MANIFESTO FOR A NEW MYTHOLOGY
There are two natural motions in the universe: a sexual movement and a rotational movement. The first is the figure of lovingkindness, the second of justice; the first gives and receives, the second turns and returns. The two motions always come hand-in-hand; one is the consort of the other. Any rotation of lasting significance comes with a corresponding sexual movement, as when the rotation of the earth becomes the intercourse of night and day or the rotation of the moon becomes the ins and outs of the tide. And the opposite is also true: the most pleasurable sex surely requires the intertwining of both motions (not only that motion which is proper to it), just as the passing of time is made more pleasant by the departure and return of the seasons.
Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus. (1)
These motions in graceful union are an awesome display of life’s power: the ecstasy of the breath and return of the bloodstream propel the limbs of man, those inhabitants of his closest family, into a vital dance with one another. And as it is for our own body, so too is it for the body of God.
Emerging from His hidenness, God appears in His potencies, extending his energy to wider and wider spheres. Everywhere the changes are continuous. If there were a breach, a nothing, in the earliest beginning, it could only be in the very essence of God (2)
If it is at all then, nothing is the neuter and womb of God, that stillest point around which all the outer spheres revolve with such vigorous intensity. To live is to stretch this point into a line and to die is to fold it back again upon itself; the sphere is larger now; a new point has sprouted from the old and the old has formed itself as an encircling aura about the new. In such a way do the ghosts of our past return in the expressions of the living and does judgement bring us face-to-face with death, only to release us once more into the revitalizing light of lovingkindness. The return of his love, along with every morning’s sunrise, serve as living proof that nothing, just as everything, has always been present in God.
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Absolutely nothing signifies the innermost kernel of God, his origin and his pregnancy. There is nothing in this world beyond that point, for at that origin lies all time, past, present, and future; the beginning and the end passed us by in the single blink of an eye, and so we call this end beginning, for that which has passed us by still remains yet to come. And when all our fellows have at last returned to us, when we have at last reached a universal understanding, then we will sing the lover’s song for a final time and dance together around the body of an inside-out God.
And even after that will his creation once again be renewed. A single creation has never been enough - how uninteresting that perfect world would be. Instead, our love always and everywhere commands recreation, a possibility of stepping back in order to step forward, of falling into the abyss only to find a trampoline beneath our feet that sends us higher still than the heights of man. At its freest, this is play and at its most serious, reproduction. Here we meet God and bear witness to creation. Let this too become a source of our new mythology.
Perhaps the most basic feature of a mythology, or a science of family, is genealogy; even God cannot survive long without his consorts of love and familiarity; even God cannot survive long without striving to become historical, without taking care and stretching himself thin, like too little butter scraped over too much bread.
For gods and for men, fantasy always hardens into myth upon a single rotation, as innumerable drops of imagination clasp tightly onto one another in the condensation of careful love. And that seed which God placed in Moses was such a condensation and it took the form of a word. In the seed of the word lies a common genealogical root, which here forms a profound kinship between mythology and language; when myth speaks, love comes tumbling out of his mouth.
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The first principle of any mythological ethics must be that actions speak louder than words. Why, today, have we begun speaking so loudly and acting so quietly? Wherefore comes the death of myth and the need for its revival? Perhaps this death is only natural in the age of technological revolution; perhaps logos has grown up only to obliterate the very myth on which he was founded.
Perhaps. But more so even than the creation of the poet, the creation of the technician-scientist always closely resembles the form of its creator (i.e. it is logically constructed). Take the automobile for example; here, man puts the service of his entire body into his legs, so to speak. The automobile has a skeletal system (frame), digestive and excretory systems (fuel; energy processing; exhaust), a nervous system (built-in computer), a muscular system (engine torque), a respiratory system (air induction), etc. Like all other mechanical objects, the only anatomical function that the automobile distinctly lacks is the reproductive function, for this most original activity is nothing but a lack of mechanistic insight, the black-box par excellence of man’s existence; perhaps this is why it most often happens at night. Alone in this regard among the systems of the human body, the reproductive system is not “reproduced” in any object; for when man attempts to reproduce reproduction, the object of his creation always escapes the very use he intended for it and seems to take on a life all of its own. This I would characterize as the primary problem facing the rise of artificial general intelligence, the problem of its apparent asexuality; there is nothing less intelligent than a man caught in the throes of desire, and yet the restful intelligence of a son depends quite thoroughly on the living desire of his father. This is to say, echoing Freud, that the technical-scientific body of knowledge was accumulated first and foremost in the bedroom, rather than in the lab.
In common contemporary discourse there is great fear and reverence for artificial intelligence; but in reality, artificial life is undoubtedly far more powerful and far more terrifying, and it is already upon us; man himself is our most familiar example. Let this be the first practical lesson of our new mythology.
It remains entirely uncertain whether the science of artificial life is in any formal sense a science at all - it seems in many regards more properly akin to the mythology we are coming toward, to a scientific art, than to an artificial science. But perhaps this very uncertainty is the great beauty of the technological age - to witness such heights of intercourse between the technosphere and the biosphere, between the technician-scientist-as-poet and his nature, that they seem to become lost in one another. This fluidity is the only clear starting point for a mythology of our time.
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Now that we have overcome the age-old opposition between mythos and logos, if any opposition at all remains then it is only an ethical one, embodied in the seemingly impossible character of mythology. While logos expresses the ethic of the true, mythos expresses the ethic of the familiar.
I for one am a knight of the familiar - I feel the blood of my father and my father’s father coursing through my veins and I remember; I see visions of my children and my children’s children and I remember - I would eradicate entire galaxies for my family. But I am also a liar (albeit, hopefully a noble one) and it should come as no surprise that I disregard the truth. So how then does myth respond when he is called into question by truth, when he is accused of being merely a myth?
He responds with a terrifying and magnificent demonstration of evil, for the knight of truth sees only light where he sees the truth; if you throw him suddenly into darkness, his eyes will be poorly adjusted and he can easily be led back to the light in any direction of your choosing. Our new mythology will give us the ability to see in the dark. The willful recognition of evil, especially in one’s God and oneself, is the highest truth of a mythological ethics, to put it paradoxically.
Unlike a knight surrounded by his family, the knight of truth is always alone, always ashamed and tired, looking apprehensively to the sky as if some brief respite might fall on him from above. But despite the many holes he has incinerated into his own eyes, he still has no room to deviate, not even a place to lay his head, and he has no Sabbath; God is always directed upward only for those who are always toiling below. Where man rests in his soul, God rests too; he not only reaches unto the poles of aether and abyss, but also unto the horizon; he comes down diagonally in lashing belts of wind and rain, a hurricane swirling madly round.
The knight of truth is miserable and pathetic, but is he thereby wrong? “Those things you speak of too are God,” he tells us, “and yet God is also something above and beyond those things. He is a whole greater than His parts by virtue of the fact that He moves us. This is the true God, a God in the light of which everything that exists is good.” In this light, how do we answer the question of theodicy; how do we reconcile the darkness of evil and death, the evil of death, with a God who is enlightened, all-loving and immortal?
Let us explain. While it is true that the life of the lion fully determines the gazelle on the plane of death, it is also true that the death of the gazelle determines the lion just as fully on the plane of life; will we not grant this giving too the name of lovingkindness - can death not too work in the service of life, just as evil works in the service of God?
The name of the bow (biós) is life (bíos), but its work is death (3)
Ironically, the evil of God will surely become the very source of his popularity. After all, if there is one thing in the world that is popular, it is evil, for evil always forms the larger part.
One good man in a thousand have I not found (4)
And if there is any truth to evil then it is a mythological truth. Insofar as it is a receptacle for evil, our new mythology is a religion of the masses. Yet this very evil is the evil of the righteous, for God is powerful, beyond good and evil; just as he sits invisibly, deep in the heart of man, so too is he massive. That evil dwells in Him gives hope even to the most unashamed sinner.
(1) Bataille, The Solar Anus
(2) Scholem, Kabbalah and Myth IV
(3) Heraclitus, Fragments 64
(4) Ecclesiastes 7:28
by T. M Blepharon
T. M Blepharon is a philosopher and artist. He is the author of “The Early Work” and “Recreational Metaphysics”, both published by Old Mole Press. He is on Instagram @maxims.and.marginalia and online at oldmolepress.com.