Let not thy left Tao know what thy right Tao doeth - III

René Magritte, La lunette d'approche (The Telescope), 1963
Oil on canvas - The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

I have now lined up a series of pieces of data – hints about how the world is – and all the pieces share the notion of not communicating something under some circumstances. It is important that the Ancient Mariner not tell himself that he is blessing the snakes, and especially that he not define a “purpose” of the act of blessing. He must bless them “unaware.” ... The Indians at Iowa City shall not be photographed. The camera shall not point at their ritual actions to make them see themselves and tell the world about these mysteries. I am irritated by Joe‘s interrupting my psychedelic trip while he sets up a tape recorder, and still more irritated when he asks me to repeat what I had begun to say, which obviously could only be done with extra consciousness. And so on.

I cannot even say clearly how many examples of the same phenomenon – this avoidance of communication – are contained in the stories I have set side by side...

We find over and over again in different parts of the world and different epochs of religious thought a recurrent emphasis on the notion that discovery, invention, and knowledge in general must be regarded as dangerous. Many examples are familiar: Prometheus was chained to the rock for inventing the domestication of fire, which he stole from Phoebus Apollo; Adam was punished for eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge; and so on.

Greek mythology proposes the danger of knowledge again and again, especially cross-sex knowledge, which is always fatal. The guilty man is torn to pieces, and the Greeks even had a word for this fate, which we might Anglicize to say that he is sparagamated. Examples include Actaeon, who accidentally spied on Artemis bathing and was torn apart by her dogs, and Orpheus, who was torn to pieces by nymphs after his return from Hades, where he went to bring back Eurydice. He looked over his shoulder at her as he was leading her back and therefore lost her forever. There is also Pentheus, the disciplinarian king who was led by Bacchus to spy on the Bacchae in Euripides‘ play of that name. The god had the king dress up as a woman and climb a tree to watch the women‘s festivities. They detected him, uprooted the tree, and tore him to pieces. His mother was among the women, and in the final scene of the play she comes back from the mountains carrying her son‘s head, screaming about the “lion” that they had killed. Her father, Cadmus, then performs an act of psychotherapy. “Who did you marry?” The queen answers. “What son was born?” Again she answers. Finally, Cadmus points to the head of Pentheus; ”Who is that?” Then the queen suddenly recognizes her son‘s head. The mythical outcome of male voyeurism is death by being torn apart. We laughingly say to children, “Curiosity killed the pussy cat,” but to the Greeks it was no laughing matter.

I believe that this is a very important and significant matter, and that noncommunication of certain sorts is needed if we are to maintain the “sacred.” Communication is undesirable, not because of fear, but because communication would somehow alter the nature of the ideas.

 There are, of course, monastic orders whose members are under constraint to avoid all verbal communication. (Why especially the verbal?) These are the so-called silent orders. But if we want to know the precise contexts of that noncommunication which is the mark of the sacred, they will not give many clues. By avoiding all speech they tell us very little.

For the moment, let us simply say that there are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching holy ground. Then if we had enough instances of the unuttered, we could begin to reach for a definition of the “Sacred.” At a later stage, it will be possible to juxtapose with the stories given here examples of necessary noncommunication from the field of biology, which I believe to be formally comparable. What is it that men and women hold sacred? Are there perhaps processes in the working of all living systems such that, if news or information of these processes reaches other parts of the system, the working together of the whole will be paralyzed or disrupted? What does it mean to hold something sacred? And why does it matter?

Let not thy left Tao know what thy right Tao doeth - II