| From Hakim Bey's "T.A.Z."
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COMMUNIQUE #10
Plenary Session Issues New Denunciations--Purges Expected
TO OFFSET ANY STICKY karma we might have acquired thru our pulpit-thumping sermonette against Xtians & other end-of-the- world creeps (see last ish) & just to set the record straight: the A.O.A. also denounces all born-again knee-jerk atheists & their frowsy late-Victorian luggage of scientistic vulgar materialism.
///// We applaud all anti- Xtian sentiment, of course--& all attacks on all organized religions. But...to hear some anarchists talk you'd think the sixties never happened and no one ever dropped LSD.
///// As for the scientists themselves, the Alice-like madnesses of Quantum & Chaos Theory have driven the best of them towards taoism & vedanta (not to mention dada)--& yet if you read The Match or Freedom you might imagine science was embalmed with Prince Kropotkin--& "religion" with Bishop Ussher.
///// Of course one despises the Aquarian brownshirts, the kind of gurus lauded recently in the New York Times for their contributions to Big Business, the franchise-granting yuppie zombie cults, the anorexic metaphysics of New Age banality...but OUR esotericism remains undefiled by these mediocre money- changers & their braindead minions.
///// The heretics & antinomian mystics of Orient & Occident have developed systems based on inner liberation. Some of these systems are tainted with religious mysticism & even social reaction--others seem more purely radical or "psychological"--& some even crystallize into revolutionary movements (millenarian Levellers, Assassins, Yellow Turban Taoists, etc.) Whatever their flaws they possess certain magical weapons which anarchism sorely lacks: (1) A sense of the meta-rational ("metanoia"), ways to go beyond laminated thinking into smooth (or nomadic or "chaotic") thinking & perception; (2) an actual definition of self-realized or liberated consciousness, a positive description of its structure, & techniques for approaching it; (3) a coherent archetypal view of epistemology--that is, a way of knowing (about history, for example) that utilizes hermeneutic phenomenology to uncover patterns of meaning (something like the Surrealists' "Paranoia Criticism"); (4) a teaching on sexuality (in the "tantrik" aspects of various Paths) that assigns value to pleasure rather than self-denial, not only for its own sake but as a vehicle of enhanced awareness or "liberation"; (5) an attitude of celebration, what might be called a "Jubilee concept," a cancelling of psychic debt thru some inherent generosity in reality itself; (6) a language (including gesture, ritual, intentionality) with which to animate & communicate these five aspects of cognition; and (7) a silence.
///// It's no surprise to discover how many anarchists are ex-Catholics, defrocked priests or nuns, former altar boys, lapsed born-again baptists or even ex-Shiite fanatics. Anarchism offers up a black (& red) Mass to de-ritualize all spook-haunted brains--a secular exorcism--but then betrays itself by cobbling together a High Church of its own, all cobwebby with Ethical Humanism, Free Thought, Muscular Atheism, & crude Fundamentalist Cartesian Logic.
///// Two decades ago we began the project of becoming Rootless Cosmopolitans, determined to sift the detritus of all tribes, cultures & civilizations (including our own) for viable fragments--& to synthesize from this mess of potsherds a living system of our own--lest (as Blake warned) we become slaves to someone else's.
///// If some Javanese sorcerer or Native American shaman possesses some precious fragment I need for my own "medicine pouch," should I sneer & quote Bakunin's line about stringing up priests with bankers' guts? or should I remember that anarchy knows no dogma, that Chaos cannot be mapped--& help myself to anything not nailed down?
///// The earliest definitions of anarchy are found in the Chuang Tzu & other taoist texts; "mystical anarchism" boasts a hoarier pedigree than the Greco-Rationalist variety. When Nietzsche spoke of the "Hyperboreans" I think he foretold us, who have gone beyond the death of God--& the rebirth of the Goddess--to a realm where spirit & matter are one. Every manifestation of that hierogamy, every material thing & every life, becomes not only "sacred" in itself but also symbolic of its own "divine essence."
///// Atheism is nothing but the opiate of The Masses (or rather, their self-chosen champions)--& not a very colorful or sexy drug. If we are to follow Baudelaire's advice & "be always intoxicated," the A.O.A. would prefer something more like mushrooms, thank you.
Chaos is the oldest of the gods--& Chaos never died.
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