Commentary XIII

Year End: In the Tunnel with Invisible Light

This has been a painful year for me. Anxiety, depression, and what might be executive dysfunction have made walking on the sea of life an exercise in trying not to drown. Unlike Peter, I am not lifted back up… yet, if ever. I will be blunt: I am not looking forward to 2024. I have never had excitement for a new year, but these past few years it tends to feel more like an inconvenient fiction than it usually is. I can’t seem to make detailed plans or set goals. I get disoriented. I simply can’t think to that level yet. I’m making it up as I go, one confused front stroke at a time. I wrote and read less than I wanted. I slept less than I wanted. I am battling brain fog most of the week, and more than half the time I think I’m not going to make it.

But, I did learn new things this year. I took classes. I read fascinating things. I went to an anime convention for the first time, with the help of a friend. I have bought a prop katana. I have found some of the reality of the “little things that make you excited” that I thought I’d never understand. In hindsight, I should have known a prop katana (Zoro’s Enma from One Piece in this case) would make me happy, but I could never have guessed that I would be that excited about it. I haven’t been that excited in a very long time.

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I just finished another course by Dr Butler, on Greek Polytheism in the poets. We mostly focused on texts like the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod’s Theogony, especially learning methods of interpreting them. As it is with these things, you learn by doing, and I have to say Dr Butler’s “doings” have been eye-opening on that front. There are many memes about (for instance) Zeus based on those myths. You come out of that course taking those memes less seriously, but perhaps learning to take them as memes (with the misinformation it usually bases itself on) and not think that Zeus the God is actually a philandering rapist. I also learned to disentangle the notion of philosophical interpretation from Platonism. While I am indeed a Platonist and will use those categories, the art of reading, reciting, and participating in myth is beyond any one set of philosophical traditions.

Indeed, the most important lesson I have learned about these myths is that the things philosophers picked up on their interpretations were not entirely unknown by the composers of those texts. I struggle to find the words to use, but the basic idea is that myth and poetry are “metaphysics by other means” (to use Butler’s phrase in a previous course). We “proper” metaphysicians (or we humans qua metaphysicians) are rather late to the party that was started by the poets themselves. Sometimes, it is enough to just read the poems, to dance our words, our eyes, our bodies and our rituals to them. There is no more anxiety to “fix” some “irrationality” in them. Instead, we can narrate the form of their “suprarationality”.

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This course has aided my ever-unfinished attempts to reinterpret the Bible in polytheist terms, some results of which are on this blog. If I were to give a chart of my position in terms of debates around the “allegorical”, “literal”, etc reading of the Bible, I’d say that to start, we have infantilized the Biblical authors to an amazing degree. To use the example of the book of Genesis, reducing the creation myths to reactions against “pagan” renditions and its message to the simple phrase that “The Jewish God alone is the creator” is a remarkable flattening that seeks to make the text palatable to the average person at the expense of the details of the text itself, or its integrity. On the other hand, the Young Earth Creationist does the same thing, only backwards and inside out. The YEC reduce the story to the paradigm of modern physical theory alien to the text. The related positions (day-age theory, etc) don’t fare much better.

If we see myths as the primary metaphysics, then something changes. You can finally see why Kabbalists do such strange interpretive moves, for instance. Once some of the thin schemas are applied (such as mapping temporal progression in a myth as a synchronic space of relation), and even apply wordplay and word associations, the legitimate insights of historical-critical scholarship (creation as a temple, the lack of creatio ex nihilo in the text, etc) become meaningful in such an overwhelming way. It’s a beautiful way to read. It’s so beautiful, that I have almost impulsively applied it to almost every media I encounter, to varying degrees of success.

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I have wild ideas I sometimes repress because of a restless inner critic. But the revolution in my interpretive thinking has brought them back up. For instance, seeing Luffy from One Piece as connected to Sun Wukong in more than a simple literary way. I have a love relationship with animated fictional characters. The experience of beauty is the experience of the Real, of some real, so it is somewhat of a quest of mine to find that real that shines through fiction as fiction. This is especially true in a world where fiction might be taking the place of myth (or is it fiction transforming into myth?) because it is over-saturated with this media. I have not seen a place where myth comes to life as in animated media. There are theologies and many a metaphysics to be articulated, specific to animation, not just film in general. An approach to this would involve articulating perspective as an Arche for the animated world of 2-dimensional representation. I remembered last week that Butler did talk about this in a class on artists like DaVinci. I am still re-reading the book[1] based on the course and I haven’t gotten there yet, but I think that is a very fruitful path to follow. I think that Luffy can eventually inspire (or be) the face of a God whose power is this representational perspectivism.

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These thoughts on media and myth come in the aftermath of an introductory presentation on Postmodernism I did quite recently. I have to say I haven’t even scratched the surface on that topic, but it is part of a theme I have experienced this year, that I find in common between Vargas and Butler, a theme perhaps best seen in the light of Antonio Vargas’ interpretation of “Agathon” (usually “Good”) as “Value”[2]. There is a not-so-implicit association with money[3] in this translation. Some might see this as a profanation of the concept, but I see it as crucial to the insight behind the translation. I think such unorthodox translations can help better contextualize these ancient ideas. I mean, the oracle told Diogenes to “debase the currency” and he did not think the language of money to be profaning the oracle’s divinity. This has been specially made clear to me due to my current job in the financial sector.

In a financial context, monetary value is what makes an object intelligible. It is the coherence of the object in that setting. You can even see the interplay between what Platonists would call Limit and Infinity in the way the price of one thing is not exactly reducible to the price of the sum of all that thing’s parts. The relationship between desire as demand, and supply as a vector of “financial being” in determining the “value” of items is a description of the “integrity” or “unity” of said items in a financial field. The amount of financial “tokens” determine at once the financial worth of the product (in that it unites this many units of token) and the value of the tokens themselves (a strong currency means fewer tokens for this or that item, that is, the token unites more quantities of item). Similarly, Proclus talks about “tokens” (sunthēmata), the “mark” or “symbol” of that God on things. It is that “token” that supplies the thing’s existential integrity beyond formal categorization, beyond simply being a particular horse, tree, man, etc. One might say it is the value that a God “buys” things, and makes it theirs; not just theirs, but an expression of theirself. But this cannot exist except in the co-generation of an original field of exchange, unlike us where the field presupposes other fields prior, and Proclus says that the Gods together generate Being.

If you can grasp this, or rather have it grasp you, it is an apocalypse in the original sense, a revelation. For instance, you can now see an analogy between the nation as a unit and a God as a unit. Insofar as a God, as its own “unique” token, it is a “metaphysical nation”. Take this as far as possible, in the direction of not seeing a God as a discrete entity with a closed psychic consciousness. This is why Proclus can say that “About every God, there is an appropriate series of angels, heroes, and daimons, for every God leads a multiplicity which receives his own form”[4] and that each God themself is a “self-complete unity together with the beings that incorporate (μετέχει) it.”[5] America is a unity together with the beings that incorporate its character/symbols. So is Nigeria. A God goes well beyond this, but it images, in a way, the unity of a God, to the point that we can see a Nation as a daimonic instantiation of this principle where the daimonic is any temporal circuit of activity that repeats or perpetuates itself through time. Suddenly, you can see in the very ordinariness of things their divine character, even if you may not be able to make out what God this character belongs to. Everything is full of Gods, there is no disenchantment. A God is not a closed psychic subjectivity, like us, which we associate with personhood. But because of this, a God can include and be many such subjectivities at once and even embrace such subjectivities that conflict, insofar as the unity that embraces them is not some formal universal. Each God is thus in this sense “suprapersonal”. Each God can be and is beyond this a multiplicity of eternal “providences”, or “noetic” structures, all embraced by each God as unity unsurpassed, value unsurpassed, where a unit token is the worth of everything that exists, the coherence of all things; and all this insight at least partly as a result of an insightful translation.

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This has been my year: a confrontation with the God qua inhuman, and the God in the human, the Gods in the institutions and the imperfect humans (including me) that inhabit and help form their spaces in the imaginal as well as the material. I sometimes hear the loud silence of the universe and see its dark light. I did not win, but I did change, ever so slightly. One learns to adapt (even if badly) in a world where providence is not determinism but a gift of self-ownership. To return to the One is to be one’s self. So it is with the Gods. I do not yet know what is coming. I just know, as I did years ago, that whatever happens, my psychic integrity failing or not, if I forget this or not: it will be well, all manner of thing shall be well. There is space, and there is value. Now I have to ask (forever maybe): what is my value?

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[1] Edward P. Butler, The Way of Being: Polytheism and the Western Knowledge System (Notion Press, 2023).

[2] Antonio Vargas, “Proclus’ Elements of Metaphysics,” accessed November 23, 2022, https://www.academia.edu/44841806/Proclus_Elements_of_Metaphysics. See for instance his translation of proposition 8: Everything that incorporates value (no matter how it incorporates value) is drawn by primary value, which is nothing else but value.

[3] "To Agathon as value, the concern with measurement and units (monades), the hierarchy, the existence of equivalent divine punishment across generations, the images of gods distributing gifts that become other things in the lower orders - there is a paper to be written on the presence of Money in Proclus’ system.” - Antonio Vargas, “Random Thoughts,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), March 1, 2023, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/random-thoughts.

[4] Proclus Commentary on the Timaeus, IT 3.166, as quoted in Edward P. Butler, “Time and the Heroes,” Walking the Worlds: A Biannual Journal of Polytheism and Spiritwork 1, no. 1 (2014): 23–44.

[5] Antonio Vargas, “An Henadological Find,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), December 5, 2022, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/an-henadological-find?utm_medium=email.