<2023-02-19T22:49:48.000Z> Will_O_The_Wild: Hi MikeYou may remember me from Imperium Press Discord or Joel's Telegram. I am going through my philosophical/theological journey in paganism and I found your talk with Dave Martel critiquing Monism highly poignant. It is true that looking at Monism's consequences is a good "early warning system" that tells us something isn't quite right, but an irl BMEWS can also mistake a harmless UFO for a hostile object. So either I'm still ignorant about the more sophisticated points of Monism or you did pick up a ballistic missile. Here is where I was left thirsty for more information: you mention systems of immanence as a competing theory to transcendence. I want to worship something that is not simply material because I feel as if ritual is more than just aesthetic; a ritual when done right to me has some sort of "click" that speaks to my soul that I can't begin explaining using rational language. Here is where my questions begin, in all good faith. Is there even a space for something as "souls" in this system of immanence? Because your talk with Dave, though good, left a sour taste in my mouth when you critiqued Monism's uniformity of souls: Yes, I get why seeing all bodies as containing equal souls sort of makes particularism irrelevant, but making higher forms of existing irrelevant by saying things emanate from the physical world terrifies me even more. I hope you can reply bring some nuance to this because I also feel like this doesn't have to be a strict dichotomy :)
<2023-02-20T02:26:21.000Z> imperiumpress: Hi, thanks for reaching out. It's true that there isn't a complete dichotomy between immanence and transcendence. There's always something that's present, underfoot, or just "there"—the immanent. And there's always something that goes beyond it—the transcendent. This relationship between the one and the other is predicted by the core metaphysic of paganism (and Europeans), which is differential ontology, which states that "to be at all is to differ from something else real". There can't be ONLY immanence (or transcendence), and transcendence can't be reduced to an epiphenomenon of immanence (or vice versa). The two always exist in relation to one another. However the traditional (pre-Axial) understanding is that immanence is more important than transcendence. This got reversed when traditional Indo-European theologies became corrupted.But privileging immanence doesn't mean we have to be materialist because we can't equate materialism with immanence. Materialism is simply another monism ("everything is material") and monism is is pure transcendence, anti-traditional, anti-European. Our Bronze age ancestors wouldn't have understood it because it is quite literally impossible to conceive of "what everything is made of". How could you describe it, except in terms of what it makes up? And privileging immanence doesn't mean rejecting what is higher because we can't equate transcendence with what is higher. Transcendence often, in fact, usually means what is lower. When a tranny transcends their birth gender to find the "real" gender they were "supposed" to have all along, they have in fact been degraded. Transcendence means to go beyond—if you go beyond what is proper, this is not higher but lower.The proper way to conceive of these things is not far from Nietzsche saying "the soul is only something in the body". But we can refine it and say that "soul and body are not two things". We don't have to say "everything is matter" to do that. We just have to understand that the soul does not transcend the body, because if we do, then it's just a hop skip and a jump to saying "and so does my gender, and ultimately, "I can leave the body behind and just become transhuman". It's not the HUMAN in transhuman that's the problem, but the TRANS.
<2023-02-27T18:32:00.000Z> Will_O_The_Wild: Thank you! Your response is worth a lot to me. Understanding Pagan theology is already hard as it is because we are forced to reconstruct everything from the historical bits and pieces that survived and the factionalism of this niche community doesn't help either so finding satisfying sources is very difficult.