Green Man, Earth Angel

Tom Cheetham

Description

Green Man, Earth Angel explores the central role of imagination for understanding the place of humans in the cosmos. Tom Cheetham suggests that lives can only be completely whole if human beings come to recognize that the human and natural worlds are part of a vast living network and that the material and spiritual worlds are deeply interconnected. Central to this reimagining is an examination of the place of language in human life and art and in the worldview that the prophetic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—presuppose. If human language is experienced only as a subset of a vastly more-than-human whole, then it is not only humans who speak, but also God and the world with all its creatures. If humans' internal poetry and creative imaginations are part of a greater conversation, then language can have the vital power to transform the human soul, and the soul of the world itself.

Foreword

Acknowledgments

1. "We Are Now in Heaven": The Mundus Imaginalis and the Catastrophe of Materialism

2. Consuming Passions: The Poet, The Feast, and the Science of the Balance

3. Black Light: Hades, Lucifer, and the Secret of the Secret

4. Within This Darkness: Incarnation, Theophany, and the Primordial Revelation

5. Harmonia Abrahamica: The Lost Speech and the Battle for the Soul of the World

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Sujets

• Comparative religion

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791484159
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

TOM CHEETHAM
Foreword by Robert Sardello
Green Man,
Earth Angel
The Prophetic Tradition
and the Battle for the Soul of the WorldGREEN MAN,
EARTH ANGELSUNY SERIES IN WESTERN ESOTERIC TRADITONS
David Appelbaum, editorGREEN MAN,
EARTH ANGEL
The Prophetic Tradition and
the Battle for the Soul of the World
Tom Cheetham
Foreword by
ROBERT SARDELLO
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESSPublished by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
ALBANY
© 2005 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval
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electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, address
State University of New York Press
90 State Street, Suite 700,Albany, NY 12207
Production, Laurie Searl
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cheetham,Tom.
The prophetic tradition and the battle for the soul of the world / Tom Cheetham.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in Western esoteric traditions)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-7914-6269-2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-6270-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Spirituality—Psychology. 2. Corbin, Henry. 3. Mysticism—Islam. 4. Psychoanalysis
and religion. 5. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875–1961. I.Title. II. Series.
BL624.C4515 2004
200'.1'9—dc22
2004041605
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1To Joan, Ben, and AmyHenry Corbin
1903–1978
Director of Studies in Islam and the Religions of Arabia,
École practique des Hautes Études, Paris;
Professor of Islamic Philosophy at the University of Teheran, Iran;
Lecturer at the Eranos Conferences in Ascona, Switzerland;
Co-founder, University of St. John of Jerusalem.Contents
Foreword xi
Acknowledgments xix
One “We Are Now in Heaven”: The Mundus Imaginalis
and the Catastrophe of Materialism 1
TWO Consuming Passions: The Poet, The Feast, and
the Science of the Balance 13
THREE Black Light: Hades, Lucifer, and the Secret
of the Secret 31
FOUR Within This Darkness: Incarnation, Theophany,
and the Primordial Revelation 63
Five Harmonia Abrahamica: The Lost Speech and
the Battle for the Soul of the World 119
Notes 127
Works Cited 147
Index 155Foreword
Tom Cheetham has written a remarkable book that has the power of shifting
our way of imagining the world.This power stems from his insight into a core
longing felt within the heart of human beings, a longing for wholeness that
feels as if it were a memory.We imagine that there was a time, long ago, when
human beings lived reverently in relation to the earth and the cosmos.We felt,
so the story says, whole, in our place, with God at the center and the
periphery.Then the Great Disjunction happened. Matter and Spirit were split into
two isolated realms. God was removed from the world and placed in His heaven
and the earth, gradually at first, and then more and more rapidly, became the
great supplier of commodities, mere material substance. Different thinkers
locate this disjunction at different times and due to different factors, but it is
always depicted as occurring sometime in actual history, and the story says we
have been on a downward course ever since.This way of imagining the
unfolding of evolution always looks to the past as the better time, and all our efforts
need to be focused on retrieving the sensibility of the past.The more
sophisticated tellers of this story do not imagine we can return to the past, but they do
feel we can return to the values of the past, or find ways of living those past
values, primarily by living in relative isolation from the present world
dynamics, encompassed in a shield of fear.
Cheetham’s first creative contribution lies in pointing out the obvious, but
it is obvious only to one who has a living inner life.The longing for wholeness
is an archetypal longing. It belongs to the essence of the soul to feel such
longing. It will always be there.This longing motivates us to search for the ultimate
inner meaning of our existence and to at least find ways to assure we do not go
off on collective tangents that depart from world destiny.When we understand
that the longing originates in the soul, new ways of imagining the world have
to be sought, and these new ways have to be conscious soul ways. Here lies the
second and truly great contribution of this book. Cheetham recognizes that a
longing of the soul has to be responded to in kind.That is, only soul can respond
to soul. Only soul understands soul. If we are to ever get anywhere with this
archetypal longing, we have to approach it on its own terms.A metaphysics that
xixii Green Man, Earth Angel
excludes imagination, the hallmark of soul, as a world force, is fated to painful
longing without the slightest possibility of resolution. Metaphysics that has no
place for the category of imaginal being splits spirit from matter with no way
for them to ever be linked. Longing becomes replaced by abstract thought that
turns into systems of science and technology. Materialism characterizes the other
side of the split. Materialism is the outlook that says that everything in the
universe can be understood in terms of the arrangement and action of purely
physical forces.And, more subversively, materialism offers the notion that all longings
can be quieted through material means of every sort.
Cheetham develops a method of proceeding from longing to questions of
metaphysics. His method consists of making us feel deeply all that we have lost
with the way reality has been split up; the loss of the imagination, the loss of
living speech, words as angels, the loss of reading that speaks from within
reality rather than about it, and most of all, the loss of the sense of place. He throws
us into the depth of loss, the depth of despair, really.We cannot recover what
we cannot feel. Cheetham’s method involves a descent into hell, a necessary
descent, but one that distinguishes the hell we live—the literal, surface-bound,
consuming, manic world, with the fructifying descent into the darkness where
we await the voices and visions of the archetypal worlds.
Cheetham progresses in his method by seeing through the split of spirit
and matter, seeking to establish what a metaphysics with imagination as the
forming force of the world would mean.As long as we think only in terms of
spirit and matter, and its two primary manifestations in the world, religion and
science, we contribute to the loss of the subtle, participative sense. An
archetypal metaphysics views creation as happening every moment.All is alive.And
soul is not in us; in this metaphysics, we are in soul.The implications of such a
view are enormous. However, it takes more than the idea of such a metaphysics
to begin discovering the ways to live such a proposed reality.And here is the
third great contribution of this book. Such a metaphysics exists.The outlines of
it can be found by interpreting the work of C. G. Jung in a radical way, and the
further outlines of it are found in the work of Henry Corbin, the primary
emphasis of this book.
Cheetham makes a long and fruitful excursion into the work of C. G.
Jung as a preparation for introducing the reader into imaginal metaphysics.We
have come to think of Jung as the phenomenologist of the soul.When we
come to Jung’s work on alchemy, however, we find that the alchemists were
seeking to make spirit conscious.They were working out an imaginal
metaphysics of transformation in their theorizing-visioning, and they demonstrated
the practicality of this metaphysics in the practice of alchemy. Jung did not
quite see them this way, but, in truth, the alchemists were attempting to free
spirit from matter and were not just projecting their fantasies onto matter.
Alchemy was simultaneously a transformation of self and of world into
completeness. Jung reads this completeness, this wholeness, as involving the incor-Foreword xiii
poration of contradictories, the light and the shadow of soul reality.
Cheetham’s understanding of Jung’s project and the limitations of that project
is brilliant. Once those limitations are clear, he is able to establish an all
important bridge from Jung to the astounding work of Henry Corbin, from depth
psychology that never quite made the metaphysical leap, to Islamic mysticism’s
fully developed imaginal metaphysics.
Central to the movement from Jung to Corbin’s creative interpretation of
Islamic mysticism is the difference between the darkness of the Shadow in Jung
and the luminous darkness of the divine Night. In Jung there exists a throwing
together of soul experience and spirit experience without really seeing that
there is a decided difference. Jung’s adamant commitment to soul made it
impossible for him to conceive of anything outside of soul, or to plead
ignorance when it came to saying what was behind archetypes. Even spirit, for Jung,
is the soul