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Mythos and Stories as Models of Practice
April 22, 2018 By polyphanes in mathesis, occult, philosophy Tags: calendar, fable, grammatemerologion, grammatomancy, hermeticism, myth, mythology, mythos, neoplatonism, pythagoreanism, qabbalah, religion, story	Leave a comment
Lately, I've been fiddling around with Python and LaTeX scripts again. For those who aren't as inclined to computers, the former is a very flexible, extensible programming language of no small fame, while the latter is a type of language used to format, typeset, and compile documents (sorta like what HTML and CSS are for webpages). I use Python for all my short, little, experimental research things, like calculating certain astronomical/astrological phenomena or doing a brute-force search of all 65,536 possible geomantic charts for particular patterns, minimums, or maximums of certain qualities. Meanwhile, I use LaTeX for all my document needs, mostly for ebooks but also for letters, résumés, and other things in lieu of a normal word processor like OpenOffice or Microsoft Word (because I'm a crazy fool who loves the commandline and raw power over convenience and ease).
The main impetus for this bout of hobby programming that's been going on this week is so I can make a full calendar in LaTeX that spans from June 23, 2009 through June 23, 2047, complete with dates of eclipses, lunar phase changes, seasonal start and midpoint dates, and zodiacal ingresses of the Sun. It's hard to find that sort of data over such a wide span of time, and much more difficult than that to find it in an easily-obtainable format that I can use for LaTeX compilation. To that end, I wrote the scripts to calculate all the astronomical information from scratch (Jean Meeus' "Astronomical Algorithms" is a godsend of a book for this, so do get yourself a copy for reference) and formatted the output just the way I needed it. It's not exactly an exciting feeling to realize that it's easier to just code and test all the algorithms yourself than trying to find the data you need online, but after two long days of coding, the profound feeling of accomplishment can't be easily described (except, of course, as "fucking awesome and thank god that's over").
For what end would I take on this crazy project, you might ask? Because this unusual span of time is the 69th cycle of 38 years of the Grammatēmerologion, the lunisolar grammatomantic calendar I devised that associates the days of the lunar months, the lunar months themselves, and the lunisolar years with the letters of the Greek alphabet for use in ritual grammatomancy and, more broadly, my nascent theurgic practice of mathesis, a new kind of Hermetic theurgy I'm developing that refocuses on Pythagorean, Platonic, and Neoplatonic influences before introduction of qabbalah. It's been a bit since I've done any mathetic work, given the whole house-buying/house-moving of 2016 and the Year in White of iyaworaje that went on through most of 2017, but I'm preparing slowly to pick it up again. Since a daily observation of the letter of the day is a practice I found great use with, I wanted to have an actual calendar to reference instead of having another one of my scripts calculate it for me each and every morning. (This also means I'll be getting back to my Daily Grammatomancy posts I was doing for a while over on my Facebook page, so if you haven't liked it yet, please head on over and do so!) So, yanno, it's the little gains that help give a sturdy foundation for this sort of work.
The thing is, though, that I'm not setting out to develop this whole new practice and system for its own sake, or for the sake of being able to say "look at me, mister high muckety-muck of my own sandcastle!". I want a way to explore the Neoplatonic and Hermetic cosmos without having to rely on the procrustean bed of qabbalah that we can't seem to escape from, purge, or ignore; Hermeticism and Neoplatonism existed before and did fine without it, and even if qabbalah brought in excellent insights and models and frameworks for the two philosophies to expand with (and it most certainly did!), after a certain point, those same models and frameworks can become a hindrance. If nothing else, taking another look with another system can breathe a breath of fresh air into these things, and allow for opening up new doors and avenues to cosmic exploration, theurgy, and spiritual development.
Going through my old posts and notes on what I've already set up is incredibly useful, but I see something clearly now that I didn't before (time is great for providing experience, after all, no matter how much we might think we have some at the time). Consider one of my favorite quick rituals, the Blessing of the Vessel, first discussed in this 2015 post, which I use as a way for generating a sacred elixir to partake of the blessing of the Divine. This ritual works quite well on its own, though it uses some pretty arcane Judaeo-Coptic symbolism. However, if I were to make a mathetic variant…I ran into a mental wall trying to figure that one out. Sure, I could just replace the names of the angels or godforms, but…that seems hollow to me. While swapping out related concepts from one system to automagically transform it into a new system is definitely a thing, like using a Celtic or Hellenic deities instead of the four archangels to make more pagan forms of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, I personally find the practice distasteful and it never seems to work as fully, as cleanly, or as effectively as the original ritual in its own context with its own appropriate entities and names. Moreover, I couldn't think of anything comparable to the symbols and metaphors used in the Blessing of the Vessel that could be seen in Hellenic mythology off the top of my head, which…
That reminded me of that post I wrote not too long ago about how the rituals we use are means of reliving myths. La Regla de Ocha Lukumí, more commonly known as Santería, is a perfect example of this. All the ceremonies we participate in, all the things we wear, all the offerings we make, all the songs we sing, and so forth are established not just by tradition, but by the precedents laid out for us in the mythological stories that undergird the entire religion. In this case, as in many religions and systems of faith, "myth" here doesn't just mean a fairy-tale, but a narrative that explains how things become into the world and why we do certain things in a certain way. The mythos of a religion, then, is the collective story of the cosmos from the point of view of that religion; to participate in the religion is to participate in the eternal telling-retelling of that mythos, where we are both a member of the audience as well as an actor on the stage. Every religion is like this: Christianity retells the story of Christ's sacrifice through the Eucharist, which is an eternal event that is played out in discrete instances that participate in the eternal truth of Jesus' sacrifice; Judaism retells the story of the covenants of God with Noah, Abraham, Moses, Aaron, and Aaron and the Exodus through the Passover Seder and the various mitzvot they maintain; Buddhism describes the paths to nirvana through the practices of the Buddhas and bodhisattvas and how we are to understand the Noble Eightfold Path as well as all the discrete, different practices that can more quickly help us achieve our goal; Santeria tells through all the odu and all the pataki about the exploits of the orishas and how they impact our lives and what we can do about the problems through the rites and rituals that the orisha laid down so long ago, and so on. Even in magic, we use stories that undergird our work: Solomonic magicians take on the role of Solomon as primordial gōes, reiki masters take on the role of their initiators going back to Usui-sensi to ply their work, Greek necromancers take on the role of those heroes like Odysseus who went down to the land of the dead and came back alive, and so forth. These aren't just simple stories we tell to children; these are the archetypal foundations of ideology, worldview, culture, faith, and interaction that our societies and civilizations are built upon and grow around.
So, what then of mathesis? I realized that, though I have the basic ideas of Hermetic theurgy within a Pythagoreansim-centered Neoplatonic framework down and a handful of basic tools and methods at my disposal, I lack a story, a myth that explains what the whole goal is and how spiritual practices and methods should be established. It's these stories that not only provide inspiration for new methods to grow and develop, but also point to some of the dangers I might face and flaws I might find in myself along the way, as well as the remedies and precautions to take for when I do face them. Without such a story, all I'm really doing is bumbling around in the dark repeating the same acts over and over with no purpose. I can liken this to an actor on a stage reciting the same soliloquy extemporaneously with neither context nor play; no matter how excellently they might recite it, it has no meaning or purpose except to practice the ability of recitation for its own sake. It's only when such a soliloquy takes place in the proper context of a play that it has meaning. All these practices of purification, meditation, contemplation, initiation, and whatnot don't mean anything if they don't have an overall story to fit into. Like a collection of pieces to build furniture from IKEA, if you don't know what you're doing and have no instructions to fit everything together, that collection is going to remain nothing more than a pile of bits and odds and ends that don't do anything except allow for someone to play at a frustrating adult version of Legos.
Now, I should say that I'm not trying to distill mathesis down to any one myth, any one story that we know of from ancient Greece. I'm not suggesting that I'm doing that, or that I should do that. I'm really talking about something more archetypal and fundamental than any one story, something that takes place time and time again in individual stories. Consider what Leo Tolstoy (or Dostoyevsky, or John Gardner, or others) once said: "all great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town". This is the kind of archetype I'm talking about: a fundamental action that takes place. Just how the Iliad is an example of the classical "war epic" while the Odyssey is one of the "journey epic", and how the Aeneid is an example of both, and all of which take place in greater and larger cycles of epics and sagas, each with their own stories and subplots that collectively describe how things come to be, what is the sort of high-level framework "saga" that mathesis might adopt as its underlying mythos? That's an interesting thing for me to ponder as a model for mathesis.
After all, consider that we can use the word "model" in terms of "framework", but also in the sense of "role model". What sort of character am I playing out by working in this way? What sort of tribulations, conflicts, issues, problems, predicaments, and crises might I face? Where might I look towards for help and succor? To what end do I play out this role, and how does this role pick up and start again (reincarnate, rebirth, renew) in another iteration of the story? After all, the idea of "role model" is played out quite heavily in occult and spiritual work in terms of godforms; the Catholic priest takes on the role of Jesus when he lifts up the host and say "this is my body", the Vajrayana Buddhist takes on the role of their yidam in meditation, the Golden Dawn initiate takes on the role of any number of Egyptian gods for a given ritual, and so forth. In adopting a role, we take on the strengths, weaknesses, abilities, and powers of that form we take; consider the Headless Rite, where the primary mechanism is to become Akephalos, the Headless One, to command the forces of the cosmos for exorcism or banishing or conjuration. Not only do models inform us what our views of the cosmos will be like, but models also inform us how we act within that cosmos and what our abilities and limitations are.
This isn't to say, of course, that we can't, don't, or shouldn't live by our own stories; of course we can, and we must! While there's definitely truth to Ecclesiastes 1:9—"what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"—there's a difference between the fundamental archetype which is mythos and the discrete, concrete instantiation of a a story that falls under that mythos. Like with the whole "two stories, journey or arrival" quote from above, consider that, at least under the "journey" header, we have such disparate and varied stories such as that of The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, Pokémon, and the Odyssey are all such stories. Under the broader notion of Proto-Indo-European religion, which formed the basis for many of the pagan religions across Europe and some parts of Asia and the Near East, there are high-level archetype stories of divine horse twins, a sky father, a dawn goddess, and a hero slaying a dragon; take a look, dear reader, at Celtic, Greek, Roman, Slavic, Vedic, Nordic, and other Indo-European myths and you'll find countless stories that relate to them, oftentimes many iterations of a single story with different variations. We each have our own story, each of which is unique, and all of which play into the archetypes of the cosmos both as processes and actors.
Come to think of it, that's one of the things that I think we as occultists tend to neglect. It's…it's at least an issue, but I'm unsure whether it's a full-blown problem, that so many of us lack contexts for the things we do. Like the actor reciting a preset soliloquy extemporaneously without context, many of the practices we have are so distanced and removed from the theologies, cosmologies, and philosophies that gave birth to them, and we're at a loss without understanding that collective context. I mean, sure, the Headless Rite will still work for you whether or not you understand the currents of Egyptian, Christian, Jewish, Greek, gnostic, academic, priestly, and folk influences that collectively gave rise to that ritual and its place in the broader understanding of Greco-Egyptian magical praxis and theory, but knowing all the rest of that does significantly help attune oneself better to the ritual, not just by understanding where it came from, but also the role of the ritual, the magician who invokes Akephalos, and Akephalos itself. To put it in modern terms, consider chaos magic with its notion of paradigm shifting. You can pick up any ritual and make it work, sure, but if you can't paradigm shift between them, you can't get the most out of any given ritual you perform because you aren't immersed in the fundamental contexts (the mythos) that allow for that ritual to work.
This is most dangerous for eclectic practitioners that don't belong to any one tradition or practice except "what they feel like, a bit of this and a bit of that"; without a coherent, cohesive, connective mythos that undergirds their worldviews, philosophies, cosmologies, and so on, I find it extremely rare that anything of what they do even comes close to the power and efficacy of someone who has a mythos and has truly integrated themselves and everything they do into that mythos. A mythos as model, then, provides both a skeleton and a skin for one's practices: a skeleton to arrange and structure one's practices together, and a skin to separate out what belongs to it and what does not, filtering things in to and out from one's system of practices. Without a mythos, you're just a jumble of things that you do, some of which may have an immediate use but no overarching purpose; a set of practices without a mythos is no more than a jumble of IKEA parts without instructions that may or may not combine together to form a useful bit of furniture, and even then only if you stumble upon the right combination and order of doing so. If you're just interested in performing and knowing how to perform individual acts for individual needs, more power to you, but if you're looking for purpose and direction and how all these things you do can lead to you it, then you're going to need a mythos to understand how all these things you do play into it.
It's because of this that I'm so interested in setting up a new kind of Hermetic theurgy with Neoplatonic philosophy divested from qabbalah. The central mythos is the same both with and without qabbalah, sure, but the stories that play out would be different. A different story means different actors, different problems, different predicaments, different crises, different climaxes, different resolutions, different conclusions, even if it all fits into the same mythic pattern. With each new difference comes new insights, new abilities, new techniques, new practices that can be developed, refined, and applied, yielding new ways to understand the cosmos and ourselves. Mathesis and qabbalah might both be mirrors made of the same stuff that reflect reality, but they'd present it from different angles, with different views, colors, shadows, and understandings of the thing to be reflected.
Qabbalah works for Hermeticism, to be sure, but almost all that we do is part of the same Hermetic story. I want to tell a new story, and see where else I might end up. What story will mathesis tell, I wonder?
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