Category Archives: Hermetic Library Reading Room

The Hermetic Library Reading Room is an imaginary and speculative future reification of the library in the physical world, a place to experience a cabinet of curiosities offering a confabulation of curation, context and community that engages, archives and encourages a living Western Esoteric Tradition. If you would like to contribute to the Hermetic Library Reading Room, consider supporting the library or contact the librarian.

The Psychology of Transference

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Psychology of the Transference by C G Jung:

The central matter of this book is Jung’s exigesis of the illustrations to the “Rosarium Philosophorum,” in keeping with his psychological reading of medieval alchemy. The sequence of illustrations with their original captions is worth sustained attention in its own right. Jung’s explanations are sometimes mildly incoherent—a fact which he recognizes and excuses on the grounds that he is attempting to address inherently unconscious processes.

He is right to note that the “transference” process is not unique to the analyst-analysand relationship, but is common to the vast majority of spousal scenarios, and in a more general way to the experience of “objective” reality as a whole. And yet, despite his prefatory digression that “The Church would be an ideal solution for anyone seeking a suitable receptacle for the chaos of the unconscious, were it not that everything man-made, however refined, has its imperfections,” (par. 392) he constrains his discussion of psychological projection in religious contexts to the doctrinally hypostasized figures of myth and doctrine, rather than treating the actual relationships among worshippers and religious officials. Perhaps he balked (unconsciously?) at making so plain the sacerdotal role of the psychoanalyst! [via]

Accelerando

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Accelerando (Singularity) by Charles Stross:

I’ve read all of Charles Stross’s Laundry novels, which are humorous neo-Lovecraftian espionage adventures. Those involve extensive homages to various earlier writers, with some consequent inflections of writing style. Accelerando is the first of Stross’s straight-ahead science fiction books I’ve digested, and I presume it represents a more direct delivery of his authorial voice. (There’s a simulated Lovecraft cameo at page 337, though.)

In subject matter, this book seemed most comparable to the excellent work of Ian McDonald, with an ambitious 21st-century futurology involving radical technologies of simulation, artificial intelligence, and enhancement of human capability. But true to his title, Stross imposes a pace of change far in excess of what I’ve seen in McDonald’s books. He has evidently taken Moore’s Law of integrated circuit development and its extrapolation in Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns as the axioms of his story about what might become of our species and our planet. Not only does Stross have the intellectual fortitude to narratively stare down the “technological singularity” but he also confronts Fermi’s Paradox. He enlists Ray Bradbury’s notion of the matrioshka brain, Robert L. Forward’s starwisp, and other inventions that seem inevitable in the face of unchecked technological development.

Given some of the topical focus, I was prepared for the futurological flavor of this book to have something in common with Olav Stapledon’s Star Maker. Instead, I was surprised to sense a certain kinship to 1970s-era Robert Heinlein novels. Perhaps Heinlein’s orientation to the aerospace research of his day has its analog in Stross’s own background in software engineering. Moreover, the characters and their motivations are sketched in the manner that reminds me much more of Heinlein than, say, McDonald.

The novel has a triple-triadic structure, with the nine chapters having seen individual publication as short stories prior to their assembly here. As a consequence, there is something of an expositional “reset” at the start of each part, with a little redundancy and narrative hand-holding. But in light of the huge changes in context imposed by each transition from one part to the next, the effect is barely noticeable, and actually somewhat comforting. Another effect of this compositional process is that each chapter seems to have roughly the same dramatic weight as the others. The last of them could be read equally as climax or denouement, depending on the reader’s inclination. Each of the three larger sections is focused on a successive generation of a single family moving deeper into the trans-human condition.

While not as overtly comedic as the Laundry books, Accelerando definitely has its share of laughs, many of them with a black sense of humor, such as the throwaway mention of cannibalistic cuisine on page 262. The characters are strong enough to keep the narrative rolling, despite its frequent interruption with bulletin-style text bringing the reader up to date on the state of (post-)human affairs for the decade in question. The entire book — excepting the occasional retrospective glance — is written in the present tense, and it is a mark of Stross’s artistry in using this unconventional technique for novel-length fiction in English that I didn’t even notice until I had read most of the way through the first large chapter. In the seven years since it has been collected into a novel, history has of course provided some contradictions to point up the status of Accelerando as a fiction, but the sort of events it proposes could still credibly be in our future. [via]

The Baphomet

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Baphomet by Pierre Klossowski, with an introduction by Michel Foucault:

This novel, with its appetizing title, is a brief-but-heavy excursion into and out of history. The prologue takes place in a commandery of the Knights Templar mere days before their arrest by the French authorities. But the story proper occurs in some sort of bardo inhabited by the disembodied “breaths” of Jacques de Molay, Theresa d’Avila, Friederich Nietzsche, and others.

The prose alternates between wild philosophical speculation and striking sensuous image. Klossowski uses the narrative form to advance the most original metaphysical notions that I have encountered in a good long while. He acknowledges the Gnostic notions of metempsychosis, Christian eschatological resurrection, and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, and comes up with a component that they all missed.

I don’t wish to say any more for a text that, in able translation, speaks so well for itself. Hail to the Prince of Modifications! [via]

The Comedy of Agony

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Comedy of Agony: A Book of Poisonous Contemplations by Christopher Spranger from Leaping Dog Press:

This slender volume of aphoristic meditations can be read in a variety of ways. One possibility is to consider it to be instructional scripture by Tyler Durden. Another would be a rich mine of sigfile quotes guaranteed to offend the pious and conventionally-minded. I think this one may need to go in my Christmas cards: “Had she only miscarried, the Virgin Mary could have saved the world.”

Spranger’s religious reflections presume a Biblical-Miltonian narrative, although his atheology has a wide scope, including admiration for the metaphysically sadistic aesthetics of Asian Buddhism. There’s no indication of familiarity with Aleister Crowley’s work, but Spranger’s strong affinity for and constant allusion to Nietzsche (who, unnamed throughout, is referenced once as “a certain leg-puller”) makes him a close cousin to Thelemites, at any rate. In particular, his piece on “The Attractions of Rage” makes a fine complement to Crowley’s chapter on love in Little Essays Toward Truth, and he makes some insightful remarks on the Thelemically-vexed term “compassion”: “Men to whom agony is unknown have grabbed a hold of this concept and perverted it completely, reducing it to something low and effortless, when in fact compassion requires risk and presupposes rank.”

Spranger is evidently resigned to embodiment, attachment, strife and sorrow, but he writes that like it’s a bad thing. One wonders what the return of Saturn has in store for the 28-year-old author. [via]

Jethro Tull’s Aqualung

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Jethro Tull’s Aqualung (33 1/3) by Allan F Moore, book 14 in the 33 1/3 series from Bloomsbury Academic:

Author Allan Moore (just one L, not the celebrated comics writer) heads up a university department of music and sound recording, and it shows in this study of the Jethro Tull album Aqualung. Writing for a popular audience, Moore takes some care not to get too musically arcane, and he explains technical terms as he introduces them. Even so, there are a few passages in the book where his discussion of chord sequences made my eyes glaze over a bit, and I’m enough of a musician to have played many of those chords myself out of a Jethro Tull sheet music book I have.

One aspect of the musical discussion that I found very worthwhile was consideration of the “sound box” — i.e. the virtual acoustic environment engineered through stereo sound — in tandem with the instrumentation and other recording effects. I’ve read one other volume in this “33 1/3″ series about the masterpieces of audio vinyl, and this element didn’t come up in that case.

Besides the musical features of Aqualung, a chief part of its incontrovertible lyrical and semiotic substance is a struggle with/over religion. In this case, the lack of sophistication in Moore’s treatment might be due to either his trepidation about confronting readers with difficult religious ideas, or his own anemic grasp of them. Anyhow, while he makes a few interesting points on these lines — such as his consideration of the charcters in “Locomotive Breath,” — he ultimately doesn’t do justice to Ian Anderson’s perversely pious and profound confrontation with conventional Christianity.

Still, the whole book is a quick read, and if its only effect had been to motivate me to reacquaint myself with a terrific album of music, it would have been well worth my time. [via]

Nomad Codes

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica by Erik Davis:

Erik Davs’ Nomad Codes is a beefy collection of mostly-short articles and essays written during the decades on either side of Y2K, in contemplation of music, drugs, literature, magick, and all manner of cultural weirdness. For the most part, these are biographical studies of creative figures and popular anthropology of countercultures, but there are a couple of movie reviews, and other less identifiable literary forms.

I was pleased to see Davis employ the category of ludibrium in his “Shards of the Diamond Matrix,” but the result wasn’t nearly as compelling to me as the personal anecdotes that surface in various various travelogue passages, in the prefatory “Teenage Head” memoirette, and the two brief essays “Diamond Solitaire” and “Remote Control.” These latter pieces seem to be signposts for the two (complementary?) spiritual conditions that Davis is most concerned to indicate: mystical engagement and paranoid alienation. Unlike his ludibrium, the more theoretical piece on “Tantric Psychedelia” uses tantra to refer to the Asian religious tradition, not the popularized sex mysticism of neo-tantra.

With dozens of pieces broken out into five sloppily thematic sections, there’s quite a bit of variety here. Davis approaches his material intelligently, but he doesn’t condescend to his subjects or his readers, and the book is a pleasure to read. I seem to share his interests sufficiently that, in many cases, his exposition didn’t show me anything new, but I enjoyed it anyway. And there were certainly a few ideas and people I was grateful to encounter for the first time. [via]

Superior Beings

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Superior Beings. If They Exist, How Would We Know?: Game-Theoretic Implications of Omnipotence, Omniscience, Immortality, and Incomprehensibility by Steven J Brams:

The plural “Beings” in the title of this book is a little misleading. The text is not a discussion of polytheistic deity, angels, praeterhuman extraterrestrials, or hidden adepts. It is instead an application of game theory mathematics to the issue of relationships between a hypothetical person (P) and a “superior being” (SB). Moreover, the “superior being” postulated is of the sovereign type common to Abrahamic monotheism. In creating his preference rankings for applying various 2×2 game matrices to relations between SB and P, Brams uses interpretations of biblical narratives as justifications. My own esoteric interests had me coming to this book with curiosity about its conclusions relative to mahatmas or secret chiefs, but I find that its models are far more relevant to relations between an aspirant and his personal genius, or Holy Guardian Angel.

“Superior being” seems to be a deliberate weakening of the “supreme being” used in Western theological parlance. Brams is interested in modeling relations with a being whose powers and horizons immeasurably exceed the human, but he is not concerned with the traditional and trivial paradoxes of rigorous omnipotence. By positing an SB that submits to the calculus of the games in this book, he suggests that the answer to the question “Could God create a rock so big that He couldn’t lift it?” is certainly yes. And he accurately points out the fact that some passages of the Bible indicate a God of vast but finite power.

Still, the dependence on biblical notions of divine behavior is awfully limiting for anyone with a genuine philosophical interest in “superior beings.” The author seems to admit as much when he refers to a game schematic “which seems to offer a generic representation of God’s retribution in the Bible — and maybe elsewhere” (139). (Even so, the notion of the Biblical God as the national genius of the Hebrews makes these game representations reasonable on a certain level.) Brams does provide some interesting challenges to Pascal’s Wager, and he concludes with a novel perspective on the Problem of Evil.

The book is also an engaging introduction to the mathematical techniques involved in game theory analyses. Brams presumes no prior experience in game theory on the reader’s part, and provides a rich context for examining these logical tools. [via]