Eros & Magic

I just received the book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Ioan P. Couliano in the mail and am very excited about what it may add to my perspective, especially re: the presence of ancient ritual and magik as it is used by the powers that be in our current society. For those who don’t know Couliano’s work or are new to it (like me), he was a renowned professor at the University of Chicago and one of the successors, like Joseph Campbell, to Mircea Eliade in the study of religion, mysticism and the like. Couliano died in 1991, possibly the victim of a political assassination–but I won’t get in to that just now; that just happens to be one more intriguing thing about him.

Here I’ll quote one passage from the Introduction to Eros & Magic that resonates with me:

It is still thought that a chasm separates our contemporary view of the world and ourselves from the concepts held by Renaissance man. The manifest sign of this cleavage is supposed to be modern technology, fruit of “quantitative science,” which began to develop at the end of the seventeenth century. Though the most eminent authorities on the history of science tell us that the subject matter of a Newton, a Kepler, a Descartes, a Galileo and a Bacon has absolutely nothing to do with this so-called “quantitative science,” nevertheless the same mistaken opinions of our rationalist nineteenth-century forebears continue to be held.

I felt the smile come already when I read this opening passage as, for me, I feel, that magik still plays a huge role in our world, though we don’t recognize it for the rebranding. It’s kind of like Philip K. Dick’s idea that we’re all living in 70 A.D. or like the Guns ‘n Roses song Patience (”the streets don’t change, but maybe the names”). Newton practiced alchemy, much to the chagrin of mainline scientists and skeptics who’d like to paint him with their same rationalist mein (and maybe that’s why Darwin got elevated over Alfred Russell Wallace–as a spiritualist–and early environmentalist to boot, Wallace would be embarrassing to their framing of history and that chimera called progress). And Newton’s not the only one: Kepler took astrology seriously and Galileo worked up astrological charts into his early sixties. However, to get taught this about these guys or to know that one of the early founders of U.S. rocket science firmly believed in and practiced magik, would be to call into question the ruling scientific/technological myth of our times (which is giving way to another myth, perhaps, as we head to a new era resonant with the Renaissance-see the Feb. 7th post here for where I’m extrapolating this from).

Here’s another passage from Couliano’s introduction that speaks to me:

Magic and science, in the last analysis, represent needs of the imagination, and the transition from a society dominated by magic to a predominantly scientific society is explicable primarily by a change in the imaginary. [This book] examines changes at the level of the imaginary rather than at the level of scientific discoveries; granted, of course, that a discovery is only made possible by a certain horizon of knowledge and beliefs conducive to it.

This points to something that I feel should be obvious. Certain kinds of beliefs lead to certain kinds of discoveries. In the days when magik as magik represented an above-board, widely accepted belief, people made discoveries about spirits and other non-material consciousnesses, including how to use and control them (and use them to control one’s environment and other humans). In the age of our technological Spectacle, discoveries have been made about material things. This wouldn’t necessarily mean that all the discoveries made in one way are false and unreal (even if some might be) simply because the map used to get to them differs from ours. But we won’t be privy to perceiving those realities and discoveries and perceptions allowed by certain maps if the map we use doesn’t allow for them–or only allows us to perceive them in the most mundane and material way.

This also raises the question, in what way have our imaginations been changed? And what does that mean for us if they have?

Couliano follows this passage up with the following paragraph, which felt the most provocative to me:

Nowadays, if we can boast of having at our disposal scientific knowledge and technology that used to exist only in the phantasies of magicians, we must allow that, since the Renaissance, our capacity to work directly with our own phantasms, if not with those of others, has diminished. The relationship between the conscious and the unconscious has been deeply altered and our ability to control our own processes of imagination reduced to nothing.

This seems to get at something I contemplated with the cellphone post. And I’d say that in our time the material technology, which we don’t ultimately control, has played a part in that loss of control over our processes of imagination. If imaginal magik that is liberatory and a potential skill of each individual atrophies it becomes the monopoly of those who know how to use it or, in the case of machine magik, those who can afford it or hold the capital and resources to produce it. If you do not have an awareness of hypnosis and an ability to use it for your personal good in your skillset, which seems to be the common lot these days, then you are more apt to get manipulated by or have to put up with its use against you by marketers, p.r. firms and governments. If you can’t understand the messages your spirit sends through dreams, you can’t ulitize them and end up having to go to a shrink to figure it out for you. If you don’t know how to conquer limiting beliefs or entrain your mind through meditation to more positive and productive frequencies, then you may grow dependent on the drugs the pharmaceutical industry or the street sells you; you may end up spending lots of money on Brainwave machines and CDs (which, don’t get me wrong, sound pretty cool) rather than being able to do what those things do for you for yourself.