The Metaphysical West and the Spirit of Atlantis (by Dorijan Nuaj)

Karl Marx spoke of imperialism as the final stage of capitalism. Historian Arnold Toynbee claimed that increased domination over the environment was more a symptom of collapse than of growth. Militarism, according to Toynbee, is a common feature of breakdown and disintegration and also marks imperialist capitalism. Today, we are witnessing precisely that Marxist "final stage of capitalism": an unprecedented consolidation of capital, as described by economist Thomas Piketty, along with militarism and heightened control over the environment. The symptomatic privatization of virtually everything—every possible resource—serves as further evidence. Needless to say, the global West, as an expression of imperialist and militarist capitalism, cannot truly be considered an empire in the traditional sense of the word. Thus, I use the term here colloquially. Perhaps it would be more accurate to revise Marx’s term and say that pseudo-imperialism is in fact the final stage of capitalism. The global pseudo-imperial West, in the narrow sense, is nothing more than a collective designation—a bearer of identity—for global financial capital. That very capital is the essence of the West: its blood, its spirit, and its power.

In this worldwide flood of financial capital, we see the image of a mythical water element reducing the world of real economy—tied to actual life, real culture, and civilization—to a Noah's Ark, desperately adrift in a watery wasteland. This image represents the sheer quantitative dominance of the global ocean over the global landmass, whose shores are eroded by speculative waves, reducing its expanse to the level of islands—ideally depicted as a fragmented Pacific or Caribbean archipelago. Even symbolically, those so-called offshore locations—tax havens on faraway tropical islands—are telling and emblematic, serving the role of modern pirate coves. The world today has been drowned in a flood of historical proportions: the flood of the financial West. Geopolitically speaking, the West itself has become nearly shoreless, turning into the embodiment of a metaphysical West—a place of abyssal descent and quiet dissolution. Above it all, above the surface of that immense watery mass, we see lunar reflections and, beyond them, the spirits of Saturn and Jupiter. At the same time, we witness the pale glimmers of the Sun sinking ever deeper. The Moon represents production, the fertility of capital, the printing of money, its ex nihilo creation, the illusory nature of currencies and financial derivatives—a mirror of financial speculation. Jupiter symbolizes yield, profit, privilege, and gain. Saturn stands for mass, context—the one who creates paths of events, the master of time and process. Riding the waves of this (post)modern cargo cult, which promises its believers and priests (investors) gifts (profits), this modern embodiment of the ancient god Mammon has seized all of humanity. This global flood is the manifestation of the metaphysical West—its chthonic emergence that, in our time, revives the fate of mythical Atlantis: a plunge into the watery abyss. It is the transformation of the maternal water element—the Great Mother—into the Terrible Mother, the devourer, whose gaping jaws now represent the ever-more-likely prospect of civilizational collapse.

In Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law, there is a verse indicative of this theme: “A rich man from the West shall pour his gold upon thee. From gold forge steel!” In this statement, we sense a reflection of the cargo cult—though in a different sense. The rich man from the West is an ancestor or forerunner—a spirit—arriving from the world of the dead or the departed, bringing a sacred metal from which the adept will forge a golden sword. Of course, this is not literally about gold, but rather symbolic of something else. The sword in question is the alchemical melitus gladius, the honeyed sword, the solar sword made of gold—if we understand gold as a part of the subterranean Sun, since gold resides and "ripens" underground. This sword is a symbol of the effective use of solar energy and its earthly spiritual derivative—gold. The sword of golden steel is like Excalibur, and only the rightful king is worthy of wielding it to part the waters and reveal the salvific land. That mythical West may, in some sense, be Atlantis—from which emanates the flame of gnosis that nourishes various magical and religious currents. Here I’d like to quote an indicative passage from the very beginning of the famous book by occultist Michael Bertiaux:

“One time there was a big school of magick on the island of this same Atlantis and the magicians were very powerful. What they didn’t know when they were alive they soon learned after they died. The island, as we said, just sank under the ocean and the magicians went down with it. But they didn’t die, they just became spirits with fish-like bodies and frog-like bodies, and snake-like bodies. They did this so they could continue their work under the ocean, in their big temple down at the bottom of the sea. They are still down there, but they are also spirits and as spirits they are able to do a lot of things. In fact they know how to do more things now than they knew a long time ago. The older they get the more powerful they get.”
—Michael Bertiaux, The Voudon Gnostic Workbook, Weiser Books, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2007, p. 1.

melitus gladius

From there, these deep chthonic sleepers telepathically and through dreams influence their initiates. The scarab, as a chthonic creature, points precisely to that dark depth—the habitat of essential plutocracy. From there come obsessions, projections of aliens, and all things demonic and obscure. I am not sure that these phenomena should be interpreted purely in terms of darkness and depravity—but I am certain it would be wrong to ignore that element. Ultimately, it does not matter whether Atlantis ever truly existed—for as a symbol, it is real: an aggregate of magical power and the source of an essentially vampiric force. Atlantis is the occult spring of thalassocracy and of the modern black parasitic economy upon which the invasive, destructive consumer culture is built. That culture is the most vulgar form of the cargo cult—or rather, its secular, agnostic modalities. The key word of this depraved mindset is success. Success lies behind every interest, every profit, every form of power. It is the root of motivation and serves as a kind of mental talisman implanted in the modern individual. The word for sin is Success. Failure is only its consequence.

However, the very source of parasitic thalassocracy is also the starting point of vampiric manipulations of sexuality. Sexuality—or, more precisely, its abuse—belongs to the stream of occult causes upon which today’s global cargo cult is founded. We know that the so-called world’s oldest profession once held a sacred role in the form of temple prostitution, linked to the planetary nature of Venus as expressed in various goddesses. Yet what I wish to highlight is the vampiric archetype behind temple prostitution, buried deep in prehistory and in the depravities of the black magicians of Atlantis. To evoke this image, it is enough to recall the monstrous behaviors of certain sorcerers from the lineage of ancient seers in pre-Columbian Mexico, as described by Carlos Castaneda. They engaged in terrifying and bizarre behavior—by human standards—in desperate attempts to survive, to somehow tap into the energy of the living.

Fritz Schwimbeck

Similar forms of energy extraction by depraved sorcerers—this time linked to sexuality—are mentioned by Michael Bertiaux. He hints at peculiar brothels ruled by blind forces in service of energetic vampires who drain the semen of men to maintain their existence. Though conveyed through brief allusions, Bertiaux cracked the door open to understanding the true origin of prostitution. That motif is rooted deep within the underworld of black-magical realms, inhabited by strange creatures like the ghastly fish that dwell in the great oceanic abysses where eternal darkness reigns. From those depths come the cargo cults of prostitution and pornography. The Age of Aquarius, with its undulations, will stir the sediment from the depths—releasing to the surface unimaginable energies and forms of consciousness, whose vibrations and emanations will flood the minds and bodies of human beings. Visions reminiscent of Lovecraft, the resurgence of interest in Atlantis, pre-Columbian American civilizations, dinosaurs, monstrous aliens—all of it is the result of a kind of renaissance of the spirit of Egypt within modern civilization. And the road out of Egypt leads directly to Atlantis. All of this finds grounding in the plan of the spirit of the age. From Saturn’s perspective, it is clear—and by understanding Saturn’s nature, we may begin to fathom why the things written here are taking place.

Analogy and Magic (by Dorijan Nuaj)

Many practitioners of modern esoteric teachings and practices have encountered the demand to memorize and permanently retain numerous tables of correspondences that connect various phenomena and symbols. This requirement has long been—and still is—imposed on students of certain occult schools. Why is it necessary to know by heart the connections between certain symbols and phenomena in order to engage in occult and magical practices at all? Where does this imperative of rote memorization come from? In fact, it’s not strictly necessary—but modern people have long lost the ability to connect phenomena and symbols through analogy, having become accustomed to thinking in abstract concepts. These connections, or attributions, are not exact or scientifically established; they exist solely in the mind as patterns of analogies. They serve as navigational tools of the mind and form the foundation of what is known as the art of memory.

For instance, those who view astrology as inaccurate and absurd will quite logically and reasonably deny that planetary positions influence our lives in any way. From their point of view, skeptics are absolutely right—but only because they fail to grasp the basic rule of magical perception and thinking. Of course, the stars and planets as physical bodies don’t exert that kind of influence, but there exists a correspondence—that is, an analogy—between their movements and our destiny, character, and life circumstances. So, what connects these phenomena is an analogy, one that doesn’t exist objectively in the sense of how we today define something as real, but rather exclusively in the mind of the practitioner. The same applies to the reading of tarot cards, geomantic figures, or I Ching hexagrams. Objectively speaking, they’re just symbols someone is playing with—yet the core process of divination, interpretation, and prediction takes place in the practitioner’s mind. It is something entirely subjective, and yet it is often from that position of subjectivity that the diviner accurately perceives what was, what is, and what will be. A successful diviner, in truth, reads from their own imagination. The positions of the planets and stars in the sky, the way the cards were laid out, or the constellation formed by specific symbols all serve as triggers for an inner imaginative process—that is, for a magical understanding of reality. And that understanding is archaic. At this point, it’s useful to present key excerpts from Béla Hamvas that are relevant to this discussion:

“The vision and thinking of historical man rest on logical opposites; the vision and thinking of archaic man rest on analogies... Analogy means that between every phenomenon, person, shape, substance, or quality there is both difference and connection. The fact that everything in the world differs, yet is the same; everything is the same thing, but that same thing appears in multiplicity—this is what the ancients called analogy... In the recognition of analogies, logical reasoning is not decisive but rather a deeper and more elemental experience. Analogies are experienced by manas, the inner sense. It survives by directly perceiving the mutual relationship of inner images revealed before it. Such a direct, logically inexplicable connection exists between metaphysical principles and numbers... Historical man does not think in images but in meaningful oppositions and is completely blind compared to archaic man. The intellectual activity of modern man is abstract and unreal... The hallmark of the world is not in oppositions, but in differences... Everything similar is different and everything different is similar, though similarity never entirely overlaps, and difference never turns into absolute opposition. Opposition is not a property of the world or of reality, but of abstract meaning... To see through analogies is to be sensitive to similarities and differences... In archaic times, human knowledge was not a conceptual construction of abstract qualities, but personified and genetic.”
— Béla Hamvas, Scientia Sacra

If someone in the 21st century wishes to engage in the occult—or even just to understand the worldview of ancient people—or wishes to step outside the frameworks of contemporary thinking, they must learn to think in a way proper to that world. It’s akin to reviving a kind of epistemological and cognitive atavism. Of course, achieving this completely is difficult, but learning tables of correspondences and practicing their visual and spatial representation is one of the first steps in that direction.

When we mentally establish a chain such as: Moon / silver / water / the letter M / feminine / night / Water trigram / the symbol of the bow / the veil / cyclicality / the left eye / dog / owl / dream, and when we internalize this associative sequence of similarities so that it begins operating automatically in our minds—that is a solid starting point. We won’t equate these things as identical, but we’ll learn how to connect what we perceive or confront with the cosmos—and ultimately with ourselves. Thus, I can take a silver coin and claim it represents the Moon, even though the coin obviously has no direct connection to Earth’s satellite. Yet the two objects share a common ideal quality. That is the nature of the magical link between them. Once my mind adopts a certain set of such connections, that set can endlessly branch and expand.

Ultimately, all phenomena are interconnected, yet they differ enough from one another. It is up to our minds to group the properties that link or distinguish them into a kind of inventory of the world. Some have long rightly said that God is everywhere and in everything, yet still cried out that God cannot be in a statue, in stone, in wood, or in a painting. But God most certainly can be in a cloud, in a statue, in a tree, in a painting, in a symbol, a letter, a word, in the stars—and finally, in human beings themselves. This view is, in essence, animistic. Yet animism is the embodiment of the ancient worldview, which was far more immediate than the one that took shape during the historical process and the rise of conceptual thinking at the expense of image-based thought.

Those who declared that God cannot be present in a thing or form effectively severed or cut off that object or phenomenon from the continuity of the world’s unity—at least in their own minds. In doing so, they closed themselves off, and those they influenced, from one potential experience. In that sense, the continuous process of closing off and separating has brought us to today’s neo-barbaric state—where humans no longer respect nature, other people, or even themselves, having separated living from non-living nature. Today, we witness absurd attempts to reunite the living and non-living through some kind of cyborgization process.

Those who once condemned the worship of stone statues of gods or stars feared that people would worship empty objects rather than the divine—but doesn’t the worship of stone mean precisely the discovery of the divine within the stone? That was merely the expression of a turning point that had occurred long before. It was a radical response to the decadence of previous religious-magical formulas, as the historical process represented a distancing from the original unity of the world. The result was the abstract God—God as a concept—which ultimately led to atheism as a negation not only of that abstract God but also of what preceded it, which the concept of God itself had previously negated.

In light of all this, tarot is a form of neo-animism, as its followers often attribute to its images and symbols more than just archetypal significance. As a tool of divination, tarot brings us into contact with the beyond—with the spirits of the tarot. For the initiates, the cards are alive. Moreover, tarot operators have etched all the cards deeply into their memory.

The foundations of pagan theology and magic of atavistic resurrection (by Dorijan Nuaj)

By naming the animals, Adam was in fact invoking gods—or aspects of God. In this sense, we might say that Darwin’s theory of evolution, likely contrary to its author’s intention, suggests that humans descend not from animals per se, but from gods—that is, from those occult forces whose living symbols are precisely animals. Erich Neumann notes that for primitive humans, it was natural to perceive a numinous ancestor in animal form. Humans descend from gods represented as animals, whether those gods created humankind or became humans by degradation or descent. Kenneth Grant wrote that deities with animal heads served as guardians and guides to the secret pathways of the underworld. These deities formed strata of the subconscious containing the powers of the animals whose forms they embodied. Humanity, says Grant, has lost the key to understanding these divine forms, because such a key does not exist on the level of rational explanation.

In the biblical order of creation, animals precede humans because gods precede human beings—hierarchically, ontologically, and temporally. However, Adam Kadmon, as the symbol of the cosmic human, was created first and is older than all gods and animals, for he contains them all within himself. Thus, from the occult perspective, the human being can, through layers of the deep psyche, summon divine consciousness symbolized by a particular animal—a process that lies at the heart of magical atavistic resurrection. According to Kenneth Grant, these divine forms are typically associated with ancient animal-headed deities. In this way, atavisms—or pre-human powers—manifest within the magician, who experiences and actualizes in the astral world the energies and powers once held by those specific animals. The reawakening of animal atavisms within a human recalls the concept of messianic resurrection, or that of the slain god. Resurrection emerges in the body, as a physical or physiological event, meaning it is—according to Grant—a direct experience. The renowned historian of religion Mircea Eliade cites a passage from the Scandinavian epic Ynglinga Saga (Chapter VI) describing Odin’s followers:

“They went without armor, wild like dogs and wolves. They bit their shields and were as strong as bears and bulls. They slaughtered men and neither iron nor steel could harm them. This was called berserker rage.”

Eliade explains that berserkers were warriors wrapped in bear skins (serkr), thus magically and completely identified with the bear—and at times with the wolf. One became a berserker through an initiation involving a series of warrior trials. Through these ordeals, the initiate adopted the way of being of the beast—becoming all the more dangerous a warrior the more he behaved like a beast. He was transformed into an overman by succeeding in channeling the magical-religious power of the predator.

The well-known esoteric symbol of the Lion-Serpent is also atavistic, and evidently a necessary mode of messianic manifestation. The lion is simultaneously the symbol of the Judean tribe from whose bloodline the Messiah is to come. And yet, by demonizing Egyptian magical-religious practice as diabolical idolatry, Moses effectively abolished the possibility of magical obsessions with divine atavisms and their zoomorphic natures. In doing so, an entire aspect of the microcosm was cast into shadow for the sake of worshiping and receiving instruction from an invisible and formless God who, throughout Old Testament history, appeared in various ways, ultimately becoming—within the experience of his followers—a mystical light, a sacred text, and a magical alphabet. In the light of experience, gods are formulae—that is, keys. Let us set aside feelings, strength of conviction, definitions, or the nature of inner visions and experiences. In the purely practical sense—and that, in the end, is what matters most—God, gods, demons are formulae: vocal, symbolic, visual, energetic. Do I believe in formulae? Of course I do, but it is almost absurd to ask. It’s like asking a mathematician whether he believes in equations. Of course he does—but what he’s really interested in is solving them. Equations only matter if they prove true or false in relation to a specific problem they are meant to solve. Many would say that this view of the divine is rigid and limiting, but without a functional focus, insisting on a sublime, incomprehensible, infinite divine is meaningless—except as a subject for philosophical discourse.

To the Egyptians, the gods—or neteru—were countless variations of superhuman presence permeating our world. Thus, neteru were, among other things, axes, serpents, and falcons. The historical and mythological anthropomorphization of the gods—from the Christian God-Man to the doctrine summed up by the phrase “Man is God”—has blurred the nonhuman nature of divinity. Can a human become god without first ceasing to be human? Or does one become divine precisely by fully actualizing their humanity? Admittedly, such questions may seem like empty rhetoric, and from a practical standpoint, they make little sense. From a practical standpoint, one can identify with a formula in order to unlock it within one’s consciousness. In other words, formulae are to be used—and the magician, like the mathematician, is someone who works with formulae. The neteru, that is, gods or formulae, are givens of the world—just like air, water, earth, grass, animals, or anything else. And just as we engage with all these givens without hesitation, so too do we engage with formulae. They are natural givens of our world and our consciousness. Granted, among these givens lurk many dangers—but so do dangers lurk among far more banal phenomena. We can drown in water, crash into the earth, be poisoned by plants, be torn apart by animals, carried off by the wind, and so on. Likewise, we can go mad from formulae—or be led to death by them, just like by anything else.

Now that we have cleared up some uncertainties, let us turn to the paths of unlocking these formulae. Let us begin with language, since we are accustomed to thinking of magical formulae primarily as words. Our ancestors created language by mimicking animal sounds, and this onomatopoeic language is universal, forming the basis of all derivative spoken tongues. We do not need spoken language in order to think—we need it to communicate with one another, and even then, the language of signs and gestures is often sufficient. Spoken language develops as the human world grows more complex. We have now grown accustomed to thinking in linguistic forms. This is a consequence and product of generational cultivation. In that sense, the language of signs, movements, and imitation of animal sounds is older. Magical formulae are therefore not only words—and often not words at all. At their core lies an intention accompanied by a specific movement, gesture, body posture, or a series of gestures often expressed through dance. This alone is usually sufficient—and in ancient times, it was all that was needed. With the development of magic, or more precisely its intellectualization, sound was added to the process—then voice, and eventually the willed projection of mental images. Thus we arrived at complex magical formulae and rituals. So, we have a movement or sequence of movements, gesture or expression, posture, position of hands and fingers, sound we emit (whistling, clicking, screeching, howling), words we say, chant, or sing (meaningful or meaningless), in sequences and repetitions; we have rhythm, we have the images we imagine—and all this is combined with the appropriate place and time for magical action. We must choose a specific place and time: when the wind is favorable, when the spirit confirms the moment by sending a sign—a strange cloud, a sudden gust of wind, or the appearance of a fitting animal; when the Moon is in a certain phase, on a certain day and season, and when a certain constellation is visible in the sky, etc. All of this must align with our intention and the nature of what we seek to achieve.

From all this, we can see that magic is the original scientific discipline—a kind of primal science rooted in experience and experimentation, underpinned by a complex worldview based on the all-encompassing determinism of universal interconnectedness. The agent enabling this determinism is expressed through a power whose exponents are the neteru—that is, gods or daimons. These entities, however abstract they may be, are—in the magical sense—quite concrete.