Читать книгу The Little Book of Demons - Ramsey Dukes - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

I am writing this book to help people tackle the problems of everyday life.

The book recommends one simple formula: treat life the way you would want to be treated yourself. Talk to your plants; empathise with the moods of your car, the office copier or your computer. Recognise the weather, the landscape, nature for what they truly are—mighty gods—and learn to read their expressions. Study all the patterns of success or frustration in your life, name them as demons and learn to work with them rather than simply suffer or deny them.

In place of a plethora of self-help books offering Seven Secrets of..., Ten Scientifically-proven Habits of ..., The Four-step Process to Complete and Utter... and so on, I am suggesting one simple solution as the answer to everything: do as you would be done by.

How boring.

But it’s surprising how a simple idea like that can ruffle people’s feelings. I will people your world with demons, angels, gods and spirits of all sorts and persuasions—if you really don’t mind that, then you may want to skip this first part. But I know that some people won’t be at all grateful for all this fun.

Indeed, some will say: “All this nonsense about demons is simply putting the clock back hundreds of years to an age of superstition, animism and gullibility.” (I think they mean “putting the calendar back”.)

So this chapter is especially for those who are worried about my approach to demons. People who are reading this book in order to get angry rather than enlightened will find that this introduction raises the stakes somewhat.

Cue for demonic laughter...

SLIPPING BACK? OR BOLDLY STEPPING FORWARD?

Aren’t we slipping back into outmoded superstition if we talk of demons instead of using proven scientific and psychological terms to describe what are, after all, no more than causal interactions however complex?

Do you think that? Or does a part of you think that?

If so savour the thought right now—re-read the question and live that doubt. Is there any hint of revulsion in the feelings it evokes? The slightest unease?

The phrase “slipping back” betrays a sense of linear progress, an idea that we have risen steadily from a dark ignorant past towards ever-increasing understanding and enlightenment. But what if that progress has been less direct: if, for example it took the form of a wave motion, like an incoming tide requiring occasional retreats into superstition in order to consolidate and realise each rational revelation? Is that not how nature herself evolves? Is not every Winter an apparent setback to the progress of Summer, though actually a time of reaping and thinning for the benefit of next year’s growth?

The author has a confession to make. It is not something that need reduce the value of this book, but it is something that the reader ought to know. I do not believe in that linear progressive view. Indeed I once parodied it in these terms¹ :

When I was young the accepted wisdom was that our primitive forbears, being ignorant and brutish, used to do silly things. This we call ‘magic’. Through many millennia of doing silly things they learnt to do silly things rather well. Doing silly things well is what we call ‘art’. Through further millennia of doing silly things well, plus increasing civilisation, they learnt to do silly things with authority. This we call ‘religion’. Then at last, during the last five hundred years, we grew up and learnt to be sensible instead. This we call ‘science’.

What I noted was that—contrary to this common view—magic tends to come after, rather than before, science. Just as science tends to displace religion, so will magic usually displace science. And I am not claiming this as some great triumph of magic over science, any more than it is a great slide back into ignorance. It is simply the way things churn.

Taking myself as an example: after learning the truths and methods of science at school and university, I found myself not less, but more inclined to embrace the magical philosophy of Aleister Crowley. The same is true of the numerous Wiccans with degrees in computer studies. Taking a wider example: the 1950s were a time of extreme materialism and reverence for the power of technology and scientific endeavour, and yet we moved forward to a magical revival in the 1960s—just as the Victorian scientific revolution paved the way for a fin de siecle revival of magic and mystery. More seriously, perhaps, the rational philosophical enquiry of the classical era was followed by the so-called Dark Ages when magic flourished. Do we not hear anxious commentators even now fretting over the rising popularity of astrology, tarot reading and supernatural beliefs despite our widespread scientific education and frequent media de-bunking?

Have these examples persuaded you? Oh dear, I hope not! The idea is not to batter into submission that part of you that opposes my magical ideas, but rather to moderate its loneliness by conceiving a younger sibling, a new idea that a revival of magic might be one part of progress. Two distinct demons that can look forward to years of amusing and nourishing discussion, co-operation and conflict as they grow up together within the ecology of your mind.

PATTERNS AND CAUSES

Some people will be stuck at this point; stuck because I have not yet defined what I mean by ‘magic’.

My first real demonstration of magic will be to refuse to define what I mean by magic. For magic proceeds by recognition, not definition.

Instead of seeing magic as a well-defined area of activity, I see it as a direction of inclination. For example: whereas science looks at phenomena, classifies them by definition and seeks underlying causal connections, magic looks at phenomena and recognises patterns.

A naive example: if you notice that traffic lights are always red when you are in a hurry, you are thinking magically; and if you therefore calm yourself down before a journey in order not to suffer too many red lights, then you are doing magic. If instead you decide that there can be no connection between your mood and the behaviour of traffic lights then you are thinking scientifically; and if you decide to count the lights on each journey to confirm whether the results are purely random, then you are doing science².

By the way: both these experiments work equally well. It is mental inclination, not effectiveness, that distinguishes science from magic.

Although I have not defined magic, I have now given something for the dogs of doubt to get their teeth into—pattern recognition. There have been a number of discussions recently about irrational human handling of luck and risk, and the usual conclusion runs along these lines:

One of the measures of intelligence is an ability to recognise subtle patterns. Not just visual patterns but also patterns of sound and patterns of events. This has significant survival value: for example, it allows a creature to sense and avoid a dangerous situation even before it has had time or data to work out precisely the nature of the danger. We humans have evolved enormous skills in this respect, and it has enriched our culture with the appreciation of pattern and interaction in music, art and drama, but we are sometimes too good at pattern recognition, and this is the basis of superstition and the follies of speculation. People, singly and en masse, see patterns in random events and gamble on the predicted outcome. In terms of group hysteria, these patterns can become self-fulfilling, as when everyone believes in the New Economy and it inflates as a result. But chance holds sway, and eventually these patterns are revealed for the illusion that they are. The bubble bursts or the gambler’s ‘run of luck’ collapses. We emerge bruised and not much the wiser.

That makes sense, doesn’t it? We’re too good at seeing patterns so, instead of encouraging and developing this skill we need to restrain and discipline it using our rational faculties. Register a hunch, maybe, but never act upon it before it has been critically analysed and tested against reality.

I don’t agree.

What is this talk of being ‘too good’ at something? Millions of years of evolution have led us to where we are, and I respect that fact. If we have exceptional talents as a result, then I believe we must learn to develop and work better with those talents rather than subjugate them to other abilities. When people get their science wrong, my answer is that they should improve their science, not reject it. By the same token, when we get our magic wrong, I believe we should improve our magic, not abandon it.

This book is intended to improve our magic as best it can. So it will be encouraging us to take a closer look at pattern recognition. Consider this example.

I take a stone, and I release it. It falls to the earth, every time I do it, in a quite predictable pattern.

The same happens with an apple.

I take a live butterfly and release it. The subsequent motion is very hard to predict or explain, but I recognise that it will, almost invariably, flap about for a while.

I take a bird and release it. At first the results seem as chaotic as the butterfly’s, but then I discover patterns of interaction. Under certain circumstances (as with homing pigeons) the bird will fly toward me. More typically it will flee away in fear. And so on.

I take my wife and release her. An even wilder universe of possible results emerges, and yet my supreme pattern recognition skills begin slowly to map that territory: there is coming toward me in love, or coming toward me in anger; there is indifference, laughter, torrents of abuse... and there are multiple layers of conscious or unconscious simulations of such reactions in order to make a point or express something which may arise from any region of her soul or the interactions between us.

Four years of marriage and, although I still pay more attention to my wife than to any bird, butterfly or stone, there remains so much to explore. For I do believe that our fellow human beings form the most complex patterns of all.

I quote above what I was taught in my formative years, about mankind’s steady rise to the mastery of science. It went with a belief in our defining trait as: “Man—the toolmaker”. The idea being that we alone learnt to make and master tools and this lead to every evolutionary advantage including enormous brain development. However, as the above example illustrates, no tool can be as complex as another human being. No mechanical process can match the perversity of an individual or group of people.

I therefore propose that it was not tool-making, so much as social interaction that went with the evolution of our larger brains. (And I note the recent discovery³ that certain crows have been shown to possess remarkable tool-manipulation skills to confirm that tool-making is not so closely linked to brain size as was taught.)

You see it in a growing baby: picking things up and releasing them over and over. Smiling and observing the world smiling back. At some point nearly every child makes the vital leap and recognises that certain patterns of reaction are so complex that they can only be accommodated by projecting some of its own conscious awareness out into the pattern—in other words, by assuming that other people too are conscious, intelligent beings. “Mama must be a person—just like me!”

This is the very assumption that is helping me to map the territory of wild and wifely behaviour patterns. It would also help me to model the bird’s behaviour to some degree.

This book argues that there is no more powerful technique for handling our environment. This is far from being a reversion to primitive and outmoded behaviour. Look for conscious intelligence in phenomena and you awaken the greatest powers of the human brain to assist your exploration or mastery. Whereas those who insist on hording “conscious will” inside themselves, and seeing only mechanical processes outside themselves, are closing down most of their brain connections.

This is the true “dumbing down”—a simplification of thinking that does indeed give sharper focus but offers little greater advantage. Like abandoning the fork for a knife—it cuts better but the peas of wisdom roll off and you risk cutting your tongue within the mashed potato of success.

Superstition thrives on absolutes, not relatives. Religion and science teach us to look for absolutes and so we lose trust in what is relative. Magic teaches us to walk on the shifting sands of relative or workable truth and that is a great skill. Without that skill we can only kid ourselves that truths must be absolute. Superstition is not the result of magic, but rather the result of people wandering into magical territory armed only with the tools of religion and science.

That is why our culture has become so deeply superstitious and why I refuse to cloak my ideas in pseudo scientific or religious terminology—even though it would improve my status among the gullible.

So... a slight adjustment to the phrasing of the opening paragraph of the previous section:

Aren’t we turning our back on outmoded superstition when we talk of demons instead of falling back on clumsy scientific jargon and psychobabble to describe what are, after all, the exquisite complexities of human experience?

WE ARE ENSNARED IN AN EVIL WEB OF DARK FORCES

Baby pushes Spoon to edge of Table and... over it goes. Spoon hits the floor with a satisfying tinkle, leaving a charming little splash of white and gold— milk and cereal—to relieve the monotonous pattern of the dining room carpet. Baby gurgles with joy.

Baby is discovering the delightful mastery that Will exercises over the environment. It’s the tenth time spoon has hit the floor with unfailing obedience during this meal—not that Baby knows anything yet about the number ten nor of its intimations of Pythagorean perfection and cabalistic or even ordinal significance.

Spoon never lets Baby down. Not like Mama. Sure enough, Mama is now bending down to retrieve Spoon, and will put it back in the dish with one of those delightful little sighs but—uh oh—she has stopped to rinse it under the tap this time, and stands arms akimbo scowling for a few seconds before returning Spoon to its launching pad.

Mama is a problem to Baby. She is clearly controllable—like everything else—but seems to malfunction at times. It’s a tiresome responsibility for Baby, who has so much work to do without the added burden of learning to operate a defective Mama.

Baby is forced to sacrifice vital learning/growing time and energy to the contemplation of this problem—and Baby eventually comes up with a stunning, mind-blowing solution. Is it possible that Mama might contain a Me inside her? Until now it has been obvious that there is only one Me in the world, and that is Baby; but if Mama is being operated internally by an invisible Me—a Me that can be feeling happy one minute, bored or angry another— then it might explain her erratic responses.

Baby begins the most dramatic experiment of a lifetime—pretending that other people are being operated by a Me and asking “how might Me behave if it was out there rather than here?”—and Baby’s world is, as a result, being enriched with the warmth and light of human interaction.

Two great forces are now locked in battle for Baby’s soul.

One force says “GIVE! For I am the path of Magic and Art! Give meaning to the world and it will repay you an hundredfold! See patterns in everything, for pattern adds value. Trade Self for Understanding and Nature will become your mirror, reflecting back the many facets of your infinite complexity, for everything is alive and longing to teach you. Personify the world and I will grant you WISDOM!”

The other force says “TAKE! For I am the path of Religion and Science! There are no patterns, there is no life, save only the will of God or the laws of physics. Guard your soul within you—never trade it—for it is not yours but God’s, an illusion woven from the laws of physics. Objectify the world and I will give you POWER!”

Should Baby move forward from the discovery of Mama’s soul? Should Babe look again at the family pets and realising that they too might possess volition and be better understood in those terms? As a grown up, might he not speak of a sailing vessel as ‘she’ and seek to divine her moods and subtle handling characteristics under changing tide and weather patterns in such terms? When the office photocopier persistently misbehaves just when the pressure is on, might he not ask the question “but how does it know we are in hurry to meet deadlines?”

And next time the spoon hits the floor so satisfyingly, might not Baby peer over the edge of the table—a second chance to appreciate the aesthetics of the situation—and actually thank the spoon for being so co-operative? Do this, and Baby’s world grows richer and more nourishing day by day—an ever-ready breast inviting Babe to suck the milk of wisdom.

Or should Babe rather retreat from all this sharing of complexity and concentrate attention on the compliant Spoon? Gadgets can be much more complicated than Spoon, and take longer to control, but eventually they give in without the need to bargain with them by sharing out Me. Family pets might seem to have minds of their own but, as Pavlov has shown us, they can also be coerced into mechanical patterns of behaviour. It might take a long time, but even Mama has buttons that can be pressed—and the whole secret of worldly success lies surely in the calculated manipulation of your business colleagues. While others get distracted into hugging trees and kissing their children, there are millions to be made by exercising our God-given dominion over matter. Who needs a rich environment out there when they can have all those riches for themselves?

Reader! You stand outside the walls of my thesis and two Great Beings guard the entrance.

One, a mighty demon of polished brass seven cubits in height and wielding a flaming sword, beats its fist against the right hand gate and cries with the voice of thunder:

“Take my path, foolish reader! For mine is the path of Religion and Science, of law that must be obeyed! No matter whether the law is of god, or of physics, you stand helpless before it for I am all-powerful and you are weak— a plaything of original sin, a mere genetic mechanism to be imprinted by circumstance. But I will give you power, for I will teach that there is no will but God’s will, and therefore all phenomena are mechanical, even your fellow beings. Nature is under your command to exploit for your good. Other people are no more than consumers of your product, so raise your price! Be the fittest to survive! Conquer all and leave a wasteland—for matter has no life and you have naught to lose! Reason is my standard, but Psychopathy is my secret name!”

The other, a mighty demon eight cubits high, clad in snowy samite and bearing a silver chalice from which an endless stream of milk is flowing, beats its fist against the left hand gate and cries with the voice of tempest:

“Take my path, wise reader! For mine is the path of Art and Magic, of laws made to tinker with and throw aside! I know you as a thinking, feeling being that will make up your own mind—so what can I do but invite you to the great adventure? Be one with nature and your fellow beings, trade your soul for meaning and stay hungry! Experience is not to own, but to eat. Taste life, don’t hoard it, and you will find love. Empathy is my standard, but Fellow Victim is my secret name!”

Choose, reader, choose!

I said CHOOSE! Damn you!

Oh well, if you must stand there dithering, then you might have time to notice that between the two great gates there is a little doorway with the door ajar. Peep in and you see a family seated round a hearth and the elder man smiles and invites you in for a cup of tea, saying:

“Well done! So you didn’t fall for either of those charlatans out there! Let me introduce myself: I was writing this book and got a bit bored with the intro so decided to repeat the opening argument in demonic form—no longer a self-help manual but a cosmic battle cry. Don’t worry about making choices at this stage, all that matters is what can be learnt from your own responses.”

•When I re-presented my introduction in terms of great powers, a choice of paths that could lead humankind into a world of nature and love or into a world of destruction and power, did it become more interesting to you?

• Or did it revolt you? That a thoughtful, if possibly misguided, thesis was being sensationalised in this obvious way?

• Or did you simply wonder what the author was playing at?

The first two responses are what I would consider to be superstitious: an over-reliance on demons to motivate us, or an instinctive rejection of them.

The third reaction is that of an awake human being, an explorer whose intelligence, alertness and sensibilities have not been altogether subjugated by a thousand years of religious and scientific cultural dominance. It is the response of someone who knows that a human being, not a sinner, nor a machine, is writing this book.

To those who chose the first two responses I say “have you forgotten that the author will receive a small amount of money, and an iota of kudos, every time a copy of this book is sold?”

Ah yes! And that would surely explain why I would want to sensationalise my thesis, in the desire to win more sales!

But no—for I know that many potential buyers would be put off by a sensational approach.

Ah well, that explains it—that is why you have now deflated the sensational approach in order to win more respectable sales.

The oh-so logical process of reason has just reached two diametrically opposite conclusions based upon an assumption that I am a mechanism seeking to boost sales of my book. The fact is that I, the author, am a total mystery except for one crucial fact: I too am a human being.

As a mystery I might want to boost sales, at the same time I might be addicted to unconscious self-sabotage, or I might want to prove how clever I am. I might want to teach you, or to help you, or to atone for deep feelings of childhood guilt. I may equally be a simple explorer of ideas, or an artist playing with words...

In fact I’m more likely to be all these things rolled into one and that would still be but a tiny part of the whole of me. And yet the whole pathetic structure of Western academic discourse is based upon the inane assumption that people should write what they mean to say.

“Science proves a connection between infertility and...” and we are supposed to believe it, rather than consider that it is a team of scientist who have made the announcement, human beings with individual agendas and in the pay of an institution with its own agendas. The papers are full of book reviews that blindly assume that, because the author makes an impassioned case, they must believe what they are writing.

And yet there is a ghetto for lies. The same people who reject homeopathy because it is “scientifically unproven” will go to the theatre and applaud when a man in tights pretends to be the King of Denmark, and that a few square metres of wooden flooring is a battlefield. They will go to an art gallery and see lovingly painted scenes of cruelty and destruction, without automatically assuming the artist loves cruelty and destruction. They will applaud a film portrayal of Nazi fanatics without assuming the director is a Nazi fanatic.

Indeed, the assumption that life, nature and our fellow humans are profound, unfathomable, mysterious and rich in meaning still survives in our culture. It is safely quarantined in a ghetto called “art”, and I am simply proposing to lead it out into the real world in the name of magic.

So, don’t be put off by those tired old gas-bags hired by the so-called “serious” media; the rent-aboffin acamediacs who decry superstition, the New Age, astrology and human gullibility; those dinosaur spokespersons of the Enlightenment who splutter at the least glimpse of shade. This book is about putting meaning back where it belongs and living magically.

Sure, mankind needs certainties in times of terror. There is a place for science and religion when we are living in the trees, or being invaded by Goths, or discovering terrifying new worlds across the ocean. But in a world where cyclists wear hideous helmets, where cars may only be parked at the owner’s risk, where packets of peanuts bear the message “warning—this product may contain nuts” and where teachers can be sued for allowing adventure in an adventure holiday—in such a world we have far greater need for art and magic.

Absolute truth, whether religious or scientific, should be celebrated for what it is—a crutch for epochs of lameness—and not become a burden in times of such agonising comfort as ours. Science and religion are a balm in times of uncertainty, but in an over-regulated world like ours we need art and magic to bring back the life.

In the prosperous nations today we do not seek marriage partners to huddle against the cold, or for mutual support in the battle for survival. Instead we marry for fulfilment, for romantic love. We marry to invite challenge into our lives, not to overcome it. We crave the excitement and will turn up the volume and wallow in films and tales of terror to regain that sense of being alive.

Do you really want to go on clinging to the skirts of science and religion and the flabby certainties of acamedia when you could be dancing naked on the heath by moonlight? Do you need the desperate diet of fake media frenzies—terrorism, paedophilia, cannibalism, murder and mayhem—to keep up the phantasy that we still live in a dangerous world and need religion and science to control it?

Or are you prepared to dance with dangerous ideas for a change?

Let me now introduce you to a different sort of partner—a real slut of an idea.

And be prepared to ride the comet’s tail!