Esoteric Coffeehouse

As mentioned last time, I will now talk about the identity of the Navi and their religion from a Paracelsian perspective. Just as a reminder, Paracelsus was a revolutionary philosopher, alchemist and physician living in the 16th century (I already touched upon some elements of his life and philosophy here and here). Now, I’m not saying that Cameron was necessarily acquainted with Paracelsian speculation, but it must be kept in mind that the ideas of Paracelsus had a strong impact on the development of Western culture, though the extent of his influence still awaits research.

One of the first things that you notice about the Navi people is their size. They are approximately twice as big as the ordinary humans. They live in the thick forest, in brotherhood with all animals and plants. They are able to ‘fly’ by becoming one with their dragons and have developed a keen ability of falling from huge heights without really getting hurt.

All these characteristics made me think straight away of the mythology of the sylphs, originating in Paracelsus’ speculations. Paracelsus wrote a strange little work called ‘The Book of Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies and Salamanders and the Other Spirits’. According to the Book of Sylphs, there are spirits in nature which live in each of the four elements: water, fire, air and earth.

The water creatures are called undines (or nymphs), the fire ones salamanders, the air ones sylphs (or sylvesters) and the earth ones gnomes (aka pygmies). Each has its own characteristics and rapport with humans. Of all of these, the sylphs appear most humanly; Paracelsus informs us that they are ‘like men’ except they live in the forest, and are ‘cruder, coarser, longer and stronger’ than the human beings. They have intercourse with men, except, Paracelsus maintains in Renaissance vein, they have no soul since soul is reserved to human beings only. Otherwise, they don’t seem to differ very much from men: they work, eat, converse in similar ways to humans.

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Happy New Year to all. Since it is the beginning of the year, I thought I’d experiment a little and write from time to time some commentaries on esoteric ideas related to popular culture. And what better way to start than with a review of the movie Avatar.

While I was watching Avatar, the concept of mundus imaginalis coined by historian and philosopher Henri Corbin kept crossing my mind in regards to the world of Pandora. Mundus imaginalis  is, simply put, the world of imagination – a world we project out of our mind. To us today this may be a poetic expression, but to traditional esoteric thought, this world was as real as we are, an intermediary place between this world and the divine one. It was a place we could access in our dreams and visions by the aid of a so-called ‘third eye’.

It is a phenomenon of our contemporary imagination to present this spiritual world as more accessible. What could make us transcend the barrier between our mundane universe and this magical one? The answer often is: technology. In Avatar, we see that technology (of a very expensive and sci-fi kind) can turn Jake Sully into an avatar capable of interacting with the world of imagination, symbolized by Pandora’s Navi people. We can see technology facilitating the forbidden interaction between the elusive Navi and the human beings.

But how does this apology for avatar technology reconcile with the explicit denial of technology amongst the idealistic Navis? After all, the Navis reject all complex machines and prefer hunting with spears and arrows. The movie’s answer is, by differentiating between ‘good’ technology and ‘bad’ technology. The good technology is the ‘soft’ kind: the one of computers and complex systems. It is this technology that allows one to ascend to the forbidden world of the Navis. Remarkably this world, we learn, is built on the same principles as soft technology. Grace the scientist puts it plainly: the Home Tree is a neural network connecting all trees on the planet. And if that wasn’t clear enough, we have the very explicit image of the Navi ‘jacking in’ the planetary system with their hair (Naughty as I am, I briefly wondered why would Jack and the Navi girl need to have sex the usual human way when they seemed to make love through their hair just fine).

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It’s almost April Fools Day, and you should be either thinking of a prank or considering how to avoid being ‘fooled’. That’s because, on 1st of April, there are only two types of people out there: the pranksters and those being played a prank.

Nobody has been able to decipher the actual origin of April Fools Day. Theories abound from attributing it to the Bible and the Gregorian calendar change to the Holi festival in India, which has similar characteristics. You can read all about it in the Wikipedia article (1). I’m interested so much in where the celebration came from but why it survives to this day. What makes us still enjoy playing the April Fools game in this day-and-age?

Before answering that question, it is perhaps a good idea to look at the characteristics of this informal celebration. As we all know, it always occurs on the 1st of April, which is the first month of real spring (after the spring equinox) and used to represent the first day of the Julian New Year (2). Thus, it is a time of unclear, tentative beginnings, where things are not yet settled in their ordered pattern. The weather is still capricious, windy and cold; winter wrestles with the spring, and nothing is certain yet.

This time of disorder, uncertainty and ambiguity is an ideal period for the emergence of the ‘fool’. The fool is a person socially defined as ridiculous, inferior or incompetent (3) or, an unintelligent person, somebody considered to lack good sense or judgment (4). The fool is someone who is made fun at. We can see from these definitions that the fool is a role assigned by the others, or perhaps assumed by someone by himself or herself – it does not exist outside a social environment. Thus, a fool is ‘made’ (5). A good example of ‘making a fool’ is certainly the April Fool prank. The prankster seeks to prove the ‘prankee’ as a fool – a gullible or weak-minded person. If the ‘prankee’ falls for the joke, he has been made into fool.

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Before New Age, there was Spiritualism. Just like New Age, Spiritualism started as an American counterculture movement. Just like New Age, it was a spontaneous, ‘democratic’, unorganized form of belief that did not have religious hierarchy or sacred books, at least until very late. The vestiges of Spiritualism are still with us today: ghost sightings, poltergeists, haunted houses, possessed people, mediums etc. Movies like Ghost and the Sixth Sense are but the latest manifestations of a movement that sprang in the middle of the 19th century. Even though Spiritualism waned sometime between the two World Wars, beliefs in ghost manifestations have survived. After all, a 2006 Gallup Organization poll revealed that 32% of Americans believe in ghosts (1).

At the core of Spiritualist belief was the alleged phenomenon of ghost apparitions. The dead appeared to the living in organized sessions called séances, being channeled by human beings with special paranormal gifts called mediums. The pattern was laid out through the first séance that launched the Spiritualist craze, which took place in Hydesville, New York in 1848. The Fox sisters allegedly communicated with the spirit of a dead person which heralded a new era when “the spirits clothed in the flesh are to be more closely and more palpably connected with those who have put on immortality” (2). From there on, the Spiritualist movement spread like wildfire across the United States. Mediums appeared everywhere, organizing spectacular séances where noises (rappings), table turning, automatic writing, levitation, partial or total ghost materialization and others occurred. The democratic nature of séances attracted a great number of those disgruntled with organized religion as well as women seeking liberation from Victorian conventions (3).

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The other day, being hit with an annoying bout of cold, I was (re)reading a short treatise by the medieval Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi. Suggestively called “A Tale of the Western Exile”, the story follows the saga of a wisdom-seeker in the “Western” lands (1). In this story of esoteric initiation, the “West” stands as a negative symbol of materialism and bodily pleasure. Suhrawardi was heretic philosopher who was executed in 1191 by the Sultan. Yet, if you ask an average Middle Eastern man today, chances are that he will hold similar views regarding the West being decadently materialistic. The resilience of this perspective of the West coming from the East is remarkable. Yet the views of the West in Europe were often different. Let’s now briefly switch to another mythical tale, this time written on the other extremity of the medieval world, in Ireland. Here, the adventures of St Brendan tell us how the saint sailed to the fairy islands in the West. The voyage takes him to the borders of Christian paradise whence he must return (2). Here we have a dramatically different view of the West as a spiritual, if real, land of the blessed.

This over-simplistic analysis is not meant to say that the Westerners always looked to the West and Easterners to the East for salvation. Things are much more complicated than this, and they probably go to the core of what we feel about the cardinal points of East and West. They are obviously linked with the Sun’s path in the sky. In the East, the Sun is just rising, foretelling a new day. Hence the East is about renewal, hope, the promise of a new beginning. The West is the mysterious end – the unknown at the end of the road. The West is about death, afterlife, the latter times, and frequently about the hopes of earthly survival beyond natural death.

Indeed, the Greeks, Celts and other cultures viewed the West as the direction souls departed after death. Yet the good souls did not simply vanish, but would continue to dwell in the “Western” islands. Hence mythologies such as the Greek Islands of the Blessed and Avalon of the Britons focused on the existence of islands where dead souls continued on living. These islands were physical places in the people’s minds at the time: Christopher Columbus himself believed in the existence of St Brendan’s Island (3).

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