Back in the days of Socrates, in the mind of Socrates, their lived what we might call a keen but highly dangerous and unpopular idea that people weren’t fit to govern themselves. More, and it seems strange, this lack of fitness relative to self-government was exactly paralleled by a mysterious prohibition Socrates had picked up from the Mystagogues at Eleusis:

There is a doctrine whispered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand. Yet I too believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we men are a possession of theirs.

This prohibition recurs as similarly fundamental, and religiously derived, in Hamlet:

Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!

We might, also, notice that in being unfit relative to self-government, according to this mystagogic view, the individual thereby becomes a sort of property of the State, as if a character in a play. A character who can neither decide his own course, nor opt out of participation.

This hermetic servitude – in both senses of the word hermetic– recurs in an unusually revealing garb in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, as a prohibition against self-willed travel in Time. It recurs again in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, as an implied prohibition against exactly the science Doctor Jekyll in part, and tragically, discovers. This is the Science of a sort of psychological liberty capable of upending the internal order of government, dethroning the ego and liberating those sub-personalities that exist hidden within the human tyranny.

In these terms, the same prohibition is easily recognized in the warning of the Sufi Naqshbandi, about seeking after contact with what Rumi elsewhere and when termed, the Divine Ray of the Prophet. This, I suppose, being the Ray that hit the Prophet himself, by the power of which he prophesied. The essence, in other words, of his elevated station.

It is therefore better, did man but know it, to avoid all metaphysical entanglements rather than to allow himself to be acted upon by the supreme force which will amplify, magnify, his faults if he lacks the knowledge of how to cure the fault, or of how to approach the teaching so that his faults are not involved in the procedure.

This same danger has long been referenced in more familiar terms in the aphorism: Power corrupts. In light of this phrase, we might draw a sort of equivalence between the Divine Ray of the Prophet and the Will of the People in a democracy, such as our own is supposed to be. And even if we might argue with the idea that the presidency necessarily corrupts, it seems beyond dispute that it ages.

On the Other Hand

There are the songwriters. Rumi himself is on both sides. He details why wine – the Sufi term for the Divine Ray, the Power – is forbidden in one poem; then in another, describes a man driven to verbal diarrhea by the Divine Ray, only to eventually run clean. Singer-songwriter Martin Sexton expressed this same idea in his song, Golden Road:

Then bring your song to the river at sunrise
Sing that song ’til the river runs clean
It will happen to you
As its happened to me

This is expression of what we might call the doctrine of Illuminism, which bases itself on an idea of a fundamental capacity within human beings. We are made, from this perspective, to know the Light. Yet to know the Light is to know the peril, for, as Naqshbandi put it, “the supreme force which will amplify, magnify, his faults if he lacks the knowledge of how to cure the fault.”

The peril of the supreme force, in psychological terms, is in the classic political terms of the founding American generation the peril of democracy. It is the peril facing rock stars and beauty queens.