r/planetarymagic • u/CliffordHLow • 8h ago
The Blind
*Cargo cults, and the inexpert recovery of the Science of Images.*
*THE INSULT*
Occultists have a phrase they use on each other, and it isn't a kind one. To say that someone is "cargo culting" is to say that he is copying the outside of a practice without the inside, performing the gestures of a rite whose workings he does not understand, in the hope that the gestures alone will bring the result. It is said of beginners who buy the robe before they have read the book, of eclectic practitioners who borrow a Tibetan mudra and a Yoruba offering and a Hermetic hexagram in the same evening, and of anyone whose magic looks like a costume drama. It is a useful insult because the failure it names is common. I want to take it seriously, which means first finding out where it came from, and then pointing it at the one place occultists almost never point it, which is the revival of their own tradition.
*WHAT HAPPENED IN MELANESIA*
Ask the occultist who uses the phrase what a cargo cult was and you will get a picture rather than a history. Natives on a Pacific island, after the Second World War, carving headphones out of coconut shells and clearing airstrips in the jungle so that the American planes full of goods would come back. The picture isn't false, exactly. Something like it happened. But it is a cartoon, and the cartoon does the work the insult needs it to do, which is to make the people in it look simple so that whoever is wielding the insult can feel that he isn't like them. Everything I want to say in this essay depends on taking the cartoon apart, because the history is more interesting than the picture, and a good deal less flattering to the person using the word.
So here is the history, in enough detail to replace the picture, and then I will come back to what it means.
In 1919 the villages along the Vailala River in the Gulf of Papua were taken by a movement that the colonial officials called the Vailala Madness. People shook and fell into trance. They abandoned the old ceremonies, burned the masks, and set up flagpoles and tables laid with flowers, and they waited for a steamer crewed by their ancestors to arrive carrying the goods the white men had, rifles and tinned meat and cloth and tobacco. The government anthropologist, F. E. Williams, went up the river to investigate in 1922 and wrote the first long report on what would later be called a cargo movement. He was not an admirer (his report has "the destruction of native ceremonies" in its title), but he wrote down what he saw, and the shape he recorded has repeated itself in dozens of places since. The ancestors would return. They would bring cargo. The whites had been intercepting it. The right conduct and the right rites would bring it home.
On the island of Tanna in what was then the New Hebrides, in the late 1930s, people began to speak of a figure called John Frum, who promised that if they returned to their old ways and threw off the missions, a new age would come with wealth for all. Then the war came, and with it the Americans, who built enormous bases on the islands to the north and hired Tannese men to work on them, Black and white soldiers alike, with more cargo than anyone on Tanna had imagined existed, unloaded from ships and dropped from aircraft onto islands where a steel axe had been a treasure a generation earlier. When the Americans left, the cargo stopped. The John Frum movement is still alive. Its people raised the American flag on February 15, 1957, and that day is still their holiday.
The phrase "cargo cult" itself first appeared in print in November 1945, in the Pacific Islands Monthly, from a planter named Norris Mervyn Bird, who meant it as a slur. Within a decade it was a scholarly category. Peter Worsley's *The Trumpet Shall Sound,* in 1957, surveyed some sixty movements across the region. Peter Lawrence's *Road Belong Cargo,* in 1964, followed the cults of the Madang district of New Guinea through five phases from 1871 to 1950 and told the story of the prophet Yali, who had served with the Australians in the war, had seen Australia with his own eyes, and came home to a people who were certain he had been shown the secret of where the goods came from.
That is the history. Now set it beside the cartoon and notice what the cartoon left out.
The islanders weren't stupid and they weren't childish. They were reasoning carefully from the evidence in front of them, inside a world where that reasoning was correct. In their world wealth did come through right relations with the ancestors and through ritual properly done; that was how gardens grew and pigs multiplied and exchanges succeeded, and everyone knew it. Then white men arrived who did no visible work, grew no food, made nothing with their hands, and received, at intervals, from over the horizon, an endless flow of goods of a kind no one had ever seen made. The whites spent their days in strange disciplines (sitting at tables, making marks on paper, raising flags, marching in lines, speaking into boxes). The conclusion was obvious. The goods came by ritual, the whites were performing the ritual, and they were hiding its key. So you reproduce what you can see of the ritual as exactly as you can, and you go looking for the missing piece. The factories in Birmingham and Detroit, the shipping lines, the whole invisible apparatus that produced the cargo, were not in evidence, and I do not see how anyone could have inferred them from what the islanders had access to. They copied what they could see because what they could see was all there was to copy.
The anthropologist Lamont Lindstrom, who has spent his career on Tanna, argued in 1993 that the cargo cult story has survived in the West for so long less because of what it says about Melanesians than because of what it says about us. We tell it because we recognize the desire. I think he's right, and I suspect it is truer of occultists than of anyone. Followed back to its source, the insult isn't about simple people on an island. It is about what any intelligent person does when he can see the results of a system and not the system, and that is a situation every one of us who practices a recovered art has been in.
*FEYNMAN'S AIRSTRIP*
The phrase reached the wider world through Richard Feynman, in his commencement address at Caltech in 1974. He had been thinking about what separates science from the things that look like it, and he reached for the islands.
"During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas. He's the controller. And they wait for the airplanes to land." And then the sentence everyone remembers. "They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land."
Feynman's point was not about the islanders at all. It was about scientists who follow the forms of investigation, the apparatus and the papers and the statistics, while leaving out the one thing that makes investigation work, which he called a kind of utter honesty, the willingness to report everything that might make your result wrong. Cargo cult science has all the equipment and none of the integrity, and the planes don't land. From Feynman the phrase went to the programmers, who in the 1990s began to speak of "cargo cult programming" for code copied from a working example without any understanding of why it worked, kept in place because removing it felt dangerous. And from the programmers (who overlap with occultists more than either group likes to admit) it came to magic.
So the insult has a fairly precise meaning if you follow it back. It doesn't mean "primitive" or "superstitious." It means a practice reconstructed from its visible surface by people who could not see the system behind the surface, who reasoned sensibly from their own world about what the surface must mean, and who were wrong because the real cause was something they had no way to observe.
*THE SHAPE OF AN INEXPERT RECOVERY*
Keep that definition and set the islands aside, because what I want to talk about is what happens when a tradition that has been dead for centuries is reconstructed by people who can see only part of it.
The rule is simple, and as far as I can tell it is general. A recovered tradition gets rebuilt in the image of whichever of its parts survived as a living discipline. The recoverers aren't fools. They reason from their own world, as the islanders did, and in their own world a certain kind of cause is the kind that produces effects. So they look at the old texts, recognize the part they already know how to do, assume that part is the engine, and treat everything else as decoration or as the superstition of the age (the two usually get sorted by how embarrassing they would be to explain to a colleague). The runway gets built beautifully, the fires are lit at the right spacing, and the forms are perfect.
I can date the inversion, because I lived through both halves of it. When I came into magic, the settled opinion of the community, so settled that nobody argued it, was that the astrological conditions in the grimoires and the old books were a blind. The author had put them in to intimidate the reader, or to make a superstitious one wait forever for a sky that never came, and a modern practitioner who knew better skipped them and got on with the work. I don't remember anyone dissenting. Thirty years later the opinion has turned completely over. Now the election is the one thing that cannot be skipped, and everything else, the figure, the material, the suffumigation, the words, the place the thing is buried, is read as the blind, or the costume, or the optional part. The same books, the same recipes, and two generations each sure that what the other kept was the decoration. What decided it in both cases was not the text. It was what the readers could do. The ceremonial magicians of my youth couldn't cast an election, so the election was the blind. The astrologers who came after them could, so the election was the engine. Each generation found the cause where its own competence ended, and that is the cargo cult rule stated as plainly as I know how to state it.
I wrote recently that the Science of Images is a degenerative tradition, one that believes its perfection lies in the past and that the work of the present is restoration, and that restoring it fully will take decades. This essay is a case study in what an inexpert restoration looks like from the inside, and I'm qualified to write it because I helped make one.
*HOW THE ART CAME BACK*
The Science of Images did not come back to the modern world through magicians. It came back through astrologers.
The sequence matters. From the early 1980s the traditional astrology of Lilly and Bonatti and the Arabic authors was being recovered by a small movement of translators and practitioners, Lilly's *Christian Astrology* was back in print in 1985, and the Project Hindsight translations began in 1993. David Pingree's critical edition of the Latin *Picatrix* appeared in 1986, and in the two decades after it the book went from a rumor to a text that an English reader could hold, in a translation from the Arabic in 2002 and then in the complete translation from the Latin in 2011 that this site uses. The people who could read the *Picatrix* when it arrived were the people who could read its conditions. "When the Moon is in the first face of Taurus, free of the malefics, and the ascendant is fortunate." That is an astrological sentence, and an astrologer looks at it and sees a problem he knows how to solve, and by the late 1990s he had software that would solve it in seconds. It was the one part of the old art that had never entirely died, that still had teachers and a literature and a method, and so it was the part through which everything else was seen.
What came out of that was an art understood as electional astrology with a craft project attached. The talisman was the chart you could wear. You found a moment when the planet was strong and the Moon was well placed, you engraved something at that moment, and the engraving carried the moment. The image on the stone, the material of the stone, the suffumigation burning while you worked, the words spoken over it, the state of the person speaking them, the animal substances and herbs the old recipes called for, the long addresses to the planets, the regimen the old authors imposed on the operator, all of that was present in the texts and was treated, mostly, as the texture of the thing rather than its substance. Some of it was kept as a gesture toward authenticity. Some of it was dropped as medieval clutter. A good deal of it was never seen at all, in the way that the shipping lines were not seen from the beach at Tanna, because nothing in the recoverer's world suggested that it could be a cause.
I'm not describing other people here, or not only. This is the art as I first learned it and first practiced it, and it was the common understanding of a whole generation, mine, which did something valuable (it brought the book back into the world) and read it with the eyes it had.
*WHAT THE BOOK ACTUALLY SPENDS ITS PAGES ON*
Open the *Picatrix* and count. I have done it roughly, with the complete English translation, and the numbers are instructive even allowing for how crude the method is.
The word "image" and its relatives appear more than seven hundred times. "Spirit" close to five hundred. "Suffumigation," "incense," and their relatives more than two hundred and fifty, and that is the vocabulary of a single operation, burning things, which the book describes in more detail than any other single act. "Petition" and the words for addressing the planets more than two hundred and fifty. Stones, metals, herbs, plants, and animals, several hundred mentions between them, with whole chapters devoted to which animal's parts belong to which planet. The sage, the man doing the work, and the condition he must be in, more than two hundred. "Ascendant" and "hour" together about three hundred. The word "election" itself, in any form, *fewer than thirty.*
Now, the astrological conditions are everywhere in the book, and I don't want to be misread. Nearly every recipe opens with the sky. But they are the frame of the recipe. They say when. Everything after the when, which is most of the text, says what, and of what, and with what burning, and with what words, and by whom, and in what state. The third book is largely the natures of the planets and the long rites of the Sabians of Harran, with their garments and their suffumigations and their formal addresses. The fourth is spirits and confections and the material from the *Nabataean Agriculture,* and it closes with chapters on how the operator must live. A reader who comes to this book as an astrologer finds his own discipline on every page, which is true, and concludes that the book is about his discipline, which is not.
Whether the astrology is the most important part, or the least, or one part among several whose weights differ from recipe to recipe, I am not going to say here. I have views, and they belong in another place. The point of this essay is smaller and I think pretty hard to argue with. The recovery treated one part of the art as the art, and the text doesn't.
*ONE RECIPE, READ BOTH WAYS*
Take a single recipe and read it twice. The first book of the *Picatrix* gives an image to drive scorpions out of a city. Make a scorpion in very pure gold, in the hour of the Sun, with the Moon in the ascendant or the fourth, seventh, or tenth house, in Taurus, Aquarius, or Leo, and best in Leo, "because Leo is by nature more contrary to a scorpion"; let the Sun be in Leo and Saturn retrograde. Make the tail first, then the feet, then the claws, then the head. When the parts are made, put the left claw where the right should be and the right foot where the left should be, and set the stinger upside down on the tail, so that the scorpion is stinging itself. Bury the image inside a stone with a hole in it, and let the stone be a metallic ore, and bury that in an important part of the city. The author stops in the middle of this to say that "there are many things to consider and you should understand them well, because they will assist you in all of your works."
Read as the revival read it, the recipe says a scorpion, in gold, with the Sun in Leo and the Moon well placed. That is the chart you could wear. Everything else is the kind of thing a medieval compiler puts in, the swapped claws and the inverted stinger and the holed stone and the ore and the order of making and the choice of ground, and a reasonable modern reader passes over it the way he passes over the instruction to fast on the day before. Read as the book reads itself, every one of those items is a condition. The author gives a reason for the sign, which is a reason about natures and not about timing. He gives the order of the parts and says the order matters. He builds a figure whose whole point is what it depicts, a scorpion turned against itself, which is an image in the old sense of the word and not a label for a date. He specifies the material twice, the gold of the figure and the ore of the housing. He specifies where it goes. The election is one line of eight, and it is the only one of the eight the revival knew how to take seriously.
I am not going to say which of the other seven does the work, or whether they all do, or in what proportion, because I do not yet know and neither does anyone else, and the essay before this one says why that will take a long time to find out. What I will say is that the book treats them as conditions, and when the recovery dropped them it dropped conditions and not ornament. It is worth knowing, too, that the stripped-down reading has a medieval precedent, which gives it a dignity it did not earn. The Speculum Astronomiae carved out a class of image that "obtains its virtue solely from the celestial figure," with no suffumigation, no words, and no characters, so that a churchman could live with it, and its own author would not commend even that. It was a legal category, built to survive a censor. The revival rebuilt that category without knowing it had been built before, and called it the art.
*MY OWN AIRSTRIP*
I began with planetary candles in 2001. In 2003 I became the customer of a working astrological magician, bought his talismans, learned to use them, and began to learn how to do elections from him. From 2004 I made my own, about two thousand of them over the next two years. They weren't rings, but they were carefully elected. I had learned the astrology well and I was proud of my charts, and I can still defend most of those elections today. The talismans did nothing. Not one of them, as I have told at more length in The Place to Stand. I kept the charts, which is how I know they were good, and I did not keep much else about them, which tells you what I thought mattered at the time.
I had built the runway and lit the fires along the sides. The form was perfect. In 2006 something changed in how I made them, and from that year I began to have results that I could repeat, and the results are why this site exists. What changed was not my astrology. I will say what it was in another place. What I will say here is that nothing in the understanding I had been given prepared me to expect that the change would matter, and that is the mark of a cargo cult recovery. The practitioner isn't doing the visible part badly; he has no way of knowing that the invisible part is there.
*WHAT THE PLANES NEED*
The islanders of Tanna were not wrong that there was a system behind the cargo. They were wrong about what it was, because the parts that mattered were out of sight. The remedy wasn't better runways. It was to learn the system, which took generations, and which Melanesians have done, becoming engineers and shipping agents and pilots, and some of them, with a sense of humor the insult never credits them with, keeping the John Frum day as well.
The remedy for us is the same, and it is the long restoration I described in the companion to this essay. The Science of Images will not be recovered by getting better at elections. It will be recovered by taking seriously, one at a time, every part of the operation that the old books took seriously, the image, the material, the suffumigation, the ensoulment, the petition, the conduct of the operator, and by keeping a Record of what happens when each is done as written and when it is not. That is slow. It is the work of many practitioners over many decades, and most of what any one of us learns will turn out to have been in the book all along, in a chapter we skimmed because it didn't look like a cause.
What that means in practice is simple to say. Read the whole recipe, not the chart in it. When you make an image, make it as written once, with every condition the text gives, before you decide which conditions you can drop. Keep a record of what you did and what followed, in enough detail that you could tell the difference between a talisman that worked and a talisman you liked. And when one fails, look at the rest of the recipe before you look at the chart, because the chart is the part you already know how to check, and the runway is always the part that looks finished.
So when an occultist uses the phrase, I do not object to it. The insult is accurate. It is only pointed the wrong way. Every one of us who took up this art took it up from a beach, watching cargo we did not understand come down out of a sky we could not read, and built what we could see. I built my runway and lit the fires along it, and I can tell you what it feels like when the sky stays empty. It feels like the sky's fault. It never is. The planes do not land because the runway is wrong. They do not land because the runway was never the part that mattered, and no one who is proud of his runway will go looking for the part that was. Building it was not stupidity. Staying on the beach is.