Mystagogy as Marketing

Beware of the snake that eats its own tail.

First, a brief note: I’m looking for someone with an anti-mimetic spirit to work in a digital communications role (inquire here). Several roles related to The CLUNY Project are also still available separately here.

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The ouroboros is a symbol of a snake eating its own tail. It comes from the ancient Greek words literally meaning “tail” (οὐρά) and “eating” (-βορός). This is what content is. Like a meme, content’s telos is to replicate itself, and it does that by consuming itself.

In the ancient world, the ouroboros symbolized an eternal cosmic return, the transmigration of souls, and fertility. Content is no different. Content begets more content (fertility), it transmigrates (video content becomes written content becomes TikTok reels becomes tweets becomes…), and it reappears eternally, trapped as it is within the digital mechanisms of Amazon Web Services, regurgitated and served back up to us at just the right time when a prediction model determines we are most in need of it.

In the content paradigm, my only motivation for writing this Substack essay would be for you to read my next essay. In that paradigm, my hope if you read my book would be that you read my next book, too—and then that you “go down the rabbit hole”, as they say. I have a decent-sized archive here now. The next piece from me that you read would eat this piece, and the thing after that would eat that piece. The snake would eat its tail.

There is a different kind of creative approach, though, which I think represents the opposite: mystagogy. This approach leads one away from the content and into the mystery of life. It leads one to reality, to the real. It is content for which the terminus ad quem is something other than content. It is the creative spirit of the poet, like Rainer Maria Rilke, for whom the legendary Archaic Torso of Apollo was a work produced to tell him only one thing: “You must change your life.”

There is a different paradigm. And that paradigm will require the use of new and different mediums. Let’s discover them.