An article of faith

"Doubt is a pain too lonely
to know faith is his brother."
~ Khalil Gibran

 

 

 

 

 

The Fifth Key of the Tarot, known variously as the Pope or, more commonly, the Hierophant (the word literally means 'teacher of holy things'), is the sixth card along the journey of the Fool. The Law of Fives, that false teacher, suggests it should be significant (not only is it the fifth key, but the prime factors of six sum to... five).

 

We've intimated previously that knowledge is bound by unsurmountable limitations, and that transcendental truth cannot be gained through the application of reason alone. What is left is what necessarily underpins any edifice of reason: faith.

 

Faith is what the Hierophant offers - faith, the "substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," as the Book of Hebrews relates. Faith is often derided in our materialist culture; but the truth is revealed when we consider the foundation of that culture - for it rests on certain axioms of ontology, of epistemology, which in their nature are not and cannot be proven from earlier principles. Faith is the bedrock of rational consciousness: faith, which appears to admit none of the character of reason, turns out to be essential to reason; just as reason, appearing to ridicule faith, depends upon it. This is an intimate paradox, whose nature I shall leave it to the reader to decide.

 

It is tempting to assert that enlightenment, that cannot be accomplished through Reason alone, can be accomplished through Faith. There are even examples that seem to corroborate this assertion; but, in truth, Faith alone fails too. The reason for this is in fact rather subtle; it has to do with the relative plasticity of Reason.

 

Suppose you hold some view derived logically from certain agreed axioms - as a trivial example, suppose you are of the opinion that there are no black swans, based on the empirical observation that you have never seen anything but white swans and the meta-empirical observation that empirical observations are reliable arbiters of actual fact. Suppose you then encounter a black swan. This new datum contradicts a predicate of your hypothesis, and, as a rational thinker, you revise your hypothesis: you accept the existence of black swans (this possibility is why Hume had a Problem with Induction).

 

Now, suppose your belief that all swans were white stemmed from a pure faith, unsullied by Reason. Suppose you encountered a black swan: your faith would not admit its existence. You would rationalize that it was not a swan, or that it was a white swan painted black, or that you imagined it, or any of a hundred other counterfactuals to avoid having to assail your article of faith.

 

Faith in the transcendent is a precursor to enlightenment; faith in the merely subjective is a barrier to enlightenment. And neither Faith, nor Reason, will enable us to tell the difference...

 

This then, is both the power and the peril of the Heirophant: that he offers a reality more permanent than the one we can apprehend through Reason, yet less certainly true.

Clothes maketh the man

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power,
the world will know peace." ~ Jimi Hendrix

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hans Christian Andersen gives us a tale, among many, that concerns a certain Emperor. This Emperor desired clothes suitable for his noble standing and prodigious authority; two wily tailors claimed that they had such garments, possessed of this property - that only persons of the wit and nobility of the Emperor would be able to see them. Accepting the Emperor's gold, they proceeded to drape him in entirely imaginary raiment, before leading His Imperial Majesty to a mirror. Unable to admit that he saw himself naked - mindful that only a mean and ignoble mind would see him thus - the Emperor confessed himself delighted, and went forth among his courtiers. They, like their Emperor, were unwilling to admit what was right before their eyes; bound by convention, by fear, by orthodoxy, they all gathered round and praised the wholly fictitious new clothes. A parade was arranged, the better to display the Emperor's wonderful new clothes to his subjects; as it happened, one of these was a small boy, too foolish to have accepted the conventional wisdom, who cried out "the Emperor is naked!" Horror turned to hilarity as the crowd accepted the boy was right; the power of the Emperor was broken, and he was humiliated.

 

There is a lesson here when we consider the Fourth Key of the Major Arcana, also The Emperor. Where the Empress denotes the natural energy of qi, the Emperor represents the shaping and harnessing of energy, the imposition of will upon the world, the establishment of order. Malaclypse the Younger might remark that the Empress reflects upon the Eristic Illusion, while the Emperor reflects upon the Aneristic Illusion. The truth, as we might guess, is neither of these illusions, and also both.

 

Although the Emperor is the Fourth Key, he is the fifth card in the Major Arcana. The Law of Fives tells us that he should have some significance as a result, but we should be alerted by the presence of the Zeroeth Key that the significance here can be misleading. Parasimplicity necessarily entails doubt, which is another restatement of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. All the same, the stability - the permanence - of The Emperor is another characteristic of the transcendent, and it is interesting to note that the card, self-similarly perhaps, has undergone rather less transformation down the ages than other members of the Arcana. The hidden weakness beneath the apparent strength of The Emperor is the one alluded to in that Andersen fairy tale: namely, that his belief in his own power blinds him to the existence of anything beyond it. Being merely puissant, the Emperor believes himself to be, in King James' memorable phrasing, a "little God on Earth." His inflexibility in a world of flux renders him susceptible to obsolescence.

 

The Emperor is a cautionary tale; emblematic of structure, he carries the implicit reminder that all that can be made, can be unmade. As Solomon's ring reminded him: Gam Zeh Ya'avor.

Pope Joan

"I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope
and all his Cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self."
~ Martin Luther

 

 

 

 

The Pope is the spiritual leader of Roman Catholicism, the 'Vicar of Christ,' God's right hand on Earth. According to orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine, the Pope is infallible - his word is divinely inspired, and so cannot be in error (the Muslim prophet Mohammed, in what you may see as an echo or evolution or reflection of this, remarked in the Hadith that "my people cannot agree on error;" as a result, ijma, or 'consensus,' is considered in scholarly Islamic circles to be a basis of religious authority. Authority, and fallibility, have not been explicitly discussed as yet, but of course they are centrally important to a parasimplistic worldview). One might expect that in the spiritually symbolic Major Arcana, one would find a Pope, and one does (his number, as Malaclypse the Younger could tell you, is 5, and we'll come to a discussion of his import later); but first, one finds a Popess.

 

The reason for this is tied in with the numerology we talked about a while ago, the arithmetic underpinning of the Law of Fives. The Magician, numbered 1, represents the apotheosis of the Self in this moment (allegorically, the Self in the moment of satori, the Self in the moment of awareness of itself qua self) - but this Sein-in-der-Welt is, of course, not the parasimplistic self, which is both itself and something more than itself. The Magician is identity, and Identity is an illusion.

 

The Popess, numbered 2, is duality; this is represented most clearly by her obvious femininity, by contrast with the foregoing two cards (respectively showing Man in the folly of ignorance, and Man in the folly of self-knowledge). In Rider-Waite, she is shown with a crescent Moon at her feet - this is also the iconographic depiction of the Virgin in Roman Catholicism, in reference to the Book of Revelations (and, intriguingly, according to one theory, in reference to Catholicism itself, and what came before it) - and wears the diadem of Hathor, the Egyptian "Mistress of the West." Both allusions identify the Popess with motherhood, with the divine, and with the yin energy of the taijitu. In Rider-Waite, she is depicted holding the Torah and seated between the pillars of the Temple of Solomon, reinforcing the syncretism of the imagery.

 

(The Popess also has a historical imagery to it, a very early and subversive element of proto-feminism, but despite her appearance in the title, Pope Joan is not a subject for discussion in this metanow.)

 

The Popess can be understood as the apotheosis of the female, which is more than mere Identity because the female can nurture and birth new beings. The female explicitly has something of the divine energy of Creation in her, which the male can merely ape with construction of unliving devices. The symbolism of the Virgin is significant here; the Popess powerfully alludes to the Pagan Triple Goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and the biologically necessary role of the male in conception is not to be understood here as part of the Divine Mystery of creation. Where the Fool represented blind faith, and the Magician self-knowledge, the Popess betokens intuition - a sense of things unseen, complementary to and cumulative with the Magician's arid knowledge of what is clearly before him. The Popess makes the connections between things without needing to know what those things-in-themselves are; the Magician understands things in their nature without appreciating the wholeness of the world. Thus the necessity of union between the energies for balance, and for enlightenment.

Taking stock

"Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory
but that it is institutional." ~ Terry Eagleton


On its face, "parasimplicity" looks a lot like an excuse to make things that are really simple a lot more complex. But, as I hope you've picked up by now, what parasimplicity - or anything else - looks like isn't close to being what it really is. For instance - and this is just a 'for instance' - it also serves as a handy tool for making things that are really complex a lot more simple. The Law of Fives is extremely simple, and as good a shorthand for the very complex things it actually references (which this collection of blogs to date has similarly referenced but at more length, including the obligatory self-similar discussions of the Law of Fives itself). The reduction of all paradoxes to the twin paradigms of All-in-One and One-in-All is another parasimplistic operation (actually the final operation in a chain that begins with the appreciation of all statements as interactions of paradoxes, but we'll get to that).

So, how do we apply parasimplicity? How do mountains become not-mountains, and then not-rivers become rivers? If you've been paying attention, you may already know. What you know may even be what I was trying to say; equally, what you know may be more than what I know. We can't know what we don't know, but we'll get to that, too.

Let's tie in the koan to our five-layer reality cake.

Mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers - this we can consider to be referring to the objective mountains and rivers. Bear in mind that these are not mountains and rivers we can ever directly know: we form subjective impressions of the relations of properties we intuit as belonging to the objective realm, and that is as close as we can get to knowing them.

Mountains are not-mountains and rivers are not-rivers - these not-mountains and not-rivers are not, as you might be forgiven for thinking, equivalent in our model to the subjective mountain- and river-impressions. The not-mountain is the intersubjective mountain: the mountain that emerges from discourse, from interrogation of our subjective mountain-impressions. IF the objective mountain is real, and IF our impressions of it are accurate, and IF we share our impressions truthfully, and IF we don't later edit or filter our consensus to fit some concept of 'truth' - and those are all very big 'ifs' indeed, which we'll review when we turn to Baconian Idols in the near future - then the not-mountain may be apparently identical with the mountain (this is one of the cruder approaches to paradox resolution, in fact - the rejection of the paradox as presented on the grounds that the presentation is corrupted by one or more of these factors). But not-mountains are, well, not mountains..

Mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers - these 'again' mountains and rivers are the transcendental mountains and rivers, which we have said are immanent upon the subjective (we might, with a sly wink at Dali, say they are immanent upon the objective as well; in fact Dali's paranoiac-critical method is another rewarding subject for study). We have already said that we can't directly know the objectively real mountain - so how can we possibly hope to know the transcendental mountain beyond? We cannot cross the same river twice (so claims Heraclitus), so how can we know the transcendental river that is beyond all those once-crossed iterations?

The answer is that we need to work against our brilliant knowledge-building engines, our glorious rational Big Brains. We are hardwired to recognize patterns, and we are hardwired to filter and sort the data our brains receive to make it a coherent conscious experience (a trivial example with which you're probably familiar: optics being what it is, the visual data we receive on our retinae is inverted; our brains flip the image over during processing to restore it to its putative objective orientation). However, if we seek the transcendental, that which is equally remote from all things, that in which mountains are again mountains is equivalent to mountains are not mountains or even mountains are rivers - we won't find it after our brains are through processing the data.

Recall that objective entities are entirely separate from subjective ones. Yet our brains, in processing the data from the objective, produce impressions that are subjective and are qualitatively the same as Humean ideas that have no relation to empirical data whatsoever. What this tells us is that the process of rational cognition is capable of bridging the divide that separates objective and subjective - and what that is really telling us is that, somewhere in there, we are working in the transcendental. Each and every one of us, it turns out, is also a Gateless Gate.

The transcendental Universe is self-similar, not only with the objective, but with the myriad subjective Universe-impressions. We could, perhaps, approach some rational understanding of the transcendental if we could somehow simultaneously apperceive all of those possible subjective information-states; but the self-similarity of the Universe, embodied in the Gateless Gate of each self-aware consciousness, makes this unnecessary.

How do you pass through a Gateless Gate? Begin with a gate, and take the gate away so it becomes gateless. Then pass through. 'Get OUT,' as Crowley had it.

The womb of truth

“Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute,
and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself
and yet never escapes itself.” ~ T. S. Eliot

 

Over the last couple of posts, we’ve looked at paradoxes – statements that seem to be understandable in our representative system, but produce confounding results. Mandelbrot’s statement that a coastline gets longer the shorter the scale of measurement becomes is an example of a paradox of infinite recursion; Godel’s statement that any logical system must be inconsistent or incomplete exemplifies a paradox of self-referentiality. I will hereby gift you another of my unsubstantiated assertions: all paradoxes are either paradoxes of infinite recursion, and so statements about the One-in-All; or they are paradoxes of self-referentiality, and so statements about the All-in-One.

These concepts of One-in-All and All-in-One, to which we briefly alluded some time ago in a discussion of the Phoenix, are important in theology, where they provide analogies for the Divine. Within the pentapartite model of reality outlined early in the life of this blog, these concepts are transcendental – they derive meaning only as relations with ideals, or metarelations.

Systems constructed by our rational faculty cannot grasp these metarelations, because they are bound to the objective and subjective realms. Even though I am providing you the raw material for a scheme that describes metarelations, it necessarily falls short of being properly descriptive – my assertion that there exists something beyond our understanding is not at all the same thing as an assertion that this specific entity here is understandable as being beyond our understanding (in fact, you might be able to recognize this second construction as a restatement of the paradox of self-referentiality). Nevertheless, an examination of paradoxes has value – not only as an intellectual exercise, but also as a spiritual one.

Nicolas of Cusa, known also as Cusanus, elaborated a sophisticated philosophy around this notion of paradox as a womb of truth in the transcendental sense. He posited a cosmology in which God was both within and beyond the All of Creation and the Nothingness of Void; he described God as the non aliud, the ‘not-other,’ that is, the thing which is neither One nor the Other (this can be seen as a challenge to the Aristotelian Law of the Excluded Middle, an anticipation of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, or yet another restatement of the paradox of self-referentiality). For Cusanus, God was the unimaginable union of All and Nothing in One.

(A quick aside: note that Cusanus here introduces a third element to our earlier picture of One-in-All and All-in-One. In fact, we can now talk of One-in-Nothing, All-in-Nothing, One-in-All, Nothing-in-All, and All-in-One. We could talk of Nothing-in-One, but that would actually be Two, harking back to our earlier discussion of essential numerology. The cosmology of One, Nothing, and All is another restatement of the Law of Fives.)

Cusanus accepted that God was unknowable, in accordance with Church teaching (he was a Bishop of Rome in the Catholic Church). He nevertheless felt that we could understand something of the Divine, seeing perhaps “as through a glass darkly” but seeing nonetheless. Cusanus believed this could be accomplished by meditation upon the coincidentia oppositorum, the “marriage of opposites” – in the sense that paradoxes simultaneously defy and unify the opposites of True and False in a bivalent logic, they are ripe for Cusanian study.

Creatio ex nihilo

“Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.”
~ Robert Smithson

 

Zero is believed to have been invented as a number like other numbers by the Indians, somewhere between the fifth and ninth centuries. The idea of ‘null space’ or the ‘void’ was known and used by earlier cultures, but the Indians were the first to produce a symbol that could be utilized in mathematical calculations to represent the void. When we consider numbers today, it is appropriate for us to begin with zero as the unique numerical symbol for nothingness – indeed, when we derive mathematical operations from set theory this is exactly how we do start, with zero as the symbol for the empty set.

If the first number is zero, denoting nothingness, then the second number – one – denotes identity. In set-theoretic terms, it is the set which can have only one possible element (the set of the empty set, in fact). This set-theoretic interrelation between nothingness and oneness is mirrored in the symbolism of the taijitu, and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo – something out of nothing.

The existence of zero and of one as numbers generates the concept of category; a unitary entity having more than one component subentities. The simplest structure of category is duality – the category that has exactly two elements, as ‘one and zero.’ The numerical symbol for duality is two.

Three elaborates this concept of category further into the more general plurality. Where twoness denotes a paradigm of either/or, a binary system within which ‘one’ may acceptably and completely be defined as ‘not-zero,’ threeness opens a doorway – a Gateless Gate, indeed – onto countable infinities of paradigm in which each element is uniquely itself and cannot be defined in terms of any other element (although it can be defined in terms of all other elements, with reference to the established concepts of nothingness, identity, and duality).

Four, being both the sum and the product and the power of two twos, embodies divisibility. This is a further elaboration upon plurality – with the addition of fourness, we now find that there exist some plural entities which are both entities in themselves and unions of lesser entities. We can, of course, derive numbers along the real number line by defining mathematical operators that utilize this principle more generally – indeed, we could do that when we had only zeros and ones to play with – but fourness is the philosophical symbol that uniquely develops this concept.

These, then, are the numbers which symbolize the essential concepts of being: nothingness, identity, duality, plurality, and divisibility. You probably already realized this, but we have just derived another expression for the Law of Fives.

A legal discursion

“The real reality is out there, but everything you know about ‘it’ is in your mind,
and yours to do with as you like.” ~ Malaclypse the Younger

 

I shall begin, as may already have become anticipated, with something that appears unrelated entirely to the question at hand. FIAT applies, of course.

The story I am about to relate, as with most of my stories, is not my own. It has been suggested that there are, after all, very few stories but a great proliferation of forms - the six-word story famously produced by Earnest Hemingway ("For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.") is composed in a profoundly limiting format, but you will be familiar with numerous elaborations upon it without having to consult your memory for long. This particular story is both itself, and a metaphor for itself, and a metaphor for this writing in which I relate the story, and a metaphor for FIAT itself. That seems to be a lot of freight, and it may not become any less when I confidently relate that you may appreciate it on any or none of these levels and still understand it as perfectly, or imperfectly, as anybody else.

Let those who have eyes to see, then, see this.

Some years ago - it doesn't matter how many - there was a gentleman who took the peculiar name of Malaclypse the Younger (this much of the story is true). He got together with another gentleman, glorying in the yet more peculiar name of Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, and these two gentlemen under the influence of some mellow psychoactive materials produced a book, within which was a great deal that was never meant to be understood. Among the most important of these was the Law of Fives, formulated and stated by Malaclypse the Younger (on page 00016) as follows:

All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or multiples of five, or are somehow
directly or indirectly appropriate to five. The law of fives is never wrong.

Lord Omar was, at some later unspecified time, to sagely observe: "I find the Law of Fives to be more manifest the harder I look," this being a substantially clearer explanation of the law than its statement by Malaclypse.

I didn't say it was a very good story.

Moving from - or, depending upon your perspective, through - that to the nature of being is as easy as listing the distinctly separate understandings of being which collectively inform my usage of the verb...