Exteriorized Consciousness

Evola writes of the vegetable in the final chapters of the first half of The Hermetic Tradition. Imperfect Gold, separated from the one-ness of the World, is then cast into the black earth, the leaden world of base matter. Consider the mixture, feces, crumbled rock, nitrogen deposits, decomposition products, bacterial output, bug excrement, gore… an orgy of life and motion at its terminus becomes the black fertile soil upon which the gold falls. Gold is then scourged open, the hard outer shell pierced from within by its own potential and its being destroyed for life to sprout. It intakes and grows, blossoming by its precoded pathways in a flower, achieving now a truly perfect Gold.

The process of this decomposition has an posterior position in the herbal and vegetable world of the Garden. Knights appear in medieval marginalia fighting snails, fully armoured, steel blazing in combat. Anyone who’s had escargot will know a deep connection in the posterior of the garden - the uncanny similarity between the taste of snails and mushrooms. This is no accident. Both are symbols of the larger posterior side, that of digestive-functionaries within the garden in order to produce the substrate of the garden. Mushrooms rise from a vast orgasm that can stretch across miles upon miles, as the king’s crown of the soil’s living body of digestive bacteria and rootlife.

The Garden is a fully enclosed world, with its own Heaven, Hell and Earth, the latter being posterior motions downwards to turn the organic into the fertile and anterior motions of the fertile giving birth to the floral, herbal, and vegetable. The Garden is distinguished from the Forest and the Field in this way. While the Field must be sustained artificially, as any monopurposeful space must be, and the Forest springs a result of processes larger than itself, the Garden alone is a full capsule, of creatures in a carefully cultivate symbiosis, an enclosed world to bring forth the most intimate pleasures, herbs, essences, medicines, pharmakon, intoxication, micronutrients, etc.

Forest-actions are thereby replicated. The same codependence of life, of becomings, that meet at a confluence-point to spring up in the lush is carefully cultivated by hands into a world-unto-itself, much like the forest. The Garden represents the Forest where the hand has been made visible, where intellect is brought down to the human level. Gardens often have an architectural or economic teleology as such, the hand producing them doing so under certain directives and within a specific context of taste or need - much the same as the Forest arises from the confluence of factors into an area of land, the Garden arises from a confluence of factors upon a population.

Gardening is magical, a microcosmic act of Creation done by the hand. This act of creation has to be carefully considered, as one that is the pinnacle of extending ones thoughts outwards. Gardening here means the cultivation of life to create an environment, bringing together strands and tensions of life as one is guided to by the hand beyond their own. Gardening, no matter what specific medium it may take, whether stone or floral or digital, is a magical act of extending the consciousness into three dimensions, to create a macrocosm of one’s interior space, in order to fully inhabit one’s headspace - the ideal environment for practice to occur in.