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The Matter of Wonder
The Matter of Wonder
Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and
the New Materialism

Loriliai Biernacki
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
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Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Biernacki, Loriliai, author.
Title: The matter of wonder : Abhinavagupta’s panentheism and
the new materialism /​Loriliai Biernacki.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022040694 (print) | LCCN 2022040695 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197643075 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197643099 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Abhinavagupta, Rājānaka. | Materialism—​Religious aspects—​Hinduism. |
Kashmir Śaivism. | Panentheism.
Classification: LCC B133.A354 B54 2023 (print) | LCC B133.A354 (ebook) |
DDC 294.5/​2—​dc23/​eng/​20221021
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​202​2040​694
LC ebook record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​202​2040​695

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197643075.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

 For Mary Biernacki and Ivan Biernacki,
my mother and father, and for John Shanks.
Acknowledgments

Every book is really the product of many minds fermenting the ideas
that come forth. Here I would particularly like to express my gratitude to
Sthaneshwar Timalsina for his thoughtful conversations, Fred Smith for his
deep knowledge, and David Lawrence for his insight. Much appreciation to
Mike Murphy, Jeff Kripal, and Catherine Keller for encouraging me to think
outside the box. Also thanks go to Vasudha Narayanan, for her encourage-
ment, Greg Shaw, Bill Barnard, Glen Hayes, John Nemec, Karen Pechilis and
NBs Carol Anderson, Whitney Sanford, Robin Rinehart, Corinne Dempsey,
Rebecca Manring, Phyllis Herman, and Nancy Martin. A special thanks to
Ramdas Lamb for his inspiration. Thanks go also to my colleagues at the
University of Colorado, especially Susan Kent and Terry Kleeman and my
students there, particularly James Batten. Particular thanks also to John Lauer
and Radhika Miles and Trupti Manina for her work on the cover. Also, thanks
go to Cynthia Read at Oxford University Press and to Theo Calderara and
the team there in the production of the book. I want to thank also my parents
Mary and Ivan Biernacki, and especially my thanks go to John Shanks for his
loving patience and support through the process.
Contents

Introduction: The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism

and New Materialism  1

1. Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism  12

2. The Matter of Wonder  46

3. The Subtle Body  71

4. Panentheism, Panpsychism, Theism: Abhinavagupta on

Consciousness, Sentience, and the Paperclip Apocalypse  95

5. It from Bit, It from Cit: Information and Meaning  123

Notes  155
Bibliography  221
Index  241
Introduction
The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and
New Materialism

I bow to him who pierces through and pervades with his own essence
this whole, from top to bottom, and makes this whole world to consist
of Śiva, himself.1
—​Abhinavagupta

We may someday have to enlarge the scope of what we mean by a

“who.”
—​John Archibald Wheeler

Even down to a worm—​when they do their own deeds, that which is to

be done first stirs in the heart.2
—​Abhinavagupta

If thou be’st born to strange sights, Things invisible to see, Ride ten
thousand days and nights, Till age snow white hairs on thee, Thou,
when thou return’st, wilt tell me, All strange wonders that befell thee
—​John Donne

In this book I argue that the panentheism of an 11th-​century medieval Indian

Hindu thinker can help us to rethink our current relationship to matter.
Writing in northern India from 975 to 1025 ce, the Kashmiri philosopher
Abhinavagupta (950–​1016) articulated a panentheism—​both seeing the di-
vine as immanent in the world and at the same time as transcendent—​as a way
of reclaiming the solidity, the realness of the material world.3 His theology un-
derstood the world itself, with its manifold inhabitants, from gods to humans
to insects down to the merest rock as part of the unfolding of a single con-
scious reality, Śiva. This conscious singularity—​the word “god” here does not

The Matter of Wonder. Loriliai Biernacki, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197643075.003.0001
2 The Matter of Wonder

quite do justice to the pervasive panentheism involved—​this consciousness,

with its capacity to choose and will, pervades all through, from top to bottom;
human and nonhuman, as Abhinavagupta tells us, “even down to a worm—​
when they do their own deeds, that which is to be done first stirs in the heart.”4
His panentheism proposed an answer to a familiar conundrum, one we still
grapple with today—​that is: consciousness is so unlike matter; how does it
actually connect to the materiality of our world? To put this question in more
familiar 21st-​century terms, how does mind connect to body? This particular
question drives the comparative impetus for this book.

Abhinavagupta

A towering figure in India’s philosophical landscape, influential far beyond

the boundaries of his native Kashmir in the thousand years since his death,
Abhinavagupta wrote extensively on Tantra, an innovative religious move-
ment that began in India in the first half of the first millennium.5 Tantra as a
religious system cut across religious boundaries, steering Buddhist groups and
sectarian Hindu groups, Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava, and even an abstinency-​minded
Jainism6 away from an earlier ascendant asceticism to a philosophy and a
praxis more keenly focused on the body as part of the path of enlightenment
and on ritual, especially ritual involving the body.7 Perhaps in keeping with
Tantra’s attention to the body, it may not be surprising to find Abhinavagupta
exercising his keen intellect as well in the domain of the senses, writing also
on aesthetic theory.8 And while Abhinavagupta is especially well known today
for his writing on Tantric philosophy and ritual, it is probably fair to suggest
that historically in India his pan-​India fame rests especially on his writings on
aesthetics, where his theoretical interventions shaped aesthetic understanding
through the following centuries.9 This material, sensual orientation shapes a
physical portrait we have of him as well. One of his devotees, as Pandey tells
us, a disciple who studied directly with Abhinavagupta, Madhurāja Yogin,
gives us a visualization of Abhinavagupta.10 Certainly, the intervening centu-
ries make it hard to accord it any genuine accuracy; still the image we have is
evocative, redolent of a sensual, physical embrace of the world. His long hair
tied with a garland of flowers, bearing the insignia of a devotee of the god Śiva,
rudrākṣa beads, and three lines of ash on his forehead, he plays a musical in-
strument, the vīna, and in an anticipated Tantric gesture, two women are at
his side holding lotus flowers and the aphrodisiac betel nut.11 Portraits aside,
Abhinavagupta’s writing is compelling and fresh even after these ten centu-
ries precisely because of Abhinavagupta’s ability to weave philosophy within a
 Introduction 3

mundane material awareness.12 Keen in its psychological comprehension, his

acute sensibility of how the mind works can help us navigate our own contem-
porary engagement with the matter all around us.

My Argument

Particularly for a New Materialism, I propose that Abhinavagupta’s articula-

tion of panentheism, centered around a foundational subjectivity, gives us a
first-​person perspective that may offer a helpful intervention for our world
today as we rethink our own relationship to matter, to the natural world
around us, other humans and nonhumans, and the rapidly disappearing
insects and worms that cross our paths.13 Abhinavagupta’s panentheism
postulates a single reality, Śiva, which unfolds out of itself the wonderful di-
versity of our world. He tells us that

the category called Śiva is itself the body of all things. “On the wall [of the world
which is itself Śiva] the picture of all beings appears, shining forth”—​This statement
indicates the way that all these appear.14

His panentheism aims to keep our sights on the world, with all its matter
and multiplicity, as real. A tricky endeavor for a singular reality, Śiva, a
nondualism.15 Classical, familiar attempts at nondualism try mostly to show
us how our idea of the multiplicity of the world as real is just a mistake in
judgment. Abhinavagupta’s panentheism instead reformulates the relation-
ship between matter and consciousness. He draws on psychological, linguistic
modes, the idea of subject and object, to tell us that we find nested within ma-
teriality the possibility of a first-​person perspective, even in a mere rock.16 We
find consciousness at the heart of matter. Rethinking the boundaries of life,
matter, and consciousness, his strategy offers a way to think through mate-
riality, for a New Materialism in particular, compelling in its decentering of
the human.
I focus on key elements of Abhinavagupta’s panentheism to address cen-
tral issues for a New Materialism. First, his use of wonder (camatkāra), I pro-
pose, serves to alter our vision of matter, pointing to its essential liveliness.
Moreover, it reinscribes transcendence within a bodily subjectivity. Second,
I suggest his use of the term vimarśa, a kind of active awareness, can help us
think through how we get the idea of sentience, that is, to think through the
relationship between what is living and what is not. Third, I propose that he
uses his inherited cosmological map of what there is (familiar to students of
4 The Matter of Wonder

India as the tattva system) to map phenomenologically how this originary

consciousness, Śiva, progressively transforms its original subjectivity in stages
to become objects, the materiality of earth and water that make up our world.
Fourth, in addition, I suggest that he draws on the tattva system to chart how
we get the many out of the One. Fifth, I propose that we may read the theology
he gives us of the subtle body as a way of affording intentionality to the affec-
tive processes of the body, outside of human egoic intentions.
Finally, I propose that Abhinavagupta’s strategy for connecting conscious-
ness to materiality can instruct our own century’s adoptions of panpsychism and
dual-​aspect monisms, models that contemporary philosophers and scientists
use to solve the problem of how life and consciousness relate to mere matter—​
particularly in terms of our current enthusiasm for ideas of information. In this,
I use Abhinavagupta’s philosophy to address issues relevant for us today, and
I do so comparatively, drawing on our own current cultural preoccupations to
frame his panentheism.17 In sum, I argue that Abhinavagupta’s panentheism
is too important a resource to not be used in our current construction of our
world, particularly in the face of our rapidly increasing capacity to manipulate
matter—​and, indeed, in view of the consequent ecological results.
In the five chapters that follow I present an outline of Abhinavagupta’s
panentheism, charting how his panentheism maps the relationship between
materiality and consciousness, between immanence and transcendence. But
my particular focus is on the material side of the equation. Abhinavagupta’s
nondualist panentheism has, assuredly, been invoked more generally in the
context of an idealism, that is, more on the consciousness side of things.18 Here,
I contend that paying attention to his sophisticated articulation of materiality
can help us in our own understanding of what matter is and how it matters. To
get a feeling for the importance of matter in his nondualism, we can compare
him with another nondualist, the great nondual mystic of the 20th century,
the South Indian Ramana Maharshi (1879–​1950). Ramana Maharshi’s phi-
losophy is often aligned with the nondualism of Advaita Vedānta, the well-​
known Indian philosophical conception, in a nutshell (though this is perhaps
too brief), that the world we experience here is illusory, is Māyā. Ramana
Maharshi instructs us to ignore the world. We do not need to know about the
world, he tells us; we just need to know about the Self.19 He instructs us

[t]‌o keep the mind constantly turned inwards and to abide thus in the Self is the
only Self-​enquiry. Just as it is futile to examine the rubbish that has to be swept up
only to be thrown away, so it is futile for him who seeks to know the Self to set to
work enumerating the tattvas that envelop the Self and examining them instead of
casting them away.20
 Introduction 5

In other words, we do not need to know what our world is made of in order to
get enlightened. It is rubbish, futile knowledge; simply toss it out. In contrast,
Abhinavagupta tells us:

Now, it would not be correct to say that for our present topic—​i.e., to convey the
recognition of the Lord—​it is not necessary to ascertain the world as object to be
known; [this is not correct, because] only to the extent that one makes the world
into an object, to the extent that it is known, can one then transcend the level of ob-
ject, of thing to be known and allow the true sense of the knower to take root in the
heart, its fullness being grasped by mind, intellect and ego.21

Abhinavagupta addresses head on the assumption that enlightenment means

we drop the idea of a world out there. Even if his readers might think that the
path to enlightenment means concerning ourselves only with the highest, the
recognition (pratyabhijñā) of the Lord, as we hear in the echoes of Ramana
Maharshi’s advice, Abhinavagupta instead reminds us that the fullness of in-
sight also includes the materiality of the world. Only by knowing the world do
we allow the real sense of the knower to blossom in the heart. It is, of course,
important not to understate the legacy of transcendence and idealism that
Abhinavagupta inherits and embraces. However, in this book I will focus es-
pecially on the materialist side of Abhinavagupta’s thought. Rather than on
the wall of the world that is Śiva, my center of attention is instead on the fan-
tastic diversity of the picture, which has mostly been neglected in much of the
excellent work on this thinker.22

My Primary Source Material

My thinking on Abhinavagupta and his perspective on the materiality side

of things has been especially influenced by my primary source material.
I have worked particularly with the third section of one of Abhinavagupta’s
last works, his massive Īśvara Pratyabhijñā Vivṛti Vimarśinī (Ipvv), the Long
Commentary on the Elucidation of Recognition of the Lord, composed in 1015
ce.23 The Sanskrit text, handed down in manuscript form through genera-
tions from Abhinavagupta’s time, was first published in Kashmir in three
volumes from 1938 to 1943; I draw primarily from the third section, titled the
Āgamādhikāra, comprising 100 pages of Sanskrit.24 Abhinavagupta’s text is a
commentary; he provides explanatory notes to a text written approximately
50 years earlier by his great grand teacher Utpaladeva, the Īśvarapratyabhijñāv
ivṛti (Elucidation of Recognition of the Lord), which is itself a commentary on a
6 The Matter of Wonder

shorter set of verses composed by Utpaladeva, Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā (The

Verses on Recognition of the Lord). Thus, we have a commentary on a com-
mentary on an original set of verses. Abhinavagupta also wrote a shorter com-
mentary on Utpaladeva’s compelling verses, and Utpaladeva wrote his own
autocommentary as well.25
The Āgamādhikāra deals particularly with received knowledge, what the
tradition has passed down. Āgama is typically translated as “scripture” or “re-
vealed text.” Abhinavagupta and Utpaladeva, however, use the term not so
much to focus on particular scriptures or textual sources, but rather to discuss
knowledge of the cosmos, the cosmology that we find in the tattva system, the
classification of all that exists, handed down by tradition.26 Abhinavagupta
explicates the received tradition of cosmology, the tattva system, within his
understanding of a subject–​object continuum, offering us a map of how an
originary consciousness, Śiva, unfolds to become the myriad objects that
make up our world. The two chapters of the Āgamādhikāra chart out what the
world is made of, following Abhinavagupta’s Tantric classificatory scheme of
cosmology, the tattvas, and then addresses the tradition’s understanding of
different modes of subjectivity in relation to the objects we find in the world.
Describing these two chapters, Abhinavagupta tells us:

So far [Utpaladeva] has explained how the group of tattvas exist as object and im-
mediately preceding that he explained the nature of the subject also. Here, because
of its importance, the text reveals the essence of the object because it is helpful for
the recognition of one’s own divinity. So it is a topic worth delineating in detail.27

Again, we see Abhinavagupta telling us that we need to know the world; we

need to know the essence of the objects we encounter if we want to achieve our
own enlightenment. The Āgamādhikāra charts out the nature of the world, the
materiality all around us.
Abhinavagupta’s Long Commentary is interesting and helpful because he at
times offers long and insightful expositions on various ideas that we do not
find anywhere else; it is also difficult because Utpaladeva’s autocommentary,
the Elucidation (vivṛti), has been lost. As a result, Abhinavagupta’s Long
Commentary makes reference throughout to particular specific words whose
source is no longer extant. Still, many of his long excursions are coherent and
compelling without recourse to Utpaladeva’s lost text; the situation is also
remedied to some extent by the availability of Abhinavagupta’s earlier shorter
commentary (Ipv). A translation for the Long Commentary as a whole and
for this third section, the text of the Āgamādhikāra, is not yet available.28 For
this reason, when I offer translations drawing from Abhinavagupta’s writing
 Introduction 7

and particularly this text, the Āgamādhikāra, to explicate Abhinavagupta’s

thought, I give the passages of Sanskrit in the notes section at the end of each
chapter. All translations are my own.

Panentheism and the New Materialism

Abhinavagupta’s panentheism maps out the nature of matter, telling us we

need to understand matter if we want to understand ourselves and our own
enlightened divinity. This focus on what matter is, I suggest, can help steer our
own thinking as we face a rapidly crashing environment and help to rethink
how we relate to our material world. For a nascent New Materialism in partic-
ular, keenly attuned to how the way we think about matter directs what we do,
Abhinavagupta’s panentheism with its sophisticated articulation of subjec-
tivity in relation to the matter of our world may help to refine our contempo-
rary attitudes toward the rocks and insects and worms all around us. Of course,
I am premising this suggestion on the provocative thesis that Lynn White ar-
ticulated all those years ago—​that our model of the world, our theology or
cosmology, sets the stage for how we treat the matter of our world.29 Indeed,
as the Oxford English Dictionary attests in its helpful list of dated examples
of usage, as early as 1991 we start to see panentheism associated with a way
of addressing our environmental challenges.30 What is it about panentheism
that makes it environmentally friendly? The answer to that question, I might
venture, has to do with the idea of linking things that seem quite different
from each other. Panentheism links the material world to something that is
quite apart from its materiality, an outside force, a divinity, that transcends
matter altogether. This cozy material affinity is indeed encoded linguistically
in the word. As a concept itself, the prefix pan—​that is, the world, matter, and
materiality—​is affixed to theism, the transcendence of deity. The two are not
made into one, merged as in pantheism, but rather the materiality of the world
and the transcendence of deity are linked, yet still held apart in a productive
tension. In this sense, panentheism operates as a ligature holding in tension
both the many and the one, both matter and transcendence.
I suspect that what made panentheism particularly attractive for
Abhinavagupta in the 11th century was the ligature, its rather Tantric assertion
to have one’s cake and eat it too—​that is, its claims toward both the materiality
of the world and the transcendence of divinity.31 Panentheism can give us both
consciousness and matter, not dissolving one or the other. Consciousness as
something outside transcends the materiality of our world, yet it is held in pro-
ductive tension with the world, not erasing the messy matter of immanence.32
8 The Matter of Wonder

In this respect, panentheism points to a way of thinking about the link between
matter and consciousness, a metaphysical hitching together of two seemingly
polar opposites. This book as a whole also proposes a similar sort of ligature, a
comparative project bringing together disparate elements in the hope of a pro-
ductive tension, an 11th-​century Tantric on the one hand and a contemporary
New Materialism on the other. It focuses on our contemporary concerns around
what is sentient—​animals? viruses? artificial intelligence?—​set in relation to
Abhinavagupta’s articulation of what gives rise to sentience. And the book deals
with our current conceptions of information as data—​articulated in juxtaposi-
tion to Abhinavagupta’s theology of mantra, mystic sound.33 In this sense, the
comparative project that unfolds in the following five chapters operates in the
style of the 17th-​century English Metaphysical poets, like John Donne, hitching
together disparate things to reveal at the heart of things a sense of wonder.

Chapter Outline

Chapter One looks at Abhinavagupta’s conception of subjectivity (ahantā) in

relation to matter, and specifically in terms of what it can impart for a New
Materialism. Subjectivity, (ahantā), a first-​person person perspective, works
as the fulcrum of his panentheism. What makes us sentient depends on
our capacity to identify with the sense of “I,” rather than the “this” (idantā),
a state of being an object. Abhinavagupta reminds us that attention to sub-
jectivity is needed for thinking through our relationship to matter. Notably,
Abhinavagupta uses psychological, linguistic modes, rather than our more fa-
miliar ontological distinctions, to parse out the differences between humans
and nonhumans and matter. Not ontologically driven, this modal formula,
rather helpfully for a New Materialism, decenters the human in our cosmology.
Humans and rocks alike share a fluid ability to move between being a subject
or an object, giving us consciousness innate to matter. At the same time that
Abhinavagupta asserts an innate capacity for sentience, even for things that
seem to be dead objects, like rocks, he also proposes a way to differentiate be-
tween things that are sentient and things that are not. With this distinction we
also examine how Abhinavagupta helps us to think through how we get mul-
tiplicity within a philosophy that claims there is only one reality. Throughout
this chapter I offer a comparative assessment of Abhinavagupta in relation to
a New Materialism. Walt Whitman, for instance, a figure frequently invoked
for a New Materialism, also poses an expansive first-​person perspective in his
poetry, a similarity, I suggest, that shares with Abhinavagupta’s first-​person-​
centered philosophy a capacity to enliven objects.
 Introduction 9

Chapter Two begins with a discussion of how science and scientists, from
Carl Sagan to some contemporary neuroscientists such as Anil Seth, in-
voke wonder as a way of bringing in an atheistic transcendence. This chapter
delineates Abhinavagupta’s formulation of wonder (camatkāra), arguing that
the phenomenology of wonder serves to underscore an inherent subjectivity,
even in mere matter. Tracing out the Indian genealogy of wonder through its
roots in cooking, we see Abhinavagupta emphasizes the sensory and sensual
elements of wonder. At the same time, Abhinavagupta’s conception of wonder
offers a way of delineating between what is alive and what is not in a way that
offers a permeable boundary between mere matter and life. Wonder happens,
Abhinavagupta explains, when the “I” can reflect on itself; it is the signal of
life, sentience. With a keen phenomenological attention, Abhinavagupta’s
analysis of wonder turns on its head the way we usually think of wonder. He
tells us that the power of wonder is not so much that it offers a transcend-
ence that leaves behind the fetters of an earth-​bound material body, but rather
that wonder instead alters our vision of matter, pointing to its essential liveli-
ness. This in turn alters how we understand transcendence. It is not an up and
out situation, leaving behind sluggish dumb matter; instead it points to an
inwardness, a heightened subjectivity. Abhinavagupta rewrites transcendence
in one other way as well. We typically imagine transcendence as a space of
timelessness, above the change of the world. Abhinavagupta instead rewrites
time back into this transformed notion of transcendence.
Chapter Three begins with a discussion of Darwin’s description of his loss of
faith when he witnesses the parasitic wasp infecting the caterpillar. How could
a benevolent God create this sort of monstrosity, he asks—​a parasitic wasp
inside the caterpillar, two beings, one body, boundaries transgressed. Here
the focus is on the boundaries of bodies and agency. In this context, I discuss
Abhinavagupta’s idea of the subtle body as a body also inhabited by some-
thing other than the person claiming the body. Here, however, in this Tantric
case, the other consciousness inhabiting the body is not an invading parasite
directing the body, but an image of deities directing the body. I suggest that
Abhinavagupta’s theological inscription of deities driving human action adds
an important element to the notion of bodies and matter. Abhinavagupta’s
theology offers a perspectival shift toward recognizing the body’s own claims
to intentionality, an intentionality that typically is only accorded to mind or
spirit. In this sense, the panentheism out of which Abhinavagupta fashions
his conception of the subtle body enfolds within it an upgrade for the idea of
bodies, of matter. Theology here registers a respect for the affective processes
of the body. Locating gods in the body tells us that the mind is not the master
in the house; rather, sentiency, will, and desire arise throughout the body’s
10 The Matter of Wonder

functions, separate from the mind’s desires. Moreover, this theology of the
body proposes these multiple affective registers in a way that does not dwell
(neither lamenting nor rejoicing) on the subsequent disappointment and loss
of the sovereignty of the ego and its free will. So while a contemporary thinker
like Brian Massumi strives to find a model to understand the complex, refrac-
tory affective flows of the body in a language of the virtual, Abhinavagupta
instead reads this complexity of multiple affective flows through a lens of the
forces of deities with their own conscious trajectories. In this respect, this
panentheist theology affords a foundational liveliness to the multiplicity of
agencies that make up the body. Here it is referenced in Abhinavagupta’s map
of the subtle body, which sees the body itself as an ecology of beings, materi-
ally embedded.34
Chapter Four opens with the conundrum of computer sentience: Stephen
Hawking’s and Elon Musk’s deep fears of artificial intelligence. This chapter
uses this framework to address a key element of Abhinavagupta’s panen-
theism: how we attain sentience. This chapter first points to the differences
we find between a currently popular panpsychism and Abhinavagupta’s pan-
entheism. Even as contemporary panpsychism is appealing precisely because
it brushes aside dualistic conceptions of God, still we see in its formulation
the influences of a Western legacy of transcendence. In this chapter I propose
also that rather than look at the terms ubiquitously used to translate the no-
tion of consciousness from Indian languages to English—​terms like cit, citi, or
saṃvid, which are typically employed to talk about consciousness—​instead the
term vimarśa more closely approximates what contemporary neuroscience
understands as consciousness. I suggest that Abhinavagupta affords priority to
vimarśa precisely because of its links to activity, a capacity to do things in our
material reality. With this observation, drawing on Harald Atmanspacher’s
classificatory work, we look at how Abhinavagupta’s dual-​aspect monism
stacks up in relation to other 20th-​century Western conceptions of dual-​
aspect monisms. I conclude the chapter by returning to my initial query re-
garding computer sentience.
Chapter Five returns to Darwin’s anguish and loss of faith over the para-
sitic wasp and discusses newer findings that suggest the idea of signaling and
information-​sharing across species. The parasitic wasp comes to lay its eggs
inside the caterpillar because the plants being attacked by the caterpillars
signal to the wasps via pheromones. Using this framework, I then take up the
idea of information where information, as I have discussed elsewhere, takes
on a dual nature, both as material substance and as something that conveys
mental intentionality.35 I draw comparisons with contemporary Western
ideas of information, its links to New Materialism and to Abhinavagupta’s
 Introduction 11

panentheism as a way of thinking about consciousness as information. The

idea of information, I suggest, is attractive for a current perspective because it
seems to take away the subjective element of knowledge, giving us something
we can measure and manipulate. Yet, if we examine it more closely, I propose
that instead what makes information powerful as a concept for us today is
that it embeds an unspoken bivalency, which links back to the intentionality
and meaning of the subject who knows. The final section of this chapter ties
this bivalency back to Abhinavagupta’s articulation of subjectivity (ahantā)
and its corollary, a state of being object (idantā). Through this background,
I examine Abhinavagupta’s account of how we get diversity, agonistic relations
of wasps and caterpillars, in a nondualism, a system where there is only one
consciousness. I suggest that interpreting the tattva system, the cosmology
Abhinavagupta inherits, as a phenomenology of consciousness moving from
subjectivity to object, Abhinavagupta demonstrates a panentheism that is ca-
pable of unfolding to embrace the rich diversity that makes up our world.
This book, then, is about this medieval philosopher’s panentheism and what
it might have to offer for our world today as we think through the complexity
of our relationships to our world’s myriad others, to both biologically living
and nonliving matter. My hope is that it will afford us new ways of thinking
about materiality that can help alleviate our current planetary predicament.
1
Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and
New Materialism

In evolutionary biology and cognitive science as in artificial intelli-

gence, whatever the specifics of the disagreement, when you want to
get out the big guns, you accuse the opponent of ascribing agency to
nature’s machinery.
—​Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock

This, my hand is god; my hand is greater than god, for this touches the
auspicious. It is a medicine for the world.
(Ayam me has to bhagavānayaṃ me bhagavattaraḥ| ayaṃ me
viśvabheśajo ^yagṃ śivābhimarśanaḥ)
—​Śrī Rudrapraśna

as if stones and metals had a desire, or could discern the place they
would be at, as man does; or loved rest, as man does not
—​Hobbes, Leviathan1

Abhinavagupta’s Panentheist Matter

If, in the 21st century, in the midst of the 2020 pandemic we still clung to the
idea of human exceptionalism—​that we humans can mold an inert planet to
fulfill human goals, human desires—​well, the scourge of the Covid-​19 virus
has put that fond dream to rest. We now live in the panic of a virus hiding eve-
rywhere. A tiny, indeed invisible collective, not even living by some biological
standards, has managed to crush empires, stealthily, without malice.2 Even in
the same way, we humans as well, without any malice, have managed to engi-
neer the fate of whole species, wipe out so many others as we enter now into
the sixth great extinction. Our six-​foot boundaries, like a failed border wall,
remind us that our old world is gone. The slow recognition that we cannot
maintain the old fictions of “us” and “them,” that living organisms “possess

The Matter of Wonder. Loriliai Biernacki, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197643075.003.0002
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 13

soft boundaries, very soft boundaries,”3 is an ecological driver for the shifts
pressing forward with a New Materialism. Birthed in our current crisis of
ecology, a New Materialism calls for a shift in our relationship to other spe-
cies, a deeper awareness and respect for the matter that makes up our world.
The sort of shifts called for are, however, new only against the backdrop of
Western modernity. We find in fact a much earlier, sophisticated articulation
of a vitally embodied materiality in the medieval panentheism of the Indian
Tantric philosopher Abhinavagupta, who flourished in the last part of the
10th century through the early 11th century in Kashmir. Even if his sights of
other species’ agency extended not so far as to encompass the not-​quite-​alive,
not-​quite-​visible virus, they reached at least down to the tiniest moving crea-
ture he did see. He tells us: “When those [beings] belonging to Māyā—​even
down to a worm, an insect—​when they do their own deeds, that which is to
be done first stirs in the heart.”4 That is, even the tiniest worm has an agency
and a consciousness capable of choosing, a subjectivity rising in the heart.
Remarkably not anthropocentric, ecologically, this medieval panentheism
casts a wide net, so much so that even a worm or an insect has a will, its own
desires stirring in the heart. Compare this, for instance, to Descartes’ infa-
mous beast-​machine (bête-​machine), where animals, far from having desires,
are just dumb machines, incapable even of feeling pain.5 I suspect the contrast
speaks volumes about our own culture’s implicit attitudes toward our planet’s
other inhabitants.
In particular, Abhinavagupta’s panentheism takes the form of a
cosmopsychism: a single nondualist reality unfolds out of itself the rich variety
that makes up our world. Of course, already we can begin to glean a shift in our
ideas of boundaries. Six feet, or a border wall? We living beings possess very
soft boundaries. A single cosmopsychism unfolding to make us all means, on
one level, that we are all connected. Yet, even while Abhinavagupta’s panen-
theism tells us there is only one reality, a nondualism, still, this not a philosophy
that says only what the mind imagines is real. Instead, the matter of the world
is quite real. Thus, in a striking departure from more familiar nondualisms,
which give us a world that is illusory, that is, a deceiving Māyā, Abhinavagupta
pushes away the notion that the world might be merely an idealist fabrication.
As we see later in this chapter, Abhinavagupta offers us a plurality of myriad
others, all real. Rather, what makes up this one reality is pictured, curiously, in
the image of a wall (bhitta); this wall (or perhaps like the screen of a movie),6
really consciousness itself, unfolds the multiplicity of the world out of itself, not
ever losing itself, while it takes the form of all sorts of things—​humans, insects,
rocks, and clay. This is a cosmopsychism that tells us that even for a “clay jar—​
its true nature is the essence of consciousness.”7 Certainly, we should keep in
14 The Matter of Wonder

mind that this 11th-​century thinker is dealing with different philosophical is-
sues than those we deal with today, and in this respect, Abhinavagupta’s em-
phasis on unity and transcendence is not to be underestimated. Nevertheless,
I suggest we can find in his thought a keen attention to materiality that offers
a rich and helpful relevance for our own current thinking about the nature of
matter. Moreover, his insights on the materiality of our world can enrich a New
Materialism, sorting through our contemporary complications with our cur-
rently deeply challenged material world.
Abhinavagupta brings a particular creative insight to the table—​ one
that I think makes it especially helpful for a New Materialism. This cre-
ative insight is his account of subjectivity. Subjectivity, “I-​ness” (ahantā) in
Abhinavagupta’s terminology, is the foundation for consciousness and sen-
tience around which our catalogue of what there is pivots. This move, making
the stance of subjectivity the foundation, rather than a substance like human
bodies the foundation, or an essence, like a divine spark confined to humans
the foundation—​this entails that the sentience and consciousness that accom-
panies subjectivity becomes available even for clay jars, for leaves of grass.
For Abhinavagupta, it is a matter of adopting a first-​person perspective. In
fact, much New Materialism is also about reimbuing matter with subjec-
tivity, giving it its own voice.8 Abhinavagupta’s model offers a sophisticated
articulation of how subjectivity can function in relation to materiality. In his
model, the world as a cosmopsychism progressively unfolds from an inward
and heightened subjectivity into the materiality that makes up the fabric of
what we see here, preserving even in the densest matter a latent subjectivity,
and with this, a lively capacity for agency. Being a subject, “I-​ness,” is always
at the core. Indeed, every object retains its innate, if forgotten, subjectivity, as
an outpouring of that subjectivity as we will see below. Thus, all things, from
rocks to clay pots, to leaves of grass to humans, to beings higher than humans,
to beings higher also than gods (who are, after all, only marginally better off
than some humans, and less aware than some humans for this Indian cos-
mology): everything partakes of a mix of being a subject and being an object.
Our limbo reality, a mix, partly subject, partly object, in one respect
mirrors that of the virus. The virus—​is it alive? Or not? Indecidably sentient,
the virus, maybe alive, maybe not, demonstrates even our fate as humans.
Measured against the scale of subjectivity, we too, are partly alive, partly
not, as we will explore below. I suggest, then, that Abhinavagupta can offer
much to a New Materialism precisely because of his focus on an already
embedded subjectivity, consciousness innate to matter. In particular, I offer
that a New Materialism might profit from three elements in his thought. First,
the idea that an attention to subjectivity is necessary for thinking through
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 15

our relationship to matter. This first point will perhaps push against a cur-
rent remnant ideology of atheist materialism, which leans as it does out of
a habit of modernity toward the third-​person perspective. A materialism is
always a case of “it,” the object, rather than an “I,” a subject.9 This perspec-
tive, I suspect, lingers still for a New Materialism as well. Yet, I suggest that a
New Materialism can stand on a much firmer ontological ground by taking to
heart Abhinavagupta’s conception of subjectivity. A notion of subjectivity is
key, as I have argued elsewhere, to prevent the panpsychist ground of a New
Materialism to avoid devolving simply into the thin panpsychist veneer that
John Searle criticizes.10 In this way Abhinavagupta’s intuition is radical for our
21st-​century perspective: he suggests a materialism hinged upon the subjec-
tivity of matter; materiality has a voice.
Second, Abhinavagupta’s thought is not a discourse on things as entrenched
ontological entities; entities are fluidly transposing between being a subject or
an object. Both of these modes are always available to even the merest worm,
even the clay jar. Abhinavagupta tells us, “Even the lifeless third-​person, [the
‘it’], if it sheds its lifeless form can take on the first and second-​person forms
[the grammatical I and you].”11 Ultimately we can degrade the earth, its non-
human inhabitants, its seeming nonconscious inhabitants precisely because
we deny these the status of subjectivity. They remain “it,” objects to be manip-
ulated by humans, who place themselves as the only genuine subjects in a
mechanistic modernity. Third, along with this, it points to Abhinavagupta’s
recognition that our own mental appraisals of the world play a role in the
world’s own capacities for subjectivity. That is, we ourselves participate in the
liveliness of what we encounter in the world; a kind of practice of recognition
enables not just our own selves, but the multiplicity of the world as well to ex-
press a lively subjectivity. My hope is that his unusual panentheism, its realist
pluralism, its decentering of the human in his cosmology, moving away from
an implicit anthropocentrism, its earnest insistence on the innate conscious-
ness of matter all around us—​that these might persuade New Materialists
to give Abhinavagupta’s panentheism a second look, despite the fact that it
comes from a non-​Western culture, from the 11th century.
In terms of a map for where we will go in this chapter, before getting to
the heart of Abhinavagupta’s model, in the next section we look at the idea of
boundaries in our current viral predicament and its significance for a New
Materialism. In sections three and four of this chapter, I address elements of
a contemporary New Materialism that at least on the surface appear to be at
odds with Abhinavagupta’s thought. I begin here by discussing the idea of
atheism and its links to a New Materialism. Keeping in sight here the gene-
alogies of a New Materialism, particularly its invocations of a thinker like
16 The Matter of Wonder

Walt Whitman, we see why it might still make sense to offer comparisons with
an Indian mystic, Abhinavagupta. Following this discussion, we look com-
paratively at the idea of anthropocentrism and how Abhinavagupta’s model
moves away from anthropocentrism by shifting terms away from the binary
of human or nonhuman to a scale of subjectivity. That is, sentience is not so
much based on species or the human as a benchmark, but rather on the de-
gree of subjectivity. We also take a first look at the thorny issue of the Many,
pluralism within a philosophy that says there is only one reality. How do we
get the many within the one of a nondualism? After this discussion, in section
five, we address the ticklish problem of animism. Here we move more deeply
into Abhinavagupta’s conception of subjectivity, and with this, we explore
how Abhinavagupta manages to assert an innate sentience for objects and
at the same time still propose a differentiation between things that are sen-
tient and things that are not. In section six, we look at the grammatical struc-
ture of Abhinavagupta’s thought and what it means for the idea that objects,
things, might have agency. Following this discussion, in section seven we re-
turn to the problem of plurality, the One and the Many. In particular, by way
of comparison with Spinoza, a figure often invoked for a New Materialism,
Abhinavagupta’s formulation of subjectivity gives voice to a more expan-
sive articulation of immanence than we find even in as radical a thinker as
Spinoza. Here we also look at the problem of telos. Abhinavagupta’s model, as
we also see, does not follow the model of object-​oriented ontology of thinkers
like William Harman and Timothy Morton, in that with Abhinavagupta’s
cosmopsychism, we are not barred from accessing the inside of objects.
Rather, what prevents the utilitarian designs of a human hubris that Harman
so thoughtfully advocates against is instead that objects themselves have ac-
cess to subjectivity. In the final section, we address our mixed status as first-​
person, the “I” and third-​person, “it,” the object. With this discussion, we see
that how we perceive objects, thinking in a rigid binary between sentient and
nonsentient, makes a difference. How we think about matter matters for the
material world around us. Here, we return to Whitman, whose own poetic
style—​an expansive and persistent first-​person perspective coupled with an
inclusive celebration of things—​converges with Abhinavagupta’s philosoph-
ical articulation of a first-​person capacity to enliven objects.

The Virus

What then of the boundaries between us and this current deadly virus? As
Rodney Dietart suggests, when it comes to viruses, we want a culprit, a foe to
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 17

eradicate.12 It seems that the panic of borders, of inside and outside, itself is
part of our current consciousness, a viral consciousness bolstering a mentality
of war. Livingston and Puar point this out in biological terms,

The paradox of viral and microscopic entities is that an interdependent relationship

is acknowledged only through the epistemological oversimplification of the virus
as an “intruder,” thus revealing viral “illness” to be an anthropomorphic qualifica-
tion dependent on the understanding of the human body as a unified, bounded,
political whole that must survive any threat to it.13

And oddly, not so unlike a simultaneous call to dissolve a legacy of political

boundaries—​as we create our 6-​foot boundaries, our concurrent wave of pro-
test calls us to break down old racial boundaries harming black lives,14 all in
the middle of a politics pinning its flag on a border wall.
Our multiple implications in other lives call for radically rethinking our
boundaries, our obligations, how we call and recall the many others inhabiting
this planet. The virus, yes, a foe. Still, these times call for us to recognize our
ancient bonds to these, our microbial ancestors. As Lynn Margulis reminds
us, shining a light on our particular anthropocentric amnesia: “our culture
ignores the hard-​won fact that these disease ‘agents,’ these ‘germs,’ also ger-
minated all life.”15 And we still need them to survive. Stephen Buhner points
out, “had bacteria not developed resistance to antibiotics, all life on this
planet would have already become extinct simply from the millions of tons of
antibiotics now present in the environment.”16
Viral life is considered not alive because it relies on a host to reproduce. It
needs another corpus to replicate its own life. Yet, if we think about this, how
much of our own body is really us? Ninety percent of the DNA in the human
body is foreign, not really human, but other, bacterial life.17 Even the air we
breathe is teeming with other life. Not a simple inert molecular oxygen, hy-
drogen, carbon, the very air we inhale is swarming with the DNA of other
species, only typically 5% human; another 85% nonhuman bacterial DNA.18
Indeed, Margulis’s breakthrough insight revealed just this multispecies mu-
tuality. The basis of life, the human cell with its mitochondria, was already a
symbiotic interaction between species, a merger with an ancient bacteria—​all
while this current deadly COVID virus leaves us struggling to reassert the
boundaries of life, mask barriers and six-​foot spacing.
What is also remarkable is how these superbly intelligent, if not quite living,
beings manage to so precisely manipulate the human body’s own immune
defenses. They use human molecular signaling, the cytokine cascade, usually
designed to eliminate an “intruder” to instead create the cascade that allows
18 The Matter of Wonder

the virus entry into human cells, allowing it to replicate in the human body.19
How does a nonliving entity manage to pull off such an extensive redirection
of the human immune system to serve its own reproduction? Does it have
agency? Is it mere algorithm? And could an idea of virus agency extend to a
kind of self-​directed choice?
Allowing that a virus might be an agent—​the sort of radical rethinking at
the heart of a New Materialism—​is no doubt tinged with an element of taboo.
As Jessica Riskin reminds us, the history of Western science asserts “that
agency cannot be a primitive, elemental feature of the natural world; that the
idea of natural forms of agency has no place in legitimate science.”20 The tricky
business of agency, as Riskin explains, threatens to upend an established neo-​
Darwinian model. Even as some biologists, like James Shapiro, can see no
other reasonable explanation than a knowingness all the way down to the level
of cells: “cell cognition” where even cells and organisms “are cognitive (sen-
tient) entities that act and interact purposefully to ensure survival, growth and
proliferation.”21 These are the fringes or maybe the beginnings of a paradigm
shift—​like Stuart Kauffman suggesting that bacteria act on their own behalf
in seeking food. Most science understands the bacterium to simply be “the
environment.”22 Kauffman, however, extends a kind of autonomous agency to
all sorts of things such as bacteria, yeast cells, and paramecium.23 These new
pivotal shifts, a New Materialism rethinking how we understand matter, no
doubt deriving from an urgency surrounding our shifting climate, are radical
in part because as Riskin notes, “such an idea violates the classical mechanist
ban on agency in nature.”24
In this context, we might also recall the eerie agency of a heavy dull metal
lingering in the air and soil, pervading dense urban landscapes like Los
Angeles via gasoline: tetraethyl lead Pb(C2H5)4. Rick Nevin’s brilliant statis-
tical detective work demonstrated that as lead was phased out of gasoline be-
ginning in the 1970s, the crime rate significantly declined.25 The emotional
life of humans, our anger, our capacities to think before hitting or shooting
or stabbing are tied to molecular amounts of this dead inert lead.26 Or we
might consider Jane Bennett’s discussion of the interactive agency of mul-
tiple players, the assemblage of electrons and trees, humans and wind and fire
that coalesce in their actions to cause a massive power blackout.27 Viruses,
electrons, heavy metals,28 all these seemingly inert objects, exhibit agencies
outside our human control. We think we control, manipulate, and study them,
yet like the “natives” that early anthropologists studied, these objects have
their own goals. We too are locked into their varied trajectories; their actions
outstrip human telos. They give the lie to the notion that we humans are this
earth’s sole agents and ends. Might we relate to them differently?
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 19

Perhaps Marie Kondo’s KonMari method for “waking up” that book or vase
or old piece of jewelry by tapping it is not just the kitsch of a new-​age ani-
mism, a 21st-​century Japanese “god of tidying.”29 Perhaps instead it appeals in
part because it touches in us a kind of forgotten, taboo expression of the life of
things.
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost in their seminal, landmark volume on
New Materialism propose three components to the theoretical interventions
a New Materialism brings to how we might rethink about what matter is: first,
there is the idea that matter itself is lively; it exhibits agency. Second, Coole
and Frost consider the bioethical issues regarding the status of life and the
human. Third, they point to the geopolitical and socioeconomic implications
of New Materialist thought, these three components emphasizing the “pro-
ductivity and resilience of matter,” in contradistinction to recent constructivist
positions.30 This study of Abhinavagupta’s panentheism focuses particularly
on this first intervention, the idea that matter exhibits agency, is lively, but
also on the second intervention, toward the ways that Abhinavagupta’s con-
ception of matter reconfigures the status of life and the human in unexpected
ways for us, for instance, extending to a notion of subtle matter, subtle bodies,
and his assertion of a latent subjectivity even in inert things. I leave aside their
third concern of New Materialist thought, which, while keenly important
for a current politics, will distract from understanding this medieval Indian
philosopher’s thought and how it might enrich a New Materialism.

Atheisms, Pan(en)theisms

New Materialist thought represents a new theoretical venture, with varied

articulations, centered primarily around rethinking the matter that makes up
our world. As Jane Bennett points out, “The machine model of nature, with its
figure of inert matter, is no longer even scientific. . . . Yet the popular image of
materialism as mechanistic endures.”31 The image of mechanism, I suspect,
is also driven by a need to displace religious sentiment, a legacy birthed in
the early transitions into a scientific worldview.32 A New Materialist thought
seems mostly to honor this legacy, wearing on its sleeve its alignments with
the atheological commitments of scientific modernity. Indeed, the adoption
of the nomenclature “materialism” signals just such a nontheistic perspec-
tive. So, Samantha Frost lays the groundwork for understanding Hobbes’s
thought as New Materialist,33 while contextually, as Shapin and Schaeffer
note, Hobbes’s embrace of a mechanistic scientific worldview signals an early
atheism, understanding matter as inert, as so much clay ready to be fashioned
20 The Matter of Wonder

by the hands of human ingenuity—​an attitude toward matter that is still per-
vasive throughout our current technological approach.34
The newness that a New Materialism brings, then, lies in its inflections of
materiality, recovering in it an innate vitality even while still couched in an
atheistic register. Contemporary thinkers associated with New Materialisms,
like Jane Bennett, William Connelly, and Karen Barad, thus call into question
an uncomplicated, simply mechanistic understanding of matter, gesturing in
place of older models of materialism toward an immanent vitality in matter,
toward a panpsychist cosmology.35 Apart from these New Materialisms, pan-
psychism is itself rapidly becoming a popular and viable alternative to older
mechanist models of matter, in part because of its promise for solving the phil-
osophical problem of the mind–​body gap.36 In any case, though, the gestures
of a New Materialism toward panpsychism enable us to reclaim a vitality and
dignity for matter, while avoiding slipping into premodern conceptions of
vital matter, that spirits might inhabit matter, the slippery taboo of animism.
These allow for a fundamental atheism, all the while reclaiming a kind of vi-
tality, even dignity, for the world of matter.
Yet, if we scratch beneath the surface of an explicit atheism, curiously, the
formulations of a number of New Materialist thinkers, Bennett for instance,
pattern after outlier traditions of non-​Western religiosity,37 investing heavily
in an understanding of the natural world and matter as vital, able to act
agentially. Matter in myriad forms can even communicate with us humans,
even if only on some visceral, gut level. Bennett offers us this image of matter
speaking to us, pointing to the numinosity of objects, of things, like aban-
doned trash, a discarded bottle cap, an old glove on the street in an almost
mystical exchange, in her encounter with the odd liveliness of this marginal-
ized matter.38 The similarities to the mysticism of Indian traditions are con-
spicuous. That is, it is hard not to see a resonance with the numinosity of the
stones placed around a village banyan tree,39 alive, encountered by chance, and
calling to us with a barely perceptible, indefinable numinosity. But the simi-
larity is not simply that both encounters offer an experience of a numinosity
detected in seemingly lifeless matter. Nor is it just that both rely on a phil-
osophical congruence of what matter is: namely, the idea that matter itself
cannot be separated from an idea of agency, even intelligence, intentionality.40
There is here in addition a genealogy, a historical legacy informing this new
tradition; Bennett’s work, for instance, traces back through Emerson, Thoreau,
and Whitman to Indian thought. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were all
deeply influenced by Indian mystical nondualist traditions, evidenced par-
ticularly in Emerson and Thoreau’s encounters with early translations of the
Bhagavad Gītā, and the influence of a nontheistic Advaita Vedānta on these
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 21

American Transcendentalists.41 This historical influence works in soft ways as

well, with generalized ideas that are naturalized, habitual elements of an Indian
worldview, a Indian felt geist seeping into the attitudes of these 19th-​century
forward-​thinking Americans. Whitman’s earthy poetry replaces personal
theism with a paean to the divine in all of life, naming the divinity of even the
smallest blade of grass, “heap’d stones” and “brown ants” in Song of Myself.42 Is
it surprising from our 21st-​century vantage to see a similar paean to divinity
in the materiality of life in the Vedic Śrī Rudrapraśna, Namakam, the poet
here seeing the divine everywhere as thousands of Rudras,43 discovered in
the trees, multicolored, blue-​throated, and red and yellow, like young-​grass,44
found in food, in leaves, in what people drink,45 that divinity discovered as the
ruler of robbers, of those who have quivers with arrows, and those who do not,
of those who steal with ordinary deception and those who use great deception
to steal,46 of those with lots of shaggy hair and those whose heads are shaved,47
in vegetation that is dried up and that which is green,48 in wells and holes in
the earth, where there is rain and where there is not rain.49 Stylistically, these
paeans present affinities, a shared practice of naming extensively the variety of
life in its beauty and its seamy sides. Certainly, Whitman never had access to
this Vedic text. Still we see an analogous ideological orientation, taking in all
experience as divine expression. While familiar for Indian traditions, arising
in its early Vedic beginnings, Whitman’s earthy panpsychist transcendence
of theism50 was news for its 19th-​century context. What do we make of these
affinities? For our purposes here particularly, we notice that India’s nondualist,
panpsychist, and in Abhinavagupta’s case, panentheist orientations tend to-
ward blurring theism. They blur it to an extent that it no longer looks at all
like a familiar Western theism. These orientations blur their theisms so effec-
tively that they play well with the atheisms of a New Materialism. Indeed one
can find this phenomenon more widely operative in our current scientifically
influenced culture, as Jeffrey Kripal has brilliantly tracked.51 And the reason
they play so well together? Even while these nondualist Indian doctrines vary
in how they understand the ontology and status of matter, depending on the
specific tradition, still these nondualist approximations of matter tend to offer
models that are not so intrinsically embedded—​that is, not quite so stuck in
20th-​century materialism’s Western theistic legacy: the binary of spirit and
inert body.52
What we might take away from Abhinavagupta’s panentheism, as we see
below, is that we are secret sharers in a recursive, inward-​directed awareness
that manifests viscerally as a vitality, a quality of liveliness that occasionally
jumps out of those things that we normally peg as the dead inertness of matter.
Abhinavagupta’s panentheism suggests that we recognize a vitality in posse,
22 The Matter of Wonder

always entangled with the matter of our daily life. How and why should we get
past our time-​honored views on matter as simply dead, inert stuff? A figure
like the 20th-​century Indian philosopher Daya Krishna in part addresses
the why of getting beyond our ingrained commonsensical approach, as he
articulates the paradox of materialism that sees matter as dead:

[T]‌he “real” reality for those who want to deny consciousness as a paradigmatic
example of “reality”, for them is “matter” which, of course, is neither “living” nor
“conscious”, nor anything else except that which is described or designated by
the term “materiality” which itself is understood as that which is essentially “non-​
conscious” and nonliving. Matter, thus, is understood in terms of a negation, and
yet it is not only supposed to be the most certain and self-​evident thing that eve-
ryone believes in, but, paradoxically, that in whose “denial” it has its own “being”,
is felt by all not only to be ultimately “unreal”, but also as demanding their own
understanding in its terms.53

The irony, then, of matter for materialism is that we can only understand it in
terms of negation. Yet this negative existence is the most certain reality, the
most “self-​evident thing,” that which we all believe in, clinging to its inert neg-
ativity to explain ourselves.

Anthropocentrisms, Pluralisms

Apart from New Materialism’s shifts away from dualist theologies, they share
also with Abhinavagupta’s panentheism and Indian traditions generally an
attitude that works against human exceptionalism. Understood as a kind of
posthumanist stance,54 much New Materialist thought rejects an idea of special
human privilege among so many other species on the planet. A mostly uncon-
scious legacy of modernity, this notion situates humans as the only rational,
self-​aware, free agents, and with it, sanctioning a practical human domination
of all else we find on earth55—​as our current climate crisis attests, to the det-
riment of the planet as a whole. Perhaps not surprisingly, New Materialisms
thus find affinity with the animisms of indigenous traditions.56 Indian cos-
mologies more generally share this extension of agency beyond the merely
human, and indeed take it in an unexpected direction, according agency and
intention not just to others species, monkeys and crows and insects, but to a
plethora of other beings, including beings with subtle bodies, beings thought
to be higher than humans57: deities whose bodies take the form of mantras,
and beings like the yakṣa, a spirit tied to trees, and the vidyādhara, beings
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 23

with bodies that appear at times anthropomorphic enough to fool humans,

but with other sorts of nonhuman skills, like the capacity for flight.58 We ad-
dress this foray into the body as subtle body later in Chapter Three. In any case,
Abhinavagupta inherits a legacy of other sorts of intelligent beings beyond
just the human from his Indian tradition; there exist beings considered more
intelligent, more advanced than humans as well as beings, some animals, for
instance, understood to be less intelligent.59 Right away we notice that this is
not quite in line with the kind of democratic equalizing associated with a New
Materialism. Distributed agency, electrons, viruses, wind, lead, all agents, all
on a level playing field: this especially signals a rejection of anthropocentric
bias.60 However, the sort of hierarchy that places humans not at the top, but
somewhere in the middle offers an advantage in that it exposes a latent, still
present, but hidden privileging of the human deeply embedded in modernity.
This is what a notion of subtle bodies and subtle beings higher than humans
undoes. The inchoate recognition that electrons and viruses have agency
and power is novel and surprising precisely because it is set against a mod-
ernist assumption that only humans have agency; with this one can detect in
it still an unarticulated presumption that humans have the most agency and
intelligence.61
Abhinavagupta’s perspective, deriving from his foundational nondualism
moves away from the human altogether, formulating a schema of hierarchy
based on levels of subjectivity, regardless of species. This is mapped as part
of Abhinavagupta’s exposition of the tattva system, a cosmological ontology
of what exists. We will look at this schematic, the tattva system, in Chapter
Five. For our present purposes, making the degree of subjectivity the basis of
ontological hierarchy rather than the physical species—​or the human species
as benchmark, for that matter—​not only works in alignment with his deeply
embraced nondualism, it also offers a subjectivity that displaces the idea of
the human. In this sense, it might compare to Viveiros de Castro’s notion of
an indigenous metaphysics where jaguars and humans are equally persons.62
But only partially. What might an ontology of subjectivity rather than human
species look like? David Lawrence points to Abhinavagupta comparing the
manifestation of a potter creating a pot to the reflection in a mirror of a potter
creating a pot. What or who can claim agency? Does the potter create the
pot? Is it the clay or the person molding the clay? Abhinavagupta remarks
that both the potter and the pot exhibit agency; both really can create, yet
both only create via a single source of agency that they share: consciousness
as subjectivity. Thus, agency itself is tied to consciousness in Abhinavagupta’s
nondualism; in the process, pots themselves take on agency equally as do
potters.63
24 The Matter of Wonder

Abhinavagupta’s nondualism subscribes to a conception of conscious-

ness as all-​pervasive, a quality his panentheism shares with some contem-
porary panpsychisms. But, we pause, a clay pot, really? Is this to suggest the
pot stands on an equal footing with a human potter, both or neither with a
genuine agency? Abhinavagupta’s great grand guru Somānanda signals this
sort of dynamic pantheist panpsychism when he declares, “I see by the self
of the clay pot and the clay pot sees by the self of me.”64 Somānanda’s pan-
theism spreads a wide democratic agency, with clay pots and humans inter-
actively generating a multiplicity of agency.65 This comes at a cost. As John
Nemec points out, Somānanda’s pantheism ultimately depends on a perva-
sive primordial nondualist deity, Śiva, which is at base bereft of physical form,
a completely disembodied form of being.66 Thus, Somānanda’s clay pot and
human are equally displaced by a pervasive reality of a nonbodied, nonma-
terial deity. We have a democracy of agency here, but we lose the materiality
of this agency.67 Somānanda’s disciple, Utpaladeva, and later Abhinavagupta
trade in Somānanda’s pantheist panpsychism for a modified panentheist
nonduality, which allows for a real and actual existence of a multiplicity of
individual entities,68 coming closer to the promises of a New Materialist dis-
tribution of agency.
Still, I suggest that this issue of an ontological plurality is where
Abhinavagupta’s panentheism is most at odds with a New Materialism.
Coole and Frost emphasize plurality as a key component of New
Materialisms, with “emphasis on materialization as a complex, plural-
istic, relatively open process.”69 Yet, Abhinavagupta’s panentheism is rather
more like the pantheisms that Mary Jane Rubenstein thoughtfully explores,
where pluralism inevitably entails different perspectives that might re-
duce pluralism to the One, in a debate that is not ever quite decidable.70
Abhinavagupta’s panentheism similarly shifts back and forth between the
One and the many. It is like the eye of a crow, to borrow a metaphor that
Abhinavagupta uses to describe the idea of the person (puruṣa). The folk-
lore of crows is that they have a single eyeball that moves from one socket
to the other, depending on what perspective they take, right or left. Thus,
the person (puruṣa) is also like this, connected to the unity of undiluted,
singular consciousness, the One, when the eyeball is one socket and associ-
ated with the plurality of the world, governed by Nature, Māyā, when in the
other, moving back and forth from unity to plurality.71 Ultimately though,
Abhinavagupta embraces a nondualism that, as we saw above, resolves into
a cosmopsychism. Really, there is just one conscious reality, that is, Śiva
and as Abhinavagupta tells us, that generates the whole myriad complexity
of beings out of its own self:
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 25

The category called Śiva is itself the body of all things. On the wall [of the world
which is itself Śiva] the picture of all beings appear, shining forth—​This statement
indicates the way that all these come to appear. And the purport of the entire
corpus of scriptures means to indicate that the category Śiva itself is all this.72

The world is like a picture painted on a wall; the substratum, the canvas as
wall, is what generates the whole picture. Not so much a person, but a cate-
gory (tattva),73 this Śiva generates out of itself, on itself, all the world’s fan-
tastic diversity. It is important not to understate the legacy of transcendence
Abhinavagupta inherits and embraces. However, in this book I will focus es-
pecially on the materialist side of Abhinavagupta’s thought—​rather than the
wall, and instead on the fantastic diversity of the picture, which has mostly
been neglected in much excellent work on this thinker.74
One of the first scholars to study Abhinavagupta’s work, K. C. Pandey,
pointed out how Abhinavagupta’s philosophy tends to defy our expecta-
tions of ontology; we tend to limit our choices to nondualism as idealism on
the one hand, or else an actually existing world with a plurality of really ex-
isting different entities. Abhinavagupta subverted this false choice in a kind
of have-​your-​cake and eat-​it-​too alternative, what Pandey in a seemingly
oxymoronic gesture labels a “Realist Idealism.”75 As I argue later, in Chapter
Four, what is so novel about Abhinavagupta’s panentheism is that reincor-
porating materiality, matter, in his vision is precisely what makes possible a
nondualism that can bridge the gap between materiality and consciousness.
This is Abhinavagupta’s method for solving the mind–​body problem. His
nondualism does not discard the gritty materiality of the world76 because
from top to bottom (ota-​prota), as Abhinavagupta sings in a panpsychist
poetic verse opening the Āgamādhikāra section of his monumental treatise
on Recognition (Pratyabhijñā), the world itself “is from top to bottom, shot
through with Śiva’s own sap, made to consist of Śiva.”77 Instead he argues that
if we want to know the highest transcendent state, we need to know the world
around us, all the objects that exist,

only to the extent that one makes the world into an object, to the extent that it is
known, can one then transcend the level of object, of thing to be known and allow
the true sense of subjectivity to take root in the heart, its fullness being grasped by
the inner organ [mind, intellect and ego] as beyond the status of objects.78

Even if the final aim is to rest in subjectivity, beyond the objects of the world,
still one gets there by first seeing the objects in the world. Abhinavagupta’s
nondualism proposes a subjectivity as the foundation, with the map of the
26 The Matter of Wonder

world not based on species but instead on a fluid status of subject and ob-
ject, which as we will see below, finds at base everywhere subjectivity. This
whole world of things as objects is generated out of a stance of subjectivity,
which then reaches a fullness by extending beyond a practice of seeing things
as objects. Thus, the ontological status of things entails that everything—​
humans, clay pots, insects, all—​operate in two ways, as subjects and as objects.
Subjectivity is what allows us to be secret sharers in the experience of all else
that is. This is the knower taking root in the heart. On the other hand, the
world exists as objects we apprehend. So this is a nonduality that both keeps
the world and transcends it as well. That is: a panentheism, even as the theism
blurs toward a panpsychism, or more accurately, as a cosmopsychism. In any
case, as Pandey notes with his label of Realist Idealism, Abhinavagupta in-
stead insists throughout on the reality of a multiplicity in the world, and these
many things are real. Moreover, as we see in greater detail below, they share
with us an innate subjectivity,

Animisms

There may be psychological obstacles to allowing ourselves to respect the

innate rights, the subjectivity of all those other “things”—​animals, rocks,
viruses—​on this planet. Might a practice of acknowledging a subjectivity
for other beings and things on this planet in fact work against us? Would it
leave us trapped within a scary world—​filled with things that should be just
things . . . instead coming alive, like the horror movie Chucky, a plastic doll
running amok, hell-​bent on axe-​murdering us? Animism with its links to
pantheism has a history for us, as Mary Jane Rubenstein masterfully chron-
icles, leaving in its wake a historical “tangle of relentless demonization and
name-​calling.”79 The name-​calling includes a derisive imagery connecting
pantheism’s animism to worms, that “lowest” of animals,80—​which of course,
brings to mind the contrast in Abhinavagupta’s thoughtful inclusion of even
worms in the camp of a subjectivity that counts, as we saw, “even down to a
worm—​when they do their own deeds, that which is to be done first stirs in
the heart.”81 Rubenstein also gives us the philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–​
1600), whose table and clogs and boots and clothes are alive; all have a spir-
itual substance within them: “all things ‘even if they are not living creatures,
are animate’. Nothing is inert, dead, mere (or for that matter, exploitable)
matter.”82 This medieval European animacy with a spiritual infusion is not so
distant from Abhinavagupta’s conception of a subjectivity infusing jars and
potters alike, with the difference, I suspect, that Abhinavagupta’s overarching
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 27

frame of subjectivity allows for greater attention to the materiality of indi-

vidual things, where things are not simply just the expression of an animating
spirit. We will come back to this idea of subjectivity in the next chapter.
In any case, Bruno’s “everything is in everything” and Nicholas of Cusa’s
proclamations of “all things in all things”83 are not so unlike the pervasive
Tantric dictum that everything indeed has the nature of everything else,84
so useful in Tantric ritual praxis.85 As Abhinavagupta’s great-​grand guru
Somānanda phrases it, “All entities, being aware of their own nature, exist
as all others. . . . All entities consist of everything, since everything is of the
nature of everything. Everything exists here as everything by having the na-
ture and form of [all] the various entities. The pot has my nature, and I have
that of the pot.”86 As Nemec observes, the point of Somānanda’s assevera-
tion is to make it clear that no difference exists between a sentient human
or a clay jar87 (or for that matter, a virus, or molecules of lead). Catherine
Keller offers a modern iteration of this maxim with a quantum twist from
Alfred North Whitehead: “in a certain sense everything is everywhere at
all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other loca-
tion.”88 Where it seems at times a New Materialism treads softly, hesitantly
into the sticky swamp of animism,89 Keller’s capacious Cusan holography,
panentheistically inflected, is less timid in its embrace of an animism.
Offering the perspective of the remarkable 17th-​century English philoso-
pher Anne Conway, Keller notes, “the boundary between animate and inan-
imate dissolves.”90
Similarly, with Abhinavagupta’s great-​grand-​guru Somānanda, “insenti-
ence simply does not exist.”91 As Nemec points out, Somānanda draws on an
earlier pervasive Tantric perspective, found in an iconic, likely 7th–​8th cen-
tury ce Tantric text, the Vijñāna Bhairava. Systematizing animism as a con-
templative praxis (dharaṇa), this text tells us, “knowledge, desire and so forth
appear every where in pots and other objects.”92 Even a mere clay pot has its
own desires. With this pervasive aliveness of things, objects also retain an in-
nate sense of delight, linked to a never really lost sense of consciousness. As
Somānanda tells us, “the threefold power does not cease in the moment any-
thing is created, nor does eagerness cease to exist, nor does delight.”93 In his
commentary on Somānanda’s text, Utpaladeva adds:

will, cognition, and action truly exist in the moment pots, etc., are produced. The
same is true for eagerness, which is the first part of will in the form of a particular
delight that is limited by an object; nor does the other delight, in the form of unlim-
ited bliss, cease to exist.94
28 The Matter of Wonder

The delight and intentionality, will (icchā) and eagerness (aunmukhya), that
give rise to objects does not go away once the clay jar is produced. It stays
with the object, the clay jar, as its own sort of delightful thingness. Here we
might say that the “the thing-​power” that Bill Brown finds in an object,95 that
numinosity that catches Bennett’s glance—​these arise out of the conscious-
ness the jar retains, its own innate delight. The term that Somānanda uses
for this eagerness, aunmukhya, might hint toward a helpful vocabulary for a
New Materialism.96 It offers a way of naming something that our contempo-
rary culture has trouble grasping because we lack a vocabulary to explain a
phenomenology we nevertheless experience (Brown and Bennett, I suspect,
at least). The term aunmukhya, I suggest, points to a phenomenology, what
we can see as an object’s vitality—​a clay jar’s liveliness. The object exhibits a
minute, yet still sensible, delight that takes on a focused, particularized ex-
pression in that specific object. Thus, for these Tantric thinkers a universal
delight characterizes consciousness. This consciousness never really leaves
even an object, and with a certain attention we can pick up on the object’s
specific form of consciousness as its innate eagerness (aunmukhya), its
delight-​power.
More circumspect than his predecessor Somānanda’s pantheism,
Abhinavagupta’s panentheism traces this power of things to its source, the in-
nate consciousness that even a mere object has, a deeply retained sense of sub-
jectivity. He tells us,

And in precisely this way, even while accepting the state of being mere object,
by properly, in a true way touching and perceiving the object’s “This-​ness” in
the highest sense, then out of the objects, those “things” perceived, conscious-
ness alone flows forth. The “thing” in its essential nature is the expanse of Light
(prakāśa). And this expanse of Light consists of an active awareness, the “I” which is
not looking towards something other.97

Abhinavagupta adds the precision of a dual-​ aspect formulation to the

nondualist, animist model he takes from his predecessor Somānanda, where
the “thing,” the object, is essentially the expanse of light (prakāśa).98 We will
look at this dual-​aspect formulation in greater detail in Chapter Four. Here,
in a nutshell, this light, the light of consciousness, congeals to make objects
in the world. This is one aspect of his dual-​aspect monism. At the heart of
this expanse of light—​out of which things come to be—​at the heart there lies
a subjectivity; this is the second aspect of his dual-​aspect monism. This is the
“I,” an active awareness (vimarśa), which is what gives even a clay jar its life, its
sentience.
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 29

In this model, to be a thing, an insentient object means to be linked with

what we might call an excess of third-​person perspective, “this-​ness” (idantā),
in contrast to an innate subjectivity, “I-​ness” (ahantā), the first-​person per-
spective. It is the first-​person perspective (ahantā), in its nature intrinsi-
cally connected to active awareness (vimarśa), which is the source of life, of
sentience. In Abhinavagupta’s system, however, “this-​ness” and “I-​ness” are
not two indelibly separate categories. Rather, the one is embedded within
the other. Subjectivity, “I-​ness” (ahantā) as a property of (vimarśa) lies at
the core of the “this-​ness” (idantā) that makes up the objects in the world.99
Abhinavagupta explains this dual-​aspect monism in terms of a process of cre-
ation, which nevertheless does not ever lose its inner consciousness, its true
essence as really just the divine: “pure consciousness lying in the core exists
as a state containing both inner and outer. As Māyā’s creation spreads out,
expands into many branches, the Lord remains still within the core.”100 Māyā,
the innate power this cosmopsychism-​Śiva uses to generate multiplicity, the
great variety that makes up the world, has a positive valence in this Tantric
system. So as Māyā’s creation spreads out, we get the complex variety of our
world, while still all the while, even in seeming dead matter, clay jars, a pure
awareness, consciousness remains at the core. Similarly, he tells us, “that clay
jar—​its true nature is the essence of consciousness when it is in a state without
mental differentiation; it is complete, like consciousness itself, the body of the
whole world.”101
In this way, Abhinavagupta uses this dual-​aspect monism to addresses the
paradox of just how it is that an insentient object, a clay jar, can really still be
both sentient and at the same time look insentient, like inert, dead matter. So
he tells us:

from the perspective of the manifestation of non-​duality, [consciousness] con-

tinues without ever coming to an end, even in a corpse, in the body, in a jar and so
on. So far as the sphere of non-​duality goes, this worldly distinction between sen-
tient and insentient is not made.102

As with Anne Conway, and fundamentally, for Abhinavagupta as well, the

border between animate and inanimate dissolves. Even so, he wants to explain
why it appears to us that there is in fact a difference between what is sentient
and what looks like dead matter. His explanation hinges on an idea familiar
to postmodern thought, the notion that our own personal subjectivities are
always already entangled with the objects we believe we perceive “out there.”
From his perspective, this is precisely what characterizes consciousness when
it slips below a particular threshold of awareness to the level where we forget
30 The Matter of Wonder

our inherent expansive nondual awareness, what I translate below as the “lim-
ited Subject” (grahaka). He tells us:

As far as it goes, that which is “conscious”103 contains both perceiver and object
and doesn’t have this distinction made between itself and the other, the object per-
ceived. Yet that which is conscious gives rise to both of these, limited Subject and
object. And even while consciousness exists in that way, as undifferentiated—​at the
same time, out of its own Self, that is out of its own form, which shines as only pure
consciousness alone—​it gives birth to things that, like blue, etc., are said to be in-
sentient, that lack consciousness. So it does not abandon its own form shining as
pure consciousness alone. How so? Because there is an inability there [in things
like blue, etc.] to encompass the variety of levels of awareness needed to differen-
tiate among different categories. And there the reason is given—​because of “This-​
ness” and so on. [I.e., in “This-​ness” there is not the activity of consciousness being
aware, which is what constitutes sentiency.]104

That which is conscious contains both the subject and the object and gives
rise to both. In Abhinavagupta’s model here, an initially undifferentiated con-
sciousness gives birth both to a person with a limited perspective, the “limited
Subject,” as well as to things like a blue jar, which appears to be insentient. As
Abhinavagupta explains, things seem to be insentient precisely because of the
shift to a third-​person perspective, “this-​ness” (idantā). Moreover, someone
with a limited, dualist perspective, the limited Subject, does not quite recog-
nize that their own limited perspective is what blinds them to the actual pres-
ence of consciousness even within something that looks like dead matter, a
blue jar. Even so, the shift to a third-​person “this-​ness” does not really erase an
essential life embedded at the core. It simply hides it from view. So, even when
an object, like a clay jar, appears to us as mere matter, still its deep subjectivity
has not been banished. Its consciousness is simply inwardly withdrawn, un-
available because it is inwardly focused, on a level associated with the cate-
gory (tattva) of Sadāśiva, associated with a transcendent form of deity.105 So
we see, “even the objects, which are inherently things to be known and [not
knowers], and which partake of a lack of Consciousness, these are also only
[Śiva’s] Energy which is in the form of Sadāśiva.”106 This state of Sadāśiva,
reflects the idea that its awareness is inwardly focused; the objects in the world
that we perceive to be insentient are actually purely alive consciousness, but
in a state where consciousness is inwardly withdrawn, transcendent, and thus
not externally manifest.107 If someone, Bill Brown or Jane Bennett, somehow
manages to loosen the habitual bind of seeing the world through concept-​
tinted glasses (or perhaps bifocals) of a limited subject and inert object
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 31

binary, then the object no longer appears as mere inert matter. One can then
see consciousness shining in a clay pot, in pieces of trash on the street. Thus,
Abhinavagupta’s dual-​aspect monism, with the categories of light (prakāśa)
and active awareness (vimarśa) might be pictured in the shape of a Russian
doll, as Abhinavagupta tells us, “that which is insentient rests in the sentient;
the sentient rests in light of consciousness, (prakāśa) and this rests in active
awareness (vimarśa).”108
Still, even if Abhinavagupta does retain a sense of subjectivity latent within
things, even for mere inert objects, he is not quite so pantheist as his prede-
cessor Somānanda. Avoiding the fairly common phrase that catalogues all of
creation as life from the infinite Brahmā down to a blade of grass (brahmādist
ambaparyantaḥ),109 he offers instead a demarcation that stops at insects: “the
Infinite, from Brahmā down to an insect, which in the three worlds is the
multitude of perceivers,”110 he tells us, moving away from Somānanda’s exu-
berant assertion of subjectivity for even the humble clay pot. That is, he does
not entirely erase the distinction between sentient and insentient. Similarly,
elsewhere when he glosses a verse from Utpaladeva which posits the capacity
to know and create in all living things, Abhinavagupta rather precisely notes
this as extending from the creator god Brahmā only down to insects, but not
to living things like plants and grass, nor the clay pot that Somānanda tells us
“sees” equally as he, Somānanda, a human, sees.111 Thus, Russian dolls aside,
the dual-​aspect formulation Abhinavagupta uses puts inert objects on the
side of prakāśa, the expanse of light, caught up in a third-​person existence of
“This-​ness.” Their subjectivity remains hidden from our limited gaze. We will
revisit this dual-​aspect monism in greater detail in Chapter Four. For now,
objects belong to prakāśa, light that shines; as Abhinavagupta notes, “the pro-
cess whereby “This-​ness” becomes distinct is shown to belong to the former
[prakāśa, light shining], where the material thing becomes distinct.”112 In
contrast, sentience is linked with “I-​ness,” that is, subjectivity, and vimarśa, an
active grasping awareness.

The Grammar of Objects

What might we take away from this? Namely, the idea that being alive with
its signature of subjectivity is connected not so much to an essence that a
person or thing might have, but instead to the degree to which a thing or a
person assumes a grammatical position, the first-​person perspective or the
third-​person perspective. Because, as we saw earlier, “everything is the na-
ture of everything,” there is no fixed essence of things, where only some
32 The Matter of Wonder

things—​humans—​can claim sentience, while other things, like clay jars, are
always insentient. It depends on the thing. And on our relation to it. More pal-
pably, imagine the glow of a stone Ganesha covered in orange sindhur paste
that appears to pour out some special effervescence, drawing the temple dev-
otee to consider the place and statue, the mūrti, as holy,113 or devout Catholics
taking the water from Lourdes, deeming the water to have special, magical
healing properties, blessed and further charged as they pray to the statue of
the Virgin. We typically assume that a believer who reports seeing life and
consciousness in the statue of the Blessed Virgin or Krishna is simply making
it up. It is solely a projection of human imagination. The devout Catholic
wants to believe the water will heal, and consequently the placebo effect kicks
in. We read it as projection; the devout practitioner projects her own desires
for healing and reads into what subsequently happens as the intercession of
miracles.
Abhinavagupta’s panentheist grammatology rewrites this simple binary,
where we interpret this as either animism or else we write our pilgrim off as
deluded. Nodding toward his predecessor Somānanda, Abhinavagupta offers
a grammatical expansion on Somānanda’s formulation:

“Everything in fact has the nature of all things.” Even the lifeless [grammatical]
third person, [the “it”], if it sheds its lifeless form can take on the first and second
person forms [the grammatical I and you]. For example, “listen, o stones” and “Of
mountains, I am Meru.”114

In this case, “of mountains, I am Meru” refers to the Bhagavad Gītā where
Kṛṣṇa panentheistically contains the whole of creation as his own self. For
Abhinavagupta, this signals that our own embrace of the materiality of things
allows the thing’s deeper subjectivity to come to the fore. All of us, people
and things, share a capacity for subjectivity. Thus, yes, we participate in the
life of the statue, but not as a simple anthropocentric human projection onto
mere matter. When we address even a stone as “you” instead of “it,” or when
we imagine the subjectivity of a mountain, we participate in its own vital sub-
jectivity by seeing its deeper essence, its potentiality for liveliness. We allow
space for the agency of the lifeless stone to shed its seeming insentience
(jaḍa). In this way we participate in the recognition of the life of things. We
might read Catherine Keller’s invocation of Nicholas of Cusa in similar terms.
Keller offers us Nicholas of Cusa saying, “you speak to the earth and you call
it into human nature. The earth hears you and its hearing this is its becoming
human being.”115 We might also read Jane Bennett’s experience likewise in
Abhinavagupta’s terms, as not just sensing the life of things, but also allowing
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 33

things to step into their genuine selves by her seeing them.116 Thus, when
Bennett describes the uncanny vitality she senses on a particularly numinous
morning, when a discarded bottle cap and an old glove she sees take on a life
that seems out of proportion to how we think of bits of random debris on a
city street, she participates in allowing these things to find their own innate
vitality. In Abhinavagupta’s model, this is not a species of animist projection
but a genuine seeing of the thing. By seeing it, she amplifies and allows the
“vitality intrinsic to matter”117 to emerge. Bennett also gestures toward rec-
ognizing subjectivity as the intrinsic factor, even if she does not focus on it.
Quoting W.J.T. Mitchell, she offers a typology that distinguishes objects from
things: “objects are the way things appear to a subject—​that is, with a name,
an identity. . . . Things on the other hand . . . [signal] the moment . . . when the
mute idol speaks.118 So, things become alive because we allow our own at-
tention to recognize their life, to share in their innate, if hidden, subjectivity,
to recognize the mountain as “you” and as “I.” What we might also recog-
nize about our way of thinking—​our understanding that the religious dev-
otee projects an imaginary life into the statue of the Blessed Virgin—​this way
of thinking embeds a kind of top-​down configuration of consciousness that
entails, even definitionally, that consciousness is separate from matter, which
Abhinavagupta’s system undoes.
Abhinavagupta absorbs this grammatical lens from the wider Sanskritic
grammatical tradition, mediated particularly through the 5th-​century gram-
marian Bhartṛhari. Describing the grammatical tradition’s formulation of
agency, George Cardona points out that the early 4th-​century bce grammarian
Pāṇinī derived his rules primarily in a syntactic manner, based on grammat-
ical considerations and not on extralinguistic semantic assumptions. An
agent is anything that functions independently with respect to an action, and
agency is always relationally configured and not determined by subjectivity or
by animation.119 Thus, an agent is the locus of the activity denoted by a verbal
root; the object is the locus of the result of that activity.120 In the process, there
are of course, multiple agents, as Cardona indicates, a primary agent and also
subsidiary agents. For instance, in cooking rice, even if the person, Devadatta,
who puts the pot with grains on the fire is the primary agent, we wind up with
all sorts of agents, including pots and fire, and here the pot is an independent
agent in the process that produces food.121 One is reminded here of Latour’s
suggestion that agency always arises out of a collective; actants, living or not,
break down our predjudices about subjects and objects.122 Although agency
is not determined by subjectivity or animation for Pāṇinī, Cardona, however,
points out that the commentator Kātyāyana gives as a possible solution for the
use of the desiderative grammatical form the idea that all things are treated as
34 The Matter of Wonder

intelligent animate beings, whether humans or clay jars.123 The question then
arises: is it just a case of expression, or do objects really function as agents?
Cardona outlines Kātyāyana’s response: in some cases, a clay pot, a brand new
pot, for instance, breaks not because of the sun or wind or age, but since it is
the only participant in the action, it thus breaks of its own volition. Because
the speaker wishes to express that the object acts independently, we must
conclude that the clay pot has its own agency.124 In Abhinavagupta’s gram-
matical rendition, this capacity for agency signals a deeper, pervasive sense
of subjectivity. It reveals an innate consciousness, even in things.125 Agency
necessarily entails will and hence freedom. This position stands in contrast
to what we find, for instance, in earlier, perhaps better known, philosophical
traditions like Advaita Vedānta, as Sthaneshwar Timalsina points out, which
create a paradox where “when you are free (i.e., self-​realized) you have no will
to act, and when you have the will, your autonomy is compromised by avidya
and karma . . . while, from the position of the Brahman, there is just the non-​
dual awareness that does not retain any agency or action.”126 In contrast, for
Abhinavagupta, freedom which is the essence of agency is at the heart of what
it means to be sentient, to be alive, across species and things.127

Freedom, Nonduality and Duality, and the One and

the Many

If freedom is the basis of what it means to be sentient, what does this mean
for clay pots or leaves of grass? As we saw, their subjectivity is covered over,
hidden. Abhinavagupta tells us that “the form of awareness has some freedom,
but not the part which is in the condition of being object. This is because it
does not push away the essence of ‘this-​ness,’ taking instead a form that is not
conscious.”128
Pushing away “This-​ness” brings freedom; freedom is thus tied to being a
subject.129 While this almost sounds like a political sound-​bite for European
Enlightenment thinking, here, quite literally, it applies even to a mere clay pot.
Continuing in this passage, Abhinavagupta points out that even for a mere
clay pot, freedom is its essence. Being a clay pot is simply a secondary at-
tribute, the form in which this consciousness finds itself.

[Utpaladeva] says, “not at all” [or, “not entirely” insentient] meaning that even
when freedom is not placed within and risen up in a pot, etc., there is still the form
of consciousness fixed within, because its essence is a oneness of light shining.
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 35

How will that consciousness exist by freedom being placed in it? To this he says, “as
an attribute.”130

This is a rather radical, if phenomenologically attuned, way of thinking of

things. Objects are first and foremost indeterminate blobs of consciousness,
which then become limited, defined things, deprived of a subjective stance as
they become objects to us. In this way, Abhinavagupta establishes a sense of
subjectivity as foundational. That is, this is how he shifts from a third-​person
to a first-​person perspective. So when a pot obtains freedom, when it becomes
sentient, how does it look? This consciousness, as light shining, prakāśa, is
always at the core. When it acquires its freedom, it becomes sentient. Being a
pot is just a secondary characteristic, the particular form this consciousness
takes. The looming question—​one we address in Chapter Four on vimarśa’s
links to sentience—​is what does this mean for objects like computers, artifi-
cial intelligence? One can easily guess the sort of answer we might expect. In
any case, here, however, we should note that any object exists in tandem with
its innate, if forgotten, subjectivity, as an outpouring of that subjectivity. So we
see that

[t]‌he subject’s form, which is a unity of awareness contains also an excess, an abun-
dance of awareness. This is deposited into the side of the object that is going to be
created. So inwardly the [object] has the attribute of śakti, Energy which is none
other than the form of consciousness.131

Being an object is always derivative. It is not in the nature of anything to be

simply an inert object. Always, even for a clay jar, consciousness hides at the
core. Yet, even in the midst of this cosmopsychist singularity of consciousness
unfolding itself, still, the diversity of the world is quite real. As Isabelle Ratie
insightfully points out, this philosophy avoids the idealist ontologies we find
in the Vijñānavāda idealism of Buddhism,132 or in Advaita Vedāntin varie-
ties that erase the differences of a material reality.133 Similarly, Lyne Bansat-​
Boudan points out that the terminology for consciousness for Abhinavagupta,
consciousness as a dense mass (cidghana) stresses the association with mate-
riality; the world is solid and is bodied.134 Illustrated in the voice of the author
Yogarāja, she translates for us, “To the One who, although nothing but a mass
of consciousness, is yet solidified in the form of the world.”135
Again we bump up against the tension between plurality and the One that
Abhinavagupta’s panentheism proposes, the seemingly oxymoronic “Realist
Idealism” that Pandey ascribes to Abhinavagupta. For Abhinavagupta as
36 The Matter of Wonder

well, holding both diversity and unity together is no mean feat. It is, in fact, a
wonder.

[T]‌he Energy of Consciousness is in fact all forms, the entire universe and She
touches nothing beyond Herself.” Consciousness (citi) makes manifest a wonder by
the force of doing that which is extremely difficult. This he summarizes with the
words, [Śiva/​Citi] “who in fact” “partakes of ‘This-​ness.’ ”136

Even the singular unity, the cosmopyschism that manifests this totality, this
highest being or reality—​even this can also manage to be limited, to take
the partial perspective that a rock or a tree or a clay pot or a human has. Not
simply a transcendent reality that oversees the process of unfolding into the
world—​this would, after all, be a sort of animism. No, instead we see the very
difficult wonder of immanence, the rock or tree or human itself expressing its
own consciousness.
We might see the difference here by comparison with Spinoza. As Mary-​
Jane Rubenstein points out, in Spinoza’s pantheism God is not actually the tree,
the goat, the snuff-​box.137 For Abhinavagupta, however, this would make God
too small, not actually the kind of cosmopsychism that really encompasses the
whole. No, here Citi really does accomplish this extremely difficult task of ac-
tually partaking of “This-​ness,” becoming a thing, an object, actually becoming
the tree, the clay pot. So, Abhinavagupta shares with Spinoza the “monstrous
idea” that “God has a body—​namely, the body of the world itself,”138 and he
shares the “insanity” of “Spinoza’s identification of thought and extension.”139
This latter, in Abhinavagupta’s terms, is his formulation that action is in fact
not different from knowledge. The idea of action points to the materiality
of the world, and knowledge references the mental element of thought.140
Spinoza, however, backs away from the sort of radical immanence that would
have God actually be the tree. Not so with Abhinavagupta. When he tells us of
this particularly difficult wonder—​partaking of “This-​ness”—​he takes a bold
step further indeed.
This, I suggest, arises out of Abhinavagupta’s emphasis on subjectivity.
As I mentioned earlier, I suspect that part of what hobbles a contemporary
New Materialism is still a habitual, unreflective adherence to the world as a
third-​person phenomenon. Abhinavagupta’s insight to make the perspective
of subjectivity foundational, rather than making the foundation some sort of
substance (human bodies) or essence (a divine spark), means that the sen-
tience and awareness that comes with subjectivity becomes a mode that is eve-
rywhere available, even for lowly clay pots, even for trees and leaves of grass.
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 37

Abhinavagupta’s insight panentheistically allows a way to encompass both

the bird’s-​eye view of the whole and the gritty particularity of a limited, par-
tial, dualistic perspective. In other words, a pure subjectivity can also instan-
tiate the immanence of a small, limited perspective, an insect, a person, a
clay pot. With this, we get plurality. That is, we can all be part of a unifying
field of consciousness; we can all think of ourselves as “I” and yet differ in our
perspectives from one another. So we see:

The “I” which is the nature of pure awareness constantly pervading the whole also
manifests with duality. Consequently it is reasonable that these should be different
from one another, as separate perceivers perceiving different objects.141

This is a key point. You and I can have differing awareness, different views.
This is what prevents Abhinavagupta’s panentheism from becoming the
sort of panpsychism that John Searle critiques as being “like a thin veneer of
jam”142 with no real capacity to differentiate between different instantiations
of consciousness, as I have argued elsewhere.143 The consciousness that
a dog, or a human, or for that matter a virus has, differs from each other.
Abhinavagupta’s insistence on subjectivity as foundational can include the
duality of differences. It sidesteps this problem of a uniform consciousness, a
thin veneer of jam with no difference between its expressions.
More than this, however—​even as I have suggested that Abhinavagupta’s
adherence to transcendence is not to be underestimated, that he ultimately
tends to favor the view of unity—​still we find as well a passage like this one
below, where Abhinavagupta argues that nonduality, the unity of the whole,
is not actually more true than the limited, partial perspectives of duality. In a
section where he argues against a transcendent view of Brahman, the Advaita
Vedānta view that stipulates that the world is unreal, that our seeing the multi-
plicity of the world is merely ignorance (avidyā), Abhinavagupta pushes back.
He tells us, “if you say that plurality is false, even though it appears before us,
well then, the same goes for nonduality. Nonduality is shown to be false by
virtue of the fact that plurality appears before us.”144
The lynchpin that holds together a cosmopsychism145 that can allow itself
to be truly immanent, to take on the partial awareness of tree, a human, a
clay pot, is the capacity for freedom, an ability to do things, not just on the
level of the mind, but on the level materiality as well. This freedom is the hall-
mark of a subjective stance. It is yoked to an active awareness, vimarśa, the
element of sentience, as we saw earlier, which is the second component of
Abhinavagupta’s dual-​aspect monism—​the counterpart to the shining light,
38 The Matter of Wonder

prakāśa, that makes up objects.146 And its phenomenology is signaled as the

encounter of wonder.
The idea of wonder here is not, however, a way for Abhinavagupta to stop
the conversation at the mystery of consciousness, as something we cannot
understand. Rather, this notion of wonder references a precise terminology
that links knowledge and action. Think here again of Spinoza’s identifica-
tion of thought and extension; the radical philosophical implications of that
move similarly position Abhinavagupta’s philosophy. Thus, again and again
Abhinavagupta tells us that subjectivity is composed of wonder and vimarśa
and that this is what gives freedom. We will delve more deeply into wonder
(camatkāra) in Chapter Two and look at vimarśa, especially its links to mate-
riality, in Chapter Four. For now, we might note that the phenomenology of
wonder contains within it the links to the material world vis-​a-​vis this cluster
of terms connecting action, awareness and sentience, vimarśa and parāmarśa,
with subjectivity. And with these, entailed in the idea of action are both ma-
teriality and a notion of freedom. So, by way of a few examples among many,
Abhinavagupta ties subjectivity to freedom, to active awareness, vimarśa as
sentience, to wonder:

one’s active awareness (vimarśa)—​which is really essentially the breath-​taking

wonder connected with the “I”147

the wonder and bliss which is the supreme goal and reality of freedom, and which
is defined by abiding in one’s own Self, in the “I”148

the self that is pure wonder, which is an active awareness (vimarśa), that, in fact, is
freedom.149

Consciousness as vimarśa, this active awareness, is genuinely alive, sentient.

It discovers its freedom through reflecting and embracing the “I,” which is
phenomenologically expressed as a breathtaking wonder. What exactly does
it mean to have freedom? This freedom tied to subjectivity is precisely what
generates the diversity, the plurality that makes up the world.150 This makes
sense in that the very idea of freedom points to the possibility of choosing
one expression over another. And one can see how it might arise specifically
because Abhinavagupta incorporates the capacity for a genuine multiplicity
of subjectively centered entities. This, by the way, is Abhinavagupta’s answer
to the decombination problem, that is, the problem of how a single unified
reality of a cosmopsychism can manage to divide itself and can decombine to
make the plurality we find here.151
 Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism 39

Thus, the idea of freedom is implicitly tied to a larger question of the plu-
rality of the world. It’s fair to say that Abhinavagupta draws on longer Indian
traditions of nonduality to negotiate a unity that allows a simultaneous mul-
tiplicity. Sthaneshwar Timalsina insightfully points to the grammarian
Bhartṛhari and the Advaita Vedāntin Maṇḍana demonstrating multiplicity
within a larger context of nonduality.152 However, plurality and freedom are
linked not just for Abhinavagupta’s panentheism, but for New Materialisms
as well, yet in a different way and for different goals. For contemporary New
Materialisms, the notions of plurality and freedom especially work to discount
an earlier Western theological legacy of teleology, replete with its concomi-
tant political hierarchies and patriarchies. A New Materialism reimagines an
ontology in scientific parameters away from the implicit telos of an authori-
tarian god, as a means to rethink our ontologies toward more equitable, sus-
tainable political and ecological goals.153 In this regard, I suspect that what
makes a contemporary New Materialism eye a panentheism suspiciously,
with a sidelong gaze is precisely its linkage with a telos. The radical import of
Darwin’s discovery of evolution is just this freedom from a preordained telos,
given from on high.154 I have a hunch, however, that we get stuck on notions
of telos because we have not delinked it from a third-​person phenomenology.
Teleology is habitually ordained from outside ourselves. Similarly, we tend to
think of subjectivity as egoism; that is, we typically articulate subjectivity from
a third-​person transcendent perspective (even here I use an abstract singular
noun).155 They both reference an order outside our individual subjectivities
that eradicates the multiple bumpy views that individual subjects present. So,
while a gesture toward freedom in relation to plurality in a New Materialism
is in part about avoiding telos, Abhinavagupta’s linkage of freedom to a first-​
person perspective turns this on its head. For Abhinavagupta, freedom is the
way we get diversity.156
This is referenced in how language is understood as well for this medieval
Indian context. As Raffaele Torella points out, even though Abhinavagupta
has a conception of deep unity on the highest level of consciousness,
still there remains an implicit, latent multiplicity due to the very nature
of language. He notes that even while multiplicity disappears on the level
of inward subjectivity, yet still the multiplicity of phonemes, which bring
about the multiplicity of meaning, never entirely disappears, but instead is
simply compressed (saṃkal).157 Perhaps akin to Catherine Keller’s under-
standing of the fold, complicatio, language appears as implicated compres-
sion, inwardly gurgitating.158 How does this work? According to Torella,
“The phonemes are the only reality which is not swallowed by supreme
consciousness; they never lose their own essential identity and nature
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Title: The Printer in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRINTER IN

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WILLIAMSBURG ***
 THE
PRINTER
in Eighteenth-Century
WILLIAMSBURG
An Account of his Life & Times, & of his
Craft

Williamſburg Craft Series

WILLIAMSBURG
Publiſhed by Colonial Williamſburg
MMI

i
 A Word to the Reader about Eighteenth-
Century Typography

The paragraphs on this Page and the next have been ſet in an
eighteenth-century Manner. The Type uſed is Caſlon, developed in the
early Part of the eighteenth Century by William Caſlon, the greateft of
the Engliſh Letter Founders. Caſlon in 1734 iſſued his firft Broadſide
Specimen Sheet of Type Faces cut at his Foundry during the
preceding Decade and a Half.

Although Caſlon is famous for the beautiful Type that bears his Name,
he deſerves equal Credit for deſigning ſome of the moft handſome
Type Ornaments or “Flowers” ever developed, before or after his
Time. Such Type Flowers had many Uſes—to embelliſh Initial Letters
at the Beginning of a Chapter in a Book; as decorative Devices in a
ſingle Row over a Type Heading ftarting a new Page in a Book; or
over Headings each Time a new Subject was introduced in a Text.
Flowers were caft to all the regular Bodies of the Letter from the
ſmall (Nonpareil) to the large (Great Primer) Size. The Type Flowers
uſed at the Head of this Page, in the built-up Initial opening the firft
Paragraph, and elſewhere in this Publication are reproduced from
original eighteenth-century Flowers excavated at the Site of the
Printing Office on Duke of Gloucefter Street in Williamſburg.

The longs “s” ſo evident in theſe Paragraphs originated in the ii

German Hand Script. Early German Type Founders attempted to
reproduce Handwriting as cloſely as poſſible. In the Attempt the long
“s” was evolved and was adopted by the firft Engliſh Printers who
learned their Trade from the Germans. The long “s” remained in
general Uſe until about the Year 1800. It was always uſed at the
Beginning and in the Middle of a Word, but never to terminate a
Word. It can eaſily be recognized by the Fact of having only half a
Croſſbar or none at all, whereas the Letter “f” has a full Croſſbar.

Ligatures, ſuch as ct, ſb, ſſ, ſi, ſſi, ſk, ſl, ſſl, ft, fi, ffi, ff, fl, ffl, were
developed where a long “s” or an “f” overlapped the following Letter.
Cafting the two Characters together avoided Damage to the
overlapping Letter. Although ſome Ligatures have fallen into Diſuſe,
the fi, ffi, ff, fl, and ffl are ftill common today.

Printers alſo applied, through much of the Century, ſome Rules of

Style which the modern Reader may find odd if not awkward. For
Example, they began all Nouns with a capital Letter, thus
diftinguiſhing them from other Parts of Speech ſuch as Adjectives,
Verbs, &c. In the ſame Faſhion, they capitalized Expreſſions of
particular Emphaſis, and Titles of Honor and Eminence. The Names of
Perſons and Places they not only began with capital Letters but
usually ſet in Italic Type as well.

With the exception of certain Scottiſh faces, small Capitals were found
in Roman Fonts of Type only. They were employed to denote
Emphaſis and Streſs, and were uſed where the large Capitals would
not fit, i.e., were too long. Small Capitals were alſo found in the firft
Word of the firft Paragraph after every Break in Context of a Chapter
or Section of Text.
Strange though ſome eighteenth-century Printing may appear to
today’s Reader, there is one Point that ſhould be ftreſſed. The
Idioſyncracies of a Type Page of the Period were not merely Whims of
individual Printers. They were the Faſhion of the Time. When a
Printer uſed ſeveral Sizes and Styles of Type on a Page, he was
practicing what he and his Contemporaries conſidered to be good
Typography.

The Printer in
Eighteenth-Century
Williamsburg
3
 The Printer in Eighteenth-Century
Williamsburg

If you had visited Williamsburg in the year 1743, say, and wanted to
post a letter, buy a book, a newspaper, or some writing paper, or talk
with an influential townsman, you would have sought out the shop of
William Parks on Duke of Gloucester Street. Parks published the
Virginia Gazette, the first newspaper in the Virginia colony, and his
printing office served also as post office, bookshop, stationery store,
and general information center.

It was a place of many sounds and smells, and of much activity.

There you would find ink-smudged printer’s devils carefully sorting
type under the watchful eye of the journeyman printer, an
accomplished craftsman and exacting instructor. There you would
also find the bookbinder among his calfskins, marbled papers, glues,
and presses. And on the shelves, waiting for buyers, were pamphlets
and leatherbound volumes produced in the shop or imported from
England.
Perhaps, if you were lucky, you might see a postrider burst in with
London papers, rushed from a ship just arrived from England. Then
the printing shop was never livelier, for the coming of news from
abroad was an exciting event. At such times, Printer Parks probably
stopped what he was doing, culled the choicest items from the
London journals, and made space for them on the front page of the
next issue of the Gazette. In a day or so, “the freshest Advices, 4
Foreign and Domestick,” would be on their way to Parks’s
subscribers.

In the small (1,500 people) capital of Williamsburg, this printing

office was a nerve center through which news of the vast outer world
reached Virginians and, in turn, news of His Majesty’s largest
American colony was conveyed to other colonists and their homeland.
By modern standards it was a small printing shop. But in its effect on
the people of the Virginia colony, it was a powerful civilizing force. As
one of eight or nine printers of colonial newspapers, moreover,
William Parks, through his paper, kept the people of the other
colonies informed of the major events that were taking place in the
oldest and largest outpost of Britain in America.

THE PRINTING OFFICE TODAY

For these reasons, Colonial Williamsburg has re-created an
eighteenth-century printing office as one of its series of craft shops.
Here the twentieth-century visitor will find equipment such as was
used two hundred years ago in similar printing establishments on
Duke of Gloucester Street operated by Parks and later by William
Hunter, Joseph Royle, Alexander Purdie, John Dixon, William Hunter,
Jr., William Rind, and their successors. Here a master printer and his
apprentice, in the leather aprons and full-cut breeches of the period,
set by hand type closely resembling that which Parks used.
To print its pages of hand-set type, the present Printing Office has in
operation three so-called “English Common Presses” such as were
built in the eighteenth century. One, believed to have been made
about 1750, was given to Colonial Williamsburg by American Type
Founders, Incorporated, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Of the other two, one was designed by Ralph Green of Chicago after
a careful study of the handful of known eighteenth-century 5
presses in the United States, and both were built by Colonial
Williamsburg craftsmen.

In addition to the Gazette, tracts, pamphlets, and books poured from

Parks’s press from the time he came to Williamsburg about 1730 until
he died on a voyage to England in 1750. Surviving examples of his
work reveal that he first used Dutch type, which was followed by the
more pleasing face so “friendly to the eye” developed by William
Caslon in England. From matrices similar to Caslon’s originals, his
successors in the type-founding business have cast the letters used
on the restored Williamsburg press. Parks’s neat printing and binding
ornaments, so characteristic of the classical-minded eighteenth
century, have been similarly reproduced. Eighteenth-century printers’
tools were made from the careful drawings in Diderot’s Encyclopedia
and from other sources.

To provide the kind of paper used by eighteenth-century printers,

Colonial Williamsburg began research in the 1930s into the history of
the town’s only paper mill. Started by Parks about 1743 with the help
of his friend Benjamin Franklin, the mill is believed to have outlived
him. Examples of its product were identified in 1936 in a German
Bible and a song book printed in Pennsylvania in 1763. Paper that
simulated the Parks paper was thereupon reproduced, and was used
in some of the work of the Printing Office and in some Colonial
Williamsburg books designed after examples of Parks’s work. Even
the specks and spots of the original Parks paper were imitated by a
mixture of ground flaxseed incorporated into the paper to insure the
appearance of authenticity.
Visitors to the Printing Office today may not see counterparts of the
postriders who brought mail to Parks’s printing shop and post office,
but nearly everything else is there. As in colonial days, the central
figure is still the printer, bending over his press and producing in a
day’s work what one modern, mechanized press can turn out in a few
minutes.

WILLIAMSBURG’S FIRST PRINTER

Although the colony of Virginia was founded in 1607, it was not until
the eighteenth century that printing was established there. This delay
was largely due to governmental policy. In seventeenth-century
England and her colonies, freedom of the press was yet to be
established. Even laws passed by governing bodies could not without
official permission be printed and circulated for the benefit of citizens.
Until the Licensing Act of 1662 expired in 1695, the printing trade in
England was confined to London, the universities of Oxford and
Cambridge, and to the English city of York. The governors of the
royal colony of Virginia felt empowered to refuse permission for the
establishment of printing until the year 1690, after which printers
were governed by royal instructions which required a license and
permission from the governor as a prerequisite to setting up shop.

Sir William Berkeley, who was governor of Virginia from 1642 to 1652
and again from 1660 to 1677, summarized the attitude of most
officials of his day in his famous statement, “But, I thank God, there
are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these
hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy,
and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels
against the best government. God keep us from both.” (Berkeley was
in error: free schools had existed in Virginia, though printing had
not.)
In 1682, a few years after Berkeley wrote, a printer named William
Nuthead came to Jamestown, then the capital of Virginia, proposing
to serve the government by printing the acts of the Assembly. He was
ordered by the Governor’s Council to await royal approval. Several
months later a new governor arrived with an order from the king that
“no person be permitted to use any press for printing upon any
occasion whatsoever.” Nuthead moved to Maryland, and printing in
Virginia was delayed fifty years.

7
Title page of TYPOGRAPHIA, printed by William Parks upon the
establishment of his press in Williamsburg; reproduced from the
only surviving copy—in the John Carter Brown Library,
Providence, Rhode Island.
 TYPOGRAPHIA.
AN
O D E,
ON
PRINTING.
Inſcrib’d to the Honourable
Eſq;
WILLIAM GOOCH,
His Majesty’s Lieutenant-Governor, and Commander in
Chief of the Colony of V I R G I N I A.

—— Pleni ſunt omnes Libri, plenæ ſapientum voces, plena

Exemplorum vetuftas; quæ jacerent in Tenebris omnia, niſi
Literarum Lumen accederet.
Cic. Orat. pro Archia.

W I L L I A M S B U R G:
Printed by William Parks. M,DCC,XXX.

Before 1730, however, a more tolerant attitude had developed. 8

With the permission of Governor William Gooch, the English-
born William Parks moved that year from Annapolis to Williamsburg,
which had succeeded Jamestown as the capital of Virginia in 1699.
He was designated public printer of Virginia, at an annual salary of
£120 a year, eventually increased to £280. Parks continued to print
the acts of the Virginia Assembly, which he had begun several years
before in Maryland, and soon advertised for subscriptions for a
proposed Virginia Miscellany “at his House, near the Capitol, in
Williamsburg.” Before the year was out he had printed several works,
at least five of which are known by title. One of these is an ode to
printing, Typographia, by one “J. Markland,” which salutes Gooch for
his encouragement of printing. In the high-flown style of its day, the
ode concludes:

“A Ruler’s gentle Influence

Shall o’er his Land be shewn;
Saturnian Reigns shall be renew’d
Truth, Justice, Vertue, be pursu’d
Arts flourish, Peace shall crown the Plains,
Where GOOCH administers, AUGUSTUS reigns.”

Parks was Williamsburg’s most distinguished eighteenth-century

printer and probably its most successful. In the annals of his craft in
America he is ranked with Benjamin Franklin and William Bradford,
the foremost printers in Pennsylvania and New York. Parks, like all of
his brethren, depended for his bread and butter on printing blank
forms (deeds, mortgages, bills, and the like), government work (such
as proclamations, forms, and laws), almanacs, and other job work,
but he helped establish in the American colonies that dependence
upon free and fair discussion of issues in the newspapers which
strengthened the concept of a free press. He gave impetus to
literature in a colony that had lacked the local means for its
encouragement. By his example, he was partly responsible for the
rash of journalistic enterprise in pre-Revolutionary Williamsburg.

Parks’s most influential act was his founding of the Virginia Gazette,
the first newspaper to be published in Virginia and the second 9
south of Maryland. Begun in 1736, this weekly was the leader of
a colorful succession of similarly named sheets in Williamsburg and
later in Richmond, to which the Virginia government removed in
1780. And in these Gazettes—in the 1770s published by as many as
three competing printers at a time—can be found a rich chronicle of
the events in the colonies leading to the American Revolution.
Important foreign and domestic occurrences were described in
dispatches—perhaps taken in some cases from private
correspondence—and in excerpts from other newspapers. The editor
rarely reported local happenings beyond a brief mention of ship
arrivals, marriages, deaths, fires, and the like. He often printed legal
notices and entire acts of the Virginia Assembly, without comment.
Fulsomely phrased letters to the editor posed weighty questions of
government, science, or theology.

The modern reader will find the Virginia Gazette of 1736 to 1750
undramatic in its lack of headlines, pictures, and display type. But the
ingredients of human interest are there, subtly in the note of
controversy which gradually built up to the Revolution, and
emphatically in the advertisements, which largely financed the
Gazette. Many are the notices of runaway slaves, strayed farm
animals, husbands deserted by wives, or blooded horses available for
racing or breeding. From the advertisements, also, the contemporary
Virginia reader could learn of the arrival of goods from London—
articles of fashion that were highly prized by Virginians as evidence of
their Englishness. In an early issue of the Gazette, Parks states:

“Advertisement, concerning Advertisements

“All Persons who have Occasion to buy or sell Houses, Lands,

Goods, or Cattle; or have Servants or Slaves Runaway; or have lost
Horses, Cattle, &c. or want to give any Publick Notice; may have it
advertis’d in all these Gazettes printed in one Week, for Three
Shillings, and for Two Shillings per Week for as many Weeks
afterwards as they shall order, by giving or sending their 10
Directions to the Printer hereof.

“And, as these Papers will circulate (as speedily as possible) not

only all over This, but also the Neighbouring Colonies, and will
probably be read by some Thousands of People, it is very likely
 they may have the desir’d Effect; and it is certainly the cheapest
and most effectual Method that can be taken, for Publishing any
Thing of this Nature.”

PRINTING IN AN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY

William Parks’s significant achievements seem even greater if one
understands the difficulties of operating a business in the
Williamsburg of 1730-1750. Because Virginia’s colonial prosperity was
based on a one-crop economy—tobacco—little “ready money” was in
circulation within the colony. The weed itself became a sort of
currency. The usual practice was for the plantation owner or the
small farmer to subsist on his produce and his credit until the crop
was harvested and shipped to English merchants, who from the
proceeds of its sale bought for the planter such articles as he had
directed. Because all American tobacco was transported to Britain in
British vessels, shipping space was plentiful on the westward
passage, and shipowners and British merchants offered Virginia
buyers cheap freight rates on finished goods. Thus such English
manufactures as cloth, furniture, pewter, silver, and ceramics were
sold to Virginia planters and merchants.

The two-way trade between Virginia planters and British merchants

slowed down the development of a large Virginia artisan group.
Accordingly, local industry was limited in eighteenth-century Virginia,
even in an urban center such as Williamsburg. Virginia craftsmen
complained bitterly of unpaid accounts, the necessity of accepting
such “country pay” as tobacco, corn, and beef, and the paucity of
buyers who offered ready money.

It is easy to understand why William Parks found relatively few 11

craftsmen in the Williamsburg of his day. Except for a few
trades such as cabinetmaking, blacksmithing, coopering, wigmaking,
tailoring, and shoemaking, the Virginia capital was largely a
community of taverns, townhouses, and governmental institutions,
and the colony itself was overwhelmingly rural. There is no doubt
that Virginia’s reliance on agriculture, a reliance approved by British
mercantile theory, resulted in an overdependence on the industry of
the mother country. We can thank the peculiarities of Parks’s situation
—the inability of English printers to satisfy Virginians’ desire for
regional news, and the subsidy Parks received as public printer—that
his craft became firmly established in the 1730s in Virginia. Indeed, it
seems clear that the prospect of becoming Virginia’s public printer
was what lured Parks from Annapolis to Williamsburg in the first
place.

PARKS’S SUCCESSORS IN WILLIAMSBURG

Altogether, Williamsburg had at least twelve master printers and
three separate printing locations or offices during the colonial period.
After Parks died on a voyage to England, William Hunter, the man
whom he had left in charge, bought the business. Publication of the
Virginia Gazette continued, and Hunter became public printer and
postmaster. In the latter capacity he worked in close association with
an astute Philadelphia printer, Benjamin Franklin, with whom he
served jointly as deputy postmaster-general for all the colonies.
Hunter printed in 1754 the first published writing of George
Washington, entitled The Journal of Major George Washington, sent
by the Hon. Robert Dinwiddie, Esq; His Majesty’s Lieutenant-
Governor, and Commander in Chief of Virginia, to the Commandant of
the French Forces on Ohio....

12
Masthead of Purdie’s VIRGINIA GAZETTE before the adoption of
the Virginia Resolution for American Independence on May 15,
1776, by the Virginia Convention of Delegates meeting at the
Capitol in Williamsburg.

May 10, 1776. NUMBER 67.

THE

VIRGINIA GAZETTE.
Always forLIBERTY, And the PUBLICK GOOD.
ALEXANDER PURDIE, Printer.

Masthead of Purdie’s VIRGINIA GAZETTE, substituting type

ornaments for a coat of arms of the Royal Colony of Virginia, the
first issue after the adoption of the Virginia Resolution. There
had not been time to develop a new cut.
 MAY 17, 1776. NUMBER 68.
THE

VIRGINIA GAZETTE.
THIRTEEN
UNITED COLONIES.
United, we stand—Divided, we fall.
Always for LIBERTY, And the PUBLICK GOOD.

Masthead of Purdie’s VIRGINIA GAZETTE in a following issue,

showing the new cut that reflected the growing spirit of
independence.

JUNE 7, 1776. NUMBER 71.

THE

VIRGINIA GAZETTE.
Always for LIBERTY, And the PUBLICK GOOD.
High HEAVEN to GRACIOUS ENDS directs the STORM:

After Hunter’s death in 1761, the printing office had a 13

succession of owners and operators. As tension increased
between Great Britain and her American colonies, especially after the
adoption of the Stamp Act in 1765, the relation of public printer to
government became more difficult. The printer faced the necessity of
maintaining good relations with both loyalist and patriot elements in
the House of Burgesses. One loyalist reader of the Gazette, the
Reverend John Camm, complained in the early 1760s that Hunter’s
successor, Joseph Royle, refused to publish Camm’s pamphlet arguing
the cause of Church of England clergymen because of its “Satyrical
Touches upon the Late Assembly.” On the other hand, certain patriot
members criticized Royle in the columns of the Maryland Gazette for
allegedly refusing to print their criticisms of local government. The
printer was caught between fires.

Criticism of the Gazette continued after Royle died in January 1766,

and Alexander Purdie, a Scotsman, took over the business. In what is
thought to have been his first issue, Purdie announced that “the
press shall likewise be as free as any Gentleman can wish, or desire;
and I crave the countenance and favour of the publick no longer than
my conduct may appear to merit their approbation.” Later the same
month, Purdie wrote, “As I understand it is thought by some that I
have neglected, or refused, to publish the account of a late
transaction at Hobb’s Hole [Tappahannock], this is to assure the
publick ... that I never saw the same, nor was it ever offered to me
to publish, otherwise it would have seen the light before this time:
For I do now, as I have heretofore declared, that my press shall be as
free as any Gentleman can wish or desire; that is, as free as any
publick press upon the continent.” In 1775, after Purdie established
another Virginia Gazette, his paper bore the appealing motto “Always
for Liberty, and the Publick Good.”

TOWARD A FREE PRESS

In spite of Purdie’s efforts, the trend was toward a competitive press.
A rival Virginia Gazette was set up in Williamsburg in 1766 by 14
William Rind, a Maryland printer who was more sympathetic to
the protesting colonists than Royle and Purdie were thought to be.
The motto of his paper cannily proclaimed “Open to all Parties but
influenced by None.” Governor Francis Fauquier at this time reported
to the British Board of Trade: “The late printer to the Colony [Royle]
is dead, and as the press was then thought to be too complaisant to
me, some of the hot Burgesses invited a printer [Rind] from
Maryland. Upon which the foreman [Purdie] to the late printer, who is
also a candidate for the place, has taken up the newspaper again in
order to make interest with the Burgesses.” Jefferson, who in 1766
was completing his study of law, and was a friend and admirer of
Fauquier’s, recalled later: “We had but one press, and that having the
whole business of the government, and no competitor for public
favor, nothing disagreeable to the governor could be got into it. We
procured Rind to come from Maryland to publish a free paper.”

The hot-spirited Rind was elected public printer by the House of

Burgesses. However, the job being too much for one printer alone,
the Assembly in 1769 authorized both Gazette publishers, Rind and
Purdie, to print a large volume containing the Acts of Assembly then
in force. Rind continued in office until his death in 1773 when his
widow, Clementina Rind, took over the business as Virginia’s first
woman printer.

The number of weekly newspapers in Williamsburg increased again in

1775 when Purdie, who had taken John Dixon into his business nine
years before, withdrew in favor of William Hunter, Jr., the son of
William Parks’s successor, and established his own Virginia Gazette.
When the Revolution broke in 1776, Williamsburg thus had three
newspapers, each called the Virginia Gazette. Rind’s Gazette expired
by 1777, after a succession of managers, and Purdie’s (which was
continued after his death in 1779 by Clarkson and Davis) ceased
publication in 1780. Dixon formed a new partnership with Thomas
Nicolson in 1779 after William Hunter, Jr., had joined the British 15
forces. Their newspaper was called the Phoenix Gazette and
Williamsburg Intelligencer, but it expired the following year when
these printers followed the seat of government to establish
Richmond’s first press.

So pronounced was the decline in Williamsburg’s fortunes that from

the year of the government’s removal until forty-four years later, in
1824, Williamsburg had no newspaper. Old copies of the three
Gazettes were treasured reminders of the town’s past glory. The
name, Virginia Gazette, and some of the tradition of Parks’s skill were
remembered, but little was done to perpetuate them until the late Dr.
W. A. R. Goodwin in 1926 invited Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to
restore Williamsburg. As a by-product of that movement, the proud
masthead of William Parks’s original Virginia Gazette was revived in
1930 by the late Joseph A. Osborne and his family. Likewise, in the
realm of paper manufacture, typography, book production, and
bookbinding, Colonial Williamsburg has revived the workmanship of
William Parks and his confreres. In such publications as The
Williamsburg Art of Cookery, or, Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s
Companion, published in 1938, and A Brief & True Report concerning
Williamsburg in Virginia, first published in 1935, Colonial Williamsburg
emulated type, paper, format, and binding of similar volumes from
Parks’s press. And at its Printing Office, it has sought to recapture the
manner and mood of a colonial printing shop as a part of its program
to teach twentieth-century Americans more about the lives and ideas
of their pre-Revolutionary ancestors.

TECHNIQUES OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
PRINTING
In considering the craft of printing, it is important to remember that
the western world has enjoyed the invention of movable type only
since the middle of the fifteenth century. For several centuries
thereafter, the new development was regarded with suspicion by
church and state, which, as we have seen, feared the freedom 16
of thought that would ensue if reading matter were readily
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