The inside out guts of the Order splayed on the Internet

Faivre writes in ‘The Notions of Concealment and Secrecy in Modern Esoteric Currents since the Renaissance’ - in reference to the initiate and her endeavor to comprehend the esoteric discourse (of esoteric initiatory societies) - that:

“[…] the person who makes the effort to read all (or, rather, as many as possible) of the texts hinted at, finds himself nevertheless confronted by a circular discourse made of images and symbols, a veil, as it were. It is as if that veil constituted the message itself. The circularity or paradox is that the text says countless things and, at the same time, says one main thing to which we readers are not privy”

This remarkable insight captures maybe the most important discovery of the esoteric tradition, which is germane to what Deleuze supposedly (according to Ramey) drew from it, which indeed can be seen to some degree in many continental philosophers in general, and post-structuralists in particular; maybe in Lacan more than in anyone else: the performative dancing around the message, rather than the direct adressing of it. On the one hand because the object is ineffable, hopelessly elusive, and also for pedagogical reasons: an experience leaves more impact than an instruction. In fact Henrik Bogdan argues in his book ‘Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation’ that the very secret of secret societies such as Freemasons is not some kind of knowledge in the strict sense but their rituals, or rather: the experience of the rituals. These are supposed to be set up so as to be transformative experiences, the secret is the ritual technology of soul catalysis.

Now, the link here to the post-structuralists, and particularly Lacan jumps out at us. Lacan is notorious for his many literary, philosophical, scientific and historic references, that can appear as simple showing-of, and also of “dancing around the issue”. In "‘The Sublime Object of Ideology” Zizek recounts a joke about a Pole and a Jew, where the Pole asks the Jew to tell him how Jews get so rich and the Jew says okay but first you have to pay me so and so much, the Pole pays and the Jew goes off on a long-winded explanation until he stops and says “if you want to hear the rest you must give me so and so much more”. The Pole pays yet again.. and this goes on until the Pole catches on: there is no secret, the jew is tricking him, not at all intending to tell him how jews get all their money, and the jew replies “well now you see how we jews…”

Connecting this to the Lacanian psychoanalytical treatment Zizek writes:

“What is crucial here is the double movement of the outcome - the distance between the moment when the Pole breaks out in fury and the Jews final answer. […] The Poles error is simply his perspective: he looks forward to the ‘secret’ being revealed somewhere at the end; he situates the Jew’s narration as a path to the final revalation of the ‘secret’; but the real ‘secret’ is already in the narration itself[…] The Jews ‘secret’ lies, then, in our own (the Pole’s) desire: in the fat that the jew knows how to take our desire into account. That is why we can say that the final turn of the story, with it’s double twist, correspond to the final moment of the psychoanalytic cure, the dissolution of transference and ‘going through the fantasy’.”

This passage gets at the heart of Lacan’s method, which he deployed not only on the divan but also in the lecture hall, and which is largely responsible for the many denunciations of him as a simple charlatan: what is missed is the truth of the performance, and it’s ability to (in the lecture hall case), with a sufficient degree of supposing-to-know, initiate and catalyze climbing up the hierarchy, not of a particular order but of the order of the wider tradition: of the Eternal Church.

This, the theurgical secret (which of course holds a lot more nuance and depth than my cursory expose can render), which esoteric currents have passed on and developed for hundreds, if not thousands of years, is now more and more doing it’s dervishly whirls in plain view, yet they are - as Deleuze might have said - imperceptible. Another thing that Bogdan says of secret societies is that “understanding of the rituals changes as the candidates advance through the degrees”, that the same rituals are understood differently, more deeply, as and individual has advanced further in their comprehension. This is the reason why Deleuzes ‘imperceptibility’ also to some degree means complete transparency. This may very well also be the reason why many previously secret societies or closed mystical traditions are more and more opening up, holding open lectures, being active on social media, posting explanations of the Kabbalah on YouTube etc.

Another connection that imposes itself is that of art: the ineffable object of the theurgical ritual is clearly analogical to the sublime object of art, indeed I wouldn’t consider it foolish to conjecture that a large part of how modern art functions, with oblique poetry and imperatives to do a kind of parallax interpolation between disparate gestures, that a lot of this comes from the esoteric, in a genealogical sense. Either way the point that the respective objects lend themselves to analogy indicates that both fields would benefit from transmission between the two.

There seems to be something else at play here, something triangulated by these different points, but this post is long enough as it is. Also I need to read more on Western Esotericism and Lacan before I can develop this connection to a higher resolution and see just what kind of fruit it will bear.