My last post was partly about the impossibility of psychic phenomena — especially telepathy. That is, the impossibility of thought to travel between minds in any other way than by a physical signal receivable and readable ultimately by the private machine language of the brain. In other words, I was taking a firmly materialist assumption of thought. Mind exists in matter, and cannot exist apart from it. But even as I was putting that argument into words, I felt uneasy, even (dare I say) “dirty.” I wasn’t sure if I actually believed what I was writing.

Do I actually think thoughts can only be material? Do I really not think that consciousness could have any kind of existence outside of physical neurons or circuits? Why do I think this?

The part of me that adheres to such a view is the product of Enlightenment rationality and psychology. Science has never questioned that the brain was the seat of thinking. The study of anatomy and observation of people with brain injuries since time immemorial has made clear the brain’s special role in thought—if only as some kind of transducer. It is possible even the ancient Egyptians knew about the special functions of certain of the brain’s lobes. By Freud’s time, even though neurons were not yet understood, he could create a theory of how the brain was essentially a machine for thinking. (The metaphor he used was hydraulics, because electricity was still new.)

Now, more than ever before, science is able to actually show us “thinking” as it occurs in the brain. We can map out what kinds of thoughts, what parts of our mental life, arise from activity in which areas and involve which specific circuits. It is even possible to record the firing of individual neurons and know their function in the organism’s behavior. From a rationalistic point of view, these advances put the material basis of thinking beyond question. They make it easy to dismiss the notion that a person’s mind, memories, sense of self, etc. – their “soul” – could depart the body, or survive beyond the decay or destruction of the body. The brain is more than a transducer, it seems: It’s where thought is born and lives, and where it has to stay. This makes most who study the matter of the mind dismissive of the notion of anything like the soul.

Why, then, do I feel like some kind of resentful spoilsport when I follow suit? I have no counterargument or alternative explanation for the self-evident materiality of mind, so why do I feel a twinge of guilt when I argue against psychic phenomena or disembodied thoughts in a blog post? Why do I feel like I have diminished myself ever so slightly? I’ve written before about the “rudeness of science,” but I don’t think my reaction was just guilt at being impolite or arrogant at dismissing what other people believe. I really think it is because this rationalistic/materialistic part of me is just that – a part of me, but not the entirety. I know that the brain is in the mind as much as the mind is in the brain.

“Diminishing oneself” is a real thing: pretending to be smaller than you are, crouching down to fit inside the cramped box of an identity (such as “rational skeptic”) – rather than standing tall within the fullness of your possibilities as a human. This kind of “crouching down” means restricting your vision, narrowing your gaze to only include some segment of what lies within your larger purview or field of awareness. Because any identity box is just an idea, it’s apparent limitations don’t really exist, so to make them convincing to ourselves and others they must be “mimed.”

I think we are all, even the wisest of us, to some extent like mimes doing the “trapped in a glass box” thing. It’s more than just playing or acting out our social roles; I’m referring to something inner, an inner sense of oneself. A banker who thinks that his identity as a businessman exhausts his possibilities as a human, is really just miming a reduced model of himself. A depressed person who keeps trying to fit every fact about their life into their diagnosis is likewise caught up in a mime act. Same with any identity: Black, White, Woman, Man, Gay, Straight, Christian, Jew, Atheist… When I, even in the privacy of my own head, put on the pompous airs of a scientist who can explain why the soul doesn’t exist, I am really miming a constraint in my thinking that doesn’t necessarily need to be there. I’m pretending to be smaller or more limited than I really am.

There are certain “glass boxes” we have a hard time questioning. Science, because it is so persuasive and powerful, is one of them. But the more a thing seems self-evident, the more it should be questioned and challenged. In this way, we make ourselves bigger. (That kind of fundamental skepticism should help sharpen science, too.)

All this is to say, I suppose, that I’m going to try to be more open minded.

I’ve been writing here lately about UFOs, which is something of a departure for me. But for a long time I’ve been interested in things Fortean—amazing or paranormal experiences, mysticism, the occult and the paranormal, or fringe-science topics like extraterrestrials and Bigfoot—in short, things that transcend the humdrum and everyday. Part of the reason is, I’m interested in what it means when someone witnesses something (like a flying saucer or a tall hairy hominid) “with their own eyes.” Those of a Fortean bent are necessarily interested in, and are committed philosophically to, the value and validity of individual experience.

Individual experience is, in a very fundamental way, opposed to science, and the scientific method. The latter is a set of processes whereby the individual, subjective experiencer, the human, is removed as much as possible from the gathering of knowledge about the world. This presents a problem for Forteans who also, like me, consider themselves scientists.

I think this conflict is worth confronting, because it may shed light on some of the cultural fascination with Fortean subjects. I’ve watched a lot of documentaries about Bigfoot and UFOs in the last few years, and the antagonism between science and experience can be seen clearly in all of them. One of the universal elements in such films is the token skeptic representing “the Scientific Establishment” (as Peter Graves puts it in my favorite Bigfoot film, The Mysterious Monsters). This character is the one who throws cold water on our belief; he is invariably portrayed as the Enemy, the antagonist, the stubborn authority who refuses to accept the weight of firsthand accounts. In debunking the phenomenon in question, he’ll point out the susceptibility of the mind to tricks of the imagination, to social fads, and to wishful thinking. In other words, this person distrusts personal experience, no matter how seemingly sane or sober.

This “skeptic” character clues us in to the appeal of Bigfoot and other “paranormal” phenomena. It is not simply that people wish for Bigfoot or UFOs to be real in order to give some meaning to their lives, or because they want something to believe in. (Although, sure, it’s partly that—we all, on some level, “want to believe.”) The other part is this: We–we Forteans, we back-woods Rednecks, we ordinary people–are rooting for Bigfoot or for UFOs to be real because these things represent the hope, the real possibility, that science could just for once lose the epistemological wrestling match against personal experience.

The “American religion,” as Harold Bloom has observed, is essentially Gnostic, based on the fundamental value of personal experience. This “religion” is visible in all our current debates over things like global warming and Creationism. This puts Forteans who, like me, are basically rational liberal agnostics, in strange company. What rational liberal agnostic Forteans have in common with conservative American Christians is a resentment of the meta-message of science: that the testimony of our eyes, and of common sense, is invalid.

No one likes to be told that the sense they make of the world and their lives is mistaken—it is invalidating in the extreme—and yet “you are wrong” is the tacit signal sent by most science, from Galileo right down to modern neuroimaging. A scientist telling me that my worldview is inaccurate or biased, that what my parents taught me at their knee is untrue, and that what I may have seen with my own eyes on a desolate road or over a cornfield is an error, is not going to win me as a friend.

This is why I cringe every time an eminent liberal humanist scientist like Richard Dawkins writes a book about why God doesn’t exist. Such prophets of science have fallen prey to the delusion that humans are governed principally by reason, and that they persist in holding unreasonable beliefs simply because they have not been exposed to the scientific evidence. But people will go to great lengths to defend their right to bear their experience. Put yourself in the shoes of someone raised in a conservative Christian community: If this apostle of science seems to belong to a culture that I am alienated from and that represents values I have been brought up to abhor, his rational arguments will only galvanize my own knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, my anti-scientism.

I use the phrase “right to bear experience” advisedly, because there is some way in which the gun debate in America directly reflects this basic rift between science and experience. Arguments against gun ownership tend to follow the same lines, and to preach to the same choir, as arguments for evolution or global warming; they point to evidence as if facts, statistics, trends, etc. were enough—that you just have to make people wake up and smell the data. Proponents of science are unaware that rational scientific discourse conjures the image of someone who “knows better” coming into one’s home and snatching away one’s ability to construct one’s own worldview out what one’s elders have tought one at their knees and, most importantly, what one has seen with one’s own eyes. It is exactly akin to the Redneck bogeyman fantasy of a liberal bureaucrat coming into one’s home and taking away one’s firearm.

The individual is sovereign in our hearts, whether we consider ourselves liberal humanists or conservative Fundamentalists. Scientists and writers who seek to popularize science would do well to recognize this fact. Though I consider myself a scientist, I hate how offensive and tactless science often is. I wish it would learn some manners. And I wish scientists would come up with some new way of talking that accepted and honored the sovereignty of personal experience as something more than simply a negligible statistic (the n of 1). Because the fact of the matter is that no one, not even a scientist, can receive science or scientific data except via a subjective, biased, personal experience. We live in our experience, and there is, in the end, no escaping it.

The point of such a recognition would not be to reawaken the whole early-1990s constructivist-deconstructionist move, catching science in unproductive loops of navel gazing and self-critique, but rather to make science more polite, more tactful, or more humane. Science will be more successful, the more it learns to win friends and influence ordinary people. In the meanwhile, scientists will continue to be cast as the Enemy in documentaries about UFOs and Bigfoot and all the other things that are not dreamt of in their philosophy.

“Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” (Aldous Huxley)

In thinking about Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens, we should consider not just the story of the race of Hippomenes and Atalanta, but also how Venus obtained the golden apples in the first place.

Retrieving the golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides, at the Western end of the earth, was one of the labors of Hercules. Hesperides comes from hesperios [fem. of Gr. hesperis, meaning ‘of the evening’ or ‘western’]. Hesperis is Venus in its appearance as the Evening Star. (Hesta, in Greek, became the Roman deity Vesta, from which we also get vesper, meaning evening, and vespers, the sixth of the seven canonical hours and the prayers said in the early evening–but I digress.) The garden was guarded over by nymphs (the Hesperides themselves) and by a dragon, Ladon. Dragons are omnipresent in our Art. This one, Ladon, connects to latona, mother of Apollo and Diana and cabalistically equivalent to latten or brass. This is the theme of emblem XI: “Whiten Latona and Burn Your Books.” It should also be noted, for what it may be worth, that Latona also resembles Latin, the literary language of the ancient world and the language in which most European alchemical texts (including this one) were penned.

If we divide the name of the garden differently, we arrive at hes+perides: hes- may remind us of haes, L. haeserare, “to hold fast” (as in hesitate). And perides may relate to pyrite—i.e., fool’s gold, a form of iron. Could it be that the “golden apples” aren’t true gold, but rather some false gold merely meant to capture Atalanta’s desire? The English word “fool” actually has an alchemical origin, by the way: It comes from the Latin word follis, which means “bellows.” The very definition of a misguided alchemist was a “puffer,” someone who wasted his life with his bellows, stoking a fire, slavishly, literal-(letter-al)-mindedly, following the instructions in his books.

Iron pyrite, or Iron sulfide, takes a metallic crystalline form, and was used in firearms of the period Maier was writing because it sparks when struck against a flint. Pyrite was also sometimes used to mean flint because it was believed that the fire was inside of this stone. Flint had other uses near to the heart of our Art, however: A ‘touchstone’ is a hard piece of flint used to test the purity of gold or silver. The streak left by the metal when scratched across its surface was compared with that of a standard alloy. The origins of flint are mythologically attributed to Mercury, and can also be found in Ovid. The story makes an irresistible digression:

While he was thinking only of his love, and comforting himself with his reedpipes, his cattle, unguarded, so the story goes, strayed into the fields of Pylos. There Maia’s son, Mercury, espied them, and by his cunning drove them off and hid them in the woods. No one had noticed the theft, except one old man, well-known in the neighborhood, whom everyone called Battus. His duty was to patrol the glades and grassy meadows of wealthy Neleus, keeping watch over his herds of pedigree mares. Mercury was afraid of Battus, and so he led him aside and said coaxingly: ‘Whoever you are, my friend, if anyone should happen to ask for these herds, say that you haven’t seen them. Here is a sleek cow, as a reward for doing me this favour.’ The other took the cow he gave him, and replied: ‘Go on your way, you are quite safe.’—and pointing to a stone, he added: ‘Sooner will that stone tell of your theft than I.’ Jove’s son pretended to depart; but later he returned in a different guise, and spoke in a different voice. ‘Herdsman,’ he said, ‘if you have seen any cattle passing this way, help me, and do not be party to a theft by keeping silent. In return you will have a bull and its mate for yourself.’ Now when the reward was doubled, the old man was tempted. ‘You will find them at the bottom of those hills’—and in fact, that was where they were. Mercury laughed. ‘You rogue,’ he said. ‘You would betray me to my face? Actually betray me to myself?’ and he turned the faithless heart to hard flint, the stone which even today is called ‘touchstone.’ The innocent rock still bears the stigma of that shameful deed of long ago.

So, there is perides and pur … and if you are at all getting the hang of cabala certain other possibilities will no doubt have occurred to you. But file those away in the back of your mind and return your attention to me, your teacher and guide, for one more minute, because I want to impart to you one last observation. It may be worth noting that Hesperides sounds very much like experiment, the very method of the Art we are considering. Most dictionaries will assert that experiment comes from L. experire, “to try or test”—of which we may take the touchstone as a model—but the real root will be obvious even to a schoolchild: Ex-, as anybody knows, means “from,” and peri means “near” or “around.” The same two roots form the basis of experience.

Here it is useful to remember what every alchemical writer says about the First Matter chosen for the subsequent transformation into the Philosopher’s Stone: It is something that is all around us, close at hand, and thus cheap, or even despised by the majority of people.