MDDM18: The Night's Main Drama

[Dave Monroe]

"'So much for Harlequin,' cries Dr. Franklin, 'Let
us get out into the Night's Main Drama!-- There's
Weather-Gear for all, this Scythe here is the perfect
Shape to catch us a Bolt, perhaps a good many,--
better than a Key upon a Kite, indeed,-- think of it
as Death's Picklock,-- come, form your Line...all
here?' pulling his Hood up again, '-- felonious Entry,
into the Anterooms of the Cre-a-torr....'" (M&D, Ch.
29, p. 295)

>From Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism
in the Age of Information (New York: Harmony, 1998),
Ch. II, "The Alchemical Fire" ...

   "Of all the forces crackling through the cosmos,
electricity most embodies the spirit of modernity.
Investigators first began experimenting with
electricity during the Enlightenment, and within two
centuries, the West had tamed and ruled its powerful
mysteries. Technologies of communication and control
now utterly depend on the electrical grid, and our
minds have grown rather comfortable — perhaps too much
— with the electron's conquest of shadows, stars, and
silence. Electricity feeds modernity; it is our
profane illumination.

[...]

   "The romance of electricity and animism is an old
one ... the "electromagnetic imaginary." Since the
seventeenth century, the electromagnetic imaginary has
seeped into religion, medicine, and technology, and
over that time has probably led to more metaphysical
speculations, heretical claims, and wacky gizmos than
any other natural force. Much of this chapter traces
the electromagnetic imaginary through the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, when electricity catalyzed
the kind of heady enthusiasms that data devices do
today. In fact, the transformation of electrical
current into a communicating medium, which took place
in the mid-nineteenth century, represents perhaps its
most remarkable mutation: from energy into
information.
   "The word electricity entered the English tongue in
a 1650 translation of a treatise on the healing
properties of magnets by Jan Baptist van Helmont, a
Flemish physician and Rosicrucian who worked on the
borderline between natural magic and modern chemistry.
Though Helmont abandoned the hoary doctrines of the
four elements, he remained spiritually committed to
the alchemy of 'pyrotechnia,' the Paracelsan labor of
the forge. As an incorporeal force coaxed out of
matter, the quicksilver spunk of electricity signified
for many of Helmont's ilk the spiritual energies
pregnant in the physical universe, the elixir of the
World Soul, the spark of Creation. Many of the
earliest books on electricity described the force in
distinctly alchemical terms, dubbing it the 'ethereal
fire,' the 'quintessential fire,' or the
'desideratum,' the long-sought universal panacea. Now
that electronics, electric power, radio waves, and
microwaves form the energetic matrix of the
information age, the patterns of the electromagnetic
imaginary have in many cases just slipped right into
the technological unconscious. As the electrical
historian Dennis Stillings argues, 'Material science
could not pull itself clear from the psychological
residuum that adhered to electrical theorizing, thus
permitting the symbols carried by electricity to drive
modern science toward accomplishments that strongly
echo the goals of alchemy.' Electricity, in
particular, would carry three different aspects of the
alchemical imagination into the modern world: the
fascination with the vitality of bodies, the desire to
spiritualize material form, and the millenarian drive
to transmute the energies of earth into the divine
realization of human dreams."

http://www.techgnosis.com/techgnosis/tgfire.html

And, again ...

"the Anterooms of the Cre-a-torr"

"the Door opens and the Wind and Rain blow in, Thunder
crashes"

cf. ...

"... and heretics there will be: Gnostics who have
been taken in a rush of wind and fire to chambers of
the Rocket-throne ..." (GR, Pt. IV, p. 727)

Macabre to merkabah?  See, e.g. ...

http://www.mystae.com/restricted/reflections/messiah/merkavah.html

Again, kicking myself ...

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