The Third Power

To harmonize the whole is the task of art.

(Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art: 3)

Western consciousness is often described as the result of two main influences, called the Hebraic and the Hellenic, the Hebrews and the Greeks.  The religious or Hebraic consciousness is based on faith and a certain kind of hearing.   The Greek consciousness is based on “rational” knowing or "reason" which is a certain kind of seeing.  It is the basis of science. 

Religion and science, faith and reason, are often portrayed as opposing powers battling over the territory of the mind, and individuals usually choose one over the other.  But that is only because usual history leaves out the middle third which is art and imagination.  Now by middle third I mean a connecting link, if a linear sequence in time, or a mediating power if a hierarchy, a translator, if one thing must be translated into another.  Religion, science, and art are the co-ordinated vision of human learning and education.  But learning is of knowledge, whether religious, scientific or artistic, and knowledge is structures of metaphor, and their internal form and workings are correlated with what is outside them to produce the symbol, which comes from the Greek sýmbolon, meaning ‘to throw together.”  It is in that sense of unifying symbol that Kandinsky speaks above about art. 

In human consciousness we usually say that the symbolic modes of thought, the thought of poets, develop between the sensory and the conceptual and mediate them within the mind.  In the evolution of "western" culture a similar mediating relation, or way of organizing knowledge, holds between the Hebraic and Hellenic, between faith and reason.  For me this third powerful influence on western consciousness is Egypt.  Here begins our poetic and philosophical, especially cosmological, tradition.  Egypt was where symbolic thought first flourished.

The ancient Hermetic teachings were laid down by the eponymous figure of the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus.  He is also called Thoth, Idris, Hermes of Greek mythology, Mercury, and Balinus.  Baha'ullah says Hermes has many names, depending upon which culture we are talking about.  Baha'ullah also writes of Hermes Trismegistus  in the Tablet of Wisdom, calling Him "the Father of Philosophy."   The hermetic teachings remain, despite their antiquity, the best imaginative cosmology out there.  The Hermetic tradition was a powerful stream of thought into the modern age when it was banished to the underground.  Well known “modern” students include Newton and Hegel—scientists and philosophers by day, but alchemists and occultists by night.  The name Trimegistus means “thrice-great” because he purportedly mastered the three kinds of knowledge—spiritual, mental, material.  The essence of His teachings was set out in the Emerald (Chrysolite?) Tablet.  Its most often misquoted principle is: As above, so below.  It is misquoted because it is actually As Below, so Above.  This is the structure of the cosmos. 

The principles of Hermes teachings were the foundation of alchemy and most other occult arts.  In its search for metaphors of connection between the inner and outer, spiritual and material, realms of existence and experience, this philosophy generated a whole bunch of different images.  The great chain of being, planes of correspondence, the dance of life which is the vibrations of life along the hierarchy, are all primary cosmological images organizing “western” thought even down to the Elizabethan Age. 

The planes of correspondence hold, each within its own plane, the counterparts of things in the other planes.  The chain of being connects the planes, with the dance of life going on everywhere at every link of the chain.  The Biblical image of Jacob’s ladder, with the angels going up from earth and down from heaven, is a modulation of the chain, with the added quality of the same figures movement up and down creating circulation and cycles of its own development.  Such images fell into disfavor when "modern" western thought collapsed the three-tiered cosmos into a two-term physical universe, and the plane of divinity was thrown into the unconscious.

But the hermetic principle is still going strong in the Bahá’í Writings: “The spiritual world is like unto the phenomenal world. They are the exact counterpart of each other. Whatever objects appear in this world of existence are the outer pictures of the world of heaven.” (Promulgation of Universal Peace:10)  Or in the Bab’s often repeated summation: “the Kingdoms of Revelation and Creation and whatever lieth between them.”   And Hermetic teachings underpin much of what is called New Age literature, especially The Law of Attraction.

If the above is like that below, and whatever lieth between them, then the whole cosmos is constructed symbolically.   The counterparts accord not only by themselves but also within the human reality as our spiritual and material natures which must be brought into harmony.  They are essential to each other and to the whole, like painter and canvas are both essential to getting painting done.  

The symbolic way of knowing is the basis of all art, and it precedes abstract cognition both in human collective history and individual psychology.  I mean that as the direct expression of the senses and imagination, art is pre-cognitive.  But that is not also to say it is irrational or unintelligent, or, as many school-systems say, an ornament to real learning and thus the first thing cut from the academic curriculum.  If cuts need be made, art should be the last to go for it is the most essential of the academic subjects. 

Art as ornamentation or just representation, a mere artifice, a copy of something real, is another casualty of secular, Greek rationality—often said to have begun with Plato’s blistering dismissal of the poets in The Republic--which can’t perceive art as power to invoke presence.  In what we laughingly call pre-historic times, painted images on cave walls or stones were images of power, talisman bringing the animals to the hunt, or capturing the feelings of it, uniting the essential form with its manifest form, the active force with that which is its recipient.  Over time, pictures and verbal images establish a symbol system, forming what art critics call a grammar of the imagination that both measures individual subjective depth and acts as the collective psychological ground of culture. Jung was the first to demonstrate that these interconnect in the “unconscious.”  Later, with developments in prose and a more thoroughly instrumental, denotative use of language, the metaphors, similes, analogies and other modes of figurative expression become simply literary forms.  But language itself is the great collective organ of human perception.  Its figurations are the secure units of our knowing, and its best practitioners are traditionally the poets.  Symbols make human knowledge; no surprise when we remember that the word poet means maker.  "Treasures lie hidden beneath the throne of God; the key to those treasures is the tongue of poets”, states an Islamic tradition. (The Dawn-Breakers:258-259)  We need to better understand the influence of this great tradition of thought begun in Egypt upon our own, the third power driving our development.    

The next few posts will further this exploration.