The Geometry of Anthropoetics
Mysticism and Introduction to General Occult Facts
The previous article took upon the four occult members of our body. This article will be an introduction to occult symbology; we will do this through an analysis of three great mystics from the 20th century and their respective symbols. We will connect these mystic symbols to their anthropological link—the link that ties these symbols to reality.
Let us start from the beginning: who are these mystics? These are the three mystics I have mentioned in my articles past. They are Sri Aurobindo, Franklin Merrell-Wolff and Rudolf Steiner.
Each of these three will reveal to us two truths: the three major types of major spiritual streams we may participate in, and what it means to reach the stage of spiritual perception in our modern age.
To expand on our last article we must consider the trinity, to better understand these three paths. The West knows this trinity as Father, Son and Holy Ghost and the East knows this trinity as Sad-Chid-Ananda. Since most of my readers are westerners, we will only consider the western trinity in this article, but it is just as applicable to the east. Consider this diagram, which maps out information relevant to our study:
The Father represents involution, for he gives himself up to create the world and such that the world is infused with the essence of the Father. The Holy Ghost is then the representative of evolution, where we allow ourselves to see a peculiar freedom from the Father; the Holy Ghost is the material that has started to achieve independence from the Father. Lastly, the Son is the Initiate. Initiation can appear to be a difficult subject to articulate, without the use of images. The initate sees that there is lain behind the material world the spiritual world, and to the initate, they are aware that there belongs a necessity of placing this material in front of the spirit. Both are needed in order to properly know reality. The last two columns give some other names of the trinity to help generate a larger ostensible foundation, as it is outlined in esoteric science.
If we consider the trinity in respect to these mystics and their philosophies, we get a diagram now like this:
To harken back to our previous article, we had talked about how to occultism there is an oscillation between poles within each of our subtle bodies. We either are oriented to manifestation or to ascension. These two poles stand along each of these three paths and present certain dangers inherent within them.
For example, Sri Aurobindo, while embracing the material and matter, still works to transform the entire physical and transmute it into something higher. This can lead to an overly enthusiastic view that the work we do in the integral yoga is doing more than what it actually is: when the Mother was on her death-bed many of her supporters believed her to be healing herself faster than death could approach. As well, we can see the other pole manifest when we lose sight of the physical world entirely, and end up seeking an asceticism with only a loose contact with other humans.
The path to the occult on the other hand is frought with “temptors” of their own, much like the integral yoga. By the necessity of initiation we must also to a certain degree be blissfully unaware of where we are “meant” to go; this can lead to foreign powers using our efforts for peverted means. Blavatasky can be thought of as falling prey to this, in one respect.
With Merrell-Wolff and his introceptualism we then witness an unwillingness to engage within deeper introspection, an incapacity even, where we are then covered with a darkness in regards to the deeper mysteries of the spirit.
To embrace the actual reality with each of these paths we must recognize that in the presence of their respective Masters, these dangers essentially disappear. Any of these “dangers” are to a degree theoretical and to a degree a result of each spiritual stream genuinely living within the hearts of its practitioners: precisely because of this fact, there is an element of freedom within every being who embarks on their own path. Each being will take a path necessarily different and unique to its own constitution—and thus the confusions, dangers and unwillingness that could be inherent will be held in the hands of the individual.
Each of these mystics come from places of origin that have influenced their own path. Each place has had its history of spiritual workings and organizations. Wolff belongs to the Ahrimanic America; Aurobindo to the Ascetic India; and Steiner stands among the Spiritual Germany—which is placed squarely between both the East and the West (after the war this split became even physically manifested in the Berlin wall).1
Anthropology and the Sacred
It has been noted by David R. Olson, respected psychologist and literary theorist, that when we develop grammar we gain the ability to preform geometry. He notes this curious riddle in his book Child's Aquisition of Diagonality. What are we meant to think of this? According to generative anthropology our first instance of language is the emergence of both the sacred and the significant. So, we can imagine a certain hypothesis, here, regarding sacrality and geometry. In the older forms of initation it has been noted by Steiner that these initates talked in a primarily “symbolic language”. The primary question remains what are these symbols and are there any specific geometric symbols that we may associate with certain sacred “revelations”?
Is all of human thought based upon some secret hidden geometry? To prove that would require a much wider hypothesis that in order to prove would seem to need a maximalist theory—this of which could only really be proven by certain people already initiated into seeing these occult symbols. This is an unrelenting problem to the scientific materialist philosophy that dominates the current scientific method. Those minds could not begin to put such an experiment or even project to words. We must then, seek another philosophy. Of course to our benefit, anthropology enables us to approach this problem much more gently and productively; it is precisely anthropology that deals with degrees of initation within societies. It even has already developed terms around their approaches to understanding societal initiation. They have accomplished this through the lense of emic and etic research. So in order to make such “insider knowledge” much more available to our ordinary human consciousness it appears better to take the approach that anthropology does; specifically, we may realize that the parsimonious methodology applied within generative anthropology provides the perfect tool for approaching this topic.
The implicit hypothesis here is that the aborted gesture of appropriation signifies a certain kind of geometry inherent with it: by aborting our attempt to appropriate an object, we are able to throw our intention towards the center, while maintaining ourselves on the periphery. We turn appropriation into gesture.
Rather than say simply that the asthetic oscillates between the object of our attention and our intention, we should say our consciousness follows a geometric sense. What is the asthetic oscillating on, exactly? How can we shift our attention between points, in a cyclical way, to generate a genuine asthetic without some accepted geometry that our attention is dancing along?
This geometry is at first fleeting, but it must be necessary for the scene to exist. If we only fear the Other, then the originary scene of course never truly takes place; there must be something else which holds the people together.2
The only feasible explanation is we enact a sacred geometry; in a sense we become possessed by it. If we were to give words to that feeling it would have to be “I am at the periphery and you are at the periphery, and we both want the object, but the object also is preventing both of us from reaching it, making us signal it”. Hidden within this feeling would have to be a realization, more taboo and scandalous than any other the protohuman had originally undergone. There has to be a sense in which we become the geometry, and that the life we lived before then was different than it was now that we have encountered it. The state of consciousness of geometry (the scene of language) would be different than whatever sense of primitive self the protohuman had originally concieved. Consider this: you one day encounter an experience that changes you so significantly, that you could not think of yourself as the same as you once were. This experience seems to be beyond you, connecting you to your human community and the nature surrounding you much deeper. It changes your behaviour, it creates a new way of viewing the world and even living within. Consider, then, how people describe God and spirituality. In doing so you have now learned to consciously apprehend their experiences as though they were your own, without having to have been there yourself: you have gained ostensible knowledge of the reality of the sacred through geometric (scenic) imagination. This is the geometry of the scene of language, hidden within all human culture, politics and ritual; it is not just so simply the center and the periphery, but rather a center to two peripheries, as well as a counter geometry from two peripheries back to the center. It is the seal of Soloman and the Star of David. Generative anthropology had only defined the triangular nature of our attention on the scene as a singular triangle because intuitively it recognized the paradox within this geometric unfolding: we unfold all types of geometric sequences within animal pecking orders, but it is only within human culture that the animal pecking order becomes demolished and the geometry of the center becomes shared among everyone. We gain a new dimension of analysis and life.
The more exact and explicit hypothesis stated here is, as well as more broadly acceptable, that all mystics who reach a certain level attain a degree of geometric “vision”. This geometric vision speaks of the same symbols in each version of its emergence. This explicit hypothesis can easily be seen without need to reference generative anthropology, and is offered here for the less inquisitive, or perhaps initiated.
However, if one considers again the implicit hypothesis posed by the originary scene, then an even more curious riddle, and paradox appears: if mystics are perceiving geometric shapes, that are ostensible and repeated across their experiences, and this geometry first appears consciously in the originary scene, then what really is happening when we discover language? Is it any coincidence that the first sign is, then, the “name of God”? Or that shamanism is a universal discovery among our first cultures? What does this make of the “scenic imagination”?
To give a short answer, if the geometry of the sacred introduces a schism in the foundation of the protohumans consciousness, there is only one realization that could be had by the protohuman—and that is that the object at the center of the ritual is a Being. The geometry of the scene has prevented them from oblivion, given them peace, and instatiated itself as something beyond them. And yet, each of these newly human proto-hominids must have realized that they are touched by this Being in such a way that eventually they can evoke it through their own will power. But at first, all would have to have emerged at once, and there would require quite a bit of engineering and couragousness on the part of the originary members of the now “human” cult, in trying to control and barter with this being. There is so much that could be said on this, I may have to write a book on this and the implications in the analysis and understanding of early human culture.
To draw this back around, I wish to introduce to the discourse a new parapsychological dimension, compared to the strict phenomenological hypothesizations already formulated. All significant knowledge must be sacred, and thus we must realize the secret wisdom that ties all knowledge to living knowledge. Generative anthropologies insistence on ostensivity over declarativity should be held to its highest ideal: we must, indeed, seek what it means to preform on a scene, to live within geometry. All that makes us human is living geometry.
Mystics and occultist have learned to see this “geometry” of the soul, and have recieved even greater revelations from it. It speaks to the power of this geometry how universal and consistently powerful these experience are. We should be thankful for the mystic contribution to the human experience, they continue to embark on this ancient and primordial human art of the soul.
We will continue this line of thought in the next article. Apparently I will reach the “email limit” if I continue on writing the next sections. We will deal with more specifically the Star of David in the next article.
Peace be upon you. A new day always dawns.
We might be provoked to think that “because Steiner stood in the middle he must have been the most correct, and thus his nation the most pure,” but this thought speaks to what we have already outlined in the original diagram. The dangers of initation are “misguided might” or the “misguided kingdom of god” which was exactly what happened with the Nazi party; this trend continues nowadays even, with right wing spiritualists falling prey to Nazi folk-ideology and attempt to use their initiation into certain “mysteries” against other peoples.
Some recent attempts by Adam have revolved around this intuition. He had proposed a distinction between the Gansian formation of the originary scene and one where we seek to find situations that “lead” to the origin of language. In this way, his inquiry actually is expanding the geometry of the center to ask, “before the scene of language, the geometry of the first sign, did proto-humans organize themselves in ways that lead to this originary geometry?”
Even I, myself, intially tried to speak of this feeling of “geometry of the scene” in one of my first attempts at an Anthropoetics article. It was originally titled Originary Structure. Although now I am much wiser and better equipped to back this intuition beyond simple and vague philosophical language, and have now landed into concrete terminology. This terminology that the “scene of language” is actually the “geometry of the sign” will find a good home to many budding generative anthropologists, and even may explain some topics brought up at the GASC which previously had little to answer for.
It was Marina Ludwig who proposed an interesting fact that when we share with others we feel a sense of good within us. But, quite peculiarly she started her example with the notion of a “sharing circle”, that kids often participate in. This should not be seen as mere coincidence.
To share is to engage in the geometry of the sacred, which is necessarily outside of us and our animal habits such that by practicing it generates peace within our situations; and to share is to practice the geometry of the significant within the scene, which achieves some material manifestation of the peace of the sacred.