Category: Occultism

[NB] Sefer Yetzirah historical notes: trees and recensions

On By IoIn Art, Notebook, Occultism, Rethinking Old Ideas2 Comments

I realized recently that I didn’t have a solid grasp on the historical horizon of the SY’s transmission, so I thought to do a little more digging. That is where I came across Segol’s Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalism. It is a compact work of scholarship—a fair amount of information and argument in a very brief monograph. I’ve already talked a little about what that has set me to thinking about, but I want to flag a few other details that might be useful and/or interesting in thinking about the SY.

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Mask, Personality, Synchronicity, Work

On By IoIn and Modernity, Art, Occultism4 Comments

This is a little bit of a sorting post. First up, I’ve updated the “About”; it’s now the “What’s Going On Here” button at the top of the page.

Next, let me see if I can summarize some of the trajectories that I have been taking around the Yeatsian and Jungian material. I know, I’m doing that a lot lately; I’m winnowing and that isn’t glorious work, but it seems necessary.

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Yeatsian Faculties contra Jungian Typology, Preliminary Considerations

On By IoIn and Modernity, Art, Occultism, Rethinking Old Ideas, Useful Spiritualist Concepts1 Comment

Sexiest title in the world, right? Thankfully, it’s not my scintillating wit that drives this blog. It is exactly what it says on the can, though, so that’s something.

The big distinction between the Jungian and Yeatsian material around the faculties relates to the levels at which they are pitched. The Yeatsian material is talking about souls in their extended sense, as they exceed the constraints defined by our material bodies. The Jungian typology is the inverse of that, the soul understanding itself from within the experience of the body; the Jungian typologies describe the soul in a more contracted state.

Nonetheless, the contracted soul refracts the expanded soul and in it we can divine some appreciation for the expanded soul. When we look at our psychological type, how do its various components relate to spiritual faculties?

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Yeatsian Arconology, Coda

On By IoIn and Modernity, Art, Occultism, Rethinking Old Ideas, Useful Spiritualist Concepts2 Comments

I want to leave this series of posts with a brief consideration of the horizon against which all of this plays out. The faculties of will and intellect, mask and body of fate, are not unique to the human world. They can easily be traced into all of the corners of animal, suggested in vegetal life, and even glimpsed in the physio-chemical mechanisms that underpin them, though this is more subtle.

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Yeatsian Arconology, pt. 5

On By IoIn and Modernity, Art, Occultism, Rethinking Old Ideas, Useful Spiritualist ConceptsLeave a comment

[Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4]

At this point, it should be clear that in the Yeatsian material a person is a composite being and a variety of spiritual issues develop when that composite breaks down. A person is both a daimon and a ‘human’ soul (hereafter just called ‘human’) engaged in an often awkward dialogue with each other through the medium of a person’s life. Besides the fact that these two spiritual beings co-exist in a person, what do we know about them?

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Yeatsian Arconology, pt. 2

On By IoIn and Modernity, Art, Occultism, Rethinking Old Ideas, Useful Spiritualist Concepts5 Comments

This post won’t make sense without reading its predecessor. I am going to start where I left off there and dive right in to a discussion of the arconological manipulation of human life that the Yeatsian material describes.

This material provided me with the clearest examples of how William interacted with the spirits to shape the system in cooperation with them and with his wife’s mediumistic talents. While William is often an active questioner, this material sees William proposing terms, developing his own concepts, and querying after his sense of the matter with the spirits.

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