The Transcendental Paradigm: Its Downward Trajectory

One of the many reasons why modern academia is boring is that I cannot, for instance, while studying History of Religions, employ as a source a man who is not formally trained as a History scholar, even if he has developed a theoretical framework which could be very useful as a tool for working Historians of Religion. In this case, I am thinking of Peter J. Carroll, a modern occultist who in the book Liber Kaos presents a tripartite scheme for understanding the unfolding of human history. He claims that the "psychohistory" of mankind goes through stages based on the successive growing and diminishing in strength of three fundamental paradigms: the transcendental, materialist and magical paradigms. So in ancient "shamanistic" times, Man lived in the now, the world was full of spirits and he employed magic for material benefit, while the transcendental reality was unknown or not cared about. Eventually, the materialist paradigm retreated in favour of the transcendental one, and a new balance was reached between magical and religious paradigms, while the materialist paradigm retreated, and so on. There is much that can be said about this model - it if of course not something that can be proven as a fact, rather it is only intended to make sense of things and to predict future trends. The funny thing is that academics also develop such models, yet I am willing to bet quite a large sum that the psychohistory model would be greeted with disinterest or even scorn among a large section of academics, granted that its author is a "chaos magician" who does not hold any relevant academic degree.

I am bringing up all of this because I was just now reminded of how the transcendental paradigm is collapsing all around us - slowly, and silently, but nevertheless brutally. This is perhaps no evil in and of itself, it depends on your inclinations, but for people of a spiritual bent, it is bewildering, alienating and depressing. The reminder in question is a section from the website renaissanceastrology.com, where the author Christopher Warnock explains the differences between traditional and modern Western astrology:

The public and even many astrologers are unaware that there is any difference between modern and traditional astrology. But even more than the significant difference in technique and methodology, what really distinguishes modern astrology from traditional astrology are their widely variant worldviews. Traditional astrology follows the traditional worldview, where not only does the spiritual exist, but it is primary over the material. Traditional Hermetic and Neo-platonic philosophy sees the entire Cosmos as One unified being connected by bonds of spiritual sympathy and influence and everywhere embued with pattern and meaning.

Moderns, either consciously or unconsciously either accept or are highly influenced by the modern atheistic/materialist worldview, when inevitably tends to nihilism. The modern worldview is that only matter and energy exist and thus the spiritual is non-existent. Events are random, except when caused by material or energetic causes or direct human intervention and existence is meaningless except for meaning humans choose to put on it which is subjective and conventional. Even those that state that they believe in the spiritual tend to see it operating in a materialist and mechanistic way, e.g. spiritual fields, beams or rays, or look to materialist and energetic causes to explain astrology.

The last meaning is significant: even those who are "spiritual" in fact confuse the spiritual with "energy" and psychic phenomena. And as Carroll predicts, we are now in the nihilistic phase of psychohistory, where magic and religion (i. e. the magical and transcendental paradigms) are frequently confused and bundled together under the rubric of religion; they will soon part ways though, because magic is on the rise and the transcendental paradigm is spiralling downwards.

Regardless of whether one feels more at home with one paradigm or the other, I believe this model is so fundamental in what it captures that its complete lack of publicism is just a little bit weird according to my own highly subjective viewpoint. The trinity of Transcendence, Magic and Matter is fundamentally the same as the Christian trinity of the Father, the Holy Ghost and the Son. It is the same as the more secular partition of Consciousness, Energy and Matter, with the caveat that Consciousness is frequently not seen as fundamentally real, but as a byproduct of the brain (Energy and Matter again). Finally, it is also very similar to the three attributes of existence in Sankhya philosophy: Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. For those unfamiliar with this, it is one of the core teachings of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita and building block for traditional Hindu philosphies and worldviews. (Roughly speaking, Sattva represents purity and light, Rajas is activity and passion, Tamas is darkness and inertia. I cannot claim that Sattva corresponds exactly to consciousness, that would be the Purusha; nevertheless it is pretty close.)

Suffice to say, these observations do nothing to reimburse my wallet. Now off to work!