Plato himself represented a relatively new tradition, one that sought to analyze and classify events rather than "merely" experience or imitate them. He spoke for the notion that subject was not object, and that the proper function of the former was to inspect and evaluate the latter. This perception could never take place if subject and object were merged in the act of knowing; or, to be more precise, if they never diverged to begin with. In the poetic tradition, the basic learning process was a sensual experience. In contrast, the Socratic dictum "know thyself" posited a deliberately nonsensual type of knowing.
Plato's work thus marks the canonization of the subject/object distinction in the West. Increasingly, the Greek began to see himself as an autonomous personality apart from his acts; as a separate consciousness rather than a series of moods. Poetry, to Plato, spoke of contradictory experiences, decribed a "many-aspect man" of inconsistent traits and perceptions. Plato's own psychological ideal was that of an individual organized around a center (ego), using his will to control his instinct and thereby unify his psyche. Reason thus becomes the essence of personality, and is characterized by distancing oneself from phenomena, maintaining one's identity. Poetry, mimesis, the whole Homeric tradition, on the other hand, involves identification with the actions of other people and things -- the surrendering of identity. For Plato, only the abolition of this tradition could create the situation in which a subject perceives by confronting separate objects. Whereas the Jews saw participating consciousness as sin, Plato saw it as pathology, the archenemy of the intellect. At bottom, says Havelock, Platonism "is an appeal to substitute a conceptual discourse for an imagistic one."6
Of course, Plato did not have his victory overnight. As Owen Barfield points out, original participation, knowledge via imagery rather than concepts, survived in the West down to the Scientific Revolution. Throughout the Middle Ages men and women continued to see the world primarily as a garment they wore rather than a coUection of discrete objects they confronted. Yet the mimetic tradition was severely attenuated from Plato's time on, for some form of objectivity was now present; and it was chiefly the alchemical and magical tradition that attempted to demonstrate how limited this objectivity was.
The "Hermetic wisdom," as it has been called, was in effect dedicated to the notion that real knowledge occurred only via the union of subject and object, in a psychic-emotional identification with images rather than a purely intellectual examination of concepts. As indicated, this outlook had been the essential consciousness of Homeric and pre-Homeric Greece. In the following analysis of the Renaissance and medieval world views, then, it will be understood that premodern consciousness was located, mentally speaking, somewhere between pre-Homeric consciousness and the objective outlook of seventeenth-century Europe. With the Scientific Revolution, the considerable remnants of original participation were finally ousted, and this process constituted a significant episode in the history of Western consciousness.
The sixteenth century was an unusual period in European intellectual history, one that witnessed a vigorous revival, or resurfacing, of the occult sciences, which church Aristotelianlsm had successfully kept out of sight during the Middle Ages. Yet despite its vast differences from medieval Aristotelianism, the alchemical world view had in fact permeated medieval consciousness to a significant degree. Aristotle's doctrine of natural place and motion, for example, was part of the magical doctrine of sympathy, that like knows like; and the notion that the excitement of "homecoming" causes a body in free-fall to accelerate as it nears the earth is certainly an expression of participating consciousness. Furthermore, the highly repetitive and meditative nature of alchemical operations (grinding, distilling, and so on), which would induce altered states of consciousness through a prolonged narrowing of attention, was duplicated in hundreds of medieval craft techniques such as stained glass, weaving, calligraphy, metalworking, and the illumination of manuscripts. In general, medieval life and thought were significantly affected by animistic and Hermetic notions, and to some extent can be discussed as a unified consciousness.7
What were the common denominators of that consciousness? What did knowledge consist of, given the epistemological framework of sixteenth-century Europe? In a word, in the recognition of resemblance.8 The world was seen as a vast assemblage of correspondences. All things have relationships with all other things, and these relations are ones of sympathy and antipathy. Men attract women, lodestones attract iron, oil repels water, and dogs repel cats. Things mingle and touch in an endless chain, or rope, vibrated (wrote Della Porta in "Natural Magic") by the first cause, God. Things are also analogous to man in the famous alchemical concept of the microcosm and the macrocosm: the rocks of the earth are its bones, the rivers its veins, the forests its hair and the cicadas its dandruff. The world duplicates and reflects itself in an endless network of similarity and dissimilarity. It is a system of hieroglyphics, an open book "bristling with written signs."
How, then, does one know what goes with what? The key, as one might imagine, consists in deciphering those signs, and was appropriately termed the "doctrine of signatures." "Is it not true," wrote the sixteenth-century chemist Oswald Croll, "that all herbs, plants, trees and other things issuing from the bowels of the earth are so many magic books and signs?" Through the stars, the Mind of God impressed itself on the phenomenal world, and thus knowledge had the structure of divination, or augury. The word "divination" should be taken literally: finding the Divine, participating in the Mind that stands behind the appearances. Croll gives as one example the "fact" that walnuts prevent head ailments because the meat of the nut resembles the brain in appearance. Similarly, a man's face and hands must resemble the soul to which they are joined, a concept retained in palmistry even as it is practiced today, and in the common proverb (in many langnages) that "the eyes are the windows of the soul."
One of the clearest expositions of the doctrine of signatures is found in the work of the great Renaissance magician Agrippa von Nettesheim, his "De Occulta Philosophia" of 1533.9 In chapter 33 of this book he writes:
All Stars have their peculiar natures, properties, and conditions, the Seals and Characters whereof they produce, through their rays, even in these inferior things, viz., in elements, in stones, in plants, in animals, and their members; whence every natural thing receives, from a harmonious disposition and from its star shining upon it, some particular Seal, or character, stamped upon it; which Seal or character is the significator of that star, or harmonious disposition, containing in it a peculiar Virtue, differing from other virtues of the same matter, both generically, specifically, and numerically. Every thing, therefore, hath its character pressed upon it by its star for some particular effect, especially by that star which doth principally govern it.
Given this system of knowledge, modern distinctions between inner and outer, psychic and organic (or physical), do not exist. If you wish to promote love, says Agrippa, eat pigeons; to obtain courage, lions' hearts. A wanton woman, or charismatic man, possesses the same virtue as a lodestone, that of attraction.10 Diamonds, on the other hand, weaken the lodestone, and topaz weakens lust. Everything thus bears the mark of the Creator, and knowledge, says Agrippa, consists of "a certain participation," a (sensuous) sharing in His Divinity. This is a world permeated with meaning, for it is according to these signatures that everything belongs, has a place. "There is nothing found in the whole world," he writes, "that hath not a spark of the virtue [of the world soul]." "Every thing hath its determinate and particular place in the exemplary world."
During his lifetime Agrippa was branded a charlatan and conjurer, and as we have noted, magic and Hermeticism were in continual conflict with the church. But this conflict, like the theory of knowledge that underlay it, was also one of resemblance, for the medieval church (as we shall discuss below) was steeped in magical practices and sacraments from which it derived its power on the local level. Consequently, it would tolerate no rivalry on this score.11 The important point, however, is that
all premodern knowledge had the same structure. As Michel Foucault tells us, divination "is not a rival form of knowledge; it is part of the main body of knowledge itself." Erudition and Hermeticism, Petrarch and Ficino, ultimately inhabited the same mental universe.
It is the collapse of this mental universe, beginning (if such a thing can be dated) in the late sixteenth century, that so radically marks off the medieval from the modern world; and nowhere is this more clearly portrayed than in Cervantes' epic, "Don Quixote."12 The Don's adventures are an attempt to decipher the world, to transform reality itself into a sign. His journey is a quest for resemblances in a society that has come to doubt their significance. Hence, that society judges him to be mad, "quixotic." Where he sees the Shield of Mambrino, Sancho Panza can make out only a barber's basin; where (to take the most famous example) he perceives giants, Sancho sees only windmills. Hence the literal meaning of 'paranoia': like knowledge. The division of psychic and material, mind and body, symbolic and literal, has finally occurred. The madman perceives resemblances that do not exist, that are seen as not signifying anything at all. By 1600 he is "alienated in analogy," whereas four or five decades earlier he was the typical educated European. For the madman the crown makes the king, and Shakespeare captured the shift in the definition of reality in his line, "All hoods do not monks make." Given the meaninglessness of such associations, practices such as conjuring could no longer be regarded as effective. "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," says Glendower to Hotspur in "Henry IV, Part I." "Why so can I, or so can any man," replies the latter; "But will they come when you do call for them?"
Hotspur's words are the first steps toward a relationship with the world with which we are very familiar. Glendower, on the other hand, sounds the last chords of a world largely lost to our imaginations; a world of resonance, resemblance, and incredible richness. Yet these chords may, even today, echo vaguely in our subconscious minds. Before turning to a more extended discussion of the collapse of original participation, then, it will be worth our while to stay with it a bit longer, and see if we cannot feel our way into this manner of thinking.
Participation is self and not-self identified at the moment of experience. The pre-Homeric Greek, the medieval Englishman (to a lesser extent, of course), and the present-day African tribesman know a thing precisely in the act of identification, and this identification is as much sensual as it is intellectual. It is a totality of experience: the "sensuous intellect," if the reader can imagine such a thing. We have so lost the ability to make this identification that we are left today with only two experiences that consist of participating consciousness: lust and anxiety. As I make love to my partner, as I immerse myself in her body, I become increasingly "lost." At the moment of orgasm, I am the act; there is no longer an "I" who experiences it. Panic has a similar momentum, for if sufficiently terrified I cannot separate myself from what is happening to me. In the psychotic (or mystic) episode, my skin has no boundary. I am out of my mind, I have become my environment. The essence of original participation is the feeling, the bodily perception, that there stands behind the phenomena a "represented" that is of the same nature as me -- 'mana,' God, the world spirit, and so on.13 This notion, that subject and Object, self and other, man and environment, are ultimately identical, is the holistic world view.
Of course, we sometimes experience participation in less intense forms, although sexual desire and panic remain the best examples. In truth -- and we shall treat this in detail in Chapter 5 -- participation is the rule rather than the exception for modern man, although he is (unlike his premodern counterpart) largely unconscious of it. Thus as I wrote the first few pages of this chapter, down to this page, at least, I was so absorbed in what I was doing that I had no sense of myself at all. The same experience happens to me at a movie, a concert, or on a tennis court. Nevertheless, the consciousness of official culture dictates my "recognition" that I am not, and can never be, my experiences. Whereas my premodern counterpart felt, and saw, that he was his experiences -- that his consciousness was not some special, independent consciousness -- I classify my own participation as some form of "recreation," and see reality in terms of the inspection and evaluation Plato hoped men would achieve. I thus see myself as an island, whereas my medieval or ancient predecessor saw himself more like an embryo. And although there is no going back to the womb, we can at least appreciate how comforting and meaningful such a state of mind, and view of reality, truly was.
But was this view at all real? Weren't my predecessors simply living in the same world as I am, but somehow conceptualizing it differently (i.e., incorrectly)? Doesn't the subject/object dichotomy represent a distinct advance in human knowledge over this primitive, even orgiastic identification of self and other? These questions, which are all essentially asking the same thing, are the ones most crucial to the history of consciousness, and require closer scrutiny. For there are only two possibilities here. Either original participation, which was the basic mode of human cognition (despite the gradual attenuation of that mode) down to the late sixteenth century, was an elaborate self-deception; or original participation really did exist, was an actual fact.14 We shall try to decide between these two alternatives by means of an analysis of the paradigm science of participation, alchemy.
If the standard history textbooks are to be believed, alchemy was the attempt to find a chemical substance that, when added to lead, transformed it into gold. Alternatively, it was the attempt to prepare a liquid, the 'elixir vitae,' that would prolong human life indefinitely. Since neither of these goals is attainable, the entire alchemical enterprise is dismissed as a nonsensical episode (more than two thousand five hundred years) in the history of science, a venture that could be viewed as tragic were it not so silly in content. At most, modern science concedes that the alchemists did, in the pursuit of their spurious ends, discover as by-products various medicines and chemical substances that have some utilitarian value.
As is the case with all clichés, this one contains something of the truth. The quick production of the 'lapis,' or philosopher's stone, whether in the form of gold or elixir, was certainly an irresistible goal for many alchemists, and the term "puffer" was used to denote the commercial opportunist and charlatan. "Of all men," wrote Agrippa, "chymists are, the most perverse."15 Yet a brief perusal of medieval and Renaissance alchemical plates, such as those collected by Carl Jung, is enough to convince us that such charlatartry was hardly the whole story to alchemy.16 What could these strange images (see Plates 2 - 6) possibly mean? A green and red snake swallowing its tail; an "androgyne," or man-woman, joined at the waist with an eagle rising behind it and a pile of dead eagles at its feet; a green lion biting the sun, with blood (actually mercury) dripping from the resultant "wound"; a human skeleton perched on a black sun; the sun casting a long shadow behind the earth -- these and other images are so fantastic as to defy comprehension. Surely, if all one wanted was health or wealth, there was no need for the painstaking preparation of such elaborately illustrated manuscripts. Mythopoeic artwork of this sort forces us to abandon the simplistic utilitarian interpretation of alchemy and try, instead, to chart the totally unfamiliar terrain of consciousness that this bizarre imagery represents.
It was the achievement of Carl Jung first to decipher the symbols of alchemy by means of clinical material from dream analysis, and then on this basis to formulate the argument that alchemy was, in essence, a map of the human unconscious. Central to Jungian psychology is the concept of "individuation," the process whereby a person discovers and evolves his Self, as opposed to his ego. The ego is a persona, a mask created and demanded by everyday social interaction, and, as such, it constitutes the center of our conscious life, our understanding of ourselves through the eyes of others. The Self, on the other hand, is our true center, our awareness of ourselves without outside interference, and it is developed by bringing the conscious and unconscious parts of our mind into harmony. Dream analysis is one way of achieving this harmony. We can u
nlock our dream symbols and then act on the messages of our dreams in waking life, which in turn begins to alter our dreams. But how to analyze our dreams? They are frequently cryptic, and so often violate causal sequence as to border on gibberish. But it is precisely here, Jung discovered, that alchemy can make a crucial contribution. In fact, it is by something like the doctrine of signatures that we are able to figure out what our dreams mean.17
Plate 2. The Ourobouros, symbol of integration. Synosius, Ms. grec
2327, f.279. Phot. Bibl. nat. Paris.
The language of alchemy, as well as of dreams, follows a type of reasong which I have termed "dialectical," as opposed to the critical reason characteristic of rational, or scientific, thought.18 As we saw earlier, Descartes regarded dreams as perverse because they violated the principle of noncontradiction. But this violation is not arbitrary; rather, it emerges from a paradigm of its own, one that could well be called alchemical. This paradigm has as a central tenet the notion that reality is paradoxical, that things and their opposites are closely related, that attachment and resistance have the same root. We know this on an intuitive level already, for we speak of love-hate relationships, recognize that what frightens us is most likely to liberate us, and become suspicious if someone accused of wrongdoing protests his or her innocence too hotly. In short, a thing can both be and not be at the same time, and as Jung, Freud, and apparently the alchemists all understood, it usually is.
The Reenchantment of the World Page 8