The Apophenion: A Chaos Magick Paradigm - Peter J. Carroll 2008

Neopantheism - DIY Religion

This chapter looks at possible ingredients for non-insane DIY religion. It begins with a demolition of the whole idea of objective truth in theology and seeks an Apophenia in the Neo-Pantheist concept of a personal mythology and narrative.

Part 1.

Against Logos, 'The Literal Word'

Some people have a mystical capability. They can find awe and wonder in the natural world or in the astonishing phenomena of consciousness itself, or simply in the fact that they, or indeed anything at all, or anyone else, actually exists. Others only seem to have a religious capability. They just want some answers to the big questions to believe in, and they will accept any absurdity rather than uncertainty.

Of all our instincts the religious one seems particularly vulnerable to our profound suggestibility. All too easily it gets subverted for the purposes of social and political control, or simply to make a living for wicked old men.

Most of the religion that litters our planet seems indistinguishable from mental illness.

It blinds people to the enormity and variety of the universe and themselves, it tends to narrow rather than to expand horizons, it takes myth and metaphor for literal truth, it values faith over evidence, and it seeks to impose certainty where open mindedness has more to offer.

If any individual in isolation developed a series of beliefs and behaviours equivalent in their irrationality to most of the main religions, everyone else would regard them as deranged. Let's try it:

How about a prophet or a messiah born from the anus of a man for a change? That sounds like a suitably impressive and contra-intuitive miracle. The great Sky God sent his emissary to us by this means to remind us that He creates universes out of black holes. Devotees must of course carry a symbol of the sacred 'O' ring at all times. A whole elaborate morality thus depends on the correct and incorrect uses of the anus. On feast days we celebrate its functioning, on fast days its functioning becomes punishable with burning stakes. On judgement day only the worthy will squirm through the great black sphincter in the sky, but the rest will spend eternity in a great boiling sea of, - well I guess you can fill in the theological details.

Of course this sounds deranged, yet it has about as much coherence as any organised religion, and when millions of people come to believe in it we will have to respect their beliefs or they will become very angry and probably very violent if they gain secular power. Anusites will crush the unbelievers, apostates and blasphemers!

Indeed they will take a dim view of anyone who rejects The Word of the Black Hole.

We can never know for sure in what sense the ancients believed in their gods. Did they believe in Logos type gods that really existed in some objective way as actual independent entities, or did they believe in them in the Mythos style, as metaphorical principles to explain the world and the human heart?

The belief mode of the ancient Egyptians remains obscure because their hieroglyphs do not submit to unambiguous interpretation, and they seem to have lacked the vocabulary for abstract thought, as we know it. Perhaps this in itself provides a clue as to how they thought. Mythos and Logos seem indistinguishable in what we can make of their inscriptions. Maybe they lived and breathed and thought entirely in one mode and expressed themselves exclusively in mythological terms. We often forget that the religion(s) of ancient Egypt spanned millenniums and a huge serpentine territory. Individual ancient Egyptians would only have venerated a small selection of the gods now known to us.

The classical Greeks however present a different picture. Plato made a clear distinction between logos and mythos style thinking and it seems likely that the majority of noted thinkers in ancient Greece probably regarded the myths and stories of the gods as metaphorical truths and explanations rather than as actual literal truths.

The peasantry however may have taken such tales literally but in small doses particular to certain areas only. The entire classical Greek pantheon looks like a huge family tree of fornicating and squabbling deities with ever more ludicrous stories attached, and surely no scholar familiar with too broad a swathe of it could have taken it all at literal face value. The flowering of abstract non-mythological thought in the golden age of Greece, which contributed so much to art, mathematics, philosophy, politics and science, could hardly have come about in a culture dominated exclusively by mythos style thinking. When the ancient Egyptians discovered something useful by accident the knowledge invariably became incorporated into their mythology. If the ancient Greeks discovered something by experiment they often allowed it to stand on its own as a non-theological idea.

Roman civilisation represents a bit of a setback in many ways. It took the Greek religion on rather uncritically and it failed to adopt many of the insights in Greek philosophy. Disastrously it failed to adopt Greek mathematics although it still managed to build an awesome bureaucracy and hence an effective army filled by state equipped peasant levies rather than by self equipped aristocrats.

Historians advance many reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire. Undoubtedly it suffered from imperial overstretch, dynastic power struggles, and military problems with barbarian cavalry, but it also ran into severe religious and philosophical problems. The Romans attempted to amalgamate the religions of conquered peoples with their own, and as Rome became more cosmopolitan it imported foreign cults wholesale. The cult of Mithras became popular in the army; and cults of Isis appeared in the cities. Rome itself ended up swarming with the priesthoods of various deities along with every kind of soothsayer, diviner, prophet and magician.

Out of this confusing and increasingly incredible stew of paradigms one particular religion of Hebraic origin evolved to eventual dominance and then eliminated all opposition with an iron fist. At the Council of Nicea 325AD the empire set its beliefs in concrete forever. Before that, huge differences of opinion existed between various vaguely Christian groups around the empire.

Only one god existed. It created the entire universe. It required worship. It required obedience. All other religions were wrong. Mythos style thinking ends here with the adoption of the Hebraic idea of the literal and absolute objective truth of a written religious corpus.

At the Council of Nicea the assembled worthies decided on exactly which written texts would constitute The Truth. They had plenty to choose from, and they had to discard most of the material available to them.

This stood in violent contrast to paganism which had no absolute texts at all, but had oral or written stories which it could elaborate on or alter or interpret according to taste and usefulness.

One might argue that the Roman Empire never really fell, it merely switched from mainly military to mainly religious methods of control and within a few hundred years it actually controlled more territory by the latter method.

The new Logocentric monotheism with its insistence on the literal truth of The Word of its scriptures not only discouraged mythological thinking, but it also discouraged reasoned enquiry into any other form of truth but its own. Logos in the sense which Plato intended it, the enquiry into reality by reason, lay dormant for centuries, a period which we now call the Dark Ages. During that period another intensely Logocentric monotheism arose in the Arabian Peninsula and it used exactly the same technique, a Sacred and Absolutely True book.

It took Christendom many centuries to begin to extricate itself from the idea of a fundamentally true logocentric religion and start to apply reasoning to the natural world instead of theological matters. The process seems to have begun in the renaissance with the rediscovery of Greek ideas. The invention of the printing press sparked off the reformation which helped a bit, but the Enlightenment took a long time coming. Even today some people in westernised nations seek a retreat into fundamentalism whilst many cultures of the third major monotheism remain mired in it.

Note that Logos style thinking underlies both the idea of literal truth in religion and objective truth in the material world. The results of Logos style thinking depend on whether you apply it to belief or to observation, and so do the results of Mythos style thinking. We can arrange these ideas graphically to see what paradigms result:-

Figure 1.9

The terms 'Magic' and 'Pantheism' have a rather looser and more inclusive usage than normal in this scheme. Magic includes more or less any attempt to use mythos style thinking about the observed phenomena of the world and it thus includes astrology and alchemy. Pantheism refers to the mythological/analogical attitude to belief and could in theory include polytheism or monotheism. Note that Fundamentalism can include polytheistic fundamentalism as well as the more common monotheistic fundamentalism.

Figure 1 represents a graph, and various schools of thought can occupy areas anywhere in the quadrants

My average compatriot in these British Isles has a paradigm footprint or 'psychogram' consisting of a blob centred roughly on the origin where the axes cross.

Such a hypothetical person has a general feeling that an objective reality open to rational analysis actually exists (Science). Nevertheless this person has a vague intuition that fate and intent can play a part in life (Magic). Notwithstanding this, such a person has a head full of archetypes, celebrities and narratives (Pantheism). Lastly, when it comes to the big questions of life, existence, and death, the average person usually maintains that 'There Must Be Something' (Fundamentalism).

Other cultures and individuals and schools of thought will obviously have quite different paradigm footprints or psychograms on the figure shown.

Chaoist philosophy in general, usually has an epicentre focussed on the lower left quadrant. It regards existence as basically random and chaotic but subject to the possibilities of Psychic and Physical anticipation and manipulation, and to manipulation by Belief. Thus it has tendrils extending into the Science and Pantheism quadrants. Chaoist philosophers conspicuously avoid the upper right quadrant, the domain of the Sky Fairies, the mainly monotheist gods and devils, and the whole associated plethora of other 'literally real' spirits.

The Sky Fairy quadrant differs from the others in that faith alone maintains its paradigm in the absence of evidence. Science either makes material things happen, or gets it wrong. Magic either gives useful results or it doesn't. Pantheism either supplies an agreeable narrative to live by or it fails to do so.

Fundamentalism on the other hand makes a virtue of contra-intuitive and contra-evidential faith. Indeed, only irrational beliefs can actually work for a 'literal' religion because people will not make emotional investments in defence of perfectly obvious truisms, only in defence of highly questionable ones. Faith exists only in the context of a continual internal dialogue with doubt.

Favourite topics for contra -evidential faith usually revolve around such absurdities as that you will live happily for ever whilst bad people will get their just deserts in eternal hell, and that you will get all the things you wanted in this life but didn't get, after you're dead.

Faith needs to fail to deliver the goods most of the time to attract investment of thought and emotion in it. Faith abhors blasphemy and fears apostasy because these raise those very doubts which the faithful spend so much time suppressing with ritual and prayer. Prayer basically consists of talking yourself into believing something you understand as rationally false, and then asking it for the occasional favour.

So where does the widespread idea of literally real gods and spirits come from?

It comes from the same 'theory of mind' facility that has evolved to equip us with a working hypothesis about the existence of minds in other people, (and animals), and a self-image.

Do other people actually exist? Well they exist to the extent that we either invite them into our heads or they manage to force their way in. Friends, family and colleagues may have more reality for us than people that we have not met, but politicians, celebrity figures from the media, characters in novels and comic books, people appearing in dramas and entertainment, personal heroes, all these have some sort of existence for us. Note the deliberate mixture of fake and genuine, real and imaginary, and dead and alive characters here. I describe anyone I've not actually met as 'imaginary'. (Only lunch can translate imaginary people into real people.)

Out of such experiences we build our own identities by a process of dialogue and accretion. We listen to real people and absorb their attitudes and mannerisms but we also do this with 'imaginary' people in all the various media of oral stories, art, theatre, books, radio, film and television etc. Afterwards as we reflect on our experiences of real and imaginary people we find ourselves using theory of mind on them and they acquire a reality of sorts inside our own heads.

Unfortunately our suggestibility can easily derail this highly useful ability, particularly when the suggestion gets applied heavily in youth with the full force that a culture can bring to bear. For much of history people have grown up with alarmingly large parasites living inside their minds, Monarchs, Emperors, Gods, High Priests, Dictators, and Gurus.

Unsurprisingly all of these characters have striven to control the media of the cultures in which they live. They want precise control of their own personality cult, and they don't want any competition. The growth of uncensored and uncontrolled media has done a great deal to weaken the hold of the major parasites on people's minds in democratic countries, but elsewhere, tight control of the media has strengthened it.

In a relatively free country you can fill your head with a vast selection of real and imaginary people with radically different identities, and end up with a much larger self image, or you can retreat into dialogue with something simpler like a single god or personality cult figure. In many traditional cultures and in some recent and contemporary hard-line religious or political states, you either believe in the god or demagogue or suffer serious consequences.

Perhaps for the first time in history we live in a world where a substantial fraction of humanity has freedom of belief, and hardly knows what to do with it.

Some adopt a fundamentalism or a single-issue cause or creed to create self-definition, others just seem to wander around lost in the cosmos with no metaphor for self, squandering their belief on one fad or fashion after the other in postmodernist style. Some seem to define themselves entirely by their relationships to other people, and to consist of nothing internally. They have to remain constantly engaged either socially or with 'imaginary' people from the media, or they practically cease to exist in their own minds.

As one exasperated monotheist observed, 'when people cease to believe in god, they will believe in anything', but this begins to look more like the solution than the problem.

Postmodernist, Post-monotheist culture has yet to formally explicate its ideal spirituality, although we can observe many preliminary attempts to achieve this from the New-Age movement, to Neo-Paganism, and Chaos Magic.

Despite their varied degrees of emphasis on transcendence, philosophy, and occultism, all three of these new traditions exhibit a strong current of Neo-Pantheism.

As advanced cultures pass out of a monotheist aeon rendered untenable by scientific thought, and as atheistic or nihilistic scientific positivism and modernism become progressively more questionable, Neo-Pantheism takes their place as the spirituality of choice for the dawning Fifth Aeon.¹⁰

Both Fundamentalism and Science have started to develop a profound and vitriolic hatred of Neo-Pantheism, and in doing so they have helped to define it. We can take that as a sure sign of the threat that it poses to them both.

Historically, the word Pantheism has covered a variety of beliefs,

That some sort of divine force manifests in all things,

That various gods and spirits pervade all aspects of the universe,

That god remains indistinguishable from nature, and does not consist of a person,

That the universe as a whole has consciousness, or life, or something like that.

Thus Pantheism has a long history, and it has tended to shadow orthodox thought as a species of mysticism for millennia. The emerging Neo-Pantheism of the fifth aeon has many manifestations and little orthodoxy, but nevertheless it has a number of recurrent themes which reflect its Mythos style of Belief. Perhaps it will eventually replace most existing religions. It certainly looks like a spiritual product that has evolved to meet contemporary needs.

Part 2.

Neo-Pantheism

At least eight themes seem to characterise the emerging Neo-Pantheism.

I will present them here in their most extreme expression; few Neopanths except the hardcore mystics accept all of them in this uncompromising form. Many New -Age theorists subscribe to rather hazy or dilute forms of them, whilst some Neo-Pagans have sought to create fundamentalisms all of their own.

1) Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted

This phrase of course intentionally contradicts itself in multiple ways, to create some amusing paradoxes. We could equally well express the implied meaning as;

Everything is True, but only for a given value of Truth.

This does not reflect contempt for reason; rather it reflects an intuition that all truths remain provisional and context dependent.

When it comes to choice of extant religions, Neopantheists often find some sympathy for elements of Hinduism, Paganism, Shamanism and certain forms Mahayana Buddhism. Mainly because they can find plenty of useful symbolism, a wealth of psychological and physiological techniques and a flexible attitude to dogma and paradigm within all of these, despite some of the unpleasant customs in the cultures in which they arose.

Neopantheists usually hold contemptuous views of the three Abrahamic monotheisms. They regard anything that defines itself as absolutely true as obviously false.

If they do have an interest in the abrahamic traditions it usually comes down to looking for allegorical, metaphorical, or heretical material in Kabbala, the Essene mysticism, Gnosticism, and the suppressed gospels and apocrypha.

A similar attitude pertains to science. The best scientific thought always remains provisional and open to improvement or falsification, the worst easily descends to dogma and an absolutism all of its own. Science can only ever make things possible; it cannot in principle prove the impossibility of anything. Neopantheists tend to look upon science as a source of possibility, validation waiting to happen, and ideas often worth borrowing

2) Belief and Intent create Reality

This simple phrase reveals the one and only 'Secret' of magic, mysticism, and all varieties of 'positive thinking'. It's not absolutely true of course. We inhabit a random universe and we cannot always make all of it do exactly what we like. However it works so astonishingly well for much of the time that only fools ignore it. If you don't believe this, then try negative thinking for a while and see where that gets you.

Of course it takes courage and imagination and discipline to develop the beliefs and intents to change a situation, but of all these, imagination needs enticement and encouragement first in the quest for personal empowerment. Thus whilst Neopantheists recognise belief as a tool rather than as an end in itself (faith) they may nevertheless select beliefs which appeal to their imagination and stimulate it further, ritualistically acting out the belief 'as if' true.

3) Alchemy

Nobody believes in Alchemy these days, or do they?

Medieval alchemists seem to have had a variety of agendas. Some simply sought to make gold from other metals and generally failed because they could not concentrate enough energy on their starting materials, although they did discover much about metallurgy and chemistry in the process. Others sought transmutation in a more esoteric sense and tried to turn their own base natures into spiritual gold, they seem to have obtained mixed results although many of them discovered the importance of the Chymical Marriage, the inclusion of the feminine perspective, and worked with a Sorror Mystica, a mystical sister or wife.

Many other alchemists sought medicinal objectives from increased vitality to immortality. Some accidentally achieved quite the reverse effect with heavy metal poisoning, but others seem to have discovered the astonishing effects of what we now recognise as placebo or intent based medicine. The apparent absence of anything materially effective to the scientific view in alternative medicine treatments does not discourage Neopantheists. They delight in the principle of intent and devise analogical or immaterial theories of their own to bolster belief. As you might expect, alternative health practices often fail to perform well in scientifically controlled situations. They need to function as a package on their own terms, snake bones, crystals and all, if necessary.

When conventional medicine administers placebos with full medical ritual the results frequently show better outcomes than those of 'actual' treatments, particularly with medication.

4 The Female Perspective

It seems presumptuous for a male to attempt to define what the female perspective consists of. Nevertheless neopantheism values intuition as much as logic, dreams as much as waking thoughts, psychic experience as much as rational analysis, empathy and compassion and as much as disinterested objectivity, the goddess archetype as much as the god. The neopantheist rejection of the logocentric fundamentalisms with their male monotheist deities and their almost invariably male priesthoods mirrors its sympathy for the female perspective.

5 Synchronicity and Meaning

Neopantheists rely on their personal experiential definitions of reality rather than subscribe to societally sanctioned opinion about what constitutes reality and what doesn't. Thus if a superstition gives good results it gets reused, and coincidence rarely gets dismissed as mere coincidence. We spend most of our lives trying to engineer coincidence between intent and actuality. So if a synchronicity appears spontaneously we should consider interpreting it as an affirmation of deep intent, or a warning from the subconscious. Such 'magical thinking' often attracts the derision of scientifically schooled minds, but magical thinking often produces excellent results when you have exhausted the possibilities of common sense.

6 Sky Fairies or Psi Fairies?

Do gods, demons, spirits, elementals, and discarnate intelligences actually exist?

Well, YES and NO, and YES again, to most Neopantheists.

YES, in the psychological sense that people's gods and demons often do much of the talking in social interaction anyway. So they can pass from person to person.

So we manufacture such phenomena, but they also manufacture us. As biological and social and partially psychic organisms, we consist of bits and pieces from all over.

NO, panpsychism recognises that every phenomenon has consciousness to some degree from the simple consciousness of an atom to the complex consciousness of a brain, but as consciousness consists of a property of material phenomena then it cannot exist in entirely discarnate form.

YES, in the sense that parapsychology and quantum connections allow consciousnesses to effect each other across space and time. Thus in a sense the laws of nature comprise simple and powerful discarnate spirits. Thoughts can act as discarnate spirits also, but generally with less ubiquitous effect.

Sky-fairies in the logos sense exist only inside people's heads, but Psi-fairies, projected from one consciousness to another can create effects analogous to spirits in the classical sense.

7 Personal Narrative and Mythos

Ask most modern westernised people about themselves and they usually reply by describing what they do in terms of profession and interests. They usually lack metaphors for their self or selves although some will reply with some expression of a basic inner metaphor, like I'm a Christian or I'm a Capricorn.

Neopantheists on the other hand prefer an elaborate and extensive personal narrative and mythos. For example, Mercury conjunct with Pluto in Taurus, a Crow as Clan Animal, several half remembered Past Lives, a Spirit Guide, four servitors, a mission to rediscover Atlantean wisdom, and a range of possible future incarnations in mind, plus at least another six impossible things before breakfast.

All this doubtless seems quite deranged to the logocentric mind, but neopantheists would reply that if you are going to have an inner life then you may as well have a large and flexible one and an extensive vocabulary to explore it with.

Who would choose a prosaic inner life, when they could live one of poetry instead?

Magical Thinking of course qualifies you as 'mad' in terms of our current orthodox cultural paradigm. However it merely qualifies you as 'technically inept' if you cannot make it work, within the neopantheist paradigm.

8 Cosmic Holism and Transcendence

Does the universe as a whole; exhibit any kind of consciousness that we can interact with?

Does the universe seek to evolve greater complexity and more sophisticated consciousnesses?

Could it use some help from us in this?

Do all species seem worth preserving regardless of their economic value to us?

Does some mysterious circularity in time connect consciousness and the very existence of the universe?

Most Neopantheists like to think so.

Dice worlds,

Fractal self-similarity

From Quantum to Cosmos*

*Indeterminacy in the orthogonal components of angular momentum. She does spin dice!