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Category: Correspondence

July 6, 2014

Doctrine of Correspondences.

“Furthermore, there usually is a strong holistic trait in esotericism where the godhead is considered manifest in the natural world—a world interconnected by so-called correspondences. Man is seen as a microcosm of the macrocosm, the divine universe. Through increased knowledge of the individual self, it is often regarded as possible to achieve corresponding knowledge about nature, and thereby about God. However, the interpretation of what gnosis “actually is,” or what the correspondences “actually are,” differs considerably in the history of Western esotericism.”

–Henrik Bogdan, Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation, 2007, pg. 5.

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June 30, 2014

Ficino, Talismans, and the Fifth Element.

“For Ficino the universe was made up of mystical links, or correspondences, that continuously interacted. The seven planets influenced the sublunary world with their qualities through the mystical links. The fundamental point in Ficino’s magic was that the magician, with knowledge of these mystical links, could manipulate them, and thus cause results according to his will. […]

The use of talismans as a means to attract the influence of planets was viewed as a highly powerful aid, but also a very dangerous one, since the Church condemned its use. Ficino was careful in advising the use of talismans, but, as Yates pointed out, he did discuss talismans in his work De vita coelitus comparanda. […]

According to Walker, the magic of Ficino used the human spiritus as its medium through which it worked. The spirit was the link between body and soul, and the human functions of sense-perception, imagination, and motor activity were connected to the spiritus. The human spiritus was made up of the four elements, and it formed a corporeal vapor that flowed from the brain, where it had its center, through the nervous system. Furthermore, the human spirit was connected to the spiritus mundi, which mostly consisted of the fifth element—quinta essentia or ether.”

–Henrik Bogdan, Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation, 2007, pg. 55.

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June 20, 2014

Law of Correspondence 2.

 

Throw a rock into the ocean.

Your rock causes ripples. Those ripples interact with waves and tides and currents and other ripples to create a symphony of effects, which are influenced in invisible ways by an infinitude of other disturbances.

Chaos is a cacophony, yet there is order.

Everything interacts with everything else. Until entropy.

The consequences of your rock cannot all be hung around your neck. We generate our own world, we throw rocks, but so does everyone and everything else.

Because we can only imagine the changed molecules of wavelets breaking on distant shores as a result of our rock, does not mean that our rock had no impact. It did.

The infinite interactions of the ripples of our rock with all of the other events in the ocean may be unknowable for us, but it does not mean that they are unknowable.

There is an ocean. There is a rock. There are laws of the universe.

Except that the universe is not an ocean, and actions and thoughts, which are indistinguishable from one another, are not rocks.

And the laws of the universe include the caveat that all laws have their neutralizing opposite.

Including the law that there are no laws.

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June 20, 2014

The Law of Correspondence.

 

I believe that serendipity is dictated by the law of correspondence.

Everything is connected to everything. There are no coincidences.

My therapist dismisses this as “magical thinking,” as though this is a criticism rather than an observation. I laugh at him.

Clark observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

O’Toole’s Corollary of Finagle’s Law posits that the perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum. For me, that about covers it.

Just because we subconsciously create the events of our lives does not mean that we are not responsible for them.

Dimly apprehending the implications of our experiences is just another revelation about the limitations of our thinking.

Because we create ourselves thinking about ourselves creating ourselves thinking about ourselves, we dance along a perpetual precipice.

What is vertigo, if not a glance into the abyss?

 

 

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