John Dunn - The Mythology

The Mythology

Kiss on Dr John Dunn. The Mythology

Love

First in the Mythology is Love: variously Logos, God, the Word, the Cosmic Jesus, living thought, creativity.

‘He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.’ (1 John 4:16)

Of course, not everyone dwells in love, meaning that God is absent from the existence of, for example, the Children of Urizen, the living dead. Rejecting Love, at each moment they murder the cosmic Jesus.

Love is creativity

Another aspect of Love to be added to the Mythology is creativity. Let us take Samuel Taylor Coleridge's understanding of the creative process as a starting point. The obvious thing is that Coleridge renders creativity as something almost synonymous with imagination.

Coleridge described the highest level of imagination as the ‘Secondary Imagination’. (Hierarchically, this was placed above 'Primary Imagination' and 'Fancy'.) Coleridge described the 'Secondary Imagination as follows:

The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses,dissipates in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

The Secondary Imagination takes the created world and recreates it. It has the power to make it new. It has a God-like power.

Only God and man can create something from nothing. The imagination and creativity are related to the First Creator. William Blake considered the human Imagination to be God; and as Love is God, I will add Creativity to the Mythology as an aspect of Love.

The Seraphim

Rilke might have screamed at the angels, but if only he had known, he had been in the company of the highest orders of angels all along. He was a nothing innocent before them, but a poet after them. Yes Rilke was right, 'every angel is terror', i.e. every angel brings with it the terror of the end of innocence.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic

Orders? And even if one were to suddenly

take me to its heart, I would vanish into its

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains

to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

The Seraphim occupied their bodies. They were your lovers Rilke.

The Seraphim are not distinct from God, so must occupy innocents to awaken men.

Whoever is a Seraph, that is a lover, is in God and God is in him; even, it maybe said, God and he are one. (Oration on the Dignity of Man, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola)

Only the highest orders of angels enjoy the immediate gaze of God and know the mystery of love.

An angel occupied your body and spoke to me… touched me… and drew me towards the Divinity.

On the way I collided with the Gods of obstruction, Luciferic beings who beat upon my astral body.

I felt the hammer-hardened capacity for evil, but also the potential for freedom that only an angel-touched man can know.

“I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.” (Silesius)

Angel, were you sent to rescue God?... to rescue Love?... to rescue the Word?... to rescue the Cosmic Jesus? ... to rescue living thought? ... to rescue creativity?

Ananke

Man, in the image of the first Violator

Inthe Mythology, Ananke is the symbol of undifferentiated Oneness, equilibrium, the endless repeating cycle and entropic death. The champion of violation is Eros, the victims of equilibrium are the Innocents, the promoters of the One are the Children of Urizen. Ultimately the contest is between Love and Evil.

In the one infinite Cosmos without man, there would be no ‘that is’, there would be no ‘be’ing.

Where there is no being, there is void, no-thing; there is 0. Without man, 1=0.

The struggle is against the return of the One, the return of Ananke.

Forto break free is a coming to being, with the implication that not to break free is to exist in a state of non-being, or locked in the closed circle of 0.

Ananke is entropic death.

Each triumph against Ananke is birth and new life.

New life demands the breaking of the equilibrium, the endless repeating cycle.

For life to break free, Ananke must be violated.

Violationcomes first; the wilderness must be beaten back and equilibria overturned. For what is life? It is violation at all levels, from the human individual to the cosmic. Life must be actively chosen over 0.

Thewilderness is never conquered. There is a natural and eternal tendency to return and ouroboros is the symbol. This return is the passive fatalism of a sub-humanity that obeys the tendency in its various iterations: Spinozism, Marxism, Kabbalah, the mind lost in the Heart of Darkness.

What will be the measure of success?

For the individual it will be by how much he is distinguished from the herd.

Formankind as a whole it will be by how much we are distinguished from nature through art, architecture, feats of engineering and the active control and management of the Earth. The ultimate measure will be the density of the population made possible by man’s marshalling of the Earth’s resources to his own health and benefit.

Beyond that it will be by how far into space the mind of man has penetrated.

Whatof the Orphic egg metaphor? It has its chicken and egg limitations. YesEros broke free; but only after an egg itself was penetrated and fertilised.

A 1=0 equilibrium has to be violated from outside; there has to be an outsider.

In the Creation, the equilibrium of 0 was violated by God.

The equilibrium of the Garden was violated by the Devil.

The equilibrium of Adam was violated by Eve.

The equilibrium of fallen man was violated by the Incarnation.

Man, in the image of the first Violator, is the proof of God.

© John Dunn.

The Innocents

Beulah

In William Blake’s mythology, there is a place called Beulah, which the Innocent might say resembles the traditional idea of Heaven. The Innocent are wrong of course. It differs from the traditional heaven in that it is a temporary place of rest, not a final destination. It is a place in which the do-nothing dumb masses might find contentment. Here the danger lies.

From Beulah, one can be tempted by the followers of Urizen to go down to Generation, the realm of birth and death, a sub-human world, driven by instinct.

Above is Eden: not the peace that passes understanding or the saints’ everlasting rest, but an active strife of contraries that reflects the dynamism of human nature. Eden experiences a kind of warfare, but spiritual warfare that is creative and constructive.

Creativity and constructive…Only God and man can create something from nothing. The imagination and creativity are related to the First Creator. William Blake considered the human Imagination to be God.

Children of Urizen

They hide amongst the Innocents.

They feed off the Innocents.

They set Innocent against Innocent.

They send the Innocents to war.

You know you've met them,

probably when you've thought about it afterwards.

They don't smile, they sneer.

They look at you with calculation.

Snared in Urizen's net, they are the living dead.

Their lives are empty and uncomplicated.

Being themselves devoid of love,

when they meet Him they murder Love.

God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (I John 4:16)

They that dwelleth without love, what are they?

The anti-Love; the masonry of hate; the children of Urizen.

Root them out, pleads Eros to the Innocents, root them out

Urizen

To judge the Lamb of God

Satan’s Synagogue is William Blake’s name for the false religion that worships the base powers of this world.

Manmustand will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect the Synagogue of Satan.

It is called a synagogue because it murders Love, adhering instead pharisaically to a vengeful law.

Urizen called together the Synagogue of Satan in dire Sanhedrim
To judge the Lamb of God to death as a murderer and a robber. (Blake’s Jerusalem)

In The Mythology, Love is known variously as God, the Word, Logos, Jesus, Creativity.

Urizen - Devil worship

Blake did not see the Creator as an entity apart, an all-knowing God which controlled the affairs of man from across a divide. Such a distanced entity Blake described rather as Urizen, the demiurge, a 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter.

By implication, this made of the Bible's Jehovah a Satan, the puppeteer pulling the strings of mankind, an over-bearing father, a failed architect, and the 'Accuser of the World' who unfairly condemned Adam and Eve when he was the one at fault.

Christian religionism for Blake had carried over the worshipping of the demiurge from the followers of Jehovah, which made it, essentially, Devil Worship.

Antique terror on Dr John Dunn.

Terror Antiquus by Léon Bakst (1908)*

Ancient Terror

In the beginning was the One.

And the One was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the world was one to me, and I was indistinguishable from it.

And the One looked to the infinite as an equilibrium, with its self-regulating mechanisms and its own necessities.

And there was no observer to confirm upon the One the status of being.

For what is it to be?

‘To be’ is to be distinguished as one thing from another.

To be is the ‘that is’ of the observer's mind.

In an infinite Cosmos without man, there would be no ‘that is’, there would be no ‘be’ing.

Where there is no being, there is void, no-thing; there is 0.

Without man, 1=0.

And the One was nought, and I was non-being.

And I did not see; there was no-one to see.

And Ananke, the entropic death of all previous existences, reigned supreme over the face of the still dark waters.

© John Dunn.