Territorialist Islam

Sitting in the quiet and civilized company of south Asian diaspora Chinese reading and sipping oolong tea, the ambience is suddenly interrupted by the blaring and intrusive nasal cacophony of the Mahometan call to prayer blasted through massive amplifiers from the nearby mosque. This is Malaya, but it is the same across the border in Siam, and the same in Java and much of northern Hindoostan too. Armed with electric sound systems the Mahometans now see fit to bombard their neighbours with the peel of the ‘adzan’: "Alahoo akbaa, Alahoo akbaa…. There is no god but God, and we won’t tolerate anyone who disagrees." The electric amplifier has become the weapon of choice for Saracens in such places. It sounds off five times a time, most aggrievedly at five or four o’clock in the morning lest the faithful, and anyone within earshot, should be so impious as to prefer sleep to banging their foreheads on the ground in a show of submission to Mooselman law. 

On his recent journeys throughout the Indian subcontinent, and then the Malaccan Straits, and yet more recently throughout the islands of the East Indies, it has become perfectly evident to the present writer that, more than being a “call to prayer” – hurry to prayer! hurry to prayer! – the adzan is, first and foremost, a territorial device. It is the way that the Mooselmans mark their territory in the same way a dog urinates on a lamp-post.

For Mahometanism, in both its historical and contemporary forms, is above all else a creed of territorialism, and it remains so in a manner that stands in contrast to modern Christianity which, by and large, has dropped its territorial pretensions. Christians, that is, some time ago gave up on the territorial entity once called ‘Christendom’, while the Saracens have clung to the notion of a territorial ‘House of Islam’. These are functions, no doubt, of the colonial and then the post-colonial eras. Colonialism in its first phases concerned an extension of ‘Christendom’ but this narrow notion was then sublimated to a more universal worldview. After all, the first purpose of the Christian faith was to dissolve particularisms in order to accommodate the civilizing mission of the Roman Empire. One suspects it was created for this very purpose. Counter- and post-colonial Mahometanism, in contrast, has failed to universalize. On the contrary, with the collapse of the Ottomans and the rise of the fundamentalist Wahhabis it has ossified into a virulent cult of anti-colonial rectitude – it is this that it shares with progressives and Leftists, the Whigs of the West. The cry of Alahoo akbar is at the same time the cry of “Colonialists Out!” Every advance of modernity, every overture of internationalism, no matter how sane, is greeted as a colonialist infringement. In the Mahometan worldview there are two types of places: the Darasalaam, the House of Peace, and the Darasalhaab, the House of War. Peace, to the Mahometan means submission to Islamic Law. The Call to Prayer, when it is blasted across non-Muslim neighbourhoods, means exactly ‘we are coming to subdue you’ until you submit.

In Malaya of recent times matters have grown increasingly uncomfortable for the Chinese minority. Under Wahhabi influence the otherwise moderate modes of Malayan Mohametanism – restrained by the civilizing hand of the British as it was, it must be said – has hardened into more territorial forms. That is, the Malays increasingly regard Malaya as Mooselman territory and increasingly embrace all the geopolitical consequences that follow from that fact. We see the same happening in the East Indies. The Mooselman activists – conspicuously fired by anti-colonial rhetoric, let us note – are pushing for laws that would make alcohol prohibited throughout all the lands of the Indonesian archipelago. They see this as simply formalizing a fact, namely that such lands are Mooslem lands, and they – being good Mooselmen – have a duty and an obligation to impose the laws of God upon God’s land. This is their whole mentality. They deplore “innovation”. It is a simple reality to which they subscribe. There is the territory of God and the territory of Shatan. The Islamic project is simple: turn the latter into the former. Non-Mooslem minorities are exposed to this mindset. The Chinese in the Malay peninsula, the Hindoos in Bali and other pockets of East Asia are increasingly besieged. 

The scene of the Bali nightclub bombing in 2002

Moreover, this same territorial ideology is shaped by the distinctly militant and aggressive history of Mohametan territorial expansion. The present author stood recently at the memorial marking the place of the bombings of a nightclub in Legian (Kuta) in the Balinese islands. There, in October 2002, Mahometan militants ignited a series of bombs that killed hundreds of young people, most of them Australian, who were that night enjoying music and beer during their holidays in the island getaway. A further bomb targeted the American embassy in Bali at the same time – Alahoo akbaa! – Colonialists out! The justification for such a heinous act was, and is, in the Mahometan mind quite straightforward; the logic is this: 1. Indonesia is a Muslim nation. 2. Alcohol and modern immorality is forbidden in Islam. 3. If it requires force to cleanse Islamic soil of such pollutants, then so be it. 4. The Prophet – peace be upon him - would do the same. 

On his travels throughout Java the present writer found to his dismay that there was a large swell of sympathy for this mentality among the Javanese. They shrug their shoulders, look you in the eye and say “But this is Muslim land!” The Indonesian government rounded up a few of those who committed that particular atrocity, executed a few of them eventually, but others remained at large and the so-called “school”, madrassa, in central Java at which they all studied and were indoctrinated in the ideology of territorial Islam was not touched and remains active to this day. One cannot but remember this fact when one hears the call to prayer. It signifies: this is Mahometan land. Mahometan law prevails here. Flouting of Islamic norms will not be tolerated, and if the pious resort to violence it is, after all, an act of religion, or in fact an act of love, the purpose of which is to restore existential ‘peace’ (for Islaam = the religion of salaam.)

One encounters versions and degrees of this ideology everywhere in the so-named ‘Daraslaam’. A conspicuous and tragic instance of it persists in modern Palestine. Among the Mooselman Palestinians there is a prevailing insistence that territorial compromises are not only undesirable but impious and “contrary to religion”. The writer recalls seeing a representative of this tragic people in a television interview during which the representative was asked repeatedly why he could not even countenance a territorial compromise with the Israelis. “It is not that we do not want to,” he explained, exasperated. “You must understand. We cannot! It is against our religion.” His exasperation was born of the realization that outsiders see his position as merely obstinate. No, he was not being obstinate. Rather, his hands are tied. There is nothing he can do. He means, by this, that under Mooselman Law (in all its permutations) there is simply no provision for conceding so much as an inch of territory. The best he, and the Palestinians, can offer is a postponement of the issue. The soil cannot be conceded. Not ever. Once land is under Mooselman rule it remains Allah’s forever, until Judgment Day. But Mooselman Law does allow for a “truce” that “postpones” the obligation to fight for the aforesaid soil. Thus the Palestinians cannot, will not, will not ever, concede a single inch of ground to the Israelis, and cannot, will not, will not ever, recognize the right of Israel to exist, for this is simply impossible – inconceivable – under all shades of Mooselman Law. Even the possibility of a postponement of the issue is a legal stretch, however. It is only possible as a military strategy. In fact, in actuality, the obligation to fight to restore Islamic soil to Islam is absolute and binding upon all of the faithful. It is this intractably territorial and necessarily militant ideology that dooms the Palestinians to their on-going predicament today.

Palestine, indeed, is a microcosm of the tragic state of affairs that prevails in the Mooselman faith more generally. The Saracen is trapped in a medieval territorial mindset that is invigorated by and overlaps with the resentful and venomous ideology of Whig anti-colonialism. It is this, above all, that guarantees that the Mahometan world is doomed to remain a failed modernity. This has been appallingly clear to this present writer throughout his many travels. Nothing quite prepares one for the glaring realities of a trip through Pakistan, for example. There are many modernities, and among them are successful ones and unsuccessful ones. Japan, for instance, is a case of a successful modernity. Post-Maoist China too. Singapore, certainly. Hong Kong. Taiwan. The eastern Asians have been determined to make the most of the inescapable facts of modernity and in this have often been able to safeguard important features of traditional life in doing so. But the same cannot be said of most parts of the world where a Mahometan majority population prevails. 

The present author recalls showing some young, educated ostensibly “modern” Malayan students (engineers, medical students etc.) pictures of the Cordoba mosque in Spain and explaining, since it was news to them, that Spain had been Muslim some 500 years ago. They reacted with horror. Here was Islamic land now ruled by Christians? The shame! The shame! The reaction of one of these students was that Muslims must – must! it is an obligation as binding as five prayers a day! – fight to restore this land (Andalusia) to Allah. He was not joking.

On the whole, one must count the Islamic world – such as it is – a case of a failed modernity. Need one mention the festering pusule that is the entirety of modern Mesopotamia? At the core of this failure is the whining territorial obsession that bleats from the loud-speakers of mosques at every prayer time. This is what is at the heart of Mahometan extremism and jihad ideology too. It is no mystery. There is now a self-perpetuating industry of Leftist academics devoted to unraveling the “sociological problem” of extremist Islam. More often than not such academics share the same anti-colonialist underpinnings of this ideology. In fact, we might say they are gazing at a deformed reflection of their own pathological worldview. This explains their duplicity and double-talk and such extraordinary Orwellian nonsense as the argument that confronting jihadism “only makes it stronger” – the risible paradox that those who denounce and warn of Mahometan extremism “fall into the extremist’s trap” while those who advocate a self-despising and accommodationist multiculturalism and open borders will somehow defeat them with kindness and cuddles in the end. With such “experts”, you see, it is always the West that is to blame. Whereas, in fact, jihadism has two obvious causes and it does not take a taxpayer funded Left-wing think-tank to work it out: it is the conjunction of two abiding themes in Mahometan orthodoxy, namely militant aggression and religious territorialism. Those who claim that jihadi ideology is not incidental but innate to the Mahometan faith are right. The “experts” – listen to them - will tell you it is just an (understandable) reaction to colonialist oppression. But in reality it goes much deeper than neat sociological reflexes. It is, unfortunately, an indelible feature of all versions of an unreconstructed Islam. The die was cast when the Wahhabis took control of modern Islam. The Mooselmans as a whole have failed to restructure and rethink and reform the faith into any shape that might reasonably negotiate a successful modernity. The opportunities to do it, especially in the XIXth and early XXth centuries, were squandered. Now the sad fact is that the Mahometan world is burdened with a totalitarian religious creed that will fail them at every turn of the modern era.

What solutions might be possible? How might the Mahometan faith proceed otherwise? How might it be “reconstructed”? These are huge questions and we cannot consider them in any detail here, although the simple facts of the matter are that (a) Islam is not going to go away and (b) it cannot continue as it is. One can see little or no prospect of change, though, and so in any foreseeable future a deepening tragedy is the only likelihood. The Straits Chinese in Malaya seem resigned to this. The Hindoos in the East Indies will eventually be confronted with the fact that Islamic chauvinism will dictate the future of Indonesia too. Recent events in Turkey – the collapse of Attarturk’s secular Turkey and the European dream - need to be acknowledged in this context too. And Palestine? Impossible. Yet a path must be found eventually, and it must surely be found from within Mahometanism itself. There is simply no other choice. Perhaps the only path that can be discerned is in Soofic sublimation. Territorialism can be universalized. And the jihad can be turned to the ‘greater Jihad’ that is the war against the false ego, the nafs, which is to say that the militant spirit of the Mahometan might, conceivably, be internalized since this is an established theme in Mooselman spirituality already. There are no answers to be seen in externalist Islam, though. Not in any of its current manifestations. The plain truth is that the ossification of the Wahhabi revolution was a catastrophe for Islamic religion. It doomed modern Islam to the juvenile literalism of Salafism, a stance utterly incapable of addressing the complexities of modernity in any meaningful sense. There is really no hope for the Mahometans until the fall of the House of Saud at very least and, after that, until the disease of Salafism is erased from the global Ummah. Any fair assessment for this most likely extends to generations hence, if ever. The irony is that the call to prayer includes the phrase “Hurry to success! Hurry to success!” In today’s unreconstructed Islam those who answer that call are hastening to failure. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Eight Immortals and the Imaginal

The Eight Immortals, figurines on a mantel in a Chinese private residence. 

The octagon, the number eight and the symbolism thereof features throughout Chinese spirituality. This eightfold symbolism takes both abstract (which is to say geometric) and iconographic (pictorial) forms. On a visit to any Taoist temple one will be surrounded by examples of each at every turn. Octagonal patterns and architectural features – such as octagonal windows – abound, and various groupings of eight are to be found on the altar and throughout the temple decorations. As noted in a previous post on this subject (see here) the most basic signification of this preponderance of eightfold symbolism is essentially alchemical. There is no religious tradition more overtly alchemical than that of Taoism; Taoist symbology is replete with alchemical themes and motifs. The octagon – and by extension all parallelisms of the number eight – signify regeneration. In the plain figure of the octagon – to explain it in its simplest terms - we see the square (earth) regenerating into the circle (heaven). In this sense it is preeminently number of the third term in the Great Triad of Chinese spiritual philosophy: man.

The present author has encountered this profusion of eightfold symbolism everywhere he goes in his journeys through the historic centres of the Malacca straits Chinese. Every temple, every clan house, and also every shop and private dwelling is marked by symbols of eight. Two orders of symbols are especially conspicuous: the eight trigrams of the I Ching, and the eight immortals of the Taoist pantheon. These feature in temples, but are also found on the mantels of private houses, over doorways, or in personal insignia. These are the two great instances of orders of eight in typical Taoist symbolism. Accordingly, they are often set in parallel. The eight trigrams are abstract and mathematical. The eight immortals are figures of fantastic mythology. One trigram belongs to each immortal and one immortal belongs to each trigram. 

The eight trigrams

The immortals call for a few extra comments. As a set they represent the following polarities: Male/Female, Old/Young, Rich/Poor, Noble/Humble. Their significance can be seen in the ‘Bridge of the Immortals’ display at the oldest of the Chinese temples in the old trading port of Phuket Town. The bridge illustrates four immortals on each side, and together they represent the bridge between mortal life and the immortal state which is the objective of Taoist spirituality. 

Four on each side of the bridge, the eight immortals are depicted seated on clouds. Clouds, in this context, signify the imaginal realm. The immortals are figures of the imaginal.  

That is, this symbol – the bridge – informs us, quite clearly, that the traditional hagiographies of the eight immortals, along with their accompanying iconography, is a body of knowledge that forms a bridge from one state to the other. The immortals – all of whom are supposed to have once been mortals, and all of whom attained immortality through various techniques or adventures which are the stuff of folklore and legend - are exemplars, paradigms of the Taoist path albeit rendered into fantastic forms. In other respects, they are the embodiment of the primal forces encapsulated in the eight abstract trigrams of the I Ching. 

The Eight Immortals are sometimes shown on a checkered floor, invoking, amongst other things, the (8 x 8) symbolism of the chessboard.

This symbolism, that is to say, spans from pure mathematical abstraction to the most fecund, elaborate folk mythology which needs to be understood as imaginal in the Corbinian sense. That is, the immortals are figures of the intermediate or imaginal realm. They are not gods in the fully celestial sense. They are mortals who have ascended to the imaginal world, usually symbolised by clouds (whereas the fully celestial realm is symbolized by stars.) Like imaginal figures in other traditions, they are often said to be still alive on earth or to visit earth in bodily form from time to time. The imaginal is of great importance in Taoist spirituality. Just as it is the most directly alchemical religious tradition, so Taoism is the most directly imaginal. It is a strongly visual tradition with an emphasis upon spiritual imagination. The group of Eight Immortals are the main denizens of the Taoist imaginal realm. 

The most popular depiction of the Eight Immortals in Chinese sacred art has them at sea, travelling by boat to the Conference of the Peach. Imaginal figures - beings of the imaginal realm - let us note, are invariably associated with the airy and watery elements. 

The Eight Immortals decorating the awning of a Chinese temple. 

The Eight immortals - postage stamps of Thailand.

The Eight Immortals as superheroes - from the Singaporean TV series. 

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Below, the pictures of the eight immortals are matched to the trigrams of the I Ching according to the customary arrangement. There is an elaborate folklore connected to each figure, and every motif in that folklore is explicable in terms of alchemical symbolism. To decode it, though, is a ponderous undertaking - it is a subject for later posts. Only the barest outlines are offered below. 

* * * 

LAN TSAI-HO 

A 'Holy Fool' figure and so directly cognate with the 'Fool' in the Tarot cards of the Occidental tradition. He became an immortal when he was sixteen years old. He represents the pure yang power - the phallic energy of spring. 

* * * 

HO HSIEN-KU 

Pure yin. She became an immortal at fourteen years old after eating the Peach of Immortality and ascending to heaven in full daylight. She attained the power of stopping her menses and thus conserving her feminine energy. Associated with herbs and healing, she is able to live of heavenly dew and pure chi. 

* * * 

ZHONGLI QUAN

Often counted as the chief of the Eight immortals, he is usually shown as fat bellied and scantily dressed. He was formerly an army general who took up residence as a hermit in a mountain cottage. One day, a stone wall in his dwelling collapsed, revealing a jade box that contained instructions on attaining immortality. During a great famine her transmuted copper and pewter into gold and silver to give to the poor. 

* * * 

LU TUNG-PIN 

Known to the Chinese as 'Ancestor Lu'. A friend to the poor and oppressed, he was a Confucian scholar who attained the secrets of immortality, lived 400 years on earth and reappears from time to time. 

* * *

CHANG KUO-LAO 

An old man and hermit. After he died and was buried, his coffin was found to be empty. He assists souls to reincarnate, so the Chinese place his image in bedrooms to help with the conception of children. 

* * *

HAN HSIEN-KU

He was expelled from a Boodhist temple for being rude and rowdy, but studied the Taoist arts and attained immortality. He was shown the top of the World Tree, fell from it but quickly revived himself. He carries a flute upon which he plays the Six Healing Sounds of Taoism. 

* * * 

TSAO KUO-CHIU 

One of two brothers, he was so ashamed that his brother was a murderer and a hedonist that he retired from the world to live as a hermit. One day, he met two of the immortals who were so impressed with his learning they invited him to join them. He plays casanets in a gentle rhythm wherever he goes. He is believed to still live on earth among mortals. 

* * * 

LI TIEH-KUAI 

Called 'Iron Crutch'. A beautiful but vain youth, his soul temporarily departed from his body but when it returned his disciples had cremated his body. He therefore occupied the form of a lame beggar who hobbles with an iron crutch. Cognate to various figures in European folklore and mythology and such figures as the lame smithy god Hephaestus in Greek mythology. Accordingly, his trigram is the element Fire. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Primitive is Not the Primordial

In one of the very few items of writing by the darling of heroic capitalism, Ayn Rand, that the present writer has ever bothered to read – let us stress here that he has not usually the slightest affinity with Mrs Rand and her philosophy – she makes a useful distinction between two dominant cultural tendencies in contemporary Western civilization. She cites the year 1969 as a watershed, and points to two great defining moments in Western culture in the summer of that year: the moonlanding of Apollo 11 in June and the Woodstock Music Festival in August. The moonlanding, she says, was a great moment of cultural optimism and was celebrated by those who look to science, technology and reason as the path forward for humanity. Woodstock, however, was the inverse of this: the hairy hippies who assembled there and wallowed in the mud were, she says, representatives of cultural decline who embraced a regressive, anti-modern, anti-science ideology that celebrates the primitive and the irrational, cowers from the future and retreats into the poverty of the past. In her essay, if not elsewhere, she proposes that the contemporary West is a battleground between these two opposing visions, one characterized by triumphant science and other by a backward-looking back-to-nature flight from reason.

In itself, it seems to this present writer, this is not an inaccurate analysis. Mrs Rand has successfully identified an important cultural polarity, a key tension, that remains to this day in occidental culture – there is, on the one hand, a strong drag towards scientific optimism and the ideology of progress, and against this there is also a strong drift towards what we might characterize as a modern primitivism typical of but not isolated in the so-called ‘counter-culture’. Both tendencies can be observed all about us. They pervade our culture. They are like counter-weights to each other. The present writer, in any case, has always been acutely aware of this polarity because it has appeared to him as an unhappy dilemma, a Scylla and Charybdis, a dichotomy of evils through which one must navigate as best one can.

Mrs Rand, the atheist ‘Objectivist’, of course, was a dedicated, wholehearted proponent of the merits of blind scientism. She was a self-appointed high priestess in the religion of materialist progress. It is not a religion to which the present writer has ever subscribed. At the same time, however, Rand’s critique of the Woodstock generation was certainly not unfounded. There are those who, rejecting scientific optimism and the progress narrative, would rather wallow in mud instead. This takes many forms but always involves an attraction to those phases of history, and pre-history, most remote from modernity. One of the paradoxes of modernity is that it includes a revival of the primitive. At Woodstock we saw a new tribalism. Its personal emblems - nudity, barefootedness, uncut hair - are all a rejection of the marks of civilization. In Australian sociology those that populate this tribalism, which has developed and mutated in several directions since Woodstock, are called “ferals”. They display a comprehensive rejection of civilization and its norms – which they denounce as a mistake from the outset - and typically embrace forms of neo-primitivism instead. It is, indeed, a powerful and widespread movement with many manifestations in fashion, politics, art, music and social relationships. We today find it in diverse forms and fads – the paleolithic diet, the tattoo craze, New Age shamanism, Ayahuasca retreats in the Andes. But it is, as Mrs Rand rightly says, pathological: regressive, defeatist, irrational, self-destructive, decadent, deviant, escapist, vandalistic. 

The problem for this writer, anyway – a problem that has occupied much of his life – has been to escape from this choice of evils and to find another way. In part, this quest was answered by so-called ‘perennialist’ perspectives (or, as he prefers, and more accurately, ‘primordialism’.) In such perspectives the heroic capitalism championed by Mrs Rand, along with its godless Prometheanism, is also deviationist and, finally, luciferic. Modern man has, at his own peril, turned away from a perennial and indeed primordial heritage of wisdom and is drunk on his own pride. Modernity, in this perspective, is recklessly anti-traditional. The great truths of human civilization embodied in traditional orders east and west are being cast aside. Man himself is threatened by his own machines. But the perennialist/primordialist perspective is not, for all of that, a retreat into the irrational, the unintelligent and the primitive. Instead, it is a recapitulation, a re-statement, a re-visiting of, a re-attunement to a metaphysics and wisdom found in such pre-eminent thinkers as Plato, Shankara, Ibn Arabi, Lao Tze, of a spirituality found in the great religious traditions, and patterns of life and cosmology typical of the great, mature, historical (grain-based) civilizations of the world – a mode of civilization shattered by industrialism. It proposes not retreat but continuity, while seeing modernity as a rupture and a betrayal.

Unfortunately, many of those who have identified with or been influenced by perennialist/primordialist perspectives have not always navigated clear of the pitfalls of primitivism in their aversion for modernity. There are those who, turning away from Scylla, have fallen into the embrace of Charbydis. The present writer has witnessed, over his lifetime, the increasing confusion of the primitive with the primordial. It is a confusion and a conflation which is today quite advanced. Largely, if not wholly, it is the product of the life and teachings of the French-Swiss perennialist Frithjof Schuon. Monsieur Schuon began his spiritual career as a student and follower of Rene Guenon and like Guenon found a home in Mohammedan Soofism. In large measure Schuon’s core doctrines are a reworking of the Saracen sage Ibn Arabi. But at a certain point in the 1980s he relocated to the mid-west United States and, pursuing a childhood obsession, engineered a syncretic amalgam of Soofism with the lore of the American Plains Indians. More and more his teachings became imbued with the naturalist pagan perspectives of the Indians until the Soofism gave way to so-called ‘primordial gatherings’ in which his followers would sit sky-clad (naked), or dress in quasi-Indian outfits, participating in quasi-Indian rituals. In his writings Schuon proposed that the pre-literate red man was just as much a spokesman for the ‘sophia perennis’ as Plato or Thomas Aquinas.

Thus did Schuon fuse together the primitive with the traditional. It was a fusion that would never have been entertained by Guenon, and indeed it was not long before many of Monsieur Guenon’s associates and students cut their links with Schuon entirely. Guenon was, arguably, the most astute and vicious critic of modernity in the XXth century. His Reign of Quantity is a devastating account of the ways in which the modern order violates the traditional world-view. But at the same time he was not in any sense an advocate of the primitive. The Guenonian view is starkly different to the Schuonian. Guenon once wrote, for instance:

The sociologists pretend to assimilate [the ancient mentality] to that of the savages, whom they call “primitives” when on the contrary we regard them as degenerates. If the savages had been always in this inferior state that we witness, it would be impossible to explain the multitude of customs they possess (without comprehending them anymore), which cannot be but vestiges of lost civilizations…

For Guenon, here and elsewhere, “savages” and their cultures are “degenerate” forms – he hesitates to call them “primitive” because he does not regard them as “prime” - and it is from “lost civilizations” that they have degenerated. He admits that there is a “multitude of customs” that they possess, which amounts to a residual body of tradition, but they do not comprehend such customs anymore. For Guenon, then, the primitive is residual, not integral. To explain this he invokes the idea of “lost civilizations” such as, say, the traditions of the lost civilization of Atlantis.

We must hasten to add at this point that it is doubtful if the luminous Monsieur Guenon believed in “lost civilizations” in a crude literal sense; his view of history and historical processes – more a heiro-history - is no way literalist and mechanical at any point. But he did subscribe to the traditional view – it is even a Biblical view – that the “primordial” has its roots in an antediluvean order (literal or symbolic) of which tribal groups, ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’, the uncivilized, are “vestiges” or, as Guenon elsewhere puts it, “debris.” What we find in the primitive, then, is the mere traces, the ruins, the dregs, of something once great and vast that came before. This is not a matter for anthropological or archaeological objections either. The point is that this is, indeed, the traditional narrative. It is a view found again and again in traditional sources. Let us be clear about this. The traditional trajectory of history (not a profane history, to be sure, but a sacred history) is this:

1. The world comes into being.
2. Great civilizations come into being.
3. Cataclysm: [Flood] Great civilizations are destroyed.
4. New civilizations emerge.
5. Primitives etc. are the remaining degenerations from the civilizations prior to the cataclysms.

Again: it makes no difference to us if this is or is not a narrative that can be sustained by anthropological or archaeological evidence. It is not a point of science. The question is: what is the traditional view of the lore and customs of primitive peoples? The answer is: it is (or is as if it is) a residue of something that was once whole and integral. 

"Primordial gatherings"

This, assuredly, is very different to the more Rousseaean view propounded in the work of Frithjof Schuon. He elevates the primitive – specifically the red man, but by extension indigenous, tribal and ‘First Nation’ traditions generally – to the first rank of Tradition with an upper-case T. It is among these tribal peoples, he says, that we find the primordial and he accords these traditions with an integrity lost in later traditions. In Islam, to cite the example relevant to Schuon’s own life, there was but one Prophet, Mohammed, but among the Plains Indians, he says – before the arrival of the white man – every man was, as it were, a prophet, such was their dignity. Schuonianism makes much of the ‘Feminine’ and of ‘Nature’ and he regards the primitive man to be nearer to these ideals than not only modern man but civilized man per se. The primitive is elevated in Schuon. In Guenon, and other ‘perennialists’, we find the repositories of Tradition to be rather the great religions and the great civilizations prior to the modern deviation. 

Among Schuonians, the 'feathered sun' of the Plains Indians - not the Aum symbol of the Vedas or any other established symbol of Tradition - became the symbol of "perennialism". 

This innovation in Schuon’s thinking is, in some respects, a perverse outcome of the perennialist critique of evolutionism and its reassertion of the more traditional doctrine of de-evolution. Guenon, Schuon and many of their followers offered a strident attack upon the theory of evolution, both in its biological and social forms. Instead, they drew attention to the fact that in the traditional world-view – such as in the Yuga doctrine of the Hindoos - the qualities of man and the cosmos decline over the ages, the world winds down, it does not get progressively better. The traditional mind-set, found throughout and across the great civilizations, is fundamentally conservative: it cannot conceive of the son being greater than the father. But does this then mean that a headhunter in the New Guinea highlands is spiritually superior to St Francis of Assisi? Some perennialists – convinced that we are in the grip of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age at the end of a cosmic cycle – have sought the mythic Golden Age in the jungles of the Amazon, the deserts of Australia and the bushlands of Africa. Such identifications are usually guided and informed by the profane ideologies of Marxist anthropology, romantic ecology, feminism and similar, which have all sought to valorize and idealize the primitive for strategic reasons of their own and which form the intellectual edifice of modern neo-primitivism.

What then is the primordial if it is not to be found among “savages”? In large measure the error is a mistake in categories and labels. The pedantic Guenon was perfectly right to insist on a more careful use of the term “primitive”, for it should only be applied to what is truly primary. Let us recall that in the Biblical narrative what comes first is the Garden of Eden. What is primary is Edenic. And this is a cultured garden, an order, and should not in any sense be confused with “wild nature”. The Biblical narrative is very clear on this. Wilderness, like the “savages” that populate it, is a falling away from the pristine and original order. What is primordial, properly speaking, is Edenic, and it is only by confusion of Rousseaean proportions that we can mistake the primitive tribesman to be living in Eden. Tradition, properly speaking, is a golden thread that goes back to the Garden of Eden, not to a group of aborigines in Arnhem Land. Such people may well be “nearer to nature” than modern man, but the primordial, properly speaking, is not concerned with “nature” but with a transcendent Source, and this is a very different thing. Eden bears the imprint of Heaven. Nature, however pristine, is nevertheless a falling away.  It is a crucial distinction.

The New Age is characterized by combinations of eastern spirituality plus either scientism or primitivism (or both). That is, typically, one or both of the two tendencies identified by Ayn Rand are mixed with oriental religion.

Recently, the present author was reading the commentaries on the I Ching by the XVIIIth century Taoist master Liu Yiming. The Master refers to the “primordial” throughout, and in exactly the Edenic sense. The Tao is primordial, and it would be a grotesque miscalculation to suppose that the Tao is nature.

The quality of strength in people is original innate knowledge, the sane primal energy. This is called true yang… This energy is rooted in the primordial, concealed in the temporal. It is not more in sages, not less in ordinary people. At the time of birth, it is neither defiled nor pure, neither born nor extinct, neither material nor void . It is tranquil and unstirring, yet sensitive and effective. In the midst of myriad things, it is not restricted or constrained by myriad things. Fundamentally it creates, develops, and brings about fruition and consummation spontaneously, all this taking place in unminding action, not needing force.

The I Ching, in its primordiality, looks back to a mythic China, not to the primitive China of the anthropologists and archaeologists. The primordial is the Original, the Source, the Beginning, the Root, what is innate from the outset. It is lost and found and lost again and again, as TS Eliot wrote. But it is certainly not the same as the primitive. Who would ever had guessed that the primordialism of which Rene Guenon was such a lucid and sober representative would one day degenerate into middle-class children of Woodstock sitting around naked in “primordial gatherings” – the sorry spectacle of perennialist hippies?

The path through the era in which we live – whether it is the Kali Yuga or not – is assuredly narrow. On the one side is the dehumanizing pitfalls of technology. Millions fall into that pit every day. But on the other side, awaiting those who flee from that, are the degradations of the new primitivism where people think that imitating the imagined lifestyle of the Noble Savage brings them nearer to the primordial and the Real and the True. It is as false a dream as the pursuit of the exotic under the same delusion. Primitivism is not a legitimate response to modernity. It is part of the same disease. Of the two opposing visions identified by Ayn Rand - triumphant science or the flight from reason - which is akin to the perennialist or primordialist perspective? Neither. The real quest is to escape from this false dichotomy altogether. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Some Notes on Islam & the Chinese Tradition

In most translations of Mohammedan works, such as the Koran, into Chinese, the name of God, Allah, is rendered by two Chinese characters meaning "True Lord".

* * * 

THE BIFURCATION OF THE CHINESE ORDER

In several short works, but specifically the essays in Insights into Islamic Esotericism & Taoism and Confucianism, Rene Guenon applies his usual clarity to the seemingly diverse religious phenomenon of both Islamic and Chinese civilization. This is of concern to the present writer as he makes his way through South-East Asia – specifically the Chinese areas of the Malay peninsula – and heads towards western China and the far end of the silk road. It is difficult to find even slightly useful reading material on the essential features of the traditions that converge in these regions. Guenon’s essays, as usual, are remarkable for their perspicuity, precision and authoritative insights. There are shortcomings in the Guenonian perspective, sure enough – a Masonic preoccupation with initiatory organizations and secret societies, for example – but it is always a relief to encounter his stern, unadorned, mathematical prose and to appreciate his utter indifference to sociological and other profane considerations. His disdain for Boodhism is refreshing too. 

When all is said and done Guenon deals with religious traditions as though through a series of geometrical models. These are sometimes simple and sometimes complex. In the present case – Islamic esotericism, or Soofism, on the one hand and the Chinese traditions, Taoism and Confucianism, on the other – the schema is relatively simple, at least in the first instance. It is an essential feature of Guenon that religions manifest both inner and outer dimensions. There is externalism – popular forms - and then there is the inner or esoteric – hidden or secret or elite - aspect of the tradition concerned. In comparing the Mohammedans with the Chinese, he proposes that there is an all-important contrast in the way these two dimensions, inner and outer, are arranged in each case. Leaving aside all the details and whatever complexities arise, this is the key to a Guenonian study of these traditions. 

In the Guenonian perspective, the Mohammedan order is concentric with the esoteric (tariqah) within the external casing of the Law (shariah). It is a model of kernel and protective shell. Thus:

But as Guenon explains, the Chinese order does not work in this way. Rather - for reasons that we need not discuss at present - the two spiritual functions, inner and outer, have been effectively bifurcated. Taoism is the esoteric function and Confucianism the external or exoteric function. Their relationship in the Chinese case is parallel rather than concentric. Thus:

This, for Monsieur Guenon, is what is crucial to appreciate about the nature of the Chinese tradition, especially in contrast to such a tradition as Mohammedanism. We should add that this model is quite separate to and distinct from the imposition of Boodhism upon the Chinese tradition. The model described here was established and settled long before Boodhism arrived in China. Boodhism adds nothing and takes nothing away from it. Often in modern studies the Chinese tradition as a whole is described as the 'Path of Three ways' - Taoism, Confucianism, Boodhism. But Boodhism, as Guenon insists, is not integral to the Chinese order. 

* * * 

THE ANALECTS & THE HADITH

The Prophet Mohammed said, "Seek knowledge, even if it is in China." 

There are some rather obvious parallels – at least in form – between the Analects of Confucius and the Hadith of Mohammed. In both cases we have short, pithy sayings and examples of word and deed as recorded by disciples and companions. And in both cases these records act as exemplars or patterns of behavior. The Hadith are the recorded words and deeds of the Prophet – supposedly – and they function to guide and shape all the patterns of Mohammedan life. They establish Mohammedan ethics as well as manners. The Prophet is True Man, the model for all men.

In the Chinese tradition this is exactly the function of Confucius. It becomes conspicuous to anyone who spends more than a little time among the Chinese, even in this day and age, that there is a common model, a common ideal, of behavior among them, and this ideal is set by Confucius. Confucius is the exemplar, the Master, the standard of all that is proper and correct. This is especially evident in the Analects which, indeed, take a form very much like the Hadith found in the Mohammedan tradition. Confucius is the True Man, and we learn of his deeds and words through the analects recorded by his immediate followers in the form “The Master said…” or “The Master did…” Moreover, the circumstances in which he lived as well as the disciples and people around him are regarded as paradigmatic. They set examples to be emulated by everyone thereafter. Thus do the (traditional) Chinese say “Confucius says…” and cite some analect or saying in exactly the same manner as Mohammedans habitually cite the Hadith with “The Prophet said…” Chinese life is textured in this way just as is the social life of the Mohammedans. It is a close parallel between the two traditions.

Anyone familiar with any of the Hadith (traditions) of Mohammed will recognize the form, if not the content, of the following examples of the traditions of Confucius:

The Master said: “When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are shameful. When a country is poorly governed, wealth and honour and shameful.”

The Master said, “One should study as though there is not enough time and still feel fear of missing the point.”

The Master said: “In the morning hear the Tao. In the evening die content.”

The Master said, “I have yet to see a man who loved virtue as much as sex.”

The Master said, “There are shoots that never come to flower, and there are flowers that never bear fruit.”

Ji Wenzi always pondered matters thrice before acting. The Master heard of this and said, “Twice is enough.”

Though the Master’s meal was only greens and vegetable congee, he inevitably offered some in sacrifice, and always in ritual reverence.

When the Master was at home in his neighborhood, he was warm and courteous, and seemed as if he found it difficult to speak. In the ancestral temples or at court, he was articulate, his speech merely showing signs of caution.

When the Master was at leisure, his manner was relaxed and easy.

When sending his greetings to someone in another state, the Master would twice bow low as he sent the messenger off.

When mounting a carriage, the Master always faced it squarely and grasped the mounting cord. Once in the carriage, he did not turn to look at those standing behind him; he did not speak rapidly; he did not point.

The Master said, “Be devoted to faithfulness and love learning; defend the good Tao until death.”

The Master said, “Extravagance leads towards disobedience; thrift leads towards uncouthness. Rather than be disobedient, it is better to be uncouth.”

When the Master slept, he did not assume the position of a corpse. When at leisure, he did not ornament his dress.

The Master was vigilant about three things: fasting, war and illness.

When the stables burnt, the Master returned from court asking, “Was anyone hurt?” He did not ask after the horses.

The Master taught by means of four things: patterns, conduct, loyalty, faithfulness.   

* * * 

The concept of the One is not absent from Chinese thought. And the concept of the Nothing - a metaphysic of emptiness - is not absent from Mohammedan thought. The Confucian classics speak of “the all-pervading One” (i kuan) and Taoism refers to “holding onto the One” (shou i). The I Ching refers to “heavenly Oneness”. Unity of the absolute, in fact, is a constant theme in both Confucianism and Taoism. But, as Guenon notes, the bifurcation of functions within the Chinese order mean that the purely metaphysical and the personal never meet. Thus the Absolute is not usually presented as a “God” in the Semitic and occidental manner. The negative conception of the Tao is more like Aristotle’s unmoved mover, although in other respects it is, in function, like a creator. “The Tao produces the ten thousand things,” says the Tao Te Ching.

It is entirely possible to reconcile this with Mohammedan metaphysics. It is only externally that the Mohammedan deity is a personal god, or even a “god” at all. This is the contention of Toshihiko Izutsu’s powerful study, Sufism and Taoism, where he draws parallels between the Soofi metaphysics of Ibn Arabi and the metaphysics of the Tao. Despite Islam’s positive theology, in Soofism there are strong apophatic themes, and it is there that Mohammedanism may meet the temperamental preferences of the Far East. It is possible to read the confession of faith in an apophatic manner. The exclusive tribalism of “There is no god but (our) God” can be read, instead, as “There is no god. Only Allah.” Allah, in that case, is – like the Tao - beyond all conception, beyond personhood, too great to be any god of human understanding. The god of the externalists is an idol. Let us remember also that the Kabba in Mecca is empty. Finally, the only symbol that fits Allah – the Real - is nothingness.

* * * 

RAMADAN IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA

While Mohammedanism has a long presence in China – especially western China – the Chinese authorities are, very wisely, fully aware of its potential to disturb the equilibrium of Chinese society. Precisely because the Mohammedan model is different to that of the traditional Chinese, and there is no neat bifurcation of the religious and the social, it may – if one is not alert to the inherent dangers – operate as a political ideology under a religious cloak. In contemporary China, the authorities in Peking are understandably anxious to prevent this and are ever on guard against religious movements that act as political agents.

An acute issue amongst China’s Mohammedan communities is the fast of Ramadan. Every year the authorities are at pains to downplay and restrict the extent of the fast. This usually earns them the ire of so-called ‘human rights’ groups, but it is an entirely justifiable strategy in the context. In areas where Mohammedans obtain demographic density, the fast of Ramadan becomes a de facto political instrument. It enables the Mohammedans to completely close down an entire region, to completely disrupt the ordinary machinations of life, for an entire month. This becomes a very potent method for imposing Islamic control upon commerce and government.

Quite properly, the Chinese will have none of it. They have passed regulations insisting that all schools, transport and government services will continue as normal throughout Ramadan, and eateries and cafes must remain open too. People are free to fast if they wish – you cannot stop people from not eating or drinking – but Chinese Mohammedans will be prevented from disrupting services and normal social functions, from shutting down society, in the name of Ramadan. Far from being an abuse of ‘human rights’, this is a wise policy that should be adopted wherever pernicious and troublesome concentrations of Mohammedans exist. You can fast, but you cannot shut down civil society. The difficulty, always, when dealing with Mohammedan minorities is that the inner and the outer, the spiritual and the political, are almost impossible to separate. This, as the Guenonian model above illustrates, is in the very structure of Islam. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

A Journey into Taoist Hell

Following poorly printed maps labelled in broken English and handed out by auto-rickshaw drivers at Thai flea markets is a hazardous undertaking at the best of times. The present author recently set out on a foot march through the suburbs of Trang - a Chinese city in southern Siam - following the instructions on one such map in search of a certain Chinese temple that he was assured was worth the journey. It proved to be a major undertaking.

Trang is not a particularly large city and is very orderly, but when you are not sure just where you are headed then it might as well be a sprawling labyrinth. After a few wrong turns you find yourself thoroughly lost, and since the road signs are all in Thai script there are few useful landmarks to help you on your way. Soon you are wandering aimlessly through industrial estates and semi-rural allotments. Moreover, setting out after lunch is a mistake in the 'Mad dogs and Englishman' category. The humidity starts to soar in the early afternoon. Rain clouds gather but no rain arrives; just an inpenetrable wall of humidity shimmering under the blazing sun. You go on regardless, though, and buy some water off a man on the roadside who, you think - if his hand signals are to be believed -, indicates that yes there is a temple, or something, somewhere on ahead. Eventually you decide that you'll give it five more minutes before turning around, and then - suddenly - as you come around a bend, there it is! Temple gates in the distance! It is a small miracle, and an ordeal, but you've made it!

* * * 

The temple in question is undoubtedly one of the strangest this author has seen in all his travels. It is sacred to the great Chinese war god Guan Yu who is honoured with a full-sized statue, along with his horse, just outside the temple portals. Thus:

The grounds of the temple are very colourful, with numerous small buildings and service structures with the whole space centred on a very tall and prominent dragon pillar, which indeed is the emblem of the temple as marked on the map the author has been following. The temple is known for this tall pillar. Thus:

The temple itself is large and spacious and features a dragon pool below the open aperture in the centre of the ceiling such that the pool and its dragons shine within the gloom of the space. Few other temples make such dramatic use of the light of the oculus. The effect is very pleasing, giving the whole a sort of mystical, luminous ambience. Dragon symbolism - always standard in any Chinese temple - is especially accentuated here, both in the grounds and in the temple, and it is done very well. Thus:

. 

Beyond the temple, through a side door, is an opening onto a quite extensive covered space with tables and chairs for dining. It is a space intended to accommodate a large congregation, especially during the famous Trang vegetarian festival each October during which crowds of Chinese travel from far and wide. It is perhaps relevant to this function, and to vegetarianism specifically, that at the far corner of the dining area is a small temple to the Hindoo deity Shiva. It is remarkable because it is entirely in the Hindoo style. Its whole iconography is Hindoo, an entirely Hindoo gesture within an otherwise completely Chinese temple complex. Thus:

The Shiva temple is the small building in the distance. Its function is directly related to the dining area. It is arranged, evidently, so that diners can easily access it.

None of this, however, prepares the visitor for a further section of the complex back towards the main gates and to the left. There is a small temple to Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, and a large statue to the laughing Boodha, Boodai - a great favvourite among the Chinese. But then, without warning, one encounters an outdoor garden scene that features a bridge and life-sized, lurid efigies of poor souls being tortured by a vicious demon. Thus:

Then, in a shelter beyond this - back out into the heat and following the pathway - you come to an extraordinary scene: an extensive, explicit diorama depicting the many tortures of Taoist hell in all their gruesome detail. It is an unexpected and arresting discovery. The author had been told the temple was worth the visit, and the tourist literature made much of the dragon pillar in the courtyard, but no one had mentioned a full-scale rendering of the torture chambers of the Chinese underworld in pornographic naturalism! Thus:

Some dozen explicit tortures are depicted. Here are a few:

Pounding

Bisection

Dismemberment

Bed of Nails

Eaten alive by Dogs

Wok fried

The agents of torture are feirce crazy-eyed chocolate-brown demons, each of them wearing tiger-skin underpants with tiger faces on their behinds. Thus:

Commanding the demons are the various ministers of hell. There are, firstly, the two guides to the Chinese underworld, Ox-Head and Horse-Face, who in this case are standing guard at one end of the display. By tradition these are the first beings the dead soul encounters after crossing the bridge into the Underworld. They carry pitch-forks and deliver the souls to the torture chambers where each soul is punished according to their failings and misdeeds. Here they are:

More menacing, though - and a successfully macabre feature of this particular display - are the two figures called the Heibai Wuchang, the black and white 'Ghosts of Impermanence'. They are watching on as the demons do their work. Here they are:

Images of these two ghouls also feature on the altar at one end of the display. Thus:

The purpose of the diorama, it is clear, is to remind visitors to the temple complex of the terrible purifications that await them in the afterlife as a consequence of their sins in this current life. The scenes are lurid and ghoulish in order to frighten and terrify.

Westerners very often have entirely sanitized views of Taoism - Boodhism too - and have a corresponding bleak and prejudiced view of the occidental traditions, and Catholicism in particular. They are surprised, even shocked, to find that the eastern religions have such graphic and violent depictions of a terrible afterlife. ("I thought terrifying people with tales of hellish torment was the stuff of the medieval Church. Alan Watts never mentioned this!") 

In reality, Taoism - by which we mean popular, practical, religious Chinese Taoism and not the secularized philosophical version, or coffee shop Taoism, known in New Age circles - proposes a complex afterlife featuring purifying tortures prior to reincarnation. Numerous Taoist texts describe the hell-realms and their denizens and the torments thereof in shocking detail. They are a commonplace in Chinese folklore. To a great extent this has been appropriated into Taoism from Boodhist descriptions of the 'Naraka' (realms of punishment) since - contrary to Western misunderstandings - Boodhism too has conceptions of otherworldly punishments every bit as grisly as any ever imagined in Catholicism. 

Indeed, the present author can think of no depictions of the torments of hell in Christian art - not even in Heironymous Bosch or Dante - that are quite as graphic and quite as extreme as these. The diorama at Trang illustrates the perverse depths of the oriental religious imagination. A journey to this temple - the Guan Yu temple on the northern outskirts of Trang - is worth the effort just for this. It is a sobering and confronting reminder of a dimension of oriental religiosity about which many Westerners know nothing. Taoists, like Boodhists, are threatened with terrible punishments if they misbehave. The fact that hell is a temporary phase of the afterlife in the eastern traditions and not an eternal damnation as it is in the West is, in context, small comfort. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black