The Mansus-the game’s occult centre-is another name for a feudal unit of land measurement and so expectedly, progress through the Mansus is framed as spatial, as the player moves from The Wood to the White Gate and so on. The real draw of Cultist Simulator is its occult topography. And yet, as Reza Negarestani notes, to excavate this meaning is to deform the experience of it: “Instead of layers and levels, Hidden Writing populates subways, sunken colonies, a social commotion teeming underneath.” The trick to true understanding, then, is to find and descend into old books, abandoned mines, empty tombs, and all other chthonic spaces. “As above, so below,” goes the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus.Īll occult literature is subject to this kind of layering, where real meaning is found like the stratified layers of rock below the surface of the earth. The Rosicrucians (a modern occult society in the vein of the Illuminati) claimed that the wisdom hidden in the crypt of Christian Rosenkreutz lay in the true understanding of its architecture. The fourth-century Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis describes one vision where the number of steps leading up to the altar represent hidden alchemical truths. To that end, there is a lengthy tradition of expressing secret knowledge in spatial terms. Only fools believe a rose is a rose we know that it means something else. Reading, say, the seventeenth-century alchemist George Starkey’s notes and believing that his discussion of the Doves of Diana is some Roman myth is foolishness. We can even jettison the idea of allegory entirely, as surface appearances are not to be enjoyed for their own sake the surface is effectively immaterial, a cypher to disguise meaning from the profane while ensuring the initiated will know what is being said. It is not merely that the rose is never just a rose-the rose is never a rose at all It is not merely that the rose is never just a rose-the rose is never a rose at all. More fundamentally, occult literature denies the very usefulness of surface appearances. The forest is not an actual forest, but spiritual tumult roots do not represent roots, but the material world. For instance, the Kaballa-a structured system of Jewish mysticism-uses the image of a tree to describe its own map of enlightenment: its roots lie in Malkuth, the Kingdom or earthly world, and travelling up the trunk-through the emanations-takes the aspirant to Keter, or the Crown.īut we are not talking about a literal tree any more than we are a literal forest, for allegory is the defining feature of occult literature. Nor is his cosmography the only one to use arboreal imagery in this regard. Nor are the animals that he encounters merely animals: the leopard is his lust, the lion his pride, and the wolf his avarice. Of course, that forest is not an actual forest-it is a symbol for the confused and fraught state the poet finds himself in at the middle of the journey of his life. Dante begins his Divine Comedy trapped in a forest.
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