Many practitioners of modern esoteric teachings
and practices have encountered the requirement to learn by heart and
permanently memorize numerous tables of correspondences that connect various
phenomena and symbols. This requirement was, and still is, present for students
of some occult schools. Why is it necessary to know by heart the connections
between certain symbols and phenomena to engage in occult and magical
practices? Why is there this imperative of rote learning? In fact, it is not
absolutely necessary, but people today have long since lost the ability to
analogically connect phenomena and symbols because they are accustomed to
thinking in concepts. These connections and attributions, are not something exact or
scientifically established; they exist solely in the mind as schemes of
analogy. They are landmarks of reason and the foundation of what is called the
art of memory.
For example, those who consider astrology to be
inaccurate and absurd, quite reasonably and logically, refute that the
positions of planets have any influence on our lives. From that point of view, skeptics
are entirely correct, but that is because they do not perceive the basic rule
of the magical way of perceiving and thinking. Of course, stars and planets as
physical bodies do not have that kind of influence, but there is a
correspondence, an analogy between their movements and our fate, character, and
life circumstances. So, there is an analogy that connects these phenomena, and
that analogy does not exist objectively, in the sense of how we are accustomed
today to consider something real, but exclusively in the mind of the one who
deals with it. The same applies to tarot card
readings, geomantic figures, or I Ching hexagrams. Objectively speaking, these
are just some symbols with which someone is playing, but the main process of
divination, interpretation, and forecasting takes place in the mind of the one
who deals with it. It is something entirely subjective, yet the diviner often
accurately guesses what has happened, what is, and predicts what will be from
this position of subjectivity. A successful diviner actually reads from their
own imagination. The positions of planets and stars in the sky, the way the
cards are laid out, or the configuration of certain symbols serve as stimuli to
the internal imaginative process, that is, the magical understanding of
reality, and this understanding is archaic.
The
Hungarian esotericist Béla Hamvas, in his book Scientia Sacra, states that the
vision and thinking of historical man rest on logical oppositions. In contrast,
the vision and thinking of archaic man are based on analogies. According to
Hamvas, analogy means that between every phenomenon, event, personality, form,
matter, and property, there is both a difference and a similarity. The fact
that everything in the world is different, but still identical, everything is
the same, yet this same thing appears in multiplicity, is a fact that in
ancient times was called analogy. For Hamvas, in recognizing analogies, the
decisive factor is not the logical activity of meaning, but rather a deeper and
more elemental experience. Analogies are experienced by the inner sense. The
historical man does not think in images but in meaningful oppositions and is
completely blind compared to the archaic man. The intellectual activity of
modern man is abstract and unreal. Everything similar is different, and
everything different is similar, but in such a way that similarity never
completely coincides, and difference never turns into complete opposition.
Opposition is not a property of the world and not a property of reality, but of
abstract meaning. Seeing in analogies is a sensitivity to similarities and
differences. Finally, Hamvas concludes that in archaic times, human knowledge
was not a conceptual construction of abstract properties, but rather
personalized and genetic.
If someone wishes to engage in the occult in the 21st century, or simply wants to understand the world of ancient people, or desires to step out of certain contemporary frameworks, they must learn to use the mode of thinking inherent to that world. It's akin to reviving a kind of cognitive-atavistic understanding. Of course, it is difficult to achieve this completely, but learning the tables of correspondences and picturing and spatially imagining them is one of the initial steps in that direction. When we establish in our mind the relation Moon / silver / water / sound M / female / night / I Ching trigram Water / symbol of the bow / veil / cyclicity / left eye / dog / owl / dream, etc., and when we adopt that associative chain of similarities so that it begins to work automatically in our mind, that is a good starting point. We won't equate this chain, but we will learn how to connect something we perceive or encounter with the cosmos, ultimately with ourselves. Hence, I can take a silver coin and claim that it is the Moon, even though the coin in my hand obviously has no direct connection with the Earth's satellite, but the two objects share a common quality of conceptual significance. That is the nature of the magical link between them. Once the mind adopts a certain sequence of such connections, that sequence can endlessly develop and branch out. Ultimately, all phenomena are interconnected, but they are sufficiently different. It is up to our mind how we group the properties that connect or distinguish them in our catalog of the world.
Some have long correctly claimed that God is everywhere and in everything, but have nevertheless cried out that God cannot be in a statue, in stone, wood, or a picture. Yet God can very much be in a cloud, in a statue, in wood, in a picture, in a symbol, a letter, in a word, in the stars, ultimately in man himself. This view is essentially animistic, but it is precisely animism that embodies the ancient worldview which was more immediate than today's, founded during the historical process and the development of conceptual thinking at the expense of the visual and analogical. Those who said that God cannot be in something have, in their own minds, separated or cut that thing or phenomenon from the continuity of the unity of the world. In fact, they have closed themselves off to one possibility. In this sense, the continuous process of closing and separating has led us to the neo-barbaric state of today, where man does not respect nature, does not respect other people, does not respect himself, having separated the living from the non-living nature.
Today, we have absurd attempts to reconnect living and non-living nature in some cyborgization process. Those who condemned the worship of stone statues of gods or stars feared that people would worship empty objects and not God, yet does worshipping a stone not mean discovering the divine in the stone? It was merely an expression of a turning point that occurred long before that. It was a radical reaction to the decadence of the previous religious-magical formulas, as the historical process meant moving away from the original unity of the world. The result of this is the abstract God, or God as a concept, which ultimately produced atheism as a negation, not only of that abstract God but also of the previous one that the appearance of the abstract God negated. In this sense, the tarot is a form of neo-animism, as its adherents often attribute more than archetypal significance to the images and symbols depicted. The tarot as a divinatory instrument is something that brings us into contact with the beyond, with the spirits of the tarot. For tarot initiates, the cards are alive. Why then should God not dwell in them? Moreover, tarot operators have meticulously engraved all the cards into their memory.
