Occult Cosmologies and Hyperspatial Harmonics
Rediscovering William Irwin Thompson's musical metaphysics
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In my last essays, I touch upon a few subjects and themes we will explore in my upcoming course, Secret Histories and Spiritual Revolutions. These include occult summonings and egregores. One commenter on my egregore essay reminded me of a crucial idea from William Irwin Thompson (1938 - 2020). Thompson was a fantastically brilliant cultural critic and philosopher. His work falls in-between disciplines, and, therefore, can easily be lost and forgotten. But he deserves to be better known — revived, rediscovered, celebrated. I find him one of the most incisive thinkers of the last half century, far ahead of his and our time.
Through Waterstone’s Press, I just re-released 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl under the less time-sensitive title, Quetzalcoatl Returns. I wove Thompson’s insights through that book. They were crucial in shaping my perspective. I thought I would revisit a few the quotes from Thompson used in Quetzalcoatl Returns, providing some context. Here is the one that reminded me of Thompson’s incandescent genius:
“What if at the higher levels of meaning consciousness is like a hyperspace in which each point is equidistant from the other and where ‘the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere? … The mythologies of the occult seem like baroque music: there is an overall similar quality of sound and movement, but, upon examination, each piece of music is unique; Vivaldi and Scarlatti are similar and different.” - William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth
On Thompson’s intellectual journey, he liberated himself from the constraints of mechanistic and materialist thought through his expansive yet rational inquiry. Before I found Thompson’s comparison of occult mythologies and musical compositions, I was flummoxed by the overlapping similarities yet jarring differences in various esoteric cosmologies. Gurdjieff, Dion Fortune, Rudolf Steiner, Alesteir Crowley, etcetera, speak about similar phenomena but in very different registers. When I understood the parallel to the “truth” we find innately in music, which is sensible beyond purely logical categories, my understanding deepened.
Thompson believed we need to shift “from a postmodernist sensibility in which myth is regarded as an absolute and authoritarian system of discourse to a planetary culture in which myth is regarded as isomorphic, but not identical, to scientific narratives.” Once again, this idea inflected my ideas. Like Patrick Harpur (another one of my favorites), Thompson built a bridge from the arid literalism of our postmodern condition to the regenerative capacity of mythological thought. Myth can reawaken our imaginative and intuitive faculties — if we define a proper relation to it.
Thompson also understood that we still live, today, embedded in a mythic structure: We live the myth of techno-rationality civilization, simultaneously efflorescing and rushing to its downfall. He wrote:
“Some god or Weltgeist has been making a movie out of us for the past six thousand years, and now we have turned a corner on the movie set of reality and have discovered the boards propping up the two-dimensional monuments of human history. The movement of humanism has reached its limit, and now at that limit it is breaking apart into the opposites of mechanism and mysticism and moving along the circumference of a vast new sphere of posthuman thought.”
I palpably experienced this on “9/11,” when I walked downtown toward the falling towers, through crowds of bewildered, dust-covered workers and television reporters. The catastrophe felt like a staged simulation, a museum diorama of the apocalypse archetype.
Thompson also thought: “We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out: Which is exactly what our new mythologies (such as 2001) are trying to tell us.” In an essay, he proposed that our erosion of the physical plane/biosphere suggests we are nearly finished with the physical body as a vehicle of incarnation. We would, in the future, incarnate in networks or lattices, he conjectured. This still seems compelling, and echoes other esoteric ideas.
As one of the only serious post-war critics to appreciate Rudolf Steiner’s occult history, Thompson described the “Steinerian vision” as one that “looks at the human as so completely embedded in the animal, vegetal, and mineral evolution of the solar system that it becomes nonsense to separate a fictive ‘matter’ from mind, and a mere three dimensions from ten. . . . All of the seemingly mystical perceptions of Steiner have a biological relevance that fits a new kind of science, and a new kind of culture.” Thompson is right about this. Amazingly, even now, very few can see it.
Steiner expressed an elaborate cosmology in which the Earth reincarnates again and again, taking different forms, which he named “Sun,” “Saturn,” “Moon,” etcetera, stages. Humanity exists with different bodies, at more or less dense or subtle levels of materiality, in every stage — both in the farflung past and distant future. As Thompson described it, for Steiner, “the planets are not hunks of stuff out there but nodes of vibration that resonate in multiple dimensions that enfold themselves into one another in patterns of complex recursiveness in which Sun, Moon, and Saturn are also modalities of Earth.” Thompson’s intricate, musical description of Steiner’s cosmology helped me feel into this strange, new, non-dichotomous world.
Thompson thought our contemporary fixation with UFOs and extraterrestrials reflected a basic error in our perception of time and space: “The meeting we are expecting in front of us in linear time has already occurred, is now occurring, and will continue to occur…” Gods and advanced aliens “do not talk to us, they play with us through our history. . . . Our subjective-objective distinctions about reality are incorrect. As in the world view of the Hopi Indians, Matter, Energy, and Consciousness form a continuum.” Here, again, he was one of the only postmodern thinkers able to articulate other modalities of knowing and being — the indigenous and mythic — which we need to rediscover to retrieve the dimensionality we forfeited in return for dogmatic rationalism.
Please check out Thompson’s books. Coming Into Being, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, and At the Edge of History are three of my favorites. Also, please consider picking up a copy of Quetzalcoatl Returns, where i meshed the Thompson-ian vision into my larger meta-historical design. And lastly, I hope you will take my new seminar where we will develop a shared context for thinking through occult and esoteric ideas from a perspective that hopefully “transcends and includes” the current worldview.
Hi Daniel I still haven’t received a discount for your occult series , so I can’t sign up.
I'd love to hear more about what Thomspon says about ufology. Temporal anomalies, like missing time, and evidence that the shape-shifting other has access to an additional dimension of time span all encounters with mystical entities from fairies to "aliens." There's consistent testimony that those on the other side of the event horizon of death transcend the space/time construct that seems so real to those of us incarnated in meat bodies. Here's something I wrote about that a couple of weeks ago: what people interpret as ‘extraterrestrials’ are far more likely shapeshifting disincarnate former humans who have become mind parasites seeking to torment us and feed off our negative emotions."
"My late colleague, Terrence McKenna, said that if we wanted to look for an ecology of souls (supposed ‘aliens’) that would be highly interested in us, who would understand our psychology intimately, and would usually take on hominid-like forms, the most likely source would be us—us from the part of the lifecycle we usually can't observe—the human dead. Specifically, the earthbound dead, those who can't move on and still want to interact and feed their terrestrial desires. A mountain of evidence stretches back thousands of years to support that. And when Terrence showed artist renderings of the ‘Greys’ to Amazonian shamans, they said, ‘Oh, the ancestors.’
So, we need to be careful about those who claim extraterrestrial contact when those experiences have so much continuity with strange encounters people have had for millennia. We live at the dawn of the space age, so what people see and label now as UFOs and extraterrestrials were called by other names in the past. There was an abductee who found herself on a ship surrounded by what appeared to be grey aliens examining her, but then she recognized one of them as her deceased mother. And I’ve had my own encounter with what at first looked like an alien coming out of a silver disc, but then proved to be a deceased person from my old neighborhood in the Bronx.
My reading of the evidence is that most of what people call ‘aliens’ are disincarnate human beings appearing in forms that are part psychoid and part physical and who seek interaction with the living for a variety of motives. There have been some encounters where the ‘aliens’ will actually say they are dead people. Same with some fairie encounters of yesteryear. A common theme in modern abductions is the so-called aliens will say they need to hybridize with us because they’ve become nonviable and can no longer experience emotion. To me, that sounds more like a hungry ghost than a different species from an advanced alien civilization.
Whitley and Ann Streiber documented the connection, but we now have a much more comprehensive source, Joshua Cutchin’s exhaustively researched book, The Ecology of Souls. I’ve exchanged a few messages with him, and his two-part work, which is about 1100 pages long, is the definitive source on the topic.