Vestiges of a Philosophy

OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N W E S T E R N E S O T E R IC I SM

Series Editor
Henrik Bogdan, University of Gothenburg

Editorial Board
Jean-​Pierre Brach, École Pratique des Hautes Études
Carole Cusack, University of Sydney
Christine Ferguson, University of Stirling
Olav Hammer, University of Southern Denmark
Wouter Hanegraaff, University of Amsterdam
Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol
Jeffrey Kripal, Rice University
James R. Lewis, University of Tromsø
Michael Stausberg, University of Bergen
Egil Asprem, University of Stockholm
Dylan Burns, Freie Universität Berlin
Gordan Djurdjevic, Siimon Fraser University
Peter Forshaw, University of Amsterdam
Jesper Aa. Petersen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

SPIRITUAL ALCHEMY
From the Age of Jacob Boehme to
Mary Anne Atwood, 1600–​1910
Mike A. Zuber

MYSTIFYING KABBALAH
Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and
New Age Spirituality
Boaz Huss

OCCULT IMPERIUM
Arturo Reghini, Roman Traditionalism, and the
Anti-​Modern Reaction in Fascist Italy
Christian Giudice

THE SUBTLE BODY

A Genealogy
Simon Cox

RETAINING THE OLD EPISCOPAL DIVINITY

John Edwards of Cambridge and Reformed Orthodoxy
in the Later Stuart Church
Jake Griesel

VESTIGES OF A PHILOSOPHY
Matter, the Meta-​Spiritual, and
the Forgotten Bergson
John Ó Maoilearca
Vestiges of a Philosophy
Matter, the Meta-​Spiritual, and the Forgotten
Bergson

J O H N Ó M AO I L E A R C A
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ó Maoilearca, John, 1965– author.
Title: Vestiges of a philosophy : matter, the meta-spiritual, and the
forgotten Bergson / John Ó Maoilearca.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Series: Oxford studies in Western esotericism |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022029948 (print) | LCCN 2022029949 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197613917 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197613931 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197613948 | ISBN 9780197613924
Subjects: LCSH: Bergson, Moina, 1865–1925. | Mediums. | Spiritualists. |
Science and spiritualism | Mysticism. | Materialism. | Bergson, Henri, 1859–1941.
Classification: LCC BF1283.B 4645 O53 2022 (print) |
LCC BF1283.B 4645 (ebook) | DDC 133.8—dc23/eng/20220729
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029948
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029949

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
 Contents

List of Illustrations  vii

Acknowledgments  ix
Prologue: A Reciprocity of Acceleration  xi

Strange Memory: An Introduction in Five Parts  1

1° =​10° Zelator Covariant  22
One:  Ordinary Mysticism, the Hyperbolic, and the Supernormal  29
Two:  Meet the Bergsons  33
10° =​1° Ipsissimus Covariant (Neophyte)  43
Three:  Hyper-​Ritual  58
Four:  “O My Bergson, You Are a Magician”  63
Five:  On Watery Logic, or Magical Thinking  76
2° =​9° Theoricus Covariant  85
Six:  Of the Survival of Images  95
Seven:  On the Meta-​Spiritual  109
4° =​7° Philosophus Covariant  118
Eight:  Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum: “Leave No Trace”  129
3° =​8° Practicus Covariant  136
Nine:  Spirit in the Materialist World  161
Ten:  Veridical Hallucinations and Circumstantial Evidence  166
Epilogue: The Whole of the Moon  176

Notes  179
Bibliography  217
Index  229
 Illustrations

Figures

1.  The Tree of Life 19

2.  Henri Bergson 34
3.  Mina Bergson (also known as Moina Mathers, or Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum) 36
4.  Bergson’s Cone of Memory (first variation) 50
5.  “Akas of Apas” Tattwa Cards 96
6.  Bergson’s Circles of Expanded Memory 99
7.  Bergson’s Line of Pure Memory to Perception 100
8.  Connection between the Worlds 101
9.  Directions of Force in Enochian Pyramids 101
10.  Tattwa Symbols 102
11a–​c. Three Images from the Golden Dawn Grimoire (Courtesy of the
Library at the Grand Lodge, Holborn, London) 104
12. The Melancholy of Ulad (Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale
de France) 105
13.  Vault Layout for Ceremony 106
14.  Bergson’s Cone of Memory (second variation) 132
15.  Lindsay Seers in Nowhere Less Now (Courtesy of Lindsay Seers) 149

Table

1.  A List of Concordances 170

 Acknowledgments

I want to thank many people whose thoughts, shared either in conver-

sation or in print, have helped this book emerge from its darkness: Paul
Atkinson, Lucy Bolton, William Brown, James Burton, Alastair Cameron,
Jimena Canales, Howard Caygill, Dennis Denisoff, David Fenton, Matthew
Goulish, P. A. Y. Gunter, Emily Herring, Lin Hixon, Ian James, Wahida
Khandker, Katerina Kolozova, François Laruelle, Beth Lord, Catherine
Malabou, John Meechan, Markus Rajala, Filipa Ramos, Diarmuid Rooney,
Anne-​Françoise Schmid, Anthony Paul Smith, Iris van der Tuin, Catherine
Wheatley, Amanda Wilkinson, and Yaron Wolf—​all have helped light a path
for me without which it would have been far harder to see a way through
the work. I’ve also been remarkably fortunate to meet with individuals along
the way who have been generous enough to share with me whatever was
needed to offset the many gaps in my knowledge when writing a book such
as this: Mark Price, for his crucial understanding of the Kabbalah’s Tree of
Life; Ties Van Gemert, who shared both his paper on Bergson and psychical
research, as well as insights into some of the oddities of Henri Bergson’s vo-
cabulary; Owen White, who shared his time with me each week for well over
two years as we both schlepped away at our respective projects; and the late
Pamela Sue Anderson, who shared kindness with me from when we first met
in 1994 until I last saw her talk in late 2016, speaking on Bergson in fact—​a
true spirit of Isis. Without the ongoing advice and collegiality of Charlotte de
Mille and Juliet Chambers-​Coe, two very real and creative spirits, this would
certainly have been a lesser work.
Louise Pichel at the Museum of Freemasonry, London, and the officers
at the Museum of Witchcraft, Cornwall, were commendable in allowing me
access to and copies of materials in their archives (when this was possible be-
fore the pandemic). The Gladstone Library in Hawarden, Wales, was the per-
fect residence in early 2020 to allow me to begin the writing process—​peace
and quiet are rare things to find in a library nowadays, and it has it aplenty.
The trail of friends helping me track down various rights and permissions—​
Nicola Levy, Michael O’Byrne, and Lisa Power in particular—​proved indis-
pensable when navigating the labyrinthine world of music publishing.
x Acknowledgments

I am especially grateful to Henrik Bogdan for his initial acceptance and

subsequent guidance of the book through its publication in the Oxford
Studies in Western Esotericism series—​he has been, as is said, a “marvel.”
In addition, I would like to thank those at Oxford University Press who have
borne this project along—​and Rachel Ruisard and Cynthia Read, in par-
ticular, deserve my appreciation. The production and copyediting skills of
Narayanan S. and Leslie Anglin, respectively, improved the book greatly,
as did two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, whose suggested
amendments also helped to advance it in significant ways. Lindsay Seers was
kind enough to provide help in sourcing some of the images in the text.
Finally, I must pay a debt to my family: James, Eoin, and Aoife first, who
deserve much sympathy for all the nights that their Dad stayed awake at
work on the book (with some resulting grumpiness the next morning per-
haps, after too little sleep); my sister Margaret, for demonstrating the pa-
tience and stoicism of an older sibling; and, finally, my partner Laura Cull Ó
Maoilearca—​my co-​conspirator in all things spiritual and material, a mystic
and a woman of action, but most importantly the élan that has given this work
life from its initial gestation through to its eventual materialization. That élan
comes to Laura from her late father, Roger Cull, who was a mix of science and
art, earth and ether as well, and to whose spirit I dedicate this book.
 Prologue: A Reciprocity of Acceleration

Among the many challenging ideas found in the works of Henri Bergson, one
of the strangest, and most difficult, concerns what he called “complete rela-
tivity.” This concept appears in his penultimate monograph, Duration and
Simultaneity. This text gathered ideas concerning Bergson’s infamous clash
with Albert Einstein at the Société française de philosophie in 1922.1 At the
center of their disagreement lies a difference in attitude toward “Langevin’s
paradox,” or the “twin’s paradox,” first put forward in 1911 by the physicist
Paul Langevin in his own exploration of Einstein’s special theory of relativity
(STR). This paradox concerns a thought experiment where one “voyager,”
Paul, sends his twin brother, Peter, off in a rocket at a speed just less than
that of light.2 After a year, the rocket turns around and heads back to earth
at the exact same velocity. Peter gets out after what has now been a two-​year
journey in the rocket only to discover that Paul has “aged” two hundred years
“and has long been in his grave.”3
This is a predicted result from STR due to Peter traveling close to the
speed of light, which retards the aging process (following Einstein’s theory).4
Understood as two (biological) clocks, Peter’s velocity relative to Paul allows
him to age more slowly than Paul. Peter cannot reverse time, but he does
retard it, at least relative to Paul. Yet it might still be asked: why is it Paul’s
aging alone that quickens relative to Peter? After all, in a consistent rela-
tivism of time, surely Paul could be seen as traveling at near to the speed
of light relative to Peter—​their speeds are reciprocal and covary—​in which
case, there would be no age difference between the two at all.5 So here is the
paradox: the answer to whose aging slows down and whose speeds up all
depends on which frame of reference you decide to treat as immobile (and
take your measurements from), and which is taken as being in motion rela-
tive to this frame. And, as this decision is entirely contingent, it leaves STR
looking somewhat perverse as a theory.
Moreover, for Bergson, separated twin siblings are more than interchange-
able clocks; they are living beings that cannot be substituted for each other
without losing something in the process. From this vantage point, a clock is
an impersonal abstraction of our lived experience of time (durée). Indeed, it
xii Prologue

is one that privileges only one frame of reference at a time in what Bergson
dubs a “single” or “half-​relativity” (la demi-​relativité)—​the frame of reference
of the immobile measuring the mobile. In contrast to this seemingly flawed
approach, Bergson proposed a “double” or “complete relativity” (la relativité
complete) where there are no privileged reference frames and where no per-
spective can be completely represented by another in an act of substitution.6
Every frame or perspective is equalized as completely individual. It is impos-
sible for Paul to represent the personal experience of Peter fully, because ex-
perience is more than the representation of experience. For one to represent
fully another’s lived time, one must experience it in every detail, in person.
But this is impossible without actually being that other person: “if I want to
actually measure Peter’s time, I must enter Peter’s frame of reference; I must
become Peter. If I want to actually measure Paul’s time, I must take Paul’s
place.”7 Otherwise, all I am left with is my virtual image of Paul, not his ac-
tuality. Ultimately, STR is predicated fallaciously on “a time or a space [that
is] always virtual and merely imagined, never real and experienced.” Its “es-
sence” is to “rank the real vision with the virtual visions” or to hide “the dif-
ference between the real and the virtual.”8
Let’s pause for a moment to think this through, because, in one way or
another, it is crucial for everything that follows in this book. Fulfilling the
counterfactual, “if I had been you . . .” entails me being all that you are, and
hence not I-​being-​you (which would only bring along non-​you baggage with
it), but you-​being-​you (which even includes all of your kinds of self-​alterity,
auto-​differentiation, etc.). We need a complete history (material, psycholog-
ical, and social) to “transform” one person genuinely into a real other person
(rather than merely an abstraction of that other): this would be an exhaustive
factual analysis of that person-​there-​and-​then that only that person-​there-​
and-​then can embody.9
This emphasis on haecceity, on the thisness of this temporal perspective
(a real time that is always lived by an actual someone, somewhere) is not to
reinstate a totalizing logic of self-​identity, hermetically sealed off from all al-
terity, however. Indeed, to circumvent the dichotomies associated with STR,
it is precisely the logic of separation (Peter or Paul) that must be overcome.
The scene is thereby set for alternative logics, logics based on objects that are
not only solid, hard bodies impervious to substitution with each other, but
also fluid ones, watery and gaseous ones, or even sonic ones. This will involve
performative, imagistic, and diagrammatic thinking, where some things
can indeed be this and that, here and there, but not through a transcendent
 Prologue  xiii

act of substitution (my representation of you standing in for you), so much

as an immanent act of partial self-​expansion, alteration, or bifurcation. To
follow this work, we will need different logics that come from different kinds
of things. Some of these logics will appear standardly “philosophical” or
rigorous in a “hard” material sense; but some others will appear (or will be
named) “mystical,” “occult,” or “spiritual.” As if that’s a bad thing.
Therefore, the stipulation that this is not that (that Peter is not Paul) need
not be seen as an immovable obstacle but a creative constraint, because to
voyage or travel—​be it in time or space—​is not a matter of mere represen-
tation between solid bodies. Transport involves a transfer of being, too—​a
qualitative change subtends (and “supertends”) every quantitative one. If
the voyaging siblings could be ontologically interchangeable, it would not be
as wholes, but as moving, fluid, and luminous parts, within other “wholes”
that are themselves mutating. They would be alter egos altering each other
mutually within “larger” processes. These “parts” are not separate, impen-
etrable things, but lines of moving continuity which flow heterogeneously.
And, finally, these “heterogeneous continuities” would embody the thisness
or thatness of each partial perspective—​nonsubstitutable from the outside
precisely because they are mobile, moving inside duration (at various foli-
ated levels). Following an alternative way of thinking, this logic might also
be called a “Tattwa Vision,” the hermetic practice of perceiving “thatness” in
order to undertake another kind of cosmic voyage.
This book is dedicated to the strange voyages taken by two figures from
history whose reciprocal accelerations took them far apart from each other
on one level, and yet who also remained within an ongoing, “covarying”
change, a continuous movement of alteration.10
 Strange Memory
An Introduction in Five Parts

I believe precisely that, at the base of all our mystical states, there are
techniques of the body which have not been studied. . . . I think that
there are necessarily biological means to enter into “communication
with God”.
—​Marcel Mauss, “Body Techniques”1

Zelator

A lifetime ago in 1990, I shared a London house with a ragbag group of

fledging academics. Like me, they were working in the city at various part-​
time jobs such as “desktop publishing,” proofreading, or legal services, while
waiting to begin their doctoral studies in the autumn. I was going to work
on Bergson at University College, London—​at that time an exotic endeavor,
both for me and the College (Bergson Studies has become more mainstream
since then). One evening in and around March time, I ended up in the unen-
viable position of trying to explain Bergson’s ideas about time and memory to
a friend of a friend. This was at our own house party and, despite loud music
playing, I did my best to educate the fellow. I should add that this chap was al-
ready a philosophy graduate, but he clearly needed the benefit of my learning
nonetheless (he was also taller than me, better looking, and much more suc-
cessful with the opposite sex, but there was nothing I could do about all that).
Having rehearsed my clarification of Bergsonism a number of times previ-
ously, its dénouement was always at the point when I would explain how, or-
dinarily, “we think that memory is the mental faculty that allows us to recall
the past, whereas, for Bergson . . .” But here, my listener interrupted and fin-
ished the sentence for me: “whereas with Bergson, memory is when the past
recalls us. Yes, yes.” He was also a clever clogs.2 This episode must have grated

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0001
2  Vestiges of a Philosophy

on me for a while as it is one of the few things I can easily recollect from that
period of my life.
This thesis of memory as ontological, as a real persistence of the past in
our psychic lives, obviously did not come to life with Bergson alone: in var-
ious forms it harks back to the Renaissance (the spheres of the universe as
memory system) and then ever further to Plato’s anamnesis (recollection
not merely as knowledge of the past but knowledge from a past life abiding
within us as the soul travels from one life to another—​metempsychosis). The
idea that memory is a form of (mental) time travel can be understood cogni-
tively rather than ontologically, of course, wherein it is only a representation
of the past, albeit one that has real effects in the present.3 This is the way it is
understood in numerous psychological studies, the most well-​known pos-
sibly being Ellen Langer’s “Counter Clockwise Study” in 1979. This experi-
ment involved eight elderly men living for a week in a residential retreat that
re-​created the social and physical environment of 1959. After the week was
over, all eight appeared to have grown younger as a result, be that under-
stood in terms of cognitive or physical health. Their attitude—​conditioned
within a kind of “Proustian space”—​reversed the effects of the aging pro-
cess to render them younger, as measured on a number of levels (physical
strength, perception, cognition, taste, hearing, and visual thresholds). The
house they entered was a figurative time slip of sorts: Perry Como played on
a vintage radio; The Ed Sullivan Show shone from a black-​and-​white TV; all
the books and magazines in the house were period correct. Nor were there
any mirrors in the house that might break this spell. Moreover, the eight men
in the experimental group were instructed to behave, to act, just as if it re-
ally were 1959 now, rather than to reminisce about 1959 from the current
year of 1979. Meanwhile, a control group in another house “remained” in
1979 and only had to recollect the life they had in 1959. In them, no signif-
icant changes were detected at the end of the exercise.4 The eight in the ex-
perimental group, however, exited the house as different people, analogically
de-​aged.5 Yet, of course, beyond the confines of this house, everything was
still in “1979”: though the effects of some of the men’s advancing years might
have been tempered, nobody conducting this experiment was claiming that
time itself was really put in reverse, inside or outside of the house.
The idea of a real (psychological) time machine—​one where you, or some
aspect of you, are the machine—​was not being entertained in this experi-
ment. Some films, on the other hand, have flirted with this idea. One of them
is Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time (1980), which was filmed at about
 Strange Memory  3

the same time as the “Counter Clockwise” experiment. The protagonist

of the story, played by Christopher Reeve, travels from 1980 back to 1912
through sheer force of will—​achieved through self-​hypnosis, a prepared en-
vironment in an old hotel (another “Proustian space”), and performative
acts (dressing and behaving as though it actually were 1912). This story can
also be compared, therefore, with Bergson’s thesis that memory is a moment
in which the past in itself returns. The first thing that connects them is the
use of “Proustian space”—​environmental stimuli that facilitate the return of
the past. Indeed, is it merely a coincidence that the cousin of Bergson’s wife,
Louise Neuberger, and the best man at their wedding, was Marcel Proust?
What mutual influence Proust and Bergson may have had has frequently
been debated over the years in terms of the similarities and dissimilarities
between their approaches to memory and the past. The verdict has usually
been that there is indeed some connection between them, but that Bergson’s
is a more voluntarist theory: through an amplification of perception, more
of the past enters into the present and extends it. That amplification does not
come primarily through involuntary happenstance as with Proust (an unan-
ticipated taste, smell, or sound), but through active work upon our attention
toward both the environment and our “inner” experience of it.6 This exten-
sion is not “all in the head” as a mental set of representations either, pace
the cognitivist approach in modern psychology. And this is where Bergson’s
stance is both more complicated than some, and quite novel (for any “clever
clogs” still reading).
The following quote from Bergson’s 1911 lecture at Oxford, “The
Perception of Change,” captures a sense of this:

Let us reflect for a moment on this “present” which alone is considered to

have existence. What precisely is the present? [ . . . ] My present, at this mo-
ment, is the sentence I am pronouncing. But it is so because I want to limit
the field of my attention to my sentence. This attention is something that
can be made longer or shorter, like the interval between the two points of
a compass. [ . . . ] Let us go further: an attention which could be extended
indefinitely would embrace, along with the preceding sentence, all the ante-
rior phrases of the lecture and the events which preceded the lecture, and as
large a portion of what we call our past as desired.7

One year later, in a lecture given in Paris on “The Soul and the Body,” Bergson
attempts to “push the argument to its limit” by imagining a single sentence
4  Vestiges of a Philosophy

“lasting for years”: “well, I believe that our whole psychical existence is some-
thing just like this single sentence, continued since the first awakening of
consciousness, interspersed with commas, but never broken by full stops.
And consequently I believe that our whole past still exists.”8 Attention is the
time machine for Bergson. Indeed, one might even say that each of us suffers
from some degree of attention-​deficit disorder, only it is one which is species-​
specific, with (perhaps) only a few artists, mystics, and so-​called madmen, as
we will see, being less “disordered” than the rest of us.
In extending this attention (by whatever means) what we call our “past” is
embraced within what we call our “present.” The former distends the latter.
So far, so “merely” psychological, perhaps. After all, it is only a matter, for
now, of what we call “past” and “present.” Yet Bergson seems to hedge his bets
between psychology and ontology by remaining unclear as to what is being
maintained here—​my past as I remember it, or the past itself. Ordinarily, we
would say that there is a major difference between the two, yet Bergson invar-
iably fails to make the distinction, speaking interchangeably about “my past,”
“memory,” and “the past.”9 On one page of his 1907 book Creative Evolution,
for instance, he writes that “the piling up of the past upon the past goes on
without relaxation.” Only then does he say on the next page that “it is with
our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will
and act,” and later again that “from this survival of the past it follows that con-
sciousness cannot go through the same state twice.”10 So, once more, though
it is I who actively remembers from the present moment, what returns is not
a recollection, but the past in which I reside (my past is the past).
Ultimately, most commentators agree on this one point as regards
Bergson’s theory of memory—​for him the past is a real agent, alive and
kicking, in one form or another: “it is we who are in time, rather than time
that is in us” (Grosz); “we are not ‘in’ time, in the manner that objects oc-
cupy parts of space. We are time, unfolding at different speeds” (Khandker);
“rather than conceiving of memory as a way of relating to the past from the
perspective of the present, Bergson regularly equates memory with the to-
tality of one’s past as it is preserved in itself ” (Perri); “the past is not in the
past but in a present which exists virtually and which lies below and beyond
the time of adaptation” (Mourélos).11 I could go on (don’t worry, I won’t).
Nicolas de Warren calls all this “Bergson’s Copernican Revolution” whereby
consciousness as a whole does not move from the present to the past, but
“from the past to the present, from memory to perception.”12 When I re-
member, I do not reach from the present into the past, but a part of the past
 Strange Memory  5

extends my present, that is, my attention toward reality. It distributes my per-

ception in space and time. Consequently, the agency is twofold, belonging
both to me (it is my act of attention-​recollection) and the past (whence the
recollection emanates).

Ipsissimus

Strange ideas to be sure, then, and yet, despite some appearances to the con-
trary, this is not a Bergsonian idealism that would render the world as being
“for me,” the real as my idea, or as an artifact of language, a product of desire,
power, difference, or whatever else. Bergsonism has always proposed some-
thing between realism and idealism—​ideas related to the world realistically.
To answer the question, “What returns in memory?” therefore, with only
ever one kind of part—​an idea, a representation, or even more concretely,
an affect, an attitude, or a bodily relation, would still confuse one part for the
whole. What returns is the real past itself, in part. And ideas, too, are real, for
of course they are parts of the real as well. The real past sometimes returns
in part as idea, but oftentimes in many other forms. As Matter and Memory
puts it:

Between this perception of matter and matter itself there is but a difference
of degree and not of kind . . . the relation of the part to the whole. . . .
My consciousness of matter is no longer either subjective . . . or rela-
tive. . . . It is not subjective, for it is in things rather than in me. It is not rel-
ative, because the relation between “phenomenon” and the “thing” is not
that of appearance to reality, but merely that of the part to the whole.13

Mereology. In this part-​whole relation, complex though it must be (espe-

cially when understood as a temporal connection), we may find the solu-
tion to how “my past” and “the past” become so interchangeable for Bergson
(where personal memory dovetails with the historical past), so that hopefully
the mysterious idea of the past remembering (me) in my act of remembering
the past becomes less perplexing. A part-​whole relation, but one that is taken
in time rather than space, creates a series of continuities: these are indivisible
changes, ones that are themselves “within” another change that itself changes
(that is, they are “in” durée). As Jean Hyppolite tried to explain as far back as
1949: “this duration—​which is pure succession, the extension of the past into
6  Vestiges of a Philosophy

the present and therefore already memory—​is not a series of distinct terms
outside of one another, nor a coexistence of the past with the present. But
rather, it manifests the indivisibility of a change, a change that, as Bergson
notes in chapter four of Matter and Memory, undoubtedly endures.”14
Change changes—​so there is not one monolithic or homogeneous conti-
nuity for Bergson (as Gaston Bachelard liked to portray it in his never-​ending
critique of duration), but a range of continuities with different durations
strewn throughout the cosmos.15 Indeed, they are the cosmos: continuities
of bodies, large and small, of spatial arrangements, of ideas, of affects, of
species, of phyla, and so on—​each enduring at different, changing, and foli-
ated levels of tension (or “tone” as Trevor Perri puts it).16 What unites these
temporal parts, if only partially, is not containment within any one single,
transcendent timeline, but this tone or level of tension. It is something imma-
nently temporal that we will call “covariance.” What makes one temporal part
that part of this whole (which is itself another part of another whole) is the
durée it shares with others, its covariance.
Admittedly, the phenomenology of grief, for instance, will offer a coun-
terexample to all this talk of continuity, especially when it is phrased in wa-
tery metaphors of “flow,” “streams,” “fluids,” or “waves.” Grief, by contrast,
blocks—​it stops. Grief and mourning (or even more severely, trauma) are
experienced by many as a halt in time, a stoppage of time in its supposed
“flow.” All the clocks are stopped, and time freezes within either a past trau-
matic event or a perpetual present of loss. These clocks are mechanical, of
course, but to resort to that fact here would be a crude response. Nor do we
need to invoke the truism that “time heals all wounds,” or even retort that
our biological clocks are immune, or at least indifferent, to the psychological
phenomena of suffering (they are not, by the way). It is not a coincidence that
the Indo-​European root for memory is (s)mer—​which means “to mourn,”
and that the Germanic root is smerd—​which means “pain.” As the psychol-
ogist Patrick McNamara notes in this regard, “memory’s deep roots extend
back into mourning.”17 In fact, such a wholly different experience of time,
the seemingly complete restriction of its flow, is precisely evidence for ex-
actly the multiplicity of times being put forward here. Time flows differently
on different planes, sometimes in such felt experiences of endured deceler-
ation that it indeed feels as if at a complete standstill. In truth, the intimate
connections between grief, mourning, and memory are precisely some of
the different ways in which the past survives within the present, or rather re-
mains indivisible within a present.
 Strange Memory  7

This question of variances (fast, slow, flowing, blocked), of different

parts, also demonstrates just how inadequate the language of “one or many”
is when applied to time. And with that, the logic of separable solids proves
itself unfit for discussing identity, individuality, or unity (versus their puta-
tive opposites in generality, divisibility, and multiplicity). To overcome this
dilemma, Bergson invented assorted formulas for durée, such as “a moving
continuity . . . in which everything changes and yet remains the same,” or
that which is “ever the same and ever changing.”18 Continuity versus discon-
tinuity, therefore, is a false opposition when one thinks of time as coming in
different varieties, with no one time transcending all others (Newton’s “ab-
solute” time that “flows equably without regard to anything external”—​the
putative one-​dimensional clock-​time of the universe). The error lies in as-
suming a certain continuity of the same, of homogeneity, irrespective of which-
ever absolute measures out and orients that sameness (time as container, or as
arrow, or as increasing entropy, or its opposite, increasing complexity, and so
on).19 In what covaries, therefore, we will suggest that the things that do re-
main the same, that continue, do so in diverse ways. Only three of these will
take up most of our investigative efforts here: historical (in ways that allude
to what we call “influence” but also go beyond it), philosophical (a concep-
tual lineage of sorts), and psycho-​physical (as material, spiritual, and even
art-​cultural covariances).
Undoubtedly, the term “covariance” has its technical meaning in math-
ematics and statistics (concerning the interrelations between two or more
variable quantities that remain unchanging), but its literal sense as a com-
plex relation of movements, as an echo of variability across temporal levels,
is where it is put to use here. Bergson himself talks of a simple version of this
covariance with an ordinary example of train travel:

Movement is reality itself, and what we call immobility is a certain state of

things analogous to that produced when two trains move at the same speed,
in the same direction, on parallel tracks: each of the two trains is then im-
movable to the travellers seated in the other. But a situation of this kind
which, after all, is exceptional, seems to us to be the regular and normal
situation, because it is what permits us to act upon things and also permits
things to act upon us: the travellers in the two trains can hold out their
hands to one another through the door and talk to one another only if they
are “immobile,” that is to say, if they are going in the same direction at the
same speed. “Immobility” being the prerequisite for our action, we set it up
8  Vestiges of a Philosophy

as a reality, we make of it an absolute, and we see in movement something

which is superimposed.20

Immobility is a complexity of mobilities. This is not a relationship between

substances, the intentional subject, say, or its intended object, but between
changes, variations. We heard earlier that, in the Special Theory of Relativity
what is deemed to be moving or not is relative to the frame of reference one
adopts. For Bergson, however, when two real movements are covarying, they
create an immobility, a seemingly invariant continuity between themselves.
There is a continuity between temporally separated processes, becomings
that share the same vector but not the same time or duration. We must take
note, nevertheless: the continuity is itself what Bergson elsewhere called a
“variation perpétuelle,” constantly (invariantly) moving, albeit more slowly.21
Nothing is perfectly still, absolutely immobile: if everything moves, though,
it is not as measured within one transcendent time, but simply as experienced
within a “larger” one, a different temporal scale.
Of course, the two trains in the quotation above are separated by space.
But if the movements in our extended train image are “separated” in time,
how would we connect them? And who are we to do so? If they are separate
in time, then there is no transcendental simultaneity to measure and contain
the covariance (a view from nowhen). Perhaps, therefore, the covariance is
real but can only be experienced immanently, within the phenomenon, as the
physicist and philosopher Karen Barad would say—​in a well-​formed appear-
ance. Covariance: when the relation between two changes (variance) remains
constant—​a “changing with” or “with-​change,” Mitveränderung, Mitvarianz
(perhaps it sounds better in cod-​German?).

Theoricus

But I am getting far ahead of myself. To lay my cards on the table, the strange-
ness of Bergson that I mentioned at the outset is not restricted to a number of
conceptual peculiarities or inconsistences found in odd corners of his work.
It concerns the entire thrust of his thought as a philosopher, one following
the best scientific data of the day from psychology, biology, and physics, and
yet also enframing them within a context where the physical world is un-
derstood as movement, energy, and force, alongside of which lie many other
forces that might be dubbed physical and “spiritual” as well. It concerns a
 Strange Memory  9

philosopher who reputedly denounced magic and publicly distanced himself

from mysticism for most of his career, only to dedicate his last major work to
tackling both, with mysticism rerendered as a kind of activity or movement
rather than intellectual contemplation or private ecstasy.22 It also concerns
a philosopher who increasingly withdrew from public life with age, not in
order to stop his pursuit of philosophical knowledge so much as to conduct
his enquiries in private, for they were, as he confessed, only “for me.” And,
finally, it must concern Matter and Memory, if not the best known, certainly
the most peculiar of all Bergson’s books. Published in 1896, the strangeness of
Matter and Memory comes from two elements: a first chapter that performs a
bizarre thought experiment that equates the entire universe, indeed all being,
with light—​a light that shines, reflects, and refracts upon itself within a set of
images; and a third chapter that diagrammatizes memory as a great cone, or
rather as a conical past in itself within which my past moves via expanded or
contracted attention.
Yet all of these concerns only comprise half of our story. Most importantly,
this strangeness must invoke Henri Bergson’s sister, Mina Bergson, a.k.a.
Moina Mathers (or Moina Bergson Mathers), spiritualist and mystic, skryer,
astral traveller, and image-​maker. Mina was at the height of her powers in
the 1890s, running an important Occult society, producing mystical art-
work, and by the end of the decade practising the Egyptian mysteries of Isis
in Parisian theaters—​all at precisely the same time that her brother Henri
was writing Matter and Memory and later invested as Professor of Classical
Philosophy at the Collège de France. He was already a leading figure within
the French academy by this time, eventually becoming the most renowned
European philosopher in the first years of the following century. She was his
seemingly estranged sister, though in her own right already celebrated as a
feminist and occultist. Brother and sister were living in Paris, working simul-
taneously through seemingly very different but nonetheless complementary
approaches to questions concerning the nature of matter, spirit, and their in-
teraction. These are the separated siblings at the heart of our enquiry, whose
covarying ideas will be analyzed on the basis of a logic of reciprocal accelera-
tion, a watery, endosmotic logic of two lives sharing many strange ideas.
In this book, then, I will be examining the writings and recorded practices
of Mina Bergson/​Moina Mathers, their rarity notwithstanding, alongside
those of her sibling. With her husband, Samuel MacGregor Mathers, Mina
Bergson led the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” all through the 1890s,
and subsequently the “Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega” from 1903
10  Vestiges of a Philosophy

(eventually taking over as its sole head a little after Samuel’s death in 1918).23
She did this while living in Paris and performing public rites as one part of
the Order’s activities, the other involving private rituals of initiation and ad-
vancement in occult learning. Such was her fame in the last decade of the
nineteenth century that historian Dennis Denisoff has described her and
Samuel as the “neo-​pagan power couple” of the Belle Époque.24
What did they do, then—​what was the purpose of such Orders as the
Golden Dawn? This simple description from Christopher Armstrong ini-
tially sums it up well: “the acquisition of a certain ‘gnosis’ or private experi-
ential contact with ultimate realities through the deliberate deployment of
incantations and rituals, drawn from various sources, some genuinely an-
cient and associated with the historic Rosicrucian movement, some osten-
sibly archaic but in fact of very recent concoction.”25 Pace Armstrong’s jibe
about “concoction” by the Golden Dawn, their public performances were
never intended to be historically accurate. They were creative and artistic
invocations—​a “performance art,” according to Denisoff, with ceremonies
that were, as Frederic Lees described them at the time, “artistic in the ex-
treme.”26 Performed at the Théâtre La Bodinière and other secret locations in
Paris, Mina Bergson, dressed as high priestess Anari, would invoke the god-
dess Isis materially, immanently, and in person.27 (Parenthetically, whereas
an evocation in Enochian magic brings a spirit into the world as a separate en-
tity, in an invocation the spirit is channeled by the medium into another body,
her own being a common choice for such embodiment: she is not a means of
communication so much as an incarnation of spirit, a moving conduit that,
as we will see, works through mimetic performance as well as symbolism.)28
Isis, who is first recorded c. 2350–​2100 bce, is the Egyptian goddess of life,
the all-​encompassing mother, a moon goddess, as well as the goddess of
nourishment, healing, and magic (in the Osiris Myth, she brings her brother,
Osiris, partially back from the dead).29 So important for the Golden Dawn
were these Isis rites, moreover, that after 1900 Samuel and Mina would refer
to all their work as part of the “Isis movement.”30 That a goddess was central
to the Golden Dawn is not surprising given the feminist orientation of many
of its principles: the Golden Dawn preached the equality of the sexes on all
fronts, as well as other radical causes in that era, such as animal rights and
vegetarianism.31 In our efforts here to recover Mina Bergson’s ideas, it will
also be necessary to examine a number of specific facets contained within
this image of a feminine, divine “movement,” and thereby a means to see it
equally as an assembly of continuities, of covariants.
 Strange Memory  11

Reconnecting Henri Bergson’s peculiar theory of memory with his ultra-​

realism toward the past (it lives, it exists), while arguing for certain “spir-
itualist” and even occult underpinnings to this connection (that coincide
with some of his sister’s practices), is far from a novel type of enterprise in
the history of ideas, however. Be it one within a philosophical lineage (G.
W. F. Hegel’s gnosticism, Gilles Deleuze’s post-​Kantian esotericism, or the
mystical sources of existentialism, say), or a scientific one (Newton and al-
chemy, for instance), looking for such reflections in a dark mirror is not an
uncommon form of investigation.32 All the same, as Joshua Ramey cautions
us, there remains a “contemporary ambivalence over the validity and signif-
icance of esoteric, let alone ‘occult,’ apprehensions of nature and mind” such
that a certain “political risk” comes with any such reading, especially in the
face of the materialist worldview that currently dominates philosophy and
“theory” in general. If the risk is worth taking, therefore, it is, as he says, be-
cause the “marginalization of hermetic traditions . . . constitutes a sympto-
matic repression of the complexity of both the history of modern philosophy
and the stakes of contemporary culture, which is, from the internet to the
cinema, completely obsessed with magic and with the occult.”33 As Henri
Bergson is increasingly being enfolded within the history of philosophy as
a known quantity, a domesticated figure with a few odd views in the philos-
ophy of mind and metaphysics of time (“memory is when the past recalls us,”
yes, yes), it remains important to remind ourselves of just how wild many
of his ideas were and remain, even today. This is not to maintain a stance of
perpetual outsider—​a gratuitous heterodoxy or exoticism—​but to reinscribe
that strangeness within more mainstream philosophy. What Gilles Deleuze
describes as “state philosophy,” and François Laruelle as “standard philos-
ophy,” should be countered, or nonstandardized, with its estranged other, its
alter ego. Following this imperative, we will introduce several overlooked
covariants, some historical, others more contemporary in theme, at various
junctures through the course of the book.

Philosophus

One of those contemporary themes is materialism. A good number of terms

with seemingly immaterial connotations have already been offered here—​
the spiritual, the psychical, magic—​and others, too, might be added, such as
gnosticism, hermeticism, occultism, and mysticism. Unsurprisingly, most,
12  Vestiges of a Philosophy

if not all, are anathema to contemporary discourses around materialism. So,

we ask, is this attitude justified? Undoubtedly, several approaches in both
ontology and philosophy of mind (especially the mind-​body relation) have
gathered under the banner of a “new materialism” in the first two decades
of the twenty-​first century. Though this particular title covers a wide range
of materialisms, variously espoused through biology, neurology, physics,
and even mathematics, they were and for now remain unquestionably part
of mainstream European thought in many circles. More broadly still, “ma-
terialism” as such—​be it “new” or “old,” “historical,” “transcendental,” or
even “performative”—​still today represents the received wisdom in much
contemporary philosophy. Whereas small corners within Anglo-​American
“analytic” philosophy have of late attempted to rehabilitate the spiritual—​or
consciousness—​through panpsychism (in the work of Galen Strawson and
David Charmers, for instance), or the process thought of Whitehead and his
heirs, the European approach seems happiest when keeping a safe distance
from anything with even a hint of the immaterial about it. Yet, as we will
see, there are even more heterodox models of mind available to us than these
Anglo-​American views, ones that might be sustained without necessarily
being accompanied with such (incompatible) associates as the immaterial,
the ideal, or the disembodied.
The most significant and current European materialism is undoubtedly
this “new materialism.” It is built upon two premises that are noteworthy for
our study. The first concerns what counts as “new” in its understanding of
matter. Though Christopher Gamble, Joshua Hanan, and Thomas Nail argue
in their 2019 study of the movement that “there is currently no single defini-
tion of new materialism,” they do add that they all share the view that there
was a “perceived neglect or diminishment of matter in the dominant Euro-​
Western tradition as a passive substance intrinsically devoid of meaning.”34
Whereas modern materialism was defined by “the passivity of matter in-
sofar as matter is what is caused or moved by something else: vital and
causal forces or natural laws of motion,” the new materialists emphasize how
“matter is “alive,” “lively,” “vibrant,” “dynamic,” “agentive,” and thus active.”35
In sum, this is a view of matter that is neither physicalist nor mechanistic in
the senses taken by many of the eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century reduc-
tive materialisms, with physics deemed the supervening science that treats of
ultimately inert, passive, and atomistic quantities in calculable, determined
motion. Wholes were deemed epiphenomenal in one way or another in this
view, and only an analysis into composite parts revealed the truth of the
 Strange Memory  13

matter. Indeed, such approaches more or less continued well into the twen-
tieth century in positivist philosophies, with only very recent developments,
such as “New Mechanical Philosophy” (or “New Mechanism”), tempering
the views held by many in this tradition.36
By contrast, new materialism loosely follows Gestalt principles and deems
matter to form complex, nonlinear, dynamic wholes that are not the sum
of their parts. This focus on the micro by both old and new materialisms—​
in physics to be sure but also in biology (stem cells) and cognitive science
(neural plasticity, embryonic epigenesis)—​ is what Sam Coleman calls
“smallism”: the idea that truth resides in the smallest particulars of reality
(which may clump together to form larger wholes); that “the ontological
truth is to be found with the small, or with all the “smalls” in all their in-
numerable multiplicity.”37 In the new materialism, however, wholes are also
real, even though emergent—​their properties constitute a genuinely different
level of reality, albeit that they are generated by the complex interactions of
their smaller, constitutive elements. This emergence of the larger from the
smaller, one that is neither reductive (the large does not reduce entirely to the
small) nor mechanistic (such small matter is not passive), is a crucial aspect
for much of this thinking. The question of level and scale, therefore, both
spatial and temporal, will be critical in what follows here, too.
Whether it be Quentin Meillassoux’s “mathemic” valorization of contin-
gency, the idea of “plasticity” in Catherine Malabou’s neurophilosophy, en-
tanglement in Karen Barad’s philosophy of physics, or “vibrant matter” in
Jane Bennett’s neo-​vitalism, we can also see a second, less explicit premise
of new materialism in much of its work: namely, that whatever number of
emergent, nonreducible properties are allowed to matter, the idea of spirit
cannot be added to the list. Nonreduced materiality alone prevails, while a
transcendent, Platonist notion of spirit—​the only one deemed possible by
some—​remains the conceptual outsider to be either eliminated or simply
ignored. As John Zammito writes: “one of the essentially contested issues
surrounding the new materialism is how to conceive the relation of ‘spirit’ to
the natural.”38 This is why the possibility of a nontranscendent (or immanent)
spirit is rarely, if ever, entertained. This is where some historical research may
be of use, in particular around the school of “French Spiritualism.” This was
a loose tradition of thought that lasted from the late eighteenth century up
to Henri Bergson himself as its final representative. Despite its name, it was
not a school of the occult, but what we might nowadays call a nondualist,
nonreductive approach to mind and body. These earlier French philosophers,
14  Vestiges of a Philosophy

including Maine de Biran (1766–​1824), Félix Ravaisson (1813–​1900), and

Émile Boutroux (1845–​1921), were equally determined to find a way in
which matter and spirit could be thought together, but without turning to
either dualism or reductionism. The place of spirit was retained in their re-
search through movement, duration, and habit.39 Many of their ideas will re-
turn in what follows.
Without falling for something like biologist Gerald Edelman’s straw man
argument—​that is, the idea that anything other than the most parsimonious,
scientistic, and nonsubjective approaches is simply turning physics into
a “surrogate spook”—​we can still admit that matter is weirder than many
would allow.40 And that is precisely where the “new materialists” are correct,
although also where they are less “new” than proclaimed. For example, the
materialism of contingency forwarded in Meillassoux’s Après la finitude from
2006, actually reinvents, one hopes unwittingly, the ideas of Émile Boutroux,
whose De la contingence des lois de la nature from 1874 argued for a sim-
ilar contingency in the laws of nature. Only, and here’s the twist, Boutroux
argued his case in the name of spiritualism, not materialism. This makes
Meillassoux’s valorization of the contingency of nature in the name of mate-
rialism even more ironic. For Boutroux, the contingent is a sign of spirit, not
mathematized matter. Having said that, we are not here to correct new ma-
terialism or detract from its valuable contributions to European philosophy.
We wish to add to them.41 As Adela Pinch writes, modern-​day “trends in
the humanities that embrace panpsychism, vibrant matter, object-​oriented
ontologies, and extended or dispersed conceptions of consciousness, could
benefit from an examination of Victorian debates about panpsychism.”42
Both the panpsychists and spiritualists (in the French sense of the name)
offer us alternative models for thinking about matter and its interrelations
with human and nonhuman life, mind, and spirit. Indeed, in the example of
Henri Bergson, we see an attempt to naturalize spirit via his concept of durée,
without reducing or eliminating it.
We asked earlier whether the attitude of much contemporary materialist
thought toward the category of spirit was justified. Behind this possibly sim-
plistic question lies another, more complex one, however: can the category of
the spiritual (expanded in terms of its allied names, the esoteric, the occult,
the mystical, and so on) provide an added dimension to “materialism” in such
a manner that neither reduces it nor inflates itself, but simply shows how the
difference between the two might be considered a matter of temporal scale,
 Strange Memory  15

of level or plane? A recent work from Larry Sommer McGrath is illuminating

in this regard. In Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in
Modern France, he writes that the spiritualism that emerged in France in the
late nineteenth century was not like the spiritualism that went before—​this
was a “new spiritualism,” or at least it was significantly different from older
varieties because it had taken a scientific, and even materialist turn. As he
reports on this particular reading of the issue: “the new spiritualism is not a
new doctrine,” one author wrote in 1884; “it is spiritualism renewed by sci-
ence.” The characterization of this transformation as a turn to materialism
took hold thanks to a critic of the movement. A defender of the old guard
decried what he saw as its abnegation in the form of “neo-​materialism.”43 For
Sommer McGrath, this critic was actually right and a “materialist moment”
had now “inflected the spiritualist movement by the turn of the century.”
Moreover, the chief protagonist of this turn, Sommer McGrath contends,
was Henri Bergson: “the thrust of his oeuvre, I argue, was to steer a material-
ized spiritualism into the twentieth century.”44 Not only was Henri Bergson
the most “successful representative of the materialist turn in spiritualism,”
according to Sommer McGrath he “led a movement that operated with much
more expansive notions of rationality, positivism, and materialism.”45 And
here we see a clear dovetailing between this new, turn-​of-​the-​century spir-
itualism with what is new in the new materialism we have currently, and it
concerns a shared nonreductive approach to both matter and spirit:

The charge of “neo-​materialism” was revelatory. The accused never ascribed

the label to themselves; yet, it was hardly a misnomer. [ . . . ] Unlike reduc-
tive materialisms, which conceptualized matter as the substratum and final
explanation of spirit, this “neo-​materialism”—​and its leading practitioner,
Henri Bergson—​reimagined matter to enter into a partnership with the
spiritual powers of memory, creativity, and action.46

Sommer McGrath is not alone in his more ecumenical interpretation of the

spirit-​matter relations at play among these thinkers. Jeremy Dunham writes
that the “new spiritualists” were “inspired by developments in the life sciences
[and] developed a theory of nature as open, creative, and evolving,” while
Mark Sinclair and Delphine Antoine-​Mahut have argued that “spiritualism
in the first half of the [nineteenth] century should be seen as a plural and
open-​ended development of a programme rather than as the reproduction
16  Vestiges of a Philosophy

of a one-​track thought,” and even that we “have to reject as simplistic and

superficial standard characterizations of positivism and spiritualism as dia-
metrically opposed.”47 And to round out these new, revisionist histories, we
can turn to Jean Gayon, who argues furthermore that

Bergson was a “spiritualistic positivist.” This is not retrospective inter-

pretation, something that I would formulate because it sounds like a
nice paradox. It is the plain expression of the historical fact. Around
1900, “spiritualistic positivism” was the current name of a living tradi-
tion among certain French philosophers, such as Jules Lachelier or Émile
Boutroux. Like Bergson, who was directly influenced by them, they empha-
sized a conception of the mind founded on spontaneity, contingency and
indeterminism.48

What we see, then, is a clear reciprocal acceleration between the flight of new
materialism away from old materialism—​a flight that was inflected by prop-
erties also associated with spirit (creativity and contingency)—​and the flight
of the new spiritualism away from the old, whose own trajectory was mod-
ified by elements from material science. So, instead of talking of matter or
spirit, we might talk in terms of continua, of contingency, creativity, and vi-
tality. But again, these continua are not homogeneous, but themselves replete
with qualitative change, with mutation.
And here is where we can also make a further point about covariance.
In his essay, “Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter,” Derek Woods
speaks about the difference between “scale variance” (things that change
with scale) and “scale invariance” (things that do not).49 This notion
builds on the work of philosopher of science Mariam Thalos and her con-
cept of “scale freedom,” which Woods interprets in his own work to mean
“freedom from the notion that any single scale is the master scale.” What
Woods takes from this is the principle that “there is irreducible activity at
every scale,” and finally that “matter may not be the best concept for what
the new materialism works to address.”50 The covariance, and covariants,
we will talk about here concern a continuity formed through movements
changing in concert: not as the same activity simpliciter but as different
activities (plural) in some form of temporal reciprocity. And neither a
spiritualism devoid of matter nor a materialism devoid of spirit can ac-
commodate such continua.
 Strange Memory  17

Practicus

In all of this—​Henri Bergson’s ultra-​realism toward the past and Mina

Bergson’s mystic invocations, aligned as spiritualist alter egos to certain
aspects of new materialism—​is it all going just a bit too far? Have we stretched
Bergsonism to its breaking point? Vladimir Jankélévitch’s reading of Henri
Bergson may help us here. First, he commends us to reinvent Henri Bergson
rather than be faithful to him: “Bergson’s intention was not that we do again
what he did but that we do again as he did. It is Bergsonian to look in the di-
rection he shows us but not at all to go on and on about Bergsonism, about
the place it occupies, about the right drawer in which to stow it away.”51 The
Bergsonian direction, the Bergsonian movement (not “Bergsonism”), is what
continues Bergson. And this unfaithful fidelity is also a kind of love:

Bergson, for the first time, gives us a sense that philosophy is an act that each
of us undertakes on his own account, as if he were alone in the world, as if
he were the first to do it, as if no one had ever done it before him. Naturally,
that is not true, but one must act as if. In this respect, the philosophical act
resembles love. The one who does it redoes what millions of human beings
have done before him. And yet he experiences what he does as something
entirely new, unheard of, original, spring-​like. For him, redoing is doing;
for him, to start again is really to start; the one who loves for the first time is
in his own way a brilliant inventor and improviser.52

In Henri Bergson’s own words, “one knows, one understands only what one
can in some measure reinvent.”53 This Bergsonian movement does not begin
or end with Henri Bergson either (nor even with Mina Bergson as an equal
protagonist). Each reinvention begins as if anew, like an act of love (what
Alain Badiou would call an “event”). New materialism is one example of a
presently widespread movement that is both itself and a reinvention. Yet
some may still ask, what is the subject of such movements? What is being
reinvented, what is being remade in these hetero-​continuities? And the an-
swer, it seems, is all kinds of different, heterogeneous beings: spatial (covari-
ance all the way up, and down), temporal, affective, bodily, and conceptual (to
name a few). There is an indefinite number of continuities in this continuist
stance. We, however, will look at it through five domains in the following
order: history, psychology, biology, philosophy, and physics.
18  Vestiges of a Philosophy

In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett discusses Michel Serres’s own
discovery of structural invariance in the historical birth of physics: as far
back Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, we see a powerful isomorphism at work:

The Book V, on the world and nascent humanity, is traversed by the same
laws as the Book IV, on perception; and these are the laws of matter found
in Book II. Always the same whole, a multiplicity of elements, and al-
ways the same operations at work on these wholes. The method by struc-
tural invariants, generalised to the global stability of flowing movements,
establishes materialism.54

Matter, perception, humanity, and world. The title of Serres’s five-​volume

history of ideas, Hermès, invokes the messenger of the gods to signify a
communication between the sciences and the arts, a translator that enables
us to commute between different domains. Similarly, the Hermetic orders
of the Middle Ages and after also invoked a seemingly simple principle of
covariance, “as above, so below.” Yet, as we will see later, this basic scalarity
concealed something more sophisticated. Significantly, the Hermetic lit-
erature of antiquity and the Renaissance is based around a fictional char-
acter, Hermes Trismegistus, who was actually “a human composite figure
possessing characteristics of the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek god
Hermes.”55 In other words, he was invented: a cultural appropriation that
has been reappropriated, and reinvented, many times since in different
eras and by different groups of people, large and small, many of them
often seeking, by fabulation, origin stories with continuities, lineages, or
traditions of their own.
In our own reinvention of such esoteric thinking, the five aforementioned
covariants (history, psychology, biology, philosophy, and physics) will be
named after five of the grades or levels found within the Golden Dawn (for
reasons that will soon become clear). These levels are numbered and named
as follows: 1° =​10° Zelator Covariant; 10° =​1° Ipsissimus Covariant; 2° =​9°
Theoricus Covariant; 4° =​7° Philosophus Covariant; and 3° =​8° Practicus
Covariant. Both names and numbers concern the position of the grade on
the Kabbalistic “Tree of Life” or Minutum Mundum (“little world” or “little
universe”), a hermetic diagram popularized by the Golden Dawn that struc-
tured divine reality as well as our mortal position within it, and knowledge
of it (see Figure 1). The equals sign between the numbers is not an equa-
tion, by the way, but a graphic marker indicating a student’s progress through
 Strange Memory  19

1
Kether
(Crown)

3
Binah 2
(Under- Chokmah
standing) (Wisdom)

5 4
Geburah Chesed
(Severity) (mercy)

6
Tiphareth
(Beauty)

8 7
Hod Netzach
(Splendor) (Victory)

9
Yesod
(Founda-
tion)

10
Malkuth
(Kingdom)

Figure 1  The Tree of Life

the system, how many grades have been completed (first number) and how
many remain outstanding, in principle at least (second number).56
In this book, however, the diagram and its elements are used syncretically,
bringing philosophical issues together with historical and spiritualist
ones: for Zelator, the issue of discrete opposites versus continuities in the past
20  Vestiges of a Philosophy

relationship between spiritual/​psychical research and its debunkers (zealots

on both sides); while for Ipsissimus (or “superlative self ”), we look at psycho-
logical studies of memory and the formation of identity. The remaining three
grades are named after perspicuous issues among three particularly impor-
tant figures associated with contemporary materialist thought: Jane Bennett
(Theoricus)—​studying the connections between seeing and unseeing as
regards biological life, matter, and spirit; Catherine Malabou (Philosophus)—​
examining how a philosophy can remain “plastic” and continually mutate,
even against its own ideas, and therewith open itself up to what Malabou
calls “superstition”; and Karen Barad (Practicus)—​the philosopher-​physicist
who relates subatomic theory to ethical and epistemological problems of
identity, and so places practice and agency at the heart of reality—​a gesture
that we will extend further into art, and in particular what could be described
as the “performance art” of Mina Bergson.57 These staged encounters do not
purport to be critiques, either negative or positive—​I am not sufficiently ex-
pert on materialism to accomplish that—​but they do orchestrate a number of
salient ideas from these sources that should prove of interest for materialists
and nonmaterialists of various hue.
It might have been noticed that these Kabbalistic grades are not in their
original order on the Tree of Life. That is deliberate. Their disorder here
reflects the fact that this structure of covariants is a philosophical experiment,
an attempt to shape a set of ideas according to a nonstandard model, the her-
metic one of the Golden Dawn. However, it does not share any of the ontolog-
ical commitments of its source material. In this respect, we can think of this
as an experiment in the spirit of François Laruelle’s theory of “nonstandard
philosophy.” Laruelle’s approach seeks to equalize different kinds of know-
ledge by flattening them: no one form is exemplary, the model of thought.
Epistemic hierarchies are rejected because they are circular: be its authority
based on logic, rigor, consistency, or scientific verification (through one or
other privileged science), each model’s claim to epistemic supremacy is ul-
timately question begging (or “auto-​positional” as Laruelle would say) and
can only ground itself through axiomatic presupposition.58 Yet, for Laruelle,
such flattening that does not make all philosophies equally unreal or untrue
(the standard, albeit self-​contradictory view of relativism), but only equal.
At a minimum, they are equal as immanent parts of the Real (which is itself
never defined, as that would simply establish a new authority, be it via mate-
rialism, idealism, even nihilism, and so on). In this Laruellean spirit, then,
the hermetic grades of the Golden Dawn are only used by us as a model, and
 Strange Memory  21

not the model; that is, they are adopted without any “religionist” commit-
ment to their ontology, to what Wouter J. Hanegraaff describes as an “impos-
sible dream of a ‘history of truth.’ ”59
And this is why their grades are employed here in a disorderly fashion, or
rather they are flattened: there is no hierarchy, teleology, or evolution of stages
at work here. In one sense, however, the covariants themselves do “evolve” as
they appear and reappear through the book: and that evolution is through
their duration. Beginning quite small and almost as an aside from the struc-
ture of the main argument, they grow in scale until, by the end, the parts
have virtually overwhelmed the whole. As such, the structure of the book
performs a thesis that is sustained throughout (almost ad nauseum)—​that
any continuity harbors a discontinuity within itself, that is, a heterogeneity,
an interference. Only, at this higher level, a new heterogeneous continuity
of sameness and difference is thereby invented. I will leave the reader to dis-
cover any other elements that might covary (and so continue) between ei-
ther the parts of the work or within each part. This is especially with regard
to one historical covariance that hardly needs to be pointed out (though of
course I will): that the three women and one nonbinary person who occupy
most of these reflections comprise one spiritualist from the past and three
materialists from the present.
 1° =​10° Zelator Covariant

In The Bergsonian Controversy in France 1900–​1914, R. C. Grogin notes

that the equivalent word in French for the English term “spiritualism” is not
“spiritualisme,” as one might expect, but “spiritisme.” Spiritualism, as used in
France, “denotes a system of belief in opposition to materialism.”1 Spiritism,
however, dealt with the paranormal, the psychical, or the supernatural.
Hence, the philosophical school of French Spiritualism, for instance, was
one arguing for the irreducibility of mind to matter, or at least to a certain
mechanistic conception of matter (as we already heard). Naturally, this raises
the question as to what would be the equivalent English term for this French
spiritualisme, if it is not “spiritualism.” “Anti-​reductionism” would be too an-
tithetical, for there is also a positive account of mind rather than only a skep-
tical account of matter (or “opposition to materialism”) running through
this doctrine, albeit coming in different forms depending on whether one is
looking at Maine de Biran, Ravaisson, Boutroux, Bergson, or any number of
others. “Idealism,” “immaterialism,” or “subjectivism” would each also pre-
sume a common metaphysical monism that was not shared either. Even a
“property dualism” would miss the mark in some cases. And this is especially
true of Henri Bergson. As Jean Gayon writes:

For Bergson, matter and mind are not substances. They are “tendencies” or
“forces.” These tendencies conflict and collaborate in many areas of human
experience and, beyond, of reality. [ . . . ] For him, the mind/​body problem
(or more broadly the mind/​matter problem) had to be examined in areas
where these distinctions were obscure: phenomena of a high degree of ma-
terial complexity, which can also be interpreted as “lower manifestations of
the mind.” The spiritualist/​materialist debate is uninteresting and sterile if
it focuses on the superior psychological faculties, understanding, reason,
creative imagination.2

So let us leave names aside for now. In fact, even Anglo-​French spiritualism/​
spiritisme in the nineteenth century was not averse to the incorporation of

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0002
 1° = 10° Zelator Covariant  23

the physical into its explanations of the paranormal, especially in the light
of new scientific discoveries about the nature of matter. As Richard Noakes
points out, new conceptions of “electricity, energy and ether offered possible
physical explanations of telepathy, telekinesis and disembodied souls.” In
fact, a good amount of historical research has shown that in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, “theories and ideas in psychology, biology, and
physics flowed to and, occasionally, from psychical research”3

X-​rays seemed to behave like longitudinal and transverse etherial waves,

radium emanations were startlingly more energetic than anticipated on the
basis of energy conservation, and telepathic transmissions, spiritualistic
levitation, and disembodied spirits defied fundamental notions of space,
time, and matter.4

Such a seemingly powerful consilience between physics and psychics even

left some “genuine” (read “old”) spiritualists aghast. Those who claimed to be
in contact with the spirits of the dead were up in arms, throwing doubt on the
physicists’ “brain wave” theories of telepathy in as much as they appeared to
reduce the traces of departed spirits to merely latent powers of living minds.5
Sometimes, scientific corroboration was the last thing desired.
More broadly still, a consilience of ambition between psychical and phys-
ical research was still recognized in some circles—​and it was one concerning
their shared foundations. As Mark Morrison observes, neo-​alchemists, for
example, were able to interpret the implications of “modern atomic theory
in a way that emphasized the unity of matter (and even of energy).” In their
view, it was oneness, rather than disunity and separation, that character-
ized the “major substratum of atomic theory,” and all that was needed was to
“spiritualize” this principle of fundamental unity. The idea of an “ever simpler
and more basic unity” was never unique to the natural sciences, according to
Morrison, and “unified field theories, and even the Theory of Everything in
more recent physics” share a set of presumptions with hermetic and occult
approaches.6 (It is no surprise that the “God Particle” is as much a quasi-​
theological notion as it is a popular name for the Higgs Boson particle in
modern physics.) That many ideas in physics involve statements about time,
perception, the absolute, or individuality that sound not only metaphysical
but mystical is not so interesting for us, however: what is significant are the
different means through which mystics arrive at, and experience, their ver-
sion of these views.7
24  Vestiges of a Philosophy

And that means can cut both ways, either to re-​enchant matter (in-
flate science) or reduce mind (deflate psychism). Richard Jones’s work on
the “philosophy of mysticism,” for instance, concedes that an individual’s
mystical experience achieved through meditation (opening the “doors
of perception,” etc.), might also be realized through both more mun-
dane methods (enjoying the beauty of nature, art, or music), as well as
more pathological ones: emotional stress, grief, despair, illness, starva-
tion, disability (e.g., epilepsy), brain injury, or sense deprivation.8 And
any of these ordinary methods can also serve to deflate one’s spirits, in
every sense.
Jones also points out that there are generally two types of reduction that
can work to discredit mystical claims: scientific ones that see mystical states
as “nothing but electrochemical activity in the brain or some other physical
or biological phenomenon,” and sociocultural reductions that interpret them
as “social, psychological, or cultural phenomena.”9 Pamela Thurschwell’s
approach would be a sophisticated version of the latter. Following the ex-
ample of Friedrich Kittler’s work in media archaeology, spiritualism is read
by her as a kind of “magical thinking” informed by the new kinds of repro-
duction and communication technologies that were emerging in the nine-
teenth century. Apparatuses like the telegraph and telephone “suggested
that science could help annihilate distances that separate bodies and minds
from each other.” Suddenly, the claims of spiritualist mediums might be
supported: “talking to the dead and talking on the phone both hold out
the promise of previously unimaginable contact between people.”10 Yet the
technology can also rebound on those employing it as a model. If medium-
ship is made analogous to a technology, perhaps the former’s emergence as
a cultural phenomenon at the same time as the introduction of the latter is
more than just a coincidence. Thurschwell quotes Kittler to great effect on
this matter:

the tapping specters of the spiritualistic séances with their messages from
the realm of the dead, appeared quite promptly at the moment of the in-
vention of the Morse alphabet in 1837. Promptly, photographic plates—​
even and especially with the camera shutter closed—​provided images of
ghosts or specters which in their black and white fuzziness, only empha-
sized the moments of resemblance. Finally one of the ten uses Edison
predicted . . . for the recently invented phonograph was to preserve the “last
words of the dying.”11
 1° = 10° Zelator Covariant  25

As Thurschwell then concludes, “there is always already a ghost in the ma-

chine, a telepath on the telephone wire”: the spiritual is brought down to
earth more with a tap than a thud.
Returning to Jones’s work, it is notable how multilayered these reductions
can be. Reductive approaches to mystical experience, “constructivists”
as he dubs them, are wont to see mystical episodes as “genuine neurolog-
ical events,” but he adds that the “alleged cognitive content of all mystical
experiences is totally controlled by the experiencer’s prior religious beliefs.
[ . . . ] No part of even a depth-​mystical experience is unstructured—​i.e.,
untouched by language or concept.” Nature and nurture, brain and symbol,
serve together against the supernatural. In the words of one such construc-
tivist, Steven T. Katz:

there are NO pure (i.e., unmediated) experiences. Neither mystical expe-

rience nor more ordinary forms of experience give any indication, or any
grounds for believing that they are unmediated. That is to say, all experi-
ence is processed through, organized by, and makes itself available to us in
extremely complex epistemological ways. The notion of unmediated expe-
rience seems, if not self-​contradictory, at best empty.12

Katz puts it more pithily as follows: “what the Buddhist experiences as nir-
vana is different from what the Jew experiences as devekuth.” This is simply
because “mystical experience is ‘over-​determined’ by its socio-​religious mi-
lieu.”13 Nothing is purely given—​and all seeming givens are the product of
selection and shaping. Yet where Jones refers to Katz and his followers as
“constructivists,” Katz himself prefers to describe his approach as “contex-
tualist,” and the crucial context for all experience, according to Katz, is lan-
guage: “language,” he contends, is “integral to mystical practice. This is not to
exaggerate this fact or, yet, to attack the central issue of ineffability, but it is
to begin to widen our parameters, to broaden our understanding, as to how
language relates to mystical experience.”14
However, these approaches can be double-​edged, too. “Nonconstructivists”
or “decontextualists”—​arguing for the irreducibility of mystical experience—​
will reason that various cultural conceptualizations may indeed influence
our interpretations of the spiritual, but that this “does not mean that they
must be present during the depth-​mystical experience itself.”15 There re-
mains something that transcends every mediation. Against all such Kantian
(constructive) approaches, “any postexperience intentional object is the
26  Vestiges of a Philosophy

product of memory and a conceptual scheme, but the experience itself is a

direct awareness of a noumenon.”16 Memory here, funnily enough, plays the
role of mediator and so introduces doubt because of its purported indirec-
tion. As the decontextualist Robert K. C. Forman argues, for instance, there
are “PCEs [pure consciousness events],” which “show signs of being neither
constructed nor shaped in either form, content, or process.”17 Forman sets
out the initial case for these PCEs, not with accounts from mystics but with
ordinary (though rare) psychological experiences. These are experiences
anyone can replicate, and he turns to them simply to show that a pure, un-
mediated experience can occur, and so therefore that not all experience is
mediated, be it through language or any other social conduit. Forman’s prec-
edent PCE is that of a homogeneous perceptual field, or Ganzfield:

Under conditions of steady or regular sensory input, in other words, senses

and sensations are commonly forgotten. [ . . . ] just as the processes are par-
allel, the effect of such a recycling of a single subroutine is parallel with
those of the Ganzfeld or the constant auditory stimulus. Not merely does
the recycled stimulus itself ultimately fade, but there is a complete disap-
pearance of any sense of thinking, perceiving, and so on. All perception and
mental activity come to be forgotten. [ . . . ] Such an emptiness, it should be
clear, is not like remembering something and applying it to form or reform
visual information, rather it is more akin to a massive forgetting.18

The Ganzfield effect is interpreted by Forman as a “complete disappearance,”

“emptiness,” or “massive forgetting.” Whether the language of forgetting here
is apt or not, it is significant that this liminal, yet ordinary nonmystical state
is used to admit the possibility of extraordinary versions of these same states.
As Forman continues in a later text:

There are at least two epistemological modalities, or states of conscious-

ness, available to the human being: ordinary and mystical. Ordinary
experiences, thoughts, emotions, sensations, perceptions, and the like are
intentional. Objects are encountered as distinct from the self. Their content
is constantly changing. [ . . . ] Mystical experiences of the PCE type (and
perhaps aspects of others) are, by contrast, nonintentional. One encounters
or rests within awareness per se itself, however it is understood. The con-
sciousness encountered therein is “experienced” as unchanging.19
 1° = 10° Zelator Covariant  27

Forman’s final rehabilitation of decontextualism rests on the existence of

these extraordinary mystical states, and the difference between them and
their linguistic expression. Such expressions mediate the PCE in a language
informed through various, ordinary “epistemological modalities.”
This duality of experience versus expression is not new, of course, either
among theorists of mysticism or philosophy: Henri Bergson himself also dis-
tinguished between the immediate experience of an intuition and its neces-
sary distortion in any subsequent attempt to communicate that experience.20
What Forman calls a “mystical PCE,” Bergson called a “metaphysical intui-
tion.” In both cases, though, there is a special epistemological modality, one
which Forman analyses as “our knowledge-​by-​identity of awareness” (which
is nonlinguistic and nonconceptual),” and Bergson defines as “the sympathy
by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide
with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it.”21 Do note,
though, the mundanity of the Bergsonian object in this immediate know-
ledge: it is not confined to religious states, or even liminal psychological ones,
but is part and parcel of an everyday metaphysics of perception. An intui-
tive knowledge of any perceptible object is possible (which is then contrasted
with a scientific/​conceptual knowledge that analyses the object through its
exterior appearances). In this respect, we might say that Bergsonian intuition
propounds an everyday mysticism of object perception.
It may be said that we have been playing a little fast and loose in these last
pages between different categories: the psychical (as parapsychological re-
search), the spiritual (in both occult movements and mediumship), and the
mystical (as an individual’s private experience). Nonetheless, what they and
indeed their opponents all share to some degree is a view of the transcendent
nature of the putative reality underlying all these categories. As Jones puts it,
from the mystical point of view:

What is transcendent is not merely an infinite amount of something nat-

ural or some part of the natural realm that we cannot know, such as “dark
energy,” but something of another type altogether—​something that in
principle cannot be open to scientific study in whole or in part. Nor is it
in a space beyond our spatiotemporal realm that encompasses it, although
philosophers often treat it that way: it is something to which any phenom-
enal categories such as “space” would not apply. It is in an ontologically
unique category.22
28  Vestiges of a Philosophy

From the perspective of the practitioner of magic, this alternative ontology

involves different sets of laws governing different kinds of objects. In Persuasions
of the Witch’s Craft, Tanya Luhrmann represents this stance as follows:

The basic idea is that there are many different kinds of matter-​ like
substances. Among them are psychic forces, granite rocks, imagined
objects, spiritual essences and so forth. All of these substances interact with
each other, but granite-​like objects and spirit-​like objects are governed by
different natural laws. The point is that things which are normally thought
not to exist (like a mental image of a polar bear, outside the imaging subject’s
mind) do exist, but in a different way, and under different laws, than do ta-
bles and chairs. Golden-​hearted dragons are real, but not like brown-​eyed
anthropologists.23

Even though different versions of this general idea might be favored by dif-
ferent magicians, nevertheless, according to Luhrmann, “most of them view
things imagined as a sort of stuff, which has an impact upon a tables-​and-​
chairs reality.”
This “magical realism,” so to speak, raises another question from the
Bergsonian vantage point, however: what if this alternative “stuff,” these
“different kinds of matter-​like substance” that might not even fit our usual
“phenomenal categories” like space—​what if this stuff was not any kind of
substance at all, within or without ordinary experience? In other words, what
if it was rather a kind of temporal continuity that always operates imma-
nently, only at different scales (be they super-​or sub-​), some of which, being
so different from our own “norm,” that they are taken as para-​normal when
all they are is super-​normal—​a continuation rather than an alternative? What
we might call the “supernormal”—​to give a new use to an old word—​is the
ordinary at a different temporal level, yet always in some kind of continuity
with others.24 Not one ulterior reality parallel to ours, but unattended aspects
of a multilayered reality shared with indefinitely many others.
The Zelator grade, as its name would suggest, indicates all the energy of
the initiate, the student, an absolute faith in the earth (“Malkuth” in the Tree
of Life diagram), which, all the same, must not be taken as unspiritual.25
Confidence in the power of the first name learned at the outset will soon give
way to a continuism that sees names like “material” segue into the “spiritual”
and “spirit,” just as “psychical” research bleeds into “physics” research, spirit-
ualism into “spiritisme,” and so on. And such continuities represent what we
will later call the “meta-​spiritual.”
 1
Ordinary Mysticism, the Hyperbolic, and
the Supernormal

Earlier, we heard Robert Forman discuss the difference between “ordinary”

and “mystical” epistemological modalities. In addition, I have forwarded the
idea that “ordinarily” we understand personal memory as a mental faculty of
representation and the past as an impersonal, objective dimension of time
that transcends mind, or, likewise, that we make ordinary distinctions be-
tween “my past” and “the past.” I contrasted those ideas with Henri Bergson’s
strange views, especially the more alien versions of Bergsonism that often
conflate or fuse such dyads. This has led to the suggestion that there may
be something more outlandish still, even mystical, in his work. This is not,
I should add, the same as the well-​worn and rather tired refutation that all
of his work is simply mystical nonsense (a basic name calling without any
clarification as to what “mysticism” might mean in this or any context). It is
instead a call to investigate some of the odd conflations operating in Henri
Bergson’s work, the “dynamic” monisms he utilizes in order to think through
our ordinary dualities of thought and experience. We are not, then, pursuing
an exercise in making Henri Bergson “spooky,” or even spookier, but rather
in comprehending the stranger elements of his philosophy within a mundane
context—​that memory is indeed a part of the past, but only a part of it. This
is the proposal that a kind of real time travel through memory might be par-
tially possible, but not in any wholly impersonal fashion (as in a machine trav-
eling through time, for instance).
Elsewhere, I have written about a strategy of “supernormalization” that
provides an exit from the stark duality of natural and supernatural, or of the
normal and the paranormal.1 It offers a paradigm that thinks only in terms of
differences of degree rather than of kind. The category of the supernatural, as
found in the arts, culture, philosophy, or even science (“spooky physics”), is
rerendered as structural: a projected inconsistency or hyperbolic state of the

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0003
30  Vestiges of a Philosophy

“natural”; a placeholder for any “outside” whatever; or a liminal position that

must be occupied by someone, thing, or property. For instance, as we know,
Henri Bergson upheld an ultra-​strong realism toward the past, arguing in
Matter and Memory that the past persists as real, immanent in the present,
and not merely as an outside, transcendent recollection of the past. In the
same text, he describes how “when a memory reappears in consciousness,
it produces on us the effect of a ghost,” of a “mysterious apparition.”2 The
past as specter as memory. Yet this paranormality is brought down to earth
without reduction or elimination through a double maneuver: first, there is
the seeming naturalistic reduction—​the specter seen as merely a memory
(reduction)—​but then there is a second refraction whereby this ghost
memory itself is inflated as a real part of the past. The reduction of the re-
duction. The part (memory) is not an unreal representation of the past, but
an actual fragment of the past surviving in what looks like a hyperbolic state,
as an apparent exception or inconsistency. The past as “merely” my memory,
becomes my memory as the past (in part). Hence, this partiality is a differ-
ence of degree only, not a substantial one of kind.
Or take time travel again. Leaving aside any technological means that
might make physical time travel theoretically possible and even mundane,
the experience of being in a period of time outside of the standard, Newtonian
“flow” of our natural lifetime—​its “phenomenology,” so to speak—​can be
reduced to a delusion or hallucination of some sort, perhaps with some un-
derpinning pathology or at least anomaly of the brain.3 Yet this reduction can
itself be reduced so that we now see the brain hallucination itself as a kind of
real time travel. Consciousness (experience) as mere brain event becomes
the conscious brain part moving in a new time—​a kind of panpsychic time
travel. Deflation followed by reinflation. I have previously called this strategy
a “refractive reduction,” or “full anthropomorphism” (modeled on Henri
Bergson’s theory of “complete relativity” in Duration and Simultaneity). Such
doubled reduction is also what I’m calling “supernormalization” here: a kind
of low-​key mundanizing of the supernatural; or an extraction of the super-
natural by natural means.4
My usage of “supernormal” has a lot in common with that of the late
nineteenth-​century writer, Frederic W. H. Myers, who rejected the word
“supernatural” altogether as meaningless. He coined this term “super-
normal” instead, to apply to phenomena that are merely beyond what usually
happens, basing it on an analogy with the term “abnormal.” One study of
Myers has described his life work as an attempt to develop a series that linked
 Ordinary Mysticism, Hyperbolic, Supernormal  31

the “unknown to the already known,” and so went from “normal to abnormal
to supernormal psychological phenomena.”5 As he himself wrote in 1885,
“when we speak of an abnormal phenomenon we do not mean one which
contravenes natural laws, but one which exhibits them in an unusual or inex-
plicable form.” The supernormal is the abnormal normal, so to speak—​and
both exist on a “continuum” or “spectrum.”
In this way, we can think of supernormalization as pure imma-
nentism: there is an immanent continuity such that the supernormal is al-
ways already the so-​called normal: time travel is always already recollection
(and not merely as “mental” time travel); the ghost is always already a pure
memory. In other words, it was Kansas all along, Dorothy. Where we differ
with Myers is as follows: he would think of telepathy or clairvoyance, say, as
liminal versions of mental representation, that is, as mental states lying along
the same spectrum as our normal psychical life, only far from where we ordi-
narily operate. We, however, simply take the corollary to heart: there is some-
thing always already “telepathic,” say, in our ordinary, normal ability to “read
minds” (such that, to those who supposedly suffer “mind-​blindness,” having
a neurotypical “theory of mind” is a mystery).6 Similarly, self-​representation
could be seen as a kind of out-​of-​body, or astral, experience, with so-​called
astral projection simply being the hyperbolic form of representation (“hyper-
bole” originally meaning “a throwing beyond”—​from the Greek, hyperballein,
“to throw above or beyond”). These states all exist on a continuum, as Myers
puts it, but for us it is a heterogeneous continuity. Whereas Myers focuses on
the unseen part of the “spectrum” in order to anchor its liminal status in the
normal (going from mundane to extra-​mundane), we, instead, enfold the
extra-​mundane into the ordinary without qualitatively altering the latter—​
everyday mental events are always already varied enough or sufficiently het-
erogeneous (if we could pay closer attention to them): Kansas metaphysics.7
This is why we will ask whether Mina Bergson’s mystical practice, as found
in performances such as the rites of Isis, scrying, or astral travel, might not be
rendered both “ordinary” and epistemological through a supernormalization
without reduction. Such an “ordinary mysticism” would change the way we
see the extraordinary by enfolding it within the ordinary while also showing
how esoteric knowledge might be equal (continuous) with supposedly more
“accessible” forms of knowledge. Indeed, in her own occult practices, as we
will see, we can sidestep both Mina Bergson’s religionist commitments (and
their assumed hierarchies) as well as any merely decorative and aesthetic in-
terpretation of her work, so as to then see her use of costume, props, posture,
32  Vestiges of a Philosophy

dance, and other “movement arts” all playing a role as equalized forms of
knowledge (what she herself will call an “occult science”).8 In other words,
her methods of mysticism will be used, without religious or supernatural
commitments, as a model of knowing.9
Some might suspect that any method of teaching and learning that eman-
ates from a hermetic society cannot avoid some form of authority, some
crypto-​philosophical hierarchization of knowledge. Secret rituals, initiation
rites, privileged access, and scaled grades of membership, do not bode well
as regards any presupposition of an equality of knowledge (as we are enter-
taining here). And turning to the aesthetic dimensions of mystical ritual
would not necessarily provide a “get out of jail” card with respect to author-
itarian epistemology either. As Bruce Lincoln has shown, authority can op-
erate through both language and, more subtly, a whole “theatrical array of
gestures, demeanors, costumes, props, and stage devices.”10 So perhaps the
suggestion that a hierarchy of knowledge is still at work here remains perti-
nent. This all remains to be seen. We will endeavor, nevertheless, to subtract
the “religionist” element of even this aspect of the Golden Dawn, their arcane
infrastructures and obfuscating bureaucracy notwithstanding, to leave only
the raw material of their spiritualist approach in view, seeing their “emic”
worldview, as it were, via an “etic” stance. And, ultimately, we will thereby try
to show how mystical experience can be immanent within ordinary experi-
ence just as mystical thought is immanent within philosophy.
 2
Meet the Bergsons

Henri and Mina were the son and daughter of Michal Bergson (1820–​1898)
and Katherine Levinson (1838–​1928). They were born six years apart, in
1859 and 1865, respectively, and were the couple’s second and fourth born, in
a family with seven offspring. Their five other children were Juliette, Joseph,
Philip, John, and Renée. Their father, a pianist of some repute, was born in
Warsaw; their mother, in Doncaster, England. She was of Anglo-​Irish ex-
traction, though both she and Michal were also Jewish. The family was per-
ipatetic, following Michal’s musical career across Europe—​Henri was born
while they were based in Paris; Mina, while they were in Geneva. In 1869,
four years after Mina’s birth, the family left Paris for London, where they
stayed thereafter. However, they left Henri behind in Paris (then aged about
ten) to complete his education in the French system, visiting home in Britain
only in the summer holidays. Indeed, while his family became British, Henri
eventually adopted French nationality in 1878. Curiously enough, then, there
is not a drop of French blood in Henri Bergson, supposedly the quintessen-
tially French philosopher of his time, nor in any of his siblings, including
Mina. As Henri Bergson’s biographers conclude, the current Bergson family
is British.1 After their father Michal’s death in 1898, their mother Katherine
retired to Folkestone with her daughter, Renée. She died thirty years later in
1928. Within that period from the 1890s to the 1920s, as we well know, two of
their children brought more than a little celebrity to the family name.
Henri’s story is familiar to many: graduation from the École Normale
Supérieure in 1881; a professor of philosophy at lycees in Angers, Clermont-​
Ferrand, and finally Paris all through the 1880s; the publication in 1889 of
his doctoral thesis, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (trans-
lated into English as Time and Free Will), followed seven years later by Matter
and Memory in 1896. He held a chair at the Collège de France from 1900
onward and, in 1907, published his most famous work, Creative Evolution,
which has defined Bergsonism ever since as a vitalist philosophy. World

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0004
34  Vestiges of a Philosophy

renown followed—​though one that faded rapidly after the Great War—​with
the Noble Prize for Literature coming in 1927. Following the German occu-
pation of Paris in 1940, Henri refused any special treatment from the new re-
gime as a celebrated Frenchman rather than as a Jew: despite moving close to
the Catholic faith in the late 1930s, at the end he wished to show his solidarity
with the Jewish people. And, as Jewish, he was required to register at his local
police station, which he did, contracting bronchitis while standing in line.
He died on January 3, 1941, aged eighty-​one and was buried at the Cimetière
de Garches just outside Paris—​“the most influential of all twentieth-​century
French philosophers,” as Jean Gayon describes him.2
Mina’s story is far less known. A talented artist from an early age, she
studied at the Slade School of Art in London, where she became friends
with fellow student, Annie Horniman (who would also later join the Golden
Dawn). In 1887, she met the English occultist Samuel Liddell MacGregor

Figure 2  Henri Bergson (SPCOLLECTION /​Alamy Stock Photo)

 Meet the Bergsons  35

Mathers (1854–​1918), one of the founding members of the Golden Dawn,

and, from 1891, its leader. Mina herself joined the Golden Dawn in 1888,
changing her forename to Moina—​apparently to give it a more Celtic air.3
She was its first female member.4 In 1890—​and against her family’s will—​
Mina and Samuel married. In May 1892, the couple moved to Paris and
founded the Ahathoor Temple for the Order. While the 1890s were its most
successful period, with hundreds of members comprising artists, writers,
and even civic leaders and socialites joining the Golden Dawn (culminating
in MacGregor being commissioned to produce a replica Egyptian Temple
of Isis for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris), this success was not
without some aggravation. By the turn of the new century there were also sig-
nificant instances of political infighting, threatened schisms, and accusations
of fraud.5 A further infamous incident followed in 1901, involving a London
trial concerning a separate Order’s sexual violence against its own members,
which brought extremely unwelcome publicity to Samuel and Mina (this
“Horos” group having used instruction materials stolen from the Golden
Dawn). This spelled the end of the core Golden Dawn group. Nonetheless,
Samuel and Mina stayed on in Paris to set up its successor organization in
1903, the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega. They continued their
work, though now with more and more emphasis on the public side, with the
“Isis movement” and its Egyptian mysteries becoming increasingly impor-
tant. But Alpha et Omega never regained the heights of success the Golden
Dawn enjoyed with its illustrious and influential membership. After Samuel’s
death in 1918 (possibly from the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918–​19), Mina
eventually became the sole head of Alpha et Omega until her own death
ten years later. By 1919, she had moved back to England to run their temple
in London. She lived there until her death in 1928, at Saint Mary Abbot’s
Hospital, at the age of sixty-​three. It is alleged that she died from voluntary
starvation.6 Mina’s body was cremated. An unhappy ending? Perhaps. Yet we
will insist that this is not only a tragic tale. On the merits of her own thoughts
and practices, as well as in the reciprocal trajectories formed with her sibling
Henri, we shall see covariances and continuities that manifest many signs of
a fulfilling life.
There is no documentation of Henri’s views of his sister’s work (or vice
versa), and indeed it is alleged that she was mostly estranged from her family
(though others caution that this has been overstated).7 However, we do know
that Bergson visited the Mathers—​when both lived in Paris from 1892 to
1918—​and that at one point Mina lived within 800 meters of her brother’s
36  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Figure 3  Mina Bergson (also known as Moina Mathers, or Vestigia Nulla

Retrorsum) (The History Collection /​Alamy Stock Photo)

house, less than a ten-​minute walk. They surely saw each other frequently
enough, Mary Greer going so far as to speculate that they most likely met
to discuss “their mutual interest in aspects of the spirit and in psychology.”8
As to the lack of any record of these encounters, we can easily imagine many
reasons why Henri, for one, would have wanted to keep such associations
private, if not completely secret, for the good of his budding philosophical
and academic reputation. Perhaps Mina did, too, for both personal and ideo-
logical reasons. Yet, even if by some miracle they had never met alone and in
person in this period, in what follows we shall show how they met, and con-
tinued to meet, in spirit.

* * *
 Meet the Bergsons  37

Dennis Denisoff describes the public ceremonies of the Golden Dawn

as “feminist ritual performance,” and it is worth pausing to consider this
point on a number of levels. First, it must be remembered that the Golden
Dawn’s primary concern was with knowledge as a means to emancipa-
tion and self-​elevation. (It is telling that “Know Thyself ” is the title of
one of Mina Bergson’s most important texts.) They were not interested in
the use of magic for entertaining the curious or consoling the bereaved
or gullible: there were no table turning (“tables tournantes”), rappings,
levitations, flying objects, or ectoplasmic materializations to see here.
Nicolas Tereshchenko enumerates the central practices of the Golden
Dawn as follows:

1. The study of Qabalah, Alchemy, Astrology, the Tarot and the system of
Magic called “Enochian”;
2. Exercises in visualization, meditation, concentration, and other
procedures such as divination;
3. The practice of rituals, either as a group in a properly furnished and
consecrated Temple, or alone, in the privacy of one’s own Temple or
Oratory (which could be almost wholly imaginary, i.e. visualized, with
the irreducible minimum of magical paraphernalia, such as a wand and
a sword).9

The Golden Dawn, then, was an institute of sorts, involved in knowledge

and learning, although its curriculum was esoteric in content. Even so, it
had levels of achievement and awards (grades), and these were all open to all
sexes. As Marco Pasi points out:

The exceptional status that women enjoyed in these occult organizations

had several implications, which worked at different levels. On the one hand,
groups such as the Theosophical Society or the Golden Dawn offered a
space where not only men and women worked together, under conditions
of equality, for a common goal, but also where women could experiment
with positions of authority and power that were denied to them in society at
large. On the other hand, an occult group such as the Golden Dawn could
also function as a sort of educational institution. In fact, one should not
forget that, at the time, women’s access to universities was still very limited,
if it was possible at all.10
38  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Of course, this para-​academic training, with its own entry requirements and
graduating degrees, operated with a secret knowledge, a kind of gnosticism
rather than publicly accessible research databases and outputs. This secrecy
can doubtlessly be interpreted in terms of power, then, and through that, in-
equality. With access to higher, privileged grades of knowledge (gnosis) only
coming through bizarre forms of ritual initiation (the rules of which were
kept confidential) and a strict hierarchy of command maintained within the
Order, from Zelator through to the various grades of Adept, it is easy to inter-
pret its clandestine processes as a cover for various forms of obfuscation and
control. Such tactics are familiar to anyone acquainted with modern-​day cult
movements, or at least their representation in mainstream media.11
However, even if one were to ignore the clear disanalogies between occult
groups like the Golden Dawn and present-​day prejudices about modern cult
movements and their leaders, we are left with two other ponderable issues.12
First, that knowledge, and access to knowledge, has always been connected to
power (who would be so naïve to think otherwise?), and, though one might
grant this fact while still maintaining that the difference of degree involved
made these Hermetic societies that much more pernicious, it was nonethe-
less the Golden Dawn that actually practiced real equality in its admissions
policy and paths to “promotion.” Furthermore, a second thought concerns
the question of secrecy directly. It is perfectly consistent that a group dedi-
cated to self-​improvement through education of the self, self-​illumination in
other words (“know thyself ”), should employ methods involving first-​person
experience, privileged access to subjective states (and therewith states of the
subject), and a knowledge that was less ineffable or incommunicable than
bodily and performative (it had to be physically practiced to be achieved).
That a prioritization of interiority, the private, and the personal informed its
mission and structure should come as little surprise. Indeed, Pasi connects
the primacy of embodiment in the rituals of the Golden Dawn positively to
the question of power and equality:

It could be argued that in occult groups such as the Golden Dawn, an at-
tention for the body was already intrinsic to the kind of ritual work that
was being practiced. Unlike mainstream freemasonry, in this case both
men and women participated in the rituals. It is certainly no coincidence
that several members of the Order were theater actors by profession,
including one of the most prominent women among its membership,
Florence Farr.13
 Meet the Bergsons  39

Returning to the question of feminism, Mary Greer’s study, Women

of the Golden Dawn, points out that, as a group supporting radical social
movements, the women members of the Golden Dawn—​Mina Bergson and
Florence Farr, as well as others like Annie Horniman, Maud Gonne, and
Pamela Colman Smith—​represented examples of the kind of “New Woman”
appearing at the end of the nineteenth century. As she writes, in the late 1880s

the public concept of a “New Woman” began to emerge. She could hold a
job or have a vocation. She loved whom and where she chose. Although
she continued to hold chastity as an ideal, she now considered the standard
equally applicable to men.14

For the status quo, this was often regarded as a dangerous development:

. . . for female members of a magical society known as the Hermetic Order

of the Golden Dawn, who not only donned Egyptian robes and read books
of magic but also divined the future with the cards of the Tarot, no other
proof of their iniquity was required. In plays and novels, even those written
sympathetically, the New Woman succumbs to hysteria or madness; she
becomes physically ill or dies—​often by her own hand; she always faces an
unhappy end. Society is based upon order, which has no place for an inde-
pendent, self-​sufficient woman. In reality, these women existed, and they,
in fact, changed society. As outcasts they were unacknowledged, but that
very inability of society to see who they were and what they accomplished
gave them a particular power that today we find incomprehensible.15

The Golden Dawn’s heyday was in the 1890s. The first decade of the new
century would belong more to Mina’s brother, of course, especially fol-
lowing the publication of Creative Evolution in 1907. Yet Mina Bergson
still had an imposing presence, and not only on account of her celebrated
performances. The ideas embedded in these performances are not just “ar-
tistic in the extreme” (as we heard) but extremely thought-​provoking as well.
Notwithstanding ideas of, at best, “proximal authority” or, at worst, a sup-
posed female “mind passivity” within occult Victorian circles, her spiritualist
ideas and practices developed within the Golden Dawn remain fascinating
on their own merits and worthy of comparison with other philosophies of
the time.16 That is not our only motive for examining them here, however.
Though any influence she might have had on Henri’s work (or he on hers)
40  Vestiges of a Philosophy

remains completely undocumented, she, like him, believed that a concord-

ance was beginning to emerge between natural science and (mystic) spiritu-
alism at the turn of the twentieth century. As she wrote in 1926:

material science would appear to be spiritualizing itself and occult science

to be materializing itself. . . . The Ancient Wisdom, the Sacred Books, taught
that we cannot understand Matter without understanding Spirit, that we
cannot understand Spirit without understanding Matter. That Matter and
Spirit are only opposite poles of the same universal substance.17

Here, she has articulated almost verbatim a key tenet of the “new spiritu-
alism” that had come to the fore in French philosophical circles near the start
of the belle époque. Meanwhile, we know that Henri Bergson was always in-
terested in philosophical spiritualism, psychical research (though somewhat
furtively for the most part) and, latterly, religious mysticism.18 Yet the sources
for some of his own esoteric ideas remain largely uncharted, especially those
appearing in the first and third chapters of Matter and Memory. Given that
a nonstandard philosophy can be found in Mina Bergson’s writings and
mystical practices, this should give us pause. In her theorization of these
performances, we go beyond aesthetics to find her use of costume, color,
voice, movement, and forms of dance all playing a role as kinds of occult
science, equal to any science of matter. Moreover, we will unearth ideas con-
cerning time, process, and an “astral plane” that bear more than just a passing
resemblance to one of Henri Bergson’s most challenging concepts—​that of
the Virtual—​which is his own, processual version of a “universal substance”
that generates matter and spirit.
This brings me to another point of convergence, that around the Golden
Dawn’s feminist principles, Mina Bergson’s “feminist ritual performance,”
and their analogue in what might be called “Bergsonian feminism.” In the
chapter of her book The Philosophical Imaginary entitled “Long Hair, Short
Ideas,” Michele Le Doeuff comments on a facet of the cult of (Henri) Bergson
in the 1900s that struck many—​its large female membership:

We still smile at the court of women who flocked round Bergson, but we
systematically forget to wonder whether this court was not in fact satisfying
(or inspired by) Bergson’s own desire. The fact that this court was composed
of women who were following the Collège de France lectures in an amateur
 Meet the Bergsons  41

capacity (without expecting qualifications, cashable university diplomas,

from them) seems to me significant.19

The symmetry of women gaining entry to the academy, either through the
public system of the Collège de France or the para-​academy of the Golden
Dawn (or, in some cases perhaps, both), reveals a parallel inventiveness
needed by women in pursuit of knowledge at that time. Yet it also exposes
a larger social issue. As Emily Herring asks in an essay on Henri Bergson’s
celebrity, “why, when Bergson was popular, was he so popular, and espe-
cially with women?”20 Despite being given “derogatory nicknames such
as caillettes” (a small bird signifying a “frivolous babbling woman”), or
“snobinettes,” as well as a simple prejudice that his female audience were “ig-
norant socialites more interested in being seen at a fashionable event than in
learning about philosophy,” Herring argues that there may have been some-
thing significant happening in this adulation.21 On the one hand, it might
have been that Henri Bergsonʼs philosophy, being seen as “grounded in an
unreliable and obscure mysticism that was “feminine” in nature,” attracted
many followers despite, or even on account of, this putative aspect.22 This as-
cription was undoubtedly offered at the time as a slur, of course, hitting two
targets at once (mysticism and presumptuous women). On the other hand,
however, there may have been an intrinsic value to this association between
Henri Bergson’s philosophy and feminism—​as Herring explains:

In 1913, the American author and feminist Marian Cox (born Mabel
Marian Metcalfe) published the article “Bergsonʼs Message to Feminism.”
She argued that humanityʼs quest for a better understanding of the
Universe, both scientific and theological, had so far been entirely based
on male, materialistically driven methods. Instinct and intuition, on the
other hand, were in tune with the creativity of life and with the female
mind. By placing instinct and intuition at the centre of his philosophical
method, Bergsonʼs outlook was therefore “an exposition and a plea for
this female-​method in the future quest of knowledge.” Ultimately, said
Cox, Bergsonʼs philosophy would aid the liberation of women. Therefore,
at a time when the idea that Bergsonism was inherently feminine was
being used to diminish his authority as a philosopher, Cox argued that it
was because Bergsonʼs philosophy was feminine in nature that it should
be taken seriously.
42  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Certainly, this connection between Henri Bergson and the feminine can be
unpacked further in a number of ways. On the question of mysticism, Marie
Cariou was writing about Henri Bergson and mysticism in the 1970s in this
very context: in the section titled “La Féminité” of her book Bergson and le
fait mystique, she states how “the woman’s gaze, we are told, is the prototype
of the mystical gaze” (“Le regard de la femme, nous dit-​on, est la prototype
du regard mystique”).23 Though, of course, we must be alert to the presump-
tion of a particular feminine essence supposedly found in mysticism (as if
mysticism, alongside the feminine, were both givens that did not need to be
historically reclaimed from patriarchal meanings and structures—​as, for in-
stance, Grace Jantzen attempted in her work),24 Cariou’s intervention reveals
another curiosity in the history of Henri Bergson’s philosophical legacy: its
postwar domination by Francophone women. This will be hard to hear for
some within the Anglophone reception of Bergson who, for various reasons
(I’ll say it—​mostly ignorance), place the survival of Bergson’s philosophy
entirely at the feet of Gilles Deleuze and his 1966 book, Le Bergsonisme.25
Yet the fact remains that the major commentators on Henri Bergson all
through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in France were mostly women: it was
the works of Rose-​Marie Mossé-​Bastide, Madeleine Barthelemy-​Madaule,
Angèle Kremer-​Marietti, Jeanne Delhomme, and Marie Cariou that kept the
Bergson flame burning within the French academy for nearly forty years.26
In the face of a Deleuzian consensus that has served as a gatekeeper to inter-
pretations of Henri Bergson for many years now, their names and, in some
cases, superior readings have all but been erased from the philosophical re-
cord, even in France. Small gesture though it is, we acknowledge their in-
valuable work here, for that record. In addition, the connections formed in
this book between contemporary female philosophers of matter and Mina
Bergson’s spiritual practices and theories will also, we hope, be regarded as
part of a historical revisioning of Bergsonism that works in a similarly un-
fashionable “fashion.”
 10° =​1° Ipsissimus Covariant (Neophyte)

There are many, many types of memory discussed in modern psychology—​

personal, semantic, perceptual, motor skill, cognitive skill, linguistic, epi-
sodic, procedural, explicit, implicit, intentional, incidental, and more—​but
collectively they underscore one thing: the mystery of remembering, the
puzzle of how a living, present existence or state (such as a brain engram, for
instance) can invoke an absence, the inexistent, the deceased past.1 Why else
would Henri Bergson have described, as we heard earlier, the reappearance
of a memory as ghostly, as a “mysterious apparition”?2 Historically, such a
mysterious power was held in veneration. As Patrick McNamara reminds us,
Mnemosyne, “the goddess of memory,” was Zeus’s wife and the mother of the
Muses, those “goddesses of all of the arts and sciences.” Though a minor deity,
her status nonetheless reflected “the awe with which Memory was held in the
ancient world.”3 In Rewriting the Soul, Ian Hacking describes how “no art
was more carefully studied, or esteemed, from Plato until the Enlightenment,
than the art of memory. Or perhaps we had better say the art of memorizing.
This art was a collection of techniques or technologies of memory, variously
called De arte memorativa, memoria technica, mnemonics.”4 Such mne-
monics operated as a technique of storage and retrieval; that is, it relied on
a model of memory as something stored at a locality, or, in terms that Plato
and Aristotle would have understood, “placing.” It only follows from this that
a whole set of “architectural mnemonics” should arise, building on the idea
of memory as storehouse, with ever more creative three-​dimensional spaces,
well-​furnished houses, or even entire cities. Eventually, as we know today, the
brain itself became the ultimate organ of storage—​only now not as a mne-
monic but a real place.
Yet for Henri Bergson the mystery and wonder of memory reside in some-
thing quite different from storage and recall, be they perfect or imperfect: it
is less how we remember that needs to be explained and more why we forget
that should meet with our astonishment. Moreover, as Trevor Perri notes,

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0005
44  Vestiges of a Philosophy

to suggest that there is a large but still limited number of forms of memory
is to think of memory incorrectly in terms of “individual recollections” that
are “fixed, static, and something ready-​made (tout fait).”5 Instead, for Henri
Bergson “memory is a single dynamic process in and through which the past
that is preserved in itself can be manifested in an infinite number of different
ways.”6 As Henri Bergson writes in his 1904 course on the history of theories
of memory, memory “is not a thing; it is progress; it is a movement.”7 The
puzzle for him, therefore, was why this movement gets interrupted—​why do
we forget? Given the survival of the past through continuous movement, as
in a speech act that might last a lifetime, the question becomes, why do we
suffer any amnesia at all, why are we not all “hypermnesic”? The answer for
Henri Bergson will also turn to the brain, but not as a mysterious organ of
storage but one of selection, of exclusion. Turned toward life, the living must
focus their attention on the practicalities of survival, on the future, leaving
their past “elsewhere,” so to speak, on the periphery of vision.8 This is why
the “mysterious apparition,” the “ghost” of memory, only appears as such to
those who do not experience the relevant continuity (as, of course, most of
us are physiologically and cerebrally conditioned to do). Only some individ-
uals have such a “weakness” in their futural, “forward” vision that it allows
them to look backward as much as forward, to reverse the usual orientation
of human experience. In this respect, it is significant that what struck Jean-​
Paul Sartre about Henri Bergson’s theory of memory images was its supposed
magical quality: they possessed “tendencies and powers as magical as the
powers of attraction that Hume conferred on images.” Yet, as we will explain
later (in the “Theoricus Covariant”), this “magical” quality exists in the eye
of each beholder, in a selective in/​attention. Hence, what Sartre sees as the
magical “force” belonging to memory that allows memory to “insert itself ”
mysteriously within present perception can also be seen, on another level,
as a kind of continuity or covariance that has not been heeded.9 The magic
is natural, perhaps even material, but operating at a level such that some can
only see it hyperbolically as preternatural (and even call “spiritual”).
Let us stay with the issue of storage, though, and leave selection aside
for now. Henri Bergson’s key criticism of the theories of memory current
in his era was that they thought that memory was a set of images stored
in the brain. Today, we talk instead of “engrams” (from the Ancient Greek
γράμμα, grámma, a “written character, letter, that which is drawn”), which
are traces or pathways left from repeated cerebral activity—​furrows for long-​
term memories. The brain as internal notepad. One of the earliest examples
 10° = 1° Ipsissimus Covariant (Neophyte)  45

of memory localization is found in Plato’s Theaetetus, which likens memory

formation to impressions left in wax: “now I want you to suppose, for the
sake of the argument, that we have in our souls a block of wax, larger in one
person, smaller in another [ . . . ] We make impressions upon this of eve-
rything we wish to remember among the things we have seen or heard or
thought of ourselves.”10 Even in these early days of thinking about memory,
however, it was not long before the wax metaphor ran into trouble. Aristotle
pointed out that this model is too fully present, whereas memory is an ab-
sence, being of what no longer exists, the past. Impressions or traces left in
wax are, by contrast, too entirely present. As Paul Ricoeur wrote in his own
work on memory and forgetting: “in the trace, there is no otherness, no ab-
sence. Everything is positivity and presence.”11 Leon ter Schure updates this
wax metaphor in a helpful manner:

The wax-​metaphor has its modern equivalent in the “representationalist”

(also called “instructionist”) view that memory can be reduced to neu-
rological traces in the brain. According to the representationalist view,
the mind “stores” impressions from the environment, and uses these for
its cognitive operations. Memory is thus a neurophysiological process that
functions like a camera.12

The latest theories of memory localization now refer to specific regions of

the brain (“hippocampi forming spatial maps”) that function as sophisti-
cated storage and retrieval mechanisms.13 For some, that these regions are
still fully present, existing in a “now” with no direct link with the past, does
not pose a real problem (as Aristotle thought). Julian Barbour writes

Everyone accepts that our memory (certainly our long-​term memory) is

somehow coded in the trillion or so connections between the several bil-
lion or so neurons in our brains. But this is a structure in one Now. It is a
structure that contains mutually consistent records of what we call our past.
Or brain is . . . [a]‌time capsule. It is a Now with such a special structure that,
by itself, it suggests it is the outcome of a process that has taken place in
time in accordance with definite laws.14

This “special structure” now carries the burden of the enigma of memory.
Yet the problems for storage theories are only beginning. What traces
also cannot do is convey how memory feels, or as ter Schure puts it, the
46  Vestiges of a Philosophy

“historicity of a memory, its historical feel that causes it to stand out dis-
tinct from the present.”15 Moreover, not only are impressions and traces
unfaithful to the phenomenology of memory (which, in any case, could
be discredited by self-​styled eliminativists who regard qualia or “feels”
like these as just so much deluded folk psychology), storage theories
equally call into question the veridicality of memory. As Aristotle also
asked: why should the perception of a trace be taken as a memory of some-
thing else rather than what it is—​a perception? However, as ter Schure
himself concludes, to escape this conundrum, we need to turn to Henri
Bergson: his “radical answer” is found in his ultra-​realism, the fact that
“we know a memory from a perception because memory remains attached
to the past by its deepest roots.”16
Whereas for some philosophers, “realism” toward the past simply entails
the belief that the past did once exist (that it was indeed once present), Henri
Bergson’s ultra-​realism is the view that the past still exists. Opposed to both
these positions is that of the “anti-​realist,” who would say that the past need
not have existed, even as a previous present. It is perfectly logical to think
of the past as an unreal fiction that is constantly constructed retrospectively
within the present (which continually regenerates itself). This version of
“now” really is special, and multiple. Bertrand Russell is probably the most
renowned representative of such an extreme presentism toward the past, at
least from the logical point of view:

In investigating memory-​beliefs, there are certain points that must be

borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-​belief
is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer.
It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-​belief that the
event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have
existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the
world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a pop-
ulation that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically nec-
essary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that
is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis
that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are
called knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are
wholly analysable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just
what they are even if no past had existed.17
 10° = 1° Ipsissimus Covariant (Neophyte)  47

In the face of such powerful logic, all is not lost for pastists, however. The
Bergsonian response to the idea of an ever-​renewed now turns on its already
narrow, and question-​begging, conception of the present. Henri Bergson’s
ultra-​realism toward the past is based on his temporal holism: it is the con-
tinuity or indivisibility of the past in the present that makes memory “real.”
Indivisibility means that the present is always already partly “in” (what we
call) “the past.”18 Hence, what Henri Bergson eventually calls “pure memory”
is not a mental duplicate referring to the historical past (which can never
genuinely prove its credentials as past), but rather the past itself as it persists
in the present. Pure memory should not be confused with recollection, which
always mixes memory images with present perceptions, which thereby also
form corruptions and other inaccuracies in our faculty of recall. Whereas a
recollection actualizes the past in an image, pure memory is this past. Indeed,
any form of recollected memory, as habit, disposition, a picture, or whatever
else, is simply one or other distortion of this purity of memory, which is, in
truth, merely the reality of the past itself. The only way to prove the past is to
show that it never left; or as Matter and Memory says, “the truth is that we
shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselves within it.”19
Admittedly, this stance is no less question-​begging than that of an eternal
Now, given that it assumes a uniform immanence of the past within the pre-
sent, or rather, a shared extension of a present that continues into a so-​called
past. And yet we might recall the points made earlier about qualia, as well as
the immanent experience of durée, “within the phenomenon”: the fact is that
different experiences of time qua durée are possible. This is not a relativism
but an immanentism: different temporal experiences, or levels of attention,
are equally real. It may well be that no one level of the distended present-​
past is shared by all; that Bertrand Russell, for instance, truly experiences
(at times) an extremely narrow breadth of duration, though it may border
on what is deemed “pathological” among humans (the parallels between
philosophers and the insane need no rehearsal here). Naturally, as a Platonist
of sorts, Russell would regard the logic of his argument as sui generis (having
nothing to do with experiences of time), whereas, as empiricists, we would
relate it to worldly matters—​indeed, his logic simply is one kind or level of
temporal experience. In the end, we should heed the advice of Ian Hacking,
who cautions us against thinking that any opposition between a presentist,
physicalist approach to memory (what he calls “memory as anatomy”) and
a more Proustian, phenomenological approach (“memory as narrative”) is
48  Vestiges of a Philosophy

ever absolute: “memory-​as-​narrative is often part of an antiscientific ide-

ology. Yet it should never be forgotten that memoro-​politics emerges pre-
cisely in the scientific context of positive psychology. It is part of the secular
drive to replace the soul with something of which we have knowledge.”20
Concomitantly, when a Bergsonian like Georges Mourélos writes in the
1960s against the physiological approach to memory in favor of a “spiritual
space-​time,” the difference between the imagined positions may not be so
great (a Zelator covariant connects them).21 Indeed, the work of neurosci-
entist Patrick McNamara, who is mostly sympathetic to Henri Bergson’s
views, suggests that the rejection of localization is not straightforwardly anti-​
scientific. The issue revolves around the question of what space is doing in
these models:
Memory images were not separated by spatial distances but by qualita-
tive differences. If Bergson is correct about this claim, the consequences for
memory theory could be immense. If space was not essential to memories,
then the storage metaphor collapses. Similarly, if memories are “contained”
in a nonspatial realm then communication of memory images between two
personal consciousnesses should obey laws different from those of verbal
communication. Finally if memory is nonspatial, then the identity, or iden-
tities that memory supports should not be reducible to one particular or-
ganized “container” like a brain.22

McNamara himself argues against the storage metaphor in favor of a

selectionist model akin to the one forwarded in Matter and Memory. “we
come equipped with a set of neuropsychological systems whose operations
are compatible with the basic descriptive elements in Bergson’s selectionist
memory theory.”23 The brain does not store memories; it selects them: the
correlation of brain events with mental-​recall events (evidenced through
imaging technologies, or cerebral pathology) would undoubtedly sustain
both theses (storage and selection). But only the selectionist thesis avoids the
problem of emergence (how does one mind-​substance emerge from a qual-
itatively different substance?). If the brain does not store memory but rather
selects it, and if it is thereby only a record of something, if it traces something,
it is of types of selection: hetero-​continuous lines of selection.
So, allowing for a moment that correlation could prove causation, we
would still not know which causation was at work, storage or selection. To
support the first thesis, though, one must overlook the miracle of how ce-
rebral matter can be both itself (grey matter) and our thoughts and feelings
 10° = 1° Ipsissimus Covariant (Neophyte)  49

(short of eliminating the latter as illusions): the “hard problem” of mind-​

body interaction. In other words, causation is not identity. Though identity
is less of a problem for the second thesis of selection, to support it one must
make the leap to believing that memory is not stored anywhere at all (even
“in” the past) but that the past survives as memory: “Bergson is at pains to
point out that the selection-​process involves a movement of the past toward
the present rather than the present calling up the past. [ . . . ] The past is the
active agent.”24 How the past can have agency, be an agent, is only one more
puzzle emerging from this shift of paradigms in thinking about memory.
In addition, making matters even more complicated is the fact that memory
itself must be understood in all its diversity, a finessing that works against
the storage model in particular. Alongside episodic, procedural, explicit, im-
plicit, voluntary, and involuntary memory (we know how the list goes on),
McNamara cites “state-​specific memories, sensory memories (as in phantom
limb pain), emotional memories, olfactory memories, body memories, col-
lective and cultural memories, dream related-​memories, prospective mem-
ories, spontaneous memories. . . .”25 Even stranger, memory frequently does
not involve recollection, so that one can be influenced by the past yet still not
experience “remembering.” For instance, one can have a sense of familiarity
in a moment, as in déjà vu, but still not “remember.” Amnesiacs, likewise, can
“refer to the past but cannot recollect the past. We can speak about the past
with no accompanying remembering experience.”26 And so on: memory is
myriad in variety. In fact, Henri Bergson would go even further. His theory of
planes of memory entails, as he puts it himself, “a thousand repetitions of our
psychical life” stretched between sensori-​motor mechanisms and the “pure”
memory that is the past itself in its virtual presence:

between the plane of action—​the plane in which our body has condensed
its past into motor habits—​and the plane of pure memory, where our mind
retains in all its details the picture of our past life [“le tableau de notre vie
écoulée”], we believe that we can discover thousands of different planes of
consciousness, a thousand integral and yet diverse repetitions of the whole
of the experience through which we have lived.27

Not one, two, or ten types, but thousands: thousands of levels or planes of
memory. Memories from planes closer to the pole of action straddle all the
different ways that a past can be enacted or embodied rather than simply
“represented.” As Stephen Kern puts it, “for Bergson every movement leaves
50  Vestiges of a Philosophy

traces that continue to affect all subsequent physical or mental processes. The
past collects in the fibers of the body as it does in the mind and determines
the way we walk and dance as well as the way we think.”28 Pure memories
are not individuated pictures (Bergson’s reference to “le tableau de notre vie
écoulée” notwithstanding): they are more like embryos that “contain” the past
as a “biological process” in waiting.29 And even recollections that represent
(or “think”) that past do not picture it either: “to picture is not to remember,”
according to Bergson.30 Recollection is not a static imaging, for every trace,
be it localized or widely distributed, is a movement, the dynamic record of
previous selections.31
Accordingly, this is not a quantitative multiplicity where memories differ
only in an arithmetical scale of “rhythm,” “complication,” or “contraction,”
say, or of being more of less visually clear, or whatever else. It is a continuity
of qualified variations that, of course, includes ideas of rhythm and contrac-
tion, but that are also as different from each other as a picture, a pain, a dance,
a taste, a hallucination, or the passage of grief can be from each other. Henri
Bergson is adamant that each plane is completely different in nature from the
next: to put all memories on one plane would be to differentiate them only by
“degree of complication” or “composition.” The cone is a “solid” volume, as
Bergson puts it in his lecture course on memory from 1904, and not simply
a flat “surface.”32 And yet these qualitative differences are still in continuity
because each plane is also the manifestation (in different modes) of the same
entire past. Each plane is a different way in which the same surviving past—​
”tout de la mémoire”—​reappears.33

A B

A' B'

A'' B''

Figure 4  Bergson’s Cone of Memory (first variation) (Reproduced from

Bergson, Matter and Memory, 1911)
 10° = 1° Ipsissimus Covariant (Neophyte)  51

Henri Bergson’s diagram of the Inverted Cone (see Figure 4) is crucially

important as an illustration of this theory of memory. The apex of the cone
S represents the point of insertion of memory as recollection into our ac-
tual perception of the world P. Above it are the thousands of virtual planes
of memory AB, A’B’, A”B”, and so on (turtles all the way up, so to speak),
awaiting the moment when they, too, might return to perception, like a
reawakened ghost. In actuality, they are best seen as nonlinear continuities
that may, or may not, find a covariant at another level. We will come back to
this figure in the sixth part of this work on the “survival of images.”
Returning to the image of the trace in these theories of localization and
storage, Sarah Robins’s essay on memory traces notes how pervasive this idea
has been over a long time, featuring in nearly every account of memory since
Ancient Greece, though often employing very different metaphors: “they ap-
pear as birds in Plato’s aviaries and images in Locke’s storeroom of ideas, as
well as grooves in phonographic records, pictures in a gallery, and textual
and digital archives in the vast library of the mind.” They can also be “static or
dynamic, analogues or patterns, symbolic or connectionist, representations or
dispositions, localized or distributed.”34 More to the point, the ever-​increasing
evidence for “neural mechanisms of remembering” in contemporary science
has led to an assumption that memory traces must exist to underpin how
these mechanisms function:

Memory scientists continue to assume that the functional description

of memory traces . . . will serve as a guide to the cognitive and neural
mechanisms that constitute the trace, or engram. [ . . . ] Memory scientists
often take the discovery of the neural mechanisms involved in remem-
bering as vindication of the assumed trace requirement. As more evidence
regarding the neural mechanisms of remembering is accumulated, the
question of whether there are memory traces recedes further into the dis-
tance. Within memory science, little attention is given to the justification of
this commitment to memory traces. The question is not whether there are
memory traces, but rather how they work.35

And yet, recalling Ian Hacking’s warning not to see too great a divide between
the anatomical and narrative approaches to memory, it is also noteworthy
how “trace” can play a role in much more personal accounts of the past. In
Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, Annette Kuhn writes that
“the past is gone forever. We cannot return to it, nor can we reclaim it now as
52  Vestiges of a Philosophy

it was. But that does not mean it is lost to us.” In fact, for Kuhn the survival of
the past comes only through its markers, its traces:

The past is like the scene of a crime: if the deed itself is irrecoverable, its
traces may still remain. From these traces, markers that point towards a
past presence, to something that has happened in this place, a (re)construc-
tion, if not a simulacrum, of the event can be pieced together. Memory work
has a great deal in common with forms of inquiry which—​like detective
work and archaeology, say—​involve working backwards—​searching for
clues, deciphering signs and traces, making deductions, patching together
reconstructions out of fragments of evidence.36

Significantly, because neither shares Henri Bergson’s ultra-​realism toward

the past (that it survives), both Kuhn’s biographical account and the neu-
roscientific version rely on traces being left behind by the past, either as
markers on a “exterior” scene or as engrams within the interior body. For
both, something no longer existing (the past) caused those traces. As Stephen
Robbins describes it, if the past event and the present recollection “are
separated by a temporal gap” (the past does not survive à la Henri Bergson),
then only a cause can connect them because, quite simply, “action at a dis-
tance is impossible.”37 Whatever their make-​up, personal, impersonal, ob-
jective, subjective—​traces are intertwined with a “causal theory of memory”
to justify themselves as traces. Robbins continues thus: “the only way for the
past event to be the cause of the remembering is for there to be a memory
trace—​or series of memory traces—​that form an uninterrupted causal chain
between the two events. Causation must be gapless; hence memory causation
requires memory traces.”

* * *
The radical anti-​realist—​like Russell—​places much more store on imag-
ination as the creative agent in the process of remembering, present per-
ception continually imaging a fictional wake trailing behind it. Even for
less outlandish accounts, though, scientific evidence seems to support the
view that “memory and imagination are profoundly intertwined.”38 As
Kourken Michaelian, asks: “. . . the question for the theory of remembering
becomes: What distinguishes episodic remembering from episodic imag-
ining?”39 Children, for example, are highly prone to embellishing their mem-
ories of an event with more detail and better organization than was ever
 10° = 1° Ipsissimus Covariant (Neophyte)  53

contained within the original experience. As McNamara puts it, “the child’s
memory is creative. Each act of remembering is, for better or worse, a cre-
ative achievement.”40 Not only children participate in this fancy, however,
and there is a huge literature dealing with “memory distortion” and “crea-
tive remembering” for all ages, young and old, and all states of mind, healthy
and unhealthy. Medical cases of memory loss provide many examples of
false memory, certain kinds of patient often filling in the gaps with fantastic
or impossible accounts (of prior lives, how they arrived into hospital, what
their current condition is, what the world beyond the hospital is like, and so
on). These accounts are known as “confabulations.” Yet these patients are not
intentionally lying. McNamara describes the real tragedy of their situation
thus: they believe they are reporting “true memories and one gets the feeling
when witnessing an episode of confabulation that one is present at the birth
of new memories.”41
It is notable that such creative remembering poses a challenge for
causal accounts of memory involving storage and localization (traces,
markers, engrams, etc.) in as much as a major virtue of the causal ac-
count is that the true memory is supposed to be real precisely because it
was caused by real events. If memories are now seen as fundamentally
“intertwined” with imagination, even in nonpathological cases, what price
now their basis in real causation by real events? “Simulationist” accounts,
such as Kourken Michaelian’s, renege on the need for a causal trace but
also risk disconnection with any “representational content” (real events)
as a result.42
Furthermore, what would follow were we to raise the stakes, and scale,
of such (con)fabulations even higher, by returning to both the spiritualist
and ultra-​realist approach to memory and the past? Indeed, from the her-
metic perspective, the opposition between memory and imagination is a
false one. For practitioners within the Golden Dawn, for instance, imagi-
nation is not a faculty of the unreal, of the nonexistent—​it has its own re-
ality. As Tanya Luhrmann writes, the doctrine of the Golden Dawn explicitly
stated that “imagination was a reality and that it could affect the material
world. The different ‘plane’ that these magical writers present is not de-
fined by different rules—​that conception emerges somewhat later—​but is
rather composed of different materials, one apparently unsubstantial, the
other substantive, but both ultimately interdependent.”43 Indeed, one of the
Golden Dawn’s teaching texts, or “Flying Rolls” (No. V, “Some Thoughts on
the Imagination”), resolutely states:
54  Vestiges of a Philosophy

The uninitiated interpret Imagination as something “imaginary,” in the

popular sense of the word; i.e. something unreal. But imagination is a re-
ality. When a man imagines he actually creates a form on the Astral or even
on some higher plane; and this form is as real and objective to intelligent
beings on that plane, as our earthly surroundings are to us.44

Luhrmann helpfully expands on this claim by explaining how these

practitioners “use a term like ‘plane’ to confer a separate but equal status
upon this imaginative world. They also speak of the ‘inner plane’ and
shorten the phrase to ‘the inner.’ ‘Inner’ is a disingenuous term, how-
ever. It does not mean ‘merely’ imaginative or emotional or internal.”45
Hence, the “visualization” of abstract shapes such as a hexagram, say, is
a crucial initial phase of occult practices such as astral projection.46 The
inner, the imaginative, is fabulated and real: visualization (or any of
the other sensory modes of creation) is not merely representation. This
supernormalization of the imagination is one of the ways, according to
Alison Butler, that the Golden Dawn revolutionized the Victorian practice
of magic: it introduced the “dominance of the imagination and the will in
the magical process.” Moreover, the magic rituals were now controlled,
not only by “the magician’s will and imagination,” but were so directed
without intermediary.47
That said, it must be acknowledged that there is a long history to the
“imagination-​as-​real” idea in Western esoteric thought. Figures including
Alfred Sinnett and Rudolf Steiner, for instance, were making similar points
to the Golden Dawn about images and the imagination at about this time, or
even earlier. In 1881, for example, Sinnett wrote that “the human brain” has
the power to “project into and materialize in the visible world the forms that
his [the adept’s] imagination has constructed out of inert cosmic matter in
the invisible world.”48 He also wrote later that there were “conditions of being
that, contemplated in imagination from the physical plane level, seem to rep-
resent different orders of creation,” and that on the “astral plane under sim-
ilar conditions, the things desired” can take on “objective reality” through
this use of imagination.49 In An Outline of Occult Science from 1910, Rudolf
Steiner acknowledged that many see in imagination only the power of “in-
vention,” and yet, for occult science, what he calls the “imaginative” must
be understood as a concept that stands for “that which is ‘actual’ in a higher
sense than are the facts and beings common to physical sense-​perception.”
The “imaginative”
 10° = 1° Ipsissimus Covariant (Neophyte)  55

is called into being by the soul in its state of higher consciousness, the
things perceived in this state of consciousness are spiritual facts, and spir-
itual beings, to which the senses have no access, and—​since this condition
of the soul is caused by meditating upon symbols, or “imaginations”—​the
sphere to which this condition of higher consciousness belongs may be
termed the imaginative world, and the knowledge relating to it, imaginative
knowledge.50

Contemporary research in Western esotericism has maintained this call to

see in the psychology of imagination more than is allowed by an “overly ra-
tional bias.” Wouter Hanegraaff, for instance, cites Gilles Fauconnier and
Mark Turner, the pioneers of “blending” theory, stating that “the next step in
the study of mind is the scientific study of the nature and mechanisms of the
imagination.” In a further turn toward scientific naturalism in this area, Egil
Asprem has even analyzed Mina Bergson’s descriptions of scrying and astral
projection as a practice of extra-​mundane imagination that was earnest in
its methods of verification and error elimination. He shows in some detail
how she used “test symbols” taken from a “vast system of correspondences”
whereby a vision could be carefully checked for its authenticity, in particular
against the possibility that it was “only taken from memory or constructed
by one’s own mental creativity.”51 (The tacit differentiation here between real
imagination and merely imaginary imagination is telling.) Indeed, Asprem
and others see strong potential for a cognitivist turn in esotericism research
that would investigate “kataphatic,” or image-​based, practices of the Golden
Dawn (like clairvoyance and astral travel, for example) in terms of “shifting
attention to specific (internal and external) sensory cues,” or as afterimage
effects caused by the “physiology of the human eye combined with the brain’s
strategy for interpreting sense data.”52
It is in Henri Bergson’s realist theory of the memory image, however, that
we possibly find the most potential for such naturalistic readings. In his
Bergson-​inspired neuroscientific study of “mind and variability,” one of the
primary objectives of Patrick McNamara is to demonstrate that selectionism
is a compelling approach. In addition, he goes on to show how “imagina-
tive activity and memory are indissolubly linked,” and that what we call “per-
sonal identity might also be an imaginative creation,” that “the act of recall
or remembering really involves an experience of the self.”53 This second aim
of his enterprise, however, leads to an odd moment in his reading of Henri
Bergson, in as much as McNamara claims that “Bergson had little to say
56  Vestiges of a Philosophy

about identity” (and so instead turns to William James for this part of his
enquiry).54 Yet he does Henri Bergson a disservice on this front. Actually, at
the very outset of Matter and Memory’s selectionist approach, it is not only
the brain that is an instrument of selection (rather than localization), but my
own identity, too, is intertwined with the selection among images. Among
“this aggregate of images which I call the universe,” there is one of them, Henri
Bergson says, “which is distinct from all the others, in that I do not know
it only from without by perceptions, but from within by affections: it is my
body.”55 One image stands out, is selected, through affect—​the feeling of
being embodied in the first person, as “my body.”
It is worth lingering over this misreading, or omission, because it offers
us a clear example of what Henri Bergson means by “continuous heter-
ogeneity.” His selectionist approach does not say that the self in irredeem-
ably fragmented or fractured, but rather that it is multiple and unitary at
the same time (this is also a major tenet of his 1903 essay, “Introduction to
Metaphysics”). There is a continuity, but it is heterogeneous, even in oneself.
Now, at one point in his study, McNamara puzzles over a “whole series” of
autobiographical memory images: as someone who grew up in a family, went
to school, met friends and developed these friendships, married, had chil-
dren, parented those children, and so on. He then answers the subsequent
question “Who am I?” as follows: “you are many.”56 In this dialectic of the one
and many, McNamara also revisits a debate whose modern form was shaped
by Joseph Butler’s criticism of John Locke’s theory of the self. When Locke
based personal identity on memory (“the same thinking thing, in different
times and places”), Butler pointed out that memory is an inherently personal
selection. As such, memory presupposes personal identity and so cannot rest
upon it.57 In McNamara’s updated version: “memory, therefore, presents to us
a paradox”: it can “constitute the basis for personal identity, since it preserves
a record of the story of our lives,” yet it also “imaginatively constructs mul-
tiple identities.”58 Continuity and discontinuity. One self and many selves.
However, Bergsonian duration also allows for the same conjunction, the self
as one and many, or a heterogeneous continuity of many selves, and indeed of
many pasts. In fact, Henri Bergson devoted a good amount of his 1910/​1911
course at the Collège de France to Morton Prince’s pioneering psycholog-
ical study of what we nowadays call “Dissociative Identity Disorder” (or pre-
viously, “multiple personality syndrome”). Prince’s celebrated case of Sally
Beauchamp particularly interested Henri Bergson, and he even likened the
phenomenon of multiple personality to a series of “possessions.”59 Despite
 10° = 1° Ipsissimus Covariant (Neophyte)  57

McNamara’s claim to the contrary, Henri Bergson does have a lot to say about
identity, or at least its many varieties.
Integrated into Henri Bergson’s own metaphysics of different levels of du-
ration, one can only say that the self is one and many “at the same time,” if
this “sameness” is understood as covariance or invariance rather than simul-
taneity (which would be an abstract spatial rendering). As Leonard Lawlor
writes,

I may introspect and sympathize with my own duration; my duration may

be the only one. But, if I make an effort, I sense in my duration a variety of
shades. In other words, the intuition of duration puts me in contact with a
whole continuity of durations, which I could, with effort, try to follow up-
wardly or downwardly, upward to spirit or downward to inert matter.60

In “selectionist” language, I am a selector (or my brain is), but I am also the

product of another selection at another scale. Understood in a temporalized
rendering, we might add that, in my contracted level of duration, when I per-
ceive X, something else at a different level of duration, remembers X.61 My
durée is but one part of another durée.
In the Golden Dawn, the highest grade within the order, based on the
Kabbalist system, is named “Ipsissimus.” Ipsissimus means the “super-
lative self,” or “completely oneself.” The likeness to Spinoza’s definition
of “Substance” or God as “what is in itself and is conceived through it-
self ” hardly needs to be called to attention. It can also be likened to Henri
Bergson’s idea of the “whole of the self,” as Vladimir Jankélévitch pointed out.
And such wholes are open for Henri Bergson—​they are not substances but
processes. Consequently, given that wholes, too, endure and mutate, they can
also be seen as incomplete parts selected by other wholes at other levels.62
And so on (turtles, all the way). Each whole is also a part, each many is also a
one. Ipsissimus, therefore, is also “Neophyte,” the lowest grade or even the un-
graded, the incomplete at a whole other level.
 3
Hyper-​Ritual

Even when compared to her brother’s fickle celebrity, the ascent and de-
scent of Mina’s star was rapid. Other than a few cursory entries in biog-
raphies of Henri Bergson, Mina Bergson’s name mostly survives through
histories of the Golden Dawn and other occult societies. And apart from
those histories, there are few references to her in contemporary culture.1
Moreover, if we are to gain an impression of what Mina Bergson believed
about spiritualism and the occult, she did not leave us much to go on.
The available texts laying out her methods and ideas amount to four core
documents (currently, at least): her 1926 preface to the second edition
of Samuel Mathers’s Kabbalah Unveiled (originally published 1898) and
three teaching texts (or “Flying Rolls”): “No.21, Know Thyself ”; “No.23,
Tattwa Visions”; and “No.36, Of Skrying and Travelling in the Spirit-​
Vision.”2 Alongside these writings, and any historical documentation of
her and Samuel’s activities in Paris, we do, however, also have all of the rit-
ualistic practices and paraphernalia from the Golden Dawn and Alpha et
Omega grimoires (handbooks on magical practices): the copious phrases,
symbols, languages, props, costumes, sets, mathematic equations, colors,
choreographies, and stagings that were part of any member’s initiation
and ongoing training as they moved from neophyte through the higher
grades within the Order.
Naturally, such a profusion of rituality brings with it a hierarchy of apti-
tude (Neophyte, Practicus, Adeptus Major, etc.) as well as hermeticity—​but
as we said, this does not necessarily imply inequalities within institutional
power so much as advancements in aptitude. Henrik Bogdan describes its
structures as follows:

The initiatory system of the Golden Dawn is based on the kabbalistic Tree
of Life. Each degree is attributed to a particular sefira, starting with the de-
gree of Zelator which is attributed to Malkuth, and ending with Ipsissimus
which in its turn is attributed to Kether. The degree of Neophyte is a prelim-
inary degree and is considered to take place below Malkuth. The candidate

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0006
 Hyper-Ritual  59

thus symbolically ascends the Tree of Life through the rituals of initiation.
At the initiations, he or she is instructed in the particular symbolism of the
sefira that the degree is attributed to, as well as in the symbolism of the paths
leading to the said sefira.3

These terms “Malkuth,” “Kether,” and so on will be explained shortly. The

Tree of Life, as we know, is a hermetic adaptation from the Jewish mystic
system of the Kabbalah.4 The Tree and its arboreal system of sefirot, the ten
“emanations” of the infinite (Ein Sof), was the foundation for the Golden
Dawn’s structure and practices, forming an extremely complicated symbolic
system involving elements derived from Judaism, Christianity, astrology,
and the Tarot.
Nonetheless, were we to suspend the ontological commitments behind
these rituals to look at them instead as models of thinking and knowledge ac-
quisition, we might begin to see them as ultra-​performative materializations.
They make spirit matter, both in the sense of making appear and, dare we say,
rendering matter as spirit through performance.5 The connections between
ritual, performance, and “as if” behavior have been extensively discussed by
theorists such as Victor Turner and Richard Schechner.6 This is performance
as an act of suspension of disbelief.7 Such behavior can also be seen as a kind
of attention training within a prepared environment, such as a Temple vault,
and as such, one that forms a covariance with what is nominally “past” or
“spiritual.” (We will give a modern example of such a performance later in the
Practicus covariant.)
We get one glimpse of the hyper-​rituals and performativity of Mina
Bergson’s work in the dedication to her with which the poet and one-​time
Golden Dawn member W. B. Yeats began his 1925 book, A Vision:

Perhaps this book has been written because a number of young men and
women, you and I among the number, met nearly forty years ago in London
and in Paris to discuss mystical philosophy. You with your beauty and
your learning and your mysterious gifts were held by all in affection, and
though, when the first draft of this dedication was written, I had not seen
you for more than thirty years, nor knew where you were nor what you
were doing, and though much had happened since we copied the Jewish
Schemahamphorasch [“the explicit name”] with its seventy-​two Names
of God in Hebrew characters, it was plain that I must dedicate my book
to you.8
60  Vestiges of a Philosophy

The reinscription of seventy-​two names9: such was the kind of painstaking

spiritual labor undertaken at the Golden Dawn. Entries in Mina’s work
diary also show whole evenings given over to Tarot readings, many of them
lasting four or more hours. Ritual here becomes hyper-​ritual. And names
and naming were a part of this excess. In fact, Mina Bergson had a penchant
for collecting names. So far, we have only reported two (Mina Bergson/​
Moina Mathers), but she also was known as “Bergie” (while an art student
at the Slade), “Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum” (her Golden Dawn “magical name,”
meaning, among other things, “I Leave No Trace”), the shorter “Vestigia,”
the longer “the Very Honoured Soror Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum,” the letters
“VNR,” the numbers “6° =​5°,” and later “7° =​4°” (her varying Hermetic
order grades), the titles “High Priestess Anari,” and “Countess MacGregor
of Glenstrae” (Samuel’s influence), and finally, at least to her English niece in
later years, “Auntie Mouse.”10
The issue of multiple names will return, too, but what they all “denote” (if
I may use that word) is a person behaving, not as an ascetic contemplative,
but as a woman of action. Not only had she cofounded a temple and estab-
lished a major occult Order, her performances were the public face of the
Golden Dawn. As R. C. Grogin reports:

In 1899 Mina and the order caused something of a sensation in Paris when
they staged a theatrical performance at La Bodinière Theatre, called the
Rite of Isis. Jules Bois was on stage to explain the ancient cult to the fashion-
able audience. The Paris correspondent of the Sunday Chronicle reported
that Mina achieved a great success. Rivalling her brother in popularity at
least for the moment, she “completely won their sympathy by her graceful
attitude and dignified manner. More than that, she is very handsome, she
has a beautiful oval face with large black, mysterious eyes and beauty always
tells in Paris.” In gratitude for the performance the ladies offered bouquets
of flowers and the gentlemen threw wheat on the altar.11

Such an engaged spiritualist might well remind us of the “heroes” and active
models that Henri Bergson commended in his 1932 book, The Two Sources
of Morality and Religion, as the great mystics within the Christian tradi-
tion.12 Mina Bergson herself wrote that the mystic “should not retire from
the world,” that it is better to live among others and “influence them by our
example.”13 In her preface to Kabbalah Unveiled, she adds that mysticism “is
a system eminently suited to Western occultism, which a man can follow
 Hyper-Ritual  61

while living the ordinary life of the world, given that this is understood in its
highest sense.” So much for the “hermetic,” the “enclosed.” Here, the active
mystic meets the ordinary human.
The need to restrain oneself from the usual stereotypes of mysticism, espe-
cially egocentricity and monomania, are also uppermost in Mina Bergson’s
descriptions. In Flying Roll No.21, “Know Thyself,” she writes

There is too much tendency to wish all to follow the Ideal of one—​we are
apt to forget that the Ideal of each will lead to the same Truth. We can help
each other better, then, by helping each to rise according to his own ideas,
rather than, as we often unwisely do, in advising him to rise to what is best
in ourselves only. That error of wishing to make another as ourselves is an-
other and a very hurtful form of most subtle egotism.14

Such a pluralism of approach was already hinted at in her more thematic

concern with the relationship between science and spiritualism cited earlier.
Indeed, gnōthi seauton, “know thyself,” the Delphic maxim most famously
associated with Socrates, was also connected with other Greek sages, not all
of them philosophers in the modern sense but also scientists (Pythagoras,
Thales), artists (Aeschylus), and of course mystics like Heraclitus. As we
saw, Mina Bergson wrote as an ecumenist of sorts—​endorsing an emergent
monism of matter and spirit rather than the usual dualism associated with
certain strains of occult thought: “Material science would appear to be spiri-
tualizing itself and occult science to be materializing itself. [ . . . ] Matter and
Spirit are only opposite poles of the same universal substance.”15 Of course,
this duality of orientation over a dualism of substance is also highly reminis-
cent of the opening of Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory:

We will assume for the moment that we know nothing of theories of matter
and theories of spirit, nothing of the discussions as to the reality or ideality
of the external world. Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest
sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them,
unperceived when they are closed.16

Instead of a dichotomized matter and spirit, for Henri Bergson, there is a

unity within a universal imagery. And in 1907, when Henri Bergson begins
the third chapter of Creative Evolution with an attempt to explain the seem-
ingly mysterious correlations between intellect and materiality, he will
62  Vestiges of a Philosophy

propose that the two “are derived from a wider and higher form of existence”
and that it must have been the one process that “cut out matter and the in-
tellect, at the same time, from a stuff [étoffe] that contained both.”17 Mina
Bergson’s “universal substance” again, or perhaps what we will see her later
call the “eternal attraction between ideas and matter”: matter and ideas (or
spirit) as “poles” within one spectra(l), continuous entity, which she then
names “the secret of life.”18 Both of Henri’s texts were written while Mina
was in Paris, obviously, but it is especially Matter and Memory that stands
out in this secret correlation—​a book that has been variously described as his
most “learned,” “rich,” “brilliant,” and “difficult” works.19 This is the book he
published in that glorious decade of the 1890s, when Mina and Samuel, the
“neo-​pagan power couple,” held court to great acclaim.
 4
“O My Bergson, You Are a Magician”

In her 2015 doctoral dissertation at Northumbria University, Helen Green

writes:

The era’s fascination with what Alex Owen in The Place of Enchantment
calls, “a new esoteric spirituality” meant that, for some, the more mystical
aspects of Bergson’s thought were adopted and integrated into the outlooks
of movements like Theosophy and the Order of the Golden Dawn. This
connection, though unconfirmed by the philosopher, was for its disci-
ples given credence by his acceptance of the presidency for the Society for
Psychical Research (1913) and, furthermore, by public knowledge that he
was the brother of leading occultist Moina Mathers (née Mina Bergson).1

Green then proposes that Mina Bergson herself must have felt sufficiently
certain that her brother’s ideas were in harmony with her own mystical beliefs
to mention, again, how “material science would appear to be spiritualising it-
self ” in her preface to The Kabbalah Unveiled. This is doubtless a crucial state-
ment by Mina Bergson, of course. In point of fact, however, she did not name
her brother in this connection at all, but rather the distinguished English
physicist, and part-​time psychical researcher, Sir Oliver Lodge (a figure Henri
Bergson also admired, incidentally, and who had read the philosopher’s
work).2 Indeed, Alex Owen’s 2004 book, subtitled British Occultism and the
Culture of the Modern, tempers this enthusiasm for the syncretic, especially
on Henri Bergson’s own part, by noting that when Yeats visited Mina Bergson
in Paris in 1894, he was “aware that MacGregor Mathers was irritated by his
inability to impress his brother-​in-​law with his magic.” Owen goes on to add
that “there is no indication that Bergson showed any interest in magic, but he
was nonetheless involved with psychical research and deeply concerned with
matters relating to spirit and consciousness.”

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0007
64  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Owen’s caution here raises an allied question: what was Henri Bergson’s
view of traditional religion? Though it has been argued elsewhere that Henri
Bergson was a spiritualist even “from the start” of his philosophical career,
and that the problem of God was central to all of his work, such interpret-
ations of his ideas are outliers, to say the least.3 As Vladimir Jankélévitch
states in an essay on “Bergson and Judaism,” the “pluralist immanentism of
Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution doesn’t lend itself well to the idea
of a monotheistic transcendence.” Indeed, it is difficult to see how a doctrine
that is, as Jankélévitch says, “temporalist, continuationist, immanentist, and
on top of all that pluralist [could] have anything in common with Hebrew
monotheism.”4 All the same, Jankélévitch will also say that,

over the absolute nothingness, Bergson would no doubt have preferred

the mystical nothingness of the Kabbalah and Dionysius the Areopagite,
because that nothingness is richness and plenitude, inexhaustible infinity
(En-​Soph) or, as Angelus Silesius says, “Super-​Nothing”; that nothingness
is not the void where the spectacular magic of creation is wrought in a coup
de théâtre, but rather like the dynamic schema that is the germ of poetic
improvisation: it is the unfathomable abyss and fertile night referred to in
negative theology.5

It is fascinating to see Jankélévitch refer to Ein Sof and its emanations in

this context. Moreover, if there is a perpetual theme of the Kabbalah, it is its
understanding of the world as emanations within the divine, and the idea
that knowledge of this process of emanation only comes through learned
techniques designed to retrace the path of this emanation, by returning to
the original infinite. Compare this retroactivity, then, with Henri Bergson’s
own exhortations in Matter and Memory to “seek experience at its source,
or rather above that decisive turn where . . . it becomes properly human ex-
perience.” Before this “turn of experience,” he continues, there remains to be
“reconstituted, with the infinitely small elements which we thus perceive of
the real curve, the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them.”6
The “darkness behind them” is not an empty nothing, however, but a “Super-​
Nothing,” rich and inexhaustible.
Such a reorientation within experience does offer a strong echo of this
Kabbalist movement of involution. Likewise, the need to “reverse the
normal direction of the workings of thought” as described in “Introduction
to Metaphysics,” the obligation to “think backwards” as one commentator
 “O My Bergson, You Are a Magician”  65

put it, provides a similar covariant.7 For Kabbalists, then, it is clear that
one must retrace the emanations in order to progress through the sefira. As
Grogin notes,

the Bergsonian and Kabbalistic views of man, so popular in the late nine-
teenth century, proceed from the same assumptions: that man lives a highly
routinized, mechanical life, mundanely bound by the rhythms of his body
and by habits of reaction and perception. He is a man who blindly seeks
pleasure and avoids pain, and it is only the rare man who, through the
proper instruction, can overcome this, break the outer crust of habit and
enter into a higher spiritual awareness.8

And the “proper instruction” is to move in reverse. Admittedly, these ret-

rograde movements might appear odd at first, when seen coming from a
Bergsonian perspective. Normally, duration only moves forward in Henri
Bergson’s rendering (though without any fixed direction) and so is irrevers-
ible. True, but how we falsely yet habitually conceptualize real time itself pre-
cisely as reversible, and so actually expendable or unreal as passage, needs
itself to be put in reverse according to the philosopher. This is a double re-
versal, therefore, one that, like the negation of the negation, reorients us toward
positive, creative movement (going backward in order to go forward, so to
speak).
Returning to the God question, in “Existentialists and Mystics,” Iris
Murdoch may have put her finger on something closer to what really
connects Henri and Mina Bergson on the matter of religion—​even more so
than certain movements within thought and technique (philosophical and
Kabbalistic). In that text she writes that mystics inhabit “a spiritual world
unconsoled by familiar religious imagery.” Rather, she claims, mystics should
be thought of as “artists” who “invent their own imagery.”9 Certainly, the
biography of Mina Bergson fits that profile very well. With respect to reli-
gion and the Golden Dawn more broadly, it has even been suggested that
calling it a religion, even a “syncretic” one, is a misnomer. As Ronald Hutton
shows, the Golden Dawn’s practices were not about worshipping God but
empowering the practitioner:

. . . the ceremonies of the order were not acts of worship; their focus was the
celebrant. It was far from obvious, in the performance of the Qabbalistic
Cross, whether the kingdom, the power, and the glory belonged to God or
66  Vestiges of a Philosophy

were being promised to the human carrying out the ritual; this ambiguity
no doubt made it acceptable to people with a wide range of beliefs.10

Wouter Hanegraaf reports that such an emphasis on the individual rather

than the collective, one that is concerned more with cultivating personal ex-
perience through praxis rather than doctrinal belief, might be best summed
up by the term “spirituality” rather than “religion.”11 Qua spiritual prac-
tice, then, the Golden Dawn was radically heterodox when compared with
institutional religion. This heterodoxy, sometimes termed “Victorian and
Edwardian immanentism,” is explained by J. Jeffrey Franklin as follows:

The heterodox responses, as in Theosophy and the Golden Dawn, were

cosmotheistic and therefore more than prepared to exchange revealed
monotheism for immanence, scripture for nature. Rather than defending
Jesus’s revealed divinity, they embraced Osirian mythology, even cele-
brating Jesus’s membership in that lineage, and also reinstated the divine
feminine.12

Such avowed heterodoxy can be seen in the approach of Mina’s brother, too.
Recalling Henri Bergson’s adage that one can only understand “what one can
in some measure reinvent,” we must also note that both brother and sister
were lapsed or secularized Jews, with each eventually inventing his or her own
means to engage with the most abstract questions of existence. Significantly,
Henri Bergson’s definition of the “amateur” as opposed to the professional in
philosophy completely upends our usual understanding: it is the former who
approaches problems entirely using the ready-​made techniques and termi-
nology set by others, by the “tradition”; the professional approach is instead
to invent one’s own route through the problem.13 In place of doctrinal belief,
we have an immanent, almost artistic practice.
Contrary to Yeats’s account, moreover, we know that Henri Bergson was
actually interested in magic, at least as a field for academic study, and this
concern culminated in the publication of The Two Sources in 1932. Hence, it
should not be so surprising to Owen, as it seems to be, that “in a striking par-
allel with occult thought, he argued that matter and spirit are not opposites
but part of a whole.”14 Our book’s primary concern is precisely with this
striking parallel. Owen even notes how the great historian of mystic thought,
Evelyn Underhill, attended Henri Bergson’s London lectures of 1913 in the
wake of her own recent success with the book Mysticism and reported back
 “O My Bergson, You Are a Magician”  67

that she was “drunk with Bergson.”15 Significantly, much of the historical re-
search underpinning Henri Bergson’s own theories in The Two Sources did
in fact come from her work. In a note in The Two Sources, he acknowledges a
mutual influence with Underhill: “similar ideas will be found in the remark-
able works of Evelyn Underhill. . . . The latter author connects certain of her
views with those we expressed in L’Evolution Creatrice, and which we have
taken up again, to carry them further, in the present chapter.”16
I said “significantly” earlier because, for a number of years in the mid-​
1900s, Evelyn Underhill was also a member of the Golden Dawn. Indeed,
Underhill even wrote “a defence of magic” in 1907.17 Now, I opened this sec-
tion with an irreverent use of William James’s famous note to Henri Bergson,
dispatched after he had first read Creative Evolution, “O my Bergson, you are a
magician and your book is a marvel.”18 Taken literally (other than as fawning
praise or a lazy slur), Henri Bergson was no magician to be sure, but he was
philosophically interested in the topic. He was clearly aware of mediumship
where “the magician sometimes works through the medium of spirits” and
the notion of occult forces.19 That a magician might even believe she is able
to influence events and material objects at a distance is described in The Two
Sources as “a logic of the body, an extension of desire, which comes into play
long before intelligence has found a conceptual form for it.”20 Rage against an
absent enemy, for instance, can so magically transform the world as to make
our gestures of attack (pouncing, throttling) bring the image of our opponent
within our grasp.21 Expressed bodily, it is a “logic”; taken conceptually, it is a
force, though one with many names:

Words such as mana, wakonda, etc., express this force, and at the same time
the prestige surrounding it. You will not find the same precise meaning for
all of them, if you are looking for precise meanings, but they all correspond
to the same vague idea. They express that which causes things to lend them-
selves to the operations of magic. As to these operations themselves, we
have just determined their nature. They begin the act which man cannot
finish. They go through the motions which alone could not produce the
desired effect, but which will achieve it, if the man concerned knows how to
prevail upon the goodwill of things.22

Henri Bergson’s descriptions of this force were based on research by contem-

porary anthropologists (some of which is regarded as dubious today), but
his conclusion, which immediately follows the passage earlier, was not. He
68  Vestiges of a Philosophy

declares that magical thinking is not the preserve of the so-​called primitive
mind or the magician, but that “magic is then innate in man.” Indeed, it is in
all men and women. He continues:

Let there be no talk, then, of an era of magic followed by an era of science.

Let us say that science and magic are both natural, that they have always
co-​existed. . . . Driven back by science, the inclination towards magic still
survives, and bides its time.23

Ahead of his time, Henri Bergson has no truck here with the idea of a teleo-
logical progress from “primitive” mentality toward the modern rational (usu-
ally Western) mind. He offers an evolutionary view, without a doubt, but he
does not confer moral or intellectual value on its later “stages” such that the
modern psyche leaves the earlier ones behind in its inevitable advance. Each
phase lives on in all minds.
Henri Bergson’s own discussion of “fabulation” in The Two Sources is it-
self an examination of one such natural tendency toward magical thinking,
namely our inclination to anthropomorphize certain physical processes as
“Events.” Some processes are deemed to possess intent, especially ones with
deadly effects (natural and man-​made disasters). An earthquake, say, seems
to be deliberately trying to kill me. It is as if there was some malign purpose
from the outset: hence, the disparate processes (which is “all” an earthquake
actually is—​a set of natural processes) are combined into one Event, the
“Earthquake,” with its own intentionality. The reason we fabulate the event
like this is in order to give ourselves the possibility, overwhelmed as we are, to
thwart the will of this larger being: though we may appear physically doomed,
if it has an intent, then we may be able to outwit it.24 This is the peculiar kind
of innate magical thinking, that is, for Henri Bergson, latent within each of
us. As a tendency, it “bides its time” and emerges only in extremis, with pro-
cesses involving death or serious injury in accidents or disasters. So basic is it
that it would be wrong to think of fabulation as “only” a form of imagination,
according to Henri Bergson, still less a form of play, artistry, simulation, or
pretense: it is far more elementary than each of these and lies not only at their
source but also at the source of much religious belief—​animatism, animism,
polytheism, and so on. If imagination is only imaginary for Henri Bergson,
then it seems that fabulation is, at least at some level, more than imaginary.
Moreover—​and this point will become ever more crucial in what follows—​
given that in Creative Evolution Henri Bergson attributes consciousness and
 “O My Bergson, You Are a Magician”  69

memory to life at all levels of the real, and even to matter (understood as a
relatively distended duration), it is not a little ironic that the magical fabu-
lation of life and mind within physical processes is not actually philosophi-
cally baseless for him.25 Such fabulations are simply operating at the wrong
scale, one where human intervention deludes itself as to its own power over
matter. Our “magical” beliefs are never thrown away by the so-​called modern
mind, nor should they be. Matter itself is “magical,” so to speak (a panpsy-
chism runs through Bergson, as we will soon see), but it would be wrong to
think that it must respond to our interventions. Such an illusion is simply
thought, logic, or desire, projecting itself at what is an inappropriate level for
it. Counterfactually, then, we might say that magical thinking might be right
to behave as if ritual, incantation, or performance could conquer space, time,
and the standard laws of physics and biology, were it not for the case that:

1. It projects itself at an improper level (it is not necessarily operative at

our scale); and
2. It thinks of its causal powers as voluntarily (even though they are not in
our power to control); and
3. It thinks of the source of magic as a substance (when it is, rather, a
movement, a process).

Whether or not these “errors” of judgement, of scale, are irredeemable is an-

other matter. Perhaps we can fashion the conditions for an involuntary event,
or at least increase its likelihood, if only to some infinitesimally small degree
(when that one infinite monkey succeeds at typing the complete works of
Shakespeare). And, as with fabulation’s own fashioning of hope in the face
of certain death, it may be this chance, however small, that spurs us on to at-
tempt the act, no matter how improbable in the long run.26
Tellingly for our present concern, when Henri Bergson elsewhere writes
about a “panoramic vision of the past” in its totality, it is in the context of
near-​death perception: the “sudden disinterestedness in life born of the
sudden conviction that the moment is the moment of death.” At such a final
realization of the inescapability of one’s death, there is a total recall of the past
rather than the fabulation of life talked of in The Two Sources.27 Our orienta-
tion from future to past is put into reverse as at least part of what was keeping
our entire past from flooding our present is breached. Henri Bergson talks
about this “panoramic vision” in 1913 during his address, as its new presi-
dent, to the Society for Psychical Research (which was founded by Frederic
70  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Myers, by the way). In fact, beyond this discussion of magic, his ongoing en-
gagement in psychical research has already been noted, even though it was
not always made public.28 Long before this Presidential Address, his interest
in the paranormal was clear, as Howard Caygill has discussed in his essay
“Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual.” This essay deals with an early report by
Henri Bergson, published in the Revue philosophique in 1886. In “De la sim-
ulation inconsciente dans l’état d’hypnotisme,” he records his participation
(with his assistant, “Robinet”) in the case of a boy who had been credited
with powers of telepathy while hypnotized. This boy was supposedly able to
read the mind of a man who was reading a book unseen to him (the boy
would report back the words the man was silently reading). In this case,
though, Henri Bergson demonstrated his skepticism. He was able to disprove
telepathy by discerning instead an extraordinary degree of sensitivity of vi-
sion (hyperaesthesia) under hypnotic suggestion (the man reading was also
the hypnotist). The boy could read the book’s text, reflected (back to front) in
the cornea of the reader’s eyes. Here is Caygill citing Henri Bergson’s account:

For Bergson and Robinet it was as if the hypnotised subject “read every-
thing correctly, but as if read in a mirror where they had perceived symmet-
rical images of real objects.” From this the investigators drew the startling
conclusion that the reading took place “on the cornea of the hypnotist,
playing the role of a convex mirror. Without doubt the reflected image must
have been extremely small, given that the numbers or letters must have
been hardly 3 millimetres in height. Taking into account the radius of the
cornea at 7 to 8 mm, a simple calculation shows that this cornea, working
as a convex mirror, would reflect an image of the numbers and letters a little
less than 0.1 mm.” This extraordinary deduction pointed to the existence of
hyperaesthesia, or the ability to perceive way beyond the limits of normal
perception.29

The solution to the case was both more ordinary than telepathy and yet
extraordinary, too. Seeing in miniature, in a biological crystal ball so to
speak, only hugely reduced in scale. Smallism. Here is a good example of
supernormalization—​extracting the supernatural by natural means: the
boy is not telepathic—​he is only seeing things, albeit seeing things extraor-
dinarily well—​hyperacuity. This is less a deflation (of the psychical, the
paranormal, spiritualism, or magic) and more a case of the ordinary being
elevated from within—​hyperaesthetic conditions going unnoticed (because
 “O My Bergson, You Are a Magician”  71

they are natural, innate) in Frederic Myers’s sense of the supernormal. Where
we would extend Myers’s version of supernormalization, via Bergsonism, in
this context would be by showing that even normal levels of any visual acuity
are only normalized after the fact. The “magic” of all vision is the “always al-
ready” of an immanent bond with reality: the visual image that is part of the
real-​whole, which is itself, according to Matter and Memory, a set of images.
Our vision of the world is not a constructed representation (in a Kantian-​
style duality between mind and reality), but what remains, a selection, from
a reality made of images. Hyperacuity is simply a different selection. As a
comparison, even normal, rather than telepathic, intersubjective communi-
cation can often appear to employ a “power of divination” between individ-
uals, according to Henri Bergson.30 Hence, the need to insert a mysterious
“theory of mind” (or, in miniature, “mirror neurons”) to explain intersub-
jectivity. This insertion comes retrospectively in a rationalist reconstruction
or reverse engineering. In point of fact, it is simply that individuals (minds,
images, thoughts) are not fully individuated, being the product of a partial
dissociation (a set of images refracting themselves) rather than an association
(one image representing another). Or if you prefer, our mental separation
was never a given, solid factum, but follows a much waterier logic.
Incidentally, while we know that Henri Bergson read Myers’s work (they
even corresponded in 1886), and that he had this early interest in psychical
research, we also know that his 1886 report on telepathy would be the last
time for many years that he would engage with such research, or anything
else close to the paranormal and spiritual, at least publicly.31 It is no coinci-
dence, then, to learn that Henri Bergson was admonished for showing this
interest by one of his own supporters, Alphonse Darlu (1849–​1921). Darlu
was a professor of philosophy and would eventually become the Inspector
General of Higher Education from 1901 until his retirement in 1919. Even
earlier than that, however, he was a mentor to many young philosophers
within the French education system (he even founded the journal Revue de
métaphysique et de morale in 1893 with some of his students).32 Darlu would
have known, therefore, that dabbling with such fringe experiments in telep-
athy could easily harm the early career of any academic perceived as devi-
ating from the orthodoxies of the day, which were still highly positivist and
materialist.
Nearly thirty years later by 1913, however, Bergson’s career, and reputa-
tion, was unimpeachable. The title of his address to the Society for Psychical
Research was “Phantasms of the Living and Psychical Research,” and here,
72  Vestiges of a Philosophy

finally, he was free to discuss another case of apparent telepathy. It concerns a

woman who claimed to perceive (not merely sense) in every detail the death
of her husband, a military officer, who was killed on a battlefield a great dis-
tance away: “at the very moment when the husband fell, the wife had the vi-
sion of the scene, a clear vision, in all points conformable to the reality.”33
What is really fascinating is that Henri Bergson sidesteps the debate between
whether this was a case of telepathy or clairvoyance on her part as follows: “if
the picture was the reproduction of a real scene, it must, by every necessity, be
because she perceived that scene or was in communication with a conscious-
ness that perceived it.”34 Significantly, it is still a matter of perception here for
Bergson because of the concrete details in her record of the death scene, even
though it was operating through some form of “communication” (this is not
mind-​reading). Henri Bergson refers to this case as explicitly offering “. . . the
possibility of perceiving objects and events which our senses, with all the aid
which instruments can bring them, are incapable of attaining.”35 This will
sound odd to many: how can we perceive without sensing, how can there be,
as he then puts it, a “veridical hallucination” such as this?
Normally, we might entertain the idea that we can sense things without
noticing them, without perceiving them (“subliminally” shall we say). Yet
Henri Bergson has got it the other way around: perception is wider than sen-
sation, for sensation is a narrowing or restriction of perception. One might
conclude that he is simply referring to extra-​sensory perception here, were
it not that his philosophy has never been one that wishes to transcend the
body and its powers (as many philosophers frequently do), but rather en-
hance them (and expand attention, too). Instead of an attempt to escape per-
ception, Henri Bergson elsewhere speculates on what might result were we to
“return to perception, getting it to expand and extend.” Perhaps, he suggests,

instead of trying to rise above our perception of things we were to plunge

into it for the purpose of deepening and widening it. Suppose that we were
to insert our will into it, and that this will, expanding, were to expand our
vision of things.36

And, in fact, Matter and Memory offers a model of such perception which is
only different from sensation by degree, as part is to whole. Moreover, it is not
that perception is built upon the priority of the senses but that the senses are
a posterior narrowing of, or selection from, this “pure” perception.
 “O My Bergson, You Are a Magician”  73

A perception that is more powerful than our senses—​or a percept that is

more than a sense: this is the hypothesis that the first chapter of Matter and
Memory calls “pure perception”—​a kind of Leibnizian, monadic percep-
tion that mirrors the entire universe with varying degrees of attentiveness.
Attention again. For his part, Caygill concludes his essay on the 1886 telep-
athy case by quoting from The Two Sources’s final words and finding a simi-
larly cosmic meaning there:

Bergson intimates that the life of action and utility preserved by the “atten-
tion to life” of consciousness can be succeeded by a new attention to life ap-
propriate to hyperaesthesis and the virtual, an “attention to life” to which he
gives the name “joy.” Such an attention to life, one of hyperaesthesia, would
free us from the limits of action and survival and would bring the “refrac-
tory earth” back in line “with the essential function of the universe, which is
a machine for making gods.”37

We will speculate later on what the idea of “making gods” might entail (Henri
Bergson does not expand), especially as regards the Egyptian mysteries
performed by Mina Bergson. In the meantime, the “striking parallels” Alex
Owen spoke of between the investigations of brother and sister will only con-
tinue to mount, be they in terms of magic or the psychical. For it may well
have already struck those readers with an interest in psychic phenomena that
Henri Bergson’s analysis of the case of the dying officer above is neither one
of standard telepathic nor clairvoyant power: when Henri Bergson says that
“she perceived that scene,” it advances the prospect of something far more
occult—​that this was a case of spontaneous astral projection, what we will
hear Mina Bergson describe as “travelling in spirit vision.”38
Before we turn in more detail to Mina Bergson’s own oeuvre, however,
a word about terminology. Owen recounts how “Bergson’s ideas resonated
with Kabbalistic and other occult notions of the crucial conjunction of words
and images in creating a timeless moment of spiritual illumination.”39 In
similarly imagistic vein, we just heard Howard Caygill make reference to
“hyperaesthesis and the virtual.” In the context of discussing perception and
images, however, I have long argued that Henri Bergson’s notion of the vir-
tual must be taken in all of its optical specificity. Alas, the Deleuzian effect on
many readers of Henri Bergson has resulted in my protests often falling on
deaf ears, with some exceptions. Perhaps we will have a better hearing from
74  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Mina Bergson. The following comes from her introduction to the Kabbalah
Unveiled:

Take the astral plane in its varied divisions, where some of the adventures
described by the seer take place. This plane may be described as a hall
panelled with mirrors, where one is confronted with bewildering reflexes.
Manifesting therein are numerous and varying entities.40

As explained in Mina Bergson’s own discussions of “scrying” (a type of

spiritual seeing), or demonstrated in her practice of “Tattwa visions,” the
importance of imagery (“thought-​pictures”) to astral projection, astral clair-
voyance, or travelling in “spirit vision,” is obvious.41 These images are fun-
damentally actual and specific in form. Tattva is a Sanskrit word meaning
“thatness,” “principle,” “reality,” or “truth.” It is to hermetic spiritualism what
both “logos” (word, form, logic) and “haecceity” (thisness) are to Western
philosophy.
The language of “planes” in the Golden Dawn’s theorization of astral pro-
jection is obviously reminiscent of Matter and Memory’s discussion of the
“different planes of consciousness” strung between a “plane of action” or pure
perception, where images are in their most concentrated form, and a “plane
of dream” or pure memory, where they exist in their most relaxed state.42
Most important, though, is the detailed, concrete existence of those images
on Henri Bergson’s plane of pure perception, which I have speculated could
be his version of astral projection. Throughout his argument for a real per-
ception in the story of the dying officer, he bases his case on detail—​on “an
infinity of details all independent of one another.” For Henri Bergson, indi-
vidual specificity is all: “one blade of grass does not resemble another blade of
grass any more than a Raphael resembles a Rembrandt,” as he says in his essay
on “The Possible and the Real.”43 And this is no less true for Mina Bergson,
for whom there is not “a single grain of sand to which an idea is not attached,
the idea which formed it.”44 A real perception of a man dying on a battlefield
would involve numerous details, of faces, uniforms, weaponry, movements,
light, and landscape: were this vision a mere coincidence, therefore, to “see”
each of these details accurately in their real specificity would involve a count-
less number of further intersecting coincidences, giving us a degree of im-
probability far outweighing that posed to common sense by the existence
of such a psychic phenomenon. So, when Matter and Memory opens with
the statement, “here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of
 “O My Bergson, You Are a Magician”  75

the word,” the vagueness of the word belies the individuality of its sense. For
Henri Bergson, the individuality of movement and image simply is its meta-
physical status—​that is how what he calls a “true empiricism” merges with a
“real metaphysics,” for there is no such thing as movement “in general” (or
anything else “general” for that matter).45 Any “principle of individuation”
exists immanently within real, actual movement rather than a “metaphys-
ical”—​meaning immaterial—​substrate of “prime matter,” as Aristotle might
have it. For Bergson, matter is already individuated by its own movement,
rather than being merely an instrument of individuation.
 5
On Watery Logic, or Magical Thinking

In their 1900 joint interview with Frederic Lees, Mina and Samuel, per-
forming as High Priestess Anari and Hierophant Rameses, discussed their
personae and what was occurring on stage in their performances. Samuel/​
Rameses first:

we are not monotheists, and for that reason we have sometimes been called
idolators. But is not the universe, God manifest in matter, a great eidolon?
We are pantheists; we believe that each force of the universe is regulated
by a god. Gods are, therefore, innumerable and infinite. . . . Nothing that
you can see here is without its meaning, nothing is without its purpose. For
instance, here is a sistrum [an ancient Egyptian musical instrument like
a rattle] which is shaken during our ceremonies. One side of the wooden
body of this instrument represents the Beginning, the Alpha; the other side
the End, the Omega; the metal part symbolises the Arch of Heaven; the four
metal bars are the four elements. You will notice that on each of these bars
are five rings, which, being shaken, represent the shaking of the forces of
nature by or through the influence of the divine spirit of life. It is the same
with our dress. . . .1

And so on. Leaving aside the language of representation for a moment (x

“symbolizes” y), what strikes the reader most here is the exactitude of de-
tail in their use of images (“eidolon”) and instruments—​“nothing is without
its purpose.” The hyper-​ritualized use of objects is both the invention of the
Golden Dawn and a continuation of sorts: after all, these paraphernalia and
their spiritualized roles were fabricated from hybrid sources—​established
religions, occult texts, and other mystical traditions. In the expanded sense
of the performance (performer plus object plus stage . . .) this is also a type of
continuity, but one with change, mutation, built in.
In the interview, Lees then turns to Mina/​Anari, and we hear her take a
step back from this specific performance to make a more general, philosoph-
ical point. In particular, she argues for the need to think the divine through

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0008
 On Watery Logic, or Magical Thinking  77

the female principle. Why, she asks, do we so often neglect the feminine as
that part of the divine

which represents at one and the same time the faculty of receiving and that
of giving—​that is to say, love itself in its highest form—​love the symbol of
universal sympathy? That is where the magical power of woman is found.
She finds her force in her alliance with the sympathetic energies of Nature.
And what is Nature if it is not an assemblage of thoughts clothed with
matter and ideas which seek to materialize themselves? What is this eternal
attraction between ideas and matter? It is the secret of life. Have you ever
realized that there does not exist a single flame without a special intelli-
gence which animates it, or a single grain of sand to which an idea is not
attached, the idea that formed it? It is these intelligent ideas which are the
elementals, or spirits of Nature.2

One could easily interpret these descriptions in hylomorphic terms—​passive

matter informed by ideas—​but Mina Bergson is no Aristotelian. There is an
agency to matter, too, in this “eternal attraction between ideas and matter,”
which is also the “secret of life.” Of course, much of what she also says about
this female element will strike us now as banal romanticism, but we must
not forget that such ideas were radical in their time, formative for much that
would come later, and resonant with ideas that, in her brother’s more accept-
able idiom, were once deemed ground-​breaking. Seven years later in Creative
Evolution, Henri Bergson would write:

We have this sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal love, so

striking, and in most animals so touching, observable even in the solicitude
of the plant for its seed. This love, in which some have seen the great mys-
tery of life, may possibly deliver us life’s secret. It shows us each generation
leaning over the generation that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the
fact that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of
life is in the movement by which life is transmitted.3

Life and its secret(s). Love, attraction, and “sympathy,” too—​the last, a key
term in Bergson’s theory of intuition but also a word with strong mystical
significance—​form a set of images shared between Mina and Henri.
In respect to “secrets” in particular, the language of cloaks, films, and
veils (removed, as in Kabbalah Unveiled, or not), is also concurrent between
78  Vestiges of a Philosophy

the two. In his 1911 lecture “Philosophical Intuition,” Henri Bergson talks
about “films,” “screens,” and other veil-​like structures in a thought-​provoking
manner in so far as he does so while directly addressing the use of concep-
tual imagery itself. Discussing how a philosopher might use images to think
through philosophical concepts such as, for example, Berkeley’s subjective
idealism, he writes that

It seems to me that Berkeley perceives matter as a thin transparent film

[mince pellicule transparente] situated between man and God. It remains
transparent as long as the philosophers leave it alone, and in that case God
reveals Himself through it. But let the metaphysicians meddle with it, or
even common sense in so far as it deals in metaphysics: immediately the film
becomes dull, thick and opaque, and forms a screen because such words as
Substance, Force, abstract Extension, etc. slip behind it, settle there like a
layer of dust, and hinder us from seeing God through the transparency. The
image is scarcely indicated by Berkeley himself though he has said in so
many words “that we first raise a dust and then complain we cannot see.”4

Such a heuristic image is both troubling and evanescent. In that it is also, he

claims, “a receding and vanishing image,” it “haunts, unperceived perhaps,
the mind of the philosopher.”5 Such veil-​like images are then contrasted with
another type of imagery, that of language:

according to this, matter is a language which God speaks to us. That being
so, the metaphysics of matter thickening each one of the syllables, marking
it off, setting it up as an independent entity, turns our attention away from
the meaning to the sound and hinders us from following the divine word.6

Crucially, however, for Henri Bergson all such images are actually superior
to philosophical concepts because, when aggregated in number, they sug-
gest a movement that straddles time. The very same philosophy could operate
“in other times,” only not through concepts. If Berkeley’s thought survives it
will be as a meaningful image that “is less a thing thought than a movement
of thought, less a movement than a direction.”7 This is what survives from
Berkeley or continues through a Berkeleyan movement in thought: what we
have called covariance.8
One exceptionally prominent image throughout Henri Bergson’s own
writings is that of water. Given his metaphysics of transformation, that images
 On Watery Logic, or Magical Thinking  79

of fluidity, liquidity, flow, and water itself are so prevalent is not surprising.
As Camille Riquier points out, Henri Bergson uses the material image of
water (and, to a lesser extent, air and fire) “in order to suggest, through the
image, the moving reality in which his new metaphysics is installed.” Hence,
we get a thoroughly liquid metaphysics propounded through such images
as “the ‘jet of vapor,’ the ‘fluid,’ the ‘ocean of life,’ the ‘sheaf,’ the ‘immense
wave’ [onde], the ‘wave’ [vague], the ‘flow’ . . . and the ‘fluent.’ ” Riquier
argues that this “mediating image of his [Bergson’s] own thought” operates
by suggestion. These images “suggest what escapes” the concept, what the
concept “cannot absorb and which continues to be felt as the properly ac-
tive moment of being: its mobility, its moving [mouvance], its duration.”9
Indeed, Riquier goes so far as to say that, “if water is a privileged image it is
because Henri Bergson himself cannot do without it. It runs through all his
writing as the new element into which he wants to install philosophy. It is the
mediating image of his own thought and from which no intuition, even his
own, can be deprived.”10 That is why we can say, without exaggeration, that
Bergsonism is not simply a philosophy of flow and the fluid, but that it is
a fluid philosophy built upon, as Henri Bergson himself demands, “almost
fluid representations.”11 Of course, less tangibly material images can also be
found in his work, such as those taken from music, but nonetheless, Riquier
still asks, whether we “have to wonder if it is not the fluidity of water, air
or fire and the continuity of their passage into each other (fluidification of
boiling, condensation, freezing, fusion) that then provides Bergsonian im-
agery with its evocative power.”12 (Parenthetically, we could contrast Riquier’s
use of evocation, wherein a continuity of passage is suggested through a
flowing medium, with Mina Bergson’s use of invocation, wherein the con-
tinuity is embodied through the medium herself. And the apparent pun on
“medium” here is intended, though not in jest.)
This primacy of water imagery even extends to Henri Bergson’s discus-
sion of the origins of religion in The Two Sources. The evolution of religious
thought, he argues, follows a path whereby matter was originally “fabulated”
as a living being through a process he likens to a “partial anthropomor-
phism.” In fact, there are at least three forms of fabulation (animatism, an-
imism, and theism) in his account of religion that can also be seen as three
forms of mediating imagery. The intentionalization and vitalization of matter
begin with diffused, impersonal forces (animatism) before concentrating
those forces into spirits localized in particular places (animism), followed
by the attribution of increasingly more human personality to those spirits
80  Vestiges of a Philosophy

that at the same time detaches them from the world, until we have a full-​
blown theism with a divinity that transcends its creation, including a ma-
terial world now deemed spiritless and inert.13 Despite the clear teleology
here, each “stage” is an end in itself and retained as a fundamental perceptual
faculty. Two features of fabulation stand out, however: first, that it more or
less mirrors Bergson’s own philosophical progress, only in reverse—​his first
book Time and Free Will (1889) confining durée, and with that life, memory,
and consciousness, to the human mind, before Matter and Memory (1896)
and then Creative Evolution (1907) extend this durational being to all life and
even matter. In that sense, Bergsonian metaphysics reascends the slope that
the “modern” mind has come down (or in Kabbalist terms, it retraces the
path of emanation). Second, the image of water—​itself full of metaphysical
purpose in Henri Bergson’s iconography—​is central to his discussion of an-
imism. He argues that “water spirits,” for example, began as “vague entities
dwelling, for instance, in springs, rivers and fountains.” Once given a name,
they acquire their “own particular shape,” a “clearly defined personality,” and
even later become a “minor deity.” Yet, before these religious reifications
occur (substantializing and immobilizing in one), there was the fabulation of
the water spirit directly:

the spirit of the spring must have been the spring itself, as possessing a
beneficent virtue for man. To put it more clearly, that beneficent action,
in its ever-​present aspect, was the spirit. It would be an error in such a
case to regard as an abstract idea, I mean an idea extracted from things
by an intellectual effort, the representation of the act and of its continu-
ation. It is a datum provided directly by the senses. Our philosophy and
our language first posit the substance and surround it with attributes,
and then make such and such acts arise therefrom like emanations. But
we cannot too often repeat that the action may be forthcoming first and
be self-​sufficient, especially in cases where man is particularly con-
cerned. Such is the act of pouring us a drink [nous verser à boire]: it can
be localized in a thing, and then in a person; but it has its own inde-
pendent existence.14

“It has its own independent existence.” The spirit of the spring is its “drink-​
pouring”, so to speak, is its gift-​offering. Despite further and further an-
thropomorphism (further down the slope of “emanations”), the original
fabulation of life is basic: such early spirits, “in the elemental form which they
 On Watery Logic, or Magical Thinking  81

first possess . . . fulfil so natural a need that we must not be surprised to find
the belief in spirits underlying all ancient religions.”15
Water is also central to Mina Bergson’s self-​understanding of her prac-
tice, as can be seen in the “Tattwa Visions” Flying Roll. The Flying Rolls, re-
member, were types of lecture—​teaching texts—​that were also instruction
manuals for members of the Golden Dawn. The date of “Tattwa Visions”
is uncertain but it must predate The Two Sources (which appeared in 1932,
four years after Mina’s death). In it, she describes a vision of one of the
“elementals,” the “spirit of water” or “Akas of Apas.” It begins thus:

A wide expanse of water with many reflections of bright light, and occa-
sionally glimpses of rainbow colours appearing (perhaps symbolising the
beginning of formation in Water). When divine and other names were pro-
nounced, elementals of the mermaid and merman type appear, but few of
other elemental forms. These water forms are extremely changeable, one
moment appearing as solid mermaids and mermen, the next melting into
foam.16

It continues in this fashion of strongly figural anthropomorphism

(“mermaids and mermen”) mixed with abstract elemental properties
(light, color, solidity, melting). Whereas the image of Isis mixes spiritual
abstraction (she is the goddess of life) with personifying traits (she is the
all-​encompassing mother, nourisher, the healer of her brother Osiris) in a
manner allied to Henri Bergson’s “spirit of the spring” that fabulates an in-
tention directly from an action (of offering, of pouring), these “elementals”
of Mina Bergson are both more and less individuated as persons: they are
equally figural and processual—​“water forms” that appear as mythical sea-​
beasts and flowing matter (“foam”), yet without mental attributes.
This Flying Roll, and other works by Mina Bergson, are found in the
Golden Dawn handbook compiled and edited by Israel Regardie in the
late 1930s. Other entries on the “Apas” Tattwa instruct the user to “imagine
something of the shape and brightness of the half moon, putting down heat
and thirst, and that he is immersed in the ocean of water.” He or she should
also “at that time repeat the word Vam” (a syllable denoting “body, speech,
mind, and gnosis”).17 Mina Bergson herself talks about both images and also
“vibrating the names of Water,” before concluding that “these operative forces
are represented by Angels, each with their respective office in the world of
moisture. These forces working in Yetsirah, when descending and mingling
82  Vestiges of a Philosophy

with the Kether of Assiah, are initiating the force of that which we as human
beings call Moisture.”18 Prolix though this appears, it is clearly a technique of
image and sound manipulation employed to attune our perception within a
watery logic.19 Seen through the assortment of New Age formulae that have
accumulated around similar practices since (opening the “doors of percep-
tion,” drawing back the “veil,” “altering” or “raising” our state of conscious-
ness, etc.), this will doubtless seem both far too outré and equally old-​hat
to be refracted into anything useful for us. Alternatively, we could regard
them as epistemic models or technologies: structural placeholders within
nonstandard techniques for thinking that involve images and sounds, body
practices, and ritualized movements (a “magical thinking” rehabilitated for
thought). In Henri Bergson’s language, if the embodied brain is a filter, then
varying that body-​brain by whatever means—​art, philosophy, mysticism,
diet, self-​harm, injury, disease—​must also alter the filter, our attention, for
good or ill (no drugs required).20 Performed knowledge—​or what others
might call the need to “think in duration” (not about it).21
In the (relatively) respectable direction of this very same thought, we see
Henri Bergson writing, for example, about Socrates as a philosophical exem-
plar who operates more as a posture or contagious emotion than a set of ideas.
His thought is described as “alive” (vivant), a “living thing” that conveys an
“attitude” (from attitudine, “fitness,” “posture”). When later philosophers
adopt that attitude, one of dialogical critique with others, with society, then
“Socrates is there, Socrates alive.” These successors do not follow an archetype
so much as a Socratic movement, which is a form of living. The Socratic is also
called a “creative emotion.”22 Others might be tempted to call it an affective
“meme,” or “block of affect.”23 Yet the continuities at issue here are remakes or
translations rather than “replicators”—​they mutate in each act of copying or
emulation (a hetero-​continuity).24 So, when we wrote earlier that, for Henri
Bergson, the individuality of movement was both its lived, empirical truth
and its metaphysical reality, we might now take this further: movement is
personalized (being general and individual at once).25 We can therefore ask,
which is more insane: invoking “spirits” through ritualized bodily behavior,
or continuing a life as movement, as attitude? Continuing the Socratic move-
ment or, indeed, George Berkeley’s philosophical thought (the Berkeleyan
movement) through the manipulation of images; or expanding one’s spirit-​
vision through objects, practices, and sound?
Don’t answer that question just yet. In a peculiar concurrence, George
Santayana produced a scathing critique of Henri Bergson in 1913 that would
 On Watery Logic, or Magical Thinking  83

certainly imply that committal papers were needed for both brother and
sister. It is sufficiently entertaining and illuminating, however, that it is worth
quoting at some length:

There is a deeper mystification still in this passage, where a writer

[Bergson] is said to “plant himself in the very heart of the subject.” The ge-
neral tenor of M. Bergson’s philosophy warrants us in taking this quite lit-
erally to mean that the field from which inspiration draws its materials is
not the man’s present memory nor even his past experience, but the sub-
ject itself which that experience and this memory regard: in other words,
what we write about and our latent knowledge are the same thing. When
Shakespeare was composing his Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, he
planted himself in the very heart of Rome and of Egypt, and in the very
heart of the Queen of Egypt herself; what he had gathered from Plutarch
and from elsewhere was, according to M. Bergson’s view, a sort of glimpse
of the remote reality itself, as if by telepathy he had been made to witness
some part of it; or rather as if the scope of his consciousness had been
suddenly extended in one direction, so as to embrace and contain bodily a
bit of that outlying experience.26

Bravo! Mina Bergson would certainly not see a problem here—​invocation

is a sound method. Though perhaps a little embarrassed, Henri Bergson,
too, would have to concur with Santayana’s following conclusion: “so per-
ception, for him, lies where its object does, and is some part of it; memory is
the past experience itself, somehow shining through into the present. . . .”27
Again, spot on! Furthermore, “in the universe at large the whole past is pre-
served bodily in the present; duration is real and space is only imagined;
all is motion, and there is nothing substantial that moves; times are incom-
mensurable; men, birds, and waves are nothing but the images of them (our
perceptions, like their spirits, being some compendium of these images).”
Images, yes, which are moving. So, if the “Queen of Egypt” is understood as
a complexity of movements (posture, attitude, at micro-​and macro-​scales),
then it is, of course, possible in principle to place oneself into her “very
heart”—​to become her, by invoking covarying movements. And this might
involve, ridiculous though this will sound, the literal cells and organelles of a
heart qua biological organ, and every other part materially implicated in what
was unique about Cleopatra, what her movement embodied. Movement is all
that survives.
84  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Of course, this was all intended as a reproach: for Santayana—​the “mel-

ancholy Platonist,” according to George Steiner—​Henri Bergson offers us
“nothing but the images” of real things, and that will not do.28 Bergson’s
opening renunciation in Matter and Memory of both idealism and realism is
but a sham, Santayana says: Bergsonism is merely a “terrified idealism,” a phi-
losophy where “appearance is all.”29 Yet “appearance” is taken by Santayana to
mean idea at best, and an image at worst. And for him an image is only a pic-
ture (when it is far more than that for Henri Bergson). Moreover, Santayana
is also a dualist, and so for him it follows that there can be no middle ground
between realism or idealism. This part of his attack concerns Matter and
Memory when Henri Bergson says that he is using the word “image” uni-
versally to designate “a certain existence which is more than that which the
idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist [read ‘mate-
rialist’] calls a thing—​an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and the
‘representation.’ ”30
Admittedly, the word “image” would seem to be a very poor starting
point for a philosophy that purports to be neutral as regards idealism and
materialism, at least if image is to act as some form of “neutral monism”
(to use Bertrand Russell’s term).31 So why did Henri Bergson choose the
term “image”? Images are also affective and moving, according to Matter
and Memory’s first chapter, so their visuality may well be synaesthetic—​as
pure perceptions, the individuated modalities of the senses would emerge
only latterly, once these images have been refracted.32 The neutral, there-
fore, may be less semantic impartiality than simple equalizing, a flattening
within a dynamic monism of movements. This is an equalizing along a con-
tinuum or spectrum made of time—​images of/​as time. There would still be
differentiation by degree—​so mind and world are not identical: again, my
memory is a (real) part of the past—​but it would not be spatial (“remote,”
as Santayana puts it). When Santayana speaks of the scope of consciousness
being “extended in one direction, so as to embrace and contain bodily a bit of
that outlying experience,” he is not that far off the mark. Mina Bergson’s spir-
itualization of matter and materialization of spirit is not a neutral monism ei-
ther, but another way of demonstrating a watery, mind-​world intermingling
(a “halfway” existence) that operates temporally through movement (when
understood as both general and individual).
 2° =​9° Theoricus Covariant

Possibly the most emblematic of the new materialisms to have emerged is

the “vital materialism” of political theorist Jane Bennett. A good deal of her
contribution to the movement revolves around what she sees as a misun-
derstanding of matter as something inert or passive, devoid of all vitality.
Reversing this attitude is her primary objective. As we heard John Zammito
describe before, “spirit” has always posed a problem for new materialism.
And this problem also provides the theoretical context for Bennett’s own ma-
terialism in the following manner:

One of the essentially contested issues surrounding the new materialism

is how to conceive the relation of “spirit” to the natural. Should the pro-
ject be to divest even the human of the last vestiges of “spirit,” thus com-
pleting the “disenchantment of the world,” or should the project be to read
“spirit,” traditionally taken to be exclusively human, as more widely and es-
sentially distributed in nature itself? [ . . . ] Two stances have emerged: “re-​
enchantment of the world” as “vibrant matter,” celebrated by Jane Bennett
and others; and “visceral” materialism, heaping scorn upon any residue of
the “ghost in the machine.”1

We will see, however, that Bennett would actually contest any connection
between her vibrant matter and “spirit.” In her materialism, it is matter alone
that has both real agency and life. So far, so old vitalism perhaps, but this
rough similarity to older vitalisms conceals a real advance on them in her
view. For example, she rejects Aristotle’s hylomorphic dualism of a “pas-
sive,” “raw, brute, or inert” matter that, like some sleeping beauty, awaits a
suitor to wake it into apparent life. This dualist view sees “vibrant life” as
what arrives from an outside to insert itself into a “dull” material (hyle), give it
form (morphé), and make it flower into a semblance of its own life.2 Though
she admits that the hylomorphic model is “a kind of vitalism, positing some

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0009
86  Vestiges of a Philosophy

nonmaterial supplement with the power to transform mere matter into

embodied life,” the fact remains that, in its approach, “any “formative” power
must be external to a brute, mechanical matter.”3 For Bennett, though, matter
is not like this at all: against a dualist and mechanist tradition going back to
Descartes, her matter is not comprised of “merely mechanical operations.”4
It has real agency. Nor is matter a separate world within a world (that also
contains spirit, life, or mind): rather, “everything is made of the same sub-
stance” (matter), which comprises all “things” and “events,” human and non-
human.5 Fundamentally, then, matter is “vibrant, dangerously vibrant,” and
comes already “formed” as active bodies that, much as Spinoza would have
thought, “strive to enhance their power of activity by forming alliances with
other bodies.”6
Certainly, then, matter is not mechanical in this approach: this is a
nonreductive materialism. Following Bruno Latour’s actor-​network theory
of “actants,” Bennett defines vitality as “the capacity of things—​edibles, com-
modities, storms, metals—​not only to impede or block the will and designs
of humans but also to act as quasi-​agents or forces with trajectories, propen-
sities, or tendencies of their own.”7 This stance will allow her, she claims, to
“theorize events (a blackout, a meal, an imprisonment in chains, an expe-
rience of litter) as encounters between ontologically diverse actants, some
human, some not, though all thoroughly material.”8 Such “vital materialism”
in Bennett’s eyes is a true ontological equality. And, despite any appearance
of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism (the second of which Bennett
does not find off-​putting anyway), this is a political equality, too, of sorts: a
material democracy in action. Bennett’s thesis is, after all, not only a phil-
osophical one: it is also “a political ecology of things”—​a vital materialist
theory of democracy.9
Two additional features of Bennett’s materialism is its focus on things,
“thing-​power,” and the networks which they comprise (again following
Latour but also Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblage theory”). Being already
formed, matter is never amorphous and always “thingly.”10 She is interested
in the “materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap,” as well as
“fire, electricity, berries, metal.” These are all things, that is, vivid entities not
wholly reducible to the “contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never
entirely exhausted by their semiotics.” These entities possess “thing-​power,” a
phenomenon, she says, that “gestures toward the strange ability of ordinary,
man-​made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of
independence or aliveness.”11 Importantly, these things act within a “human
 2° = 9° Theoricus Covariant  87

nonhuman assemblage,” a “federation of actants.”12 As Isabella van Elferen

points out, in a Latourian actor-​network, action “is continuously distributed
between actors, always overtaken or “other-​taken” by other actors.” Action is
always interaction with others, and this is the case irrespective of whether or
not “these others are human or non-​human.”13
This wide distribution of action, of “doing,” among participants allows
Bennett to sidestep subject-​centered questions of intentionality: Did the gar-
bage disposal unit decide to break down? Does the temperature gauge know
how hot it is? These seem like reasonable examples of reductio ad absurdum.
Yet mental attitudes alone do not an action make. Instead, Bennett asks such
thingly questions as the following:

Did the typical American diet play any role in engendering the widespread
susceptibility to the propaganda leading up to the invasion of Iraq? Do
sand storms make a difference to the spread of so-​called sectarian violence?
Does mercury help enact autism? In what ways does the effect on sensibility
of a video game exceed the intentions of its designers and users?14

In this celebration of thing-​power and material vitality, Spinoza, Latour,

and Deleuze are frequently invoked by Bennett as allies. So, what of Henri
Bergson and his vitalist philosophy? Here, Bennett is more circumspect. On
the one hand, she opens her research with the clear acknowledgment that
if a “vital materiality can start to take shape,” one must awaken what Henri
Bergson described as “a latent belief in the spontaneity of nature.”15 On the
other hand, however, Henri Bergson’s own vitalism is still too dualistic for
her, being “based on the distinction between life and matter” that leaves
matter as “unfree, mechanistic, and deterministic.”16 Though she shares with
Henri Bergson a “common foe in mechanistic or deterministic materialism,”
and even accepts that for him life and matter are not separate substances but
“tendencies,” or “strivings that exist only in conjunction and competition
with each other,” or even just “nascent changes of direction,” still and all, even
Henri Bergson is tarred with the same brush of participating in “the tradition
of imagining matter as inert.”17
This is an inaccurate reading, or rather, it is inattentive. Yes, across an en-
tire philosophy spanning over forty years of work, one can dig out phrases
from Henri Bergson that sound dualistic and traditionally ungenerous
in their attitude toward matter. Nonetheless, the vast majority of his core
ideas do not treat matter as mechanistic, inert, and passive. Space, however,
88  Vestiges of a Philosophy

understood as a projection made upon matter, is indeed a tool, a pure means,

by which organized matter (life) seizes other things around it. But matter
for Henri Bergson has its own duration, and therewith a vitality and even
consciousness of its own (at a certain level). Matter and Memory states it
clearly: “matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked to-
gether in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and trav-
eling in every direction like shivers through an immense body.”18 Summing
up his philosophy in 1920, Henri Bergson even invoked the notion of “World
Soul” as prefiguring what can only be called a “vital materialism”:

The ancients had imagined a World Soul supposed to assure the conti-
nuity of existence of the material universe. Stripping this conception of its
mythical element, I should say that the inorganic world is a series of infi-
nitely rapid repetitions or quasi-​repetitions which, when totalled, consti-
tute visible and previsible changes. I should compare them to the swinging
of the pendulum of a clock: the swingings of the pendulum are coupled
to the continuous unwinding of a spring linking them together and whose
unwinding they mark; the repetitions of the inorganic world constitute
rhythm in the life of conscious beings and measure their duration. Thus the
living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is
continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration
without searching, no searching without groping. Time is this very hesita-
tion, or it is nothing. Suppress the conscious and the living (and you can do
this only through an artificial effort of abstraction, for the material world
once again implies perhaps the necessary presence of consciousness and
of life), you obtain in fact a universe whose successive states are in theory
calculable in advance, like the images placed side by side along the cinemat-
ographic film, prior to its unrolling. Why, then, the unrolling? Why does
reality unfurl? Why is it not spread out? What good is time?19

Of course, Henri Bergson is talking here about atomic and subatomic

levels of matter rather than at Bennett’s more thingly scale, but his point
still stands: that time exists at all, that the whole is never given but always
unrolling, always unfurling—​this is the central question. In fact, the impor-
tance of real time (its ineliminability) in Henri Bergson’s philosophy is such
that the answer to the question—​what good is time?—​shows why the mate-
rial universe must be regarded as living. Even predictable processes (such as
the clock mechanism he describes above), given that they, too, are processes
 2° = 9° Theoricus Covariant  89

and so rhythmic and temporal, indicates for Bergsonism the presence of life
in the material realm. As Camille Riquier comments, taking color vibrations
as his example, and all the while interpolating Henri Bergson’s own words:

Red is, at one level, a light that “accomplishes 400 trillion successive
vibrations,” at another level, a sensation of color for a perception that has
contracted it “in a duration too narrow to capture the moments.” Body and
soul, matter and perception, “flow posed on a flow,” the “difference in ten-
sion” between their rhythms “explains their duality and their coexistence.”
At the same time as consciousness intensifies in perception, its own rhythm
is thwarted and delayed by the rhythm of matter.20

It is a “difference in tension” between their rhythms that “explains their duality

and their coexistence.” So, yes, Henri Bergson incorporates the appearance
of duality into his explanation rather than brushing it aside as a misunder-
standing. But “body and soul” have rhythm, vibrate, and so are alive, albeit at
different levels. There is even a moral case to be made that Henri Bergson ac-
tually sees matter as unfairly deprived on its own durée by other levels—​those
that regard only themselves uniquely as forms of life. This vitalist chauvinism
condenses the durée that belongs to matter and with that, an indeterminate
realm is transformed into a determinate one:

one might ask . . . if it is not precisely to pour matter into this deter-
minism . . . that our perception stops at a certain particular degree of con-
densation of elementary events. In a more general sense, the activity of the
living being leans upon and is measured by the necessity supporting things,
by a condensation of their duration.21

A “condensation of their duration.” Matter clearly belongs to the same stuff as

life, even while being different. It may have no agency in the Bennett-​Latour
sense of the term (which is already an anthropomorphism, as Bennett will
happily admit), but it is not “mechanistic,” not “passive,” and not “inert.”
Why, then, does Bennett not see this? Why does she not give Henri Bergson
the same benefit of, if not doubt, then at least the partial ambiguity that she
accords to others? Spinoza, for instance, is still regarded as a “touchstone” for
her work, despite his theism and the foundational nature of God in his phi-
losophy.22 Riquier’s reference to “body and soul” earlier (“corps et âme”) may
hold the solution. I believe that the answer to Bennett’s selective vision comes
90  Vestiges of a Philosophy

down to the word “spirit,” a term still associated with Bergsonism, despite
Deleuze’s “monstrous” reading that downplayed its role to that of a bit part.23
To participate in Bennett’s version of a new materialism, all notions of spirit
must be exorcized. As she puts it, there can be no “spiritual supplement”
added to matter.24 “The vibrancy I posit in matter,” she writes, can never be
“attributed to a nonmaterial source, to an animating spirit or ‘soul.’ ”25 The
“temptation” of pervious vitalisms, including Henri Bergson’s but also Hans
Driesch’s, is always to “spiritualize the vital agent”—​and this must be avoided
in any new vital materialism that she could support.26
Admittedly, Bennett is honest about some of the extra-​philosophical
motives in her animosity toward spiritualism, taking a considerable time-​
out to familiarize the reader with specifically American trends in political
culture. In particular, there is what she calls the “soul vitalism” of Christian
evangelists (promoted by ex-​President George W. Bush while in office be-
tween 2000 and 2008). Caught up with the politics of embryo rights and
women’s rights, these Christians interpret “vital force” as “a divine spirit
that animates the matter of the embryo.”27 And, though Bennett is careful
to distinguish the vitalism of Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch from this
soul vitalism, one still suspects that there remains some guilt by associ-
ation nonetheless, a good deal of the problem resting on the term “soul”
and its connections with “spirit.” Yet, as we know, not all spiritualisms are
alike, and we should be careful to distinguish “spiritism” from philosophical
spiritualism.
Indeed, the term “spiritualist” belongs with a whole constellation
of other titles that can be ascribed to Henri Bergson equally. As Mark
Sinclair proposes: “Bergson is an animist, a spiritualist, and a panpsychist”
(ironically, only “vitalist” is missing from his list here).28 Marie Cariou
would add “pantheism” to that list, though it would be unlike any form
that went before: “if Bergson rejects traditional pantheism and monism
it is on the ground of a new pantheism and a new monism: an open pan-
theism and monism where the union of God with nature is not confusion,
where the unicity of the élan vital is not reductive but where one cannot
deny, without contrivance, that the all is in the same and the same in all.”29
“Dynamic monism,” “dualist and unitary,” “dualism of tendency”—​these
descriptions, and others, can be taken as synonymous, or at any rate as
alternative images for the “heterogeneous continuity” we have been
defending throughout these pages.30 They certainly do not denote reduc-
tive, mechanical conceptions of matter.
 2° = 9° Theoricus Covariant  91

Panpsychism, for instance, though not a term Bennett uses in Vibrant

Matter at least, should not be so neglected and can be taken as an approach
allied to vital materialism (assuming that any version in question does not
simply replicate a hylomorphic duality in micro). Certainly, Bruno Latour is
not allergic to the term, especially given his admiration of A. N. Whitehead’s
philosophy. More to the point, though, attributing psyche to all being, which
is a recurrent reading of Bergson, must surely dispel the impression of anti-​
matter tendencies in his thought. From Henri Hude (“panpsychist theses are
constant in Bergson. It is a Leibnizian heritage”), through Mark Sinclair as
cited above, to Yasushi Hirai’s recent work on this very topic, categorizing
Henri Bergson as panpsychist is hardly controversial.31 Hirai also cites Barry
Dainton on the issue, an analytical philosopher who commends Henri
Bergson’s version of panpsychism as “an attractive position in the contempo-
rary analytical context.” Dainton himself says that

Bergson’s solution to the problem of consciousness is not solely of histor-

ical interest. For anyone interested in a unified, monistic, world-​view, one
where the mental and the physical are not fundamentally different in kind,
then the approach pioneered by Bergson—​a novel combination of direct
realism and panpsychism—​is well worth considering.32

The quotation from Henri Bergson that we used earlier to introduce his own
vital materialism (and panpsychism) referred to the ancient conception of
a “World Soul,” an idea he then stripped of its “mythical element” in order
to offer us his metaphysical variation on the same theme. Oddly enough,
for all Bennett’s aversion to “soul vitalism” in favor of something more non-
human, we know that she is not against all forms of anthropomorphism in
principle. A “touch of anthropomorphism” she says, can “catalyze” our sen-
sibilities: “revealing similarities across categorical divides and lighting up
structural parallels between material forms in “nature” and those in “culture,”
anthropomorphism can reveal isomorphisms.”33 Furthermore, Bennett goes
so far as to liken vibrant matter to that sense of the word “nature” that histori-
cally “signaled generativity, fecundity,” and was anthropomorphically named
“Isis or Aphrodite.”34 (We will return to Isis, or rather she to us, later.)
Such anthropomorphizing may even be “worth running the risks associ-
ated” with it, Bennett concedes, namely “superstition, the divinization of na-
ture, romanticism”—​in other words, the mythic language of souls.35 Again,
her charity of interpretation does seem rather one-​way. For the fact is, it only
92  Vestiges of a Philosophy

takes a little first-​hand knowledge of Henri Bergson’s texts to move beyond

the stereotypical interpretation of Bergsonian vitalism as a notion regarding
some mysterious substance or force animating all living matter in a hylo-
morphic fashion. The theory of the élan vital has little of the anima sensitiva,
archeus, entelechy, or vital fluid of classical vitalisms. This is a critical vitalism
focused on life as a thesis concerning time (life as continuous change and
innovation) as well as an explanatory principle in general for all the life sci-
ences. When asked directly about the meaning of his vitalism, Bergson was
adamant: “all that is positive in my vital impetus is motion.”36
This hermeneutical aspect of Bergson’s vitalism should give us pause. It
is part and parcel of his own nonreductive, anti-​mechanistic approach that
cautions against excessive objectivism in biology. Indeed, even Creative
Evolution describes vitalism simply as “a sort of label affixed to our ignorance
[as to the true cause of evolution], so as to remind us of this occasionally.” He
then adds that it is the mechanistic (neo-​Darwinian) interpretation of the
development of life that “invites us to ignore that ignorance.”37 Going fur-
ther, among the various meanings of Henri Bergson’s élan, one that stands
out comes from The Two Sources as a principle of unknowing, an obstacle
to totalizing explanation. The élan here again stands for the intractability of
any complete “physico-​chemical explanation of life,” for the “inadequacy of
Darwinism,” the “mysterious character of the operation of life,” and finally
for “what is still unknown” in our philosophy of life.38 Can it be doubted,
then, that Henri Bergson’s élan is also an epistemological corrective? Indeed,
Richard Green goes further still, citing the élan as an idea that was never
intended “to explain anything; he [Bergson] merely wanted this poetic ex-
pression to mark that about living things which could not be understood
in mechanistic (or in finalistic) terms.”39 From this perspective, it could be
argued that Henri Bergson’s vitalism has transformed in his last monograph
from what was misunderstood as an inexplicable and inexpressible force into
a principle of conceptual insufficiency when faced with vital phenomena.
More than merely an epistemic principle of “negative capability,” however,
this notion goes well beyond representation, true or false.
Valorizing the unknown is not mystery mongering for the sake of it.
Bennett herself writes that “a careful course of anthropomorphization can
help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds
my comprehensive grasp.”40 Well, the question of what “exceeds my compre-
hensive grasp” is central to Henri Bergson’s élan, too, but without gratuitous
mystification. Going beyond supposedly clear concepts when discussing life,
 2° = 9° Theoricus Covariant  93

the vibrant, or vitality, and instead embracing “merely” suggestive imagery

is not the second-​best option in his view, but the only way to think of life
consistently, or rather covariantly. Admittedly, Henri Bergson’s use of highly
imagistic language for the élan won him as many enemies as it did friends.
Yet it has to be said that Bennett’s own work is also strewn with images (or
“modifiers” as she calls them) of life’s movement: there is a “pulsing” dimen-
sion to agency, things are “aquiver” with virtual force, matter is “vibrant,
vital, energetic, lively, quivering, vibratory, evanescent, and effluescent.”41
Bennett is not at all ashamed of her ornate language, of course, and it comes
atop of her well-​informed discussions of stem cell biology or metallurgy that
certainly offer up much more fine-​grained empirical evidence than is found
in the work of many other post-​Deleuzian theorists. The ornament is nei-
ther for show nor (however) heuristic purpose. It just is. For Henri Bergson,
though, “vague” imagery is actually the most precise means available when
it comes to durational phenomena, the best way to suggest its intuition when
a “clear” concept is not only lacking but also unwanted (and harmful). The
élan, and the images that instantiate it, suggest a movement when we cannot
know it conceptually. Nevertheless, any possible turn to the unknown as a
positive reality like this is not entertained by Bennett in the way that Henri
Bergson believes necessary.
Placing such heavy value in the unknown, on what remains below our ful-
lest “sensibility” and conceptualization, is not, incidentally, forwarded here
as a kind of “God of the gaps,” or rather, “vitalism of the gaps” (the “gaps” in
question would need specification in any case—​would these be spatial gaps
or temporal ones, and at what scale?). Of course, one can praise uncertainty as
a virtue, but it can also be a crutch. Perhaps it is its religious connotations that
make many resist embracing such an under-​knowing, believing adamantly
that only dogmatic credulity will follow from it. Nonetheless, unknowing can
itself be positive, an immanent force worth cultivating as a movement first
rather than only as misrepresentation. Unknowing in this context is not an
epistemic state—​qua lack in knowledge, a privation or failure in accessing the
Real—​but a countervailing force, orientation, or movement already within
the Real.42 The occult—​from the Latin occultus, “hidden from sight, secret,
esoteric”—​need not be a cult (of power). Occultus comes from the past parti-
ciple of occulere “to hide from view, conceal” (which itself goes back to Indo-​
European *ḱel-​ meaning “cover, conceal”). The Theoricus grade, however,
means “beholder, spectator” (just as “theory” does). In this context, we might
say that Bennett beholds just as much as she disregards. This is not a fault to
94  Vestiges of a Philosophy

be corrected through a rectification in thinking from the outside. She cannot

see value in spirit because she beholds, and theorizes, matter in another way.
The Theoricus covariant. To see spirit differently, not as immaterial substance
but as multiple movements shared equally between both things deemed “ma-
terial” and those things deemed their opposite, would be a reorientation, a
shift in attention, and, perhaps, a further democratizing gesture in thought
and vision.
When all movement is mysterious (not just God’s), then preserving the
“mystery as mystery” (as Martin Heidegger put it) is neither obfuscation nor
epistemic failure—​it is vital. Why, after all, was becoming or change so mys-
terious to ancient philosophers that Parmenides would deny its reality? Why
was movement also so mysterious (or “paradoxical”) to Zeno of Elea sub-
sequently? These were not just thought experiments in the modern sense,
but real experiences of unknowing, some things being seen and understood,
others not. According to Henri Bergson, real time, understood as qualitative
change, the constant upsurge of novelty, or movement, is something which
we “cannot think”—​but we can feel it: “all this we can feel within ourselves
and also divine, by sympathy, outside ourselves, but we cannot think it, in the
strict sense of the word, nor express it in terms of pure understanding.”43 To
the “pure understanding” or conceptual mind, real time, change, or move-
ment is not only unfathomable, it is unseen or unattended. Significantly, the
etymology of “mystery” is shared with that of “mystic.” Both come from the
Greek mustikos and mustés—​meaning an “initiated person,” but they also
hark back to muo and muein, meaning to “close the eyes or mouth.”
In every variation there are unknown, unseen variables. Theoricus, to be-
hold. Occultus, to conceal. Two sides of one dyad. When we turn to Karen
Barad’s “agential realism” and its use of Neils Bohr’s atomic theory, we will
see a different balance of insight and blindness to that of Jane Bennett’s vital
materialism. None of these occlusions should be seen as epistemic failures
but rather as the ocular dynamics of thought, the necessity of selective in/​
attention. Moreover, we will soon propose that there are unknown or hidden
variables that are real-​as-​unknown. Following David Bohm’s alternative
interpretation of the mysterious phenomena of nonlocality seen in the op-
erations of quantum mechanics, we will argue that the unknown is not essen-
tially unknowable in any one location (localization again) but functions in a
radically holistic manner that makes their “hidden” status ontological rather
than epistemological: the whole is itself open, indeterminate, and indefinite,
not just our knowledge of it.
 6
Of the Survival of Images

Modern theories concerning the relationship between images and magic run
from examples like André Bazin through Stanley Cavell to Vilém Flusser,
each emphasizing in their own fashion how images operate very differently
when set within the context of magic. As Flusser writes, “in the historical
world, sunrise is the cause of the cock’s crowing; in the magical one, sunrise
signifies crowing and crowing signifies sunrise.”1 He extends this reciprocity
of meaning further when discussing color images:

If one compares the colour of our own world with that of the Middle Ages
or of non-​European cultures, one is faced with the difference that the
colours of the Middle Ages and those of “exotic” cultures are magic symbols
signifying mythical elements, whereas for us they are mythical symbols at
work on a theoretical level, elements of programs. For example, “red” in the
Middle Ages signified the danger of being swallowed up by Hell. Similarly,
for us “red” at traffic lights still signifies “danger,” but programmed in such
a way that we automatically put our foot on the brake without at the same
time engaging our consciousness.2

Within the Hermetic context, the power of the image, and the making of
images through special use of the imagination, gains even more power, taking
the image well beyond any unreal representational interpretation. Recall the
guidance from the Flying Roll on “Some Thoughts on the Imagination” stip-
ulating that the creation of images is a very real act: the imagination is not
“imaginary”—​it forms a reality.3 Imagination, “the faculty of building an
image” as Mina Bergson puts it, is a creative tool that the occult practitioner
uses with trained skill.4 When she discusses Tattwa cards revealing the “spirit
of water,” or “Akas of Apas,” the images of each are no mere pictures alone—​
they are implements as well. The image for “Akas” is a black or indigo egg,
and for “Apas” a silver crescent (see Figure 5).

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0010
96  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Figure 5  “Akas of Apas” Tattwa Cards

These images or thought-​pictures, produced on Tattwa cards, could be used

for a number of occult practices. As Joscelyn Godwin explains in “Esoteric
Theories of Color,” the use of flashing colors such as on Tattwa cards employed
“a physiological phenomenon, in which the eye projects a color that is not
there, to create an imaginal situation. The purpose is to enter a realm where
vision operates without a physical substratum. Such things happen in dream
and drug experiences, but the object of the Golden Dawn’s, as of most initiatic
training, was to enter such states voluntarily and to control them.”5
In “Of Skrying,” Mina Bergson herself writes “in both skrying and astral
projection, then, the key to success would appear to be, alternately, to employ
intuition and reason, firstly by permitting each thought-​picture to impress
itself on the brain in the manner comprehended generally by the word ‘inspi-
ration,’ followed by the reason applying its knowledge . . . to an affirmation or
correction of the same.”6 Whereas astral projection—​a form of self-​hypnosis
through concentration upon a symbol (a self-​induced pure consciousness
event perhaps)—​can begin with figurative images, scrying more often than
not begins with real or quasi-​reflective surfaces. Hence, the Tattwa card acts a
kind of mirror, allowing the practitioner to perceive

some scene in the universe reflected in the symbol which you hold, this
latter being to you as a mirror which shall reflect to you some scenes not
within your range of sight. And secondly, you can continue the operation
by using the same symbol, and by passing through it project yourself to the
scene in question, which before you had only perceived as a reflection.7

In other words, the Tattwa vision is a form of virtual image. She con-
tinues: “you must be prepared to receive impressions of scenes, forms, and
 Of the Survival of Images  97

sounds as vivid thought forms.” Such “thought forms” are not only visual,
though, but involve complete “experiences,” that is, “things heard, things felt,
as well as things seen, which would prove that the qualities that we are here
using are really the sublimated senses.” This material “crystallizes the astral
plane and completes it.”8
The image is not “imaginary,” remember, and there is almost a quasi-​
synesthesia of images being employed here, one that defragments our sep-
arate sensory modalities in order to remount the slope of emanation from
the infinite Ein Sof. When neuroscience argues that synesthesia could be an
example of “human vestigiality” (reflecting a phase of brain development
prior to its evolution into specialized sensory functions), then synesthetes
themselves become vestiges of our neurological past—​living embodiments
of the “spiritual in art” (as Wassily Kandinsky put it) or the art in spiritu-
alism (seen in members of the Golden Dawn and their practices).9 A “spir-
itual synesthesia” might even be something nonsynesthetes could acquire
through the Golden Dawn’s training methods: operating on the plasticity of
mind and brain to reintegrate separate images into a more holistic, contin-
uous perception.
Indeed, in what could almost be Mina Bergson’s own invocation of
Leibniz’s notion that each monad’s perception is a more or less confused
image of the entire universe (a reference Henri Bergson was fond of making),
she adds that these “insignia and implements” embody “a perfect represen-
tation of the universe.”10 The ritual implement is a monad, no less than each
image of the universe in Matter and Memory’s first chapter is also a monad.
And when writing about travelling on the astral plane, Mina Bergson goes
further still:

Having succeeded in obtaining the thought vision of the symbol, continue

vibrating the divine names with the idea well fixed in your mind of calling be-
fore you on the card a brain picture of some scene or landscape. This, when it
first appears, will probably be vague, but continue to realize it more and more
of whatever nature (imagination or memory, etc.), you may believe it to be—​
remembering that this is a passive state of the mind, and not yet is the time to
test or reason. Only when the thought picture shall have become sufficiently
tangible and vivid, and you find that you are beginning to lose the sense of
confusion and vagueness, should you begin to apply tests.11

We earlier heard Egil Asprem talking about this testing phase of occult travel
in the imagination as a method of verification and error elimination with
98  Vestiges of a Philosophy

quasi-​scientific rigor. Mina Bergson herself finally notes that the return to
this world from the Astral Plane can also be challenging:

Some students, I believe, have great difficulty in returning. In such a case

one can do so gradually by first flying into space, thinking of this planet,
fixing the thoughts on the particular country, then on the particular spot
therein, then on the house, and lastly on the room and entering therein. But
in most cases this would be unnecessarily complicated.12

We need no reminder that Matter and Memory begins with images “in the
vaguest sense of the word”—​a vagueness that is not by chance and is not a
lack. Again, Henri Bergson’s position was that his seemingly vague (and or-
nate) language was the clearest way to depict durée.13 In an interview with
Lydie Adophe, he responded curtly to the suggestion that his ideas were
sometimes metaphorical: “I rarely make metaphors, interrupted Bergson
sharply. These are images.”14 Indeed, when it comes to the “spiritual world,”
for Henri Bergson it is the suggestive power of the image that may allow
us a “direct vision.”15 Here is my point: vagueness also operates in Henri
Bergson’s travels, not on the Astral Plane, but on his own virtual one of pure
memory, where the past/​my past exists. In one passage from Matter and
Memory, he offers us instructions on how to “actualize” a recollection from
this virtual plane of pure memory (so beloved of Deleuzian readers):

. . . we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first,

in the past in general, then, in a certain region of the past—​a work of ad-
justment, something like the focusing of a camera. But our recollection
still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting
the appropriate attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing
cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines be-
come more distinct and its surface takes on color, it tends to imitate percep-
tion. But it remains attached to the past by its deepest roots, and if, when
once realized, it did not retain something of its original virtuality, if, being a
present state, it were not also something which stands out distinct from the
present, we should never know it for a memory.16

Gilles Deleuze, and Deleuzian readers of Bergson, ontologize this plane of

pure memory, making it absolutely nonpsychological. In doing so, they ig-
nore the fact that Henri Bergson never opposed psyche to matter or being.
Everything endures to some degree: even the absolute endures (be it taken as
 Of the Survival of Images  99

B'

C'

D'

Figure 6  Bergson’s Circles of Expanded Memory (Reproduced from Bergson,

Matter and Memory, 1911)

Divine Being or Being as such)—​it is never complete, but open, becoming,

or indefinite. Yet, irrespective of whether the ontology of the virtual is re-
ally a (cosmic) psychology, the parallels between entering and leaving the
virtual and astral planes, as described by Henri and Mina respectively, are
conspicuous. Both use images that are vague and wide in scope at the outset,
becoming sharper in detail, more concrete and particular as we progress,
falling back either to earth or the world of actual perception.
I have frequently stated that Matter and Memory is Henri Bergson’s strangest
book. It is also his most graphical, being by far the most illustrated with diagram-
matic images. The most famous diagrams from it are the Circles of Expanded
Memory, the Cone of Memory, and the Line of Pure Memory to Perception.
The diagram above (Figure 6) is of the “circles of (expanded) memory”
(A, B, C . . .), reflected in the “deeper strata of reality” (A,′ B,′ C′ . . . ). We
have already seen the inverted cone image (see Figure 4 on page 50), one
of two variants appearing in Matter and Memory’s third chapter titled, “Of
the Survival of Images.” As we know, the base of the inverted cone, A, B,
represents the virtual plane of pure memory, understood as the persisting
past itself. Memory operates first through a relocation upward, moving away
from the apex and toward the summit, A, B, before then redescending down
toward the point S. The summit is also the “place” where images survive—​as
if images could live, die, and return.17 In truth, they do not die so much as fall
into a disregard. The next image (Figure 7) shows our entire “psychical life”
rendered as a line straddling pure memory and perception.18
100  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Pure memory Memory image Perception

A B O C D

Figure 7  Bergson’s Line of Pure Memory to Perception (Reproduced from

Bergson, Matter and Memory, 1911)

The diagrams found in the handbook of the Golden Dawn are clearly
embedded within a very different network of mystical references and
practices. Nonetheless, though they do not offer us a stand-​alone philosophy
(unless we take their practices as philosophy), they do evoke many continui-
ties with Henri Bergson’s diagrams in Matter and Memory.19
The image on the next page (Figure 8) is the “Connection Between the
Worlds” of Malkuth and Kether. Malkuth (‫) מלכות‬, drawn top, is the most “ma�-
terial” emanation from Ein Sof (‫)אין סוף‬. Kether (‫)כתֶ ר‬,ֶ ּ shown bottom, is the
closest or most direct to Ein Sof of any order of manifestation. Note that its ori-
entation is inverse to the Tree of Life, where Malkuth is at the base, Kether at
the summit. The Tree of Life itself (see Figure 1 on page 19), leaves even less to
the comparative imagination. It is composed of ten spheres (“Sephiroth”), with
each sphere (Sephirah) denoting a divine or universal quality, an emanation of
God, but also possessing specific attributes of angels, angelic orders, or astro-
logical correlates. They are arrayed according to these orders, ranked in terms
of immediacy to the highest divine quality, with Kether utmost at the top. Every
aspect of an adept’s training is to allow him or her to progress from the base to
the summit. The final image (Figure 9) is titled “Directions of Force in Enochian
Pyramids.”20 What echoes here are the lines of force of each of the elements,
which are similarly centripetal and placed along two perpendicular axes in the
diagram, similar to Henri Bergson’s “psychical life” drawing (Figure 7).
Particularly redolent, however, are the conic images and the movements
they outline, there even being a clear though indirect influence between Henri
Bergson’s usage and the Golden Dawn’s via W. B. Yeats. The famed images of
“widening” gyres, cones, and vortices strewn throughout Yeats’s poetry, but es-
pecially in his book A Vision (that he dedicated to Mina Bergson), stem from
Figure 8  Connection between the Worlds (Reproduced from Israel Regardie,
The Golden Dawn, 1937)

Strongest Weakest
place of place of
Air Fire
Strongest Strongest
place of place of
Earth Water
Weakest Weakest
place of place of
Water Earth
Strongest Weakest
place of place of
Fire Air

Figure 9  Directions of Force in Enochian Pyramids (Reproduced from Israel

Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 1937)
102  Vestiges of a Philosophy

the “experiments and thinking” he took away from his time with the Golden
Dawn. Furthermore, according to Meghan McGuire, Yeats was also influenced
by Henri Bergson directly after his Golden Dawn period, and those very
same gyres correlate heavily with “the diagrams of cones and gyres scattered
throughout Yeats’s copy of Matter and Memory.”21 Naturally, however, such fig-
ures do not establish any sure lineage—​they are just lines after all—​and so they
do not prove influence (be that proof through logical argument or empirical
evidence). But this display is not about influence. What it does demonstrate
(show) are visual echoes, covarying images, that, circumstantial though they
are, help to complete a picture in our imagination.
The diagrammatic and rich, colorful use of Tattwa symbols is also part of
this image-​building practice. I already introduced some of the Tattwa visions
for Akas and Apas earlier. The most significant others are reproduced here in
full (Figure 10).

Element Alone Earth Air Water Fire Spirit

Earth
(Prithivi)

Air
(Vayu)

Water
(Apas)

Fire
(Tejas)

Spirit
(Akasa)

Figure 10  Tattwa Symbols

 Of the Survival of Images  103

Even more complex are the myriad diagrammatic drawings found within
the grimoires of Golden Dawn members, each one devoutly copied out by
hand. Several pages, from the copy held at the Free Masons’ United Grand
Lodge in London, are reproduced here (Figures 11a–​c).22
Of course, though seldom mentioned thus far, the contribution of the
Tarot—​or divination cards—​to the graphical toolkit of the Order is extremely
important, too. In fact, Mina Bergson designed her own set specifically for
the Golden Dawn—​as did each member, irrespective of his or her artistic
talent.23 We should consider, though, that Mina Bergson was also the most
accomplished visual artist in the Golden Dawn (see Figure 12),24 and this
left her responsible for illustrating various manuscripts as well as much of
the visual design and decoration of the Ahathoor Temple in Paris, including
its contents—​the props, implements, and other paraphernalia of ceremony.
Indeed, Mina Bergson’s artistic skill and training were eventually dedi-
cated to spiritual practices alone, such that when she writes to Yeats about
conducting “various experiments with colour,” this should be understood
as more than simply an aesthetic development—​it must have been an oc-
cult experiment, too.25 As Charlotte de Mille notes, Mina Bergson “may have
mostly stopped painting oil on canvas, but she did not stop creating. And
in accordance with the beliefs of the GD, she regarded her work in ritual as
a means of manifesting a truer, more insightful consciousness in the indi-
vidual, and by that individual, in society at large—​the noblest endeavor pos-
sible in a lifetime.”26
The stage design for the Ahathoor Temple must be included in this spir-
itualized art practice. A computer graphic of a temple Vault and its layout
for one ceremony (“Adeptus Minor Temple, Third Point”) is reproduced
here (see Figure 13). The stage design and “directions,” so to speak, are
conspicuous.
The ceremonial vault is clearly both a sealed room and one species of
Proustian space, a prepared chamber with choreographed movements inter-
woven with a configured area that is both highly decorated and populated
with various apparatuses. Like all such ceremonial vaults, it was based on
descriptions of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz, the mythical fifteenth-​
century founder of the Rosicrucians, from which the Golden Dawn claimed
ancestry in their system of beliefs and practices. A continuity of movements,
but with a semifictional origin—​confabulation again.
A helpful idea in the context of interior design comes from Jane Bennett
and her own re-​enchantment of space. She employs the traditional Chinese
concept of shi, which involves “the style, energy, propensity, trajectory, or
(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 11  Three Images from the Golden Dawn Grimoire (Courtesy of the
Library at the Grand Lodge, Holborn, London)
 Of the Survival of Images  105

Figure 12  The Melancholy of Ulad (Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de

France)

élan inherent to a specific arrangement of things.” It is another example of a

“vibratory” notion:

The shi of a milieu can be obvious or subtle. It can operate at the very
threshold of human perception or more violently. A coffee house or a
106  Vestiges of a Philosophy

East

Chief Adept
North

South
Second Adept

Third Adept
West

Figure 13  Vault Layout for Ceremony (Reproduced from Israel Regardie, The
Golden Dawn, 1937)

school house is a mobile configuration of people, insects, odors, ink, elec-

trical flows, air currents, caffeine, tables, chairs, fluids, and sounds.27

Not that the shi itself is static (a container)—​it is a continuity that includes
change: “it is the mood or style of an open whole in which both the member-
ship changes over time and the members themselves undergo internal alter-
ation.” Intertwined with the agency of human celebrants, the prepared space
of the Golden Dawn’s temple can consequently be seen to have its own agency
in how it both remembers/​continues its past arrangements while innovating
novel forms out of them through emerging practices. Such a space is never
 Of the Survival of Images  107

static. Its own movements are a memory, too, that is, a type of continuity
keeping the “present” specious and the “past” immanent.28
Alongside this “montage-​collision” of visual images that we have staged
here, we must not forget sound: “thought forms,” remember, are “things
heard, things felt, as well as things seen,” according to Mina Bergson. For
every clairvoyant, there is also a clairaudient. Mina Bergson was both. The
vibratory method—​sounds produced by the practitioner—​is key to this.29
After all, “chanting,” the rhythmic repetition of voice, shares its etymology
with “enchantment” (from cantare, to sing) wherein the world is brought
under the influence of magic. Instructions for the “correct pronunciation and
vibration” of divine names (often from the Enochian “angelic” language)—​
for water, say—​appear repeatedly in Mina Bergson’s texts.30 Pronunciation is
a careful material sounding that must be performed correctly if it is to be ef-
fective. And the vibratory mode is even more corporeal: according to Samuel
Mathers’s script, it starts with inhalation and a vivid picturing of the letters
to be vibrated, followed by exhalation and slowly pronouncing “the Letters
so that the sound vibrates within you. . . . Imagine that the breath, while quit-
ting the body, swells you so as to fill up space. Pronounce the Name as if you
were vibrating it through the whole Universe, and as if it did not stop until it
reached the further limits.”31
Setting aside this last cosmic aspect for now (the parallels with techniques
in certain forms of transcendental meditation are clear), we can also find a
counterpart to this “vibratory mode” of thought in Henri Bergson. This is
another aspect of his own philosophical strangeness emerging from those
passages in his writing that emphasize the form and rhythm of sound as a
tool for communicating meaning. Here he is in the 1912 lecture “The Soul
and the Body”:

Consider thinking itself; you will find directions rather than states, and you
will see that thinking is essentially a continual and continuous change of
inward direction, incessantly tending to translate itself by changes of out-
ward direction, I mean by actions and gestures capable of outlining in space
and of expressing metaphorically, as it were, the comings and goings of the
mind. Of these movements, sketched out or even simply prepared, we are
most often unaware, because we have no interest in knowing them; but we
have to notice them when we try to seize hold of our thought in order to
grasp it all living and make it pass, still living, into the soul of another. The
words may then have been well chosen, but they will not convey the whole
of what we wish to make them say if we do not succeed by the rhythm,
108  Vestiges of a Philosophy

by the punctuation, by the relative lengths of the sentences and part of the
sentences, by a particular dancing of the sentence, in making the reader’s
mind, continually guided by a series of nascent movements, describe a
curve of thought and feeling analogous to that we ourselves described. [ . . . ]
The rhythm of speech has here, then, no other object than that of choosing
the rhythm of the thought: and what can the rhythm of the thought be but
the rhythm of the scarcely conscious nascent movements which accom-
pany it?32

The “rhythm of the thought”—​from rhuthmos, which originally meant simply

“to flow,” rhein. And the oddness does not end there. In Henri Bergson’s
1922 introduction to La pensée et le mouvant (Thought and the Moving), he
writes that “before intellection properly so-​called, there is the perception of
structure and movement; there is, on the page one reads, punctuation and
rhythm.” To understand a writer, one “must fall into step with him [the au-
thor] by adopting his gestures, his attitudes, his gait” (this is another reason
that I emphasize the corporeal reading of “attitude” in Henri Bergson’s use
of the term).33 Where we might normally talk about communication as in-
formation transfer, Henri Bergson talks about the need to “seize hold of our
thought in order to grasp it all living and make it pass [or flow], still living,
into the soul of another.” What seems so ordinary in our language as to verge
on the banal, its sound (be it written or vocalized), is made strange by this
emphasis on rhythm and structured movement as the bedrock of commu-
nication. Where Mina Bergson and the Golden Dawn used vocal repetition
(chanting) to enchant the voice (making it a divine communication), Henri
Bergson made it normal again, but only by supernormalizing the ordinary
communications of one soul with another. Both, nonetheless, saw in the
“vibratory mode” something that is usually missed in our understanding of
how images (in this case sonic ones) are transported, or survive, across space
and time.
 7
On the Meta-​Spiritual

Are we being credulous in these spiritualizations of the real, believing too

much too easily? Yes, this is a kind of thought experiment, a hypothesis in
nonstandard philosophy and knowledge, but is it also excessive to ask the
reader to suspend her disbelief for this long? Why am I doing this anyway?
Why look so hard for correspondences between one seemingly half-​crazed
philosopher and another half-​rational occultist? Two drunks, managing to
stay upright by leaning into each other’s fall, might look impressive, but they
are falling nonetheless. So, yes, again, perhaps some parallels of imagery,
“mystico-​metaphysical” theory, and metatheoretical approach (balancing in-
tellect with intuition) can be found between an allegedly estranged brother
and sister, both celebrated in varying degrees, and both living and working
in Paris at the same historical moment. Some restorative justice is surely in-
volved, too, not as regards any influence that was denied (to either party), but
in terms of “her-​storical” interest: Mina Bergson should be “remembered”
more than she is, and given more due for her work on spiritualization (even if
she never wanted to leave any traces or “vestiges” in history).1 And, of course,
this is indeed an exercise in nonstandard philosophy that strives to expand
what we understand by philosophical thinking by taking occult spiritualism
as a model for thought. As an equalizing and pluralizing gesture in philos-
ophy, however, it will attract as many (yay democracy!) as it will repulse
(New Age baloney).
Yet this spiritualist turn is not to be confused with a simple inversion
of dominance within a matter-​spirit binary that does nothing to alter ei-
ther of its terms. What is needed, and called for, is a non-​Platonist model
of spirit: spirit brought back down to earth, so to speak. So, a demotion of
sorts, but one that does not entail such incompatible categories as the imma-
terial or the disembodied, but instead something like a degree of hyperaes-
thesia operating unnoticed and wholly naturally in our ordinary perception.
Would this not be the natural sibling to an “inflated” matter? Such alternative
and radical concepts of spirit might then be seen as complements—​or even
alter egos—​to new materialism and its notions of vibration, entanglement,

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0011
110  Vestiges of a Philosophy

and plasticity. Only when polarized as incompatible substances would spirit

and matter enter a duel of antagonistic opposites, caricatures of themselves
in fixed states: lumpen bodies versus unearthly specters. On this alternative
view, spirit would not name one insubstantial substance opposed to another,
substantial one: it would name one aspect of a changing relation (a heteroge-
neous continuity), or the features of a changing relation, both of whose relata
are mutating, too.
Likewise, the “meta-​” of metaphysics should no longer name that which
leaves or transcends the physical world (metaphysics as crypto-​physics,
“spooky physics”), but rather that in the world which changes, change or be-
coming. As Zeno of Elea might contend, even the most pedestrian move-
ment is a metaphysical gesture of sorts (though a false and mysterious one for
him). Henri Bergson’s solution to Zeno’s “Achilles Paradox” is perfectly ordi-
nary: Achilles’s steps were “overtaking-​steps”—​and that is how he overtook
the tortoise: “I take a first step, then a second and so on: finally, after a certain
number of steps, I take a last one by which I skip ahead of the tortoise.”2 Such
banality belies the fact that gesture is complex. As Pasi Valiaho describes
Bergson’s usage, “gesture is not simply bodily movement but “ ‘a manner of
carrying the body.’ . . . It is a corporeal rhythm that has become expressive,
a rhythm of quality. [ . . . ] For Bergson, ‘my body’ organizes the world into
meaningful patterns through gestures with function and purpose.”3 Like
G. E. Moore’s proof of an external world (he holds up his two hands, gestures
with each hand to the other while saying, “here is one hand . . . and here is
another”), the ordinary bodily gesture carries a (non-​Platonist) metaphysics
within it.4
As regards the primacy of matter, commentators Christopher Gamble,
Joshua Hanan, and Thomas Nail rightly argue that “it is not enough merely
to say that everything is matter. This amounts to saying everything that is is.
For us, there is ‘nothing but matter,’ but unlike old materialisms this is not a
reductionistic claim because matter is not a substance that everything can
be reduced to. Matter, for us, is a fundamentally indeterminate performance
or process-​in-​motion.”5 Yet again, however, just as we saw (with Meillassoux
and Boutroux) that radical contingency can evidence one definition of ma-
terialism just as equally as another of spiritualism, so, too, indeterminate
“process-​in-​motion” can cut both ways: in Creative Evolution this is precisely
how Bergson describes the latter: “we understand by spirituality a progress
to ever new creations, to conclusions incommensurable with the premises
and indeterminable by relation to them.”6 Neither Mina Bergson’s “universal
 On the Meta-Spiritual  111

substance” nor Henri Bergson’s “wider and higher form of existence” name
fixed things or states, only tendencies: spirit as becoming, force, creativity,
and certainly process-​in-​motion (vibrating, entangled, plastic, even).
Spirit, consequently, can act as a structural placeholder—​ or “meta-​
spirit”: whatever falls outside of, and resists, a reduction to nothing. Such
a meta-​spirit can have a multitude of names, one of which might even be
“matter,” or, understood as a tendency, the “meta-​material.”7 The objective is
to naturalize spirit, and even matter (as supernormal) in the ordinary Real—​
not with only one name (“plasticity” or “vibrancy” or even “duration”) but
with multiple names, equally pronounced—​all the names of all the practices
of the Real. Hence, while Mina Bergson’s “thought-​forms” can be regarded as
materializing spirit in the manner that she depicted, Bennett’s “thing power”
or “vibrant matter” can, as we saw, equally be seen as “spiritualizing” matter,
despite her disavowals. As Henri Bergson says on a related issue, “if telepathy
be real, it is natural”: all we need to know is which “nature,” and whose natu-
ralism, is in question.8
Supernormalization is not, therefore, the decision that all and any
“spooky,” “meta-​psychical,” or paranormal phenomena are real, but rather
the hypothesis, the thought experiment, that asks, if such phenomena were
real, how would we naturalize them, how would we integrate or reverse-​
engineer them into (one knowledge of) nature? If X be real, X is natural—​
but what would this integration into our view of nature look like? What we
need, to use a Wittgensteinian strategy, are redescriptions that leave “every-
thing as it is”: we see things, attend to them, and theorize them, differently,
within the Real rather than outside of it in some impossible view from no-
where. The Theoricus covariant does not re-​enchant phenomena; it restores
them within the Real—​one might say that it merely de-​impoverishes them.
Hence, for example, if ghosts were real, we can ask what they might be
like, naturally. What part of the ordinary might they continue, in some de-
gree? Would they look like . . . memories, for example? We already heard
Henri Bergson describe how the reappearance of a memory in conscious-
ness “produces on us the effect of a ghost.” It is most likely a coincidence,
then, but still interesting to learn that Maurice Maeterlinck, who thought
of Henri Bergson as “the greatest thinker in the world” (and who was also
one of Henri Bergson’s favorite writers), should employ memory in his
1908 play The Blue Bird as a faculty of resurrection: as the awakened spirit
of Granny Tyl tells her grandchild, “every time you think of us, we wake up
and see you again.”9
112  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Naturalization need not entail reduction, however. For example, one su-
pernormal interpretation of time travel (or at least one of its more feasible
versions) leaves it hidden within the status quo: if time travel is possible, then
it will have already happened. And if such be the case, then we in our world
might already be a “future” being visited by its relative past or vice versa: if
the anomalous phenomenon is real, it is natural.10 In other words, to the pro-
posal that all memories are ghosts, we might add that some ghosts might be
time travelers, too.
On this issue of seemingly anomalous phenomena, Ian Hacking offers a
helpful insight on the related topic of “marvels”:

scientific curiosities are topics whose existence is acknowledged by

scientists, but about which they can do nothing. The Brownian motion of
molecules was a curiosity for a century. It was well known. When it was fash-
ionable for nineteenth-​century country houses to keep microscopes, one
showed one’s guests the latest insect from the Amazon—​and the Brownian
motion. The photoelectric effect was a more recherché curiosity for eighty
years. These effects were scientific because they could be observed with a
certain amount of instrumentation; they were curiosities because they were
isolated phenomena that fit no vision of the world. [ . . . ] One way to silence
a topic of research is to treat it as a curiosity or turn it into a marvel. Science
abhors a marvel, not because marvels are vacuous, empty of meaning, but
because they are too full of meaning. . . .11

On this account, ghosts could be similarly “natural” even without complete

inter-​theoretical integration into other naturalistic discourses: they would
coexist as “marvels” alongside, if not within, networks of more mundane
meaning. The marvel is both seen and unseen: an observable, but one of such
excess that it does not fit any standard vision of the world. Here is another
instance of such excess meaning: when Ernest Rutherford and Frederick
Soddy discovered that radioactive thorium could transform into an inert gas,
Soddy could not suppress his joy and exclaimed to Rutherford that they were
looking at “transmutation,” only to be cautioned straightaway by Rutherford
in no uncertain terms: “don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off
as alchemists.” In fact, as Mark Morrison observes, “the newly emerging sci-
ence of radioactivity routinely generated comparisons to alchemy.”12 And, of
course, radiation (X-​rays) was invoked by psychic researchers, too (though
less so spiritualists) as a model by which to understand parapsychological
 On the Meta-Spiritual  113

phenomena. Until its effect had been completely integrated within extant
discourses of science, it was a “marvel” that could feed into various eso-
teric systems of thought or “visions of the world.”13 Even the mystical “astral
plane,” though it had its roots in medieval thought, could be mundanized as a
fourth spatial dimension in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Zelator covariance again.
The repetition of a supposedly supernatural phenomenon, which is not
the same as its repeatability (it may still recur spontaneously and unpredict-
ably), is one route to such naturalizations. Images stemming from popular
entertainments are a prime site for such everyday miracles. For example, the
banalization of even the dead returning to life is a favorite trope of science-​
fiction television (Les Revenants, 2012–​15; Dr Who’s “Army of Ghosts,” 2006),
film drama (Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, 2004), every ghost film ever seen, and
the entire zombie horror genre. Fictional biological processes, mind ma-
nipulation, or time slips may be some of the mechanisms deployed to sup-
port such bizarre events. Resurrection or reincarnation would be religious
variants of such para-​explanations, too, of course.
Alternatively, were one to clarify properly the immaterialist version of
spiritual return or survival after death, so as to ask, “What would it be
for a spirit, qua purely immaterial entity, to return in all its unembodied
phenomenality?,” the subsequent answer might be surprising. What would
pure spirit look like, divested of all matter? This would be a thought exper-
iment akin to Henri Bergson’s purifying method in Matter and Memory,
which attempts to separate out completely what we understand as the sub-
stantial difference(s) between matter and spirit, perception and memory,
in the most rigorous sense of their opposition. The results are what he calls
pure perception and pure memory, two virtual forms of normal perception
and memory, only completely dissociated in terms of any spatial proper-
ties. He pursues this purification so that we might be better able to discern
the immaterial in both its difference and its continuity with matter, that
is, in its difference of tendency, of orientation, within a continuity. Here is
a kind of “dualization”—​not to be confused with a dualism of substance,
for this concerns a process—​a dualization of different kinds of movement
in order to found a new monism of movement.14 This dualizing would
be in contrast to the fudge between bodilessness and nonbodilessness
found in literalist approaches, be they in the Christian tradition (with
the conundrums that follow from the resurrection of all bodies: are they
clothed or unclothed, old or young, cremated, amputated, etc.?), the
114  Vestiges of a Philosophy

phantasmagoria of ghostly tales, or the pseudoscience of science-​fiction

and zombie horror.
More sophisticated versions of these hybrid conceits do exist, however,
such as in Philip K. Dick’s novel Counter-​Clock World, which, as James Burton
tells us, can be read as a gnostic text in rendering “resurrection commonplace
due to a cosmic event that reverses certain biological and temporal processes,
and yet having it result neither in salvation nor in everlasting life.”15 Again,
setting the clunky mechanism aside (biological reversal), there is something
of value in this naturalism nonetheless, as Burton demonstrates. In such a
flattened approach, we can begin to understand how “gnostic Christians saw
the Resurrection as a spiritual truth rather than an actual event, a symbolic
expression of the possibility that anyone might be ‘resurrected from the dead’
at any time, to become spiritually alive.” Quoting one gnostic text from the
Nag Hammadi Library, Burton explains how ordinary resurrection comes
to stand for “the transformation of things, and a transition into newness.”16
Those “biological and temporal processes” notwithstanding (should they
merit close examination), the mundanization of resurrection as renewal is
another means by which the supernatural refracts into the supernormal.
Hollywood cinema remains, however, stubbornly confused about the su-
pernatural, mixing ordinary material properties with supposedly “immate-
rial” ones (that are, in truth, simply other forms of matter) in order to achieve
the extraordinary as so-​called spirit. With respect to ghost films, for example,
from a Bergsonian perspective their spirits are never ghostly enough, never
sufficiently insubstantial, and are always a confusing mix of matter and spirit
interpreted as two kinds of incompatible substance (ghosts who cannot
speak, cannot move objects, yet who can still see, stand on firm ground, and
so on).17 However, this is not the place to repeat scholastic debates on the pos-
sible existence of beings that have no mass and yet can still move and act (fol-
lowing Aquinas on angels). Nor will we take the Derridean route of affirming
the spectral on account of its aporia, by insisting on the ghost consisting en-
tirely of “mutually exclusive states, oscillating unpredictably between life and
death, visibility and invisibility, materiality and immateriality, as well as the
past, present, and future.”18 Rather, it is the specter’s conflation of temporal
tenses (past, present, and future) that should give us pause, especially as
regards cinema itself (irrespective of its ghost-​story genres). More useful for
us, then, would be Edgar Morin’s view that “cinema itself has become a world
of spirits where phantoms manifest themselves like a great number of the ar-
chaic mythologies: an ethereal world filled with omnipresent spirits.” I turn
 On the Meta-Spiritual  115

to Morin here because he then adds that this cinema is where we see “past,
present and future oscillate as in a state of osmosis just as in the human brain,
memories, the imaginary future and the experienced moment merge. This
Bergsonean [sic] duration, the perceivable indefinite, it is the cinema that
defines it.”19 Cinema is composed of images that fuse time and haunt us—​
memories that are ghosts and ghosts that are time travelers. Yet, as images,
these specters are equally material and spiritual in the Bergsonian rendering
of these terms as temporal (rather than in Hollywood’s confused dualities of
substance).
In fact, it is the very same sub-​Cartesian dualism that still dominates con-
temporary philosophy of mind and transhumanist culture (where mind is
seen as an intelligence separable from any one physical “platform”), that
equally reigns on the silver screen through ghost films, body-​swap com-
edies, reincarnation stories, and other genres where spirit is simply a form
of faux substance, a transferable energy, or quasi-​thing (basically, fanciful
equivalents to the telegraphy, X-​rays, and higher-​dimensional planes that so
impressed certain nineteenth-​century spiritualists). For Henri Bergson, these
are confused dualities that require proper separation in order to be reunited
temporally (not in space). As he puts it in Matter and Memory: “questions
relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be
put in terms of time rather than of space.”20
All the same, if we also strip away everything substantial from spirit (ex-
tended space, inert body, mechanism, efficient cause and effect), with what
are we left? Movement. According to Henri Bergson, movement is altera-
tion or qualitative becoming (not spatial transition). Something truly ordi-
nary is “hiding” in plain sight (nothing is hidden, or “virtual,” to everyone): a
something that might also survive at some level, then, that might straddle
those things we call “past” and “present.” Only that “thing” is not a thing but
a partial continuity, a movement, a specific becoming in person (there is
no “becoming in general”).21 Spirit, purified in this way as a kind of move-
ment, is, oddly enough, visible everywhere, restored to space, bodies, and
even causation. But this is not a hylomorphic reinsertion of “spookiness.”
I think I can see why Jane Bennett only sees such restorations as dualistic: be-
cause they are viewed in terms of a substantialized space—​res extensa and
“res inextensa” (extended and unextended things)—​rather than in terms of
time. A logic of separated, solid bodies, rather than a watery, temporalized
logic. The Bergsonian restoration or reintegration is only the temporalizing
redescription or revisioning that leaves everything as it is, while also uniting
116  Vestiges of a Philosophy

difference “in terms of time rather than of space.” Nonetheless, what results is
at best a marvel to some, or an unseen variation to others. What is unseen, or
unknown, though, can itself be a force, an élan in thought.
The standard Hollywood version of the supernatural is simply what it
projects as the inconsistent hyperbolic of the natural, an outsider or “qualita-
tive” emergent, rather than what it is—​the “merely” quantitative, the differ-
ence of degree. It is the difference within the one and many durées understood
as heterogeneous continuity. For we have said it often enough: there are only
differences of degree. But a “degree of what?” one might ask. In fact, how can
there be degrees or even levels and planes in duration, in creative change?
Isn’t that simply another form of spatialization? This question requires the
mereological response—​the “part” or degree being of a whole that is open,
incomplete, enduring, or not-​whole. As a part, it is “smaller” and contained
or foliated (if one must speak now in terms of size and scale), and yet it is not
strictly quantifiable, measurable, or reducible to being a mere component: its
participation concerns temporality or movement, a covariance that is shared,
continued, and not owned by any part, large or small.
At an even more metatheoretical level (without this “meta-​” implying a
logic of higher-​order representation, by the way), we can say that matter is
simply this, and spirit that—​too gestural demonstratives, literally and figura-
tively. These gestures, or “poles,” in Mina Bergson’s language, are the minimal
dyad (be it of substance, property, or even direction of process), and all that
“matters” is that they be mutually irreducible. This irreducibility explains why
the Real does not appear as just one thing, even if only in virtue of the illusion
or hallucination of at least two things (because then we have the illusion and
nonillusion—​two things): “spirit” and “matter,” “manifest” and “scientific,”
“living” and “dead,” or just “illusion” and “reality.” There is always the dual
aspect, the double life. The names are unimportant, but the demonstrability
is (showing “this” and “that” by giving each a name). Naturalisms are rarely
naturalistic enough, then, and need to be hyper-​correlational, hyper-​parallel,
with psycho-​physical parallels going all the way “up” and “down,” “in” and
“out.” So, to say that everything is X (an old or modern arché), that everything
is matter, or everything is spirit, or difference, or durée, is ultimately vacuous,
for there is always the real illusion of at least two. (You could say that this illu-
sion is itself an illusion, but I wouldn’t if I were you.)22
Conversely, for a pluralism that says, “Everything is many,” its own for-
mula, too, must be sufficiently recursive if it is to avoid a substantial monism,
a static nomination: it must continually and indefinitely reperform itself
 On the Meta-Spiritual  117

anew with novel formulations and names. To speak like a gnostic, it must per-
petually resurrect itself. As we will see next, this performance of new names
(and new ways of naming, many of them nonlinguistic) simply is the ramifi-
cation or bifurcation of types (kinds, levels, planes, or degrees), at once both
logical and cosmological, that emanate from the paradoxes of reflexivity. In
what follows, a Philosophus covariant will be visible at work in the plasticity
and epigenetics of Catherine Malabou’s thought—​one that tackles this same
aporia of reflexivity and asks: must a philosophy of change, change, too?
 4° =​7° Philosophus Covariant

It is time to speak more about scales and scalarity, a topic that has dogged our
discussion from the moment we first referred to levels, parts, or degrees in
space, time, and memory. In “Philosophical Intuition” (1911), Henri Bergson
says this: “the matter and life which fill the world are equally within us, the
forces which work in all things we feel within ourselves; whatever may be
the inner essence of what is and what is done, we are of that essence.”1 Mina
Bergson, in “Know Thyself,” states as follows: “the God of the Macrocosm only
reflects Himself to Man through the God of Man’s Microcosm. [ . . . ] hence
the great assistance given to us in the teachings of our Order which insist
on a careful study of the Kingdoms of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm
side by side with our Spiritual Development, one study helping the other;
in fact the two are almost inseparable.”2 Microcosm and macrocosm. One
of the key principles of Hermeticism is that of “as above, so below.” This is
the idea that earthly events reflect those occurring on an astral plane by
means of correspondences and attunements. In “Of Skrying,” Mina Bergson
describes how

imagination (eidolon) means the faculty of building an image. The imagi-

nation of the artist must lie in the power, which he possesses more or less
in proportion to his sincerity, and his intuition, of perceiving forces in the
macrocosm, and allying or attuning himself thereto, his talents naturally
and his artificial training permitting him to formulate images which shall
express those forces.3

Once again, we see the importance for the Golden Dawn of a nonimaginary
use of imagination—​here as the ability to “build” an image attuned to the
macrocosm. (We should also remind ourselves that the Kabbalistic “Tree
of Life” was also called the Minutum Mundum—​the “little world or uni-
verse.”) As regards levels, in Wouter Hanegraaff ’s analysis of the systematic
“correlations between the macrocosm and the microcosm,” he describes how
the occultist was able to explore “the various dimensions of the astral plane

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0012
 4° = 7° Philosophus Covariant  119

so as to change his or her own inner structure and to enable him or her to me-
diate divine influences to the world.”4 The divine is immanent to the human.
Obviously, this can be turned on its head, as Ludwig Feuerbach does by re-
ducing God to a human projection of our species’ perfection (“as below, so
above,” as it were). Beyond the religionist or anti-​religionist commitments of
theism or atheism, however, in secular terms we can say that the occultist’s
spatial model removes the need to transcend oneself in unity with the “above”
because each human can already ally or attune him or herself with the Real in
the “below.” The self is remolded, not annihilated.
Sometimes the esoteric homologies between macroscopic and micro-
scopic employed obvious anthropomorphism (the sun and moon as eyes, the
moon as breast, the sun as face, and so on).5 Yet, as Joscelyn Godwin notes,
these doctrines of correspondences, complements, or analogies were not just
between polarities of large and small, human and divine—​they also existed
between elemental colors and sound, colors and elements, or colors, letters,
and shapes.6 And indeed, Mina Bergson’s own “allying and attuning” would
seem to denote quasi-​physical images of connection: an “alliance” is a binding
(from alligare, “to bind”), while an attunement is a tension or stretching
(from teinein, “to stretch”).7 In each image, a material connection, binding
and tensile, is formed between micro-​and macro-​levels, a physico-​spiritual
amalgam that is both unifying and multilayered. Writing about the Corpus
Hermeticum, Joshua Ramey explains its teaching that “materiality and spir-
ituality are profoundly united,” with life itself being a process in which “the
nature of the divine is both discovered and produced in an unfolding of per-
sonal and cosmic, evolutionary and historical time. This is the meaning of ‘as
above, so below’: the process of natural life as a ‘manifestation of encosmic
divinity.’ ”8
We might say that the center is “decentered” through a proliferation of
centers: in Bergsonian terms, a kind of “complete relativism” is installed, a
flattened ontology with no unsurpassable hierarchy of macro over micro (at
least in principle)—​there is movement between levels. We have noted, how-
ever, that with the fabulation of minds beyond our own, such proliferations
should be treated cautiously: attributing powers at the wrong scale, irrespec-
tive of the equalities of macrocosm and microcosm, can lead to delusions
of voluntarism and control (what cognitivists call “hyperactive agency de-
tection”). Moreover, this type of Renaissance “episteme,” one governed by a
relation of analogy between every level of nature, above and below, need not
be seen simplistically as only spatial, despite the language used to describe
120  Vestiges of a Philosophy

it. Scale is not always a set of nesting Russian dolls, of quantities containing
quantities. Many authors agree on this. For Bruno Latour, the notion of con-
tinuous, transitive scales needs to be dismantled entirely, such that switching
dimensions is never a smooth “zoom” in or out, but a disorientation that
is “as much temporal as spatial.”9 Likewise for Karen Barad, scale is “much
more complex than simply a “nesting relationship,” being instead “a property
of spatial phenomena intra-​actively produced, contested, and reproduced.”10
Even Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of the “molar” and “molecular”
must be seen, they say, as systems of reference or relation rather than as spa-
tial scales.11
Indeed, even quantitative scales themselves can be qualified, too, as being
more than quantity, more than the ability for one magnitude to contain an-
other.12 Size, too, can resist quantification. Writing about “bigness” within
the theoretical humanities, David Wittenberg points out that

Size change is a confrontation with the hyperfactical density and opacity

of the body itself: the body is constantly in the way, inhibiting conventional
views and viewpoints, and often directly terrifying. To be big, or rather to
be too big—​or to be compelled to confront what is too big—​is to reanimate
a primal physical relationship with objects that the acquisition of correct
scale sublimates or distills away. [ . . . ] Bigness is not something we accom-
plish by rescaling. Bigness comes before scale, maybe strictly speaking be-
fore size. And therefore, all the more, it precedes any analytic of magnitude
or of the sublime.13

Bigness is a quality, no less than oneness or twoness are not quantities in

the first instance either, but qualities, qualia even (at least for mathematical
intuitionists like L. E. J. Brouwer or Henri Bergson).14
Admittedly, a top-​down mereology, regarding the part from the perspec-
tive of the whole, might seem to be an impossible task if one is actually the
part in question. How can the small transcend its partial point of view? And
yet Spinzoa starts from God, or Substance, just as Deleuze and Guattari
write, it is said, from the point of view of the Earth on itself as a giant mole-
cule.15 The era of “Big data” is one empirically anodyne way in which patterns
of change, rhythms, and continuities might reveal themselves to their own
participants. Big data can be seen as a temporal resampling, time-​lapse geo-​
anthropology operating at higher degrees of tension. Such bigger pictures
might reveal who knows what was happening when we were collectively
 4° = 7° Philosophus Covariant  121

doing “X,” even though we each thought at the time that we were operating
individually doing “Y.”16 Hence, as Bennett suggested earlier, American food
may have facilitated the invasion of Iraq, and sandstorms may be involved
in the spread of violence. As we see, the part-​whole relations in play in these
examples are not at all scalar in any quantitative sense of containment. The
principle of “as above, so below,” of the “micro” reflecting the “macro,” can
also be translated into a number of other, more contemporary vocabularies,
such as general systems theory, complex systems, Deleuzian assemblage
theory (giant molecules and “microbrains”), or David Bohm’s radical holism
(which we will address later), to name just a few more ordinary renderings.
Each of these translations brings its own difficulties with it, no doubt.
Much of the puzzling nature of scale and composition can be tempered,
however, when we think of it in terms of time. The relations between parts
and wholes, mereology in other words, must be thoroughly temporalized.17
For example, we can also qualify a scale by temporalizing it in terms of
rhythm, say, or in the language of memory. We can follow the second route by
comparing Henri Bergson’s ideas with those of Carl Jung (no stranger to eso-
teric ideas either in his own psychology). Pete Gunter does exactly this when
he writes about Jung’s “collective unconscious” alongside Creative Evolution’s
theory of a “biological memory” contained within each animal, “dormant
potentialities, ‘memories’ of a common past which it shares with all other
living creatures.”18 Examples given by Henri Bergson himself include the
Ammophila wasp, which seems to have a magical knowledge of the physi-
ognomy of its traditional prey, a caterpillar, allowing it to apply just enough
venom to paralyze but not kill it (mummifying it alive for later consump-
tion).19 In what could be seen as an animal prefiguring of Arthur C. Clarke’s
“third law”—​that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic”—​for Henri Bergson, any sufficiently evolved “instinct” will ap-
pear to reason as magical knowledge. Yet this miracle is only apparent: what
is real is the continuity formed by the coevolutionary movement of two ap-
parently separate entities—​wasp and caterpillar—​in one relation. These bio-
logical forms are really two sides of a continuous process—​a process that is
itself composed from other, interpenetrating processes. Instinct appears mi-
raculous only when we do not think of it in terms of continuous evolutionary
movements at the correct scale, movements that are “reciprocally deter-
mining” (in Deleuzian language), “entangled” (Barad), or, in Henri Bergson’s
idiom, “interpenetrating” each other. Though this biological account from
Creative Evolution would need updating, its essentials remain the same, as
122  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Patrick McNamara explains: “each organism, therefore, carries within itself a

‘replica’ of the local environment, as well as the collective memory of its spe-
cies. [ . . . ] The ‘memory’ of each person, therefore, supports the paradoxical
experience of infinite depth and personal intimacy.”20
Henri Bergson’s acknowledged influence on Jung, of course, led to this
biological memory being thought of as a collective unconscious, one where,
as Gunter describes it, a “mystic or an artist is ‘seized by an archetype’
[ . . . ] grasped by fundamental energies which it is his task to express in novel
forms.”21 This collectivization of memory is also to be found in the practices
of the Golden Dawn. As Charlotte de Mille tells us: “Golden Dawn members
relate episodes of collective dreaming, whereby multiple consciousnesses
could permeate one another to create shared experience. Moreover, they
believed that this activity opened access to a universal ‘Great Memory.’ ”22
W. B. Yeats himself, de Mille then reminds us, wrote on essay on “Magic” in
1901 that described individual memories as “part of one great memory, the
memory of Nature herself.” Yeats even recounts a particular vision of a past
life, a moment when participating in a Golden Dawn ritual, which exempli-
fies precisely this collective. In this vision, Samuel Mathers

held a wooden mace in his hand, and turning to a tablet of many-​coloured

squares, with a number on each of the squares, that stood near him on a
chair, he repeated a form of words. Almost at once my imagination began
to move of itself and to bring before me vivid images that, though never too
vivid to be imagination, as I had always understood it, had yet a motion of
their own, a life I could not change or shape.23

What is strange about this account—​and why it might be deemed proof of a

“Great Memory”—​is that the recollected scene was not Yeats’s vision, but that
of another member of the Golden Dawn. And yet he recalls it, not so much
as his own memory than as a shared one, a collective memory. In fact, for
Yeats, these experiences were proof “of the power of many minds to become
one, . . . till they have become a single intense, unhesitating energy. . . . all the
minds gave a little, creating or revealing for a moment what I must call a su-
pernatural artist.”24
This nonspatial “upscaling” of memory through mystical means has
ties with other thinkers than just Henri Bergson and Jung. Joshua Ramey’s
research on the hermetic tradition’s influence on Deleuze’s thought
demonstrates effectively the connection between the mystical perspective
 4° = 7° Philosophus Covariant  123

and Deleuze’s notion of a “cosmic Memory.” In Deleuze’s own words, this

Memory is one that actualizes “all the levels at the same time, that liberates
man from the plane or the level that is proper to him, in order to make him
a creator, adequate to the whole movement of creation.”25 Unsurprisingly,
those words are from Deleuze’s 1966 monograph Bergsonism, as Ramey
well knows when he also connects Bergson directly to the hermetic tradi-
tion: “mysticism is thus, for Bergson—​and one might add, retrospectively,
for Renaissance hermeticism—​not so much an ability to distance oneself
from time and circumstance through identification with God, but an intensi-
fication of cosmic memory, an involution in the past of a universe. . . .”26
Moreover, upscaling memory in this fashion is only one form of tempo-
ralized mereology, where the small regard themselves as composing the Big
through collective experience, through shared “memory.” The direction or
orientation of this upscaling can be inverted by looking at rhythm or tension.
Comparing Henri Bergson’s work to Whitehead’s theory of structured socie-
ties, Leonard Eslick argues that the latter is perfectly “analogous to Bergson’s
hierarchy of durational rhythms.”27 The aggregate can now be seen working
top-​down rather than bottom-​up. In both these cases, however, it is a matter
of rhythm. In Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson words this top-​down as-
sembly as a “higher degree of tension”:

would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a con-
sciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch
the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the
great phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in con-
densing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more
differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very
long history. To perceive means to immobilize.28

These “higher degrees” are also rendered as “planes” in Henri Bergson’s work,
of course. We have already examined the resemblances evoked between the
plane of pure memory (or virtual) and the Golden Dawn’s astral plane as
extensions of our optico-​perceptual apparatus (the latter once described by
Mina Bergson as a “hall panelled with mirrors”). But they share a distribu-
tion or scalarity in how they work as well. Matter and Memory tells of a “scale
of being” along which diverse rhythms of duration are arrayed. For Henri
Bergson, “there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many
different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or
124  Vestiges of a Philosophy

relaxation of different kinds of consciousness and thereby fix their respective

places in the scale of being.”29 Yet the scale is temporal, not spatial or hierar-
chical in value (at least at face value, for they all belong equally to durée). The
same might even be said for Mina Bergson, for when she writes of the “Three
Planes of Being” traveled in “psychic experiment,” though these grades are
ranked ontologically, they all belong to Ein Sof nonetheless. Ein Sof is indeed
distributed differently, but still immanently in its ten emanations.30

* * *
A final discussion of levels, of above and below, must now involve philosophy
itself, the Philosophus covariant. In her essay “Before and Above: Spinoza and
Symbolic Necessity,” the philosopher Catherine Malabou ordinarizes the “sa-
cred” in her own particular manner through what she calls “an experience of
overreading.” For Spinoza, she writes, the mind

has a natural tendency to overinterpret—​and such is the origin, the very pos-
sibility of the sacred. [ . . . ] For Spinoza, to overread or overinterpret means
to confer semantic content on a word or phrase by inflating its (absence
of) referent. This overinflating is fundamentally both spatial and temporal.
Spatial: God is understood as a central power, coming from above, a high-
ness (hence all the superpowers attributed to a God conceived as a legis-
lator: jealousy, arbitrariness, love, and others). Above, in Spinoza, is the
most acute example of the spatial overreading of the sacred. It implies an
overarching and overlooking position proceeding from a hidden and un-
reachable power. Temporal: in its temporal sense, above means “before.” All
prophets have seen, have heard somebody or something that was there be-
fore, already, waiting to be seen or heard. Above and before are the two main
structures or patterns of sacralization. . . . In these two structures, we recog-
nize the very economy of superstition.31

The “over” can be understood as excess but also, in its excess, as a fabula-
tion of the spatial in terms of superstition—​the God or gods operating above
us. However, just as Henri Bergson’s theory of animist fabulation found that
its error rested only in its animating the natural world at an improper level,
so Malabou argues that superstition can be redeemed within a theory of in-
terpretation. And this also operates on superstition of the past, the Before,
alongside the Above. Citing Emile Benveniste’s work in linguistics, she
reports: “superstitio is the gift of second sight which enables a person to know
 4° = 7° Philosophus Covariant  125

the past as if he or she had been present, superstes. This is how superstitiosus
denotes the gift of second sight, which is attributed to ‘seers,’ that of being a
‘witness’ of events at which he has not been present.”32 For Benveniste and
Malabou, then, as a tendency to overread, superstition is not “bad per se”:

On the contrary, it marks the origin of the symbolic, and in that sense it
cannot be totally separated from ideality. [ . . . ] what he showed is that
the origin of interpretation resides in overinterpretation. . . . No need, for
Spinoza, to refer to any transcendence in the message. Overinterpretation
is, in a certain sense, immanent to the message.33

There is much to discuss in this passage: superstition as both belief and ac-
tion (or presence) at a distance; or sacralization as equally temporal and
spatial (“before and above”). But we will focus first on Malabou’s theory of
interpretation in this regard, and especially on how it impacts on the ques-
tion of language and the evolution of theory—​how philosophy mutates into
different forms from itself. For the fact is that the excess or overinterpreta-
tion that Malabou sees within the “sacred” message can also be applied to
her own work as a new materialist. Her text Morphing Intelligence can be
(overly?) read as immanent to the evolution of her project’s ambition to keep
Continental philosophy informed by the latest research emerging from the
brain sciences. In maintaining this acquaintance with the empirical, she has
found that her own renowned thesis concerning the “plasticity” of our brain
requires reformation.34 In her book What Should We Do with Our Brain?, she
originally argued that the concept of neurological plasticity, the idea that our
brains change throughout the course of our lives as they adapt to evolving
circumstances, brings with it the promise of a new kind of human freedom.
It opens up the possibility that we can intervene in our brain’s evolution by
changing those circumstances: we are not biologically determined bottom
up, but can change our fates, top down, working in tandem with this biolog-
ical flexibility.
And yet, in the preface to Morphing Intelligence she offers a new account
that mitigates, among other things, the voluntarism of her earlier view. She
admits that “for a long time I believed that neuronal plasticity proscribed any
comparison between the “natural” brain and machines, especially computers.
However, the latest advances in artificial intelligence, especially the develop-
ment of ‘synaptic’ chips, have mounted a serious challenge to this position.”35
The need to develop her concepts and languages—​in particular, replacing
126  Vestiges of a Philosophy

the centrality of plasticity with that of “epigenesis”—​can be regarded as both

a drawback for any philosophy trying to maintain its currency through an
ever-​evolving scientific materialism but also as the virtue of a thought like
hers that is attempting to materialize its own performance through these co-
variant mutations. Epigenesis is the theory that the embryo develops progres-
sively from an undifferentiated egg cell. That life follows a program of sorts,
going through a predictable sequence of events, lessens both the plasticity of
biological forms as well as, at least in Malabou’s view, any clear distance being
kept between the organic and the artificial. She charts her conversion from
plasticity to epigenesis as follows:

For years, I explored the concept of plasticity, viewing it as the poten-

tial starting point for a new conception of freedom that would no longer
be separated from the biological definition of thought and action. Isn’t
brain plasticity exactly this vitality of intelligence—​the one that tests,
measurements, and factors will never identify? [ . . . ] Unfortunately,
however—​or is it fortunately?—​recent developments in artificial intel-
ligence shook me out of my nondogmatic slumber. I came to see that the
conclusions I presented in What Should We Do with Our Brain? were, to
put it bluntly, wrongheaded. Shortly after that book came out, it became
apparent to me that it needed revising, if not a complete rewrite. This
suspicion dawned on me upon reading an article about recent compu-
tational architectures, especially IBM’s creation of an entirely new type
of chip, a “neuro-​synaptic processor” that dramatically increases pro-
cessing abilities while minimizing the energy required for computation.
But the title of the article, “IBM’s Neuro-​Synaptic Chip Mimics Human
Brain,” was misleading. In fact, this chip is not capable of “imitating”
synaptic functioning: it functions de facto as a synaptic connection. It is
a synapse.36

With a certain zeal of the new convert, the philosopher pushes further than
the science, proclaiming a real identity over a correlated function. More than
that, however, Malabou’s own thesis has “morphed:” as a bio-​philosophical
hybrid of deconstructive thought and brain science, it has deconstructed it-
self, rendered plasticity plastic by tempering its own freedom with epigenetic
predictability, programmability. As such, she asks, “how could we not con-
clude that plasticity is programmable, since it is becoming the fundamental
program of cybernetics? But is a programmable and programmed plasticity
 4° = 7° Philosophus Covariant  127

still plasticity? Not that plasticity is the opposite of the concept of program on
principle. Epigenetic mechanisms are programmed genetically.”37
Such a renewal in language-​thought no doubt reflects in part a desire to
seek out the new and extraordinary within science in order to maintain a
philosophical distance from the ordinary (empirical evidence quickly dating
itself and the philosopher’s reliance on it). However, there is the counter-
vailing need to renew language simply in order to think in duration. This is
part of the price paid by any “scientific philosophy,” in the truest sense of the
term. In Time Reborn, physicist Lee Smolin writes with great relevance to this
point: “Scientists think in time when we conceive of our task as the invention
of novel ideas to describe newly discovered phenomena, and of novel mathe-
matical structures to express them. If we think outside time, we believe these
ideas somehow existed before we invented them. If we think in time, we see
no reason to presume that.”38 And this is exactly what Henri Bergson meant
by the requirement of philosophy to “think in duration”—​the need for it to
use “flexible, mobile, almost fluid representations” in order to stay true to the
“mobility of the real.”39
Like Malabou, Henri Bergson formed much of his philosophical research
around the empirical sciences, Matter and Memory focusing on studies of
the brain in particular. Yet, as Paul Atkinson explains, Henri Bergson was
looking to place “the brain within an ontology of perception rather than
deriving a theory of perception from the operation of the brain.”40 And
that ontology was processual and immanentist. In terms of methodology,
therefore, he insisted on the inevitability for any serious philosophical
terminology—​and he includes his own language of “durée,” “multiplicity,”
and “differentiation” here—​to lose its purchase on real process unless it, too,
continually mutated.41 Every new idea is eventually stripped of its suggestive
power as it slowly absorbs the more mundane thoughts linked to it by associ-
ation. Philosophy must renew its language and imagery if it is to remain vital.
A theory of change must itself change. Or, as Malabou would say, intelligence
morphs.
Even our attempt here to reintegrate the paranormal within the normal (as
“supernormal”) is also, for now, a renewal of language that must eventually
lose its way, not by coming to the end of its line, but by being replaced with
other lines of continuity. Following Henri Bergson’s lead and Malabou’s re-
cent example, philosophy must overinterpret itself. This need not be achieved
only through scientific fluency (though that could be part of it, too): what is
needed is the ability to create new philosophical concepts and images using
128  Vestiges of a Philosophy

whatever materials come to hand. Changing names once or twice is not suf-
ficient either: the real is not comprehended simply “by giving it a name.” On
the contrary, because reality and logic, too, are essentially processual (or in-
essential) for Henri Bergson, philosophy must keep creating the right expres-
sion to fit new realities. Names need to keep multiplying, like images.
Such mutation or morphing could even act reflexively as the recursive
metamorphosis of “meta-​physics” itself, so it would be understood now as an
ever-​expanding perception rather than an intellectual grasp of some eternal
truth—​an empirical metaphysics sub specie durationis, as Henri Bergson put
it, over Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis. Yet such ramifications would not pro-
ceed within a disembodied logical regress of types or orders of representation,
so much as a real progress within cosmological tiers, levels, or planes.42 And
this is why overinterpretation—​a multiplication of names—​is not the repre-
sentation of this one level, but the invented effects of many levels construc-
tively interfering with each other.43 Out of the paradoxes of “reflexivity” (does
a theory of change, change?) stem not only different, ramifying logical types,
but different cosmological levels, generated through a material-​spiritual auto-​
poetic agency, or what we will hear Thomas Nail call “bifurcation.” As above,
so below, micro and macro, super and sub: heterogeneous kinds of conti-
nuity operating “vertically” and “horizontally” on different scales, temporal
and spatial.
And so also, before and after. An expanded perception (or “second sight”)
for Bergson means that a “past” is brought back to presence by distending, or
stretching, this present if only momentarily. Superstitio. For Mina Bergson’s
“superstition,” one becomes a “seer” of the “before,” a witness of events at
which one was never present, but which continue in lines of movement that
can be recreated. And that recreation also involves renaming conventions—​
all the names of the divine, and more.
 8
Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum
“Leave No Trace”

Dennis Denisoff ’s essay on Parisian occulture in the Belle Epoque,

“Performing the Spirit: Theatre, the Occult, and the Ceremony of Isis,”
discusses Mina’s and Samuel’s celebrity in the context of performance art.
A contemporary account from the time might explain why. In 1900, jour-
nalist André Gaucher attended one of these Rites and reported back to his
journal L’Echo des merveilleux as follows:

When the rite began the priest and priestess knelt at the foot of the statue
[of Osiris] to light a diffuser of perfume, and the sanctuary was filled with
the scent of benzoin and incense. Then they sprinkled grains of wheat and
flowers on the floor and on the worshippers. [ . . . ]
The white veils and garlands along the walls fell with an ominous shiver
and the walls were revealed to be covered in black. At the same time the
torches were extinguished, as if by an invisible wind. The drapes at the rear
of the hall then tore apart with a sinister rustling. In the distance a shapeless,
chaotic mass was slowly emerging from the blackness. The worshippers sat
up, rigid, motionless, then cried out, three times: “Osiris! Osiris! Osiris!”
[...]
All around were sighs and convulsive cries. Bodies rolling on the ground,
in the darkness, prey to terrible nervous spasms. Others stood up, straight
and rigid, their faces drained of blood, their eyes haggard. A reddish glow lit
the depths of the sanctuary with an infernal light, from behind the gigantic
statue which seemed to be locked in a terrible grin. At the foot of the statue
appeared a fantastic circle of superhuman beings: the hawk’s head of the
god Horus, the jackal’s muzzle of Anubis, the bull’s head of the god Thor.1

At some point soon after, Gaucher admits to losing consciousness. Quelle

performance! Osiris, Horus, Anubis, Anari, even Thor. Theater as ritual/​ritual
as theater—​Antonin Artaud should have been so fortunate to achieve similar

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0013
130  Vestiges of a Philosophy

effects in his Theater of Cruelty thirty years later. In his essay, Denisoff is
most interested in the ephemerality of such a performance, its transience as
an event, which he connects with Peggy Phelan’s idea of the “unmarked”: “the
transience of performance—​its amorphous function across the private and
the public—​was recognized as a source of power and is what drew Golden
Dawn initiates to it.”2 For Phelan herself the “power of impermanence” is
real: “there is real power,” she contends, “in remaining unmarked; and there
are serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal.”3 Hence,
Denisoff for his part continues thus: “the evanescence of the supernatural
is one with that of performance; while the latter can be recorded, it is never-
theless itself impermanent. This agency of the unaccountable, I argue, occult
practitioners recognized as a magical power.”4 The unmarked, the evanes-
cent, the traceless—​these terms can indicate lack, absence, or what stands
hyperbolically beyond the fullness of nature as supernature; but they can also
signify something quite ordinary—​the plenitude of movement.
Of Mina Bergson’s numerous names, possibly the most telling is her
chosen Golden Dawn magical name, Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum (often abbre-
viated in manuscripts to VNR). A condensation of a phrase from Horace’s
Epistles, I, i, 75, meaning “the past leaves no traces,” it can also be variously
translated as: “I Leave No Traces Behind,” “No Stepping Back,” or, most sug-
gestively, “Leave No Trace.”5 Given that these chosen names were often aspi-
rational, we might ask what it might have signified in Mina’s case. The past as
ephemeral? Or a traceless existence in which “there is real power”? Or a de-
sire to be untraceable, to be unmarked in some way? Mina Bergson certainly
did her best to have it so. Mary Greer notes that, at the end of her life, having
rejected all friendly offers of support, she essentially starved herself to death.
All of the original temple furniture from Alpha et Omega and all of her re-
maining papers were subsequently burned (following instructions from the
highest order of the “Secret Chiefs”).6
In terms of Phelan’s thesis of performance as unmarked, and Mina’s in-
vocation of spirits as an occult performance, we might say that what is not
left behind is also what can be brought to “presence” in such performance: a
movement, a bodily gesture, projected colors, vibrated sounds—​but no solid
residues, no “permanent” things. Not representing (picturing) the past but
performing it, even with images. And no spooky substances either, no con-
fusion of matter and spirit as opposed things—​only traceless ghosts. Indeed,
the very idea of séance or ectoplasm was anathema to both the Golden Dawn
and the Alpha et Omega which followed it—​they did not practice that kind
 Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum: “Leave No Trace”  131

of “magic.” The spiritualization of matter is not its transubstantiation (the in-

sertion of a ghost into another substance), but its ephemeralization—​seeing
matter as moving, traceless, evanescent, and thereby real. One such material
was Mina’s performing body: in the words of Rebecca Schneider on “theat-
rical re-​enactment”: “this body, given to performance, is here engaged with
disappearance chiasmically—​not only disappearing but resiliently eruptive,
remaining through performance like so many ghosts at the door marked
‘disappeared.’ ”7
Recall how, for Henri Bergson, memory is not a set of images stored in
the brain. Talk of “engrams” as traces left in the brain from repeated cerebral
activity raises as many questions as it supposedly answers. Why those traces,
why those repetitions, if not because they were made by what I was inter-
ested in, by my attention? Deflation to a purportedly mechanical brain, but
followed by an inflation of that brain re-​envisioned as the brain in all its own
individuality, not even Catherine Malabou’s “our brain,” but my brain: the
brain as an individual assemblage of selective movements, intersecting lines
of continuity.8 For Henri Bergson, there are no general, that is, mechanical
laws of mental association, only personal ones, “plastic” ones. When looked
at closely enough, the brain reveals itself to be more than an impersonal,
predictable mechanism, but a set of such individuated movements. Perhaps
then, and so to listen to Mina Bergson again, the memories that recur (the
special ones, the evocative-​involuntary, Proustian ones) are connected to
the ritual memories or experiences that are attempting to repeat, to return, to
survive at another level—​what we heard Malabou earlier describe as “some-
thing that was there before, already, waiting to be seen or heard.” These
“somethings” (Gaucher’s “shapeless, chaotic mass” perhaps?) only need a
ceremony, performance, or rite as their conduit, their interrupted contin-
uation. The ritual—​bodies in motion, instruments, staged space, sounds
and light included—​as macro-​brain and collective memory. Smallism and
“largism”; or, to proliferate the hermetic principle as follows: “as below, so
above, as above, so below. . . .”
In this regard, a peculiar significance can be found in some of Henri
Bergson’s previously unpublished lectures at the Collège de France. The lec-
ture scripts from 1903 and 1904 have recently appeared and throw a slightly
different light on this “something” that tries to return.9 Furthermore, in the
midst of these “new” texts, a famous image does return: the renowned dia-
gram of the cone in Matter and Memory that we discussed earlier. Only, in
the 1904 lecture on memory, the cone here comes back in a new guise, with
132  Vestiges of a Philosophy

a different shape and different symbols that actually connect with ideas of
ephemera (the untraced), performance, and the spiritualization of matter
(see Figure 14).10
The topmost plane of the cone, marked by RR”, is the “plane of dream”
(“plan du rêve”). Note, however, the way that the lines of the cone now pass
upward beyond RR”. Indeed, they do so indefinitely because the human
dream state never defined pure memory for Henri Bergson—​it merely in-
dicated (“figuratively,” as he says) the direction of those planes approaching
pure memory “above” more closely than those “below” nearer to living per-
ception.11 As he explained in these lectures, there are memories that, the
closer to RR” they approach, the more personal, virtual, and really past they
are (“in” a past that is real). Memories that come closer to a perception at
the point of the cone M gather together through various “dynamic sche-
mata” (marked SS”) rather than simply falling chaotically into our present
perceptions (at least while we are awake and not dreaming).12
M symbolizes a “plane of movement” (sometimes also called a “plane of ac-
tion”) at this point of the cone.13 But it is how Henri Bergson newly describes
the way in which memories move down from RR” to M that is truly revealing.
Matter and Memory described how a memory produces on us the effect of a
“ghost,” but eight years later, his language has amplified: now, he says, “there
are ghosts,” of a sort. Though the memories located at RR” are still “obscure,”
he claims that they nonetheless exert “a kind of thrust” that might help them
“return . . . to full light.” “In a way,” he continues, they are “ghosts who would
like to materialize themselves.” The analogy proceeds as follows:

R R'

S S'

Figure 14  Bergson’s Cone of Memory (second variation) (Reproduced from

Bergson’s notes, 1904)
 Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum: “Leave No Trace”  133

At the top of the cone, at point M, there is movement, there is, one might
say, life; there is the flesh and blood that make life; but on the plane RR”,
there are ghosts. These ghosts would like to borrow from point M the blood
and flesh found there to become living beings. [ . . . ] Which . . . amongst
all these ghosts, will be the ones who succeed in materializing themselves?
Those who have the strongest relationship with the present perception,
those best able to insert themselves, those also who exist better than others
in the movement that we are sketching. . . . 14

Thus, we see the significance of calling the point of the cone M, the “plane of
movement.” To return, a ghost must fit into a movement that (we might add)
calls it, invokes it, and so allows it to materialize (materializing “spirits” by
spiritualizing matter with a particular movement, so to speak).
Henri Bergson is writing playfully here, of course, and so are we, in part.
Yet the analogy with phantoms and spirits is a recurrent trope within his
writing, even in “serious” work in the philosophy of psychology or the his-
tory of philosophy. When citing Plotinus’s Enneades, for example, he also
likens memories to “souls” that are “lying in wait in the depth of the uncon-
scious,” a “phantom memory, materializing itself in sensation which brings
it flesh and blood, becomes a being which lives a life of its own, a dream.”15
The mention of dreaming is striking here, for the reference to the Enneades
comes in Henri Bergson’s 1901 lecture on “Dreams” (Le Rêve) where the
question of movement, of how pure memory-​images gain a foothold in the
living, moving world, is given an even more suggestive rendering—​as phan-
toms entering a dance:

But the memories which are preserved in these obscure depths are for us
in the state of invisible phantoms. They aspire, perhaps, to the light: they
do not even try to rise to it; they know it is impossible, and that I, a living
and acting being, have something else to do than occupy myself with them.
But suppose that, at a given moment, I become disinterested in the present
situation, in the pressing action, in both of the forces which concentrate
on one single point all the activities of memory; suppose, in other words,
I fall asleep: then these repressed memories, feeling that I have set aside
the obstacle, raised the trap-​door which held them back below the floor
of consciousness, begin to stir. They rise and spread abroad and perform
in the night of the unconscious a wild phantasmagoric dance. They rush
together to the door which has been left ajar. They all want to get through.
134  Vestiges of a Philosophy

But they cannot; there are too many of them. Of the many called, which
will be chosen? It is easy to guess. Just now, when awake, the memories
admitted were those which could claim relationship with my present sit-
uation, with my actual perceptions. [ . . . ] So, then, among the phantom
memories which aspire to weight themselves with colour, with sound, in
short with materiality, those only succeed which can assimilate the colour-​
dust I perceive, the noises without and within that I hear, etc., and which,
besides, are in harmony with the general affective state which my organic
impressions compose. When this union between memory and sensation is
effected, I dream.16

It is the “phantom memories” that perform this wild dance here. I am asleep
and only dreaming. Yet dreaming is only one state of my consciousness. Other
planes of consciousness, of trance, fugue, hypnotic states, dissociative states
(all of which Henri Bergson was well acquainted with in his research) would
each offer different means for materialization, diverse forms of movement at
M. The movements that we “sketch” (or perhaps “trace”) can be multiple—​
and doubtless ones produced in artistic and mystical performances could be
counted in their number. Phantom memories need to find a purchase, a rela-
tion in, or kinship with, the present in order to return to life. What the jour-
nalist Gaucher described as “a shapeless, chaotic mass . . . slowly emerging
from the blackness” in Mina Bergson’s Rites—​such phantoms need to live as
“blood and flesh.” So the question naturally arises: what type of movement
might reanimate those who, in Henri’s words, “rise and spread abroad and
perform in the night of the unconscious a wild phantasmagoric dance”?17 Or,
in other words, what else might M stand for?

* * *
To return ourselves to the question of leaving no trace in the context of Mina
Bergson’s biography, it is noteworthy how Henri Bergson’s own preoccupa-
tion with “discretion” and the “virtues of the private and the secret” struck
many of his contemporary commentators.18 In a final item of correspond-
ence from 1939, and sounding like an astronaut about to return to his space-
ship, he wrote: “I continue to work as best I can, but it is wrong to have said
that I was preparing a new book. The truth is that I would like, before leaving
our planet, to come to an opinion on certain points, and to do it for me.”19
One year later in December 1940, Henri Bergson would, against all advice,
line up with his co-​religionists to register as a Jew. He died within a month
 Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum: “Leave No Trace”  135

after contracting bronchitis. In his will, he forbade the publication of any un-
published writing. No final book appeared after he had left “our planet.” Like
his sister, all his personal notes and correspondence were destroyed on his
instruction.20
That we have only just now cited ideas from works that were unpublished
in Henri’s own lifetime is, therefore, a partial betrayal of his request. Yet no
less is true of this very enquiry into the vestiges of Mina’s ideas, a woman who
wished to remain without a trace. Should we disturb their spirits too much,
we might hope for some exoneration in the view that it is the unmarked
performance which has real creative power, that the indefinite, ephemeral
movements of enduring life (Henri) and spiritual ritual (Mina) contain an
immanent truth that survives unseen. And these truths will remain at least
partially untraced, despite what we are documenting here. Alternatively, be-
yond any virtue signaling in my retelling of Mina’s “her-​story” (though hers
is a story that should be told, irrespective of motive), and beyond endorsing
Henri’s possibly bourgeois values of “discretion” or “privacy” (though staying
faithful to “the inner,” to “knowing thyself,” was truly paramount for both
him and Mina), there remains the necessity of invention when trying to un-
derstand the alterity of another. This is no less true of my documentations
of the two Bergsons. When I cannot be the other, I must fabulate, remake,
or invoke him or her. In our fabulation, therefore, our infidelity to both
Bergsons could be redeemed through Vladimir Jankélévitch’s recommenda-
tion that we remake Bergson rather than simply reproduce him—​that it is
“the Bergsonian direction, the Bergsonian movement” alone that continues,
that survives.21 Only, in this performance, it is the two Bergsons together,
as alter egos, that need to be brought to life—​not in “flesh and blood” but as
covarying movements of thought. If this book is about memory and a for-
gotten Bergson, it is also a book that performs its recollection as an invoca-
tion through heterogeneity, discontinuity, and covariance.
 3° =​8° Practicus Covariant

In an essay by physicist Paul Halpern, wonderfully titled “Spiritual

Hyperplane,” we find a useful history of both older and more recent
engagements by spiritualists with the science of physics. Or, we should say,
spiritually inclined physicists. One of these can be found in The Unseen
Universe, a popular book from 1875 by mathematical physicists Balfour
Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait. It was published anonymously, and for ob-
vious reasons: as Halpern reports, it attempted to link the principle of the
conservation of energy with the spiritual question of life after death. In
one passage, it also connected a “fourth dimension” of space with an “un-
seen realm” that could be interpreted as spiritual. Halpern cites Stewart
and Tait thus: “just as points are the terminations of lines, lines the bound-
aries of surfaces, and surfaces the boundaries of portions of space of three
dimensions: so we may suppose our (essentially three-​dimensional) matter
to be the mere skin or boundary of an Unseen whose matter has four
dimensions.”1
Stewart and Tait were not alone in their off-​duty speculations as physicists
(some of whom, such as Oliver Lodge, emerged in their wake). We heard
previously of “neo-​alchemists” and telepathists looking to atomic theory and
X-​rays, respectively, for scientific confirmation of these paranormal phe-
nomena. Here, however, the interest in the spiritual comes directly from the
scientists, and the object of fascination at this point for many was space. In
1879, German physicist Johann Zöllner published Transcendental Physics.
He, too, was engrossed in the significance of a space beyond the usual three
dimensions. Halpern describes how Zöllner posited “that space’s restriction
to three dimensions could simply be a persistent mirage. Perhaps, then, the
world of the spirit, including all manner of psychic occurrences, had a per-
fectly natural explanation in a hitherto unexplored dimension.”
These underground conjectures by physicists about other spatial
dimensions soon drew to a close, however, when one theory in particular
appeared: Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It was the general theory,
Halpern argues, “which enabled physicists to reclaim higher dimensions

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0014
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  137

from the spiritualists” (no more “spooky physics” to trouble Gerald

Edelman).2 These days, Halpern concludes, “most physicists eschew any
spiritual connotations of higher dimensions,” though he adds that, perhaps
in some cases, the “mystique” of the spiritual “as expressed in books such as
The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) by Gary Zukav—​has helped to draw new
recruits to the genuine science.”3
Even earlier than Zukav (who was not a scientist) came the work of
Austrian physicist Fritjof Capra, whose 1975 book The Tao of Physics explains
itself perfectly in its subtitle: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern
Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Seeing parallels between the “new physics,” as
it was still called in the 1970s (primarily meaning quantum mechanics and
relativity theory) and spirituality has become a common enough strategy in
a good deal of science and humanities writing since then. It is something
that Karen Barad’s version of new materialism in Meeting the Universe
Halfway from 2007 excels at (despite their protests to the contrary that they
are not conducting any such work in mere “analogy”).4 Where Capra gave us
physics and the Tao in order to see the world anew as a highly interconnected
ecology, Barad gives us physics and high theory (poststructuralism, feminist
theory, posthumanism, and performance studies), in order to think about
the problems of epistemology afresh as forms of “entangled” knowledge. And
there’s no shame in either enterprise. A professor of Feminist Studies, Barad
is unusual in the academic humanities for also having a doctorate in the-
oretical physics. They apply their interdisciplinary approach across various
arts and humanities, performance theory being a crucial one. As Christopher
Gamble, Joshua Hanan, and Thomas Nail write, Barad’s materialism is
invested in a “new sense of aliveness” rather than any vitalism, new or old: “in
sharp contrast with Bennett, then, Barad’s notion of matter’s vitality does not
derive from alleged essential differences between life and death, but is what
performatively engenders those differences.”5
Like Bennett, though, Barad begins with their new conception of matter,
in this case one that emerges from quantum mechanics (especially the ver-
sion championed by Niels Bohr). In this approach,

Matter is neither fixed and given nor the mere end result of different pro-
cesses. Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative.
Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things. Mattering is
differentiating, and which differences come to matter, matter in the itera-
tive production of different differences.6
138  Vestiges of a Philosophy

We will look more closely at these claims anon, but we should first hear Barad
out when they claim that their “diffractive approach” to physics is no mere
compare-​and-​contrast exercise. Their research has no patience, they write,

for tricks with mirrors, where, for example, the macroscopic is said to
mirror the microscopic, or the social world is treated as a reflection of the
metaphysics of individualism perfected in atomic theory, and so on. The
drawing of analogies, like that between special relativity and the cubist
school of painting, for instance . . . can be very interesting. But these
common modes of analysis are only of limited value, and insufficient for
understanding the deeper philosophical issues at stake. . . . This diffractive
methodology enables me to examine in detail important philosophical is-
sues such as the conditions for the possibility of objectivity, the nature of
measurement, the nature of nature and meaning making, the conditions
for intelligibility, the nature of causality and identity, and the relationship
between discursive practices and the material world.7

No model of “as above, so below” here, then. Nor will readers, they add,
looking to be “dazzled, entertained, and mystified by a quixotic sideshow of
isolated facts and cutesy quirks of quantum theory,” find any satisfaction in
their work.8 Their approach is serious and explores “deeper philosophical is-
sues,” as we heard, without any showmanship.
Iris van der Tuin is one philosopher who has taken Barad’s work very
seriously and, indeed, seen parallels between it and Henri Bergson’s ideas.
When Barad states that “reality is not composed of things-​in-​themselves
[thingification] or things-​ behind-​phenomena [representationalism] but
‘things’-​in-​phenomena,” or when they write of an “ongoing flow of agency,”
and a “processual historicity,” van der Tuin sees ideas here that are “very
much in line with Bergson.”9 Indeed, the dynamism at the heart of Barad’s
view of the world is thoroughly Bergsonian in spirit if we look to Barad’s
writing directly:

Materialization is not the end product or simply a succession of interme-

diary effects of purely discursive practices. Materiality itself is a factor in
materialization. The dynamics of mattering are nonlinear: the specific na-
ture of the material configurations of the apparatuses of bodily produc-
tion, which are themselves phenomena in the process of materializing,
matters to the materialization of the specific phenomena of which they
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  139

are a part, which matters to the ongoing materialization of the world in its
intra-​active becoming, which makes a difference in subsequent patterns of
mattering, and so on; that is, matter is enfolded into itself in its ongoing
materialization.10

Barad’s conspicuous use of the verbal form “mattering” (which we will later
see David Bohm call a “rheomode,” or deeply verbal grammar) and their
emphasis on matter as process—​materialization—​is obviously evocative of
Henri Bergson, too. This materialization is best understood as a process of
emergence for Barad: “matter refers to the materiality/​materialization of phe-
nomena, not to an inherent fixed property of abstract independently existing
objects of Newtonian physics.”11 Similar comparisons between Barad and
Henri Bergson can be made with regard to the dimensions of time as well.
On the question of the persistence of the past, their interpretation of the new
physics contains many echoes of Matter and Memory: “the existence of the
quantum discontinuity,” for instance, means that “the past is never left be-
hind, never finished once and for all [ . . . ] rather the past and the future are
enfolded participants in matter’s iterative becoming.”12
Though there is much more emphasis on matter or the language of “mate-
rialization” here than might be found in Henri Bergson himself, the fact that
it is framed within a processual context of “becoming,” or “the inexhaust-
ible dynamism of the enfolding of mattering,” makes for familiar reading,
with further talk of “the world and its possibilities for becoming [that] are
re-​made with each moment,” and the need to be “alive to the possibilities of
becoming,” which is itself an “ethical call . . . written into the very matter of
all being and becoming.”13 And so on. Barad’s critique of “thingification” is
likewise very Bergsonian: even though they retain the idea of substance, like
him, they rerender it as process, as becoming: “matter is substance in its intra-​
active becoming—​not a thing but a doing.”14
Whereas Bennett puts far greater store on “thing-​power” at the larger scale
she is mostly writing about, Barad’s subatomic level of discourse sees things
differently. Things for them are emergent from processes, or as they put it,
“relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-​within-​phenomena emerge
through specific intra-​actions.”15 When Henri Bergson writes about ani-
mism in The Two Sources in terms of things being substantialized by having
their activity extracted from them, we clearly see an antecedent position to
Barad’s: “our philosophy and our language first posit the substance and sur-
round it with attributes, and then make such and such acts arise therefrom
140  Vestiges of a Philosophy

like emanations. But we cannot too often repeat that the action may be
forthcoming first and be self-​sufficient.” An action, for Henri Bergson, “can
be localized in a thing . . . but it has its own independent existence.” When
such actions are hypostatized, extracted as immobile ideas, the “subject”
of the process thereafter can only “relapse the more completely into the state
of a thing pure and simple.”16 Things emerge from actions, from processes
deemed intentional and predicated of a substance, a subject.
Barad’s neologism “intra-​action,” cited earlier, signifies “the mutual con-
stitution of entangled agencies,” and it is the cornerstone of their approach.17
It is more than simply a concept of relation or dialectic that has been given
a physicist’s spin, however. Relata do not exist and then interact: their ex-
istence emerges reciprocally, intra-​actively. Hence, as Barad proclaims, their
notion of intra-​action “constitutes a reworking of the traditional notion of
causality.”18 And there is something performative at work here at a basic,
metaphysical level, too. Agency, they write, “is a matter of intra-​acting; it is
an enactment, not something that someone or something has.”19 This agency,
this performativity, is also posthuman for Barad; indeed, they call it a
“posthumanist notion of performativity” as it involves “all bodies, not merely
‘human’ bodies.” What interests them is how these bodies “come to matter
through the world’s iterative intra-​activity—​its performativity.”20 Finally,
we should also note that this phrase “come to matter” is a play on words by
Barad: things “matter” for them in as much as they emerge as both material
and of value in one and the same process of materialization. That is why we
earlier heard them mention an “ethical call” in their project: this is more than
a contribution to knowledge; it is also a portrayal of how what matters is si-
multaneously known, valued, and meaningful.
All these concepts are tied together—​meaning, mattering, valuing—​so
that the word play is not only played by words but is part of a larger perfor-
mance: “meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but
an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility.”21 The
ultimate name or “ism” for all of this, then, is proposed by Barad as follows:

I propose “agential realism” as an epistemological-​ ontological-​

eth-
ical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and
nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in
scientific and other social-​material practices, thereby moving such consid-
erations beyond the well-​worn debates that pit constructivism against re-
alism, agency against structure, and idealism against materialism.22
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  141

Now, Barad’s reference to ethics here is slightly ironic for me because, in

many respects, I have not done their philosophy complete justice in my re-
hearsal of its ideas. It could be said that I have got their argument the wrong
way round by focusing on its philosophical ramifications rather than on
its inspiration, in physics. When they write that “phenomena are differen-
tial patterns of mattering (‘diffraction patterns’) produced through complex
agential intra-​actions of multiple material-​discursive practices or appara-
tuses of bodily production,” there is a long backstory behind this technical
vocabulary.23 It begins with the “two-​slit diffraction or interference experi-
ment” that originated in Thomas Young’s scientific work in the early 1800s.
A light source is passed through a plate with two parallel slits, thus splitting
it in two. An “interference pattern” of dark and bright patches of light is
formed on a screen beyond the plate when the light from the slits hits it. This
“double-​slit experiment,” as it is also known, was a demonstration showing
that light could behave in ways that displayed the characteristics of both a
wave and a particle. In Young’s time, it was thought that light consisted of ei-
ther waves or particles, and his experiment was to provide evidence favoring
the wave theory of light. Yet the experiment was also prescient in that it indi-
cated, well before its time, the quantum mechanical nature of light as prob-
abilistic, at least according to a later interpretation developed by Niels Bohr.
Light, in this view, was now equally wave and particle on the basis of real
probability, not only statistical probability. And though many baulked at the
idea that a thing or event could really exist as a probability (Einstein, who fa-
mously said that God does not “play dice” in response to these ideas, was one
such skeptic), Bohr’s interpretation prevailed nonetheless: light could live a
double life as wave and particle. Here is how Barad brings the story up to date
in more contemporary language. These days, it is not just light, in fact, but all
matter which behaves so peculiarly:

under certain circumstances matter (generally thought of as being made of

particles) is found to produce a diffraction pattern! That is, we find bands or
areas where significant numbers of particles hit the screen alternating with
areas where hardly any particles hit the screen. But this is not at all how we
would expect particles to behave: we would expect the bulk of the particles
to wind up opposite one slit or the other (i.e., no alternating band pattern).
And yet diffraction effects have been observed for electrons, neutrons,
atoms, and other forms of matter. And even more astonishing, this diffrac-
tion pattern is produced even if the particles go through the diffraction
142  Vestiges of a Philosophy

grating one at a time (that is, even if there is, if you will, nothing else around
for each particle to interfere with, whatever that might mean).24

Oddly enough, Barad’s anti-​foundationalist metaphysics (relations over

relata, emergence over substrate, irreducible processes, etc.) is, all the
same, founded on the truths of fundamental physics, even as it posits an
epistemology and practice that is intra-​active or diffractive. In this, how-
ever, they would not be the first to practice such inconsistency, and one
could even argue that they must at least be paraconsistent (doing X and not
doing X), given the unstable “foundations” of their theoretical touchstone,
quantum mechanics, and its ability to practice double-​think (X is a wave
and is not a wave).25 In such a case, the defense would have to say that
paraconsistency is the only consistency available. Nonetheless, this would
be as odd as things go: any similarities between the discontinuous logic
of paraconsistency and, say, the irrationality of the paranormal, would
have to be disavowed. Quantum matter may behave oddly, but it is still
not the “spooky physics” of higher dimensional space investigated by the
spiritualist physicists of the nineteenth century. Only matter matters here,
and what others might have once deemed immaterial has now become
immaterial.26
Nonetheless, if we cannot go directly to the spiritual from Barad’s ideas,
we can at least take an alternative route through art. Our own endeavors at
destabilizing the normal/​paranormal binary through the concept of hetero-
geneous continuities (and supernormalization) can now turn to art and, in
particular, performance art practices in order to flesh out Barad’s ideas. In
fact, Silvia Battista’s Posthuman Spiritualities in Contemporary Performance
does just this when looking at the art installations of James Turrell, espe-
cially his use of the aesthetics of light. His work, she writes, celebrates “light
as entangled in both the physical and the metaphysical, without feeling com-
pelled to discern between the two.” Rather than reflect on light as a “pro-
vocateur for the human spiritual senses,” he sees “light as a thing worthy
of attention in itself for its intrinsically mysterious, liminal qualities.”27 For
Battista, Turrell’s installations create “a stage for light to perform its extra-​
ordinary qualities,” structures that “offer the privileged opportunity to watch
and witness light as a thing . . . entangled with space and time.”28 These spaces
of Turrell are Baradian in her eyes, becoming “temples where, to use Barad’s
terminology, we meet ‘the universe halfway to move toward what may come
to be.’ ”
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  143

With the reference to “space and time” here, perhaps we should not be sur-
prised that Battista’s descriptions of Turrell’s work then take a turn that, like
van der Tuin earlier, connects Barad’s work to Henri Bergson’s ideas:

. . . despite the fact that light’s frequencies, particles and waves, refractions
and reflections are absorbed by and entangled with/​in our organism, this is
a theatre that does not need us human beings for starting its performances.
Light and its particles are actors that vibrate and travel, project and move,
regardless of whether we are present or not [ . . . ] Our participation in these
processes invite[s]‌reflection on the ephemerality, mutability of life; a cer-
tain humility, recognition of scale (of a life, a thought, and everything in
between); but also offers the possibility of liberation from functional/​in-
strumental time in our culture, and related conceptions of the self.29

This “liberation from functional/​instrumental time,” she argues, involves a

change in duration, and thereafter she cites an essay by Pierre Montebello
on Henri Bergson, “Matter and Light,” to bring out how the “change of light
becomes our changing in light” as a “form of duration connected to our
own.”30 If we look to Montebello’s essay itself, we see how it confirms the
relevance of Henri Bergson to this performative aesthetic of light as a non-
human actor:

In The Creative Mind [La pensée et le mouvant], Bergson has recourse to

the example of colors, which are wave lengths. Everywhere his vocabu-
lary translates the opposition between body and color, between geometric
figure and figure of light, solid reality and supple interrelatedness. [ . . . ]
This omnipresence of the theme of light, of radiating, of color and of waves
in Bergson’s philosophy translates something of an era: the passage from a
world of images to a world where one must perceive the imperceptible light
that animates things. Creative Evolution is inscribed in a larger movement
of dematerialization of matter, a movement of going beyond the image and
the object, toward their source, toward the intimate and secret movement
of things.31

The language of light as an actor that “animates things,” going beyond

“image” and “object” to the “secret movement of things” sounds simulta-
neously Bergsonian and Baradian. With respect to the former, however, we
might ask—​which Bergson? The “intimate and secret movement of things”
144  Vestiges of a Philosophy

also echoes Mina Bergson’s language of the “eternal attraction between ideas
and matter,” which is for her “the secret of life.”32 And as for the “move-
ment of dematerialization of matter,” it takes very little to see here also ideas
belonging to both the Bergsons, yet voiced specifically by Mina Bergson as
the “spiritualizing” of “material science.”
The direct connection between Mina Bergson and not only art but per-
formance art (and, therewith, Barad’s posthuman performativity) has been
discerned by Dennis Denisoff and Charlotte de Mille. She writes of Mina
Bergson’s art work for the Golden Dawn as “an elaborate form of perfor-
mance art.” It is an art practice, however, “with a very particular intention.”
As de Mille reports: in a letter to Yeats, Mina Bergson was adamant that the
creation of rituals was “ ‘a long and difficult business . . . Anything of the
kind got up without the solid foundation of Truth we will not have anything
to do with, and neither will you of course.’ ”33 What Truth were the rituals
invoking? Obviously, nothing too “solid,” given their spiritualist leaning. The
mystery rites invoke the past, past spirits, only as movement, in performance.
So we might now ask this kind of question: can a dance, or even a gesture
in a dance, be a memory? According to the many kinds of bodily memory
we listed earlier, the answer is yes. But can such a memory be transpersonal,
acting beyond the individual’s biographical space and time to a distribution
not only within a collective space but also across a supra-​personal time? This
would not be a past life remembered, but a prior movement in a person that
is continued into another life, another “body.” To do something, this thing,
“in memory of me,” for example, need not entail reproducing biographical
events faithfully and “to the letter”: it would be to continue a movement, even
as it has been interrupted, and perhaps even corrupted, in its multiple inter-
pretations (“materializations”), partly accurate and partly inaccurate.
This is not “spooky performance,” however. Let me give another example.
Simone Forti’s performances as a “movement artist” rely on the body as a pri-
mary source of memory that is both personal and supra-​personal, human and
nonhuman: “I am interested in what we know of things through our bodies,”
she states.34 This knowledge can even be nonhuman knowledge, such as “of ”
animal movements, for instance, even as they are continued within her own
human body. Indeed, especially as they are continued within her body. As
Filipa Ramos says, this is not an imitation or reproduction of the movement
of a flamingo, say, or a bear, but its heterogeneous continuation—​a mimesis
of processes. Or as Forti herself claims, “it seems that vertebrate animals
transitioned from ocean to dry land; their first and second adaptations were
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  145

respiratory and ambulatory. It appears that the development of the respira-

tory organs and members to keep the body off the ground were simultaneous
and of maximum integration; the limbs were laterally oriented. Ah back-
bone! Oh past and future memories!”35
Henri Bergson’s (and Jung’s) biological memory again. Forti’s “dances,” or
“movement art,” are also embodied, nonhuman memories—​past lives, the
past life of the backbone for instance, reincarnated. It is significant here that
Jane Bennett cites Manuel de Landa’s work on “evolutionary rather than bi-
ographical time,” too, only for her it is as an example of “mineral efficacy,”
in particular the development of bones in living bodies, bone as actant. De
Landa recounts how, around five thousand million years ago, “a new material
for constructing living creatures emerged” to replace “the conglomerations of
fleshy matter-​energy that made up life.” A sudden mineralization occurred,
with soft tissues, “gels and aerosols, muscle and nerve,” being replaced by
bone.36 Such evolutionary time—​even longer than that involved in the de-
velopment of “dorsality,” the backbone—​can also be recalled in dance, con-
tinued in movement. And this mnemonic and embodied persistence of the
dorsal past cannot be written off, or normalized, as simply a hugely elon-
gated chain of cause and effect. For Barad, remember, mechanical “cause and
effect,” the billiard ball causality or interaction of bodies across space and
time, is no longer ontologically sound: instead, we have an intra-​activity that
restores material agency to nonhuman actors, bones and dancers, past and
present.37
Perhaps, though, we have tipped the balance too far in favor of philosoph-
ical speculation in all this talk of causation, memory, and mimesis over ex-
perience itself, both artistic and scientific. Admittedly, a lot of positive things
have been written by philosophers about dance and, indeed, movement art,
especially when thinking of it as an inspiration for philosophy: it can be
an “action transposed into a world, into a kind of space-​time, which is no
longer quite the same as that of everyday life” (Paul Valéry), a “metaphor for
thought” (Alain Badiou), or even a model of nonphilosophical thinking that
resists philosophical appropriations of dance as “intensification of move-
ment,” or “metaphysical excess” in favor of an “ ‘ordinary’ rather than meta-
physical aesthetics” (François Laruelle).38 All the same, maybe we should put
a lid on the philosophy and leave until later ideas of dance or performance
philosophy. In fact, the work of Lindsay Seers, though admittedly located
more in video and performance art than movement or dance, is extremely
philosophical in its own right. It offers us an “ordinary” aesthetics that is very
146  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Baradian in its themes, employing optical experimentation (she once turned

her mouth into a rudimentary camera) and the concept of twinness and en-
tanglement in various guises. Moreover, her installation/​performance work
Nowhere Less Now in particular also engages with themes concerning bio-
logical memory, quantum mechanics, transpersonal biography, and (here’s
the kicker) the life and work of both Henri and Mina Bergson. In its first in-
stallation it was also located within a church, the Tin Tabernacle in Kilburn,
London.
In an interview given at the opening of Nowhere Less Now in 2012 (the
work has gone through a number of iterations since), Seers tells her inter-
locutor that “I start with a question—​where does the past exist?”39 In notes
accompanying the installation, its themes of opticality, genetic twinning, and
memory are introduced as follows:

The starting point for all of Seers’s work is a personal family connection,
and for “Nowhere Less Now” it’s an old photograph of Seers’s great-​great-​
uncle George, himself a sailor, as was Seers’s father. The photograph was
taken in 1890, when George was 24, on a ship called The Kingfisher. “As
soon as I began looking into George’s story, I uncovered lots of uncanny
facts,” Seers explains. . . . “The first being that George and I share the same
birthday, September 27, and that we were born exactly 100 years apart—​
he in 1866 and myself in 1966.” [ . . . ] Another photograph Seers drew
on for this project was of an early female freemason, possibly George’s
wife, Georgina. “George was a mason, like many naval men,” she says.
“I’m very influenced by the ideas of French philosopher and mystic Henri
Bergson (1859–​1941), whose sister, Moina Mathers, was married to one
of the founders of esoteric organisation Golden Dawn, based on free-
mason practices,” Seers explains, “This was also one of the first of such
groups to admit female members.” Mathers studied at the Slade School
of Art, as did Seers. When she tried to find out what records they had
of Mathers, all that came up was a card saying that during that time she
was living in Kilburn. “Moina was born in 1865, George in 1866 and the
Kilburn church was built between 1863 and 1866, so everything meets at
this one point in time.”40

Past and present intertwine through various sets of correspondences (maybe

not yet covariants), a crucial one being between two female artists born nearly
a century apart. Seers begins with Bergson the philosopher, though, rather
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  147

than Bergson the occult-​artist: “the starting point is from a notion of the phi-
losopher Henri Bergson’s intuition as practice, to make art ontological.” To
make art ontological—​to give it “being.” This is highly apt. Given that Henri
Bergson was portrayed by Paul Valéry and others as having “questioned as
a professor and replied as . . . a poet,” it is not all that surprising that Henri
Bergson himself should have described philosophy unapologetically as an
art for the masses, offering altered perceptions “more continual and more
accessible to the majority of men.”41 Philosophy, he continued, enables a de-
mocracy of vision irrespective of artistic aptitude: “all things acquire depth—​
more than depth, something like a fourth dimension which permits anterior
perceptions to remain bound up with present perceptions.”42 The fourth di-
mension again, only here not in any immaterial sense, but as an enhanced
aesthesis, a purer perception.43 In its own fashion, Nowhere Less Now
performs these “anterior perceptions” and gives them “being” through eyes,
cameras, costumes, avatars, ships, churches, and cults.44 As such, it professes
an absolute equality of images (“everything is images, and all images are
equal”) no less than that found in Matter and Memory which begins and ends
“in the presence of images.”
The installation takes the form of two thirty-​three-​minute films that are
projected simultaneously within the Kilburn church, along with a multilay-
ered soundtrack relating George’s story as a sailor, his family life, journeys to
Zanzibar, and so on. Storytelling, or narrative memory, again:

One of the aims of my work is to explore an idea of narrative that exists

way beyond itself. [ . . . ] Bergson didn’t believe in the idea of polarities,
like fact or fiction, and that’s a process I try to work within, between imag-
ination and experience, the faultiness of memory and the instability of the
moments that we’re in. The way that we experience life is through compli-
cated connections that leap backwards and forwards, along with constant
shifts in our sense of self, identity and emotional state. I hope “Nowhere
Less Now” has a similar connectivity, to be as close as possible to our actual
experience of “being.”45

These are familiar themes by now—​the power of imagination as real,

the inconsistency of memory, and the ordinary (“actual”) experience of
life and being. The use of twin projectors continues this theme of optical
doubling, especially of the photographic image—​an artistic variation of
Young’s interference experiment. However, Seers’s focus on imagery leads,
148  Vestiges of a Philosophy

ironically, to an eventual absence of photographs as an aspiration: “the fu-

ture of my intuition is a world without photography.”46 The world will not
need photographs simply because everything will become a type of pho-
tograph or image in Seers’s vision. And, of course, this is also Matter and
Memory’s first “intuition.” Its second intuition, too, is shared with Seers,
namely that images are located nowhere. The work’s accompanying text
clearly states that images are not localized: “no images are stored in brains,
no images in water. Where is the image? Nowhere. Yet images are every-
where.”47 An equality of images, equally distributed, in space and across
time, past and present. But they are never localized. They exist across time
“through complicated connections,” because the answer to the question
“Where does the past exist?” is equally, “Nowhere and everywhere.” There
are multiples forms of each—​pasts and presents. As a consequence, Seers
goes looking for her past in different places, things, and optical presents
hitherto unattended. She must reconnect with “the” past on many levels.
First, via physiognomy, through a genetic twin terminated at the embry-
onic stage but leaving a trace in the heterochromia (a tiny imperfection
within the eye) of her alter ego, George. Yet that is but one level of history,
a biological one. She also invokes the past through ghost ships, the Yoruba
people, photographs of past relatives, and present reenactments of past
events.
Contrary to a dream in the book accompanying the work that discusses
the possibility of “complete vision,” Seers’s film actually proclaims that, for
something to be visible, something else must be invisible, unseen.48 There
is always an economy of attention and vision. Occultus and Theoricus again.
And this attention can be either benign or malign. In George’s eyes we see
the marks left by a malign regard—​one twin destroying and absorbing the
other. In heterochromia, a trace of the suppressed other survives neverthe-
less, a virtual twin that has been biologically assimilated, incorporated, yet
still showing the mark of its separate existence in the pigment of one iris: the
past within the present.
In Claire Hazelton’s review of Nowhere Less Now for Aesthetica maga-
zine, Mina’s presence in the work is made conspicuous for the audience.49
She writes of Seers’s own identity becoming “confused” as it begins to “spill
into and fuse with that of artist and occultist Moina Mathers (Mina Bergson).
Dressed in masonic dress, the artist’s explorations lead her to perform a grue-
some sacrificial act at two ponds aptly named ‘the twins’ in Tanzania. The
film ends unresolved.” Hazelton continues as follows:
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  149

From the seed of one name, George Edwards, Nowhere Less Now has
constructed a strange reality set simultaneously in the past and future.
[ . . . ] But the question of “who is George?” still remains unanswered even
after exploring this space. Upon researching once at home, a motto taken
up by Mathers/​Bergson for The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn ee-
rily appears to speak for the unidentified character, reading “Vestigia Nulla
Retrorsum,”—​”I leave no traces behind.”50

And it is here, in these “confused” identities, that things take a further

quantum turn in the work itself, especially in respect to the “image of Moina
Mathers” (as its accompanying text relates). Indeed, at one point “Walter,” a
character who may or may not be a “quantum cosmologist” appears, relating
how “there is actually a Golden Dawn prophesy, or shall we say rumouri, that
if the society frequently invokes the authentic images of their founders, then
one day they will show up.” Who Walter actually is remains unclear, for there
is also mention of dual identities, the “wave function” collapse in quantum
mechanics, and even Young’s “famous slit-​screen experiment.” These mys-
terious events ultimately lead to the narrator, whose identity remains no
less uncertain either, to say that all he or she wants is “to know my extension
as a set of events on the other side of the slit from my external identity as
Lindsay Seers.”51 An answer of sorts eventually comes in the shape of a pho-
tographic image: on the rear of a monochrome picture of a black clad woman

Figure 15  Lindsay Seers in Nowhere Less Now (Courtesy of Lindsay Seers)
150  Vestiges of a Philosophy

(see Figure 15), in a costume embroidered with Masonic and Golden Dawn
insignia, the following is written: “ ‘This is me dressed as my great great
aunt Georgina. She is my manifestation of Moina. Do what you need to do.
Further the image? Repeat yourself? I trust you. Let me know what I can do.’
It was signed ‘Lindsay Seers.’ ”52
Seers’s work is obviously not an attempt to be true to the past (whatever
that might mean, given the multiple pasts, human and nonhuman, micro
and macro, that she invokes). It is, rather, an overt exercise in fabulation
and confabulation, a “faultiness of memory” that is simultaneously accurate
and inaccurate. It is this mixture of images that may, nonetheless, capture
something real on account of the suspension of any one identity possessing
them: what they continue and recollect is not the same, homogeneous thing,
but a heterogeneous group of movements. Ironically, the mystic artworks of,
and performances led, by Mina Bergson herself were seldom offered the same
charitable interpretation. The garments used in her Golden Dawn ceremonies
were indeed (as critics now argue) an unfaithful mix of Hermetic and Egyptian
influences, the rituals themselves being anachronistic as well as a hodgepodge
of Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and amateur Egyptology. What Mina and
Samuel’s reconstruction of the Egyptian mysteries offered was a “kind of
not-​quite-​right approach to ancient Egyptian religion.”53 In fact, according
to C. J. Tully, the main problem with Mina and Samuel’s attempt at creating
their initiatory system was that “there were no Egyptian Mysteries to begin
with.” It was a mistake to believe both that these public Egyptian festivals for
Osiris were actually “mystery initiations,” as well as “the idea that participants
in the Graeco-​Roman Isis processions were all mystae, rather than simply
members of the collegia.”54 In sum, the Parisian Isis movement was hopelessly
compromised with “historically inaccurate syncretic constructions.” Like the
Golden Dawn initiation ceremonies themselves, far from being “authentic an-
cient Egyptian rituals,” they “were constructed from a combination of clas-
sical and pharaonic sources filtered through a Hermetic lens.”55
Yet did Mina and Samuel care? Of course not. Their works were, as we
heard, “artistic in the extreme” (and in more than one sense), and they were
clearly content to work with their ahistorical reconstruction of Isis as an
“eternal, mysterious, magical figure representative of universal harmony,
unity and nature.”56 Faced with the ridicule of professional Egyptologists,
their response (in interview) was to commend “beautiful truths . . . dead to
the Egyptologist, but so living and so full of vital force to them.”57 Indeed,
it may have struck the reader earlier that Mina Bergson’s text, “Of Skrying,”
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  151

described “the imagination of the artist” as central to this occult practice—​

not the “practitioner,” nor the “adept,” but the “artist.” Art, then, was surely
fundamental to what she believed she was doing (and after all, the goddess
of memory, Mnemosyne, was also the Greek goddess of all the arts and
mother of the nine Muses). As fellow Golden Dawn member John William
Brodie-​Innes wrote: “whether the Gods, the Qliphothic forces” (i.e., the evil
demons of the Hebrew Qabalah) “or even the Secret Chiefs” (i.e., the sup-
posed invisible superhumans who are believed to direct the activities of au-
thentic magical fraternities) “really exist is comparatively unimportant; the
point is that the universe behaves as though they do.”58 Brodie-​Innes even
goes on to claim that this stance (the “philosophy of the practice of magic”)
is “identical” with the pragmatism of C. S. Pierce. We would add that it is as
if the very notion of “as though” (or “as if ”) renders representation as beha-
vior, as cosmic process. The “as if ” of the philosophers, at least from Kant on-
ward (and Henri Bergson, too, uses the phrase “comme si” in a perspicuous
manner in much of his work) or “seeing as” of imagination, is rerendered as a
real, if partial, becoming.
To criticize Mina Bergson for inaccuracy in her rituals, therefore, would
be no less churlish than it would be to censure the modern artist Marcus
Coates for performing a shamanic ritual in a Liverpool council flat (in his
2004 work Journey to the Lower World). Hers was an art that was both faithful
and unfaithful, aesthetic and spiritual, intertwining memory with imagina-
tion (as it is increasingly acknowledged we all do). It was a creative behavior
forming a hetero-​continuity with the real rather than a static representation
of it. As “supernatural artists,” though, Mina and Samuel practiced this in
extremis, being witnesses of events at which they could not have been pre-
sent. If their art was an avant-​garde aesthetic, it took the term literally, seeing
ahead what had come before: a continuity (truth) that is heterogeneous (a
beautiful truth).
Moreover, though scholars like Wouter Hanegraaff describe the practice
of the Golden Dawn as distinctly modern in as much as it operated within
the context of a “disenchanted world,” and so also with a psychologized ap-
proach to magic (though he adds that this would not make it any less real in
their eyes), others have even questioned whether modernity can be marked
off so straightforwardly as disenchanted. If disenchantment is seen more as
a “regulative ideal” than an actualized state, then there is space left for those
who practice a magic that is both psychological and “naturalis,” of the natural
world: there is no need for an either/​or.59
152  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Returning to Seers’s work, we can see that it, too, similarly confabulates
false memories together with real historical detail, biological facts, and bi-
ographical musings—​with photographic imagery and optical apparatuses
supporting both tropes within the artwork, real and unreal. The micro-​
doubling found in Karen Barad’s engagement with subatomic physics is
rendered, independently and through art, on a human and macro-​scale, cre-
ating alter egos straddling space and time as two aspects of one “being.” And
why not? According to Barad, “quantum mechanics is thought to be appli-
cable at all scales.”60 In fact, the central idea of entanglement is not, they say,
“simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities,
but to lack an independent, self-​contained existence [ . . . ] Individuals do not
preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part
of their entangled intra-​relating.”61 This is the elimination of “absolute sep-
aration,” where those “distances that separate bodies and minds from each
other” are rendered derivative, emergent.62 If you had not already noticed,
I have just been citing Barad’s research alongside Pamela Thurschwell’s de-
scription of psychical research. Doubtless, separation and distance have
not been eliminated by Barad in the figurative manner seen when para-
normal researchers linked telepathy with the new telecommunications of
the nineteenth century, but distance is still seen as secondary by Barad in
a corresponding fashion: “phenomena are the ontological inseparability of
agentially intra-​acting components.”63 What we wish to do now, in conclu-
sion, is temporalize this intra-​action at an even larger scale through the work
of the two Bergsons.
Barad points to this temporal possibility, though most often only in
passing:

time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are itera-
tively reconfigured through each intra-​action, thereby making it impos-
sible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal,
beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past
and future.64

The disavowal here of any absolute differentiation between “continuity

and discontinuity” is particularly odd, however, given that they lean heavily
toward discontinuity in their later work. In “Quantum Entanglements and
Hauntological Relations of Inheritance,” for example, they experiment with
a “disruption of continuity”: this will be “a performance of spacetime (re)
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  153

configurings that are more akin to how electrons experience the world” (we
might call this “what is it like to be an electron?”). And yet, it is an experi-
ment that simultaneously avoids “flat-​footed analogies between ‘macro’ and
‘micro’ worlds” while also providing “a way of thinking with and through dis/​
continuity.” They write of a . . .

. . . a dis/​orienting experience of the dis/​jointedness of time and space,

entanglements of here and there, now and then, a ghostly sense of dis/​con-
tinuity, a quantum dis/​continuity, which is neither fully discontinuous with
continuity or even fully continuous with discontinuity, and in any case,
surely not one with itself.65

This performance of Derridean undecidability is somewhat disingenuous,

however, in as much as, like Derrida himself, difference still wins over iden-
tity (as does writing over speech, absence over presence, and so on): in the
bivalent logic of the continuous-​discontinuous, when something is said to
not be “fully discontinuous with continuity,” that is another win for disconti-
nuity. What is needed is not an ambivalence or ontological complementarity
between one term and its negation, but their reintegration—​a continuity that
is heterogeneous, not discontinuous, a fullness and positivity rather than a
lack and negation.66
As Thomas Nail states in Being and Motion (a work in process thought
that acknowledges a large debt to Henri Bergson), “division only appears
as lack or discontinuity from the binary perspective of the divided region.”
An “intensive” division, as he calls it, is very different: it “adds a new path to
the existing one, like a fork or bifurcation, producing a qualitative change
in the whole continuous flow. The bifurcation diverges from itself while still
following the ‘same’ continuous movement.”67 The same is continuous in as
much as it “flows” heterogeneously (producing “qualitative change”).
Therefore, we reach the obvious question: what is unvarying, or contin-
uous, in a heterogeneous continuity, be it across temporal or spatial scales, if
it is not at least some form of the same (even of the same movement)? And the
response involves a kind of recursion—​but not one that only logically turns on
itself in an aporetic fashion (the paradox of reflexivity): it is a real, cosmolog-
ical recursion that reveals a new type, scale, or level of continuity, a mutation
(Nail’s “bifurcation”).68 What continues is hetero-​continuity: logical reflex-
ivity or recursion becomes fractal, a scalar self-​similarity—​logical regress be-
coming cosmological progress, through mutation. Which is why we continue
154  Vestiges of a Philosophy

to use new names, new practices, new philosophies. To continue using the same
language of “matter” (or indeed of “spirit,” or of “movement”) for all levels of
space and time becomes untenable, or rather, it simply is rendered mutant by
its own eventual recursion. Hence, scale invariance, qua “movement,” can be
seen at the same time as a conceptual variance (or mutation) that opposes the
transcendentalism of philosophy.69 As we learned with Catherine Malabou in
the Philosophus covariant, thought must mutate, change will change.
So now we place physics center stage again, only this time with a new
protagonist—​one who will emphasize a kind of quantum continuity over
the lacks and privations attendant upon Barad’s use of Neils Bohr and post-
structuralist thought. We will also see a temporalization of the quantum
that is not based upon ontological ambiguity (an impossibility to “differen-
tiate in any absolute sense between . . . past and future”), but a fundamental
and positive holism within time. For all its well-​argued championing of the
dominant Bohrian interpretation of quantum phenomena, tucked away in
a few corners of Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway is this alternative vi-
sion of the quantum realm: the radically holist model developed by physi-
cist David Bohm. The differences between the two perspectives boil down
to this dyad: localization and holism. Where Bohr maintains that (what we
nowadays call) “entanglement” demonstrates that differently located enti-
ties are nonetheless nonseparable (their quantum properties are intrinsically
coengendered), Bohm pushes this half-​holism even further. His “radical ho-
lism” completely denies any such localization and argues instead for “radical
nonlocality” within quantum theory (what a Bergsonian might call “com-
plete holism”). It is not that different things intra-​act—​different things do
not exist: “for Bohr . . . holism is about (specific) differences (and specific
connectivities) that matter—​differences within oneness, rather than [as for
Bohm] oneness as a seamless, all-​encompassing whole.”70 The latter, “one-
ness as a seamless, all-​encompassing whole,” is the radically holist view.
This position, initially dubbed the “hidden-​variable theory” but later the
“ontological theory” (as nothing is actually hidden for it), was initiated by
Bohm in the 1950s, and especially with his book Causality and Chance in
Modern Physics in 1957. It was further developed in subsequent works with
physicist Basil Hiley in the 1970s and 1980s.71 Bohm’s stance is situated
somewhat “halfway” between Einstein and Bohr on two issues. On the one
hand, he partly sides with Einstein against Bohr on the reification of proba-
bility: God does not play dice. On the other, whereas both Einstein and Bohr
were unwilling “to give up on locality” (though they “passionately disagreed
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  155

about the question of separability,” with Einstein remaining in favor), Bohm

is all for radical nonlocalism.72
We turn to Bohm, however, not in order to pile even more highfalutin
theory onto what is already a strange set of ideas—​to out-​Barad Barad, so
to speak—​but to Bergsonize and temporalize the discussion even further: to
make it covary.73 Engaging Bohm also allows us to return to our beginnings
and Henri Bergson’s encounter with Einstein’s special theory of relativity
(STR). Now at last we can fully recover his idea of a “complete relativity” that
is underscored by real time—​durée—​and which stands in contrast to STR’s
half-​relativity. STR, despite its name, retains a transcendent perspective that
spatializes time (rendering all frames of reference relative within an abso-
lute geometry of space). Bohm is valuable, therefore, because he offers an
alternative, not only to Bohr’s reading of quantum phenomena, but equally
to Einstein’s reading of cosmic events.
He is also something of a process thinker. Process theory, of course, sees
things as secondary to movements, and even as complexes of movements.
Things do not underlie, support, or transport movement (as when a cat
crosses the road): rather, there are types of movement that evolve, mutate,
but still continue heterogeneously (catlike road-​crossing being one instance).
Indeed, in his 1980 book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm outlines
a model of “flowing, verbal” language and thought, or “rheomode,” that rests
on a process grammar more suited to representing process reality.74
Iris van der Tuin also reports on this kinship in her “diffractive” reading
of Barad and Henri Bergson, pointing out that Bohm’s “contemporary
refutations of Einstein’s relativity” equally affirm the Bergsonian theory of
duration. In fact, van der Tuin is referring to Timothy S. Murphy’s work
here.75 In the following, we can hear Murphy himself further explaining what
is at stake in these differences of interpretation between Bohr and Bohm, es-
pecially toward locality and nonlocality:

The phenomenon of non-​locality implies that faster-​than-​light connections

exist not only between separated subatomic particles, but also between
widely separated parts of the larger universe. . . . Many recent interpret-
ations of quantum theory include non-​locality, but they do not place it at
the conceptual centre of the interpretation as David Bohm’s work does,
and therefore they can temporarily avoid the confrontation with rela-
tivity. On the macroscopic scale of the universe, however, we cannot avoid
confronting quantum non-​locality with the theory of relativity, which can
156  Vestiges of a Philosophy

be and often is ignored on the subatomic scale. Bohm and Hiley [Bohm’s
co-​researcher from the 1970s and later] insist that their “ontological inter-
pretation helps bring out a fundamental inconsistency between relativity
and quantum theory, centred on the question of nonlocality.”76

For Einstein, his theory of relativity simply states that, in his own words, “the
general laws of nature are to be expressed by equations which hold good for
all systems of coordinates, that is, are covariant with respect to any substitu-
tions whatever (generally co-​variant).”77 According to Murphy, this means
that “physical laws remain the same for all frames of reference and so all
frames of reference may be transformed into one another.”78 This is how
we arrived at the twin’s paradox discussed at the outset—​a geometric (“ge-
neral”) covariance that actually retains an absolute point of view, reducing
all other changes to mere relations relative to its immobile stance—​a tran-
scendent view from nowhere. For Henri Bergson, a real (“intégrale”) covar-
iance, as in two trains moving in concord with the same vector, is shared (or
continuous) simply because it is not interchangeable, because it is between
two heterogeneities. To adopt the position of the other completely, I must
become the other. In quantum nonlocality, there is a violation of the theory
of relativity in as much as it “posits apparently instantaneous (or at least ex-
tremely rapid) communication, real simultaneous determination, between
widely separated objects.”79 In Henri Bergson’s terms, this is a lived simul-
taneity that is not a spatialized now, but real covarying processes: the “com-
munication” is based on real experience, on higher and wider experiences
that have not fully dissociated (Bergsonian panpsychism). What looks like
telepathy or spooky “action-​at-​a-​distance” is simply what has not been fully
individuated. Of this, Henri Bergson writes

Between our consciousness and other consciousnesses the separation is

less clear-​cut than between our body and other bodies, for it is space which
makes these divisions sharp. Unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, which
so often have that power of divination, give evidence of a possible interpen-
etration of human consciousnesses. It would appear then that phenomena
of psychological endosmosis exist.80

It is not that one mind accesses another mind from without (separation), but
rather that the two were never fully differentiated from each other to begin
with (partial dissociation over total unity or disunity). Durée is shared as
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  157

one and many, one between many: its internal structure, its heterogeneity,
simply is the alterity we comprise in our degree of differentiation, our level
of durée. (Parenthetically, such a dissociative, nonsolid logic also allows for a
supernormalization of an apparent “power of divination” between minds.)
For Bohm, the nonlocal movement of particles takes place within “a unique
frame in which the nonlocal connections operate instantaneously.” As
Murphy sees it, Bohmian nonlocality “undoes the reduction of time to space
performed by relativity theory and establishes an irreducibly privileged frame
of temporal reference for physical experiments.”81 Real time is restored—​not
as a view from nowhere extracted from real experience by eliminating its in-
dividuality, but as a “temporal reference” to precisely what is unique in any
one real perspective. This is where Bohm clearly shows that he is Bergsonian,
as we seen in this final quotation from Murphy:

Bohm and Hiley go so far as to describe the privileged reference frame of

non-​locality as a “universal order of succession,” which is a “hyperplane of
constant time . . . obtained by considering[,]‌at each point in space-​time, the
line connecting it to the presumed origin of the universe.” . . . Such a “uni-
versal order of succession” bears a striking resemblance to Bergson’s con-
cept of duration. . . . In practice, though, this privileged frame or “time of
inherent excellence” would have to coincide with or be transformable to the
laboratory frame of reference in order to avoid temporal paradoxes, and in-
deed in order to be observable at all. Thus the “universal” or “unique” time
of non-​local interactions would be multiple in principle . . . since it would
be determined in each singular case by the experimental arrangements of
the particular labs involved in investigating it. [ . . . ] Bergson called this as-
pect of duration the “impersonal time in which all things will flow.”82

A “hyperplane of constant time.” A “universal” or “unique” time of non-

local interactions that would be “multiple in principle.” This is the return of
duration, and not only in human form, for it manifests many levels of du-
ration, not one. What Barad calls the “elements of physical reality” that a
hidden-​variable theory uncovers must be nuanced.83 The simultaneity be-
tween temporal flows need not be abstract and spatial, and the variables need
not be hidden, but simply unseen or unknown. So, where nonlocality can
be (and has been) derided as “passion-​at-​a-​distance,” “fashion at a distance,”
and, of course, “spooky-​at-​a-​distance,” there is room to make this idea or-
dinary, albeit at a certain scale.84 The “at-​a-​distances” or separations that
158  Vestiges of a Philosophy

would be involved are indeed relative and only apparent to one perspective,
but the perspectives that comprise them are real. They are neither illusory
nor merely optical (virtual): what embodies, what incarnates those “gaps,”
are physical processes. They are not hidden but simply unseen because they
are spread everywhere in different spaces and across different times; hidden
in plain or ordinary sight, across the whole (which is itself becoming). As
Seers would put it, they are nowhere because they are everywhere. They are
real physical movements, levels of durée, foliated or “implicated” (in Bohm’s
words) within the other levels of durée that comprise an incomplete whole.
One and many.
For Henri Bergson, the whole is indefinite or open, itself continually
evolving as well. Barad comes close to this idea, or rather its implications,
when writing that, for intra-​actions, “interior and exterior, past, present,
and future, are iteratively enfolded and reworked, but never eliminated (and
never fixed).”85 Later, she adds, “the past is never finished once and for all and
out of sight may be out of touch but not necessarily out of reach.”86 Barad,
using Bohr, entangles things across space for sure (such that things are not
fully “across” from each other at all); and here she gestures toward a temporal
version of the same: entangled time. The “spiritual hyperplane” that Paul
Halpern described nineteenth-​century psycho-​physicists searching for is not
Mina Bergson’s astral plane or Henri Bergson’s virtual plane. Nor is it Bohm’s
“hyperplane of constant time.” What connects these planes is neither family
resemblance nor overweening analogy, but a continuity that is uneven, inter-
rupted, and heterogeneous.
The spiritually inclined physicists that we started out with, Stewart, Tait,
and Zöllner, might themselves be spooked to find that spirit was never dis-
embodied in a higher dimension of space, but perfectly incarnated among
a covarying set of processes stretched throughout the “life of the cosmos”
(to use Lee Smolin’s phrase). In Duration and Simultaneity, Henri Bergson
criticized the idea of a geometric covariance as illusory, where Peter is but
a fictional image for Paul, and vice versa. For Henri Bergson, we recall, to
represent fully another’s lived time, one must experience it in every de-
tail, in person. But this is impossible without becoming that other person: “If
I want to actually measure Peter’s time . . . I must become Peter.”87 This is
real covariance—​not possible through a fanciful picturing of the other, but
possible through a real continuation of their movements in oneself. When it
comes to time, to a real covariance between a past and a present, we have the
continuity that Henri Bergson called “experienced and lived” (an expanded
 3° = 8° Practicus Covariant  159

present that retains a past). Such expansion is not wholly due to individual
agency in recollection (you), but the agency of time itself, the past, remem-
bering you. Invocation, if it works at any level, would be the voluntary attempt
to “call upon” (invocare) the involuntary, to make time intervene through
ritual, performance, or even, in Henri Bergson’s philosophical version, what
he also called “intellectual effort.”88 Real covariance as nonlocalized memory
(continuing heterogeneous movements across time). And invocation as
intra-​action. This is how the two Bergsons, Henri and Mina, respectively
entangle time “across” past and present. They themselves may be entangled,
too, as covarying siblings, albeit operating at different levels of duration in
their lives’ researches, each one invoking the other.
Patrick McNamara adds a further dimension to this radical holism of time,
splicing it here with the operations of memory and the selection of multiple
identities:

According to this theory [selectionism], election of target variants

constitutes consciousness. Because people in a given culture possess similar
cumulative memory stores, the variants they generate in a given memory
cycle will also contain similarities, and when these variants match one an-
other, those persons experiencing the match will experience one another’s
thoughts. The extreme case would occur when two people transiently select
relatively similar or even identical “selves.” Such an event is theoretically
possible, given the selectionist assumptions we’ve outlined in the previous
pages.89

McNamara mentions “response to an affective cue” as one way in which

“two people would generate similar associates or select similar selves.” In
place of identities or “persons” understood as substances, we would see
these “thoughts” themselves as movements: their continuous variation
“across” (or “down”) nonlocal time-​spaces, when different levels covary (as
“one”), before and after, above and below. Invocation, “possession” even, or
just ordinary metempsychosis—​but all on different scales.90 Radical holism
meets “matching variants” meets the “power of divination,” or Bohm plus
McNamara equals the two Bergsons. And in Seers’ Nowhere Less Now, we see
these meetings in a practice, at once human and nonhuman, that remarkably
complements Barad’s theory of sub-​atomic performances.
We can now end this covariant with a question and a suggestion. Though
God does not play dice, perhaps She might play cards instead, in particular,
160  Vestiges of a Philosophy

the game of Tarot? With origins going back to fifteenth-​century Italy where
it began as a simple game of chance, its occult repurposing came three hun-
dred years later near the end of the eighteenth century. With that, the cards
gave seemingly chance events new meaning for the purposes of divination,
or as Catherine Christof puts it, “a symbolic cipher for universal truths,
representing . . . the transformational and evolutionary journey of a soul.”91
Chance is tamed, a little, with nonstandard causality (foretelling Bohm’s first
crucial work, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics). Divination through
cartomancy offers us a little fabulated order coming out of chaos, signs of a
probable fate from a random selection of cards. Again, memory, even Yeats’s
“Great Memory,” is not stored anywhere: it is selected. If one asks, “From
where?” the answer comes: the past that lives on through new (heteroge-
neous) lines of continuity. And who selects? Again, the past, though at an-
other of its levels, which are indefinite in number simply because “the past”
does not exist—​there are only the numerous lines of presents-​pasts inter-
fering with each other “all the time.”
So does the Tarot divine the future through its selection? I would say that
it is highly improbable that it should, but not impossible. The Tarot, or any
other form of supernatural divination, is rightly deemed absurd by most, for
in (nearly) all probability it is ridiculous to think that one level of durée could
control a constructive interference with another at such a higher degree of
tension. And yet, within the enduring universe or open whole, no amount of
improbability, or implausibility, can exhaust an indefinite period in the long
run—​and, as David Hume realized, “the long run” is a very long time, indeed.
That said, a very long time could pass in the blink of a fabulated God’s eye.
Perhaps that is why hope—​or what Jean-​Paul Sartre called humanity’s “use-
less passion”—​springs eternal.
 9
Spirit in the Materialist World

We have already suggested that, in a feasible model of time travel, we in

our world might already be a future being visited by its relative past—​the
time traveler as ghost memory—​or vice versa. That “vice versa” would en-
tail travelers from the future already being here, too.1 And so they may be,
though not as clandestine emissaries, however, but, in the fullest naturaliza-
tion possible, as ordinary individuals wholly unaware of their “secret”: after
all, they have to “fit in” fully if they are to have truly arrived here. Such a
complete arrival would preclude maintaining any personal acquaintance
or bodily connection with other eras—​modern body implants such as hip
replacements, pacemakers, or their future equivalents could not time travel
into the distant past where they could not exist. Their identity would remain
too futural, relatively speaking. In fact, it can be argued that a feasible time
travel does not involve temporal displacement at all if such a transport only
understands time as spatial, as a link or container: to change “in” duration
is not to change “inside” time but a change of time—​a qualitative becoming,
a change “in” identity. As Richard Matheson’s protagonist concluded in the
time travel novel Bid Time Return:

More and more, I am becoming convinced that the secret of successful

time travel is to pay the price of eventual loss of identity. . . . My presence
in 1896 is like that of an invading grain of sand inside an oyster. An in-
vader of this time, I will, bit by bit, be covered by a self-​protecting—​and
absorbing—​coat, being gradually encapsulated. Eventually, the grain of me
will be so layered over by this period that I will be somebody else, forgetting
my source, and living only as a man of this period.2

To truly be here in this space and time, one must truly be of this space and
time, at least eventually. The arrival from elsewhere, then, may be gradual.
Yet the change in identity will not be of essential substance (which, by its own
definition, cannot change) but of movements.

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0015
162  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Let us return, therefore, to this idea of the ordinary and push it a little fur-
ther. Possibly the best sign or revelation of any time travel being possible is
precisely when our mind makes it happen—​when one’s ordinary memory
expands “the” so-​called present. Perhaps all of us (unbeknownst to ourselves)
are time travelers who are “here” already, having always already arrived, or
are perpetually arriving anew. “Mental time travel,” thus, would be neither
figurative nor second-​best: it would be as good as it gets.3 This is one way to
supernormalize time travel: through the idea that we already “travel” in our
own mind through our own lifespan, our past (and perhaps also that we see
others, our alter egos, traveling the other possibilities of life alongside us).
Alternatively, out of that glimpse of a different durée, we can invent, or rather
fabulate, the idea of a hyperbolic time travel that is free-​ranging across an im-
personal time, the past, and which is contained along a spatializing timeline,
measured by a clock and propelled by a machine.
Yet this switch from the subjective to the objective, from the view from
somewhere to a view from nowhere, is not the only option possible. Rather
than eliminating the role of one’s mind in mental time travel to leave us with
an abstracted or generalized time travel (no ghost, only the machine), mind
could be extended otherwise as spirit, as psychic, metaphysical movement.
This is not a Platonic metaphysics of abstraction, but the Bergsonian one of
an enlarged attention to life. “Introduction to Metaphysics” concludes with
a contrast between a general abstraction and such an attentive holism: “in
this sense, metaphysics has nothing in common with a generalization of ex-
perience, and yet it could be defined as the whole of experience (l’expérience
intégrale).”4 This would be a different kind of amplified time travel, not
through objectivized spatial lines and general mechanisms, but via an ex-
tended mental attention, collective, intersubjective memory, and embodied
performance—​each of them components of “l’expérience intégrale.” It would
still be real and immanent, despite its transcendence of any one individual
life. Our own mental time travels in memory could then be compared to
this real time travel, as one might compare a part to the whole, a glimpse
that is immanent to what it sees. What Henri Bergson refers to as a real past
surviving in the elasticated present (“our whole past [that] still exists”), and
Mina Bergson practices as the invocation of a distant past through her own
body, would then be the real expansions of this glimpse: one, academic and
respectable, the other, occult and outlandish, but both realized through
movement.
 Spirit in the Materialist World  163

The ordinary can also help us rethink other temporal continuities, such
as survival after death. Normally, any supposed persistence of our personal
identity would be denied by traditional materialism on account of a finite
continuity of the body (in particular, that of the mortal brain), but affirmed
by traditional spiritualism and its trust in an infinite continuity of mind (or a
putatively “immortal” aspect of mind such as memory or intellect).5 In each
case, however, one kind of substantial continuity is assumed, be it a nega-
tive, terminable one (based on matter), or a positive, interminable one (based
on spirit). The specific language of continuity might change (from what “re-
mains,” or “survives,” to what “persists,” “subsists,” or even “transcends”),
but its tacit homogeneity stays constant. The idea that we are forwarding
instead—​of hetero-​continuities taking myriad forms, ones that are not de-
pendent on any particular vehicle (material or immaterial substance) nor any
one (homogeneous) form of continuity—​is given brief attention. Standardly, a
substance is denied or affirmed in its continuity, be it mysterious or not: but a
multiplicity of different continuities—​covarying, interfering, ephemeral, and
existing at different levels (yet always mundane, wherever they may be)—​is
left unnoticed or unseen.
In the work before you, we have attempted to think survival through con-
tinuity and indivisibility, through ritualized, habitual, movements or beha-
vior: a “supernormal” that, only when projected at an improper level, will
fabulate the implausible, the “spooky.” This would be a destructive inter-
ference that cancels out the continuity in a single, fleeting thought rather
than amplifying it through a sustainable, collective bodily response. The act
of offering water by the Spring, for example, is fabulated as a spirit, a per-
fectly individuated metaphysico-​real movement. Isis, goddess of healing
and nourishment, simply is the giving of sustenance, is that movement,
too—​continued, surviving, or “invoked,” across another body, that of Mina
Bergson. The Practicus covariant—​a machine for making a goddess (man-
ifest).6 This watery logic is one of the new, heterogeneous logics needed to
rethink the relationship between “knowings,” between “sophia” (philosophy)
and “gnosis” (mysticism).7 The philosophy of mysticism (Henri’s) becomes
indiscernible from the mysticism of philosophy (Mina’s): not on account of
a fuzziness that would only be an exotic variant of classic, hard-​bodied logic,
but as a real, practiced, water logic (or air logic, or sonic logic).8 As Marcel
Mauss put it in our opening epigraph: “mystical states” are simply “body
techniques that we have not yet studied.”9 But then, following his deflation,
164  Vestiges of a Philosophy

comes the inflation: “I think that there are necessarily biological means of
entering into ‘communication with God.’ ”10 What God is, however, is super-
normal, too.
So there really is nothing unreal to see here, only aspects of the Real left
mostly unseen—​its becomings, its arrivals, its movements. One might even
ask oneself this: if a human subject does not pre-​exist as substance but only
comes to be (say, through “fidelity” to an “Event,” as Alain Badiou argues);
and, correspondingly, if a divine subject (the philosophers’ God) can only
come into existence through radical contingency (Quentin Meillassoux’s
extension of Badiou’s idea)—​then, what of the existence of a nonstandard
Goddess? What if the Goddess-​spirit never pre-​existed as substance or sub-
ject at all, but comes into existence—​is invoked each time anew—​through
heterogeneous continuity, through wholly random and contingent acts of per-
formance, a set of hyper-​ritualistic practices involving other communicants,
their use of voice, script, and dialogue, as well as animals, the environment,
sets, costumes, and ceremonial regalia? Some of these acts might not even be
voluntary or intentional and include both small and large nonhuman actors
(or “actants” if you prefer), such as brain events, metabolic events, viral and
bacterial agents, climate and atmospheric occurrences, and so on. What if
all that, already, simply was the invoked goddess insofar as she might par-
tially manifest at all: immanent-​divine movements covarying across bodily-​
temporal scales, “above” and “below”? This is as good as it gets. Infinitesimally
improbable, perhaps, but not impossible. The fabulations of such improbable
“faith,” taken as a mystical state, rest on a fluid, hopeful logic in as much as
covariance is not about the same continuity (Isis returned in all her flesh and
blood existence for doubters to probe), but different, hetero-​continuities. Or
rather, qua supernormalization, personal and collective “memory,” with all
its worldly facilitators, would be the invocation of the goddess, because the
goddess does not transcend the act. Invocation as immanence: all memories
are ghosts; some ghosts are time travelers; and perhaps some time travelers
are gods.

* * *
Henri Bergson’s strangest ideas in Matter and Memory point to the possi-
bility of transcending the present, the “now,” with a distended perception, an
expanded attention that reanimates my past. Mina Bergson’s work attempted
to transcend her personal identity in performative invocations of the past—​
“the Isis movement,” as she and Samuel so often called it, being literally that
 Spirit in the Materialist World  165

in essence: elaborated movements. In one scalar sense then, Henri Bergson

plays the part to Mina Bergson’s (open) whole, the micro to the macro
enveloping it—​alter egos at different scales. If such images of nesting or con-
tainment make the reader uncomfortable, we might return instead to physics
and Karen Barad’s language of “quantum entanglement” to describe Mina
and Henri: not literal twins, but entangled minds nevertheless. This might
thereby make ours a diffractive reading of their different trajectories, rather
than the simple exercise in “compare and contrast” that it can appear to be: an
accumulation of interference patterns of light and dark, amplification and
annihilation.11
 10
Veridical Hallucinations and
Circumstantial Evidence

Le physique soit simplement du psychique inverti

—​Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

In this research into the conceptual relations of Mina and Henri Bergson,
we might seem to be traveling among “veridical hallucinations,” which was
how Henri Bergson described paranormal perception. Our own fabulations
may amount to no more than a set of reciprocating projections, or dream-​
like coincidences, between the two. Dreams, in Henri Bergson’s view at least,
are “only” relaxed forms of perception in any case: they are perceptions that
have been overwhelmed with wildly associating images from pure memory,
the phantasmagoria of the past.1
According to François Laruelle, however, every philosopher (not only the
crazy ones) hallucinates a world that is “withdrawn” from the Real, only then
to hold itself as the authoritative account of all reality. This is not simply a
Kantian admonition against the misplaced ambitions of traditional met-
aphysics: all philosophy, for Laruelle, simply is the gesture in thought that
gives itself the authority to pronounce on the essence of reality, to master it
from a hallucinated outside—​a view from nowhere.2 It is the withdrawn or
de-​parted part of the Real. The hyperbolic part that stands “over and beyond”
the Real, transcending it. Irrespective of whether any particular historical
philosophy is materialist, idealist, realist, nihilist, or whatever else, qua phi-
losophy, we could say that its real conditions are supernatural for Laruelle,
“spooky.” This ghostly philosophy is neither spectral nor “hauntological” on
account of an aporetic presence-​as-​absence, that is, as a Derridean ontology
of difference. It is simply the de-​parted. Mixing Laruelle and Henri Bergson
together like this, we arrive at a position that sees standard, conceptual phi-
losophy become the thought, from whatever source, that abstracts itself from

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0016
 Veridical Hallucinations  167

the Real as a transcendent view from nowhere, a view it believes is sufficiently

general to capture the essence of reality without remainder and by dint of its
authority alone: rather than integrate itself into the whole, it is the part that
attempts to be the whole through its own abstraction, the ghostly de-​parted.
In Sigmund Freud’s Future of an Illusion (1927), he talks about Romain
Rolland’s term “oceanic feeling”—​that sensation of an indissoluble bond be-
tween oneself and the external world, the quasi-​mystical sensation of losing
oneself in union with the cosmos. For Rolland, this affect is the source of
various symptoms associated with all the religiously minded (not just
“mystics”). In Freud’s naturalization of this view, unsurprisingly, it becomes
the remnant of an infantile consciousness that has not yet differentiated
itself from others. For Laruelle, once again, any such unity, any “All” is an
illusion—​including that of the philosophers. A commitment to what he calls
a “unitary illusion” is characteristic of a “bad philosophical mysticism” (le
mauvais mysticisme philosophique), which he contrasts with gnosticism or
“ordinary mysticism,” which suffers no such delusions.3 Gnostic knowledge
need not imply authority, therefore, whereas the exemplary philosophical
gesture does rest on privileged access (to God, Being, or the Real). If seeing
ghosts, be it as “memory” in philosophical psychology or as the revenant
dead in Hollywood cinema, merely displays different forms of credulity, then
all of philosophy is no less credulous as regards its own authoritative vision.
Standard philosophy (as the transcendent view from nowhere) is a ghost
that walks alone, a departed vision of a putative absolute which can have any
number of names—​matter, spirit, power, energy, force, life, difference. . . .
Yet, like the ghosts in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), it does not
know what it is or realize that the ones who are supposedly haunted by others
are the actual phantoms.
“Unitary illusion” belongs to every view that would reduce a multiplicity
to an arché, X, rather than leave all things (plural), equal in the Real, which it-
self, of course, cannot be defined (lest we fall back into philosophizing again).
Striving for “union” with the neo-​Platonic “One,” ecstatic or otherwise, is re-
dundant for Laruelle because we are already in the One, already and ordi-
narily mystic. The immanent as “always already,” again. Significantly, Henri
Bergson’s nonreductive temporal naturalism is not guilty of this reduction
to or union with the One or any other arché, be it material or abstract. As
we saw through Malabou’s reading of Spinoza, even to say that “everything
is moving” involves a self-​reference (“everything . . .”) that thereby ramifies
into other types of movement, or the performance of new names. And this
168  Vestiges of a Philosophy

is no less true either of Mina Bergson’s engaged, progressive mysticism. Just

as Henri Bergson in “Introduction to Metaphysics” tries to think unity and
multiplicity together in the images of durée, so Mina Bergson, in Kabbalah
Unveiled, when thinking of the divine as either “single” or a plural set of
“Forces,” writes of “a plurality whose action is unified, an unity whose action
is pluralised.”4
And what of our own accounts, philosophical and nonphilosophical, in
all of this? Perhaps we, too, should heed the warnings against hubris, hal-
lucination, and reductive monomania for our own endeavor. Certainly, we
would do well to interrogate our fictions and not let them fabulate too far,
capture the Real from a purportedly external view from nowhere. After all, it
is ultimately undecidable whether Henri and Mina Bergson really did work
in concert in any manner, or whether this is all my hallucination—​the truth
probably lies somewhere in between. All the same, we should not abandon
the power of imagination too quickly, especially within the context of a pro-
cess view that values immanent creativity. As James Burton points out with
regard to the early Christian Gnostics, fictioning does not have to imply
falsehood or an inexistent, but rather the immanent creativity of spirit:

when Bishop Irenaeus attacks Valentinian gnostics for creating “imaginary

fiction,” “new forms of mythological poetry” and for relying on feeling and
intuition rather than divine authority, he is criticizing precisely what those
same gnostics see as a great resource, the soteriological use of fiction (or in
other words, fabulation). [ . . . ] Whereas the special gnosis (knowledge) by
which the gnostic Christians defined themselves may give them the out-
ward appearance of cultish mystics, what it really amounts to is the know-
ledge that anyone may have a relationship with the divine, through creative
activity, through fictionalizing, and that all claims to privileged, exclusive
access to God are themselves pure, static fictions.5

“Claims to privileged, exclusive access to God” are, as Mina Bergson would

say, “a subtle egotism.”
Nevertheless, it is still not wholly implausible that some of my own
thinking is egotistic, too (subtle or otherwise): a wishful performance of
circumstances, coincidences—​ the fictional operating within the Real.
I began with a memory from my past—​as real or as false a memory when
compared to the past as I could honestly hope it could be (there is no “out-
side” account, alas). Yet I did not invent it, entirely. The memory, one of very
 Veridical Hallucinations  169

few from that era of my life, returns to me unbidden, channeled along tracks
in my brain that are laid “deeper” with each reminiscence. The original expe-
rience grated on me, of course, no doubt from Freudian motives, but now it
returns for both personal and impersonal reasons.
While I did not discover a reciprocity between the Bergson siblings as a
ready-​made fact, as I say, it was not entirely invented either. According to
Meghan McGuire, “although Moina and her brother did not agree on all phil-
osophical issues, there are frequent echoes of his theories in her words and
her actions within The Golden Dawn.” McGuire adds that the connections
between brother and sister are often quite subtle, such as in Mina Bergson’s
magic name, Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum, which, she claims, is “reminiscent of
her brother Henri’s philosophy of change, where the past is always present,
and the present is only a process of becoming.”6 Or, perhaps the resemblance
moves in the other direction or in both directions at once. Henri Bergson
frequently argued that, when an increasingly large number of probabilities,
no matter how improbable, begin to converge and interfere, there is cause
for certainty. So let me draw up a table (see Table 1) of the most obvious
concordances between the two protagonists of our story and look for this
convergence. Though these are not the “infinite number of coincidences” that
Henri Bergson spoke of as transforming the improbable into a certainty, they
are indicative of some parallelism, and even covariance.7
“Realism toward the Past” is listed on both sides of the table. Perhaps it
should be “my past” on Henri Bergson’s side. The “return to the past,” the
“reality of the past,” a sense of the “nearness” of the past within “the pre-
sent”: such ideas can be understood personally (as memory in Henri
Bergson), impersonally (the brain traces of objective science), or, dare we
say, transpersonally (suggested in Bergsonian pure memory and pure per-
ception, but fully implemented in Mina Bergson’s invocations).
Returning to Ellen Langer’s “Counter Clockwise Study,” it is easy enough
to think of this “memory house” as a Proustian space retrieving “lost time”
for us, a “time travel” within one’s own experience, one’s own memory alone.
And we can simply leave it at that—​memory is subjective, it’s all in the head
after all. Supernormalization, by contrast, sees personal memory as a glimpse
of transpersonal “time travel,” a past (because there is no one thing behind
the expression, “the past”) restored through an expanded or “defragmented”
attention, be it formed voluntarily, involuntarily, or some mixture of the two.
Is it merely all “in your head”? Yes. Deflation. But the head is the brain—​
the expansion can be objective, or at least differently “personal”: it involves
170  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Table 1  A List of Concordances

Henri Bergson Mina Bergson

Monism incorporating duality Monism incorporating duality

Supernormalizer Divinizer
The absolute and access to it The absolute and access to it
Realism toward the Past Realism toward the Past
Against Reductive Materialism Against Reductive Materialism
Open to the “paranormal” Open to Material Science
Hyperaesthesia/​Pure Perception Scrying through Objects
Pluralist and Monist: “scales of being” Pluralist and Monist: “Three Planes of
Being”
Process as Immanence Victorian/​Edwardian Immanentists
Use of Diagrams/​Imagery Use of Diagrams/​Imagery/​Symbols
Use of Rhythm/​Structure Use of the Vibratory/​Vibration
Virtual plane Astral plane
Thinking in Duration/​Changing Multiple Names
Philosophical Vocabularies
Philosophical Spiritualism/​Empirical Occult Spiritualism/​Hermetic Kabbalist
Metaphysics
Philosophy of Mysticism Mysticism of Philosophy
Religious Convert (possibly), but still within Converted to syncretic religious
Abrahamic tradition thought, including Abrahamic elements
Few posthumous traces Few traces of any kind left

selections performed through your brain part, your engram (this one, not that
one). Reinflation. External objects, props, visuals, sounds, and (“Proustian”)
spaces correlate with internal organs of “representation” centripetally, so to
speak (top-​down); but also “spontaneously” (congenitally, bottom-​up), me-
chanically, or chemically induced. Above and below. The (brain) part can
also mutate to excess and centrifugally affect the whole in a kind of dementia.
What J. W. Dunne, for one, thought of as real time travel within nth higher
dimensions of the brain becomes a real restoration of the past through phys-
ical mutation of brain cells, often life-​threatening to the organism as a whole,
of course. Thought through the prism of scale, of macro-​and micro-​(and
a little anthropomorphism), one can say that these parts are attempting to
overtake the whole (which is also Henri Bergson’s definition of pain in Matter
and Memory).8 Destructive interference from the radicalized part, the mu-
tant, the cancer.
 Veridical Hallucinations  171

Following a Deleuzian reading of Henri Bergson, Leonard Lawlor

describes duration in terms of “alteration,” reading dureé through an ethics of
the other, the “alter”: “the logic of duration is not one of same and other, but
a logic of alteration; duration is the same becoming-​other.”9 Linked to this is
the image of an other haunting one’s perception, which has been a significant
variable throughout the work we have looked at here. The past—​not as a dead
time but as a piece of “present” within a multiplicity of presents—​exists on
the periphery of one’s attention, one’s vision, and is only temporarily “lost.”10
Depending on how far one wants to push this thesis, we can be afforded
either a real, but partial glimpse of such time within our own psychic life,
or something much more than that from the past lives of others, our alter
egos: durée as alter-​ation.
Furthermore, if we take this transformation beyond the anthropocen-
tric scale of subjective phenomenology (the whole subject) toward the
anthropomorphized brain part (supernormal naturalism), then the part
becomes another “alter,” indeed, another alter ego, one of many micro-​
alter egos. An equality of scales, an ordinarizing through equalizing. With
that flat equality in place, one can naturalize the exotica of memory—​the
dovetailing of my past and the past—​at micro-​levels (the brain, in all its
health and ill health) but also at macro-​levels—​the movements, postures,
and rituals of various assemblages that, in a kind of nonreductive super-​
behaviorism of collective subjects, invoke and re-​embody former “lives.”
The transmigration (or travel) of souls, metempsychosis, is altered: metem-​
psychosis becomes metem-​psychoses—​the diseased brain at one micro-​
level, the deceased past (as movement), at another, macro-​level. Mereology
once more.
Henri Bergson argued that false problems (“errors”) were due to confusing
or misperceiving two or more things for one thing: a false problematic is not
solved but dissolved by multiplying the number of variables at play within it.11
Hence, we have types or levels of time, not just one. And, likewise, the con-
stant endeavor in his thought to discern types or levels of space, of order, of
memory, or of relativity, morality, religion, and even multiplicity itself. False
problematics misapply the level of their enquiry (“level” from libra, “scales”);
or rather, they do not even see that there are levels at all, that there are types or
multiplicities in play. They see only the one same kind, and its negation, with
either one dominating or even eliminating the other (materialism, realism,
idealism, spiritualism) or a never-​ending dialectic between the two. Zelator
covariance.
172  Vestiges of a Philosophy

Following this insight, we might say that the mystical/​spiritual—​when it

is not seen as an extension (or continuity) of the ordinary but instead as a
“cut,” a hyperbolic and transcendent “beyond”—​is a hallucination of same-
ness, of homogeneity. It is a misapplication or confusion due to a monoc-
ular vision. Hence, the “cut” in seeing memory as only ordinary (and not as
a kind of time travel), and seeing time travel as only extraordinary (not as a
kind of memory). Seeing only cuts or hard discontinuities rests on a logic of
solids, a logic of “separation” (Barad) that engenders the disenchantment of
the near and ordinary and the enchantment (or mystification) of what comes
to be seen as unearthly, extramundane, or ontologically virtual: incredible
hinterworlds rejected by the hard-​headed and accepted by the credulous.12
Theoricus covariance. These are all symptoms of the cut (a different kind of
“partition of the sensible,” to speak like Jacques Rancière); it is a totalizing,
homogenizing, authoritarian vision—​ the “destructive interference” of a
part trying to be (the) whole. Hyperbolic projection might then be seen as
the destructive projection (hyperballein, “to throw above or beyond”) of one
level onto all.13 This is the thought that needs to be transcended by imma-
nence and “superstition” (or what we have called supernormalization). Or
the Philosophus covariant. Spirit vision, rendered supernormal instead, sees
things through a fluid logic in terms of continuous yet different beings—​but
they are different in time, not space: “questions relating to subject and object, to
their distinction and their union, should be put in terms of time rather than of
space.”14 Occultus—​an unseen “distinction and union” or heterogeneous con-
tinuity. Where the hyperbolic was, there the supernormal shall be.
We have been doing a lot of analogizing here, to be sure—​what Karen
Barad called “tricks with mirrors.” The hermetic grades of the Golden Dawn’s
Tree of Life, Theoricus, Philosophus, Practicus, and so on, were invoked as
covarying with aspects of Bennett’s, Malabou’s, and even Barad’s own
thought practices. Admittedly, at the right level of abstraction one can see
almost anything as anything else: analogizing can go as far as the word “like”
can carry you (x is like y); and at the level of just Being as such, that’s pretty far
(after all, even fictional things exist as fictions). Descend the plane of abstrac-
tion and add some detail—​the appearance of materiality, an outline shape,
some color, movement, and texture, or (less concretely) intensity, vibrancy,
scope—​and gradually things start to fall into their “proper” places or catego-
ries. Which things still correlate? Which patterns emerge and at what scale?
Is capitalism “like” schizophrenia, for instance? Or is it more like cancer? Are
political events driven by paradoxes in set theory, or are they simply like such
 Veridical Hallucinations  173

mathematical theories? In one of his later books, François Laruelle compares

quantum mechanics to Christological principles, just as Barad compares
it with identity politics. The entire history of structuralism and poststruc-
turalism is underpinned either by analogy with Saussurian linguistics or a
determination by it (depending on how one sees language and textuality).
What would contemporary philosophy of mind do without the metaphors of
computers, neural nets, and artificial intelligence? In previous work, I have
argued for a kinship between paraconsistent logic, Laruelle’s democracy of
thought, and hyperkinetic film editing. (It’s a job.)
Such seemingly fictional gatherings and bindings, “allying and attuning,”
as Mina Bergson called them, are neither wholly invented nor discovered.
What counts as simple analogy (most abstract), as a correlation (more de-
tail), or as a covariance (more concrete, moving details) will involve a good
deal of imagination as well as close observation (depending on the levels in
question). There are lines of heterogeneous continuity, the perspicuity or im-
plausibility of which can take a lifetime to “demonstrate,” not only so as to
persuade others to their “satisfaction,” but perhaps first in order to convince
oneself.
If one thinks about these acts of allying immanently rather than represen-
tationally, then they are never inventions of the Real nor discoveries about
it. Instead, they are nascent acts of creation or “re-​invention” within and by
the Real, a part of the Real, even if at the smallest “scale” imaginable, of the
neophyte, the neonate, imagination itself. The Real is enduringly incomplete
and unwhole: it is open and indefinite, and in it some processes are only be-
ginning, even while they continue other, older ones through what Thomas
Nail called “bifurcation.” To award any such fabulation the badge of “reality”
on account of its “correspondence,” “coherence,” “consistency,” “rigor,” or
just physical “solidity” (whatever that means anymore) is missing the point.
Likewise, to count it the same as anything else just because you (think you)
believe this is to enter into a “half relativism.” Such unilateralism denies the
immanent reality of others’ views, a billion other beliefs that do not repre-
sent but act (or rather, their partial representations are acts). They act like
matter, like the laws of physics, or biology, or mathematics—​they are hyper-​
collective (allied) beliefs that can overwhelm with their “strength of opinion,”
so to speak. The power of “as if.” Unlike Hollywood cinema’s phantoms (or
neutrinos), there is no way to walk through a wall unharmed, no matter what
you believe: “solidity” as matter’s groupthink. Again, you are just a (moving)
part, a microcosm, and your passing thought or comparison is just a part of
174  Vestiges of a Philosophy

a part, too: so it is partly real, yet not like everything else (everything else is
not like everything else either). In other words, all things are real but not in
any one way that makes all things the same. Not all things flow with the same
liquidity or speed, for instance (sometimes it pays to be bleedingly obvious).
That said, solid beliefs (and the beliefs of solids) are not entirely immovable
and impenetrable either, at least not in principle and at the appropriate level
or scale. Yet they are supremely enduring: once again, difference and same-
ness are matters of time rather than space.
One might conclude, therefore, that “heterogeneous continuity” (or co-
variance) is not so much a solution to any problem but simply a new name for
a perennial problem—​of how past and present interact, and with that inside
and outside, spirit and matter. And this may well be true, though such con-
tinual renaming of a problematic, especially if the new name “sticks,” is also
the best we can hope for—​it is as good as it gets. If the new name, and con-
comitant new conceptualizations of everything else around the name, do in-
deed stick, it should be because they form a varying, partial whole with a set
of other current problematics: ones concerning, say, the place of traditional
practices within the contemporary, the nature-​culture divide, religion and
science, decolonizing knowledge, or posthuman and animal thought. It is a
name that is also a becoming-​unproblematic, a dissolution rather than solu-
tion. And, like any arrival, that becoming is gradual.

* * *
It is in Creative Evolution that Henri Bergson offers an orientational reading
of life and matter, a duality of direction—​“le physique soit simplement du
psychique inverti.” The physical is simply the psychical, inverted.15 Indeed,
Georges Canguilhem once redubbed Creative Evolution as equally a theory
of the “élan matérielle” were one simply to invert (but not in any way dismiss)
its arguments.16 Obvious wordplay aside, these inversions do capture some-
thing of the Mina-​Henri bifurcation, one of methods and materials (mysti-
cism/​philosophy, spiritualism/​science) dovetailing from different “poles” of
the one “substance” (which is not a substance but a movement). This would
offer a shared vision of life and world united through temporality, the one op-
erating performatively to invoke and embody parts of the past directly in the
person of the priestess; the other, operating conceptually to explain my past
as immanent within a set of “larger,” stratified presents, accessed through an
expansion of attention. The difference is one of orientation (as when a rocket
 Veridical Hallucinations  175

rotates to head back to its point of departure), one going from the past to my
past, the other from my past to the past.
The question that remains, therefore, is who of the two, Mina or Henri,
was really in the rocket while the other remained on earth.
 Epilogue
The Whole of the Moon

According to Bergson (Henri), “the truth is that we shall never reach the past
unless we frankly place ourselves within it.”1 One aim of this work has been to
ask how literally we should take this statement. A little over twenty years ago,
I published an introduction to Henri Bergson’s philosophy that had, as one of
its declared aims, to retrieve his ideas from what I described then as the “phil-
osophical ghettos of ‘vitalism,’ ‘spiritualism’ and ‘psychologism.’ ”2 Perhaps,
in attempting to model a nonstandard philosophy using spiritualism as its
source material, all I have achieved here is a certain gentrification of those
ghettos, replacing their original residents with new, respectable types: Didn’t
you know that Plato was a mystic, too, as were these physicists? And what
these modern materialists say over there is very similar to this nonsense over
here (heck, even a Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, the late
Michael Dummet, wrote about the Tarot).
Understandably, I hope that such interpretations of this experiment will
be rare (though I do not delude myself into thinking that they will be non-
existent). The purpose of supernormalization is to show hetero-​continuities
between the ordinary and the extraordinary, to show that something sup-
posedly unearthly is found in plain sight by looking at the earth (and even
its most disreputable denizens) with far more attention than it is usually
given. In the pairing of Henri and Mina, we see two allied attempts to natu-
ralize spirit and spiritualize matter at work, two inverse, yet covarying ways
of rethinking naturalism and spiritualism beyond deflation or inflation (they
are, in their different ways, both supernormal). The work of one of them was
well-​acknowledged at the time and subsequently (Henri’s); the other, Mina’s,
has been lost to contemporary view for a good while, even as its performa-
tive, mystical, and artistic approach to spirit and matter has become all the
more timely.
Mina Bergson came from a respectable family and had a very famous, and
very respectable, brother. She did not lead a respectable life, however. Yet her

Vestiges of a Philosophy. John Ó Maoilearca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197613917.003.0017
 Epilogue  177

ideas and practices matched those of her closest relative both in breadth and
depth. Possibly even more so—​there is still so much more to research and for
future scholars to unearth about both the Bergsons and their strange ideas
about spirit, matter, and, of course, time—​especially the past and memory.
One might even say that Henri gave us the “special theory of the past and
memory” while Mina left us the “general theory.” Perhaps Henri knew this,
too. There is an odd passage near the middle of his 1911 essay on William
James’s pragmatism that, in retrospect, can be read in the light of much more
than its ostensible subject:

According to James, we bathe in an atmosphere traversed by great spiritual

currents. If many of us resist, others allow themselves to be carried along.
And there are certain souls which open wide to the beneficent breeze. Those
are the mystical souls. [ . . . ] The truth is that James leaned out upon the
mystic soul as, on a spring day, we lean out to feel the caress of the breeze on
our cheek, or as, at the seaside, we watch the coming and going of sail-​boats
to know how the wind blows. Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are
truly uplifted and carried away: why could they not enable us to experience
directly, as in a scientific experiment, this uplifting and exalting force?3

The vestiges of Mina’s mystic philosophy comprise occult training techniques,

Hermetic worldviews, and a spiritual performance art that, set side by side
with the more usual tropes of her brother’s philosophy (intuition, empirical
evidence, deduction, argument), unveil nothing less in comparison. All the
same, both the philosopher and the mystic only ever glimpsed something
“wider” from each of their vantage points, hers incarnated through forms of
dance and ritualized movements, his governed by philosophical codes and
experiments. If she did see more than he, though, she undoubtedly suffered
more as a result.

* * *
There is a song by The Waterboys that now seems appropriate to mention
by way of a final remark. “The Whole of the Moon” may, or may not, have
been playing at that house party in March 1990 when I tried to explain the
Bergsonian philosophy of time and memory—​or at least Henri’s version of
it—​to my interlocutor. Yet when Mike Scott sings “I was grounded /​While
you filled the skies /​I was dumbfounded by truth /​You cut through lies,” it
seems like he must have been in the room, too. The lyrics continue to resonate
178 Epilogue

with the story of Mina and Henri, especially when the protagonist describes
how “I spoke about wings /​You just flew /​I wondered, I guessed, and I tried /​
You just knew,” before ending with the perfectly astral conceit: “I saw the
crescent /​You saw the whole of the moon.” The philosopher-​mystic and the
mystic-​philosopher, the part and the whole.
 Notes

Prologue: A Reciprocity of Acceleration

1. See Canales 2015.

2. Jimena Canales tells us that “Langevin’s original publication did not talk about twins
or use the common names later given to them by Bergson of Peter and Paul; rather, he
simply described a single ‘voyager’ taking off from Earth in an imaginary rocket and
only imagined what would happen when he returned” (Canales 2015, p. 57).
3. Bergson 1965, p. xvi.
4. The purported irrelevance of this criticism to the general theory of relativity of 1915,
on account of it adding the decelerations and accelerations of the rocket rotating mid-​
journey, and that are not reciprocated on earth, was side-​stepped by Bergson disaggre-
gating, and so further relativizing, these forces as themselves internally comprised of
symmetrically related frames of reference. In other words, he downsized the problem
and found that it was still present at a smaller scale: see Bergson 1969.
5. Canales 2015, pp. 58–​59.
6. See Bergson 1965, p. 30.
7. Bergson 1969, p. 174. He made the same point over thirty years earlier in Time and
Free Will when discussing the representation of another’s experience of freedom
(also using the protagonists Peter and Paul): “Peter and Paul are one and the same
person, whom you call Peter when he acts and Paul when you recapitulate his history.
The more complete you made the sum of the conditions which, when known, would
have enabled you to predict Peter’s future action, the closer became your grasp of his
existence and the nearer you came to living his life over again down to its smallest
details: you thus reached the very moment when, the action taking place, there was
no longer anything to be foreseen, but only something to be done” (Bergson 1910,
pp. 188–​89).
8. Bergson 1965, pp. 150, 152, 177 (in French: “toujours virtuels et simplement pensés,
jamais actuels et réalisés” and “mais l’essence de la théorie de la Relativité est de mettre
sur le même rang la vision réelle et les visions virtuelles”; and “pour effet de dissimuler
la différence entre le réel et le virtuel.”
9. See Bergson 1992, pp. 102–​3 on a related thought experiment concerning alterity: to
be in Shakespeare’s place (and so able to write Hamlet) would entail “thinking all that
Shakespeare will think, feeling all he will feel, knowing all he will know, perceiving
therefore all he will perceive, and consequently occupying the same point in space
and time, having the same body and the same soul: it is Shakespeare himself.”
180 Notes

10. Paul Atkinson follows F. C. T. Moore in the view that we need to nuance our usual
understanding of “duration” in this regard: “F. C. T. Moore argues that the trans-
lation of durée as duration omits one of the other senses of the word as ‘the fact or
property of going through time’ or continuance and, consequently, he argues that
the English expression ‘durance’ is more suitable. Here the emphasis shifts from
the description of a temporal expanse to the movement inherent in time and what
it means to endure, for the continuity of time is actually felt as a continuance that is
irreducible to an external and measurable representation” (Atkinson 2020, p. 20).

Strange Memory: An Introduction in Five Parts

1. My translation from Mauss 1968, p. 386: “Je crois que précisément il y a, même au
fond de tous nos états mystiques, des techniques du corps qui n’ont pas été étudiées. . . .
Je pense qu’il y a nécessairement des moyens biologiques d’entrer en ‘communication
avec le Dieu’.”
2. This is how Henri Bergson himself puts it: “The truth is that memory does not con-
sist in a regression from the present to the past, but, on the contrary, in a progression
from the past to the present. It is in the past that we place ourselves at a stroke. We
start from a ‘virtual state’ which we lead onwards, step-​by-​step, through a series of
different planes of consciousness, up to the goal where it is materialized in an actual
perception” (Bergson 1990, p. 239).
3. It is also claimed that such episodic (“autonoetic”) memory is specific to humans
(acquired about the age of four years): see Tulving 2005, pp. 4, 21. My thanks go to
Markus Rajala for this reference.
4. Langer 1989, p. 155, “The control group was told once again that they were to con-
centrate on the past. [ . . . ] In contrast, the orientation remarks for the experimental
group stressed that the best way to learn about the past may not be through simple
reminiscence. Rather, we should try to return as completely as possible in our minds
to that earlier time.”
5. “The experimental group as a whole improved while the control group’s performance
worsened somewhat over time” (Langer 1989, p. 163).
6. I do not pretend that this account of Proust’s position is the only tenable one, and I am
sure that much nuance could be added by Proustian scholars.
7. Bergson 1992, pp. 151–​2.
8. Bergson 1975, pp. 69–​70.
9. See Bergson 1911a, pp. 5, 6; in French, see Bergson 1959, pp. 498–​9: “l’amoncellement
du passé sur le passé se poursuit sans trêve,” and then “c’est avec notre passé tout entier,
y compris notre courbure d’âme originelle, que nous désirons, voulons, agissons,”
followed by “de cette survivance du passé résulte l’impossibilité, pour une conscience,
de traverser deux fois le même état.” See also his Cours on memory (Bergson 2018,
pp. 32–​33): “si nous pouvions la retrouver, nous serions transportés dans le passé;
nous revivrions notre passé” etc.
 Notes  181

10. Bergson 1911a, p. 5. All emphases mine. Both Bertrand Russell and Jacques Maritain
specifically upbraided Henri Bergson for this conflation of memory with the past; see
Russell 1914, pp. 21–​24; Maritain 1968, pp. 219–​23, 231–​36.
11. Grosz 2005, p. 3; Khandker 2020, p. 85; Perri 2017, p. 510 (citing François 2008, p. 30);
Mourélos 1964, p. 136.
12. de Warren 2015, p. 247. See also p. 248: “The pure or virtual past is not in me; on the
contrary, I live in the pure past.”
13. Bergson 1990, p. 230.
14. Hyppolite 2002, p. 112.
15. See Bachelard 1963. Conversely, one might say, with Leibniz, natura non facit saltus
(“nature does not make jumps”), of course: but this Leibnizian axiom of the spa-
tial plenum, where there are no breaks or cuts, can also be temporalized through
Bergsonism as the plenitude of creativity, the fullness of novelty, or the continuity of
change. Spatial cuts, be they affirmed (Bachelard) or denied (Leibniz), are no longer
opposed to continuity, once they are temporalized as heterogeneous continuity.
16. Perri 2017, p. 516.
17. McNamara 1999, p. 117.
18. Bergson 1990, p. 197; Bergson 1910, p. 101.
19. Naturally, then, if there is no universal time but only instead partial durations, any
feasible time travel would only concern local moments rather than encapsulate a uni-
versal slice of time—​a certain “bubble” of activity within, say, “1912,” a part of 1912,
rather than “all” that happened within that calendar year—​whatever “all” might be
imagined to mean here.
20. Bergson 1992 (“The Perception of Change”), pp. 143–​4. The irony of this image of
moving trains is palpable given the importance of trains in Albert Einstein’s thought
experiments explaining his special theory of relativity, which Henri Bergson argues
confuses real time with space.
21. See Bergson 2018, p. 308.
22. In addition, after one foray into psychical research (a case of telepathy) early in his ca-
reer, Bergson immediately stopped all such enquiries for almost thirty years, probably
on the sound advice that this would hamper his academic career. We return to this
event later.
23. As will become clear, names and naming conventions are extremely important for
the practices of the Golden Dawn, and Mina herself had many names, both outside
the Golden Dawn and within it. This leads to some challenges for writing about her
life and work alongside that of her brother and husband. If I were to use her taken
surname, “Mathers,” in any discussion of an idea or practice, I would have to differ-
entiate between which Mathers (Samuel or “Moina”—​her adopted forename in mar-
riage) was in question. Even more so, however, when discussing ideas belonging to
“Bergson,” it would be unclear if it is Henri or Mina who is in question. So I have de-
cided to use forename and surname for both her and her brother, “Mina Bergson” and
“Henri Bergson” whenever the context might not make it clear. Not only can this act
to reinforce their sibling relationship, it should also help to equalise their status within
this study as thinker-​practitioners of equal value. Moreover, if I use the adjective
182 Notes

“Bergsonian” thereafter, any ensuing ambiguity over ownership will be intentional;

it might also help strengthen the idea of shared covariant movements which do not
belong to any particular subject or substance.
24. Denisoff 2019b.
25. Armstrong 1975, pp. 37–​38.
26. Denisoff 2019b; Lees 1900.
27. Mina Bergson reported that Isis had appeared to her in a dream and asked her to
perform the Rites publicly. Given what we will see later in Henri Bergson’s theory of
dreams as hypercorrelated perceptions (phantasmagoria), one might even say that
Mina Bergson’s dream of Isis was also a performance, albeit in sleep and so with par-
tial movement paralysis
28. As performed here, these Rites invoked the spirit of Isis into a statue, though it is the
movements of Mina’s body (as “priestess”) that invoke the spirit. But it could also have
been invoked directly into her own body: see Butler 2011, p. 58, who notes that for the
Golden Dawn, “divine forces can be made to appear in people as well.” Nonetheless,
as Butler adds (p. 92): “One thing we do know about the cult of Isis is that its rituals
required a house or temple because of the tradition in Egyptian cults in which the di-
vinity was believed to reside within statues. This is interesting when speculating that
the ritual may have involved the animation of these statues by the divinity, or even, in
a theurgic spirit, the animation of those taking part in the ritual. This speculation was
one held by MacGregor Mathers and his wife in their reenactment of the rites of Isis
in Paris.” See also Butler 2011, pp. 146–​8, on other subtle differences between invoca-
tion and evocation, especially in the Golden Dawn and its use of unmediated magic
(where no intermediary spirits are needed for the magician to invoke or evoke a spirit
or power from a spirit).
29. I say “partially” because it was a two stage process: in one version of the myth, Osiris,
a king of Egypt, was murdered and dismembered by his brother Sep; so Isis must first
find the parts of his body and reintegrate or defragment them. This brings him partly
back to life in what we might call a supernatural fashion. But then, in what we would
later dub a “supernormal” continuation, Osiris is fully resurrected only through bio-
logical reproduction: for Isis is both Osiris’s sister and wife, and their son, Horus, is the
ordinary means by which Osiris’s continuation and survival can be completed.
30. See Greer 1995, pp. 237, 238, 250. Technically, as C. J. Tully informs us, their Isis
movement was not “connected to the Golden Dawn and reflected the Matherses’
long-​standing interest in ancient Egyptian religion” (Tully 2020, p. 148).
31. See Colquhoun 1975, p. 76. An odd passage in Henri Bergson’s The Two Sources
(Bergson 1977, p. 260) on vegetarianism (his sole reference in all published works)
probably goes back to a “lecture” from his brother-​in-​law at one of Henri’s dinner
visits (reported by W. B. Yeats) to the Mathers’, where meat would not have been
served: “I enjoy a well-​prepared dish of meat; to a vegetarian, who used to like it as
much as I do, the mere sight of meat is sickening. It may be alleged that we are both
right, and that there is no more arguing about taste than about color. Perhaps: but
I cannot help noting that my vegetarian is thoroughly convinced he will never revert
 Notes  183

to his old inclinations, whereas I am not nearly so sure that I shall always stick to
mine. He has been through both experiments; I have only tried one. His repulsion
grows stronger as he fixes his attention on it, whereas my satisfaction is largely a
matter of inattention and tends to pale in a strong light. I do believe it would fade away
altogether, if decisive experiments came to prove, as it is not impossible they will, that
I am directly and slowly poisoning myself by eating meat.” It may well turn out that he
was correct. Bon appétit.
32. See Pattison and Kirkpatrick 2018 for a very respectable collection of essays on the
mystical sources of existentialism. For the Gnostic, or rather “Hermetic,” Hegel, see
Magee 2001. See also Ramey 2012, p. 234n on such readings: “certain post-​Kantian
thinkers such as Hegel, Schelling, Novalis, and Josef Hoëné-​Wronski were all strongly
influenced by esoteric traditions. As [Christian] Kerslake has now definitively
shown, this post-​Kantian esoteric line had a profound influence upon Deleuze.” Such
enterprises can also be pursued for less edifying reasons, such as Peter Hallward’s Out
of This World (2006), the primary purpose of which was to damn Deleuze by associa-
tion with spiritualist ideas, and thereby (even more importantly) bury his philosophy
in advance of the emergence of Alain Badiou’s thought, which could thereby assert its
dominance within the Anglophone reception of contemporary French philosophy all
the more easily.
33. Ramey 2012, p. 10.
34. Gamble, Hanan, and Nail 2019, p. 111.
35. Gamble, Hanan, and Nail 2019, p. 116.
36. See the essays collected in The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical
Philosophy (Glennan and Illari 2017). In particular, see the essay by Mark Povich
and Carl F. Craver, “Mechanistic Levels, Reduction, and Emergence” (Povich and
Craver 2017): p. 188: “In aggregates, the property of the whole is literally a sum
of the properties of its parts. The concentration of a fluid is an aggregation of
particles; allelic frequency is a sum of individual alleles. Aggregate properties
change linearly with the addition and removal of parts, they don’t change when
their parts are rearranged, and they can be taken apart and reassembled without
any special difficulty. This is because in true aggregates, spatial, temporal, and
causal organization are irrelevant. . . . Mechanisms, in contrast, are literally more
than the sums of their parts: they change non-​linearly with the addition and re-
moval of parts, their behavior is disrupted if parts are switched out, and this is
because their spatial, temporal, and causal organization make a difference to how
the whole behaves.”
37. Coleman 2006, pp. 40–​44; cited in Pinch 2014–​15, p. 15.
38. Zammito 2017, pp. 309–​10.
39. It was Ravaisson who showed how habit must be seen as spiritual rather than
mechanical.
40. See Edelman 1992, pp. 212–​18. Oddly enough, Edelman cites W. B. Yeats’s “A Vision”
to show how even intelligent people can be attracted to the “spooky and mystical”
(p. 213). Yeats’s “A Vision” was dedicated to Mina Bergson.
184 Notes

41. See Delitz 2021, pp. 109–​14 for an engagement with a new materialism that takes a
positive line on Bergson’s influence.
42. Adela Pinch, “The Appeal of Panpsychism in Victorian Britain,” p. 1.
43. Sommer McGrath 2020, p. 10.
44. Sommer McGrath 2020, p. 10.
45. Sommer McGrath 2020, pp. 15–​16, 13.
46. Sommer McGrath 2020, p. 135.
47. Dunham 2020, pp. 1005, 988; Sinclair and Antoine-​Mahut 2020, pp. 862, 863. Sinclair
and Antoine-​Mahut also describe “two halves” (p. 857) of French spiritualism, one
dominated by Victor Cousin, with its “eclectic” mix of German idealism and Scottish
common-​sense philosophy, and a more “positivist” spiritualism following Ravaisson
and the idea that biology has more in common with psychology than physics (p. 860).
48. Gayon 2005, p. 47.
49. Woods 2017, pp. 200–​24.
50. Woods 2017, pp. 201–​2.
51. Jankélévitch 2015, p. 257.
52. Jankélévitch 2015, p. 257.
53. Bergson 1992, p. 87. See also Bergson 2018, p. 198: “suivre un calcul, c’est le refaire pour
son propre compte.”
54. Bennett 2010, p. 154n26.
55. See Morrison 2007, p. 17.
56. Different occult societies had different hermetic grading systems, and the
Golden Dawn had ten grades using ten positions or divine emanations (“se-
phira”) on the Tree of Life (Malkuth, Kether, etc.). However, it is noticeable
that the numbers of the grade always add up to eleven rather than ten (3° =​ 8°
Practicus; 4° =​ 7° Philosophus, etc). This is because the Golden Dawn also
counted an extra step, “Daath” in the middle as a special position synthesizing
all of the sephira. Both this and the final three positions of the “third order”
(10° =​ 1° Ipsissimus, 9° =​ 2° Magus, and 8° =​ 3° Magister Templi) were only
achievable “in principle” as many argued that they were the unique prove-
nance of “astral beings,” or “Superieurs Inconnus”—​t he “secret chiefs” guiding
the Order and instructing its leaders. Non-​astral beings could progress no
further than 7° =​ 4° Adeptus Exemptus (which Mina Bergson did attain). The
equals sign, as mentioned, is not an equation but functions graphically. It can
be likened to the dividing line of the letter Aleph ‫​—א‬i ndicating a connection
upward and a connection downward, as well as a division. As such, it shows
how each side is linked to the ascent the student is working on and a de-
scent to where she began. A spiritual diagrammatology of sorts. My thanks to
Dr. Mark Price for these insights.
57. Malabou, Barad, and Bennett probably represent the most important and original fig-
ures among the first generation of new materialist thinkers, with second-​generation
work being done by Felicity Colman, Iris van der Tuin, and others. Some of the newer
work is collected in the journal Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research.
58. See Laruelle 2013.
59. Hanegraaff 2008, p. 296.
 Notes  185

1° = 10° Zelator Covariant

1. Grogin 1988, p. 59n10. Grogin also notes that “spiritism” has an added
“reincarnationist component” over the English “spiritualism.”
2. Gayon 2005, p. 46.
3. Noakes 2014, p. 2.
4. Noakes 2014, pp. 1–​2.
5. Noakes 2008, p. 11.
6. Morrison 2007, p. 63.
7. See Jones 2016, pp. 176–​7.
8. See Jones 2016, pp. 135–​6.
9. Jones 2016, p. 134.
10. Thurschwell 2001, p. 3.
11. Thurschwell 2001, p. 23.
12. Katz 1978, p. 22.
13. Katz 1978, pp. 38, 46.
14. Katz 1992, pp. 34n9, 15.
15. Jones 2016, p. 60.
16. Jones 2016, pp. 60, 59.
17. Forman 1990, p. 25.
18. Forman 1990, pp. 37–​38.
19. Forman 1998, p. 29.
20. See Mullarkey 2004b.
21. Forman 1998, p. 32; Bergson 1992, p. 161.
22. Jones 2016, p. 173.
23. Luhrmann 1991, pp. 274–​5.
24. This use of the term “supernormal” also contrasts starkly with the other contempo-
rary usage in biology and psychology that builds on Nikolaas Tinbergen’s pioneering
work in ethology: there, a supernormal stimulus is an exaggeration of a normal
condition, one sometimes eliciting maladaptive behavior—​so the “super” is indeed
a real excess (see Barrett 2010). In our usage here, the emphasis is on ordinarizing
the “super” through a reinterpretation of the normal, bringing it back to earth, so to
speak, by enlarging our view of how the normal functions.
25. As Mina Bergson puts it in the Golden Dawn’s language, “Malkuth is in
Kether . . . Kether is in Malkuth” (Bergson/​Mathers 2016c), p. viii.

One: Ordinary Mysticism, the Hyperbolic,

and the Supernormal

1. See Ó Maoilearca 2019a.

2. Bergson 1990, p. 145.
3. This is indeed the plot of Richard Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return, which he adapted
into a screenplay for the film Somewhere in Time (Szwarc 1980). Yet, whereas the film
186 Notes

simply allows its protagonist (“Richard Collier”) the supernatural ability to will him-
self to return to a distant past (partly also through self-​hypnosis—​mental time travel
in extremis as it were), in the book we are told that the hero has a brain tumor, leaving
it open that his entire experience was in fact only “in his head,” literally. Skeptical
work, such as seen in Shermer 2011, grasps this nettle by talking simply of “the
believing brain” or “believing neuron” when it comes to explaining belief in super-
natural or preternatural phenomena: belief in such patent falsehoods is itself a brain
phenomenon. Yet the existence of these clear cerebral correlations can be reoriented in
order to inflate the cerebral rather than deflate the phenomenal.
4. See Mullarkey 2004a; Ó Maoilearca 2015, chapter four.
5. Kelly et al. 2007, p. 72. See also p. 78: “To illustrate this view of our ordinary self as
a ‘segment’ of a larger Self, Myers used an analogy with the electromagnetic spec-
trum. Specifically, he suggested that the Individuality or larger Self can be thought
of as analogous to a ray of light which, when filtered through a prism, appears as a
continuum, or spectrum, of colors. Our ordinary waking consciousness corres-
ponds only to that small segment of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to
the naked eye (and varies from species to species); but just as the electromagnetic
spectrum extends in either direction far beyond the small portion normally visible
to us, so human consciousness extends in either direction beyond the small portion
of which we are ordinarily aware. In the ‘infrared’ region of consciousness are older,
more primitive processes—​processes that are unconscious, automatic, and primarily
physiological. [ . . . ] Sleep, for example, and its associated psychophysiological pro-
cesses are an important manifestation of an older, more primitive state. . . . In contrast,
in the ‘ultraviolet’ region of the spectrum are all those mental capacities that remain
latent because they have not yet emerged at a supraliminal level through adaptive ev-
olutionary processes. In the ‘ultraviolet’ region, therefore, are those new modes of
functioning that appear rarely, fitfully, and briefly. They are the “super-​conscious op-
erations. . . . ”
6. A passage of dialogue from the biopic of the animal scientist Temple Grandin, who is
not neurotypical, runs as follows:
Temple: “[People] keep on giving each other looks and I don’t know what
they mean.”
Eustacia (Temple’s mother): “People tell each other things with their eyes.”
Temple: “I will never learn how to do that”
(Temple Grandin, dir. Mick Jackson, 2010).

What appears mysterious, or even magical, clearly lies in the neural connections
of the beholder.
7. Delivering a phenomenon from the category of the supernatural, understood as a
projected hyperbolic discontinuity, into the supernormal, understood as many dif-
ferent or heterogeneous continuities, is also bound up with a conversion from only
seeing a phenomenon associatively (going from the parts to the whole) to seeing it
dissociatively (running from wholes to parts). At heart, then, these are two different
orientations in mereology when it is understood as a process.
8. Bergson/​Mathers 2016c, p. viii, my italics.
 Notes  187

9. Though I am using Laruelle’s method of nonphilosophy as an inspiration here, others,

like Egil Asprem (2014), have asked if we can think of esotericism in terms of a “re-
search programme” (following Imre Lakatos), and whether such comparisons should
only be based on genealogy or might also incorporate analogies between structures
or functions.
10. Lincoln 1994, p. 5. See also pp. 116–​17: “I do not view authority as an entity, still less
one that came into existence in one historic era and disappeared in another. Rather,
I take it to be an effect (and the perceived capacity to produce an effect) that is op-
erative within strongly asymmetric relations of speaker and audience. Further, this
effect can be exercised whenever certain rather general features are brought into con-
juncture: the right speaker, the right speech and delivery, the right staging and props,
the right time and place, and an audience, the historically and culturally conditioned
expectations of which establish the parameters of what is judged ‘right’ in all these
instances. I thus take authority to be much more supple, dynamic, and situationally
adaptable. . . .”

Two: Meet the Bergsons

1. Soulez and Worms, p. 37.

2. See Gayon 2005, p. 43: “There can be no doubt that Henri Bergson . . . was the most
influential of all twentieth-​century French philosophers. Until about 1960 there was
general agreement about this. [ . . . ] In the past 30 years, however, this situation has
changed dramatically. Most philosophers under the age of 50 know little or nothing of
Bergson.”
3. She was said to be “as much of a Celtophile as her husband”—​see Greer 2013, p. 7.
4. Female membership of the Paris Temple would eventually comprise almost half of
its body. See Bogdan 2008, pp. 253–​4: “From 1888 to the schism in 1900 almost 400
members had joined the GD through one of the five Temples. Isis-​Urania in London
had 229 members, of which 133 were men and 96 women; Osiris Temple in Weston-​
super-​Mare had a total of only 12 members, of which all were men; Horus Temple in
Bradford had 55 members, consisting of 40 men and 15 women; Amen-​Ra Temple
in Edinburgh had 54 members of whom 29 were men and 25 women; and finally,
Ahathoor Temple in Paris had 26 members, consisting of 11 men and 15 women. The
total number of members was thus 376, of which 225 were men and 151 women.”
5. See Butler 2011, pp. 11–​15, for an account of these events and their damage to the
Golden Dawn.
6. Greer 1995, p. 358. Coincidently, this was the same year that her mother Katherine
died, aged ninety-​four.
7. See Colquhoun 1975, p. 53. Yet Mary Greer notes that, on her return to England at
least, she was an affectionate aunt, and suggests that “any family disagreements from
when she first married Mathers were long past and that she was a welcome part of the
family” (Greer 1995, p. 357).
188 Notes

8. Greer 1995, p. 42: “Although Mina saw little of the brother she idealized while growing
up, she was later to live near him in Paris for twenty-​five years. It seems obvious that
with their mutual interest in aspects of the spirit and in psychology (Henri became
the president of the British Society for Psychical Research), they no doubt met often
for discussion and probably argued over their differing perspectives.”
9. Tereshchenko 1986, pp. 82–​83.
10. Pasi 2009, p. 64.
11. For an articulation of something like this view, see Franklin 2018, p. 42: “Perhaps the
real point is to keep the ultimate source mysterious by ever pointing backward and
insisting that it only can be known to the fully initiated adept. This, after all, is the
strategy used to effect by the adepts of Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, and, for that
matter, the Church of Scientology, a more recent occult-​scientific religion that rivals
the hybridity of its late nineteenth-​century antecedents.”
12. The Golden Dawn invited individual adults as members, not minors nor indeed whole
families; its members came and went with relative ease; and the founding members
did not profit from the group’s activities—​indeed, something closer to penury was
more often the norm. Whether or not contemporary new religious movements (aka
“cults”) actually conform to the antithesis of each of these characteristics (and the
prejudices of many toward them) is another matter altogether.
13. Pasi 2009, p. 65.
14. Greer 1995, pp. 13–​14.
15. Greer 1995, p. 15. The theme of invisibility and power returns later.
16. See Hedenborg White 2021; Owen 1989.
17. Bergson/​Mathers 2016c, p. viii. Of course, “materialization” is rich in meaning for
occultists, and its significance for both Bergson’s shall gradually manifest in what
follows.
18. This is how R. C. Grogin reports on Henri Bergson’s attitude: “What Bergson was
trying to do in large part in the generation following 1889 (and this only becomes
clear with the appearance of Creative Evolution in 1907) was validate esoteric ideas
through empirical and rational means. This was why he rejected the more ex-
treme forms of the occult in favour of the empirical methods of psychical research.
According to his brother-​in-​law, MacGregor Mathers, Bergson was not the least bit
interested in magic” (Grogin 1988, p. 43). Grogin’s last point oversteps the mark, how-
ever, especially since Henri Bergson’s The Two Sources spends so much effort elabo-
rating a sociobiological account of the origins of magical thinking.
19. Le Doeuff 2002, pp. 107–​8.
20. Herring 2019, p. 10.
21. Herring 2019, p. 3.
22. Herring 2019, pp. 5–​6.
23. Cariou 1976, p. 226.
24. See Jantzen 1998.
25. See Deleuze 1988. To a lesser extent Deleuze’s two Cinema books in the mid-​1980s
helped to maintain this impression, especially in Film Studies.
 Notes  189

26. Significant works by these authors include Mossé-​Bastide 1959; Mossé-​Bastide 1955;
Barthelemy-​Madaule 1966; Kremer-​Marietti 1953; Delhomme 1954; and Cariou
1990. This is not to reduce the important role of male commentators in this period,
such as Leon Husson, Jean-​Claude Pariente, Henri Gouhier, Georges Mourélos, or
Alex Philonenko—​the Henri Bergson bibliography is so huge (with over three thou-
sand items up to 1986 and probably in excess of a thousand more since then) that a
numerical majority of works by male philosophers in almost inevitable given the sys-
temic biases against women in academia both before and after World War II: but this
makes the relatively large representation of women among the best secondary litera-
ture all the more striking.

10° = 1° Ipsissimus Covariant (Neophyte)

1. See McNamara 1999, p. 11. See also Michaelian 2016, p. 5: “In psychology, Tulving has
influentially dubbed this form of memory episodic (Tulving 1972, 1983). . . . Episodic
memory refers, roughly, to the form of memory responsible for allowing us to revisit
specific episodes or events from the personal past. It is typically contrasted with se-
mantic memory, which allows us to recall facts without necessarily giving us access to
the episodes in which they were learned.” Procedural memory is “the kind of memory
at work when one learns a new behavior or skill” (p. 26).
2. Bergson 1990, p. 145.
3. McNamara 1999, p. 122.
4. Hacking 1998, p. 201.
5. Perri 2017, p. 516.
6. Perri 2017, p. 516.
7. Bergson 2018, p. 309.
8. See Bergson 1975, pp. 70–​71, on how the brain keeps our attention pointing forward
and on life.
9. Sartre 2012, p. 51.
10. Plato 1997, p. 212.
11. Ricoeur 2006, p. 426. Cited in ter Schure 2020, p. 128.
12. ter Schure 2020, p. 128.
13. As first revealed through animal experiment: see Bickle 2017, pp. 34–​47.
14. Barbour 2000, p. 105.
15. ter Schure 2020, p. 128.
16. ter Schure 2020, p. 128. For Bergson’s own discussion of Aristotle on memory, see his
lectures on the history of theories of memory given at the Collège de France in 1904
(Bergson 2018, pp. 255ff).
17. Russell 1921, pp. 159–​60.
18. For a contemporary version of Russell’s presentism, we need only turn to Julien
Barbour’s cosmology (Barbour 2000): see Marchesini 2018 for a Bergsonian critique
of Barbour’s “Platonian” notion of “special Nows” or “time capsules.”
190 Notes

19. Bergson 1990, p. 135.

20. Hacking 1998, p. 251. Indeed, the type of “two cultures” approach that Hacking wishes
to temper is prevalent on both sides. Ian McEwan is on fine form here illustrating
the case for the arts: “Think how humanised and approachable scientists would be
if they could join in the really important conversations about time, and without
thinking they had the final word—​the mystic’s experience of timelessness, the cha-
otic unfolding of time in dreams, the Christian moment of fulfillment and redemp-
tion, the annihilated time of deep sleep, the elaborate time schemes of novelists, poets,
daydreamers, the infinite, unchanging time of childhood” (McEwan 1987, p. 120).
21. Mourélos 1964, p. 133.
22. McNamara 1999, pp. 84–​85. Italics mine. He goes on: “Unfortunately, none of these
implications have received any substantial scientific investigation. One possible ex-
ception might be the case of psi abilities like telepathy, but such abilities are contro-
versial.” The other exception is his own work.
23. McNamara 1999, p. 56. McNamara’s co-​option of Bergson’s selectionist approach is
also motivated by an underlying Darwinism of selective adaptation (in the fashion of
Gerald Edelman’s “Neural Darwinism”), and it explains part of the subtitle of his book
“Mental Darwinism.” Pace Bergson’s critique of Darwinian gradualism, McNamara
nonetheless emphasizes the compatibility between the two forms of selectionism.
McNamara is not alone in finding Bergson’s direct (nonstorage) account of memory
credible, psychologist Stephen Robbins having also made the case for the selectionist
account (for instance, in Robbins 2006) as well as Bergson’s holism (while relating it to
the work of David Bohm—​see Robbins 2017).
24. McNamara 1999, pp. 56, 41.
25. McNamara 1999, p. 12.
26. McNamara 1999, p. 24.
27. Bergson 1990, p. 241; see also p. 162.
28. Kern 1983, p. 41.
29. See Bergson’s Collège de France lecture on memory for December 11, 1903 (Bergson
2018, p. 33): “Le vrai processus de la localisation n’est donc pas quelque chose de
mécanique, comme ce que j’ai décrit. Cela, ce n’est pas le processus d’intercalation,
de juxtaposition, c’est un processus qui ressemble beaucoup plus à un processus
biologique, à la segmentation d’un ovule: l’ovule se segmente, se divise indéfiniment de
manière à parcourir toutes les phases de la vie embryonnaire. C’est cela l’intuition: la
période s’est divisée, s’est segmentée en souvenirs qui s’éparpillent et qui constituent
alors un développement, sur un plan, de tous les événements qui remplissaient cette
période.” See also Bergson 2018, pp. 309–​10, on using this biological model.
30. Bergson 1990, p. 135 (“Imaginer n’est pas se souvenir”).
31. See Kelly et al., 2007, pp. 270–​1 for more on Bergson’s theory of memory retrieval,
which, they say, “comes remarkably close to the picture . . . emerging from the latest
neuropsychological and functional neuroimaging studies. On Bergson’s view the
overall pattern of brain activity associated with some particular act of conscious
remembering constitutes a sort of “frame,” into which the memory knowledge
somehow ‘inserts’ itself.”
 Notes  191

32. See Bergson 2018, p. 124.

33. See Bergson 2018, pp. 134, 191.
34. Robins 2017, pp. 76, 78.
35. Robins 2017, p. 84.
36. Kuhn 2002, p. 4.
37. Robins 2017, pp. 80–​81.
38. De Brigard 2017, p. 138.
39. Michaelian 2016, p. 5.
40. McNamara 1999, p. 25.
41. McNamara 1999, p. 27.
42. See Michaelian 2016. Werning 2020 argues for a midway position with “Trace
Minimalism,” which “rejects the need for memory traces to carry representational
content” (p. 329) while avoiding strongly constructivist approaches, like Michaelian’s,
that run the risk of nihilism (no reliable content in memory): “The minimal trace is
the causal link between experience and remembering. The minimal trace does not
carry any representational content, but just cognitively non-​categorical, and sequen-
tial hippocampal information. The resulting prediction, i.e., the constructed scenario,
can be regarded as a simulation of the past. The memory trace is reliable if properly
functioning in so far, as the result of the prediction has a high probability of being
close to the truth (in spite of the misinformation effect etc.), given that also the pre-
vious experience was reliable” (p. 328). However, whereas the reliance on (causal)
traces is minimized, the presumption that the brain stores content is retained, only it
is stored in a distributed fashion.
43. Luhrmann 1991, p. 876.
44. Resurgam 1987, p. 47.
45. Luhrmann 1991, pp. 857–​8.
46. See Hanegraaff 1997, pp. 109–​10: In “the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, visu-
alization is essential to such central practices as the ‘Middle Pillar Ritual’ (where the
practitioner aligns himself to the kabbalistic Tree of Life, and visualizes how the ‘uni-
versal energy’ descends as iridescent light through all the sefirot that correspond to
his own body) or astral travel (where the practitioners must visualize a hexagram that
then becomes a ‘doorway’ through which they enter another world of the reified im-
agination, where they encounter angels and other entities).” Some of these exercises
could be likened to an attempt at constructing a self-​imposed Ganzfield, putting them
on a par with Robert Forman’s ur-​PCE (pure consciousness event).
47. Butler 2011, pp. 155, 157. See also Plaisance 2014 for criticism of Butler’s claim that
the Golden Dawn revolutionized Victorian magic rituals in these and other respects.
48. Sinnett 1881, p. 129.
49. Sinnett 1919, pp. 57, 38.
50. Steiner 1914, pp. 320–​1. See also pp. 405–​6, 453–​4.
51. Asprem 2008, p. 159.
52. See Asprem 2017 and Asprem and Davidsen 2017, p. 8.
53. McNamara 1999, pp. xi, 75.
54. McNamara 1999, p. 62.
192 Notes

55. Bergson 1990, pp. 17–​18.

56. McNamara 1999, p. 30.
57. See Locke 1979, II.xxvii.ii; Butler 1736.
58. McNamara 1999, p. 31.
59. Bergson 1972, p. 858. McNamara 1999, p. 33, mentions in passing Henri Bergson’s
interest in multiple personality disorder. See also Hacking 1998, p. 132, for more
on Morton Prince and the Sally Beauchamp case. In his Collège de France course
on memory for February 12, 1904, Bergson also addresses the earlier case of
“dédoublements de la personalité” found in Eugène Azam’s studies of the patient
named “Félida” (Bergson 2018, pp. 154–​5) and so showing his abiding interest in the
topic. See also Hacking 1998, pp. 159–​70, for further comments on the Félida case.
60. Lawlor 2020.
61. And, indeed, when the two levels interfere—​we experience déjà vu, oneself as another
at a different level—​or my perception experienced as (another’s) memory.
62. As Paul Atkinson points out (2020, p. 126), on the one hand, free, artistic creation for
Bergson “involves the ‘whole personality,’ ” and yet, on the other hand, such a whole
contains a multiplicity, an alterity: citing (p. 28) Le Rire, he quotes Bergson thus: “If the
characters created by a poet give us the impression of life, it is only because they are the
poet himself,—​a multiplication or division of the poet,—​the poet plumbing the depths
of his own nature in so powerful an effort of inner observation that he lays hold of the
potential in the real, and takes up what nature has left as a mere outline or sketch in his
soul in order to make of it a finished work of art.” See Bergson 1911b, p. 151.

Three: Hyper-Ritual

1. Apart from appearing in David Fenton’s novel The Ghost Club (2014), an earlier
novel by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, The Woman Between the Worlds (2000), and artist
Lindsay Seers’s installation Nowhere Less Now (2012), her only other modern appear-
ance that I have found is a very odd one in an online fan page (“wiki”) for the video
game, Assassin’s Creed: https://​ass​assi​nscr​eed.fan​dom.com/​wiki/​Moina_​Math​ers. We
examine Seers’s engagement in the Practicus covariant.
2. There is also a fourth, technical Flying Roll by Mina Bergson, “No.31, Correspondence
between Enochian and Ethiopian Alphabets,” which is of less interest. More signifi-
cant is a joint interview from 1900, “Isis Workshop in Paris,” between Frederic Lees
and Samuel and Mina, a.k.a., Hierophant Rameses and the High Priestess Anari,
which holds some interesting information. There is also some surviving personal cor-
respondence; though, from what I have seen of it thus far, these hold less interest for
general readers.
3. Bogdan 2008, p. 251.
4. See Luhrmann 1991, p. 268: the “ ‘Middle Pillar’ is a term used by Golden Dawn
students (and their descendants) to describe the balanced use of the kabbalah, along
the central core of the Tree of Life—​Malkuth, Yesod, Tiphareth, Kether. The term is
often shorthand for a balanced, integrated approach to life and its problems.”
 Notes  193

5. The link between modern performance theory and ritual, religious or secular, is un-
controversial, going back to Richard Schechner’s “broad spectrum” approach in the
1970s whereby “any action that is framed, presented, highlighted, or displayed is a
performance” (see Schechner 2002, pp. 1–​2). The hyper-​rituals of the Golden Dawn
could then be seen as hyper-​performative, a further extension of the spectrum into
different space-​times (allegedly).
6. See Schechner 2002; Turner 1986.
7. As might time travel be understood: the suspension of disbelief or acting as if it
were 1912.
8. Yeats 1978, p. ix.
9. In Kabbalah the most intricate of the divine names comprises seventy-​two letters, but
the letters in varying combinations can become seventy-​two names as well.
10. See Greer 1995, p. 357.
11. Grogin 1988, p. 40. Coincidently, Henri Bergson’s lecture rooms were also covered in
offerings of flowers from his adoring audiences, at least at the height of his fame; see
Antliff 1993, p. 99.
12. Oddly enough, despite a certain gender bias toward male mysticism in The
Two Sources, Bergson’s actual examples are more often than not female—​St.
Teresa, St. Catherine of Sienna, Joan of Arc, etc. Published four years after
his sister’s death, one might also wonder about the effect her death had on its
composition.
13. Bergson/​Mathers 1987, p. 155. One clear example of this activity lies in the fact that
both Henri and Mina were very active during the First World War, Henri partici-
pating early on in a number of diplomatic missions to the United States in order to
convince Woodrow Wilson to join the Allies in the war, while Mina and Samuel
transformed their home in Paris into an army recruitment center, which, according
to W. B. Yeats, succeeded in recruiting six hundred Americans and Britons living in
France (see Greer 1995, p. 349).
14. Bergson/​Mathers 1987, p. 158.
15. Bergson/​Mathers 2016c, pp. vii–​viii.
16. Bergson 1990, p. 17—​my emphases. It is notable that Macgregor Mathers, in his
1900 interview with Lees, claimed that “the universe . . . [is] a great eidolon [image or
ideal].” Mina Bergson will later use this term when discussing imagination.
17. Bergson 1911a, pp. 197, 210.
18. From Greer’s citation of Lees, Greer 1995, pp. 208–​9.
19. Kolakowski 1985, pp. 37–​38; Pilkington 1976, p. 7. Mourélos writes (1964, p. 103): “we
absolutely agree with M. Jankélévitch declaration that, of all of Bergson’s works,
Matter and Memory is the most brilliant.”

Four: “O My Bergson, You Are a Magician”

1. Green 2015, p. 19.

2. See Bergson 1975, p. 34.
194 Notes

3. See Hude 1989–​1990: the “hypothesis” of Hude’s eccentric study is that there is a
“spiritualist Bergson from the start” (vol. I, p. 19) and even that “the problem of god”
is Bergson’s continual problem (vol. II, p. 185).
4. Jankélévitch 2015, p. 228.
5. Jankélévitch 2015, p. 227.
6. Bergson 1990, pp. 184, 185.
7. Bergson 1992, p. 190; see Moore 1996.
8. Grogin 1988, p. 61n31. He continues, “Bergson once acknowledged that he had taken
instruction in Hebrew, but was quite clear in maintaining that he had ignored the
Kabbala. Nevertheless, critics have insisted that the connection exists.”
9. Murdoch 1999, p. 225.
10. Hutton 1999, p. 82. For the Golden Dawn as a syncretic” or “hybrid” religion, see
Franklin 2018, p. 185.
11. See Hanegraaff 2020, p. 78: “A large-​scale empirical study directed by Heinz Streib
and Ralph W. Hood has demonstrated that the term “spirituality” is broadly under-
stood today as referring to the practice of what they call “privatized, experience-​
oriented religion. . . . Hence it refers to types of religion that (1) are focused on the
individual rather than the collective, (2) are concerned with the cultivation of per-
sonal experience(s) more than with legal or doctrinal matters, and (3) emphasize
praxis over belief.”
12. Franklin 2018, p. 154. It is Michael Bevir who coined the term “Victorian and
Edwardian immanentism” (Bevir 2011, p. 22).
13. See Bergson 1972, p. 1528.
14. Owen 2004, pp. 135, 136, my emphases.
15. Owen 2004, p. 136.
16. Bergson 1977, p. 194n.
17. For more on Underhill’s time in the Golden Dawn, see Armstrong 1975, pp. 36ff. Her
1907 “A Defence of Magic,” was reprinted in its majority in her key work, Mysticism in
1911, though by that time some of her initial belief in mystical magic had waned.
18. James 2015, p. 181.
19. Bergson 1977, p. 148.
20. Bergson 1977, p. 140.
21. In 1939, Sartre would generalize this idea in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions
to make the function of all emotion a magical transformation of the world. See
Sartre 2001.
22. Bergson 1977, p. 141.
23. Bergson 1977, pp. 141, 146.
24. See Mullarkey 2007.
25. See Bergson 1975, p. 11 “consciousness is coextensive with life.” That matter also
endures is a major thesis of Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution.
26. We will return to the question of probability and chance when discussing the Tarot at
the conclusion of the Practicus covariant later.
27. Caygill (2013, pp. 256–​7) links hyperaesthesia and panoramic vision thus: the one
operates in space, the other in time: “His most telling example is the panoramic view
 Notes  195

of the past that is evoked in a moment of mortal danger. This is not the spatialization
of time, but the phenomenon of hyperaesthesia assuming its temporal dimension in
memory. [. . . ] A new attention to life thus emerges, one not restricted to voluntary
action and oriented ahead, but which assumes the complex nexus of past, present and
future that constitutes the monad.” See also Bergson 2018, pp. 132–​3.
28. In 1901 (twelve years before his address to the Society for Psychical Research),
Henri Bergson records his participation in the “Groupe d’études des phénomènes
psychiques,” whose task was to look at “psychic phenomena”; see Bergson 1972,
pp. 511–​12. His 1903 report talks of radiation and psychic phenomena (Bergson
1972, pp. 606–​9). Grogin (1988, pp. 51–​52) discusses the case of “Eusapia Palladino”
who was “tested in forty-​three seances which were conducted between 1905 and
1908. She was examined at various times by a distinguished company of physicists,
psychologists and physiologists who included Professors Richet, Ballet, Courtier and
Madame Curie of the Sorbonne, and D’Arsonval, Perrin and Bergson of the Collège
de France. On several occasions Bergson and Madame Curie were the controllers—​
they held Eusapia’s hands to insure against cheating.” Henri Bergson was skeptical of
her performance as genuine. He records these sessions in Bergson 1972, pp. 673–​4.
Grogin also notes (1988, p. 65n85) that Henri Bergson was a member of the “Thirteen
Club,” which met on the thirteenth of each month to discuss psychic matters. Its
other members included Charles Richet, Eugène Osty (director of the Institut
métapsychique internationale), Emile Boirac, and Flammarion. See also de Mille
2022, p. 2. In fact, Henri Bergson’s interest in psychic phenomena goes back as far
as 1886, as we will see later, but he held it at a distance from his public research work
until 1913.
29. Caygill 2013, p. 250.
30. Bergson 1992, p. 32.
31. See Evrard 2021 for an overview of Bergson’s undulating public enthusiasm (or “une
certaine ambiguïté,” p. 249) toward psychical research throughout his career, espe-
cially in the light of his more positive private investigations in the area, which some
have even described as an “open secret” in certain French academic circles.
32. See van Gemert and Eland 2021.
33. Bergson 1975, p. 82. Henri Bergson, quoting an interlocutor who told him the story
of this vision, only says that the officer died “in an engagement”; but from the details
of his own discussion of the case thereafter, it is clear that it was an engagement on a
battlefield.
34. Bergson 1975, p. 85, my emphasis. Not that telepathy is discounted as a myth by Henri
Bergson, but, as always, its putative reality will need to be naturalized: see Bergson
1975, pp. 79–​80. See also Barnard 2012a, pp. 239ff: Barnard ruminates on the possi-
bility that a “radio reception” or “filter theory” of consciousness fits Henri Bergson’s
approach best, and would allow him to think of telepathy as real (p. 239): for “Bergson,
it is quite likely that telepathic communication between minds still does take place
‘under the radar’ almost continuously, not just for especially gifted psychics, but for
everyone (in much the same way that radio or television waves are ubiquitous).”
35. Bergson 1975, p. 86.
196 Notes

36. Bergson 1992, p. 134.

37. Caygill 2013, p. 258. Toward the end of this study we will offer a remake of this final
line from The Two Sources in the image of Mina Bergson’s mystical thought.
38. In Flying Roll No.XI, “Of Clairvoyance,” MacGregor Mathers distinguishes be-
tween clairvoyance and astral projection as follows: “In this Travelling of the
Spirit . . . you perceive a different result to that of the clairvoyant, mirror-​l ike
vision-​s cenes and things instead of being like a picture, have the third dimen-
sion, solidity, they stand out first like bas relief, then you see as from a Balloon,
as it is said, by a bird’s eye view. You feel free to go to the place, to descend upon
it, to step out upon the scene, and to be an actor there. If voluntary, it comes
across as an out-​of-​b ody experience, but the first difference is one of detail—​
being less like a picture and more like actually being there” (MacGregor 1987,
pp. 79–​8 0).
39. Owen 2004, pp. 138–​9.
40. Bergson/​Mathers 2016c, p. xii, my italics
41. There is a cross pollination of ideas here with those of theosophist Annie Besant and
“thought-​forms” that we have not the space-​time to pursue further. But as Denis
Dennisof explains, “herself a synaesthetist, Besant explains that the images in their
book “are not imaginary forms, prepared as some dreamer thinks that they ought to
appear,” but “representations of forms actually observed as thrown off by ordinary
men and women” (Denisoff 2019a, pp. 146–​64).
42. See Bergson 1990, pp. 172, 241–​2.
43. Bergson 1992, p. 103.
44. Bergson 1975; Lees 1900.
45. See Bergson 1992, p. 175. Incidentally, one could thereby also argue that Henri
Bergson’s response to the twin’s paradox in the special theory of relativity—​refuting
the interchangeability of the sibling’s personal experience—​is motivated by a radically
individuated affect, a “haecceity,” “thatness,” or Tattwa vision.

Five: On Watery Logic, or Magical Thinking

1. Lees 1900.
2. From Greer’s citation of Lees, see Greer 1995, pp. 208–​9.
3. Bergson 1911a, p. 142.
4. Bergson 1992, p. 119.
5. Bergson 1992, p. 109.
6. Bergson 1992, p. 119.
7. Bergson 1992, p. 121.
8. And this survival is no less true of Henri Bergson himself, as Jankélévitch said
(Jankélévitch 2015, p. 257)—​“it is Bergsonian to look in the direction he shows,” not
to reproduce his ideas as he wrote them.
9. Riquier 2009, pp. 43–​44, 35–​37. All translations mine.
 Notes  197

10. Riquier 2009, pp. 43–​44. Italics mine. For more on the centrality of images in general
for Henri Bergson’s method and philosophy, see Podoroga 2014, pp. 129ff.
11. Bergson 1992, p. 168.
12. Riquier 2009, pp. 43–​44. Italics mine. See Szerszynski 2021, p. 16 for an interesting
take on Bergsonian individuation in terms of “colloidal social theory” (colloids are
substances such as foams, powders, or gels that exhibit macroscale physical proper-
ties that go beyond the binary of solid or liquid): “a colloidal social theory can help us
to be more sensitive to the animacy and sociality of matter and materials. Thinking in
and across the whole family of colloidal species and their subspecies provides a frame-
work for understanding and relating a wide range of material powers and behaviours.
In the substance of the colloid, what Bergson called the élan vital derives its creativity
by dividing itself not into individual entities and lineages, or into life’s explosive force
and the resistance of matter, but into solid and fluid, continuous and dispersed, and
across causal domains at different spatial scales.”
13. Bergson 1977, pp. 152, 176.
14. Bergson 1977, pp. 152–​3, translation altered. Italics mine.
15. Bergson 1977, p. 153.
16. Bergson/​Mathers 2016b.
17. Wallace 2001, p. 181.
18. My italics. Yetzirah is the third of four worlds in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Assiah is
the fourth, an active realm incorporating the world of sensation and the unseen ener-
gies of matter.
19. See Neimanis 2017 for a contemporary use of “bodies of water” as the mediating
image for a feminist and posthumanist phenomenology.
20. See Barnard 2012b, p. 295: “Seen from a Bergsonian perspective, we are (subcon-
sciously) connected with the entire universe and the apparent clear-​cut separa-
tion between objects is not ontologically real but instead is created by the filtering
mechanisms of the brain as well as by unconscious, deeply engrained patterns of
memory and belief. Given this alternate set of metaphysical assumptions, then, it
makes sense to posit that different spiritual disciplines (e.g., chanting, fasting, medi-
tation, dancing, ritualized ingestion of sacred plants, and so on) simply serve to open
up the inner floodgates in a ritually controlled and culturally sanctioned fashion,
allowing practitioners to more easily and effectively absorb and integrate the pow-
erful information that is pouring into them from different currents of the ocean of the
ever-​changing images that make up the universe as we know it.”
21. Bergson 1992, p. 34. See Mullarkey 1999a, chapter eight.
22. Bergson 1977, pp. 61–​62.
23. I am obviously referring here to the ideas of Richard Dawkins and Richard Semon
(meme/​mneme theory) and Deleuze and Guattari (affect theory), respectively.
24. For the remake as a reinvention of form or movement rather than content, see Ó
Maoilearca 2015.
25. Though as we will see, movement is general (as quantity) and individual (as quality) at
different levels (“above” or “below”).
26. Santayana 1913, p. 87.
198 Notes

27. Santayana 1913, p. 88.

28. Santayana 1913, p. 88. See George Steiner’s “Foreword” to Murdoch 1999, p. x.
29. Santayana 1913, p. 105.
30. Bergson 1990, p. 9.
31. That said, many other “neutral monisms” are rarely sufficiently neutral—​be they
composed from “experience,” energy, powers, information, events, or even “life,”
“difference,” or the Real—​as they are frequently determined (either from the start
or eventually) with properties from one or other side of a dyad, thereby revealing a
hidden bias after all.
32. Interestingly, G. William Barnard, while admitting that “pure perception” is only a
hypothetical construct for Henri Bergson, still claims, nonetheless, that it is a very
useful analytical tool “because it enables us to recognize that there is a “that-​ness,” a
stubbornly objective “external” matter-​like aspect to our everyday perceptions, a core
of our perceptual experience that, while it may be partial, is nevertheless also not rela-
tive, not simply our own subjective creation” (Barnard 2012a, p. 137).

2° = 9° Theoricus Covariant

1. Zammito 2017, pp. 309–​10.

2. Bennett 2010, p. vii.
3. Bennett 2010, p. 56.
4. Bennett 2010, p. 48.
5. Bennett 2010, pp. 12–​13, x.
6. Bennett 2010, pp. 12–​13, x.
7. Bennett 2010, p. viii.
8. Bennett 2010, p. xiv.
9. Bennett 2010, p. 106. I say that hers is an equality “of sorts” because it retains some
chauvinism: “To put it bluntly, my conatus will not let me ‘horizontalize’ the world
completely. I also identify with members of my species, insofar as they are bodies
most similar to mine. I so identify even as I seek to extend awareness of our inter-​
involvements and interdependencies. The political goal of a vital materialism is not
the perfect equality of actants, but a polity with more channels of communication
between members” (p. 104). The slippery slope from identifying “with members of
my species” first (i.e., speciesism) to other chauvinist identifications (why not with my
gender, sex, race, etc.?) is obvious, and blaming “my conatus” for such political expe-
diencies will not wash, unless one is happy to depoliticize (and even naturalize) other,
less convenient divisions, too.
10. Bennett 2010, p. xiii.
11. Bennett 2010, pp. 5, 107, xvi.
12. Bennett 2010, p. 28.
13. Van Elferen 2020, p. 204. See Latour 2005, pp. 45–​46.
14. Bennett 2010, p. 107.
 Notes  199

15. Bennett 2010, pp. vii–​viii.

16. Bennett 2010, pp. 64, 76.
17. Bennett 2010, pp. 63, 76, 77.
18. Bergson 1990, p. 208.
19. Bergson 1992, pp. 92–​93, italics mine. In the original, the parenthetical remark
goes: “Et vous ne le pouvez que par un effort artificiel d’abstraction, car le monde
matériel, encore une fois, implique peut-​être la présence nécessaire de la conscience et de
la vie.”
20. Riquier 2009, p. 190.
21. Bergson 1992, p. 303n6 (hardback edition).
22. Bennett 2010, p. x.
23. If Deleuze’s reading of Henri Bergson helped to popularize his work again in certain
corners of Theory, which it surely did, then it was at the price of some gross distor-
tion in places and, ultimately, a conflation with Deleuze’s similar, but still (in crucial
places) different ideas. Getting the balance right of which ideas in this reading are
Bergson’s and which are Deleuze’s has continued to be such a thorn in the side of
Bergson Studies that one might even begin to think that it might have been healthier
for the ongoing reception of Henri Bergson if Deleuze’s reading could be bracketed
and set aside for a while, at least until we can remember what is not Deleuzian about
Henri Bergson.
24. Bennett 2010, p. xiii.
25. Bennett 2010, p. xvii.
26. Bennett 2010, p. 81. All the same, Bennett’s hard-​headedness does not stop Gamble,
Hanan, and Nail 2019 from commenting (p. 112) that “while vital materialism explic-
itly rejects any form of essentialism, we think it nevertheless manages to sneak back in
through a metaphysics of life projected onto inorganic matter.”
27. Bennett 2010, pp. 87, 88, 83.
28. Sinclair 2019, p. 217.
29. Cariou 1976, p. 99, my translation. One can imagine a book on “The New Pantheism”
quite easily.
30. See Čapek 1971, p. 193; Čapek 1987, p. 132; Mourélos 1964, p. 90.
31. Hude 1989–​1990, vol. II, p. 36.
32. Hirai 2020, pp. 2–​3.
33. Bennett 2010, p. 99. See also Bennett 2010, p. xvi. “We need to cultivate a bit of
anthropomorphism—​the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman
nature—​to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world.” It is these “struc-
tural parallels” or “isomorphisms” that, put through the processual mill, I am calling
“heterogeneous continuities” or “covariants.”
34. Bennett 2010, p. 117.
35. Bennett 2010, p. 118. We return to superstition later when discussing Malabou.
36. Bergson 1972, p. 1031.
37. Bergson 1911a, pp. 48–​49.
38. Bergson 1977, pp. 112–​14, 116.
39. Green 1995, p. 170.
200 Notes

40. Bennett 2010, p. 122.

41. Bennett 2010, pp. 80, 57, 112.
42. See Ó Maoilearca 2015, p. 244. Other philosophical uses of mystery range from
avowed intractable issues (“hard problems”) within analytic philosophy of mind (for
instance, “new mysterians” like Colin McGinn argue that the mind-​body problem is
unsolvable); or more humanistic uses of mystery as an existential corrective against
philosophical hubris: see, respectively, McGinn 2000 and Cooper 2017.
43. Bergson 1911a, p. 137.

Six: Of the Survival of Images

1. Flusser 2000, p. 9.
2. Flusser 2000, p. 66.
3. Resurgam 1987, p. 47.
4. Bergson/​Mathers 2016a.
5. Godwin 2017, p. 467.
6. Bergson/​ Mathers 2016a. Anyone in any way familiar with Henri Bergson’s
“Introduction to Metaphysics” of 1903 (Bergson 1992, pp. 159–​200) will recognize a
similar dialectic of intuition and intellect here.
7. Bergson/​Mathers 2016a.
8. Bergson/​Mathers 2016a.
9. See Brang et al. 2010. Both an artist and occultist (like Mina Bergson), Pamela
Colman Smith was also the most famous actual synesthete member of the Golden
Dawn, using this faculty in her artistic and spiritual practices (see Denisoff 2019a).
Paul Atkinson discusses Kandinsky from a Bergsonian point of view at Atkinson
2020, pp. 215–​16, and especially, p. 52: a “debt to Bergson” may have also “inspired
some of the ideas in Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in particular
when he talks about the importance of the ‘vital impetus,’ in which the artist as part of
a spiritual avant-​garde is guided by ‘feeling’ as they strive toward the ‘immaterial.’ ”
10. Bergson/​Mathers 2016a.
11. Bergson/​Mathers 2016a.
12. Bergson/​Mathers 2016a.
13. See Bergson 1992, p. 42; see also Bergson 2018, pp. 225–​6 on the essential obscurity of
“movement” and how any clarity and distinction brought to its analysis must involve
its spatialization.
14. “Entretiens avec Lydie Adophe,” p. ix; cited in Riquier, p. 35.
15. See Mullarkey 1999a, pp. 241–​2. See Bergson 1992, p. 43: “Let us not be duped by
appearances: there are cases in which it is imagery in language which knowingly
expresses the literal meaning, and abstract language which unconsciously expresses
itself figuratively. The moment we reach the spiritual world, the image, if it merely
seeks to suggest, may give us the direct vision, while the abstract term, which is spa-
tial in origin and which claims to express, most frequently leaves us in metaphor.” In
 Notes  201

Bergson 1972, p. 980, Henri Bergson says that metaphors should be taken seriously,
that is, nonmetaphorically.
16. Bergson 1990, pp. 133–​4. Remember that “attitude” means something closer to “pos-
ture” for Henri Bergson.
17. In later works, like “The Perception of Change,” this “survival” is rerendered as an
indivisibility—​the indivisible continuity within different levels of duration (and their
related levels of “condensation” of, or “attention” to, temporal change or passage). This
is why our earlier analysis of Henri Bergson’s interpretation of a case of telepathy in
“Phantasms of the Living and Psychical Research” equated pure perception with astral
projection, whereas here we compare the plane of pure memory with the astral plane.
In truth, these two equations can themselves be merged because memory and percep-
tion become indivisible in Henri Bergson’s later work—​just as the past and the pre-
sent become nominal: they are things we call “past” and “present” depending on our
degree of attention to life. That said, there is already an earlier version of this striated
version of duration in the fourth chapter of Matter and Memory, which puts much
more emphasis on what unites the different planes (condensation or tension) and not
what divides them (as in the first and third chapters on perception and memory, re-
spectively, as separated temporal modalities). Vladimir Jankélévitch goes so far as to
say that the fourth chapter of Matter and Memory contradicts the rest of the book.
I would not go that far: it simply takes the first steps toward cosmologizing the more
first-​person perspective of the earlier chapters (that later work would elaborate, as
psyche leaves the human ego to enter the nonhuman world as movement).
18. Bergson 1990, p. 132.
19. Mullarkey 2006, chapter five.
20. “Flashing Tablets” should also be mentioned here. These were talismans, magical
objects, often decorated in complementary colors and with divine names, or symbols,
that had special powers that would aid in invocations or evocations.
21. See McGuire 2017, p. 24, who argues that “due to Yeats’s relationship with Mina
Bergson and the Order of the GD, he was exposed to Bergsonian ideas long before he
read and studied the philosopher’s work for himself.” Moreover, “in addition to the
diagrams of cones and gyres scattered throughout Yeats’s copy of Matter and Memory,
his annotations suggest that the poet found an interesting correlation between
Bergson’s complex understanding of memory and his own representation of the Four
Principles” (p. 59). The four principles are “Spirit, Celestial Body, Husk, and Passionate
Body.” See also Yeats 1978, p. xi: “The symbolic forms of psychic geometry projected in
VA [A Vision, 1925 edition] were not in fact based primarily on Plato or Swedenborg
or others of the classical writers Yeats liked to cite but rather on the experiments and
thinking of his many friends and fellow students, first in the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn and more significantly in the Society for Psychical Research.” This is
especially true of the vortices, gyres, or cones (p. 31n129).
22. Similar documents from Golden Dawn members can be found at the Museum of
Witchcraft and Magic, at Boscastle, Cornwall. Other archival materials are reputed
to exist in San Francisco, New York, and Geneva, though I have yet to gain access to
them. There are also at least three private collections concerning the Golden Dawn
202 Notes

which are held by individuals wishing to remain anonymous and are difficult for
scholars to access. See Gilbert 1987, pp. 163–​68.
23. Pamela Colman Smith, artist, synesthete, and Golden Dawn member, was also re-
sponsible for the artwork in the classic Waite-​Smith Tarot deck; see Denisoff 2019a,
pp. 146–​64.
24. It is notable that Mina Bergson retains her maiden name in this illustration from
1898. She translated some of Fiona Macleod’s (William Sharp’s) poetry, including
“The Melancholy of Ulad.” Sharp was also a member of the Golden Dawn. The aqua-
relle work here, a painting with thin, transparent (rather than opaque) watercolors,
appears to be an advertisement for a staging of a fragment of the poem. Mina planned
several such stagings, including ones of Yeats’s works (having translated Yeats’s early
play The Land of Heart’s Desire, she apparently planned a production of it in Paris in
1898). See Yeats 1977, pp. 42–​43.
25. Yeats 1977, p. 43.
26. De Mille 2022, p. 16. Citing Greer (1995, p. 225), De Mille notes how Mina Bergson
wrote to Yeats stating that she “had to abandon any idea of an independent career in
that direction, to be kept busy not only with the techniques of magic itself but with the
techniques of art in magic’s service.”
27. Bennett 2010, p. 35.
28. In addition, the group that Samuel and Mina founded after the Golden Dawn, the
“Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega,” placed great emphasis in its name on
what Mina calls the “living images” of all religions, the Rose, Cross, Lily, and Lotus.
The image of the Rose is crucial for Mina Bergson—​“its mysterious centre, its nu-
cleus, the central Sun, is a symbol of the infinite and harmonious separations of
nature”—​and it appears throughout the visual occulture of Alpha et Omega. See
Bergson/​Mathers 2016c, pp. ix–​x.
29. The vibratory is essential to invocation, as Nicolas Tereshchenko points out
(Tereshchenko 1986, pp. 85–​86): “The most important rituals of invocation are also
the quite essential training towards the supreme moment of eventual Union with the
One Creator. For this to become possible, and before daring to attempt it, everything
must change in the aspirant. More precisely and specifically, the vibratory rate of all
his bodies must become considerably higher than man’s usual rate, approaching the
high frequency of vibrations of the Absolute Being. Through the prescribed rituals,
exercises and prayers . . . little by little the vibratory rate of the practicing magician
rises through the frequent and intimate contact with the invoked ‘god–​forms’ of
Egyptian and other Divinities.”
30. See Bergson/​Mathers, “Flying Roll No.31.” See also the W. B. Yeats online archive at
https://​my.mat​terp​ort.com/​show–​mds?mls=​1&m=​CfD9​eU6i​Phf (accessed July 24,
2021): “Adepts of the Golden Dawn practised the ‘Enochian Magic’ developed by the
Elizabethan magician Dr. John Dee and his medium Edward Kelly, revealed to them
by angels and using an angelic language supposedly first given to the patriarch Enoch
by the angel Ave. Words from this language of the angels were used in Golden Dawn
ceremonies, referred to as Enochian calls. The structure of the Enochian system was
based upon a cipher of numerological and set permutations of elements arranged on
 Notes  203

a grid of letters called the Enochian Tablets. From these elemental tablets were de-
rived the names of various elemental powers, angels, beings, and spiritual dominions
known as Aethyrs.”
31. MacGregor Mathers, “Flying Roll No.12, Telesmatic Images and Adonai.”
32. Bergson 1975, pp. 56–​59.
33. Bergson 1992, pp. 86–​87. It is undoubtedly disappointing that its title La pensée et le
mouvant was translated in English as The Creative Mind.

Seven: On the Meta-Spiritual

1. See the section, Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum: “Leave no Trace” for an explanation of this.
2. Bergson 1992, p. 145.
3. Valiaho 2010, pp. 17, 60.
4. Moore 1993, p. 166. Paul Atkinson points out (Atkinson 2020, p. 17) that Bergson
“formulated the theory of durée, his response to the philosophy of the Eleatics,
while taking a walk during his tenure at Clermont-​Ferrand” and that “according to
Chevalier, in 1926 Bergson complained that he was beginning to have problems with
his movement and claimed that this also affected his thought. Bergson was someone
who liked to move around while thinking and while teaching, and he did not like the
way that the École normale and the Collège de France limited his movement” (p. 13).
5. Gamble, Hanan, and Nail 2019, p. 125.
6. Bergson 1911a, p. 232.
7. As Khandker (2020, p. 161n6) points out with regard to Charles Hartshorne’s
“psychicalism”: “Hartshorne defends this position as a ‘true physicalism.’ It is not
simply that he is a ‘spiritualist’ or idealist, but that what we understand physicality
and spatial position to be require reformulation: ‘If physical means spatial then
mentalism or psychicalism is physicalism, for space is how sentient beings have
neighbors (Peirce) with whom they react, and their basic operations (Whitehead) are
prehensions, feelings of (others) feelings.’ ”
8. Bergson 1977, pp. 79–​80: “If telepathy be a real fact, it is a fact capable of being re-
peated indefinitely. I go further: if telepathy be real, it is possible that it is operating
at every moment and everywhere, but with too little intensity to be noticed, or else in
such a way that a cerebral mechanism stops the effect, for our benefit, at the very mo-
ment at which it is about to clear the threshold of consciousness. . . . if telepathy be real,
it is natural” [“si la télépathie est réelle, elle est naturelle”].
9. See Grogin 1988, pp. 42–​43, 61n36.
10. See Ó Maoilearca 2019a.
11. Hacking 1998, p. 143. Earlier we heard William James not only call Henri Bergson a
“magician” but his book Creative Evolution “a marvel.” That the Bergsonian approach
to evolution, being neither mechanist nor finalist, has never found a natural home
within standard evolutionary theory or its standard antitheses, makes calling it a
“marvel” all the more prescient, given Hackings description here.
204 Notes

12. Morrison 2007, p. 4.

13. Wahida Khandker cites François Jacob usefully in this regard (Khandker 2020, p. 67): “In
The Logic of Life, François Jacob reflects on the impact of the invention of new technolo-
gies on scientific analysis, noting that even the invention of the microscope was simply an
application of abstract theories of light, and the world of “swarming forms” that it opened
up was slow to alter existing conventions of interpretation of the relation between the
lives of macro-​organisms and microbes. The presence of this hitherto unseen microcosm
was even (for Buffon) “a flagrant insult to the whole living world.”
14. See Mullarkey 1999a, chapter eight.
15. Burton 2015, p. 108.
16. Burton 2015, p. 108.
17. Other cinematic traditions of the supernatural may well avoid such pitfalls given
that their story-​telling conventions are less dualistic to begin with: the Japanese, “J-​
Horror” cycle, for example, exemplifies specters that are, as Jay McRoy puts it, “not
quite ghosts in the strictest sense of the onryou or kaidan tradition, but not quite con-
ventional biological monsters either” (McRoy 2005, p. 180).
18. Pereen 2017, p. 168.
19. Morin 1956, pp. 43, 69, cited in Blassnigg 2006, pp. 113, 116.
20. Bergson 1990, p. 72.
21. Bergson 1911a, p. 324. See also Atkinson 2020, p. 134: “The processes of a plant
growing from a seed, an insect coming into being or a colour changing are quite dif-
ferent, and they must not lose their distinctiveness when integrated into a ‘colourless’
image of Becoming in general—​Becoming should always be conceived as a multi-
plicity of becomings.”
22. For more on this dyadic refutation of monism, see Ó Maoilearca 2014.

4° = 7° Philosophus Covariant

1. Bergson 1992, p. 124.

2. Bergson/​Mathers 1987, pp. 151–​2.
3. Bergson/​Mathers 2016a.
4. Van Egmond 1997, p. 332.
5. See Lincoln 1986, pp. 21–​22.
6. See Godwin 2017.
7. It is a little ironic that one of the main problems at the interface of neuroscience
and cognitive psychology is called “the binding problem,” one aspect of which
concerns how background knowledge, abstract concepts and categories, and affective
components all combine into a single experience in the brain.
8. Ramey 2012, p. 3. An “encosmic” divinity is immanent, one might even say earthly.
9. Latour 2017, p. 96. Latour is commenting here on the work of Olafur Eliasson: “Olafur
Eliasson is right to insist on the fact that the mechanisms of disorientation he employs
are as much temporal as spatial.”
 Notes  205

10. Barad 2007, p. 245.

11. “The molar and the molecular are not distinguished by size, scale, or dimension, but
by the nature of the system of reference envisioned” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
p. 217). That said, Deleuze and Guattari do continue to use language suggestive of
scale: majority, major, massive, big, mass, collective, whole, global, macro-​, super-​,
over-​, and molar itself, on the one hand; partial objects, part organs, larval selves,
minority, minor, local, part, component, small, miniaturization, sub-​, micro-​, and
molecular itself, on the other. And the value is almost always on the side of the small,
what Sam Coleman called “smallism.”
12. In Bergson 2010, the critique of intensive magnitudes in the first chapter (psycho-​
physics) rests on subverting the relation of container and contained that underpins it.
13. Wittenberg 2019, p. 352.
14. See Brouwer 1975.
15. See Lambert 2005.
16. It is not that X would be an illusion that is displaced by the truth of Y, but that, at dif-
ferent scales, a redescription or renaming of an event becomes evident.
17. Such temporalization is more than simply time sampling, which would still be quan-
titative. A temporalized scale must be distinguished from a temporal scale—​which is
only the quantification of a process: the former is the qualification of a quantity, a spa-
tial entity integrated into real time.
18. Gunter 1982, p. 644. For a more up-​to-​date account of such biological memory, with
reference to Henri Bergson, see Longo 2019.
19. Bergson 1911a, pp. 181–​3. Deleuze and Guattari’s much more famous wasp and or-
chid example in A Thousand Plateaus is a modern variation on this theme.
20. McNamara 1999, p. 118.
21. Gunter 1982, p. 646.
22. de Mille 2022, p. 7.
23. Cited in de Mille 2022, p. 9.
24. Cited in de Mille 2022, p. 9.
25. Ramey 2012, p. 183.
26. Ramey 2012, p. 31.
27. Eslick 1987, p. 362.
28. Bergson 1990, pp. 207–​8.
29. Bergson 1990, p. 207. It would be interesting to unpack the phrase embedded in this
quotation, “it is possible to imagine . . . ” using Mina Bergson’s Golden Dawn ideas for
building an image of the higher degrees of tension.
30. Bergson/​Mathers 2016c, p. xi. In Deleuzian or even Spinozist language, there is a
univocity or substantial equality among the “expressions” of the infinite.
31. Malabou 2016, pp. 104–​5.
32. Benveniste 1973, p. 527; Cited at Malabou 2016, p. 106.
33. Malabou 2016, p. 107.
34. See Malabou 2008 for her original position.
35. Malabou 2019, p. xvii.
36. Malabou 2019, pp. 82–​83.
206 Notes

37. Malabou 2019, p. 91.

38. Smolin 2013, p. xv. See Marchesini 2018 for both a positive comparison of Smolin’s du-
rational thinking with Bergson, and also a critique of where he falls short of thinking
consistently about time, that is, in a fully Bergsonian, and immanent manner.
39. Bergson 1992, pp. 34, 168, 189. For more on this, see Khandker 2020, pp. 6–​7.
Khandker (2020, p. 106) extends this processual methodology to Bergson’s use of
diagrams, too, seeing them, not as “fixed representations of well-​defined things, but as
indications of processes that are continuously changing, whilst settling momentarily
into fixed forms for the purpose of practical activity. They reveal pure memory to be
a useful myth, so to speak, insofar as its suggested ontological status (as Deleuze, for
example, emphasizes it) serves a particular function: to open up reflection on the re-
configuration of matter in temporal terms and thus the reconfiguration of mind in
terms of processes.”
40. Atkinson 2020, p. 189.
41. See Bergson 1992, p. 35: “The habitual labor of thought is easy and can be prolonged
at will. Intuition is arduous and cannot last. Whether it be intellection or intuition,
thought, of course, always utilizes language; and intuition, like all thought, finally
becomes lodged in concepts such as duration, qualitative or heterogeneous multi-
plicity, unconsciousness—​even differentiation, if one considers the notion such as it
was to begin with.”
42. See Mullarkey 1999a, pp. 181–​5.
43. The phenomenon of interference is the “process whereby two or more waves of the
same frequency or wavelength combine to form a wave whose amplitude is the sum
of the interfering waves” (Parker 1982, pp. 472–​3). Interference can be destructive
or constructive. The latter is when the trough and crest of both waves coincide. The
former is when the trough of one wave coincides with the crest of another; that is,
they are completely “out of phase.” In this case, if these two waves are of equal am-
plitude, they can cancel each other so that the resulting amplitude is zero. And as a
wave must, to be a wave, have an amplitude of some dimension, then the result of this
encounter is no wave at all, or annihilation. As we will see in our engagement with
Karen Barad’s work, interference can be seen graphically when one splits up light with
two parallel slits (as in “Young’s Two-​Slit” experiment). An interference pattern can
be seen by letting the light from the two slits fall on a white screen. A pattern is pro-
duced of dark and bright patches of light. Dark patches or “fringes” indicate waves
that have interfered destructively. The bright fringes indicate waves that have inter-
fered constructively.

Eight: Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum: “Leave No Trace”

1. Gaucher 1900, pp. 446–​9, cited in Greer 1995, pp. 248–​9.

2. Denisoff 2014, pp. 10–​11.
3. Phelan 1993, p. 6; cited in Denisoff 2014, p. 9.
 Notes  207

4. Denisoff 2014, p. 9. We saw Greer 1995 (p. 15) also connect power with invisibility.
5. Horace, Epistles, I, i, 75.
6. Greer 1995, p. 358.
7. Schneider 2011, p. 102.
8. See Bergson’s lecture on memory from January 29, 1904 (Bergson 2018, pp. 116–​17,
119) on the importance of distinguishing between “impersonal memories” and mem-
ories that belong to my own personal experience. This seemingly fatuous distinction
(don’t all memories belong to some person by definition?) covers an important point
about “actualization”: nearer the plane of pure memory and unrecollected, memories
belong to my past, which is really present, in embryo so to speak. Once recollected or
actualized, memories come closer to an impersonal, or public, sharable perception—​a
memory-​image that is not so much mine, that is, belonging to my past reality, my
past-​time (or “event” as Bergson puts it at one point—​p. 125), as one that, though
dated and signed as mine, is nonetheless now a common currency, an impersonal
memory (of mine). He also describes it as a process of “interference” (p. 129) between
different personal memories as they actualize, erasing or “neutralizing” (p. 134) some
of their individual personality as they move from subjectivity to objectivity (p. 129). It
is the difference between what has not yet manifested and what has manifested.
9. We have already referred to the Cours on memory (Bergson 2018) a number of times
in these notes. The lecture scripts are not Henri Bergson’s originals (he forbade any
posthumous publication of his private notes and correspondence) but have been
reconstructed from professionally typed notes taken during his courses at the behest
of the poet and essayist Charles Péguy, a devotee of Bergson.
10. See Bergson 2018, p. 123. More generally, the editor of the 1903–​4 Cours, Arnaud
François, refers to how the lectures build on Bergson’s positions in Matter and
Memory, noting in particular a third form of recognition being added to the auto-
matic (or inattentive) and attentive forms discussed in the 1896 book—​“recognition
through movements of imitation” (echoing Bergson’s frequent statement that to un-
derstand something is to remake or reinvent it for ourselves). This theory of three
kinds of recognition then becomes a “general concept of mental life” through “planes
of consciousness” (just as in Matter and Memory). See François 2018, p. 12.
11. Bergson 2018, pp. 127, 138.
12. These schemata—​first introduced in Bergson’s 1902 article “Intellectual Effort”—​are
dynamic, imageless ideas that organize our memories as they descend from RR,”
ferrying them from virtual life back to actual life (see Bergson 1975, pp. 186–​230).
Each schema is a guiding model for constructing mental images as they are actual-
ized in perception, neither particular nor universal, but capable of mediating between
memory-​images and perception. Though Bergson says that such dynamic schema
are “not easy to define” (Bergson 1975, p. 196), he nonetheless explains how a set of
images must be “reconstructed” through these schema in order to “meet” a percep-
tion (Bergson 1975, p. 208). Sounding at times like a Kantian idea, at other times a
Husserlian one, the schema is a “meaning” that “guides us in the reconstruction of
forms and sounds,” and thereby informs recognition. Though the schema is an aid to
the subdivision and coordination of images as they come closer to a perception, it is
208 Notes

itself not an image. Bergson gives the example of the peculiar ability of chess masters
to remember the state of play of several chessboards at once: “the players all agreed
that a mental vision of the pieces themselves would be more disturbing to them than
useful” (Bergson 1975, pp. 207, 197–​8). Rather, it is the chess piece’s function or
meaning that is paramount.
13. Bergson 2018, pp. 127, 138.
14. Bergson 2018, p. 128.
15. The full quotation goes as follows (Bergson 1975, p. 118): “. . . souls dwell in the
world of the Ideas. Incapable of acting, and moreover not even thinking of acting,
they lie at rest above time outside space. But, among bodies, there are some which
by their form respond more than others to the aspirations of certain souls. And,
among souls, there are some which find their own likeness, so to say, in certain
bodies. The body, unfinished, as it has been left by nature, rises towards the soul
which can give it complete life. And the soul, looking down on the body and per-
ceiving it as the reflexion of itself in a mirror, is fascinated, leans forward and falls.
This fall is the beginning of life. I may liken these detached souls to the memo-
ries lying in wait in the depth of the unconscious, and the bodies to our sensations
during sleep. Sensation is warm, coloured, vibrant and almost living, but vague;
memory is clear and distinct, but without substance and lifeless. Sensation longs for
a form into which to solidify its fluidity; memory longs for matter to fill it, to bal-
last it, in short, to realize it. They are drawn towards each other; and the phantom
memory, materializing itself in sensation which brings it flesh and blood, becomes a
being which lives a life of its own, a dream.”
16. Bergson 1975, pp. 116–​17.
17. In the French (Bergson 1959, p. 886), the line goes, “dans la nuit de l’inconscient, une
immense danse macabre.” The translator of the lecture, H. Wildon Carr, notes, how-
ever, that not only was this translation authorized by Henri Bergson, it was also a
collaborative effort. Bergson was bilingual, so the deliberate choice to translate the
French “une immense danse macabre” as something quite different (“a wild phantas-
magoric dance”) is revealing.
18. Lacroix 1943, p. 197n1.
19. Bergson 1972, pp. 1588–​89.
20. See Soulez and Worms 1997, p. 36.
21. Jankélévitch 2015, p. 257.

3° = 8° Practicus Covariant

1. Halpern 2018.
2. Halpern 2018.
3. Halpern 2018.
4. Barad’s chosen pronoun is “they.”
5. Gamble, Hanan, and Nail 2019, p. 123.
 Notes  209

6. Barad 2007, p. 137.

7. Barad 2007, pp. 93–​94.
8. Barad 2007, p. 249.
9. Van der Tuin 2011, p. 24. She is not alone: Ali Lara (Lara 2017, p. 14) writes that “the
idea of diffraction is about matter’s behavior, or better about matter’s dynamic and vi-
brational nature. Barad, like Bergson, is clear in this quality of matter.”
10. Barad 2007, p. 180.
11. Barad 2003, p. 822.
12. Barad 2007, p. 234.
13. Barad 2007, pp. 234, 398.
14. Barad 2007, pp. 140, 151. As Henri Bergson does, too, in fact: “let me insist I am
thereby in no way setting aside substance”; Bergson 1992 (HB edition), p. 305n23—​
but he insists on this while also asserting that “reality is mobility” (Bergson 1992,
p. 188), or in other words, substance is reinterpreted as a kind of mobility, a com-
plexity of change or movements.
15. Barad 2007, pp. 140, 151.
16. Bergson 1977, pp. 152–​3.
17. Barad 2007, p. 33.
18. Barad 2007, p. 140.
19. Barad 2007, p. 178.
20. Barad 2003, p. 808; Barad 2007, p. 152.
21. Barad 2007, p. 821.
22. Barad 2007, p. 25.
23. Barad 2007, p. 140.
24. Barad 2007, p. 82.
25. François Laruelle would be another anti-​foundationalist who turns to the quantum
realm for a model of knowing that is pluralist: see Ó Maoilearca 2015, chapter two, on
“Paraconsistent Fictions and Discontinuous Logic.”
26. I own up to cribbing this counter-​wordplay on the “immaterial” from Pirates of the
Caribbean: At World’s End (Verbinski 2007).
27. Interestingly, Laruelle turns to Turrell as well for a “new aesthetic (and theoretical)
object: light as such, the being-​light of light.” See Laruelle 1991, cited in Galloway
2013, p. 231.
28. Battista 2018, pp. 83, 89, 91.
29. Battista 2018, p. 87.
30. Battista 2018, p. 90.
31. Montebello 2007, pp. 97–​98.
32. From Greer’s citation of Lees at Greer 1995, pp. 208–​9.
33. De Mille 2022, p. 13.
34. From Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body (Breitwieser 2014, pp. 1, 9); cited in
Ramos 2021.
35. From the edition of Planet, Edizioni Pari & Dispari, Cavriago, Reggio Emilia, 1976,
cited in Ramos 2021.
36. Bennett 2010, pp. 11–​12.
210 Notes

37. For more on backbone memories (or “continuities”), see Wills 2008 and
Moynihan 2019.
38. Valery 1976, p. 65; Badiou 2005; Laruelle 2013, pp. 148–​9. Alongside Valery et al.,
Einav Katan (Katan 2016), provides an updated example of what Laruelle means by
such philosophical appropriation, a “salvation” of dance that sublimates it into “this
superior choreography that is philosophy.” Katan writes: “expression generates a sur-
plus and its ideas go beyond the intentionality of a dancer and/​or a choreographer.
Along with its actual rhythm of development, an expression conveys an illusion; it
becomes a gesture with a semblance that transgresses its actuality” (p. 194). See also
Cvejić (2015), who uses Bergson to interesting effect.
39. Lindsay Seers’s Nowhere Less Now was an Artangel commission that ran from
September 8 to October 21, 2012, at The Tin Tabernacle in London. The interview
with Aesthetica Magazine can be found at http://​www.aes​thet​icam​agaz​ine.com/​blog/​
lind​say-​seers-​nowh​ere-​less-​now-​lon​don/​—​acces​sed July 24, 2021.
40. https://​www.linds​ayse​ers.info/​cont​ent/​lind​say-​seers-​nowh​ere-​less-​now—​acces​sed
July 24, 2021. For the record, I was born in 1965. That Henri Bergson is described
here as a “philosopher and mystic” is rather premature in my view, making the present
work seemingly redundant.
41. Cited in Pilkington 1976, p. 104; Bergson 1992, p. 157. Atkinson 2020 notes (p. 16)
that “rather than creating a new system of thought, Bergson developed new ways of
thinking through philosophical problems as a way of revitalizing philosophy. Valéry
argues that one of Bergson’s greatest contributions to philosophy was the develop-
ment of an alternative language to the sciences and systematic philosophy, which
brought together poetry with the rigour of the exact sciences in order to reveal the
orientation of a philosopher’s thought.”
42. Bergson 1992, p. 157. See also Atkinson 2020, p. 24: “Bergson confirms his view that
the arts are founded on intuition like philosophy and that ‘philosophy is a genre and
the different arts are its species’ (la philosophie est un genre dont les différents arts sont
les espèces).”
43. Significantly in this regard, Atkinson (2020, p. 39) also reports that “while sitting
for his portrait with the painter Jacques Émile Blanche, Bergson asked Blanche
about Cubism because the Cubists were at the time seeking some type of theoret-
ical foundation for their ideas on the fourth dimension, but the interest was only
passing.”
44. Hagen 2012, p. 8; Bergson 1990, p. 17.
45. https://​www.linds​ayse​ers.info/​cont​ent/​lind​say-​seers-​nowh​ere-​less-​now.
46. Hagen 2012, p. 181.
47. Hagen 2012, p. 23.
48. Hagen 2012, p. 8.
49. Hazelton 2012.
50. Hazelton 2012.
51. Hagen 2012, pp. 116, 122, 9.
52. Hagen 2012, p. 161, 165.
53. Tully 2009, p. 68.
 Notes  211

54. Tully 2009, pp. 69, 71. According to Tully (p. 69): while there certainly were Greco-​
Roman mysteries of the Hellenized Isis, the false idea that there were ancient Egyptian
“mysteries” originated with Greeks such as Herodotus, who misunderstood the
Egyptian cult of Osiris at Abydos, interpreting it as “mysteric” because it was carried
out by a specially consecrated priesthood, unlike the part-​time priests of Greece.
While access to the inner recesses of the Egyptian temple was limited to the priest-
hood, festivals were open to the public, not restricted to groups of initiates.
55. Tully 2020, pp. 145, 151.
56. Tully 2020, p. 160.
57. Tully 2009, p. 72.
58. Cited in King and Skinner 1976, p. 15.
59. Hanegraaff 2003, p. 368; see also Josephson Storm 2017.
60. Barad 2007, p. 350. See also p. 279: “Clearly there are major obstacles to observing
quantum behavior for large-​scale systems. But however difficult it is to realize in prac-
tice, in principle we ought to be able to observe quantum behavior in macroscopic
systems.”
61. Barad 2007, p. ix.
62. Barad 2007, p. 89; Thurschwell 2001, p. 3.
63. Barad 2007, p. 33.
64. Barad 2007, p. ix.
65. Barad 2010, pp. 240, 244.
66. This “reintegration” could also be seen as the “disintegration” or dissolution of what is
for Bergson a “false” dichotomy (or binary).
67. Nail 2019, p. 69.
68. These are the bifurcations we referred to earlier when addressing the ramifications
of logical types (Russell) and cosmological levels (Bergson) that emerge from the
paradoxes of reflexivity. Oddly enough, though, Nail makes little mention of the work
of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers on thermodynamic bifurcation, despite its
huge influence and the fact that Prigogine and Stengers also acknowledge their debts
to Henri Bergson. See Prigogine and Stengers 1984.
69. This is what François Laruelle calls the “structural invariance” of one thought
standing outside and dominating all other scales, all other thoughts—​a thought he
dubs “philosophy.”
70. Barad 2007, p. 459n61.
71. Murphy notes that hidden-​variable theory actually goes back to Louis de Broglie
(1892–​1987), who was a student of Langevin, and himself acknowledged the influ-
ence of Henri Bergson on his own ideas: “Louis de Broglie, who developed the first
‘hidden variable’ interpretation of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and later in-
spired Bohm in his fuller version of it, notes the many similarities between quantum
theory and Bergson’s work as a whole in his Physics and Microphysics” (Murphy 1999,
p. 79n18).
72. Barad 2007, p. 319. As Barad also says (2007, p. 174): “Bohr did not find Einstein’s
concerns troubling because Bohr did not share the same metaphysical beliefs.” Hence,
no dice for Einstein.
212 Notes

73. Though Bergson rarely uses the verbal form, to “temporalize” as we have here, he
can talk about adding a “temporal colour” to the description of a phenomenon: see
Bergson 2018, p. 116.
74. Bohm 1980, pp. 34–​60.
75. Van der Tuin 2011, pp. 28–​29n6. Murphy (and Van der Tuin) are not alone, however,
with Paul Atkinson (2020, pp. 224–​5) also writing about Bergson and Bohm both
believing in “undivided wholeness.” Milič Čapek (Čapek 1971, p. 309), too, records
Bergson’s likeness to Bohm’s concept of a qualitative infinity within the cosmos: “ ‘the
qualitative infinity’ . . . of nature shows clearly his [Bohm’s] affinity with process phi-
losophy of the type [Bergson’s] discussed in this book.”
76. Murphy 1999, p. 74.
77. Cited at Murphy 1999, p. 74.
78. Murphy 1999, p. 74.
79. Murphy 1999, p. 74.
80. Bergson 1992, p. 32.
81. Murphy 1999, p. 75.
82. Murphy 1999, pp. 75–​76. We would take issue with the use of this last line taken
from Duration and Simultaneity (Bergson 1965, p. 47), given Henri Bergson’s dia-
logical approach: he seems to be assenting to a theory of impersonal time here, and so
giving away some ground to the STR; but this is only so that he can later retake that
ground by showing where such impersonal time still falls short of real time (durée).
Nonetheless, there are indeed more extended rhythms of duration that contract our
own in Henri Bergson’s theory (especially outside Duration and Simultaneity), and
these would appear impersonal relative to us (at least before we fabulate a personality
out of them).
83. Barad 2007, p. 273.
84. Barad 2007, pp. 318, 319.
85. Barad 2007, p. 182.
86. Barad 2007, p. 394.
87. Bergson 1969, p. 174.
88. See Bergson 1975, pp. 186–​230.
89. McNamara 1999, p. 136.
90. Another relatively ordinary example of metempsychosis, or what he calls the “translife
of the soul,” comes in Laurent Debreuil’s concept of an “intellective space” (Debreuil
2015, pp. 111ff): “I may still speak of my soul as an effect of this mind toward another
I than the one I think I am using. My soul is a singular persistence of my thinking into
yours, yours, and yours. [ . . . ] Our souls are ‘immortal,’ for they do not live. They
have a translife, they are differentially performed by organisms. They disappear, when
painted stones are erased, languages go extinct, memories vanish. But, as long as their
tracé is to be found, they will appear, and sink. [ . . . ] This strange place, I call it the in-
tellective space, that is, a putative space where thought and knowledge are performed
and shared, and not only computed according to universal laws that would ‘speak’ to
us directly and by themselves” (pp. 119, 120, 3).
91. Christof 2017, p. 160.
 Notes  213

Nine: Spirit in the Materialist World

1. See Ó Maoilearca 2019b.

2. Matheson 1998, pp. 216, 302.
3. Moreover, we must strip away the confused mixtures of time and space operating in
the usual models of time travel. Take the time machine itself, for example. Such tran-
scendent machines are somehow able to coexist in the past (or future) as well as their
present such that they never completely enter into the new time at all. The fictional
time travel machine is a transcendent, atemporal transport and so, like some objet
petit a, never immanent within either its original time or any other. Its circulations
(voyages) embody both the possibility and impossibility of time travel, at least as we
standardly think of it, because they can never either fully arrive at their destination or
return to their point of departure.
4. Bergson 1992, p. 200.
5. The “transhumanist” notion of a transcendent intellect or intelligence that survives
any particular hardware platform (bioware/​meatware/​siliconware, etc.) which would
“host” it as digital software might appear to be a materialist route to actual immor-
tality. Yet its obvious Cartesian origins (mind reduced to an essence of self-​awareness
that is cut off from any particular body) clearly show it to be a crypto-​spiritualism
predicated on one form of continuity—​cogitative self-​sameness (I think, I am; I think,
I am . . .)—​with only a solipsistic God, or its software equivalent, to maintain its exist-
ence. See Clarke 2009.
6. This, we suggest, would be Mina Bergson’s remake of the concluding line from Henri
Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion that we heard Howard Caygill quote
earlier (Bergson 1977, p. 275): “the essential function of the universe, which is a ma-
chine for making gods.”
7. In A Biography of Ordinary Man, François Laruelle writes of a “mystical-​ordinary
acting” that would allow “for the description of the World in its remoteness and its
strangeness, of its heterogeneity—​the heterogeneity of philosophical logics—​as fun-
damentally undecidable” (Laruelle 2017, p. 84). It is this strangeness of the World (or
Real, as Laruelle would later put it) that requires heterogeneous logics to depict it.
8. Yeats, we recall, used the phrase “mystical philosophy,” which now has added weight.
9. See also Sommer McGrath (p. 17) on how, in new French spiritualism, even “faith
came to be seen as a bodily practice”—​one later example being Bergson’s reading of
magical fabulation as a “logic of the body” (Bergson 1977, p. 140).
10. My thanks to Alastair Cameron for alerting me to this passage from Mauss.
11. In a future work I hope to demonstrate the ethics of our perceptual categories and
beliefs (the “structure of regard”) in terms of interference phenomena, and vice
versa—​that the destruction and construction of waves are normative acts, acts of be-
lief. The beliefs acquired or learned as character traits, for example (be they normal or
“pathological”), would be read as interfering lines that have been significantly ampli-
fied. For further interesting remarks on Walter Elsasser’s work on “amplification” as
a mode of “functioning of the living” (and in the context of Whitehead’s thought on
microcosmic and macrocosmic relations), see Khandker 2020, pp. 44–​46.
214 Notes

Ten: Veridical Hallucinations and Circumstantial Evidence

1. As McNamara relates (1999, p. 129), Henri Bergson “suggested that the dream in-
volved a lifting of the normal inhibitory stance of the brain, a relaxation of the
usual ‘interested’ and outward-​oriented stance of the individual.” For J. W. Dunne,
such dreams could be tokens of real time travel—​but that’s another story: see Ó
Maoilearca 2019b.
2. See Laruelle 2013.
3. Laruelle 2017, p. 160. Laruelle writes of an “ordinary mysticism,” wherein he claims
that “the mystical is pre-​philosophical, or, as we will say, ‘ordinary’ ” (Laruelle 2017,
p. 59).
4. Bergson/​Mathers 2016c, p. x. Indeed, the charge that mystical systems of thought de-
sire unity with one absolute principle may well be undeserved in many cases, at least
in terms of their underlying metaphysics. See Jones 2016, pp. 193–​4: “most mystical
systems do not involve an all-​encompassing nonduality in which all of the apparent
diversity in the world is in the final analysis unreal. [ . . . ] There may be a sense of
union or a sense of individuality melting away, but there is no ontic change in na-
ture from what was already our true situation all along—​only the false conceptual
boundaries that we ourselves had created soften or disappear. Through experiencing
the commonality of being, one gains a knowledge by participation, but there still is no
new ontic union of substances.” Jones continues, using Brahmanism as his example
(p. 197): “For Advaita, only Brahman is real, and thus there is nothing else to unite
with it. There is no ‘absorption’ of an independent self into ‘the Absolute.’ Nor is the
universe the pantheistic body of Brahman. The Upanishads have an emanationist
position, but Advaita and Samkhya interpret the situation differently. The popular
image of a drop of water merging in the ocean does not fit the metaphysics of these
traditions.”
5. Burton 2015, pp. 109–​10.
6. McGuire 2017, pp. 23, 24.
7. See Bergson 1975, pp. 84–​85. It should be noted that Bergson is more likely to speak
of tendencies, rather than probabilities, when it comes to anything else, material or
spiritual, other than epistemology. But the notion of real probability that emerges in
physics with Bohr’s work can be plausibly translated into the language of tendency
when seen through the lens of heterogeneous continuity.
8. See Bergson 1990, p. 56, 233–​4. See also Bergson’s course on memory at the Collège
de France for February 5, 1904, where he reiterates this mereological theory of phys-
ical pain but also adds the same part/​whole analysis for emotional suffering, taking
grief for a deceased parent as his example (Bergson 2018, pp. 145–​7). Recall also that
in Richard Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return we are told that the hero has a brain
tumor, leaving it open that his entire experience of time travel was literally “in his
head.” But such a deflation can be pivoted to inflate the cerebral rather than deflate the
phenomenal.
9. See Lawlor 2002, p. 82. See also Deleuze 2004: pp. 25–​26: “But for Bergson, alterity is
still not enough to make it so that being rejoins things and really is the being of things.
 Notes  215

He replaces the Platonic concept of alterity with an Aristotelian concept of alteration,

in order to make of it substance itself. Being is alteration, alteration is substance. And
that is what Bergson calls duration, because all the characteristics by which he defines
it, after Time and Free Will, come back to this: duration is that which differs or that
which changes nature, quality, heterogeneity, what differs from itself. The being of the
sugar cube will be defined by a duration, by a certain manner of persisting, by a cer-
tain relaxation or tension of duration.”
10. Indeed, The Two Sources adds a clear ethical dimension to Bergsonian attention as
“attention to life.” What stands in contrast to an inattention toward others is the “open
soul,” the soul whose centripetal movement of love is inexhaustible (not even a love
of “all humanity,” nor a love extended “to animals, to plants, to all nature” could ex-
haust it—​Bergson 1977, p. 27). This would be a positive, ethical attention to all, one
that could well be set alongside a Kantian tradition of attention as respect or rever-
ence (Achtung) or even a quasi-​mystical attention such as Simone Weil’s “voiding” or
Iris Murdoch’s “clear vision.” Neither Kant nor Plato (a crucial source for both Weil
and Murdoch), however, can be numbered as conceptual allies of Henri Bergson. His
attention to life is neither rationalist (a reverence for law) nor transcendentalist (an
escape from the senses): attention to life is inherently experiential, being based on the
findings of psychology, biology, and mysticism, albeit as understood through a pro-
cess philosophy.
11. See Mullarkey 1995.
12. After all, the virtual is not a different ontological realm but perfectly optical and psy-
chological, only of a different type.
13. That modern philosophy was partly colored by the hyperbolic stage of Cartesian doubt,
which eventually trapped it within a prison of representation (Kant), is also an excess
that was valorized in “postmodern” (sic) thought (see Derrida et al.), which offers
us a number of related instances of what Laruelle calls the “philosophical decision”
(or cut) whereby philosophical thought withdraws from the Real. This withdrawal is
also described as an “hallucination”—​a projected image, or rather an invented image
that is doubtlessly real yet improperly seeing itself as exhaustive of the real (the part
standing for the whole). See Ó Maoilearca 2015 for more on this withdrawal.
14. Bergson 1990, p. 71.
15. Bergson 1911a, p. 221.
16. See Canguilhem 1943. Even for Canguilhem, though, what counted was the first
term, the élan, movement, or direction: life or spirit is matter in an opposed direction.

Epilogue: The Whole of the Moon

1. Bergson 1990, p. 135.

2. Mullarkey 1999b, p. 3.
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 Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.
Tables and figures are indicated by t and f following the page number

abstraction, xii, 88, 162, 166–​67, 172–​73 Artaud, Antonin, 129–​30

actants, 86, 145, 163–​64 Asprem, Egil, 55, 97–​98, 187n.9
action, plane of, 49, 74–​75, 132 ‘as above, so below’. See scales
activity, 16, 85–​86, 89, 139–​40 astral plane, 31, 54, 55, 73, 74–​75, 96–​99,
Adophe, Lydie, 98 118, 170t, 196n.38
Aeschylus, 61 Atkinson, Paul, 127, 180n.10, 192n.62,
agency, 4–​5, 19–​20, 48–​49, 77, 89, 92–​93, 200n.9, 203n.4, 204n.21, 210nn.41–​
106–​7, 129–​30, 140, 158–​59 43, 212n.75
aging, xi, 2 atomic theory, 23, 136, 138
“Akas of Apas” Tattwa Cards, 96f attention, 2–​5, 43–​44, 72, 73, 81–​82,
Alpha et Omega (Order of), 9–​10, 34–​35, 83, 93–​94, 148, 169–​70, 171, 174–​
58, 130–​31, 202n.28 75, 176. See also concentration;
alter egos, 147–​48, 171 unseen, the
alteration, xii–xiii​, 115–​16, 171 attitude. See posture
alterity, xii–​xiii, 135, 156–​57 authority, 20–​21, 31–​32, 37, 41, 166–​67
analogy, 30, 119, 137, 138, 173
angels, 81–​82, 100, 107, 114–​15 Bachelard, Gaston, 6, 181n.15
animatism, 68, 79–​80 Badiou, Alain, 17, 145–​46, 164, 183n.32
animism, 68, 79–​80, 139–​40 Barad, Karen, 13–​14, 19–​20, 85–​86, 87,
anthropocentrism, 86, 171 88–​90, 91–​94, 137, 142–​43, 159, 172–​
anthropomorphism, 79–​81, 86, 89, 91, 73, 184n.57, 206n.43,
119, 170t, 199n.25 Barbour, Julian, 45, 189n.18
Antliff, Mark, 193n.11 Barnard, G. William, 195n.35, 197n.20,
Antoine-​Mahut, Delphine, 15–​16, 198n.32
184n.47 Barthelemy-​Madaule, Madeleine, 42
Anubis, 129–​30 Bazin, André, 95
Aquinas, Thomas, 114–​15 becoming, 8, 94, 98–​99, 110–​11, 115–​16,
arché, 116, 167–​68 126–​27, 139, 150–​51, 157–​58, 163–​
Aristotle, 43, 44–​46, 74–​75, 189n.16, 64, 174
214–​15n.9 being, 146–​48, 152
Armstrong, Christopher, 10, 194n.17 scale of, 123–​24, 170t
art, 3–​4, 43, 61, 118, 122, 142, 144, 146–​47, belief, 46, 125, 173–​74
150–​51, 152 Bennett, Jane, 13–​14, 18, 19–​20, 85, 89, 94,
of memory, 43 103–​5, 115–​16, 145, 184n.57, 198n.9,
practice, spiritualized, 103 199n.26, 199n.33
in spiritualism, 97 Benveniste, Emile, 124–​25
230 Index

Bergson, Henri, 33–​34, 34f, 35–​36 causation, 48–​49, 52, 53, 69, 95, 115–​16,
Bergson’s Circles of Expanded 138, 145–​46, 194n.26
Memory, 99f Cavell, Stanley, 95
Bergson’s Cone of Memory (first Caygill, Howard, 69–​70, 73–​74, 194–​
variation), 50f 95n.27, 213n.6
Bergson’s Cone of Memory (second ceremony, 10, 65–​66, 76, 106f–​3, 131
variation), 132f chance, 69, 154–​55, 159–​60. See also
Bergson’s Line of Pure Memory to probability
Perception, 100f change, 5–​6, 7, 8, 94, 106–​7, 110, 116–​17,
Bergson’s selectionist memory 120–​21, 127, 128, 143, 153–​54, 161
theory, 48 continuous, 91–​92, 107–​8
Bergson, Michal, 33 creative, 116
Bergson, Mina, 33, 34–​36, 36f in duration, 143
Bergsonism, 1–​2, 5, 17, 29, 33–​34, 41–​42, indivisible, 5–​6, 201n.17
70–​71, 78–​79, 84, 88–​90, 122–​23 qualitative, xiii, 16, 94, 153
Berkeley, George, 77–​78, 82 Charmers, David, 11–​12
Besant, Annie, 196n.41 Christof, Catherine, 159–​60
Bevir, Michael, 194n.12 cinema, 2, 11, 113, 114–​15
bifurcation, xii–​xiii, 116–​17, 128, 153–​54, clairvoyance. See scrying
173–​74, 211n.68 Clarke, Arthur C., 121–​22
biology, 8, 11–​12, 13, 17, 18–​19, 22–​23, Cleopatra, 83
68–​69, 92, 173–​74 clocks, xi–​xii, 6, 88, 162
Blanche, Jacques Emile, 210n.43 Coleman, Sam, 13, 205n.11
bodies, xii–​xiii, 49–​50, 85–​86, 87–​88, 89–​ Colman, Felicity, 184n.57
90, 120, 130–​31, 140, 143, 144–​45, Colman Smith, Pamela, 39, 200n.9,
156, 162–​64 202n.23
inert, 109–​10, 115–​16 color, 40, 58, 81, 89, 95, 96, 98, 119, 133–​
Bogdan, Henrik, 58 34, 143, 172–​73
Bohm, David, 94, 120–​21, 154–​58, 159–​ Como, Perry, 2
60, 190n.23, 211n.71, 212n.75 concentration. See attention
Bohr, Niels, 94, 137, 141, 154–​55, 158, concepts, 14, 16, 22–​23, 53, 54, 78–​79, 90,
211n.72, 214n.7 125–​27, 140, 142, 143
Bois, Jules, 60 conceptualization, 25–​26, 65, 92, 93–​94
Boutroux, Emile, 13–​14, 16, 22, 110–​11 concordances, 39–​40, 169, 170t
brain, 23, 24, 25, 30, 43–​45, 48, 96, 97, 127, Connection between the Worlds, 101f
131, 168–​69, 171, 189n.18 consciousness, 3–​5, 26, 29–​30, 81–​82, 83,
Brodie-​Innes, John William, 150–​51 84, 87–​88, 89, 123–​24, 133, 134, 156
Brouwer, L.E.J., 120 higher, 55
Burton, James, 114, 168 human, 22, 43–​44, 64, 156
Bush, George W., 90 constructivists, 25
Butler, Alison, 54, 182n.28, 191n.47 contingency, 13–​14, 16
Butler, Joseph, 56–​57 continuity, 5–​7, 8, 16, 28, 31, 43–​44, 50,
56–​57, 78–​79, 87–​88, 106–​7, 113–​14,
Canales, Jimena, 179n.2 120–​22, 127–​28, 152–​54, 158–​59,
Canguilhem, Georges, 174–​75, 215n.16 163–​64, 201n.17
Čapek, Milič, 212n.75 continuity and discontinuity, 56–​
Capra, Fritjof, 137 57, 152–​53
Cariou, Marie, 42, 90 temporal, 28, 163
 Index  231

See also discontinuity; heterogeneous Descartes, René, 85–​86, 213n.5, 215n.13

continuity diagrams, xii–​xiii, 19–​20, 99, 100, 131–​32,
continuum, 30–​31, 84 170t, 206n.39
Corpus Hermeticum, 119 Dick, Philip K., 114
correlation, 48–​49, 118, 173. See also difference
covariance of degree, 5, 29–​30, 38, 84, 116
correspondences, 109, 118, 119, 146–​ qualitative, 48, 50
47, 173–​74 diffraction, 141–​42, 209n.9. See also
cosmology, 98–​99, 119 quantum mechanics
costume, 31–​32, 40, 58, 146–​47, 163–​64 dimensions
Counter Clockwise Study, 2–​3, 169–​70 higher, 136–​37, 142, 158–​59, 170t
covariance, xiii, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–​11, 16, 18–​19, of space and time, 118, 136,
20–​21, 43–​44, 59, 116–​17, 156, 173, 139, 146–​47
199n.33. See also correlation direction, 7–​8, 17, 78, 83, 84, 87–​88,
Cox, Marian, 41 103, 107–​8, 116, 132, 169. See also
Craver, Carl, 183n.36 tendency
creation, 54, 64, 95, 122–​23, 152, 173–​74 Directions of Force in Enochian
Creative Evolution, 4, 33–​34, 61–​62, 64, 67, Pyramids, 101f
68–​69, 77, 79–​80, 121–​22, 174–​75, discontinuity, 7, 21, 56–​57, 135, 142, 152–​
194n.25, 203n.11 53, 163–​64, 172. See also continuity;
creativity, 15, 16, 41, 43, 55–​56, 95, 110–​11 heterogeneous continuity
cult movements, 38 distance, 24, 51, 52, 67, 71–​72, 122–​23,
culture, 29–​30, 91, 143, 159 125, 129, 152
Cvejić, Bojana, 210n.38 divination, 37, 70–​71, 156–​57, 159–​60
divine, the, 64, 66, 76–​77, 79–​80, 81, 98–​
Dainton, Barry, 91 99, 100, 118–​19, 167–​68. See also God
Darlu, Alphonse, 71 and gods; goddesses
Dawkins, Richard, 197n.23 dreams, 49, 74–​75, 96, 132, 133–​34, 148,
de Biran, Maine, 13–​14, 22 166, 208n.15
Debreuil, Laurent, 212n.90 Driesch, Hans, 89–​90
de Broglie, Louis, 211n.71 dualism, 29–​30, 61, 84, 85–​86, 89, 113–​14,
de Mille, Charlotte, 103, 122, 144, 195n.28, 170t, 174–​75
202n.26 dualization, 113–​14
death, 68, 69–​70, 113–​15, 136, 137, 163. Dunham, Jeremy, 15–​16
See also survival Dunne, J.W., 169–​70, 214n.1
Deleuze, Gilles, 10–​11, 42, 86–​87, 89–​90, duration, 5–​6, 13–​14, 47–​48, 57, 78–​80,
119–​21, 122–​23, 129–​30, 188n.25, 87–​88, 89, 116, 123–​24, 143, 155,
197n.23, 199n.23, 205n.11, 205n.19, 156–​58, 170t, 171
206n.39 levels of, 57, 157–​59, 201n.17
Deleuzian thought, 42, 73–​74, 98–​99, 120–​ See also real time
23, 171, 205n.30, 214–​15n.9 dynamic schema, 132, 207–​8n.12
Delhomme, Jean, 42
Delitz, Heike, 184n.41 Edelman, Gerald, 136–​37, 183n.40
dematerialization, 143–​44 eidolon, 76, 118. See also imagination
Denisoff, Dennis, 9–​10, 37, 129, 144, Ein Sof, 59, 64, 97, 100, 123–​24. See also
196n.41, 200n.9, 202n.23 emanations
Derrida, Jacques, 114–​15, 153, 166–​67, Einstein, Albert, xi, 136–​37, 141, 154–​55,
215n.13 156, 181n.20, 211n.72
232 Index

élan, 92–​93, 103–​5, 115–​16, 197n.12, Fauconnier, Gilles, 55

215n.16 feminism, 39, 41, 187n.4
elementals, 77, 80–​81 feminist ritual performance, 37, 40
Eliasson, Olafur, 204n.9 Fenton, David, 192n.1
Elsasser, Walter, 213n.11 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 118–​19
emanations, 59, 64–​65, 79–​81, 97, 100, fiction, 46, 113, 147, 168–​69, 172–​73
123–​24, 139–​40. See also Ein Sof flashing tablets, 201n.20
emergence, 13, 48, 139, 142 flow, xiii, 6–​7, 30, 78–​79, 108, 153, 157,
emotions, 26, 82 173–​74. See also fluidity; water
enchantment, 107, 151, 172. See also fluidity, xii–​xiii, 6, 78–​79, 105–​6, 127, 163–​
mystification 64. See also flow; water
energy, 8, 22–​23, 28, 103–​5, 126, 136, 167 Flusser, Vilém, 95
engram. See traces forces, 67, 76, 77, 78, 79–​80, 81–​82, 91–​94,
Enneades, 133 100, 115–​16, 118, 167–​68
Enochian Magic, 10, 37, 100, 107, vital, 90, 150–​51
202–​3n.30 Forman, Robert, 25–​26, 27, 29
entanglement, 13–​14, 109–​10, 145–​46, forms, 54, 67, 68, 74, 82, 85–​86, 96–​97,
152, 153, 154, 139, 141–​42, 163
epigenesis, 125–​26 biological, 121–​22, 125–​26
equality, 31–​32, 38, 86, 147–​48, 198n.9 elemental, 80–​81
equalizing, 84, 109, 171 Forti, Simone, 144–​45
Eslick, Leonard, 123 frames of reference (relativity theory), xi–​
esotericism, 11, 18–​19, 40, 54, 55, 121–​ xii, 8, 155, 156
22, 146 François, Arnaud, 207n.10
essence, xi–​xii, 42, 77, 118, 164–​ Franklin, J. Jeffrey, 66, 188n.11
65, 166–​67 freedom, 16, 126–​27
events, 17, 25, 31, 68, 85–​86, 89, 124–​25, French spiritualism, 13–​16, 22, 184n.47,
128, 129–​30, 159–​60, 163–​64 213n.9, See also spiritualism
cosmic, 114, 155 Freud, Sigmund, 167
evocation, 10, 78–​79. See also invocation
evolution, 21, 79–​80, 92, 97, 123, 125 Gamble, Christopher, 12–​13, 137, 199n.26
Evrard, Renaud, 195n.31 Gaucher, André, 129–​30, 131, 134
existentialism, 11 Gayon, Jean, 15–​16, 22, 33–​34, 187n.2
experience, xi–​xii, 6, 25–​26, 27, 29, 30, 31, gesture, 31–​32, 67, 86–​87, 107–​8, 110, 116,
47–​48, 49, 64, 121–​22, 147–​48, 152–​ 144, 158, 166–​67
53, 158–​59, 162 ghosts, 29–​30, 31, 111, 112–​13, 114–​15, 130–​
depth-​mystical, 25–​26 31, 132, 133, 161, 162, 163–​64, 167
outlying, 83, 84 films with, 113, 114–​15
personal, xi–​xii, 66 Gilbert, R.A, 201–​2n.22
temporal, 6, 47–​48 Glazer, Jonathan, 113
unmediated, 25–​26 glimpse, 59, 77, 83, 162, 169–​70
expression, 27 gnosticism, 11–​12, 38, 114, 167. See also
knowledge
fabulation, 18, 52–​53, 68–​69, 79–​80, ‘gnōthi seauton’. See ‘know thyself ’
103, 150, 163–​64, 166, 168, God and gods, 64, 65–​66, 78, 89–​90,
212n.82, 213n.9 118, 120–​21, 122–​23, 124–​25, 167,
of life, 69–​70, 80–​81 168, 194n.3
of order, 159–​60 making of, 73
Farr, Florence, 38–​39 See also divine, the
 Index  233

goddesses, 10, 43, 81, 150–​51, 163–​64 heterogeneity, 21, 31, 56–​57, 150, 151, 153,
feminine divinity, 10, 41–​42, 76–​77 156–​57, 158, 159–​60
Godwin, Joscelyn, 96, 119 heterogeneous continuity, xiii, 17, 21,
Golden Dawn, The, 9–​1 0, 18–​1 9, 56–​57, 82, 90, 116, 128, 142, 151,
20–​2 1, 37, 38–​4 0, 53, 54, 58, 153–​54, 163–​64, 172, 173, 174,
59, 60, 65, 66, 100–​2 , 103, 122, 186n.7, 199n.33. See also continuity;
129–​3 1, 149–​5 0, 181–​8 2n.23, discontinuity
184n.56, 188nn.11–​1 2, 193n.5, hierarchy, 21, 31–​32, 58
194n.10, 200n.9 Hirai, Yasushi, 91
Gonne, Maud, 39 holism, 120–​21, 154, 159, 162, 190n.23
grades, hermetic orders of, 18–​20, 21, 28, Horace, 130
31–​32, 37, 38, 60, 93–​94, 123–​24, Horniman, Annie, 34–​35, 39
184n.56 Horos group, 34–​35
Grandin, Temple, 186n.6 Horus, 129–​30
Green, Helen, 63 Hude, Henri, 91, 194n.3
Green, Richard, 92 Hume, David, 43–​44, 160
Greer, Mary, 35–​36, 39, 130, 187n.7 Hutton, Ronald, 65
grief, 6, 24, 50 hyper-​ritual, 59, 60, 193n.5. See also ritual
Grogin, R.C., 22, 60, 64–​65, 185n.1, hyperaesthesia, 69–​71, 73–​74, 109–​10
188n.18, 195n.28 hyperbolic, 23, 162, 166–​67, 172, 215n.13
Guattari, Félix, 86–​87, 119–​21, 205n.11, hyperplane (of constant time), 157–​58
205n.19 Hyppolite, Jean, 5–​6
Gunter, Pete, 121–​22
gyres, 100–​2 idealism, 5, 20–​21, 22, 84, 140, 171
identity, 19–​20, 48–​49, 55–​57, 147, 148,
habit, 13–​14, 47, 65 149–​50, 159, 161, 163–​64
Hacking, Ian, 43, 47–​48, 51–​52, 112, multiple, 56–​57, 159
192n.59 See also individuality; self
hallucination, 30, 50, 116, 168, 172 images, 55–​56, 61–​62, 70–​71, 74–​75,
Hallward, Peter, 183n.32 77–​80, 81–​82, 83–​84, 92–​93, 95, 97,
Halpern, Paul, 136–​37, 158 98–​102f, 127–​28, 130–​32, 143–​44,
Hanan, Joshua, 12–​13, 110–​11, 137, 146–​48, 197n.10
199n.27 of fluidity, 78–​79, 147–​48
Hanegraaff, Wouter J., 20–​21, 55, 66, 118–​ mediating, 78–​79
19, 151, 194n.11 and memory, 43–​44, 48, 55–​57, 100f
Hartshorne, Charles, 203n.7 photographic, 147–​48, 149–​50
hauntology, 152–​53, 166–​67 virtual, xi–​xii, 96–​97
Hazelton, Claire, 148 imaginary, the, 37, 54, 68, 87, 92–​93, 95,
Hedenborg White, Manon, 188n.16 97, 114–​15
Hegel, G.W.F, 11, 183n.32 imagination, 52–​53, 54–​56, 68, 95, 97–​98,
Heidegger, Martin, 94 100–​2, 118, 122, 147–​48, 150–​
Heraclitus, 61 51, 173–​74
Hermes Trismegistus, 18 and memory, 51–​53
Hermes, 18 See also eidolon
hermetic principle, 131, 177 immanence, 13–​14, 20–​21, 29–​30,
Herring, Emily, 41 31–​32, 66, 93–​94, 106–​7, 125,
hetero-​continuities. See heterogeneous 162, 173–​75
continuity immaterialism, 22, 113–​15, 200n.9
heterochromia, 147–​48 immobility, xi–​xii, 7–​8, 139–​40
234 Index

individuality, 7, 23, 43–​44, 70–​71, 74–​75, Lachelier, Jules, 16

82, 131, 152, 156–​57, 161. See also Lakatos, Imre, 187n.9
identity; self Langer, Ellen, 2, 169–​70
instinct, 41, 121–​22 Langevin, Paul, xi, 211n.71
intellect, 61–​62, 163 language, 25–​26, 27, 76, 77–​78, 80, 125–​
interference phenomena, 21, 127, 141–​ 26, 127–​28, 139–​40, 153–​54, 155,
42, 160, 163, 164–​65, 169–​70, 172, 206n.41
192n.61, 206n.43, 207n.8, 213n.11. Lara, Ali, 209n.9
See also quantum mechanics Laruelle, François, 11, 20–​21, 145–​46,
intra-​action (Barad), 139–​40, 152, 158–​59 166–​68, 172–​73, 176, 187n.9,
intuition, 27, 41, 57, 77, 78–​79, 92–​93, 96, 209n.25, 209n.27, 211n.69, 213n.7,
109, 118, 147–​48, 168, 206n.41 214n.4, 215n.13
invention, 54, 76, 127, 135, 173–​74 Latour, Bruno, 86–​87, 91, 119–​20, 204n.9
invocation, 10, 17, 78–​79, 83, 97, 135, 158–​ Lawlor, Leonard, 57, 171
59, 162, 163–​64. See also evocation le Doeuff, Michele, 40
ipsissimus covariance, 18–​20, 43–​57, 58 Lees, Frederic, 10, 76–​77, 192n.2, 193n.16
Irenaeus, Bishop, 168 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 44–​45, 73, 91,
Isis, 9, 10, 31–​32, 60, 81, 91, 129, 163–​65, 181n.15
182nn.27–​29, 211n.54 levels, 13, 18–​19, 37, 43–​44, 47–​48, 57, 68–​
69, 88–​89, 116–​17, 118, 122–​23, 128,
Jacob, François, 204n.13 147–​48, 153–​54, 157–​58, 159–​60,
James, William, 55–​56, 67, 176–​77, 163–​64, 171–​74
203n.11 See also planes; scales
Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 17, 57, 64, 135, Levinson, Katherine, 33
196n.8, 201n.17 life, 69–​70, 73, 77, 78–​81, 82, 85–​86, 87–​
Jantzen, Grace, 42 89, 91–​93, 119, 133, 135, 143, 174–​75
Jones, Richard H., 24, 25, 27, 214n.4 attention to, 73, 201n.17, 215n.10
Jung, Carl, 121–​23, 145 secret of, 61–​62, 77, 143–​44
light, xi, 8–​9, 81, 129, 131–​32, 133,
kabbalah, 18–​19, 59, 64, 65, 73–​74, 141, 142–​44
118, 193n.9 Lincoln, Bruce, 31–​32
Kandinsky, Wassily, 97, 200n.9 lived time, xi–​xii, 158–​59
Kant, Immanuel, 25–​26, 150–​51, 207–​ localization, 48, 51, 53, 55–​56, 94, 154. See
8n.12, 215n.10, 215n.13 also nonlocality; storage (of memory)
Katav, Einav, 210n.38 Locke, John, 51, 56–​57
Kern, Stephen, 49–​50 Lodge, Oliver, 63, 136
Kerslake, Christian, 183n.32 logic, xii–​xiii, 9, 46, 47–​48, 67, 115–​16,
Khandker, Wahida, 4–​5, 203n.7, 204n.13, 127–​28, 153–​54, 163–​64, 171, 172–​73
206n.39, 213n.11 watery, 81–​82, 163–​64
Kittler, Friedrich, 24 love, 17, 77, 124
‘know thyself ’ (‘gnōthi seauton’), 61, 118 Lucretius, 18
knowledge, 2, 18–​19, 20–​21, 27, 31–​32, Luhrmann, Tanya, 28, 53, 54
37, 38, 46, 47–​48, 55, 91–​92, 93–​94,
144–​45, 168 MacGregor Mathers, Samuel, 58, 63, 107,
magical, 121–​22 122, 193n.16, 196n.37
See also gnosticism machines, 2, 24, 29, 73, 85, 125–​26,
Kremer-​Marietti, Angèle, 42 162, 163–​64
Kuhn, Annette, 51–​52 MacLeod, Fiona (William Sharp), 202n.24
 Index  235

macrocosm, 118, 119, 171. See also Meillassoux, Quentin, 13–​14, 110–​11
microcosm; scales Melancholy of Ulad, 105f
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 111 memoro-​politics, 43–​44, 47–​48
magic, 10–​12, 37, 39, 43–​44, 54, 63, 66–​71, memory
95, 121–​22, 150–​51 biological, 49, 121–​22, 145–​46, 205n.18
magical thinking, 24, 67–​69, 81–​82 collective, 121–​22, 131
magicians, 28, 54, 67–​68 cone of, 8–​9, 50–​51, 99, 100–​2, 131–​
magnitude. See scale 32, 133
Malabou, Catherine, 13–​14, 19–​20, 124–​ diversity of, 49, 144
28, 131, 153–​54, 167–​68, 184n.57, false, 52–​53, 147, 150, 152
205n.34 great, 122, 159–​60
manifestation, 50, 86–​87, 100, 119, 149–​50 and imagination, 51–​53
Marchesini, Paula, 206n.38 localization, 44–​45, 158–​59
Maritain, Jacques, 181n.10 long-​term, 44–​45
marvels, 67, 112–​13, 115–​16, 203n.11 narrative, 47–​48, 147
materialism, 11–​13, 14–​15, 16, 18, 19–​21, personal, 29, 49, 169–​70
22, 84, 85–​86, 110–​11, 125–​26, 176, phantom, 133–​34
203n.7, 213n.5 plane of pure, 49, 98–​99, 100f, 123–​24
new, 11–​15, 16, 17, 85, 89–​90, 109–​ pure, 31, 47, 49–​50, 74–​75, 98, 99, 100f,
10, 137 113–​14, 132, 166, 169, 201n.17 (see
vital, 85, 86, 87–​88, 89–​90, 91, 94, also perception, pure)
199n.27 traces, 51, 52
materiality, 53, 61–​62, 67, 79–​80, 86–​87, mental time travel, 31, 162
88–​89, 114–​15, 119, 133–​34, 138 mereology, 5–​6, 116, 121–​22, 171, 186n.7,
materialization, 40, 54, 59, 61, 132, 133, 214n.8. See also relation
134, 138–​39, 140, 188n.17 meta-​spiritual, the, 28, 111. See also
mathematics, 7, 11–​12, 120, 173–​74 spiritual, the
Mathers, Moina. See Bergson, Mina metaphor, 51, 98, 145–​46, 172–​73,
Matheson, Richard, 161, 185–​ 200–​1n.15
86n.3, 214n.8 metaphysics, 11, 27, 57, 74–​75, 78–​80, 110,
matter 128, 162, 166–​67
spiritualizing, 14–​15, 84, 111, 133, 176 metempsychosis, 2, 171, 212n.90
vital, 85, 86, 87–​88, 89–​90, 91, 94, Michaelian, Kourken, 52–​53, 189n.1,
199n.27 191n.42
Matter and Memory, 8–​9, 61–​62, 64, microcosm, 13, 70–​71, 83, 91, 118, 119,
72–​73, 74–​75, 84, 98, 99–​102, 123, 120–​21, 128, 170t, 171, 173–​74. See
193n.19, 194n.25, 201n.17, 201n.21 also macrocosm; scales
Mauss, Marcel, 1, 163–​64, 213n.10 Minutum Mundum, 18–​19, 118–​19. See
McEwan, Ian, 190n.20 also Tree of Life, the
McGinn, Colin, 200n.42 mirrors, 2, 70, 73, 74, 96, 138
McGuire, Meghan, 100–​2, 169, 201n.21 mnemonics, 43, 145
McNamara, Patrick, 43, 48, 49, 52–​53, 55–​ monism, 22, 90, 116–​17, 170t, 198n.31
57, 121–​22, 159, 192n.59, 214n.1 Montebello, Pierre, 143
McRoy, Jay, 204n.17 Moore, G.E., 110
meaning as mattering (Barad), 137, 138–​ Moore, F.C.T., 180n.10
39, 140, 141, 142, 152 Morin, Edgar, 114–​15
mechanism, 55, 113, 115–​16, 131, 183n.36 Morrison, Mark, 23, 112–​13
mediums, 10, 67, 78–​79 Mossé-​Bastide, Rose-​Marie, 42
236 Index

Mourélos, Georges, 4–​5, 48 ontology, 4, 11–​12, 20–​21, 98–​99, 127, 152,

Moynihan, Thomas, 210n.37 153, 155–​56
multiplicity, 6–​7, 18, 127, 128, 163, 167–​ ontological commitments, 20–​21, 59
68, 171 Osiris, 10, 66, 129–​30, 150, 182n.29,
Murdoch, Iris, 65, 215n.10 211n.54
Murphy, Timothy S., 155, 156–​57, Owen, Alex, 63–​64, 66–​67, 73–​74
211n.71, 212n.75
mutation, 16, 76, 128, 153–​54, 170t panpsychism, 11–​12, 14, 68–​69, 90–​91
Myers, Frederic W.H., 30–​31, 69–​71 paradox, xi, 16, 56–​57, 128, 153–​
mystery, 29, 31, 43, 63, 70–​71, 77, 91–​92, 54, 172–​73
94, 110, 149–​51 Langevin’s, xi–​xiii, 179n.2
Egyptian (mysteries), 9, 73, 150 of reflexivity, 116–​17, 128, 153–​54
mystical states, 1, 24, 26, 163–​64 paranormal, 22, 29–​30, 69–​70, 71, 111,
mysticism, 11–​12, 23–​24, 25–​26, 27, 29, 127–​28, 136, 142
31–​32, 41, 42, 60–​61, 66–​67, 122–​23, Parmenides, 94
163–​64, 167, 196n.37, 213n.7, 214n.3, particles. See quantum mechanics
214n.4, 215n.10 Pasi, Marco, 37, 38
mystics, 3–​4, 9, 23, 25–​26, 39–​40, 60–​61, past, the
167–​68, 176, 177 Bergson’s ultra-​realism towards, 10,
mystification, 83, 172. See also 45–​46, 47, 53
enchantment return to, 29–​30, 43, 50, 161, 162,
169, 171
Nag Hammadi Library, 114 survival of, 4, 43–​44, 51–​52
Nail, Thomas, 12–​13, 110–​11, 137, 153–​54, past life, 2, 49, 122, 144, 145
173–​74, 199n.27, 211n.68 Péguy, Charles, 207n.9
naturalism, 55–​5 6, 111, 112, 113, perception, pure, 73, 74–​75, 84, 113–​14,
114, 116, 161, 167–​6 8, 171, 176, 146–​47, 169, 198n.32, 201n.18. See
195n.34 also memory: pure
negation, 65, 153, 171 performance, 39–​40, 59, 76–​77, 129–​32,
Neimanis, Astrida, 197n.19 134, 135, 140, 142–​43, 144–​46, 152–​
Neuberger, Louise, 2–​3 53, 193n.5
neurology, 11–​12, 14–​15, 45, 48, 51, 52, performativity, 2–​3, 59, 81–​82, 140
97, 126 Perri, Trevor, 4–​5, 6, 43–​44
Noakes, Richard, 22–​23 personal identity. See identity
nonlocality, 94, 155–​56, 157–​58, 159 perspective, xi–​xii, xiii, 4–​5, 120–​21,
Bohmian, 156–​57 154, 156–​58
See also localization Phelan, Peggy, 129–​31
Nowhere Less Now (Lindsay Seers), 146–​ phenomenology, 6, 30, 45–​46, 171
47, 148–​49, 149f philosophus covariance, 11–​16, 18–​20,
116–​28, 153–​54, 172–​73
Ó Maoilearca, John, 197n.24, 204n.22, philosophy
209n.25, 214n.1, 215n.13 history of, 11, 133, 172–​73
occult, xii–​xiii, 11, 13–​15, 58, 60, 67, 73, of mysticism, 24, 163–​64, 170t
93–​94, 129, 130–​31 nonstandard, 20–​21, 40, 109, 145–​46,
groups, 33–​34, 37, 38 168, 176, 187n.9
science, 31–​32, 40, 54, 61 physics, 11–​14, 17–​19, 22–​23, 136, 137,
thought, 61, 66–​67 138, 139, 141, 142
occultus, 93–​94, 148, 172 spooky, 29–​30, 110, 136–​37, 142
 Index  237

physicalism. See materialism Rancière, Jacques, 172

Pierce, C.S., 150–​51 Ravaisson, Félix, 13–​14, 22, 183n.39
Pinch, Adela, 14 real time, xii–​xiii, 65, 88–​89, 94, 155, 156–​
Plaisance, Christopher, 191n.47 57. See also duration
planes, 49–​50, 50f, 53–​54, 74–​75, 115, realism, 5, 29–​30, 46, 84, 91, 94, 140, 166–​
116–​17, 122–​24, 132, 133, 158 67, 170t, 171
See also levels; scales recollection, 2, 4–​6, 47, 49–​50, 51, 52–​53,
plasticity, 13–​14, 109–​10, 111, 116–​ 97, 98, 158–​59
17, 125–​27 reductionism, 13–​14, 15, 24, 25, 29–​30, 31,
Plato, xi, 2–​3, 43, 44–​45, 51, 107, 162, 176, 111, 112, 156–​57, 167–​68, 170t
201n.21, 215n.10 Reeve, Christopher, 2–​3
Plotinus, 133 Regardie, Israel, 81–​82, 100
Plutarch, 83 relation, 5–​6, 7, 8, 13–​14, 85, 109–​11, 120–​
posture, 31–​32, 82, 83, 171, 201n.16 22, 134, 140, 142. See also mereology
Povich, Mark, 183n.36 relativity, xi, 137, 155–​57
practicus covariance, 18–19, 136–60, general theory of, 136, 179n.4
194n.26 special theory of, xi–​xiii, 8,
Price, Mark, 184n.56 155, 176–​77
Prigogine, Ilya, 211n.68 resurrection, 111, 113–​14. See also
Prince, Morton, 56–​57 survival
probability, 74–​75, 141, 159–​60, 164, 169, rhythm, 50, 65, 88, 89, 107–​8 , 110,
194n.26, 214n.7, See also chance; 120–​2 2, 123–​24, 170t, See also
tendency vibratory
process, 68, 69, 88–​89, 110–​11, 119, Ricoeur, Paul, 44–​45
127–​28, 137, 138, 139–​40, 155, 168, Riquier, Camille, 78–​79, 88–​90
169, 170t rites (of Isis), 31, 60, 129, 131, 182n.28
Proust, Marcel, 2–​3, 47–​48, 131, 180n.6 ritual, 9–​10, 37, 38, 58–​59, 60, 129–​30,
Proustian space, 2–​3, 103, 169–​70 131, 144, 150, 151, 193n.5. See also
psychic hyper-​ritual
life, 31, 49, 100, 100f Robbins, Stephen E., 52, 190n.23
phenomena, 73, 74–​75, 112–​13 Robins, Sarah, 51
research, 22–​23, 28, 40, 63, 69–​70, 71, Rolland, Romain, 167
152, 181n.22, 195n.28, 195n.31, Rosenkreuz, Christian, 103
201n.21 Rosicrucianism, 9–​10, 103, 150
pure consciousness events, 25–​26, 27, 96, Russell, Bertrand, 46, 47–​48, 52–​53, 84,
191n.46 181n.10, 189n.18, 211n.68
Pythagoras, 61 Rutherford, Ernest, 112–​13

qabalah. See kabbalah Santayana, George, 82–​84

quality, 48, 50 Sartre, Jean-​Paul, 43–​44, 160, 194n.21
quantity, 11, 119–​20 scales, 13, 14–​15, 16, 68–​69, 70, 119–​20,
quantum mechanics, 23, 138, 139, 121–​22, 155–​56, 163–​65, 170t, 171,
141–​4 2, 143, 153, 154, 155–​5 7, 172–​74, 197n.25, 205n.17
211n.60, 211n.71. See also invariance of, 16, 153–​54
interference phenomena; waves, See also levels; microcosm;
quantum macrocosm; planes
Ramey, Joshua, 11, 119, 122–​23 Schechner, Richard, 59, 193n.5
Ramos, Filipa, 144–​45, 209nn.34–​35 Schneider, Rebecca, 130–​31
238 Index

science, 12–​13, 14–​15, 18, 20–​21, 23, 24, spiritualists, 9, 10, 14, 17, 19–​20, 21, 23, 90,
39–​40, 68, 112–​13, 126–​27, 136–​37 112–​13, 115, 136–​37
antiscientific ideology, 47–​48 spirituality, 63, 66, 110–​11, 119, 137
scientism, 14 spiritualization (of matter, science), 23, 40,
Scott, Mike, 177–​78 61, 63, 76, 109, 130–​32, 143–​44
scrying, 31–​32, 55, 58, 74, 96, 118, 150–​51, Steiner, George, 84
170t, 196n.38 Steiner, Rudolf, 54, 198n.28
secrecy, 31–​32, 38, 64–​65, 77–​78, 93–​94, Stengers, Isabelle, 211n.68
134–​35, 143–​44, 161 Stewart, Balfour, 136, 158–​59
Seers, Lindsay, 40, 145–​46, 149f, 210n.39 storage (of memory), 43–​45, 48–​49, 51, 53.
selection (theory of memory), 43–​45, 48–​ See also localization
50, 55–​57, 70–​72, 159, 170t Storm, Josephson, 211n.59
self, xii–​xiii, 31, 38, 55–​57, 118–​19, 143, 147, strangeness (of Henri Bergson), 8–​9, 11
159. See also identity; individuality Strawson, Galen, 11–​12
Semon, Richard, 197n.23 subject, 17, 38, 115, 139–​40, 163–​64, 171,
sensation, 26, 71–​72, 89, 133–​34 172. See also substance
Serres, Michel, 18 substance, 28, 48, 57, 79–​80, 109–​11,
Shermer, Michael, 185–​86n.3 113–​15, 116, 130–​31, 139–​40, 161,
shi, 103–​7 163–​64, 174–​75, 208n.14
Sinclair, Mark, 15–​16, 90–​91, 184n.47 immaterial, 93–​94, 163
Sinnett, Alfred, 54 universal, 40, 61–​62, 110–​11
smallism, 13, 70–​71, 131, 205n.11 See also subject
Smolin, Lee, 127, 158–​59, 206n.38 substitution, xi–​xiii, 156
Socrates, 59, 61, 82 super-​nothing, 64
Soddy, Frederick, 112–​13 supernatural, 31–​32, 113, 114, 122, 129–​
solidity, xiii, 81, 115–​16, 173–​74 30, 151, 166–​67, 186n.7
Sommer McGrath, Larry, 14–​16, 213n.9 supernormal, 28, 29–​31, 54, 70–​71, 111,
soul vitalism (Bennett), 90, 91 114, 163–​64, 169–​70, 171, 172, 176,
souls, 2, 4, 22–​23, 44–​45, 47–​48, 55, 89–​90, 185n.24, 186n.7
91–​92, 107–​8, 176–​77 survival, 73, 113–​14, 163. See also death;
space, 4–​5, 27, 48, 103–​5, 106–​8, 115–​16, resurrection
136, 142–​43, 144, 145, 156–​59, symbols, 25, 55, 58–​59, 77, 96, 97, 131–​32
161, 171–​72 Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 197n.12
spatiality, 13, 17, 84, 119–​20, 123–​25, 128, Szwarc, Jeannot, 2–​3
157–​58, 161, 162, 200n.13
Spinoza, Baruch, 85–​86, 87, 89–​90, 124, Tait, Peter Guthrie, 136, 158–​59
125, 128, 167–​68, 205n.30 tarot, the, 37, 39, 59, 103, 159–​60, 176,
spirit vision, 58, 73, 74, 82, 172 194n.26, 202n.23
spiritual, xii–​xiii, 8, 28, 43–​44, 55, 59, 65, tattwa, visions and symbols, xiii, 58, 74, 81,
73–​74, 136–​37 95, 96–​97, 102, 102f, 196n.45, See also
practices, 42, 58, 66, 103, 163–​64 thatness
world, 65, 98, 200–​1n.15 telepathy, 22–​23, 31, 69–​72, 83, 111, 156,
See also meta-​spiritual, the 181n.22, 195n.34
spiritualism, 14–​16, 22, 23, 24, 28, 39–​40, tendency, 22, 43–​44, 61, 68, 86, 87, 91,
89–​90, 97, 171, 174–​75, 176, 194n.3, 110–​11, 113–​14, 203n.8, 214n.7, See
197n.20, 213n.5 also direction; probability
new, 14–​16, 40 tension (degrees or levels of), 6, 89, 119,
See also French Spiritualism 120–​21, 123–​24, 160
 Index  239

ter Schure, Leon, 45–​46 van Elferen, Isabella, 86–​87

Tereshchenko, Nicolas, 37, 202n.29 Vault Layout for Ceremony, 106f
Thales, 61 vegetarianism, 10, 182–​83n.31
thatness, xiii, 74, 196n.45, 198n.32, See Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum (Leave No Trace),
also tattwa, visions and symbols 60, 130, 149, 169, 203n.1
theoricus covariance, 18–​20, 43–​44, 86–​87, vibrant matter, 12–​14, 18, 85–​86, 91, 92–​
88–​89, 91, 92–​94, 111, 148, 172–​73 93, 111
Theosophy, 63, 66 vibratory, 107, 108, 170t, 202n.29, 209n.9,
thing-​power (Bennett), 86–​87, 139–​40 See also rhythm
thought-​pictures, 74, 96–​97, 107, 111, visualization, 37, 54
196n.41 vital materialism. See materialism,
Three Images from the Golden Dawn vital
Grimoire, 104f vitalism, 16, 85–​86, 87–​88, 90, 91–​93,
time. See duration; real time 137, 176
time travel, 2, 3–​4, 112, 114–​15, 161, 162,
163–​64, 169–​70, 193n.7, 213n.3 water, 78–​80, 81–​82, 100, 103, 107, 147–​
Tinbergen, Nikolaas, 185n.24 48, 163–​64
traces, 23, 44–​46, 48, 49–​50, 51–​52, spirit of, 81, 95
53, 129–​31, 134–​35, 147–​48, 149, See also flow; fluidity
191n.46 Waterboys, The, 177–​78
Tree of Life, the, 18–​21, 19f, 28, 58–​ waves (image of), 143
59, 100, 118, 191n.46. See also waves, quantum, 141, 142, 143. See also
Minutum Mundum quantum mechanics
truth, 13, 20–​21, 61, 74, 82, 114, 128, 135, Weil, Simone, 215n.10
142, 144, 150–​51 Werning, Markus, 191n.42
Tully, C.J., 150, 182n.30, 211n.54 Whitehead, A.N., 11–​12, 59, 63, 91, 100–​
Tulving, Endel, 180n.3 2, 103, 122, 144, 159–​60, 203n.7,
Turner, Marc, 55 213n.11
Turner, Victor, 59 Wills, David, 210n.37
Turrell, James, 142–​43 Wittenberg, David, 120
types (logical and cosmological), 116–​17, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 111
128, 153–​54, 211n.68 Woods, Derek, 16
world soul, 87–​88, 91
Underhill, Evelyn, 66–​67, 194n.17
universe, the, 2, 7, 8–​9, 41, 73, 76, 96, 97, Yeats, W.B, 66–​67, 122, 147, 183n.40,
155–​56, 157, 160 193n.13, 202n.24, 202–​
unseen, the, 94, 112–​13, 115–​16, 135, 136, 3n.30, 213n.8
148, 157–​58, 163–​64, 172. See also Young, Thomas, 141, 147–​48, 206n.43
attention
Zammito, John, 13–​14, 85
vagueness, 74–​75, 97, 98 zelator covariance, 1–​5, 18–​20, 28, 38, 48,
Valéry, Paul, 145–​47 58–​59, 112–​13
Valiaho, Pasi, 110 Zeno, 94, 110
van der Tuin, Iris, 138, 143, 155, 184n.57, Zöllner, Johann, 136, 158–​59
212n.75 Zukav, Gary, 136–​37