In this episode of the podcast we continue our discussion of the first thirty pages of Ramsey Dukes’ essay on magical thinking; “Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed”, commonly abbreviated to S.S.O.T.B.M.E.
Dukes’ model of compass directions differentiates between Art, Magic, Religion and Science, and the modes of thinking associated with each direction. In Dukes’ model of the four compass directions Dukes suggests that, “Magic, Art, Religion and Science represent movement towards Wholeness, Beauty, Goodness and Truth respectively.” These compass points, according to Dukes, don't have to conflict with each other; they can exist alongside each other. One doesn’t have to be correct and the rest wrong. An intelligent person can allow them to co-exist and use or adopt one or more as each situation calls for them.
We take our time to discuss functional specialisation in the brain, and in particular, hemispheric specialisation. Research into the human brain has consistently found areas of functional specialisation. For example, verbal cognition is processed largely in the left hemisphere of the brain of most people, and imagery or spatial cognition is largely processed in the right hemisphere of most brains, and the frontal lobes in each hemisphere are responsible for executive functioning, or higher cognitive functions like organisation, planning and decision making. Prominent researchers Miller and Cummings used PET (Positron Emission Tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic imaging) scans to support functional specialization of the frontal cortex—finding the left frontal cortex active in verbal working memory processes and and visuospatial working memory in the right frontal cortex.
In our discussion we agree that there seems to be some more occluded areas of the brain or nervous system responsible for some of the functions Ramsey Dukes is evoking when he writes about the kind of processing going on in magical thinking. Dukes writes, “I want to suggest that our brains have evolved a non-logical data processing facility which is, in its own way, every bit as useful and sophisticated as reason but which we tend to play down or analyse away because its causal connections seem so tenuous. This facility which I call ‘feeling’ acts much faster than reason and seems to process vast amounts of data in parallel rather than sequentially like logical thought. As such it is hard to put into words, the words chosen tend to be feeling words, and the process is more akin to Art than Science.”
As an exercise in understanding we attempt to take Tarot Divination and map it against Dukes’ model of the four compass directions of Magic, Art, Religion and Science.
It’s also worth mentioning, especially now that we have reached the second of our two-part series on this text, that Dukes never actually reveals the sex secrets of the black magicians, and neither do we…
References
Links
Music for the show by Si Mulumby
A Glimpse of Eternity by Alejandro Tuama