Flora, Evelyn deMorgan, 1894
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now . . . but it’s all theatre . . .
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
To be worst,
The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.
The lamentable change is from the best;
The worst returns to laughter.
King Lear IV.1.2-6
Floration in the presence of death
Mystic horticulturist Alan Chadwick employed a certain technique he called “floration in the presence of death”. In fact, you could sum his whole approach as one of increasing fertility via “life into death into life”. Here we look at potted plants specifically. If you have a plant that is in too large a pot, it will keep spreading roots, only marginally interested in production of flower and seed for a new generation. If you are looking for floration, you can either wait for the roots to reach the edge of the pot, or repot it into one of reduced size.
When its roots hit that wall, the plant wisdom understands it is at an end, a boundary (Hermes/Gemini rules enclosures); it is now that its purpose transforms from growth to reproduction. Suddenly seeds are of utmost importance, and to get seeds you need flowers first. “Martha! The children!” as Chadwick would say. An inflorescence of beauty unfolds as flowers proliferate in an ambuscade of abundance. Deadheading the flowers only increases production.
Not to get all Chauncey Gardener-y here, but this might be an apt allegorical lens through which to view the miasma of events now amidst the apparent dénouement of Western Civilization.
In spite of what the socialists will tell you, which is that we are all merely deterministic historical effluvia, ineluctably headed to an atheistic communal hive-lihood, all civilizations and cultures emerge based on some sort of sacred revelation. They often begin at their apex — which goes in the face of the theory of progress — then fall into an entropic desuetude, and in their demise circle back ouroboros-like to reconnect to their beginnings before dropping seeds that the next cultural iteration can graft onto. For example, Rig Vedic Sanskrit hymns, composed possibly four thousand years ago, maybe more, are far more complex than the Sanskrit of the Bhagavad Gita, written a couple of centuries BC. If you need more, compare the easiest line in Shakespearian English to the most complicated tweet.
Like everything in Geminidistan, there are always dark and light versions of this floration. For example, approximately one generation into Mao’s communist rule, the Chinese people were tiring of communist top-down idiocy, incompetence and iron control. Not to mention famine. Around 1956, Mao instituted the Hundred Flowers Campaign, based on a poem: “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”, with the stated purpose of inviting criticism from the public of his policies. As you know, the Cultural Revolution followed hard upon that, using that list of malcontents, resulting in the re-education, imprisonment and murder of at least 60 million Chinese. (Noam Chomsky’s recent statements that Donald Trump is a worse mass murderer than Mao or Stalin should be seen in the context of his apparent Bidenesque deterioration and slide into useful idiocy. He lost us two decades back when he thought that 9/11 could not be any form of an “inside job” because he didn’t think the intelligence agencies were smart enough to pull it off. This happens when you view the ground of reality from an abstracted cushy ivory tower. He should have stuck to linguistics.)
Since history repeats in not circles but spirals, all the “woke” tech platforms (now connected to China’s Communist Party in twisted ways), have for the early part of this century fomented full floral uncensored expression of our individual attempts to uncover and express as best as they could what is really going on. “Let a hundred independent journalists flower”. That snake oil has now turned rancid: anyone who banked on yt, fb, amazon, the twit thing, et al, having any relationship now to free speech, are self-censoring and editing thoughts by using coded language, and are demonetized, deplatformed or looking for uncensored platforms that may or may not get co-opted themselves. On one level people lose careers for ‘discovered’ indiscreet tweets of their youth; on another, fatuous adherents of the tech religion of Virtue Signaling con-descend on anyone not in their cult; on another there have been arrests, doxing, and lives ruined for the thought crime of expressing an opinion. That in a real sense pales compared to the torture and organ harvesting by the Chinese Communist Party, servicing their US and European patrons, but we have to pull down the oxygen mask (not the oxygen-depriving mask) and save ourselves first. Moral triage.
The floration is of course dual. Antifa and its miasma of socialist, communist, corporate, ngo, intelligence, and political funders and trainers has co-opted blm, and are in full flower doing what brown-shirted (now black-shirted) socialists can only ever do: tear down and rewrite history; retrain and brainwash youth; incite violence and run away in cowardice awaiting their next orders. (If you don’t think this is a coordinated attack, consider all the arrests by armed-to-the-teeth police for opening hair salons, solo surfing, or demonstrating peacefully in the face of a total bs lockdown, while the police stand idly under someone’s orders watching all the looting, burning, shooting, etc.) It is a kind of dark Aquarian Age expression of flowering, reminiscent of Morticia Addams growing black roses, removing the flowers, and sticking the thorns in a vase for admiration. Or, as opposed to garden flowering, where every bloom even on the same plant is different, this is a swarm of robotic mindless, humorless locusts following their programming of consuming anything viable. All the while they think they think their own thoughts and operate from organically-produced opinions.
As mentioned in the Chapel Perilous post, those who enter drunk on the cup of sympathy, without the sword of reason, will act solely on emotional triggers, all the while deluded into signaling themselves as compassionate.
Back to the quote from King Lear. Being at the bottom of Fortune’s felly stands in hope (esperance), and leaves fear aside. We will need all of our creativity. We will need all of our imagination. We will need all of our humanity. We will need all of our insights. We will need every unfrayed connection to the spiritual side of ourselves. Rumi wrote his unfathomable poetry while the Mongols took his city of Konya. He wrote letters in verse to the new governors exhorting them to rule from the highest aspect of themselves, and chided them (in verse!) when they did not.
Even if we flower evanescently only to drop seeds, plant an infinitude of them.
More than this is happening. The reset is not going to be a prison planet. It is not going to be an AI Disney world of coffin apartments controlled by our “environmental” smart cities. This is the last gambit of the controllers — and make no mistake, this is a spiritual war before anything else, and every “villain” we can point to in this sphere is just a delivery-boy lackey for dark inhuman apersonal spiritual forces that in my experience I can only call archons. They have nothing but the same two cards to play: blunt fear and violence. Once enough of us look at their pathetic hand and say, “Is that all you’ve got? We have love, beauty, art, humor, compassion — we have a fellowship of souls! Go find another planet to fuck up!”
There is nothing to compare it to now.
We are not only at the terminus of the cycle of American exceptionalism, but simultaneously ending the greater cycle of Western civilization itself, which began with the mystic preSocratic Greeks, Empedocles, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Xeno, Pythagoras. Add in the ending of the Piscean age of hierarchies, and maybe even the 25,920 years of the great precessional cycle. We have a lot on our circuitous plate.
One of those seminal mystic Greeks, about 2500 years ago, Empedocles, said a lot at the onset of our culture that pertains to our present time. He practiced as an iatromantis, or healer-priest, in Sicily and famously jumped into Mt Æetna, leaving behind a single golden sandal. He also railed against being separated from his divine source, yet then realized his own divinity. His depiction of the Geminid reality is through the twin divine forces of Love and Strife. Love is expressed as Aphrodite; Strife he did not name, but hinted at Eris or Prosperina as goddesses of chaos and death respectively. Love binds and Strife separates. We love to love Love, but it can bind us in a smothering unity. We need Strife to separate, to individuate, to compel. Separation engenders creativity, songs of mourning and yearning.
Empedocles, Parmenides and Pythagoras were in no way philosophers in the current sense of academics dispensing irrelevant abstractions. They taught ways of living — all wisdom and spirituality are eminently practical. Knowing how to live, for them, also meant knowing how to die. (Even Socrates said this is the main goal of philosophy.) Their main practice was called incubation, which is similar to the shavāsana or corpse pose in classical Yoga. Few Yoga practitioners understand the pose is literal, not merely descriptive. They would lie in absolute stillness (hesychia in Greek) and surrender until they were carried into the ground of their being, which equals the dark inchoate source of all light and wisdom. And it is a death, a death before you die, and that passing transmutes one into floration as the apotheosis of a human. Empedocles said: “I come among you no longer as a mortal but as an immortal god”; or as Heraclitus said, “Immortals become mortals, mortals become immortals: they live in each other’s death and die in each other’s life”. This is our all but eclipsed birthright.
The creative flowering engendered by this extinction (nirvana means “extinguishing”), for these sages — still available to us — took the form of laws, poetry, art, architecture, music, humor, all in service of that vision, that realization of unity with one’s deity. All true art emerges from that mystic pump of the connective tissue of Love, and the grief of separation through Strife. And it is hard, maybe harder than ever, to sift the junkyard detritus of fear-engendering media spells, cast by third-rate magicians for their inhuman kingpins, and unstrand that web of cacophony encasing our hearts. But that note, the vibration at the center of our world of experience, awaits us. Pythagoras may have called it the harmony of the spheres, the yogis nada brahma; it is always there, a fountain at our heart center, and all it wants is to be heard for the first time in millennia. So that it needs to sound no more.
We have reached the point of no possible return. We have our choice of death. Either the transformative death of emerging from our limited selves and flowering like it’s nobody’s business, or the grim stasis that so many of our companions on this planet have already embraced. The AI that everyone predicts has already subsumed them. They find it comforting to mumble viral slogans through muffling masks, fully vaccinated against the numinous song within that beckons them. They look forward to the eternal hallucination of uploading their consciousness into “environmentally sustainable” subcompacts of endless orgasms and banana splits.
“And what could be closer to living death than aspiring to have your consciousness transistorized and encased in heavy metal? What sort of logos ensues from there? The way to trick death is to die before you die, to still the ego out of vibration so that the original note shines forth, singing death’s final secret: there is no death.”
— from Katabatic Wind
Krys and Steve Crimi
Solstice 2020
