Notes Toward an Esoteric Theology
Theology is the word, or logic, of god. Esoteric Theology is then the word, or logic, of the hidden god. This verges on the oxymoronic, the self-contradictory. Yet we must remember that deities are tricksters, and religion is the most serious form of play.
So where do we begin in our examination of the hidden god? With Revelation, the places where this hiddenness is revealed. And not the revelation of text, the great books of the Word, but in Symbol and Sign—extra-linguistic, extra-logical—and in the experience of communication, the moment when the gods talk back. We must begin at the interstice of symbol and response—when active imagination along archetypal lines leads to direct experience of communication with, entrance into, embarkation upon the path through the hidden god-world. Initiation. Esoteric theology is an examination of the most mysterious of religious symbol, the grail, and how this relates to the body, the sex, the fact that we are incarnate in fleshy bodies that experience god within themselves and in their edges, in their most intimate spaces and in their interactions with other people, other spaces, other drifting, other gods.
What of initiation? We speak here of the threshold, the beginning, the birth, the Fool beginning his journey, the Hero setting off—the Heroine’s fall, the inner death, the matrescence, the puberty. Here we speak of the movement from the exoteric to the esoteric, that which is beyond speech and sign, but which so much of theology, philosophy, religious studies, psychology, aims at putting into words. It escapes like sand or water, fits into whichever mould we ask of it while always escaping beyond, within. Initiation—we classify it structurally, we speak of societies and sects, of trauma and ritual—of the madness when we believe too much, of the secrets eternally unrevealed. Initiation is the edge and the centre. This is the greatest mystery of human experience, that which divides the sheep from the goats, the madman from the sane one, the philosopher from the god. The secret, impossible to describe, impossible to fence off, impossible to enclose. Impossible even to put into metaphor—is it inside or outside, disembodied or deeply embodied? It is all—it is the electricity sparkling from the edge of our fingertips and the aching of our skin. It is the secret of sex and its overspilling. It is our journey through life, and the imaginary friends we make along the way. It is the recognition that between god, the devil, our ego and our other, there is no difference. And not recognition in an obtuse, theoretical way, but the lived experience of the both/and, the impossible overspilling of the body/spirit. It is the refutation of god as over there, somewhere else, someone else—it is the feeling of god vibrating inside the self, the reorientation of the entire life, of every step and every word and thought and vision to this path that is a delta, an octopus, and we are children splashing in the shallows, and we are crocodiles wallowing in the deep.
When I say esoteric theology, I mean something truly new, and something truly ancient. I mean it is time to reorient ourselves entirely. I mean we must stop being so fearful of the knowledge that we ourselves possess, that spills from us, that overcomes us with waves of emotion and waves of terror, with the passing of a wild god. When I say esoteric theology, what I mean is: we must enter the church and the temple, and we must scream and wail and prophesise, that we must bleed and overspill, that we must melt and tear asunder, that we must force them to recognise that god is here, among us, that we can reach it, that we are a part of it, and that all of human experience tends toward this great recognition, this real birth, this rebirth which we recognise and which we fear. When I say esoteric theology I mean, the theologian is not the explorer but the continent to be explored—that god cannot be found up there, outside, in that community or this one, but when my skin prickles and my throat catches screams, when I dance and cry and fall to the ground, frothing. I mean to say, the academy began with theology, and here it must end.
Esoteric theology is the theology of initiation; and the theology of initiation cannot do anything else but initiate all those who grasp it. It cannot be any other way, for this is our tendency, our deepest desire, our greatest loss; it is thus that we fear, and it is thus that we must embrace our fear, to dance with Pan among the falling vines of these ancient once-white towers, to sing the praises of the wild god and the goddess who comes upon his tails. When I say esoteric theology I mean, I want to do scholarship like Cixous did, like Kristeva did; like Nietzche did, or Zizioulas, or like John did when Revelations spilled forth from his pen.
The ramblings of a madwoman? Precisely; if there is a point, it is this one. We must embrace the madness of god, we must walk to the butcher’s block voluntarily, severing our ties with all that holds our knowledge back from all its blooming. We must tip over the cup, empty the grail, offer ourselves at the altar of the academy; only thus can we make the changes, the great, religious, social, epistemological, moral, all-so-human changes that we need if we are to survive this coming apocalypse.
What happened when the churchman met the witch? The birth of a thousand devils, all-desiring, all-seducing. This is where my theology begins; where the trained theologian meets the practicing witch inside of me, and by turn they fuck and they fight and they flee and they fill one another, and I see that they are two sides of the holy hermaphrodite, and I see that we have sectioned off our knowledge on two sides of a Great Divide. And thus I offer something simple; I say that I, entering the sacred halls, will dance across the great crevasse—and with my dancing I will show others how to do the same.
