The hallmark of modern consciousness is that it recognizes no element
of mind in the so-called inert objects that surround us. The whole
materialist position, in fact, assumes the existence of a world "out
there" independent of human thought, which is "in here." And it also
assumes that the earth, excepting certain slow evolutionary changes,
has been roughly the same for millennia, while the people on that earth
have regarded the unchanging phenomena around them in different ways at
different times. According to modern science, the further back in time
we go, the more erroneous are men's conceptions of the world. Our own
knowledge, on this schema, is of course not perfect, but we are rapidly
eliminating the few remaining errors that do exist, and shall gradually
arrive at a fully accurate understanding of nature, free of animistic
or metaphysical presuppositions. Modern consciousness thus regards
the thinking of previous ages not simply as other legitimate forms
of consciousness, but as misguided world views that we have happily
outgrown. It holds that the men and women of those times
thought
they understood nature, but without our scientific sophistication their
beliefs could not help but be childish and animistic. The "maturation"
of the human intellect over the ages, particularly in this century, has
(so the argument goes) almost completely corrected this accretion of
superstition and muddled thinking.1
One of the goals of this chapter is to demonstrate that it is this
attitude, rather than animism, which is misguided; and that this
attitude stems, in part, from our inability to enter into the world
view of premodern man. We have already established that modern science
and capitalism were, historically, inextricably intertwined, and can
appreciate that the perceptions and ideology of modern science are a
part of large-scale social and economic developments. But because this
scientific attitude is our consciousness, it is nearly impossible to
abandon, even momentarily. Indeed, doing so is usually regarded as prima
facie evidence for insanity. Nor does the recognition of the relativity
of our own consciousness serve, by itself, to place us at the center
of a different consciousness. In short, it is very difficult to form a
reliable impression of the consciousness of pre-modern society.
One thing that is certain about the history of Western consciousness,
however, is that the world has, since roughly 2000 B.C., been
progressively disenchanted, or "disgodded." Whether animism has any
validity or not, there is no doubting its gradual elimination from Western
thought. For reasons that remain obscure, two cultures in particular,
the Jewish and the Greek, were responsible for the beginnings of this
development. Although Judaism did possess a strong gnostic heritage
(the cabala being its only survivor), the official rabbinical (later,
talmudic) tradition was based precisely on the rooting out of animistic
beliefs.2 Yahweh is a jealous God: "Thou shalt have no other gods before
me"; and throughout Jewish history, the injunction against totemism --
worshipping "graven images" -- has been central. The Old Testament is
the story of the triumph of monotheism over Astarte, Baal, the golden
calf, and the nature gods of neighboring "pagan" peoples. Here we see the
first glimmerings of what I have called nonparticipating consciousness:
knowledge is acquired by recognizing the
distance
between ourselves and
nature. Ecstatic merger with nature is judged not merely as ignorance,
but as idolatry. The Divinity is to be experienced within the human heart;
He is definitely not immanent in nature. The rejection of participating
consciousness, or what Owen Barfield calls "original participation," was
the crux of the covenant between the Jews and Yahweh. It was precisely
this contract that made the Jews "chosen" and gave them their unique
historical mission.3
The Greek case is less easily summarized. At some point between the
lifetime of Homer and that of Plato, a sharp break occurred in Greek
epistemology so as to turn it away from original participation and
contribute, out of very different motives, to the gradual disappearance of
animism. It is difficult to conceive of a mentality that made virtually
no distinction between subjective thought processes and what we call
external phenomena, but it is likely that down to the time of the "Iliad"
(ca. 900-850 B.C.) such was the case. The "Iliad" contains no words
for internal states of mind. Given its contextual usage in this work,
the Greek word psyche, for example, would have to be translated as
"blood." In the "Odyssey," however (a century or more later), psyche
clearly means "soul." The separation of mind and body, subject and object,
is discernible as a historical trend by the sixth century before Christ;
and the poetic, or Homeric mentality, in which the individual is immersed
in a sea of contradictory experiences and learns about the world through
emotional identification with it (original participation), is precisely
what Socrates and Plato intended to destroy. In the "Apology," Socrates
is aghast that artisans learn and pursue their craft by "sheer instinct,"
that is, by social osmosis and personal intuition. As Nietzsche pointed
out, the phrase "sheer instinct," which in Socrates' mouth could only be
an expression of contempt, epitomized the attitude of Greek rationalism
toward any other mode of cognition. For this reason, he found Socrates
(and indeed all of Western civilization) tragically inverted. The
creative person, wrote Nietzsche, works by instinct and checks himself
by reason; Socrates did just the reverse. And, Nietzsche continued,
it was the Socratic form of rational knowledge which (despite Socrates'
trial and sententing) spread itself across the public face of Hellenism
after his death.4
According to Eric Havelock, Plato regarded participating consciousness,
as exemplified by the Greek poetic tradition, as pathological.5 Yet
this tradition had been the principal mode of consciousness in Greece
down to the fifth or sixth century before Christ, and during that period
it served as the sole vehicle for learning and education. Poetry was
an oral medium. It was recited before a large audience that memorized
the verses in a state of autohypnosis. Plato used the term mimesis,
or active emotional identification, to describe this submission to
the spell of the performer, a process with physiological effects that
were both relaxing and erotic, and that involved a total submergence of
oneself into the other. Pre-Homeric Greek life, concludes Havelock, "was
a life without self-examination, but as a manipulation of the resources
of the unconscious in harmony with the conscious, it was unsurpassed."
Plato himself represented a relatively new tradition, one that sought to
analyze and classify events rather than "merely" experience or imitate
them. He spoke for the notion that subject was not object, and that the
proper function of the former was to inspect and evaluate the latter. This
perception could never take place if subject and object were merged
in the act of knowing; or, to be more precise, if they never diverged
to begin with. In the poetic tradition, the basic learning process was
a sensual experience. In contrast, the Socratic dictum "know thyself"
posited a deliberately nonsensual type of knowing.
Plato's work thus marks the canonization of the subject/object
distinction in the West. Increasingly, the Greek began to see himself
as an autonomous personality apart from his acts; as a separate
consciousness rather than a series of moods. Poetry, to Plato, spoke of
contradictory experiences, decribed a "many-aspect man" of inconsistent
traits and perceptions. Plato's own psychological ideal was that of an
individual organized around a center (ego), using his will to control
his instinct and thereby unify his psyche. Reason thus becomes the
essence of personality, and is characterized by distancing oneself from
phenomena, maintaining one's identity. Poetry, mimesis, the whole Homeric
tradition, on the other hand, involves identification with the actions
of other people and things -- the surrendering of identity. For Plato,
only the abolition of this tradition could create the situation in which
a subject perceives by confronting separate objects. Whereas the Jews
saw participating consciousness as sin, Plato saw it as pathology,
the archenemy of the intellect. At bottom, says Havelock, Platonism
"is an appeal to substitute a conceptual discourse for an imagistic one."6
Of course, Plato did not have his victory overnight. As Owen Barfield
points out, original participation, knowledge via imagery rather than
concepts, survived in the West down to the Scientific Revolution.
Throughout the Middle Ages men and women continued to see the world
primarily as a garment they wore rather than a coUection of discrete
objects they confronted. Yet the mimetic tradition was severely attenuated
from Plato's time on, for some form of objectivity was now present;
and it was chiefly the alchemical and magical tradition that attempted
to demonstrate how limited this objectivity was.
The "Hermetic wisdom," as it has been called, was in effect dedicated to
the notion that real knowledge occurred only via the union of subject and
object, in a psychic-emotional identification with images rather than a
purely intellectual examination of concepts. As indicated, this outlook
had been the essential consciousness of Homeric and pre-Homeric Greece. In
the following analysis of the Renaissance and medieval world views, then,
it will be understood that premodern consciousness was located, mentally
speaking, somewhere between pre-Homeric consciousness and the objective
outlook of seventeenth-century Europe. With the Scientific Revolution,
the considerable remnants of original participation were finally ousted,
and this process constituted a significant episode in the history of
Western consciousness.
The sixteenth century was an unusual period in European intellectual
history, one that witnessed a vigorous revival, or resurfacing, of the
occult sciences, which church Aristotelianlsm had successfully kept
out of sight during the Middle Ages. Yet despite its vast differences
from medieval Aristotelianism, the alchemical world view had in fact
permeated medieval consciousness to a significant degree. Aristotle's
doctrine of natural place and motion, for example, was part of the
magical doctrine of sympathy, that like knows like; and the notion that
the excitement of "homecoming" causes a body in free-fall to accelerate
as it nears the earth is certainly an expression of participating
consciousness. Furthermore, the highly repetitive and meditative nature
of alchemical operations (grinding, distilling, and so on), which would
induce altered states of consciousness through a prolonged narrowing of
attention, was duplicated in hundreds of medieval craft techniques such as
stained glass, weaving, calligraphy, metalworking, and the illumination
of manuscripts. In general, medieval life and thought were significantly
affected by animistic and Hermetic notions, and to some extent can be
discussed as a unified consciousness.7
What were the common denominators of that consciousness? What
did knowledge consist of, given the epistemological framework of
sixteenth-century Europe? In a word, in the recognition of resemblance.8
The world was seen as a vast assemblage of correspondences. All things
have relationships with all other things, and these relations are ones
of sympathy and antipathy. Men attract women, lodestones attract iron,
oil repels water, and dogs repel cats. Things mingle and touch in an
endless chain, or rope, vibrated (wrote Della Porta in "Natural Magic")
by the first cause, God. Things are also analogous to man in the famous
alchemical concept of the microcosm and the macrocosm: the rocks of
the earth are its bones, the rivers its veins, the forests its hair and
the cicadas its dandruff. The world duplicates and reflects itself in
an endless network of similarity and dissimilarity. It is a system of
hieroglyphics, an open book "bristling with written signs."
How, then, does one know what goes with what? The key, as one might
imagine, consists in deciphering those signs, and was appropriately
termed the "doctrine of signatures." "Is it not true," wrote the
sixteenth-century chemist Oswald Croll, "that all herbs, plants, trees
and other things issuing from the bowels of the earth are so many
magic books and signs?" Through the stars, the Mind of God impressed
itself on the phenomenal world, and thus knowledge had the structure of
divination, or augury. The word "divination" should be taken literally:
finding the Divine, participating in the Mind that stands behind
the appearances. Croll gives as one example the "fact" that walnuts
prevent head ailments because the meat of the nut resembles the brain
in appearance. Similarly, a man's face and hands must resemble the soul
to which they are joined, a concept retained in palmistry even as it
is practiced today, and in the common proverb (in many langnages) that
"the eyes are the windows of the soul."
One of the clearest expositions of the doctrine of signatures is found
in the work of the great Renaissance magician Agrippa von Nettesheim, his
"De Occulta Philosophia" of 1533.9 In chapter 33 of this book he writes:
All Stars have their peculiar natures, properties, and conditions,
the Seals and Characters whereof they produce, through their rays,
even in these inferior things, viz., in elements, in stones, in
plants, in animals, and their members; whence every natural thing
receives, from a harmonious disposition and from its star shining
upon it, some particular Seal, or character, stamped upon it; which
Seal or character is the significator of that star, or harmonious
disposition, containing in it a peculiar Virtue, differing from
other virtues of the same matter, both generically, specifically,
and numerically. Every thing, therefore, hath its character pressed
upon it by its star for some particular effect, especially by that
star which doth principally govern it.