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Title: Spiritual Anarchism
Author: Peter Lamborn Wilson
Date: 2002
Language: en
Topics: notes, spirituality, Fifth Estate
Source: Retrieved on 7th October 2021 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/359-winter-2002-2003/spiritual-anarchism/
Notes: Published in Fifth Estate #359, Winter, 2002–2003.

Peter Lamborn Wilson

Spiritual Anarchism

“Cowper came to me and said: ‘O that I were insane always. I will never

rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so.

O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as

mad as any of us all—over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from

Bacon, Newton and Locke.’”

—William Blake (1819)

1.

Stone Age Conservative (tribal, roughly egalitarian, proto-shamanic,

hunter/gatherer/gardener, gift economy, etc.)

Sumerian city states (4^(th) Millennium): the breakdown of original

unstriated human polity; the emergence of separation (see P. Clastres).

Enkidu in Gilgamesh: domestication of the “Wild Man.”

The Good Old Cause & Everlasting Gospel—what Blake called Druidism—in

fact has always been the guise of our Stone Age shamanism and “goddess”

paganism

Vs.

the 6,000-year Illuminati con-job: state religion.

The emergence of money as the Sexuality of the Dead.

2.

Bronze Age: war god paganism, leading to Iron Age imperial paganism of

Rome, the Great Beast of Revelation; against this the early Church

appears as a dialectic of resistance, especially in its Essene or

Nazarite/Ebionite form, Zealotry, gnosticism, social reform

(moneylenders out of Temple, Gospel of the Poor, etc.) and neo-platonic

mysticism

vs.

the “Donation of Constantine,” appropriation of Christianity by Rome

itself (just as Sumerian priest kings appropriated Neolithic

spirituality as the “suppressed content” of the Temple cults).

Christianity, originally a radical-gnostic cult (“Kingdom of heaven

within you”) now functions badly as state religion:—severe

contradictions, schizo-culture, etc.

3.

But all religion is rooted in basic contradiction: the old Stone Age

spiritual content (the Clastrian mythos, so to speak) plastered over

with Metal Age ideology of hegemonic separation. (See especially the

Enuma Elish or “Babylonian Genesis” where war god Marduk slays Tiamat

the Neolithic goddess.) Religion constantly attempts to overcome or

rectify this contradiction. But the moneylenders always return to the

Temple and rectification is once again shunted off into heresy,

apostasy, magical shadows, ritual crime.

Heretical millennial sects talk of restoring the Golden Age; this dream

derives from actual memories (stored in myth) of Stone Age

rough-egalitarian hunting/gathering/gardening gift-economy and

shamano-pagan society.

4.

Spirituality does not equal religion. Spirituality is the imaginal

creative (esprit) of the social; religion its inverse of negation, its

“spectre” as Blake says: the alienation of that creativity into powers

of oppression. However, due to complex paradoxes of dialectics, the

kernel of spirituality is often found encased in shells of

religion—especially the mystics (e.g. Eckhardt and the Spiritual

Franciscans)—and the poison of religion often taints the heresies,

especially if they gain real power.

5.

In religious times all talk and practice of non-authoritarianism will be

expressed in religious terms—usually as heresy, schism, apostasy, magic,

etc.—but sometimes as “reform within the Church” or marginal but

permitted forms of excess (monastic communism for example).

Historians of anarchism who trace it from a few Greek Cynics direct to

the Enlightenment, with nothing in between, fail to appreciate the

realness of mentality every age must experience something of freedom (if

only its dream) on pain of losing its humanity. The history of anarchism

as consciousness (rather than ideology) lies buried in an archaeology of

spiritual resistance. We need to re-read the heretics. (See for example.

R. Vaneighem’s work on the heresy of the Free Spirit.)

6.

The Problem of Gnostic Dualism. Extreme forms of spirituality often

identify the social world with the natural world—and condemn them both.

They reject the “god of creation” as evil and even revile the “soul” as

principle of life. Only “spirit” satisfies such extremists. Their

body-hatred becomes more exaggerated and severe even than that of the

Church (which at least condemns suicide and promises the resurrection of

the body).

The problem of dualism haunts anarchism, I think. Proudhon’s hatred of

God may have derived from his early reading of Gnostic Dualist

literature (while he was typesetting it)—a kind of secular Catharism.

Atheist materialism, a la Bakunin, can seem weirdly immaterial

sometimes, ridden by its own hobgoblins, categorical imperatives, blind

science-worship, machine over human, strange asexuality.

Christian/dualist body-hatred occupies the secret heart of our

“environmental crisis”—even as post-Christians we cannot escape the

Conquest of Nature motif, which colors nearly all 19^(th)-20^(th)

century progressive thinking.

Possible help in overcoming such crypto-Dualism might come from a

“pantheistic monist” approach to shamanic and pagan models—what T.

McKenna called the Archaic Revival—not a return to the Stone Age but a

return of the Stone Age.

7.

Because we’re all post-Enlightenment whether we like it or not,

“Science” poses for us the problem of teleology (or teleonomics as Henri

Bergson called it). We really believe in the Death of God. The spectral

aspect of the Enlightenment—what Adorno (?) called “the cruel

instrumentality of Reason—flattens permissible consciousness into one

big 2-D map. Any manifestation of meaning would threaten the monopoly of

“brute accidence”, “random collision of particles,”

mechanistic/behaviorist models of consciousness—”Newton’s Night”.

Hence the contemporary plague of meaninglessness: we all feel its germs

lurking behind some thin scrim of hygienic daylight. Collapse of ethics.

No thought for seven generations. Stop forest fires by cutting down the

forests. “There’s no such thing as Society”—Lady Margaret Baroness

Thatcher.

8.

The Movement of the Social on the unconscious level constituted in

itself a kind of (anti)religion. After all what proof exists for atheist

materialism?—just as spooky as God, really—the absence of meaning.

The Communist Party as yet another Holy Roman Empire.

And the philosophical weakness of anarchism surely lies somewhere near

the fault line between meaninglessness and ethics. How can there exist a

right way to live in an “absurd” universe? Existential commitment? Leap

in the dark? But why not simply carve out one’s own share, or rather

more? What bushspirit say Nay? (See Stirner/Nietzsche.)

Nietzsche of course went mad and signed his last letter “Dionysus and

the Crucified One”—a god reborn, but only into speechless abyss.

Possibly we need to consider the exigency of a “rough morality”—and

perhaps even some sort of meaning—however inexpressible—or even

“spiritual”.

9.

Now with the collapse of the Social and the triumph of Global Capital we

shattered remnants could put on happy faces and say that globalism is

just the new internationalism, the final Final Stage of Capital, and

that soon the means of production will finally fall ripely into the

hands of an enlightened global proletariat. Or—we could gloomily admit

that the Totality has engulfed us, that History is dead, that alienation

is universal, that the last Enclosures have been carried out, that the

logic of technology and money combined ends with the elimination of the

human, Virilio’s time-space-pollution, the Big Accident. Or—we could go

on refusing to accept the dichotomy—go on demanding the impossible. But

what is the impossible, if not a kind of spirituality?

If religion and ideology both have betrayed us perhaps we need a new

paradigm. But every “new” worldview has ancestors. Post-modernism

needn’t mean simply sifting through the rubbish of history to construct

more “revolutionary” commodities and attitudes. Let’s say we want to try

to imagine a non-authoritarian Green movement based on Proudhonian

anarcho-federalism and kropotkinite mutual aid—basic “plumb line

anarchist” stuff—but rooted in some form of spirituality. Where could we

look for inspiration? Do we have a “tradition?”

10.

A genealogy of resistance? a “golden chain of transmission” passing on

the Stone Age autonomist spirit from age to age?

Since we’ve mentioned medieval Europe let’s start there; unfortunately

we’ll have to ignore the Classical era, the Orient, etc.—Taoism for

example, or Sufisin and Shiite Extremism, radical Kabala (Sabbatai Sevi

and Jacob Frank), Hinduism (esp. Tantra, or radical syncretists like

Kabir, or the Bengali Terrorist Party)—also tribal shamanism and its

history from Stone Age to present. Instead we’ll stick with

Christianity, if only because most of us are brought up to consider it

the Enemy par excellence.

Subject for research:

Joachim di Fiori and the Spiritual Franciscans;

Beghards & Beguines—Brethren of the Free Spirit;

The Adamites (literal return of Golden Age—went naked “for a sign”);

Radical wing of Renaissance Hermeticism, esp. Giordano Bruno, burned at

the stake for heresy 1600, and the alchemist Paracelsus, who supported’

the Peasants Revolt 1525 against Luther and the princes;

The Radical Reformation—neither Catholic nor Protestant. Anabaptists and

“Bible Communism”;

The Spiritualists (Sebastian Franck, Schwenckfeld, Paracelsus) who

preached an exoteric Invisible Church with no dogma, sacraments,

ministers or authorities;

The Libertines;

The Family of Love;

The Rosicrucians, the idea of “radical tolerance,” influence of Sufi

alchemy and Jewish Kabala;

German mystics—Eckhardt, Tauter, Suso—later Jacob Boehme and the

Hermetic Pietists (Jane Leade & the London Philadelphians);

English Revolution (see Christopher Hill and J.P. Thompson)—Diggers,

Ranters, Levellers, Seekers, Fifth Monarchy Men and Muggletonians

(Blake’s mother was a Muggletonian), early Quakers, Antinomians; later

the Blasphemers’ Chapels;

Left-wing Freemasonry: John Toland, the Druids and Freethinkers. Paine &

Blake as “druids.” Masonic societies behind the French Revolution;

William Blake—sine qua non;

The left wing of German and English Romanticism;

Charles Fourier as Hermetic Socialist;

American Romantics—Thoreau, Emerson, S. Pearl Andrews, Spiritualism and

Radical Reform, the “Religion of Nature” (Native American influence);

Gustav Landauer, Gh. Scholem, W. Benjamin;

Surrealism (especially the fascination with Hermeticism) also R. Callois

and G. Bataille;

The return of shamanism (since at least the 18^(th) century);

Neo-paganism;

Universalist heresies;

Psychedelic cults, “entheogenic ceremonialism”; etc.

11.

The Critique of Civilization needs a strong science of its own.

Post-Enlightenment science with its “dead matter” crypto-metaphysics

needs a Kuhnian revolution. Restitution of meaning. Re-enchantment of

the landscape. Not just a Sorelian myth but a real myth. Surrealist

Surrationalist Surregionalist subversion requires potent Earth-centered

spirituality, a Gaia Hypothesis that’s more than hypothetical—a

spiritual experience. Ecstasy as enstasy. (See Bakhtin)—festival

consciousness as magic.

In this context Hermeticism recommends itself because of its rectified

neoplatonic view of matter as spirit—the doctrine of Earth as a living

being. (Nicholas of Cusa, Pico, Ficino, Cambridge Neoplatonists, etc.)

Hermeticism is not a religion but a science of spirit and

imagination—empirical, experiential, and experimental. Historically it’s

closer to us than shamanism or the oriental ways, culturally familiar

(tho also strange, always strange). It’s compatible with Christian,

Jewish, Islamic and Hindu mysticism, maybe also with Taoism and

Buddhism, certainly with Rosicrucianism and Masonry, and with most of

the great heresies.

12.

I don’t want to argue for “anarchist spirituality” or “spiritual

anarchism” on principle. By their fruits shall ye know them. “Research”

here means participation, a willingness to hallucinate and be swept away

beyond the Censor of Enlightened Reason, perhaps even into the daemonic.

Psychonauts in psychic bathyspheres.

—October 2002

Sidebar

Excerpt from the book Modern Pagans: An Investigation of Contemporary

Pagan Practices. Eds. V. Vale & John Sulak. Available from RE: Search

Publications: (415) 362–1465 www.researchpubs.com

In Western culture, anyone who is too deviant gets locked up, yet many

more spiritual cultures honor the mad ones, sometimes as shamans.

They’re said to have vision and to be able to see other worlds. If they

become absolutely damaging and are not participating in the collective

reality at all, then sometimes they’re sent off to be hermits—but not

out of disrespect or invalidation. But in this culture there’s no place

for mystics or shamans.

The dictionary definition of psychosis is “a sharply altered and

different reality.” But that’s what we go for when we’re doing ritual or

taking psychedelics: we’re altering our reality….When I first entered

the Pagan community, I was having some intense mystical experiences that

I couldn’t tell anybody about, mostly because I had no language or

lexicon to describe the things in my head, but I managed to find other

outsiders who understood. It took me some time to learn the languages of

Paganism, so that I could communicate my experiences to other people.

Now, even if the rest of the world thinks I’m crazy, I’m okay with

that—because the rest of the world really is insane. I look at global

capitalism and transnational corporations and how much of the planet is

being destroyed and workers exploited, and I think being crazy or

depressed is a healthy reaction to that!

—Joi Wolfwomyn