Following up on yesterday’s post about the Kybalion, I felt the need to clarify a bit further the difference between the panpsychism or mentalism of traditional Hermeticism as opposed to that of modern occultism, as espoused in books like the Kybalion. It is actually a topic that deserves a much longer discussion, and maybe one day I’ll start that discussion. This is just a short collection of incomplete notes.
The trouble with philosophical terms is that they often originate in ancient times, but they develop additional or alternative meanings as history goes on. The term psyche, for instance, is usually taken in a psychological sense today, but in most older philosophers it was just the term for ‘soul’. The idea of soul, in turn, was somewhat different in pre-Christian pagan philosophy than it ended up being after Christianity took over.
When we read in texts like the Kybalion statements like “the universe is mental” (in the sense of part of the mind, not in the sense of crazy, which would be understandable) and compare it with assertions found in the Hermetica about the nous (usually translated mind) revealing itself as the ultimate principle; or even when we compare it with the great presocratic philosophers that certainly inspired the mysteries that later merged into the Hermetic tradition (take Heraclitus’ “the limits of the soul you could not discover”, or Anaxagoras’ assertion that the mind/nous is the principle that orders all things), then we would at first think that this person writing the Kybalion must have been exactly in the same tradition.
But between the ancient notion of mind and the Kybalion’s notion of mind there are two millennia. Two millennia during which Christianity essentially reinvented the concept of soul to mean something much closer to what we understand it to be; then modern philosophy radicalized the subject-object and mind-world distinction; then Idealism mashed everything together again into a new panpsychism that is only an echo of the ancient one; then philosophical decadence set in, leading to the gradual dissolution of all great philosophies; during which time the notion of psyche or mind was slowly appropriated by people attempting to treat it according to the scientific method (those who would later become the first psychologists), as well as by irrationalists of the vitalistic trend.
Against this background, it is unreasonable to think that the concept of mind would remain the same, especially since XIX century occultism is largely the product of the post-revolutionary (as in French revolution) desire for the exotic and strange that the revolution had wiped away together with the old regime.
When there is a historical paradigm shift, finding ourselves in the new paradigm usually estranges us from the old one, and since we operate from the new paradigm, we tend to apply its categories in our attempt to understand how the old paradigm was. This, for instance, is also what led people after the French revolution to look at the tarot as an incomprehensible artifact with arcane meanings, even though it was perfectly understandable within the medieval framework in which it was created.
Well, the cultural paradigm from which the author of the Kybalion talked about the mind is evidently modern. This, in itself, is not bad. No one says that old Hermeticism had all the answers and everything past that is junk. I am not a reactionary who believes all that needed to be said and done has been said and done in times of yore and now all that is left is to go back to it.
The problem arises when the author of the Kybalion is so clearly ignorant of his own paradigm that he uses it to concoct a philosophy that is just a mediocre expression of its own Zeitgeist but uses enough words of the old Hermeticism to make it seem as though he is just summing up millennia of history in a pamphlet. This, in itself, is clearly un-hermetic.
Again, creating new philosophies is not in itself a problem. The problem is that modern occultism (of which the Kybalion is an expression, and not even the best one) is intellectually stuck in that period and has turned into a philosophical and spiritual cul-de-sac of misunderstandings.
In that cul-de-sac, mentalism is simply the triumph of the subjectivistic view of the mind that was en vogue at the time, and that forms the framework of today’s nonsense (see law of attraction, for instance); whereas in the old philosophy, the mind was generally seen as a superior ordering principle of which humans could partake (when they were reasonable, that is, reason-like) but not exhaust.
MQS
