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Moorish Weather Report, by Hakim Bey. From Mad Far
Jubilee Greetings
The accompanying text, "Moorish Weather Report" by Hakim Bey is
excerpted in its entirety from -- the Mad Farmers' Jubilee
Almanack -- Vol. 1 No. 1 (Winter Solstice 1993).
Published quarterly for now, (annually beginning in 1995), the
Almanack features a calendar section including the calendars and
significant holidays of many world traditions, as well
as a plethora of other phenomena to be found in the worlds of
nature & imagination.
The first issue contains work by Freddie Baer, Schwaa, Rob
Brezsney and Antero Alli as well as many others. Copies are
available through Left Bank Distribution at 4142 Brooklyn
Ave. NE Seattle WA 98105.
Submissions of material, inquiries letters and orders for the
Spring '94 issue ($6.00 ppd. avail. early March) may be sent to
(James Koehnline & Troy Skeels, editors) the Mad Farmers Jubilee
Almanac, c/o James Koehnline PO Box 85777 Seattle WA 98145.
*Information about the Moorish Orthodox Church and the Grand Jubilee
Project are available from the above address as well, please include
an SASE with all correspondence.
Salaam
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Moorish Weather Report
If the Earth is a living being, what constitutes her skin?
The hermetic "Natural philosophers" elaborated the Hesiodic
cosmogony whereby Chaos, Eros, Earth, and Old Night, make up the
original pantheon of becoming. The hermeticists understood that we
live and walk on the pelt of an animate body - just as Chinese
mythographers called humans the fleas or lice on the body of the
cosmogonic chaos-figure, Pan Ku. We are Earth's symbiotes - or
parasites - or (Allah forbid) her germs.
The old Hermeticists also seemed to believe that atmosphere
pervaded the entire universe if they envisioned flights to the moon
or stars, for example, they never imagined the need for "spacesuits"
to protect them against a Vacuum. Air was everywhere. Cyrano de
Bergerac dreamed of a way to reach the moon by attaching to his
body many sealed crystal vials of dew, which was believed to fall
from and return to the moon. Unable to escape from the vessels, the
dew would lift Cyrano on rays of lunar attraction. Thus weather
itself was - at the very least - sublunar in scope.
Meteorological phenomena or sky-events, from rain to clouds to
comets, were not seen as parts of Earth's body, but rather as
evidence that the universe itself is also alive. Thus every culture
perceives a mating of Earth and Sky - an erotic reciprocity with the
universe - which fecundates the planet. Weather spirits or deities
belong to that sphere which is precisely not the Earth Sky or
"heaven", which includes what we call "space" - the aether which
fills the universe and is also alive - expresses its sexual relation
with Earth in the form of weather. For the early agriculturalists
weather is the sperm of the spirits. One of the signs of this
meteorological Eros is the mushroom which (as John Allegro pointed
out) has no seed but is planted direct from heaven by lightning bolts
- an almost universal belief.
Charles Fourier described the Aurora Borealis as the flickering
remnant of a once-great "aromal ray' whereby Earth in former times
held sexual congress with other planets and stars. Unfortunately due
to the malign influence of Civilization, which has degraded even
meteorological phenomena, the "Northern Crown" no longer serves its
proper function. If we could overcome Civilization and establish
social harmony, we'd see the Boreal Crown shoot forth a coherent
laser-like 1000-hued ray of pure aroma, or stellar jizm, and
simultaneously we would receive similar rays projected at us from
other planets, like sunbeams but even more concentrated and
fruitful.
Thus from the Stone age up to our great "demi-messiah" Fourier,
the adepts have seen weather as outside the earth. No matter what
"science" tells us, this viewpoint will remain valid to the extent
that weather, as a sensuous event, really does come to us from
"outside". Looked at this way, the skin of Earth is her dirt-surface,
her water-surface, and her stable biota such as plants (her "hair",
etc.). The motile biota constitute an in-between zone or ambiguous
third term between Earth and Sky- Humans, the upright pivots of
this intermediate realm, are precisely the mediators between Earth
and the weather, controlling rain by sacrifice or dance, and
interpreting the falling stars. The Etruscans catalogued eleven
varieties of lightning as auguries; - weather has meaning, but the
meaning is vaporous and evanescent as weather itself. The Taoists
saw pictographic characters written in the clouds - but for the most
part only spirits could read them Even in modern meteorology the
weather retains an uncanny ability to express itself in mysterious
glyphs which seem to hover on the edge of meaning, like the Lorentz
"Butterfly Attractor" which describes the ultimate unpredictability
of weather in the form of a mathematic "writing" in the shape of a
butterfly. In some way, weather always appears to us as an "Other".
However, science no longer believes that dew rises to the Moon
and falls again with moonbeams. Earth is surrounded by "hard
vacuum" (a nice paradox) which may be virtually universal. We've
seen photographs of the Earth which seem to recreate the visions of
shamans in flight, and we have noticed that weather is a very local
phenomenon. At first it might seem that the weather (clouds, blue
sky, etc.) makes up Earth's cloak, a kind of close- fitting halluc-
inatory opalescent kinetic garment of atmosphere and moisture. But on
further contemplation a more accurate metaphor occurs: - weather is
not the cape but the skin-- the peau sensible - of the living Earth.
None of us can escape this new world view. Even though as
individuals we continue to experience weather coming to us from
Outside, we must now superimpose on this symbolism another and
perhaps complementary symbolic structure.
In this second view, we humans are no longer precisely the
ambiguous pivots between Earth and Sky. Our relation with Earth has
become much more intimate. We are inside her skin. We are part of
the Weather itself, her kinetic flesh, her kaleidoscopic nudity. Now
we ourselves seem somehow much more permeable, such that clouds
and blue sky, rain and lightning, might well move in us and through
us, as much parts of our skin and organs and in turn are parts of the
skin organs bones of Earth. We are ourselves meteorological events,
not unlike rain or falling stars.
* * * * *
Looking at weather from this point of view as well as from the
traditional point of view should help us to overcome the rather
exclusive duality of "earth and heaven" which became so exaggerated
in the agriculturalist religions (1). The calendar is the first
ideology, an attempt to reconcile the messy organic year of the
seasons with the crystalline precise year of the stellar sky; and thus
it is the first attempt to regulate "the world" (human society) on the
basis of an abstract idea. Those who claim to "control" (i.e. know)
the calendar, and can predict sky-events, can also control the
fecundating activity of the sky, its spermatic fertility. Eventually
the masters of the calendar can become more stellar (less organic
and messy) even in their own relation to the Earth. They can begin to
control (i.e. predict) the weather and thus to control the Earth's
fecundity. They can invent agriculture (2).
The violence to the earth which this invention demands creates
the sensation of an immense imbalance, a final break with the original
"order of intimacy" (as Bataille calls it) of the old Gathering way of
life, the way of humanity before tool-making and hence prior to
symbolic and abstract systematization. religion per se now comes into
being to restore this imbalance through yet more cruelty (human
sacrifice, cannibalism, etc.). The old duality between Earth and Sky
gradually deepens into dualism, the Gnostic hatred for the organic,
the nostalgia for pure stellar perfection (and eventually supra-
stellar disembodiment), pure spirit - which from Earth's perspective
is nothing but death (3).
Now our new understanding of weather as Earth's skin might in a
sense help to repair the lost order of intimacy which eroded so
drastically with the invention of the calendar. In our new view of
things, Earth and Sky (the weather-sky, not the stellar sky) are
really parts of one and the same living being, rather than opposing
principles. We understand weather as a form of chaos (if such an
expression makes any sense) which relates itself intimately with
the ordered chaos or "Miraculous" negentropy of life itself. Weather
and biosphere are now seen as two different densities of the same
substance - the Hesiodic kaos. The distinction between a human
being (or a mushroom) and a lightning bolt no longer seems so clear -
or so important.
For us then the problem which presents itself is not the
deconstruction and disappearance of the calendrical ideology, but
rather the reconstruction and re-appearance of a more primordial
pre-calendrical epistemology. Day and night, summer and winter,
earth and the stars are no longer to be seen as making up any
categorical dualisms, but rather as constituting a spectrum of
dyadic energies (not too different from Taoist yin-yang five-
elements theory). This would not involve a total return to some
hypothetical Pleistocene pre-calendrical non-system based on pure
spontaneity, but rather the synthesis of our new "chaos" under-
standing with ALL the old lunar, solar, and magical calendars.
Obviously we can't lose or dump the agricultural/stellar calendar
even if we wanted to. It has become part of our means of experiencing
time and space; and on some level we are all still agriculturalists -
rebellious peasants! ("Tierra y Libertad!"). What we want is to sup-
plement this Farmer's Almanac with our Gatherer's anti-calendar, to
superimpose the two, and to arrive at new (yet somehow primordial) ways
of moving through space and time.
Our anti-calendar, which spontaneously experiences each moment as
new and agrees with the Sufis that "there is no repetition in
theophany", can be compared to the dreamtime of primordial Chaos;
while the agricultural calendar can be compared with the mythic
figures who exemplify Order and who are, in fact, the calendrical
deities. For a long time now the chaos-calendar has been suppressed,
and the "agricultural" epistemology of Order has been elevated to the
status of an ontology or a metaphysics. The year of Order - in which
theophany does repeat itself 365 times a year - has tyrannized our
perception of time for a Long time, about 6000 years in fact a "long
duration" indeed - though only a flyspeck on the whole time of human
awareness. Finally (with the "Death of God") Earth herself can at last
be declared inert, non-organic - in fact, "dead" - and this
pronouncement has provided agricultural/industrial Civilization
with its terminal excuse to "rape our mother the Earth" and pollute
her atmospheric skin with our antibiotic exhalations.
Ironically the agricultural calendar itself is now forgotten,
buried under the debris of thousands of later ideologies, despised
as peasant superstition, lost in a meaningless past (except for a few
spasms of commodity fetishism like Christmas or Halloween) -
every day the same, Work or Leisure, with never a moment of true
festival. And now we see that even the agricultural calendar, for all
its cruelty, had great merit, compared with the soulless and
mechanical year of Late Capitalism. The Old Farmers and old Moors
preserved and transmitted a powerful poetics in their almanacs.
Why, the almanac is a veritable occult treatise, a coding of all the
wisdom of Ur and Memphis, a Hamlet's Mill or dream-machine for the
production of mythopoesis. Above all the almanac represents a religion
of festivals, a pattern of points of superabundance in which the rich
moments of the year are made sacred by acts of generosity and excess.
No, we can't give up the calendar; in fact we want to save it. But to
do so we must surrender the calendar as categorical imperative; - we
must admit that the "calendar of chaos" is yet older and more direct,
and at the same time far newer and more precise. In short, we want a
synthesis or synergetic cross fertilization of the calendars of chaos
and order.
The agricultural calendar maintains a system of gender duality and
inequality, as well as class duality and inequality. It presents us
with a dialectic of surplus and scarcity, both of sexuality and of
goods (4). By contrast the calendar of chaos, which characterizes a
pre-agricultural and even a pre-hunting economy, offers far less
scope for such categorization and stratification. It appears to be
based on spontaneity and excess. It lies far closer to the "order of
intimacy" which in fact is not an order at all but a chaos, a
cornucopious outpouring of continual creation - "new every day on
the potter's Wheel of heaven" (Chuang Tzu).
The original perception of Earth as a living being includes a
recognition of her generosity an outpouring which links space (which
is full of good things) and time (which does not withhold those good
things) to human consciousness in the "order of intimacy". The
invention of the calendar signals a growing mistrust of space/time,
which must now be influenced and directed by a human consciousness
that is separate and even alienated from Nature's intimacy and spon-
taneity. however, the calendar has not yet "killed" Earth nor has it
made a metaphysical principle out of "Capital". It still reveres Earth
and sacrilizes space/time. One may speak here of a "peasants" utopia -
exemplified in so many Chinese myths and social movements - in which
agriculture has not yet disrupted the natural harmonies nor given rise
to inequality and injustice.
Whatever the historical authenticity of this "stage of development",
it remains with us as an ideal and even as an ideology (as in Mexican
anarchism, for example, or "Jeffersonian" agrarian democracy). Once
again, for us it is not a matter of any "return TO the Stone Age"
(whether Paleo- or Neolithic) but rather a return OF the stone age".
All the magical calendars are coming back - the whole palimpsest has
been illuminated and become legible to us. Why? Because under
Capitalism the calendar itself has been replaced - by schedules of
production and consumption - and Earth buried in concrete like a
corpse. Medieval peasants angered over calendrical "reform' rioted
and demanded "Give us back the lost eleven days!" We however must
demand Give us back the entire lost year.
* * * * *
In this reading of the almanac, in which both the year of order and
the year of chaos will receive their due honor, we shall have to give
up certain lingering manichaean attitudes about the weather.
Television weather shows - those poverty-stricken parodies of the
almanac - assure us that the weather is "good" or "bad". "Weathermen",
washed-out ghosts of once-great priests of Stonehenge and Tenochtitlan,
smirk or grimace to give us our cue. "Accu-weather" is treated like a
commodity; "climate control" and weather-management are posited as high
values. Nature in wilder moods now appears only as "emergency", and is
measured in millions of dollars of damage...; no longer seen as
portent of the deaths of kings. But our calendar will be glad to hear
the winds howl And the wolves come back, just as glad as it is to see
the sky blue and wildflowers bloom in the ditch. Our almanac will be
based on that old zen saw, "Every day is a fine day."
At midnight a low mist hangs in the trees on the hillside above
the lake, lit from above by the Moon, making our suburban maples into
a Grimm Bros. forest - in the Samhain season - in the air of the Real
World our almanac advises us to live like the weather. Rain or shine -
embrace the skin of Earth.
Hakim Bey
Long Pond Ashram,
Oct. 20, 1993
1) Of course "modern science" itself also propagates a form of
dualism which needs to be overcome, a split between life on earth
(including the "weather sky") and death everywhere else in the
Official Universe (including the "stellar sky"). Such "perceptions"
are only tangentially related to "empirical evidence"--in effect all
scientific paradigms serve as ideologies first and only secondarily
as disinterested descriptions of physical reality. Therefore we feel
free to ransack discarded and alternative paradigms (e.g.
Hermeticism, Fourierism) to construct theories with which to
challenge the dominant Paradigm Which is of course, as always, a
mask for ruling class ideology. The dominant paradigm accepts
neither Earth nor sky as "living beings", but from our point of view
this attitude can be attacked from two angles: first, for its
inadequate definition of "life", and second, for its oppressive effect
on cognition. Our quarrel is not with particular "facts" (though we
might question the ontological status of "facticity" in general), but
rather with ideas. The neo-hermetic paradigm in fact resonates in
many intriguing ways with post-Classical science (quantum, chaos,
etc.) - but we're arguing about interpretations not facts. We have
(potentially) all the facts we need to consider the animate quality of
Earth, and even of the "universe" -- what remains is a matter of
cognition.
2) As A. Marshak has demonstrated in The Roots of Civilization, the
calendar began in the Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic with versions
of lunar years such as some hunting societies still use. The basic
problem - the reconciliation of the lunar year with the solar
(seasonal) year, may have taken millennia to solve. First, then,
comes the calendar, THEN comes agriculture and the Neolithic, and
further refinements of the calendar. Paradoxically, technology both
follows and determines ideology - or at least, so it would seem in
this case.
3) The Neolithic fertility cults, whether of Mesopotamia or
Mesoamerica, are simultaneously cults of death. Only thus can the
pseudo-crystal of the CITY impose itself on the chaotic arabesque of
Nature. So also the Aztec priest flays the god's victim and dons his
skin - for the priesthood is precisely that which kills to overcome
death, to take on the rigid crystalline purity of the stellar heavens
which are beyond the realm of decay and dissolution. The process
culminates in the Christian vision of heaven as a stellar CITY, and of
a solar year centered on the god's torture and death. Interestingly,
the Islamic calendar which abandons the solar/agricultural year and
returns to a more archaic lunar year, also abandons the fixed year
for a year which "wanders" (in relation to the Sun, that is). Could
this psychic nomadism represent a survival of the pre-Islamic
"goddess cults" of Mecca, which Mohammad once contemplated
preserving within Islam?
4) The hunter/gatherer understands hunger, but not scarcity. The
chief function of the calendar in Neolithic times seems to have been
the separation of Time into periods of scarcity and surplus (just as
agriculture itself separates Space into wild and cultivated,
unproductive and productive, bad and good). The stratification of
time and space permits or facilitates the stratification of society
and its cleavage along lines of deficit and abundance, class, gender
priority, and war.(See the 1968 anthology Man the Hunter; Sahlins'
Stone Age Economics; Clastres' Society Against the State; and [with
reservations] Zerzan' s Future Primitive.)
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