Category: Psyche

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Following Hermes and Serpents – Archetypes of Cyberspace

fUSION Anomaly Has a quote from Hakim Bey The Obelisk :

It is Hermes who bridges the gap between the metalinguistic and the sublinguistic in the form of the message, language itself, the medium; he is the trickster who leads in misleading, the tremendum that echoes through the broken word. Hermes is therefore political, or rather ambassadorial — patron of intelligence and cryptography as well as an alchemy that seeks only the embodiment of the real. Hermes is between text and image, master of the hieroglyphs that are simultaneously both — Hermes is their significance, their translatability. As one who goes ‘up and down’ between spirits and humans, Hermes Psychopomp is the shamanic consciousness, the medium of direct experience, and the interface between these other forms and the political. ‘Hermetic’ can also mean ‘unseen’.

The full article is here. Also this from Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism In The Age Of Information:

Already in Homer, Hermes is a multitasking character. The figure who flits through the _Iliad_ as a messenger and thief becomes in _The Odyssey_ a guide of souls and a shamanic healer, curing Odysseus from Circe’s witchy poison. But the god really doesn’t find himself at center stage until the pseudo-Homeric _Hymn to Hermes_, written around the sixth century b.c.e. The poem begins with the nymph Maya, lately loved by Zeus, giving birth to a boisterous child. Leaping instantly out of his crib, the babe Hermes dashes into the outside world, where he happens upon a turtle. He kills the creature, takies up its shell, and invents the lyre, becoming the “first to manufacture songs.”

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Translated version of Das Begrabnis der Seele in die technische Zivilisation

Translated version of http://www.cgjungpage.org/psychtech/giegerich2.html

Wolfgang Giegerich has an essay – The Burial of the Soul in Technological Civilization. It is on the C G Jung Page, but only in German. I snipped a bit an searched for it in Google, found the page and then clicked the Translate this Page link. Back came a translated version of the article. Here is a sample:

Certainly, if I give the title to my lecture: Funeral of the soul into the technical civilization, then would like to seem it, as if I also into the same long-known horn of the dissatisfied ones to push and over the Seelenlosigkeit of the technology, which wanted to complain uneasiness in the culture. But so simply it does not stand around the word funeral of the soul. It does not have simply a negative, devaluing meaning, as we are bent today’s ones however to assume, because we do not have relationship to grave and funeral. That was for example with the old Egyptians completely different. These created the products of their entire culture activity to a large extent for the only purpose to let it disappear to buried and on Nimmerviedersehen in the grave.

“Interesting” English. The machine gave up about half way through as if from fatigue.

I am not sure what Giegerich is saying exactly – but it seem to fit that technology has taken the soul out of his essay – all very appropriate. Fun!

Funny that the machine could not translate “Seelenlosigkeit of the technology” – perhaps it was just too offended by the phrase!

In paragraph above I hear him saying something like this:

Technology has ripped the soul out of the world. We would be having a funeral for the loss of soul in the world if funerals were not part of that very soulfulness we have lost. The machines have won. We lost and we don’t even know it.

I don’t think like that myself. The soul has jet lag perhaps. But no, I think it is actually faster than all of our speed of light wonders. When it comes to technology the soul is like the planet Mercury – fast – and invisible a lot of the time. It takes a while for us to see it. Old technology shows off its soul but with new stuff the soul is shy, hiding behind glitz. We can see the soul now in an old ZX81 – I wish I still had ours. I think he might be saying that too, somewhere in the essay, but about wrought iron.

Here is an interesting bit, I think he is saying what i just said:

Could the winter not its own yardstick have and its own language speak, and couldn’t it not us be demanded to go along and the movement of immersing into the hellignuechterne water supportless follow the course of the yearly, so that we are with our heart in it and from it, with its measure, the world to see?

So should we learn to appreciate the soul in the new world?

He proposes the idea that we give up our disdain for technology and dive into the holy water of our sober culture…

To dive into the hellignuechterne water would mean to learn by patient hearing of the cold and speechless things of the technology a new language with its own rules and its own idioms a language, which is not our native language, but the foreign language of the concrete walls, airplanes, moon rockets, television sets, computers, atom bombs, in addition, the language of the advertisement, the statistics and the modern economy coined/shaped by multinational companies.

OK, he proposes it but does he advocate it? I am not sure about Giegerich, but it would seem William Gibson does just that in Pattern Recognition where we are steeped in the foreign language of our familiar iconised world.

I am doing Giegerich an injustice by not grasping the essay but just playing with it all. I don’t have a clue what he is saying, but I love the topic. I love some of the words: hellignuechterne which is in the opening poem: In the holy-sober water and Seelenlosigkeit I love the idea of the romantic world being the summer and us now being in the winter of the soul – just not sure if that is his idea or not!

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Quicksilver : Volume One of The Baroque Cycle

Neal Stephenson’s new book announced.

The editorial review now on Amazon

Book DescriptionIn this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.

Daniel Waterhouse possesses a brilliant scientific mind — and yet knows that his genius is dwarfed by that of his friends Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Robert Hooke. He rejects the arcane tradition of alchemy, even as it is giving birth to new ways of understanding the world.

Jack Shaftoe began his life as a London street urchin and is now a reckless wanderer in search of great fortune. The intrepid exploits of Half-Cocked Jack, King of the Vagabonds, are quickly becoming the stuff of legend throughout Europe.

Eliza is a young woman whose ingenuity is all that keeps her alive after being set adrift from the Turkish harem in which she has been imprisoned since she was a child.

Daniel, Jack, and Eliza will traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures including Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, and other great minds of the age. Traveling from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London to the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between, this magnificent historical epic brings to vivid life a time like no other, and establishes its author as one of the preeminent talents of our own age.

Sounds amazing. And there is that name: Shaftoe straight from Cryptonomicon. That alone is intriguing.

The title is of interest to me. Obviously this is set in a pre Internet era. But not in a time before the archetypes of cyberspace were around. I am in the middle of, well further than that, almost completing an essay on that topic, and Quicksilver looms large. Mercury, or Hermes as the Greeks called him was working, driving the realm we now know as cyberspace. I wonder if Stephenson has made the same connection? Undoubtedly!

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Probing Hermes

Lit review for my Archetypes of Cyberspace essay:

The Art of the Classical World

This is a nice image of the staff and makes me think of the sign for Mercury and is pertinent to the strange debate about the symbolism involved. Here is a link to a site that claims the caduceus is not the medical symbol at all.

In other words, the Caduceus was just the wand of a conniving god of thieves who helped folks to Hades, and had nothing to do with medicine, let alone healing.

More on that here. With a more traditional image of the caduceus:

Fuller discussion here and here.

Ginette Paris argues more convincingly for two medicines that need clarifying: Hermes and Apollonian.

Interesting too is the link between Hermes and the later Hermes Trismegistus, here is a page light & clear.

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Ithaca

Ithaca

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Love this poem by Constantine Cavafy. Thanks Stephen, for sending it along a few years ago.
Continue reading “Ithaca”

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… if it isn’t intelligence, it has often been mistaken for it

Playing God is an essay by Douglas Rushkoff

From Evolution to EmergenceThere are a few faiths in which congregants are invited to participate in the creation and interpretation of the underlying narrative. Certain Jewish sects spurn answers in favor of more questions and interpretation; Quakers enjoy a dogma-free, town-meeting-style Sabbath. Most religious traditions, though, simply treat their believers as a “mass” who must depend on priests or ministers for access to the “story.” But just as the Internet has led patients to information about alternative medical treatments (often against doctor’s orders), it has given congregants something in the spiritual realm that is very rare-the ability to find alternative stories about who we are, who made us, and why.

More important than any one story we may have discovered or written, the experience of sifting through them all and writing our own has changed our relationship to religion, perhaps forever. The Internet is anathema to unitary narrative. If you want to understand life only as a story etched in stone, you had better stay away.

Every early culture composed stories-myths-to explain the basic facts of existence. For centuries, we have understood our world-even our sciences-as being somehow authored: that things were set in motion by someone or something. We cling to the belief that our existence proceeds by design. That’s why Darwin’s theory of evolution was such a threat to our narrative understanding of the world, and why creationists resist its implications to this day. But even those of us who believe in evolution have been able to impose a kind of narrative on top of it in which we imagine matter and life to be groping steadily and consciously toward complexity, with evolution itself as the agent of that grand authorial entity we dearly hope exists.

Now our computers are forcing us to entertain new, even less linear models for why things happen. One of these models, described in Steven Johnson’s new book, Emergence, explores the way everything from ant colonies to ancient cities finds its order. It turns out that queen ants issue no decrees, and ancient cities still in existence today had no official planners. The necessary preconditions must exist, but it now appears that life, organisms, communities, and order arise-emerge, in other words-from the bottom up. There is no central story, yet there is radical change and something that, if it isn’t intelligence, has often been mistaken for it.

And what is the chief prerequisite for emergence to occur? You guessed it: networking. Interconnectivity is what allows an “it” to become a “they.” Instead of acting on its own, each atom, molecule, cell, organism, or community can act as part of a larger complex-a networked being.

OK, if it isn’t intelligence, what is it? Is there some sort Chardannian teleology? Is it just nature, bell curves and Bradford’s Law? There is a method in the swarming mobs of a net-work. Emergence looks interesting. How does it relate back to the old classic on this, Engles’ Dialectics of Nature.

McLuhan had a phrase: escape into understanding. My hunch is that the way to know is to not understand. Well, to know certain things, understanding works fine in its own niche. More than a hunch, I know this from being a psychotherapist. I see the escape into understanding all the time. “I want to know WHY she did that to me!” “How could he do that!” There is never a resolution to those questions, they aren’t questions, but while they sound like questions there is no … resolution. Now there is a nice word. A return to a solution? Becoming fluid? Coming into focus? Resolution comes from the WHAT question about experience itself. What am I experiencing? If we can go one beyond seeing the world in a grain of sand, we are a grain of sand.

Experiential learning is at the core of training to do psychotherapy. Once on this path all theory is more or less secondary. Ok, there is no central story, but there is an inner story, and the inner story is a facet, an incidence of something that can’t be understood without a story.

Many people are writing about this networked phenomena, and right from the inside. My hope is to be able to keep hold of the thread that sees beyond the social and technical and political in all of this and to find a story with a resolution.

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Xanadu

Ghosts of Xanadu

The behavior of ants has been likened to a distributed mind, a demonstration of collective intelligence. In Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach an ant colony is even used as a main character to drive home the point that the actions of dumb individuals can add up to a smart collective. Xanadu was supposed to enhance the intelligence of the human race, too, but a new feature in your web browser is unlikely to have ramifications that profound. Yet in both language and art the act of linking nouns together creates new meaning, which is a nice bonus we’re sure can be pulled off with a few hours of surfing.

Smart Mobs? Does linking and back linking and networking make a mob more intelligent? I don’t know.

OK, I have done it, will this happen:

Link to this page and it will link back to you automatically
Have a response to something said on this page? Want others to see it after reading this article? This page can detect where a visitor is coming from and provide a permanent link back to it that all other visitors can see. Link to this article from the page where you’ve posted your response, and a reciprocal link to your page will be made automatically and for free.

Later: But it won’t happen… only the top 20 referrers get listed! Could I make my weblog do this?

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Networks – Bound by Love

Backlinks — Love
Jon Udell using a biological analogy to look at blogspace

O’Reilly Network: Blogspace Under the Microscope [May. 03, 2002] I said in an earlier column that blogspace is a laboratory for group-forming experiments. As we conduct and observe those experiments, it seems useful to reflect on how life itself uses information loops to sustain multicellular collaboration.

The analogies are compelling — though also, let’s admit, fashionable and subject to abuse. Happily, biologists and information scientists are now talking to one another more and more. Having that conversation in blogspace might be a good way to get to the root of what blogspace is becoming, and how, and why.

“It’s hard to avoid the sense that there’s some biological force at work here.” This reminds me of the physical analogy that Moreno uses with the notion of “social atom”. There really is a pattern to seemingly random behaviour, chaos theory works with that, social net-work theory does too. However Moreno enabled the psychological work as an integral inescapable part of that investigation. Social net-works are patterns of what he called tele, feelings projected into… space. What is that space! Now it is blogspace! Moreno called it the sociometric matrix. (Hence the movie? 🙂

By going for the biological analogies it becomes easy to avoid the psychological. How about this: Patterns of linking – new norms and technology for doing so – are expressions of archetypal forces. That leads us to examine them as stories, myths, gods.

So what is the backlinking an expression of psychologically? On the net we tend to keep strict control of how public we make our choices and also our chosen-ness. We reveal our popularity, say being in the top 40 of daypop, or showing off the hit counter, but keep access to the logs private. Biologically, technologically there are reasons for that… from a marketing perspective there are economic reasons. Psychologically? Our chosen-ness, our choices are both the stuff of cyberspace, and the stuff of who we really are. What we click and what we link reveals a lot and who clicks and who links us does too. What are these forces of attraction? Forces of attraction on a physical plane… are magnetism, gravity. But see where it leads when we look through that psychological eye: Love. Eros. We want to control Love. It can’t be done. There must be a story there.

How about this passage by Stanley Richards: Eros, Master od Perversity

It comes about like this: Eros draws us to what is opposite because he is the desire for union. Giving way to Eros means permitting yourself to be attracted, not merely to what you like – but towards what is different from you, even radically different, even to what repulses you. For Eros is the great joiner. He reaches out to join you to what is unlike you: the opposite sex, the opposite idea, the opposite way of life, the opposite goal, the opposite course, the opposite god and, heaven help us, the opposite morality.

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Cybertime

Cybertime
Meg Hourinan in O’Reilly Network: What We’re Doing When We Blog [Jun. 13, 2002]:

What distinguishes a collection of posts from a traditional home page or Web page? Primarily it’s the reverse-chronological order in which posts appear. When a reader visits a weblog, she is always confronted with the newest information at the top of the page.Having the freshest information at the top of the page does a few things: as readers, it gives a sense of immediacy with no effort on our part. We don’t have to scan the page, looking for what’s new or what’s been changed. If content has been added since our last visit, it’s easy to see as soon as the page loads.

Additionally, the newest information at the top (coupled with its time stamps and sense of immediacy) sets the expectation of updates, an expectation reinforced by our return visits to see if there’s something new. Weblogs demonstrate that time is important by the very nature in which they present their information. As weblog readers, we respond with frequent visits, and we are rewarded with fresh content.

Cyberspace is what we called it but cybertime might have fitted as easily. Space is shrunk so we have a global village (perhaps) and time has altered the notion of now. It has altered it to the extent that we have to use words like “real-time”, synchronous, asynchronous. The passage by Meg Hourinan draws attention to this simple phenomena, the use of time… not unexpectedly in web logs. Yes the content is “fresh” or stale… but a strange thing happens, by logging it old content becomes fresh. I think so anyway. I often log old items here, because I think they are still fresh. Sometimes because they are particularly old, like my notes on Huxley’s Crome Yellow. The asynchronous nature of email and web groups is a way that the now has stretched. But for it to be experienced as a stretch we need to see the date. This dating of items is needed so we can get the timing right on the wave we are surfing. Dating items on the web was there from the early days with the conventional Last Updated line at the bottom of the page. With weblogs it has promoted itself to the top. Hmmm, as in newspapers, hence the weblog is more like journalism. Journals too have dates. Rebecca Blood mentions

In early 1999 Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. Brig evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site consist of dated entries. Webloggers debated what was and what was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal was the most complete listing of weblogs available, Brig’s inclusive definition prevailed.

All this is of particular interest in that it echoes what happens in the psyche. From the outside it looks as if people in therapy are examining the past, but that is not so. What they bring to a session is “fresh” — because they brought it! And why? Because the pattern of the past will be repeating in the present and the pattern is the interesting thing. Patterns of the soul – archetypes – are worth catching. To be fully there – the ‘past’ also needs to be time-stamped — it is impossible to imagine a specific feeling without a specific moment (or span of them). The underlying pattern is outside of time. Fits with the idea that the soul is eternal. e-ternal, not a reference to the e words but just wondering if it means outside of time?

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