A Voyage to Arcturus
Apr. 14th, 2006 05:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryA friend of mine to whom I taught Greek and with whom I have been reading Greek for many years, prevailed upon me to read David Lindsay’s novel, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). It is neither science fiction nor fantasy as those genera are ordinarily conceived—metaphysical fiction would be a more apt term.
The book was filmed as a student project at Antioch University during the school year 1968-69. The book and a DVD of the film are both available on Amazon. A google search on Voyage to Arcturus will turn up some other reviews.
In any case I outlined my views on the book in a series of e-mails, of which I will post a slightly edited version here. It will seem elliptical and perhaps meaningless to those who have not read the book.
_________________________________________________________
Leehallfae is a being both man and woman, you may recall, from a race [phaens] that preceded and was superior sexed human, while Joiwind's husband was born containing both sexes and the boy and girl in him had to fight for dominance until one was killed. These must both surely be references to the hermaphroditic 'whole-bings' of Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium. You'll recall that this is what ae [Lindsay’s hermaphroditic pronoun] has to say about Surtur [i.e. God], whom ae calls Faceny:
Faceny is of this nature. He faces Nothingness in all directions. He has no back and no sides, but is all face; and this face is his shape. It must necessarily be so, for nothing else can exist between him and Nothingness. His face is all eyes, for he eternally contemplates Nothingness. he draws his inspirations from it; in no other way could he feel himself...For the same reason, phaens and even men love to be in empty places and vast solitudes, for each one is a little Faceny...
Compare this text of Plotinus:
It does not seem to me that one ought to think of those in the intelligible world as using auditory speech and, even should they have bodies in the heavenly region, certainly all of the discourse that passes here on earth because of doubt and misunderstanding would not exist there; but since everything they do is well-ordered and according to nature there would be no commanding or advising, and they would understand what is communicated from one to another in intellectual communion. Even here on earth we can understand through our eyes many things even from those who are silent, but there all bodily existence is purified and each one is, so to speak, all eye. Nothing is hidden or falsified, and before one could speak the other sees and understands.
Finally, here is a possible origin of the name Maskull [the book’s main character], in that of the stage magician Maskelyne, very popular in the London of Lindsay's youth.
_____________________________________________________________
I just watched the DVD as far as Maskull's first night on Tormance. I fear it will have to be seen in little snippets like that, given my other duties.
It will not perhaps surprise you that I had already formed the conclusion that on the chief importances of the novel was its prefigurement of the hippy movement. Here we see that theme developed through its adaptation at the height of the movement. I suppose you did not miss that the invention of the three taking the back-rays in pill form leaves little doubt that the director envisioned the whole thing as an LSD trip?
But I must admit that I was surprised to see the role of Maskull played by Charles Manson [i.e., an actor who affected many of the same styles as Manson—surprisingly my correspondent, now pushing 80, had never heard of Manson].
___________________________________________________________
The metaphysical system that Lindsay creates is Gnostic.
That is, it presupposes that there is a greater unseen reality on which the world perceived by the senses depends, which is a Platonic notion. If differs, however, from Plato, who thought that this world was made in imitation of that one in the best possible way, in thinking that this world is an inherently evil and deformed copy of that world, made by a being of a fallen nature (the demiurge, or builder, in Greek). The process of creation goes terribly wrong and divine light becomes fallen and imprisoned in matter.
Gnostic ideas developed in antiquity among groups that received sufficient education to understand Platonic metaphysics, but nevertheless felt socially isolated or disenfranchised, in other words, who had special occasion to view the world as evil, mainly (but not exclusively) Jews and Christians.
Several other distinctive doctrines developed from the initial Gnostic premise. Namely that this world would be limited in time (an idea anathema to Platonists), and that since the upper world was aware of the fallen nature of this copy, it would send an emissary to this world to set things right by bringing about the end of what ought never have been created in the first place. Typically the role of this emissary is to rescue the fallen elements of the divine light and restore them to the upper world--these consist of the souls of the Gnostic group members (very often other human beings were seen as a kind of demonic counterfeit not possessed of true souls). Once this light was removed, the whole rotten structure of the material world would cease to exist. The Gnosis itself is the knowledge of the world's true character which the emissary delivers to mankind through revelation. In this sense we can view the last chapter of Arcturus as a Gnostic apocalypse.
You will see immediately that Krag/Surtur represents the divine world, Crystalman/Shaping the Demiurge, and Maskull/Nightspore the redemptive emissary. If we look to the etymology of those names, it seems that Shaping is an attempt to render Demiurge, while Nightspore probably refers to semen (which is sometimes lost at night, esp. among the members of a largely celibate community) as the instrument of inseminating the divine light into matter--Galen, the ancient physician, actually talks about the shininess of semen as being evidence of its divine origin. He believed that it was a concentration of the vapors exhaled by the stars and descending to earth in the form of dew. Manichaeans thought that this divine light was also contained in shiny fruits like watermelon (if you cut one open in bight sunlight you will see its glisten) and that eating it concentrated the divine light which it was virtuous to consume and so concentrate for its eventual return to God. The name Surtur is Old Norse, and, I believe, is, according to Norse myth, the oldest divine being to come into existence, and the ruler of Muspelheim. While that is a place of destructive fire in Norse myth, I suppose we must take muspel light in the novel as the trapped divine light.
The use of Norse names (in so far as any traditional mythological names are used) is not without interest. It suggests that Lindsay may not have had direct access to any Gnostic writing and created his own system from scratch, combining anew the Platonic metaphysics and sense of dissatisfaction that originally gave rise to Gnosticism. Certainly what little we know of his biography ('he won a scholarship to university, he was forced to go into business and became an insurance clerk' and declined a directorship in favor of retiring to write [from the book jacket]) suggests dissatisfaction. On the other hand, I think we can conclude that he had read Plato and Plotinus (the passage about God being all eye I quoted to you in an earlier e-mail is very suggestive). The text of Plotinus had just a few years prior to Arcturus’ publication been Englished for the first time by Mackenna. Plotinus has occasion to write several hundred pages refuting Gnostic doctrines which he had first to describe, so I think that this is the probably source of the Gnostic ideas Lindsay presents. Also, we may certainly assume that he was highly conversant with Christianity, which is a very attenuated form of Gnosticism. Plotinus does not use any of the colorful names common in Gnostic texts (such as Barbelo, Ialdabaoth, etc.), leaving Lindsay to supply mythic names either from his slight knowledge of Norse myth or his own rather eccentric sense of etymology (Krag, I suppose is meant to be God as the sacred mountain, etc.). However another Norse element is the idea that the Divine world is not completely superior to the fallen and must actively fight against in an equal battle whose outcome is not obvious and may be the defeat of divinity. There is no Gnostic system in which the overpowering might of the Divine world is not emphasized--Jesus can fix the whole thing just by uttering his name. The equal struggle concept, on the other hand, seems to rest in Indo-European myth inasmuch as it is to be seen also (although not to the same degree as in Norse myth) in Zoroastrianism, and perhaps the earliest Sanskrit writings. For the most part ancient Gnostic systems were enmeshed in Semitic myth.
Seeing the film reminded me of an interesting feature of the book. Many characters (starting with Joiwind) tell Maskull that Crystalman and Surtur are the same being. That is, the believe the claims of the fallen demiurge to be the only and highest God. It is precisely this mistake that both the Neoplatonists and the Gnostics accused orthodox Christians of. Believing in this deception was part of their fallen condition. "The devil masquerading as God" (p. 279). "'It must mean that life is wrong, and the creator of life too, whether he is one person or three.'" (p. 214). Cf. Porphyry’s “…the chief of the demons that pretends to be the Greatest God.’
Many individual poinst in Arcturus recall specific Gnostic ideas:
''It seemed to Nightspore that that the green atoms were not only being danced about against their will, but were suffering excruciating shame and degradation in consequence." (p. 275). This recalls the idea that the whole process of world creation in many Gnostic systems came about when one element of the unfolding of the divine light in heaven (Sophia) proudly decided to try and create the next level of existence on her own without her painter (Jesus) and so had what was termed an abortion--namely the physical world we see around us and its blind god (Yahweh or Ialdabaoth) who made it using the fallen divine light but without knowing the true nature of the higher reality. Sophia herself became trapped in this world and was reincarnated form one generation to the next always in the body of a prostitute (including Helena of Troy).
"'The world is good and pure, but many men are corrupt...One person...believed the universe to be, from top to bottom, a conjurer's cave.'" (p. 48). This from Joiwind. This highlights again Joiwind's (and humanity's in general) ignorance of the true state of cosmic affairs, and also is a pointed reference to the parable of the cave in the Republic.
Maskull and Polecrab debate whether the world of the sense is a dream (as Socrates once asked how on earth one could tell is the experience of everyday reality was a dream or not), and then Polecrab concludes this: "This world...I know it's really here...Yet it's false...Side by side with it another world exists, and that other world s the true one, and this one is all false and deceitful..." (p. 157). The highly Platonic and Gnosticizing character of this statement need hardly be elaborated.
This is when Maskull momentarily sees into his own body in a kind of vision: "he now saw clearly that [his blood cells] resembled minute suns in their scintillating brightness. they seemed like a double-drift of stars, streaming through space. One drift was traveling towards a fixed point in the centre, while the other was moving away from it." This again alludes to human blood (and especially Semen which is a concentrated form of blood in ancient thought) being distilled starlight. It is also an allegory for the descent of fallen souls from heaven, and the ascent of saved souls back to heaven. In case you're wondering, the souls descend though a gate in the sky located at the point where the sun rises of the spring equinox and reascend through another gate located where the sun rises on the fall equinox. Somebody really ought to tell this to NASA so they can direct their efforts along those lines. One may read about this in Porphyry's On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey.
"A beautiful, fantastic spectacle was presented by the cliff-faces, the rocky ground, and the boulders which choked the entire width of the gorge. They were of a snow-white, crystalline limestone, heavily scored by veins of bright, gleaming blue. The rivulet was green no longer, but a clear, transparent crystal. Its noise was musical, and altogether it looked most romantic and charming." There is nothing Gnostic or Platonic here, but I have often visited this place in my dreams, and especially the caves located beneath the cliffs where that stream finds it source.
"...the face, pale as ivory and most femininely shaped, suddenly became most beautiful. The lips were a long, womanish curve of rose-red, her hair was a dark maroon. Maskull was greatly disturbed; he thought that she resembled a spirit, rather than a woman." Again, nothing of theological interest here, but how do you suppose Lindsay happened to so accurately describe my wife?
"But the rhythm persisted...only now against a background of thunder...Maskull's...body was like a prison. He longed to throw it off--to spring up and become Incorporated with the sublime universe which was beginning to unveil itself..." (p. 252). that the body is a prison or tomb was a basic tenant of Plato (he makes the pun soma--sema [body--grave marker] which is inferiorly rendered in English as womb--tomb), and, of course, the return to God is the whole point of Neoplatonism. One is reminded of the beautiful Gnostic poem Thunder—Perfect Intellect in which thunder stands as a symbol for the heavenly call to salvation. [but that shows how tricky this kind of analysis is—the image does recall the poem, yet the poem was completely unknown until the publication of the Nag Hammdi codices more than 40 years after the novel was written)
"The sound comes from Muspel, but the rhythm is caused by its traveling though Crystalman's atmosphere. His nature is rhythm as he loves to call it...or dull, deadly repetition, as I name it.' (p. 270). At last, confirmation that popular music is of the Devil!
In general, I have to say that I was profoundly disappointed with the Arcturus . It would be easy to say that this is because of my familiarity with the source material, so that every utterance that Lindsay makes that is meant to sound profound and vatic just seems to me cheap and derivative, but that is not necessarily the case since I have a higher opinion of other works that deal with the same subject matter (such as Malamud's The Natural which deals allegorically with the Kabbalsitic version of Neoplatonic myth), or Davies who often deals with this kind of myth, albeit at a further remove. My dissatisfaction with the book is neither adequately explained by the relative amateurishness and inexperience of Lindsay as a writer. Rather I would say that Lindsay starts from a position of weakness and ignorance, and desperately searched for meaning which he has to see as detached from ordinary human experience. I would be more interested in a writer who gives form through tradition to a profound sense of meaningfulness within himself. It seems a much stronger potion. It is why, I suppose I ultimately prefer Neoplatonism to any form of Gnosticism (including Christianity).
My criticism of Lindsay, then, is the same as of the hippy, whose attitude was, "Hey man, they're hiding something from us! Let's go find out what it is!' How much better to live in a manner where 'knowing what it is' comes from within one's inherent character. But starting from a position of emptiness and ignorance, how easy it must be to fill up that void with counterfeits of the truth--hence the hippy fascination with drugs, and the essentially fascistic nature of their political thought (if one may characterized by so elevated a term repeatedly shouting out 'Fuck the Pigs' in an effort to silence opposition). Thus you can see how easily in the film Lindsay was subsumed under hippy ideology. And that wasn't the only example of this. An author whom I'm sure you never heard of--Carlos Castaneda--plagiarized and dumbed down many of Lindsay's ideas in a series of best selling books that exercized a strong influence among the hippies and particularly the form of hippiness that led to the New Age, and to which I am especially hostile because it cast its vacuous spell on my poor benighted father whose internal emptiness is frightening to see.
The book was filmed as a student project at Antioch University during the school year 1968-69. The book and a DVD of the film are both available on Amazon. A google search on Voyage to Arcturus will turn up some other reviews.
In any case I outlined my views on the book in a series of e-mails, of which I will post a slightly edited version here. It will seem elliptical and perhaps meaningless to those who have not read the book.
_________________________________________________________
Leehallfae is a being both man and woman, you may recall, from a race [phaens] that preceded and was superior sexed human, while Joiwind's husband was born containing both sexes and the boy and girl in him had to fight for dominance until one was killed. These must both surely be references to the hermaphroditic 'whole-bings' of Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium. You'll recall that this is what ae [Lindsay’s hermaphroditic pronoun] has to say about Surtur [i.e. God], whom ae calls Faceny:
Faceny is of this nature. He faces Nothingness in all directions. He has no back and no sides, but is all face; and this face is his shape. It must necessarily be so, for nothing else can exist between him and Nothingness. His face is all eyes, for he eternally contemplates Nothingness. he draws his inspirations from it; in no other way could he feel himself...For the same reason, phaens and even men love to be in empty places and vast solitudes, for each one is a little Faceny...
Compare this text of Plotinus:
It does not seem to me that one ought to think of those in the intelligible world as using auditory speech and, even should they have bodies in the heavenly region, certainly all of the discourse that passes here on earth because of doubt and misunderstanding would not exist there; but since everything they do is well-ordered and according to nature there would be no commanding or advising, and they would understand what is communicated from one to another in intellectual communion. Even here on earth we can understand through our eyes many things even from those who are silent, but there all bodily existence is purified and each one is, so to speak, all eye. Nothing is hidden or falsified, and before one could speak the other sees and understands.
Finally, here is a possible origin of the name Maskull [the book’s main character], in that of the stage magician Maskelyne, very popular in the London of Lindsay's youth.
_____________________________________________________________
I just watched the DVD as far as Maskull's first night on Tormance. I fear it will have to be seen in little snippets like that, given my other duties.
It will not perhaps surprise you that I had already formed the conclusion that on the chief importances of the novel was its prefigurement of the hippy movement. Here we see that theme developed through its adaptation at the height of the movement. I suppose you did not miss that the invention of the three taking the back-rays in pill form leaves little doubt that the director envisioned the whole thing as an LSD trip?
But I must admit that I was surprised to see the role of Maskull played by Charles Manson [i.e., an actor who affected many of the same styles as Manson—surprisingly my correspondent, now pushing 80, had never heard of Manson].
___________________________________________________________
The metaphysical system that Lindsay creates is Gnostic.
That is, it presupposes that there is a greater unseen reality on which the world perceived by the senses depends, which is a Platonic notion. If differs, however, from Plato, who thought that this world was made in imitation of that one in the best possible way, in thinking that this world is an inherently evil and deformed copy of that world, made by a being of a fallen nature (the demiurge, or builder, in Greek). The process of creation goes terribly wrong and divine light becomes fallen and imprisoned in matter.
Gnostic ideas developed in antiquity among groups that received sufficient education to understand Platonic metaphysics, but nevertheless felt socially isolated or disenfranchised, in other words, who had special occasion to view the world as evil, mainly (but not exclusively) Jews and Christians.
Several other distinctive doctrines developed from the initial Gnostic premise. Namely that this world would be limited in time (an idea anathema to Platonists), and that since the upper world was aware of the fallen nature of this copy, it would send an emissary to this world to set things right by bringing about the end of what ought never have been created in the first place. Typically the role of this emissary is to rescue the fallen elements of the divine light and restore them to the upper world--these consist of the souls of the Gnostic group members (very often other human beings were seen as a kind of demonic counterfeit not possessed of true souls). Once this light was removed, the whole rotten structure of the material world would cease to exist. The Gnosis itself is the knowledge of the world's true character which the emissary delivers to mankind through revelation. In this sense we can view the last chapter of Arcturus as a Gnostic apocalypse.
You will see immediately that Krag/Surtur represents the divine world, Crystalman/Shaping the Demiurge, and Maskull/Nightspore the redemptive emissary. If we look to the etymology of those names, it seems that Shaping is an attempt to render Demiurge, while Nightspore probably refers to semen (which is sometimes lost at night, esp. among the members of a largely celibate community) as the instrument of inseminating the divine light into matter--Galen, the ancient physician, actually talks about the shininess of semen as being evidence of its divine origin. He believed that it was a concentration of the vapors exhaled by the stars and descending to earth in the form of dew. Manichaeans thought that this divine light was also contained in shiny fruits like watermelon (if you cut one open in bight sunlight you will see its glisten) and that eating it concentrated the divine light which it was virtuous to consume and so concentrate for its eventual return to God. The name Surtur is Old Norse, and, I believe, is, according to Norse myth, the oldest divine being to come into existence, and the ruler of Muspelheim. While that is a place of destructive fire in Norse myth, I suppose we must take muspel light in the novel as the trapped divine light.
The use of Norse names (in so far as any traditional mythological names are used) is not without interest. It suggests that Lindsay may not have had direct access to any Gnostic writing and created his own system from scratch, combining anew the Platonic metaphysics and sense of dissatisfaction that originally gave rise to Gnosticism. Certainly what little we know of his biography ('he won a scholarship to university, he was forced to go into business and became an insurance clerk' and declined a directorship in favor of retiring to write [from the book jacket]) suggests dissatisfaction. On the other hand, I think we can conclude that he had read Plato and Plotinus (the passage about God being all eye I quoted to you in an earlier e-mail is very suggestive). The text of Plotinus had just a few years prior to Arcturus’ publication been Englished for the first time by Mackenna. Plotinus has occasion to write several hundred pages refuting Gnostic doctrines which he had first to describe, so I think that this is the probably source of the Gnostic ideas Lindsay presents. Also, we may certainly assume that he was highly conversant with Christianity, which is a very attenuated form of Gnosticism. Plotinus does not use any of the colorful names common in Gnostic texts (such as Barbelo, Ialdabaoth, etc.), leaving Lindsay to supply mythic names either from his slight knowledge of Norse myth or his own rather eccentric sense of etymology (Krag, I suppose is meant to be God as the sacred mountain, etc.). However another Norse element is the idea that the Divine world is not completely superior to the fallen and must actively fight against in an equal battle whose outcome is not obvious and may be the defeat of divinity. There is no Gnostic system in which the overpowering might of the Divine world is not emphasized--Jesus can fix the whole thing just by uttering his name. The equal struggle concept, on the other hand, seems to rest in Indo-European myth inasmuch as it is to be seen also (although not to the same degree as in Norse myth) in Zoroastrianism, and perhaps the earliest Sanskrit writings. For the most part ancient Gnostic systems were enmeshed in Semitic myth.
Seeing the film reminded me of an interesting feature of the book. Many characters (starting with Joiwind) tell Maskull that Crystalman and Surtur are the same being. That is, the believe the claims of the fallen demiurge to be the only and highest God. It is precisely this mistake that both the Neoplatonists and the Gnostics accused orthodox Christians of. Believing in this deception was part of their fallen condition. "The devil masquerading as God" (p. 279). "'It must mean that life is wrong, and the creator of life too, whether he is one person or three.'" (p. 214). Cf. Porphyry’s “…the chief of the demons that pretends to be the Greatest God.’
Many individual poinst in Arcturus recall specific Gnostic ideas:
''It seemed to Nightspore that that the green atoms were not only being danced about against their will, but were suffering excruciating shame and degradation in consequence." (p. 275). This recalls the idea that the whole process of world creation in many Gnostic systems came about when one element of the unfolding of the divine light in heaven (Sophia) proudly decided to try and create the next level of existence on her own without her painter (Jesus) and so had what was termed an abortion--namely the physical world we see around us and its blind god (Yahweh or Ialdabaoth) who made it using the fallen divine light but without knowing the true nature of the higher reality. Sophia herself became trapped in this world and was reincarnated form one generation to the next always in the body of a prostitute (including Helena of Troy).
"'The world is good and pure, but many men are corrupt...One person...believed the universe to be, from top to bottom, a conjurer's cave.'" (p. 48). This from Joiwind. This highlights again Joiwind's (and humanity's in general) ignorance of the true state of cosmic affairs, and also is a pointed reference to the parable of the cave in the Republic.
Maskull and Polecrab debate whether the world of the sense is a dream (as Socrates once asked how on earth one could tell is the experience of everyday reality was a dream or not), and then Polecrab concludes this: "This world...I know it's really here...Yet it's false...Side by side with it another world exists, and that other world s the true one, and this one is all false and deceitful..." (p. 157). The highly Platonic and Gnosticizing character of this statement need hardly be elaborated.
This is when Maskull momentarily sees into his own body in a kind of vision: "he now saw clearly that [his blood cells] resembled minute suns in their scintillating brightness. they seemed like a double-drift of stars, streaming through space. One drift was traveling towards a fixed point in the centre, while the other was moving away from it." This again alludes to human blood (and especially Semen which is a concentrated form of blood in ancient thought) being distilled starlight. It is also an allegory for the descent of fallen souls from heaven, and the ascent of saved souls back to heaven. In case you're wondering, the souls descend though a gate in the sky located at the point where the sun rises of the spring equinox and reascend through another gate located where the sun rises on the fall equinox. Somebody really ought to tell this to NASA so they can direct their efforts along those lines. One may read about this in Porphyry's On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey.
"A beautiful, fantastic spectacle was presented by the cliff-faces, the rocky ground, and the boulders which choked the entire width of the gorge. They were of a snow-white, crystalline limestone, heavily scored by veins of bright, gleaming blue. The rivulet was green no longer, but a clear, transparent crystal. Its noise was musical, and altogether it looked most romantic and charming." There is nothing Gnostic or Platonic here, but I have often visited this place in my dreams, and especially the caves located beneath the cliffs where that stream finds it source.
"...the face, pale as ivory and most femininely shaped, suddenly became most beautiful. The lips were a long, womanish curve of rose-red, her hair was a dark maroon. Maskull was greatly disturbed; he thought that she resembled a spirit, rather than a woman." Again, nothing of theological interest here, but how do you suppose Lindsay happened to so accurately describe my wife?
"But the rhythm persisted...only now against a background of thunder...Maskull's...body was like a prison. He longed to throw it off--to spring up and become Incorporated with the sublime universe which was beginning to unveil itself..." (p. 252). that the body is a prison or tomb was a basic tenant of Plato (he makes the pun soma--sema [body--grave marker] which is inferiorly rendered in English as womb--tomb), and, of course, the return to God is the whole point of Neoplatonism. One is reminded of the beautiful Gnostic poem Thunder—Perfect Intellect in which thunder stands as a symbol for the heavenly call to salvation. [but that shows how tricky this kind of analysis is—the image does recall the poem, yet the poem was completely unknown until the publication of the Nag Hammdi codices more than 40 years after the novel was written)
"The sound comes from Muspel, but the rhythm is caused by its traveling though Crystalman's atmosphere. His nature is rhythm as he loves to call it...or dull, deadly repetition, as I name it.' (p. 270). At last, confirmation that popular music is of the Devil!
In general, I have to say that I was profoundly disappointed with the Arcturus . It would be easy to say that this is because of my familiarity with the source material, so that every utterance that Lindsay makes that is meant to sound profound and vatic just seems to me cheap and derivative, but that is not necessarily the case since I have a higher opinion of other works that deal with the same subject matter (such as Malamud's The Natural which deals allegorically with the Kabbalsitic version of Neoplatonic myth), or Davies who often deals with this kind of myth, albeit at a further remove. My dissatisfaction with the book is neither adequately explained by the relative amateurishness and inexperience of Lindsay as a writer. Rather I would say that Lindsay starts from a position of weakness and ignorance, and desperately searched for meaning which he has to see as detached from ordinary human experience. I would be more interested in a writer who gives form through tradition to a profound sense of meaningfulness within himself. It seems a much stronger potion. It is why, I suppose I ultimately prefer Neoplatonism to any form of Gnosticism (including Christianity).
My criticism of Lindsay, then, is the same as of the hippy, whose attitude was, "Hey man, they're hiding something from us! Let's go find out what it is!' How much better to live in a manner where 'knowing what it is' comes from within one's inherent character. But starting from a position of emptiness and ignorance, how easy it must be to fill up that void with counterfeits of the truth--hence the hippy fascination with drugs, and the essentially fascistic nature of their political thought (if one may characterized by so elevated a term repeatedly shouting out 'Fuck the Pigs' in an effort to silence opposition). Thus you can see how easily in the film Lindsay was subsumed under hippy ideology. And that wasn't the only example of this. An author whom I'm sure you never heard of--Carlos Castaneda--plagiarized and dumbed down many of Lindsay's ideas in a series of best selling books that exercized a strong influence among the hippies and particularly the form of hippiness that led to the New Age, and to which I am especially hostile because it cast its vacuous spell on my poor benighted father whose internal emptiness is frightening to see.
