Two esotericists: John Michell and Nick Land, the former a Traditionalist and the latter a Promethean. Michell was an amiable aristocratic stoner, in the manner of Graham Hancock, who followed Pythagorean Traditionalism: there was once a Golden Age (in Hindooism, the Satya Yuga) when the world was governed in rhythmic harmony; this harmony was expressed in proportional monuments and sacred pathways that spanned the earth; at Stonehenge, choirs kept national harmony. The underlying structure of reality is composed of the Platonic forms; and these forms—particularly the golden ratio—are encoded into cathedrals, mosques, and temples. Nobody entered the Academy without knowledge of geometry, and Socrates demonstrated that even a child could draw geometric forms from scratch; his philosophy was the art of remembrance—a way to make people recall the ideal forms.
The rhythmic vibrations of this metaphysical reality underpin our mundane reality; to vibrate at the right frequency, as Christ did, instantiates Adam Kadmon, the cosmic man; hence Christ was the second Adam. Adam is the cosmos itself; and we see him again in the perfect proportions of the Vitruvian Man. During the Golden Age there was perfect song, a time when men spoke words at the right frequency and so could bend objects to their will. As Leonard Cohen sang, “Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord.” You meet Christ when you enter a church: the church is proportioned in accordance with the cosmic Christ-man, and the music expresses his metaphysical form in harmony—this is the reality of Christ.
This situation degraded considerably with the advent of zero; not zero as a number, but zero as a manipulable entity—as a part of algebra. Imported from India, zero was positioned at the start of the Western number line, not the end as in India; and this opened the door for negative numbers, the collapse of Platonic harmony, and the rise of non-empirical and unintuitive geometric forms. Further catastrophe arose with the arrival of non-Euclidian geometry, a development that exploited certain ambiguities in the language used by Euclid to express his propositions, particularly his fifth proposition—and so a whole strange and profane geometry was born; and this was a step to the Dark Age or Kali Yuga.
Land’s thought is feminine—lunar in esoteric terms—because it is based in technology and technology is feminine; just think about how men give their cars and aircraft female names and see the machine as temperamental and changeable, just like a woman. Actual women sense this and resent men for their love affairs with computers and other machines. Technology, femininity, and materialism go together and originate in the head; hence Land uses the number “333” as his Twitter account avatar, since 333 relates to the crown (head) chakra—complete masculine conscious knowledge rests on the techno-feminine head. The knowledge of the feminine head is made possible through the illumination of the spiritual heart; the intuitive path of knowledge, Michell’s path.
Whereas Michell admired the bucolic megaliths as ancient geometric gateways to the divine, Land admires the city: the city is a ceremony composed from its root network of fibre-optic cables, sewers, and non-Euclidian skyscrapers that melt on the skyline—it is a labyrinth, the Internet is the pulsation of Hell itself; pure energy, pure chaos in all its creative potential. The city vibrates at curious frequencies: its strange geometry summons daemons that grant us novelty.
This is the left-hand path of Prometheus: man transcends himself through technology and becomes post-human; to do so, he will explore the forbidden dimensions activated through discordant music. This is Lucifer’s realm, the perfect light-bringer. Blockchain and Bitcoin are technologies Land endorses because they cannot lie, each provides an indelible record. This is truly “Aryan” technology, in the spiritual sense of that word: the Aryan in the spiritual sense being the twice-born man who cannot tell a lie; he worships Mithras, the god of contracts and soldiers—god of the blockchain.