[WARNING: A dictionary may come in handy in deciphering this post.]

It is a remarkably odd thing to find myself saying, but I sometimes feel that I've figured out just enough to know that there's something absolutely amazing going on that I haven't quite got a handle on yet. There are so very many dots, and so few lines connecting them..... The result is a florid imagination that loves to wander freely through everything that could be true, but probably isn't.

Let us wander, then, you and I, through a garden of unconnected and unrelated facts, and let me weave you a daisy-chain of weird tales.

Let's start with a metaphor. If you look into the careers of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, you will find them involved, jointly or singly, with the beat generation, with the hippies and yippies, with punk, hip-hop, and rave culture, with grungy slackers... which is to say that the outward presentation of something should never blind us to its inner meaning. The outer presentation may, in many cases, be entirely disposible, or even misleading. To say that the Grateful Dead and the Residents (or, for that matter, the Mentors) were pursuing incompatible missions is to ignore the fact that, so far as anyone knows, they may have been the same people.

For example - and not the one motivating this post - it is a singular and highly significant fact (which the reader may confirm for herself) that occult, esoteric, and Hermetic literature has a great deal of content related to indirect and covert communication. One can hardly find an occult handbook without some system of secret writing or sacred alphabet - from the runes, which remain popular among pagan revivalist types, to the peculiar illuminist ciphers included for no directly discernible reason in the Illuminatus! trilogy. Elements of the Kabbalah may be read this way, insofar as gematria, temurah, and notarikon amount to ways of overloading a text with additional and exoterically invisible meanings. One may imagine a persecuted people to have reasons for developing systems for the transmission of private matters by private means.

Or: Perhaps occultism has nothing to do with the supernatural.

For example, consider the extensive use of complex, and generally unexplained, allegorical symbols in alchemical illustrations and insignia. One may consider diagrams such as Maier's as rebuses, or even hieroglyphics. Why go to such trouble to cloak matters of metallurgy and proto-chemistry?

One may ask: who needs to keep secrets? One may start ticking off groups: smugglers, syndicates, spies, undercover police, drug users and distributors, the persecuted and unpopular, homosexuals, heretics, 1337 |-|@xrs, revolutionaries, saboteurs, black ops agents, assassains, provocateurs... Of course, we think of cryptography as a neutral field - a branch of mathematics, nowadays, and much of it pursued openly and collaboratively, and yet - why would anyone, operating in secret, share their techniques for maintaining secrecy? As Burroughs said [paraphrasing here], a definitive glossary of furtive speech can never be written.

Regardless of motive, this ongoing concern dovetails nicely with the occultists' other fascinations: the interpretation of natural appearances to reveal hidden meanings and the operation of subtle or hidden forces (as in astrology); the use and exploration of symbolism generally; the rather poetic interpretation of daily life through myth and archetype; and a persistent use of specific and meaningful objects - remains, altars, incenses and herbs, ritual garb, candles, wands and athames... Occultism is a hermeneutic orgy.

A. O. Spare's magic(k)al system includes the compression of ideas into sigils - single images made by the efficient rearrangement of the original words and signifiers the magician is concerned with. This idea of condensed significance emerges in many contexts.

Crowley published a massive index, 777, which allows the correlation of numbers, letters, and an astonishing array of other signifiers, and their significateds - flowers, stones, colors, odors, shapes, the gods of many pantheons, tarot cards, astrological entities, etc. A room intended for ceremonial magic(k), in this way, can become a densely-packed text by virtue of it's decoration and furnishings. His writings, unsurprisingly, require an enormous amount of exegesis to fully unravel. Oddly enough, he was accused of working as a spy, though for whom is, itself, a matter for debate. Similar accusations dogged Madame Blavatsky, whose Theosophical Society included a surprisingly large number of people involved in the Irish and Indian revolts against imperial British rule. Semi-theosophist Alice Bailey also wrote sympathetically of national liberation movements.

Speaking of spies, John Dee - who in collaboration with Edward Kelly either discovered or created or refined the system of Enochian magic, so-called, including the Enochian language, which features an alphabet and a number of rather comical words - has also been alleged to have been not only Elizabeth's astrologer, but also Her Majesty's spy (or as they are sometimes called, "diplomat"). His crypto-designation: 007. Believe it or not.

The masons, of course, extend the treatment of cryptic communication to such brilliant media as clothing and accessories (and their arrangements), postures, gestures, and, notoriously, handshakes. Their ability to continually discover new and more refined messages encoded in their rituals would put most students of liturgy to shame.

Returning to espionage for a moment, spies themselves have a rich (and, one presumes, largely untold) history of finding ridiculously indirect means of communication - spy novelists, perhaps moreso. A want ad in the newspaper reads "Found: a red bicycle, by the railroad crossing at Front street and Sixth. Please contact via this paper." This means that the Russian double-agent they are trying to turn will do so for no less than a half-million dollars. If the bicycle had been green, he would settle more cheaply. There is a car crash near the football stadium. We must pull our observers out of the local FBI office. If it had been near the hockey rink, it would be safe to proceed as usual. Outkast release a new single - it stays on the charts three weeks. Ah, but if had been five... And if it had been in 3/4 time... Did you tally up the number of censored words in the radio version? Is there gum stuck under the coffee table or not?

Burroughs, again, was fantastically consumed by the Mayan priesthood and its hieroglyphics (see Ah Pook is Here), and by the development of ways to convey complex ideas through images (see The Book of Breething). This last, in part because of the non-sequential mode in which an image is taken in, as opposed to an alphabetic text.

There is something sublime in all this - a sort of aesthetic of obfuscation and encoding, and also a fantasy of a more refined form of conversation. We can imagine a unified system in which every aspect of one's behavior, speech, clothing, home decor, employment choices, hairstyle - all have a meaning. (Hanky codes, anyone?) We almost might learn to judge people's degree of refinement by their ability to convey something without appearing to say anything at all.

And there is also another, higher code - with the additional merit that it literally and absolutely cannot be broken. This is summed up by the old cliche ("cliche" is a French word meaning "truth") that true communication is only possible between equals. Or, as "Bob" used to say: "There are two types of people in the world: those who Get It, and those who don't. If the meaning of this is not immediately clear to you, count yourself among the latter." (I think there are at least five plausible ways of taking that... Get it?)

Wittgenstein says, in the front matter of his Tractatus, words to the effect that only those who have already thought through the issues at hand along the lines that he has, and who have drawn the conclusions he has, will understand his exposition of those ideas. And, certainly, if you were to hand his book to someone without both the relevant background and the relevant capacity, it looks like gibberish.

I have also known people to be dismissed as fools or lunatics for the simple reason that they never talked down to others but said directly and without mystification, exactly what was on their minds. One might as well recite UNIX source code to a penguin. If it thought anything, it might very well think that you were doing a piss-poor job of being a penguin.

This is, I think, not strictly a matter of education or intellect, though. Sometimes it is simply a matter of not doing something that, when you do it, makes you oblivious - like, say, being obstinate, or cowardly, or inflexible, or dishonest. Like these, but not necessarily these. Since I seem to be pretty Damned ignorant, we may suppose that, whatever it is, I'm still doing it, too.

So, what looks like nonsense to the hypothetical "man on the street"? (What does anything look like to a hypothetical man?) Dada, surrealism, modern art and literature generally, most recent theoretical physics... Well, okay, we get that. Please note that the man in question can't explain why these things are nonsense, because (1) he doesn't know logic, either, and (2) he has no idea what they are saying at all, but mostly (3) his framework, being more restricted than the frameworks he is trying to unravel, can be explained by them, but he in turn can't explain them.

But let's strive onward. What looks like nonsense to folks who do understand all of the above? A prime candidate: Zen - records of conversations and other encounters between notorious Zen practitioners are quite opaque to outsiders - I suppose Enlightenment is the ultimate secret handshake.

Alan Watts related a story of the typical young monk / old monk genre. The old monk asks for the meaning of a passage, or perhaps of a concept or a technical term. The young monk answers that the countryside, the air, and they themselves are all nothing but the body of the Buddha. The old monk replies, "Of course; but it's a shame to say so."

In the end, mysticism always converges on the same punchline - you can get there, but you can't get there by going straight forward.

 

Tags: Pedantry ; Lies ; Freemasonry ; Espionage ; Occult ; Philosophy