Fantastic Metropolis

This was the religious war, the war for and against the attempted re-imagination of God, the battle to bring about the Blakean “re-casting” of God: as Blake could claim his many Zoas and yet still claim he was a monotheist, because all gods are one god, the Church under Innocent III and Honorius III and their heirs like Gregory IX sought to pare God down into a reflection of the Papacy itself, to cast the Throne of Peter in place of the Chariot and the Throne, to make God from the vast Adam Kadmon, the shi’ur komah containing all possibilities down into a Pope of the Universe, a reflection. Obviously, a Manichæan, forgetful of the idea that matter was as much the creation of the good god as spirit, would find the idea of trying to cast God as an emanation of an earthly Head of the Church to be anathema, an exaltation of the demiurgic Samael spirit. To an Ophite, of course, this would merely be a backwards, crippled approach to their own idea of the union of opposites, which makes sense, since it would be in the Ophitic Gnosticism preserved in Moorish al-’Andalus that the future pope Gerbert of Auriliac would first have come across these ideas: his rejection of Catharist principles would not have been a lie, if he were an Isma’ili-inspired Ophite borrowing from the formative Kabbalists of Spain who composed the Zohar, as opposed to the later Kabbalists of Languedoc who supplied dangerous wisdom to the Catharists via the composition of the Bahir a century later. In essence, beyond the fear of losing the power of exorcism, the Papacy could be seen here as worried about losing their monopoly on mysticism and spiritualism: the Cathars’ ideas were not the real heresy, being rooted in the same gospels (and secret gospels) that were used to keep mystics like Honorius in power. It was the idea that the Papacy itself wasn’t necessary, and that God wasn’t merely some sort of Super-Pope in charge of Heaven as the Pope was to Christendom and the Earth, that was a danger.

We remember Crowley’s argument about magic and the godhead: “In the first part we have seen all numbers as Veils of the One, emanations of, and therefore corruptions of, the One. It is the Universe as we know it, the static Universe. Now the Aspirant to Magic is displeased with this state of things. He finds himself but a creature, the farthest removed from the Creator, a number so complex and involved he can scarcely imagine, much less dare to hope for its reduction to the One.” We can imagine that, under the sheltering guise of rival religious orders such as the Cluniacs, the Cistercians, and later groups like the Jesuits, Dominicans and Franciscans (All set in opposition to each other, so even if each has a fragment of the truth—the Cluniacs the sic et non of Abelard, the Cistercians and Dominicans the wisdom brought back by crusaders and visions like those of Hildegard—they cannot bring it together in syncretic synthesis, for they never find common ground. “Opposition is truest friendship,” perhaps, but only if you examine your opposites), the secretive order of sorcerers at the heart of the Vatican started by Gerbert sought to break down the Kabbalistic riddle of Abraham and answer the divine equation though the process of al-jabr, the reduction of complexity. Meanwhile, those groups they most savagely attacked were either the Arabic possessors of Jerusalem (from whence Gerbert’s wisdom derived) or the Catharist inheritors of the idea of opposite forces. Of course, this is just a continuation of an ancient process that every religion embarks upon once in power, and a specific attack Christianity has made use of since its first inroads into Europe: the absorption and digestion of the gods and goddesses of rival faiths, the quite literal eating of the god that makes itself manifest in the ritual of the Eucharist, inverted to mean the gods and goddesses transformed into saints and leprechauns, only now the divine absorption is placed in a framework of subservience and justification to a God formed in the image of the institution originally intended to offer homage. Could this winnowing down of divine diversity, the burning up of spirits and gods to fuel the ascent of the “new God,” have failed to create a counter-reaction?