© fra Nefastos 2007
In the previous article carrying the same name as this one my intention was in a general way to point the inter-connection between Occultism and Satanism, as methods of interpretation of the mystical and the un-conscious, and their part as integrators of consciousness. This second part has instead been made in the intention to sketch the nature of occultism as an independent system – naturally very shortly. There seems to be a need and order for this kind of sketching, since the term Occultism is very wrongly characterized and understood nowadays, but it is seen as a label for un-justified make belief and hocus pocus, where the primary intention is in the performance of magical tricks. My intention here is not to make a propaganda for the world view of occultism or defend it against the often-made accusations or offences of the more materialistic scientific view – from this aspect the issue has been delved with in the booklet “Tieteen Uskonto” (The Religion of Science). Instead, I wish to present a short information package for those people, who might be interested for a general picture of the world view of Occultism when separated from the above-mentioned mistakes in its usual characterization.
Shortly: Occultism is both science, religion, philosophy, art, and a general skill of living and thinking – and all these without stone hard dogmas. When seen as a science, Occultism does not have the empirical and naturalistic – so. materialistic – premise implicitly connected into it. Modern science disregards occult phenomena a priori because of its own understanding, that have no other basis than prejudice; why science is based still far more into Aristotelian scholastics than into Platonism, is not because Aristotle would have presented the majesty of nature better than Plato, but because the Aristotelian philosophy appeals more into the person-centred and materialistic thinking of the occidentals. Bacon didn’t present the totality of the world more realistically than shall we say, for example the Yogic wizard Milarepa, but he knew how to form it into the language that pleases more the internal soul-strings of a man born into our western culture – for the western mind is basically materialistic and separatist, and this basis is completely emotional, not rational. Every true poet, an artist, a religious man realizes the fact, that the way of modern science to reduce thinking into the molecular movement is in fact quite insufficient way to present the truth. Thus the science of Occultism is such, that in addition to a physical phenomena it connects into the reasonable construction of the universe spiritual matters and factors, and sees them as well understandable – and with certain reservations – and as “quantifiable” (demanding its own kind of methods of course) as are the objects of the materially based science.
How about he religious aspect of Occultism? If Occult science was too religious to be “taken seriously” nowadays, so in the same way the Occult religion is far to scientific to be considered as religious. When Christianity developed out of irrationality the essential doctrine of its theology, then with the yell “I believe, since it is irrational” it has created a vast, yet in reality completely unnecessary gap between religion, philosophy and science. Sacred emotions/feelings, a deep dedication and devotion, even ecstatic mentality – all these are things that can be considered completely reasonably without them losing their scent of holiness or anything essential of themselves. On the contrary, when religion and science are understood as different methods perceiving the same reality, the religious view leads of course into transcendence – gives reality a moral and aesthetic dimension; and in the same way the scientific and philosophical intelligence prevents religion leading the individual towards insane fanaticism and wrong make belief.
I think there’s no special reason to talk about art and philosophy in this connection, since – very fortunately! – in these things the modern culture has not been able to make the leveling push, that demands the borders to be set so tightly, that not a drop of mysticism falls into the forbidden territory, that the so called enlightenment has claimed to its self. – Though, it is not that it would not have been tried in philosophy, for example: The characteristic need for the philosophy of the 20th century to put analogical marks between the truth and its crystallization in the form of human made language tells in a very striking way about this kind of aim for dangerous petrifying; luckily philosophy has shown to be a little harder to bite for materialism than science, which it swallowed soon after rising into the collective consciousness. (As a side-mark, the church is of course largely the guilty party for this, because it had swept science under the carpet and forced it into a conflict with its self; may we remember Galileo… After this, is it really a miracle that science, after its rise into power, does not especially love religion and does not wish to take its views into consideration in a wide-minded fashion?)
Good, good – this “Occultism of ours” is therefore a pseudo-science, consisting in reality of incomprehensible mess of ideologies thrown into the garbage can of science; of religious ecstasy – demanding psychological observation without a doubt; of philosophy that does not have a slightest scent about exactitude and does not even wish to aim towards it; and on top of that, it is made of all kinds of folkloristic incomprehensibilities, that have been soaked in the sub-consciousness for so long, that they have been cooked together as a some sort of view that hardly stays under a one ism; is this so? – By all means then. We have no need to convert any one, since we know all too well the fact that not many men would have the capability to understand occult philosophy, even if one desired to do so, but that any one who gets distracted into the mirror mazes of the occult sciences, will there engage ones self into terrible dangers; to neuroticism, madness, for the perdition of the immortal soul; the very same soul that so few in these days even really believes in… therefore, DO NOT listen, DO NOT delve deep into our doctrine, DO NOT even try to understand, and without exception DO NOT follow the terrible Cartesian method (left half way by himself) of tearing everything uncertain down into their foundations and seeing the world with new eyes, without premises, the guiding line being only the search for the truth… but understand however the main thesis’ of Occultism and its way to view the world as an interwoven unity, before you start declaring your hymns of victory.
For this is the key: “To view the world as an interwoven unity”. In modern times, when one fashionable word weighs in the scales of “truth” as much as a thousand analogies leading towards real understanding, can Occultism be presented in the following manner:
Occultism (“a secret science”) is a world view, according to which spirit and matter in their different states manifest the modifications of a single substance in the world. According to Occultism, just as a solid object can melt and vaporize in the right circumstances, in the same way can energy change its shape and appearance in different levels of being, starting from the material and transforming through different levels of the psyche and intelligence to a pure spirit. The world view of Occultism in monistic, holistic, and hermeneutical, its theology is most closely describable as a pantheistic henotheism, that regards all existence as a manifestation of a divine substance: therefore all that is manifested is alive and all that is alive is in the same way sacred and holy. The highest Godhead is the Absolute, and from this Absolute countless monadic consciousness’ emanate, descending little by little in power and consciousness, to return later on, through the evolutionary roads of the physical and (especially) those of the soul, back into the absolute having more consciousness than before. The temporal comprehension of Occultism is cyclic, and this cyclical view is seen working as a spiralling movement starting from a certain zero point (laya), through which the non-manifested and un-created transforms into the manifested: in this way the eternal and non-temporality is present in time and above/around it, and time as well as matter are more like projections of consciousness – a subjective illusion, although collective and analogical in its working methods – rather than objective reality external / independent of consciousness. According to its upholders, in Occultism, the forms of which vary in some measure throughout history and culture, there is still a perennial, an un-changeable and a unified system in its core, a system that has been taught in the mystery schools of ancient Greek and Egypt as well as in the Yoga systems of India, in the old religions of the new continent and in the latest ones of the old continent, and there are signs of it everywhere and in every time, since it is the mother root of all differentiated religions and philosophical systems; a trunk from which they all have spread. Occultism considers the evolutionary capability of the human soul as almost infinite, and certainly does not believe the modern man representing the very ultimate peak of evolution. Instead, individuals can through very demanding exercises (that are seen when physical, when psychical, moral or spiritual, although all of these are the one and the same thing in the end) become like “super-men” that have in possession of them miraculous abilities: omniscience, immortality and the power to control natural forces etc. The high-flying metaphysics are an essential part of occultism, where the most essential part is being played by the omnipresence of certain universal basic forces and their general effect both in the microscopic scale as well as also in a profoundly vast scale – in the macrocosm. These basic forces are described usually as seven, ten or (more rarely) as the twelve original archetypes, gods or cosmic-creators, that are the very first emanations of the absolute God-substance and therefore the cosmic basic forces in the basis of all more differentiated forces. An important occult principle is also the connection between consciousness and a certain kind of power and dynamism in the manifestation of all of these forces.
Although it is very easy to stain the name Occultism by connecting into it completely un-justified presentations and un-philosophical New Age -jargon, this kind of delusional association can in reality banish only very superficial people from the observation and study of the matter itself. Many things presented under the name “Occultism” are laughable and irrational, but certainly not as many as those irrationalities presented in the name of religion. Occultism is first and foremost a philosophy, that – as mentioned – does not stop into some premises or dogmas when studying the nature of reality, and after finding the universal basic laws, it applies them with the same kind of systematized organisation and methodology into the fragile spectre of existence itself. The one who gets afraid the vast conclusions of Occultism – say for example the thought about magic, or sentient and conscious beings outside the human mind – does so only because the world view of the Occult sciences is so far from the prejudices one has secretly adopted and learned from the outside, not because the Occult thoughts or views would be more miraculous than any incomprehensible creation of nature: the fact that I’m writing here, and later on the reader can follow the course of my thought in a collectively fabricated reality by adhering to external symbols; or that from the seed of another being can evolve another, conscious being in the womb of its mother; that there are countless shining star systems in the depth of the space; the fact that the bird is singing in the tree nearby; the fact that Homer created his Odyssey or that Jesus has presented The Sermon of the Mount. The totality of existence is a continous, incomprehensible, truly a silencing miracle, and the levitations of the occult adepts and the fabric-herring moors don’t seem so strange after one truly understands this.