Sacred Magic and the Western Death Cult

'The Empress' by Katrin Welz-Stein

Over the past couple of months I have been enjoying a couple of unrelated online discussion forums studying Valentin Tomberg’s extraordinary text Meditations on the Tarot. In one recent conversation with Shari Suter and Nate Hile at the Grail Country channel on Youtube, we discussed the third letter of the book on the card The Empress. (You can watch it here).

I don’t know exactly how many times I’ve read this book, but it is definitely in the double-digits, and every time I read it I find new riches. One thing that jumped out at me this time—and which came up in our conversation—is what Tomberg describes as the role of “sacred magic” in the world through the symbol of the Tree of life which he contrasts to the methods of science since the seventeenth century. “For the practical aspect of the scientific ideal, “writes Tomberg, “is the domination of Nature by means of putting into play the principle of destruction or death.” [1] This was not a new insight of Tomberg’s: Goethe and Rudolf Steiner had said much the same things (as did Robert Fludd and Thomas Vaughan before them), and closer to our own time Mary Midgley, Pierre Hadot, Rupert Sheldrake, and David Bohm have stood in general agreement with this claim, which is in its essence a very sophiological intuition. He continues:

“Imagine, dear Unknown Friend, efforts and discoveries in the opposite direction, in the direction of construction or life. Imagine, not an explosion, but the blossoming out of a constructive ‘atomic bomb.’ It is not too difficult to imagine, because each little acorn is such a ‘constructive bomb’ and the oak is only the result of the slow ‘explosion’—or blossoming out—of this ‘bomb.’ Imagine it, and you will have the ideal of the great work or the idea of the Tree of Life. The image itself of the tree comprises the negation of the technical and mechanical element.”

The subtitle of Tomberg’s masterpiece is “A Journey into Christian Hermeticism,” and by “Hermeticism” Tomberg means a Christian synthesis of art, science, and religion. This was evident in pre-Reformation Western Christian culture in, for example, the imagery of the microcosm and its relationship to the macrocosm or in the signatura rerum, the signatures of things (plants, minerals, animals, stars, planets) and the spiritual realities to which they point. This Hermeticism, I claim, is almost identical to Sophiology.

“Now the ideal of Hermeticism is contrary to that of science. Instead of aspiring to power over the forces of Nature by means of destruction of matter, Hermeticism aspires to conscious participation with the constructive forces of the world on the basis of an alliance and a cordial communion with them. Science wants to compel Nature to obedience to the will of man such as it is; Hermeticism—or the philosophy of sacred magic—on the contrary wants to purify, illumine, and change the will of man in order to bring them into harmony with the creative principle of Nature (natura naturans) and to render them capable of receiving its willingly bestowed revelation. The ‘great work,’ as an ideal, is therefore the state of the human being who is in peace, harmony, and collaboration with life. This is the ‘fruit’ of the Tree of Life.”

Biodynamic farming is a great example of this kind of Hermetic cooperation with Natura. On the other hand, modern science, for the most part, continues to operate along the lines of compulsion (which we can by extrapolation define by the, alas, too-often heard term “mandate”). If anything over the past two-plus years, we have seen the apotheosis of a “science of the mandate,” in its grasping for a totalizing and absolute dominion over all aspects of human life. This is the way of death.

In fact, as my interlocutor Mr. Hile recently observed, what we have all around us is a “death cult,” and I would add that institutional science is the high priest of this religion.

Central to this religion—though rarely admitted openly—is a hostility to fecundity, which we can see in the cult’s hostility to fertility. And this fecundity touches all domains:

“The third Arcanum of the Tarot, being an arcanum of sacred magic, is by this very fact the arcanum of generation. For generation is only as aspect of sacred magic, If sacred magic is the union of two wills—human and divine—from which a miracle results, generation itself also presupposes the trinity of the generator, the generant, and the generated. Now, the generated is the miracle resulting from the union of the principles of generator and generant. Whether it is a matter of a new idea, a work of art, the birth of a child, is not important; it is always the same law of generation which operates; it is always the same arcanum—that of fecundity—which is at play; and it is always the same mystery of the Incarnation of the Word which is the divine prototype here.

“We have said above that sacred magic is life such as it was before the Fall. As life is always generative, the arcanum of sacred magic is at the same time that of generation before the Fall—vertical generation, from a higher plane to a lower one—instead of horizontal generation, which is accomplished on a single plane.” [2]

So, what we have is fecundity versus the Western Death Cult, as I have recently written on the gradual opening to the possibility of socially acceptable infanticide. And the presence of the Death Cult is nowhere more apparent than in its constant attacks on Nature—most vividly shown in its attack on the feminine.

Examples of these attacks are rampant, particularly in the rhetorical games (and I’m an English and philosophy professor—I know about rhetorical games) currently at play by the Enemy. One absolutely tragi-comic example is the recent story in which midwives in the UK’s Brighton and Sussex Hospitals were told by higher ups to stop using “vagina” when referring to a woman’s reproductive organ and, instead, adopt “‘front hole’ or ‘genital opening’”—an idea that surely is the product of some woke administrator’s back hole. Such innovations would be unthinkable without the interventions of Science, Inc. Just as Huxley predicted in Brave New World, the word “mother” is now increasingly equated with the most vulgar profanity. A similar word game now coming into common parlance is to replace “pedophile” with “minor attracted person.” O brave new world that has such people in it.

Tomberg’s exact contemporary Lewis Mumford also saw what was happening and what was coming. Writing in 1964 (very close to the time at which Tomberg wrote on The Empress), Mumford had this to say about the march of technology:

“The danger springs from the fact that, since Francis Bacon and Galileo defined new methods and objectives of technics, our great physical transformations have been effected by a system that deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, overplays the role of abstract intelligence, and makes control of physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of existence….

“The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communications, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires.

“…. Once our authoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquillizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: life itself will not survive, except what is filtered through the mechanical collective. The spread of a sterilized scientific intelligence over the planet would not, as Teilhard de Chardin so innocently imagined, be the happy consummation of divine purpose: it would rather ensure the final arrest of any further human development.” [3]

Medical, technological, and rhetorical attempts to control Nature are ultimately attempts to control the Real. Attempts to control Nature and the Real, therefore, are assaults on both the feminine and the masculine, as well as on the family. Assaults on the feminine and the masculine and the family, then, are finally assaults on the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine—and they’re not on a spectrum.

It is a matter of what kind of science one wants: a science based upon the will to power, or a science of collaboration with life. It doesn’t seem like a very difficult choice.

Scene from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. He certainly understands Sophiology.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (Amity House, 1985), 68.

2. Ibid., 72-73.

3. Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (Winter 1964); 1-8, at 6-7.

The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse

I have a lot of books. Though I’ve never taken an inventory, my library probably totals in the low thousands, everything from farming to mead making and distilling, literature and literary criticism, arts and crafts, science, biography, theology, philosophy, psychology, history, not to mention many obscure works on magic, alchemy, astrology, and other esoteric subjects. I wrote my dissertation on a number of poets, mystics, and alchemists—John Donne, Henry Vaughan and his alchemist identical twin Thomas, Jane Lead, Sir Kenelm Digby, and John Dee—so there’s my excuse.

Recently, I was interviewed by the very generous Piers Kaniuka for his Youtube channel, Resistance Recovery. We were scheduled to discuss my latest book, Sophia in Exile, but we also spent a good chunk of our conversation talking about the various manifestations of Romanticism—in the 18th century and with the hippies in the 20th, for example—and the Occult Revival and the Celtic Twilight movements of the 19th century came up as an example of resistance to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the technocracies of its time.

When Marygrove College, where I used to work as a professor of English, philosophy, and religious studies, announced it would close at the end of the semester, the library started selling off its collection at 10 cents a piece. Tempt me not, Satan! I did my best to clear the joint. I loaded up on all kinds of books in my various disciplines. Among books by the great Continental philosophers and medieval mystics and theologians, I scored C.G. Jung’s Collected Works (though one volume is in absentia) and the 10-volume set of Donne’s Sermons—that was a good thing, too, because all of my notes from my dissertation research on the sermons were still inscribed in the margins. Don’t judge me: it was obviously all part of God’s plan. I meant to grab the collected works of Sigmund Freud, but the last day of the semester was a snow day and school was closed. I still have nightmares about it.

I have a number of collector’s items, though I used to have more. In my twenties I collected rare books. Let’s call it an investment strategy. Times were hard financially early in my marriage, however, so I ended up selling a lot of the books so we could buy stuff like, you know, food. But I still have a few treasures. I have first editions of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism and W.B. Yeats’s A Vision and I have a collection of The Spectator from 1714 that I picked up twenty years ago in a junk shop in, I think, Niagara Falls, Ontario or someplace thereabouts.

But one of the more curious books I own is one I picked up at Marygrove for a dime. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse was almost an afterthought. I write about poetry and mysticism, so I grabbed it as one might grab a candy bar at the grocery store checkout line. Impulse item. It sat on the shelf for a couple of years. Then I read it. Wow.

The book starts out, surprisingly, not with Cædmon, but with an incantation:

Amergin

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am the beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am the wild boar in valour,

I am the salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a word of science,

I am the point of a lance in battle,

I am the God who creates in the head the fire.

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?

Who announces the ages of the moon?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun?

Dang.

Actually, Cædmon never appears. Which is odd.

The book, which was published in 1921, features many of the poets one would expect: Southwell, the Metaphysicals, Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley (no Keats), Cardinal Newman, the Brownings, Tennyson, Whitman, George MacDonald, both Dante and Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Francis Thompson, G.K. Chesterton, and John Masefield. It also includes some lesser known poets, such as the Roman Catholic nun Augusta Theodosia Drane, the Pre-Raphaelite Arthur W. E. O’Shaughnessy, Yeats’s one-time love interest Katherine Tynan, and the great Canadian poet Bliss Carman. But then it gets really weird.

The big surprise (for me, anyway) was to find so many poets of the Occult Revival and the Celtic Twilight included. I expected Yeats of course—though he only gets two poems! This was, to be sure, before his late flowering and some of his strongest poems, such as “The Second Coming,” “Lapis Lazuli,” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” Here he is represented by “The Rose of Battle” and “To the Secret Rose.” Also included are Yeats’s countryman, the visionary, poet, and social reformer Æ (George Russell) and Yeats’s co-editor of Blake, Edmond Ellis. Alongside these more conventional poets, however, were some real eye-openers.

The collection includes three poems by the (almost entirely unknown today) mystical Freemason W. L. Wilmshurst and work by esoteric historian A.E. Waite, not to mention offerings from William Sharp (also known under the nom de plume Fiona Macleod), the spiritualist Elsa Barker, the Irish pantheist Edmond Holmes, the aforementioned Evelyn Underhill, as well as—wait for it—the magician and all-round naughty person Aleister Crowley—who gets more space than Yeats!

This all kind of blew me away—this was the Oxford University Press, after all. So I checked into the editors, D.H.S. Nicholson and A.H.F. Lee. Both, it turns out, were members of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—which kind of shatters Oxford’s reputation for propriety and decorum. But this explains many of the others included in the collection—Yeats, Sharp, Underhill, Waite, Wilmshurst, and (I think Barker)—were also members of the Golden Dawn. And in the same lodge! Not much else is known about Nicholson, he seems to have been independently wealthy, but Lee was an Anglican priest.

Still, how did these guys swing the editing gig? The plot, as they say, here thickens. As I discovered, a young editor then at the Oxford University Press hired the editors for the job. His name: Charles Williams. That’s right: the Inkling—but the edgy Inkling. Williams, not surprisingly, also belonged to the Golden Dawn for a period, so The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse then becomes a kind of in-group project, the Esoteric Squad, so to speak.

Another interesting tidbit: Late in the book, which moves chronologically, in the section in which the Golden Dawn poets appear, two poems attributed to “Anonymous” appear. Usually in these kinds of collections, the anonymous poems appear in the beginning, derived as they are from “the dark backward and abysm of time” in which names often become lost to us. These two poems, “At the Feet of Isis” and “A Ballade of the Centre,” then are curiously placed and curiously attributed. I haven’t been able to find any scholarly evidence yet, but my money says they belong to none other than Charles Williams himself. Here’s the closing stanza of “At the Feet of Isis,” chock full of sophianicity:

Her feet are in the darkness, but Her face

Is in high Heav’n—all Truth inhabits there;

All Knowledge and all Peace, and perfect grace,

And in the wonder of Her joy they share

Who, blindly clinging to Her feet erstwhile,

Obtained the priceless gift—the vision of Her smile.

Tell me this isn’t by the same guy who wrote The Figure of Beatrice.

Amazing what a dime can purchase nowadays.

Not in the book: but it should be!

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

A Rosicrucian Easter Meditation

from Daniel Cramer's 'Emblemata sacra' (1624)

In my scholarship, I often write about the Rosicrucian phenomenon that appeared in the first decades of the seventeenth century. In Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, I have a chapter entitled “The Rosicrucian Mysticism of Henry and Thomas Vaughan” and in The Submerged Reality, I have one on the Paracelsian physician and Rosicrucian apologist Robert Fludd, and recently I edited an edition of the seventeenth-century alchemical fantasy, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. So when I hear the word “Rosicrucian,” I don’t immediately think of quasi-Masonic fraternal orders devoted to esoteric ritual or occult trivia. In fact, I don’t think of such groups as Rosicrucian at all. In those cases, “Rosicrucian” is a glittering generality, a mirror that receives the projected reflection of the ego. This is not to say that such groups don’t have interesting doctrines; but they don’t obtain as Rosicrucian, at least in the seventeenth-century understanding of the word.

Actually, what I do think of when I hear the word “Rosicrucian” is medicine. The Vaughans were both physicians, and Henry issued translations of Heinrich Nollius’s Hermetick Physic and The Chymists Key in 1655 and 1657, respectively. Fludd and his German counterpart Michael Maier were also physicians, Fludd a respected member of the Royal College of Physicians and Maier, the private physician of Emperor Rudolf II. These were hardly fringe figures, though the medicine all of these men practiced was deeply indebted to the Swiss medical wonderworker, Theophrastus von Hohenheim, better know to posterity as Paracelsus. Were these medical professionals alive in our own cultural context, they would no doubt be practicing what we now call “alternative medicine.” Unfortunately, today’s reigning medical archons don’t consider alternative medicine as proper medicine at all, and many insurance providers won’t cover patients seeking these paths; and many alternative practitioners, to be honest, don’t want to fall into the snares of bureaucratic interference in the art of healing, whether it be from the realms of government or corporations.

In the Fama Fraternitatis, the Rosicrucian manifesto first published in 1614, we find a sketch of the mythic background of the order, a sketch, more importantly, that outlines the Rosicrucian ethos. The art of healing is listed first among their list of commitments: “That none of them should profess any other thing than to cure the sick, and that gratis.”

“To cure the sick, and that gratis”: these words strike me with hope, but that hope is compromised by living in a medical culture too ensconced with governmental control and capitalistic desires. The pharmaceutical companies pump billions of dollars into advertising ($30 billion in one year, according to The Los Angeles Times) a practice outlawed in most civilized countries. Money is a most addictive drug, and media conglomerates are addicted to BigPharma’s supply chain and are always looking for the next fix. BigPharma certainly seems to be interested in medicine, but I’m not all that convinced that it’s interested in health. Prove me wrong. While we’re waiting, don’t plan on any rigorous journalistic investigation of BigPharma as a matter of course, especially when it comes to using third world populations as human guinea pigs (a “best business practice”), a method darkly illustrated in John le Carré’s book The Constant Gardener, later turned into a film directed by Fernando Meirelles.

Another commitment mentioned in the Fama may appear unobtrusive at first: “After such a most laudable sort they did spend their lives; and although they were free from all diseases and pain, yet notwithstanding they could not live and pass their time appointed by God” (my emphasis). This line, probably more than any other, has haunted my imagination for much of the past thirty years or so. What is our time appointed by God? The medical establishment has invested much time and treasure into prolonging life, but it does not seem that it has invested similar resources into prolonging health. Indeed, the “4 out of 5 doctors” who recommended margarine instead of butter and saccharine instead of sugar did much to decrease the health of people—while standing on a platform of almost godlike authority. I suspect that their nefarious “research” promoted in the 1970s has much to do with the explosion in Alzheimer’s and dementia sufferers we see today, sufferers like my mother and a beloved aunt. Where’s a class-action lawsuit when you need one?

I often contemplate the approaching “appointed time.” Further on in the Fama, we read: “The what secret soever we have learned of the book M. (although before our eyes we behold the image and pattern of the world) yet there are not shewn unto us our misfortunes, nor the hour of death, the which is known only to God himself, who thereby would have us keep in a continual readiness.”

The readiness is all.

You can hear me talking more about Rosicrucianism on the Post-Structuralist Tent Revival podcast.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.