I was reading the recent post over at Hermetic Lessons and it reminded, oh, yeah, right, the Klippot, the places at which the work can take a nasty turn, and if you do the work long enough, you are going to rumble around them, risk falling into them, maybe even stumble right into them and have to make your way out (ugly scenes). That isn’t oogie-boogie scary, it’s just practical caution scary. The first time I saw them laid out neatly it was as idolatry-bloodshed–sexual perversity, but you don’t even have to squint to see Blogos’s blasphemy-insanity-sickness/death in that distinction.
Tag: Bible
Book Shrine II
My writing head is mostly at noodle lately. I have been thinking about some bigger things, some of which I have already talked about here, others which are big and sweeping and a little scary. I don’t like to let the practice of writing here languish, so, yep, noodling it is. Let’s talk a little more about that book shrine.
[NB] Apocalypse as Mystery
Suitably enough, after talking about pushing the apocalypse back into the subtle world where it belongs, I sat down this morning with Revelations. I mentioned a little while back that I was pretty sure a more apophatic approach to the Tree of Life could be brought to the text and this morning felt like the time to gently start that process, see if my hunch held up.
[NB] The Mother’s Tribe
This post follows the Absalom one closely, stepping forward in the material to look at another way of looking at the mother in the Judaic mythology, this time in the prophetic book of Isaiah. Again, let me emphasize that there are a number of good historical dimensions to this material (especially Isaiah with its even clearer historical roots), including questions of provenance and propaganda, but I want to keep those to the side while I talk about the mythological dimensions of it.
[NB] History as Myth
Dumezil observed in Mitra-Varuna that one of the tricks with understanding the Roman relationship to broader Indo-European patterns was realizing that the Romans concealed most of their mythology in history. Instead of an account about the creation of the world, they would rather an account of the creation of the republic or the founding of a temple.
Forever Towns
Gilles Deleuze returns frequently to the question of time in his philosophical work. It forms the basis of early texts like Difference & Repetition and The Logic of Sense, it defines his late works like Cinema, and it is everywhere in-between, including Thousand Plateaus with Felix Guattari. What is the punchline of all that work? Time is fuckin’ weird.
