On Maps and Territories
“The menu is not the meal.”
― Alan Watts
In the occult world I think we all tend to have —from time to time— a bit of a fixation on studying what has been laid down before us by those that came before. Countless hours are spent studying obscure texts, grimoires and dead languages, hoping to glean any bit of wisdom that might fall like crumbs into our laps. Entire reading lists must be consumed in a delirious binge in order to progress, chapters and charts must be memorized and pronunciations must be puzzled over before we feel like we have perhaps started down the road towards understanding.
Every magus, witch and astrologer needs to start somewhere, and any of the above mentioned is a fine enough starting point. Things do need to be memorized, grimoires do provide great frameworks for ritual, and astrologers do need to work with the planets and stars. All these things are true, in the sense that they provide the basis for learning and understanding. We must remember, though, that doing magick has very little to do with books or memorization.
If you’ve lived any amount of time on this Earth you’ve heard the phrase, “the map is not the territory.” The phrase was made famous by Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who lived from 1879 to 1950.
Nosey astrologers might be interested to know that Korzybski was a Sun in Cancer, Moon (probably) in Capricorn. He also had a very tight conjunction of Mars and Saturn in Aries, as well as Jupiter in Pisces.
Korzybski believed that humans were limited in what they were able to know by their nervous system, and by language. In this way, he believed that humans did not experience reality directly but instead through the abstraction of language and senses. In his paper titled Science and Sanity, Korzybski said:
A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
Indeed, the name of a thing is not the thing itself, but an abstraction by which we represent it internally. Our senses are filtered through the interpretation of our brains and our minds. The currency of our mind is symbol.
The ideas of Alfred Korzybski directly influenced writer William Burroughs, of Naked Lunch fame, who attended one of his workshops when he was 25 years old. Korzybski’s work also influenced Alan Watts, Robert Heinlein and Robert Anton Wilson.
In his book Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson synthesizes Watts and Korzybski in the following passage:
All experience is a muddle, until we make a model to explain it. The model can clarify the muddles, but the model is never the muddle itself. "The map is not the territory"; the menu does not taste like the meal.
When you think about it, it’s obvious that the name of a thing isn’t the thing itself, but we act as if it is so, especially in occult practice. Think of the power of a name; the names of God, the names of angels and demons, secret magical mottos we give ourselves. Are they the thing named? Does the name itself become a totem with enough power to stand on its own?
Maybe it would be productive to understand what a thing is, anyway? Physical objects exist in space time, made up of subatomic particles subject to a myriad of exotic forces, including the quantum zero point field. These, in turn build up atoms that vibrate, absorb and give off various quanta of energy. Is the thing the set amount of atoms that make up what is within its boundaries? Perhaps, but on the atomic level, what differentiates the atom of the gases in the atmosphere from the next atom over that makes up the cellulose in the wood of a chair? Where does one begin and one end? What about ideas? Where do they live? Are they in the electric waves and colliding chemistry of our neurons when we think about them? Or do they exist somewhere else, maybe in Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious?
I think one way to begin to play with the idea of maps and territories is to think of the object or idea as a type of river. The object is a flowing collection of ideas, atoms, connections and potential that exists in time, and perhaps also in space. When we name a thing, when we identify it as a quanta of information existing in the context of our perception, we pin it down at the moment we apprehend it. Imagine an archer shooting at a flowing length of gauze that is infinitely long. Where the arrow strikes, it only pierces one small section of the overall length of the fabric. This is like our apprehension of an idea or object, we can only perceive a very limited amount of the overall information that exists in connection with an object. Say we pick up a rock along a river bank. At that moment, it is shiny, wet, round and smooth, perhaps gray in color. But what of the forces that created it in the first place? What about later, after you toss it back into the river? Will it make its way to the ocean? Did another person in the past pick up that same rock, and toss it in the river somewhere else? Where was the rock when the universe exploded into existence? Was it just a group of atoms that happened to condense around what would become our sun, and then later our planet? The web of connection extends forward and backwards in time and space unto infinity.
Every idea-object is its own river, every river runs inextricably through, around and on top of every other river. In the end we see that we exist in an ocean of indistinguishable rivers that are so interconnected as to be undifferentiated at the highest levels. The rock is indistinguishable from the big bang and the heat death of the universe.
What do we map, if we can never apprehend the territory in all its complexity? The scope of our maps are limited, but can we actually use this fact to our advantage?
As magicians we often rely on the fact that the map isn’t the territory. When you burn a green candle for a Venus ritual, you are counting on the fact that all things green are in some way part of what makes up the idea of Venus. The color green is an eddy in the river that makes up the thing we call Venus, along with the metal copper, ideas like beauty and love, amongst many other ideas.
Bonini's paradox states, “As a model of a complex system becomes more complete, it becomes less understandable. Alternatively, as a model grows more realistic, it also becomes just as difficult to understand as the real-world processes it represents." In other words, a map that exactly replicates the territory is not a very useful map. This is why we have altars and make magical circles. It is much more convenient to create a map of the territory in miniature in order to do our Work. In fact, the tools of the magus —the wand, cup, sword and pentacle, are simply mappings of the terrain of universal archetypes into easily usable forms. One might find it extremely hard to work with the potent creative energy of the universe in abstract, but a wand will do just fine.
The problem with the map though, is that it depends on the viewpoint of those who created it. My map is different from your map. Much like art, experience is subjective and so must be a thing created from a certain point of view. This is the danger in relying too much on what was set down before. Plato made a certain map, and so did Crowley. The maps work for many because our points of view are similar, so they line up with our version of reality in certain places. If all the points correspond well enough, we are happy with the map. If they don’t, we must make our own.
How do we fine tune, or outright create our own working maps? Luckily we are all equipped with the tools to do so —our senses and our selfhood. You will learn everything you need to know about the element of water by swimming in the ocean. You don’t need to refer to any charts or tables, just observe and connect the dots. A dew drop on a flower will work just as well as a cup in ritual. The important thing is to recognize the infinity in each idea-thing, and to think about how to bring it down to human scale.
Praxis
The maps we use are all around us, hiding in plain sight. Think about how to retrofit an existing map so that it more correctly reflects your territory. Maybe the map is a tarot deck, in this case think about different ways to interpret each card or different ways to utilize them. Have fun and experiment with different maps, create your own Tree of Life, or your own directional map based on local landmarks or your specific view of the night sky.
Analyze a ritual you know well. Reverse engineer how the territory must be, according to the map that someone created in the form of this ritual. For instance, in the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, the territory includes potent directional energy where the archangels reside, an all powerful God that is drawn down from above, and mechanisms that enable gestures and movements to hold power. Does this map serve the territory well? Why, or why not?
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