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To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick,talk.religion.misc,alt.pagan.magick,alt.pagan,talk.philosophy.misc,alt.mythology From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nagasiva) Subject: TMaroney: Syncretism and Magick Date: 18 Jun 1997 12:51:21 -0700 [all from thelema93-l@hollyfeld.org: Maroney] The issues raised here concerning inappropriate syncretism, such as using Hebrew names of power together with Egyptian deity, are not new. The Graeco-Roman mysteries and their offshoots in Neo-Platonism were highly syncretistic; their practices of assimilation have been largely responsible for the disrepute in which syncretism is held today in the academic community. The academic response, however, is starting to become less dogmatic, or at least more readily challenged, as in Kingsley's recent book on Empedocles(1), or the concerns raised by Robert F. Campany in his comparison of the ancient Chinese sage Xunzi with the pre-modern mythic theorist Durkheim(2). The new postmodern critique, reflexively including scholarship itself among its subjects, notes that it is just as much an error to hold religious practitioners to the criteria of postmodern scholarship and derogate their efforts for their inevitable failure to meet irrelevant criteria, as it is to dismiss the efforts of traditional commentators to understand their own ritual and mythic practices as being not really a kind of thinking and observation at all. Both these naive critiques of traditional religious philosophy depend on arrogant assumptions about the unique superiority of current scholarly methods and viewpoints. In syncretism as practiced either by Neo-Platonists or modern occultists we find practices which seem on the surface as if they should be taken as literal statements about an underlying substrate of symbolic commonality. That is, the connection between, say, Osiris and Tiphareth is not presented by the syncretiser as a new creative assertion, but as a longstanding fact which has always been true, even if it was not well known. Many syncretisers claim that the fact was always known by a secret group of initiates who have only now cleared this truth for public release(3). Judged as comparative religion or textual analysis this sort of assertion is defective. It is therefore tempting to dismiss syncretism as a failed attempt at amateur scholarship. If we look at what these commentators are trying to accmplish in context, however, we wind up with a rather different model. Although a claim of traditionalism is made, what is actually happening is that new myths are being created, as well as new ritual practices based on those myths. Specifically, the myth of syncretists is that all known myths are only differentiations of a single unifying primordial myth, sometimes called the Secret Doctrine. This type of universalist myth can be found not only in occult and Neo-Platonic sources, but in Freemasonry, Baha'i, pre-modern comparativism, popular Roman attitudes towards foreign gods, and so forth. The myth that Osiris is an expression of Tiphareth deserves the same deference that the observer gives to any other myth, and its faux historical content is no more a matter for concern than, say, the fact that Pandora was not really the first woman. These are the terms on which syncretistic statements need to be engaged: as expressions of the myth of a common system constantly active and unified behind the appearance of diversity in myth and ritual. (There is a risk of condescension in this reinterpretation. Writers like Blavatsky and Crowley really believe that they are contributing to comparative religion, and letting them off the critical hook by transposing their writing to a new domain -- that of myth-making -- derogates their own account of their intent. However, the fact is that when judged by standards in fields like anthropology, religious studies, or even philosophy, their work fails to make much of a contribution: this critique is inevitable. We can take them at their face value, and so be forced to dismiss their work completely because it does not play well in the scholarly arena, or we can try to recognize that there is a difference in intention between their work and scholarly work, and so recognize its value with respect to its actual set of intentions and assumptions. The latter is consderably less hostile and dismissive, although either interpretation would be rejected by the writers themselves.) For instance, while a set of tables of correspondence is useless for the scholar, for the ritualist it serves as a new kind of myth from which ritual practices may be generated. It masquerades as the key of all religions, but it is not that -- it is a kind of divination table, based on a set of freshly-minted mythic "facts" about the relations between traditional symbols. It is above all a practical tool, and judging it as if it were a dissertation in religious studies would miss the point, even though its creators might like it to be judged that way. An objection to syncretism that has been raised here is that it leads to awkward and inelegant combinations of elements that are actually irreconcilable. Again the strongest example given has been the combination of divine names from the devoutly anti-Egyptian Hebrew tradition with the names and images of Egyptian deities from the 19th-century Egyptology craze. While this criticism may be valid on a literary level -- a great deal of freshly-rolled myth is poorly crafted -- it is inevitable that in a system based on a myth of universalism, disparate symbols will be deliberately juxtaposed. This illustrates the basic premise of the myth, that all the appearances of diversity in religious symbolism are only illusionary, and that on an inner level accessible to adepts, the symbols are all instantiations of an abstract unifying supermyth. These juxtapositions of opposed symbols are not simply ignorant or careless. They represent a deliberate flouting of exclusionary taboos. The symbolic universalist knows full well that it is offensive to an ordinary Christian to say that an aspect of Jehovah is virtually synonymous with a Greek god, an astrological sign, and an Arabic demon, and so he or she chooses to be offensive to express a protest against these differentiations. A system that did not contain these "erroneous" juxtapositions would be a system that did not express the universalist myth. Any mythic system based on protest creates conflicts with those who are dedicated to the targets of protest. A devout Jew, steeped in an idea of sacralization which is rooted in the overthrow of Egyptian polytheism by Hebrew monotheism, must find it grotesque and absurd to combine the two traditions. To the Jew, universalism is erroroneous in its leveling, while to the universalist, traditional Judaism is erroneous in its parochialism. It is not the work of the scholar to resolve such disputes, because they are not disputes on a scholarly plane -- they derive from the social and emotional factors by which people accept certain myths and reject others. The scholar is treading on very dangerous ground in making normative statements about mythic acceptance and rejection and must ordinarily be content with simple observation(4). At the same time, it is possible to contribute descriptively in explaining in what ways the criticisms that each side aims at the other fail to accurately engage the other's intent and assumptions. Notes: (1) Peter Kingsley, "Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition" (Oxford University Press, 1995). (2) In Ronald L. Grimes (ed.), "Readings in Ritual Studies" (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), pp. 86-103. (3) One can find claims of this sort in occult writers such as Blavatsky, Mathers, and Crowley. (4) For some important considerations in normative discourse on ritual and myth, see Ronald L. Grimes, "Ritual Criticism" (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990). -- Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org http://www.maroney.org ======================================================================== >Tim, this interests me. Are you saying that the establishment of a new >associative context is primarily a creative exercise, in that the >correlations established(although patently not arbitrary) are to a certain >extent the results of the ingenuity of the correlator? Yes, but I would emphasize the arbitrary nature of the relationships. Major gods like Apollo have so many attributes that they could be correlated at some small remove to almost anything. The selection of some particular attribute (such as music, inducement of visionary experience, solar illumination, the progression of the seasons, theft, stateliness, cattle herding, or whatever) as the primary attribute by which Apollo is connected to the universalist table of correpondences is an arbitrary choice by the syncretistic practitioner. Through a set of arbitrary choices of this kind, each of which reduces a complex symbol to a simple cipher, a new universalist myth consisting of a set of relationships is created. Crowley's 777 is an example of such a myth. >The post-Joycean >concept of lexi-links and the Dalinian concept of "delirium of >interpretation" spring to mind. You'll have to bring me up to speed on those ideas. Literary and art criticism are not fields that I have studied in any depth. >If so, to what extent would you regard the >ingenuity of the magician as capable of manipulating pre-existing mythic >symbolism and inserting it in a new interpretative context? Are you arguing >against 'fixity' and in favour of 'fluidity' of interpretation? Hmm. Well, I'm trying not to argue too much in favor of or against anything; my hesitancy in expressing normative judgments here results from my past practice of criticizing syncretists as if they were writing dissertations in religious studies -- there is a moralism to this kind of critique and it prevented me from understanding the actual practice of syncretism until my mind was changed by Campany. Rather than arguing against fixity and for fluidity, I am noting a practice of fluid interpretation and its conflict with a practice of fixity, but declining to try to settle their dispute. I would say that the interpretations employed by modern magicians are highly fluid and that their assertions of traditional symbolic continuity (or fixity) are ritual statements serving to express the universalist myth, rather than defensible literal descriptions of their practice. The Apollo on row 6 of 777 is not the traditional Apollo to whom temples were built in Greece and Rome, and his reduction to a cabalistic cipher would probably be offensive to someone whose spirituality revolved around a traditional concept of Apollo. I do not mean this as either an endorsement or a criticism of such expressions of the universalist myth or of traditional symbolism. -- Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org http://www.maroney.org ============================================================= >I think it interesting that both Joyce and Dali were obsessed with >establishing correlations between apparently disparate phenomena. In >"Finnegans Wake", Joyce via the dream of the central character suggests >that the unconscious mind is capable of establishing a complex series of >correspondences amongst phenomena, that to the conscious mind appear >arbitrarily related. For instance, phonetic resemblance provides such a >linkage in Joyce's work, irrespective of any etymological correlation. >Dali's "paranoiac-critical method" is similar in that Dali deliberately >sought to induce in himself a state of 'psychosis' in order to perceive >hitherto unsuspected correlations between (consciously?) unrelated objects. >So for Dali, Vermeer's "The Lacemaker" is morphologically a rhinoceros horn >because he perceives the same underlying geometrical structure in the two >apparently unrelated objects. Here it seems we do have creative acts similar to the creation of tables of correspondence and other symbolic diagrams. The difference would appear to be that both Joyce and Dali acknowledged the creativity of the act, while occultists insist they are discovering pre-existent facts about the supermyth. Nonetheless, they may all be playing in the same ballpark. I could only speculate as to the underlying psychology of these correlational practices, though obviously there is a good deal of overlap with connectionism. [...] -- Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org http://www.maroney.org ================================================================ EOF -- (emailed replies may be posted) ------- join the AMT syncretism!!! see http://www.abyss.com/tokus ---------- call: 408/2-666-SLUG!! "Sure, kid. It's the truth. Trust me. Where's your money?" - TShuler
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