The Neckless Ones: A Historical Puzzle
A longstanding tradition on this blog allows the readers to nominate and vote on a theme for the month’s last post in any month that has five Wednesdays. July being so favored, the usual lively contest unfolded five weeks ago, and the winner this time was the question of why the cultures of the modern industrial West slapped a taboo on the concept of a life force almost five centuries ago, and have kept that taboo rigidly in place ever since.
It really is an odd spectacle. Nearly all other cultures around the world and across the ages treat the life force as an ordinary part of human experience. It’s not something spooky or weird, it’s just a normal aspect of life. Most languages have words for it—qi in Chinese, prana in Sanskrit, pneuma in Greek, ruach in Hebrew, n|um in !Kung, and so on—just as they have words for “rock” or “sky.” What’s more, in most cultures, people work with the life force, using methods that have a great many common factors: controlled breathing, for example, and certain types of movements of the hands. Yet in the Western world, for the last five centuries, our political and cultural authorities, our educational institutions, and our mass media have insisted at the top of their lungs that all this is dangerous superstitious hogwash.
What makes this even stranger is that if you go back more than five centuries, people in the Western countries also recognized the existence of the life force and made much use of it. There was a common word for it, too: in Latin, the language of the educated in those days, it was spiritus, or “spirit” in English. Everybody knew about it. Among other things, the concept had an important religious dimension—when believers in those days talked about the Holy Spirit, they weren’t engaged in theological logic-chopping, they were talking about that particular mode of the life force that embodies the Divine, which they could expect to encounter and experience in religious services and in prayer.
Finally, capping off the weirdness, some of the most pervasive intellectual challenges in all of Western thought are only problematic because of this odd taboo. The classic example is the mind-body problem. We all have minds; we all have bodies. How do these two very different things relate to each other? Philosophers have gone around and around about that one for five hundred years. Before then, the answer was obvious: the life force, or more precisely the subtle body of life force that each of us has, served as the intermediary between them. It’s as though people insisted that there could be no such things as necks, and then devoted five centuries to the most absurd intellectual contortions in the attempt to explain how their heads could possibly be connected to their shoulders.
So how did we get into this bizarre situation? And where do we go from here?
Let’s begin with the historical question. While there were a few scattered thinkers in earlier times who ventured in this direction, the first one that matters in terms of Western history is William of Ockham (1287-1347), the founder of the Nominalist movement in medieval philosophy and the inventor of the famous rhetorical device called, after the Latin spelling of the place he was born, Occam’s Razor. Born in the little village of Ockham in Surrey, he was educated at Oxford and got his master’s degree but was denied a teaching certificate due to serious (and justified) suspicions of heresy. He then left Britain for continental Europe, stirring up controversy wherever he went, and ended up as the house intellectual of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV, writing political screeds to support his patron’s struggles against the Pope.
You can read all about his voluminous writings and the debates they launched in various places online. The crucial thing to know about him is that the philosophy he founded, Nominalism, got its name by insisting that nothing exists except for individual objects. Everything else is simply a name (thus “nominalism”) that human beings use to classify individual objects. In particular, such words as “goodness” or “justice” are simply labels we slap on the behavior of certain objects we call “persons”—they have no other meaning. Ockham’s theology thus insisted that God could just as well have decided to make murder and adultery virtuous acts, and calling something “good” simply meant that God commanded humanity to do it.
“Occam’s Razor,” his famous debating tactic, was of a piece with all this. The version usually cited, Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate (“entities are not to be multiplied without necessity”), appears nowhere in his works but many variations on the same idea do occur there. This claim, that an explanation with fewer factors was more likely to be true than one with more factors, is of course very popular nowadays, and has been stretched in the usual way into the claim that “the simplest explanation is usually correct.”
It’s also complete balderdash. Occam’s Razor, in fact, might better be called Occam’s Fallacy. A glance through the history of science, for example, will show that there is no correlation between the number of factors posited in a theory and the accuracy of the theory: theories are as often wrong through being too simple as through being too complex. Dull as the old theologian’s razor has become, though, it’s stayed in constant use right up to the present, because it has two features that are extremely useful for thinkers of Ockham’s type.
The first is that it provides a convenient argument against the existence of anything that people in authority want to deny. You can see this at work in the insistence by scientists that meteorites did not exist, which continued well into the nineteenth century, or the similiar insistence by scientists that continental drift did not happen, which didn’t collapse until the 1970s. In both cases robust evidence for the phenomenon was dismissed using ad hoc handwaving, based on the insistence that it’s so much simpler to hold that rocks don’t fall from the sky and continents don’t move. Readers of mine who follow other disputed phenomena will find the arguments used in both these former controversies painfully familiar.
The second feature of Occam’s Razor that makes it popular unfolds directly from the first: it’s extremely convenient if you want to engage in the logical fallacy of argument from authority but don’t want to admit that this is what you’re doing. This works because that tricky word “simplest” is a value judgment, not an objective quality. Which is the simplest explanation of reports of meteorite falls—that meteorites exist, or that some complicated cascade of explanations or excuses is responsible every time people report seeing a rock fall from the sky? It depends on who you ask, of course. This kind of weasel-worded gimmick, in which a subjective value judgement is decked out in the borrowed finery of objective fact, is of course very common these days as well. Again, my readers will doubtless be familiar with examples.
That is to say, Ockham’s thought was ultimately political in nature. To argue that “goodness” is simply an arbitrary label imposed by divine whim is to lay the groundwork for an argument that other terms are equally arbitrary and can be imposed or erased by the whim of less metaphysical authorities. That was why Ockham was so useful to Emperor Louis IV in the latter’s ongoing conflict with the Pope. The Catholic church in those days, and the Guelphs (the political faction that supported the Popes in these quarrels), insisted that their side of the quarrel was supported by eternal truths; the Holy Roman Emperors and the Ghibellines, the faction that supported their side, needed some way to undercut that claim. Nominalism provided them with the intellectual ammunition they needed to insist that the Popes were just brandishing empty words to prop up a purely arbitrary claim to power.
The struggle between Nominalists and the opposite party, the Realists, kept medieval intellectual life hopping in much the same way that the struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines kept the political life of the age astir. Both conflicts, intellectual and political, worked their way over time to an uneasy truce. That finally shattered at the dawn of the seventeenth century, after the political and religious climate in Europe had changed utterly. The Protestant Reformation, the rise of powerful monarchies in western Europe, and the birth of the first wave of mercantile capitalist economic systems set all Europe topsy-turvy. Behind it all was the revolution in transport that gave Europe tall ships capable of rounding the globe with holds full of cargo, and the first rush of the astounding and wildly destabilizing flood of wealth that this technological breakthrough brought back to Europe.
The philosophical and political struggles that resulted are almost always presented by modern Western writers in an oversimplified form, and also in isolation from one another. The political struggle, we are told, pitted the old aristocracies against the rising mercantile-capitalist class, and the latter won; the supposedly unrelated philosophical struggle pitted the old religious belief system against the first stirrings of modern science, and the latter won. Of course both victories were retroactively described as the inevitable triumph of progress and common sense over medieval backwardness. It’s a convenient fiction that allows a great deal of inconvenient history to be obscured.
In fact, there were three sides to the struggle, not two, and the philosophical contest was a direct reflection of the political struggle. At one point of the triangle were the old aristocracies and the ideology they supported, which was more or less traditional Christianity. At the second were the mercantile class and the ideology they supported, which was materialist science, which at the time was the the latest development of Ockham’s Nominalism. At the third point were an odd assortment of people, ranging from monarchs to members of the literate working classes, and the ideology they supported: Renaissance Hermeticism.
Let’s take a moment to unpack those last two words. In the twilight of the ancient world, the Christian church (not yet divided into Orthodox and Catholic camps) did its level best to suppress the rich magical heritage of antiquity while preserving a cleaned-up version of the theory, in the form of Neoplatonist theology, and practice, in the form of sacramentals. (This is a catchall term for all the various religious objects and practices that aren’t counted among the formal sacraments: for example, holy water is a sacramental.)
Fast forward a thousand years to the fifteenth century. A collection of essays written by pagan mystics in Roman times and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus surfaced in Italy and inspired a great many intellectuals to try to recover the lost treasures of ancient occultism. They argued that the same logic that permitted sacramentals could be extended to cover Christian magic, alchemy, and astrology. That view became widespread among members of the urban working classes, newly literate due to the effects of the printing presses; it was popular among a great many intellectuals across the class spectrum; and it also found a home among royalty and their courts, for reasons that deserve a close look.
Beginning in the fourteenth century, kings in various parts of Europe started allying with the urban proto-capitalist class as a way to counter the immense power of the hereditary nobility, which owned much of the land in each kingdom and could (and did) muster private armies large enough to overthrow monarchs. It was a smart move on both sides, since the proto-capitalists needed protection from the nobility just as much as the kings did, and the emergence of effective infantry weapons—pikes, longbows, and ultimately gunpowder—gave it teeth.
The problem for the kings was that by the seventeenth century, due to the immense wealth to be had from maritime trade, the new mercantile capitalist class had the money and power to start overthrowing kings themselves, and they had begun supporting materialist science and ascetic religious movements—Puritans in England, Jansenists in France, and so on—which undercut what was left of the magic of kingship. Elizabeth I of England started quietly cultivating the Hermetic movement as a counterbalance; her successor James I, called “the wisest fool in Christendom” in his day, who concealed utter ruthlessness and impressive political skills under a geeky pose, picked up on it and ran with it—but James’ son Charles I didn’t have his father’s gifts, and allied instead with the old nobility against the mercantile class while doing his level best, for religious reasons, to suppress the Hermetic movement.
The English Civil War followed. Charles lost and was beheaded in 1649. That set the Hermetic movement free to swing to the other extreme and embrace radical politics, which it promptly did. The Diggers, the Levellers, the Fifth Monarchy Men, and the other revolutionary movements of the 1650s, which sketched out to an astonishing degree the revolutionary ideas of the next two centuries, were heavily influenced by Hermetic ideas; Gerrard Winstanley, the great theoretician of the Diggers, drew his economic theory explicitly from Hermetic alchemical thought. This was not a feeble phenomenon; at one point in the 1650s the revolutionary movements came within an ace of seizing control of the army and the kingdom.
That sent panic through the mercantile and aristocratic classes alike, and forced them to find common ground. King Charles II accordingly was called back from exile and took the throne, religious and political differences ended in a series of awkward compromises, and England settled into the hybrid system of government it’s had ever since. Similar processes took place in other western European countries, but England was the one that counted, because that’s where the industrial revolution took off. It’s also where the system of centralized representative government, which concentrates power in the hands of capitalists and aristocrats while giving everyone else the illusion of participation in politics, first took root.
The suppression of the life force was part of that. The life force was the keynote of Hermeticism, the bond that united mind and matter and explained how magic and other occult sciences worked, so out it went. That expulsion was redoubled in the nineteenth century when the capitalists and the aristocrats turned on each other, using the squabbles over Darwinism as their excuse; once the capitalists won, the aristocrats were stripped of most of their remaining political power, and the Christian churches lost the last of their authority, today’s dogmatic materialism became the order of the day, and the new centralized systems of education that replaced older, decentralized, more or less religiously based arrangements all over Europe and North America proceeded to enforce that, ramming the new doctrine down the throats of each subsequent generation.
So that’s how most of us lost our necks, and became heads bobbing along somewhere vaguely above our bodies. That’s how a set of ideas that started out as the talking points of medieval Ghibellines trying to advance the cause of the Holy Roman Emperors, and then morphed into another set of talking points used by mercantile capitalists to undercut the authority of kings and aristocrats in the hope of replacing both by straightforward plutocracy, got turned into one of the core belief systems of the modern world and used as a bludgeon to beat down anybody who perceived something they weren’t supposed to perceive.
Yes, what all this implies is that worldviews—all worldviews—have a political dimension, and are accepted or rejected by societies far more often on the basis of politics than for any less gritty reason. Scientific materialism was embraced by the West because it justifies the authority claims made by scientists, and thus the claims to power and wealth of the people who pay the salaries of scientists. Of course science and technology have brought benefits; pour vast amounts of money and talent into any set of ideas, and that’s going to happen—and it’s worth noting that the propagandists who wax rhapsodic about the benefits of science and technology are remarkably mum when it comes to mentioning the corresponding costs.
Thus it’s anything but an accident that a great many people who want to take control of their own health back from the fantastically corrupt and abusive medical industry we have here in the US have turned to health care modalities that use the life force. (Yes, that’s spelled “quackery” in the jargon of today’s materialist pseudoskeptics; funny how they never apply that label to the many products of the pharmaceutical industry that provide little or no benefit.) It’s no accident, either, that magic has been practiced with passionate fervor all through the American underclass from colonial times on, producing first-rate systems of magical practice—African-American conjure is probably the best documented of these, but far from the only one.
It’s also why, whenever the political and economic systems of American society stop benefiting most Americans, that old nemesis of the establishment, Hermetic occultism, comes surging up again out of the crawlspaces of society. Think of it as the return of the repressed, or simply as the inevitable consequence of denouncing something to the skies when what you offer in its place isn’t working too well. As the world created by scientific materialism run amok proves to be unfit for human habitation, people are looking for alternatives, and the more strident the denunciation of those alternatives become, the more people will perk up their ears and embrace whatever will outrage their supposed betters most.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer a bit of advice to any Christian clergy who might be listening in on this conversation. You might consider looking back a few centuries and relearning all the ways that your churches used to direct spirit—that is to say, the life force, blessed by the divine influence—to help people with their daily lives. (Yes, that’s spelled “sacramentals” in Catholic jargon.) Your predecessors used to do a lot of healing and blessing; of course they believed in the real existence of their god, and I’m not sure how many of you still do, but that’s something you’ll have to settle in the privacy of your own conscience. If all you can offer is earnest moralizing and amateur counseling, that may not cut it any more.
In the meantime, teachers of the old occult traditions are still around, still helping people learn how to perceive the life force and work with it. As scientific materialism implodes around us, I don’t think we’ll have any shortage of students.
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