Letter to a Harsh Theologian: Notes on Idolatry
24:11 | ☿ | 5 October 2022 | 14 Vendémiaire CCXXXI | 2 Waxing🌔
I have been telling you about idol worship. I had thought it a curiosity, or i thought it a project we could both expound upon, or i thought it might be beneficial to you to have someone you know directly share a different perspective on the matter, or i thought it fun to talk about a special interest of mine.
Idol worship, as you could put it, or magyk, or prayer, or experience or half a dozen other things i might catagorize it, is interesting to me like—no, yes quite but and not for as— a technology, like the secret name of God written in the spots of the tiger {Borges}, a desiring machine, . I am fascinated—to the ironic dismay of the author’s eternal soul, i’m sure—by the materialist magician mentioned in your best book Screwtape, as a kind of platonic paradox to which the demoniac researchers were striving under brutal motivation (how quintessentially dystopian, no? and what if i told you that i am a demon trapped under brutal motivation?) to actualize—materialize, no?—this bidents arc, twice the sinner, economics of soul—commodity versus the communism of God
that's something i could get behind, the establishing of a cosmmunist , Cosmo politan, politician…
25:51 | ☿ | 5 October 2022 | 14 Vendémiaire CCXXXI | 2 Waxing
Today i went to the Metaphysical Sky-Gardens Store. I looked at literal idols—the Devas depicted in burnished bronze, Visnu and Siva, gods whom i got to know well during the darkest days of my collapse, got to know on academic terms, admittedly, and it is, if not an academic, a scholar, a philosopher and theosopher and critic and any number of other terms that i interact with these things. it is my way. i have others. and i chose which ones to use based on what i think will be revolutionary, or dialectical, or fun, or harmless, or harmful, i have many ends and i have many means, and i don’t know how nearly enough of them work or how to apply them or what to make of them. that is as good a reason as i suppose i feel like coming up with to experiment, to play, to enjoy spiritual exploration. And it makes me happy, constructing my altar and stressing different valences like a musical instrument, which hopefully i will be able to add to the altar as well. i look forward to saving money—probably a fraction of my tips, which i regard as a lunar, sacro-profanically charged source of income, ..—to use @ the metaphysical gardenstore and goodwill, the latter of which isexcellent for accruing beautiful furnishings for my altar, shrine, temple, monastic cell. i want to not only celebrate these as things, but as gods in their own right! you say God is big, but why? why is God not small? who is to say i do not find and celebrate both God and Gods and Godess/(es) and demons and angels and spirit and spirits and ghosts and souls and phantoms and signs in these? who is to say that your scriptures are wize and my Tarot, (another element of my calandar/daily practice/temporal politics of the self) is harmful? i would contend, obviously, that NEITHER CAN EVER POSSIBLY CAUSE harm, both are of INFALLIBLE aid, and that NOTHING i say can be taken as a direct trans (raadio radio radio radio radio radio broadcast radio broadcast transcast intercept transmission transmission transmission of information ? meaning? or and but rather yet an obscure mirror, an imperfect and self-concious formula, a scanner darkly, a mirror of ghosts, no feast without ghosts ghosts ghosts ghosts ghosts ghosts
at the metaphysical gardenstore …. they have incense and incesse ecutremonot (??spelling??) (a term my lover has infused into my vocabulary) , idols (none to Santa Muerte, Holy Death, Flaquita, Nina Blanca, a Petitiaient, one whom one works with.. … …. …. but i did see Visnu and Siva and Ganesh, and would it not be an idol to you anyway if i got a cruceifix, or if i prayed to the god of my staff, or my other such talismans …and yet people do these things Clive, and it doesn't escape my notice clive that it is precisely the people you're empire exploited and racialized and genocided, but no, your iconoclastic party has a pure and absolute relationship with your 4000 grandfathers, and while the buddha and dao and a few prized Good Oriental Bad Oriental is standing in the shadow and the fact of the master matter of is is that you want to get rid of his practice. you're so sure you're right and he's wrong. well guess what? he's right and you're wrong, and he's wrong and I'm wrong, …
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i am a materialist magi , a student of witchcraft and a practitioner of Left Handed Arts. who else do you think wants to be a priest? you give us too much credit, and you give the credit you credit us much too little.
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26:11 | ☿ | going back through edits
you say its dangerous;--do you think i don’t know that? but go and learn what this means: there are dangers to worshiping El also, and Christos, and Logos, the saints and the daemons and the Messengers and the Prophets, the healers and soothsayerss and exorcists and witchdoctors and ghostdoctors and demon charmers and nightmare singers. we know more about the kinds of risks we run when we let Gods and Bosses and Consuls run about like that without some Divine magfly getting in their way. the gods are real and they require revolutionary initiatives of their own
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i say that idol worship does hurt us, and that it does lead us astray. but what if sometimes i want to hurt? what if sometimes I want to be led astray? is that negative freedom merely implied , by the unfortunate logic of law, to be my special reserve? orandbutratheryetcould it also be a jumping off point? for example. sometimes i cut myself. i haven’t done it lately. make of that what you will. now set that aside, and i;ll tell you what i make of it. i make something beautiful, and intense, something quintessentially red, redder then i previously thought it could go. red is my favorite color, though i felt some masculine shame for a while about that, and anyway i have many favoritie colors. i hurt and it is a hurt which is entirely within my control. consider the aesthetics of that—and they expect me, the unreconstructed poet that i am, to turn it down?! the kind of control which can fill uninterupted unsegmeñted one continuous momentorganism, one single organ or time, of time , weeks or months or evenings two decades long pursuing on the piano, or a video game, a prayer you pray until you really mean it, a scar you reopen because you have repon it on the list of things you keep making to do.
yes, that’s rather good, rrather demystifying? or counter mystifying, if i’m lucky. we must always strive to be lucky in our writing, and when we must not strive, we must hope to be lucky, and when we must not hope, we must pray, and when we must not pray, then we must despair of God ever getting his shit together on your time and kick his ass off the couch and onto the curb, and let him do the work of making it worth my time to talk to him. the family members and deities we break up with often need sharpest borders
I say that yes God did warn us against idol worship for important reasons. and whats more, i say we must ask important to whom? himself, among others, because your god is a jealous god, a jealous old god is He. and he called for his prophets and he called for martyrs and he called for his (per)Sons Three.
blasphemy is a specially kind of literature which i suppose elevates itself to scripture in its own right, and perhaps elevates other things, and why shouldn't i write Scripture? when escritor scripture after all means they which is written
26:17
I do not say that it is easy for humans to make little gods out of everything we see. nor do I deny it. What I do say is that the propensity or tendency of humans to make gods, or idols , is one of my favorite things about humans! It displays great ingenuity, sensitivity, creativity, aesthetic energy, … can this be used for ill? NO, it can NEVER be Used for Ill, WHATWOULDTHATEVENMEAN.
’lmao
<< Illyitch here >>
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i do not comment here why humans have this tendency. i’m working on different questions, and different answers, and different discourses altogether!
this whole business of need-love in your metaphysics, Clive, its just ever so boring, so uninspired. And this dichotomy between G-d and Need-Love? Why shouldn’t the gods, and God, and brahman, and the catagorical imperative, and the Spectre, need things? Who are you Clive to speak as their representative, their Ontological Representative no-less! Did Christ not need His mother? you’re the member of the party (don’t get me started on your antipartisanship Clive, the church is not a Pyramid, it is an aessembly, iglesias, Clive , Ig holy mother fucking lesias!) which is so front and center about God becoming man and man God and so on (not a disparage, that one, i think you’ve got there building blocks for any number of great theologies with that one)--so of course need love would apply, and does apply.
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i would like to write a story about Mary aborting Jesus and it being completely fine.
She could have adventures of her own, other adventures, maybe she's queer, gay Mary , … an order of nuns,,,,
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i have read you all my religious life Clive, and everywhere except in some of your fiction i find you again and again to be my Enemy, ideologically speaking. your outlook is far too jadedly anglican, i think, your longing disparage for the Catholic cults too much the perverse mirror of my own attitudes and sensitivities. you should real Borges, Clive, I think you could bond over your doting englishness and then he could outdo you with his metaphysical themes, all without ever ceasing to be a conservative, i might add. a surrealist conservative, what a treat, and why not! nightmares could make any of us conservative far faster than we’d like to admit.
one might say that i want to keep loving God. So what if I do? I am not so sure that God exists— so you (might hypothetically) say, oh contrair mon ami, mon despaireeteieou, i rather think that in certain ways, i have it on better authority then yours that in fact He really does—though not necessarily in the sense(s) that you or He would be comfortable with. But might I not—no, might I would—add other even more important questions!? to wit. is God deserving of our love, and if so, which God, and which love?
in any case, i don’t particularly care for being psychoanlayzed to my face without at least asking my consent first. does the love for God prompt a love for a specific propensity of part of humanity to make idols, or does the propensity to love the human tendency of making idols produce in me my own ways of relating to and creating the creator by which i can create myself? None of this is orthodox, not at all biblically sound nor eccumenically politicque, but thats the advantage of being an apostate and a revolutionary! I’ve left the Church, perhaps I’ll found or find another to call my own, or several, or something altogether different from a church, or any number of other things. (No, not that number. no, not that one either.) and so i would have thought that, having made my apostasy, i would no longer be expected to take account of your more fine point theological prescriptions. but then again, Clive, you write not so much for nearly-christians as those who are holding onto the quick talus already sliding down the cliff of Doubt, oh terrible demon, ye who takes so little regard of our desires, and simultaneously far far too much.
Why Must the Golden Calf be a Distraction? Why must God be big? or “far, far greater than anything we can put our hands on”-- if we cannot put our hands on him, then i as a hands-on learner can just as easily say that, in terms of being a hands-onability, my gods are supperior to your iconoclastic one!
I do not think God gives us our humanity, i think we give it to ourselves, and to each other. we enlist each other in this tragihicomic ensemble, casting roles and casting lots and casting nets and casting hexes. we do not need humanity to give function to God, when the Gods are capable of giving us divinity, and getting it back from us, used and ironed and stained and transubstantiated.
i know you take this all very seriously, and i do not expect you’ll like what you read. fortunately it is not your problem. it is, as it were, my soul, my choice.
extracts—add later as headings? footnotes? god i wish i could do footnotes
cr Letter to a harsh critic
magic, or thaumaturgy, or applied theology, or practical mysticism, or cultic, or rite, …all very folk-catholic, a co-/ccross-traditional cousine of min to which i have few rights but for which i have much respect.
platonic paradox-oh that’s rather good
and why not?! it is not unprecedented: Lunacharsky sought to buid gods, for one, and i imagine other marxist/materialist magi have interesting insights… …. … …
§ by such ways as ghosts traffic §
if i know God by means of the buddha, then you give glory to the buddha, for in giving glory to the buddha you give glory toGod, but if i know No God through the buddha, then you critique—or rather, correct the Buddha , and seek to re-say what he say so that He Say what everyone says.
and if i know G-d by Thoth as well as by Logos, by the Spectre and by the Fire of Dialectics, multiplicity and difference, rhizome and body without organs, why do you not celebrate with me, and give glory to them, for they give glory to god, or give glory to god, for god gives glory to me, or give glory to me, and i’ll stash it away for a rainy day when i need a little glory in my life.
Do I blashemize? Yes, I blashphemize! It takes a very special person to blashphemize as well as I do, it takes someone who cares about blasphemizing very very much!
do i contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself! I am angry==I contain paradoxes|.|
Abort Your Soul
_Toothtaker
☭ | 8 October 2022 | 17 Vendémiaire CCXXXI | 5 Gibbous Waxing🌔 | 25:39
and another thing! where do you get the nerve to just write off animism, Shinto, nature worship, why do you decide that the line falls on idol worship is one of the actually important ones? come up with all that yourself, did you, or are you merely parroting the spiritual colonialism of your niche?