But apart from all these negative elements, the difficulties now under review have an aspect that can be called positive, and this may be taken to include everything in our world as we know it that is actively favorable to the intervention of subtle influences of an inferior kind, whether its work be done consciously or unconsciously. The logical sequence here would be to consider in the first place the more or less ‘determining’ part played by the actual agents of the whole modern deviation, since the intervention of inferior influences really represents a new phase in the said deviation, and fits in exactly with the sequence of the ‘plan’ by which it is brought about; it would clearly be necessary to seek in some such direction for the conscious auxiliaries of the malefic forces, though the extent to which they are individually conscious of what they are doing may actually differ greatly in particular cases. As for the other auxiliaries, those who act in good faith then, because they know nothing of the true nature of the forces involved (thanks to the recently mentioned influence of the modern spirit) are never anything but mere dupes, though this does not prevent their activity from being proportional to their sincerity and to their blindness; these auxiliaries are already virtually numberless, and they can be placed in many categories, ranging from the ingenuous adherents of all sorts of ‘neo-spiritualist’ organizations to the ‘intuitionist’ philosophers, by way of the ‘metapsychical’ scientists and the psychologists of the more recent schools. This matter need not be pursued any further for the moment, for to do so would be to anticipate what will come later; in the meantime some examples must be given of some of the ways in which ‘fissures’ can actually be brought about, also of the ‘supports’ that the inferior order of subtle or psychic influences (for the terms ‘subtle’ and ‘psychic’ applied to a domain are for present purposes synonymous) are able to find in the cosmic environment itself, to assist them in bringing their action to bear on the human world and to enable them to propagate themselves therein.
26
Shamanism and Sorcery
The present period corresponds to the final phases of a cyclical manifestation, and for that reason must exhaust its most inferior possibilities; that is why the period can be said to be using up everything that had been set aside in earlier periods: that and nothing else is truly characteristic of the modern experimental and quantitative sciences in particular, together with their industrial applications. For similar reasons the profane sciences, as has been said, even when considered from a historical point of view as well as from the point of view of their content, are really and truly ‘residues’ of some of the traditional sciences.[120] There is yet another fact that accords with those just mentioned, though its real significance is scarcely ever grasped, and that is the frenzy with which the moderns have undertaken the exhumation of the vestiges of past periods and vanished civilizations, despite their incapacity really to understand anything about them. This in itself is not a very reassuring symptom, because of the nature of the subtle influences that remain attached to such vestiges and are brought back into the light of day with them, and are so to speak set at liberty by the exhumation as such, without raising any suspicion in the minds of the investigators. In order to explain this more fully, it will first be necessary to deal briefly with certain things that in themselves are as a matter of fact wholly outside the modern world, but are not for that reason any the less capable of being used so as to exert a particularly ‘disorganizing’ influence in that world; the rest of this chapter is therefore a digression only in appearance, and it will incidentally provide an opportunity for the elucidation of certain matters about which too little is generally known.
In the first place, yet one more confusion and error of interpretation arising from the modern mentality must be dissipated, and that is the idea that there exist things that are purely ‘material’. This conception belongs exclusively to the modern mentality, and when it is disencumbered from all the secondary complications added to it by the special theories of the physicists, it amounts to no more than the idea that there exist beings and things that are solely corporeal, and that their existence and their constitution involve no element that is not corporeal. This idea is directly linked to the profane point of view as expressed, perhaps in its most complete form, in the sciences of today, for these sciences are characterized by the absence of any attachment to principles of a superior order, and thus the things taken as the objects of their study must themselves be thought of as being without any such attachment (whereby the ‘residual’ character of the said sciences is once again made evident); this kind of outlook can be regarded as indispensable in order to enable science to deal with its object, for if a contrary admission were made, science would at once be compelled to recognize that the real nature of its object eludes it. It may perhaps be superfluous to seek elsewhere the reason for the enthusiasm displayed by scientists in discrediting any other conception, by presenting it as a ‘superstition’ arising in the imagination of ‘primitive’ peoples, who, it is suggested, can have been nothing but savages or men of an infantile mentality, as the ‘evolutionist’ theories make them out to have been; but whether the reason be mere incomprehension on their part or a conscious partisanship, the scientists do succeed in producing a caricature of the situation convincing enough to induce a complete acceptance of their interpretation in everyone who believes implicitly in whatever they say, namely, in a large majority of our contemporaries. This is what has happened in the particular case of the ethnologists’ theories about what they have agreed to call ‘animism’; strictly speaking this word might well possess an unobjectionable meaning, but only on condition that it were understood quite otherwise than they understand it, and that no meaning which is not justifiable etymologically were admitted.
The truth is that the corporeal world cannot be regarded as being a whole sufficient to itself, nor as being isolated from the totality of universal manifestation: on the contrary, whatever the present state of things may look like as a result of ‘solidification’, the corporeal world proceeds entirely from the subtle order, in which it can be said to have its immediate principle, and through that order as intermediary it is attached successively to formless manifestation and finally to the non-manifested. If that were not so, its existence could be nothing but a pure illusion, a sort of phantasmagoria behind which there would be nothing at all, which amounts to saying that it would not really exist in any way. That being the case, there cannot be anything in the corporeal world such that its existence does not depend directly on elements belonging to the subtle order, and beyond them, on some principle that can be called ‘spiritual’, for without the latter no manifestation of any kind is possible, on any level whatsoever. Confining attention to the subtle elements, which must therefore be present in everything and are merely more or less hidden according to circumstances, it can be said that they correspond to that which properly speaking constitutes the ‘psychic’ order in the human being; it is therefore legitimate in every case, by a natural extension implying no ‘anthropomorphism’ but only a perfectly valid analogy, also to call them ‘psychic’ (and that is why a cosmic psychism was spoken of previously), or even ‘animic’, for these two words, according to their original meanings and their respectively Greek and Latin derivations, are really precisely synonymous. It follows from this that there can in fact be no ‘inanimate’ objects in existence, and also that ‘life’ is one of the conditions to which all corporeal existence without exception is subject; and that is why nobody has ever arrived at a satisfactory definition of the difference between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’, for that question, like so many others in modern philosophy and science, is only insoluble because there is no good reason for posing it, since the ‘non-living’ has no place in the domain to which the question is related, and the only differences involved are really no more than mere differences of degree.
120
But only of some of them, for there were other traditional sciences which have not left in the modern world even the smallest trace, however deformed and deviated. It goes without saying, too, that all the enumerations and classifications of the philosophers apply only to the profane sciences, and that the traditional sciences could in no way be made to fit into their narrow and ‘systematic’ categories; at this time, more appropriately than ever before, could the Arabic saying be applied to the current period, to the effect that ‘there are many sciences, but few scientists’ (