The black goddess and the sixth sense

by Peter Redgrove

In this work, the author shows how we are surrounded by invisibles; forces which animals know but humans have come to ignore or only participate in unconsciously. These forces include electricity, magnetism and the deeper reaches of touch, smell, taste and sound. Peter Redgrove presents evidence to suggest that not only individuals but the world as a whole stands to benefit from simple awareness. Presiding over this transition from unconscious to conscious experience is the symbolic presence of the Black Goddess, who may be traced in many guises from ancient to modern times - from tantric oracles and gnostic cults to Coleridge's poetry and Surrealist painting. The book blends the poetry of "The White Goddess" with the wide-ranging applications of "Supernature" to express this general need for more awareness. Peter Redgrove is a poet and co-author of "The Wise Wound".

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Peter William Redgrove was a British poet, who also wrote prose, novels and plays with his second wife Penelope Shuttle.

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will require something of a vaguely defensive preamble about my approach to occult/esoteric readings and concepts. As I said in my review of Wilhelm Reich's Listen, Little Man!, I'm basically a rationalist but I believe there is much inspiration and insight to be gained by delving, carefully, into the irrational (most arch rationalists are just as reactionary as those they consider deluded fantasists). Cultural factors complicate discussion about topics like this: ordering structures we've developed over time (Psychological theory, Medical theory, Sociological Theory, Systems of Government, Physics, Judeo-Christian Western Religion, The Enlightenment and even the concept of rationality itself) as we, consciously or unconsciously, assembled what we now call civilization, color and tint the general public's reaction to claims of hidden ("occult") knowledge. Capitalism (while probably the best system we've come up with), when left to run rampant as it has in Western culture, turns *everything* into a commodity, including people, their lives and emotions, and (relevant to this discussion) important ideas. So, for example, drop a word like "Kaballah" or "Chakra" into the mind of a modern, media-soaked individual and the reaction will probably be dismissive or derogatory (adopt a California "valley girl" voice when you say either word and you get my point). But both of these concepts have long and interesting traditions behind them, as do the systems they arise from, they've just been cheapened by our culture because that's what Capitalism does, uses up ideas for all the money they can generate (commodifies them), reducing their complexity to make them easier to sell, and then degrades them so that they become dismissible, unlikely to challenge or change the status quo in any way (even traditional, orthodox religions suffer through this process, although it's a little more complicated in their case). It's a very complex problem, not something it's possible to delve into in depth here, but it's something I'm reminded of again and again - we disregard ideas that society has told us are mock-worthy, rarely attempting to move past the surface image and wrestle with the real thought, tradition, experience or research underneath, because, well, that's just hard work.

All this is in service of a warning: if terms like "Patriarchy" (or "Matriarchy"), concepts like Goddess worship, modern occultism or esoteric thought seem automatically laughable or immediately set off your warning systems (relatable to images of irritating feministas or pompous college lecturers or slick, new age handbook spokespeople - just like you've been trained to see by lowest common denominator culture), this book isn't for you. Oh, it isn't as if all those annoying caricatures don't actually exist (of course they do, that's commodification and reductive stupidity at work), but, for example, if your entire conception of Christianity is of a slick huckster working the Evangelical crowd for money and political power, or for that matter, your entire concept of Capitalism is of child slave labor (or your entire conception of Socialism is Orwellian Government Control)... well, hopefully you understand my point (and let's not even get into whether or not I'm advocating for some across-the-board equivocation, where every idea is equally valid - I'm not, I'm just trying to point out what the flip side of that view is the disregarding of interesting or important ideas through their reduction to surface cartoons). The world is complicated and we tend to caricaturize too easily, to allow us to go on living the way we do, messed up though it may be.

So, in short, I believe there is something to be gained by investigating "irrational" systems of thought and belief (even if it's just for creative inspiration, and often it proves to have much more worth than that), although one also has to watch out for the opposite tendency to mistake the menu for the meal, the map for the territory, and somehow believe the system you're investigating is suddenly "The Truth". In fact, there's a lot to be gained by questioning even the cultural concept of "rationality" as we've received it (and some danger in this approach as well, of course - mind-control cults and Totalitarian Governments know this trick), as this book elaborates on. In the end, all that this fruitful interrogation requires is a creative and flexible mind, capable of projecting possibilities and playing with ideas, comparing, contrasting, examining, embracing, undermining, enjoying and feeling (thank you, Robert Anton Wilson). These are the thoughts that underlay my readings into occult and esoteric "knowledge" (and when I review a more directly magickal work, perhaps I'll expand a bit on what I feel a lot of occult material can be boiled down to).

All that having been said (jeez, I'm running out of placeholders!) - I found this book utterly fascinating. I'd kind of stepped away from the Occult/Paranormal/Esoteric side of my reading for the last 5-or-so years, pursuing other interests. But after reading The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Nørretranders (another endlessly fascinating, if very dense, read that may change your view of yourself and the world), I found this volume while packing some unread books and thought I'd take a gamble. Peter Redgrove was a poet, educated at Cambridge, and he weaves an argument here that's synthesized from his knowledge of science, literature, creativity, symbolism and modern occult theory.

The book starts as an examination by Redgrove into a widely recognized belief that has very little scientific rationale to back it up: the idea that people's moods (and even occasional physical processes) can be influenced by changes in the weather. This leads into an interesting look at creative and melancholy moods in the Romantic poets (Coleridge, et al.) and how they themselves linked them to the weather and "airy" imagery. Some interpretations of the imagery behind the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx follow, in which the symbols of sight and rationality are linked and seen related to the Enlightenment's denigration of the other senses, and the focus on rationality and perceived information as "truth" (with some hints that the female/animal Sphinx symbolizes the "dark senses" that were devalued), with some discussion of how this relates to Freud's Oedipal Theory. Then, Redgrove examines the four other senses from a scientific angle, discussing their recorded extremes in singular cases (blind men expanding their hearing, touch, taste, etc.), and then moving out into the wider world of senses that animals exhibit, revealing the vast world of scent (pheromones), audio (sub and supersonic), tactile (pressure variances), taste (seriochemicals) and electromagnetic, magnetic, infrared and ultraviolet radiation that surround us all the time but which we do not perceive - or do we? Redgrove argues that most probably, in the past, our senses were more subtle and tied us into the natural world in ways we can now only barely conceive. With the rise of visual-based/rational culture, the other major senses (and a variety of more subtly attuned ones) were subsumed or circumscribed. And yet they continue to work, even without our knowledge, as our "dark senses". This then moves into an analysis of "black" or "dark" imagery in folklore, mythology, poetry and occultism, including figures like the Black Madonnas of Europe, the Egyptian Goddess Isis, Lilith (the supposedly demonic, earlier wife of Adam), the various inspirational Goddess figures of the Surrealists and, yes, the Sphinx, and how these figures symbolize "unnatural/irrational/visionary" knowledge received through occult means that bypass sight and the rational mind, and operate through scent, touch, taste, sound or dream (Redgrove postulates that the unconscious/dream state is how the dark senses now routinely manifest themselves).

Redgrove and (his wife) Shuttle's The Wise Wound: Menstruation And Everywoman is then touched upon, as women are seen as retaining more of the knowledge of these "dark senses", consciously or unconsciously, due to menstruation and its ties to natural, lunar cycles which underlays the subjugation/denigration of the feminine/intuitive in male/rationalist culture (and the identification of such senses and the knowledge they bring with symbols of witchcraft, prophecy, demonology and lewd - that is to say, pleasure-based, not procreation-based - sexuality) as the patriarchy subsumes matriarchal powers (although various artistic movements, including the Romantics and the Surrealists, routinely rediscover these senses and their ties to the occult feminine - and thus are routinely identified as effeminate). As I mentioned before, one needn't buy into the literal existence of a worldwide matriarchal/Goddess religion as dogma, now thoroughly disputed and debunked as a fact, to accept the more general concepts and symbolic ideas expressed here (unless you somehow think women have always secretly held the power throughout history and never been treated as second class citizens, and if so I've got a bridge you might like to buy). I should also mention that the argument about lunar cycles noted above is the point where most modern feminists will take issue with Redgrove, as that movement seems to consistently and contradictorally claim women's singular importance while denying any substantive difference with men, so such suppositions will be pronounced as sexist in giving women special status - you have to be doing something right if both Conservative and Liberal camps find something to complain about in your ideas.

The last part of the book extrapolates on that old favorite of occult exposés, "secret" sex-magick rituals (now widely known) and what they actually entail (and what might be their actual, biologic/mental/visionary purpose in the theoretical framework proposed, as opposed to the more generally floated "much occult power is gained" handwaving favored by the Hermetic schools). Although the details of said rituals were familiar to me (that is to say, what is actually "done") thanks to having read a lot of Robert Anton Wilson, this book had the first (somewhat) logical argument and explication of why it's done and how it might actually work, or what is being achieved in a non-metaphysical sense (or to be more accurate, in a partly biologic, partly metaphysical/symbolic sense).

There are a myriad of gems scattered throughout this book and, on top of the interesting ideas, it made me want to read some of Redgrove's poetry (although I'm really not a poetry guy). Most intriguing were the early sections on creativity and inspiration being tied to the unconscious and the "dark senses", although I always enjoy a symbolic, occult tour of folklore and mythology as well. Even if you think it's all bunk (and I should point out that Redgrove is the kind of writer, rare in the field of occult and new age texts, who supports his assertions through meticulous notation of primary texts), you might be surprised at the thoughts it could spark, or the odd associations it may cause you to see in the "rational" world. Definitely a work I'll be dipping into again and again.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read two of Redgrove's novels I was interested to see how his nonfiction work interleaves with his fiction. As I noted in my review of the novel The Terrors of Dr. Treviles, which he collaborated on with his wife Penelope Shuttle and which I read in parallel with this, all of his writing seems to exist along a single continuum of investigation into consciousness and sensory experience. This work here is a sprawling survey of literature informing Redgrove's ideas around our latent (and primary) senses, weather sensitivities, and the contemporary significance of mythological figures and paradigms, among other sundry topics all broadly related to the invisible forces among us. Because the book, especially considering its relatively slight length, covers so much ground in a rather haphazard manner, it's difficult for me to adequately sum it up any further than this. However, I've pulled some of the quotes I was most interested in and included them below. Also, at the end of the book Redgrove includes a section on techniques and exercises for further personal research into (non-drug-induced) mind expansion (for lack of a less loaded term), at least some of which will likely be familiar to those on a focused path toward self-realization, as well as an extensive and enticing bibliography.

--Here he is reviewing electromagnetic radiation and specifically in this passage he had been discussing Basil Spence's redesign of Coventry Cathedral. He goes on to write:

All is penetrated and immersed in the wave-complex of visible and invisible light. What we see is determined as much by the invisible as the visible, for the quality of the visible light cannot be separated from the Deeds and Sufferings [source: Goethe] of invisible radiation, or the look of a place from its sound, or the smell of it from the look, for, as we shall see, wherever there is a fragrance there is likely to be a subvisible radiance, charging the light with its underglow.

--In this section he is discussing the so-called diagnosis of schizophrenia:

What place is there in this society for people who see visions? If they are lucky enough to encounter a belief structure which assures them that what they envision is real or useful, and they find it is so, and can handle it, then they become witches, shamans or poets. But if they encounter a psychiatric doctor who cannot understand these matters except in terms of 'mad' or 'sane' and can see no way of adjusting them to society, then the person surprised by the extension of his senses will be treated as mad, and will accordingly withdraw into the isolation of madness.

--One of the most intriguing sections was on weather sensitivity, in which he quotes a statistic that states it affects 30 percent of the population in an overt reaction and the rest in an occult response (i.e., they react without realizing the source acting on them). This bioelectrical effect reaches all the way into the glandular systems. He spends a decent amount of time on this but I could read an entire book about it. He does include a couple of books in the bibliography by Dr. S. W. Tromp on biometereology, which I plan to follow up on.

--There is an interesting section on Surrealism and particularly on women Surrealist artists. Here he draws heavily from Whitney Chadwick's survey of women Surrealists (which I still need to read!). He touches on Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, and Leonor Fini. In discussing the latter's use of the Sphinx image, Chadwick is quoted thusly: 'By assuming the form of the Sphinx she exercises all the powers that have been lost to contemporary women.' Fini herself is later quoted in this phenomenal passage, which I thought was so powerful:

I have never been attracted by fecundity. It is the refusal of utility: participation in the continuity of the species is an abdication. In order to have children a humility nearly inconceivable in the modern world is necessary, a brutalised passivity or a mad pretension . . . Myself, I know that I belong with the idea of Lilith, the anti-Eve, and that my universe is of the spirit. Physical maternity instinctively repulses me.'

--Finally, Redgrove includes a short but compelling section on African ways of knowledge—the draw of the inherent blackness or negritude of the Black Goddess—and in part contrasts the European and African world views:

Léopold Sédar Senghor, for instance, in his essay 'The African Apprehension of Reality' considers how the European will face an object only as an objective intelligence, a warrior, a man of will, a bird of prey; how he separates it from himself, distinguishes it, fixes it, kills it; and in a pitiless Cartesian analysis, dissects it, then makes use of it. Senghor quotes an old African sage he had talked to: 'White men are cannibals. They have no respect for life . . . It is life which makes human, not death. I am afraid it may all turn out very badly. The whites by their madness to destroy will in the end bring troubles upon us.'

I was struck by a similarity in that passage to the ideas expressed by the Native American writer Jack Forbes in his early text of the anti-civilization movement, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, in which he expounds upon his philosophy of the wétiko (Cree for 'cannibal') sickness that has possessed the perpetrators of terrorism, genocide, and ecocide throughout history; and warns that 'to adjust to a wétiko society is to become insane.'

Redgrove's book is not without its flaws. It rambles at times and it attempts to cover a lot of ground in too short of a page count. At times it is difficult to tease out Redgrove's own synthesis from the dense web of quotes he weaves from his generous host of primary materials. However, I found it well worth the effort of close reading to extract what was of particular interest to me.

[For a much more detailed, coherent, and organized overview of this book, please see GR user Shawn's excellent review. He also discusses other topics covered in the book that I don't touch on here.]

[Joyce Pavao · Rating 3 out of 5]

really interesting how climate affects one!

[Side Real Press · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first read this book about 20 years ago and then it seemed a fabulous read because it seemed to provide some sort of scientific validation for my interests into so-called “occult” knowledge. I was inspired to pick it up again as I have recently been reading a lot about the Romantic period with particular reference to their idea that there is a universal 'force’ of sorts, an idea that to an extent prefigured and seemingly influenced Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.

Redgrove is a Jungian with a strong interest in the occult, but he is also a poet and thus also interested in the ideas of free association/heightened sensation and synesthesia, the latter being where one perceives things in a way not normally associated with the particular sense, for example feeling colours.

He is particularly interested in the sense of smell and refers continually to its evocative powers. He compares our senses to those of animals and obviously finds humanity lacking, suggesting that we have somehow lost touch with our ability to access the universal unconscious. He talks a lot about dreams and creativity and other extra-bodily experiences such as sex/orgasm. Redgrove goes further and emphasizes the role of women and their supposedly unique characteristics and that given the phallocentric nature of society (this is the eighties after all, and things have moved on - for some) these need to be fully recognised if we are to develop as both individuals and as a race.

Now, I have a lot of sympathy with his position and his ideas and although I might have made this book sound like some hippy new age rubbish there is a lot of interest within its pages. Not only the scientific studies he cites but his comments upon the nature of creativity. There is a particularly interesting section on the role of women surrealists and their particular vision compared to the men. I shall be reviewing the book that he draws a lot of his material from (Chadwick’s 'Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement’) very soon.

However, there are moments when Redgrove gets carried away by his own enthusiasm is and he suddenly throws in a statement which sadly undermines his whole position. The most jarring one for me is where he quotes from the Oliver Lodge’s Spiritualist book ‘Raymond’ using the dead mans utterances on a ‘universal force’ as evidence for his thesis. I do not think he meant to present this as an example of poetic intuition but rather as solid ‘fact’. Obviously this undermines the strength of his argument but then uses the same quote to make an extremely interesting suggestion about ghostly phenomena which brings it back on track again so it appears as if it is a poetic intuition after all.

If one can bear such moments, and parts of the book which are either to rambling or, at the opposite extreme, try to pack too much into a single page, it is still an extremely interesting read even though a long time has elapsed since it was first written. I believe it is (or should be) something of a minor classic among occultists but don’t let that that put you off.

3 1/2 stars…

[Aepril · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most influential books on my personal artistic and spiritual path. One of a kind.

[Kay Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's worth the OOP price