gnoxic

I just stumbled across this site that looks as if it was built in 1994. It introduces itself thusly... This is the GNOXIC nexus: where gnosis dances with logic along the stream of semiosis. I see. There's a complicated explanation of the neologism here, but (while the site may contain quite a lot of deeply profound shit; I didn't really look) never mind all that. Here's the deal: I am hereby appropriating "gnoxic" as a wonderful portmanteau for toxic gnosticism Rather than define what I mean by that -- you can probably guess -- let me unpack how I got to that page. Maybe I should number the steps so I don't get lost and go off on a dozen tangents. It's bad enough as it is. In fact, I may have to refer to my history (though as you know, my history is not your history, just as My Truth is not Your Truth, but don't get me started on that one). For some reason I can't remember now, I looked up Black Elk on Wikipedia. Then I noticed there was a link to a University of Nebraska full-text PDF of Black Elk Speaks. So I went and poked around in it. I found a bit in the Preface to the 1972 edition that says the first edition, published forty years earlier (1932), had been pretty quickly remaindered, but that... Somehow a copy found its way to Zurich, Switzerland, and was appreciated by a group of German scholars, including the late Carl Jung, the famous psychologist and philosopher. "Aha! Carl Jung, the famous psychologist and philosopher," I thought to myself. So I fired off a google search for... Black Elk Jung Cary Baynes And that's how I found that GNOXIC page. But that hardly explains my search terms, does it? I hear you saying "Cary Baynes? WTF?" I feel your pain. It helps to know that Cary F. Baynes translated the I Ching or Book of Changes into English from Richard Wilhelm's German translation of the Chinese. (You can read the full text here.) And oh yeah, C.G. Jung wrote the Foreword. It also helps to know that, before she did that, Cary Baynes was married to Jaime de Angulo, a sort of Spanish caballero proto-hippie dude who lived at Big Sur and was heavy into anthropological and and linguistic studies of Western American Indians. See, inter alia, Rolling in Ditches with Shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization of American Anthropology. You can read more about Cary Baynes and Jaime de Angulo in Jung: A Biography by Deirdre Bair, and in detail here on Google Books. Now, it turns out that Jaime was hanging in New Mexico with Mabel Dodge Luhan, who figures among a long historical list of narcissist salon freaks and "high-status people" collectors. She had already collected D.H. Lawrence, and Jaime helped her to collect C.G. Jung, who zipped over from Zurich to Taos in 1925 to catch the Wild West Show. And that's how I knew that searching for "Black Elk Jung Cary Baynes" would probably bring up some curious shit. It may well have done, but then I lost interest. So anyway: gnoxic. dangerous character with Egyptian ray gun

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