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Title: Moorish Weather Report Author: Hakim Bey Date: October 20, 2003 Language: en Topics: climate Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://hermetic.com/bey/weather
Then said the weather god to the queen goddess: ‘we must act at once!
‘we shall perish of hunger!”’
“The Hittite Myth of Telpinu” (“The Disappearing God Type’q, in TH.
Gaster, Thespis (1950), p. 303
”…Apollonius replies like a pure sophister: ‘And must I think then’ –
saith he – ‘that the world is a living thing?’ Saith Jarcas: ‘Yea,
verily, if you reason rightly; for it giveth life to all things.“’ –
Thomas Vaughan, The Fraternity of the Rosy Cross (1652)
If the Earth is a living being, what constitutes her skin? The hermetic
“Natural philosophers” elaborated the Hesiodic cosmogony whereby Chaos,
Eros, Earth, and Old Night, make up the original pantheon of becoming.
The hermeticists understood that we live and walk on the pelt of an
animate body — just as Chinese mythographers called humans the fleas or
lice on the body of the cosmogonic chaos-figure, Pan Ku. We are Earth’s
symbiotes — or parasites — or (Allah forbid) her germs.
The old Hermeticists also seemed to believe that atmosphere pervaded the
entire universe if they envisioned flights to the moon or stars, for
example, they never imagined the need for “spacesuits” to protect them
against a Vacuum. Air was everywhere. Cyrano de Bergerac dreamed of a
way to reach the moon by attaching to his body many sealed crystal vials
of dew, which was believed to fall from and return to the moon. Unable
to escape from the vessels, the dew would lift Cyrano on rays of lunar
attraction. Thus weather itself was — at the very least — sublunar in
scope.
Meteorological phenomena or sky-events, from rain to clouds to comets,
were not seen as parts of Earth’s body, but rather as evidence that the
universe itself is also alive. Thus every culture perceives a mating of
Earth and Sky — an erotic reciprocity with the universe — which
fecundates the planet. Weather spirits or deities belong to that sphere
which is precisely not the Earth Sky or “heaven”, which includes what we
call “space” — the aether which fills the universe and is also alive —
expresses its sexual relation with Earth in the form of weather. For the
early agriculturalists weather is the sperm of the spirits. One of the
signs of this meteorological Eros is the mushroom which (as John Allegro
pointed out) has no seed but is planted direct from heaven by lightning
bolts -an almost universal belief.
Charles Fourier described the Aurora Borealis as the flickering remnant
of a once-great “aromal ray” whereby Earth in former times held sexual
congress with other planets and stars. Unfortunately due to the malign
influence of Civilization, which has degraded even meteorological
phenomena, the “Northern Crown” no longer serves its proper function. If
we could overcome Civilization and establish social harmony, we’d see
the Boreal Crown shoot forth a coherent laser-like 1000-hued ray of pure
aroma, or stellar jizm, and simultaneously we would receive similar rays
projected at us from other planets, like sunbeams but even more
concentrated and fruitful.
Thus from the Stone age up to our great “demi-messiah” Fourier, the
adepts have seen weather as outside the earth. No matter what “science”
tells us, this viewpoint will remain valid to the extent that weather,
as a sensuous event, really does come to us from “outside”. Looked at
this way, the skin of Earth is her dirt-surface, her water-surface, and
her stable biota such as plants (her “hair”, etc.). The motile biota
constitute an in-between zone or ambiguous third term between Earth and
Sky-Humans, the upright pivots of this intermediate realm, are precisely
the mediators between Earth and the weather, controlling rain by
sacrifice or dance, and interpreting the falling stars. The Etruscans
catalogued eleven varieties of lightning as auguries; — weather has
meaning, but the meaning is vaporous and evanescent as weather itself.
The Taoists saw pictographic characters written in the clouds — but for
the most part only spirits could read them Even in modem meteorology the
weather retains an uncanny ability to express itself in mysterious
glyphs which seem to hover on the edge of meaning, like the Lorentz
“Butterfly Attractor” which describes the ultimate unpredictability of
weather in the form of a mathematic “writing” in the shape of a
butterfly. In some way, weather always appears to us as an “Other”.
However, science no longer believes that dew rises to the Moon and falls
again with moonbeams. Earth is surrounded by “hard vacuum” (a nice
paradox) which may be virtually universal. We’ve seen photographs of the
Earth which seem to recreate the visions of shamans in flight, and we
have noticed that weather is a very local phenomenon. At first it might
seem that the weather (clouds, blue sky, etc.) makes up Earth’s cloak, a
kind of close- fitting hallucinatory opalescent kinetic garment of
atmosphere and moisture. But on further contemplation a more accurate
metaphor occurs: — weather is not the cape but the skin– the peau
sensible — of the living Earth.
None of us can escape this new world view. Even though as individuals we
continue to experience weather coming to us from Outside, we must now
superimpose on this symbolism another and perhaps complementary symbolic
structure.
In this second view, we humans are no longer precisely the ambiguous
pivots between Earth and Sky. Our relation with Earth has become much
more intimate. We are inside her skin. We are part of the Weather
itself, her kinetic flesh, her kaleidoscopic nudity. Now we ourselves
seem somehow much more permeable, such that clouds and blue sky, rain
and lightning, might well move in us and through us, as much parts of
our skin and organs and in turn are parts of the skin organs bones of
Earth. We are ourselves meteorological events, not unlike rain or
falling stars.
Looking at weather from this point of view as well as from the
traditional point of view should help us to overcome the rather
exclusive duality of “earth and heaven” which became so exaggerated in
the agriculturalist religions (see note 1). The calendar is the first
ideology, an attempt to reconcile the messy organic year of the seasons
with the crystalline precise year of the stellar sky; and thus it is the
first attempt to regulate “the world” (human society) on the basis of an
abstract idea. Those who claim to 11control” (i.e. know) the calendar,
and can predict sky-events, can also control the fecundating activity of
the sky, its spermatic fertility. Eventually the masters of the calendar
can become more stellar (less organic and messy) even in their own
relation to the Earth. They can begin to control (i.e. predict) the
weather and thus to control the Earth’s fecundity. They can invent
agriculture (see note 2).
The violence to the earth which this invention demands creates the
sensation of an immense imbalance, a final break with the original
“order of intimacy” (as Bataille calls it) of the old Gathering way of
life, the way of humanity before tool-making and hence prior to symbolic
and abstract systematization. Religion per se now comes into being to
restore this imbalance through yet more cruelty (human sacrifice,
cannibalism, etc.). The old duality between Earth and Sky gradually
deepens into dualism, the Gnostic hatred for the organic, the nostalgia
for pure stellar perfection (and eventually supra- -stellar
disembodiment), pure spirit — which from Earth’s perspective is nothing
but death (see note 3).
Now our new understanding of weather as Earth’s skin might in a sense
help to repair the lost order of intimacy which eroded so drastically
with the invention of the calendar. In our new view of things, Earth and
Sky (the weather-sky, not the stellar sky) are really parts of one and
the same living being, rather than opposing principles. We understand
weather as a form of chaos (if such an expression makes any sense) which
relates itself intimately with the ordered chaos or “Miraculous”
negentropy of life itself. Weather and biosphere are now seen as two
different densities of the same substance — the Hesiodic kaos. The
distinction between a human being (or a mushroom) and a lightning bolt
no longer seems so clear — or so important.
For us then the problem which presents itself is not the deconstruction
and disappearance of the calendrical ideology, but rather the
reconstruction and re-appearance of a more primordial pre–calendrical
epistemology. Day and night, summer and winter, earth and the stars are
no longer to be seen as making up any categorical dualism’s, but rather
as constituting a spectrum of dyadic energies (not too different from
Taoist yin-yang five-elements theory). This would not involve a total
return to some hypothetical Pleistocene pre-calendrical non-system based
on pure spontaneity, but rather the synthesis of our new “chaos”
understanding with ALL the old lunar, solar, and magical calendars.
Obviously we can’t lose or dump the agricultural/stellar calendar even
if we wanted to. It has become part of our means of experiencing time
and space; and on some level we are all still agriculturalists
-rebellious peasants! (“Tierra y Libertad! ”). What we want is to
supplement this Farmer’s Almanac with our Gatherer’s anti-calendar, to
superimpose the two, and to arrive at new (yet somehow primordial) ways
of moving through space and time.
Our anti-calendar, which spontaneously experiences each moment as new
and agrees with the Sufis that “there is no repetition in theophany”,
can be compared to the dreamtime of primordial Chaos; while the
agricultural calendar can be compared with the mythic figures who
exemplify Order and who are, in fact, the calendrical deities. For a
long time now the chaos-calendar has been suppressed, and the 11
agricultural“ epistemology of Order has been elevated to the status of
an ontology or a metaphysics. The year of Order — in which theophany
does repeat itself 365 times a year — has tyrannized our perception of
time for a Long time, about 6000 years in fact a “long duration” indeed
— though only a flyspeck on the whole time of human awareness. Finally
(with the “Death of God”) Earth herself can at last be declared inert,
non-organic — in fact, “dead” — and this pronouncement has provided
agricultural/industrial Civilization with its terminal excuse to “rape
our mother the Earth” and pollute her atmospheric skin with our
antibiotic exhalations.
Ironically the agricultural calendar itself is now forgotten, buried
under the debris of thousands of later ideologies, despised as peasant
superstition, lost in a meaningless past (except for a few spasms of
commodity fetishism like Christmas or Halloween) — every day the same,
Work or Leisure, with never a moment of true festival. And now we see
that even the agricultural calendar, for all its cruelty, had great
merit, compared with the soulless and mechanical year of Late
Capitalism. The Old Farmers and old Moors preserved and transmitted a
powerful poetics in their almanacs. Why, the almanac is a veritable
occult treatise, a coding of all the wisdom of Ur and Memphis, a
Hamlet’s Mill or dream-machine for the production of mythopoesis. Above
all the almanac represents a religion of festivals, a pattern of points
of superabundance in which the rich moments of the year are made sacred
by acts of generosity and excess. No, we can’t give up the calendar; in
fact we want to save it. But to do so we must surrender the calendar as
categorical imperative; — we must admit that the “calendar of chaos” is
yet older and more direct, and at the same time far newer and more
precise. In short, we want a synthesis or synergetic cross fertilization
of the calendars of chaos and order.
The agricultural calendar maintains a system of gender duality and
inequality, as well as class duality and inequality. It presents us with
a dialectic of surplus and scarcity, both of sexuality and of goods (see
note 4). By contrast the calendar of chaos, which characterizes a
pre-agricultural and even a pre- hunting economy, offers far less scope
for such categorization and stratification. It appears to be based on
spontaneity and excess. It lies far closer to the “order of intimacy”
which in fact is not an order at all but a chaos, a cornucopious
outpouring of continual creation — “new every day on the potter’s Wheel
of heaven” (Chuang Tzu).
The original perception of Earth as a living being includes a
recognition of her generosity an outpouring which links space (which is
full of good things) and time (which does not withhold those good
things) to human consciousness in the “order of intimacy”. The invention
of the calendar signals a growing mistrust of space/time, which must now
be influenced and directed by a human consciousness that is separate and
even alienated from Nature’s intimacy and spontaneity. However, the
calendar has not yet “killed” Earth nor has it made a metaphysical
principle out of “Capital”. It still reveres Earth and sacrilizes
space/time. One may speak here of a “peasants” utopia — exemplified in
so many Chinese myths and social movements — in which agriculture has
not yet disrupted the natural harmonies nor given rise to inequality and
injustice. Whatever the historical authenticity of this “stage of
development”, it remains with us as an ideal and even as an ideology (as
in Mexican anarchism, for example, or “Jeffersonian” agrarian
democracy). Once again, for us it is not a matter of any “return TO the
Stone Age” (whether Paleo- or Neolithic) but rather a return OF the
stone age”. All the magical calendars are coming back — the whole
palimpsest has been illuminated and become legible to us. Why? Because
under Capitalism the calendar itself has been replaced — by schedules of
production and consumption -and Earth buried in concrete like a corpse.
Medieval peasants angered over calendrical “reform” rioted and demanded
“Give us back the lost eleven days!” We however must demand Give us back
the entire lost year. In this reading of the almanac, in which both the
year of order and the year of chaos will receive their due honor, we
shall have to give up certain lingering manichaean attitudes about the
weather. Television weather shows — those poverty-stricken parodies of
the almanac — assure us that the weather is “good” or “bad”.
“Weathermen”, washed-out ghosts of once-great priests of Stonehenge and
Tenochtitlan, smirk or grimace to give us our cue. “Accu-weather” is
treated like a commodity; “climate control” and weather-management are
posited as high values. Nature in wilder moods now appears only as
“emergency”, and is measured in millions of dollars of damage … ; no
longer seen as portent of the deaths of kings. But our calendar will be
glad to hear the winds howl And the wolves come back, just as glad as it
is to see the sky blue and wildflowers bloom in the ditch. Our almanac
will be based on that old zen saw, “Every day is a fine day.”
At midnight a low mist hangs in the trees on the hillside above the
lake, lit from above by the Moon, making our suburban maples into a
Grimm Bros. forest — in the Samhain season — in the air of the Real
World our almanac advises us to live like the weather. Rain or shine —
embrace the skin of Earth.