Symbolic experience is intensely intuitive — pre-cognitive.

What we do with these experiences, however, has everything to do with how we cognize. And that “cognitive how” is determined by how our intuitions are organized as organs in a spiritual organism.

Such spiritual organisms are souls, and the soul’s organic functioning is faith.

This organic faith-functioning of souls, though, is known solely by its fruits — the objects of faith: belief, language, action, style, preferences, etc.

Those unable to understand upwards from object mangle everything symbolic and try to make symbols signify downwards. Downward into literalism, into explicit beliefs, into physicality, into body — into irreversible downwardness.

The same thing that makes a “jihadist” make literal war on neighbors who seek peace — is the same thing that drives those seized by the upward call of Androgyne to instead lie down under the knife on an operating table — is the same thing that compelled human sacrifices — is the same thing that makes a psychologist imagine a world of suppressed, submerged subconscious beliefs as the wellspring of myth — is the same thing that makes charlatans use the celestial maps to navigate sewers and to conjure chaos from sacred order in order to sell mumbo jumbo to the gullible.

When an alchemist’s metaphysic knows only the lowest physicality he is cursed with the Midas touch, compulsively turning whatever gold he touches into cash.