Lost Marginalia

Last year when I saw that Jacob was wearing archaic garb, I looked for the most appropriate “Jacob” in our cultural past and hit upon Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), whose writings are an influential component of the Western esoteric tradition.  A 16^th-century shoemaker, Boehme had visions that revealed the world-as-becoming through a dynamic struggle between opposing forces: good and evil, light and dark. Rather than perfect or fixed, God is an unfolding that engendered a temporal world of division (with free will) in order to achieve a state of grace, a redeemed harmony; as Antoine Faivre writes in “Access to Western Esotericism”: “…a Supreme Being who ‘sees’ in his living mirror, in the Divine Wisdom or Sophia, the potential world.”

Importantly, Boehme, as with others in the hermetic tradition, considered the physical world to be composed of signs, thus placing emphasis on images, i.e. visual information. Faivre also points out the relationship of the words “image,” “imagination,” and “magnetism,” so that the imaginative faculty does not result in delusion but revelation: “..rather it is a kind of organ of the soul, thanks to which humanity can establish a cognitive and visionary relationship with an intermediary world…” What an analogy for the imaginative enterprise that is “Lost,” a unique television series that never arrives at a set point but is constantly unraveling – that uses visual clues that bear repeated viewing. [Boehme’s writings influenced the original “Lost,” i.e. Milton’s “Paradise Lost."]