An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 5)
Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2026 2:41 pm
“There must have been a time when men were demigods, or they could not have invented Chess.” - Gustav Schenk
Chess Incepts as a Sacred Rite
We previously explored how our seemingly ‘private’ imaginative rehearsal space took shape through perforations in the encompassing instinctive orientation of our ancestors. An ‘ontogenetic’ echo of this collective ‘phylogenetic’ process also unfolds in our individual development from conception to childhood as our instinctive orientation is perforated and our living imagination is turned to intellectual stones by which we rehearse for the primary flow. In this context of perforated orientation, the ancient iterations of games like Chess emerged. They were fashioned to help ‘caulk the gaps’ of the perforated flow, so to speak, by acting as symbolic reminders of the intuition that had been blotted out. These rites helped the soul, through the exercise of its blossoming human intelligence, once again feel how it navigates the primary flow and seeks to expand its intuitive orientation; a navigatory experience which had now been veiled in confused dream imagery and the unconsciousness of sleep. Like the Sphinx, and many other religious symbols and practices, such games posed to man the riddle of what he is in his deeper nature and invited him to begin participating in its unriddling.
Just as the adult environment provides the human infant with emotional and linguistic patterns to imitate, the wise ancient initiates provided their various communities with archetypal spiritual patterns to imitate. The aim of this occult education was to mitigate the ‘anterograde amnesia’ that was setting in. This collective amnesia unfolded gradually over centuries and millennia. Ancient cultural manifestations across all domains of life can only be understood by becoming more sensitive to this developmental arc and its implications. Many of the seminal images that have made a lasting impression on humanity reflect a period of transition between intuitive perspectives within the primary flow, most notably the transition to our 4x4 narrowed and delayed aperture of spatial consciousness. For example, the image of the Medusa turning anyone who looked upon her to stone, as referenced above. Or the image of Osiris being dismembered by his brother Set, who scattered the resulting pieces across Egypt. Both reflect the decoherence of holistic, intuitive consciousness into our fragmented imaginative replicas. It is now the task of the human soul, archetypally represented by Isis, to locate and reassemble these pieces through individual intelligence as fully conscious (moral) intuitions.
We have now lost sight of this task due to our highly aliased perspective on the primary flow. One simple way to sense this trajectory is to consider the colloquial meaning of words, for example, “imagination”. In modern times, the meaning of such a word has been stripped of all concreteness. Most people feel like the gestures of their imagination comprise a ‘subjective’ process of fantasizing and combining mental pictures in a mostly arbitrary way, based on personal likes and dislikes. Yet, at the core of this word is “mage” or “magic”, which evokes a deeper act of focusing lawful aspects of encompassing intuitive reality into the manifest environment through symbols that can influence the course of destinies. What we now dryly feel as ‘my thinking’ and ‘my thoughts’ was felt by the ancients, even into the early Middle Ages, as a truly magical act that embodied the supersensible relations of the primary flow in images of mythic proportions. Similarly, the word “evolution” can evoke a pictorial sense of unrolling or unfolding the convolutions that presently constrain the inner flow, as we experimented with in the previous part, rather than merely a process of ‘random mutations and selection’ that shaped physical forms in the distant past and cannot be experienced.
Full essay - https://spiritanalogies.substack.com/p/ ... -chess-456
Chess Incepts as a Sacred Rite
We previously explored how our seemingly ‘private’ imaginative rehearsal space took shape through perforations in the encompassing instinctive orientation of our ancestors. An ‘ontogenetic’ echo of this collective ‘phylogenetic’ process also unfolds in our individual development from conception to childhood as our instinctive orientation is perforated and our living imagination is turned to intellectual stones by which we rehearse for the primary flow. In this context of perforated orientation, the ancient iterations of games like Chess emerged. They were fashioned to help ‘caulk the gaps’ of the perforated flow, so to speak, by acting as symbolic reminders of the intuition that had been blotted out. These rites helped the soul, through the exercise of its blossoming human intelligence, once again feel how it navigates the primary flow and seeks to expand its intuitive orientation; a navigatory experience which had now been veiled in confused dream imagery and the unconsciousness of sleep. Like the Sphinx, and many other religious symbols and practices, such games posed to man the riddle of what he is in his deeper nature and invited him to begin participating in its unriddling.
Just as the adult environment provides the human infant with emotional and linguistic patterns to imitate, the wise ancient initiates provided their various communities with archetypal spiritual patterns to imitate. The aim of this occult education was to mitigate the ‘anterograde amnesia’ that was setting in. This collective amnesia unfolded gradually over centuries and millennia. Ancient cultural manifestations across all domains of life can only be understood by becoming more sensitive to this developmental arc and its implications. Many of the seminal images that have made a lasting impression on humanity reflect a period of transition between intuitive perspectives within the primary flow, most notably the transition to our 4x4 narrowed and delayed aperture of spatial consciousness. For example, the image of the Medusa turning anyone who looked upon her to stone, as referenced above. Or the image of Osiris being dismembered by his brother Set, who scattered the resulting pieces across Egypt. Both reflect the decoherence of holistic, intuitive consciousness into our fragmented imaginative replicas. It is now the task of the human soul, archetypally represented by Isis, to locate and reassemble these pieces through individual intelligence as fully conscious (moral) intuitions.
We have now lost sight of this task due to our highly aliased perspective on the primary flow. One simple way to sense this trajectory is to consider the colloquial meaning of words, for example, “imagination”. In modern times, the meaning of such a word has been stripped of all concreteness. Most people feel like the gestures of their imagination comprise a ‘subjective’ process of fantasizing and combining mental pictures in a mostly arbitrary way, based on personal likes and dislikes. Yet, at the core of this word is “mage” or “magic”, which evokes a deeper act of focusing lawful aspects of encompassing intuitive reality into the manifest environment through symbols that can influence the course of destinies. What we now dryly feel as ‘my thinking’ and ‘my thoughts’ was felt by the ancients, even into the early Middle Ages, as a truly magical act that embodied the supersensible relations of the primary flow in images of mythic proportions. Similarly, the word “evolution” can evoke a pictorial sense of unrolling or unfolding the convolutions that presently constrain the inner flow, as we experimented with in the previous part, rather than merely a process of ‘random mutations and selection’ that shaped physical forms in the distant past and cannot be experienced.
Full essay - https://spiritanalogies.substack.com/p/ ... -chess-456