What I Said Yesterday to the Masonic High 12 Club
Music: Shellyan Orphan: Humroot I want to thank you all for having me, and your generosity and invitation is proof enough that Masonic fellowship, like justice, is blind to a given brother's personal eccentricities or appearance.
My interest in Masonry was cultivated as a result of my research into the Western occult tradition in the 19th and 20the centuries. This research began about five years ago at the University of Minnesota as I was preparing to write my dissertation for my degree. My talk today is derived from that work, which will be published as a book this August. The book is about the object of strange, mysterious, or difficult language and symbols, including the forces behind their invention, and the experience of hearing, reading, and interpreting such difficult language.
Put in more familiar biblical terms, my research concerns the modern equivalent of the shibboleth, a term for the famous speech-password in the book of Judges. I suggest that the story of the warring Semitic tribes can certainly be read as an occult allegory for the keeping and telling of secrets. As many of you well know, the story goes like this: Ephraimites and the Gileadites are warring, and the latter defeats the former. The Gileadites fashion a blockade to catch fleeing E Ephraimites, and established a password to let their buddies through. Each escapee is asked to pronounce the word "shibboleth," ancient Hebrew for either "ear of corn" or "stream." In the dialect of the Gileadites, the word was pronounced with a "shhhhhhh" sound, while the Ephraimites pronounced the word with a simple "s" sound. Apparently, thousands of folks said "Sibboleth" and got into some pretty deep sit yammering on about ears of corn to the sentries.
The example of the shibboleth points to what I mean when I say "occult rhetoric": it denotes the way in which human language is used to create inside and outside groups, as well as to do other things I'll speak about shortly.
The example of the shibboleth also helps me get at two important terms in my book's title: "the occult" and "rhetoric." I trust most of you are familiar with the meaning of "secrecy" and "mass media," so let me first discuss "rhetoric," then the "occult."
The term "rhetoric" is itself a kind of shibboleth when one recognizes the way it is used in the academic tradition is radically different than the way it is used by our politicians on television. Some of you may recall that the key lecture of the Fellowcraft degree urges the study of rhetoric as well as six other arts and sciences. Well, my academic field is rhetoric or rhetorical studies, and I can tell you us rhetoricians sometimes tire of people telling us that we study-dare I say it? bullsit. Us academic Gileadites often wish the popular media tribes would recognize the term in a very different sense: namely, that rhetoric denotes the serious study of persuasive speaking and writing, and the way in which human language and symbols effect human behavior and consciousness.
Now, let me turn to the more controversial term, "the occult." Despite whatever you hear in the mass media, the occult is not reducible to worshipping the devil. In fact, the occult tradition is much more noble than that, and can be traced back to the emergence of the natural and social sciences. The occult should be understood simply as the study of secrets both secular and divine. One of the things I do in the book is explain why secrecy is important and what its uses were in respect to the occult tradition: for starters, secrecy was called for by early scientists because open discussion of their researches could lead to state persecution. Eventually, as democracy spread across the west, this necessity of secrecy shifted from protection from state power to other functions. The most notable function of secrecy is familiar to everyone in this room: secret knowledge helps to engender social bonds among those in the know.
Regardless, the occult tradition concerns secrets about ultimate reality, and insofar as Masonry participates in the disclosure of symbols and allegories for intuiting divine truths, then it too participates, by virtue of secrecy, in the Western occult tradition.
As many of you probably recall upon your introduction to Masonry, many of its symbols are strange, weird, often confusing-and there is an awful lot of it. What my book tries to do is describe the function of strange and difficult language, how it works to help the aspirant to greater understandings of ultimate reality, and how it works to create groups of belonging.
Obviously I do not have time enough to explain how occult rhetoric works in any detail. Today I'd like to focus on one simple element: the role of the imagination and its relationship to publicity.
Masonry, like most occult orders, is esoteric in nature because symbolic signification is not strict, but imaginative and associative, a thought process that we can trace back to the dialectics of Plato. In the occult tradition, the use of one's imagination is, in fact, central.
To make this case, let me refer to a brief case study, the writings of the 19th century French magician and Freemason, Eliphas Lévi. In many ways Lévi's writings on magic mark the beginning of "modern occultism," a moment in the occult tradition that is characterized by a popular interest enabled by media technologies of mass production, as well as a general withering of the influence of religious prohibitions against the practice and study of occultism. Many scholars of the occult often locate the nineteenth century revival of popular interest in the occult with the publication of Lévi's occult books. What was significant about these books, and what many a curious reader undoubtedly found attractive, was Lévi's vivid writing style. As Elizabeth Butler noted, Lévi's books belong more truly to literature than to the science of the occult, for his poetic talents helped him to transform relatively dry books on the subject into something both radiant and sinister, transforming descriptions of ritual into something akin to a sensational novel. For example, Lévi describes the art of the Kabbalist as that which concerns the most astonishing formulae in the service of The Mother of God, within whom the Kabbalist realizes "all that is divine in the dreams of innocence, all that is adorable in the sacred enthusiasm of every maternal heart."
Given Lévi's creative and literary talents, it is not surprising that the imagination played an important role in his descriptions of the conduct of transcendental magic. The imagination, Lévi said, "is only the soul's inherent faculty of assimilating . . . images and reflections contained in the living light." Yet it is an extremely important capacity for the adept, whose imagination is "diaphanous, whilst that of the crowd is opaque." Lévi emphasized the importance of imagining magical symbols in the creation and use of talismans and sigils, as well as the significant role that mental images play in divination. Indeed, Lévi was fond of sprinkling his books with numerous illustrations and magically "charged" symbols. In fact, the imagined deity Lévi created to reside over the magical arts, the Sabbatic Goat, has long eclipsed Lévi's fame as the Magus who invented it (see handout).
Now, it is undeniable that Lévi's many books on the occult tradition were written for a popular audience, and this fact begins to explain why the occult tradition is increasingly associated with the dark arts. Lévi was writing in a time when paperback books and dime novels were beginning to appear. Tabliod newspapers were starting to proliferate, and journalism as we know it begin to emerge. In other words, the late nineteenth century witnessed the advent of what you and I would call "publicity." Imagine, if you will, the challenge publicity posed to occult organizations, especially the Masons: with the proliferation of the printing press, the threat of having one's cherished secrets "published" was increasing. The threat that mass publication posed to the Masons was, in fact, largely responsible for the Antimasonic movement in the United States in the 19th century; as some of you will recall, William Morgan was purportedly murdered because he threatened to publish the secrets of a Master Mason, thereby spawning a floodtide of resentment and so-called "Morgan Committees."
But back to France: insofar as the secrets of the occult tradition could be-and were-published on a wide scale, Lévi and other occultists, such as Albert Pike, began writing in an even more difficult style. Insofar as the general public were curious and wanting to read about occult secrets, Lévi started writing highly evocative and deliberately ironic treatises on the occult that spoke with a double tongue. In what is perhaps his most famous treatise, Transcendental Magic, Lévi decided to play an ironic joke that has plagued the occult tradition ever since: Knowledgeable of the legend of Faust, and certainly tired of the accusations that occultism was actually a demonic exercise, Lévi made up a ritual for conjuring the devil. Let me read a bit of this ritual to give you a sense of its patent ridiculousness:
The instructions continue for a considerable length. Now, it should be clear at this point the task that Lévi sets for the neophyte devil worshipper is tremendous! Lévi piles up an insurmountable number of ritual elements for evoking the devil that are, well, fairly ludicrous.Conditions of Success in Infernal Evocations
. . . . A fast of fifteen days must be observed, taking a single unsalted repast after sundown. It should consist of black bread and blood, seasoned with unsalted spices or black beans and milky narcotic herbs. We must get drunk every five days after sundown on wine in which five heads of black poppies and five ounces of pounded hemp-seed have been steeped for five hours, the infusion of being strained through a cloth woven by a prostitute . . . The evocation should be performed on the night between Monday and Tuesday, or that between Friday and Saturday. A solitary and forbidden spot must be chosen, such as a cemetery haunted by evil spirits, a place where some murder has been committed, or a druidic alter or an old temple of idols. A black seamless and sleeveless robe must be provided; a leaden cap emblazoned with the signs of the moon, Venus and Saturn; two candles of human fat set in black wooden candlesticks, carved in the shape of a crescent; . . . a copper vase containing the blood of the victim; . . . the blood of a goat, a mole and a bat; four nails taken from the coffin of an executed criminal; the head of a black cat which has been nourished on human flesh for five days; a bat drowned in blood; the horns of a goat . . . and the skull of a patricide. . . . .
Lévi's misleading rhetoric here, however, is designed to do a number of things: first, it is designed to put off the curious dabbler; second, it is designed to amuse the reader who is "in the know." It is funny to imagine some fool trying to do this (and to our knowledge no one has). Yet more importantly, the clue that this is not to be taken seriously is the complex understanding of the forces of good and evil, the way in which most occultists believed human kind was an amalgum of the forces of good and evil that must be kept in balance.
As most occultists during this time period would argue, the forces of good and evil come from the same, supernatural SOURCE (indeed, some of the so-called higher degrees of Freemasonry continue this teaching), that good and evil are part of some ineffable divine plan that is beyond the human capacity to represent it. Hence, to distinguish between good and bad magic was to misunderstand the "nature" of magic. Were Lévi's remarks meant to be taken seriously, then? Nope. They were a deliberate, ironic blind. They were deliberately misleading.
Now, the problem with being deliberately misleading with remarks about the devil is that, with publicity, the non-occultist can take you seriously-and that's exactly what happened! In my book I attempt to show how the mischievous jokes of renowned occultists continued a Faustian legend of making deals with the devil that persists to this day. Countless occultists in the 20th century have been accused of being secret devil worshippers, which is in part the direct consequence of curiosity and the logics of publicity.
As you might imagine, the rumor that occultists-including Freemasons-worship the devil has contributed in part to the decline of interest in secret societies in the past century. In bringing my talk to a close, let me suggest another reason why: The occult tradition has declined in the twentieth century as a result of the failure to exercise the human imagination.
As Lévi argued, understanding complex symbolism requires the use of one's imagination. Indeed, we can trace Freemasonry back to the ancient Mysteries, which taught that reality is a series of dimensions or levels that the aspirant learned about through grades or degrees. One was asked to imagine, in his mind's eye, what moving through multiple realities must be like. Masonry makes similar demands on the candidate: the allegory and symbolism of Masonry is designed to stimulate the imagination of the candidate as he moves into increasing levels of awareness. Indeed, this is exactly the function of the temple of King Solomon, a imaginary device that can be traced back, again, to the ancient Greek device of imaginatively moving through space to memorize speeches and catechisms. In other words, not only is Solomon's temple symbolic, but it is also a mnemonic device-a stimulus to imagination and to memory. Insofar as Masonry is an esoteric tradition, one can understand why imaginative symbols are needed as mnemoic devices: without mental pictures, the catechism would be awfully difficult to memorize.
In our current world, we are asked less and less to imagine. Instead of using our minds eye to think through complex myth, allegory, and symbolism, we have the television screen and the movie theatre. This is especially the case among younger people, who read much less than previous generations and therefore lack the same capacity to envision new worlds in their heads. And why should they need to? Everything is image these days--everything imaginable has been created by the mass media dream factory, as if to render our capacity to imagine obsolete (as an aside, I would also argue it is in the interest of media capitalism to hijack the human imagination, but more about that perhaps later).
What I'm saying, then, is that the mass media have contributed to the decline of the occult tradition for two reasons: first, increasing publicity has led to a number of attempts to keep occult secrets secret-which has backfired. In our age of surveillance, web-cams, and "reality television," claming to have a secret can lead to undue scrutiny. This continues to be the case with the Freemason's, who are erroneously charged with the most preposterous motives, from running the New World Order to worshipping aliens from outer space.
Second, the mass media have contributed to the decline of the occult tradition because communication technologies have changed the way people think about and understand reality (viz., "epistemology"), and thereby altered our capacity to imagine. Insofar as the imagination is central to the occult tradition, it would make sense that Masonry and other allegorical and symbolic teachings are less and less appealing to young people AS modes of literacy change. In short, what many Mason's have said about the decline of the Fraternity among younger generations is true: if you want a reason for Masonry's decline, then you need look no further than your living room, which, for most of us, is the seat of human imagination today. We call it "television"