The Grand Dance, and the importance of metaphors
The metaphors we choose matter. When the lines between symbolic and actual start to blur and no longer become so mutually exclusive, the more powerful the way we frame things becomes.
In Eustance Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard's tightly written 1959 classic The Elizabethan World Picture, the master scholar lays out three visions of the English Renaissance world, as experienced in the time of Shakespeare, Dee, Donne and Milton.
These visions, in short: the Chain of Being, the distributed-but-mediated correspondences, and the Cosmic Dance. I find the Dance the most useful.
The idea of creation as a dance implies “degree,” but degree in motion. The Static battalions of the earthly, celestial, and divine hierarchies are sped on a varied but controlled peregrination to the accompaniment of music. The paths of each is different, yet all paths together make up a perfect whole.
– EMW Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture
The more experience and experiments I pursue following paths back into the past, the more apparent the process of de-alienation from a profoundly living Cosmos – and my unique place within it. There is joyful work to be done.
Dance instruction from the Black Dragon
When examining the Sigil of Solomon from the mighty grimoire, Black Dragon (published in Crossed Keys, this almost could be read as a top-down view of dance steps.
This is also one of the infrequently expressed benefits of actually reproducing these, with one’s own hand; the act of trying to replicate the figures, letters and line, spending precious time and focus, this opens the floor for all sorts of oblique insight.
In particular, I really got the sense of the three worlds – the natural, the celestial, and the philosophical – as well as a fourth. To me – this is where the Operator stands. At once, the Operation, the identification with the virtue of the Creator, and the realisation that, in the words of Sassy the Sasquatch, the Universe begins with You.
All points in delicately balance and utterly polarised, across each circle – with the three outer circles revolving around the centre, the hexagram, the union of opposite.
In my reading, to my current understanding, the Event, and its two composite parts – the endlessly repeating schema of how things are, and the Potential for anything, something, everything, to change.
If the world is some sort of Gurjieffian pain machine, or the perpetual path of atonement for some fundamental failing of first forebears, this limits the possibilities to a certain range of usually dour outcomes.
But – when the world is a giant, beautiful, baffling and wild dance, and you’re at the centre, the interactions that happen between dancers in the eternal night become something quite different indeed.