Tag: Neoplatonism

The Akashic Records

To access past lives, the Hero of my tale consults the Akashic Records.

Derived from Sanskrit, “Akashic” means ethers or “that which holds all.” Vogue writer Shabana Patker-Vahi asks us to picture at one and the same time a massive library and a celestial mirror. Akashic reader Simrin Gregory likens it to “an energetic database that stores every choice we have ever made as individual souls.” As our hero is to learn, the records help us release energetic blocks retained from the past. To access, says Patker-Vahi, set intentions, develop clarity around questions one wants answered, and try reiki. She also suggests tarot readings and/or guided meditations paired with binaural beats set to 963Hz.

Hero shrugs his shoulders and thinks, “Accessing an imaginal technology on the scale of the Akashic Records is not unlike inheriting a time machine. Only the Records do time machines one better, as they steer us clear of butterfly effects while nonetheless enabling anamnesis.”

“Besides,” he confides, speaking across dimensions now to his companions. “At this point, I’m willing to try anything.”

Saturday May 22, 2021

A package arrives from my friends at Theurgical Studies Press containing two chapbooks, the press’s first releases: Benjamin Gardner’s “Incident at Funk’s Grove” and Erik Waterkotte’s “Inside the Found Photograph.” Along with the chapbooks, Gardner also included his read-along book The Cabin. These are beautiful small-press objects made by writers who are also talented printmakers and painters. Gardner and Waterkotte work adeptly wherever they try their hand. They present themselves as theorgoi, who, as the Chaldean Oracles report, “do not fall under the fate-governed hand.” Theurgy was a form of magic performed by Neoplatonists. Theorgoi, then, are those who practice this magic: figures who invoke deities through ritual. Horror is generally not my cup of tea, and Theurgical Studies Press is at least in part a publisher of horror. “What is the nature of the horror to which my friends are drawn?” I hear myself wondering. But “Incident at Funk’s Grove” is a delight. Entry into the story’s grove functions as would passage through a portal. One crosses the magic circle that bounds contemporary realism so as to access the world of the weird.

Tuesday December 8, 2020

Esoteric speech, says Federico Campagna, is speech among friends. Campagna is a brilliant Sicilian anarchist philosopher. He’s the author of Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. Campagna’s thought explores world-making. We make worlds voluntarily with others, he says. These are anarchist cells. Campagna’s thought draws upon Platonism and Neoplatonism, Heidegger, anarchists like Max Stirner and Colin Ward, mystics like Simone Weil and Henry Corbin, Iranian Islamic philosophers of the 12th century. And somehow Campagna is now himself a Catholic, as he declared on a recent podcast. His next book, slated for publication early next year, is called Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents. By speaking esoterically, we admit other dimensions of reality — parts that can’t be spoken given the language we speak. Descriptive language alone is not enough. Make of speech instead an event, a happening, like multidimensional correspondence chess. Build a device — equal parts database, memex, and volvelle, inspired by Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu.