A Language Purely Beheld: The Anamnesis of Sophia

 

Author's note: My thoughts on many of the topics in this essay have changed and developed significantly over the past year and a half, particularly in regard to certain elements relating to the Christian mythos. I won't go back and revise the essay to reflect these changes. I think some of the big picture elements still hold, despite disagreements I now have with many of the details. Also I find that when you allow yourself to see where you came from, the steps you make toward progress become clearer and are all the more rewarding. - November 5, 2021

LOGOS OF THE MACHINE ELVES

Over the course of history, the way we as humans communicate with each other has undergone continual transformation into ever more complex modes. This through line in communicative advancements can in a way be seen as the principal driving force of human culture. In fact it’s often cited that the way we communicate and use language are what served to lift the human species out of animal existence and into history to begin with. So then, if communication is the sine qua non of humanness—if it’s the vehicle carrying us through the peregrinations of historical process, steering us into ever more complex, complicated, and interconnected domains of living—where is it all heading?

Terence McKenna, bardic psychonaut and early pioneer of the Psychedelic Renaissance, had an idea of one possibility. It was an idea he spoke of often in his lectures and writings of a future state of near-instantaneous communication. In this envisioned state, the symbolic barriers interposed between conscious agents will have shrunk to essentially nil, in effect allowing for a kind of direct transference of thought from mind to mind. This was a future he saw somehow intrinsically presaged in the DMT breakthrough experience, where the denizens of a seemingly autonomous and free-standing parallel continuum—the “machine elves” as he called them—offer the experiencer hyperdimensional gifts in the form of a visible language, a language “purely beheld.” In this language, “there is no ambiguity about meaning because there is no recourse to a dictionary of agreed upon signification.”

Perhaps the DMT flash is simply another dimension, McKenna speculated. Or perhaps it’s a glimpse into the future of humanity. Perhaps the machine elves are trying to show us how to use their language, and perhaps someday we even will. Is immersion into a world of purely beheld language the destiny of the historical process? This was an idea for which McKenna found a kind of strange justification in the writings of the Hellenistic philosophers, particularly Philo Judaeus, who spoke of the existence of “a more perfect logos.” Logos, the Greek term translated as “the Word” throughout the Bible and which featured prominently in the philosophical and theological systems of the late pre-Christian and early Christian era, was essentially an archetype embodying the structural-organizational principle of the cosmos: that which gives rise to order and form. God speaks creation into being through the Logos. Hence, human language was a seen as a kind of microcosm of this phenomenon. McKenna invoked the concept of the Logos often. Reflecting on Philo’s conceptualization of it and attempting to tie it to the possible implications of the DMT experience, he said:

“Language has the potential to be seen […] Well I saw this years ago in DMT flashes and lo and behold […] Philo Judaeus talks about what he calls the Logos. The Logos was an interiorized teaching voice, which Greek ecstatics sought to contact. And Philo sets up a little dialogue and the first speaker says, ‘what would be a more perfect logos?’ ‘A more perfect logos than the informing, teaching voice?’ Philo answers, ‘the more perfect logos would go from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a noticeable moment of transition.’ Astonishing! I always wondered, did they know what they were talking about? What did it mean to them? What did it mean to him to write that sentence?"

Evidenced in McKenna’s depiction of Philo’s logos is the fact that the Logos, in addition to being a cosmic principle, was attributed a kind of agency or personhood (a common feature of deities in the theological systems of the time; a well-known example still relevant today is the Christian Trinity: One God in Three Persons) which allowed it to communicate with and through receptive individuals (the philosophers) as a kind of voice in the head. In his lectures, McKenna typically goes on to admit some confusion as to how one might conjure the Logos in the manner described by Philo; that is, except through the aid of pharmacological intervention—in other words, through the use of psychedelics.

McKenna was fond of relating his encounters with the voice of the Logos. There were certain substances that, according to him, brought these encounters on more readily. Chief among them (besides DMT) was psilocybin, the principal psychoactive component in magic mushrooms. He described his communications with the “voice of the mushroom” as both verbal and visual; questions posed to the mushroom would result in verbal responses accompanied by visual representations of the verbal content. The mushroom’s personality was playful, mischievous, and sometimes scolding, offering answers to Terence’s reality-seeking questions in the form of riddles, puns, and admonishments.

Though McKenna considered contact with the Logos to be particularly pronounced with psilocybin and a feature of psychedelic experience generally, the DMT experience was for him the quintessence. On a “breakthrough dose” of DMT, the experiencer undergoes a complete reality swap. Every element of one’s perception—all the contents of the senses—are swapped out with something completely alien, transporting the experiencer out of ordinary reality and into a completely different one. This was for McKenna the ultimate psychedelic destination, the domain that all others were leading to but only DMT could fully deliver. Unlike the other psychedelics, the DMT space offered a glimpse of the Logos fully manifest. According to McKenna, the DMT space is literally “made of language.” The entities who inhabit the space seem to spawn from the fabric of the space itself. They too are made of language. Their communications with each other and with the human experiencer spawn “impossible objects” into being, which themselves turn into living entities, which in turn spawn further linguistic objects. McKenna described these objects as infinitely perplexing yet instantly comprehendible and “pregnant with meaning.” What better representation of a perfect logos could there possibly be than a visible language of this kind? A language where the contents of thought are expressed and comprehended nearly simultaneously, transmitted from mind to mind without the intercession of a symbolic medium—it would seem this is Word in its purest form, the Word made flesh.

SOPHIA: THE GNOSTIC MISSING LINK

I believe McKenna correctly identified the visible language of the DMT experience as a more perfect logos. However, he seems to have overlooked one crucial component in this assessment. What McKenna misses, which could possibly have been avoided through a more thorough application of the systems of thought from which the notion of the Logos sprang, is that this union of logos with image—the elimination of the barrier between thought and its expression—implicitly invokes the involvement of the feminine deific complement to the Logos: the Sophia.

Sophia, or wisdom, was a central idea in Hellenistic, Platonic, Gnostic, and early Christian thought. Today we still see a trace of the term hidden in the word philosophy, derived from philosophia, or “love of wisdom.” (How and why is wisdom feminine? Wisdom can be thought of as the integration or synthesis of knowledge. Integration and synthesis both indicate coming together—feminine—while knowledge indicates spreading or branching out—masculine). In order to see how Sophia fits into the picture of the more perfect logos, we must examine her role within the tradition from which she received the fullest attention, namely that of Gnosticism.

Gnosticism was a set of religious systems and practices that developed around the first century AD during the initial flourishing of Christianity. Though not a single standardized system, all formulations of Gnosticism placed strong emphasis on the relationship of the physical world in the current time period to a central cosmogonic myth. There were many variants of this cosmogony, some quite elaborate, but all contained several common features and some version of the following scheme:

The physical world has as its origin a heavenly, noncorporeal realm of hypostatic entities in dynamic relationship—a realm of archetypes. This realm, called the Pleroma, begins as an undifferentiated unity which then splits into two opposing principles—masculine and feminine—thus initiating a cascade into manifest existence. Through a series of emanations, creation descends through various aeons into less and less rarified domains, all of which are reflections of the initial pair or syzygy. The resulting system of syzygies constitutes the Pleroma and contains the prototypes for all worldly phenomena.

How then does the physical world come into being? This is where Sophia comes in. In the last aeon before the creation of the world, Sophia—the feminine aspect of the final pleromatic syzygy—attempts to emanate without her male counterpart and gives birth to an abortive monster deity, the Demiurge, who creates the material universe. The debased Sophia then falls into material existence, becoming trapped in matter (darkness) and spread out through creation in the form of divine sparks (light).

A few further aeons down the chain, human beings appear, picking up roughly at the point where the Christian Old Testament begins in Genesis with Adam and Eve (also reflections of the original divine pair). The ultimate goal of the individual human being is to achieve gnosis, sometimes conceived of as a mystical understanding of the Gnostic cosmogony and in other systems as an actual union with the primordial being (God). The purpose of humanity as a whole is to free Sophia from her bondage in matter so that she may return to the Pleroma and correct the imbalance there caused by her fall. The way forward toward this heavenly aim is provided by Christ, an incarnation of the Logos (a masculine emanation from a very early aeon).

According to Valentinus, father of the Valentinian school of Gnosticism, Christ (the Logos) and Sophia await the spiritual man at the entrance of the Pleroma.

With all this background in place, the Logos-Sophia pairing begins to make sense. Put another way, what the Gnostic system seems to be saying is this:

The physical world is a microcosmic reflection of the dynamics of a heavenly arrangement. All worldly phenomena recapitulate the primary action of the androgynous primordial being, who in thinking its first thought created both the raw idea or structure of this thought (Logos) and its instantiation or image (Sophia). Due to the fall of Sophia, there is a corresponding imbalance in the human realm which tilts toward the masculine. This causes the Logos—form, complication, striving forward—to predominate and the Sophia—image, integration, taking in—to be subdued. This over-masculine imbalance must be corrected or redeemed by a restoration of the feminine principle.

So we see that any search for a more perfect logos, if we are to understand the term in its original context, is incomplete without Sophia. The Word made flesh—form conjoined with image, thought given expression—is itself inherently a duality, a hieros gamos or holy marriage between a pair of opposites. Following this same contextual framework, we are faced with the paradoxical and perhaps uncomfortable notion that the restoration of the feminine principle must be mediated through the masculine, through Christ as Logos. It would seem that, if anything, the effect of Christianity on the past two thousand years of Western cultural development has been a kind of hypermasculinization, with the two-headed paradigm of capitalism and scientific materialism as the latest and fullest flowering of this masculinizing tendency. If the problem as identified by the Gnostics is an excess of masculinity, how would injecting more masculinity into the equation serve to restore the balance? The answer to this question is rather complicated, hinging on an epochal enantiodromia foreshadowed in the structure of the Christ myth itself. In order to understand it, we must turn to the work of Carl Jung, whose terminology I’ve been explicitly referencing throughout this essay but haven’t yet acknowledged. The perspective he provides is perhaps the last piece of the puzzle in my attempt at reformulating McKenna’s more perfect logos.

JUNG AND THE COMING FEMININE EPOCH

According to Jung, the appearance of Christ in the human drama constitutes one in a series of connected epochal turning points, each involving both a remembering or anamnesis of Sophia and a transformation of the God Image (humanity’s psychological relationship to God). Immediately prior to Christ in this series was Job. In the story of Job, God’s jarring brutality is put on full display as he allows Satan to inflict an onslaught of devastating torment upon God’s most faithful servant Job. Jung argues that through this story man is shown to have, in a sense, outgrown and surpassed the Hebrew God Yahweh (whom Jung identifies with the Demiurge). Man’s moral and rational compass has evolved to the point where he can no longer accept the contradiction between God’s divine status and brutal nature. The God Image has thus begun a transformation from the irrational, vengeful tyrant of the Old Testament into the just, benevolent God of the New Testament. God begins to remember his ecstatic union with Sophia in the Pleroma. This transformation reaches full actualization in the phenomenon of Christ, in whom God incarnates into an actual man to sacrifice himself for the benefit of all humanity to come. This both serves to instantiate the transformed God Image (to make the Word flesh) and to correct the injustice done to Job (to redeem pre-Christian humanity).

Importantly, in the Gnostic conception, Christ is born to an incarnation of Sophia, the Virgin Mary as the untainted “second Eve.” This simultaneous physical instantiation of the divine feminine and masculine principles might at first seem in itself to provide the restoration of balance sought and predicted in the Gnostic cosmogonic myth. However, Jung argues, the virgin birth is a hidden fly in the ointment. In exalting the Virgin Mary to divine status, she is attributed a kind of perfection, thus losing “something of her humanity: she will not conceive her child in sin, like all other mothers, and therefore he also will never be a human but a god.” With mother and child both as gods, the mythologem of the virgin birth only arrives at a partially genuine Incarnation of God. (The flaw inherent in the model of the virgin birth is perhaps also reflected in the phenomenon of the two Marys: Mary the Virgin and Mary Magdalene. This double persona seems to split the feminine archetype into its dual functions as mother-begetter and bride-complement, indicating a certain failure of integration). Furthermore, as the feminine principle—representing completeness, or imperfection—is typically conceived as having a compensatory effect on the masculine principle of perfection, the total divinization of Mary in a sense masculinizes her function and sets the stage for an enantiodromia. This enantiodromia, or separating of the opposites, will come to define the Christian epoch. Thus, Yahweh’s masculine nature is slyly carried over into the world of the New Testament to await genuinely feminine compensation in a future age. “[…] despite all the recognition and glorification of the feminine principle this never prevailed against the patriarchal supremacy. We have not, therefore, by any means heard the last of it.”

We are now in the position to make sense of the notion that Sophia’s redemption is achieved through Christ. The pleromatic masculine-feminine imbalance is in a sense overcorrected by the virgin birth, and the era of hypermasculinization that ensues in result explicates one pole in a necessary enantiodromia. It instantiates an earthly manifestation of the unbalanced masculine principle comparable in magnitude to its reflection in the Pleroma, rendering possible a compensatory explication of the feminine principle of equal magnitude. The subsequent coming together of this pair in the following epoch—the ultimate hieros gamos—would ostensibly constitute the ultimate goal of the Gnostics: the true redemption of Sophia. With word and image together as one, we arrive at an epoch, or Aion as Jung might put it, of identity between thought and its expression. What would this look like for the human beings inhabiting this new world? Quite possibly, a language purely beheld.

COSMIC MASCULINE AND FEMININE IN THE NEW GENDER PARADIGM

So we see that McKenna’s conception of a more perfect logos necessarily entails Sophia. In fact, the addition of Sophia as the contrasexual balancing component is precisely what makes it more perfect, what makes it a complexio oppositorum (union of opposites). McKenna seems to have fallen into the trap of what Derrida aptly called phallogocentrism, or a privileging of the masculine, in the expression of his idea. We can perhaps excuse this error, considering the degree to which McKenna stressed the importance of rekindling the feminine spirit elsewhere in his lectures and writings. He was harshly critical of the hypermasculinity of modern culture, which he took to be pathological.

It’s fine and well to criticize hypermasculinity, but doesn't the sheer act of ascribing archetypal (and hence universal) status to notions of masculinity and femininity in the manner we’ve been smack of gender essentialism? Masculinity and femininity—by whose standards? Have we not spent the last half century disabusing ourselves of this mistaken outlook?

I maintain that feminine and masculine are in fact cosmic principles, and therefore in a way immutable. The distaste we postmoderns might experience at this assessment is in my estimation primarily due to two factors: the way we frame and categorize the feminine, and the mistaken assumption that to admit of a cosmic gender duality necessarily implies and reinforces the traditional view (now largely rejected) that gender expression must align with sexual identity.

Let's address the first factor. It seems to me that it is the particular collection of traits and characteristics most often highlighted in depictions of traditional femininity that now rubs people (myself included) the wrong way. I would argue this is precisely because that collection of traits consists mostly of those which serve to highlight the historical masculine-feminine power differential—in other words, traits depicting femininity as subordinate to masculinity. Nurturing, caregiving, gentleness, emotionality—these aren't negative traits in the slightest; but they circumscribe any individual embodying them within a sphere of fragility, rendering her/him/them vulnerable to masculine subjugation. A simple reframing to incorporate archetypally feminine traits outside the power differential can help tilt our depiction closer to parity. Wisdom (Sophia herself), intuition, synthesis, and healing—to name a few—are attributes of the cosmic feminine which, when combined with all others to form the totality of the feminine archetype, crystallize a pole of the duality arguably equal in power and potency to its masculine counterpart.

And now the second factor. In today's sociological landscape, a far more nuanced and complex understanding of sex and gender has come to be recognized. Sex and gender identity are not identical concepts. Nor are they strict binaries. Rather, they are two separately operating continua which firstly do not necessarily correlate and secondly allow individuals to self-orient within these continua. However, recognizing a fluidity within the space between the poles of a binary (or quaternary, in this case) construction does not eliminate the poles themselves. The poles still exist; it's just that not all phenomena directly express or encapsulate one or the other.

Jung would argue that pairs of opposites are responsible for the dynamism of the phenomenal world and therefore inescapable. Duality and bifurcation are, in a very deep sense, fundamental to the nature of multiplicity. Any complexity that arises around a pair of opposites necessarily involves either a movement between poles or the addition of one or more other pairs of opposites into the framing. In the case of current cultural attitudes toward sex and gender, both these possibilities can be seen to be operative (fluidity between male and female on the sex continuum—although it must be granted that this is somewhat tightly constrained by biology—and the addition of the gender identity continuum). Our current understanding has not done away with the notions of the cosmic feminine and masculine. But our relationship to them isn't fixed or static. Rather, it's increasingly one of flux and dynamic activity.

Returning to the issue of the masculine-feminine power differential for a moment: it’s fairly clear, in the abstract, that a power differential between two poles of a binary structure can easily lead to the subordination of the less powerful by the more powerful. If balance of power is to be restored, one strategy is for the disadvantaged pole to take on the characteristics of the advantaged, thus rendering the two poles more identical. (If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.) This certainly seems to be the situation in the case of the male-female dichotomy of Western culture (and arguably a majority of human culture in general) where feminine characteristics, traditionally exhibited by women, have long been subordinated to masculine characteristics, traditionally exhibited by men. This has manifested in an oppressive social situation for women until very recently, at least in the West, when the above-mentioned fluidity in the expression of gender has become more accepted and cultural edicts around gender roles less deeply entrenched. However, due to the pre-existing and continuously reinforced male-female power differential, this has resulted largely in the adoption of traditionally masculine characteristics by women; women are in a sense impelled to masculinize in order to participate in domains of culture once held off limits to them. They may participate fully insofar as they do so as men. In this way, the semblance of a true power balance is created and maintained, while culture at large remains heavily tilted toward the masculine.

Correspondingly, more and more, women and girls are the heroes in today’s narratives. However, in most cases the man or boy who once played the masculine hero archetype has simply been swapped with a female body. Only very rarely does the main protagonist, whether female or male, exhibit archetypally feminine virtues. But these efforts to turn the tables on narrative gender portrayals, while falling short of a true swing toward the feminine, indicate at least a kind of initial stirring in that direction. While we may be far off from a true tipping of the scales toward a feminization of culture, the narrowing of the power differential (even if only nominal) and the conscious attempts to subvert traditional narratives around sex and gender are a sign that a space may be opening for the return of Sophia.

SIGNS OF SOPHIA

Sings of massive tectonic shifts in culture greet us everywhere we turn. The world of twenty years ago looks nothing like our world today in which our day-to-day lives are governed by forces and phenomena that had scarcely been imagined more than a decade ago. (Again, following the historical pattern, we see the majority of these changes taking place in the domain of communication). At the same time a feeling of complete loss of direction and crippling uncertainty about the future sends us hurtling into an abyss of total disorientation. Like the body of a caterpillar which in its metamorphosis disintegrates into a formless goo inside the pupa, we cannot make heads or tails of our situation. Inside this amorphous confusion there is nothing to grab hold of, no signal pointing the way forward in any clear direction. There seems to be no indication as to how (or if) we will emerge from this state. Clearly this is evidence of an epochal transition of some kind. The question that concerns this essay is of course the following: Could this be the end of what Jung identified as the Christian era—the era of hypermasculinity, of science, of materialism, of exponential protrusion into the fathomless depths of material complexity through techne—and the beginning of the swing toward the feminine pole of the epochal enantiodromia?

Historically, when shifts of this magnitude occur, a bubbling up from the collective psyche begins to evidence itself in art, story, and ideology. Intimations of the emerging paradigm spring forth from the depths of the unconscious, providing the proto-material from which the new world will come to be fashioned. We must then task ourselves, if we’re searching for evidence of a true shift toward the feminine, with identifying potential models for this framework within the output of current artistic and literary channels. Cinema and television are arguably still the most relevant artistic media of our time, so for the purposes of this essay, I’ll focus my search there.

Immediately Darron Aronofsky’s 2017 film mother! comes to mind. This film, an absurdist biblical allegory depicting the extent to which the Christian mythology that undergirds Western culture sustains masculine dominance at the total expense of the divine feminine, goes perhaps halfway toward depicting the Sophian perspective we’re after. The brutality that the film’s female protagonist (Mother) experiences at the hand of her seemingly invulnerable God-like male counterpart (Him) comes to an unbearably intense head when the throng of his devotees who’ve invaded their home against Mother’s will rip her newborn baby to shreds with their bare hands. In a fit of rage (embodying the “Kali” archetype of feminine chaotic destruction), Mother burns the house down, badly injuring herself but leaving Him totally unscathed. He then reaches into her chest and pulls out her heart, hardening it into a kind of crystal object (the Philosopher’s Stone?), which resets the plot back to the beginning, erasing Mother’s memory and implying that the narrative will cycle indefinitely. The way these symbols come together isn’t an exact match for what we’re looking for, mainly because the masculine God-figure is never compensated by an equal feminine force. Many relevant symbols are present, but they don’t quite form the structure sought. The film does however do a remarkable job at illuminating the hidden hypermasculinity of the Christian mythos and clearly illustrates a stark void in the space that ought to be occupied by a balancing feminine archetype.

In Denis Villeneuve’s critically acclaimed but understated alien contact film Arrival (2016) we find a direct hit. This film, whether consciously or unconsciously, fully encapsulates the Sophian vision, uniting both Jung’s and McKenna’s frameworks with nearly all the symbolic pieces in place.

 

Twelve mysterious alien craft have entered Earth’s atmosphere and parked themselves just above the ground at seemingly random locations around the globe. Teams of scientists have made it inside the spaceships to find the aliens of each craft—massive squid-like beings as tall as buildings—behind a large glass wall. The space behind the wall is filled with a dense atmosphere of white vaporous clouds between which the aliens slip in and out of view, making themselves visible when they wish to communicate. Their communication with the humans is done via the glass wall, upon which they spray highly ornamented circular patterns of black vapor. Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are recruited by the United States military to decode and broker communication with the beings. After an initial meeting with the aliens, Banks and Donnelly set to work on decoding their language. Banks eventually cracks it and builds up a dictionary of terms and their related symbols, which slowly facilitates communication with the aliens. An interesting feature of their language is that its syntax is nonlinear.

Banks has been having flashbacks of her dying daughter, which become more vivid and more frequent as she works with the aliens and their language. Eventually, the humans and aliens establish a sufficient shared vocabulary for Banks to ask why they’ve come. They reply, “offer weapon,” which throws the United States team and the other teams around the globe into a panic. China begins preparations to take military action against the craft parked over their territory.

As Banks’ flashbacks become more intense, she receives what seems to be a precognitive vision that convinces her to enter the craft by herself. Her intuition was right; the beings send a pod down to bring her up into the craft alone. There she finds herself behind the glass, in the ethereal white vapor face-to-face with the beings. They explain to her that they have come to help humanity, because in three thousand years they’ll need humanity’s help in return. She learns that “weapon” was a poor translation for a concept better interpreted as “tool.” This tool is their language, which when implemented properly changes the user’s perception of time, allowing them to see into the future. We learn that Banks’ flashbacks of her daughter weren’t flashbacks at all but premonitions of the daughter she will have with Donnelly sometime in the future.

Banks’ increasing ability to see into the future culminates in a premonition of the phone call she will eventually make to the Chinese General convincing him to stand down his military. Tensions diffuse and the aliens depart, having successfully gifted their language to humanity.

Donnelly expresses his love for Banks and they discuss whether they’d have done things in life differently if they could see the future. From her visions, Banks knows she will have a child with him, and that this child will fall sick and die. She chooses to bring her daughter into the world despite knowing this information.

It might not be immediately clear from this summary I’ve just laid out how the plot of Arrival relates to the points I’ve been making in this essay. Allow me to condense it down to what I believe to be its fundamental structure:

Extraterrestrials have descended upon the Earth, apparently to deliver a message to humankind. The world’s militaries, a male physicist, and a female linguist are assigned the task of brokering communication. Seeing that the linguist possesses a special insight, the physicist steps aside and provides a space for her to take the lead on cracking the alien language. Guided by her superior intuition, the linguist solves the puzzle of the extraterrestrials’ enigmatic syntax and comes to find that utilizing it engenders a direct perception of the future—an experiential dissolution of temporality. Using her newly augmented powers of perception, she singlehandedly de-escalates heightening global tensions and saves the world from destruction. The aliens depart, leaving humanity the gift of a kind of magic language.

Hopefully this plot summary helps to illuminate that, when analyzed in terms of its archetypal and symbolic content, Arrival reveals a structure and message that serve to beautifully amalgamate Jung’s vision of the coming Sophian epoch and McKenna’s intimations of a more perfect logos. In fact, Arrival shows (as I’ve attempted to in this essay) these two perspectives to be two sides of the same coin. With Louise Banks as both the main protagonist and the only relevant female character in the entire film (other than her daughter), the feminine archetype remains the focal element and driving narrative force throughout. Furthermore, she is a professor of linguistics, the embodiment of the Logos taken to its masculine limit. Banks, however, shows linguistics alone to be inadequate to the task of apprehending the extraterrestrials’ advanced language. Feminine wisdom, intuition, boundary dissolution, and direct perception are needed to effect the quantized phase shift into the higher domain of communication inhabited by the aliens. The Logos must be balanced by the Sophia. Not only that, but it is through Logos that Sophia must make her entrance into the phenomenal world—humankind’s ability to comprehend the more perfect language relies on first having traversed the era of symbolic communication. (Remember that Jung, by way of the Gnostics, identified Christ the Logos as the instrument by which Sophia is redeemed. Thus we see Christ as the harbinger of the ensuing epochal enantiodromia and the era that developed in his wake as the long but necessary masculine buildup to a numinous feminine compensation.) In their attempts to communicate with the beings, the global teams of scientists and military personnel are constrained to those ideas which can be conveyed via the glass wall—via symbolic signification. (They represent the dual aspects of the masculine: brute force and technical prowess. Together with Banks, they trace out a hierarchical progression from the earthly to the divine, with each level of this hierarchy as a necessary foundation for the next. This hierarchy is clearly depicted in the poster design for the film). However, Banks enters into the mysterious cloud chamber behind the wall and receives mind-to-mind transference of information from the beings, in the form of direct experience. Through this spiritual encounter, she is given the gift of a language purely beheld. She in turn bestows this gift upon all of humanity, effectively saving the world and ushering in a new feminized era.

Banks is elevated to nearly divine status through her decision to give birth to her child despite the foreknowledge that she will die in childhood. In making this decision, she both reflects the relationship of God to humanity (omniscience to mortality) and recapitulates the story of Mary, who accepts the tragic fate of her son. Except, this time the hidden flaw in Mary’s virgin birth is corrected by three factors. Firstly, there is no immaculate conception and hence no total divinization of the feminine. Secondly, the divinization originally bestowed upon the Virgin Mary in the former epoch is actually transferred to humanity itself; now in possession of a magical language, man has become omniscient. The function of the Christ archetype has thus been distributed across all of humanity. This feminized paradigm shift is reflected in the fact (the third factor) that the child born to the Sophian figure is female. However, her death during childhood indicates that, though she’s omniscient, she isn’t immortal. The society of the coming epoch has yet to solve the riddle of death. Perhaps this will be the objective of yet another epoch beyond the return of Sophia (the epochal Coniunctio Oppositorum?).

***

I shouldn’t forget to mention the significance of the Other in the formulation of the Sophian epoch we’ve just examined here and in those of both McKenna and Jung. McKenna was fond of invoking the concept of the “wholly Other” in his discussion of psychedelic experience. His ultimate Other—the DMT elves and their more perfect logos—bursts forth into our experience from another dimension, offering the magical language gift. In the Arrival, the gift-giving Other comes presumably from outer space, from elsewhere in the physical universe. With Jung the Other originates in the psyche. In his 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, he argues that UFOs are psychological projections, autonomous components of the collective unconscious. (For Jung, this didn’t preclude the possibility that they were in a sense real—that phenomena were psychological didn’t mean they were merely so). As highly activated unconscious contents, they are indeed capable of delivering numinous gifts. For Jung, delivery of numinous material was in fact the purpose of mythological systems.

As the notion of the Other as bestower of magical gifts emerges as a commonality among all these perspectives, a strong case can be made for its inclusion as an essential component in the picture of a Sophian future I have begun to sketch. Interestingly, in his YouTube video Art and Technology: From Death to Glory, symbolism expert and icon carver Jonathan Pageau also points out that this notion of the “gifts of the foreigner” is a common theme found throughout the Bible in association with ideas of cultural advancement. So we see the theme has deep archetypal roots and is to a certain extent universal, which should be enough to satisfy us that it’s not simply a coincidence in the idiosyncrasies of three thinkers.

***

Through a synthesis of the various models I’ve examined throughout this essay, we come to the following formula of historical transformation (beginning from the start of the common era):

The phenomenon of Christ (Logos) —> The masculine epoch (era of techne) —> Point of maximum masculine expression —> The Return of Sophia (delivery of the magical language by the Other) —> The feminine epoch (era of image and dissolution) —> Point of maximum feminine expression —> Coniunctio Oppositorum?

This picture, though of course highly metaphorical, wildly speculative, and a bit grandiose, seems to map neatly onto the world as we experience it. For me personally it’s become a useful tool in grokking the big picture—a broadly applicable and perspective-widening lens through which to view our current moment in time in relation to past, future, and the broader cosmic drama. I of course don’t afford these ideas any degree of metaphysical certainty. In a recent interview for my YouTube channel, Neo-Jungian cognitive scientist Anderson Todd remarked to me, “I think you have to go to a very high level of abstraction before you can believe that The Trickster is a fundamental feature of reality.” By this he was implying that we should be careful in assigning metaphysical status to archetypal models. I wholeheartedly agree with this view. Regardless of what’s really going on, one thing seems certain: the evolution of communication has been, and continues to be with ever increasing intensity, the primary driver of human culture. Whether we receive the gift of magic language and arrive at a kind of collective gnosis or continue to hurtle deeper into a maelstrom of confusion and despair, it’ll surely be in the wake of further profound transformations of communication.