Spiritual Destinations

of an Anarchist

Peter Lamborn Wilson

Spiritual Destinations of an Anarchist
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-
N oncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
https:/ I creativecommons.org

Ardent Press, 2015 Autonomedia

Published by Aragorn Moser autonomedia.org
Layout by Leona Benton
pobox 568
Printed at "The Compound"
Brooklyn NY 11211-0568
1818 Carleton St.
Berkeley, CA 94703-1908

- Chaos, Eros, Earth and Old Night Gnosis: A Jou ma/ of the
Western Inner Traditions #34 Winter 1995
- Spiritual Anarchism: Topics for Research Fi�h Estate Vol.
37 #4 (359) Winter 2002/03
- "Anarchist Religions"? Fi�h Estate St. Vol. 45 #2 (383)
Summer 2010
- Anarchy & Ecstasy Fi�h Estate, Vol. 25 #2 (335) Winter
1990-91
- Evil Eye Ova I I "Control" September 199 I
- Secret of the Assassins, Book of Lies ed. Richard Metzger
disinfonmation NY 03

- Secular Antinomian Anabaptist Neo-Luddism, Fi�h Estate

Spring 2006

- Interview with INTO-GAL, 2006

- Against Metaphor UNBEARABLES PORTFOLIO ONE.

Ackenman Loft Gallery: San Francisco, CA 1994

- Phone Interview Uacob Eichert) TRY! August 14, 2008

-"Stain Your Prayer Carpet with Wine" Skin of the Goat (A

Type of Cook Book) 2014

Thanks to Raymond Foye and Nathan Smith

 Chaos, Eros, Earth, and Old Night:
Radical Neo-Hermeticism and Ecological Resistance
I

Spiritual Anarchism:
Topics for Research
,),)

"Anarchist Religion"?
47

Quantum, Chaos, & the Oneness of Being:

Meditations on the Kitab al-Alef
57

Anarchy & Ecstasy

.91

Evil Eye
IOI

Against Metaphor
113

Secret of the Assassins

115
Secular Antinomian Anabaptist Neo-Luddism
/Z.9

Interview with INTO-GAL

NJ

Phone Interview Uacob Eichert)

17S

"Stain Your Prayer Carpet with Wine"

18.9
Chaos, Eros, Earth, and Old Night:
Radical Neo-Hermeticism and
Ecological Resistance

That a great deal ojbelief must be present . . . -

that is the precondition of every living thing
and its life. Therefore, what is needed is that
something must be held to be true-not that
something is true.
-Nietzsche1

Prestidig itation
Nietzsche says we need an "illusion" to keep
society going in the face of the breakdown
threatening it through knowledge-the
knowledge of existential vacuity, the displace­
ment of "Man," the death or silence of God,
the terror of a freedom which is not an ab­
stract idea but a fate. If we are to invent (a word
which used to mean "find out") such an il­
lusion, then we should arrive at one which
works, which is effective. This sh ould be pos­
sible on the assumption that effective action
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power. trans. Walter
Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967).
507/1887.

I
does not necessarily depend on truth, since
truth does not exist in any literal sense, where­
as effective action can be said to "exist" at least
in some situational sense.
The Will to Power 1s m large part
concerned with the question of action, which
is what makes it so much more valuable
to us now, unfinished as it is, than many of
Nietzsche's finished products . We don't need
his precise experiments (or even his basic
axioms) so much as we need his methodology.
The sections on art and love seem particularly
powerful discussions of the possible utility
of certain illusions (let's call them "myths"
to escape the usual connotations of futility
connected with the word "illusion") . To take
Nietzsche at his word is to envision a society
of free spirits devoted to art and love and the
transformation of the social element, simply
because they-from the superabundance oflife
in them-find such play to be a challenging
and j oyful action.
Interesting as we may find such an image,
Nietzsche's method for arriving at it holds
more interest for us now than the image itself.
In searching for an image which could bring
action into being (so to speak) , Nietzsche went
back beyond the Enlightenment to Natural
Magic as propounded by the Renaissance
he so admired. In Natural Magic, as loan P.
Couliano points out, 2 we find a program for
deploying the imaginal process to bring about
individual and social transformation. The
following proposal arises from methodology
derived from The Will to Power in the light of
recent reading on the history of Hermeticism
or Natural Magic in the Renaissance and after.3

The Reality Wars

If we're searching for a myth that might be
effective, we should p erhaps hesitate to ransack
an epistemological system-Natural Magic­
that has been so thoroughly debunked and
abandoned by modern science and philosophy.
And in fact we should certainly exercise
extreme caution in dealing with both the
supernatural and the ideological claims of

2 loan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
3 See Thomas Frick, The Sacred Theory of the Earth
(Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 1986), a
collection of old and new texts on the Hermetic and
neo-Hermetic theory of the Earth which I found invalu­
able in preparing this article.

3
Renaissance magic, lest our proj ect decay at
once into some form of romantic reaction or
New Age fantasy. What interests us is not the
hoodoo aspects of magic (charming though
they may be) but rather the role played by
Hermeticism in the complex struggle for
paradigm hegemony in seventeenth-century
science.
The players in this game included ( 1 )
the Baconians o r proponents o f experimen­
talism; (2) the Cartesians or "Mechanick Phi­
losophers"; (3) the Newtonians; and (4) the
Hermeticists. Classical modern science, the
winning paradigm, turned out to include el­
ements from the first three systems but very
little from the fourth. From Bacon it took the
efficacy of experimentalism; from the Car­
tesians it took the image of the world and
Nature as dead matter; from Newton it took
the basic structure of classical physics, with its
imagery of force, energy, gravity, dimensional
space, and lineal time (metaph ors which influ­
enced and facilitated the emerging ideology
of capitalism) .
From Hermeticism, however, science
inherited nothing except a few odd and
accidental discoveries in chemistry, but no
basic ideas, no maj or tropes. This is at least
according to science's own official history
of itself. Of course this legend is simply not
true. Newton smuggled one central Hermetic
concept into his system, that of "action at a
distance," to explain gravity. He even used the
Hermetic/ erotic term for it: "attraction." But
Newton never published his secret alchemical
treatises, and for political reasons he disguised
his debt to Hermetic science, thus p erpetuating
the decisive betrayal so incisively condemned
by William Blake.
Blake was the last serious Hermetic
radical. Newton and his allies opted for real
power-the Royal Society-and turned th eir
backs on the embarrassing enthusiasts and
cabalistic conspirators of the Hermetic left.
In doing so, they succeeded in swiping the
Hermetic concept of attraction while utterly
rej ecting the Hermetic idea that had always
seemed to accompany and even explain the
mystery of action at a distance- the idea ef the
animate world.
According to Hermetic philosophy
or Natural Magic, the world is alive, and

5
thus, like any living individual, can be said
to have spiritual faculties such as intellect
and imagination. Imagination is not simply
the impotent fantasy of an ego locked inside
a skull and able to influence the world only
as a ghost in the machine; the Hermetic
imagination is a force capable of acting at a
distance through the subtle will-substance of
attraction focused through images.This can be
done because everything is alive and to some
degree conscious. The world carries out this
attraction (life attracts life) , and the individual
consciousness can accomplish the same thing
(on a necessarily microcosmic level) through
the practice of Natural Magic.
Newton's brilliant move was to accept
the idea of action at a distance (gravity's "at­
traction") while denying that it could be
considered in any way conscious or animate,
or that it could possess a prolongation in the
world as topocosm4 or in human consciousness
as microcosm. Attraction was in fact "mechani­
cal," even if it did not depend (as the Cartesians

4 Topocosm: place as mandala, landscape as micro­

cosm. a term apparently invented by Theodore H. Gas­
ter. See his Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the An­
cient Near East (New York: Harper Torchbooks. 1950).

6
 argued) on corpuscular activity in the aether. 5
The world was indeed a clock, even if some
of the springs were invisible or purely math­
ematical. (No wonder some of the Cartesians
accused Newton of thinking like a wizard!)
Some science fiction writer should
speculate about what modern science would
have become if Hermeticism had won the
paradigm battle of the seventeeth century.
Perhaps such "strange" aspects of physics as the
wave/particle theory of matter, uncertainty,
Bell's Theorem, and chaos theory, would have
been discovered much earlier. Certainly we
would have an advanced technology, for the
Natural Magicians were no technophobes or
Luddites . But it would be a technology based
on the perception of the world as animate
rather than dead; thus our science fiction
writer is free to imagine an "appropriate,"
biologically oriented, noninvasive technology,
"green" and doubtlessly erotic, strong on life
enhancement, consoousness studies, and
5 Some physicists are still searching for these corpus­
cles. now called "gravitons." since even relativity and
quantum mechanics do not rule out their existence.
An interesting question: if they really exist, would it be
necessary to accept that some sort of "aether" also
exists?

7
ecology, and weak on Promethean, antihuman,
wasteful, and destructive designs. A pleasant
fantasy . . . But the purpose of the present essay
is to ask whether it is perhaps not yet too late
for such technology to come into being.

Hermeticists on the Living Earth

"Chaos was first made, and in that all the

elements at one and the same instant; for the
world was manifested and brought out of the
Chaos like a chick out of an egg."
To this Apollonius replied like a pure sophister:
"And must I then think"-saith he-"that the
world is a living creature?"
Saith Jarcas: "Yes, verily, if you reason rightly;
for it giveth life to all things."
"Shall we then"-saith Tyaneus-"call it a
male or a female creature?"
"Both,"--saith the wise Brahmin Uarcas]-for
the world, being a compound of both faculties,
supplies the office of father and mother in the
generation of those things that have life."
-Thomas Vaughan
(Eugenius Philalethes) ,
The Fraternity of the Rosy Cross
8
 [The true magus,] abounding in the loftiest
mysteries, embraces the deepest contempla­
tion of the most secret things, and at last the
knowledge of all nature. [The magus,] in call­
ing forth into the light as if from their hiding­
places the powers scattered and sown in the
world by the loving-kindness of God, does
not so much work wonders as diligently serve
a wonder-working nature.
[The magus,] having more searchingly ex­
amined into the harmony of the universe,
which the Greeks with greater significance
call sympatheia, and having clearly perceived
the reciprocal affinity of natures, and apply­
ing to each single thing the suitable and pe­
culiar inducem�ents ...brings forth into the
open the miracles concealed in the recesses of
the world, in the depths of nature, and in the
storehouses and mysteries of God,just as if she
herself were their maker.
-Pico della Mirandola

Hair of the Dog

VVhen our spirit has been carefully prepared
and purged by natural things it is able to

,9
 receive many J?.ifts through the stellar rays,from
the spirit of cosmic life. Cosmic l!fe is visibly
propagated in grasses and trees, which are like
the hair of the body ef earth; it is also revealed
in stones and metals, which are like the teeth
and bones ef this body; it circulates in the living
shells ef the earth, which adhere to stones. By
making frequent use ef plants and other livi111<
beings it is possible to gain a great deal from the
spirit ef the world.
-Anonymous Hermeticist

lf the world is a tree,then we are the blossoms.

-Novalis

The proposal: to revive the Hermetic myth

of the living Earth as an effective means to­
ward the radical transformation of scientific,
technological, and indeed social paradigms; to
counter utilitarianism, "progressism," capital­
ism, and other destructive tendencies based on
classical modern science (loosely defined as
knowledge of the material world) . In order to
accomplish this, we ought to be able to show:
1 . That the world view of Natural Magic is
not simply delusive, and that it is open to
10
rectification by philosophical and critical
theory.
2 . That this critique could result in a new
paradigm capable of offering a coherent
analysis of "scientific facts";
3. That this paradigm could prove effective,
both as science and as myth, in a transformation
of Nature.
In short, we need to show that the myth
of the living world could be both necessary and
sufficient to further the radical social proj ect
of "liberatory action" in the vital interface
between technology and life, between culture
and biosphere.
To deal with these points in order:
1 . Philosophy since Nietzsche has more or less
dissolved the nineteenth-century borders of
rationality. "Reason" is no universal category
but can only be defined in the context of a
given consensus. We still have borders, of
course, such as the one between the shrinking
daylight world of the classical scientific
worldview and the encroaching shadow of
coincidence, shamanic consciousness, and
the archaic wild(er)ness. There's no need to
redefine the world of shadow in terms of the

II
world of daylight or vice versa (although the
stranger "facts" of quantum and chaos theory
do sometimes seem to violate the border,
smuggling something chthonic through the
customs of rationality) . Nor is there any need
to consider either world "real" or "unreal"
in some exclusive sense. Hans Peter Duerr
points out (in his book Dreamtime)r' that one
can keep a foot in both at once, on the level
of experience, and thus be called "one who
straddles the fence"-a term for witches or
shamans in some cultures. Couliano shows
that Hermeticism was j ust as "rational" as
the Mechanick Philosophy in terms of the
seventeenth-century consensus-maybe more
so-and just as "rational" as modern science
in terms of the twentieth-century consensus .
This does not mean that Hermetic
science is as valid, useful, or correct as modern
science in operational terms. It isn't. But the
modern consensus paradigm has been shifted
(especially by quantum and chaos) in a direction
that makes the philosophy of Hermeticism look
interesting again. It might even be said that
6 Hans Peter Duerr. Dreamtime: Concerning the Bound­
ary Between Wilderness and Civ1kzation (New York:
Blackwell, 1985).

l.Z
Natural Magic provides more useful images
for thinking about, say, Schrodinger's cat, than
does classical Newtonian physics.
If Natural Magic is to b e rectified in
such a way as to resuscitate its usefulness, we
should no doubt begin by ignoring the un­
provable or disproved aspects of Hermetic
science (alchemy, astrology, etc.)7 and concen­
trate instead on certain basic images, among
them the central image of the living Earth .
2 . Natural Magic rej ects the escape clause of
the supernatural as a means of explaining away
its irreducible sense of amazement about the
world. Bacon and Newton presumably felt
this astonishment but managed to suppress
it; the Cartesians abolished it altogether, and
today's disenchanted power-parasitic scientists
are their lineal descendants. But relativity,
quantum theory, and chaos have revived
amazement; in fact it may be impossible to

7 This is not meant to discourage research in such

promising areas as traditional medicine and "plant wis­
dom," shamanic therapeutics and consciousness stud­
ies, or even certain aspects of alchemy. On the contrary,
if Hermetic science is to be revived, it must deploy it­
self especially 1n those areas where 1t does indeed offer
"hard" solutions-not only 1n order to benefit humanity
but also to make propaganda for its new and rect1f1ed
world view.

/,)
do any truly elegant science m these fields
without such amazement-and the same could
be said of brain-mind research, morphogenic
field research, psychedelic studies, or other
inherently "strange" disciplines.
The Hermetic science ofthe Renaissance
did indeed depend on certain teleological
axioms-and it is precisely the avoidance of
teleology that since the seventeenth century
has been taken to characterize all real
science. Certainly if our myth is to satisfy the
uneasy shade of Nietzsche it cannot make
use of any such loopholes, whether crudely
supernaturalist or subtly teleological. If we're
proposing a neo-Hermetic paradigm, we must
find a mode of transition to this new world
view that does not violate the older world
view's demands for coherence and falsification.
A rectified Natural Magic must not indulge in
special pleading, nor must it make appeals to
irrationalism, romantic reaction, or nostalgia,
or to a cynical relativism that would deny the
value of all testing or thinking.
Here the work of certain contemporary
scientists takes on a new luster, especially Ilya
Prigogine's investigations of creative evolu-
tion and the work of the Gaia scientists such
as Lovelock and Margulis. In other words,
rectified Natural Magic can b e seen as com­
patible with the axioms and procedures of a
science that will develop (and already is de­
veloping) the links between morphogenetics,
chaos, cognitive studies, the biogeostructural­
ism of the Gaians, etc. This newly emerging
paradigm also takes in social sciences as well
as "soft" sciences such as ethnopharmacology,
ecology, ethology, and even weather predic­
tion. In short, our brand of Hermeticism is
indeed equipped to become a paradigm in the
full Kuhnian sense of the word.
3. But is it the paradigm we want? We know
th at classical science h as been used to j ustify
industrialization, capitalism, behaviorism, and
the ravaging of the environment, mega-war­
and we know we no longer want these things .
But is there any reason to believe that a shift to
a world view based on the image of the living
earth will help us overcome the cultural and
technological aspects of the old (and dying)
world of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton?
Moreover, is there any reason to suppose
that this image will encourage appropriate

15
technology, respect for wild(er)ness, a psychol­
ogy of enhancement rather than control, or an
economics that is neither capitalist nor com­
munist but human? Will the living Earth return
to us bearing the dusty reactionary luggage
of Renaissance mumbo jumbo, a social order
based on new forms of oppression (such as ec­
otopian fascism) , or a mind science rooted in
"magical" brainwashing rather than liberation?
Can the image of the living Earth be consid­
ered in any way an inherently radical solution?
In seventeenth-century politics Hermet­
icism stood for radicalism and revolution, not
for "medieval reaction." Rosicrucianism and
early Masonry can best be understood as radi­
cal Protestant political movements, and most of
the extremist sects of that period were heav­
ily influenced by the Hermetic world view.
(The Family of Love is especially fascinating
as a link between Behmenite mysticism and
Renaissance occultism on the one hand and
Anabaptist revolutionary politics on the other.)
As Natural Magic steadily lost ground
in the eighteenth century to Mechanick and
Newtonian science, it retreated underground
into the alternate universe of heresy and rebel-
16
lion, that subterranean stream which has never
ceased to flow beneath "our" world from the
very moment Neolithic culture forced Paleo­
lithic culture to disappear. To a certain extent
Hermeticism became the scientific paradigm
of this underworld, even as it failed to conquer
or even influence the daylight world of p ower.
Robert Darnton, in his wonderful study
of mesmerism, 8 shows how Hermetic ideas,
relegated to the shadowy realm of crank oc­
cultists, became wedded to an equally shad­
owy realm of social heretics, Masonic con­
spirators, pamphleteers, lumpen intellectuals,
and utopian fantasists . One of the greatest, a
traveling salesman from Lyons named Charles
Fourier, 9 experienced in 1 799 his own vast
vision of the animate universe, comp arable
to that of Blake in grandeur and complexity.
Fourier proclaimed himself far greater than
Newton, who had merely discovered the "at­
tractive force" of gravity, whereas Fourier
himself had determined that attraction-erotic
8 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the
Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press. 1968).
9 See J. Beecher. Charles Fourier: The Visionary and
His World ( Berkeley, California: University of California
Press. 1986).

17
attraction-was the animating force of the
entire universe. Like Ficino, Pico, Bruno, and
Paracelsus (though perhaps entirely unaware
of their works) , Fourier enthroned Eros as the
reality principle, and on this basis deduced the
need for the eradication of civilization and
the inevitability of utopia.
According to Fourier, not only t '1e
Earth but also the solar system and the entire
universe are alive. (Thus Fourier's theory can
be called far bolder than that of the Gaians,
who think only Gaia lives.) Stars and plan­
ets, moreover, connect with each other and
with the animate whole by means of " aromal
rays;' which are the vehicle of their " copu­
lation." Earth, however, has a problem: it has
been literally knocked from its course by the
potent disease of civilization, which prevents
us Terrans from realizing and expressing our
own "passional attractions."
The cosmos is geared, so to speak, to
provide an excess abundance of brilliance,
luxury, amorousness, and beauty, whereas civi­
lization offers only dull morality, scarcity, ugli­
ness, and oppression. Labor itself, which to us
is a curse, was meant to be " attractive," and in
Ill
the utopian condition of "Harmony" each of
us would have at least thirty diffcrent voca­
tions in order to fulfill our many app etites for
activities which are enj oyable in themselves.
Once the conditions of Harmony were
achieved, the cosmic illness of Earth would
go into remission; so p owerful the influence
of our human social and sexual bliss that the
other planets would feel the force of attrac­
tion and move closer to Terra. Thus realigned,
our solar system would harmonize all its aro­
mal rays. Earth's ray (at present visible in its
diseased state as the aurora borealis) would
once again shoot forth to make love to the
stars. Moreover the Terran ecology would
undergo vast changes: the seas would turn to
lemonade, and all creatures would live in har­
mony; in fact certain species such as lions and
sharks would turn into their opposites-anti­
lions and anti-sharks, now pacific and helpful.
All this would happen, not on a Darwinian
time scale of eons, but almost instantaneously
once the Earth's human inhabitants converted
to Fourierism and arrayed themselves (volun­
tarily and spontaneously) into the sexualized
"phalanxes" or " series" of Harn1onian society.

/.9
 This page can scarcely do justice to the
grandeur, complexity, and nobility of Fouri­
er's ideas, which inspired the creation of hun­
dreds of Fourierist phalansteries in the mid­
nineteenth century, and which seduced-at
least for a time-such eminent Victorians
as Horace Greeley, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
Engels and Marx, and the founders of Brook
Farm. Here we must concentrate on Fourier
as a Hermeticist, for although he scorned all
other systems than his own and in fact knew
almost nothing of the "high" magical tradi­
tion, he was recognized as a true visionary by
Illuminists, Martinists, Mesmerists, and Swe­
denborgians; his theory of analogies (or "cor­
respondences") unconsciously repeated that
of Paracelsus and was picked up by B audelaire
and Rimbaud. Fourier had his socialist follow­
ers, who tended to downplay his obsessions
with cosmic fate, "gastrosophy" (Harmonian
metacuisine) , or phalansterian orgiasticism,
but he's also had his poetic admirers, including
Walter Benj amin, Roland Barthes, and Andre
Breton, who appreciated him precisely for his
unique combination of Hermetic imagina­
tion and sensual delight.
20
 Fourier attacked religion on two ba­
sic counts : ( 1 ) it inculcates morality and thus
denies passional attraction; and (2) it denies
"divine providence," that is, the natural super­
abundant generosity of material reality, the
luxuriousness of Harmonian nature that is our
true birthright. The aliveness of the world im­
plied for Fourier the unconditional value of
the human body and its appetites and desires,
which (in Harmony) would lead inexorably
to social bliss.
In this, as he loved to boast, Fourier
taught the exact opposite of all religion and
philosophy, which are based on the superior­
ity of soul or mind over body, on the idea of
the imperfection of material reality, and on
the condemnation of passional attraction as
sin. Without naming it, Fourier thus put his
finger on the " Gnostic trace" in all religions­
mind/body dualism and the denigration of
corporeal becoming in favor of an eschatol­
ogy that transcends the flesh .10
10 The monotheistic idea of "resurrection in the flesh"
was meant as a metaphysical rectification of the dual­
ist aspects of cosmology (and probably crystallized
historically out of the Church's battles with Gnostic
dualism). But of course this idea blatantly contradicts
the monotheistic idea of "heaven" (which Fourier

.2/
 Monotheists can accept the idea that
matter is dead because for them matter is sin­
ful, and the wages of sin are death. D escartes
was a pious Christian and was applauded by
pious Christians for saving the transcendence
of the soul, the supreme cogito, from both the
materialists (for whom mind is but an epi­
phenomenon of matter) and from the Natu­
ral Magicians (for whom mind and body are
aspects of each other) . The idea that matter
itself is alive indeed demands of us a view of
the relation between self and world that is ut­
terly opposed to all religion and philosophy
(as Fourier and Nietzsche defined them) ex­
cept Hermeticism.
For Natural Magic, body, mind, and
world are inextricably interwoven. Thus the
Hermeticist's attitude toward Nature is neither
passive (since we are participants in the world)
nor rapacious, dismissive, and destructive. Na­
ture is not "fallen" and therefore cannot be
considered a mere repository of resources to
derided for its imaginal poverty) a s a purely spiritual
state of being. For Fourier heaven is on earth, only
possible in the body. I t's true that he believed in rein­
carnation: he found it an appealing idea because being
in the body was for him the only conceivable form of
eternity or absoluteness.

,!,!
be exploited or conquered. Human beings­
bodily and cognitively-are both wards and
guardians of Gaia, both caretakers and enjoy­
ers, somewhat in the manner taught by Native
American shamans . Fourier, like all the Her­
meticists, was fascinated by reports of tribal
people still living pre-Neolithic lives; the Euro­
pean mages recognized in such social structures
a parallel to their own utopian systems. They
intuited an analogy between the shamanism of
th ese societies and their own Neo-Pagan spiri­
tuality. Even Nietzsche (who is in this sense a
Neo-Pagan) replaced the dead God of mono­
theism with revived Greek and Oriental deities
to symbolize his sense of the primacy of life
over fleshless abstraction. (Nietzsche actually
did develop a myth in which he could believe,
and which he hoped would change society: the
myth of the eternal return. Perhaps he would
have h ad more success with a myth -0f the liv­
ing Earth, since it implies such a powerful and
Nietzschean "yea to life.")
It may seem odd to link the socialist
Fourier with the individualist Nietzsche in
defense of the living Earth. But in truth Fou­
rier's "social being" would be a far more real-

J!3
 ized (indeed superhuman) individual than any
poor cripples of civilization, while Nietzsche's
"supermen" would find true fellowship in a
society of free spirits, in love, and in art. The
dichotomy between the social and the indi­
vidual has been exaggerated by nineteenth­
century political ideologues. The truth is that
both sides are true simultaneously. Or so the
theory of the living Earth would seem to sug­
gest: Each of us is a part of Nature, it is true,
but our value as individuals is not thereby less­
ened in any way, since it would be equally true
to say that Nature is a part of us, each of us in­
dividually. Nature's freedom from all abstract
"categorical imperatives" does not reduce all
biota to a faceless mass; on the contrary, it re­
stores to each thing its own true unique face.

A Tactic of Reappearance
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him
or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken to him or
her who remains jagged and broken.

I swear there is no greatness or power that does

not emulate those of the earth,
 There can be no theory of any account unless it
corroborate the theory of the earth,
No politics, song, relig ion, behavior, or what not,
is of account, unless it compare with the
amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality,
rectitude of the earth .

Say on, sayers ! Sing on, singers !

Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth !
Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost,
It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come
in use,
When the materials are all prepared and ready,
the architects will appear.
-Walt Whitman,
"A Song of the Rolling Earth"

In The Temporary Autonomous Zone11 it was

suggested that "disappearance"-meaning the
driftlike avoidance of all categories-could be
considered a tactic for radical liberatory action.
Here, in counterbalance, it is suggested that
there may also exist tactics of reappearance.
11 See Hakim Bey, TA.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous
Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York:
Autonomedia, 1985, 1991).
 And in fact why should nothing ever
come back again? On the contrary; everything
recurs . Lovelock points out that space flight
and the first photographs of the whole Earth
taken from orbit supplied the occasion for
the recurrence of the idea of Gaia. He says
it was first proposed by the Scots geologist
James Hutton in 1 785 but was ignored by the
Royal Society (perhaps because it smacked of
Natural Magic) .
The myth of the living Earth cannot die
because, like all "true" myths, it relates to and
arises directly from the body. It is in fact the
myth of the body. Even earlier, in Babylonian
and Chinese myth, Chaos (Tiamat, Hun­
T'un) is the body of the Earth. These myths
deserve to return, not only because they would
provide imagery for the popularization of
radical chaos science, Prigogine's theories, or
Ralph Abraham's work on complex dynamical
systems, but also because they represent a
social stratum, rooted in the Paleolithic, which
is primal, material, ludic, festal, 12 oriented to

12 For a discussion of the "festal spirit," see Mikhail

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World trans. H. lswolsky
(Bloomington, I ndiana: I ndiana University Press, 1984) .

.Z6'
the gift rather than the commodity. 13 It is also
gender-egalitarian, based on excess rather than
scarcity, lacking any structure which could
be called the "state," polymorphously erotic,
esthetic, and magical. In this sense we can
speak of a tactic of reappearance rather than a
mere sentimental evocation of some lost and
probably spurious totality.
To some degree this proj ect involves the
revival (and rectification) of a magical propa­
ganda proposed by the Hermetic utopianists.
Most humans spend most waking hours in a
kind of low-grade sernihypnosis . In this state
they are susceptible to suggestion, to manipula­
tion through imagery. In this sense, as Couliano
points out, modern mass psychologists and ad­
vertisers already practice a magical propaganda,
but for purposes of control rather than libera­
tion. But the image of the living Earth belongs
to the mythology of awakening rather than of
soporific dullness; it is (as Nietzsche might have
said) a myth of" daybreak." As a potent image of
life it successfully bypasses the filter of linguis­
tic abstraction and its map/territory ideology,
13 Marcel Maus, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Ex­
change in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London:
W.W. Norton, 1990).

.27
 not to deepen hypnosis and the mechanisms of
control, but to plant a seed of wakefulness.
Science (especially mechanistic classical
science) and religion (especially supernatural­
ist authoritarian religion) arc still fighting their
tired old battles for control of the world-a
cheap wrestling match which has long since
ceased to interest any but the most deeply
hypnotized marks. The world of this discourse
is long overdue for a new synthesis, one which
would make use of science without its world­
destroying Promethianism and of religion
without its world-denying Sisyphism. The
recent (but so far unconvincing) attempts to
reconcile classical science with archaic or Ori­
ental wisdom bear witness to a genuine desire.
Slowly, slowly, something begins to emerge,
or reemerge. The spiral of intellectual history
brings it round again, but makes it new, rec­
tifies it, adorns it with brand-new scientific
"facts" and hypotheses, and perfumes it with a
flavor of" New Theology."
The partisans of the living Earth have a
clear course of action laid out for them. The
image has already taken root in both religious
and scientific thought and provides a bridge
between two opposites . The obvious areas of
attack (or rather seduction and penetration)
include radical philosophy and the history of
science; ecological activism; the emergence
of " Green" or " Goddess" theology within
the monotheistic religions; the entire " Gaian"
movement; the growing nonauthoritarian/
autonomist antipolitical movement; the indig­
enous people's movement; the micronational­
ist or bioregionalist movement; the embattled
remnants of the various "sexual freedon1" ten­
dencies; repentant socialists newly converted
to an ethic of freedom; repentant capitalists
who suddenly see the advantages of socialism
now that it is too late; aging hippies; young
peace punks; Neo-Pagans, etc.
While none of these groups can assume
a lone position of power, they are all capable
of uniting at least on the tactical level under
t:1e symbolic banner of the living Earth. This
image could be the crystal that precipitates
a rain of resistance and reconstruction-re­
sistance to the masters of " dead matter," re­
construction of Blake 's green and merry land
right here in Albion or Turtle Island or wher­
ever we live our everyday lives.

.2.9
 And what reality would the banner
stand for? It would consist of the interpen­
etration and mutual seduction of everyday life
and wild(er)ness . Anarchists know that every
flag-even th e black flag of anarchy-needs to
be burned once in a while, lest even the best
idea, the idea of freedom, become a spook or
a shibboleth . But in the moment of insurrec­
tion, which is like a moment of intoxication,
it becomes permissible to "worship" a symbol,
because one already stands in the presence
of the reality it represents. Therefore, next to
the black escutcheon of Chaos and Night, we
might raise the green pennant of Eros and
Earth, and venture forth, like surrealist knights,
to do beautiful and absurd deeds of chivalry . . .
Chaos Never Died
The Earth is Alive

[Revisions (201 4): Fourier probably knew more

about Hermeticism than I realized.

I like the idea of Daniel Quinn (author of IshmaeQ

that humans should give up being "mentors" of
Nature andjustget out of the way.

30
The photograph of the "whole earth" has had
the unfortunate side-effect of creating a concept
of"Spaceship Earth," which is far from useful for
enhancing the experience of a living Earth.]

31
 S p i r i tu al Anarchi sm:
Topics for Research

Cowper came to me and said: 'O that

I were insane always. I will never rest.
Can you not make me truly insane? I
will never rest till I am so. 0 that in the
bosom of God I was hid. You retain health
and yet are as mad as any of us all-over
us all-mad as a refuge from unbelief-­
fro m Bacon, Newton and Locke. '
-William Blake ( 1 8 1 9)

1.
Stone Age Conservative (tribal, roughly
egalitarian, pro to-shamanic, hunter/ gatherer/
gardener, gift economy, etc.)
Sumerian city states (4th Millennium) :
the breakdown of original unstriated human
polity; the emergence of separation (see P.
Clastres) .
Enkidu in Gilgamesh: domestication of the
"Wild Man " .
The Good Old Cause & Everlasting
Gospel-what Blake called Druidism-in fact
has always been the guise of our Stone Age
shamanism and "goddess " paganism vs. the
6000-year Illuminati con-j ob : state religion.
The en1ergence of money as the Sexual­
ity of the D ead.

2.
Bronze Age : war and paganism, leading t o Iron
Age imperial paganism of Rome, the Great
Beast of Revelation;
Against this the early Church appears as
a dialectic of resistance, especially in its Essene
or Nazarite/Ebionite form, Zealotry, Gnosti­
cism, social reform (moneylenders out ofTem­
ple, Gospel of the Poor, etc.) and neoplatonic
mysticism vs. the "Donation of Constantine " ,
appropriation o f Christianity by Rome itself
G ust as Sumerian priest kings appropriated
Neolithic spirituality as the "suppressed con­
tent" of the Temple cults) .
Christianity, originally a radical-gnostic
cult ("Kingdom of heaven within you ") now
functions badly as state religion:-severe con-
tradictions, schizo-culture, etc.

3.
But all religion is rooted in basic contradiction:
the old Stone Age spiritual content (the
Clastrian mythos, so to speak) plastered over
with Metal Age ideology of hegemonic
separation. (See especially the Enuma Blish or
"Babylonian Genesis" where war god Marduk
slays Tiamat the Neolithic goddess .) Religion
constantly attempts to overcome or rectify this
contradiction. But the moneylenders always
return to the Temple and rectification is once
again shunted off into heresy, apostasy, magical
shadows, ritual crime.
Heretical millennial sects talk of restor­
ing the Golden Age; this dream derives from
actual memories (stored in myth) of Stone
Age rough-egalitarian hunting/ gathering/
gardening gift-economy and shaman-pagan
society.

4.
Spirituality does not equal religion. Spirituality
 is the imaginal creative (esprit) of the social;
religion its inverse or negation, its "spectre" as
Blake says:-the alienation of that creativity
into powers of oppression. However, due to
complex paradoxes of dialectics, the kernel of
spirituality is often found encased in shells of
religion-especially the mystics (e.g. Eckhardt
and Spiritual Franciscans)-and the poison of
religion often taints the heresies, especially if
they gain real power.

5.
I n religious times all talk and practice o f non­
authoritarianism will be expressed in religious
tern1s-usually as heresy, schism, apostasy,
magic, etc.-but sometimes as "reform within
the Church" or marginal but permitted forms
of excess (monastic communism for example) .
Historians of anarchism who trace it
from a few Greek Cynics direct to the En­
lightenment, with nothing in between, fail
to appreciate the realness of mentalite: every
age must experience something of freedom
(if only its dream) on pain of losing its hu-

,J6'
manity. The history of anarchism as conscious­
ness (rather than ideology) lies buried in an
archaeology of spiritual resistance. We need
to re-read the heretics . (See for example R.
Vaneighem's work on the history of the Free
Spirit.)

6.
The Problem of Gnostic Dualism. Extreme
forms of spirituality often identify the social
world with the natural world-and condemn
them both . They rej ect the "god of creation"
as evil and even revile the "soul" as principle
of life. Only "spirit" satisfies such extremists .
Their body-hatred becomes more exagger­
ated and severe even than that of the Church
(which at least condemns suicide and prom­
ises the resurrection of the body) .
The problem of dualism haunts anar­
chism, I think. Proudhon's hatred of God may
have derived from his early reading of Gnos­
tic Dualist literature (while he was typeset­
ting it)-a kind of secular Catharism. Atheist
materialism, a la Bakunin, can seem weirdly

37
immaterial sometimes, ridden by its own hob­
goblins, categorical imperatives, blind science­
worship, machine over human, strange asexu­
ality.
Christian/ dualist body-hatred occupies
the secret heart of our "environmental
crisis" ;-even as post-Christians we cannot
escape the Conquest of Nature motif , which
colors nearly all 1 9th_zoth century progressive
thinking.
Possible help in overcoming such cryp­
to-Dualism might come from a "pantheis­
tic monist" approach to shamanic and pagan
models-what T. McKenna called the Archaic
Revival-not a return to the Stone Age but a
return ef the Stone Age.

7.
Because we're all post-Enlightenment wheth­
er we like it or not, "Science" poses for us the
problem of teleology (or teleonomics as Hen­
ri Bergson called it) . We really believe in the
Death of God. The spectral aspect of the En­
lightenment-what Adorno called the cruel

J8
instrumentality of Reason-flattens pernus­
sible consciousness into one big 2-D map.
Any manifestation of meaning would threaten
the monopoly of "brute accidence", random
collision of particles, mechanistic/behaviorist
models of consciousness-"Newton's Night."
Hence the contemporary plague of
meaninglessness: we all feel its germs lurking
behind some thin scrim of hygienic daylight.
Collapse of ethics. No thought for seven gen­
erations . Stop forest fires by cutting down the
forests. "There's no such thing as Society"­
Lady Margaret Baroness Thatcher.

8.
The Movement o f the Social on the uncon­
scious level constituted in itself a kind of (anti)
religion. After all what proof exists for atheist
materialism?-just as spooky as God, really­
the absence of meaning.
The Communist Party as yet another
Holy Roman Empire.
And the philosophical weakness of
anarchism surely lies somewhere near the
fault line between meaninglessness and ethics.
How can there exist a right way to live in an
"absurd" universe? Existential commitment?
Leap in the dark? But why not simply carve
out one's own share, or rather more? What
bushspirits say Nay? (See Stimer/Nietzsche.)
Nietzsche of course went mad and
signed his last letter "Dionysus and the
Crucified One"-a god reborn, but only into
speechless abyss. Possibly we need to consider
the exigency of a "rough morality"-and
perhaps even some sort of meaning-however
inexpressible-or even "spiritual " .

9.
Now with the collapse o f the Social and the
triumph of Global Capital we shattered rem­
nants could put on happy faces and say that
globalism is just the new internationalism, the
Final Stage of Capital, and that soon the means
of production will finally fall rip ely into the
hands of an enlightened global proletariat.
Or-we could gloomily admit that the Total­
ity has engulfed us, that History is dead, that

40
alienation is universal, that the last Enclosures
have been carried out, that the logic of tech­
nology and money combined ends with the
elimination of the human,Virilio's time/space
pollution, the Big Accident. Or-we could
go on refusing to accept the dichotomy-go
on demanding the impossible. But what is the
impossible, if not a kind of spirituality?
If religion and ideology both have
betrayed us perhaps we need a new paradigm.
But every "new" worldview has ancestors.
Post-modernism needn't mean simply sifting
through the rubbish of history to construct
more "revolutionary" commodities and
attitudes. Let's say we want to try to imagine
a non-authoritarian Green movement based
on Proudhonian anarcho-federalism and
Kropotkinite mutual aid-basic "plumb line
anarchist" stuff-but rooted in some form
of spirituality. Where could we look for
inspiration? Do we have a "tradition"?

10.
A genealogy of resistance? a "golden chain

41
of transmission" passing on the Stone Age
autonomist spirit from age to age?
Since we've mentioned medieval Europe
let's start there; unfortunately we'll have to ig­
nore the Classical era, the Orient, etc.,-Taoism
for example, or Sufism and Shiite Extremism,
radical Kabala (Sabbatai Sevi and Jacob Frank) ,
Hinduism (esp. Tantra, or radical syncretists like
Kabir, or the Bengali Terrorist Party)-also
tribal shamanism and its history from Stone
Age to present. Instead we'll stick with Christi­
anity, if only because most of us are brought up
to consider it the Enemy par excellence.

Subjects for research:

]�achim di Fiori and the Spiritual Franciscans;
Beghards & Beguines-Brethren of the Free Spirit;
The Adamites (literal return of Golden Age-went
naked 'Jor a sign ");
Radical wing of Renaissance Hermeticism, esp.
Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake for heresy
1600, and the alchemist Paracelsus, who supported
the Peasants Revolt 1525 against Luther and the
princes;
The Radical Reformation-neither Catholic nor
Protestant. Anabaptists and "Bible Communism ";
The Spiritualists (Sebastian Franck, Schwenckfeld,
Paracelsus) who preached an esoteric Invisible Church
with no dogma , sacraments, ministers or authorities;
The Libertines;
The Family of Love;
The Rosicrucians, the idea ef "radical tolerance,"
influence of Sufi alchemy and Jewish Kabala;
German mystics-Eckhardt, Tauler, Susa-later
Jacob Boehme and the Hermetic Pietists (Jane
Leade & the London Philadelphians);
English Revolution (see Christopher Hill and JP.
Thompson)-Diggers, Ranters, Levellers, Seekers,
Fifth Monarchy Men and Muggletonians (Blake's
mother was a Muggletonian), early Quakers, Anti­
nomians; later the Blasphemers ' Chapels;
Lef twing Freemasonry.John Toland, the Druids and
Freethinkers. Paine & Blake as "druids. " Masonic
societies behind the French Revolution;
William Blake-sine qua non;
The left wing ef German and English Romanticism;
Charles Fourier as Hermetic Socialist;
American Romantics- Thoreau, Emerson, S. Pearl

43
Andrews, Spiritualism and Radical Reform, the
"Religion of Nature" (Native American i1ifluence);
Gustav Landauer, Ch . Scholem, W Benjamin;
Surrealism (esp. thefascination with Hermeticism)­
also R. Callois and G. Bataille;
The return of shamanism (since at least the 18tl'
century);
Neo-paganism;
Universalist heresies;
Psychedelic cults, "entheogenic ceremonialism "; etc.

11.
The Critique of Civilization needs a strong
science of its own. Post-Enlightenment sci­
ence with its "dead matter" crypto-metaphys­
ics needs a Kuhnian revolution. Restitution of
meaning. Re-enchantment of the landscape.
Not just a Sorelian myth but a real myth . Sur­
realist Surrationalist Surregionalist subversion
requires potent Earth-centered spirituality, a
Gaia Hypothesis that's more than hypotheti­
cal-a spiritual exp erience. E cstasy as enstasy.
(See Bakhtin)-festival consciousness as magic.
In this context Hermeticism recommends it-
self because of its rectified neoplatonic view
of matter as spirit-the doctrine of Earth as
a living being. (Nicholas of Cusa, Pico, Ficino,
Cambridge Neoplatonists, etc.) Hermeticism
is not a religion but a science of spirit and
imagination-empirical, experiential, and ex­
perimental. Historically it's closer to us than
shamanism or the oriental ways, culturally
familiar (tho also strange, always strange) . It's
compatible with Christian,Jewish, Islamic and
Hindu mysticism, maybe also with Taoism and
Buddhism, certainly with Rosicrucianism and
Masonry, and with most of the great heresies.

12.
I don't want t o argue for "anarchist spirituality"
or "spiritual anarchism" on principle. By
their fruits shall ye know them. "Research"
here means participation, a willingness to
hallucinate and be swept away beyond the
Censor of Enlightened Reason, perhaps even
into the daemonic. Psychonauts in psychic
bathyspheres.
--October 02

45
 "An arch i st Rel igi o n''?

It's often said that we anarchists "believe

humans are basically good" (as did the Chinese
sage Mencius) . Some of us, however, doubt
the notion of inherent goodness and rej ect
the power of other people over us precisely
because we don't trust the bastards.
It seems unwise to generalize about
anarchist "beliefs" since some of us are atheists
or agnostics, while others might even be
Catholics. Of course, a few anarchists love
to indulge in the spurious disagreeable and
pointless exercise of ex-communicating the
differently-faithed amongst their comrades .
This tendency of anti-authoritarian
groupuscules to denounce and exclude each
other, however, has always struck me as rath­
er crypto-authoritarian. I 've always liked
the idea of a "plumb-line" anarchism broad
enough to cover almost all variants of dogma
in a kind of acephalous but loosely "united
front" (or "union of egoists" as Stirner put it) .
This umbrella ought to be wide enough to

47
cover "spiritual anarchists" as well as the most
inflexible materialists .
Nietzsche famously founded h is proj ect
on "noth ing"-but ended up having hinted
at a kind of moralityless, even godless religion
("Z arat hustra," " overcoming,
. " " eterna1 return,"
etc.) In his last "Mad Letters" from Turin,
he seems to elect himself (anti-) messiah of
this faith under the signature "Dionysus the
Crucified One."
It turns out that even the axiom
"nothing" requires an element of faith, and
may lead toward some kind of spiritual or even
mystical experience : the self-defined heretic
is simply proposing a different belief. "The
Death of God" is mysteriously followed by
the rebirth of "the gods''-the pagan deities
of polytheism. Thus, Nietzsche proposes the
re-paganization of monotheism when he speaks
as Christ-D ionysus-a project first launched
in the Renaissance by such heretics and neo­
pagans as Gemistho Plethon and Giordano
Bruno-the latter burned at the stake by the
Vatican in 1 600.

48
 This very task-th e re-paganization
of monoth eism-was carried out brilliantly
by th e African slaves wh o created S anteria,
Voudoun, Candomble, and many oth er
religions m which Ch ristian Saints are
identified or syncretized with p agan deities.
Ch ango "is" St. Barbara, for example; Oggun
th e war-god is Arch angel Mich ael, and migh t
be considered th e Roman war god M ars, as
well. (See M .A. de la Torre, Santeria).
Th e saints are "masks" for th e spirits
of th e oppressed-but th ey are not mere
disguises. Many santeristas are both Cath olic
and Pagan at th e same time-which naturally
drives th e Ch urch crazy!

As my anthropologist friend Jim Wafer said

in The Taste of Blood, th ese New World faith s
are not exactly "opium of th e people" (even
in th e oddly positive and slightly wistful
way Marx used th at ph rase) , but rath er areas
of resistance against malign power. In such
religions Dionysus can indeed "be" Jesus-or
Obbatala Ayagguna-in a deliberate delirium

1,9
of pantheism where nothing depends on mere
belief because actual trance possession by
"santos" (Orishas, Loas) allows everyone present
to see, touch and even "be" the gods themselves.
(Wafer was once hit up for drinks in a
bar in Recife by a stranger who turned out to
"be" a minor rum-loving deity.) Moreover­
another Nietzschean point-these cults value
magic over morality-and believe in gods
even for queers, thieves, witches, gamblers, etc.
Oscar Wilde was first to notice the
profound likeness of anarchism and Taoism
which structurally is an acephalous congeries
of polytheist (pagan) sects, with a tendency
toward heterodoxy and non-authoritarian
social values.
Obviously some forms of Taoism-or
any pagan system-have been quite complicit
with the State; we might call them Orthodox­
ies, and in these sense forerunners of mono­
theism. But the pagan spirit always includes an
anarchic element too-a Paleolithic resistance
to the State/Church and its hierarchies. Pa­
ganism simply creates new cults, or takes old

-SO
ones underground, cults that are and must be
heretical to the ruling Consensus . (Thus, old
European paganism "survived" as medieval
witchcraft, and so on.)
In classical Rome, the oriental
Hellenistic mystery cults, magical syncretisms
of Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian and even
Indian pantheons and rituals, threatened the
traditional and Imperial order. One of these
cults, a Jewish heresy, actually succeeded m

"overthrowing" Classical paganism.

I suspect that a similar dialectic can be
seen at work in 2 1 '' century USA with its
" Imperiuim" complex, its 60 per cent church­
going citizenry, its electronic "bread and cir­
cuses," its n1oney-based consciousness, etc.
A mass of oriental and New Age
"mystery cults" continues to proliferate and
morph into new forms, providing (as a whole)
a kind of popular heterodoxy or pagan-like
congeries of sects, some of them inherently
dangerous to central authority and capitalist
technopathocracy. Indeed, various sorts of
spiritual anarchism could be mentioned here

51
as part of the spectrum.
I'm proposing that fascist and fundamen­
talist cults are not to be confused with the non­
authoritarian spiritual tendencies represented
by authentic neo-shamanism, psychedelic or
"entheogenic" spirituality, the American "re-
ligion of Nature" according to anarchists like
Thoreau, sharing many concerns and my­
themes with Green Anarchy and Primitivism,
tribalism, ecological resistance, Native Ameri­
can attitudes toward Nature . . . even with
Rainbow and Burning Man festivalism.
Here in the Catskills, we've had every­
thing from Krishnamurti to the Dalai Lama,
Hasidism to Communism, Buddhism, postin­
dustrial agriculture and Slow Food, hippy
communes of the 'Sixties-Tim Leary-swa­
mi upon pandit, Wiccan upon druid-sufis
and yogis-a landscape ripe for syncretism
and spiritual universalism, ready to become
a "burnt-over district" of mystic enthousias­
mos for green revolution, if only some spark
would set off a torch-or so one might dream.
In the context of the belief I'm envision-
ing I would situate Walter Benjamin's notion
of the Profane Illu mination. How, he asks, can
spiritual experience be guaranteed outside
the context of "religion" or even of "belief?"
Part marxist, part anarchist, part Kabbalist,
he carried on the old German Romantic quest
for a re-paganization of monotheism "by any
means necessary," including heresy, magic,
poetry, hashish . . . Religion has stolen and
suppressed the "efficacious sacrament" from
the elder shamans, wizards and wisewomen­
and the Revolution must restore it.
Recently, the idea of an historical
Romantic and even Occultist Left has gained
wide acceptance and no longer needs to be
defended. Bruno 's statue in the "Flowery Field"
where he died remains an icon for freethinkers
and rebels of Rome, who keep it decked in
red flowers . The alchemist Paracelsus sided
with the Peasants in their uprising against the
Lutheran nobility.
An Emersonian reading of German Ro­
manticism (especially Novalis) might interpret
its "first thoughts; b est thoughts" as seed and

53
fruit of Revolution. William Blake is a radi­
cal heretical institution unto himself. Leftwing
French Romanticism (and Occultism) give
birth to a Charles Fourier, a Nerval, a Rim­
baud. This deep tradition of "Romantic Rev­
olution" should be added to the consideration
of any possible anarchist spirituality.
The mystics claim that "belief " is delu­
sion; only experience grants certainty, where­
upon mere faith is no longer required. They
may even come to defend mystical or spiritual
(self) liberation against the oppression of orga­
nized religion. Blake urges everybody to get a
system of their own and not to be a slave to
someone else's-especially not "The Church's."
And, G. de Nerval, who had a pet lobster named
Thibault which he took for walks in the Palais
Royal gardens in Paris on the end of a blue
silk ribbon, on being accused of lacking any
religion, said, "What? Me, no religion? Why, I
have at least seventeen of them! "
In conclusion: any liberatory belief sys­
tem, even the most libertarian (or libertine) ,
can be flipped 1 80 degrees into a rigid dog-

S4
ma-even anarchism (as witness th e case of th e
late Murray Bookchin) . Conversely, even with­
in th e most religious of religions th e natural
human desire for freedom can carve out secret
spaces of resistance (as witness th e Brethren of
th e Free Spirit, or certain dervish sects) .
Definitions seem less important in this
process th an th e cultivation of wh at Keats
called "negative capability," which h ere migh t
be glossed as th e ability to ride th e wave of
liberation no matter wh at outward form it
migh t h appen to take.
Back in th e 1 950s, it migh t h ave been
"Beat Zen" (wh ich sadly seems to h ave disap­
peared) ; today it migh t be neo-paganism or
Green Hermeticism. Just as anarchism today
needs to overcome and shed its h istorical wor­
ship of "Progress ," so, too, I think it migh t ben­
efit by loosening up on its 1 9th century ath eism
and re-considering th e possibility (oxymoron­
ic as it migh t be) of an "anarch ist religion."
[N ote : Jn memoriam Franklin Rosemont
I sh ould add th at th e kind of Hermeto­
anarchism proposed h ere ch aracterizes th e late
Breton, and later Surrealism in general. I 'd also
like to invoke the Arab poet Adonis' great book
on Sufism ["' Surrealism. And, recommend the
Harvard edition of W B enj amin's On Hashish .
Sometimes i t gets down t o that old deliberate
derangement of the senses . . . Sometimes the
opium of the people is . . . opium.]

St. Nicholas Day '09

S'6'
 Quantum, Chaos, &
the Oneness of Bei ng:
Meditations on the Kitab al-Alef

Star-watcher, be my intimate Companion;

Spy on the lightning, my night-time friend.
Ibn 'Arabi,
Taljuman al Ashwaq XVI

Leave what thou art thinking.

There is no difference between the beings of Him
and thee.
Kitab al-Alef, 1 2

Some ten years ago in a review of Frithj of

Capra's The Tao of Physics, I noted his tenden­
cy to make comparison between the "fron­
tier" sciences and the far Eastern as opposed
to Western or Middle Eastern traditions-a
tendency which has continued in such later
works as Gary Sukof 's Dancing Wu Li Masters.
What might be called the "cosmic" aspect of
the Far Eastern traditions, their emphasis on
ontology rather than theology, make them ob­
viously immediately more attractive to "post-

57
Christian" thinkers than the Abrahamic tradi­
tions-moreover,Western science and Western
religion are most often seen as enemies rather
than allies, while the Far Eastern paths have
remained hors de combat, relatively untouched
by the raging battle between materialism and
supernaturalism so typical of the West.
Nevertheless, in my review, I suggested
certain Western spiritual figures worth re-eval­
uating in the light of modern science, most no­
tably the Great Sheikh Ibn 'Arabi and his school.
I felt this project would prove worthwhile, not
only for the sake of its inherent interest, but also
as a defense of the subtlety of the West. An in­
vestigation of alchemy, for example, might well
prove similarly fruitful, or so my instincts sug­
gest. Unfortunately, I concluded (at that time) ,
that both these projects would demand areas
of expertise far beyond my scope: not only an
insider's knowledge of physics and math, but
also a vast acquaintance with sufi literature or
alchemical literature-neither of which I pos­
sessed then or possess now. However, I have
grown tired of waiting for someone else to
stumble upon this notion, or some fool foolish
enough to undertake a comparative study of
:)8
Ibn 'Arabi and frontier physics. Perhaps I must
rush in on this vast subj ect, knowing how soon
my ignorance will betray me, in the hope that
some angel will eventually follow-if only to
chastise me for my errors.
In making certain tentative comparisons,
I intend to avoid the pathetic banality of claim­
ing that ancient revelations somehow "pre­
dicted" modern science, that the Qur' an, for
example, can be decoded as a treastise on sub­
atomic particles, or the Vedas as a foreshadow­
ing of general relativity, or that Atlantis and Mu
destroyed themselves with atom bombs. Simi­
larly distasteful is the suggestion that thanks to
modern science we can now clear up and re­
fine certain primitive crudities in the ancient
revelations, as if the Qur' an or the Vedas were
no more than failed attempts, interesting but
childish assaults on the citadel of pure science
which we moderns so smugly inhabit.
Thus, we assume the infallibility of nei­
ther ancients nor moderns-but we must and
do assume that wisdom is a j ewel of many
facets, or a light composed of many veils of
light and darkness, veils which can be torn
aside one by one forever without exhausting
the subtlety of truth . If the material world in­
deed consists of "signs" for those of "discern­
ment", as the Qu 'ran says, then the medita­
tions of a scientist or a sufi might well end by
reflecting each other; they might reverberate
or resonate with each other in ways that en­
hance our experience of wisdom, even if our
bewilderment (in the Prophet's phrase) is only
increased thereby.
The concept of al-wahdat al-wuj11d, or the
oneness of being, requires in the present con­
text neither explanation nor defense. More­
over, we here may take as axiomatic the uni­
versality of this concept. Advaita Vedanta, Zen,
Eckhart, the radical Protestant mystics, Taoism,
renaissance neo-Platonism, Ibn 'Arabi, the Is­
mailis . . . Over and over again the human in­
tellect has discovered ways to express the idea
of radical monism, the perception that reality
is unified not only on a transcendent but also
on an imminent level, that "all is one" in quite
a literal sense. Cultural drift and historical in­
fluence cannot account for the ubiquity and
timelessness of this realization. Those mod­
ern scientists who arrived at strikingly similar
conclusions about reality discovered only later
6'0
the strange coincidence with ancient mystical
teachings. We may hypothesize the probabil­
ity that al-wahdat al-wujud reflects something
of the deep underlying nature of things, and
that sufism and quantum mechanics really do
sometimes talk about one and the same real­
ity. On this assumption, we can compare the
vocabularies of both systems in the hope of
mutual illumination and consequently an en­
richment of our own appreciation of both . I
wish to avoid any dogmatism on the question
of who might benefit most from this exper­
iment-I do not claim that scientists must
learn from sufis nor sufis from scientists . Very
simply, I wish to learn from both, and espe­
cially from that resonance of comparison in
which the most delicate and original harmo­
nies might be discerned.
In science, at least since Einstein, a trend
can be noted away from Cartesian dualism and
Newtonian mechanism, toward a unification
of reality. Space and time are seen as aspects
of a single continuum, and in the search for a
Unified Field Theory, Einstein and his follow­
ers worked on the assumption that even more
radical unifications and identifications can be

61
made. Stephen Hawking, the current master
of this school, believes that within the next
20 years a Grand Unified Theory (or "GUT")
will emerge to reconcile the so-called four
basic forces in physics: gravity, electromagne­
tism and the strong and weak forces. The Big
Bang theory and the existence of black holes
and "naked singularities" point in Hawking's
view toward a single expression of the origin
of matter and energy, a beginning of time and
the universe (or multiverse) . These ideas have
suggested (to some people) some parallels with
traditional concepts such as the infinite but
bounded expanding/ contracting universe of
Hinduism. Yet, interestingly, Hawking himself
has declared all comparisons between physics
and Oriental wisdom to be sheer "rubbish" . In
his view, a unified theory is not at all the same
thing as an expression of the oneness of being.
In effect, by maintaining the inevitability of a
final and complete set of theorems to describe
reality, Hawking may simply be attempting to
extend mechanism and dualism to their logi­
cal conclusion-for the existence of a GUT, a
Grand Unified Theory, implies the existence
of a separate consciousness to apprehend and
 grasp the Grand Unified Theory. An observer
and an observed, a machine with two parts . If,
as Thomas Kuhn believes, social and psycho­
logical perceptions underlie all scientific para­
digms, then Hawking would appear still to be
searching for that Judea-Christian God who
does not play dice with the universe (so dear to
Einstein's imagination) ; even though Hawking
claims to accept quantum mechanics and its
"god'' , who (in John Wheeler's words) not only
plays dice with the universe, but throws them
where we can't find them. In short, Hawking's
nostalgia for finality implies (to me) a theol­
ogy underlying his cosmology, a yearning for
a creator-god. Post-Einsteinian physics of this
sort might better be compared with monothe­
ism or even deism than with monism.
Personally, I find Hawking's b elief in the
end of physics a depressing notion. A universe
stripped of mystery would quickly become
a hell of boredom. Reality, according to the
hadith, is veiled with seventy thousand (i.e. an
infinity of) veils of light and dark. To penetrate
them all would collapse the fabric of reality.
As Ibn 'Arabi pointed out in his commentary
on this hadith in the Tarjuman, God's Mercy
 lies precisely in the ultimate impenetrabil­
ity of reality's fabric, for b eing itself depends
on the essential unknowableness of the Unity.
" The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao. " In the
dance of Shiva, in the changing multiplicity of
the ten thousand things, there and only there
does the Unity unveil itself.
Hawking is correct to feel that this
kind of "Orential Wisdom" is inimicable to
his hopes . But other branches of modern sci­
ence than his might revel in the idea that re­
ality's essential uncertainty or unprovability
is equally important as the idea of its one­
ness. Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Prin­
ciple and Godel's Proof of the unprovability
of mathematics, do no violence to the idea
of the oneness of being. In fact, they support
such concepts of unity. However, they do in
fact imply that any mathematical or physical
description or " map " of the universe (reality)
would have to be exactly as big as the reality
it describes-whereupon the universe would
double in size-whereupon you would need
a new description based on that doubling­
and so on in infinite regress-with no end to
the unfolding of those infinities which drove
64
Georg Cantor mad, and drove Ibn 'Arabi to
sanctity-the unending stripping away of
veils of light and darkness.
The Quantum theorists happily in­
habit a universe which is not only "stranger
than we imagined, but stranger that we can
imagine" , a rather Alice-like world in which
Schrodinger's Cat may be both simultaneous­
ly alive and dead, in which particles seem to
communicate telepathically, or else-viewed
in a certain light-suddenly become waves
instead of particles. Quantum mechanics has
reinserted human consciousness into a cen­
tral position in its world view, a position from
which modern science supposedly banished
all such spooks long ago. According to the
usual "orthodox" Copenhagen interpretation
of quantum mechanics, the observer partici­
pates and is inextricably involved in the uni­
verse observed. In a sense we create by the act
of observation. This leads the Copenhagenists
to declare, "There is no deep reality." Obj ects,
every day real things, "float on a world that is
not real." (Bohr and Heisenberg, respectively.)
Other theorists, however interpret quantum
differently. For Heider, Bohm and others, " re-
 ality is an undivided wholeness. " In this interpre­
tation, "the observer appears as a necessary part
of the whole structure and in his full capacity as a
conscious bein/s· The separation of the world into an
'objective outside reality ' and 'us ', the self-conscious
onlookers can no longer be maintained. Object and
su�iect have become inseparable from each other. "
According to Bohm, " One is led to a new no­
tion of unbroken wholeness which denies the clas­
sical analyzability ef the world into separately and
independently existing parts . . . The inseparable
quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is
the fundamental reality. " Bell's Theorem, which
proves or seems to prove that quantum reality
is non-local, bolsters rather than deflates the
very Ibn 'Arabi-like contentions of Bohm and
his theories of "implicate wholeness" . Some­
thing in Bell's Theorem seems to be violating
Einstein's cosmic speed limit. Some super­
liminal aether or field, or faster-than-light
particle, or even "telepathic" particle.
The crux of quantum mechanics is the
question of the collapse of the wave function,
the point at which probability "becomes" ac­
tuality. Everett and Wheeler offer the delight­
ful notion that the wave function never t ol-
lapses, that all possible events occur, but in
alternative parallel universes, a notion beloved
of science fiction writers as well as mystics . To
quote from a wonderful cranky little pam­
phlet called The Subatomic World in the Qur' an
by Aisha Abdul Rahman at-Tarjumana:
As for some of the other worlds Ibn 'A rabi
mentions them in the Meccan Revelations. He
also gives a source in the hadith from one ef
the companions ef the prophets, Abdullah Ibn
'Abbas. He stated that the Ka' aba is one of the
houses, and that each of the seven earths has a
creation like us and so there is an Ibn 'Abbas
in each ef them. Ibn al- 'Arabi states that this
is ver!fied by the experience ef the gnostics, and
he describes some ef the earths which he vis­
ited. His description of the earths which were
created from the earth left over from the clay
efAdam is truly extraordinary. First, He (that
is, God) created the date palm from it (that is,
from this clay), and then, 'there was some clay
left after he created the date palm . It was the
size ef a sesame seed, and Allah stretched out
an earth Jrorn that bit ef clay whose expanse
was irnrnense. Had the Throne and what it
contains, the Footstool, the earth, what is un-
67
 der the earth, all the Gardens and the Fire
been put into this earth, all of it would have
been like a ring cast into the desert.'This is an
incredible field. The word for 'expanse ' is also
'space ' . This earth was originally a point and
then it became a world, a .field, utterly vast
beyond imagination. He (that is, Ibn 'Arabi)
says that 'in every breath Allah creates worlds
which glorify nig ht and day.' JMJrlds are con­
stantly being brought into existence. He de­
scribes some of those worlds which he visited.
Among them are the land ef red gold (where
one of our years is 60 of theirs), the land of
white silver, the land of white camphor, and
the land of saffron.

The sheer fantasia of such theories as Copen­

hagen anti-realism or the multiple worlds hy­
pothesis have caused a reaction called "neo­
realism" . (This term I lifted from a book called
Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert, which I
recommend very strongly.) Einstein, Planck,
Schrodinger, Bohm, and de Broglie have all
looked for ways to "save the phenomena", to
discover and describe Quantum Reality per se,
rather than take the disagreeable step of agree-
r;s
ing with Copenhagian anti-realism. ("Atoms
are not things", as Heisenberg said; or "There
is no quantum world" , as Bohr says.) Recon­
ciling the neo-realist proj ect with Quantum
facts leads to some very peculiar positions,
such as maintaining that the world is real but
non-local, as in Bell's Theorem.
Could it be that the quarrel between
anti-realists and neo-realists arises from a se­
mantic problem about the definition of "real­
ity"? In my ignorance it looks to me as if both
sides are maintaining that reality means Classi­
cal reality. Thus the Copenhagenists are forced
to deny that ordinary obj ects exist-an absur­
dity-while the neo-realists are reduced to
looking for loopholes in quantum mechanics,
and seem so far to have been utterly frustrated.
But if Quantum Reality and ordinary reality
are both real, modalities of the same one reality,
then the dichotomy vanishes like a delusion
caused by bad grammar. The only problem
then remaining is that of quantum measure­
ment, which asks, in effect, how " quantum­
stuff" becomes "ordinary obj ects."
" Consciousness creates reality. " Von Neu­
mann posits that only one kind of stuff exists,

6:9
 quantumstuff, and that ordinary obj ects are
"made" of it. At some point the wave func­
tion, the all-possible nature of quantumstuff,
collapses into a single statistical probability, a
quantum jump which somehow "creates the
world" . Where does this occur? The only logi­
cal answer appears to implicate human con­
sciousness as the setting of the wave function
collapse. Ironic that Von Neumann, the wiz­
ard of cybernetics and strategic game theory,
should have been forced to develop a math
which suggests that human consciousness
must be written into any complete explana­
tion of Quantum Reality. This " all-quantum"
explanation of Quantum Reality certainly
strengthens the wahdat al-wujud aspects of the
"implicate wholeness" theory. Here we get a
strong radical monism in which matter and
consciousness cannot be distinguished except
as modalities of a single reality.

If we combine the Everett Wheeler hypothesis

(that wave function never collapses) with Von
Neumann's quantumstuff, Bohm's implicate
wholeness, and Bell's non-locality, we could ar­
rive at a kind of insane physics which (as we
70
 shall discover) bears an eerie similarity to Ibn
'Arabi's thought. In effect, might one not say
that the wave function never collapses-but that
there still remains only one reality? That there has
never been a "fall" from one into two? If Quan­
tum Reality is non-local, if"phase interference"
and Bell's Proof mean that all quantum par­
ticles which connect retain hologrammatical
and instantaneous connections with each oth­
er-and if all matter was originally (before the
Big Bang) one dimensionless macroparticle/
wave-then all particles are implicated in all
waves, and vice versa. The universe is (as Capra
says, quoting Hindu sources) a seamless net of
jewels, every jewel reflected in every other.The
wave function collapse in this case would con­
stitute a mathematical description of a mode
of individual consciousness and its awareness
of the world, its inherent implicatedness in the
totality and oneness of that world-in fact, its
virtual identity with that world. The wave func­
tion collapse would then not actually describe
a physical event at all. In effect it would never
have happened. The universe is now what it
was and ever shall be: one reality.
In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

71
(October 1 90 1 ) appeared a transation by T.
H. Weir, of a treatise attributed to Ibn 'Arabi,
(almost certainly not by Ibn 'Arabi but by a
later and somewhat extremist adherent of his
school) , which has variously been known as
the Risalat al-ahadiya , the Kitab al-Ajwibah, or
the Kitab al-Alef (a name which ought to en­
dear it to Borges fans) . It comprises a com­
mentary on the hadith "Whoso knoweth him­
self knoweth his Lord." It begins thus :
Praise be to God before whose oneness there
was not a before, unless the Before were He,
and after whose singleness there is not an after,
except the After be He. He is, and there is with
Him no after nor before, nor above nor below,
nor far nor near, nor union nor division, nor
how nor where nor when, nor times nor mo­
ment nor age, nor being nor place. And He is
now as He was. He is the One without oneness,
and the Single without singleness. He is not
composed of name and named, for His name
is He and His named is He. So there is no
name other than He, nor named. And so He
is the Name and the Named. He is the First
without firstness, and the Last without lastness.
He is the Outward without outwardness, and
7z
 the Inward without inwardness. I mean that
He is the very existence ef the First and the
very existence ef the Last, and the very exis­
tence ef the Inward. So that there is no first
nor last, nor outward nor inward, except Him,
without these becoming Him or His becoming
them . . . He is not in a thing nor a thing in
Him, whether entering in or proceeding forth .
It is necessary that thou know Him efter this
fashion, not by knowledge (ilm), nor by intel-
lect, nor by understanding, nor by imagination,
nor by sense, nor by the outward eye, nor by
the inward eye, nor by perception. There does
not see Him, save Himself; nor perceive Him,
save Himself. By Himself He sees Himself
and by HimselfHe knows Himself. None sees
Him other than He, and none perceives Him
other than He. His veil is [only a part oj]
His oneness; nothing veils other than He-- n o
sent prophet, nor saint made perfect, nor an­
gel brought nigh knows Him . His prophet is
He, and His sending is He, and His word is
He. He sent Himself with Himself to Himself.
There was no mediator nor any means other
than He. There is no d!fference between the
Sender and the thing sent, and the person sent,
73
 and the person to whom he is sent. The very
existence of the prophetic message is His ex­
istence. There is no other, and there is no ex­
istence to other, than He, nor to its ceasing to
be (fana), nor to its name, nor to its 'named.'

If the words " God" and "He" were replaced

in this passage by the words "reality" and "it"
(and the words "prophetic message" replaced
with the words " quantum theorems" or some­
thing like that) one might be excused for mis­
taking these lines for a discussion of quantum
mechanics. In a sense the Kitab al-Alef deals
only in the purist metaphysics and the pur­
est psychology, beyond all concern with the
cosmological realm of becoming. In another
sense, however, it contains the principles of a
cosmology which we can flesh out by refer­
ence to other writings of the Sheikh in which
he deals with the specific questions about the
nature of time, matter, energy, and the uni­
verse. (Many of these supportive quotations
will be drawn from The Subatomic World in the
Qur' an which, in keeping with its crackpot
style, neglects to give any references and lacks
all footnotes or bibliography. My impression
74
is that Ms. Tarjumana discovered most of this
material in the Meccan Revelations.) In forming
this mosaic of quotations, I hope that reso­
nant patterns will arise on their own without
much prodding from me. In my ineptitude, I
must rely on intuitive taste to ferret out con­
nections, suggestions, hints of convergence,
faint echoes, and reverberations .
For example, keeping in mind what we
can of implications of relativity theory for an
understanding of time, as well as the paradox
of simultaneity exhibited by B ell's Theorem,
as well as rumours about tachyons (those par­
ticles which seem to move somehow at a slant
to our temporal dimension) let us read on in
the Kitab al-Alef:
The Prophet points to the fact that thou art
non-existent now as thou wast non-existent
before the Creation. For now is past eternity
and now is future eternity, and now is past
time. And God (whose name be exalted) is the
existence of past eternity and the existence ef
future eternity and the existence ef past time,
yet without past eternity or future eternity or
past time ever existing.
In His oneness there is no dijference between
75
 what is recent and what is orig inal. The re­
cent is the result of His manifesting Himself
and the orig inal is the result of His remaining
within Himself.
At-Tarjumana comments:
Time is an imaginary matter. The Qur' an and
the gnostics frequently point out that the deter­
mination ef time depends upon your frame of
reference. As it says in the Qur'an 3 2:5, 'He
directs the affair from heaven to earth, then
it goes up to Him in one day, whose mea­
sure is a thousand years of your reckoning.' . . .
Ibn 'Arabi describes the determination of time.
'When Allah created the Starless Sphere and
it revolved, the day was not determined in it
and it did not manifest itself at all. It was
like the water of a jug in the river before it is
in the jug.' Then He (Allah) placed the stars
which we use to determine the time. 'Then
the sphere revolves with that particular sign
at which man looks. It withdraws from him
while he stands still in that place until it once
again returns to him . Then he knows that the
sphere has revolved one rotation in respect to
him-not in respect to the sphere. We call that
rotation a day.' (Ibn 'Arabi) then goes through
76'
 all the units of time and ends by saying, 'All
of that has no existence in itself. These are re­
lationships and ascriptions. That which exists
is the source ef the sphere and the state, not
the moment and time. They are determined in
them, that is, the moments are determined in
them . It is clear to you that time designates an
imaginary matter in which these moments are
assigned. The moment is an imaginary portion
in an existent source.
In that case we might well ask, how do matter
and consciousness come into being at all? In
the Kitab al-Alef we read:
As the Prophet (may God bless him and give
him peace) said, "Oh my God, show me things
as they are clearly ', (or 'show me things as
they really are ') meaning by 'things ' whatever
is beside God (whose name be exalted), that
is, 'Make me to know what is beside Thee in
order that I may understand and know things,
which they ar�whether they are Thou or
other than Thou, and whether they are ef old,
abiding, or recent and perishing.' Then God
showed him (the Prophet) what was beside
himself, without the existence ef what is beside
Himself. So he saw things as they are: I mean,
77
 he saw things to be the essence ef God (whose
name be exalted), without how or where. And
the name 'things ' includes the soul (or as we
might say, consciousness) and other than it
of things. For the existence of the soul and
the existence ef other things are both equal in
point of being 'things ', that is, are nothing;Jor,
in reality, the thing is God and God is named
a thing. Then when thou knowest the things
thou knowest the soul and when thou knowest
the soul thou knowest the Lord.
A world in which matter and consciousness
have never actually come into being, but
which is completely real-or a world which
is not real but where matter and conscious­
ness somehow exist-both these models are,
I think, compatible with quantum mechanics
and also compatible with the system of Kitab
al-Alef. Assuming we observe the world from
the point of view of becoming (or of an ap­
parent collapse of the wave function, as quan­
tum mechanics would express it) how can we
then describe the coming-into-being of mat­
ter?-which are really two ways of asking the
same question. Ibn 'Arabi says "the non-exis­
tence of existence is existence."
78
 Allah is called 'the one who exploded
the heavens and the earth into existence ' . The
Qur' an also says, 'Have not the unbelievers seen
that the heavens and the earth were a mass stitched
up, and then we unstitched them, and of waterfash­
ioned everything ? '
Water: that i s , all-possibility or formless
chaos. Ms. At-Tarjumana says,
In the picture which we have of creation first
there was the 'Arna, the Great Mist or Cloud.
There was no atmosphere above or below it.
Then the light of His essence flowed over it
and the Mist became 'dyed', that is, permeated
with lig ht, this pure source of energy. Then the
forms of the angels who wander in love ap­
peared in it (in the Mist) . These angels are in
constant movement, unceasing motion. This is
the nature of their energy. The beginning of
creation is characterized by intense movement.
The physicists view it as high energy particles
and Islam views it as angels movingfrantically
out of the love which they experience in the
majesty of Divine Beauty. Ibn 'Arabi describes
it in this way: "Allah was in the Mist. There
was no atmosphere above or below it. That was
the first Divine manifestation. The lig ht C?f the
7.9
 essence flowed on it as He was manifest when
He said, 'Allah is the lig ht ef the heavens and
the earth .' When that Mist was dyed with the
light, theforms of the angels wandering in love
appeared in it. These are above the worlds qf
natural bodies. Neither the Throne nor any
creature precedes them . After He brought them
into existence, He gave a taj alli manifesta
- ­

tion to them . Because of that taj alli, they be­

came Unseen, Invisible. That Unseen is the
spirit of those forms. He gave them the tajalli
in His name, the Beautiful, so they wandered
in love in the majesty ef His beauty. They will
never recoverfrom it.
This primal dyad of "mist" or chaos, " desire "
or Eros, makes a remarkable parallel with the
Hesiodic cosmogony. Moreover, it brings us
to the necessity of a glance at the subj ect of
chaos in modern science.
A chaotic, or genuinely random system
such as the weather of the collisions of par­
ticles in a thermonuclear plasma, is probabi­
listic in nature and therefore is believed to be
approachable from the viewpoint of quantum
mechanics. However, a separate branch of
math has arisen to deal specifically with chaos .
so
It originated in part from E . Lorentz's proof
of the chaotic and unpredictable nature of
weather; many other strands were woven into
the new science of chaos, including the work
of Rene Thom in Catastrophe Theory, which
uses differential equations (as I understand it)
to describe in topological form the "shape" of
certain events in which the probabilities con­
verge in sudden changes or " catastrophes " .
The resultant topographical constructs,
some of them very elegant indeed, are called
"attractors" because they appear to be real but
non-physical patterns, which attract certain
configurations . Chaos math begins with the
assumption that even totally random systems
might exhibit similar or "universal" properties.
And indeed they do. Attractors can be derived
from phenomena such as Brownian move­
ment, in which dissipative structures in certain
states exhibit paradoxical tendencies toward
the emergence of new or "higher" forms of
order. These attractors (Lorentz's, for example)
feel even weirder than Thom's catastrophic
diagrams, and so are called "strange attractors".
In order to visualize what they might look like,
picture the forms of Turkish or Persian mar-

81
bled paper, or the earth's weather seen from a
satellite, or the patterns of cigarette smoke in
a beam of sunlight. Remember, these are only
two- or three-dimensional strange attractors.
N dimensions are conceivable, however-in
other words, infinite dimensions.
Chaos math might seem to violate or
at least suggest important exceptions to the
Second Law ofThermodynamics (which pre­
dicts that entropy, not order, will result from
chaos) . In fact, for those of us who have al­
ways felt depressed by the Heat D eath of the
Universe, chaos theory offers reason to b e
cautiously cosmically optimistic. Nobel prize
winner Ilya Prigogine, in his book Order Out
of Chaos, credits chaos with as much philo­
sophical importance as quantum mechanics
itself. He suggests for example that this the­
ory might help solve the problem of evolu­
tion. Neo-Darwinism appears to have failed
to answer the basic challenge put to it-not
by Creationists, but by information theorists­
that being, how to account for the emergence
of a more complex system out of a less com­
plex system? In other words, how did we get
life from the famous primal soup? "Random
8.Z
niutation", the usual evasive answer, merely
begs the question. " Garbage in, garbage out,"
say the cyberneticists. Prigogine suggests that
the spark of life be sought in the direction of
the strange attractors, which might be called
the formative-causation factor in the primal
chaos soup ; some might call it "garbage" , oth­
ers might call it "bouillabaisse" . As the Kitab
al-Alef says,
Then if one ask and say: In what lig ht regard­
est thou all the hateful and loveable things?
For if thou seest, for instance, refuse or car­
rion, thou sayest it is God (whose name be
exalted),- Then the Answeer is: God Forbid
that He should be any such thing! But our
discourse is with him who does not see the car­
rion to be carrion, nor the refuse as refuse. Nay,
our discourse is with him who has sight and is
not born blind.
Prigogine has coined the phrase "evoca­
tive evolution" to describe his hypothesis, so
strongly reminiscent of Hesiod or the Rg
Veda, or Ibn 'Arabi. If his ideas survive the
tests of experiment and verification, they
might also be used to unravel further myster­
ies such as that of the morphogenetic field in

83
biology. The problem of formative causation
in embryology or the question of how a lizard,
for example, carries out the regeneration of
a lost tail, are vexing enough to drive even
some scientists to consider various entelechies,
elans vital, and other polite synonyms for
sheer hoodoo. Rupert Sheldrake, in his New
Science of Life, suggests that a morphogenetic
field, real but non-physical, may lie b ehind or
beneath the veil of life itself-and he offers
ten thousand dollars to anyone who can prove
or disprove it experimentally! As I understand
it, this field, the morphogenetic field, would
consist of certain n-dimensional strange or
chaotic attractors, a subset of all dissipative
structures . In the vocabulary of lbn 'Arabi, we
would appear to be dealing with the archetypes.
To quote from the Kitab al-Alf!f,
Everything is perishing except His Face '; that
is, there is no existent but He, nor existence
to other than He, so that it should require to
perish and His Face remain; that is, there is
nothing except His Face: 'then, whithersoever
ye turn, there is the Face of God.'
Elsewhere lbn 'Arabi translates this Qur' anic
passage as, "Everything is perishing except itsface. "
For God's face and the face or archetypal es­
sence of a thing are, after all, one and the same.
Looked at from another point of view, however,
the archetypes are not real, "have not tasted of
reality." In opposition to the Platonic concept
of Real Ideas and their unreal shadows, lbn
'Arabi also suggests that the archetypes con­
sist of mere potential, and come into being (so
to speak) only in the act of giving rise to an
individual thing. For example, in speaking of
the basic tetrad, Hot-Cold-Wet-Dry (which
we might playfully think of as "forces") he says,
"Realities grant that these matrices do not have any
existence in their essence at all before the existence ef
complex forms from them . " Elsewhere Ibn 'Arabi
describes the actual creation process as a shin­
ing through, as a shining of light through the
mist or dust of chaos. Another description of
the beginning refers to the haba, the dust or
very fine particles . The Qur' dn says that ev­
erything is created from this dust (XXX/20) .
Ibn 'Arabi states, "A reality separated from the
universal reality and it was called 'dust'. Ali and
numerous others also refer to it. Then He, (Allah)
gave a tajalli-manifestation ef his light to the dust
which is called the 'whole'. (Implicate wholeness
8$
again?) Then theforms in it accepted as much ef the
light as their propensity permitted. "
Here again I must repeat: I am not say­
ing that Ibn 'Arabi predicted Quantum/ chaos
theory, nor that modern science has "finally
explained" what Ibn 'Arabi tried to express
in his primitive way. The comparison of the
two systems may afford us or award us some
poetic facts. Moreover it may suggest ways in
which knowledge itself can be viewed ahis­
torically and from the standpoint of unity, a
process which demands metaphors, which de­
mands "peak experiences" and their symbolic
expressions , which demands, in short, the po­
etic or creative imagination. These compari­
sons should not (and probably cannot) lead to
reductionist certainties . The good hermeneu­
tical phenomenologist (in Corbin's phrase)
demands only the perpetual unveiling of be­
wilderment upon bewilderment.
Quantum mechanics and chaos theory
undoubtedly lie at the roots of an emergent
paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense) , one which
will tend to replace both the earlier paradigms
of Classical physics and Relativity. Those
who see in the principle of chaos not a fear-
ful void, but the unfolding of what Ibn 'Arabi
calls continual creation, will seek and demand
of this new paradigm that it express itself not
in violence and Armageddon, but in libera­
tion and self-realization. As the chaos scientist
Ralph Abraham says, " Chaos is health" . In this
proj ect, the old idea of "Two Cultures" must
be discarded like worn out luggage. At a point
where Quantum/ chaos theory and sufism
might meet and resonate, at the point where
both become a science ef consciousness, there
may also exist the point where every scientific
discovery is also a human unveiling-and vice
versa. In this vision, everything, self and other,
is tajalll, a word which has been translated as
theophany, hierophany, manifestation, Divine
self-manifestation, or simply and literally as
shining through. As the Kitab al-Alef says,
"And to this the Prophet (upon whom be peace)
pointed when he said: 'Revile not the world,
for God-He is the world', pointing to the
fact that the existence of the world is God's ex-
istence without partner or like or equal. . . And
when the secret of an atom efthe atoms is clear,
the secret ef all created things, both external
and internal, is clear, and thou dost not see in
87
 this world or the next aught beside God, but
the existence of these two Abodes, and their
name and their named, all ef them, are He,
without doubt and without wavering. And
thou dost not see God as having ever created
anything, but thou seest 'everyday He is in a
business,' in the way of revealing His existence
or concealing it, without any quality, because
He is the First and the Last and the Outward
and the Inward. "
This entire comparison of Quantum/
chaos and al-wahdat al al-wujad may consist of
nothing but vain imaginings . And yet I would
prefer to make the Pascalian wager that it does
point to valid conclusions, however badly I
may have misconstrued both the science and
the sufism. For in order to deny this validity,
I would have to split myself into one of two
simple personae, either the scientist who scorns
what cannot be proven, or at best becomes a
tepid agnostic-or the humanist mystic who
scoff., at mere "material reality" , and at worst
becomes an ignoramus. Neither one of these
flatland cultural stereotypes appeals; I do not
want to be one of those two who deny, those
whom the Sheikh addresses in his commen-
88
tary on the Sura of the Merciful, in a passage
which coincidentally sums up his entire cos­
mological ontology, and with which I will
conclude:
Singularity belongs to the sea ef before-time.
Gatheredness belongs to the sea of efter-time.
The dual belongs to the Muhammadan inter­
space ef man . 'He let forth the two seas
that meet together, between them a bar­
rier which they do not overpass. Which
of your Lord's blessings will you two
deny?' Do you deny the sea which He con­
nected to Him, and annihilated to the source,
or is it the sea which He separated and called
phenomenal beings ? Or is it the interspace
on which the Merciful settled? Which of your
Lord 's blessings will you two deny? He brings
forth pearls from the sea ef before-time, and
coral from the sea ef efter-time. Which of your
Lord's blessings will you two deny? He has the
spiritual ships which run, raised up in the pure
sea of the essencefrom the realities ef the names
like landmarks. Which ef your Lord 's blessings
will you two deny? The celestial world asks
Him for its highness and purity, and the ter­
restrial world asks Him for its lowness and
89
 impurity. Every second, He is in some ajfai1:
Which of your Lord's blessings will you two
deny? All that is upon it perishes, even if its
sources are non-existent. It is a journey ef one
who draws near to the Near. Which of your
Lord's blessings will you two deny? We will
attend to you at leisure, you two. "

.90
 .Ana rchy & Ecstasy

Nineteenth century rationalist/materialist/

atheist anarchists were wont to assert that
"Anarchy is not chaos." In recent years, a
revaluation of the word chaos has been
undertaken by a number of anarchist writers
(the undersigned included) in the light of
both "mythohistory" and science. Both fields
now view chaos as more than merely violent
disorder or entropy.
Classical physics and mechanics, like
classical political theory (including socialism
and anarchism) , were based on a masked
ideology of work and the " clockwork"
universe. A machine which went haywire
or ran down was a bad machine. Chaos is
bad in these classical paradigms. In the new
paradigm, however, chaos can appear as good­
synonymous with such affirmative-sounding
concepts as Prigogine's " creative evolution."
Meanwhile, and simultaneously, mytho­
history has uncovered the positive image of

.9/
chaos in certain cultural complexes which
might be called pre-Classical (or even pre­
Historical) . Thus, the very new and the very
old coincide to offer us what can now be seen
as an anti-Classical or anti-mechanistic view
of chaos. For an anarchist to use a word like
chaos in a positive sense no longer implies a
sort of Nechaevian nihilism. Case in point (as
Rod Sterling used to say) : John Moore's pam­
phlet Anarchy & Ecstasy: Visions efHalcyon Days.
Moore appears not to have read any of
the american " chaos" school of anarchism
(such as Discordian Zen, anarcho-Taoism,
"Ontological Anarchy," etc.) . Nor does he refer
to any works in chaos science. He seems to
have " made his own system" (as Blake advises)
in relative isolation, utilizing an idiosyncratic
mix of readings which in some ways mirrors
the american synthesis (as in his absorption of
Situationist "pleasure-politics") but in other
ways diverges from it.

Image of Paradise
Moore's brilliant analysis of the figure of
Chaos in Milton's Paradise Lost, for example,
gives his work a distinctive british flavor, as
does his evocation ofAvalon (the apple garden)
as an image of paradise worth regaining. But
Moore certainly does read american books­
including F. Perlman, K. Rexroth, Margot
Adler and Starhawk. His reliance on the
latter pair of authors reveals an interest in
"neo-paganism" which will no doubt annoy
certain anarchists , despite his claim to oppose
"religion" (and " God") with "spirituality" (and
" the Goddess") . I admit to some problems with
this aspect of Moore's work, and will return to
the question again.
Moore is at his best in the presentation
of what I call "poetic facts." For example, he
investigates the etymology of the words wild
and wilderness, connecting them with will (to
be wild is to be self-willed) and bewilderment (to
wander in a trackless forest; also " amazement") .
From all this he creates a portmanteau-word,
bewilderness, which he offers as a description
or slogan of his proj ect, his "brand" of anarchy.
This is a ploy worthy of a poet.

.93
 In games like this Moore achieves his
best writing and clearest thinking. When
he relies on solid facts (such as dictionaries
contain) and his own imagination, he makes
real donations to anarchist literature (in fact I
intend to appropriate the term bewilderness for
my own purposes immediately) .

An Order of NewAge
In dealing directly with a text such as Milton
or the Oxford English Dictionary, Moore
shines. However, when he relies on secondary
material (the theories of other theorists) his
insights become less convincing, less luminous.
The extensive quotations from Starhawk are
permeated with an odor of New Age, and the
semantic vagueness of the whole feel-good
school of neo-shamanism. Moore also makes
excessive use of an author named Henry
Bailey Stevens ( The Recovery of Culture, 1 949) ,
whom I have not read, but whose theories
appear to me questionable, to put it mildly.
Forgetting his implication that the earliest
human society must have been (like Chaos

.94
itself) without "gender," Moore uses Starhawk
to assert the primordiality of matriarchy. My
own position on this vexing question is
polemical: I oppose the idea of primordial
matriarchy because I oppose the idea of any
primordial "-archy." The "Rule of Mom" may
in some ways be preferable to the "Rule of Dad"
(or then again it might not)-still, I prefer to
vote for Nobody (an-archy, "No Rule") rather
than for the lesser of two evils.
As for H.B. Stevens, he supposes that the
original society was not only matriarchal but
exclusively agricultural, or rather (to be precise)
fruitarian-vegetarian, based on an economy
of orchards and groves. Admittedly this is not
labor-intensive agriculture aimed at the pro­
duction of surplus-rather an agriculture "be­
fore the fact," before the "Agricultural Revo­
lution" of the Neolithic.The Fall from Stevens'
paradise was precipitated by the Ice Age and
its naturally-imposed scarcity, which led to
the evil innovations of hunting and then ani­
mal husbandry.
The meat-eaters (referred to as "barbar-

.95
ians") then overcame the fruitarian Southerners,
thus introducing oppression into human society.
In the Stevenian ethos, Cain the agricultural­
ist was quite right to murder Abel, the herds­
man, in defense of genuine paradisal economy
and freedom from "private property." This re­
versal of biblical values suggests the influence
of Gnostic Dualism, and indeed Stevens creates
a dichotomy in which "good" represents tree/
fruit/gathering/female/South and " evil" be­
comes ice/blood/hunting/male/North.
A fascinating thesis-but unfortunately
for its supporters no " arboricultural" tribes
have survived to be studied by anthropologists,
nor can any trace of such economies be un­
covered by ethnohistorical means. Structur­
ally speaking, the "earliest" societies we can
observe are hunter/ gatherer societies which
practise no agriculture, not even the cultiva­
tion of orchards.
Moreover, the concept of non-authoritar­
ian societies (as developed by Sahlins, Clastres,
and others) depends for its illustrative mate­
rial on hunter/gatherer economies. "War," ac-

.96
cording to this school, does not develop out of
hunting but out of agricultural economy with
its dialectic of scarcity and surplus.
Hunter/ gatherers possess non-hierarchic
organization and are frequently more gender­
egalitarian than agricultural societies. Etc. ,
etc. A great deal of writing on these subj ects
has appeared since 1 949 . None of it should
prevent Moore from admiring the poetic
vividness of Stevens' theory-but some of it
might lead him to doubt the factual basis of
Stevens' claims.
There may exist medical or political
reasons for fruitarianism-or veganism-but
Moore appears to imply the existence of moral
reasons, a stance strangely out of harmony with
his promise to adopt an "antinomian" position.
Ifhe were to argue that such-&-such behavior
1s "natural" (rather than " moral")-and
therefore somehow a categorical in1perative of
sorts-might I not then reply (as many have
done) that it is " natural" to obey authority, or
at least to accept on authority that the behavior
in question is "natural"?

o/­
;:J
 I see no way out of this dilemma-and
thus I cannot help feeling that the inhabitant
of the Bewilderness would do well to avoid
all concepts of "natural" rights and wrongs
(including the "naturalness" of hunter/
gatherer societies and even of anarchy itself) .
The chaote is free to imagine--t o imagine
Nature as Desire or D esire as Nature.
If the chaote desires such-&-such a
behavior, then let it be proclaimed by the
Sovereign Imagination that the behavior is
"natural" for that chaote-not as an inalienable
right, but as an act of will. And if anyone
should ask what then prevents the outbreak
of violent disorder and the spread of entropy,
we may refer them to Moore's own analysis of
chaos as a positive force of liberation, situated
beyond the false and oppressive dichotomy of
cosmic good and evil.
Moore makes fun (and rightly, I b elieve)
of the usual pallid anarchist version of a future,
free society, in which everything human
seems to have disappeared except the politics
of consensus . In its stead he offers a vision,

.98
centered on a mystery of wildness , wilderness,
and chaos, based on a personal reading of
myth and history but also involving practical
and experiential inspirations for action in the
here-and-now.
As such, as vision, I find Anarchy &

Ecstasy an "attractive " work (in the sense

C. Fourier used the word, to mean lovable
and sexy) . There are pages, however, where
Moore seems to take his vision for revelation,
something beyond the personal, something
absolute-and here I begin to tune out.
But as pure rant, the book overcomes
its own limitations-and for its "delirious
rhetoric" it deserves a proud place on the shelf
labeled "Chaos."

Review of Anarchy and Ecstasy:

Visions of Halcyon Days,
by John Moore. Aporia Press

,9,9
 Evi l Eye

The Evil Eye-ma/ occhio--truly exists, &

modern western culture has so deeply repressed
all knowledge of it that its effects overwhelm
us-& are mistaken for something else
entirely. Thus it is free to operate unchecked,
convulsing society in a paroxysm of Invidia.
Invidious Envy-the active manifestation
of passive resentment-proj ected outward
thru the gaze (ie thru the whole language
of gestures & physiognomy, to which most
moderns are deaf, or rather which they are
not aware of hearing) .
It's especially when we're unconsc10us
of such magic that it works best-moreover,
it's known that the possessor of the Eye is
nearly always unconscious-not a true black
magician, but almost a victim-yes, but a
victim who escapes malignity by passing it on,
as if by reflex.
In more traditional worlds (worlds of
the "symbolic order" as B enj amin puts it, as
opposed to worlds of "history") , I 've noticed

IOI
that people remain much more attuned to the
languages of gesture; where there 's no TV &
" nothing ever happens," people watch people,
people read people. Passersby in the street
pick up your mood, & according to their
temperament they clash with it or harmonize
with it or manipulate it. I never knew this
till I lived in Asia. Here in America, people
react to you most often on the basis of the
idea you proj ect-thru clothes, position G ob) ,
spoken language. In the East one is more often
surprised to find the interlocutor reacting to
an inner state ; perhaps one was not even aware
of this state, or perhaps the effect seems like
"telepathy." Most often, it is an effect of body
language.
I 've heard it said that the Mediterranean
& Mideast worlds evolved a complex
phenomenology of the mal occhio because
they are more given to envy than we
Northerners. But the Evil Eye is a universal
concept, missing not in any space (such as the
chill & rational North) but only in time-to
be exact, in historical time, the time of cold

!Oz
Reason. Reason's protection against magic is
to disbelieve it, to believe it out of Reason's
universe of discourse. Asia's defense against
magic is more magic-in this case, the blue
stone (common from Lebanon to India, maybe
even farther East) or else, in the Mediterranean
(our own "Asia") , the downpointed bull-sign
of the fingers, or the phallic amulet.
But Reason & Magic are both
superstitions ("left-over beliefs") . I suggest
that the mal occhio "works ; " but my analysis
is neither rational nor irrational. Who can
explain the complex web of signs, symbols,
forces & influences that flow & weave b etween
such enigmatic monads as ourselves? We can't
explain how we communicate, much less
what. If the "symbolic order" was replaced by
"history," & if History itself is somehow now
in the process of " disappearing," perhaps we
may at last breathe free of the fogs of magic
& the smogs of reason. Perhaps we can simply
admit that " mysteries" such as the Eye-or
even "telepathy"-somehow appear in our
world, or seem to appear, which means simply

103
that they appear to appear, & thus that they
appear.
The proper organ for this kind of
knowledge would be the body.
Now Envy is universal. But some societ­
ies attempt to keep it under control, while in
others it is unleashed by being turned into a
social principle. We have no defense against
the evil eye because our entire social ethic is
rooted in Envy. At least the benighted Asians
have their amulets & prophylactic gestures. It
was not Reason which banned these frail de­
fenses, however. It was Christianity. " Verb. sap. ,"
as English schoolboys used to say.
The two post-Xtian ideologies­
Capitalism & Communism-are both fueled
by Envy. In both systems it is a survival trait-no,
it is an economic trait. " Oeconomy"-an old
word for the totality of all social arrangements .
The "Eighties" was not the decade of greed
(which at least has the dignity of an active
force) but of envy. The minorities envied the
majority, the poor the rich, the "addicted"
the healthy, women men, blacks whites . . . yes,
the rich envied the poor (for their idleness) ,
the healthy envied the "addicted" (for their
pleasures) , men envied women (as always) ,
whites envied blacks (for their living culture,
& for their suffering) , & so on.
A crude anthropology (note the " an­
thro ) claims that "primitive mind" experi­
"

ences Envy as a female principle-(hence the

phallic defense against the Evil Eye) . A very
limited view. "Envy" may be yin when com­
pared with the yang of " greed," but the Evil
Eye, as a prolongation of Invidia, is pointy &
penetrative, like a dagger-a death-dealing
phallus-to which one opposes the phallus of
life, the penis itself. An Italian savant once told
me of the most horrendous example of the
ma! occhio he'd ever encountered, in a with­
ered & hairy-faced old woman. A healer, a
charismatic Catholic mystic, undertook the
cure of this miserable witch-& discovered
that, unknown to her, she was in fact a man
(the genitals had never descended) .
A gender-analysis of the Eye will get
us nowhere. The association of the Eye with

105
women may arise from the tendency of women
to be more sensitive to body language than
men, & thus to hold on to certain "magics"
even as they begin to vanish from those worlds
which discover history (which, as everyone
knows, is not, by-&-large, her story) .
The N uer believe that all accident, illness
& death are caused by witchcraft. Most Nuer
witches are unaware of themselves as witches.
They suffer from envy. According to our trivial
beliefs, all accidents are accidental-no one is
to "blame." We suffer from envy, but we are
"innocent." Frankly I can't believe either the
Nuer witch-finders or the pundits of our own
mechanistic worldview. Both belief-systems
are " disappearing" anyway-why should I buy
passage on their sinking ships? Things are so
much more complex than either worldview
can imagine that, in effect, things are much
more simple than either of them would have
us believe.
I mean: the effects of two human b eings
on each other occur on so many levels that
flat concepts like witchcraft or accident can't

106'
begin to do them justice. And yet, matters are
not nearly as tangled & dark as the theory of
witchcraft would have us believe, nor so brutal,
so industrial, as the theory of the mechanistic
universe. The body knows much without
knowing, the imagination sees much that it
does not need to understand. The body & the
imagination overstand-they are above mere
understanding & its clumsy abstractions .
Blue is the color of the sky & its happiness,
air & light against the earth & shadow of Envy.
But blue is also the color of death-as with
the old B edu woman who told Lawrence that
his blue eyes reminded her of the sky seen thru
the sockets of a bleached skull. The Yezidis,
the "devil-worshippers" of Iraqi Kurdestan,
refuse to wear blue beads or even clothes
because it is the color of their Lord, Satan,
the Peacock Angel, & to wear blue to ward
him off would deeply offend him. So the blue
bead is homeopathic-a bit of evil used to
defend against evil-perhaps a fragment fallen
from the Horned One himself, powerful in its
goaty virility against the chthonic negative-

107
Yin-like power of Envy. And yet the stone is
also the serenity of azure, turqoise, infinity, the
Feminine-a bit of mosaic from the matrix of
the sky, or of water.
Similarly the bull-sign, when seen
upright & face on, is undoubtedly a yang-ish
sort of symbol . . .
-but pointed down & seen m reverse­
as it is presented to the view of the Evil­
Eye-suspect (although the gesture is made
surreptitiously) , the sign becomes a Stone age
woman-image, two legs & a vulva . . .
-so that potency against the Evil Eye comes
from the "horns" which are stabbed down,
the virile element-but within that symbol is
embedded the power of the goddess as well.
Even the phallic amulet, which might at
first appear all male, is not the penis of the
animal-god, but of Priapus, a god of vegetation.
It is the penis of fruit & flower-in some sense,
a female penis.
The apotropaic complex is thus to be
seen as neither male nor female nor even,
properly speaking, androgynous. The symbols

108
revolve not around gender but engendering,
around life or energy itself as a value opposed
to the negativity, the vacuum, the deathly cold
of envy.
The opposite of the gaze of love is not
the gaze of hate, but that of envy, passive,
unliving in itself, vampirically attracted to the
life in others . A barren woman sees a pretty
newborn baby-she praises it to the skies, but
her words mean the opposite of what they say;
unknown even to her, her gaze pierces direct
to the infant's breath.Are we so certain that the
language of gesture is weak, an evolutionary
appendix soon to be bred out of the species?­
do we not suspect that it is strong, powerful
enough to attract love, or to make sick, even
to kill?
Everywhere m our world this deadly
gaze is directed at us, as m B entham's
Panopticon. We are described as victims, as
patients, as passive focal points of misery-we
are shown ourselves deprived of this or that
commodity or "right" or quality which we
most desire. The ones who tell us this-are

10.9
they not the rich, the powerful, the politicians,
the corporations? What could we still possess
to awaken in them such invidia, & the endless
assaults of their mal occhio? Could it be that
(unknown to us or to them) we are alive
& they are dead? The TV screen can be an
ultimate Evil Eye-because it is already dead,
& the dead (as Homer showed us) are the most
envious of all beings. Everything mediated is
dead, even this writing-& the dead yearn
for life. I 've tried to protect this text against
being an Evil Eye, as well as against the Evil
Eye itself, by including in it the names of the
appropriate charms. But prose alone will never
do the trick. There must otcur enchantment,
a singing that changes (our perception of)
reality. Or better, the blue breath of the serene
sky, or the hot moment of the thrusting cock.
Envy is an abstraction because it wants to
"take away from." The Evil Eye is its weapon
in the psychic/physical world. Against it, then,
must stand not another abstraction (such as
morality) but the solidest of fleshy realities, the
over-abundant power of birth, of fucking, of

110
azure breezes. The amulet we fashion against
an entire society of the Evil Eye can be no
more & no less than our own life, adamantine
as stone & horn, soft as sky.

Ill
 AGAI NST M ETAPHOR

A n imitation £?[ a Translation efAbu Nuwas by R.A .

Nicholson

Come fill the cup w/ wine-& call it WINE .

Damn all metaphor-sin in broad daylight .
Every hour of sobriety is a disgrace o f p overty­
wealth is to fall down every moment in delight.
Come speak the beloved's name w I out disguise
& curse all pleasures veiled in simile as lies

Sin & sin in multiplicity, sin in excess

for the Lord is above all Merciful
quick to forget his Wrath when the Last Days
press
& no doubt will forgive you in His Generosity
while all those moralists who abstained thru fear
of Hell

can gnaw their fingers w I envy thru all Eternity.

[Note: lbn Khallikan, who quotes this poem, com­

ments : " I t is a very fine and original thought." Ibn
Khallikan's translator (de Slane) however adds in a note:
"It is not, however, in strict accordance with Moslem
rnorality" -quite an understatement !]

113
 Secret of the Assass i n s

After the death o f the Prophet Mohammad,

the new Islamic community was ruled in
succession by four of his close Companions,
chosen by the people and called the Rightfully­
guided Caliphs. The last of these was Ali ibn
Abu Talib, the Prophet's son-in-law.
Ali had his own ardent followers among
the faithful, who came to be called Shi'a or
"adherents." They believed that Ali should
have succeeded Mohammad by right, and
that after him his sons (the Prophet's grand­
sons) Hasan and Husayn should have ruled;
and after them, their sons, and so on in quasi­
monarchial succession.
In fact except for Ali none of them ever
ruled all Islamdom. Instead they became a line
of pretenders, and in effect heads of a branch
of Islam called Shiism. In opposition to the
orthodox (Sunni) Caliphs in Baghdad these
descendants of the Prophet came to be known
as the Imams.
To the Shiites an Imam is far more, far

115
higher in rank than a Caliph. Ali ruled by
right because of his spiritual greatness, which
the Prophet recognized by appointing him his
successor (in fact Ali is also revered by the Sufis
as "founder" and prototype of the Moslem
saint) . Shiites differ from orthodox or Sunni
Moslems in believing that this spiritual pre­
eminence was transferred to Ali's descendants
through Fatima, the Prophet's daughter.
The sixth Shiite Imam, Jafar al-Sadiq,
had two sons. The elder, Ismail, was chosen as
successor. But he died before his father. Jafar
then declared his own younger son Musa the
new successor instead.
But Ismail had already given birth to
a son-Mohammad ibn Ismail-and pro­
claimed him the next Imam. lsmail's followers
split with ]afar over this question and followed
Ismail's son instead of Musa. Thus they came
to be known as lsmailis.
Musa's descendants ruled "orthodox"
Shiism. A few generations later, the Twelfth
Imam of this line vanished without trace
from the material world. He still lives on the

116
spiritual plane, whence he will return at the
end of this cycle of time. He is the "Hidden
Imam," the Mahdi foretold by the Prophet.
"Twelver" Shiism is the religion of Iran today.
The Ismaili Imams languished in con­
cealment, heads of an underground movement
which attracted the extreme mystics and revo­
lutionaries of Shiism. Eventually they emerged
as a powerful force at the head of an army,
conquered Egypt and established the Fatimid
dynasty, the so-called anti-Caliphate of Cairo.
The early Fatimids ruled in an enlight­
ened manner, and Cairo became the most
cultured and open city of Islam. They never
succeeded in converting the rest of the Islam­
ic world however; in fact, even most Egyp­
tians failed to embrace Ismailism. The highly
evolved mysticism of the sect was at once its
special attraction and its maj or limitation.
In 1 07 4 a brilliant young Persian convert
arrived in Cairo to be inducted into the high­
er initiatic (and political) ranks of Ismailism.
But Hasan-i Sabbah soon found himself em­
broiled in a struggle for power. The Caliph

117
Mustansir had appointed his eldest son Nizar
as successor. But a younger son, al-Mustali,
was intriguing to supplant him. When Mus­
tansir died, Nizar-the rightful heir-was im­
prisoned and murdered.
Hasan-i Sabbah had intrigued for
Nizar, and now was forced to flee Egypt. He
eventually turned up in Persia again, head of a
revolutionary Nizari movement.By some clever
ruse he acquired command of the impregnable
mountain fortress of Alamut ("Eagle's Nest")
near Qasvin in Northwest Iran.
Hasan-i Sabbah's daring vision, ruthless
and romantic, has become a legend in the
Islamic world. With his followers he set out to
recreate in miniature the glories of Cairo in this
barren multichrome forsaken rock landscape.
In order to protect Alamut and its tiny
but intense civilization Hasan-i Sabbah relied
on assassination. Any ruler or politician or
religious leader who threatened the Nizaris
went in danger of a fanatic's dagger. In fact
Hasan's first maj or publicity coup was the
murder of the Prime Minister of Persia,

118
perhaps the most powerful man of the era
(and according to legend, a childhood friend
of Sabbah's) .
Once their fearful reputation was secure,
the mere threat of being on the eso-terrorist
hit list was enough to deter most people
from acting against the hated heretics. One
theologian was first threatened with a knife
(left by his pillow as he slept) , then bribed with
gold. When his disciples asked him why he
had ceased to fulminate against Alamut from
his pulpit he answered that Ismaili arguments
were both "pointed and weighty."
Since the great library of Alamut was
eventually burned, little is known of Hasan-i
Sabbah's actual teachings. Apparently he
formed an initiatic hierarchy of seven circles
based on that in Cairo, with assassins at the
bottom and learned mystics at the top.
Ismaili mysticism is based on the concept
of ta'wil, or "spiritual hermeneutics." Ta'wil
actually means "to take something back to its
source or deepest significance." The Shiites
had always practiced this exegesis on the

//.9
Koran itself, reading certain verses as veiled or
symbolic allusions to Ali and the Imams. The
Ismailis extended ta'wil much more radic:11ly.
The whole structure of Islam appeared to
them a shell; to get at its kernel of meaning
the shell must be penetrated by ta'wil, and in
fact broken completely.
The structure of Islam, even more
than most religions, is based on a dichotomy
between exoteric and esoteric. On the one
hand there is Divine Law (shariah) , on the
other hand the Spiritual Path (tariqah) . Usually
the Path is seen as the esoteric kernel and the
Law as the exoteric shell. But to Ismailism
the two together present a totality which in
its turn becomes a symbol to be penetrated
by ta'wil. B ehind Law and Path is ultimate
Reality (haqiqah) , God Himself in theological
terms-Absolute Being in metaphysical terms.
This Reality is not something outside
human scope; in fact if it exists at all then it
must manifest itself completely on the level of
consciousness. Thus it must appear as a man,
the Perfect Man-the Imam. Knowledge of

I.PO
the Imam is direct perception of Reality itself.
For Shiites the Family of Ali is the same as
perfected consciousness .
Once the Imam is realized, the levels
of Law and Path fall away naturally like split
husks . Knowledge of inner meaning frees one
from adherence to outer form: the ultimate
victory of the esoteric over the exoteric.
The "abrogation of the Law" however
was considered open heresy in Islam. For
their own protection Shiites had always been
allowed to practice taqqiya, "permissible
dissimulation" or Concealment, and pretend
to be orthodox to escape death or punishment.
lsmailis could pretend to be Shiite or Sunni,
whichever was most advantageous.
For the Nizaris, to practice Concealment
was to practice the Law; in other words,
pretending to be orthodox meant obeying
the Islamic Law. Hasan-i Sabbah imposed
Concealment on all but the highest ranks at
Alamut, because in the absence of the Imam
the veil of illusion must naturally conceal the
esoteric truth of perfect freedom.

121
 In fact, who was the Imam? As far as
history was concerned, Nizar and his son
died imprisoned and intestate. Hasan-i Sab­
bah was therefore a legitimist supporting a
non-existent pretender! He never claimed
to be the Imam himself, nor did his succes­
sor as " old Man of the Mountain," nor did his
successor. And yet they all preached "in the
name of Nizar." Presumably the answer to this
mystery was revealed in the seventh circle of
initiation.
Now the third Old Man ofthe Mountain
had a son named Hasan, a youth who was
learned, generous, eloquent and loveable.
Moreover he was a mystic, an enthusiast for
the deepest teachings of Ismailism and Sufism.
Even during his father's lifetime some Alamutis
began to whisper that young Hasan was the
true Imam; the father heard these rumors and
denied them. I am not the Imam, he said, so
how could my son be the Imam?
In 1 1 62 the father died and Hasan (call
him Hasan II to distinguish him from Hasan-i
Sabbah) became ruler of Alamut. Two years
later, on the seventeenth of Ramazan (August
8) in 1 1 64, he proclaimed the Qiyamat, or
Great Resurrection. In the middle of the
month of Fasting, Alamut broke its fast forever
and proclaimed perpetual holiday.
The resurrection of the dead m their
bodies at the " end of time" is one of the most
difficult doctrines oflslam (and Christianity as
well) . Taken literally it is absurd. Taken symbol­
ically however it encapsulates the experience
of the mystic. He "dies before death" when he
comes to realize the separative and alienated
aspects of the self, the ego-as-programmed­
illusion. He is "reborn" in consciousness but
he is reborn in the body, as an individual, the
''soul-at-peace.''
When Hasan I I proclaimed the Great
Resurrection which marks the end of Time,
he lifted the veil of concealment and abrogated
the religious Law. He offered communal as
well as individual participation in the mystic's
great adventure, perfect freedom.
He acted on behalf of the Imam, and did
not claim to be the Imam himself. (In fact he

1.23
took the title of Caliph or "representative.")
But if the family of Ali is the same as perfect
consciousness, then perfect consciousness is
the same as the family of Ali. The realized
mystic "becomes" a descendent of Ali (like
the Persian Salman whom Ali adopted by
covering him with his cloak, and who is much
revered by sufis, Shiites and Ismailis alike) .
In Reality, in haqiqah, Hasan II was
the Imam because in the Ismaili phrase, he
had realized the "Imam-of-his-own-being."
The Qiyamat was thus an invitation to each
of his followers to do the same, or at least to
participate in the pleasures of paradise on earth.
The legend of the paradisal garden at
Alamut where the houris, cupbearers, wine
and hashish of paradise were enj oyed by the
Assassin in the flesh, may stem from a folk
memory of the Qiyamat. Or it may even be
literally true. For the realized consciousness
this world is no other than paradise, and its
bliss and pleasures are all permitted. The Koran
describes paradise as a garden. How logical then
for wealthy Alamut to become outwardly the

IZ4
reflection of the spiritual state of the Qiyamat.
In 1 1 66 Hasan II was murdered after
only four years of rule. His enemies were
perhaps in league with conservative elements
at Alamut who resented the Qiyamat, the
dissolving of the old secret hierarchy (and thus
their own power as hierarchs) and who feared
to live thus openly as heretics. Hasan II's son
however succeeded him and established the
Qiyamat firmly as Nizari doctrine.
If the Qiyamat were accepted in its full
implications however it would probably have
brought about the dissolution and end of
Nizari lsmailism as a separate sect. Hasan II
as Qa'im or "Lord of the Resurrection" had
released the Alamutis from all struggle and
sense of legitimist urgency. Pure esotericism,
after all, cannot be bound by any form.
Hasan II's son, therefore, compromised.
Apparently he decided to "reveal" that his father
was in fact and in blood a direct descendent of
Nizar.The story runs that after Hasan-i Sabbah
had established Alamut, a mysterious emissary
delivered to him the infant grandson of Imam
Nizar. The child was raised secretly at Alamut.
He grew up, had a son, died. The son had a
son. This baby was born on the same day as
the son of the Old Man of the Mountain, the
outward ruler. The infants were surreptitiously
exchanged in their cradles. Not even the Old
Man knew of the ruse. Another version has the
hidden Imam committing adultery with the
Old Man's wife, and producing as love-child
the infant Hasan I I .
The lsmailis accepted these claims. Even
after the fall of Alamut to the Mongol hordes
the line survived and the present leader of the
sect, the Aga Khan, is known as the 491h in
descent from Ali (and pretender to the throne
of Egypt!) . The emphasis on Alid legitimacy
has preserved the sect as a sect. Whether
it is literally true or not, however, matters
little to an understanding of the Qiyamat.
With the proclamation of the Resurrection, the
teachings of Ismailism were forever expanded
beyond the borders imposed on them by an
historical event. The Qiyamat remains as a state
of consciousness which anyone can adhere to

126
or enter, a garden without walls, a sect without
a church, a lost moment of lslamic history that
refuses to be forgotten, standing outside time,
a reproach or challenge to all legalism and
moralism, to all the cruelty of the exoteric. An
invitation to paradise.

1.27
 Secu lar Ant i n o m i a n
Anabapt i st Neo-Lu d d i s m

By banning the telephone from the home, Old

Order Amish . . . try to maintain the primacy ef
communication within the context of community.
-D. Z . Umble

Church splits are bad, some things are worse,

and one of them is to keep on compromising
with something we know is sinful.
-Anon. , Separated Unto Christ
(Old Order Mennonite tract,
circa 1 995)

The Unabomber wanted to return to about

1 880; at the other extreme, the Green Nihil­
ists demand the deep Paleolithic via the total
destruction of modern Civilization. The term
anarcho-primitivist can cover a whole spectrum
of variations on the theme of reversion, of"go­
ing back" to some "earlier" human condition.
But today's anarcho-primitivists are not
the only critics of modern technology and
/,2,9
alienation to emerge from the traditional left
or "Movement of the Social." Charles Fou­
rier may have been the first radical to out-do
Rousseau by attacking the totality of Civiliza­
tion and praising "savages and Barbarians" as
far happier than modern humanity. But he
proposed moving forward to Utopia rather
than back to Tahiti (always the French arche­
type of primitive paradise-hence, Gauguin's
later expatriation) .
Of course, a classical anarchist critique
of Civilization and specifically of technology
can already be gleaned from William Morris
and Kropotkin, with precursors among the
Romantics. (See, for instance, Byron's poem
in defense of the machine-smashers, with its
incendiary refrain: "No King but King Ludd! "
Blake's "satanic mills" were also part of the tra­
dition.) One of the original Ludd Letters de­
fined the Luddite movement as resistance to
any technology "hurtful to the commonalty."
By this definition, anarcho-primitivists
might be defined as neo-luddites . Some draw
the line at steam, others at flintknapping, but
the principle is the same. Not to make light of
the differences-but if I have to wait for the
overthrow of language, music, and even a sense
of humor before the gates of paradise crack
open even a tiny slit, then I confess despair.
The Nihilists among us appear to believe
that no compromise, no gradual approach (e. g.,
through alternative technology) can be admit­
ted. Destruction, yes. But no "building the
kernel of the new society within the shell of
the old." All Now or Nothing Never. There­
fore, they see no purpose in any piecemeal re­
versionism of a constructive nature. And con­
sequently, it seems, they see no reason to "deny"
themselves the use of cars and computers.
I find this puzzling because I find cars
and computers to be extremely unpleasurable
devices. I'd love to be able to live without them,
and I 've greatly enj oyed the few periods of my
life when I could (mostly in what we used to
call the Third World.) Unfortunately, luddism
is not a viable practice at the individual hermit
l<>vel (or anyway, not for a klutz like the au­
thor) . You need communitas (as that "Neolithic

131
Conservative" Paul Goodman put it) in order
to live luddism as a pleasure and not a form of
self-denial like wearing a hair shirt.
It's almost a Catch-22 . You need lud­
dism to make communitas and communitas
to practice luddism.
Furthermore, most of us would starve to
death without cars and computers and even
cell phones. Capital creates needs; those needs
become real. Most of us can live without a TV,
but to live without telephones would require
an organic local community organized volun­
tarily around luddite ideals.
Which brings us to the Anabaptists.
The original Anabaptists have been ad­
mired by many revolutionaries from Engels to
Landauer. The "Luther Blisset" trio of Bologna
Neo-Situationists who wrote the highly en­
tertaining erudite pulp thriller Q, depict the
old Anabaptists as out-and-out antinomian an­
archists. (Here, they were possibly influenced
by R.Vaneigem's praise of the Brethren of the
Free Spirit.) Relevant to the present discussion,
however, is the Anabaptist critique of technol-

IJZ
ogy, which only developed at a later period.
The revolutionary Anabaptists were
ruthlessly suppressed by both l 6'h century
Protestant and Catholic powers. But quiet­
ist/pacifist Anabaptism survived by fleeing to
the New World. In Europe, almost no trace
remains, but here in North America, we have
the Old Order Amish, Mennonites, Brethren,
Schwenkfeldians, and even a few Old Order
Quakers, all still living in intentional com­
munities and practicing luddism, function­
ing more or less happily without telephones,
computers, cars, or even electricity.
But are they in any sense anarchists?
They may be quite authoritarian/patriarchal
on one level, but they also retain interesting
traces of their anti-authoritarian heritage. For
instance, their bishops and ministers are cho­
sen by lot. They refuse all cooperation with
governments , will not serve in armies, or run
for office; and they practice mutual aid. The
Hutterites live as "Bible communists; " the
Amish live in separate households; but all are
intensely social. The Bruderhof, an offshoot of

133
the Hutterites, are proud of their anarcho-so­
cialist forebears and almost worship the Ger­
man anarchist, Gustav Landauer, as a saint.
The only real source of power in the
Old Order sects is the Bann, whereby mem­
bers of the autonomous congregation can ex­
communicate and "shun"-but only by unan­
imous consent-any member who refuses to
accept the (unwritten) Ordinances on tech­
nology. Uncountable splits have resulted from
use of the Bann, with subsects who use hook­
and-eye fasteners and not buttons or zippers,
and other subsects who accept cars but only if
painted entirely black including the bumpers .
The variations are fascinating and not trivial
(although sometimes amusing) . Dissidents are
free to leave. Around age 20 the youth are in­
vited to j oin the church, which of course can
only be j oined by adult baptism; if they decide
not to j oin, their decision is regretted but they
are not shunned. Physical coercion in any case
is forbidden by pacifist ideals .
The Old Orders emphasize farming be­
cause, m their view, Nature is close to God.

/J4
From the anarcho-primitive perspective, this
farming involves a level of "domestication"
unacceptable to extremists . But we should re­
member that they are actually practicing a form
of reversion, and we are not. How do they do it?
Some "plain people" share a single
phone or a single car among five or six ad­
j acent farms. Instead of electricity, they'll use
compressed air and propane. Others allow
some electricity if it's generated off-grid. One
might call this an impure or empirical luddism.
In every decision the ideal is to maintain
communities. Horses allow organic commu­
nity. The horse is the key to Old Order tech.
As one bishop put it, " If you can pull it with
horse, you can have it." But the Internet, they
feel, threatens community with utter destruc­
tion. The sects that maintain a hard line on
tech make hard use of the Bann. Around 1 907,
the main Amish body in Lancaster, Pennsyl­
vania lost a quarter of its memb ers over the
telephone question, using the Bann with strict
revolutionary logic to preserve the core group.
The Old Order Brethren divided over tele-

135
phones in 1 905. They certainly remind one
of anarchists or Surrealists or Situationists in
their tendency to wrangle and split.
Could there exist such a thing as secular
anabaptism-or is the fanaticism of religion a
prerequisite for carrying on a revolution for
400 years without flinching? In any case, their
persistence and existence prove that luddite
life is possible, given some compromises, even
in the (post)modern world.
In the 1 990s, a brief secular luddite move­
ment derived some inspiration and held a se­
ries of conferences in contact with some of the
plain people. Kirkpatrick Sale published Rebels
Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on
the Industrial Revolution: Lessonsfor the Computer
Age. But when I wrote to him two years ago he
admitted that he knew of not one secular lud­
dite community anywhere in the world.
Why can't anarchists live without elec­
tricity? Are we finally too implicated in the
Progressism and technophilia of most of our
historical movement? How many anarcho­
primitivists does it take to unscrew a light bulb?

/,Jfl
 To put the question another way: why are
we denying ourselves the pleasure of reversion?
The Amish may be dour, but they have
produced a sort of zen-shaker life-texture
that possesses spontaneous good taste-always
a sign of pleasure. Some Old Order sects al­
low tobacco and wine and "bed bundling"
among courting couples-and their various
"bees" and "frolics" provide excuses for feasts
and "visiting." Their art has powerful roots in
the creative mysticism of such Pennsylvania
Rosicrucian ancestors as Johannes Kelpius or
the visionaries of Ephrata. Romanticism and
nature mysticism come naturally to them (and
the Bruderhof read Novalis and Goethe) .
But the key to Amish autonomy is eco­
nomic self-sufficiency. They buy no insurance
and accept no government hand-outs . Farm­
ing and crafts provide what they need. In
Italy, anarchism almost provides an alternate
economy in the wide network of squats, so­
cial centers, and farms it controls. But in the
USA now, anarchism has no economic insti­
tutions capable of providing livelihoods for its

137
adherents . No food or craft coops, no farms or
Community Supported Agriculture.
The very use of technopathocracy's hi­
tech mechanisms such as cars and computers
seems to militate against the feasibility of re­
alizing other desires, as if the apparatus itself
were designed to suppress them. (Which it is.)
The Amish model involves a retreat from
"the World" rather than the revolutionary con­
frontation proposed by militant 1 6th century
Anabaptism-or by anarchism. But nowadays
retreat makes good sense from a tactical point
of view in light of the Empire's overwhelming
force for oppression on every level of "civi­
lized" life. In fact, this retreat has already oc­
curred. (American anarchism is not presently
engaged in revolution, despite its occasional
rhetoric and perennial optimism.) But why
shouldn't we make it a tactical retreat?
Can we imagine an antinomian Ana­
baptism or even a secular neo-luddism ca­
pable of organizing a tentative and impure
but still radical reversion on the microscale of
intentional community? A small but pleasur-

158
able (also risky) retreat from world ofToo Late
Capitalism?
The Old Orders don't seem to theorize.
Their Ordinances are fluid b ecause unwritten.
Writing is distrusted because it stops the flow
and threatens the organicity of tradition. In
fact, all their theory work tends to be done in
community, not by individual leaders , and cer­
tainly not by reading texts (other than scrip­
ture of course, which itself possesses a certain
fluidity in exegesis) . In a sort of Hegelian way,
theory is both suppressed in its alienating mode
as "dead letter" and realized at once in its cre­
ative mode as living community.
Precisely this "overcoming" marks the
genetic link between Anabaptism and revolu­
tionary anarchism and communism-a shared
ancestry which fascinated historians like Nor­
man Cohn and E.P. Thompson. Anabaptists
and related sects like the Old Order Quakers
have apparently failed-but only because they
turned away from the World as "saving rem­
nant" or " gathered churches," closed themselves
off from oppression and alienation rather than

13.9
confronting it with the militancy of the early
Anabaptists like Thomas Munzer. (The early
Quakers also had their ranters and militants like
James Nayler. Later, they escaped the extermi­
nation of the radical sects in England by em­
bracing pacifism and buying Pennsylania.)

Does anarcho-primitivism have any­

thing to learn from these sects? For us, it may
seem that revolution is necessary strategi­
cally but impossible tactically-precisely the
situation facing 1 6th century Anabaptism and
the anti-authoritarian antinomian extreme
"left" of the Reformation. The response was
to drop out and retreat as far from the "Anti­
christ" as possible into small utopian commu­
nities. "Revolution" was turned inward, via
the Bann and the splits, rather than outward
into missionary work or confrontational mili­
tancy. And, since some of these communities
have lasted for centuries, resisted compulsory
education, conscription, and even electricity,
an empirical argument can be made for the
efficacy of those tactics.

lfO
 Anarchist utopianism has a noble his­
tory in America. It has always been part of our
strategic deployment. If the Old Order sects
have no other lesson for us, at least they dem­
onstrate that the vortex of the apparatus can
be resisted by living without it, i . e . , outside
it-to the extent really possible.
The last time something like anarcho­
communitarianism was tried on a wider scale,
in the 1 960s, it ended in "failure." But in a
world where Capital can recuperate almost
everything, perhaps failure is our last possible
Outside. In any case, it was an adventure. Suc­
cess or failure remain unforeseeable-but ad­
venture is something that can be willed.

141
 I nterview with In to-Gal

Into- Gal: In The Western Lands William

Burroughs acknowledged your research on Has­
san i Sabbah, and we were wondering whether
you 'd actually been to the fortress ofA lamut in
what's now Iran?
PLW: I kept putting it off and putting it off and
then I 'd left Iran before I 'd ever got around to
it. At the time I was there it was a pretty rough
trip-I knew people who did it, you had to
have a four-wheel drive or rent donkeys for
the last bit of it. So it was always like I had to
organize it, I had to get someone to go with
me, and it just never worked out. People who
went there had an interesting time. They saw
the ruins that are there to be seen, and they
met people who are there to be met who
have a few legends and are nice p easants, the
way peasants usually are nice. But nothing,
no great revelations about the history or the
meaning of Ismailism have ever come out of
any of these journeys, because nobody around
there-I mean there are no lsmailis anymore
in that valley and in that region in general, so
there's really no folklore apparently, no deep
folklore anyway. I mean there are legends that
they tell. Probably the best one is by Freya
Stark, who wrote a travel book about her visit
there and she did her homework, knew what
she was looking at, and it's a well-written
and enj oyable book. It's called Valleys of the
Assassins.

When were you in Iran?

I was there for most of the '70s.

You knew of Hassan i Sabbah at that point?

Yes, it was one of the things I was interested
in because of reading that I 'd done in New
York. It wasn't just for that-actually one of
the reasons why I went to Iran was I wanted
to meet Vladimir Ivanov who was the great
Russian scholar of Ismaili studies, who at that
time had moved from Bombay where he'd
done most of his work, to Tehran. When I got
there he'd been dead for six months, and I
hadn't heard about his death, so I missed him.

144
But in Bombay I spent some time researching
the lsmailis, because they have a big presence
there. That's where the Aga Khan's lived for
so long, and they had a library, so I did some
SL rious research there.

What were the circumstances under which you

were staying there? You were there during the
uprisings, the Iranian Revolution . . .
That put an end to my living in the East.

Did you expect it?

Well, you know everybody likes to think they
knew what was coming and everything, but
we didn't. It was one of those situations where
there would be trouble and the trouble would
die down, and you 'd think oh well that's that
then. And in fact when it really came for real
it caught everybody by surprise, even though
it had been expected. Everyone knew that the
Shah's regime was pretty rotten, but no one
knew how delicately balanced it was against
the pressures of history. So that, for example,
the fact that the Shah really gave up without

145
a fight, that was the other shoe that never
dropped. Everyone was saying wow, it's going
to be awful, because he had modern weaponry
but it turned out that that modern weaponry
purchased from America was pretty irrelevant.
You can't use j et planes against half a million
chanting people, chanting in the streets of
downtown Tehran. I guess in a sense he realized
that, but it also turned out that he'd been sick
and he just didn't have the willpower to fight
anymore, and by that time both the military
and the government were pretty corrupt, and
just kind of collapsed without his iron will to
direct them. So I left at a certain point when
things were pretty violent-there would be
shooting in the streets every night, and you'd
hear guns going off and people yelling all
over the place, and every so often some mob
would rush by the door, or you'd come out
to have supper and notice that all the banks
were on fire. And finally I said, oh well this
is not nice to be here now. I had a chance
to go to a conference in Spain-I went with
my overnight bag, and while I was there the

146'
government fell. Since the organization I was
working for was kind of implicated-the
Academy of Philosophy was actually funded
by the Empress out of her personal purse in
a very medieval way. She was actually a nice
person, I always liked her actually.

A t that point what did you do ?

I'd been going to London quite a lot for five
years to run the publishing program of the
Academy of Philosophy. We did our printing
in England. I 'd be spending a month, two
months, three months in London and then
going back to Iran. So I moved to London, and
I had worked for an outfit called the Festival
of lslam, which put on the big Festival of lslam
in London in 1 975-1 worked for them as a
consultant on a number of proj ects, and they
were still in existence. They were still trying
to get something going in '78, so they hired
me, but in the end nothing ever happened, so
eventually I just gave up and left England and
came back to America. By that time I was tired
of being in self-exile too, I must say.

147
 You were born and educated in America?
Yes, in fact I didn't finish college. I always said
that the Orient was my advanced degree.

When did you first become aware �f Hassan i

Sabbah?
Well, we had a somewhat older friend when
we were young hippies in New York who was
much more sophisticated than us because he
hung around with great j azz musicians. He
himself was white, but he was an excellent jazz
musician, and he was interested in sufism and
Ismailism. And at that time we pretty much
knew nothing about it, and he introduced us
to some books on the subj ect.

And Burroughs consulted you in re.szard to The

Western Lands ?
No, I had sent him a typescript of my book
Scandal, or at least parts of it that were about
lsmailism-but I never did meet him. We
had lots of friends in common though, like
Ginsberg. I was quite surprised when he

148
mentioned it in the acknowledgments, and
then when I read the book, I realized, yes,
he had made some use of my material. And
he told me that he had never read all the
scholarship that I had read. But in fact he
was working on legendary material in very
creative, imaginative ways. That material has
turned out to be fairly inaccurate, at least
according to modern scholars like Daftary.
I strongly recommend if you want to read
the real book on lsmailism, it's by Farhad
Daftary-The Ismailis: their history and doctrines,
a big book, very scholarly.

So in terms ef your work as an artist and writer,

how do you feel about that kind ef inaccuracy?
Now there's a new tendency among scholars,
which I can say I 've been one in my small way,
to look at this material not for its historical
accuracy, but as a picture of what the society
and literary tradition makes of a certain p erson
and their heritage. So in other words, even
the miracles are interesting to note because
different kinds of things, different kinds of

14/)
figures have different sorts of miracles that kind
of fit their personality in some way, and reveal
something about them, not as actual historical
figures but as still-living forces in the lives of
the people who visit their tomb, or perhaps
helong to the Sufi order they were a fo under
of or an important figure in. And I think this is
very good-I like to know the legends about
somebody, because that's what their followers
believe, so it doesn't matter if it's true in
the sense of history and archaeology, there's
another truth. How did the meaning of this
tomb, for example, change over time? What
were the political implications of this cult?
Who amongst the rulers were the patrons, and
do we still hear about them, or are their names
repressed because later on they became villains
of history or something? So of course you have
to approach the hagiographical material with
a critical eye, but not just in this materialist
way of saying this is all nonsense, but showing
that-well how can I put it, that death is alive,
that the past is the present in some way, an
idea of course that vulgar historians have had

150
a tough time wrapping their minds around if
they're brought up in the Anglo-American
positivist or Marxist materialist traditions. And
there 's hardly anything else available to us until,
to use the term loosely, the phenomenology
of the '70s, when the idea began to come
around. It certainly struck me very forcibly,
that if you 're going to study something, you
study it on its terms, you study it as much as
possible from inside it as well as outside­
hopefully you get a balance of both that will
be fully respectful of the tradition and yet at
the same time accurate in terms of history and
archaeology.

Did you feel there was a relationship between

your life, and your earlier interest in magic, and
the mythology of Hassan i Sabbah ?
Well, there would be two ways to answer
that. One would be to say what the legendary
material meant-this is particularly important
in studying the Ismailis, because the legendary
aspect really does belong to the whole Oriental
tradition and it's that Oriental tradition that

151
the early Western scholars like E . G. Browne,
who was also an important introducer of this
material, especially into the English language,
the author of the great Literary History of
Persia, the standard and classical and extremely
delightful book on Persian literature-he was
an English scholar, I guess his work extended
into the 1 920s . But he had written something
quite early in his career about the Ismailis, about
the Assassins, which had a lot of circulation.
It's also naturally part of the Oriental tradition
in general to think about the garden and the
drug and the jumping off the side of the cliff,
all that sort of stuff. It's as much of a legend
out there as it became in the West through
the writings of various people connected with
the Crusades, who heard about it and even
occasionally met with these strange Sectarians
up in the mountains. When I moved to Iran I
saw that Sufism was the thing, and I got much
more interested in that. Then there was Henry
Corbin who taught at the institute where I
worked, and had a whole other much more
sophisticated philosophical, mystical, scholarly
approach to Islamic heresies, to Sufism and to
things even more extreme than that. Corbin
was sort of a benchmark-once again there
are many scholars who've gone beyond him
now, to such an extent that a bit of reaction
has set in-it's almost fashionable to dismiss
Corbin now. But again the accuracy of what he
was doing is not the issue to me, it's the sheer
brilliant and imaginative scope of his thinking
that he himself spun around this material. And
as a result, looked at from the point of view
of academic or standard lsmailology, it's quite
eccentric, and was clearly that at the time also,
but he got me interested in Ismailism again
just by reading his books and at that point I
made some friends in the Ismaili community,
none of whom were Iranians by the way. They
were all Indians or Pakistanis who had come
to Iran for one reason or another, or they were
in London at the Institute of Ismaili Studies
which has published a great deal of important
scholarship. In the last twenty years the whole
field has changed again because the Aga Khan
founded this institute, and hired all these

!SS
bright young people from India and Pakistan
and England to turn out this new material.
They must have published by now twenty or
thirty books, including the book by Daftary,
which has completely revised everybody's way
of looking at the material.

So it's like something in a continual state effl ux.

It's been in a fascinating state of flux ever since
I first got interested in it, and that's one of
the reasons why it's continued to hold my
attention-because the past keeps changing
in this funny way, and it isn't only to do with
shifts of attitudes. It's a very complex scheme
of interwoven material. The fact that it's still
a living religion, it's not a dead religion like
Greco-Roman Paganism or something, which
you can study under a bell jar, so even the
religion itself is changing, and the Aga Khan
says: Look, I 'd like you to emphasize these
scholars, please emphasize this or that aspect.
You know sometimes he wants to be a little
more Islamic because he doesn't want to be
seen as a heretic, sometimes he wants to be a
liberal in the Islamic world. If you go and look
at their websites I ' m sure you'll find that the
Ismailis are by no means enthusiastic about all
this fundamentalist stuff-they've always been
on the receiving end of that, and I'm sure, as
much as they dare to, they're opposing that.

Did you experience fundamentalism much when

you were in Iran?
No, that stuff was like nowhere. I mean we
all knew about it, those people have always
been around. There 's always been a tendency
amongst both the Shiites and the Sunnis
towards this kind of narrowness of thought.
but this huge international phenomenon,
no, that j ust simply didn't exist. Sufism was
what they were all involved in. Pakistan had
a few such forces, in fact a couple of their
political parties were already that way, but
they weren't in power, and nobody expected
them to be in power-they were nutcases,
you know. They were not part of the great
tradition, they were alien imports from Saudi
Arabia-that's the way most people looked

155
at them. In fact if you really get below the
surface today that's still the way they look at
it. It's just the Saudis who come in with all
this money, and money is hard to argue with.
They even did it in Brooklyn-they've come
in and thrown for a loop all the black Islamic
groups in Brooklyn-either they sign up with
the Wahhabis and get a lot of money, or else
they're heretics. So the whole thing goes on
in a fascinating way. Also I have to say that
the latest thing is that everyone's noticed these
strange similarities between Osama bin Laden
and Hassan i Sabbah. Some people have gone
much too far with this discovery, and it's led
into some conspiracy theories and so forth
which I think is a little silly. Hassan i Sabbah
was just a manifestation of an eternal archetype
in the Middle East. I 'm sure if we studied
it from this point of view we'd find that it's
pre-Islamic-the bearded prophet figure who
fights and lives in the mountains and is never
caught, and this is part of the legend. This is
why I predicted at the time that Osama would
never be caught, because that archetype does
not die in the hands of his enemies, and often
they disappear rather than die, so that they live
on forever, like King Arthur.

What were the books that influenced you ?

Before Naked Lunch came out, I was haunting
the bookstores every day waiting for it to
appear. Portions of it had been published
and had been passed around in my circle. I
might add that this circle is also the Moorish
Orthodox Church, and related hippie
institutions. In other words this was all feeding
into our '60s psychedelic religion, which
still had a vague existence in the world, the
Moorish Orthodox Church and other related
phenomena.

They were all involved with taking psychedelics . . .

Yes, these were all people who spent the
' 50s in various provincial towns-you know,
lonely, wandering the libraries, and picking
up a little of this and a little of that, and
then coming together in New York or San
Francisco, and saying, Gee, you were into that

157
too? I was into that. This was an experience I
remember having about a lot of things , that oh
my god there's other people in the world who
like this stuff? Whether it was anarchism, or
sufism, or all these things that for all we knew
were completely dead in the world, right, and
suddenly there's a whole generation of people
who are intensely romantic about it. I mean
I was virtually sent by my comrades to the
East to discover what was going on. Whether
there was in fact any sufism or Ismailism still
being practised in the world, we didn't know,
we weren't scholars-there were scholars who
knew at the time but we didn't trust them, and
they didn't trust us-we weren't speaking to
them.

So it was like something that had to develop on

your own terms?
Yes, because at college you weren't going to
learn anything about it, until grad school, and
besides that, I won't say the best of us, but a
heck of a lot of us were leaving the Academy
altogether-I certainly did. It was boring and

!S8
irrelevant, and what was going on in the street
seemed much more interesting. In retrospect,
let's say 1 964 to '72 I think was about the
most interesting intellectual period of the 20'h
century in a lot of ways, although as we all
know, it didn't produce a lot of great art and
literature.We were interested in life rather than
artistic production, the same way that previous
avant-gardes had been, and we weren't even
an avant-garde. As far as we were concerned
this was everyone. This was a revolution, this
was a n10vement, a social movement, not
just an artistic avant-garde. The new Left
also influenced everybody's thinking in this
respect, whether they were an active part of
it or not. But the Academy was what we were
leaving.And I hate it nowadays when everyone
blames what happened to the Academy on us,
on the hippies. We were against the Academy,
we wanted to bring the whole thing down.
What they're suffering through now is that
we lost, right-there was a war and we lost, so
okay blame the victims , that's what history is so
good at doing. As far as I'm concerned what

15.9
we've got now is not the fault of the hippies,
it's that hippies failed, you see, to me there 's an
important difference.

The rationale is to blame the victim for not being

insightful enough .
Right. Now we have to take the blame
for everybody's disillusionment with all
these Oriental traditions we went over and
discovered. We brought the gurus back, and
the gurus went crazy and started abusing the
disciples and buying Rolls Royces, and that
whole thing is over now to a very large extent,
or at least it's sorted itself out. Let's say during
the '80s this was terrible. There were scandals
in New York, all these Oriental paths were
having a scandal, every year there would be
some big scandal.

What was your relation to Timothy Leary-- h e

had a big influence?
Oh yeah of course, he was a tremendous in­
fluence on everybody. I have a lot of respect
for Leary, and I certainly wouldn't go back on

160
my gratitude to him directly for providing me
with some of the most amusing experiences
of my life, because I spent a lot of time up in
Millbrook. I was only a 1 7-year-old hippie at
the time, I wasn't hanging around with the fa­
mous people. I only met Leary once or twice,
it wasn't until years later that he saw some of
my writing, and I got briefly in touch with him
and told him I was yet another private in the
army of Generalissimo Leary, who had grown
up and this is what I was doing now, and that
was very sweet. That was a few years before he
died. I think he was wrong about disseminating
LSD to the millions and the masses, but hey I
probably wouldn't have had it if it wasn't for
that decision, because I wasn't any member of
any elite. He made a mistake by publishing The
Tibetan Book ef the Dead as The Psychedelic Ex­
p e rience-it gave rise to a whole generation of
horror trips that nobody needed to have. I've
always said what a pity he didn't realize the Rig
Veda was a scripture that was actually written
for people taking psychedelic drugs.

16/
 Maybe his delirious shamanism involved pushing
buttons that were sometimes wrong.
He tried everything out, and he was much
bolder than everybody else. Did you ever read
his great autobiography called Flashbacks? By
the way the cleverest autobiography title that
anybody ever came up with, in my opinion.
The guy had a terribly adventurous life-he
deserves to be considered an epical figure.

Aldous Huxley was much more reticent about

LSD and psychedelics.
His whole approach, his whole politics
would've been much more along my taste, but
if they had decided to keep it a secret and only
hand it out to the elite it certainly wouldn't
have been the '60s for whatever it's worth. But
psychedelics ended up being too much for
them, people didn't know how to handle them.

Is that to do with the urban environments in

which they were taken?
Well that's an interesting thought, probably
true. Like the back-to-the-land movement

tflz
being a direct result of p eople taking psy­
chedelics in the city and going whoah, wait a
minute, this is not right.

One of your poems actually mentions this,

your 'Obit: Kathleen Raine'- 'acid's not
compassionate: who are those squid I these
Undead in the Mall, Zombis dans le metro I one
of the great EEK moments in psycho history I 40
years later we'd still like to know.'
Yeah, I was making j okes about it there, and
that's still true I guess. I like to say there's two
ways of looking at it. You can say that either
no particular drug has a particular content,
it's all set and setting, to use Leary's phrase.
Or you can take the position that the plants
have an agenda-I think Terrence McKenna
may have coined that phrase. Terrence actually
came to believe this literally I think.

You knew him ?

I knew him vaguely. I admired him tremen­
dously and I always found him to be quite a
delightful person, and in a lot of ways what he
said makes good sense. If you just take it with a
grain of salt, even his idea of mushrooms as the
source of consciousness is a very interesting
one-I mean where does consciousness come
from? And when he talks about how plants
have an agenda, there really does seem to be
some truth to that, if I can leave out a meta­
physical interpretation of that. With ayahuasca,
the way people feel about it is that it really
takes you over and it does what it wants to do.

Aborig inal people take telepathy for granted and

use it to live, but those things maybe no longer
apply in urban, denatured environments . . .
Yeah. Well, Mircea Eliade in his book on sha­
manism proposed that the use of psychedelic
plants by shamans had to be considered a late
and decadent devolvement. And this idea was
of course contested by people who studied
shamanism in the ' 60s, who themselves had
actually experienced psychedelics and felt that
they were worthy of more respect. And in fact
I read an interview with Eliade very shortly
before his death in which he admitted he had

16'4
to revise that, and that he was now willing
to entertain the idea that psychotropic plants
were aboriginal with shamanism. So even the
great traditionalist, and I would also point out,
a right-wing fanatic, Eliade changed his view
on this, as did a number of other people who
kept an open mind through the ' 60s in the
field of religion, like Huston Smith and p eo­
ple like that.

It's interesting the relation between drugs that

are ef natural, organic origin versus the john
Lilly-type experience with ketamine, a Western
chemical anesthetic, and yet they 're still going
perhaps to similar types of revelations.
Well there are those who dismiss this dualistic
distinction between lab drugs and organic
drugs. I ' m not one of those people, but I will
say it's a fuzzy distinction. Let's take LSD for
example. It's true that it's synthesized, in the
form that most of us experienced it, but in fact
you start from an organic substance, or at least
Hofinann started from an organic substance to
make it in the first place, which was ultimately

16'5
derived from a fungus, ergot. So the argument
between the appearance of psilocybin and the
appearance of LSD in the ' 60s, this argument
about organic versus synthetic is cloudy. So
I don't want to say anything dogmatic about
this, but my pendulum swings more towards
the untreated plant preparations like psilocybe.

Regarding the desert landscape of the Middle

East, there s the myth of the warrior king Gil­
gamesh killing the demigod Humbaba and de­
stroying southern Mesopotamia $ cedar forests.
Sure.Well I've always liked the idea oflandscape
shaping consciousness. Italo Calvino is at the
other end of the Gilgamesh traj ectory there,
in his book The Baron in the Trees, about an
1 8th century baron eccentric who lives in the
trees, and Calvino did a lot of research into
forestry, and he figured out the last period
in which someone could've moved across
Europe without ever touching their foot to
the ground, from limb to limb of great old­
growth trees. It's his only full-length novel, a
lot of people don't like it, but it's one of my

166
favorite books . I mean everyone knows that
Islam is a religion of the desert. But some
people have used the term p ej oratively, to them
that sounds bad, but to me it never sounded
bad. I think deserts are very wonderful in their
way. Monochromatic landscapes are fabulous
because they're never monochromatic, they're
actually incredibly polychromatic. There are
subtleties of scale and color that occur in very
apparently monotonous landscapes, like let's
say the deforested parts of the Celtic world,
Western Ireland, parts of Brittany, where
everything is green and stone-colored and
nothing sticks out. Somehow the landscape
has become a living landscape even though it
lost its Neolithic forest cover-now it has a
new meamng.

The idea of travel-you 've spent a lot of time

traveling, but you wrote recently that 'only those
who stay in one place and refuse the agitation
and bodilessness ef modern travel can hope to
contact nature or humanity.'
Well that's somewhat personal. It's just that I

167
got old, I got tired of doing it. But it's not
entirely that, I also have some ideological
thoughts about travel, I always do, I 've done
so much of it in my life I ' m always theorizing
travel. And right now I see a difference be­
tween what it meant to travel in the ' 60s and
what it means to travel now. We would have
to talk about the changes in capitalism since
1 989. So much has changed its meaning since
then. 1 995-we were j oking about that-ev­
erybody I talk to about this agrees something
came to an end in 1 99 5 . We can't quite put
our finger on it yet, we need more hindsight
to figure out what it was that died. But the
internet was involved in it, and so was the fact
that it took five years for the fall of the Berlin
Wall to be fully felt. So round about '95 so
many things came to an end on the psychic
level-I can't point to any historical things,
maybe there aren't any, but something psyc1lic
seemed to shudder to a halt there.

Is it some kind of chemical that now exists, or

has been put into play? The new kinds of viruses

168
 that are coming out of intensive farming . . .
That's got to be possible-well it all has to do
with globalism, and global sickness is certainly
one of the great metaphors of neoliberalism.

You 've talked ef the media and its ability to

hurt people, and it's interesting this line between
Hassan i Sabbah and current experiences-you
were in New York when the World Trade Center
came down .
It's become a cliche now to say that every­
thing changed on that day, but my perspective
is somewhat different, because first of all I 've
spent a lot of time living outside the US, and
I think anybody else who had would tell you
the same, that it wasn't such a big change to
the consciousness of anyone who managed to
move beyond the provincialism of being just
a North American. Everything that changed,
and of course it didn't change, was supposed
to be America's consciousness of the world, but
any possibility of that was buried immediately
within three days of the incident by the mili­
tarist response, and the propaganda that went
with it.You could amuse yourself by going and
looking in the New York Times three days after
the event. The whole American soul seemed to
be at stake all of a sudden, with fashion de­
signers saying, I feel I've got to stop what I've
been doing. That whole idiot cynicism of the
'80s, which had completely infected media, the
kind of fifth-degree referential consciousness
of heterosexual camp, is the way I think of it.
All those people felt guilty for three days . Then
everyone went shopping again. The event had
a logo designed for it, that always reassures ev­
erybody. And the New York Times changed its
line.Whenever a logo is designed for television,
that comes to symbolize everything for every­
body. Once you focus both the conscious and
the subconscious on these hermetic icons, you
can redirect the way the mass will respond. This
is brainwashing, there's no conspiracy here. In
New York for three days suddenly something
was seen that hadn't been seen before, but this
is something that's known to every surviving
person everywhere who had to suffer through
war and terrorism. It's no big new thing. Amer-

170
icans j ust didn't get it, and we still don't get it.
For three days we got it, but then, like I say, the
negative, hermetic media consciousness slipped
over everybody like a blanket of algae.

171
 Phone Interview
Jacob Eichert

JE : What initially attracted you to Islam ?

What precipitated your move to the East in the
late sixties ?
Initially it wasn't Islam so much; it was sufism.
That was a tradition I had come into contact
with through the American Black Islamic
world. I knew people who were involved in
the Moorish Science Temple. I wanted to
know more about it and there wasn't a great
deal of information. There were simply no sufi
groups practicing in the West that I was able
to find. So that's why I decided to go to the
East to see whether there was still anything
going on in that world, which as it turned out
there was.

Many people view this latest war in Iraq as a

battle over resources. You said, "Islam offers a
critique of the Image. " On what level do you
feel this is a war to instill a culture more sym­
pathetic to the Image?

175
Are you implying, as opposed to the simple
rip-off of resources there is something sub­
tler and yet even more malignant going on,
a sort of Burroughsian viral invasion of the
Grey Room?

Yes.
I think that's undoubtedly true. One doesn't
have to assign intentionality to these things; it's
not necessarily a matter of a conspiracy theory.
This is just the way our culture works . Our
culture is to a certain extent imagophilic and
Islam is to a certain extent imagophobic. But
there are complexities within this dichotomy.
In the West we've had iconoclasm, Puritan­
ism, and very strong anti-image positions, not
necessarily stupid by any means . Any position
can be carried to a stupid extreme including
the pro-image position. We resonate with this
culturally and tend to feel that some kind of
basic human right is being threatened when
the image is critiqued.
As I have often tried to point out, we live
in a prison of images. Anyone who analyzes ad-

174
vertising on television can quickly figure this
out. I think a complete outsider would judge
that most people are completely entranced
most of the time by images, or to be more
precise by a combination of image and word,
which is a hieroglyph. The image by itself is not
ideologized, as Walter Benjamin pointed out.
But the image, let's say the photograph with
the caption, is the perfect ideological prison:
it's a closed system. It works on all levels from
the subconscious to the superconscious.
I don't know who first came up with the
term CocaColonization; I remember thinking
it was very witty when I heard it in the late
sixties. It meant and continues to mean a kind
of viral colonization; a colonization through
images, through advertising, through product,
through commodity.This culture is very much
associated with the West and specifically with
America. Right now we're living under a re­
gime that talks about the necessity for export­
ing our values, forcing them on other people
whether they like it or not, as if they were
children who needed to be given bitter medi-

175
cine for their own good. But what this medi­
cine is of course is largely a culture of images.
As such, when it appears invasively within a
culture that fears (or at least distrusts) the im­
age then great cognitive dissonances, clanging
disharmonies, and cultural abysses open up.

In what ways do you feel the "Empire ef the Im­

age " has already manifested itself in the Middle
East? I'm thinking ef Iranian New Wave Cin­
ema as a possible example. To what extent has
their distrust ef the image irrevocably abated?
That's a complicated question. First of all,
you've got a strong difference between Arab
and Iranian culture. Arab culture, for whatev­
er reason, has been much more aniconic than
Persian culture. But even in Iran there is a ta­
boo on painting the face of the Prophet. The
taboo on the image in Islam is not a one-di­
mensional smashing of the image-a defiling
of the beauty of art or freedom of the image.
It's a deep respect bordering on religious awe.
There's a legend that is somewhat widely ac­
cepted: when the Prophet returned to Mecca

176'
and smashed the idols in the Kaaba, he al­
lowed one image to remain. That image was
the image of the Virgin and the Child. Nobody
knows if it is true or not. But in any case, it
is interesting that the Prophet himself made
an exception to this ban on imagery, not to
mention Islamic culture in general. So when
you talk about Iranian cinema as somehow a
change of consciousness, then you'd have to go
back and talk about the passion plays of Tazia:
one of the very rare forms of Islamic theater
which was uniquely Iranian. It probably has a
lot of explanatory value in understanding later
developments of the plastic arts in Iran.
Perhaps your example is badly chosen.
We might better ask for examples of the pen­
etration of television into the Islamic world.
This is something that has been going on just
within my lifetime. I saw plenty of evidence of
a deep sociological impact and change of con­
sciousness . I 've read recently somewhere an
interesting observation: if evolution makes any
sense at all then it would seem clear that hu­
man beings have not physiologically evolved to

177
communicate with each other at the speed of
light. We evolved to communicate with each
other at organic speeds, face-to-face speech or
maybe riding somewhere on horseback in an
emergency or whatever. Maybe human beings
just simply aren't equipped to be as in-touch
with each other through image as we are now.
A lot of the clash of cultures these rascals talk
about, which is to a certain extent illusory, can
perhaps be attributed to a clash primarily on
the level of the image. Of course, if you want
a really hot-button example it is Abu Ghraib.
I don't need to go into details as they are well
and thoroughly discussed now-including by
David Levi Strauss. He's been doing a lot of
talking and writing about Abu Ghraib. I think
Levi's comments are worthwhile because he
is well grounded in the hermetic study of the
image, which I think is key to understanding
all this within the Western context.

In an article you wrote on the Evil Eye you said,

"our entire social ethic [in the West] is rooted in
envy. " Mat does the West envy about Islam ?

178
Yeah, that's a good question. I like that. First of
all, I would think its vitality as a religion must
be enviable to a lot of people. There is a real
envy on the part of the Christian fundamen­
talists who see that they don't live in a society
that monolithically belongs to a single tradi­
tion, the way the Islamic world does to a large
extent. For all the talk you get from Western
scholars and politicians about its decadence as
a tradition, nevertheless there it still is in all its
quasi-medieval thoroughness. Then there is the
whole romantic thing, which never goes away.
It's kind of a shadow of the Crusade mental­
ity: this romantic love of the mysterious Orient.
This isn't to be sneered at as something totally
illusory. Romanticism actually is about some­
thing real-although it might not be about
something visible, there is that distinction. I'd
like to point out that if there is romanticism
about the East in the West there is also an Ori­
ental romanticism in which the East romanti­
cizes itself with the rose and the nightingale and
love. This tradition itself then played into the
Western romantic tradition through the discov-

17.9
ery of the Orient that was going on around the
time of Goethe, Sir William Jones, or William
Blake for that matter. As you rang up I was j ust
reading a reference to Blake's familiarity with
a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. That whole
Oriental view of itself as The Mysterious Ori­
ent is a cultural reality. It's tainted with envy
but it's also tinged with love, even erotic love.
So there is a cross eroticism between the East
and West which is fascinating.

ivhy do you think this interaction is manifest­

ing itself so destructively right now?
There would appear to be many reasons for
that. The most obvious, to the point of being
brutally obvious I would say, is the demise of
Communism and collapse of the movement of
the social in 1 989. Suddenly there was no more
historical dialectic-the one that defined the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries-and there
was just this triumph of global capital. But tri­
umph is anything but pure and complete; there
is still all of darkness and nothingness to be
contended with here. Anyway, in order to mo-

!80
bilize the military industrial blah blah there has
to be an enemy. Islam is a very ancient enemy.
It has had a vast tradition of being the ene­
my going back all the way to El Cid and the
Crusades, and those images keep popping up.
They're very much a part of the culture. The
level of ignorance about Islam is just about as
deep as it was in the time of El Cid, and a lot
of the attitudes are the same. These attitudes
were easy enough to whip up into a terroris­
tic frenzy, into an image in fact. Of course Al­
Qaeda and these kinds of people collaborate
brilliantly with this scenario. It's as if they were
part of a conspiracy; I'm not saying I believe
that literally. But when you talk about image, it
seems like the image of the Twenty-first Cen­
tury is those falling towers. That was a brilliant
manipulation of imagery-as Karlheinz Stock­
hausen got in a lot of trouble for saying.

When the war in Iraq fi r st got underway US

forces failed to protect museums and archaeo­
logical sites. It was estimated that tens of thou­
sands ef Mesopotamian artifacts were stolen or

181
 damaged in the looting that followed.
There was a revisionist version of that story
and to this day I have never really gotten it
quite straight.What is your most recent source
of information on all this?

That.figure wasfrom the October 2003 issue ef

National Geographic.
The time of the incident.

Right.
I've heard that the ten thousand or hundred
thousand (or whatever the number) was ex­
aggerated. It wasn't true, and it was secondary
unimportant stuff. Now I don't know what to
believe. Much more ghastly is the story of the
Kabul Museum, which had the world's most
important collection of Greco-Bactrian art­
all completely gone. There are people trying to
trace it around the world, and I think there has
been a little success in locating where it went.
I'm not an expert on this, but I have friends
who are involved in desperately trying to find
out what happened. That was a major disaster.

18.Z
 Let's assume that this revisionist story
about the museums is true and it isn't as bad
as they say, this is still holding back important
archaeological research. Bob Black said civiliza­
tion started in Mesopotamia and it looks like it's
going to end there. It's all a disaster for serious
knowledge. The library in Bosnia, for example,
had a fantastic collection of lslamic manuscripts
that was bombed to shit by the Serbs.

What I'm curious about in all these instances

is the relationship of war to the erasure ef his­
tory-meaning extracted from the landscape.
Do you feel this is a deliberate tactic?
No I don't think so. Well, one can't be sure of
course. It needn't be; let's put it that way. Shit
happens! It's war. It's amazing how we have to
reinvent the wheel every ten minutes these days.
You'd think we were a nation of total
fucking virgins with all this Abu Ghraib stuff.
I said to Levi, "It's like Americans never saw
pornography before." Everyone is so shocked:
"You mean people get tortured in war?" It's a
bit na'ive. Give me your question again.

183
 The destruction of cultural identity as a tool of
waifare.
The conscious level of this is perhaps less in­
teresting than the unconscious level. I'm re ­
minded of the Futurist Tommaso Marinetti.
His manifesto proposed bombing all the mu­
seums of ltaly to get rid of the heavy weight of
the past dragging everything down. Basically
I'm a preservationist and think this is a hor­
rible idea. But I do understand that the past is a
heavy weight, certainly nowhere more so than
in Mesopotamia or maybe Egypt. There it all
is. It's a kind of living rebuke to the present
among other things. If you 're an Imperialist the
empires of the past were more glorious and if
you 're anti-imperialist the freedoms of the past
were freer somehow. I ' m not saying this is nec­
essarily true; I'm saying this is perhaps how the
subconscious reads history. Therefore, these
outbreaks of barbarism are always so upsetting
to cultivated and educated people for whom
there is no shadow to the idea of culture or
knowledge. But there is a shadow; the past is
a burden. So you have to keep that in mind
especially if you are like I am, if you have basi­
cally decided that museums have their prob­
lems but they're better than no museums. This
shadow has to be faced, it has to be understood,
and it has to be answered. The kind of shallow
liberal view of the situation, which sees things
only in terms of knowledge equals good and
ignorance equals bad, is two-dimensional.

You said, "lf a genuine anti- Capitalist coalition

is to appear in the world it cannot happen with­
out Islam . " What are the problems presented by
this fact? I'm thinking along the lines ef Fou­
cault's support of the Iranian Revolution.
Yes, he got in a lot of trouble for that one. I
suppose I could get in a lot of trouble for what
I said. Where is that from; where did I say that?

It's from Millennium {1 996].

Well that was then. I don't know what I would
say now. Maxime Rodinson, in his book Islam
and Capitalism, makes a very good argument
against this (one that I was deliberately over-

185
looking when I made that comment) . He was
some brand of dissident Marxist. His analysis
is pretty straightforward Marxiological, but it
seems pretty sound: although Islam had certain
aspects that could have potentially developed
into an anti-capitalist movement, it didn't. His
book was written before the Seventies, before
the Islamic Socialism period. A lot of thinkers
in the Islamic world, some of them crazy and
some of them quite interesting, tried to bring
out this socialistic potential in Islam-typi­
cally through things such as the ban on usury,
the idea of charity as a principle rather than as
a secondary aspect of religion, or the idea of
the consensus of the community. There were
people like Gamal Abdel Nasser or Kadafi.
Then in Iran there were people like Ali Shari­
ati, who did not succeed but were intellectu­
ally quite fascinating. But this period seems
to be over. Once again it seems to be one of
the great collapses that occurred around the
collapse of the movement of the social in gen­
eral. A great deal of the energy that went into
those movements now seems to be pumped

186'
into these quasi-fascistic phenomena like Is­
lamic and Hindu fundamentalism. From a ro­
mantic point of view I guess I will stick with
my statement, and as a romantic I will even
support Foucault's opinion [his hope for the
revolutionary potential of the Iranian Revo­
lution during its infancy, as expressed in Le
Monde and Nouvel Observateur in 1 978-9] to a
certain guarded degree. At least I won't come
down on him like a ton of bricks the way a
lot of his critics did. But on the other hand I'll
say it is all very disappointing. There is no evi­
dence that fundamentalism either has or can
rise to this level of dialectical thinking.As long
as fundamentalism is the leading edge, I don't
know. I ' m less sure of that statement now than
when I made it. Let's just put it that way.

187
"Stain You r Prayer Carpet With Wine"
(Hafez)

Three Favorite saints of Shiraz

Abu Ishaq or Bus'haq the Gastrosopher
gourmet chef & sufi poet who always
wrote about mysticism as food-e.g.
I am the braised tongue in the casserole of gnosis
& so on for a whole Divan

Ruzbehan Baqli-great visionary rediscovered

by Corbin-I always think of him dining on
his roof with Angels dipping his bread
into oil of the Celestial Bear

Near mausoleum of Saadi

li es art-deco reconstruction tomb of Hafez
with modern but tasteful somber garden
where Classical Persian music was played
-greatest of all Persian poets-was he
wine-soaked libertine or big-time sufi
-some say both-arguments rage even today. Get
your fortune told with his Divan
on his gravestone for extra ju-j u .

Hafez opens shy Shiraz's gardens to

the orientalist's

18.9
or lover's gaze
Narenj estan the Orangery with its royal
Zand pavilion over-tiled with roses
or just some humble adobe-walled
sparse homely vegetable patch beside
the Ruknabad made famous by Hafez
tho it's a mere trickle where
one spreads the sofreh for a pic-nic
charges up the brass Russian samovar
with
hot coals
unpacks the culinary poem the gastrosophic
hegemonic
cuisine of the whole land
Shirazi food from its baskets &

jugs of wine covered

with snow
Cold yoghurt soup w I raisins, cucumbers & fresh
herbs
served over chunks of
ice
Kebabs of lamb kidney & fat rolled in cracked
cumin cooked a la
barbeque
Mutton stewed w/ spinach & dried lemons
black with age
Chicken parts baked w I layers of sour cherries in
cake of saffron butter
/.90
nee
Fried river fish served on candied rice
w I raisins currants dried &

candied fruit
almonds pistachios & mutton fat
Roast duck w I crushed walnut & pomegranate
sauce
Dozens of various pickles-Shiraz's specialties
supervised by grandmother alchemists
& incl.
black
garlic
followed by iced Khorassani melons,
three kinds of grapes, cucumbers
watermelon (w/ black seeds)
persimmons, & apricots

-tea-

but in certain circles (can't speak

for Hafez here) instead of all this food the
mangal would
be fired up & pipes that look like
African moj o gourd rattles on flutes would be
charged with pellets of"government" opium
(nice clean sticks suitable for slicing)
(buy them at the pharmacy if you've got the
permit)
/.91
hot coals held in tongs
each picnicker combusts
then sinks back on the
now-softened rug

earthbound but
airborn
One guest produces tiny four-string sehtar
another unwraps big tambourine
or
perhaps reed flute
& someone else begins to chant-Hafez.
You can't get away from him in Shiraz
Ubiquitous as the image & scent of
totemic
roses
roses a surfeit of roses both real & imaginal
all-night nightingales can produce
almost a sick headache of too much excess
instead of excess in moderation the
darveeshee ideal
Pro-Zoroastrian pro-Christian
(because they
make & sell
wine)
a certain kind of Persian dervish
comes very close to Fitz Omar's

/.9.!
Deist Epicurean
fortuitous
(mis)translation
of Khayyam's real & rather orthodox
brand of sufism
& proceeds Beyond Good & Evil
toward the goal of
blameworthiness
embraces all the idols
breaks the chains
of the Law
uses not only hemp & opium but
mysterious forms of haoma such as
Syrian rue
(organic red dye for your fez) mixed
w/
ephedra tea
-or the
famous Amanita fly-agaric
& others not yet known to modern science
but only to grandmothers
& perfumers.

/.9,)
The Will to Power is in large part concerned
with the question of action. which is what
makes it so much more valuable to us now.
unfinished as it is. than many of Nietzsche's
finished products We don't need his precise
experiments (or even his basic axioms) so
much as we need his methodology. The
sections on art and love seem particularly
powerful discussions of the possible utility
of certain illusions (let's call them "myths" to
escape the usual connotations of futility
connected with the word "illusion") To take
Nietzsche at his word is to envision a society
of free spirits devoted to art and love and
the transformation of the social element.
simply because they-from the super­
abundance of life in them-find such play to
be a challenging and joyful action.
from "Chaos. Eros. Earth. and Old Night"

Autonomedia Ardent Press

,.--\
'\ �
��
ardentpress.org

$8