Magic and Religion: an LDS Perspective

I wrote these two blog posts for the Jung Society of Utah; unfortunately their website seems to have just gotten hacked and I can't link to my posts there at the moment.  Also, I had to cut the length of my second post to publish on their site.  Here I'm posting its original version.

Magic and Religion: an LDS perspective, Part 1

Far away, across the fields
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell
-Pink Floyd: “Breathe (Reprise),” Dark Side of the Moon

Christianity has an uneasy relationship with magic, to greater or lesser degrees among its branches. Mormons are some of the wariest of all, which is ironic when you consider the origin of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The regions of North America that nurtured this faith have also hosted folk magic practices for hundreds of years. Since the rise of various new age movements, notably Wicca and Neopaganism, modern aspirants to magic have been attracted to these homegrown systems. In response to this, people who work to preserve these traditions take pains to point out that they are firmly based in Christianity, and are not to be taken for any kind of crypto-paganism. The purpose of all these charms, incantations and concoctions was to bring about miracles – usually healing – by the power of God.

Along with this went a very real belief in and fear of witchcraft: if God could give power through special rituals, then so could the Devil, and much of the work of a Cunning Person (of whatever tradition) is to protect against evil enchantments. (As a side note, the notorious “heavy metal sign” with the index and little fingers extended comes from an Italian gesture of protection against the “evil eye.”)

Mormon attitudes to magic range from dismissive to fearful, with a healthy dose of defensiveness along the spectrum. Such defensiveness is perfectly understandable: the difference between “faith” and “miracles” on one hand and “magic” on the other looks entirely relative from a psychological perspective. Much depends on what words are chosen to describe phenomena and experiences – and who chooses those words. Any given group may identify its practices and rituals as religion and others' as magic – and in so doing, project its shadow.

And it came to pass that there were sorceries, and witchcrafts, and magics, and the power of the evil one was wrought upon all the face of the land
- Mormon 1:19

These are they who are liars, and sorcerers, and adulterers, and whoremongers, and whosoever loves and makes a lie. These are they who suffer the wrath of God on earth. These are they who suffer the vengeance of eternal fire.
Doctrine and Covenants Section 76: 103-105

Church members should not engage in any form of Satan worship or affiliate in any way with the occult. ‘Such activities are among the works of darkness spoken of in the scriptures. They are designed to destroy one’s faith in Christ, and will jeopardize the salvation of those who knowingly promote this wickedness. These things should not be pursued as games, be topics in Church meetings, or be delved into in private, personal conversations.’ (First Presidency letter, Sept. 18, 1991).
-Handbook 2: Administering the Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Official teaching holds that Satanic minions do in fact roam the world seeking to do mischief, and in popular understanding, “messing with magic,” even experimenting with common divination tools like Tarot cards or Ouija boards is a perfect way to open the door to such mischief. While Joseph Smith canonized instructions on how to tell if an otherworldly messenger is trustworthy or not (Doctrine and Covenants Section 129), and the early days of the Church were noted for angelic visitations and dramatic manifestations of spiritual gifts (like speaking in tongues), in today's church that sort of thing is greatly downplayed.

Still, from a psychological perspective many rituals and practices still exist in the LDS Church that could be considered magical. The Mormon version of the Eucharist lacks the dogma of transubstantiation but is still seen as a potent renewal of baptism, itself a ritual that enacts a transformation of the soul through a symbolic enactment of death and rebirth.

Mormon fear of magic goes along with a general unease with ceremony. For the most part the really important thing in Mormon ordinances is the faith and worthiness of those taking part. As such, the working of miracles through faith in Mormon belief might not look very magical: “no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations.” Though there are points of mechanical procedure that are prescribed with some precision, in the non-secret rituals these are minimal to the point of austerity.

The secret rituals are another matter (and Mormons get touchy about the use of the adjective “secret” even though it fits). These are understood as a gift of power from heaven which enable a soul to reach its final destination in unity with God. And then there is the remarkable “Patriarchal Blessing.” The title, so unfortunate to modern ears, is a metaphor of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their prophetic blessings to their sons. The practice offers an individual a private prophecy to help direct their life, given by a man with a special calling (in the early days of the Church, such men were referred to as “evangelists").

Describing these rituals as “magic” might seem very disrespectful or offensive to those who identify strongly with the tradition. While a psychological imagination can see the kinship between magic and religion, some believers find this hard to take: Dr. Jung constantly defended himself against accusations from Christian clergy that he reduced the message of our faith to nothing more than a working of the mind.

Jung's work gets it from both sides: believers who resent their faith practice sharing any names with what they regard as devilish counterfeits, and skeptics who despise magic and religion alike as a pathology unbecoming enlightened and civilized people.


Since Jung's great work was the reconciliation of opposites, I write in service of that goal.

Magic and Religion: an LDS perspective, Part 2

In 1994 the journal Dialogue published an article by Dr. Lance Owens: “Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection.” One of Owens' sources was Early Mormonism and the Magic World View by D. Michael Quinn – who had been excommunicated the year before. Quinn's work had been used as source material for the popular anti-Mormon comic book The Visitors, so Owens was hitting a nerve.  The mid 1990s in the Utah Mormon culture zone were also marked by lingering fears of Satanic cults (anyone who lived in Provo at the time probably heard all sorts of urban legends about goings-on in the old Academy building before it was renovated as the new city library). The word “occult” had picked up plenty of negative baggage through popular media already, and the use of it in such a context at such a time was bound to ruffle some feathers, as Owens himself anticipated.

In 1996 William J. Hamblin wrote a footnote-laden dressing-down of Owens' article. In pointing out its scholarly shortcomings he elegantly missed the real point, because after all the purpose was not only to deflect suspicion of any “occult” connection to Joseph Smith's experience or mission but to continue deprecating and depreciating any similarities between the two at all – similarities which I for one came to find inspiring rather than alarming. It took another nine years for the Mormon establishment to come around to admitting Joseph Smith's magic background, after a fashion: in Richard Bushman's authorized biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling we read that “Magic and religion melded in Smith family culture” (p. 50) and there is even a frank admission of the seerstone “blending magic with inspired translation” of the Book of Mormon (p. 131). Even so, Bushman downplayed the association, casting magic as a “preparatory gospel” for Smith's prophetic calling (p. 54).

The original meaning of the word “occult” after all being “hidden,” it would behoove us Mormons to consider how often our unique scripture mentions hidden knowledge. One striking example comes from the “Word of Wisdom”:

And all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments . . . shall find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures (Doctrine and Covenants Section 89:18-19, my emphasis)

We might consider Alma's sermon to the Zoramites, with a beautiful metaphor of a Tree of Life growing in each individual soul (Alma 32), the gnostic experiences of several Lamanite rulers (Alma 19, 22), and disciples of Christ at the time of his visit (3 Nephi 26, 28). Sometimes people shared what they learned through their experiences, sometimes they were told to keep it a secret, like Nephi (1 Nephi 14:28), Alma the younger (Alma 12:9), Mormon (3 Nephi 26:11), the Brother of Jared and Moroni (Ether 4).

Our religion is of God, their magic is of the Devil – this is too easy an accusation to make. Even in the Book of Mormon there are several instances of the true prophets being accused of deceiving people by their “cunning arts” (1 Ne 16:38), “the power of the devil” (Alma 15:15), and “the cunning and the mysterious arts of the evil one” (Helaman 16:21). Accusations, labels, meanings, are so easily used as weapons against those whom a group fears or distrusts, that an earnest truth-seeker can't afford to take such words at face value.

A psychological understanding, or a psychological imagination, helps us understand that magic and/or the occult is a way of engaging with the unconscious or the realm of the imaginative (one modern practitioner calls it the science of experiencing Truth). To recognize this means to admit the close kinship of magic and religion as branches from the same root – indeed interchangeable depending on one's point of view. There can be two ways of dealing with this: 

1. a fundamentalist rejection of any religious expression outside one's own, 
2. or a curiosity about the different ways that Truth is perceived and sought from different perspectives.

If the theologian really believes in the almighty power of God on the one hand and in the validity of dogma on the other, why then does he not trust God to speak in the soul?  Why this fear of psychology?  Or is, in complete contradiction to dogma, the soul itself a hell from which only demons gibber?  (Jung: Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works Vol. 12, p. 19)

In a series of lectures on the gnostic myth of Sophia, Dr. Owens talks about this secular age and its intolerance for transcendence. Fueled in part by absurd fundamentalist insistence on impossible dogmas as fact, a rationalist attitude has grown which pathologizes myth and gnosis (an attitude reflected by Korihor, one of the most notorious figures in the Book of Mormon). To believe in any religion or myth in light of modern scientific knowledge requires setting aside or overcoming both the rationalist dismissal of myth and the fundamentalist dismissal of fact.

When we open our mind to the possibility of revelations of something from outside the secular or even religious ego – and if we also open our minds to a pragmatic means of measuring the claims of such revelations based on the criteria given in Alma 32 – then we have the opportunity to see the dogmas of our professed creeds with new eyes: to recognize their value as myth (here I would also recommend Dr. Owens' lectures on Tolkien's mythopoeia). This means ceasing to disparage or even define myth as false distraction from truth, and instead seeing it as a way to approach Truth. This is how we can truly recognize the value of others’ myths, and our own.

No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses the great treasure of a thing that has provided him with a source of life, meaning, and beauty and that has given a new splendour to the world and to mankind. He has pistis and peace. Where is the criterion by which you could say that such a life is not legitimate, that such experience is not valid and that such pistis is mere illusion? Is there, as a matter of fact, any better truth about ultimate things than the one that helps you to live? (Jung: Psychology and Religion - Collected Works vol. 11, p. 113)


We might evaluate the ways our neighbors engage with myth and the psyche by truly perceiving the fruits of their actions rather than relying on rumor or applying the yardstick of dogmatic correctness like a punishing rod. We may still have the option of holding out faith in metaphysical facts concerning the “ultimate things,” but even if that loses traction to a more pragmatic approach, might we not find that the humility, empathy, respect and compassion we gain in return is after all the treasure our faith enjoined us to seek?

Those who found these posts interesting might also be interested in a pagan's view of Joseph Smith in this article.

Zhneshtotmatlitszeth-n'

Today I'm feeling grateful for not taking a bad path in my life.

This has to do with the kind of music I listen to. Music is such an important part of life for so many of us that it's important to be mindful of what music we're listening to and why. I feel good about the music I listen to, which gives my life more richness than I can know. I know I take it for granted most of the time, especially now with the internet.

When I was young I was in danger of going down a wrong path with my music, allowing other people to shape my listening choices in regrettable ways.

I'm talking about rock and roll.

Specifically, I'm talking about how some people tried to stop me from listening to rock and roll, and for a while I was in danger of following their misguided warnings.

I was young and impressionable when I first heard scandalized reports of the evils of rock music: bands with names like Black Sabbath and The Grateful Dead – horrors! It wasn't quite like the movie Footloose – I didn't live in a small town and the church had no problem with dancing (of the right kind), but the knee-jerk fear of the strange and different was just as strong at home and at church. I remember telling my younger sister that rock and roll was devil worship and that I wasn't going to listen to it.

I didn't keep that resolution for very long, for two reasons: my older sister's discovery of MTV and my older brothers' record collection that they left behind when they went away to college. It was a treasure trove, full of Led Zeppelin, Rush, Yes and the like. And as my sister continued to sneak views of MTV at night, she started buying more records of the bands she was hearing: mid-80s stars like Ratt, Cinderella, Poison, Def Leppard, Guns n Roses . . . my parents were very worried. I could tell that there was illicit subject matter in some of the stuff, but I had no clue that “Pour some sugar on me” was supposed to be a sexual metaphor, and I thought that Van Halen must be heavenly messengers after I watched the video of the Blue Angels stunt flying to “Dreams.”

This went on for some years, and as adolescence eroded my innocence I did sometimes suffer pangs of conscience for listening to some of the music that I did. Every once in a while I had to confront some explicit warnings from the authorities. Some I could shrug off without too much guilt, like my youth leader who thought that Queensrÿche's nifty logo looked Satanic. Others were harder to ignore.

One Sunday when I was 17, the Priests' Quorum lesson consisted of a recorded talk by some minor general authority about the perils of inappropriate music. I don't remember the who or when or where the talk had been recorded, but I had heard plenty of this kind of thing over the years, and progressing through my youth I had developed quite a selective ear for the rock music I liked so much. I knew the Rolling Stones were right out, of course, because of the story of Gene R. Cook talking to Mick Jagger on an airplane and hearing out of Mick's own mouth that their music was calculated to drive teens to have sex. (You can read about this in several places, for example here and here.)

In truth, I've always found the Rolling Stones a bit boring, so that wasn't really a problem. I had put aside a lot of rock and especially pop music that I decided was not worth my time – in fact, my 18^th year of life was when I was most heavily into Rush and Queensrÿche, and had decided that a lot of other rock music just didn't measure up to those standards. Not to mention that I could see how many of my youth leaders, in being worried about heavy metal, completely missed the more blatant sexual messages in the more mild-sounding pop music they listened to.

So I was feeling pleased with myself as I listened to this talk, and allowed myself a bit of arch amusement at this old guy's immoderate hysteria about rock music, and then he dropped the bomb. He mentioned a song that everybody knew about which had the hidden lyric “Here's to my sweet Satan.” He mentioned this as an example of the really dangerous rock music out there that we just couldn't afford to dabble with.

But he didn't name the song or the group!

I was seized by doubt. Who was it? I didn't ask if anyone in the room knew; I wasn't that outspoken. Besides, I was truly afraid of finding out: what if it was a band I really liked? What if it was Rush? I could already tell that Neil Peart was skeptical about God, and there was that 2112 album cover with the pentagram. I had come to terms with Neil's expression of his beliefs in his lyrics, and I didn't listen to "Ghost of a Chance" or "Anthem."  I could forgive Neil for not believing in God, I could even forgive him from preaching selfishness in his youth, but what if . . .

No, it couldn't be Rush. Could it? Well then who? Maybe it was Black Sabbath? I didn't listen to them, only “Iron Man” when it came on the radio.

The question sat at the back of my mind for years. I wanted to know who had done it, but at the same time I didn't, just in case I might find out that I really had been dangling from the devil's hook unknowing for years. So over 20+ years of the World Wide Web I've never looked it up online – until just a few days ago.

Actually, I stumbled across it, as I was reading about something else, viz: the recent lawsuit brought against - and won by - Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement, for the opening riff of “Stairway to Heaven.”  (I won't discuss that in this post.)

I feel like I'm late to the party in discovering this weird little nugget in The Greatest Song in the World, but, it's sad to admit, I have a history of unease with “Stairway to Heaven” and Led Zeppelin generally. The first time I heard it (I was young and impressionable) was with a family member who was analyzing the lyrics and mentioned the possibility that instead of being a song with a Good Message, as seemed plain to me, it might actually be a song with a Bad Message. In other words, what if that “piper” were really the Devil? She never said anything about the supposed hidden message in the recording; I don't think she had heard about it.

And that album cover – well, it was certainly mysterious, wasn't it? Kind of spooky, with those arcane-looking sigils. My due respect for Led Zeppelin was retarded by that initial suspicion, so that the timeless wonder and quality of their music took a long time to erode my wary defenses. On the way, of course I heard a bit of schoolyard and lunchroom rumors (though never the one about the backmasked message): “dude, they wrote the song while they were high on some drug.” “Isn't that song about the devil or something?” “Didn't they sell their souls to the devil?” In the pre-internet information-scarce environment of public schools, any scandalous rumor seemed as likely to be true as the next. It didn't help that I saw a record-burning on the news with Led Zeppelin albums prominently displayed.

By the time I was 17, I had shed almost all of my unease or guilt at listening to Led Zeppelin – I had taped just about all of their songs that got regular radio airplay, and I spent my senior skip day listening to my brothers' old Zep LPs (including #4) on a friend's turntable. Never let your schooling get in the way of your education.

If I had been told at that age that “Stairway to Heaven” had the hidden message “Here's to my sweet Satan” in it, I don't know what I would have done. I mean, I might not have been able to play it backwards for myself to check, but knowing how credulous I was I might have believed it. And that might have caused me even more psychic retardation. As it was, I got rid of a CD I bought of symphonic arrangements of Led Zeppelin songs when I was in my early 20s partly because the artwork made me uncomfortable. It was too . . . magical. I regret getting rid of that CD, partly because of my silly squeamishness, partly because the crushing rendition of “Kashmir” was worth the price alone.

Because the thing is, of course, Led Zeppelin is magical! Good British lads, they tapped into the same rich soil of Faerie that J.R.R. Tolkien did in their own way – after all, Tolkien was one of their big inspirations. I've written already about how much I loved fantasy fiction and role-playing as a teenager, and during that time I vehemently defended these hobbies against the accusations of Satanism that came from “ignorance andprejudice and fear.” I assuaged my feelings of guilt at listening to “Stairway to Heaven” with the thought that a new day dawning with laughter echoing in the forests could be understood not only as an image of the Millennium but also sounded like Bilbo and his buddies having a great time in the Shire (I'd be willing to bet my lunch tomorrow that Plant was thinking of something out of Tolkien when he wrote that line). Forests echoing with laughter sounds like the kind of world I would like to live in.  I want to pack my bags for the Misty Mountains!

If I had had cause to believe seriously that all of this was really tainted by an earnest profession of allegiance to Satan I might have turned decisively and ventured too far down the path away from all that: away from the color, vitality and wonder found in so many creative expressions influenced by or alluding to magic, whether labeled as fantasy or otherwise. I might never have picked up Robert Bly or Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung; I might have decided to really sever my relationship with fantasy fiction for good and all, I might have never started listening to King Crimson . . . who knows, I might have even decided that Harry Potter was of the Devil.

I don't like to think of myself in such a state.

Fortunately, my exposure to this strange and amusing sonic coincidence has come at a stage in my life where I'm more skeptical than I've ever been and also seldom shocked or offended by anything I see, hear or read. And I had already been inoculated against taking backmasking seriously. When I first heard about the “my sweet Satan” hidden message I thought the man was talking about a subliminal message that you might have to turn the sound up or speed up or slow down to hear, not a silly backwards thing. I don't know if I misheard or misremembered, or if the speaker was misinformed and simply took his bad information as a reliable report not needing any questions. I'm more inclined to believe the latter.

Being curious, I've still done my own investigation. I've heard the section of “Stairway to Heaven” backwards, listened to it slowed down, made phonetic transcriptions, heard multiple versions and gotten to the bottom of how that vocal line can sound like “my sweet Satan” backwards. Because I do have to admit: hearing it for the first time was unnerving. After all, hearing any human speech backwards gives an uncanny effect (as David Lynch exploited to hair-raising effect in Twin Peaks). If your mind is primed to hear “Satan” it's possible to assign that word to three utterances in the clip. This whole thing has been a good chance for me to reflect on what I learned in Linguistics about the brain's way of picking meaning out of sound, and the weird things that can result when we impose our need for pattern recognition on random stuff (think of A Beautiful Mind, for example). For years I've enjoyed reading mis-heard song lyrics, and the other day I just about wet my pants laughing to this video of Orff's “O Fortuna.”

Back to "Stairway."  Listening closely and repeatedly – as digital technology makes possible – shows that only the first utterance that you might parse as “Satan” really comes close to having all the right sounds. The others are really just “say” - reversed from “yes” and “fiy” reversed from “if” pronounced with a diphthong. But the glottal stop that Robert Plant started each does sound like a hasty N in reverse, giving those backwards utterances a resemblance to the Standard American pronunciation of “Satan.” In the first (or the last) Robert Plant led off from the glottal stop with a little nasal hum before articulating the dental fricative in “there's still time.” On the reversal that sounds like an N, giving the backwards “there's” a really close resemblance to “Satan,” priming the ear for the “yes” and “if.” Since he pronounces “time” more like “tom” the vowel keeps its purity in reverse and can sound like “my” or “mah” instead of “miah.” That makes it easier to hear “sweet” instead of the “tleet” that's really going on. The L is slightly rounded too, and with some aspiration (the common leaky articulation) of T forwards, there's your SW resemblance backwards. Also the background instruments obscure the vocal sounds, giving an even more vague input for the mind to try to process into something. With such mushy uncertainty, the pattern-making mind could fill in all sorts of weird things – like the nonsense of the rest of the supposed hidden message.

If it had been recorded today, someone might have parsed the reversal as “jest my tweet Satan.” Whatever meaning anyone might extract from that could make as much sense as that silly toolshed. (Now if it had been seeing something nasty in the woodshed, we might have a case here. Though I can't think of any lyrics that would make any sense to backmask “I saw something nasty in the woodshed.” The closest I can get is “the stove and tea, it's on, meat sauce, yeah.”)

Now why anyone would think that the mind's desperate attempts to make sense of backwards singing should mean that those improvised meanings are actually assimilated unconsciously going forward is hard to imagine . . . until you remember that people who come up with these kinds of scenarios aren't generally in the habit of thinking scientifically or even critically.

I feel silly admitting a need to have done so, but feels good to fully debunk this rumor through my own sonic/linguistic analysis. Like a Hogwarts wizard dispelling a boggart, I say “Riddikulus!” and laugh.

And I play the song for my children, glad that they are hearing it in its glory, without prejudice.

My latest post for the Jung Society of Utah

I've got more posts lined up for this blog, coming soon.  But right now I want to share a link to the latest post I contributed for the Jung Society of Utah:

Pop Psychology? Jungian Concepts in Popular Music: The Shadow

This is the first in a series of posts I've got planned for the Jung Society.  In this post I look briefly at a song by Death, and in the next one I'll look at Nick Cave.

Some thoughts after reading The Fountainhead

(One of these days I'll get back to typecasting.)

So I finally read The Fountainhead. I stayed up past 1 in the morning to finish it, and in fact I even cried at several points throughout. I want to buy my own copy of it and underline passages and write all sorts of things in the margins.

This book has been staring at me for about 20 years from library shelves, mostly through the editions with Art Deco covers. Those were terrifying Apollonian arrows pointing to a destiny that I put off for too long (like Thomas Pynchon, but that's another story). So finally I checked out a copy from the local library and got sucked in. Today, a day after reading it, I wrote the following.

Producers and parasites. In the Fountainhead Ayn Rand shows (somewhat melodramatically, but that isn't a bad thing) model characters or characters as models of these principal types in their purity. I find myself unable to dispute the core of the principles in their purity, but what I think is the cause for worry about Rand isn't the truth in the “selfishness” that is essential to every individual soul (and I want to write more about that, also parse Lehi's “men are that they might have joy” in relation to this), nor is it the core principle of whether one produces or not. Of course in real life when one person produces something and the rest of us benefit. I think of Robert Fripp's words: “Music so wishes to be heard that it calls on some to give it a voice and some to give it ears.” Civilization has been around long enough to make the manifestations of these principles – in pure and perverted forms – so complex that applying them to real-life situations entails doing everything you can to trace each economic interaction and relation back to its roots. This is why mainstream partisan politics are so dissatisfying, and why TV news and talk radio are such dismal ways to try to be informed about what's going on in the world and what you can do about it. This is also why parlor politics rarely if ever gets beyond a ritualistic bashing of everyone's favorite imagined villains, backed up with appeals to everyone's favorite authorities.

I've certainly seen Ayn Rand cast as a villain, a Korihor-like prophetess of greed and callousness. In the purity of her concepts, I accept that she wasn't advocating racism nor greed for money and power (at least not in The Fountainhead). On the contrary, she exposed those as betrayals of self, mere variations of “second-handedness.” So why does she get such a bad reputation? I haven't studied her Objectivist philosophy, so I don't know what else she wrote that attracted such ire, but I intuit the following scenario repeating countless times: a man goes out and makes a load of money in some business, reads Rand, and then says: look, I have made stuff, employed people, ergo I'm a producer. How many people completely miss the lesson of Gail Wynand? How easy it is to assume that the producers in society are not just the entrepreneurs (which is already too narrow) but the ones who have become wealthy. And how easy it is to use the label “parasite” as a politically correct justification for dismissing any concern or basic human empathy or at least rational consideration of whole swaths of people. Are they the ones making the money, making the jobs? Are they among the few, the proud captains of industry? No? Are they in misfortune, are they (or do we see them as) dependent on any kind of assistance? Do they have the impudence to procreate without having steady means of their own self-sufficient heroic make to support them materially (according to our standard of living)? Yes? Why then they're parasites. Q.E.D. And we don't have to worry that we're being racist by going along with the wink-wink nudge-nudge because Rand (or whoever) Said, so we're absolved of any effect our actions have of perpetuating collectivist oppression. Of course we'll put ourselves in the camp of producers as we whine in our parlor talk or radio call-ins or at the voting booth, even if we're working at jobs we don't really want, even if our political involvement is really an attempt to prop up some sense of meaning in our desperate lives, because we think we Get It. It's so easy to slip into this.

If there are people living in poverty we don't have to cathect to our images of them in a show of pity and meddlesome “charity,” but neither do we have to dismiss them as feckless failures because they're not all independent workers (though what if we all could be?), with the gumption to stick with their work through the tough times without complaint, facing the world alone like Roark did until enough of us finally come around to reward their contributions (through fair media of exchange that might not be available, which we might not want to admit).

Everyone is born with their own gift to give to the world, and some are more prominent than others (after reading The Fountainhead I feel I now accept the parable of the talents better, and have a new appreciation for Alma's mission to the Zoramites too), but it has to be remembered and acknowledged that the forces that so stifled the gifts of the producers included entrenched money interests, impersonal boards of directors and other features of the capitalist system. How easy it still is for second-handers at the helms of powerful corporations to cravenly claim that they are the real producers, while continuing to suffocate the world under mediocrity. It's no longer drippy Progressive preaching of self-sacrifice, it's brazen praise for “self-interest,” meaning the appetites and dictates of false, non-individuating selves: blind egos, contemptuous introjects, unacknowledged complexes, possessive archetypes – but not the true soul of every Self. A lazy appropriation of the terms of “self-interest” and “selfishness” makes it so easy to fall back into the conventional semantics that Rand took so much trouble to take apart that I wonder if it was worth her trouble and she might as well have coined a new term.

For a similar reason I currently have no interest in Objectivism as a philosophical system, because it still stinks to me of Intellectual Property, which I don't believe in. Looking briefly at the character of Roark: there is no need to impose a fiction of “intellectual property” on the architectural designs of someone with such a unique vision. If someone were to copy one of his buildings it would be imitation as tribute, flattery or incompetent servility – but it would not be theft. It means much that Rand includes the dialogue about individual private ownerships of our experiences with the world: Roark owns his buildings irrevocably, but so do those who use them or even see them, each in their own inviolate way. For Roark to act like too many so-called libertarians do, he would have to post guards outside all of his buildings to charge fees for walking in or even looking at them.

This has to do also with the struggle I've long had with reading or talking about philosophy. I like reading about it, and about psychology, and I don't dispute giving credit where due. But I return often to the words of Montaigne (in translation): “Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after: 'tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both he and I equally see and understand them.” (Essays Chapter XXV “Of the Education of Children” trans. Charles Cotton)

Even Howard Roark, who others see as cold and antisocial, takes for granted that if you saw a drowning man you would try to rescue him. It means a lot that in connection with this, when the young Gail Wynand is crawling along the sidewalk after being beaten nearly to death, the one person he asks for help dismisses him in “bovine indifference.” That adjective is important, because it is certainly an inhuman act to be so callous towards a fellow being. Rand showed this here and I'm glad to have read the book in order to have seen her acknowledgment of this truth.

Even so, the fact that she spent so much effort justifying her unorthodox use of phrases like “self-interest” and “selfishness” might not be enough to defeat this danger: the bare words stick in minds when their substance has ebbed, and then people are quick to attribute the conventional meanings to them and justify their inhumanity by the same kind of servility to a creed, this time a secular one: Rand – or whoever – Says. It is the exact same phenomenon as “the Scriptures say.” Any such vague appeals to authority should immediately put your internal radar on the alert. I can't help but think of the parable of the Samaritan when I read that episode in Wynand's youth, and I don't know if Rand had it in mind, but I'm glad she didn't have the scene take place at the door of a church, with a reverend wrinkling his nose at the human trash importuning him and slamming the door. Whether Rand meant to or not, she shows respect to Jesus' parable here, by letting it stand as a definitive statement of how religion so often leads people to do evil. She respected the parable by rounding it out, and showing how the betrayal of self which leads to such callousness can come from other sources besides religion.

The bar-keeper's refusal to help the young gangster is a betrayal of himself. It seems like selfishness and most of us would describe it as such, but it's the same kind of second-handedness that the young victim swallows and which sets him off on his meteoric rise to power. In refusing to help a young man nearly dead at his doorstep, the barkeeper is not listening to his human self in recognition of another human self, he is listening to the blindness of an ego that pits itself against others, that judges the worth of souls according to criteria inherited and accepted from others without question: gangsters, street trash, worthless. This is the turning point in Gail's life, when his refusal to accept incompetence fermented into his resolve to rule. Who knows what his career might have looked like if he hadn't started it out with such a foundation, and if whatever enterprise he began allowed room for other producers to work within it true to themselves? Do I mean something like Silicon Valley? Well, what would it take for such conditions to flourish and purify all over, not just in such pockets of privilege? I find answers to that question in E.F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich, Kevin Carson and others. For one thing, you can't get there with so much of human knowledge and invention locked up in copyrights and patents.

My working hypothesis is that most of the wealthy businessmen who are so adored by conservatives and so-called libertarians are more like Gail Wynand than Howard Roark. I wonder what kind of world we would have if half of them had the courage to make the kind of restitution that Wynand makes at the end of the book. Are Carnegie libraries enough?

One of the features in Roark's design that makes him so pure is that while those around him see him as a hero struggling against the world, he doesn't. He refuses to accept the charge of defiance that others try to pin on him, or even to feel the resentment that others feel in his behalf. He doesn't do his work out of defiance (as Wynand does), he does his work because he has to. When his first buildings go up, he faces accusations of faddishness, willful whimsy – the kind of thing that has put up monstrosities like the Information ScienceBuilding at the University of Pittsburgh. But through the book, it is evident that his love for buildings is inextricably linked with human empathy: he designs buildings with the consideration of what it will be like to inhabit them. The concern for others may be unconscious but is none the less powerful for that – in fact it may be its unconsciousness that makes it so effective. After Roark finishes the Heller house, his client says “You were very considerate of me.” Roark replies: “I haven't thought of you at all. I thought of the house. . . . Perhaps that's why I knew how to be considerate of you.”

One of the bits that brought tears to my eyes was where he sat with Dominique watching one of his buildings go up – a humble five-story store in an insignificant Midwestern town – and she expresses misguided sorrow at seeing such a brilliant architect stuck doing such insignificant buildings. He points out that it doesn't matter: he loves each building for its own sake. In fact, it bugged me, reading the book, that his Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit is built so close to the earth, at such a human scale, as opposed to the intimidating grandeur of religious buildings throughout history which always tried to make people feel small and despicable (and there my straw man alert sounded the loudest of any point in the book), yet of course Rand has to have her characters gush about skyscrapers. And of course she also takes pains to qualify how skyscrapers don't make Wynand feel small but give him a sense of the “heroic in man.” What if the Stoddard Temple had been a tall skyscraper then?

When I read the part about the Stoddard Temple I thought of one of my Humanities teachers talking about Gothic cathedrals: their uplifting effect on the spirit as opposed to the intimidation of the older Romanesque buildings. Stepping into a Gothic cathedral, he said, is like getting on board a spaceship. (And it's interesting how Gothic architecture gets such scant mention in the novel.) I think I have come to respect skyscrapers in the way that Camille Paglia respects religion, but I'd still prefer a Gothic cathedral, or something like Simon and Jasmine Dale build – or Jung's Bollingen Tower. There's a temple of the human spirit for you!

The triumphant ending of The Fountainhead brought tears to my eyes, but it wasn't because the Wynand Building was the tallest on the earth. For me, Roark's greatest triumph is Monadnock Valley. That triumph flows from an explicit empathy for a human need, as Roark himself expresses in his presentation to the developers. By doing his work he has performed a true service to his fellow beings. So when later he lectures Peter Keating about how his design of Cortlandt Homes won't be motivated by concern for the poor slum-dwellers, I know what Rand means, and I accept that she felt the need to clear away the fog of Progressive sentimentality that surrounded her when she wrote. But it still reflects the truth that when you do find your own life's work and purpose, and are true to it, you inevitably benefit others – and I affirm the rightness of rejoicing in that and calling to that, even as I agree that boasting of it and taking it up as a sign of superiority over others corrupts it.

I choose to take as a sign of maturity that when I read the portrayals of sentimental praise for “the common man” in The Fountainhead, I didn't so much protest with the youthful idealism I might have once had – hey what's wrong with the common man? – but I reflected on the soul-sucking effects of state-imposed mass instruction, standardized testing and Common Core standards (which of course award lucrative contracts to a few winning business interests – are those people then Producers? Hell no!). I thought of an editorial by a retired teacher: “Please widen achievement gaps.” I thought of Sudbury Valley School and its dedication to democratic order which produces uncommon people, of Daniel Greenberg's statement that a right to vote is meaningless without mutual respect, of the self-fulfilling fear of mob rule by those who exercise their right to vote without exercising their brains.

“You are unique – just like everyone else.” “If everyone's special, no one is.” Such sarcasm is, to quote Jung, “the prerogative of habitual grumblers with bad digestions” (“Psychology and Religion” trans. R.F.C. Hull, Collected Works vol. 11, p. 105). Take time to reflect and to imagine what a world might look like where everyone really was equal in their right and opportunity to be unique. Let that dissolve the justifications you've accepted of everything that chokes such individuality – not only prevailing fashions in dress and so on, but the political and economic structures that support those who arrogate to themselves the undeserved title of Producers and betray themselves in imposing their mediocrity on the rest of us with state-backed protections of their so-called property.

 Ayn Rand might turn in her grave, but she is in agreement with Alma the younger in this: the outrage and impatience that come from seeing just how badly the world is run, how much individual human potential is wasted, should not be taken as an excuse to hate, but should strengthen the resolve of each of us to dedicate ourselves to the growth of our individual souls. Alma's tree metaphor (like that of the wise and foolish virgins) is self-centered in that way: you are the only one who can grow that tree, and you are the only one who can eat of its fruit.

So now I wonder if I'll go find out who John Galt is.

Also I have to wonder if Blixa Bargeld or any of his bandmates ever read the book.

In which I quote obscure songs and philosophize (also not a typecast, sorry)

You run to the gate but you'll be marked late.

It's for your own good. It's for your own good.

You're likely to make the grandest mistakes.

You suffer alone in the skin and the bone.

Let's sharpen those new sets of arrows

for the next generation of playground martyrs,

and join in the game of intolerable shame,

'cos everyone shares in the sins of their fathers.

School bell rings. Single file in.

Trade you my unhappily everafters.

So bring out those things to hammer out the wings

of the next generation of playground martyrs.

-David Sylvian, “Playground Martyrs” (Steve Jansen, Slope)

I'm an art-school witness, witness this device.

I always feel so helpless lost in this episode twice.

-Justin McBride, “The West in Despair” (Finngerhutt, The Secret Life of Bookworms)

We are all of us, who have been wounded by the device of school, witness to it, though some of us have suffered more for our testimony than others. Some of us might not even be aware that we are martyrs: what we went through doesn't mean anything now that we're “grown up.” Or whatever it might mean is just that we went through an unavoidable part of life, an institution, a part of the set-up taken for granted.

In the aggregate we are an archive, a fonds, a record group, a body of evidence witness to the device that has shaped life in the US and in the industrialized world for so long that nobody remembers a time when it did not.

I always did feel so helpless, in those classrooms, on those playgrounds, lost in the episode countless times. I remember playing some sport in the gym, in fifth or sixth grade, and imagining I was in a TV show. My life went on in my mind and body as independently as was possible from the world around me and the experiences of those in it, but they had to coexist to some extent. I had to do dramatic poses and facial expressions in a freeze-frame every time the ball went by me: it was the only way I could make my life into something meaningful, the only way I could redeem it. By acting in my own private little TV show in gym class, I was the star of something. I drew a magic circle around myself, and for a time the derision of the others was an acceptable price to pay for the little bit of mastery that I owned in pulling off those poses. At first I paid the price but I did not count the cost (Neil Peart), but then after a while as it became more clear to me how ridiculous the others found my actions, and how completely they failed to understand why I did them, I think the pain of that overrode the benefit of doing it.

Magic circle, but in some way I had expected my peers to understand what I was doing, because I often assumed that the contents of my private fantasies were openly apparent to others. For a time this made it very difficult to bathe or use the toilet, because I was convinced that acquaintances could magically see through my eyes and would therefore see my private parts if I looked at them. I still have not come to any sort of workable hypothesis of how this kind of thing could have been treated. But what I am satisfied in hypothesizing is that this kind of fantasizing is rampant among children, especially introverted ones, and most especially among introverts who feel insecure packed in a classroom with other children their age and kept there by force, feeling the effects of the authority-imposed pecking order, all the more terrifying and rigid for being imposed by an authority unconscious of its actions, or whose spokespersons sometimes vocally deny the authority's unconscious unspoken actions, try so hard to go against them. Teachers often try so hard to protect children from the effects of the system they serve that it is tragic to see.

Benevolent mothers smother the child, the benefactors are in denial.

-David Sylvian, “The Banality of Evil” (Nine Horses, Snow Borne Sorrow)

Their words and wishes show themselves as powerless.

Powerless I stand before the ocean.

-Craig Bench (Pilot – Provo, 1998-2000, unfinished LP)

I want to get some students together in a safe place, sit down with them and tell them: I know of this. I understand that some of you carry within yourselves these fantasies, these private worlds, things that you cannot share with anyone, that if your parents see a hint of it they immediately judge, they may panic. If your peers see them they attack. If your teachers see they “intervene” and generally make it worse. Let me offer sanctuary. I won't even ask that you share secrets with me. Let me offer a way that you can face them, own them, manage them. I hope that in doing so you can give a space and a time for what drives them to let off steam, to vent, to find an expression that will ease the pressure on your soul and allow you to live a more purposeful, directed, awake and confident conscious life.

Writing in journals? That would be one way. Sitting still with eyes closed, daydreaming, maybe even Active Imagination? Is that appropriate for adolescents?

Dear old Mrs. Harmer in my 7^th grade art class had all of us sit in a group and put our palms over our eyes to meditate – even the inveterate offender who muttered “bitch” at her back. You just can't make that kind of thing work if any of the children feel unsafe, and they will as long as there is that dynamic of unequal power relations in a room. And you can't expect to find out those dynamics with clumsy adult attempts to get children to talk as if there were nothing under the surface, however good your intentions.

Maybe that was why I was so interested in the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot as a 7^th-grader, because I knew for absolute truth that we stand powerless before the dark water which holds mysterious beings, monsters that don't heed our wishes and which we cannot measure, no matter how many times we look, no matter how sophisticated our equipment is. That monster is there but the deadened eyes of a materialist-minded man cannot hope to see or discover it. It refuses to reveal itself to his arrogant probes.

So what is the kind of humble probe that can reveal it? School personnel just want to know how they can diagnose and treat. That's part of the problem, because the reason they want to do that is in order to get things going efficiently again, move in the direction of a program that would keep everyone safely and neatly on the road to a “success” that they can't really define. Their blind pursuit of progress and uniform success is dumping all sorts of mutogenic ooze into the water to create even more monsters.

What is the monster? I thought of Nessie as benevolent, a sort of guardian. Like Napoleon Dynamite, I thought of her as an underwater ally against the monstrous depredations of my classmates whose souls had been driven into an animal unconsciousness by the larger leviathan of the school.

Let's not insist on a coherently logical structure of metaphor here. I don't know how much I thought of Nessie as benevolent, but being so far away she couldn't get at me even if she had a mind to chomp people. Maybe it was that I felt I could hold onto something mysterious: that there were these mysterious things: monsters, aliens that I felt I could know or at least know something about. And by reading those books about monsters and aliens I felt that I had a way of managing them. At the least it was empowering to feel that I had a knowledge of things that were mysterious, maybe. Or it was a way of affirming the truth of how much that shapes life is unconscious.

Mystic rhythms, under northern lights or the African sun.

Primitive things stir the hearts of everyone. . . .

Mystic rhythms under city lights or a canopy of stars.

We feel the powers and we wonder what they are. . . .

We feel the push and pull of restless rhythms from afar.

-Neil Peart, “Mystic Rhythms” (Rush, Power Windows)

Few of my peers accepted the stories of literal monsters below the surface of factual lakes. Looking back, does it just show how little they thought of the reality of things shaping our lives that went on unspoken, impossible to challenge because they were impossible to articulate, unless in ways that could be dismissed as childish? Were my peers more interested in finding a place in the order where they could have comfort, find a place at the table, gain the favor of the king, a seat on the bench in the mead hall? Some of them were obviously going somewhere with their lives in a way that I wasn't. Some seem to have set themselves up pretty comfortably after having passed all the requirements set by that unconscious beast.

Ich bin das letzte Biest am Himmel.

-Blixa Bargeld, “Letztes Biest (am Himmel)” (Einstürzende Neubauten, Halber Mensch)

The school leviathan swirls over us like the clouds – not out of a death-eater skull, because that would show too plainly what it was up to. Some sort of imperial Chinese dragon. A superior force hovering over like a facile god: above=greater, superior in every literal sense, self-evidently our ruler. The heavens where the invisible being dwells in a place no scientific probing can ever hope to discover (another reason why I was susceptible to cryptozoology? And the shame at seeing the extents of credulity to which faith might lead was keener for my friends than for me?), and whose dictates are to be obeyed without question.

The waters above the firmament as well as those below: those unconscious processes, the mystic rhythms or the sinister forces that drove us, were not just subterranean. Subterranean were the forces that set my peers against me, that drove our conflicts with each other, that tried to find expression in what the ready guide in the celestial voice (Peart) made permissible and possible. There were unconscious forces above us that ruled over those below, and made the vessel in which the lower forces cycled and fermented.

Ancient idolatries born of natural psyche are wholesome and benevolent compared to the modern ones born of the machine which made bold to exist in the spirit instead of obeying (Rainer Maria Rilke). And it is one of the saddest ironies to me that those who shave their faces and straighten their ties should ally themselves so fully with the modern idolatries in denouncing the ancient ones as wicked, should assert that the God who brought the human psyche into being is identical with that leviathan which swirls invisibly in the skies above the school building and the skyscraper, the one that cooks children in its vessel that I don't want to call hermetic. A celestial dragon that wears smiling masks but puts the lid on us in the pot, fires below, heating the waters of our psyche in an industrial recipe. Some of the dragon's acolytes have written cookbooks and now their heirs are following those recipes, without question, because this dragon is a god to be obeyed without question. We leave the judgment to the experts, we defer to something above us, also unknowable.

This is hard, because certainly the true God is also unknowable at the core, but I hold to a segment of Rod that Nephi wrote: he doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world. I also think of Alma's seed metaphor: something is true because it is light, is discernible. It leads you along but in a way that you see plainly, even if it is only one step at a time. A kindly light leading through a dark night, instead of a prideful, garish day (John Henry Newman) – I have always found that image of the garish day to be very interesting in light of our habitual symbolism of day and light. Spiritual metaphors are like language: if one talks about above=good, below=bad, light=good, dark=bad, that's a discreet system. Within its own boundaries, those signs are valid, but it's not a universal truth, like a map might show Minnesota as purple and it works within the map, but the land isn't really that color.

The Earth's core is a second sun underground, the cthonic sun? The invisible sun?

There has to be an invisible sun. It gives its heat to everyone.

There has to be an invisible sun that gives us hope when the whole day's done.

-Sting, “Invisible Sun” (The Police, Ghost in the Machine)

Like Robert Ingersoll I want to stand on a rock of surety in this: there is a plainness like Nephi says, a basic benevolence or rightness that is discernible to everyone, the capacity to spot a naked emperor; and that this doesn't ever truly die even if we ignore it. I want to believe that no matter how deep we might try to bury this, it will keep speaking to us, and I accept that its voice speaking like familiar spirits out of the dust (Isaiah), coming out of those deep layers might sound so spooky that we will be even more likely to fear it, shun it. We could trivialize it (like using Tibetan monks' chants for Hallowe'en sound effects), or we could condemn it as evil in the same hasty judgment that one of my youth leaders showed in saying Queensrÿche's Batman-like logo looked Satanic. Or my fear that King Crimson's “Thrak” and “VROOM VROOM: Coda” were Satanic when I first heard them – and my roommate said as much: “this is Satan music!”

It certainly was eye-opening music that King Crimson gave me: they beguiled me, and I did eat. (And then learned about Thrace, which has Turkish-influenced folk music in asymmetrical meters. Robert Fripp referenced Bulgarian music as part of his European musical heritage. Like I wrote before: orcs-Turks.) Here was something that gave eloquent voice to those immeasurable monsters in the deep. And over time, I have learned that some of them indeed are our allies.

Quillcast: kindness is strength

Since I have been negligent on the typewriters, here's a quote by Robert Ingersoll, written with one of my wild goose quills in Caroline minuscule - and in some haste, as its shakiness shows.