Modernity is Antiquity

While perusing some works of Einstein, Minkowski, Mach, the Russian professor Umov and others, I came to notice certain coincidences, more or less unexpected. Namely, when these scientists tried to transform their abstract formulae in to more concrete combinations of psychical facts the material preferred by them closely resembled some shamanistic stories and descriptions that are spread among primitive peoples in Asia and America. In a way one could possibly say that the ideas of modern physics about space and time, when clothed with concrete psychical form, appeared as shamanistic.

(Waldemar Bogoras, Ideas of Space and Time in Primitive Religion)

The fifth post of my talk The Disorder of Knowledge and the Reconfiguration of Human Intelligence

But the full process of retrieval and reintegration goes back to the earliest mythical foundations of human thought, perhaps because myth is closer to the sacred and spiritual, and it is the spiritual and sacred that everyone is so thirsty for, though they will scarcely admit it.  Here we especially note the work of Eliade, Cassirer, Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Kerenyi, and others in comparative myth, and the efforts of various literary critics like Northrop Frye to establish a general grammar of the imagination founded upon literary and psychological patterns and archetypes drawn from the world’s imaginative literature, especially the myths, folk-tales, poetry and scripture.  This is the rolling up into one structure of the long historical shift from mythos to logos, from image to word, from the language of the heart to that of the mind, from holistic thoughts to sequential ones.    

Among these revivals I want to focus upon what may be the most significant one.  I mean the revival of alchemy to find precursors to modern physical science.  Somewhat paradoxically, however, to link the pre-scientific with the scientific effects both a ghostly continuity and marks off a clear discontinuity in thought.  Regarding this double result, we can say that when old Alchemy and new Science come together and are united, a B and E fusion occurs, so that knowledge is one.  At the same time new divisions are discovered or asserted.  Dean Radin, for example, states: “One view of the evolutionary trend is that physics is returning to the holistic assumptions of the magical era.  But there is an important difference.  The post-modern view no longer lacks the explanatory power of the first era.” (Entangled Minds: 244)  Of course Radin shows his bias in that he believes only concepts, physical theories and empirical verification by the senses--he belives in efficient causality not formal causality--are considered explanatory, which is a modernist conceit, but the basic thought is correct.

Physicist Scott Tyson writes: “Though incomplete, the philosophy of the Greek philosophers and the scientific understandings of the nature of matter of the twentieth century are quite similar in many regards.” (The Unobservable Universe. p. 104) Another eminent scientist, Dr. Robert Becker, nominated twice for the Nobel Prize, has written that: “Medicine has come full circle, from the mysterious energies of the shaman-healer to the scientific understanding of the life energies of the body and their relationship to the energies of the environment.  This scientific revolution has simultaneously enriched the concepts of technological medicine and supported the ideas of energy medicine. What is emerging is a new paradigm of life, energy and medicine.” (Cross Currents. p. 81)

Books like Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz about the “science” of ancient Egypt, and Symbols of Sacred Science by the philosopher Rene Guenon, stress the symbology of the ancient world as a lost mode of thought that remains useful for today.  The restoration of the divine dimension of things, so close in myth because myth was at the beginning of our intellectual development, is done in part by lifting the divine out of the basement of the unconscious where it was banished in order to regain a ternary structure of true symbology, i.e. the metaphorical union of three realms in mutual interaction with the divine reinstated at the top, human in the middle, and nature at the bottom. 

Philosophically, myth and science can not really be fused because they hold different world-views, and use different mental faculties to grasp the world.  Myth is not conceptual philosophy, but imagination and art.  Yet the gap closes whenever we perceive them as structures or lattices of metaphor.  Myth presents the creation as alive, every thing in it is a presence, is part of a vast, complex order of living things that obeys the laws of magic, and human beings have a deep inner relationship with every part of it.  Science sees the universe as composed of inorganic and organic substances, obeying impersonal mathematical laws, and with which we can only have observer/observed, or even, exploiter/exploited relations of alienation and objectification.  It is indifferent to us and we are interested in it only to the extent that we can get something from it.  Yet, when separation and alienation become unbearable the mind automatically goes integrative and mythic, and a good deal of modern physics is sounding more and more like ancient myth, as the lead quote from Anthropologist Waldemar Bogoras indicates. 

I mean that today in the same mental “space” where demons and goblins cursed and snarled, and fairies and sprites played and danced, where magicians strove with witches within an imaginative field of thought, and humans painted their magic on cave walls, now in an overlaying conceptual field,  there are holographic models, quantum events, implicate and explicate orders, and whole clans of interacting “particles” with oddly tribal-sounding names like photons, leptons, muons, bosons, gluons, and hadrons,  populating the sub-atomic landscape we are trying to find our way around in scientifically and know the nature of experimentally.  This picture of one regime of knowing laying over another and older one is an archeological metaphor, one used to great effect by Foucault in his The Archeology of Knowledge.  But we can also say that myth was the science of the ancient world and science is the myths of today.

Besides these differences in the content of the universe, e.g. flame-belching dragons vs. flame-throwing rockets, there are two other differences between the mythic and scientific world-views.   The first difference lies in their respective assumptions made about the nature of the relationship between mind and matter.  It revolves around the question: which is primary?  All myth and spiritual philosophy assumes that Mind is primary cause and material creation is both effect and powerful secondary cause, while the materialist, and scientists in general, faithful to the opposite causality initiated by Cartesian thought, assume the existence of mind as effect of biological or chemical interactions which can, in turn, slightly affect matter.  At best, the materialist sees the reflection of Mind in the mirror of creation, but says it comes out of creation, because that’s where he first sees it.  So, for him, creation is the Creator.  The truth is the relation between Mind and matter is an inter-relation, a double-reflection, Mind reflected in creation and then reflected by creation back to Itself, Mind.  This is the glorious structure of the interaction of the “active force and that which is its recipient” where “these two are the same yet they are different.”  A unified perception says that Reality and its image are both existent, and one does not change without changing the other.