Heretics book 3 - The Apocryphile Press

118 :: JOHN R. MABRY
say you come across a spider in your yard. How do you
know it’s a spider?”
“Uh, because I know what a spider looks like?”
“But you’ve never seen this particular spider, how do you
know it is a spider at all?”
“Because all spiders have eight legs?” Kat suddenly felt on
thin ice in this conversation.
“Exactly. You have in your mind a familiarity with the
archetypal spider, the perfect spider, from which all earthly
spiders draw their form and reality. Because you are
acquainted with ‘spiderness’ when you encounter ‘spiderness’
in an actual being, you recognize it, even though it may
look nothing at all like the last spider you encountered.”
“Okay, but isn’t that just something in my head?”
“Solipsism alert!” called Dylan, and Terry laughed with
him.
“How could it be just in your head, when we all share the
same archetypal knowledge?” asked Richard, also enjoying
the joke.
“Okay, he’s in,” Astrid called. “I’m going to try to
enter....it’s dim, but I’m still getting something. Pretty
hazy...okay, it’s clearing now. He roaming aisles, he’s obviously
having an attack of wonder. And I don’t blame him. It’s
pretty glorious.”
“What do you see?” asked Richard.
“Everything in the hall is in motion, ghostly images, all
interacting. It’s pretty chaotic...no, there’s order, but it’s complex.
It’s like everything here is participating in an enormous
ritual. The forms seem to be arranged in symbolic relationships
to one another, and they’re all moving. It’s kind of like
being in the middle of a huge clockworks, with everything
around you whirring and spinning in a regulated way...wow,
it’s really, really trippy.”
“Did Swedenborg write about this?” Brian asked.