Esoteric Coffeehouse

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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Since last time I wrote about the Christian Kabbalah, I thought I’d briefly talk about the Jewish Kabbalah as well, with the caveat that I’m not an expert in this. My conclusions here come from reading mainly books and articles by the best scholars in Kabbalah – Gershom Scholem and Moshe Idel.

Based on my reading, I would generally divide the Kabbalah into three main categories: Sephirotic, Ecstatic and Lurianic. I will explain each of them in some detail below.

The Sephirotic, or Zoharic Kabbalah is that which is best known to modernity. It has been described as ‘theosophical-theurgical’ in the sense that it involves a complex cosmology and metaphysics, and it also involves a human effort of uniting the lower world to the upper one. The Sephirotic Kabbalah is almost exclusively the product of the Jewish diaspora (the Sephardic Jews) in the Spanish Middle Ages. Their supreme accomplishment is the Zohar, the Book of Splendor, written sometimes in the 13th century, presumably by the Kabbalist Moses de Leon.

According to the Zohar, and other writings, God is the Ein-Soph, the indefinable, indescribable divinity. Out of this infinity, He projects himself into three initial emanations, the first three Sephirot: Kether (Crown), Hochmah (Wisdom) and Binah (Understanding). These, in turn, produce the lower seven: Daat (Knowledge), Hesed (Mercy or Kindness), Gevurah (Strength or Power), Tipheret (Beauty), Netzach (Victory), Hod (Glory), Yesod (Foundation) and Malkuth (Kingdom or Monarchy). The emanations are dynamic and create a complex relationship amongst them – it is often said that the links are more important than the actual emanations.

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At the foundation of Christian Kabbalah stands one man: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the original enfant terrible of the European Renaissance. At the tender age of 23, in 1486, Pico wrote and sent to the Pope 900 Theses of theology and philosophy which he proposed to debate with anyone that wished to do so. To these he attached an introductory Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has become a classical statement of the Renaissance worldview. It is regrettable that today he is mostly remembered for this statement of human dignity rather than his other groundbreaking work.

Unfortunately for Pico, church officials were not in a mood for a debate with the young and dashing count, and instead proceeded to analyse the 900 Theses against the Catholic dogma. They found 13 propositions suspicious of heresy, and out of these, one in particular: “There is no science that assures us of the divinity of Christ than magic and the Cabala”. Pico agreed to retract the condemned theses, but later he published an Apology which pretty much re-affirmed all his ideas. This, of course, set the Pope on fire, and Pico had to flee to France to avoid imprisonment. After many other adventures, Pico settled back in Florence, where he died at only 31 years of age, apparently poisoned by a member of the famous house of Medici.

Pico has been called the disciple and pupil of the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. They shared an interest in Neoplatonic, Hermetic philosophy and magic, but Pico didn’t think those were enough. He was attracted to the mysterious art of the Kabbalah, whom Hebrew scholars were talking to him about.

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Today I want to talk about Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), the most famous (or infamous) Renaissance magician. He is the author of one of the well-known compendium of Renaissance esotericism, On the Occult Philosophy (or De Occulta Philosophia), which is still admired by people interested in magic today.

Agrippa was a German wanderer, much like his contemporary, Paracelsus. He traveled almost all his life between Germany, France and Italy, and switched professions just as easily as he switched countries. He was a theologian, a lawyer, a physician and a hired soldier. He claimed to have acquired both a law and medicine degree In the meantime, he wrote revolutionary treatises on Renaissance magic, the vanity of knowledge, the status of women in society and Virgin Mary. Most of these he refrained to publish until late in his life.

Agrippa was an unconventional scholar; for instance, in an era when women were seen as inferior and even instruments of the devil, he affirmed that they were in fact superior to men and more spiritual than them. His defense of the female sex caused quite a sensation in the period. In his De Vanitate Scientiarium, On the Vanity of all Sciences, he rejected all forms of knowledge as empty and purposeless. Even today scholars of Agrippa’s works are baffled by his universal rejection of knowledge. He was certainly an unusual iconoclast, an unique character that built and destroyed all at once.

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Not many people liked Paracelsus during his lifetime, and even after his death his somewhat shady reputation followed him into the modern era. He was not a shy Copernicus who only published his discoveries after his death, or a reluctant Galileo who admitted his faults in front of the Inquisition. It was only too lucky for him that the Inquisition was not in full force then. As it was, he lived his life as a perpetual gypsy, until he found his untimely and somewhat mysterious death in Salzburg, now Austria.

Nowadays, when chemistry, biology or medicine look back at him, they find themselves at odds on how to integrate this pivotal figure in their textbooks. It is clear that Paracelsus was instrumental in changing the nature of medicine and ‘chemistry’ (then it was simply alchemy), but he did so in his idiosyncratic ways. Paracelsus was not a scientist, nor could he have been in that age; science as we now call it dates from the late 17th or even the 18th century. His methods and intentions were far too different to those of the later science, and no attempt at ‘recuperating’ Paracelsus for science would actually work. Hence, most scientific textbooks either avoid him or mention him for having destroyed the Galenic-Aristotelian worldview.

This was no mean feat in itself, and only Paracelsus’ ambiguous image probably prevented him from being hailed as a revolutionary of the likes of Copernicus, Galileo or Newton. Surely, the astronomical revolution was spectacular through its change of the paradigm of the earth as the centre of the universe. However, Paracelsus’ efforts of challenging the view of the composition and structure of the universe were also grandiose projects.

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