Introduction to part IV of Mithopoetics: Numen

     The presentation that I have made up to this point of the symbolic constructions of human identity carried out throughout the past ages, has followed an evolutionist point of view as far as possible. Drawing from the richness of our turbulent past, I have tried to develop humanistic psychology that on the ground of philosophical anthropology follows the increasing complexity of our symbols and identity narratives. Starting from economic survival activities, humans have developed complex and fascinating symbolic buildings that determine our identity and that of the cosmos. By trying not to give transcendentalist interpretations, I have tried not to start constructing the building from the roof, but also, I have tried not to base our understanding of the cosmos on imaginal constructions that, although have their origin in genuine deep psychological tendencies, accumulate large quantities of sediment made of errors and ghosts. These can do more harm than good to the purpose of including in our cognitive picture our most basic humanity, rooted in simpler forms of Life-Intelligence.

    What has been left out of Mithopoetics so far requires now its presence for two reasons. On the one hand, since our mythical actions are fully liminal actions that escape our well-intentioned attempts to make them liminoids, it is necessary (for the stated purposes) to make an honest attempt to say something about the "Terra Ignota" that is on the other side of the milestones and self-imposed terms. It is now necessary to look under the veil of Isis beyond the mythical-ritual axes. It is about entering decisively into the terrain of the Numen, of what is radically Other in relation to Life-Intelligence as it has been treated in the pedestrian and economic ways of the previous chapters of Mithopoetics, adding to the basic social perspective of the other three parts, a deep psychological perspective about the most hidden identity of the human being. The Transzendentale Schein and the epistemological antinomies mark a fascinating frontier that gives way to imaginal non-places and landscapes that seem to function with different cognitive principles. If we understand these illusions as limitations of the developed epistemological system, the need to define a new suprarational and supra-emotional system is imposed. This will imply the loss of anchorage with the mythical-ritual axis of the present in the Western World and much of Asia: a mixed mythical plane of the mythical-ritual axes of Human Law and Universal Law, as we discussed previously. What "suprarational" and "supra-emotional" mean will become clear with the exposition of this part of the book. It would be about the construction of primitive identity narratives, metaphysical narratives, that incorporate the numinous component of our identity as the unifying nucleus of identity on which to develop the economic actions that correspond to that deep identity. Its range seems to hide promises of unlimited existential breadth and it is time to reverse the order we have followed up to here to build our myths. So far, with the inherent limitations of a primitive identity, economic actions determined the consequent metaphysical interpretative actions of identity, which we have called “primitive narratives”. However, today our hair is burning with climate change and ecological disasters, caused by the instrumental rationality of the mythical-ritual axes of Human Law. The urgency is devastating and creates a very complicated situation: we need to bring about a large-scale human change without it being accompanied by an Apocalypse of the species.

    On the other hand, what I have left out of Mythopoetics, the deep numinous component of existence, treated and understood from its own assumptions, and not as a mere academic anthropological talk, comes to look for me at this moment in my life with an intensity overwhelming and persistent: the adventure involves a shift in focus akin to the psychological shift necessary for the treatment of Human Numen. Academic structures, linked to the mythico-ritual axes of the societies in which they thrive, cannot take steps in the directions that are now necessary. The New Religion, the technical science, prevents the passage of any heresy, and heresy is the attempt to develop a suprarational and supra-emotional knowledge (let's call it supramental for short, although these concepts will have to be clarified much further).

    However, this road is not a path drawn in a vacuum. The study of the Numen has been partly covered by Perennial Philosophy, although many times, its necessary secrecy (a mere survival strategy in dark ages, (although with a more complex casuistic than simple survival that will be explained in its due time)) and the dangerous methods of Numen science (that enters where reason sees only its own darkness) have made the entire knowledge of Human Numen gibberish in the hands of charlatans and schizophrenics. The science (in the widest and more artistic meaning of the word for knowledge) of Human Numen, the science of Life-Intelligence, will have to be anchored in the world of our vital experience, but not in the vital experience like the one that has brought us to this disaster, but in a "Vita Nuova", using Dante's expression, an immanent and cosmic Life-Intelligence anchored in the depths of her Transcendental Mystery.