Book Review: EPOCH – Part 1

Over the last several months I learned that I shouldn’t declare the subject of my next post in advance. This constitutes an important lesson, for if I had not promised to review EPOCH, I likely would have a few more posts up by now on other subjects. I imagined a simple and quickly written essay, as I read the book excitedly in only three days when it came out, but it turned out that I needed to put some time between readings in order to get the most out of them and in the meantime I’ve been introduced to sources of information that have subtly changed the way I see certain issues that will prove useful when I finish the review. As I want to get back to writing about other things (and because the first part got lengthy), I’ve decided to break the review up into two or three parts (probably three). However, I won’t write these back-to-back, as I want to actually work with the material in the book before saying more. I could crank out a cursory examination and critique from a theoretical stance, but I feel a practitioner’s point-of-view will cover more ground with more insight and ultimately seem more useful to others. Accordingly, this first part deals with only the first couple chapters – the theory sections. I make no promises as to when I’ll write the later parts.

Another interesting thing happened in the last few months – Scott Alexander created a rather interesting map of the rationalist community and included this blog as tangentially related, setting it specifically in the category of “postrationality”. This has led to a lot of discussion about what “postrationality” means. The best explanation so far comes from Darcey Riley on her blog Yearly Cider, and I suggest people look there for clarification. I agree with her take on postrationality so far and have no objections to accepting the label for myself. To me, it seems like the combination of reason and intuition, science and religion, that I normally assume as the default in magick. I have my own thoughts on the matter, of course, and will likely write about them eventually, but I want to wait for the idea to develop more fully first.

A large increase in readership has resulted as a consequence of this blog’s inclusion on the map of the rationality movement, many of whom I must assume count themselves as rationalists. I had always planned to write for an intellectual audience, but now I wonder about framing discussions of magick in a way that doesn’t set off rationalist alarm bells. Fortunately, this particular segment of the rationalist community seems rather different from some others; many of them have read Robert Anton Wilson and Aleister Crowley, and some practice sigil magick and/or tulpamancy (a practice that looks quite similar to servitor creation from Chaos magick, among other things). They even anthropomorphize emergent structures as various gods, although I think they do so sloppily and will have to discuss this in the later posts in this series.

So, it seems appropriate that my first post to overtly discuss magick concerns Chaos magick, of a type that appeals most strongly to atheists, materialists, and skeptics, as it provides an explanation of magick beyond mere psychological effects, one which the scientifically minded should find acceptable, so long as they remain open to such an explanation. Not everyone will agree. There exist pseudo-skeptics out there that stop thinking upon hearing the word “magick”, not realizing that magick does not mean “impossible miracles” or “fantastical nonsense” or even “mysterious”; such things do occur in the lore, but act more as distractions than definitions. Nor does it represent a word devoid of meaning which one can conveniently fill with a meaning of one’s choice. It instead refers to a historically persistent and culturally universal set of ideas and practices that has connections with, and relevance to, pretty much all of human experience.

There exist also other types of Chaos magickians that don’t like Carroll’s ideas past his first book, thinking them too rational and preferring instead what appears to me as possibly insane absurdist solipsism. I don’t have an answer for them. In the possible range of human interests, some people prefer art to science or vice-versa; as a postrationalist, I prefer somewhere in the middle with a moderate bias towards science. I suspect Carroll does too, which explains why I like his writing (even when I disagree) and I think many rationalists will as well.

As usual with my book reviews, I intend to summarize the text in some detail and provide commentary in the process. This will make the review rather long. You can find an excellent and more traditional book review here.

On with the review…

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Peter J. Carroll wrote the Esotericon & Portals of Chaos (EPOCH) as his 6^th book, this time in collaboration with Matt Kaybryn, who did the artwork for the accompanying Portals of Chaos card deck. For those who don’t know, Carroll previously authored Liber Null & Psychonaut, Liber Kaos, Psybermagick, The Apophenion, and The Octavo. He gained renown in occult circles with the release of Liber Null, for which many call him the ‘father’ of Chaos magic, and he writes with an exceptionally clear and concise manner that leaves one wondering how so few words can contain much so meaning, making anything he writes rather difficult to summarize.

From Psybermagick on, Carroll avoids using forms of the verb ‘to be’, employing E-prime to increase clarity and condense meaning further. I adopt this style in homage for this review, even though it slows down my writing process somewhat and results in some awkward constructions. Although using Aleister Crowley’s spelling of “magick” in Psybermagick, all of Carroll’s other writings use the spelling “magic” (which I also use for this review, despite my usual preference), and his disdain for Crowley’s philosophy becomes clear in the EPOCH.

While Liber Null consists of the stripped down basics of magical techniques, constituting the beginning instructions of Chaos magic, Liber Kaos presents a brand-new magical theory, one designed for a rational, scientific, and atheistic worldview based on equations for how magic manipulates probability. Psybermagick extends Chaos Magic Theory (CMT) and provides numerous other challenging ideas in multiple subjects. The Apophenion, among other things, introduces the idea of Apophenia, that moment of realization when one finds meaning in a seemingly random pattern, and proposes turning it into a goddess and invoking her directly to produce epiphanies. The Octavo contains mostly physics and gives equations describing a universe where not only does magic work, but it requires magic to function at all. From Liber Kaos on, Carroll has elaborated on CMT, along with his alternative cosmological theory that he now calls Vorticitating Hypersphere Cosmology (VHC), both of which currently find their most elaborate expression in The Octavo, with continuing updates on his blog. Thus far, all of Carroll’s books have built upon his previous works, and the EPOCH doesn’t differ in this regard, but in other respects it represents a very different type of book, accessible to those not thoroughly familiar with his earlier ideas and concerned mostly with the concepts graphically suggested in the card deck.

With superb production quality, the hardbound over-sized book has over 200 thick, full-color, photo-quality pages. The pictures of the Portals of Chaos deck appear full-size in the book, and only slightly less shiny than the cards. Because of its odd size (9” tall and 10.5” wide), large number of large pictures, tons of blank space, and up to three columns of small font text per page, determining the actual ‘length’ of the book seems difficult. It feels longer than Carroll’s earlier works, but didn’t seem to take longer to read. It made me wish for the expression of book length in word count instead of pages.

The 54 cards have the same large size (9” (22.9cm) by 5.69” (14.4cm)) as the pictures in the book, but the borders on the cards render their pictures somewhat smaller (7.69” (19.5cm) by 4.69” (11.9cm)).  Having the cards so large makes them kind of flimsy, and thicker cardstock would likely improve them, but their intended use in ritual as altar pieces, rather than as divination tools, makes their thinness a non-issue.

The EPOCH contains three grimoires (one each for elemental, planetary, and stellar magic), although only the grimoire of stellar magic, a manifestation of the Necronomicon, appears in classical grimoiric form with implements to construct and explicit rituals to perform to conjure a set of entities. The other two grimoires seem less robust in comparison, presenting only the entities for the elements and planets, and mostly leaving the mage to figure out what to do with them while giving sparse suggestions. This actually seems appropriate though, as the forces dealt with move from simple and general to complex and specific to complex and general, requiring greater detail towards the end. Subsequent parts of this review will cover the grimoire chapters themselves, but first comes the rationale for them.

Chapter 1

This introduction to the whole work provides a sweeping overview of the history of magic in the western world, justifying the ideas to follow and setting them in a historical context. Nothing here will appear new or mind-blowing to anyone who has kept up with the history of magic for the last couple decades, but it does tell the story with Carroll’s characteristic flair and brevity. Beginning with the era of the Greek Magical Papyri, when a great synthesis of magical ideas occurred in the cosmopolitan world of the late Roman Empire, Carroll traces the development of what he calls Platonic Pagan Monotheism (PPM) from Greek philosophy on through Neoplatonism and Christianity. The main idea in PPM consists of the perfect existence of The One, which gets equated with God, and from which depend all the various gods and spirits as aspects or emanations. Up until rather recently, all western occultism derived from this system, including Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Kabala, all of which developed in the first few centuries of the common era in the crucible of ideas mixing Platonism, monotheism, and paganism.

Carroll emphasizes that the utility of paganism, with its multiple and diverse deities providing better handles for dealing with the complexities of human psychology, ensured that it could never suffer extinction. Monotheism imposes a vision of a single self, judged by a single god and suggesting a ‘unified’ and ‘stable’ singular personality as an unquestioned good. Paganism gives us a more realistic picture of our psychology, one where we can have conflicting motivations, ideas, and emotions and seek different types of experiences for different ‘selves’. The idea of the personal multimind has remained a constant of Carroll’s ideas since Liber Kaos, and finds expression in the work of modern psychology and cognitive science as well. As a result of its utility, paganism got incorporated into the esoteric systems that developed, and even Christianity adopted its methods with the proliferation of saints and icons to take the place of the pagan gods.

The preservation of ancient magic and philosophy by Muslims during the dark ages comes next, with mentions of the Picatrix and other medieval grimoires, up until the fall of Byzantium sends ancient texts westward and inaugurates the Renaissance. Christian Cabbalah emerges at this time from the intersection of Christianity with Kabala and Hermeticism. Carroll says that this time period led to our stereotype of the scholarly wizard searching through old dusty texts, although it seems to me that this image should have also existed in the time of the library of Alexandria.

The Enlightenment, initiating the beginnings of modern science and the industrial revolution, marks the onset of the age of reason and the decline of religious worldviews. Notably, the work of Newton, despite his intense devotion to esoteric studies, showed that the world could work mechanistically without any god perpetually tinkering with it, while Darwin realized that creatures didn’t get designed ex nihilo by some benevolent creator, but evolve through random and harsh circumstances. The world appeared disenchanted, and so, spurred by colonial expansion encountering interesting religious cultures and the backlash of Romanticism to industrialism, a new esoteric revival seemed assured.

Sure enough, the magical revival of the late 19^th century manifested and found its most enduring expression in the work of Samuel Liddel Mathers, who cobbled together various streams of esoteric thought into what we now call the Golden Dawn system of magic. Using Kabala as a framework, and inspired by ancient mystery traditions, Mathers synthesized vast amounts of occult lore into a debatably coherent and somewhat cohesive structure combining Tarot, Astrology, Geomancy, Paganism, Monotheism, Spiritualism, Freemasonry, and Dr. John Dee’s Enochian magical system.

Although virtually all Western magical traditions today owe a great debt to Mathers’ influence, the system he devised remained built upon the PPM model. The combination of an abstract monotheism with a loose mythological polytheism had great appeal to the nominally religious Victorians worried about the clash between pastoral Romanticism and soul-crushing industrialism.

In contrast to the praise Carroll gives to Mathers, he has little other than mockery for Aleister Crowley. Although crediting Crowley with adding sex and drugs to the collection of magical techniques, Carroll accuses him of creating a type of neo-satanism by inverting a few ideas. So instead of the doctrine of Original Sin, Crowley gives us the doctrine of the True Will, and instead of self-sacrifice he recommends self-indulgence. For the dying god in the form of Christ, Crowley enthrones the “Crowned and Conquering Spoiled Brat of the Aeon of Horus.” Carroll will have more to say on these points later on in the book.

But science kept progressing, revealing the universe as an unimaginably huge and uncaring place wherein our planet, civilizations, and individuals had no cosmic significance. The PPM model of the all-perfect Unity/God descending through successive emanations into material manifestation looked increasingly naïve. As the atheist trends in Western societies grew more popular, religious functions got replaced by sciences, and gods (when people thought of them at all) came to symbolize psychological structures in the mind and sources of moralistic myths. For over 2000 years, people thought spirit controlled and formed matter, but now it appeared to happen in reverse, with matter giving rise to mind and/or spirit.

Yet, replacing God with Man, as Crowley attempted, seemed unsatisfactory. Science revealed the sheer horror of our fragility on our little ball of life in the mostly empty and extremely hostile vacuum of space. Humans appeared as puny inconsequential creatures, and if we wanted to find superior intelligences it seemed best to look towards the stars. And so, with humanity transfixed by the potentially awesome and likely dangerous inhuman beings on other worlds, H.P. Lovecraft began writing science fiction mixed with horror.

The Elder Gods that Lovecraft came up with possess knowledge and powers which could prove hazardous to humans. Carroll lists these as: “Direct power over the mind and the brain itself, power over the core processes of biology, the power of creating life and physical immortality, the understanding of the strange and secret geometries of the universe at both the cosmic and quantum levels, and the power to manipulate them, the powers of chaos and of creation itself.” Whereas for Lovecraft these ideas constitute “Things Which We Should Not Know”, that kind of tease has always motivated magicians to investigation. Thus, Carroll proposes using the Elder Gods as imaginary stand-ins and psychic anchors for accessing alien knowledge that almost certainly exists somewhere in the universe. Adding only slightly to CMT, he suggests that information leaks weakly across space-time in a non-local manner. By invoking gods and elder gods, humans create psychic links to information that allows for interaction in a personable manner with otherwise abstract concepts – as has been done since the days of unadulterated animism and shamanism.

In answer to the Fermi Paradox (with alien civilizations so probable, why don’t we see any?) Carroll contends that interstellar travel seems either impossible or else so resource intensive that civilizations see it as unprofitable. Alternatively, perhaps an interstellar civilization has access to an unimaginably great energy source, and if so, it would seem very unlikely that they would find us or our planet of any interest at all. Even if they did investigate us, they would undoubtedly have the ability to avoid detection.

Carroll names the emerging metaphysical theory Quantum Neo-Pagan, in contradistinction to the PPM. Keep in mind that, unlike many New Age authors who use “quantum” to mean something like ‘mysterious’ in order to give their ramblings the appearance of scientific credibility, Carroll usually does nothing of the sort. The amount of physics and math in his earlier books has deterred many a would-be Chaos magician, and the math in the EPOCH seems surprisingly sparse in comparison. Nonetheless, although he does base CMT on quantum mechanics and usually uses the word accurately, in this case with QNP he does appear to use “quantum” somewhat colloquially. Don’t let that fool you, however, into thinking he means anything like the nonsense New Age gurus mean by it (if you can figure out what they mean at all).

The main difference in the QNP model lies in replacing the ‘ultimate oneness’ at the top of the PPM model with a multitude of imaginary extraterrestrial Elder Gods who act as repositories for whatever actual alien intelligences in the universe that possess the forbidden knowledge we desire. The Kabalistic Tree of Life, for the last couple centuries, has served as the symbolic map for PPM, showing the descent of The One down through the celestial spheres culminating in the physical world. To reconcile the need for a symbolic map fitting the QNP model, Carroll will present a new glyph in the next chapter – the Chaobala.

(Get used to quirky naming conventions within Chaos magic. Carroll doesn’t call it ‘E-prime’, for instance, but ‘V-prime’ for vernacular prime, and eventually ‘Chaos Prime’ which also substitutes ‘we’ for ‘I’ in accordance with the multimind idea. Discordianism has had an important influence on Chaos magic as well.)

Lastly in chapter 1, Carroll summarizes the three grimoires:

“Elemental Magic. The Realm of the Elements, The Circle of ‘Imaginary Forces’

Here lie earth, air, fire, water, and aether, as archetypes of the physical forces and associated ‘spirits’ and servitors, the humoral personality traits and abilities, and the five basic magical operations of enchantment, divination, evocation, invocation and illumination.

Planetary Magic. The Realm of the Gods, The Sphere of ‘Imaginary Allies’

Here lie the eight, rather than seven, ‘planetary’ archetypes or archons where each of these god-forms represents one of the core emotive driving forces of the human psyche, and which create the human condition.

Stellar Magic. The Realm of the Elder Gods, The Hypersphere of ‘Imaginary Adversaries’

Here lie the archetypes of the higher knowledge and powers to which elements of humanity and many magicians aspire, despite the dangers they also bring with them.”

Chapter 2

Perhaps because the book concerns (and comes with) a deck of cards, Carroll begins chapter 2 with a brief history of tarot. Without any surprises, he tells the standard history of tarot arising as a card game in the 14^th century, getting adopted by fortune-tellers, misinterpreted as ancient Egyptian wisdom until hieroglyphics got deciphered, and finally acquiring esoteric associations with the Hebrew alphabet and Kabbalah in the 19^th century. When he asserts that the tarot trumps have no underlying scheme, consisting of essentially random images, it makes me wonder if he has not read Paul Huson’s excellent Mystical Origins of the Tarot, which gives a compelling argument that the trumps derive from well-known symbols and characters appearing in medieval Catholic mystery plays used to teach Christian mythology to a mostly illiterate society.

A good point gets made that the symbolic system occultists historically embedded in tarot by layering limited symbol sets one upon another yields a tarot that seems bloated and vague. Yet instead of suggesting an expanded tarot without  a 78 card restriction, the text switches to discussing the 54-card Portals of Chaos deck, which seems a little odd because aside from both consisting of “cards with pictures on them used by magicians”, they have little, if anything, in common with each other. Rather, the Portals deck consists of a pictorial collection of entities suitable for evocation and invocation, with only minor application to other types of workings. In contrast, the tarot, while useful in other types of magic, seems optimized for divination.

Next, Carroll gives a quick explanation of the advice to “Enchant Long and Divine Short”, talking about the exploitation of the indeterminacy that builds over time, and in particular citing the extraordinary difficulty of magic such that a 20% success rate with enchantment constitutes a useful skill, while 20% success rate in divination would lead to plenty of errors if acted on. He notes, however, that most diviners don’t do straight prediction so much as lateral thinking based off of the randomized symbols used in the divination. At this point, readers unfamiliar with Carroll’s theories might scratch their heads, as he talks about how “they may get a flash of certainty when intuiting an unexpectedly high probability sending a signal back from the future” which refers to his theory of three-dimensional time.

The discussion of divination transitions to a more detailed analysis of evocation and invocation by telling the reader that dealing with the cards as representations of god-forms for working with should come before divining or enchanting with them. Invocation consists of ritual procedures done with the goal of getting possessed by an entity, while evocation seeks only communication with, or command of, an entity. Such practices exist all over the world, and though magicians argue about the reality of the gods and spirits involved and how it all works, the techniques and expected outcomes remain the same. So while most religious systems and many modern day non-chaos magicians treat spirits as objectively real beings, Carroll says that most Chaos magicians believe that invocation involves “calling forth” hidden parts of our subconscious and that evocation involves creating an “imaginary friend by controlled schizophrenia using ritual procedures which, as in Invocation, provide protection against madness by using deliberate procedures of calling and banishing.” As such, its grounding in the psychological paradigm goes a long way towards appeasing atheists who might otherwise balk at the idea of conjuring spirits.

Religions tend to stick to evocation for communication in the form of prayer in order to connect with their god-form and receive its inspiration and influence, while often prohibiting invocation to possession and evocation for command because these tend to disrupt established hierarchies by producing novel revelations and power asymmetries. I suspect that a lot of the fracturing currently seen in Pagan and magical communities comes from the popularization of the techniques that generate new ideas and individualized traditions, but I don’t see this as a bad thing, merely a proliferation to refill a void, much like the explosions of biological diversity following mass extinctions. Eventually, I expect memetic processes to lead to the settling out of major systems and institutions will get built around them to handle the full range of personal revelations – hopefully.

Next come basic instructions on the use of the three grimoires. Magicians should work with the elemental cards by invocation and evocation, but only evocation for the simple elemental spirits (sylphs, salamanders, undines, gnomes, and sprites). This echoes the traditional advice, one doesn’t want to let a simplistic ‘lesser’ spirit possess them, likewise with gods or spirits with significantly negative traits. One should invoke the eight major planetary gods as they represent the basic selves of the integrated human personality and the magician seeks to let them all express themselves to gain psychological health. The bi-planetary gods in the system one can approach by invocation if one considers their traits desirable, or by evocation to gain allies (which Carroll here calls “daemons” as differentiated from “demons” which seem malicious and cause harm, consisting of malfunctioning psychological modules in his view). Dealing with the Elder Gods can easily produce demons and/or madness, and the magician should have a thoroughly integrated personality established by working with the planetary gods before considering encounters with the Elder Gods. This warning sees much repetition throughout the text, with the preparatory work analogized as building “sanity points”.

A short interlude follows with general advice on divination, particularly cartomancy. This almost seems obligatory simply due to having a deck of cards, even though their size makes sortilege awkward and they don’t seem particularly suited to divination. One suggestion in this section stands out to me – the idea that divining the state of knowledge of yourself in the future provides a ready magical link, because presumably you have a natural link with your future self.

At last we reach the presentation of the Chaobala, Carroll’s symbolic superstructure for arranging the forces and deities represented in the Portals of Chaos deck and meant as an analogous replacement for the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. In brief, at one end we find the five elements representing a simple break down of our physical reality on earth, and at the other end five Elder Gods who represent dangerous knowledge and various transhuman and alien ideas. Between the two lies the “Octaris Mindstar”, a fully interconnected octagon suggesting a complex psychological model of combinations of the eight basic selves. The division seems like a natural one into world, self, and other. Between the three realms lie two transition spheres: Baphomet, representing the life of the biosphere or the World Soul lies between the elements and the psyche, and Nyarlathotep, who acts as the emissary of the Elder Gods.  Although Carroll says that the diagram resembles a neural network rather than a tree, with the magician capable of starting anywhere not just “the bottom”, the direction of ascent remains as clear to me as in the Tree of Life – Earth, Planets, Stars. Indeed, he says that rarely does a magician start off with the Elder Gods, and I imagine if one did so it would produce similar results to a program of Qabalistic magic that began with an attempt to cross the abyss at Da’ath.

Carroll makes a couple errors in this section. He calls the popular Hermetic version of the Tree of Life “the Naples arrangement”, attributing it to the Golden Dawn, when actually the ‘Naples arrangement’ refers to Crowley’s sort-of-dimensional correspondences for the Sephiroth on the Tree that he came up with while in Naples – descending from the top as in the PPM model: point, line, plane, solid, motion/time, consciousness, Ananda (Bliss), Chit (Thought), Sat (Being), and fulfillment. “The Kircher Tree” refers to the popular form of the Tree of Life used in modern Hermetic Qabalah since the 17^th century. Additionally, the statement “There is no part of me which is not of the gods.” did not originate with Crowley. He got it from Mathers, who got it from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

The description of the elemental and stellar pentagrams in the Chaobala mentions “secondary spheres” between the major ones, presumably much like in the central portion with the bi-planetary gods, but these oddly don’t actually appear in the diagram. One must imagine that the text refers to an early version of the glyph where the secondary spheres showed up in all three sections. Perhaps they made it look cluttered, or maybe their inclusion suggested the need for many more cards.

Despite these minor issues, the arrangement of the Chaobalistic pantheon seems reasonable. I have thought for many years now about the main idea – replacing the top of the Tree with a multitude and reversing the causality. The rejection and inversion of Neoplatonism seems like a growing realization among magicians; John Michael Greer refers to the emerging religious sensibility that rejects the idea of wanting to escape from the world, Jake Stratton-Kent talks about the monotheist derived, anti-cosmic, world-hating aspects inherent in Neoplatonism and Qabalah in his Geosophia. Several years ago, before reading these accounts, I decided to reject the cult of The One and purged my magic of the Qabalistic monotheism that comes with stock Hermeticism these days. So I sympathize with the need to redesign the Tree of Life – I did it myself to suit my own revelations.

So when Carroll writes, “Such transcendentalism, with its implicit denial of the value of the lower emanations, would not have appealed to the classical pagans, and today it fails to appeal to neo-pagans and post monotheist philosophers and psychologists. Every pantheon or cosmogony resumes a theory of what the mind does, or should do, and the theory that it should strive to become somehow beyond worldly things and attain a heavenly disembodied state no longer seems credible or attractive.”, I find myself nodding in agreement, and wondering about how magicians with wildly different beliefs about the nature of magic, spirits, and reality find themselves converging towards an idea that has seemed heretical for an astrological age.

Oh, yes, welcome to year 5 of the Age of Aquarius.

Book Review: Vitruvius

It’s been a few years since I started this blog with its only post thus far belatedly announcing the Age of Aquarius. At the time, I didn’t know if I wanted to take up blogging or not, just get the word out on an arcane bit of dubious astrology. In the intervening years, my interests have multiplied and it now seems like a good idea to write about some of them here. One activity I’ve recently taken up is to finally commit to reading many of the classics of pagan antiquity, and it seems best to write reviews of them to clarify my own thoughts and share them with others. I begin with Vitruvius, not because his work is particularly profound, but because the copy I have has been borrowed from a friend for a couple years now, and I would like to return it. Borrowed books are distasteful to me, as I agree with Crowley that any book worth reading is worth owning, so I’ll have to track down a copy to add to my library.

Additionally, this turned out to be rather long – over 4000 words. I decided not to split it in half and, instead, present it as a summary covering the whole book. I make no apologies for length or for dullness; I am not writing this to please anyone but myself and I’ve no cohesive point to make with it. Take it for what it is – my thoughts and notes on a book. Expect future non-review posts to make actual points, court controversial opinions, and perhaps have intended audiences.

Vitruvius wrote his only surviving work, “De Architectura”, sometime around 15 BCE. When it was rediscovered in 1414 and subsequently translated as “The Ten Books on Architecture” it became a major influence on Renaissance art and architecture through the work of men like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Though it would seem likely that it was among the sources for the Renaissance mage Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s “Three Books of Occult Philosophy”, I haven’t been able to find any references to Vitruvius in it. The ‘Ten Books’ total roughly 300 pages with each “book” about 30 pages divided into multiple “chapters” of only a few pages each, making it easy to read in small chunks.

Throughout the book are numerous references to classical architectural components and I found myself repeatedly wishing for an appended glossary. Book V begins with a comment about architectural books being difficult to understand due to obscure jargon and Vitruvius promises to explain any rare terms, but he doesn’t really seem to do so at any point and most descriptions don’t lead to understanding through context. Lest whole sections be rendered incomprehensible due to having no idea what many of the nouns mean, the average reader should simply resolve to frequently look up definitions. Among the words to expect: gnomon, entablature, architrave, abacus (not the calculator), astragals, plinth, cymatium, dentils, triglyphs, sima, tympanum, acroteria, mutules, metopes, scaena, tablinum, exedra, oeci, and cavaedium.

Right away, it’s apparent that this is a book replete with ancient pagan philosophy and science, with an indirect relevance to occultism, at least in a historical sense. Vitruvius begins by stating, “The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning”, by which he means the seven liberal arts, but also drawing (including perspective drawing with lines converging to a point, an art some have thought was ‘invented’ in the Renaissance), history, philosophy, medicine, and law. The medical theory seems to involve the avoidance of bad winds coming from swamps and building cities in places unexposed to such winds.  Knowledge of history is apparently important so that one can explain odd bits of traditional constructions to clients with charming stories, such as columns carved as people in a certain cultural fashion to remind those people of the burden of their defeat in some war or other.  As a master (archi-) of arts (techne), the idea of the architect as a jack-of-all-trades is echoed in the nearly identical course of study for the 9^th century wizard laid out in Picatrix, and informs the polymathic ambitions that later characterize the ‘Renaissance man’. After discussing the fundamental principles of arrangement, eurythmy, symmetry, propriety, and economy, as well as the construction of city walls, Book I ends with an interesting discussion of the winds in sets of 4, 8, and 24, their names and general properties, and the placement of streets to avoid gusts being channeled through them. It also describes a geometric way of determining north by a post in the ground casting a shadow and finding the midpoint between two points in the day when the shadow touches a given circumference.

Although Book II begins with a quaint fable about how solitary wild humans first started congregating in groups around the remains of forest fires, and following this discovery of fire proceeded to form tribes, speak languages, and build houses, the bulk of Book II concerns construction materials: brick, sand, lime, pozzolana (a type of volcanic ash used for cement that will set underwater), stone, and timber. The operating theory for Vitruvian materials science consists of the four elements, making this section largely incomprehensible even to modern magickians who treat the four elements as metaphysical qualities and leave material qualities to the modern elemental theory of chemistry. Vitruvius is likely correct about the properties of the materials he describes, but his explanations for how those properties arise seem rather simplistic and erroneous from a modern perspective. Though we should keep in mind that he was giving the standard scientific understanding of the day, and though we may prefer the greater utility of our modern theories, they may seem just as primitive to scientists a few millennia hence (if there are any). In all cases, we need to be aware of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the Narrative Fallacy, wherein we automatically generate stories to explain the facts of our experience, with little regard for the truth or utility of such stories. It’s usually sufficient just to have a story.

Books III & IV describe the building of temples, almost entirely consisting of the proper proportions to be used and the geometry involved in ensuring symmetry, which all seems quite arbitrary by modern standards. The theory, of course, is that our buildings should mimic nature, and as evidence the proportions of the human body are described, from which da Vinci drew his Vitruvian Man image.

Proportion is defined as “a correspondence among the measures of the members of an entire work, and of the whole to a certain part selected as standard.” Interestingly, proportion is ‘analogia’ in Greek, from which we get ‘analogy’. As analogical thinking is the basis for the magickal theory of correspondences, this bit of trivia may come up again in future posts. Relevant to the construction of buildings, however, proportions dominate the instructions, ironically often in parallel with more recent drawings showing how far off various classical buildings are from the Vitruvian ideal. 

The greatest emphasis is on columns. Indeed, columns seem more important than walls in the descriptions, with great detail given for things like the proper narrowing of columns of different heights towards their tops such that they appear uniform to the eye, and the number and depth of ‘flutes’ gouged out along their length. Temples are classified by the numbers and arrangements of columns that surround a walled building housing the cult statue. The thickness and spacing (which gets its own word - “intercolumniation”) of columns is of structural concern for holding up the entablature. Artistically, columns come in three main types distinguished mostly by their tops or “capitals”. The Ionic style has what looks like rolled-up scrolls or ‘cushions’ on top, the Corinthian style displays leaves and flowers, and the Doric style is quite plain. The sheer numbers of huge nearly-identical columns required for any given building is impressive, and it’s a pity that the technical details of their manufacture are not given.

Book V discusses public buildings: the forum, basilicas (court houses), the treasury, prison, senate house, theaters, colonnades, bathhouses, palaestras (wrestling fields), harbors, breakwaters, and shipyards. Most of the detail focuses on the design of theaters with special attention to acoustics. Theaters are laid out in semicircles with divisions of areas determined by a dodecagram centered at the front of the stage. Chapter V “Harmonics” describes Greek musical theory, which I found both fascinating and barely comprehensible without further study. This is employed to describe an amplification system used in some theaters consisting of bronze sounding vessels designed to resonate with certain tones (he finally admits they are rare and I wondered if he’d seen them or just read of them and thought they were a good idea). These are then placed at geometric points among the seating for the audience in accord with the harmonic theory.

Book VI covers private houses, presumably for wealthy clients. He admits that if a lesser building must be designed to suit the environment, the available materials, or the limits of the client’s pocketbook, the architect must work within those bounds, holding the ideal in mind and making adjustments carefully. Houses are built around atriums and peristyles, large open spaces in the middle of buildings surrounded by columns, fountains, gardens, and artwork. A great variety of rooms lead off from there and considerations of lighting determine the placement of rooms. Bedrooms and libraries, for example, should have an eastern exposure, while galleries that need even light throughout the day should have windows in the north. Dining rooms differ by season, with Spring and Autumn in the east, Summer rooms in the north, and Winter dining rooms with a southwestern exposure. Country farmhouses require even more rooms for barns, storage, oil presses, and wine presses.

The introduction to Book VI recommends learning as the greatest asset, as one can’t lose it. Alzheimer’s must have been unknown, for he says, “All the gifts which fortune bestows she can easily take away; but education, when combined with intelligence, never fails, but abides steadily on to the very end of life.” He also quotes Theophrastus: “The man of learning is the only person in the world who is neither a stranger when in a foreign land, nor friendless when he has lost his intimates and relatives; on the contrary, he is a citizen of every country, and can fearlessly look down upon the troublesome accidents of fortune. But he who thinks himself entrenched in defences not of learning but of luck, moves in slippery paths, struggling through life unsteadily and insecurely.”

Before getting to the design of houses, Chapter I opens with a rather bizarre theory of racism. Starting with the logic that different climates require different types of houses, he reasons that climates also determine the differing qualities of the races: “In places on which the sun throws out its heat in moderation, it keeps human bodies in their proper condition, and where its path is very close at hand, it parches them up, and burns out and takes away the proportion of moisture which they ought to possess. But, on the other hand, in the cold regions that are far away from the south, the moisture is not drawn out by hot weather, but the atmosphere is full of dampness which diffuses moisture into the system, and makes the frame larger and the pitch of the voice deeper. This is also the reason why the races that are bred in the north are of vast height, and have fair complexions, straight red hair, grey eyes, and a great deal of blood, owing to the abundance of moisture and the coolness of the atmosphere.
                 On the contrary, those that are nearest to the southern half of the axis, and that lie directly under the sun’s course, are of lower stature, with a swarthy complexion, hair curling, black eyes, strong legs, and but little blood on account of the force of the sun. Hence, too, this poverty of blood makes them over-timid to stand up against the sword, but great heat and fevers they can endure without timidity, because their frames are bred up in the raging heat. Hence, men that are born in the north are rendered over-timid and weak by fever, but their wealth of blood enables them to stand up against the sword without timidity.”

Why do the races differ so? Well, you see, if we draw an imaginary line to the pivot point around which the sky revolves (currently Polaris) to our imagining of the southern horizon if the world were a flat disk, we get a triangle, and that resembles a harp-like instrument that the Greeks called a “sambuca” with long strings to the ground in the north producing low pitched notes, and short strings in the south making high pitched notes. Vitruvius thought that the atmosphere was thicker in the northern latitudes and thinner in the south; hence, he believed people in the south had squeaky high-pitched voices and also, incidentally, that it made them smart and clever, whereas people in the north were rendered dull-witted by the dense atmosphere. Only people in the temperate latitudes (i.e., Rome) win the Goldilocks-prize of just the right amount of atmosphere, sun, and moisture so that they can be intelligent, speak with moderately pitched voices, and have enough “blood” to supply the right amount of courage.  With typical Imperial apologetics, he concludes, “Hence, it was the divine intelligence that set the city of the Roman people in a peerless and temperate country, in order that it might acquire the right to command the whole world.” Perhaps this explains why he doesn’t discuss any styles of houses other than Roman and Greek.

Whereas most of the instructions have consisted thus far of proportions, in Book VII we begin to get practical instructions for finishing work like cement floors, stucco, vaulted ceilings, and fresco paintings. But first, as usual, comes a bit of social commentary. This time Vitruvius praises the ancient authors who left books transmitting their knowledge into the future. He condemns plagiarism, deeming it worthy of punishment, and tells a story about the well-read Aristophanes exposing plagiarists when judging a poetry contest. After he gives credit to the many authors he has learned from, he explains how he intends for his compendium of architecture to exceed all previous works on the subject before getting into practical details about building the layers of a floor, slaking lime for stucco, and framing vaultings with wood and mats of reeds. Powdered marble of ever finer grit provides the polished stucco surface, which is then ready for painting.

Before examining the sources of different colors of paint, Vitruvius devotes Chapter V to a rant about how the painting of images that are not realistic representations of things that actually exist is an affront to the principle of propriety and should not be tolerated, yet people with their poor critical faculties applaud the fantastical. “The fact is that pictures which are unlike reality ought not to be approved, and even if they are technically fine, this is no reason why they should offhand be judged to be correct, if their subject is lacking in the principles of reality”. He blames the trend of his day of painting impossible scenes, like plants with human heads, on the proliferation of bold colors that had become available to painters.

Of interest in the sections on colors are a few chemical processes which no doubt caught the attention of the alchemists. First, the extraction of quicksilver from cinnabar is described, and then a process for using quicksilver to recover gold that has been sewn into clothing. A process for oxidizing lead and copper with vinegar to make white lead and verdigris is also explained, as well as a method to make a blue pigment by heating copper with flowers of natron.

Being about hydrology, Book VIII begins with a brief discussion of the four elements emphasizing how food, water, breath, and warmth are necessary for life and conveniently supplied to us by nature.  There is evidence of an understanding of ecology, particularly the hydrologic cycle, i.e., speaking of Euripides, he says, “Earth, he held, was impregnated by the rains of heaven and, thus conceiving, brought forth the young of mankind and of all the living creatures in the world; whatever is sprung from her goes back to her again when the compelling force of time brings about a dissolution; and whatever is born of the air returns in the same way to the regions of the sky; nothing suffers annihilation, but at dissolution there is a change, and things fall back to the essential element in which they were before.” When talking about rainwater, he says, “The valleys among the mountains receive the rains most abundantly, and on account of the thick woods the snow is kept in them longer by the shade of the trees and mountains. Afterwards, on melting, it filters through the fissures in the ground, and thus reaches the very foot of the mountains, from which gushing springs come belching out.” Also, “Wherever the winds carry the vapour which rolls in masses from springs, rivers, marshes, and the sea, it is brought together by the heat of the sun, drawn off, and carried upward in the form of clouds; then these clouds are supported by the current of air until they come to mountains, where they are broken up from the shock of the collision and the gales, turn into water on account of their own fullness and weight, and in that form are dispersed upon the earth.”

Most of Book VIII describes many legendary springs with strange properties attributed to the different types of soil and the ‘juices’ they contain. Not only are there sulfur springs and hot springs, salty, bitter and sweet waters, but springs that emit oil, or asphalt, or pitch with their water; springs that are good for bathing but will kill those that drink from them, or make their teeth fall out, or make them intoxicated, or cure madness, or induce stupidity, or give good singing voices.  Given the potential dangers of water sources, testing is a good idea before building aqueducts and cisterns to channel and store it. The easiest way is to check the health of the people and animals that drink it, but boiling some in a bronze vessel and checking for sedimentation is recommended for new wells.

Aqueducts require gradients “of not less than a quarter of an inch for every hundred feet”, a task done with leveling tools. Although pipes were commonly made of lead or clay, it was known that lead was poisonous: “lead is found to be harmful for the reason that white lead is derived from it, and this is said to be hurtful to the human system. Hence, if what is produced from it is harmful, no doubt the thing itself is not wholesome.” That last part is interesting to think about in our modern world full of untested chemicals. He cites the deep pallor that plumbers acquire and concludes, “water ought by no means to be conducted in lead pipes”.

Without springs to tap, wells must be dug. The way to find a good place to dig is to look for mists rising from the ground at dawn, as well as looking for vegetation of certain kinds. The dangers of suffocation whilst well-digging are explained as poisonous “exhalations” from the earth, and testing with a lamp flame is recommended, digging air shafts if it goes out.

Vitruvius begins Book IX by lamenting the lavish awards given to the champions of athletic games who provide only momentary entertainment, but none given to the authors of books that help all of humanity continuing into the future. As examples of practical knowledge acquired by such intellectuals, he cites Plato’s solution to making a square twice the area of an initial square using the diagonal of the first square, which he says can’t be done “by means of arithmetic” There was still an idealism of whole numbers at this time. What we now call the Pythagorean Theorem is also cited, using geometry instead of algebra, of course. The story of Archimedes discovering volume displacement in a bath is told, including the interesting bit that after he runs naked through the street crying, “Heureka!” (the Greek in this edition gives a rough breathing mark), he does a series of experiments to determine that a golden crown had indeed been adulterated with silver.

Before closing with a description of sun dials and the mechanics of water clocks, Book IX provides a good description of ancient astronomy. The motion of the stars and planets about the poles is covered in some detail, with the occasional retrograde motion of the planets explained by the sun attracting them when at certain angles and thus slowing and reversing them in their courses. Two theories for the phases of the moon are given. Aristarchus of Samos’ explanation is more or less the modern one, making Berosus’ the more interesting. He thought that the moon was half luminous and half dark, and that the attractive power of the sun kept the luminous half aimed at the sun. A description of the stars composing the constellations of the zodiac, with their beginning and end points includes the interesting fact that the equinoxes and solstices were to fall at one eighth of a sign into the sign that normally begins a season, such that Spring Equinox fell when the sun was one eighth of the way into Aries. This implies a correction for the precession of the equinoxes, but Vitruvius doesn’t mention the phenomenon. A couple chapters are devoted to the arrangements of many of the constellations familiar to us today, some with different names. It was fun to try to follow the descriptions with a star chart. The only mention of astrology is that it originated with the Chaldeans.

All of this has been preparatory to describing the analemma, for which there is a complex geometric construction. Due to different shadow lengths being cast from gnomons of the same height in different locations, the analemma has to be determined at any given spot so that the hour marks of sundials can be placed and remain correct throughout the year with its changing day and hour lengths. Sundials can thus be of many types, and rather than describe the works of others as his own, Vitruvius simply lists some sundials and their creators, expecting his future readers to be able to look them up.

At last, we come to Book X. Anyone having initially glanced through the book, has likely been waiting for this, as it deals with machines and siege engines. Ancient architects were also engineers, expected to design and build cities as well as the weapons to defend and destroy them.  They also built various mechanical contraptions for practical work and to entertain people at theaters and festivals.

A machine is defined as “a combination of timbers fastened together, chiefly efficacious in moving great weights.” However, it’s the “timbers fastened together” part that matters most, as ladders count. Indeed, “In the climbing class are machines so disposed that one can safely climb up high, by means of timbers set up on end and connected by crossbeams… The climbing machine displays no scientific principle, but merely a spirit of daring. It is held together by dowels and crossbeams and twisted lashings and supporting props.” Of course, the interesting machines run in circles, force air about (pneumatics, such as organs), or hoist weights into new places, and while simple machines like mills, bellows, lathes, and carriages are commonplace conveniences, Vitruvius intends to discuss more rare and complex machines.

First up, due to their utility in lifting and placing stones for construction, are hoisting machines based on various pulley schemes, several of which are described in detail, but would benefit greatly from illustrations (an unfortunate theme in Book X). It’s interesting that Vitruvius thinks machines are derived by copying nature and that they all depend on the combination of linear motion with circular motion, whether simple levers or steelyards, presses or water wheels.  A few machines for raising water are explained including detailed instructions for making a water screw, a device normally credited to Archimedes, but not so by Vitruvius. The force pump of Ctesibius is also described, followed by the water organ which is explained with the caveat that it’s really complicated and he’s doing the best he can to describe it in words. We are referred to the writings of Ctesibius for further details and inventions; unfortunately, his works did not survive. There is an additional chapter on odometers for carts and ships called “hodometers”, the mechanics of which use the circumference of a wheel to measure distance and turn a couple of gears such that a small stone is dropped into a pan every mile. It’s apparent from the description that Vitruvius thought pi was equal to 3 1/8; the cult of rationality at the time expressed itself in the rejection of the existence of irrational numbers. Incidentally, the Roman mile was only 5000 feet.

Since Vitruvius was himself a siege engineer, the descriptions of catapults, ballistae, and scorpions are given as an arcane list of proportions for the various oddly named pieces composing them; again, illustrations would be most helpful. This section also suffers from quite a few lacunae, such that even if we wanted to follow the plans, there would be a lot of guess work. The discussion of battering rams, mobile siege towers, borers, and tortoises is less technical with some bits of history and monstrously huge siege towers described. Protecting all these contraptions from fire involved wrapping them in rawhide, hair mixed with clay, or seaweed imbedded between rawhides. Yet, at the end, he admits that effective defense of a city against such machines is not often done with other machines, but by the ingenuity of some citizen realizing a simple way to disable the machines, such as making a ‘swamp’ of sewage for towers to get stuck in, lowering a noose around a battering ram and hoisting it up with a windlass, or flooding attempts at mining under the walls.

In conclusion, I found Vitruvius to be an enjoyable read from which I learned much, though not quite what I expected. The overwhelmingly complex lists of proportions are never justified by any explanation beyond the aesthetic, while the explanations given for many observations are now known to be completely erroneous. Nonetheless, I now have a better understanding of ancient technology and a greater appreciation for the history of ideas. It is easy for modern people to be bewildered by the accomplishments of the ancients. How did they move those giant stones? Well, they had cranes. We are fortunate that this book was rediscovered and led to the restoration of some of the wonders of antiquity, kick starting the Renaissance. I would hope that some architect/engineer would take up the task of writing a similar volume including a modern understanding of things like Earthships, bicycles, cold storage, windmills, solar devices, radio, and other gadgets not dependent on industrialism as we slide into a deindustrialized future. That is, of course, assuming we get that far.