The Theory of Causal Reference
Graham Hancock’s valiant, notable life work attempts, largely in archeological terms and archeological records, to assemble unlikely concepts heretofore found only in Theosophical works such as those of Blavatsky, Sinnett and Steiner (https://grahamhancock.com). We want our positive project on conversation and consciousness to link to this unlikely chain of magic and prehistoric science, replete with pentacles and talismans, and to make it again workable, as it was among the ancients, as a social force. We propose to do this with a new understanding of language, an understanding we expect to lead to a kind of sociological interferometry, to a technique by which ancient cosmological concepts can be observed directly by positive science and compared directly with the modern ones.
The basic Theosophical conception of humanity and its characteristic self-consciousness is an origin not in blind electrochemical evolution on the earth’s surface but in an astral body constituted inwardly by an immature but self-similarly developing mass of rigid starlight, but which is guidable by the variable but rigid, parallel pressures in its environment. It is this cosmic guidance of the astral body or soul that makes for the sense and significance of the cycles of personal life and personal death, for its free floating non-biological existence, presumed to recur either regularly or irregularly in pursuit of a final or self-satisfactory equilibrium.
Much of the effect of its search for cosmological equilibrium comes from the astral body’s capacity for representation, analogy, memory or imagination. Memory is a function of the confused inner mass of the astral body naming or of having named things, of having gained sympathetic contact with something ordered and external and of having made a copy of it. This inner copy produces a fascinated, necromantic will in the astral body, and leads to its cosmic adventure. In the beginning was the Word, the Word stayed with God and the Word, more or less, turned out to be God himself.
It thus appears more or less required that to get a theory of consciousness and of the godlike astral body we will need a necromantic- or fascination-tinged theory of what language does. One very good theory, we think, of what language actually does is the Causal Theory of Reference, thought up in the 1970s and published in 1980 by Saul Kripke, then Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Kripke proposed anything a name can be about reaches the user of that name by a causal chain, often from a very remote past, that originates in the baptismal use of that name by a usually small social gathering as the rigid designator of that thing. In this way, society and conversation produce the chain of reality, of self-consciousness and its effects.
It will go more or less without saying that daily human self-consciousness goes around naming (identifying) things, in particular things of interest, all the time and in great, albeit generally subconscious, profusion. Without the subconscious stability afforded by the names of things consciousness would become disoriented very quickly, even mad. What needs to be articulated now, publicly and as effectively as possible, in a world dangerously disoriented from what should be its unity of political purpose and assent, is the names of things have deep, satisfying anchors in reality. Names matter. Whenever, using names, we speak or listen, we are in direct, exclusionary touch with a single reality in the past.
The exclusionary reality of such contact has or should have moral gravitas. Superficial talk should increasingly be rejected and replaced by something related to necromantic conjuration, which by nature always compels the attention. Freedom is not so much obedience to fashion and subjective preference as attention to the causal depth of the cosmological past and the cosmogenic order. Freedom is willed conformity with necessity, and death and its transformation is necessary. Terrestrial society everywhere will do well to adapt in perpetually novel ways to this form of freedom.
Graham Hancock’s essays on the enchanted, cosmogenic past have some important parallels, and we propose to introduce one of these here. It is to introduce conjuration into the conversational uses of naming and reference. We wish us to begin to identify conversation with magic itself, with the pre-historic, natural and spontaneous ur-theory of consciousness. Our own essays in art, science and engineering, beginning with this website, will aim to give us all an advanced form of this identification.
