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| Hain, Selknam Initiation Ceremonies |
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Intel Silicon Wafer and Manufacturing Equipment (Philip Cheung for The New York Times) |
Again, in his magnum opus Patterns in Comparative Religion, Eliade further characterizes the idea of the ‘centre’ as follows:
The symbolism of the ‘centre’ embraces a number of different ideas: the point of intersection of the cosmic spheres (the channel joining hell and earth; cf. the bethel of Jacob § 79 f.); a place that is hierophanic and therefore real, a supremely ‘creational’ place, because the source of all reality and consequently of energy and life is to be found there. Indeed, cosmological traditions even express the symbolism of the centre in terms borrowed from embryology.69
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In line with most archaic forms of thinking, the idea of the centre combines ritualistic, metaphysical and architectural aspects. A temple or sacred building is built specifically in a place that is supposed to be the centre of the world (for example, around the omphalos stone in Delphi, considered to be the navel of the world), yet at the same time it is exactly its definition as sacred, that singles out a certain place as a ‘centre’. This circularity returns in the apparently contradictory fact that there is not one, but countless and potentially infinite ‘centres’. Every sacred space, according to Eliade’s analysis, is a centre, precisely because its sacredness endows it with the quality that is essential to every ‘centre’: being the place traversed by the axis of the world {axis mundi), that is, by the axis that connects the dimensions of heaven, earth and hell. Consecration and ‘centring’ thus appear to go hand in hand, to the point that every house or city built according to proper ritual can and should be considered in itself as another centre of the world.70 The notion of centre is thus rooted in that of sacredness, which, in turn, is embodied by the figure of an axis connecting the world’s multiple dimensions. In terms of our present work on Magic, Eliade’s intuition expresses the fundamental quality of the normative imperative traversing the whole of Magic’s reality. Every hypostasis, and everything that exists in Magic’s world, is structured as a centre, in that it is always necessarily traversed by an ‘axis’ connecting the ineffable with the linguistic dimensions of existence. While in the case of Technic’s reality this connection was made unnecessary by the absence of any actual multiplicity in its reality - to the point, as we said earlier, that Technic abolishes reality tout court - in Magic’s fourth hypostasis it is revealed how the imperative of ‘centring’ runs through the entire reality-system as its organizational and architectural principle.
References to the sacred are equally appropriate, especially if the sacred is understood in terms of what the German theologian Rudolf Otto defined as the ‘numinous’. According to Otto,71 the sacred as numinous, is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans (‘a terrifying and fascinating mystery’). A force that at once attracts and repels its witness, while remaining shielded in its own ineffable dimension. Within Magic’s reality, however, the space of the sacred imposes itself as the space par excellence. As noted by Eliade, a centre, that is a sacred space, is ‘a place that is hierophanic and therefore real\ Likewise, within Magic, full ontological legitimacy - the possibility of being fully ‘real’ - is granted only to entities that are built as centres, that is, that are traversed by the life of the ineffable. For this reason, most of the creations of Technic’s cosmology, inasmuch as they embody the structuring principle of absolute language, do not find any ontological legitimacy within Magic’s reality. The notion of the individual as a processor, for example, or of an entity as pure ‘stockpiling of productive reserves’, are deemed by Magic as mere - and deadly - fantasy. The normative aspect of any reality-system accounts both for creation and for destruction: the basis, on which certain things are made to emerge within it, is the same upon which others are denied existence. In the case of Magic, the line between ‘meaning’ and ‘noise’ is drawn in reference to the ‘liveliness’ of an entity: hence the fact that most of Technic’s ontological creations don’t find any room in Magic’s reality-system. For individuals currently living within Technic’s regime, this constitutes a call for the reconstruction of their reality that is as tremendum as it is fascinans. Not everything will be able to move from one system to the other, and the sudden discovery of a living dimension in non-human entities and in inanimate objects as well as in immaterial symbols, for example, would bring forward an unfathomable mysterium that might be difficult to approach at first. Likewise, suddenly facing the absolute unreality (as in, their unreality even as conventions) of commonly accepted social institutions, might repel those who invested in them their whole presence in the world. Every sacred space is surrounded by a limit - as the guardians or the labyrinth surrounding a treasure, in several mythological traditions - and not everything will be able to pass this threshold.
Federico Campagna - Technic and Magic
