This article is
excerpted from Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology by
Peter Lamborn Wilson, Christopher Bamford, and Kevin Townley, with an
introduction by Zia Inayat-Khan. Used by permission of the publisher,
Lindisfarne books (http://www.lindisfarne.org/)
Nature
loves to hide (Becoming is a secret process). – Heraclitus (Guy
Davenport Translation)
The
sciences must all be made poetic. – Novalis [1]
If God can become man, he can also become
element, stone, plant, animal. Perhaps there is a continual Redemption in
nature. – Novalis
If the world is a tree, we are the
blossoms. – Novalis [2]
Santos-Dumont, the Parisian-Brazilian aviation pioneer and inventor of the
airplane, during a sojourn in his native land in 1934, saw federalist planes
dropping bombs on rebel troops. He hanged himself later that day. His last
words, as reported by an elevator operator: "I never thought that my invention
would cause bloodshed between brothers. What have I done?" [3]
For historians to say that A leads
inevitably to Z – for example, that German Romanticism leads inevitably to
Reaction, or that Marx leads directly to Stalin – is to mistake the bitter
wisdom of hindsight for a principle of fatality. Such determinism also insults
all revolutionary resistance with the implicit charge of stupid futility: –
Since the real Totality is always perfectly inevitable, its enemies are always
idiots. Global Capital was inevitable and now it's here to stay-ergo the entire
movement of the Social amounts to sheer waste of time and energy. The ruination
of nature was fated, hence all resistance is futile, whether by ignorant savages
or perverse eco‑terrorists. Nothing's worth doing except that which is done:
there can be no "different world."
The "Ruination
of Nature"
For Christianity nature is fallen, locus
of sin and death, while heaven is a city of crystal and metal. For Capital
nature is a resource, a pit of raw materials, a form of property. As nature
begins to "disappear" in the late eighteenth century, it comes to
seem more and more ruined. For some perhaps a Romantic, even a magical ruin (as
in the dreams of Renaissance magi and their "love of ruins," grottos,
the broken and "grotesque") – but by others felt simply as useless
waste, a wrecked place where no one lives except monsters, vagabonds, animals:
the uncanny haunt of ghouls and owls. "Second Nature" meaning
culture, or even "Third Nature" meaning Allah knows what precisely,
have usurped and erased all wilderness. [4] What remains but mere
representation?--a nostalgia for lost Edens, Arcadias and Golden Ages?--a
ludicrous sentimentality disguised as what? – as a sacred theory of earth?
The view of Nature as Ruin depends in part
(or half‑consciously) on the concept of a Cartesian ergo sum alone in a
universe where everything else is dead matter and "animals have no
soul," mere meat machines. But if the human body remains part of nature or
in nature, then even a consistent materialist would have to admit that nature
is not quite yet dead.
Science, taking over the mythic task of
religion, strives to "free" consciousness from all mortal taint. Soon
we'll be posthuman enough for cloning, total prosthesis, machinic immortality.
But somehow a shred of nature may remain, a plague perhaps, or the great global
"accident," blind Nature's revenge, meteors from outer space, etc. –
"you know the score," as William Burroughs used to say.
Taking the long view (and allowing for
noble exceptions) science does precisely what State and Capital demand of
it:-make war, make money. "Pure" science is allowed only because it
might lead to technologies of death and profit-and this was just as true for
the old alchemists who mutated into Isaac Newton, as for the new physicists who
ripped open the structure of matter itself. Even medicine (seemingly the most
altruistic of sciences) advances and progresses primarily in order to increase
productivity of workers and generate a world of healthy consumers.
Does Capital make death ultimately more
profitable than life? No, not exactly, although it might seem so to a citizen
of Bhopal/ Love Canal/Chernobyl. In effect it might be said that profit equals
death, in the sense of Randolph Bourne's quip about war as the health of the
state (which incidentally means that "Green Capitalism" is an abject
contradiction in terms).
Another science might have been possible. Indeed if we reject the
notion of fatality, another science might yet come to be. A new paradigm is
always conceivable, and theories now considered defeated, lost, wrong, and
absurd, might even (someday) be reconfigured into a paradigmatic pattern, a
science for life rather than death. Signs of emergence of such a science are
always present--because science itself wants to deal with truth, and life is
true and real. But the emergence is always-in the long run-crushed and
suppressed by the "inevitable" demands of technology and Capital. It's
our tragic fate to know and yet be unable to act.
Among those who do act, the scientists and
warriors, many believe (for the most part sincerely) that they're serving
progress and democracy. In their secret hearts perhaps some of them know they
serve Death, but they do it anyway because they're nihilists, cynically greedy
for big budgets and Nobel prizes. A few fanatics actually hate the body, hate
Earth, hate trees-and serve as shills for politicians and corporations. In
general most people find all this normal. Only a few awake – but are blocked
from action.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries a sort of three-way scientific paradigm war was waged in England and
Europe. The contenders were, first: Cartesianism – which denied action at a distance
and tried to explain gravity by a corpuscular theory that reduced the universe
to a clock-like mechanism set in motion by "God"; second,
Hermeticism, the ancient science of the micro/macrocosm, which believed firmly
in action at a distance but failed to explain gravity – and (even worse) failed
to achieve the transmutation of lead into gold, which would at least have
secured for it the enthusiastic support of State and capital; and, third, the
school of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, culminating in the Royal Society –
and the Industrial Revolution.
This scheme is vastly oversimplified of
course. The actual history of "the triumph of modern science" is far
more complex than the usual triumphalist version. We now know for example that
some of the very founders of modern science were closet hermeticists. Bacon's
New Atlantis exhibits strong Rosicrucian tendencies. Erasmus Darwin, Boyle,
Priestly, Benjamin Franklin, and most notoriously, Isaac Newton, all immersed
themselves in occult studies. Newton devoted millions of words to alchemy but
never published a single one of them. William Blake, who skewered Newton's
dead, "Urizenic" rationalism, had no idea that Newton was an
alchemist. I've always suspected that Newton simply stole the idea of gravity
as action at a distance (an invisible force) from Hermeticism. Amazingly, the
math worked. The Royal Society suppressed its own hermetic origins and
(especially after 1688) adhered to the new bourgeois monarchy, emergent
capitalism, and Enlightenment rationalism. The spooky nature of Newtonian
gravity still bothers some scientists, who persist in looking for corpuscular
"gravitons." But the Newtonians won the paradigm war and
"Newton's Sleep" (as Blake called it) still dims the eyes with which
we perceive and experience reality, despite the new spookiness of relativity
and quantum paradoxes.
Admittedly this historical sketch is very
rough, and offered with some trepidation. The whole story of the paradigm war
remains quite murky, in part because a great deal of research is still being
written from a History of Science p.o.v. deeply infected with triumphalism.
True, it's no longer fashionable to sneer at the alchemists or write as if
everyone in the Past were stupid. But alchemy and hermeticism in general are
still viewed in the light of modern science as failed precursors. The central
hermetic doctrine of the "ensouled universe" receives no credence or
even sympathy in academia-and very little grant money goes to magicians.
Therefore I offer only a tentative
hypothesis. It appears that both the Cartesians and the Newtonians happily
agreed in their eagerness to discard and deride the central thesis of the
hermetic paradigm, the idea of the living Earth. Descartes envisioned only
"dead matter," Newton used the concept of invisible but material
forces; and their followers turned their backs on any "sacred theory of
earth," banishing not only God from their clockwork oranges but even life
itself. As Novalis put it, under the hands of these scientists "friendly
nature died, leaving behind only dead, quivering remnants." These loveless
scientists see nature as sick or even dead, and their search for truth leads
only to "her sickroom, her charnel‑house." [5]
Goethe, too, attacked the kind of science
that bases itself on death-the butterfly pinned under glass or dissected rather
than the butterfly living and moving. In his great work on the morphology of
plants he founded a new branch of botany. Or rather, perhaps not quite
"new." Brilliant as it was, it had predecessors. In some sense it was
in fact based on hermeticism and especially on Paracelsus, the great sixteenth
century alchemist.[6] German adherents of Naturphilosophie, and such
independent thinkers as Goethe, or indeed Novalis (who was a trained scientist
and professional mining engineer), might really be seen as "neo"
hermeticists, steeped in Paracelsus, Jakob Boehme, and the Rosicrucian literature.
We might call this whole complex or weltanschauung, "Romantic
Science."
Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), a
member of the Royal Society, doctor and inventor, comrade of Watt, Priestly and
Wedgewood, wrote a strange epic poem based on the work of the Swedish botanist
Linnaeus, in which the sex-life of the plants was expressed in hermetic terms
deriving from Paracelsus, who wrote so beautifully of the "Elemental
Spirits" of Earth, Air, Fire and Water: the gnomes, sylphs, salamanders
and undines.7 Darwin's marvelous Botanic Garden influenced P. B. Shelley (who
also admired Darwin's political radicalism); thus Dr. Darwin could be
considered a precursor of English Romanticism but also of Surrealism and the
ecology movement. His poem has all the marks of the complex I've called
neo-hermeticism or Romantic Science. It was published in England almost at the
very time Novalis in Germany was writing his fragmentary "novel" The
Disciples at Saïs, a neglected masterpiece of hermetic-Romantic
science-theory (much admired by the Surrealists). Like The Botanic Garden, it
is long out of print (at least in English).[8]
Early German Romanticism in general can be
"read" as neo-hermeticism. Novalis, Tieck, Wackenroder, and Schlegel,
as well as J. G. Haman, "the Magus of the North," have been vilified
as "enemies of the Enlightenment," [9] but one might prefer to see
them rather as nineteenth century proponents of a seventeenth century
"Rosicrucian Enlightenment" (as Frances Yates called it), now
stripped of its medieval clumsiness: – a rectified hermeticism, refined by
practical experience and dialectical precision. Hermeticism did not stop
"evolving" with the failure of the Rosicrucian project. Romantic science
was a direct continuation of it; and hermeticism has its scientific defenders
even today (such as the well-known chaos scientist Ralph Abraham, a devotee of
Dr. John Dee).
During the Second World War certain
philosophers of both Capitalism and Communism decided to blame fascism on the
German Romantic movement and its "final" theorist F. Nietzsche.
Rationalism was defined as good and surrationalism as evil. Ecologists even
today are often tarred with the brush of "irrationalism," especially
when they're activists. A local real estate developer here in the Catskill
Mountains of New York State recently called his environmentalist enemies, a
group called "Save the Ridge," "Nazis" in an interview with
The
New Paltz Times. Everything that Capital wants is
"rational" by definition and even by decree. Capital wins all the
wars; ergo, Rationalism is "true," q.e.d.
But modern radicals such as the Frankfurt
School (Benjamin, Bloch, Marcuse), the Surrealists, the Situationists, all
decided to try to seize back Romanticism from the dustbin of History and to
champion the surrealist and even hermetic program of left-wing anti‑Enlightenment,
anti-authoritarian and ecological resistance that a recent book has called Revolutionary
Romanticism. [10]
I believe that today's ecological resistance
cannot afford to ignore its own sources in a vain attempt to reconcile itself
with the Totality and scientific apotheosis of Global Capital. Romantic Science
is literally a sine qua non for the resistance to ecological
disintegration. I would like to argue the case (tho' I'd be hard-put to prove
it) that the "new" scientific paradigm we're looking for to replace
the dead-matter/material-force scientific world view of
Enlightenment/State/Capital, can best be found in the perennial but underground
tradition of hermetic-Romantic science. Something very much like a manifesto
for this movement can still be gleaned from the Disciples at Saïs
by Novalis, a.k.a. Count Friedrich von Hardenberg.
An archetypal Romantic like Keats and
Rimbaud, Novalis was born in a haunted house and died young and handsome on
March 25, 1801, aged 29. Only the last three years of his life were seriously
devoted to literature. In 1794 he met a twelve-year-old girl named Sophie von
Kühn and fell in love with her; she died in 1797, as did the poet's beloved
younger brother, aged fourteen. Both these ghosts haunted the rest of his life
and work. In The Disciples they appear as the sophianic heroine
Rosenblüte ("Rose-petal," probably a Rosicrucian reference), and the
blue‑eyed boy who inspires the disciples. This child has all-blue eyes like
star sapphires, with no white or iris-an image that relates him to the famous
symbol of the Imagination in Novalis's only completed novel, Heinrich
von Ofterdingen: the elusive "blue flower" that became
the emblem of German Romanticism.
The Disciples remained fragmentary, in part because the Romantics believed
in fragments; Novalis called the text "fragments... all of them having
reference to nature," although he'd hoped to expand it some day into a
"symbolic novel." He worked on it while composing his best-known
poems, Hymns to Night. The story's setting, the Temple of
Isis at Saïs in Egypt, was doubtless inspired by Plato, who claimed that Solon
of Athens learned the history of Atlantis there from the Egyptian priests. This
Greco-Egyptian-Atlantaean nexus already suggests a precise hermetic intentionality,
and Novalis makes it quite clear that the disciples at Saïs are to experience
not merely an education but an initiation into nature, symbolized by lifting
the veil of Isis – simultaneously an act of epistemology and of
eroticism.
On the very first pages Novalis evokes
hermetic science quite specifically:
"Various are the roads of man. He who
follows and compares them will see strange figures emerge, figures which seem
to belong to that great cipher which we discern written everywhere, in wings,
eggshells, clouds and snow, in crystals and in stone formations, on ice‑covered
waters, on the inside and outside of mountains, of plants, beasts and men, in
the lights of heaven, on scored disks of pitch or glass or in iron filings
round a magnet, and in strange conjunctures of chance. In them we suspect a
key to the magic writing, even a grammar, but our surmise takes on no definite
forms and seems unwilling to become a higher key. It is as though an alkahest
had been poured over the senses of man." (4-5)
The "scored discs of pitch or
glass" probably refer to the Chladni Diagrams, patterns formed in resin or
sand by sound, much admired by the Romantics. [11] "Alkahest" means
universal solvent; the term was coined by the alchemist Paracelsus. The
alkahest dissolves our vision, blurs it, renders it dreamlike. James Hillman
once proposed that it doesn't matter much whether we remember our dreams or do
anything about them, because the work that goes on in dreams happens
regardless of us. Might this be true of nature as well?
The "great cipher" (in the sense
of "code") and "magic writing" suggest the occult
interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had fascinated hermeticists
since the Renaissance. The whole paragraph thus invites us to read everything
that follows as up‑dated Rosicrucian hermeticism.
On the subject of the hieroglyphs, Novalis
later says this:
"They (the disciples) had been lured
above all by that sacred language that had been the glittering bond between
those kingly men and the inhabitants of the regions above the earth, and some
precious words of which, according to countless legends, were known to a few
fortunate sages among our ancestors. Their speech was a wondrous song, its
irresistible tones penetrated deep into the inwardness of nature and split it
apart. Each of their names seemed to be the key to the soul of each thing in
nature. With creative power these vibrations called forth all images of the
world's phenomena, and the life of the universe can rightly be said to have
been an eternal dialogue of a thousand voices; for in the language of those men
all forces, all modes of action seemed miraculously united. To seek out the
ruins of this language, or at least all reports concerning it, had been one of
the main purposes of their journey, and the call of antiquity had drawn them
also to Saïs. Here from the learned clerks of the temple archives, they hoped
to obtain important reports, and perhaps even to find indications in the great
collections of every kind." (113-115)
Concerning the Veil of Isis Novalis says:
"... and if, according to the inscription, no mortal can lift the veil, we
must seek to become immortal; he who does not seek to lift it, is no true novice
of Saïs" (17). At first this doctrine may sound promethean- the scientist
"conquers" nature and ravishes her secrets--but in truth this is not
the Enlightenment speaking here. The transgression, the violation of the
paradox (you may not lift the veil but you must), can only be achieved by one
who has already transcended the all-too-human – the Nietzschean hero who is
none other than the hermetic sage.
Like all Romantics, Novalis believed in an
earlier or more primordial humanity that lived closer to nature and more in
harmony with it, as lovers rather than ravishers. In one sense he means tribal
peoples, "savages," peoples-without-government. But this "antiquity"
also includes historical periods as well, such as that of the Late Classical
neo-platonic theurgists, or even the seventeenth century Rosicrucians, as the
following passage suggests:
"To those earlier men, everything
seemed human, familiar, and companionable, there was freshness and originality
in all their perceptions, each one of their utterances was a true product of
nature, their ideas could not help but accord with the world around them and
express it faithfully. We can therefore regard the ideas of our forefathers
concerning the things of this world as a necessary product, a self‑portrait of
the state of earthly nature at that time, and from these ideas, considered as
the most fitting instruments for observing the universe, we can assuredly take
the main relation, the relation between the world and its inhabitants. We find
that the noblest questions of all first occupied their attention and that they
sought the key to the wondrous edifice, sometimes in a common measure of real
things, and sometimes in the fancied object of an unknown sense. This key, it
is known, was generally divined in the liquid, the vaporous, the
shapeless." (21-23)
"The main relation ... between the
world and its inhabitants:" – in other words, ecology, the science of
Earth's household oeconomie, the balance of a
nature that includes the human: this is the great subject of the little book,
rising directly out of Novalis's hermetic vision of earth as a living being.
This rather radical notion does not really derive from Plato and the Platonists
(as many scholars carelessly maintain); the Platonists had an almost Gnostic
disdain for the mere shadows of material reality. Tribal and shamanic peoples
almost always adhere to some view of nature as alive, but the idea only re‑enters
"civilized" western thought with the Renaissance magi, especially
Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Paracelsus. [12]
For Novalis the true language of science
would be poetry:
"That is why poetry has been the
favorite instrument of true friends of nature, and the spirit of nature has
shone most radiantly in poems. When we read and hear true poems, we feel the
movement of nature's inner reason and like its celestial embodiment, we dwell
in it and hover over it at once." (25)
"To hover over and dwell in"
simultaneously: the scientist like the poet cannot objectively separate self
from nature in order to study it without also subjectively retaining an
existential identity with the "object." A split here would constitute
an ecological disaster. In fact self and world must be experienced as
reflections of each other, as microcosm and macrocosm. "As Above So
Below" as The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus puts it
so succinctly.
"Those who would know her spirit
truly must therefore seek it in the company of poets, where she is free and
pours forth her wondrous heart. But those who do not love her from the bottom
of their hearts, who only admire this and that in her and wish to learn this
and that about her, must visit her sickroom, her charnel‑house"(27).
Within us there lies a mysterious force that tends in all directions, spreading
from a center hidden in infinite depths. If wondrous nature, the nature of the
senses and the nature that is not of the senses, surrounds us, we believe this
force to be an attraction of nature, an effect of our sympathy with her."
(...)
"A few stand calmly in this glorious
abode, seeking only to embrace it in its plenitude and enchainment; no detail
makes them forget the glittering thread that joins the links in rows to form
the holy candelabrum, and they find beatitude in the contemplation of this
living ornament hovering over the depths of night. The ways of contemplating
nature are innumerable; at one extreme the sentiment of nature becomes a
jocose fancy, a banquet, while at the other it develops into the most devout
religion, giving to a whole life direction, principle, meaning." (29-31)
The image of nature as "holy
candelabrum," contemplated by the rapt adept, seems to derive from a
Kabbalistic source, especially the so‑called "Christian Cabala" of
Agrippa and the Rosicrucians such as Knorr von Rosenroth.13 The religion
of nature here propounded by Novalis strikes me as the single most
radical idea of hermetic Romanticism-the same idea that led Bruno to the stake
in Rome in 1600. In nineteenth century America Thoreau was the great prophet of
the faith, and the paintings of the Hudson River School its icons. In the
twentieth century the American Indians re-emerged among the teachers of this
path, giving it the sharp focus of shamanic vision. Hermeticism, like shamanism,
cannot be defined exactly as a religion, nor exactly as a science. In a sense
both religion and science have betrayed us; – and it is precisely in this sense
that hermeticism offers us something else, something different. Romantic
Science is also a spiritual path. Without this primary realization science is
nothing but fatality, and religion nothing but a kind of anti-science.
The scientist poet
"never wearies of contemplating
nature and conversing with her, follows all her beckonings, finds no journey
too arduous if it is she who calls, even should it take him into the dank
bowels of the earth: surely he will find ineffable treasures, in the end his
candle will come to rest and then who knows into what heavenly mysteries a
charming subterranean sprite may initiate him. Surely no one strays farther
from the goal than he who imagines that he already knows the strange realm,
that he can explain its structure in few words and everywhere find the right
path. No one who tears himself loose and makes himself an island arrives at
understanding without pains." (37)
The "subterranean sprite" refers
directly to Paracelsus and the Elemental Spirits again: this is a gnome or
kobold, Novalis's tutelary (and seductive) Elemental, inhabitant of the deep
mines where the poet earned his living.
"Not one of the senses must slumber,
and even if not all are equally awake, all must be stimulated and not repressed
or neglected." (37-39)
Here Novalis sounds like Rimbaud; although
he speaks of awakening the senses rather than deranging them, he hints at the
possibility of a psychedelic path – or rather an entheogenic
path – since the object and subject alike of the awakened senses is a goddess.
"Entheogenic" means "giving birth to the divine within."
It's a new name for the hallucinatory experience of the phantastica; the term
is not liked or used by those who require no "divine hypothesis."
"Ultimately some who deny the
divinity of nature will come unconsciously to hate that which denies them
meaning. "Very well," say these scientists, let our race carry on a
slow, well‑conceived war of annihilation with nature! We must seek to lay her
low with insidious poisons. The scientist is a noble hero, who leaps into the
open abyss in order to save his fellow citizens."
(...)
"Exploit her strife to bend her to
your will, like the fire‑spewing bull. She must be made to serve you." (43‑45)
To this the Elementals themselves seem to
reply: [14]
"'O, if only man,' they said, 'could
understand the inner music of nature, if only he had a sense for outward
harmonies. But he scarcely knows that we belong together and that none of us
can exist without the others. He cannot leave anything in place, tyrannically
he parts us, and plucks at our dissonances. How happy he could be if he treated
us amiably and entered into our great covenant, as he did in the good old
days, rightly so named. In those days he understood us, as we understood him.
His desire to Become God has separated him from us, he seeks what he cannot
know or divine, and since then he has ceased to be a harmonizing voice, a
companion movement.
(...)
"'Will he ever learn to feel? This
divine, this most natural of all senses is little known to him: feeling would
bring back the old time, the time we yearn for; the element of feeling is an
inward light that breaks into stronger, more beautiful colors. Then the stars
would rise within him, he would learn to feel the whole world, and his feeling
would be richer and clearer than the limits and surfaces that his eye now
discloses. Master of an endless dance, he would forget all his insensate
strivings in joy everlasting, nourishing itself and forever growing. Thought is
only a dream of feeling, a dead feeling, a pale-gray feeble life.'" (69‑73)
Contemporary environmentalists, caught up
in the sharpened and swirling debates of what sometimes looks like an End Time,
may feel disappointed that Novalis lacks vehemence in his denunciation of
"evil scientists" (as Hollywood used to call them). But in the 1790s
the full implications of Enlightenment science remained largely speculative.
Satanic mills were only just beginning to appear, the concept of pollution
scarcely existed. Novalis deserves credit for foreseeing so much so
clearly--but nobody could have predicted what actually happened. Now speaking
in yet another voice, Novalis explains that the epitome of what stirs our
feelings is called nature, hence nature stands in an immediate relation to the
functions of our body that we call senses.
"Unknown and mysterious relations
within our body cause us to surmise unknown and mysterious states in nature;
nature is a community of the marvelous, into which we are initiated by our
body, and which we learn to know in the measure of our body's faculties and
abilities. The question arises, whether we can learn to understand the nature
of natures through this specific nature." (77-79)
This constitutes a perfect summing up of
the ancient Romantic doctrine of microcosmic humanity and macrocosmic nature or
existence itself.
"'It seems venturesome,' said
another, 'to attempt to compose nature from its outward forces and
manifestations, to represent it now as a gigantic fire, now as a wonderfully
constructed waterfall, now as a duality or a triad, or as some other weird
force. More conceivably, it is the product of an inscrutable harmony among
infinitely various essences, a miraculous bond with the spirit world, the point
at which innumerable worlds touch and are joined.'" (81)
"Everything divine has a history; can
it be that nature, the one totality by which man can measure himself, should
not be bound together in a history, or--and this is the same thing--that it
should have no spirit? Nature would not be nature if it had no spirit, it would
not be the unique counterpart to mankind, not the indispensable answer to this
mysterious question, or the question to this never‑ending answer." (85)
The Disciples at
Saïs is a "novel" in that it uses a
variety of voices--but very few developed characters. The voices seem not to
argue so much as play out variations in the author's mind, thus allowing him a
typically Romantic freedom of inconsistency and self‑contradiction. For example
it's not certain that Novalis himself believed that "everything divine has
a history;" but he seems to experience or feel the idea as yet another
variation on his great theme, the reconciliation of matter and spirit under
the sign of nature.
"So inexhaustible is nature's
fantasy, that no one will seek its company in vain. It has power to beautify,
animate, confirm, and even though an unconscious, unmeaning mechanism seems to
govern the part, the eye that looks deeper discerns a wonderful sympathy with
the human heart in concurrences and in the sequence of isolated
accidents." [15] (87)
Novalis criticizes even the poets for not
"exaggerating nearly enough." The I-Thou relation between
consciousness and nature should lead to magic powers, so to speak, an ability
to move nature from within rather than as an alienated outsider.
"In order to understand nature, we
must allow nature to be born inwardly in its full sequence. In this
undertaking, we must be led entirely by the divine yearning for beings that are
like us, we must seek out the conditions under which it is possible to question
them, for truly, all nature is intelligible only as an instrument and medium
for the communication of rational beings." (91-3)
(These "rational beings" of
course include the Elementals, the personae of nature.)
"The thinking man returns to the
original function of his existence, to creative contemplation, to the point,
where knowledge and creation were united in a wondrous mutual tie, to that
creative moment of true enjoyment, of inward self‑conception. If he immerses
himself entirely in the contemplation of this primeval phenomenon, the history
of the creation of nature unfolds before him in newly emerging times and spaces
like a tale that never ends, and the fixed point that crystallizes in the
infinite fluid becomes for him a new revelation of the genius of love, a new
bond between the Thou and the I. A meticulous account of this inward universal
history is the true theory of nature. The relations within his thought world
and its harmony with the universe will give rise to a philosophical system that
will be the faithful picture and formula of the universe." (93)
The "art of pure contemplation"
is also a creative metaphysics--that is, an art of the creation of value and
meaning--and also "The Art" itself in a spagyric sense, the magical
art of transmutation.
"Yes," says another voice,
"nothing is so marvelous as the great simultaneity of nature. Everywhere
nature seems wholly present." This hermetic thought leads on to a
contemplation of the consciousness of nature as essentially erotic.
"What is the flame that is manifested
everywhere? A fervent embrace, whose sweet fruits fall like sensuous dew.
Water,
first‑born child of airy fusions, cannot deny its voluptuous origin and reveals
itself an element of love, and of its mixture with divine omnipotence on earth.
Not without truth have ancient sages sought the origin of things in water, and
indeed, they spoke of a water more exalted than sea and well water. A water in
which only primal fluidity is manifested, as it is manifested in liquid metal;
therefore should men revere it always as divine. How few up to now have
immersed themselves in the mysteries of fluidity, and there are some in whose
drunken soul this surmise of the highest enjoyment and the highest life has
never wakened. In thirst this world soul is revealed, this immense longing for
liquefaction. The intoxicated feel only too well the celestial delight of the
liquid element, and ultimately all pleasant sensations are multiform flowings
and stirrings of those primeval waters in us." [16] (103‑105)
"A man born blind cannot learn to
see, though you may speak to him forever of colors and lights and distant
shapes. No one will fathom nature, who does not, as though spontaneously,
recognize and distinguish nature everywhere, who does not with an inborn creative
joy, a rich and fervent kinship with all things, mingle with all of nature's
creatures through the medium of feeling, who does not feel his way into
them." (109)
"Happy I call this son, this darling
of nature, whom she permits to behold her in her duality, as a power that
engenders and bears, and in her unity, as an endless, everlasting marriage. His
life will be a plenitude of all pleasures, a voluptuous chain, and his religion
will be the real, the true naturalism." (111)
* * *
The Disciples at Saïs is not a finished work. It ends
with a passage on the figure of the "prophet of nature" that feels
unfinished to me and even unrevised. Some commentators believe that it
constitutes a character sketch of Professor Werner of Freyberg, his teacher of
mineralogy, and apparently a true Romantic scientist. Undoubtedly Novalis meant
to go on, to create a firmer narrative structure, perhaps to add more symbolic
märchen
like the Tale of Hyacinth and Rose‑petal, perhaps to develop ideas about
specific sciences such as mining. But the various and rather disorganized
paragraphs of the book serve as aphorisms, complete little thoughts in
themselves. Novalis gave up trying to combine his "fragments" with
his narrative ideas. The latter went into his one complete novel Heinrich
von Ofterdingen. The former went into his wonderful Aphorisms or
Fragments, so admired by Nietzsche and indeed imitated by him in their
blending of eighteenth century epigrammatic wit and nineteenth century
ambiguity and Romantic fervor.
A complete exploration of Novalis as a
conscious hermeticist and Romantic scientist would require a much longer work
than this, in which for example a chapter would be devoted to the influence of
Paracelsus, and also of the great Rosicrucian novel The Chymical
Wedding of Christian Rosycross. Further chapters would compare
ideas in The Disciples with parallel thoughts in Novalis's other works, his
notebooks and letters, etc.--and then with the scientific ideas of his
contemporaries such as Von Humbolt, Goethe, and the Naturphilosophie
school.
Nevertheless The Disciples at
Saïs by itself appears to provide a clear and concise
summation--indeed a manifesto--for what we might now call eco‑spirituality.
If Novalis were writing today, two centuries later, no doubt he would have a
great deal more to say about science as alienation, about the horrors of the
industrial and "post‑industrial" assault on nature, about pollution
as the material manifestation of bad consciousness. He might be much more
pessimistic now, less certain of the return of the Golden Age-that perennial
goal of radical hermeticism and Rosicrucianism.
In 1968 German radicals like their French
and American and Mexican counterparts re‑discovered revolutionary Romanticism
and seized back the blue flower of Novalis from
the forces of reaction. "All power to the Imagination." Despite all
vicissitudes and set‑backs since the 1960s this paradigm is still emerging.
It's exemplified in the almost‑mystical ideas of certain quantum philosophers,
chaos and complexity scientists and proponents of the Gaia Hypothesis: the idea
that matter and consciousness are inter‑connected--that the Earth is a living
being--that science is an erotic relation. It persists in the ideas and actions
of those few "defenders of the earth" brave enough to defy the
greed/death/media-trance of the Totality and challenge the institutionalization
of body-hatred, misery and boredom that constitutes our Imperium and drives our
pollution of all time and space.
In the realm of science ideas can really
be considered actions--and in this strange identity science retains an ancient
and occult link with the magical hermetic tradition. But only a science freed
from slavery to money and war (Capital and State) can ever hope to empower the
ideas that would act as Novalis hoped his ideas would act: to save the world
from the dark forces of Enlightenment, from "the cruel instrumentality of
Reason"--not to fall into the opposite sin of irrational reaction-but to
transcend all false dualities in a true "wedding," both alchemical
and erotic, between consciousness and nature. That was the goal of the
disciples, the lifting of the veil of Isis, the initiation into a lost
language. If that still remains our goal today, does this prove that in 200
years we have been defeated?-or that we have not yet experienced the true dream
of the sacred theory of earth that points the way to victory?
Notes
1. Letter to A. W. Schiegel (IV, 229 in
N's German Complete Works).
2. The other two Novalis quotes are from
the "Notebook," translated by Thomas Frick in Frick and Richard
Grossinger, eds., The Sacred Theory of the Earth (Berkeley: North Atlanic
Books, 1986). Throughout this essay I will use the translation of The Novices
of Saïs by Ralph Manheim (though I prefer the use of "Disciples"
rather than "Novices"), in the 1949 edition published by Curt
Valentin in New York, with a rather useless preface by Stephen Spender, and
sixty exquisite drawings by Paul Klee. I can't think of a more appropriate
illustrator-unless perhaps Joseph Beuys. See also C. V. Becker and R.
Manstetter, "Novalis' Thought on Nature, Humankind and Economy: A New
Perspective for Discussing Modern Environmental Problems," available on
line from <cbecker@uni-hd.de>
3. Paul Hoffman, Wings of Madness: Alberto
Santos‑Dumont and the Invention of Flight (Hyperion, 2003); I saw the anecdote
in a review.
4. In the lexicon of the US Parks
Services, "wilderness" is defined as the areas most strictly
controlled and regulated-a perversion of language possible only to a government
bureaucracy.
5. Novalis, The Disciples at Saïs. See
below.
6. A.k.a. Theophrastus Bombastus von
Hohenheim, the most original thinker in alchemy since Jabir ibn Hayyan; died
1541 in Saltzberg.
7. Darwin's direct source was undoubtedly
Pope's "Rape of the Lock," also based on Paracelsus via a strange
little book called Le Comte de Gabalis, a treatise on the Elementals.
8. My copy of Darwin's great poem, with
illustrations by Fuseli and William Blake, is a facsimile of the 1791 edition,
by Scholar Press (London, 1973). Incidentally, Novalis was a reader of Darwin
and refers to him as an authority in Flower Pollen (see The Disciples at Saïs
and Other Fragments, translated by F.V.M.T. and U.C.B., with an introduction by
Una Birch [later Pope‑Henessy]; London: Methuen, 1903). Novalis's beloved dead
brother was named Erasmus. [later note: Thanks indirectly to our conference in
New Paltz, a new edition of the Manheim translation of The Novices of Saïs,
with the Klee illustrations, is now available from Archipelago Books of
Brooklyn, NY (2005)]
9. By the Rationalist philosopher Isaiah
Berlin, whose useful but polemical interpretation utterly fails to consider
hermetic roots.
10. Max Blechman, ed., Revolutionary
Romanticism (San Francisco: City Lights, 2000). See also Michael Lowy and
Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001). Thanks to Joel Kovel for this reference.
11. E. E. F. Chladni (1756‑1827) also
invented a musical instrument called the euphonium.
12. The earliest version I've found is
from Bishop Nicholas of Cusa (died 1464), who held that the Earth is a living
"star," worthy of respect and even adulation. Needless to say Cusanus
was accused of pantheism, and was greatly admired by the hermeticists.
13. "So-called" but not very
accurately. Cornelius Agrippa was scarcely an apologist for any Christian
orthodoxy. "Hermetic Cabala" might be a more precise term.
14. This speech is attributed by Novalis
to certain of the novices, but strangely they speak of "man" as of an
other. Such sentiments are attributed to the Elementals by Paracelsus. Perhaps
some of the disciples at Saïs are Elementals!
15. Among other things this passage could
serve almost as a definition of Surrealism, especially in its hermetic phases,
those that reveal it most clearly as a stage of the Romantic movement.
16.
This passage reflects the seventeenth century scientific hypothesis of
"Neptunism," now discredited but very popular with the Romantics.
An
earlier version of this article was presented at a conference on "Sacred
Theory of Earth" held at the Old French Church in New Paltz, New York,
September 21, 2003. My thanks to all participants for their critiques and
comments - Pir Zia Inayat-Khan, Rachel Pollack, Lady Vervaine, Robert Kelly,
Bishop Mark Aelred, and especially David Levi Strauss, who responded to my
paper and later gave me more quotes and references. Thanks also to Joel Kovel,
Lorraine Perlman, Raymond Foye, Kate Manheim. Julia Manheim, for permission to
use Ralph Manheim's translation of Saïs, Bruce McPherson, Jack Collom,
Christopher Bamford, Jim Fleming, Zoe Matoff, and the Huguenot Historical
Society of New Paltz. An earlier version of this paper appeared in the journal
Capitalism Nature Socialism.
See also anther version:
Peter Lamborn
Wilson, The disciples at saïs: a sacred theory of earth, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Volume
15, Number 2, June 2004 , pp. 17-30(14)