Well then, this would be a good time to offer up something I encountered just today.
My personal "guru" mentioned a book yesterday entitled "King, Warrior, Magician, Lover" by pyschologists Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette. It's a discussion of the four major archetypes that inform the male character.
Today I settled on the chapter entitled "The Magician," and was intrigued to find a range of concepts that address what we're finding down here in the rabbit hole. Here's a couple of excerpts from pp 102-103 in the paperback edition I have:
Two sciences -- subatomic physics and depth (Jungian) psychology still do the work of ancient magicians in a holistic way that brings together the material and psychological sides of the Magician energy. Each seeks to know and then to at least partially control the very well springs of the same hidden energies the ancients probed so profoundly.
Modern subatomic physics, it has been said, looks very much like Eastern mysticism as it approaches the intuited insights of Hinduism and Taoism. This new physics is discovering a microworld beneath our seemingly solid macroworld of sense perceptions. That unseen world of subatomic particles is very different from the macroworld we normally experience. In this hidden world beneath the surface of things, reality becomes very strange indeed.
There are a couple of themes that this seems to address.
First, we've been fascinated at times with the notion that there was an civilization in India that was wiped out by atomic holocaust in ancient, lost times. I don't frankly ascribed to that particularly theory (I have read at least one fairly detailed disputation of the notion based on the lack of any physical evidence... just don't ask me to find the link now...). But the idea that there are concepts buried in ancient Sanskrit texts that address in a metaphysical manner the physical complexities of the quantum void... that might explain the interest in Sanskrit of people like Beau Kitselman or J Robert Oppenheimer...
Second, I think that all of this focus on the "hidden world beneath the surface of things" has considerable merit. It reminds me of the various references and discussions we have had about Kozyrev (I think), and I have to go back and find the terminology that we used when we talked about the idea that the "aether" is actually some kind of "conscious energy." Yeah, that's the phrase, isn't it?
The thoughts I'm trying to articulate here are not fully formed, their just glimmers of an idea that took root in this afternoon's reading. But this idea of the "Magician" archetype -- "the initiate of secret and hidden knowledge of all kinds" -- it just seems to permeate this entire narrative, don't you think?
Townsend Brown -- we think of him as a scientist, but he was probably more of a "magician."
--PS