Political Alchemy: The Dangers and Temptations of Transformation to Perfection

The choice is as judicious as it is provocative in a time when all of us are threatened in our humanity, if not in our physical existence, by the massive social force of activist dreamers who want to liberate us from our imperfections by locking up in the perfect prison of their phantasy. Even in our so-called free societies not a day passes that we are not seriously molested, in encounters with persons, or the mass media, or a supposedly philosophical and scientific literature, by somebody’s Utopian imagination. (Voegelin 1990: 315)

It can be said that death, the end of physical existence, means the termination of the community between self, body and soul,[1] and that out of these three we are in good terms only with the first two, knowing just a little about the third one. But the massive social force of activist dreamers targets exactly the soul, this little-known factor of life, constantly acting in order to promote a transformation, our liberation from the state of imperfection and leading towards perfection. The notion of the soul traditionally belonged to the sphere of religions. Axial religions and spiritualities, like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity in particular contained a lot reflections about the soul, but with their passing out of sight in social scientific understanding, the notion of the soul also disappeared. Besides its disappearance, it left us in total darkness about the historical changes of the notion itself. In the motto above Voegelin captures the dismantling of the soul-body-self unity and the repositioning of the voided entity into an impossible dream-world, that he called Utopian imagination, as a result of the ceaseless operations of activist dreamers.

But this prison of phantasy is increasingly threatening our humanity, as transformation is hurting individual physical existence, it is dangerously and unpleasantly foolish, it wants to flux the solidity of the world, to change the entities into amorphous conglomerates, to transform faces into grimaces and concrete features into opaque, simplified signs. More than ever there now exists a ‘massive social force of activist dreamers’, with their continuous everyday molestation to liberate us from our normal condition, who would like to transform us, to transfigure our world from its authentic existence into an alternated shape: the dream of the simpleton to rule the world. This huge transformative zeal is the work of activists, which was not surprisingly started and restarted several times during history under several names, like Sophists, Gnostics, Marxists, or other tricksters, but always striving for perfecting existence, with persuasive self-deception and insensitivity for the price of new constructions in terms of a debased reality. The idea of being reborn into a new perfection, where any disorder and imperfection of reality will be eliminated, nevertheless is a lunatic fanatism or ‘intellectual crookedness’ (Voegelin 1990: 323) that started to feverishly spread, as Jaspers pointed it out, in the Axial Age (Jaspers).[2]

Indeed, with the Axial Age a certain political alchemy started to unroll, which looks for the termination of the unity of soul, body and self, the transfiguring of differentiation into a featureless mass. This self-same individual representation was turned into a general impersonation, which may be termed spiritualisation (see Jaspers, 2021: 10), grounded on a newly found uncertainty. Until the Axial Age the soul represented self-identity, but with the Axial Age the soul became a universal absoluteness, particularly inside the rising global or ecumenic empires. Absoluteness brought about two consequences: where tradition was being upheld and retained, its basis was transformed into transcendentality and caused a totally new zealotry, a feverish novel comprehension about the world, which extended into cosmological thinking, with their impossible demands for perfection; while the other was a striving for new constructions, outside any tradition, in order to reach a radically new and better existence. But – and this is our main point now – at the very time of their impossible demands a curious transformation occurred, which caused the emanation of souls, into accidental existence, liberated from their bodies and self.

Disturbances caused by the new search for a universal empire produced voided entities or accidental souls. This voided state was described by Voegelin in the following words: “When the living are dead, the dead who are living have no audience”. (Voegelin, 1990: 335) A voided existence is the accumulation of accidental souls, those that are without an authentic audience and reflection, shape and form, so they concentrate themselves into different conglomerates of time and space. But the living dead are different from the living ones, whose soul is in unity with their self and body. This dead state, while living, moving, and sensing, doubtless has a relation to a great variety of new circumstances and considerations, and consequently affords a great latitude to those who wish to use them precisely and comprehensively. One of these usages is the summoning of the living dead by magic or technology. This happens all the more easily as the nature of the accidental souls is that they are in flux, easily channelled, gathered and amplified without a proper body to resist. As an example for the description of such flux amplification one might refer to the commentary by Ficino,[3] the renaissance neo-Platonist to hermetic writings, who aimed at transformation by divination, using the transliteration of Frances Yates:

the doctrine of the divinity is like a torrential flood coming down from the heights with violent impetuosity. From the celestial bodies there are spread throughout the world continual effluvia, through the souls of all species and of all individuals from one end to the other of nature.[4]

Another usage can be found in the twin brother of magic, in technology, which turned the liberation of the soul, the transformation of entities into the industry of soul factories, by utilizing the effluvia of dying matter and channelling its energy into new entities. Any sort of liminal crisis, migration, war, displacement, the loss of family, death, infection, pandemic are continuously liberating souls from their bodies and self in moribund delirium (due to constant discord), and at the same time will give space for slowly progressing new structures. This may sometimes be of importance in the production of new phenomena, like institutionalised religions.

In so far as liminality is concerned, the soul is in an accidental existence, in flux: it goes from here to there, onto other subjects, ever transmitting movements and sensuals, conglomerating into new entities, so transformation occurs. Transformation fashioned its own social and political worlds, even spiritual empires since the Antiquity, enforcing the denial of earthly living through ascetism (Weber 1968: 541-56). But an entity without its assigned unity of self-mind-body is just a representation, and without the body is just a communication between the heaven and the earth, a pure vibration, that can fill any artificiality or living dead structure, like the one named as Leviathan by Hobbes.

Therefore, the soul can exist without its own self (in a transformed existence), and the body as a sort of living dead without its assigned soul even could be powerfully incorporated into political bodies, as Hobbes claimed, and can build up its social structure along the line of the real as a dual power, equally or more influential if diligent actors (‘activist dreamers’) are on its side for enacting the impulses of the soul. By the way, with modernity these representative bodies of the person are now everywhere (see Douglas 1987). There, the artificial is forcing its way steadily through all the fault lines of liminality—the living dead with the rare faculty of dramatic impersonation, expressing itself in every look and action of the real, and now can perform all actions of life. Even more, as the living dead had an invisible effect on the living body of the social, which could grow into a different, independent, divided interest from the real world, it can grow with elastic dynamism into an entity, founded on souls severed from their bodies and self. The best contemporary examples for this voided entity are the seductive imagery conglomerates, like Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Microsoft, the surrogate agencies of accidental souls, the artificial entities that are claiming the self and body of others until everything seems to work in their favour due to the liberation of souls from earthly life into a liminal fluidity. In liminality there is a strong depatterning zeal, so the right question to ask is who would move into our self-body-soul frames once they were left unattended.

As example for depatterning, we could mention institutionalised religion. It is not to be wondered that the major world religions, instituted in ‘times of troubles’ or in liminal times, should on historical experience be found greatly deficient and inadequate to the problems they intended to answer. Instead of reinforcing concrete individual souls when they needed support in a time of troubles, they channelled them into new, universalistic institutional conglomerates. The establishment of a dual power thus has a deep entanglement and collaboration with the very real, pragmatic politics of the highest circles of the politically potent and the socially highly established. Throughout the many hundred years of their rule, they repatterned us with continuous mental exercises and moral obligations, giving also stimulating examples about how to die and how to be buried, an environment which caused the Old World to become passive and tired, each version reinstating its institutionalised religion with more vigour that the previous such rule was. Patterning is an essential skill in learning, particularly in the development of mimetic arts, where awareness, sequencing and ordering, comparison and classification are in constant copying. Their tutelary power colonised the world and their missionary zeal kept it in its grip, accounting for changes in world trade, culture and mentality, but at the same time, in the background, often in secret, kept their close connections with the official power hierarchies, just like later in the Roman Empire or in the Byzantium, and without doubt also in the contemporary. Such universal patterning was performed by the summoning of accidental souls, which have a life of vibration, undulating impulses or sensuals,[5] by moving and sensing, with an eagerness for possessing the authentic.

So, the positioning of the living dead into the world did not cease to exist with the axial age, rather became ever intensified through magic, religion and political institutions, until it reached the saturation point with technologized science. The breaking up of the unity between soul, body and self has reached a decisive stage just before the turn of the last century by the revival of spiritual seances. This happened through the use of an illegitimate power gained from disintegration or death, which knocked down all restraints set up against the transformation of matter, linked to magic and sorcery. This process was amplified in an industrial scale by the detection of perceived vibrating (i.e. spiritual) forces in electricity, by experimenting with paranormal and transcendental experience. The living dead, the ever-fluxing souls without proper bodies were searching for bodies that could be possessed. Electricity is the closest thing we have to magic, as through it the production of accidental souls was transposed from magic into scientific usage.  It became a source of power that technology is able to tap into and make function beyond the constraints and limitations of the soul-body-self entity, now progressing into the merging of technology with the human body, most importantly into mind control, into downloading information into one’s own mind or other individuals minds from outside sources, to obtain total control over them. The discovery of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the accidental souls renders possible the otherwise impossible tasks of influencing and controlling others, transforming the world, perfectioning it according to the measure of the activist dreamer, replacing the old figure of the magician.

Electromagnetic radiation is the endless circularity of an infinitely repeatable mimetic mechanism which repeats forever the previous movement. Yet, it is not so obvious how it does work, how it does happen, how it does act on a great distance, interacting with our mind-soul-body entity. Hence, knowing how it worked in the past as witchcraft or shamanism – emitting souls and so communicating with the dead – we can guess about its working system in the present, when we use it repeatedly and routinely in our everyday. The disintegration and transmutation of an entity, the emitting of its delirious soul and the move to reposition it somewhere else results in energy release and entity transformation. This simple process directs magic and alchemy as well as technology and can be effected and utilized by storage devices like ionization, friction, ion conduction and similar principles, such as flowing from a less conductive type of entity to a more conductive one. But in both magic and technology electricity appears as if it were an external force. However, indeed it is a spiritual phenomenon, being the soul contents of dead or dying entities, tapped and channelled by technology, best seen in the magic practices of media industry like Google, which makes these outside forces flow in and through us, utilising the fact that our nervous system works on micro electrical impulses that can be manipulated and used without responsibility, so foolishly.

We are seriously molested, continuously hijacked and thoroughly influenced by the transformative zeal of foolish empire-builders, effected by a disintegrative terror that creates illusions of world threating virus infections, that alter perception on a massive scale, making acceptable mindless miracle cures, algorithm-directed computer databases to predict absurd disease trends and other alterations of natural biological processes through incommensurable biomedicines. We are threatened to become subordinated to a global police surveillance by mass manipulation, in particular cellular phones, by genetic engineering and gene editing, and in general by the simple fact that the amplification of artificial electromagnetic vibration has irreversible consequences. We are wired and circuited in order to be used to channel, transform and feed the living dead, fulfilling the utopian dream of a foolish mindset by transforming the world with mysterious forces that are capable of interacting with matter. These forces were considered magical in the past; however, they are only conglomerations of accidental souls, which we can call electromagnetic, nuclear, or gravitational forces, channelled to reach universal bliss, however absurd and impossible.

Bibliography

Baumgarten, A.I., J. Assmann, and G. Stroumsa (eds) (1998) Self, Soul and Body in Religious Experience, Leiden: Brill.

Douglas, Mary (1987) How Institutions Think, London: Routledge.

Horvath, Agnes (2021) Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded, New York: Routledge.

Jaspers, Karl (2021) The Origin and Goal of History, New York: Routledge. [1949]

Voegelin, Eric (1990) ‘Wisdom and the magic of the extreme: A meditation’, in E. Sandoz (ed.) Published Essays, 1966-1985, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Weber, Max (1968) ‘Asceticism, Mysticism and Salvation’, in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, New York: Bedminster Press.

Yates, Frances (1964) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Notes

[1] See Baumgarten, Assmann, and Stroumsa (1998).

[2] Writing in 1949 and being inspired by Max Weber’s comparative history of world religions as an attempt to situate modernity on a broad historical plane, Jaspers’ work was explicit about the parallels between Antiquity and modernity: ‘Our Age of Technology is not merely relatively universal, like the events in those three mutually independent worlds of the Axial Period, but absolutely universal, because it is planetary’ (2021: 157). As this sentence makes it evident, his work is also a forerunner of the contemporary literature on globalization.

[3] Marsilio Ficino took up Byzantine learning after the collapse of Byzantium, translating and commenting Plato and especially neoplatonic texts, but also Hermetic writings for the Medici court.

[4] As in Yates (1964: 35).

[5] This implies wavelength, the radiation of waveforms; see Horvath (2021).

Print