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while working on more substantive topics
Aug. 15th, 2006 06:10 pmI am still wrestling with Daniel Pinchbeck’s “2012,” a book that beautifully negates itself as it goes along. Pinchbeck has the courage towards the end of the book to recite his revelation cold (unlike Philip K. Dick, who turned his into a novel), and to suggest that (a) he may simply be insane, plus (b) he doesn’t really want to be the messenger anyway.
Pinchbeck knows all about Dick’s experience, but he doesn’t seem to know Owen Barfield’s (or his alter ego’s) experience with the Meggid in the novel “Unancestral Voice.” Barfield, of course, was a cohort of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, but he was also an anthroposophist. And anthroposophy is the one skeptical mysticism (“think these thoughts, but do not believe them,” Rudolf Steiner wrote, counseling disbelief until experience confirmed any given doctrine) that Pinchbeck finds a reliable guide through the labyrinth of drug-induced revelations and unresolvable paradoxes. That, plus good old knowledge of contemporary studies in brain physiology.
Pinchbeck ends up somewhere close to Barfield in terms of how he receives his experience. Barfield’s solicitor protagonist, when he asks the inner voice why he has been chosen, is told that there weren’t a whole lot of folks left to choose from after wars killed off so many potential candidates, who died without offspring. But the whole point of the novel is an extension of Barfield’s nonfiction claim that “in the latter days, man’s creator speaks from within man himself.” This, if I recall rightly, is from “Saving the Apperances,” the book that taught so many of us that reality is a constructed thing, and taught us that realization independently of the Frankfurt School’s secular assertion of it. Barfield also wrote the fictionalized “Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s,” in which a logical positivist, a physicist, a psychoanalyst, an ordinary fellow, and a Barfield stand-in have a debate about the nature of reality. It would have been better had Barfield and the English-speaking world in general had contact with continental philosophy; phenomenology would have been useful, and the sociology of knowledge would have been a formidable contender in the discussion. The discussion is circumscribed because of where it is held, when it is held, and who takes part in it.
But the peculiar thing is that Pinchbeck’s revelation from Quetzalcoatl, Dick’s dialogues with the early Christian who proclaims the long-awaited end of the Empire, and Barfield’s conversations with the spirit who suggests he call it the Meggid (to distinguish it from any previous guiding voice), all end up being in the realm of hermeticism or gnosticism. This could be because anyone who becomes interested in such topics ends up discovering a very similar set of books; Charles Williams, like W. B. Yeats, entered into and left MacGregor Mathers’ Order of the Golden Dawn. (Yeats’ spirits, at least, announced they had come to give him metaphors for poetry.)
I suppose pessimistic and optimistic hermetism or gnosticism can be reconciled with each other, though the notion that the world is still destined to progress towards its intended perfection is quite different from the notion that the broken vessels are a prison into which a Messenger will come, to slip us a key and thus to spring us. Pinchbeck’s revelation sort of combines his information, as the world slides toward self-evident apocalypse.
Someone should introduce Pinchbeck to Joscelyn Godwin, the professor at Colgate who knows more about the history of inward revelations than any other researcher I know of. Compraing notes directly regarding the multitude of prophecies received by Victorian mavericks, which Godwin describes so lucidly in “The Theosophical Enlightenment,” might provide some useful evaluation for Pinchbeck’s usually prevailing sense that something is going on, but he isn’t quite sure what.
Pinchbeck knows all about Dick’s experience, but he doesn’t seem to know Owen Barfield’s (or his alter ego’s) experience with the Meggid in the novel “Unancestral Voice.” Barfield, of course, was a cohort of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, but he was also an anthroposophist. And anthroposophy is the one skeptical mysticism (“think these thoughts, but do not believe them,” Rudolf Steiner wrote, counseling disbelief until experience confirmed any given doctrine) that Pinchbeck finds a reliable guide through the labyrinth of drug-induced revelations and unresolvable paradoxes. That, plus good old knowledge of contemporary studies in brain physiology.
Pinchbeck ends up somewhere close to Barfield in terms of how he receives his experience. Barfield’s solicitor protagonist, when he asks the inner voice why he has been chosen, is told that there weren’t a whole lot of folks left to choose from after wars killed off so many potential candidates, who died without offspring. But the whole point of the novel is an extension of Barfield’s nonfiction claim that “in the latter days, man’s creator speaks from within man himself.” This, if I recall rightly, is from “Saving the Apperances,” the book that taught so many of us that reality is a constructed thing, and taught us that realization independently of the Frankfurt School’s secular assertion of it. Barfield also wrote the fictionalized “Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s,” in which a logical positivist, a physicist, a psychoanalyst, an ordinary fellow, and a Barfield stand-in have a debate about the nature of reality. It would have been better had Barfield and the English-speaking world in general had contact with continental philosophy; phenomenology would have been useful, and the sociology of knowledge would have been a formidable contender in the discussion. The discussion is circumscribed because of where it is held, when it is held, and who takes part in it.
But the peculiar thing is that Pinchbeck’s revelation from Quetzalcoatl, Dick’s dialogues with the early Christian who proclaims the long-awaited end of the Empire, and Barfield’s conversations with the spirit who suggests he call it the Meggid (to distinguish it from any previous guiding voice), all end up being in the realm of hermeticism or gnosticism. This could be because anyone who becomes interested in such topics ends up discovering a very similar set of books; Charles Williams, like W. B. Yeats, entered into and left MacGregor Mathers’ Order of the Golden Dawn. (Yeats’ spirits, at least, announced they had come to give him metaphors for poetry.)
I suppose pessimistic and optimistic hermetism or gnosticism can be reconciled with each other, though the notion that the world is still destined to progress towards its intended perfection is quite different from the notion that the broken vessels are a prison into which a Messenger will come, to slip us a key and thus to spring us. Pinchbeck’s revelation sort of combines his information, as the world slides toward self-evident apocalypse.
Someone should introduce Pinchbeck to Joscelyn Godwin, the professor at Colgate who knows more about the history of inward revelations than any other researcher I know of. Compraing notes directly regarding the multitude of prophecies received by Victorian mavericks, which Godwin describes so lucidly in “The Theosophical Enlightenment,” might provide some useful evaluation for Pinchbeck’s usually prevailing sense that something is going on, but he isn’t quite sure what.
