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Psychology’s
Primitive Tongues - A Thesaurus of Occult Linguistics Preliminary Abstract, Version 13.5 Most contributors to this field of study, which I will here refer to as either Occult Linguistics or Correlative Thought, aren't very distinguished for either common sense or critical thinking skills. As a skeptic who still sees value in this study, I should be clear at the beginning that the point of view taken in this analysis will not be that of unquestioning belief in these systems. Neither does my use of the term “psychology” imply any positive correlation between the acceptance of such beliefs and mental health. Instead, I wish to ask what the structure and content of these systems, together with their broad use and attractiveness or popular acceptance, can tell us about the human mind. Regardless of the metaphysical "truth" of Kabbalah (Jewish tradition), Qabalah (Hermetic or Western Mystery tradition), Astrology, Tarot and the Yijing, the projections we make with our minds upon the cosmos can perhaps tell us more about our minds than about the cosmos. But, as mirror images, sometimes we need to understand them upside down or in reverse order, as existential pictures instead of essentialistic. Metaphysics is irrelevant to this investigation. I should also clarify here that when I speak of psychology I’m probably leaning towards a blend of neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and meme theory. If I use the word archetype it’s more likely to refer to an inherited neural predisposition to organize certain perceptions and behaviors around specific needs that we have as biological entities belonging to families and social groups of mammals and primates. I do not see Platonic forms. I view these systems as languages. Astrology, to illustrate, has developed for three millennia in a consultant-to-client situation, where the client was usually concerned about his identity in relation to the world and its changes. Whatever the excuse was that made him credulous and receptive to advice from his counselor, the language of astrology had to develop a large set of associations to psychological states and processes (planets as parts of the psyche, etc). Over a very long time. Yet the real beneficiary of this was the astrologer more than his client. The client had to learn about his particular one-twelfth of the broader human potential, while the astrologer had to understand and integrate the whole scope of the system. He had to be fluent in the language. I will be developing each system as a real language, complete with grammar, syntax and vocabulary. The work will be a handbook more for the professional than for general consumption. I am going to try to remain true to the root disciplines, even though there may be large portions of a discipline which I might actually term “silly”. We humans seem wired to find meanings in nature (human meanings whenever we can) and we will make them up if we fail. We can find cosmic significance in chicken entrails and tea leaves. The accidental arrangement of the letters of our various alphabets and the random assignments of points in time to arbitrary human calendars become, by these processes, what some see as significant numerological systems. The fact that that we have ten fingers may be the only reason that the number ten is such a significant number base for us. There is such a thing as finding too much meaning - and one of its names is “clinical paranoia”. It is, however significant that when pressed to name “the six things”, many widely separated cultures often divide the world along similar lines. This at least hints that a human universal might be lurking somewhere. This coincidence may have a common human substratum. This project might run about a thousand pages, plus another thousand counting the completed Yijing portion as a chapter.
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