each other are very different. In fact, they tend to be complementary, mutually reinforcing opposites making up the totality of the universe: insider-outsider, settled-nomadic, body-mind, masculine-feminine, steady-mercurial. Over time, the relative value of particular elements may change, but the oppositions themselves tend to remain the same (Hermes possessed most of the qualities that the Gypsies, Jews, and Overseas Chinese would be both loathed and admired for).28
Most important, many of these views were true. Not in the sense of the reality of certain acts or the applicability of generalizations to particular individuals, but insofar as they described the cultural values and economic behaviors of one community in terms of another. Indeed, very often the two communities agreed on the general terms, if not the specific formulations. The view that service nomads kept aloof, "did not belong," had other loyalties, insisted on their difference, and resisted assimilation was shared by all (and was an accusation only in those relatively few societies where assimilation was occasionally seen as a good thing). Strangeness was their profession; aloofness was their way of remaining strange; and their primary loyalty was to each other and their common fate.
Even the reasons for their strangeness were not, in essence, controversial. European anti-Semitism is often explained in connection with the Jewish origins of Christianity and the subsequent casting of unconverted Jews in the role of deicides (as the mob's cry, "his blood be on us, and on our children," was reinterpreted in "ethnic" terms). This is true in more ways than one (the arrival of the Christian millennium is, in fact, tied to the end of Jewish wanderings), but it is also true that before the rise of commercial capitalism, when Hermes became the supreme deity and certain kinds of service nomadism became fashionable or even compulsory, Mercurian life was universally seen--by the service nomads themselves, as well as by their hosts--as divine punishment for an original transgression.
Of the many legends accounting for the Gypsy predicament, one claims that Adam and Eve were so fruitful that they decided to hide some of their children from God, who became angry and condemned the ones he could not see to eternal homelessness. Other explanations include punishment for incest or refusal of hospitality, but the most common one blames the Gypsies for forging the nails used to crucify Jesus. A positive version has them refuse to forge the fourth nail and, as a reward, receive freedom to roam and a dispensation to steal, but it seems to be of more recent vintage (like the explanation of the Jewish exile as a result of Gentile oppression). Before the rise of secularism and industrialism, everyone in agrarian societies seems to have agreed that service nomadism meant homelessness, and that homelessness was a curse. Perhaps the most famous punishments in the European tradition were meted out to Prometheus, the mischievous master craftsman who stole Zeus's fire; Sisyphus,"the craftiest of men," who cheated Death, and of course Odysseus/Ulysses, that most Jewish of Greeks, whose jealous crew let loose the hostile winds that would keep them away from home.29
Another common host stereotype of the Mercurians is that they are devious, acquisitive, greedy, crafty, pushy, and crude. This, too, is a statement of fact, in the sense that, for peasants, pastoralists, princes, and priests, any trader, moneylender, or artisan is in perpetual and deliberate violation of most norms of decency and decorum (especially if he happens to be a babbling infidel without a home or reputable ancestors). "For the Rwala [Bedouin], wealth, in terms of camels, goods, and gold, could not be conserved; it had to be converted into reputation (or honor). For the peripatetics [service nomads], most of whom were emissaries from the towns, and all of whom were regarded as such, rightly or wrongly, by the Rwala, wealth is measured by possessions, be these objects or cash. Among the Rwala, to be rich in possessions implied a lack of generosity, which led to a diminution of honor, and in turn, a decrease in influence. Among townsmen--and by extension, peripatetics--possessions implied power and influence."30 All economic division of labor involves value differentiation; next to the division based on sex, perhaps the deepest is the one separating food producers and predators from service providers. Apollonians and Dionysians are usually the same people: now sober and serene, now drunk and frenzied. The followers of Hermes are neither; they have been seen as artful and shrewd ever since Hermes, on the day of his birth, invented the lyre, made himself some "unspeakable, unthinkable, marvelous" sandals, and stole Apollo's cattle.
Hermes had nothing except his wit; Apollo, his big brother and condescending antipode, possessed most things in the universe because he was the god of both livestock and agriculture. As the patron of food production, Apollo owned much of the land, directed the flow of time, protected sailors and warriors, and inspired true poets. He was both manly and eternally young, athletic and artistic, prophetic and dignified--the most universal of all gods and the most commonly worshiped. The difference between Apollo and Dionysus--made much of by Nietzsche--is relatively minor because wine was but one of the countless fruits of the earth and sea that Apollo presided over. (Dionysians are Apollonians at a festival--peasants after the harvest.) The difference between Apollonians and Mercurians is the all-important difference between those who grow food and those who create concepts and artifacts. The Mercurians are always sober but never dignified.
Whenever the Apollonians turn cosmopolitan, they find the Mercurians to be uncommonly recalcitrant and routinely accuse them of tribalism, nepotism, clannishness, and other sins that used to be virtues (and still are, in a variety of contexts). Such accusations have a lot to do with the old mirror-image principle: if cosmopolitanism is a good thing, strangers do not have it (unless they belong to a noble savage variety preserved as a reproach to the rest of us). But they have even more to do with reality: in complex agrarian societies (no other preindustrial kind has much interest in cosmopolitanism), and certainly in modern ones, service nomads tend to possess a greater degree of kin solidarity and internal cohesion than their settled neighbors. This is true of most nomads, but especially the mercurial kind, who have few other resources and no other enforcement mechanisms. In the words of Pierre van den Berghe, "Groups with a strong network of extended family ties and with a strong patriarchal authority structure to keep extended families together in the family business have a strong competitive advantage in middleman occupations over groups lacking these characteristics."31
Whether "corporate kinship" is the cause or consequence of service nomadism, it does appear that most service nomads possess such a system.32 Various Rom "nations" are composed of restricted cognatic descent groups (vitsa), which are further subdivided into highly cohesive extended families that often pool their income under the jurisdiction of the eldest member; in addition, migration units (tabor) and territorial associations (kumpania) apportion areas to be exploited and organize economic and social life under the leadership of one family head.33
The Indians in East Africa escaped some of the occupational restrictions and status-building requirements of the subcontinent ("we are all baniyas, even those who do not have dukas [shops]") but retained endogamy, pollution taboos, and the extended family as an economic unit.34 In West Africa, all Lebanese businesses were family affairs. This "meant that outsiders (without really understanding them) could count on the continuity of the business. A son would honor the debts of his father and would expect the repayment of credits extended by his father. The coherence of the family was the social factor which was the backbone of the economic success of the Lebanese traders: the authority of a man over his wife and children meant that the business was run as resolutely [and as cheaply!] as by a single person and yet was as strong as a group." Disaster insurance, expansion opportunities, different forms of credit, and social regulation were provided by larger kinship networks and occasionally by the whole Lebanese community.35 Similarly, the Overseas Chinese gained access to capital, welfare, and employment by becoming members of ascriptive, endogamous, centralized, and mostly coresidential organizations based on surname (clan), home village, district, and dialect. These organizations formed rotating credit associations, trade guilds, benevolent societies, and chambers of commerce that organized economic life, collected and disseminated information, settled disputes, provided political protection, and financed schools, hospitals, and various social activities. The criminal versions of such entities ("gangster tongs") represented smaller clans or functioned as fictitious families complete with elaborate rites of passage and welfare support.36 (In fact, all durable "mafias" are either offshoots of service nomadic communities or their successful imitations.)"
"Clannishness is loyalty to a limited and well-defined circle of kin (real or fictitious). Such loyalty creates the internal trust and external impregnability that allow service nomads to survive and, under certain conditions, succeed spectacularly in an alien environment. "Credit is extended and capital pooled with the expectation that commitments will be met; delegation of authority takes place without fear that agents will pursue their own interests at the expense of the principal's." At the same time, clearly marked aliens are kept securely outside the community: "Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury." Clannishness is loyalty as seen by a stranger.
Economic success, and indeed the very nature of the Mercurians' economic pursuits, are associated with another common and essentially accurate perception of their culture: "They think they are better than everybody, they are so clever." And of course they do, and they are. It is better to be chosen than not chosen, whatever the price one has to pay. "Blessed art thou, O Lord, King of the Universe, who hast not made me a Gentile," says the Jewish prayer. "It is good that I am a descendant of Jacob, and not of Esau," wrote the great Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem.38 "It is the feeling you might have if you went to an elite school, and then you attended a polytechnic," explained a Parsi informant burdened by an apparently inescapable sense of superiority toward other Indians. "You feel proud of your elite school, but you're embarrassed if other people know. You're embarrassed because you think they think you feel superior to them, and you do and know it's wrong."39
It has not been wrong for very long. Mercurians owe their survival to their sense of superiority, and when it comes to generalizations based on mutual perceptions, that superiority is seen to reside in the intellect. Jacob was too smart for the hairy Esau, and Hermes outwitted Apollo and amused Zeus when he was a day old (one wonders what he would have done to the drunk Dionysus). Both stories--and many more like them--are told by the tricksters' descendants. The Kanjar despise their gullible hosts; the Irish Travelers believe that what distinguishes them from their clients is agility of mind ("cleverness"); much of Rom folklore is about outsmarting slow, dull-witted non-Gypsies; and on the best of days, a shtetl Jew might concede, in the words of Maurice Samuel, "that at bottom Ivan was not a bad fellow; stupid, perhaps, and earthy, given to drink and occasional wife-beating, but essentially good-natured . . . , as long as the higher-ups did not begin to manipulate him."40
In their own eyes, as well as those of others, the Mercurians possess a quality that the Greeks called metis, or "cunning intelligence" (with an emphasis on either "cunning" or "intelligence," depending on who does the labeling). Supervised by Hermes and fully embodied on this earth by Odysseus/Ulysses, it is the most potent weapon of the weak, the most ambiguous of virtues, the nemesis of both brute force and mature wisdom. As Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant put it in their study of Homer,
There are many activities in which man must learn to manipulate hostile forces too powerful to be controlled directly but which can be exploited despite themselves, without ever being confronted head on, to implement the plan in mind by some unexpected, devious means; they include, for example, the stratagems used by the warrior the success of whose attack hinges on surprise, trickery or ambush, the art of the pilot steering his ship against winds and tides, the verbal ploys of the sophist making the adversary's powerful argument recoil against him, the skill of the banker and the merchant who, like conjurors, make a great deal of money out of nothing, the knowing forethought of the politician whose flair enables him to assess the uncertain course of events in advance, and the sleights of hand and trade secrets which give craftsmen their control over material which is always more or less intractable to their designs. It is over all such activities that metis presides.41
The Mercurians' views of the Apollonians are ultimately as rational as the Apollonians' views of the Mercurians. It wasn't Mother Earth or Apollo's herds that nourished, beguiled, and shaped the service nomads; it was people. Traders, healers, minstrels, or artisans, they always performed for the consumer, who was always right, in his own way. And so they had to pay attention. "The Kanjar know a great deal about the human resources they exploit; whereas members of sedentary communities know almost nothing about Kanjar society and culture--their experience is limited to passive audience roles in contrived performance settings."42 Singers know people's tastes, fortune-tellers their hopes (and thus their fate), merchants their needs, doctors their bodies, and thieves their habits, dwellings, and hiding places. "When begging, Irish Traveller women wear a shawl or 'rug' (plaid blanket), both symbols of Ireland's past poverty; take a baby or young child with them, even if they must borrow one from another family; and ask for tiny amounts such as a 'sup' of milk or a 'bit' of butter, playing on their client's sympathy and making any refusal seem miserly."43
As professional cultivators of people, Mercurians use words, concepts, money, emotions, and other intangibles as tools of their trade (whatever the particular trade may be). They assign value to a much larger portion of the universe than do peasants or pastoralists, and they see value in many more pursuits. Their world is larger and more varied--because they cross conceptual and communal borders as a matter of course, because they speak more tongues, and because they have those "unspeakable, unthinkable,marvelous" sandals that allow them to be in several places at once. Gypsies are always just passing through, and so, in more ways than one, are the Jews. In "ghetto times," according to Jacob Katz, "no community, even the largest, could be said to have been self-contained and self-sufficient. Business transactions brought members of different communities into touch through correspondence or personal contact. It was a typical feature of Jewish economic activity that it could rely on business connections with Jewish communities in even far-flung cities and countries . . . Jews who made a living by sitting in their shops waiting for clients were the minority rather than the prevalent type."44 Bankers, peddlers, yeshiva students, and famous rabbis traveled far and wide, well beyond the edges of peasant imagination.
They did not travel just by land or water. Some service nomads were literate, and thus doubly nomads. By a natural extension of his expertise in eloquence and wit, Mercury became a patron of writers (Mercuriales viri, "Mercury's men," as Horace called them), so that Mercurians who happened to be literate became the preeminent manipulators of texts. In traditional societies, writing was the monopoly of priests or bureaucrats; among literate Mercurians, every male was a priest. The Jews, Parsis, Armenians, Eastern European Germans, Overseas Indians, and Overseas Chinese were not only more literate (on average) than their clients; they were acutely aware of being more literate--and thus more knowledgeable and more sophisticated. What the Rom, Nawar, and Inadan are to oral culture, the scriptural Mercurians are to the culture of the written word. Businessmen, diplomats, doctors, and psychotherapists are literate peddlers, heralds, healers, and fortune-tellers. Sometimes they are also blood relatives.
Either way, they would all take a justifiably dim view of Ivan. If one values mobility, mental agility, negotiation, wealth, and curiosity, one has little reason to respect either prince or peasant. And if one feels strongly enough that manual labor is sacred, physical violence is honorable, trade is tricky, and strangers should be either fed or fought (or perhaps that there should be no strangers at all), one is unlikely to admire service nomads. And so, for much of human history, they have lived next to each other in mutual scorn and suspicion--not because of ignorant superstition but because they have had the chance to get to know each other.
For much of human history, it seemed quite obvious who had the upper hand. The Mercurians may have known more about the Apollonians than the Apollonians knew about the Mercurians (or about themselves), but that knowledge was a weapon of weakness and dependence. Hermes needed his wit because Apollo and Zeus were so big and strong. He would tease and dissimulate when the opportunity presented itself, but mostly he used his sandals and his lyre to run errands, amuse, and officiate.
Then things began to change: Zeus was beheaded, repeatedly, or made a fool of; Apollo lost his cool; and Hermes bluffed his way to the top--not in the sense of the Inadan lording it over the Tuareg, but to the extent that the Tuareg were now forced to be more like the Inadan. Modernity was about everyone becoming a service nomad: mobile, clever, articulate, occupationally flexible, and good at being a stranger. In fact, the task was even more daunting because both the Tuareg and the Inadan were under pressure to become like the Armenians and the Jews, whose economic and cultural border-crossing was greatly aided by their habit of writing things down (in their own way).
Some predominantly oral Mercurians (such as the Ibo of Nigeria) would embrace the transition; others (such as the Gypsies) would continue to service the ever shrinking world of folk culture and small pariah entrepreneurship. Some Apollonian groups would prove willing and able to convert to Mercurianism; others would balk, fail, or rebel. No one would remain immune, however, and no one was better at being a scriptural Mercurian--and therefore "modern"--than scriptural Mercurians, old and new.45 The over-represention of the Armenians and Jews in entrepreneurial and professional jobs in Europe and the Middle East (discrimination notwithstanding) was matched or exceeded by the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Parsis in India, the Indians in Africa, and the Lebanese in Latin America and the Caribbean, among others. Having established themselves as commercial intermediaries with the arrival of the Portuguese, the Parsis became British India's premier financiers, industrialists, and urban professionals--including the most famous and most successful of them all, Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata. The principal nineteenth-century Indian politician ("the Grand Old Man of India" Dadabhai Naoroji) was also a Parsi, as was the ideologue of violent nationalism Bhikhaiji Rustom Cama; all three Indian members of the British Parliament; the first Indian baronet; the first prime minister of the Bombay Presidency; the "Uncrowned King of Bombay"; the "Potato King of Bombay"; the pioneer of coffee production in the East; the first Indian to fly from Europe to India; the most prominent Indian Freemasons; most Western musicians (including, eventually, Zubin Mehta); and every single member of the first all-India cricket team. In 1931, 79 percent of all Parsis (and 73 percent of the females) were literate, as compared to 51 percent of Indian Christians and 19 percent of Hindus and Muslims.46 Similar lists could be compiled for all scriptural Mercurians (although in some areas they thought it wise to stay out of public politics).
Various Indian diasporas have outlived the British Empire (which did so much to propel them), and moved farther afield, specializing in traditional Mercurian ("Jewish") occupations such as trading, finance, garments, jewelry, real estate, entertainment, and medicine. Despite continued discrimination, Goans, Jains, Ismailis, and Gujaratis, among others, have continued to dominate the economic and professional life of large parts of East Africa (accounting for between 70 and 80 percent of all manufacturing firms in postindependence Kenya, for example). The Jains, the most "puritanical" and probably the wealthiest of all Indian diaspora communities, are second only to the Jews in the international diamond trade; in the late 1980s, having established themselves in such diamond centers as New York, Antwerp, and Tel Aviv, they accounted for about one-third of all purchases of rough diamonds in the world. In the United States, Indians (mostly Gujaratis) own about 40 percent of all small motels, including about one-fourth of the franchises of the Days Inn chain, and a substantial number of low-cost hotels in large urban centers. In 1989, the combined global real estate investment of Overseas Indians was estimated to be worth about $100 billion. At the same time (in the 1980s), the number of Indian students studying in the United States quadrupled to more than 26,000. By 1990, there were about 5,000 Indian engineers and several hundred Indian millionaires in California's Silicon Valley. Altogether, there were about 20,000 Indian engineers and 28,000 physicians in the United States, including 10 percent of all anesthesiologists. But probably the biggest jewel in the Indian diaspora's crown is the old imperial "mother country." London serves as the headquarters of a large number of Indian commercial clans, and in Great Britain as a whole, Indian and Pakistani males have a 60 percent higher rate of self-employment than "white" Britons and make up a disproportionate share of managerial and professional personnel. In the 1970s, the rate of economic upward mobility among Indians and Pakistanis was three times that of the rest of the British population.48 By far the largest and most widely dispersed of all Mercurian communities in today's world are the Overseas Chinese.
Perhaps the most popular explanation for successful Mercurianism is "corporate kinship," which is said to promote internal trust and obedience while limiting the number of potential beneficiaries. Nepotism may be good for capitalism, in other words--as long as the duties and entitlements of one's nephews are understood clearly and followed religiously.52 Indeed, virtually all Armenian, Korean, Lebanese, diaspora Indian, and American Italian businesses are family enterprises. Even the largest Overseas Chinese commercial and manufacturing empires, with offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, are similar to the Rothschild banking house in that the regional branches are usually run by the sons, brothers, nephews, or sons-in-law of the founder. The one true Mercurian faith, according to this theory, is fervent familism (which may, in a strange land, be extended to larger lineages and ultimately the whole--chosen--people). If the core of Confucianism is "the apotheosis of the family," then the behavior of large numbers of Italian immigrants to the Americas may be attributed to what Francis Fukuyama calls "Italian Confucianism."53
The problem with the strictly sociobiological explanation of entrepreneurial nepotism (such as the one advanced by Pierre van den Berghe) is that some of the most successful Mercurian enterprises--the German and Japanese ones, as well as the Sicilian Mafia--have not been kin groups. Instead, they have used family models and metaphors to create durable and cohesive quasi-families--from, in the Japanese case, master-disciple swordsmanship groups to zaibatsu ("money clique") business partnerships. The upshot, it would seem, is that the best new candidates for Mercurian roles are those groups that most closely resemble the old Mercurian tribes. The principal trait that all aspirants must possess is the combination of internal cohesion and external strangeness: the greater the cohesion, the greater the strangeness, and the greater the strangeness, the greater the cohesion, whichever comes first. The best guarantee of both is an uncompromising and ideologized familism (tribalism), which may be either biological or adoptive and which can be reinforced--or indeed replaced--by a strong sense of divine election and cultural superiority. The millenarian religious sects that do not insist on celibacy are invariably endogamous--and thus potential tribes; the endogamous tribes that take their fate and their strangeness seriously are also religious sects."
"Whatever the sources of its most recent versions, service nomadism--old or new, scriptural or oral--has always been a dangerous proposition. Unarmed internal strangers, the Mercurians are as vulnerable as they are foreign, especially because residential segregation (in forest encampments, merchant quarters, or ethnic compounds) is a necessary condition for their continued existence as service nomads among traditional food producers. In stateless societies, they are protected by their supernatural powers and exclusive specialization; elsewhere, they are safeguarded--or not--by tax-collecting elites that profit from their expertise.
The history of most service nomads is a story of sporadic grass-roots pogroms and permanent state ambivalence, as various regimes oscillated between more or less rationalized extortion and periodic confiscations, conversions, expulsions, and executions. The European Gypsies were usually seen as parasitic as well as dangerous (entertainment was the only "Bohemian" activity subject to profitable regulation), and thus hounded relentlessly, if rarely with great conviction. The scriptural Mercurians were often considered indispensable as well as dangerous, and thus allowed to remain both resident (including the granting of state protection and economic monopolies) and alien (including the toleration of physical separation, religious self-rule, and administrative autonomy).
The key to continued usefulness was economic success; visible economic success led to heavier taxation, popular violence, and renewed complaints from native competitors. Either way, considerations of long-term usefulness could become secondary to an urgent need for financial revenue or political scapegoats; occasionally, they might be abandoned entirely in favor of religious universalism or bureaucratic transparency. In the Spanish Philippines, for example, 12,000 Chinese were deported in 1596, approximately 23,000 massacred in 1603, another 23,000 in 1639, and then about 20,000 in 1662; in 1755 all non-Christian Chinese were expelled (and many converted); in 1764, 6,000 were killed; and in 1823, the levying of special taxes resulted in mass flight and imprisonment.
The rise of nationalism and communism seemed to pave the way to a final solution. If all nations were entitled to their own states and all states were to embody nations, all internal strangers were potential traitors. They might, or might not, be allowed to assimilate, but they had ever fewer legitimate arguments for continued difference and specialization. In a nation-state, citizenship and nationality ("culture") became inseparable; nonnationals were aliens and thus not true citizens. And if, on the other hand, proletarians of all countries were supposed to inherit the earth, and if only industrial workers (and possibly their peasant allies) could be true proletarians, then service nomads were to be disinherited as "bourgeois lackeys" or just plain bourgeois. Some Mercurians became communist (in opposition to ethnic nationalism), and some became Mercurian nationalists (in opposition to both), but both nationalism and communism were fundamentally Apollonian, so that many Mercurians who were not murdered became Apollonians of Mercurian descent or citizens of the newly "revived" Israel and Armenia (which tended to be more Apollonian--and much more martial--than Apollo himself).
In the summer of 1903, soon after the anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, the government of Haiti barred foreigners from retail trade and stood by during the repeated anti-Levantine pogroms that followed. For two years, local newspapers (including L'Antisyrien, created expressly for the purpose) inveighed against "Levantine monsters" and "descendants of Judas," occasionally calling for "l'extirpation des Syriens." Only pressure from foreign powers (whose representatives were themselves ambivalent about the Levantines) prevented the expulsion orders of March 1905 from taking full effect. About 900 refugees left the country. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Lebanese population of Freetown, Sierra Leone, spent eight weeks in 1919 under protective custody in the town hall and two other buildings as their property was being looted and destroyed. In the aftermath, the British Colonial Office considered wholesale deportation "in the interests of peace" but opted for continued protection. About twenty years later, the cultural commissar of an incoming prime minister of Thailand delivered a much publicized speech in which he referred to Hitler's antiSemitic policies and declared that "it was high time Siam considered dealing with their own Jews," meaning ethnic Chinese (of whom he himself was one). As King Vajiravudh had written in a pamphlet entitled The Jews of the East, "in matters of money the Chinese are entirely devoid of morals and mercy. They will cheat you with a smile of satisfaction at their own perspicacity."57
The nearly universal condemnation of the attempted "extirpation" of the Armenians and Assyrians in Turkey and the Jews and Gypsies in Europe did little to diminish this new anti-Mercurian zeal. In the newly independent African states, "Africanization" meant, among other things, discrimination against Indian and Lebanese entrepreneurs and civil servants. In Kenya, they were squeezed out as "Asians"; in Tanzania, as "capitalists"; and in both places, as "bloodsuckers" and "leeches." In 1972, President Idi Amin of Uganda expelled about 70,000 Indians without their assets, telling them as they went that they had "no interest in this country beyond the aim of making as much profit as possible, and at all costs." In 1982, a coup attempt in Nairobi was followed by a massive Indian pogrom, in which about five hundred shops were looted and at least twenty women were raped.58
In postcolonial Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese became the targets of similar nation-building efforts. In Thailand, they were excluded from twenty-seven occupations (1942), in Cambodia from eighteen (1957), and in the Philippines, relentless anti-"alien" legislation affected their ability to own or inherit certain assets and pursue most professions--while making their "alien" status much harder to escape. In 1959-60, President Sukarno's ban on alien retail trade in Indonesia's rural areas resulted in the hasty departure of about 130,000 Chinese, and in 1965-67, General Suharto's campaign against the Communists was accompanied by massive anti-Chinese violence including large-scale massacres, expulsions, extortion, and legal discrimination. Like several other modern Mercurian communities, the Chinese of Southeast Asia were strongly overrepresented among Communists, as well as capitalists, and were often seen by some indigenous groups as the embodiment of all forms of cosmopolitan modernity. In 1969, anti-Chinese riots in Kuala Lumpur left nearly a thousand people dead; in 1975, Pol Pot's entry into Phnom Penh led to the death of an estimated two hundred thousand Chinese (half the ethnic Chinese population, or about twice as high a death toll as among urban Khmers); and in 1978-79, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Chinese fled Vietnam for China as "boat people." The end of the century brought the end of Indonesia's president Suharto, who had closed down Chinese schools and banned the use of Chinese characters (except by one government-controlled newspaper), while relying on the financial support of Chinese-owned conglomerates. The popular demonstrations that brought down the regime culminated in huge anti-Chinese riots. According to one eyewitness account, " 'Serbu . . . serbu . . . serbu' [attack], the massa [crowds] shouted. Thus, hundreds of people spontaneously moved to the shops. Windows and blockades were destroyed, and the looting began. The massa suddenly became crazy. After the goods were in their hands, the buildings and the occupants were set on fire. Girls were raped." After two days of violence, about five thousand homes were burned down, more than 150 women gang-raped, and more than two thousand people killed.59
There is no word for "anti-Sinicism" in the English language, or indeed in any other language except Chinese (and even in Chinese, the term, paihua, is limited in use and not universally accepted). The most common way to describe the role--and the fate--of Indonesia's Chinese is to call them "the Jews of Asia." And probably the most appropriate English (French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian) name for what happened in Jakarta in May 1998 is "pogrom," the Russian word for "slaughter," "looting," "urban riot," "violent assault against a particular group," which has been applied primarily to anti-Jewish violence. There was nothing unusual about the social and economic position of the Jews in medieval and early modern Europe, but there is something remarkable about the way they have come to stand for service nomadism wherever it may be found. All Mercurians represented urban arts amid rural labors, and most scriptural Mercurians emerged as the primary beneficiaries and scapegoats of the city's costly triumph, but only the Jews--the scriptural Mercurians of Europe--came to represent Mercurianism and modernity everywhere. The Age of Universal Mercurianism became Jewish because it began in Europe."
Q & A with UC Berkeley prof. of History Yuri Slezkine on his new book The Jewish Century
What accounts for Jewish success more generally?
Jews belong to a certain community of peoples that engage in certain occupations in similar ways--and provoke similar resentments. Looking at it comparatively, one discovers that this specialization is very old and fairly common.
What is this specialization?
At different times and in different places, there were tribes--ethnic groups--that specialized exclusively in providing services to the surrounding food-producing societies. They include Roma-Gypsies, various so-called "Travelers" or "Tinkers," the Fuga in Ethiopia, the Sheikh Mohammadi in Afghanistan, and of course the Armenians, the Overseas Chinese, the Indians in East Africa, the Lebanese in West Africa and Latin America, and so on. I call them all "Mercurians," as opposed to their "Apollonian" hosts.
What do you mean by those terms?
Apollo was the god of both livestock and agriculture. "Apollonian" societies, the way I use the term, are societies organized around food production, societies that consist mostly of peasants, plus various combinations of warriors and priests who appropriate peasant labor by controlling access to land or salvation.
Mercury, or Hermes, was the god of messengers, merchants, interpreters, craftsmen, guides, healers, and other border-crossers. "Mercurians," the way I use the term, are ethnic groups, demographically complete societies, that do not engage in food production, but live by providing services to the surrounding Apollonians.
In the modern world, Apollonians have to become more Mercurian--more Jewish, if you will; but Apollonian values, peasant and warrior values, essentially, live on, of course. The two attitudes, two ideal types, are still with us today, and the Jews, the most accomplished of all Mercurians, are still playing a very special role in the modern world--as the models of both success and victimization.
There are striking similarities in the way all Mercurians think of themselves and of their non-Mercurian neighbors, and in the way they actually behave.
Can you give illustrations of what you mean?
Essentially, the idea is that certain things in traditional Apollonian societies are too dangerous or too unclean to be performed by members of those societies: communicating with other lands, other worlds, and other tribes; handling money; treating the body; and dealing with fire by engaging in metal work, for example. All these are typical Mercurian specialities. Most Tinkers and Travelers started out as tinsmiths. My great-grandfather was a Jewish blacksmith.
It's a very large world, if you think about it: disease, exchange, negotiations, travel, burials, reading. And these were the things the permanent internal strangers, or Mercurians, were willing to do, compelled to do, equipped to do--or very good at doing.
And these occupations were not limited to Jews.
There were a lot of groups performing such functions. And, throughout the world, they share certain features and are regarded in similar ways. Think of Jews and Gypsies. Both were traditionally seen as dangerous internal aliens, homeless for reasons of divine punishment, and engaged in harmful, morally suspect activities. They were always seen as mirror images of their host communities: Their men weren't warriors, their women seemed aggressive--and, perhaps for that reason, attractive; they remained strangers by staying aloof, not intermarrying, not fighting, not sharing meals--just making, exchanging, selling, and possibly stealing, things and concepts. And so they were feared and hated accordingly, with the Holocaust as the culmination of that long history of fear and hatred.
And I think they were seen in similar ways because they were, in many ways, similar. Both were exclusive, nomadic service providers; both had rigid taboos regarding unclean food and intermarriage; both could only survive by remaining strangers--hence the prohibitions against sharing food and blood with their neighbors, and the obsession with cleanliness.
But Gypsies have certainly not had the success that Jews have had in the modern world.
I distinguish between the majority of Mercurians, including Gypsies, who engage in small, non-literate pariah entrepreneurship; and those, like the Jews, who specialize, among other things, in the interpretation of written texts. With the rise of the modern world, the Gypsies have continued to ply their trade in the diminishing world of folk oral culture, while the Jews have gone on to define modernity.
In any case, the ways in which Mercurians and Apollonians regard each other are similar wherever one looks. What is true of Jews and their peasant neighbors in Imperial Russia is, I think, true of Gypsies and their hosts, as well as of Indians and local populations in East Africa, and so forth.
Including the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia?
Yes. The Overseas Chinese too are supposed to be clever--too clever, perhaps. You can call on the usual anti-Semitic list: they are aloof, devious, unmanly, and so on. This is the way Apollonians describe Mercurians throughout the world.
And of course one could interpret these same qualities in a positive light. "Cunning" and "deviousness" may become "intelligence" and "a general commitment to the life of the mind." Gypsies are proud of being smarter than the non-Gypsies they deal with, as Jews are, or were in the traditional Jewish world. Mercurian views of Apollonians tend to be negative too: "soulfulness," "courage," and "earthiness" may become "stupidity," "belligerence," and "uncleanliness."
In other words, the oppositions mind/body, intelligence/physicality, impermanence/permanence, non-belligerence/belligerence remain the same and are agreed upon by everyone involved. Everyone knows which traits are associated with which group; the difference is in the interpretation.
Which leads you to conclude what about the Jews?
Seen in this way, some things about the Jewish experience and the traditional Jewish economic role become less unique, so to speak. To be crude about it, perhaps, it's not an accident that there was a Gypsy holocaust.
What do you mean?
That there are similarities between Jews and Gypsies and a whole lot of other peoples who engaged in similar pursuits that go beyond their common fate under the Nazis, or the hostility that they encounter wherever they go.
This could change the way one understands anti-Semitism.
In my book, I tried to contextualize the Jewish experience, to explain both the Jewish victimization and the Jewish success.
On the particular question of anti-Semitism, my book makes the argument that anti-Semitism is not a disease, not mystical, not inexplicable. It makes the argument that the beliefs and perceptions and actions usually associated with anti-Semitism are very common, and that they are applied not only to the Jews.
Does your argument give you, personally, a different understanding of what it means to be a Jew, and of anti-Semitism?
Sure! Of course it does. I didn't write the book to preach anything in particular. But I hope that one conclusion people draw from this part of the book is that something that is understood is easier to combat. If you think of anti-Semitism as a mysterious epidemic, then it's hard to know what to do about it. When you feel you understand what brings it about, then it becomes more intelligible. And less dangerous.
But what of the Holocaust?
The Jewish Holocaust was in some ways bigger than any other event of that sort in the history of the world. But the perceptions on which it is based are perfectly familiar and very common. The history of the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, for example, is a history of relentless pogroms as well as remarkable success.
You've seen these common beliefs yourself?
Growing up in Russia one couldn't help noticing that the things people said or thought about Armenians were in many ways analogous to things people said or thought about the Jews. And there was my experience in East Africa, which is one reason I became interested in the comparison. In Mozambique, it was striking how similar the economic and social roles of local Indians were to the economic and social roles of Jews in Eastern Europe.
Did you see the Indians at the time as "Jews"?
I did. Everyone did. They're often called that--"the Jews of East Africa." And the Overseas Chinese are sometimes referred to as "the Jews of Southeast Asia."
But it's one thing to realize that the rhetoric is similar; it's another to recognize that the rhetoric is based on something people actually do, and that this goes far back into the past, and that it's much wider than the familiar example of the Indians and the Overseas Chinese.
In your book, you examine modernist literature in this way.
Joyce's Ulysses, for example, is the central text of modernism, and it is about that very opposition. The main character, Leopold Bloom, is a "half-Jew"; and the figure of Ulysses is the ultimate earthly representative of Mercurianism, of cleverness, restlessness, diplomacy, ingenuity--all those things.
Is there a famous Apollonian Jew, to use your terms?
Irving Howe said that Trotsky was one of the greatest figures in the 20th century because he managed to be both a writer and a warrior; somebody who analyzes history while making it; somebody who is equally good at thinking and killing.
One could say that Israel, and Zionism generally, is an attempt to abandon traditional Jewishness for the sake of Apollonianism with a Jewish face, as it were. I suppose Ariel Sharon would be a Jewish Apollonian. He stands for the rejection of the world of the shtetl, the life of the Diaspora, the Pale of Settlement--the Mercurian way.
How do you mean that?
Life in the Pale means living with physical weakness, coupled with eloquence and intelligence; it means doing things others despise. It means being committed to Diaspora life and tradition. And Zionism was to be the ultimate rejection of that life and tradition. The state of Israel became a place where one could escape the fate of Tevye the Dairyman--the great Sholom Aleichem character. It became a place that existed for the purpose of avenging Tevye's weakness through a rejection of Tevye's cleverness and non-belligerence.
The Holocaust created an aura around Israel that made it different from all other modern states, that excluded it from some of the expectations that are usually associated with modern states--and from certain criticisms. Because of its very special role, history, and moral claims, Israel became the state to which standard rules don't apply.
Israel has been transformed from an attempt to get away from the ghetto into a new kind of ghetto, which is the only place you can say certain things.
For instance?
It's the only place in the Western world where a member of Parliament can say--and get away with it--"Let's deport all Arabs from Israel." Or where so many people can say, as part of a routine political conversation: "We should create more Jewish children because we want this to be a pure ethnic state." Imagine someone saying the same thing in Germany: "Let's procreate to make more Germans because we have too many Turks here."
And Israel also can do things other states cannot do?
Yes, like build walls. There was an attempt to build a wall in a town in the Czech Republic--to separate the Gypsy area from the rest of the town.
What happened?
There was an outcry. It couldn't be done. So, this seems to me to be yet another tragic irony in the history of the Jews: The attempt to create a state like any other led to the creation of a state that is remarkably different from the family of states it set out to join.
But that's only one of the three great migrations. The history of the Jews in America has been one of tremendous achievement and success. The history of the Jews in Russia has been a tragedy, in the most basic sense of the word: There cannot be tragedy without the initial hope and fulfillment, without the nobility of character that the fatal flaw would go on to undermine. That's how I see the story of my grandmother's life.
And, using your Mercurian metaphor, you say that all of us in the modern age have had to become Jewish.
A central part of my argument is that the modern world has become universally Mercurian. Mercurianism is associated with reason, mobility, intelligence, restlessness, rootlessness, cleanliness, crossing boundaries, and cultivating people and symbols as opposed to fields and herds. We're all supposed to be Mercurians now, and traditional Mercurians--especially Jews--are better at being Mercurian than anyone else.
And that is the reason for their extraordinary success and extraordinary suffering in the modern world. That, it seems to me, is the reason why the history of the 20th century, and the history of the Jews in particular, is the history of three Promised Lands and one Hell.
Uranus: Revolution, destruction (especially with Mars or Pluto), disruption, electricity, contrast, contradiction, absurdity, will to freedom, arrogance, cruelty, ingenuity
Pluto: Divine indifference, non-spectral light, oversight, bending of natures, curvature, depth (a similar function on the solar system as the lunar draw of the earths waters - Eris, farther out and larger than Pluto with a similarly irregular path, is of strong importance, seemingly related to penetrating anger) the possibility of accumulating will, 'out of the ordinary', unbalance in power, riches, abundance yearning, aristocracy and the gutter.
Pluto with Sun (harmonic): Sharp penetrating potency, focus of the will, limitless confidence Pluto with Moon (harmonic): ever present sense of depth, profundity, honesty, the need to keep silent about many things, which produces a subtle and diplomatic nature with a raging will that releases depending on the rest of the chart.
Pluto with Sun (hard): Creating harsh conditions, confrontational, disruptive nature, can tap into massive forces if Jupiter is involved Pluto with Moon (hard): Suffering harsh conditions, dark mother aspects, larger-than-life fear.
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Neptune has as much in common with Moon as with Venus. Uranus has as much to do with Mars as with Mercury. No planet is another on a higher arc (fold, limiting contrast, baroque) but all planets represent logics, conditions, possibilities that are at odds with each other and thus combine in to a more or less harmonic 'tapestry of (the) soul'. Contradiction is the father of all things, to paraphrase, and the richness of this solar system is expressed fully in taking each planet as irreducible and thus either directly or through conflict adding to the others, within the paradigm of the Zodiac, which is the logic of contrast upon contrast until unity encompasses all possible contrasts.
Diversity, endless diversity that can and does make people blind and creates much very disruptive and misleading analysis, always tapping into truth but never seeing the whole picture; astrology must be approached poetically or not at all. It must be subjective, the astrologer has to take responsibility for his analysis.
At the same time, he must present it with the fitting severity of judging someones life. With innocence and cynicism, indicate divine virtues and titanic lacks, and the person will know himself as divine and titanic.
Gateway to the outer planets: the asteroid Chiron - Between Saturn and Uranus, this body represents a threshold, and wherever it shows up in a chart, energy comes leaking in or out, there is a fracture in the human structure and whatever is connected to that point in the chart is at once enhanced and 'left to the gods'. It is where the personality reaches out for the unknown and receives it.
Philosophy is essentially the art of identifying terms in their native context. Astrology has many terms of which the context has not yet been phrased to enable full rational understanding. Astrology is not a mystic art in that it is vague, it is just very complex, and it came into being way before language has detached itself from primitive superstition, and language is still caught in superstition. In a sense language, or the belief that through language we communicate truths about reality, is superstition. True knowledge is gained when the elements of language are understood in the context from which they emerge. Astrology, which pertains to an infinitely more coherent logic than verbal language does, can help us with that.
Okay here goes
Here is the traditional attribution to the signs:
♈ I am ♉ I have ♊ I communicate ♋ I feel ♌ I will ♍ I serve ♎ I -
And there it goes into the mist. You have all sorts of different definitions for the upper six signs. And with reason, as the zodiac contains in itself a gradually transforming perspective on the very concept of activity. With that idea as a guide, I figured out a way to make sense of this verb question. What is the common orientation for all the actions of the signs Libra through Pisces? They are transitive; they include both a subject and an "Other".
So I offer:
♈ I am ♉ I have ♊ I communicate ♋ I feel ♌ I will ♍ I serve ♎ There is Otherness ♏ Otherness has me ♐ Otherness thinks me ♑ Otherness feels me ♒ Otherness wills me ♓ Otherness serves me: ♈ I am.
So what you see is that with Sagittarius, the transfiguration of the duality between self and other is in full effect. Fittingly the duality itself was first manifested in Gemini after it was manifested on a broader level by the succession of Aries and Taurus. Gemini is therefore the most difficult of the first six signs to attribute a single verb to, both think and communicate are common and play is another relevant attribution. All pertain to duality. In Libra, after the duality that was conceived at the cusp of Taurus and born at the cusp of Gemini has taken on an even more matured dimension after the completion of the service in Virgo, the existence of the other. I figured this out whole meditating on the cardinality of air. I noticed how the full being is transported into the various forms around it. The Libra mind is the most agile, the most completely within the thought-field. It knows that the primal essence of this situation it is in, is the fact that there is a multi-faced situation of which it is an active part. So this otherness now begins to engulf the being. It reaches the terrifying might of the scorpio mind, which is possessed with the very fact of its interaction, it is the mightiest of signs because it is the most dangerous one. The duality, immediately after it had reached the fully matured arc from Mars' Aries to Venus' Libra, dives directly into Mars again! In psychological terms, the beauty of the realization of otherness, the surrender of the youthful ego for a maturing persona, transforms swiftly in the rather terrifying realization of the consequences of the self within an essential otherness. The self now can become anything. Once the annihilation of safety is complete, the adventure of Sagittarius can begin. This is the most extravagant sign - otherness thinks me - psychedelics surely fall under this sign, but more generally, the limitless ways in which energy can be formed into paths and how a self can be known to itself through its paths .
Otherness feels me in Capricorn. I stand, the way existence comes to me, it bounces back shaped in my image. I have the mystery of manifestation, of turning water into wine, because I stand at the right place. I am the seismic child who was born, the turn of the tide, the mystery. There is no language that can communicate the way of Capricorn, for it will only do what is there, immediately in the moment, to attain the power it already owned.
Aquarius otherness wills me. The humanitarian. Pisces, otherness serves me. The lazy *******. The king. The one to whom existence confesses that it is good, and that it wants to be born.
Aries - I am with the memory of Pisces. And with this in memory, it is so fitting that Arians are the still dreamy in their motives - they remember the reason for action from within. Virgos have maximally sobered up and only live the action, and so at the end of it, complete the task that was set in Pisces and give birth to the Other, who becomes the self at the cusp of Aries.
So holding to the transitive nature of the latter six verbs, they are: ♎ Otherness exists (the transition itself) ♏ Scorpio: I am being had/possessed ♐ Sagittarius: I am being thought (prophecy, stardom, living in the minds of the many) ♑ I am being felt ♒ I am being willed (Fate, XVII: The Star) ♓ I am being served
From which so naturally follows the transition back to action: I am being served, so there is nothing standing in the way for me to be fully active on my own accord, Aries.
♈ I am ♉ I have ♊ I communicate ♋ I feel ♌ I will ♍ I serve ♎ There is Otherness ♏ Otherness has me
That scorpio entry is not right.
"Which is to be master?" is always the defining question..., so I would enter that as, Otherness overwhelms me, and Taurus to "I resist" (the Taurus is stubborness and determination), to follow your scheme.
What do you assign the Black Sun to?
Fixed Cross wrote:
Neptune has as much in common with Moon as with Venus. Uranus has as much to do with Mars as with Mercury. No planet is another on a higher arc (fold, limiting contrast, baroque) but all planets represent logics, conditions, possibilities that are at odds with each other and thus combine in to a more or less harmonic 'tapestry of (the) soul'.
Neptune is Venus on a higher octave, Uranus - Mercury, and, Pluto - Mars.
I think of them as Avatars.
Also, speaking of avatars, consider, for example, the natural opposites house-wise - Taurus/Scorp. What is money as security and comfort in the former [venus ruled], turns to property as inner austerity, self-possessiveness [pluto ruled]. Even between conjoint houses, you see how the form Turns into a diff. avatar. Beautiful to watch.
Quote :
Between Saturn and Uranus, this body represents a threshold, and wherever it shows up in a chart, energy comes leaking in or out, there is a fracture in the human structure and whatever is connected to that point in the chart is at once enhanced and 'left to the gods'. It is where the personality reaches out for the unknown and receives it.
Right. This is because Saturn is the karmic planet; here's where your actions become your womb. If you read the Goux book on Oedipus, on the need for a necessary trial and initiation to come-into your self, then Saturn represents the Senex archetype of the discipline and trial-testing father, without whom, as Oedipus, one only possesses a false sovereignty and goes to his ruin.
Life is dangerous, and to venture into it without your self as self-foundation, can prove fate-al, in the sense, Jung said,
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.",
"Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event."
Fate is the unconscious that Befalls us,,,Destiny is the conscious that we stake, that we Hazard. Fate is like the waves playing, alluring; Man finds his Destiny without succumbing to Fate, with Balance.
Uranus is structure re-setting, Neptune dissolves the interface, and Pluto alters dimensions [charcoal turns to diamond].
Uranus thrives on polar charges [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is an extremely ancient Pythagorean term which loosely translates as 'descent' (of the soul), ...is a deeply steeped and 'mysterious' term for the embodiment of Being.
Interestingly enough, the term Cathode was taken from this term, to refer to the (presumed) bipolarity of batteries (i.e. cathode) and that of electromagnetic phenomena.
However the term originally was meant to refer to the (pseudo) polarity of the Absolute, but is translated as "descent/embodiment"].
Neptune on dream charges [allows memory to seep in and out of it], and Pluto on pressure charges [till there is nothing left but the irreducible].
Saturn is the Fate-al threshold, Uranus [water-bearing capacity, becoming your own womb] onwards determines Destiny...
I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."
— Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore
Excellent quote. That was so valuable to something else I was working on.
So now do look up Klossowski on Nietzsche where he weaves in the trope of the Medusa with the Eternal Recurrence; a fascinating book: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
If you are further interested; [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
I interpret it this way.
Man [Perseus] is a rebel.
He wants to destroy the "Real", the "Truth" that is set for him, that he is "forced to see" [Medusa].
The "Hammer" and "The Twilight of the Idols".
The mirror is an extension or reflection of one's sub/un-conscious, and so the purity of oneself, his "innocence of becoming"... and so when he looks at Medusa using the mirror and severes her head, he re-fashions and creates the world in his own image.
The playful sheen of the mirror prevents petrifaction. The playful sheen in Greek was called a kind of Metis (cunning intelligence) that etymologically relates to Medusa and Maya - all from the same root.
Quote :
"Odysseus is the hero who is polumetis as well as polutropos and polumechanos. He is an expert in tricks of all kinds (pantoious dolous), polumechanos in the sense that he is never at a loss, never without expedients (poroi) to get himself out of any kind of trouble (aporia). When taught by Athena and Hephaestus, the deities of mêtis the artist also possesses a techne pantoie, an art of many facets, knowledge of general application. The polumetis is also known by the name of poikilometis or aiolometis. The term poikilos is used to refer to the sheen of a material or the glittering of a weapon, the dappled hide of a fawn, or the shining back of a snake mottled with darker patches. This many-coloured sheen or complex of appearances produces an effect of irridescence, shimmering, an interplay of reflections which the Greeks perceived as the ceaseless vibrations of light. In this sense, what is poikilos, many-coloured, is close to what is aiolos, which refers to fast movement. Thus it is that the changing surface of liver which is sometimes propitious and sometimes the reverse is called poikilos just as are good fortune which is so inconstant and changing and also the deity which endlessly guides the destinies of men from one side to the other, first in one direction and then in the other. Plato associates what is poikilos with what is never the same as itself, oudepote tauton and, similarly, elsewhere opposes it to that which is simple, haplous." [Detienne-Vernant, Cunning Intelligence]
The playful design of the ER [the innocence of becoming] - the "Maya-lie", metis - is how one could look at the petrifying gravity of Life - the Medusa.
"Critics take the emergence of this model of vision to be deter- minative of the shift from medieval to modern. The eye that looked from the apex of this pyramid through the transparent “window” of the canvas was consid- ered to be single, lone, and immobile, set entirely apart from what it perceived to be a linear and mathematical world (Panofsky 1991, 27– 36). The lone eye was also considered to be singular, vehicle of the “clear and distinct” knowledge of Cartesian rational philosophy.
The story of the eye’s hegemony in modernity, “the sovereign nobility of vision, ostensibly redoubled by the Enlightenment,” is one of the dominating narratives of contemporary critical theory, Leigh Eric Schmidt, I think rightly, maintains (Schmidt 2000, 7). The grand narrative is not one I subscribe to in this book. Indeed, in this and subsequent chapters, I take issue with the assumption that modernity is centered solely on (a single model of) vision and that it involves “the eye’s clear eclipse of the ear” (15). At the same time, ocularcentrism is a narrative with which I must consistently contend, and for the reason that it makes modernity the story of a profound hearing loss. This withdrawal has the effect—the Medusa effect— of cutting off the philosopher’s, and therefore the institution’s, own ear and tongue.
What I see in the Caravaggio painting, as prefiguring my task in this book, is not a woman temporarily dumbfounded, but incapable of speech, altogether mute; a woman who, like Philomela, has had her tongue cut off. It’s this silent Medusa, this icon of speechlessness, that Lynn Enterline takes from the Metamorphoses, the Medusa who, throughout Ovid’s poem, utters not a single word. Thanks to Freud’s 1940 essay, we think of the Medusa effect “predominantly in terms of a visual trauma,” Enterline writes. “But in Ovid’s text it is not Medusa’s ‘head,’ or even her gaze, that petrifies. Rather, it is primarily her silenced ‘face’ or ‘mouth’ (os, oris)” (Enterline 2000, 16). Charles Segal notes that the name Gorgon comes from “the Indo-European root garj, denoting a fearful shriek, roar, or shout” (Segal 1994a, 18; qtd. in Enterline 2000, 17). Drawing on a long tradition that associ- ates the Gorgon with disturbing oral fantasies, Ovid singles out Medusa’s os as, Enterline says, in the first place, a disabled or mute mouth, a “face deprived of the capacity to speak” (Enterline 16). This silent os is, in turn, the instrument of petrification. “[B]ecause they confront Medusa’s terrifying mouth (os), numerous male victims stand forever petrified by the force of this monstrum”.
Western culture still holds on to the voice as the very essence of identity, the “vibrant principle” of life itself (Rée 1999, 3),3 and for this reason, although some distance removed from Ovid, modernity’s subject remains haunted by the fear of an os mutum, the fantasy of a mouth that cannot speak and of a voice that has been lost. In the theorizing of the medieval-to-modern tran- sition as the passage from orality to a resolutely perspectival regime, the fear of the os mutum would seem to be realized.4 And indeed, while some critics concede that different modes of looking developed in the modern era, few question the dominance of the detached spectatorial model, this model as what enabled a new technological science and an individualist social physics, as what turned vision into modernity’s master sense, and as what marked the historic defeat of a vocal and auditory culture, one attuned by its ear to the voice. So contends Jonathan Rée, citing Oswald Spengler:
The “thought of the eye,” as Spengler called it, gave birth to a proud, solitary and resolute subjectivity, cynically surveying the abstract light-world that surrounds it. The optical mind was the master of mechanical invention, but too fascinated by “static, optical details” to have any sense of the tragedy and mystery of “life.” Vision had cut us off from the ancient wisdom of ordi- nary pre-theoretical mutuality, annihilating vocality and, with it, the “inward kinship of I and Thou.” Now that modern civilization was confronting its ultimate crisis—a crisis of its own making, a crisis of technology—it was stumbling uncomprehendingly towards catastrophe: twentieth-century humanity, Spengler thought, having lost its voice and its sense of hearing, was destined to “go downhill seeing”. (Rée 1999, 4)
Modernity’s promotion of sight as what Descartes (in the Optics) called “the noblest and most comprehensive of the senses” (Descartes 1985, 152) is thus claimed to be the beginning of the end of the voice. It is important to note that in this account, loss of the voice is also a loss of hearing, an attenuation of the sense that is said to have surpassed all others in significance in the earlier oral and manu- script culture for which communication of knowledge depended on speech. In an oral culture, Donald Lowe explains, adopting the thesis of Walter Ong, communication is aural and “speech has to be heard proximately and instantly, since there is no telephone, phonograph, radio, or audiotape and disc to relay a spoken message across space or time. Speech is assimilated directly by the ear, without the mediation of the eye. And we are moved more by sound than by sight, since the former surrounds us, whereas the latter distances” (Lowe 1982, 7). With the transition from medieval oral and chirographic culture to modern typography, visuality overthrows aural immediacy, as Lowe tells the familiar story; communication now takes place by reading, “the silent assimilation of the message by the eye”. Their anxiety is fed by Heidegger’s “doleful ruminations” about the consequences, for Western culture, of its shift to an age where the world becomes “picture” (Rée 1999, 5).
In a tradition for which, as Rée suggests, even minor speech impediments such as stammering or lisping constitute “an appalling spiritual [and mental] calamity” (Rée 1999, 89), mutism is deemed equivalent to the death of the mind or animus. Even more catastrophic is prelingual deafness for the reason that, as I make the case in this book, it constitutes a more originary lack: in this tradition, one is considered dumb, in every sense of the word, because one is deaf—that is, not only lacking speech, but also the sound-concept identity that philosophers of modernity consider essential to self-presence.
Given that the voice in this tradition is, as seventeenth-century thinker Francis Mercury van Helmont contended, “an expression of male sexual strength” (qtd. in Rée 1999, 3), muteness, death of the animus, is a castration of the principle of sexual prowess. There can be no father/son filiation where the virile voice has been cut off. Nor can there even be successful femininity where the ear, as deaf, is blocked to reception of the male’s inseminating speech.
The terrifying, disabled, os that I see in Caravaggio’s Medusa is a monstrum that I want to translate in these dual terms, as evoking both oral and aural trauma, both a mute mouth and, even prior to that, a deaf ear the coming out of darkness to light is, Derrida says, the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as metaphysics (WD 27). The metaphor is at once spatial and temporal: as in Hegel, it gives the story of beginnings and of the ascending East- to-West journey of spirit through historical time, which is also an account of the sun’s, spirit’s, interiorizing return-to-itself. Western metaphysics is so bound up with the narrative of its coming to light out of darkness that the entire history of our philosophy could be considered a “photology,” Derrida suggests, “a history of, or treatise on, light”.
This photology posits an immediate relationship be- tween the voice and the light-sight (theoria, eidos, clarity, visibility, revelation, intelligibility, telos, etc.) of the mind—and precisely in so doing, as critics have not sufficiently noted, it joins speech and sight to the ear, all fully interiorized and ideal. Within the mind of the phonocentric imaginary, phonetic sound, a word, is heard “first,” and as “heard,” is what enables a metaphysical idea, a concept, to be made present, visible, to the self. “Phonè, in effect, is the signifying substance given to consciousness as that which is most intimately tied to the thought of the signified concept” (P 22). In metaphysics, Derrida maintains, this “original and essential link to the phonè has never been broken” (OG 11).
Since, as Oliver Sacks points out, the prelingually deaf “have no auditory image, no idea of what speech actually sounds like, no idea of a sound-meaning correspondence” (Sacks 1989, 26), and thus no phonetic inwardness to start with, they must represent a terrifying otherness for the phonocentric imaginary.
What is fascinating and frightening about muteness, then, is the interior lack that it supposedly reveals: the prelingually deaf cannot speak because they have no inner ear; they are without access to the interiority through which “I hear myself [je m’entendre] at the same time that I speak” (SP 77)."
"As esotericist, Brown aims to unify “the bewildering variety of roles” of the god Hermes in literature, iconography, and cult practice from pre-history to the classical period. Hermes is paradoxically the god of theft, but also the “giver of good things,’” the god of seduction, oath-making, the boundary-stone, the agora, craftsmen, merchants, pioneers, and unskilled laborers. In the 7th century Hymn, a late addition to his mythology, he is an infant with supernatural powers who steals Apollo’s cattle and then craftily conceals the evidence. As an infant, he also invents the tortoise-shell lyre, which he gives to Apollo as compensation for his theft. The depiction of Hermes as infant and as inventor of a particular musical instrument links the god to an emerging merchant class in the ancient world “making inroads to spheres formerly presided over by Apollo.” The strife between Hermes and Apollo reflects the strife between this rising economic class, with its new “acquisitive individualism,” and the elite.
In his search for Hermes’ earliest identity, the hidden common denominator in all of his roles, Brown surveys synchronically and diachronically Hermes’ most frequent epithets, dolios and klopē, trickster and thief, in Homeric, Archaic, and Classical texts. Moving forward, he looks at changes over time in the meanings of these words, and moving backwards he traces the history of concepts back to their Indo-European roots “so that modes of thought and behavior can be uncovered that are obsolete in Homer.” Brown finds that the characteristic that unites all of Hermes’ roles is “stealthy action.” Brown goes further though in that he shows how Hermes is, in his earliest pre-historic manifestation, a magician. Because in all of his extant myths “Trickery is never represented as a rational device but as a manifestation of magical power,” Hermes becomes a Trickster and a thief in later in his mythology.
Brown combines in Hermes the Thief a Marxist commitment to material history and the esotericist’s aim to make it new. He presents in Hermes the Thief (and he will develop throughout his career) a phenomenology of magic as the ability to make it new. Since Hermes represents the craftsperson, Brown sees magic in Hermes the Thief in material terms. Magic is the craftsman’s feat of transforming raw material into products:
"The relationship between primitive craftsmanship and magic, although difficult to define is admittedly close. Primitive magic is a technology of sorts; its aim is the manipulation of the external world. The primitive craftsman supplements his technique with magical practices and success at his craft is taken to indicate possession of magical powers."
As in his later works, Brown is distinctively anti-dualistic in Hermes the Thief. He collapses the distinction between secular and sacred. He shows how forms of kleptein, to deceive or to remove secretly, are also applied to magical acts, also associated with “the stealthy” in ancient Greek texts. In the Hymn, for example, Hermes “the stealthy-minded” (klepsiphronos) makes the cord Apollo uses to lead away his recovered cattle magically take root in the ground through action at a distance. Dolios, another of Hermes’ frequent epithets, which in the classical period means tricky, also carries implications of magic in its earlier forms. Forms of dolios are used to describe Circe and Calypso’s use of magical binding formulae, and to describe Proteus’ ability to shapeshift, both skills practiced by Hermes. Brown finds the link between magic and the evolution of ancient Greek commerce in another important word in the cult of Hermes. Hermes as kerōdos, giver of good things. In the classical period kerdos as noun means “economic gain” or “profit,” and as adjective, kerōdos means “good at securing profit.” Hermes agoraios, Hermes of the marketplace, in the classical period is the god of profit and the cunning intelligence it takes to get the best possible price for one’s handiwork. As the Greek economic system shifts from trade between villages at the Herm or boundary stone, to trade in a marketplace, the meaning of words related to kerd oscillates between “gain” “trickery” and “skill.” In its earliest, Indo-European form, kerdos is associated with magic:
"Its Sanskrit root is krtya, meaning “a doing,” especially a magical practice, and to the Irish cerd, meaning a craft, or craftsman, with special reference to the craft of the smith and the poet. In this root the combination of “trickery,” and “technical skill” is joined by a third notion, that of “gain” which results from “trickery” or skill."
Brown unites the variety of Hermes’ roles, and he also collapses the distinction between the sacred and secular in his account of the shift from trade on the boundaries between villages to trade in the agora between 1500-500 BC. By the classical period the Greeks had secularized their commerce; nevertheless, trade, the point of contact and exchange between oneself and a stranger, especially primitive trade on the boundary in the earliest period of Greek history is “deeply impregnated with magical notions.” “The city agora is a sacred area and inevitably contains temples” Brown observes, “in primitive trade on the other hand, the exchange is itself a ritual act.” During the pre-Homeric period, the stranger is a potentially hostile force. The boundary where strangers meet is a place of heightened significance and risk requiring magical safeguards. In the classical period, when the economic system has completely shifted from trade at the boundary to sale in the city agora, Hermes gains the epithet agoraios, and comes to represent the trickiness it takes to make a profit as well as skill in craft. Throughout his evolution, Hermes is affiliated with those who cross boundaries, for Brown, the emerging third estate of the pre- Homeric period, the craftsmen, merchants, and pioneers who cross the village line to obtain raw materials and goods for their crafts.
In the 1940’s, Brown is a classical scholar working in a Marxist framework, so in Hermes the Thief he ties all transformations in the god’s mythology over time to changes in the material economy. Even if Brown’s outcome is materialist, his philology in Hermes the Thief is esoteric, I would say, because he shows us that the old is really new. He begins his analysis by challenging a tendency to see the archaic period as primitive, and the hymn a reflection of a primitive cattle-raiding society. Instead, we should view the sixth century artifact as a sophisticated response to a complex, dynamically changing society. When Hermes, on the day of his birth steals the cattle of Apollo, with the aid of magic, we should view Hermes as a socio-psychological type. He represents a contemporary tension between an insurgent merchant class, represented by Hermes, and an entrenched and resistant aristocracy, represented by Apollo. For Brown, “The hymn projects into the mythical concept of the divine thief an idealized image of the Greek lower classes, the craftsmen and the merchants.” “The whole emphasis in the mythology of Hermes is on mental skill and cunning, stealthiness, as opposed to physical prowess.” Though his outcome is materialist, he investigates in the spirit of the esotericist; he finds unity in Hermes’ various roles, he emphasizes change, and he undermines assumptions that have governed his field of study." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Hermesian Poetics: Creativity in a Post-modern World
‘Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodical procedures, it opens up passageways, it marches ahead and marks a trail … Its process involves an affirmation, this latter being linked to the coming - the venire’- in event, advent, invention. But it can only make it by deconstructing a conceptual and institutional structure of invention that would neutralize by putting the stamp of reason on some aspect of invention, of inventive power …’
Much of Derrida’s discussion of the Phaedrus centres on ambivalences associated with the Greek term pharmakon, which at a critical point in the text is used by ‘Theuth’ (a version, most likely of Thoth) to describe to Ammon (King or the Gods or God of Gods) the socially positive uses associated with the new technology of ‘writing’. Derrida points out that the term ‘pharmakon’ had multiple meanings all of which were subliminally present to the ancient Greek mind and were closely associated with the concept of magic/sorcery (both black and white). More specifically he says that the term ‘pharmakon’ could be translated as meaning, simultaneously, ‘remedy/medicine’, ‘drug’ and ‘poison (he does not mention ‘scapegoat‘). Modern translations, steeped, according to Derrida, in the ‘either/or’ consciousness in part instituted by the Thoth inspired ‘writing revolution’ tend to translate the term as ‘remedy’, a mistake according to Derrida since such a translation obliterates important ambiguities present in the original choice of terminology. What occurs is a simplification, for the benefit of later Western philosophy, of the impact of writing on culture at a seminal moment in Western history. Near the end of his analysis Derrida, in an extraordinary passage concerning Thoth-Hermes, states of the god (and thus of the instabilities Derrida sees as latent in the then new technology of ‘writing’):
‘Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play …’
Towards the end of the same passage he writes about the deity’s association with science and learning:
‘Thoth is never present. Nowhere does he appear in person. No being-there can properly be his own … […] Every act of his is marked by this unstable ambivalence. This God of calculation, arithmetic, and rational science also presides over the occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. He is the god of magic formulas that calm the sea, of secret accounts, of hidden texts: an archetype of Hermes, god of cryptography no less than of every other -graphy …’
Finally, Derrida states, “The god of writing, who knows how to put an end to life, can also heal the sick … The god of writing is thus also a god of medicine. Of ‘medicine’: both a science and an occult drug.” Here-in is a clue to Derrida’s own ’deconstructive’ goals. In a sense the technique of ‘deconstruction’ (of tracing multiple meanings within texts, i.e. the promotion of polyphonic, rather than monophonic, writing/reading encounters) might be viewed as a kind of cultural ‘medicine‘, a remedy, a pharmakon, if you like … but there is no ‘pharmakon’, according to Derrida, without acknowledgment of the ‘poison’ - in the authority of ‘King of Kings’? In the technology of writing presented to that very same ‘King/Father’?
Deconstruction’ is an eminently Hermesian/alchemical activity.
Derrida states of deconstruction that ‘its process involves an affirmation - the venire - in event, advent, invention.’ From hints dropped elsewhere in his work it seems likely that Derrida is here alluding to the so-called ‘second phase’ of deconstruction in which a conceptual duality composed of both a dominant and a despised element is, under pressure of deconstructive questioning, forged (becomes the subject of an inventive act) into something new and liberated. The ‘relational’ dimension to this process is thoroughly democratic, the despised ‘other’ is despised no more. Such an outcome does not exclude the possibility that new oppositions or dualities might emerge in the ‘process’ or ‘event’ of questioning/deconstructing … the new state, however, would presumably also be open to deconstruction (purification?) … and so it goes, procedure after procedure the sum of which resembles the ‘circulations‘ associated with spiritual alchemy except that it is ‘signs’ in all their cultural complexity that are being placed in the alembic.
My own hunch is that anti-oppressive, philosophically ‘materialist’ goals fuel all the delightful posturing and question dodging, all the marvelously Hermesian linguistic performances one encounters in his writings. Such a position, it is true, might seem quite distant from the clearly spiritual or healing oriented goals of most Medieval spiritual alchemists. Nevertheless, when in ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend‘, Derrida writes:
What deconstruction is not? everything of course.
What is deconstruction? nothing of course!
we might be forgiven for reading into such gnomic comments certain Hermesian characteristics of expression encountered continuously in the alchemical texts of the 15th and 16th centuries whenever the authors alluded to the true nature of the ‘work’ (in particular the true nature of the ‘stone’). The coincidence doesn’t end there, the above comment is actually structured in a way that highlights certain ‘dualities’ of thinking - we are asked to ponder ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ for example, and relate such concepts to deconstructionism. Specifically we are told that deconstruction is not everything and that it is nothing … a comment worthy of a Zen monk, it is true, but also of an alchemist intent, as Jung well-understood, on reconciling opposites under the sign of Hermes/Mercury.
The famous new media analyst Marshall McLuhan argued as long ago as the 1960s that the new media of his day (radio and television) were dissolving what he labelled ‘the linear mind’ associated not only with book culture but also Post-Enlightenment, scientific and reason based notions of subjectivity. Each media form, he argued, affects us differently - which lead to the now famous statement ‘the media is the message.’" [Ian Irvine, Alchemy and the Imagination]
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
The first step, the nigredo, the black stage, occurs when the alchemist boils the solid substance to a bubbling mass. This primary material is akin to “the dragon that creates and destroys itself,” to the “primordial matriarchal world.” The nigredo is also the ouroboros or caduceus of Mercurius, the alchemical symbol of transformation. Mercury is the world soul, both male and female, present at every stage of the alchemical process. His presence in the primal soup as the circular dragon or intertwined snakes suggests that even in chaos or death is the seed of organization and life. Though the nigredo is physical destruction or psy- chological pain, it is also the water of life, the womb. The psychological nigredo is a marker of melancholy, “confusion and lostness.”35 Often associated with the planet Saturn, this psychic state is far from the sun, a dark night of the soul. This mood is the inte- rior equivalent of the goring of Adonis and Dante’s trek into the wood. Like these redemptive declines, the melancholia of the nigredo is remedy as much as disease, marker of spiritual genius as much as symbol of material disorientation.
Albedo
In this night arises a moon, the second stage, the albedo, the white, the transition from gloom and dawn. This stage appears when the solution is blanched, no color at all and the ground of all colors, transparent spirit and opaque body. On the one hand, it is the “good white snow”; on the other, it is Luna, heavenly queen. During this stage the swells of the matrix are “congealed”: Mercury as slivering snake is “frozen,” his quicksilver spirit transformed into a stable body. Mercury iced represents the world soul in a purified state. No longer boiling mat- ter (his ouroboric guise), he is matter and spirit at the same time. This new shape is innocence, the virgin waiting for marriage. Like the gloomy psychology of the nigredo, the moony one of the albedo is double. The whitened psyche, deep in dreams, forms a bridge between unconscious and conscious. On the one hand, fantasies pose dangers, for sleeping visions can easily turn one “lunatic.” On the other hand, the blanched mind enjoys glimpses of wisdom unavailable to the conscious ego. These oppositions are synthesized by the primary faculty of the albedo, the imagination, borderland between understanding and intuition, matter and spirit. From the underworld, Adonis imagines Venus; in the wood, Dante envisions Beatrice.
Rubedo
The lunar stage is the precursor to the sun, the rubedo. Achieved by melting and recrystallizing the white, the rubedo figures the process by which the Red King marries the White Queen to produce the philosopher’s stone. During this stage, the spiritual force of the red pen- etrates the purified body of the white, sublimating her from virgin to wife. The rubedo reveals Mercurius thriving as pure spirit, a fiery jewel capable of combining all oppositions into dynamic harmony—the philosopher’s stone. In synthesizing life and death as well as chaos and order, this rubedo jewel is not simply life, the eternal infant; it is also death, the dying king. Psychologically, the rubedo signals that the archetypes of the collective unconscious have been realized by the conscious ego. The unconscious becomes conscious: the man understands his feminine energies; the woman apprehends her masculine side. This is “integration.” Isis remembers Osiris, brings him back from the death, and with him engen- ders Horus; Dante, though weary from hell and purgatory, takes the hand of Beatrice, who leads him to the light. The imagination opens into the intuition. The microcosm within realizes its connection to the macrocosm, and both together become aware of their eternal relationship to the transcosmic, the pleroma.
The harmonies of the alchemical marriage and the psychological integration are not eternal but moments in a perpetual dialectic: the philosopher’s stone (the formed homunculus) is already the prima mate- ria (putrid death); Jungian individuation (the inner anthropos redeemed) arises from and must return to the darkness of the unconscious (the anthropos lost). This is the key point about the alchemical process: the alchemical work is endless conflict and resolution. Nigredo, albedo, and rubedo are all temporary instances in the ongoing processes of life, concordant discords between chaos and order, death and birth. Figuring these polarities is Mercury, who generates, sustains, and alters each stage in the work. This hermaphroditic presence is the origin, the primary material; the means, the world soul; and the end, the philosopher’s stone. Constant and changing, this “double” Mercury “consists of all conceiv- able opposites.” Hermes is the spirit of alchemy because he is a deity of complete being, revealing what many forget in their inhabitation of a half-world: chaos and ocean are the secret grounds of cosmos and city.
Mercury is the trickster, happiest when he is at play. Playing, he is able to achieve the double consciousness of the comic mode: the world is serious and not serious at the same time, a meaningful pattern of eternity and a filmy veil blocking the beyond. While immersed in the turbulence of the nigredo, Mercury can go with the flow and rise above the current. Resolving into the crystal of the albedo, Mercury stiffens into transparent geometry without forgetting the opaque flickers. He remains attuned throughout to the rubedo, the third term harmonizing matter and spirit. Embodying this tertium quid, Mercury never dissolves into fecund material, nor does he stiffen into spiritual rectitude. He enriches one pole with the other without becoming attached to either. This balancing act is closely akin to the great comic gnosis I detailed in my thoughts about the gently melancholy marriage between sorrow and joy." [ Eric Wilson, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
"In the last three months, a period including changes of sign by both Uranus and Neptune, we have seen uprisings across the Arab World, yet another Western military intervention, this time in oil-rich Libya, marches and anti-government demonstrations in Europe and North America and then, literally within 24 hours of Uranus moving across the World Point into 0º Aries, a massive earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophe in Japan. With respect to the dreadful events in Japan, the sudden viciousness and literally earth-shaking violence of the earthquake caused its own damage, but the inundation by water which followed seemed to be all the more destructive and frightening. This seemed to mirror the sudden violence and explosive force of Uranus entering Aries, followed by the vast oceanic dissolution of Neptune entering Pisces.
Neptune itself corresponds to gradual and seamless changes in reality that work so subtly and slowly and with such hypnotic force that we are frequently not even aware of their effects until they have long passed. We underestimate the magnitude of these changes at our peril, just as a tsunami may pass almost unnoticed in the open ocean, but somewhere where it clashes with unyielding structures, it unleashes its chaotic fury. Examples of physical phenomena that evince this quality of softness or blurriness, where distinct boundaries are impossible to find, include the gaseous and liquid phase states of matter, together known as fluids (especially large pools of fluid like the ocean or the atmosphere), electromagnetic radiation of whatever wavelength, and sound waves. Such physical phenomena are associated with a sense of immanence, like they totally surround the subject, an all-enveloping experience of immersion or subsumption. Arising from such boundlessness and lack of clarity is the psycho-perceptual experience of intoxication, the rendering into submission, hypnosis, sleep, trance, like enchantment in a spell, or being overcome by fumes, or inundated by powerful waves or currents. The cause, the source, may not be apparent, may be invisible, mysterious, inscrutable. But the effects, however ephemeral, penetrate to the core of one’s perceptual and emotional experience. The experience of the Neptunian realm of reality is often confusing because it challenges us to define reality at scales where definition and singular truth themselves start to lose meaning. Socially and politically, Neptune tends to correspond to ideologies that have a compelling sense of idealism or a narrative of deliverance from the imperfections of the world into a utopia of perfect order. It also says something about our sense of what it is that contextualizes or surrounds our reality frameworks, of what it is that is ‘out there’ that contains our every notion and hence implicitly conditions our beliefs about the world; this could be a philosophical position, a religious belief, a political ideology, a metaphysical argument, a cosmology or a delusion. But rather like the proverbial fish blind to the water in which it swims, we are often entirely unaware of the presence of these frameworks, and may even be unable to stay sane without them.
For the past 13 years (since 1998), Neptune has been in Aquarius, the sign of diversity, individuality, innovation, networking and groups. This has corresponded to a variety of social and political phenomena around the globe which have acted as crystallizations of the archetypal meaning of Neptune as filtered by the Aquarian perspective on life. The internet has been primary among these phenomena. Allowing free, liberated, easy access to multiple viewpoints, vast amounts of creativity and opinion, and the formation of networks of the like-minded, this technology has totally transformed human communications, as well as the media, the arts, commerce, education, science and technology and popular culture generally. Aquarius is about distributed nodes of creativity, it reifies the independence of the common individual to stand apart from the herd, and Neptune idealizes this into a virtual reality of multiple and changing identities, each catering to a different group or association. Notice how television programs featuring group dynamics have appeared over the past decade – Big Brother, The Biggest Loser, Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, etc. We have become intoxicated by each other – our idiosyncrasies, our little peccadilloes, how despite our differences we can all accept each other for our common humanity. This is truly an Aquarian bromide, an early twenty-first century salve for our perpetual seeking for greater meaning to our suffering. Neptune’s sign placements and aspects to other planets describe the ‘cult’ of the times, that quintessential perspective on life, that underlying set of assumptions which frame our outlook on life, and which act as a seemingly more constant base-note to the changing harmonies of time. So, for example in the 1970’s when Neptune was in Sagittarius, fashion, popular culture and film seemed to resonate with themes of exploration, exotic culture, religious eclecticism, space travel and spiritual development – witness the Steven Spielberg blockbuster movies like Star Wars, E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the bell-bottoms and kipper ties, the jarring and vivid colours as well as robes and exotic jewellery, and the terrible deadly religious cult of Jim Jones. All of these being very Sagittarian themes – expanding horizons, spiritual development and moralizing myths writ large as swashbuckling universal truths.
Of course the negative side of Neptune’s stay in Aquarius has also been evident in the characteristic way that we have been entranced, lulled into a dreamy reverie of self-delusion such that our grasp of what is really happening around us is weakened. In the sphere of politics we have seen the rise of the focus-group, the abandonment of any sense of deep principle in policy development and a curious sameness descend on the main players in the field. While in one sense the internet has raised the power of the individual within society, it has also caused people to disenfranchise themselves from political activity, as individualized patterns of consumption and a sense of improved recognition of our social differences and enhanced capacity for complex social affiliation and networking has perhaps resulted in us forgetting about the need for real leadership, which is what politics is all about. Because the reality is that there are many many problems affecting our environment and our species that require massive shifts in planetary consciousness, massive changes in the direction of what we owe to the world as opposed to what we can get out of the world. Traditional, conventional politics has been subverted in the last 10-15 years by an ideology of non-ideology, a sort of vacant empty space, where politicians’ views and ideas are just what they have been told to say by their market research gurus. And we all sense this, we know this is happening, yet we do nothing about it. This is the dark side of Neptune in Aquarius – the sense of political apathy, of comfort in the illusions of globalization, of neoliberal economics and ‘the end of history’ and the disinclination to awaken from the trance of individualism and the cult of everyman. For Neptune in Aquarius, dreams of utopia lie in images of an electronically networked intelligent global society, liberation from the stultifying strictures of social convention – but also from the practical, on-the-ground realities of physical, emotional and spiritual suffering and injustice that surround us in the real world, not the virtual reality of cyberspace.
After 13 years of this dream, the wheel now turns yet further. Moving into oceanic and subtle Pisces, we will start to see levels of deception and lies so gross that they border on delusion; whole movements of people believing things about the world, about the future, about humanity, beliefs that cannot be shaken, whether these notions are rational, irrational or just completely bizarre. There will be a contagion of hysteria, of hysterical fears about things that elude firm description, typically invisible or insensible things, perhaps radiation, pollution, chemicals, hormones or drugs, silently undermining and eroding our sense of what is real. An attitude of bewilderment with events will slowly develop, a sense of chaos or of being mired in intractable confusion. Disillusionment with those who peddle comforting illusions will be as pronounced as the headlong rush into escapist denial of our planetary problems, or perhaps more particularly, our human problems.
But equally there will be an idealization of ecological humility, of giving back, giving up, sacrificing that which must be let go. Perhaps also pervasive feelings of guilt and depressive negativity, although also the possibility of a more refined and realistic sense of spiritual brotherhood, and a deeper connection with the common needs that we share, with our common burden of suffering. A fashion for the monastic, for isolation or hermitage and for devotion to all that suffers in life. But as the Piscean pair of fish swim in opposite directions, forever tugging at each other, there will be extremes of escapism and hedonistic abandonment that will make the 1960s seem like a picnic. It is interesting to observe the events surrounding the Fukushima nuclear disaster to see an early example of the sense that Neptune in Pisces conveys. The leak of radiation as well as radioactive particles has been continuing since the earthquake and tsunami struck and the explosions that occurred at the plant in the succeeding days. Initially it was all over the news, experts were wheeled out to calm everyone down, and opposing experts hyped up the fear. There was a widespread feeling that the true extent of the disaster was being covered up, or at least played down. Radiation levels and radioactive particle concentrations were reported both in Japan and all around the northern hemisphere, but it is hard to know what these numbers mean – it all appears to confusing, deceptive, frightening, and yet the disaster itself seems to have largely dropped off the news programs. Even stranger, acceptable limits for radiation exposure are suddenly yanked up in the US, and President Obama confirms that more nuclear power plants will need to be built. The true extent of the deaths, illnesses and deformities which resulted from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster is now emerging (probably just under 1 million deaths alone, according to Russian, Belorusian and Ukrainian medical researchers, compared to a few thousand according to the World Health Organisation), as well as the conflicts of interest that abound from the level of the International Atomic Energy Agency down through national nuclear regulatory bodies and nuclear plant operators themselves. Just as the invisible radiation itself can be inflicting damage to your body without you knowing about it until many years later, so the corruption and institutionalized secrecy and deception of the nuclear industry has been slowly undermining its claims and its credibility. We have only begun the first chapter of the awful story that is Fukushima, but the true extent of its significance to the world has not yet been appreciated perhaps. We have certainly seen denial, dissembling and distortion of the truth, just as we saw them in the Gulf of Mexico last year when Chiron entered Pisces. With Neptune now ensconced in this sign too, a pervasive sense of toxicity is arising."
Following her lead, they walked in silence. Corridor merged into corridor. Aside from the thud of their feet on the cold concrete floor, the only other sound that filled the air was the dull drum of an air conditioning system working hard to regulate the temperature in a windowless environment. All colour seemed to have been bled from this labyrinth, as grey wall blended into grey wall, whitened only by a series of industrial LED lights. They walked for what seemed like hours.
Having turned the corner into yet again another bland 1950’s Soviet-esque passageway, he could no longer take it and exclaimed to his companion “How do you know where we are going? Are we travelling in circles?”
“It sure seems like it looks all the same to you, doesn’t it”.
Registering the surprise written across his face by her unexpected answer she pressed on, “It is hard to navigate around here without projecting”
“I’m sorry. I don’t follow. Projecting? What do you mean?”
“Have you ever daydreamed or imagined that you were somewhere else?”
“Of course, I do have an active imagination.”
“Well I don’t have to imagine. I project. I chose to see my environment in any form I wish, whenever I wish. Moreover, I create that environment within my mind’s eye and with my heart, feel and embody it, so that my senses cannot differentiate between this world and my inner world. For instance, right now you see us standing in a passageway. However I see us walking barefoot along a sunny coastline. I feel the sand between my toes. I feel the kiss of the onshore wind on my face. I smell the salt in the air. I hear the swish of the waves as they break on the shore. I hear the tweets of the birds as they sore in the air and I feel the heat of the sun on my skin. Instead of staring at blanks walls, I choose to surround myself with visions of creation.”
“The imaginal life is central to the human story, and should be central to the writing and teaching of history. The world of imagination nourishes humans and leads them to action.”
- Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination
Take a moment, if you may, to envision a world without our imagination. No books or cinema; no music or theatre; no photography; no electricity or technology; no wheel or fire; subsequently no cars, aeroplanes or heated food!
I recall listening, in 2009, as Ireland descended deeply in the Recession, to a radio presenter of a very successful morning business talk show reacting to a study whose findings were that 70% of highly successful Irish business men and women were right brainers. Her comment, echoing sentiments common within the rational sciences, was “That explains why we are in the mess we are now”, inferring that the process of imagining, creativity, subjective, feeling states are secondary to the powers of cool, detached, rational and logical thought.
Imagination is vital to our story of being human, central to our evolution and creative endeavours in every field, especially the sciences. Virtually no scientific invention was conceived by pure analytical thought and reductionism. The history of science is replete with stories of daydreams, moments of inspiration, serendipity and gut feelings and ‘blink’ moments, as science fiction becomes science fact, as fantasy inspires reality.
Regardless of the bias of our social and educatory systems, imagination is the agency through which our realities have been shaped. It is THE active creative process, through which our dreams, our feelings, our other worldly realities manifest. Everything that you see around you, from the physical terrain you reside in, to the technology that enables you to read or listen to this article, has spread from the realm of the undifferentiated source of All (ether) as non-verbal, silent thought form, through the realm of Fire, where it is animated and impassioned as inspiration (Fire). From here it is filtered into the realm of mind, as it conceived and becomes a mental concept (Air). From this realm, the idea descends into life as emotion shapes the incarnating idea (Water), before it manifests within this realm of matter (Earth)[1].
One way of conceiving this process is “to consider the creative process of an architect who is designing a large building complex. First he or she decides what kind of building will fit the purposes for which they are being constructed. Then he or she draws up the corresponding plans and considers how each building will serve its function in relationship to the other structures. Finally, he or she gives orders to his or her workers and the actual construction begins. [2]“
In astrological thinking, the level of ether is represented by the formless initial desire of the architect to build before there is any particular plan in mind. The realm of Fire would be represented by the process of designing a plan for the building on the most abstract level. Once there is a blueprint, everything still remains at an abstract level and thought (Air) must be given to figure out how the plan will work or how it can actually be implemented. Up to this point, everything has taken place in the architects mind, but now the architect must go to the site and embody the plan, by appealing to those around him or her to join him or her on the project (Water). Once the actual construction has started, we are in the realm of Earth and the finished product is itself reflects a composite of all the previous elemental states.
In short, all that we have in our life stems from a moment of inspiration. Everything that you can imagine becomes real. Imagination is not delusional, but it is a vital source of fuel that permeates our unified collective field, brought into being by those who take the time to listen to the messages relayed through meditation, serendipity, during the “first sleep” or alcohol or drug induced slumbers!!
There is no one astrological indicator for being a “right brainer” (figure 4), since each planetary archetype reflects a multivalent, multi-tiered series of emanations extending from the purely subtle to the dense and obvious. The Moon, for example, can be an expression of the interior feeling state and dream state; whereas Jupiter can reflect the growth of awareness that stems from an inner expansion. However, since the rediscovery of Neptune on the 23rd September 1846, this planetary archetype has commonly become the dominion of a dimension of life that shows itself through an ability to transcend through matter into other states of consciousness. This ethereal realm of formlessness reflects a facet of your soul yearning to reunite with something beyond your conscious self; seeking to return to Source; or to desiring obliteration of your conscious ego. Therefore any activities in life that reflect an urge to “go beyond”, “To go through” or “escape” are represented by Neptune regardless of whether those activities are constructive or non-constructive. Lucid dreaming, meditating as a means to seek enlightenment (as opposed to mindfulness), going to the cinema, watching a sun rise and getting drunk could be seen as aspects of the Neptunian archetype.
Due to the accompanying feelings of dissolution, as your soul longs to pursue a quest for wholeness, to find answers in problems that are almost insolvable, the Neptunian spectrum relates to both madness and mysticism. Was Jeanne d’Arc mad or inspired? What about the myriad Biblical prophets, science inventors or stockbrokers? The line between what is mad or inspired is often hard to draw.
The Neptunian archetype could be perceived as one aspect of the Divine within you that is attempting to eternally experience your infinite consciousness. Keeping in mind that all planetary archetypes are both metonymic and polysemic in their expression, the way in which they manifest is in accordance to your conscious awareness and not solely due to various astrological techniques (aspect, association or house placement etc.). There are lower and higher vibrational states within each spectrum. Lower, however, does not mean ‘worse’ and higher does not mean ‘better’. Those are egoic value judgements applied to energetic states of being. Archetypal expressions are what they are. Each end of the spectrum has its own set of lessons and experiences and it is not the job of astrologer to judge which way is the pattern going to find the ‘best’ expression. It just is.
So Neptune can be readily reflected in the mystic absorbed in blissful inner dialogue with gOd as well as the self-absorbed drug/ alcohol/ television/ sugar addict or psychotic who can no longer accurately discern consensus reality; the stockbroker assessing the collective mood of the market and the footballer sensing the space into which he/ she needs to make the next pass. The very same impulse that gives rise to a desire to live life altruistically and compassionately can also result in an unhealthy denial of self, a sense of helpless weakness or passivity, an impulse to retreat from life and the challenges of being in the world, or a spirituality that seeks to deny the physical body and world.
The aptitude to tap into a ‘higher’, more subtle source for inspiration and knowledge is made readily available to you by the blending of the sense of the infinite with the ability to cognitively discern and communicate. In other words the merging of Neptune with Mercury[4]! Whilst this skill is not the exclusive domain of that archetypal pairing, it is certainly one salient feature of how they communicate with each other – intuitively and silently.
Let me ask you, do you ever remember someone talking out loudly to you within your dream state? How do your furry-friends (your cat or dog) communicate with you? You inwardly know what they want or mean. They speak directly to within our own thoughts and emotions. So too Neptune with Mercury! Within the Cosmic Weave there are souls born with this specific range of possibilities imbued within their Being-consciousness. There are also personal periods during your life wherein your ability to dream-walk will be more pronounced[5].
But there are also times wherein our collective ability to witness this inspiration/ delusion state is more keenly experienced. One of those states is currently extant within our geocentric perspective of our solar system, as Mercury approaches the embrace of Neptune within Mutable Water where he stays, unmoving in early February, before retrograding[6] back into Fixed Air and then eventually returning to Neptune on 22nd/ 23rd March (figure 5).
There are essentially two processes occurring during the first loop of time for Mercury in 2014. Firstly the Mind of the Cosmos is connecting with a deep source of inspiration[7]. As previously mentioned, anyone can access this state consciously through any right brained process. Secondly, the Mind of the Cosmos is being imbued with both heart and soul, emotion and feeling, before it returns to a state of being wherein that inspiration settles as a root ideal anchoring and fixing within your soul[8].
To ensure that a moment of inspiration becomes more than a fleeting impulse or a purely intellectual ideal, the process of integration and the emergence of wisdom must “be more than merely the formation of mental concepts. While the mind and the mental being needs to be involved in the process, the heart and soul needs to be primarily involved. The heart, with its capacity to feel and the soul being with its capacity to perceive within the metaphysical dimensions through interior senses are crucial in an experiential approach. When it is experiential, we restore our own Soul connectedness and are transformed in the process.”[9]
Like the lady in the introductory story, you have the ability to create a rich inner world, projecting it onto your reality and living in accordance to your own creation. The emerging conditions within the current cosmic weave supports that emanation, as Mercury stations in Pisces (the emotional fluid state of consciousness) before returning to Aquarius (strengthening of our own ideas and opinions). This dance beautifully highlights the process of anchoring inspiration within our being with depth and feeling thereby enabling you to gain access to a sustained and constant source of inspiration."
If you were to take some time during this Water/ Air retrogradation to be alone, or to sit in stillness, your ability to tune into this higher frequency, or to attempt to access the Akashic records through meditation or lucid dreaming, would be enhanced. If you were to listen more consciously to either your inner voices or “first sleep” dreams, you now have access to knowledge and ideals that will serve to inspire you and subsequently touch all those who your Field envelopes. You can explore what area of your life that will be the ground through which this imaginal process will touch by clicking on the following link: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Alternatively you can listen to your body’s intelligence, trusting in your gut and mind’s eye, which is the thesis of Mercury’s alignment with Neptune. I will leave you with a series of quotes about the power of the imagination:
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” All by Albert Einstein
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” – Saul Bellow
“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.” – J. G. Ballard