Patrick Harpur suggests that there's an order of reality he classifies as "daimonic," which he sees as adaptive (though he does not firmly resolve whether this daimonic realm is real or false or middling, nor whether in is in our minds, ourside of our minds, or both). For Harpur, it's likely that faeries and UFOs and crop circles and crying madonnas, etc. all originate in or participate in "Daimonic Reality".
Harpur analyzes the repeated patterns in these seemingly disparate phenomena and comes up with some interesting and useful observations. I recommend this book to anyone new to magic or wrestling with unusual phenomena. One of the best things it does is make us aware of the possibility of an area between the real and the unreal. But he strongly suggests that whatever this area is--actual entities or merely the return of the repressed (a la Jung's UFO analysis), or some sort of responsive, intelligent energy field--it functions as though it has a very creative will of its own. Harpur believes that what Daimonic Reality wants is our acknowledgement of its existence.
The above paragraphs set the ground for this thought: I read a lot of conspiracy theory and generally don't take it to heart. I find it interesting because it is often like an open window on the collective psyche. Sometimes the most flagrant "nutters" mirror exactly things I see in other places. Radically different things are going on, but UFO and "lizard people" conspiracies reach for some of the same archetypes many others do... whether New Agey alien dispensationalists or Lovecraftian alien intelligences. Looking at variant material that includes the same archetypes--some very rationally, some far out--gives clues about what's going on in the broader collective. Jung used similar methods to make accurrate predictions about cultural phenomena, including the rise of Nazism and the prediction of more UFO preoccupations.
It seems to me that one of the things conspiracy theory does is give people a means and outlet for associative thinking and their perceptions of correspondence--as though there is an inherent, often frustrated drive to use the associative faculty to make sense of the world. These patterns of thought are undoubtedly natural, since the brain is hardwired associatively and generally has to acquire linear processes. Yet these natural patterns are suppressed, and if a contemporary Westerner doesn't have much engaged religion, poetry, art or ritual in their lives, these patterns may manifest pathologically. They are especially dangerous when associative and linear modes are conflated (as when myth is taken as history or oracular utterances literalized). I find it interesting that conspiracy is precisely the sort of locus where associational and historical modes are most likely to be confused, and it's a locus that is precisely about whether or not mass knowledge is corrupted!
Correspondence is about similarity and analogy and is alleged to operate across time and space, to inhere in both idea and substance. It's the logic behind sympathetic magic, and it predominated in human cultures worldwide until the advent of widespread literacy (dominating en masse until the 18th century and not sorely wounded until the 20th).
Ideas like morphic resonance and acausality appear in contemporary theoretical physics, a discipline in which complex modeling is becoming more and more visual and less and less encoded in bits of math that a human mind can hold at once. Notions along these lines seem to suggest possible reasons why correspondence works and why a failure to give it place in our psyches could result in pathology. It may inhere in the basic structures and processes of the cosmos ('as above, so below"). Associative pathology is sort of like mistaking a tarot spread for one's actual life, rather than something capabable of acausally mirrioring one's life. It's like the simplistic notion of astrology that believes the planets CAUSE change rather than simply "vibrate" in harmony with it, reflecting it from a distance through some ontological link. Freud himself was guilty of just such conflation, reading dreams and other correspondent material deductively and developmentally. The error is at the root of the Freudian absurdities so often reviled:"According to Freud, it is the insistent return of the repressed that can explain numerous phenomena that are normally overlooked: not only our dreams but also what has come to be called "Freudian slips" (what Freud himself called "parapraxes"). According to Freud, there is a "psychology of errors"; that slip of the tongue or that slip of the pen, "which have been put aside by the other sciences as being too unimportant" (Introductory Lectures 15.27), "become for Freud the clues to the secret functioning of the unconscious. Indeed, he likens his endeavor to "a detective engaged in tracing a murder" (Introductory Lectures 15.27).Sometimes a cigar not just a phallus or cigar, but is instead an eel, dirigible, rope or cigarette--and maybe all those and more at once. Sometimes it's the lit staff of Prometheus. Sometimes the cigar one perceives belongs to someone else entirely. Jung knew this and reminds us all.
Now we have this big "correspondence aether machine" in the Internet. Wonder what Jung would have thought of that? Built on the principle of association, it has become an unprecedented organ for disseminating conspiracy theory.
Source: umad-mysteries.blogspot.com
