If it weren’t for the State of Confusion, I’d hardly ever know where I am.
On the Myth side of things @bradsayers provided a wonderful link to the work of Jordan Peterson in another reply to this post. It’s worth every minute spent engaging it, for here is a person who understands myth … it the Gebserian sense, even if he’s never heard of Gebser. As we know, Gebser’s is one way of approaching the subject and a good one because of the context it provides in getting a better handle on the whole consciousness thing. Peterson’s focus is a bit broader as he’s approaching it from ontology itself. As he notes in the interview, “We don’t know what role consciousness plays in being,” yet Gebser provides us with an approach and some useful tools for understanding consciousness in and of itself, thereby providing us with some substance on the futher quest.
Another issue to which Gebser sensitizes us is what I will call “the unfoldment of consciousness in time”. Gebser used the word “mutation” to describe the transitions from one structure to another, but he also took great pains to try and prevent his model from falling into the hands of unenlightened Darwinists. Too many thinkers have overlayed Darwin’s theory with a teleos – a development toward a goal or some end (and here @Jonathan_Cobb’s essay in the Metapsychosis part of this site on the Eschaton could be helpful). This may or may not be the case, but we do not, and I believe we cannot, know at this point in time. After watching the video Brad pointed to last night, I feel much better about the Darwinian aspect of Gebser’s model itself, but I digress. The point is that there was an identifiable structure of mentation prior to the Mythical, which Gebser calls Magical.
In the Magical structure of consciousness, the ear is the organ of emphasis, the expression of its forms of realization and thought is what is called “vital experience” in English (the word is erleben in German_, derived from the noun Leben meaning “life”) as contrasted to the “undergone experience” (German: Erfahrung) of the Mythical structure, and its forms of expression are graven images, idol, and (I believe, most significantly) ritual. This is an experienced world that is both timeless and spaceless. It’s motto, per Gebser, is pars pro toto (any part can stand for the whole).
The “heard word” (for some, merely voices in one’s head … which is where Julan Jaynes lost the plot in his The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, another materialist who simply can’t come to terms with something as ethereal as “consciousness”) is a big deal. This is the Word of Creation (the Logos, in Christian terminology), the Tetragrammaton (the ineffable Name of G-d), and more. As Peterson points out in his interview, these are the folks who figured out the notion of “sacrifice” and – this is key: – embodied it; that is, they found a way to give this notion expression in reality. The spirits, the power-that-be, whatever is driving Life and their lives are encountered as reality, hence they are, in the most literal sense of the word, real. Yes, you can cut an image out of stone or wood, for that provides you a point of focus, but the truth of this reality is expressed in the cult, if you will, in the ritual acts which must be performed, in this way at these times, precisely if they are to be effective. This is the relegere, the careful observance, of which Gebser speaks and which term he takes as one of the possible (and likely) roots of our word “religion”. In sum, then, what we have are clearly delineated ways of means of tangibly affecting the world around us. These effects can be felt/experienced (erlebt) and be effected at will (for we will remember that Power is firmly rooted in the Magical structure of consciousness).
This is, of course, the efficient mode of this structure of consciousness, and it exists and can be observed to this day and every day. Just go to a Catholic mass: it is sung (and should be in Latin which most people don’t understand (neither then nor now) for it is to heard not understood (a mental act)), it is a precisely proscribed set of actions (ritual) that, if performed successfully transubstantiates the wafer of common bread and the chalice of common wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. For me, a classic case and example. But, so is your own related (already mythologized) experience regarding your own astral experience with Betelle (a carefully observed procedure resulting in a real, lived experience). There are those who will tell you that you didn’t really have the experience, you only thought you did, but you and I know whoever is saying that has no idea what they are talking about. Similarly, the Dawkinses and Harrises of the world can claim that the transubstantiation thing is only a superstition, but they’re just mouthing words, they’re not really saying anything. They can’t know because they simply deny that such is a “real” possibility.
It is easy to see how such approaches – especially given that Power (in some way, shape or form) is involved – can quickly devolve into something selfish and self-serving. That’s what happened historically: the magical structure became deficient, and good and proper spell casting becomes witchcraft and the ensuing chaos is then overcome by the mutation toward envisioned myth. (It is also interesting to note that in English we still use the word “spell” to describe the activity of calling out the correct letters in the correct order to form a given word … this most likely derived from the Old Norse and their runes (which were magical symbols, as were all original alphabets), and knowing the runes of another’s name gave you power over that person.) These were realities and people were affected by them in observable ways. Nobody was “making this stuff up” it was happening, for real. Hell, even in the last century, the Nazis practially perfected the art, black as it was (though Hitler and Goebbels used Harvard pep rallies as the model for developing their own approach), and which was almost pure magic: Blut und Boden (lit. "Blood and Ground (territory) to justify their racism and push to the East for territory), Blood being the localization of the soul for the magical structure. Racism based in blood; that is tribal (which is what I find so troubling about a number of newer social scientists who approach this topic with not enough seriousness). Social structures based on undifferentiated temporality (Thousand-year Reich … who’s going to live to see that?).
What Gebser makes us aware of (and I believe Peterson substantiates from an entirely different angle) is that the magical is a reality and it can express itself efficiently or deficiently. The recent resurgence of interest in magical matters is both interesting and disturbing. The Crowleyites and Neo-Platonists have been active for some time now. They were very visible in the Reagan and Clinton years, but the overt political emphasis on power was driving them out of every corner of the woodwork. I was living in California (Silicon Valley) at the time and the number of Thelemans (followers of Crowley’s founded religion), Chaos Magickians, and other practitioners plying their trade was legion. Many of them, of course, were already working in IT, artifiical intelligence, but soon found their ways into banking, financial services, derivatives trading … the list goes on, and I believe that’s part of the reason why were confronted with so much Chaos today. I suppose I lost sight of many of them when the world descended into the perpetual-war struggle for power. I don’t think most of the practioners I knew then were evil by nature, but they were all mere Sorcerers’ Apprentices in the end. If there is a reinvigoration of this occurring now, then I’m disturbed because too many people aren’t paying attention. They weren’t then, and they aren’t now. And that’s our fundamental problem as humans I think:
Too many of us are too willing to do too much with too many things that we know too little about. We’re not paying enough attention. Sloughing off magic as emotional superstition and myth as mere stories is paying no attention at all. To my way of thinking, we can pay attention or we can pay the price.
PS @JDockus – I know this comes across overly professorial, and I apologize for that, but I was trying to be clear about what I had in mind and why. I’m plodding again. I’m sure you understand. 