Steven Parmenius

We are living in THE capitalist moment. What I mean by this is that we are living in the midst of a stunning revelation of the nature and logic of the institutions that govern us. This revelation is clearest of course in the United States becasue that great nation does nothing by halfs and is not constrained by the virtuous mediocrity that confines Canadians to nibbling around the edges of problems rather than attacking the gordian knot. In that nation both Democrats and Republicans have agreed that in a crisis such as a war or a pandemic the number one priority is maintaining the discipline of workers. The solution to this has been brilliant: bail out corporations and give crumbs to workers. This means that in order to access any real benefit the worker must return to work in the hopes that SOME of the multi-trillion dollar bailout will trickle down to her. It does not matter how safe she feels: when the boss wants work to resume the client must go or face destitution. Had there been ...

   Jung, in his essay “Paracelsus as Spiritual Phenomenon”, mentions a verse by Angelus Silesius that may well, he thinks, be Paracelsan in inspiration.   It goes as follows: “I am like God and God like me. I am as Large as God, He is as small as I. He cannot above me, nor I beneath him be.” This he relates to the following statement by Paracelsus: “I under God and God under me”. This language is jarring enough to comment on. For Jung it is the language of suppressed humanist revolt (which it may in part be) though I would suggest a different approach is possible. Paracelsus, perhaps, experiences a divine/human polarity in which each term is relative to the other though each operates in and through the other. The basis of this duality or polarity is an occluded principle of identity which is, in the divine/human polarity, sundered. God self-actualizes in the human and the human self-actualizes in God. Behind God as one term in a conceptual polarity (the God who is ‘cr...

On my night table sits a copy of the Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena and I peruse it on a semi-regular basis as the problem it deals with, the alignment of our faculties of memory, knowledge and love is my problem and everyone else's problem too. Do I love as I know? No I do not and the section I read last night brought this home to me with unique force. Matthew 18:20 takes on a typically medieval allegorical twist in her treatment for the two, or more properly three, who are gathered in the presence of the Word, are the familiar Augustinian faculties of remembering, knowing and willing (or loving). The Word gathers the manifold into the unity of co-inherence in which the faculties mutually support rather than inhibit each other. This is true externally, in the community, but also true in the inwardness of the mind. With the shrewdness of true mystics though, St. Catherine continues by pointing out that the Word is not present in any gathering of ONE. The word is not present ...

Jung, in his groundbreaking studies of alchemy, opposes alchemy and Christian orthodoxy seeing the former as a humanistic revolt that, in an esoteric and symbolically displaced form, elevated the human to equality with God. Of course, the Neo-Platonists masters of magic, of whom we might take Iamblichus as chief, warn against exactly this kind of conclusion. The seeds of magical operation are graciously implanted in the natural realm (by way of correspondence) and are effective only by the grace of the higher gods. In this Iamblichus almost approaches the Christian concept of a miracle though such divine action is not exceptional or ad hoc like a miracle but part of the total cosmic operation. Nonetheless I think Jung was on to something. Reading a late hermetic thinker like Atwood (mentioned above) brings to light a profound tension in European culture between Christian and other, potentially subversive, elements. Atwood is an excellent case study in this as she was the wife of an ...

Let me resume with something I read the other day: a learned author discussing Newton’s interest in alchemy. This is something I can’t comment on from a scholarly standpoint but the gist of his claim is that Newton’s interest in alchemical writings was ‘scientific’ not ‘magical’. ( https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-problem-of-alchemy ). For instance, he asserts that Newton thought he could explain alchemy on mechanistic principles. Of course the author admits, indeed asserts strongly, that there was no clear line between magic and science in the 17 th century and that we should more properly say that Newton’s interest in alchemy is what we would now call ‘scientific’. This seems plausible enough but the author seems to me to miss another pertinent distinction that makes the question much clearer and simpler. There WAS a clear distinction in the 17 th century only it was not the anachronistic distinction between ‘magic’ and ‘science’. The war in the 17 th Century was...

                 What makes thinking magical thinking? There is a very easy answer to this question of course: magical thinking is any thinking I believe is foolish or immature. In this sense magical thinking is simply a pejorative phrase I apply to other people’s mistaken notions. Can we define magical thinking in a more precise sense though? We can start with an example I have heard enough times to take as an exemplar of what it means to think magically. Of course, every time I hear this tale it transpires in a different place. For this reason I have a mild suspicion it is apocryphal though I don’t know this for certain nor is it relevant for even if this story were literally, factually true it is being used as an ‘urban legend’. So, either in New Guinea or ‘somewhere in Africa I forget where’ or perhaps in the Amazonian jungle there is a belief that a certain ’magical salve’ stops bullets. Of course, since every such anecdote has a mora...