To truly believe in a world that is a sphere, is the mark of one who has lost any perception of an irreducible existence animating the world from within.

Indeed, as we begin to look at Technic’s inter­nal cosmogonic architecture and at its ensuing cosmology, we are considering Technic as a unitary principle of reality (or, in this case, unreality), which is akin to a certain conception of God. This aspect is central, not only to our analysis of Technic’s cosmogony, but also to our understanding of what Technic is to our contemporary world - and, more generally, of what a cosmogonic force represents to the age in which it is hegemonic. To our contemporary world, Technic is God, in that it acts as the overall form encompassing all the various principles that structure our world. In this sense, any attempt at analysing the spirit of an age, understood as the structure of a specific reality-system, cannot do without the conceptual toolkit of theology - in particular, of the branch of theology that looks at the process of cosmogony and at cosmological architecture.

As such, that stubborn obstacle to Technic deserves now a new and positive name - a name that is capable of presenting it in its productive aspect. ...this ‘thing’ still escapes any form of definition that attempts to capture its essence. If we still wish to somehow define it, we can only do so negatively, while remaining mindful to the insufficiency of any definition, however negative. We can name it only as ‘the ineffable’ - that which cannot be captured by language in any form.

While unavailable to take part as a tidy cog in the great machinery of absolute language, the ineffable is still capable of acting productively as the emanating centre of Magic’s alternative reality-system.

It is as if, at the centre of every existing thing, there was an atman of sorts, undetectable by our sensorial and rational apparatus, yet detectable more negativo, through a relentless questioning that seeps through the cracks of every ontological definition. Existence cannot be reduced to any of its dimensions, not even to the mere sum of its dimensions - yet, somehow existents still exist! The manifest mystery of existence, glares like a blinding light within each and every existent.

The seamless, all-encompassing unity of existence proposed by a strictly monist vision, perversely mimics the annihilating void prod­uced by the system of Technic. In both cases, the room required by reality - the however minimal distance and difference between essence and existence - is dramatically lacking.

According to Sheikh Ben Alliwa, we can understand this relationship between unity and multiplicity, or existence and essence, as that between the ink and the letters that it goes to compose on a page.

Considering that existence is ontologically superior to essence and that essential differences are just measures of the varying intensity of existence, Mulla Sadra proceeded to claim the instability and temporality of essences themselves. His claim was starkly opposed to the position of most of his contemporaries who, following Aristotle, saw essence and substance as permanent and solid categories.

Max Stirner’s entire work could be read as the philosophical account of a miraculous experience, in which the author describes...the sudden revelation of his own ineffable dimension (what Stirner calls the irreducible ‘Unique One’, Der Einzige) to his own linguistic dimension (i.e. the ‘I’, as vulnerable to linguistic and societal classifications).

here, for the first time, the ineffable speaks. The unspeakable speaks, while remaining unspeakable.

... the first principle of the ineffable emanates out of itself an entity (‘this’, or ‘I’) which, however detached from its origin, is very much a function of the ineffable itself (that is, it understands itself as a ‘person’). By uttering its first word, the ineffable creates enough of a distance from itself to allow reality to take place.... Yet, the newly created border of reality verging towards language (‘this’, T), is ontologically dependent and hierarchically subjected to its own ineffable source. Magic’s cosmology thus immediately declares what kind of reality it wishes to make possible. This is a form of reality that isn’t entirely flattened on the principle of the ineffable - if it was so, it would replicate the apocalypse of reality produced by Technic - but that sees the space between existence and essence as hierarchically ordered.

While Apollo represents the power to build linguistic constructs, the Imam stands for the supremely architectural function of directing such building works, and to constantly check them against the requirements of that ineffable life which will ultimately inhabit the house of language....Whereas Apollo is the power to mould language to create a person, the Hidden Imam is the guidance that directs such power.

Whereas in the second h the person was only potentially a subject, in this third one it begins to act as such

If we understand the ineffable as life, and life as the ineffable, this means that the person’s work consists primarily in shaping dead linguistic constructs, to render them alive.

To paraphrase Heidegger, if we can understand Technic as the essence of technology, so we can understand Magic as the essence of poetry.

According to Cassirer, symbols and myths refer primarily to a human’s emotional apprehension of the world, and thus are essentially a function of epistemology. For Jung, they have to do with the deepest foundations of the collective unconscious, and thus are to be considered essentially as psychological elements. For Eliade, on the contrary, as for most archaic societies, their origin is extra-mental and can be found in a divine dimension that actually animates the world - and thus, their proper location is within metaphysics. How are we to reconcile these different positions, if at all possible? In other words, within the architecture of Magic’s cosmos, should we consider mythologems and symbols as purely mental entities, or as things that enjoy an autonomous form of existence?

A symbol functions as a particular framework that is irreducible to its constituent atomic elements; it is irreducible to its sign, verbal or non-verbal as it may be, as well as to its immediate signification.

The fourth hypostasis thus investigates how particular combinations of symbols can give rise to meaning,

The idea of the law of correspondence is a centuries-old Hermetic concept that was first properly expressed and theorized in the Emerald Tablet, an extremely succinct treaty attributed by tradition to Hermes Trismegistus.

as the dead element of language wraps itself evermore tightly around the original life that animates it, it becomes all the more important to tailor such linguistic clothing in a way that safeguards the living element within it.

Faithful to its notion of the ineffable as life, Magic’s reality-system thus declares the imperative to keep life flowing through the narrowest capillaries of the cultural and social body. ... the imperative remains that of never closing language onto itself. Never reducing a ‘thing’ to its linguistic dimension, but keeping it always open to its own ineffable dimension, which is, after all, the same ‘ineffable as life’, that traverses all things.

... this process of turning all entities into ‘centres’, is perhaps what is most characteristic of Magic’s creation of its own reality and of its own world.

A temple or sacred building is built specifically in a place that is supposed to be the centre of the world (for example, around the omphalos stone in Delphi, considered to be the navel of the world), yet at the same time it is exactly its definition as sacred, that singles out a certain place as a ‘centre’. This circularity returns in the apparently contradictory fact that there is not one, but countless and potentially infinite ‘centres’. Every sacred space, according to Eliade’s analysis, is a centre, precisely because its sacredness endows it with the quality that is essential to every ‘centre’: being the place traversed by the axis of the world {axis mundi), that is, by the axis that connects the dimensions of heaven, earth and hell...The notion of centre is thus rooted in that of sacredness, which, in turn, is embodied by the figure of an axis connecting the world’s multiple dimensions

As it was the case with Technic’s last hypostasis, this is effectively the sunset of a cosmogonic force, yet it is also presented as the moment of its perfection - with a view to relaunch the entire process all over again.

Rather than a stream flowing out of an original source, the development of Magic’s cosmogony is revealed at this stage as a progressive self-manifestation of the original principle - hypostasis after hypostasis, unveiling after unveiling. In other words, the fifth hypostasis presents its own twilight, not as the consequence of language smothering its ineffable source, but as a manifestation of the fullness of the ineffable - which always-already included language as a part of itself.

when placed together in the form of the semicircular Roman arch, it is exactly the weight of each stone that counter-balances that of all others. Lightness is achieved through a combination of weights. A principle is achieved through its opposite, as if the opposite was already contained within the same

Within Magic’s reality, happening and existing are not identical concepts, although they ‘fall together’: linguistic presence and ineffable existence are distinct facets of integral existence, yet they ‘fall together’ to compose it.

Likewise, ineffability achieves lightness through the coincident impact of language, with the overarching form of Magic acting as the keystone.

‘Lightness’, within this perspective, amounts to the very emergence of ‘reality’ as such - that is, as a space where worldly existence, action and imagination are both possible and authentic.

If we compare the paradoxical lightness of Magic’s world, with the unbearable weight of Technic’s world of ‘possibility’, we can appreciate the therapeutic quality of Magic’s entire cosmogonic project. Whereas Technic’s ‘possibility’ attempts to relieve its own weight through an endless extension of its limits - hence its lust for infinite growth - Magic’s ‘paradox’ seeks to resolve this issue through intensive harmony.

archetypes , according to Jung, are ‘the introspectively recognizable form[s] of a priori psychic orderedness’; furthermore, ‘as a priori ideal forms, [they] are as much found as invented: they are discovered inasmuch as one did not know about their unconscious autonomous existence, and invented inasmuch as their presence was inferred from analogous conceptual structures’.

Thus, we shall approach the notion of the Self as the archetypal incarnation of Magic’s fifth hypostasis, that is as a figure in which the coincidence between the opposites of ineffability and language, existence and essence, is finally realized - and, at the same time, as the place in which Magic’s cosmogonic force dies and restarts anew. Having clarified these distinctions, let us see how we can interpret the Self as the archetypal incarnation of Paradox.

Far from being a ‘given’ with which every person is naturally endowed, the Self is thus to be understood as a difficult and precious conquest, that can be brought about only through a strenuous work at the deepest level of one’s psyche.

To close this final hypostasis in the series, and to cast a final glance at the world of Magic, as it stands in its finished form, let us consider for a moment in what sense we can call this kind of world, a ‘garden’.

But what is this ‘garden’ that stretches between pure ineffability and perfectly functional language, between existence and essence? This space in-between, this ‘garden’, is nothing less than ‘reality’ itself - reality precisely as it is produced through Magic’s cosmogony.

Magic builds its world precisely so to allow reality to emerge - a form of reality in which linguistic entities can exist and flourish on the basis of the ineffable life that traverses them.

Our primary concern was to show how it is possible to imagine an alternative reality-system that was capable of reactivating that space in which living individuals can live, act and flourish, free from any annihilating reduction to their linguistic dimension

Magic’s reality, understood as the all-encompassing ‘Self’ of the world, is thus akin to the ‘gold’ (aurum) sought by Hermetic alchemists

As discussed in the intermissions that preceded this chapter, reality always emerges as that world-making space which stretches between the limit-concepts of existence and essence; while Technic entirely denied the former principle, thus leading to a collapse of reality, Magic is capable of retaining both.

As it surpasses the notion of transcendence, so Magic also surpasses that of immanence . Its world is at the same time a world and no world at all, it is both language and silence, unmeasurable existence and limited presence, indistinctness and essence. It is unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity, where the two terms are simultaneously fused and irreducible to each other. In other words, it is reality in the form of a paradox.

Fundamentally, a person adopting Magic’s reality-system is well aware that descriptive language can be nothing but a form of concealment and dissimulation, whenever it takes the ineffable as its object.

To Graciän’s ‘saint’, as to the person who adopts Magic’s reality- system, the extreme solidarity among the living that accompanies a metaphysical ‘unity of existence’ - what is defined as Tawhid in Islamic theology - is always-already given, before and beyond societal rule.

a person’s initiation to Magic’s reality- system begins with their ‘presential vision’ of a different kind of metaphysics that profoundly affects and transforms them. Adopting Magic’s cosmological hypostases as the frame through which the world emerges to one’s experience, means shaping a particular vision of what exists in the world, and in what way existents relate to each other.

An individual’s adoption of Magic’s reality-settings as their own is thus a practice of initiation

Through Technic’s education, one learns to become a better ‘processor’: a better engineer, professor, nurse, father, lover, citizen and so on. Education in the age of Technic has to do, predictably, with the acceleration of the pace with which an ‘abstract general entity’ can contribute to the overall expansion of as many productive series as possible. Ultimately, all forms of education in Technic’s world are merely forms of training. p210

Conversely, the process of initiation is aimed precisely at producing in its subject a radical transformation at the existential and ontological level. After initiation, a person ceases to be merely the sum of their linguistic and productive dimensions, while beco­ming also a manifestation of the ineffable dimension that constitutes existence in itself.

The person initiated to Magic’s reality is at the same time the galaxy of their names and complete silence... such a person is a paradox – and in this, it resembles precisely the world that Magic produces through its reality-frame.

The paradox of Magic’s initiation consists exactly in affirming that what isn’t linguistically solvable, is nonetheless ineffably inhabitable.

Likewise, a person who has adopted Magic’s reality-system treats the descriptively linguistic structures of the world as if s/he accepted their claim to existence. How could one traverse the world, if one was to fully reject the linguistic labels that distinguish one thing from another, or to the conventions that distinguish between noise and sound? Yet, such a belief is always performed at a distance, always shrouded in the caveat of the as if.

Indeed, Magic’s initiation is a form of theurgy - but one in which the subject, the object and the process itself all merge into one entity.

Yet, such ‘political’ aims are not the main reasons behind a person’s adoption of Magic’s reality-setting. Rather, they come as welcome consequences, in the same manner that the adoption of anarchist ‘prefigurative’ practices (i.e. living already as if we had achieved radical emancipation) has public, macro-political consequences only as a symptom, rather than as its primary aim. In fact, the parallels between anarchic practice and an individual’s adoption of Magic’s reality-system in today’s world of Technic are more than superficial

Ernst Jünger, whom we briefly encountered in Chapter 1, began his century-long literary career by identifying Technic as the reality-principle of the contemporary age, while proposing to wholeheartedly embrace its reshaping of the world and of our lives within it....It was only after the Second World War, at the dawn of the atomic age, that Jünger radically modified the ethical direction of his philosophy.... Jünger recognized Technic’s nihilism as pure annihilation of any possibility of life, imagination and action in the world.

The anarchist is dependent - both on his unclear desires and on the powers that be. He trails the powerful man as his shadow; the ruler is always on his guard against him. ... The anarchist is the antagonist of the monarch, whom he dreams of wiping out.... The positive counterpart of the anarchist is the Anarch. The latter is not the adversary of the monarch but his antipode, untouched by him, though also dangerous. He is not the opponent of the monarch, but his pendant. After all, the monarch wants to rule many, nay, all people; the Anarch, only himself.

Safety is the ideological framework that allows Technic’s world to regulate the flow of its own becoming. A becoming made safe, is a becoming that is denied or transcended, but that is suspended. Securitarian ideology promises to the inhabitants of Technic’s world, a flow of becoming that is made frictionless, as if it was suspended in a vacuum.

This something - which we called ‘life’ - refuses to accept Technic’s absolute embrace of becoming and challenges its rejection of any form of eternity and stability. Life seeks to escape its pulverization into the whirlpool of endless becoming, and its pain resounds also as a request to find a place of stability to call its own. Life, even mortal life, always seeks to partake of eternity

Coherently with its overall cosmological structure, Technic presents activity as aimed primarily, if not exclusively, at increasing the instrumental potential of the world and of all its inhabitants.

Such ineffectuality of action in Technic’s world is the opposite, specular image of the supreme effectiveness of ritual action, as it’s been conceived since the dawn of time. ... Even the minuscule ritual sacrifice of a cup of milk, is capable of re-establishing the order of the whole universe.

Magic’s therapy consists precisely in helping the inhabitants of its world to exist at once inside and outside of the world, like its cosmogony created a universe that is at once in and out of language...salvation aims at actuality, unlike safety’s focus on potentiality...salvation refers to the rescue of an entity from its exclusive identification with its linguistic dimension, and to its acceptance also of the living, ineffable dimension of its existence.

It is only on the basis of one’s eternity, that one is capable of growing old and dying. This is not the traditional distinction between an immortal soul and a perishable body; rather, it is a distinction, within one’s very soul or body, of an eternal dimension and a perishable one. The linguistic dimension of existence always truly becomes, changes and vanishes, while the ineffable kernel of its existence always truly remains stable, eternal and in perfect unity with that of any other existent.