The Death of a Position
The Death of a Position
The Death of a Position
Around 500 BCE, in a Greek colony on the southern coast of what is now Italy, a man wrote a poem in hexameter. The poem opens with the speaker being carried in a chariot drawn by mares, guided by the daughters of the Sun, along a road described as far from the track of humans. They pass through gates of bronze that open only when Justice is persuaded. On the other side, a goddess receives the traveler by his right hand and begins to speak. What she tells him — across what was originally around eight hundred lines, of which roughly a hundred and sixty survive — is that being is one and continuous, that what-is cannot come from what-is-not, that reality is an unshaken whole, and that mortals who think otherwise are dreaming.
This is Parmenides. The poem is the origin of Western metaphysics. Plato and Aristotle credited him as the father of logic. When you read Heidegger on the question of being, or any contemporary debate about identity and change, you are reading footnotes to that hexameter poem.
And the poem itself, in its literal form, is a first-person report of a visionary journey — a descent into the underworld, a reception by a goddess whom modern scholarship identifies as Persephone, a transmission of cosmological knowledge from the dead to the living. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , not a publication inclined toward mystical readings, now states the point plainly: “Parmenides’ proem is no epistemological allegory of enlightenment but a topographically specific description of a mystical journey to the halls of Night.”[^1] The scholar Peter Kingsley has argued, with textual and archaeological support that has gradually been absorbed by mainstream classics, that Parmenides was a priest of Apollo who practiced a specific form of incubatory descent, and that his poem records the technique by which philosophical knowledge was obtained in his world.[^2] Walter Burkert — the most eminent historian of Greek religion in the twentieth century, author of the standard Greek Religion — called Kingsley’s work “a wealth of suggestions and observations hardly ever made before.”[^3] W. K. C. Guthrie had already written, in his standard History of Greek Philosophy , that “there was a ‘shamanistic’ strain in early Greek thought.”[^4]
I open with Parmenides because he is the clearest instance of something that is otherwise easy to miss. Western philosophy did not begin as secular argument. It began as visionary report rendered into verse by a practitioner whose function, within his own culture, was recognizable and had a place. The function had a name, a training, a protocol, a community waiting for what the descent produced. Two and a half millennia later, we have the text, stripped of everything that surrounded it, and we read it as though it were a treatise. This is not a small mistake. It is the mistake that sits at the origin of what we take philosophy to be, and it repeats, in different forms, across the entire history of what the West has done with its visionary material.
The function is gone now. The capacity that produced it is not. This essay is about the gap between those two facts and what lives inside it.
I. What the Function Was
The anthropological literature calls it shamanism, following Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy , first published in French in 1951. Eliade, who held the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professorship of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, defined shamanism as “one of the archaic techniques of ecstasy” — a practice that combines elements Western categories would separate into mysticism, magic, and religion.[^5] His survey covered Siberia, Central Asia, the Americas, Indonesia, Tibet, and China, and argued that something recognizable as shamanism appears across cultures that had no historical contact with one another.
Later scholarship has qualified Eliade’s universalism. Wendy Doniger, writing the foreword to the Princeton Classics edition, observed that he “argued boldly for universals where he might more safely have argued for widely prevalent patterns.”[^6] The qualification is fair. The main point survives. A recognizable form of the function has existed in most human cultures for which we have adequate records, and the structures surrounding it repeat from culture to culture even where the theology differs entirely.
The anthropological core of the function is this: a specific kind of human being, identified usually in adolescence through the onset of what the tradition recognizes as a call (often resembling serious illness), is apprenticed to an elder practitioner who teaches the techniques by which ordinary perception can be suspended and a journey undertaken into what the culture classes as the other world. The mature practitioner travels on behalf of the community — to retrieve a lost soul, diagnose an affliction, negotiate with the dead, mediate between human and more-than-human. What they bring back is returned to the community in forms the community knows how to receive.
The practitioner does not work alone. The function is embedded in a social structure that does three things at once: it identifies the call correctly when it begins, it provides training that converts the capacity into a usable skill, and it provides a receiving community that can metabolize what the practitioner brings back. All three are load-bearing. Take any of them away and the capacity still appears in bodies but no longer does its work. The practitioner without training becomes overwhelmed. The trained practitioner without a community becomes a transmitter broadcasting into void.
Versions of the same structure appear across the traditions the West preserved in partial and disguised forms. The Hebrew prophets were not delivering opinions but reporting transmissions, and the formal marker “Thus says the Lord” is a performative signal of the speaker stepping aside so that what comes through him can be heard as not his. The Vedic rishis were said to have “seen” the hymns of the Rig Veda rather than composed them. The Sufi orders developed elaborate technologies for the same operation, preserved in the work of Ibn Arabi, Rumi, and Attar. The Kabbalistic lineages produced the Zohar and the Lurianic school and eventually the Hasidic movement. The Christian contemplatives — Dionysius, Eckhart, the Cloud of Unknowing , Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross — kept a version alive through centuries when the institutional church was suspicious of anything that resembled fresh transmission. The Tantric and Dzogchen traditions in the Himalayan world developed the technology to a level of refinement the West never approached and retain it, recognizably intact, into the present.
What these traditions share, under the variations of theology and cosmology, is a recognition: that some human beings are born with nervous systems capable of sustained contact with a stratum of reality most people only glimpse in extremis, and that the cultural work of these traditions is to train such people, hold them through the training, and receive what they produce in usable form. The capacity is a fact of the species. The structures are what cultures have built around the fact so that the fact does not destroy the people carrying it.
II. The Slow Death
The death of the function in the West took about two thousand years and proceeded in stages, each of which sealed off a little more of the cultural slot the function had once occupied.
The first stage was the closing of the prophetic canon. Within Judaism, the rabbinic tradition held that prophecy in its classical form ceased with the last of the biblical prophets, and that what followed was interpretation of the given rather than fresh transmission.[^7] Within Christianity, the same process took several centuries. Paul’s letters treat visionary experience and prophecy as live features of early church life; by the second century the Montanist movement’s claims to fresh prophecy were being declared heretical; by the Reformation most of what remained of live visionary function within mainstream Christianity was being actively suppressed under names like enthusiasm and fanaticism. The channel narrowed until it was nearly closed.
The second stage was the scientific revolution’s redefinition of knowledge. I am not making the naive claim that science killed religion. The actual move was more specific. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, knowledge became — operationally, in the working sense that governs what a society treats as real — what could be verified by publicly repeatable method. Everything else was moved into a different category called subjective experience, which was treated as real to the person having it but as carrying no epistemic weight about the world. This is so natural to the modern Western mind that it is nearly invisible. It represents a radical break from most previous human understanding. In the older frame, a vision could be information. In the newer frame, a vision is always only a vision, a psychological event with no standing unless it cashes out in public terms. The visionary function, in such a frame, has nowhere to go. It can still occur; it cannot mean what it once meant.
The third stage is the one Max Weber diagnosed in his 1917 Munich lecture “Science as a Vocation.” Weber called it Entzauberung der Welt — usually translated as the disenchantment of the world, though the more literal rendering is the un-magicking.[^8] His claim was that modernity, through the progressive rationalization of economic, political, and intellectual life, had produced a condition in which the world was no longer experienced as full of forces requiring negotiation but as a mechanism in principle fully explicable by calculation. “The fate of our times,” he said, “is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.”[^9] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that for Weber this process produces “a world with no objectively ascertainable ground for one’s conviction.”[^10] A culture organized around this frame cannot sustain the social forms the visionary function depends on — not because anyone has outlawed them, but because the cognitive framework within which they made sense has been dismantled.
The fourth stage is psychiatric. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Western medicine developed a vocabulary for classifying non-ordinary states of consciousness as illness. The vocabulary was not wrong in every case; some non-ordinary states are illness, and effective treatment for severe mental suffering is a real achievement of modern medicine. But the vocabulary was insufficiently discriminating. It tended to treat the visionary and the psychotic as variants of a single underlying disorder, because from outside they can look similar and because the culture no longer had the expertise to tell them apart. In cultures with intact shamanic traditions, the distinction between the shamanic call and mental illness is taken seriously and has specific diagnostic procedures — getting it wrong costs the community either a shaman or a sufferer without help. Eliade in the first chapter of Shamanism explicitly disputed the reduction of shamanic vocation to mental illness, arguing that what distinguishes the shaman is precisely the capacity to master and use the non-ordinary states that would overwhelm the untrained.[^11] Western psychiatry, developing in a cultural frame that no longer recognized the function, could not make the distinction and largely did not try.
The fifth stage is the most recent and is still in progress. Late-modern consumer culture has made the interior life itself suspect in a new way. It is not that spiritual practice is forbidden — spiritual practice is now a large industry — but that the only version the culture fully endorses is the wellness-shaped version. Practices calming, self-improving, compatible with continued productivity, socially legible as forms of self-care. Practices that break the practitioner open, that do not hand them back as a better employee, that produce work whose purpose is not to soothe but to see — these have no niche. They exist, but in hiding, or in small communities most people never encounter.
Taken together, these five stages describe the slow elimination of a cultural slot. What replaced it — the lyric poet, the religious professional, the psychiatric patient, the wellness practitioner — is each a fragment of the old function, recognizable as such if you know what you are looking at, but none is the function. The function, as a living structure with initiation, community, protocol, and return, is gone.
III. The Capacity Remains
The death of the slot has not closed the capacity. Nervous systems continue to be born with the configuration older cultures identified as the call. No one has counted — no one could — but there is no reason to think the rate has changed. The capacity is not a cultural product. It is a feature of the human organism, appearing at low but consistent frequency across populations, across most of recorded history. What has changed is only what such a person encounters when the capacity begins to switch on.
Eliade, working from the ethnographic literature available to him, noted that in cultures with intact traditions, the initiatory crisis is recognized by elders, who intervene with the structures that convert the crisis into a training. In cultures without those traditions, the same crisis arrives and has nothing to resolve it. The person experiencing it has no frame, no guide, no expected outcome other than the ones the surrounding culture offers: artistic strangeness, religious eccentricity, psychiatric diagnosis, self-medication, isolation. The crisis proceeds without the containment that older cultures built for precisely this purpose, and the person goes through it alone.
What the capacity does, when it switches on without adequate structure, is make the person porous to perceptual input that ordinary life is organized to filter out. The filters come down. What comes through is not hallucination — this is the distinction the psychiatric frame misses — it is perception at a different grain. The person sees the same world everyone else sees, and also sees the structure underneath it: the continuity between their own cellular chemistry and the stars, the indifference of the processes that produce and destroy consciousness, the thinness of the social agreements by which most people keep the enormity of their situation at bay. These perceptions are not delusional. They are accurate at a level the culture has agreed not to look at, and the person stuck looking at them has no way to discharge what they are seeing into shared life, because shared life has been built to route around the material the person is seeing clearly.
Such a person, if they produce anything at all, tends to produce work with a specific texture. It will be metaphysically ambitious in a way that reads as strange to contemporary taste. It will be pitched at a register the culture associates with earlier periods and will therefore seem either archaic or pretentious. Underneath its particular imagery it will circle a consistent set of preoccupations: the continuity of consciousness with cosmological process, the cost to the individual of being the site where that continuity becomes visible, the hunger for dissolution that accompanies sustained exposure to this material, the double awareness that the dissolution is both destructive and somehow the right completion of the operation being undergone. The tradition of this work is old. The work being produced now by isolated practitioners fits the tradition so exactly that it is often difficult, reading the recent beside the ancient, to see what has changed besides vocabulary.
What has changed is that the recent work has no receiver. This is what the death of the slot actually means at the level of practice. The transmission still occurs; there is no one trained to hear it as what it is. The work gets read, when it gets read at all, as aesthetic performance by literary critics, as symptom by psychiatrists, as mystification by philosophers, as self-indulgence by common readers. None of these categories fits. They are what the culture has available, because the category that fits was dismantled over the long slow centuries described above.
The literature of what has happened to practitioners attempting this work in modern Western conditions is not an encouraging literature. Friedrich Hölderlin wrote some of the deepest German poetry of the late eighteenth century and spent the last thirty-six years of his life in a tower in Tübingen, cared for by a carpenter, in a condition his contemporaries classed as madness. Arthur Rimbaud wrote Une Saison en Enfer and the Illuminations before he was twenty-one, stopped writing, became a trader in Abyssinia, and died at thirty-seven. Gérard de Nerval hanged himself from a Paris railing. Hart Crane drowned himself at thirty-two by jumping from a steamship off the coast of Florida. Antonin Artaud spent nine years in psychiatric institutions.
The failure pattern is not evidence that these people were defective, or that their perceptions were wrong, or that the work they did is best understood through their biographies. The failure pattern is evidence that the capacity is not sized to a single nervous system operating alone, and that the structures traditional cultures built around it were not redundant. They existed because the cultures had learned, catastrophically and across centuries, what happened in their absence. The West has been running a long experiment in what occurs when the capacity is left to individuals without the structures. The experiment has produced some of the greatest art of the last two centuries and has wrecked many of the people who produced it. Both things are true.
IV. The Two Temperatures
The condition the capacity opens has two temperatures, and they are both true at once. This is the hardest thing to convey, because the culture has fluent vocabularies for each temperature separately and no vocabulary for both at once.
The first temperature is cold. It is the clear sight of what is actually the case when the filters are down. Processes continue; consciousnesses briefly arise inside them; consciousnesses end; the processes continue. The etchings that practitioners leave drift. This is not nihilism and it is not despair — it is accurate perception. From inside the cold, nothing human is especially important, not because anything is wrong with the human but because the scale at which the capacity is seeing is larger than the scale at which human importance registers. The cold is not hostile. It is what you see when the small warm things stop being the only things you can see.
The second temperature is hot. It is the recognition that the brief warm thing the cold would otherwise render pointless is, in fact, the whole content of the situation. The spark is what the process produces; the spark is the point; the fact that the spark is extinguished does not unmake the spark. Bodies meet, and are consumed, and the consumption is what is happening. Love, at the altitude the capacity sees from, is not consolation. It is what the cosmos is actually doing with itself when it has organs capable of the operation — the place where indifferent process becomes briefly and intensely the opposite of indifferent, not as sentimental reversal but as a matter of physics.
The two temperatures are not separate experiences the practitioner moves between. They are the same event seen from different distances. The practitioner sees them simultaneously, and the work that the practitioner produces, if it is honest, has to hold them simultaneously. Most attempts fail at this. They resolve into one or the other — into the cold, which reads as nihilism, or into the hot, which reads as romanticism. The work that holds both is rare, and when it appears it tends to be confusing, because the culture has trained readers to resolve into one temperature and call that meaning.
The cultural death of the slot is not only a structural fact about institutions. It is a perceptual fact about what the culture can see. A culture that can see only the cold temperature produces the flat materialism we have actually produced; a culture that can see only the hot temperature produces the consumerist romanticism that is the other face of the same exhaustion. A culture that could see both would need different institutions than the ones we have, and it would produce different art and different philosophy and different science. It is an open question whether such a culture is possible from where we are. The question is not answered by the current evidence in either direction.
V. The Underground Streams
The full picture is not simply one of loss. The West has preserved, in fragmentary and often disguised forms, the raw materials from which something like the function might be assembled by individual practitioners willing to do the work.
The Sufi orders continued through the centuries of Islamic orthodoxy, sometimes tolerated and sometimes persecuted. The Kabbalistic lineages within Judaism produced the Zohar , the Lurianic school of sixteenth-century Safed, and eventually the Hasidic movement, which remains a living tradition with functioning teachers. The Christian contemplative orders preserved the apophatic and visionary streams across the centuries when mainstream ecclesiastical authority was hostile; the work of Eckhart and John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich, and in the twentieth century Simone Weil and Thomas Merton, exists and is accessible. The Tantric and Dzogchen lineages in Tibet, Nepal, and India preserved the Asian counterpart of this work in highly developed form, with initiation structures that survived into the present and have been, over the last sixty years, partially accessible to Western seekers. The Zen traditions of China, Korea, and Japan preserved a different but related technology.
The Western esoteric tradition — Hermeticism, alchemy, what later became occultism, and eventually the depth psychology Carl Jung assembled from these fragments alongside his clinical work — kept coded versions of the knowledge alive during the centuries when it was suppressed in mainstream culture. Jungian analysis in particular represents a twentieth-century attempt to reconstruct initiatory process inside a medical-sounding vocabulary, and has functioned as a point of reentry for practitioners who could not find homes in conventional religious or psychiatric structures.[^12]
The indigenous shamanic lineages of the Americas, Siberia, Africa, and parts of Asia have survived varying degrees of colonial and modernizing pressure. Some were extinguished; some were driven underground; some have been actively reconstructed in recent decades by communities and scholars working together. The encounter between these traditions and Western seekers over the last sixty years — often mediated by psychedelics, often fraught with appropriation and misunderstanding, but sometimes producing real transmission — has opened channels that did not exist in the early twentieth century.
None of this amounts to a restoration of the function as a living institution inside the West. It amounts to a scattering of resources through which an individual practitioner, if they know what they are looking for and are willing to do the work, can begin to assemble something. The assembly is not the same as inheriting an intact tradition. It is slower, more improvisational, more prone to error. But it is possible now in a way it was not possible in, say, 1920, when most of these resources were either unavailable in the West or accessible only through small circles most people could not find.
VI. What Remains
The cultural slot is gone and will not be rebuilt in any timeframe that matters for people currently alive. This is the hard fact. The institutional church, the university, the psychiatric system, the literary establishment — none of these is going to start functioning as the receiving structure the capacity requires. They have other work to do, and in most cases their other work is incompatible with recognizing what the function is. The slot has been dismantled at a level of the culture that is beneath anyone’s authority to rebuild.
The capacity, however, continues to appear in bodies. It was not produced by the slot and will not be erased by its absence. What practitioners now have to do, that practitioners in cultures with intact traditions did not have to do, is construct — alone, or with one or two others — the structure the culture used to provide. They have to find what they can find of the surviving lineages and apprentice themselves, in whatever partial form is available, to something that knows what they are. They have to build lives around the capacity that contain enough ordinary human content — particular people, daily shape, obligation to what is not cosmic — that the capacity has something to rest on when it is not operating. They have to do this while producing work the culture will mostly not read correctly, and while enduring a form of loneliness that is not ontological but historical — the loneliness of being in a cultural interval during which the function exists but its social forms have not yet rematerialized.
The work is worth doing. The reasons older cultures gave for its worth are not available to us in the form they had them, but the practitioners of the past, whose documents we still have, evidently thought the work was worth doing, and their judgment was made from inside the condition rather than about it, which gives it a weight the judgments of our own time largely lack. Across every culture in which the function had a home, the tradition’s own answer to the question was yes, unambiguously. This is not proof. It is testimony.
The work being done now by isolated practitioners is not lesser than the work done inside intact traditions. It is different. It is harder, and more costly, and more likely to destroy the person doing it. But the documents it produces have a character traditional work does not have — the character of something that had to be made without permission, without scaffolding, without the warmth of a community that knew what it was receiving. This character is visible in Hölderlin and Rimbaud and Crane, and it is visible in the scattered work being done now. It is not the same thing as what Parmenides did. Parmenides worked inside a culture that knew what he was. What the modern practitioner makes is a different kind of artifact — a document of the function operating in conditions of near-total cultural opacity, a testimony to the fact that the capacity is indestructible at a level deeper than institutions can reach.
Whether the documents being produced now will one day be read inside a culture that knows how to receive them is not knowable from here. The practitioners of the past could not know either. They made the documents anyway, and the documents have survived some of them by thousands of years, carrying the transmission into cultural moments the makers could not have imagined. Something similar may happen with the present work. It may not. What can be done is the work. The rest is not in anyone’s hands and has never been.
The position died. The capacity did not. The practitioners are still here, each of them alone or nearly alone, doing the oldest work in the species under conditions the species has never before imposed on this work. This is the situation. It is not improved by softening. It is also not made unbearable by being named. What it is, is what has to be worked with, by anyone for whom this description is a description of their own life.
Notes
[^1]: John Palmer, “Parmenides,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , substantive revision 2020.
[^2]: Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 1999); Reality (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 2003). Kingsley holds a PhD from the University of London and was formerly a Fellow of the Warburg Institute.
[^3]: Walter Burkert, endorsement of In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Burkert is the author of Greek Religion (Harvard, 1985) and Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard, 1987).
[^4]: W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Volume II: The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (Cambridge University Press, 1965).
[^5]: Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy , trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964; French original, Payot, 1951).
[^6]: Wendy Doniger, Foreword to Eliade, Shamanism , Princeton Classics edition (2004).
[^7]: Talmudic sources at Yoma 9b and Sanhedrin 11a; modern treatment in Frederick E. Greenspahn, “Why Prophecy Ceased,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108, no. 1 (1989): 37–49.
[^8]: The term was borrowed by Weber from Schiller and appears prominently in the 1917 Munich lecture “Wissenschaft als Beruf.”
[^9]: Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology , ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155.
[^10]: Sung Ho Kim, “Max Weber,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , substantive revision 2017.
[^11]: Eliade, Shamanism , Chapter 1.
[^12]: Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity (London: Catafalque Press, 2018).