Of silence there are three kinds, the silence of the lips, the silence of thought, and the silence of reason. When the soul is completely withdrawn into its inner kingdom, the lips are mute ; thought, not being able to comprehend in any way the ineffable joy it receives, can say nothing, and reason too is condemned to silence, for when the Sanctuary of thought is inundated with divine unction human reason has no longer anything to do.
— Édouard Récéjac
In the immersion into mystery —that apophatic[1] exploration of the wild domains wherein the initiatic wayfarer plunges— it is through the systematic, conscious, and rigorous work of Silence that the alchemical pilgrim prepares to perceive and receive the voice of the numinous. This is not an ordinary silence, but sacred Silence: not mere absence of sound, but the suspension of all profane word —an imperative that commands rather than requests— interrupting human language to make space for the irruption of the tremendum. The soul, striving to grasp the Absolute, must transcend the discursiveness of understanding and surrender to a symbolic and silent form of knowledge, for «knowledge exists only through analogy» (Récéjac, 1899). This silencing constitutes the necessary preliminary for any truly contemplative experience: a detachment from noise to allow the immediacy of contact with the divine to act. Where the tumult of human creations falls silent, the Wordless Voice speaks — a Voice not born of mechanical pulmonary breath, but of pure inner trembling.
Although this Silence must be heard from within the innermost dimensions of the vessel, where the indomitable Sun of the resplendent crucible irradiates the microcosmic wastelands, it is equally vital to maintain a sort of sanitary barrier against the various emanations of the modern world and civilization itself.
The capacity for discernment —that is, the faculty of distinguishing between reality and unreality, truth and illusion, eternity and transience— becomes the pillar upon which all the inner work of the practitioner who seeks to venture into the paths of Silence must rest. This is not merely a matter of intellectual limitation: it is the ontological vertigo of the incommensurable, the radical impossibility that the finite might embrace the infinite without disintegrating. [2] [3] The Absolute cannot be attained through the categories of reason (Récéjac, 1899). True mysticism, as Fleming (1913) insists, cannot be confused with emotional vagueness or with unchecked fantasy: it is a rigorous science of being, an art of consciously establishing man’s relationship with the Absolute through the perfection of the inner life. The understanding of this paradox is what dissolves sensory mirages and unbridled fantasies. Thus, the work of the pilgrim is not merely technical; it is a spiritual gymnastics of the impossible, a descent into the shadows that shelter epiphany. Without this tool —the compass of intellect and soul— the pilgrim is condemned to wander through the endless labyrinths of sensory mirages and unbridled fantasies, a prisoner of the chains of illusion and delirium. Since it is neither a grace bestowed effortlessly nor a gift that spontaneously blossoms within the soul, this capacity must be progressively developed, forged, wrought, and hammered again and again by the initiatic wayfarer, who must remain ever conscious and vigilant, without lowering his guard, throughout the entire process of transformation from the nigredo. Following Fleming’s insights, true mystical work is inseparable from a disciplined practice and from the purification of will and understanding, thus the practice of this work involves a physical and spiritual withdrawal from the Ahrimanic radiations (the tendencies toward the concrete and the material, toward the mantle of numbers, formulas, and the inorganic structures of automatization and immediacy), under whose influence the human being falls prisoner to the world of physical senses, blinded to the essence beating beneath the illusion of appearance. Moreover, it also entails a withdrawal from the radiations that may push the initiate toward the Luciferian realms of fantasy, illusion, and superstitious thought —an invitation to forsake the firmness of the ground beneath his feet in order to become lost in the reveries of his own phantasmal constructions. The Luciferian radiations feed spiritual arrogance, the tendency toward evasion, the abandonment of embodiment in favor of the vaporous and unsubstantial. Where the Ahrimanic chains with iron bonds, the Luciferian enshrouds with a seductive mantle of lights that lead astray, overstimulating an intellect without anchorage, and intoxicating it with a false transcendence that dissolves like smoke when faced with the crude trial of reality —mere mirages that vanish. The separation from the colonization imposed by Modernity upon the individual allows the alchemical wayfarer to enter the forest passage unburdened by the residues of the world, those parasitic sediments that feed at the expense of the organism.
The realization of the act of entering the forest passage —of surrendering with reverent fear to the landscape molded by heterological waves— is likewise a pilgrimage toward the inner wasteland, toward the intuitive dimensions of the psyche. To enter the thicket is, simultaneously and necessarily, to depart from the homogeneity of civilization, from that place where the illusion of security pervades the microcosm with its uniform sameness. Silence here is not passive but saturated with invisible presences, vertigo, stupor, fear, and simultaneous attraction —the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Thus, the forest is not merely a natural space where the Acausal crystallizes into cathedrals of cellulose: it is the symbolic topography of the soul before the sacred, a realm where the Logos is eclipsed to allow the numinous fire of the ineffable to emerge. As Récéjac (1899) observes, it is in the active abandonment of discursive Logos that the opening of a “higher inner consciousness” begins, wherein the soul may begin to receive the living symbols of the Mystery.
Although noisy in the strict sense —a dissonant symphony where the crackling of dry leaves underfoot, the whispering and whistling of wind among branches and leaves, the fluttering of birds taking flight, the snapping of twigs as they break and fall, the buzzing of insects in search of food or a mate for their hieros gamos, the flowing of water in streams and waterfalls, the croaking of frogs, the relentless hammering of raindrops against whatever surface crosses their path, the varied songs of birds according to species and season, the dry sound of woodpeckers striking tree bark, the drops of water transpiring from plants and mosses, sliding down vegetal structures to finally strike the ground, the hooting of owls at night, and the sharp cries of rodents captured by predators, and so on —it is within the forest that the interior Silence resides: the detachment and unlearning from civilizational noise. The warning signs of vehicular traffic, the bright lights of advertisements, and the galloping rhythm of the races spawned by and for modern society all dissolve as the veil of sedimentary layers of comfort, accumulated upon human animality, is torn apart. True mystical knowledge can arise only where a void has been produced within the soul —an active emptying that dissolves the forms accumulated through habit and custom (Fleming, 1913).
Through the immersion into the mortuary thicket of Silence, the pilgrim accepts to be stripped, dismembered of his cultural garments, delivered to the hostile nakedness of the Real. Only through this death of the profane self can the slow gestation of the authentic being begin, for it is through the act of sacrifice that man crosses the abyss separating the profane from the sacred. In its essence, sacrifice encompasses destruction and death, for it annihilates the object as a profane thing, as an element belonging to the realm of utility, and restores it into the depths of the sacred world (Montesinos, 2016), where the original intimacy —lost and yearned for— still beats ardently within the heart of Being.
Immersed in Silence, the alchemical wayfarer performs an aphasic oblation: in kenotic abandonment, he offers himself to the Mystery, allowing the inner fire to dissolve the frontiers of his discontinuous being. This death —as the annihilation of the finite self— does not extinguish the inextinguishable continuity of Being; rather, it reveals it, just as the furious and tumultuous waters recall the primordial, amniotic, and sulphurous ocean. Thus, within Silence, there is not merely a suspension of the word: it is a bloody sacrifice of illusory forms and of the mirages that, with great vehemence, attempt to infiltrate the cathedral of cellulose. Covered in sweat, mud, dirt, and organic residues —the matter of nigredo— the pilgrim does not escape the human condition by affirming individuality, but by surrendering symbolically to the immensity that lies beneath the veil of ordinary perception. [4] [5] In this act of dispossession —at once subtle and violent— the creature of civilization falls silent not out of mere humility or terror before the mysterium tremendum, but because its own voice is dissolved in the vertiginous whirlwind of the Unnameable.
Bibliography
Campbell, J. (1968). The masks of God: Creative mythology. New York, NY: Viking Press.
Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (3rd ed.). Novato, CA: New World Library.
Chrysostom, J. (n.d.). On the incomprehensible nature of God (J.-P. Migne, Ed., Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 48, pp. 719–728). Paris: Imprimerie Catholique.
Fleming, W. K. (1913). Mysticism in Christianity. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons
Montesinos, JA. (2016). “La comunicación que el sacrificio deja al descubierto: lo sagrado y la experiencia interior en Georges Bataille.” Contrastes. Revista Internacional de Filosofía, vol. XXI-Nº2 (2016), pp. 7-25.
Récéjac, É. (1899). Essay on the bases of mystic knowledge (S. C. Upton, Trans.). New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Notes
[1] In the thought of Chrysostom —who castigates the arrogance of those who attempt “to grasp the essence of God”— there echoes a warning: «one offends God by attempting to comprehend Him with concepts.» The same must be said of those who try to capture the sacred through the noise of instrumental reason or the language of the machine (i.e., the Ahrimanic forces). «We call Him the inexpressible God, the unthinkable, the invisible, the incomprehensible; the One who surpasses all human language capacity, transcends mortal understanding, is untraceable to angels, unseen by seraphim, inconceivable to cherubim, invisible to dominions, powers, and all creation.»
[2] “The mind must be stilled, and the ego dissolved in the vast sea of the undifferentiated mystery.” (Campbell, 2008)
[3] The sensation of being overwhelmed by an ineffable magnitude, of being drawn beyond the limits of thought, time, and individual existence, is the great experience celebrated by both the mystic and the hero. (Campbell, 1968)
[4] As Récéjac (1899) points out, this final state cannot be captured by discursive thought; it can only be lived as an ineffable intuition of identity between the soul and its Absolute source.
[5] For Fleming (1913), as the soul advances in its self-dispossession, it begins to intuit no longer through the categories of discursive mind, but through a kind of immediate inner knowledge, where the distinction between subject and object is abolished in the ecstatic experience.