Rescuing Permission from the Past
If you haven’t noticed, American culture is fucked. The average American doesn’t have a ton of money, has stopped going to church, is in a dysfunctional family setting, or struggles with some form of addiction. According to some, even our food is lacking critical nutrition. I won’t even go into the disturbing frequency of mass shootings or the opioid crisis. Or the current state of racial, political, and social discourse….
Yet, America is supposed to be the best country in the world? We’re supposed to be the darling of western civilization? I’m not buying it.
We’re the best at what? Military spending? Obesity? The amount of people recreationally using drugs to cope with unhappiness in their personal lives? How about having the most citizens in prison, per capita, than any other developed nation on the face of the planet?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to live in a country with due process of law (or at least, a low-resolution version), electricity, running water, and all the leisure time I could ever imagine. I just feel like we’ve neglected a few of the most critical components of our society – religion, chief among them.
In the scope of this post, I attempt to argue why we need a new approach to religious self-expression.
To start, I realize that perhaps my measure of a nation’s “health” is different than yours. I don’t think the amount of money being printed and exchanged, low interest rates, the stock market, or the number of billionaires are accurate measures of how healthy our society is. From what I see, read, and hear, most Americans are struggling at the personal level, and considering we are a country that champions sovereign individuality, personal well-being is a pretty big deal.
It seems self-evident, then, that radical solutions are required. Producing these radical solutions requires a new religious substrate from which we can formulate, refine, and manifest creative ideas about our culture, our religion, our morals, and our values.
In short, I propose rescuing magic systems of religious self-expression and integrating them into a modern framework; combining select concepts of modern religious and ancient magic thought, through which new modes of religious self-expression will be possible.
Think I’m crazy? Good. You’re in for a fun ride.
I’ve spent quite a long time looking at where and how we got our distinctly modern, Western religious world view (big ups to the internet). It’s complicated shit, and I’m not the smartest guy around, but I stumbled on some interesting ideas while looking at the religious history of the West.
Before you shit your pants, I’m not saying that going to church and living ascetic lives is the play.
I just realized that modern religious frameworks aren’t enough to evolve beyond our concepts of religion, morality, or social value systems.
It remains that monotheistic modes of religious expression have, for a very long time, monopolized the business of spirituality. This worked for thousands of years. However, monotheistic modes of religious self-expression aren’t cutting the cake anymore, at least to Americans.
Check the stats:
According to Pew Research Center, about 70% of Americans identify as Christian; however, only 63% say they have unequivocal faith that God is real.
Weird….
Looking at the absolute belief in God by religious groups further illustrates this interesting discrepancy. Only 64% of Catholics said they have absolute faith in God; 88% for Evangelical Protestants, 37% for Jews, 86% for Mormons, and 61% for Orthodox Christians. (What I don’t understand is how you can claim to be Christian, but also not have absolute faith in God….)
What I take away from this data is that people want to believe in something, but the traditional framework for worship and spiritual development is out of touch with modernity.
Also, it’s interesting to note that religions with a more modern interpretation of Christian ideas (Evangelical Protestants and Mormons), have more members with absolute faith in God, compared to traditional faiths like Catholicism or Judaism.
My best guess is that Protestant faiths are better optimized for the modern mind. Again, it seems the more traditional faiths have a hard time reconciling old-school, traditional religious observance with modern life.
Furthermore, church attendance stats highlight how modern religion is failing the average American.
Of the people with absolute faith in God, only 49% attend church every week. So, apparently, in America, even if you’re sure God is real, you can’t be bothered to worship Him regularly in a formal context. Seems like a weird way to maintain faith, eh?
My guess for this discrepancy is that most people who believe in God also distrust most organized church institutions in general. Which makes sense, considering most modern Christian churches are just tax-exempt money-mills.
This conclusion is corroborated by the stat that 74% of Christians with absolute faith in God pray regularly.
So, if you believe in God for sure, chances are you communicate and worship him in a personalized way, forgoing dogma, institutionalized worship, and the hand-wringing clergyman.
According to the data, Christianity is struggling to resonate in the personal lives of the congregation.
What’s more, according to the same Pew study, only 71% of people with absolute faith in God get a sense of spiritual peace on a weekly basis from their faith.
It seems, to my cynical mind, that people are stressed and anxious about the potentiality of being damned to hell, so, just to be safe rather than sorry, they identify as a Christian without enacting any behavior that sets them apart as a Christian – including praying, actually believing in God, and going to church.
Interestingly enough, even as Christian church attendance (and, apparently, faith in its basic tenets), is dropping, New Age ideas are on the rise.
“Overall, roughly six-in-ten American adults accept at least one…New Age [belief]. Specifically, four-in-ten believe in psychics and that spiritual energy can be found in physical objects, while somewhat smaller shares express belief in reincarnation (33%) and astrology (29%).”
Again, these numbers tell me that people want some form of religious self-expression, but traditional Christianity isn’t cutting the cake. So, what do we do about it? Get rid of Christianity?
While, in theory, that’s a laudable goal, it’s not very practical, and historical precedent shows us what happens when you persecute people for their religious beliefs…. But I do think we need to stop considering Christianity as the "be-all, end-all" for religious self-expression in the West.
I think looking at pre-Christian Europe is a great place to pull new (er, I mean, old, but forgotten) modes of religious self-expression. Who says monotheism is the only way to express religious sentiments? Monotheists?!
Most monotheists worship a 2000-year-old crucified Jew, think they are God’s Chosen People, or justify ethnic cleansing through warfare, because “God wills it”; so, objectively, I wouldn’t worry too much about what monotheists think.
Christianity is failing Americans as a mode of religious expression, and New Age beliefs are on the rise, that’s a statistical fact.
Now my idea of looking back at ancient, magic worldviews and rescuing potent concepts from the maddening annals of history doesn’t seem like such a "nut-so" idea. Or, maybe it still does….
Anyway, while we're sorta on the subject, did you know that the West wasn’t always Christian? Ethnic Europeans were pagan, not Christian. Monotheism comes from the Middle East, where it spread to every corner of the globe, typically at the end of a sword.
This might seem like a weird statement, but (especially in America) because our culture is based on the moral, social, and religious ideas of Christianity, it’s easy to forget that our European ancestors weren’t always Christian. While this might seem like an arbitrary distinction, it’s important to point out that religious systems are often the soil of philosophic thinking, which begets the fruit of culture. To fix our currently rotted cultural fruit, maybe we should re-frame our religious soil.
Where once Western thinking came from a place of inherent, latent spiritual authority, upon the forcible introduction of monotheism, Western thinking took on a more decidedly fatalistic and rigid tone.
Good ol’ Viktor Rydberg illustrates this difference between pre- and post-Christian religious thought. Speaking of the ancient Greeks in his seminal work, The Magic of the Middle Ages Rydberg states:
“To the Greeks… no doubt was entertained concerning the ability of Reason to penetrate to the inner essence of things, since no knowledge of the fall of man, which annihilated this ability, had reached the Greeks….
“The ideal of wisdom which they had framed, was based on their inner experience... and when they exerted themselves to realize it in their lives, they always proceeded upon the supposition that this would be possible by daily strengthening of the will….”
According to Rydberg, Greeks considered themselves in unmediated possession of the formative tools of reality – Reason and Will, through which, all things could be known.
Rydberg follows up this passage on the Greeks with an antithetical concept of spiritual authority, according to the post-Christian mind. Rydberg says:
“If, on the contrary, the highest [spiritual authority] in nature is an arbitrary divine caprice [the voice of God]…then is there indeed no causality to be sought for, and consequently no field anywhere for scientific investigation… In this way, external [spiritual] authority supplants the inner, which is torn up by the roots….”
Rydberg implies that if the highest level of spiritual authority comes from someone other than yourself, there really isn’t a reason to dig into the nature of existence at all because, “it would lie far beyond the powers of man, since reason, a mere plaything for demoniac powers, cannot be trusted.”
Where the pre- and post-Christian mind differ is over who or what holds the keys to spiritual authority.
To the Christian, this power and authority is directly delineated from God, requiring His divine permission which is only granted to the hyper-obedient. To the Greek, this power and authority is inherent, and is developed, through Reason and Will.
Today, the average American is trapped by the monotheistic notion of where spiritual authority comes from. We look to the pastor, the parent, the philosopher, the teacher instead of honing personal Reason to decide the matter for ourselves.
We take what we are told about how to properly believe in God from someone else, because, more often than not, it’s the only mode of spiritual self-expression presented as valid.
To evolve our sense of religious self-expression (thereby possibly pushing our culture in a new direction), we need to forsake external authority and instead draw on personal experience and inquiry to formulate new modes of religious expression.
The way I look at it, spiritual self-expression is more like a buffet, instead of the Christian notion of a prescribed menu.
Why aren’t we taught to pick and choose the best ideas from a wide range of religious modes of self-expression, and synthesize them into a hyper-personal form of doctrine and worship? I feel like the internet basically gives us all the permission we need to explore and come to our own conclusions about religion.
Continuing on, let’s turn to Francis Yates’ groundbreaking scholarship in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Here, she identifies magic as one of the themes of religious and philosophic thought in pre-Christian Europe that played a formative role in the development of Western thinking:
“The world of the second century was, however, seeking intensively for knowledge of reality, for an answer to its problems which the normal education failed to give. It turned to other ways of seeking an answer, intuitive, mystical, magical.
“…[I]t sought to cultivate the Nous, the intuitive faculty in man. Philosophy was to be used, not as a dialectical exercise, but as a way of reaching intuitive knowledge of the divine and of the meaning of the world, as a gnosis, in short…”
We see here the philosophers of the second (pre-Christian) century refusing to turn toward a single source of "The Truth". They took it upon themselves to dig into the very fabric of reality, delving into the Magic Sea of All-Potential, pulling from its murky waters recombined conceptualizations about religion, life, the universe. This sounds very similar to the ancient Greek method, no?
The way I look at it, monotheism is like a single application, while magic, and much of pre-Christian thought, is the source code, the operating system of religious thought.
Rydberg tends to agree: “Magic is the harbinger of Science,” he begins Chapter II of The Magic of the Middle Ages:
“In the history of human development, the dim perception precedes the clean, and the dominion of imagination that of reason…. Like science, magic in its original form is based upon the principle that all things existing are concatenated. Science searches for the links of union both deductively and inductively; magic, seeking its support in the external resemblances between existing things….”
The post-Christian mind would have you believe that magic is the profane art of the Devil, while at the same time, demanding obedience to the word of a 2000-year-old Jewish carpenter. While the real definition of magic and its ancient system of practice is beyond the scope of this particular post, suffice it to say that the monotheistic accounts of pagans, their worship, and magic in general, is decidedly biased and the epitome of shitty anthropology.
This brings us to back to the start.
Monotheism has, for a very, very long time, been the only “valid” mode of religious expression in the West. It’s obviously failing, because most Christians don’t go to church regularly, and some don't even believe God is real. It’s obvious that Christianity, at this point, is nothing more than a “child’s blanky” for your eternal soul.
So, I propose digging into the past of our ancestors, combing over their pagan rites and liturgy (when and where possible) – without a poisoned, “moralistic”, Christian anthropological lens – not to revivify a tradition long dead, but to regain permission and the tools to dig into the magical subconscious and pull organic modes of religious self-expression from the formative fabric of reality.
Fuck needing permission from your Bishop or Rabbi or Priest. If you want to know the secrets of the universe, look for the answers yourself. As a divine co-creator of reality, you have the ability to Know. You do not need permission from a monotheist to explore what's inherent to being.
Maybe, just maybe, when we learn to shed the fetters of monotheism, we’ll be able to push our cultural and personal identities beyond their currently self-defeated co-dependence.
These are just my ideas, though. I doubt they're the actual play, but I'm fucking sick and tired of waiting for someone else to figure it out for me. I was inherently born with the divine intellect, as are all humans on Earth, and I plan on exercising it, pushing it Above and Below.
I'm more in touch with my sense of morality, of what I value as true. I stopped relying on an old book to tell me how to act, and I started acting in a manner that made me feel good (which tends to make others around you feel the same), because I don't consider myself separate from God.
Through imagination, intellect, and the will, I can manifest anything I dedicate myself too -- in short, I am inherently divine. I don't need American culture to know how to act. I don't need God to tell me how to think, and I don't need permission to dig into the mysteries of life.
What I do need, is other Americans committed to continual growth and improvement, even if it means rethinking their precious monotheistic religion.