And on the divine twins

As I get older, I start to recognise certain repeating moments in my life, certain seasons, processes, stations of the wheel. And because I’m older, and perhaps also a little wiser, I’ve learned not to fear them so much, because I remember what they have to teach, and also what then comes after.

This moment is nigredo. That’s the name for a process the alchemists described — and Jung later elaborated — in which the materials to be transformed are blackened, decomposed, and reduced to their most base essence. Alchemy, though, was never just about the transformation of material substances from one form into another, but also about the transformation of the alchemist himself, with the ultimate goal being a state of unity of opposing forces or drives.

In Jung’s esoteric delvings, he saw nigredo quite similar to what the Christian mystic, St. John of the Cross, had seen as the dark night of the soul. It was a state of necessary despair and ego death, where all previous beliefs prove themselves to have been false, all identities reveal themselves to have been merely masks, and everything which seemed once certain and solid melts into air.

Nigredo isn’t a singular moment, however, but rather a repeating process. In alchemy, substances required multiple transformations, a repeating cycle from nigredo to rubedo and then back again. What we think we know and who we think we are likewise must be blackened repeatedly, “destroyed” (though never annihilated) and then reforged like the repeating seasons of the earth. We die, are born, and then die again so to be reborn, all the while still “living” and striving towards a time when the drives that defeat us and the drives that create us become lovers to each other.

The soul work of alchemy relies on a framework that’s become quite anathema in our current age, that of polarities and opposing equal forces. In other words, “binaries,” though not anything like the computer sense of the term. They are not just one set of polarities, but multiple oppositions — masculine and feminine, solve and coagula, expansion (Jupiter) and contraction (Saturn), yin and yang. Each part of a pair leads to, regulates, opposes, and births its counterpart in a relentless dance, constantly trying to solve the other’s contradictions and excesses.

When in balance, which is never a state of equilibrium, these oppositions create the world. It’s easiest seen in the unity of male and female in the act of sex, which — despite all the transhumanist fantasies that we can escape the earth — is how each of us has come into being. An example less likely to trigger the fanatics, however, is the way a gardener must both nurture and cull in order to have anything to eat. Let every one of a thousand seeds grow in a small area of soil, and not one of them will grow large enough to bear fruit; kill off most of them to let a few strong ones survive, and you’ve actually then got a garden.

That latter part, the culling, is a terrifying truth we’re not much fond of regarding. To kill something so that other things can live sounds like cruelty, and one immediately wonders anyway who is wise enough to decide which (or who) should live and which (or who) should not. Any gardener knows the absurdity of this question, though: there is no moral authority to call upon in such matters. You sow multiple seeds because you’ve no way of predicting which will sprout and which will not, and you’ve anyway got no say in the matter. The seeds decide, and it’s then up to you to choose which of them you’ll nurture and which of them you’ll cull. Choose all or none of them, and you’ve made sure none of them will become what they want to be. You have to choose, and there’s no right or wrong decision, and that’s the terrible burden of being human.

Where things get truly awful to countenance is when such decisions involve not plants but humans. Large scale questions about energy consumption and industrial civilization, for example, or how much freedom to limit to avoid death during a pandemic. Those who make those decisions have no more insight than the rest of us, only more awareness of the competing influences and a better vantage from which to watch the results of their choices.

Bogs in Ireland are littered with the corpses of sacrificed victims with the nipples cut off, because ancient people had a mechanism for punishing kings who made bad decisions. There in Ireland, the priest class (the druids), upon understanding the unfitness of the king in the eyes of the gods and the people, sacrificed him. Why cut off his nipples, though? Because the king was an embodiment of both male leadership and female nurture; supplicants would kiss and suck at his nipples to show fealty.

We still suckle at the nipples of the powerful, but we no longer have a way of drowning them when the land has turned against them. Instead, they remain in power, or are voted out and then go on speaking tours, while the crops wither, the oceans rise, and the people suffer.

The matter of a king embodying both the masculine and the feminine in one body is worth more attention, as that’s still how we look at the state’s role in our lives. We think of it as both mother and father, nurturer and protector. We expect it to care for those who cannot care for themselves, to educate our children, to provide for us, to feed us; we want it also to protect us from harm, to police streets and borders, punish criminals and foreign enemies, and to collect the spoils of war (oil, usually) for our benefit.

Because we no longer sacrifice kings, there will never be a real reckoning for the state, and there are countless reckonings we desperately need. Ukraine, for example: billions of dollars poured into a corrupt nation to fight off an invasion by a larger equally corrupt nation, with every offer of peace rejected at the behest of the United States. Guns that flooded into Ukraine now flood also into the streets of every city in Europe, and there’s no bog deep enough to hold all those responsible.

Of course, there’s also the matter of Covid. All the evidence points to a lab leak and human manipulation of a virus for its origins, but we’ll never get a confession, let alone an apology. Nor will there be public inquiries into whether or not the lockdowns and other restrictions even mattered, nor recognition of the psychological damage done by making human interactions illegal, and there will be no attempt by governments to relinquish the powers they accumulated during that time.

Something that made a lot of sense to me about the Covid years was an observation Nina Power made in a discussion with Jack Donovan, that the conflict and imbalance was really between the “feminine” drive to nurture and protect life versus the “masculine” drive to enjoy life through risk. The oppressive caution and restrictions imposed upon populations were an excess and over-reach of that first drive, privileging the fear of dying over the desire for living.

I’d go a bit further, though. The problem was not just that a smothering maternal fear that we might become sick came to rule over us, but that the paternal desire to punish willingly served that fear. The extreme state violence against anti-restriction protesters in Europe and in Canada were absolutely that paternal drive — in service to the maternal drive — in its extreme. In other words, it’s not that one drive has won out over the other; rather, they’re both corrupted, equal partners in a toxic and dysfunctional marriage. Though one drive was privileged and the other vilified, they still acted as willing partners.

The problem that arises in such situations is predictable: the buried desires, like the shadow, goes to its own excesses to correct the imbalance. If, out of an excess of care and nurture you avoid culling anything in a garden, you’ve actually sentenced everything to a stunted, choking death. In other words, by choosing too much care and compassion, you’ve actually chosen its opposite. By trying to save everything, you’ve killed everything.

It’s uncomfortable to feel one’s way into this way of thinking, and it’s understandable that many fear those who even try to. That’s why, I think, there’s such an intense desire to destroy all binaries in gender, because to think in oppositions requires allowing that both twins might actually be necessary and co-creative. To suggest there is anything important, necessary, or unique about being male or female is a great crime in our days, and yet if there were neither of those things, there’d be nothing to transition into. To be “non-binary” is merely to re-affirm the existence of those two poles, while attempting to skip past all the necessary alchemical work of the soul to reach its ultimate goal, the divine androgyne.

Gender is hardly the only place where we try to murder the divine twins within us, to avoid the terrible truth that we are all composed of co-creating, opposing, and equally-important drives. To believe Saturn’s limits on Jupiter’s expansions are not just necessary but also a great kindness is a particularly heinous apostasy now. To even dare speak about the limits of nature and the inevitability of collapse after capitalist over-reach is to speak irrevocable blasphemy, even while the oceans rise and the harvests fail.

For all our modern rejection of binaries, our thinking has become much more like the primary circuit of the computers that rule our lives. The computer binary, though, is nothing like the fucking-and-fighting of the divine twin opposition, but rather only that of a yes or no, on or off, zero or one, either-or, all or nothing. Thus, we may think in terms of “flesh” and “spirit,” but one must be superior to the other, and the other, inferior. Thus, we are given to think in terms of “left” and “right,” but only if we also insist that one of those is evil and the other is good.

At the end of my book, Being Pagan, I included an expanded version of “A Plague of Gods,” an essay I’d written regarding the matter of cultural appropriation. Having noticed how social justice frameworks seemed to be arguing for the same kind of racial and cultural separatism as nationalist frameworks, I had finally begun to realize that the concepts of the right sacred and the left sacred no longer mapped onto their political equivalents, if they ever had at all:

To be clear, the right sacred has a necessary role. As in the words of T.S. Eliot, “mankind cannot bear very much reality.” It is the role of the right sacred to appease, to propitiate, to give offerings to the Other in order to ensure the survival of a people. It is the right sacred that creates and then beheads the sacred king who contains within him the will of the gods and the entire divine order.

Without the right sacred, there is only divine forces, and humans are powerless in their midst. But without the left sacred, there is only division, constant propitiation, constant need for apologies for ever increasing offences (as in modern social justice discourse). Without the left sacred there are only walls and fences, everything property, everything in its proper place. The messy and terrifying chaos of the forest is cut back and mown over, the unpredictable rivers once worshiped as gods are straightened and dammed. The needs of humans become the only priority, without thought to what once-divine nature might think about its exploitation. Animals and plants, once seen as sacred Other beings and ancestors, now become mere industrial products wrapped in that ultimate right sacred invention to keep things pure: plastic.

The right sacred and the left sacred are, like other oppositions, divine twins of each other. The right sacred draws boundaries between humans and gods, as with a ritual circle or a temple. It does this not so that we can meet the gods, but that we cannot be destroyed by them. Remember: the Christian’s god is said to “hide” his face, angels are said to diminish their presence, and priests entered the “holy of holies” sideways with their eyes averted. This is because the full presence of the divine — in all religions — has always meant the annihilation of man.

I think there was a time where the necessary role of the right and left sacreds were manifested in their political equivalents. The conservative drive to slow down social and technological disruption led to stable societies and resilient environments, just as the liberal drive to allow freedom of thought and creative exploration made those societies worth living in. Perhaps, in some places, the correlation still continues. Here in Luxembourg, the liberal government was replaced by a conservative one whose political platform could be succinctly summarized as, “let’s slow down a bit.” Years of growth and abrupt “modernization” under the previous liberal-left government led to a crushing housing shortage and a subsequent rise in homelessness and crime, the tripling of the time needed to commute to work, and an increase in environmental destruction to make way for all this transgressive progress. The “right” offered to voters a Saturnine contraction, a respite from the growing pains, and a chance to catch their breaths.

Elsewhere, though, “right” and “left” political tendencies seem schizophrenic in their positions, making them more alike each other even as they become more extreme. Both want to curtail freedom of expression, to increase economic expansion, and especially to enforce through state and mob violence their false visions of both past and future upon every living being. Like rival prison gangs, they vie relentlessly against each other for control over a territory they cannot actually govern, to set the rules for behavior behind bars they cannot ever bend.

So, I am in nigredo again. To explain exactly what that means for me isn’t quite possible, as I don’t actually know what’s being blackened.

I do know, at least, that caring whether or not the left can ever escape its madness isn’t something I’d like to keep doing. The unhinged — well, actually, fucking insane — people who’ve kept it hostage for so long aren’t going to go away, and the machine mind is zealously converting more people to that way of thinking with each passing week.

I need to let go my unfounded hope this will change any time soon, or even ever.

I mentioned that, in writing “A Plague of Gods,” I’d begun finally to notice there was no longer any correlation between the left and right sacreds and the left and right political categories. I noticed this, but didn’t really let myself understand this. Good friends and people I admire have urged me privately to let go my commitment to such an artificial division, and perhaps it’s finally time for me to do that.

And also, I’ve needed for a long time to reconcile the divine twins of my own nature. What made the past four months so crippling for me was my over-embrace of the drive to care and be cared for, to not offend, to placate and to smooth over differences so to be doing — and seen to be doing — the correct things. In a conversation with someone who’s seen me through much worse, after telling him how hard I’d been trying to do the “right things,” he laughed and shook his head:

“I’m sorry, but you know that’s not your path. You’re always going to be the charming troublemaker and the adorable rogue. Being a ‘good boy’ is killing you. You let yourself try to do that, and now you know you that doesn’t work. Be yourself again.”

So, that’s what I’ll be doing. That such a time comes so close on to the winter solstice is a great kindness. Easier to have a dark night of the soul when the things are anyway their darkest, and when the return of the light manifests itself on the earth while manifesting in your soul.