A Living Religion
In Search of a New Hierophany
If you’ve read any of my previous works then you will know I’m not exactly the biggest fan of industrial modernity. More narrowly, I tend to focus on the impacts that this condition has upon man, and his experience of the world; how technology shapes our lives in ways utterly unplanned, and beyond its intended scope. One drastic consequence of modernity is what Heidegger named the “flight of the gods”. The crisis of our age leaves us moderns out of touch with many elements of prior human experience, if not secluded from truly “human” being altogether and religion is no exception. I will here explore the process of religion and how modernity has disrupted this in a fundamental way.
“...there can be no such thing as “a sound modern education” - as well as talk about a “lively modern faith” or a “serviceable modern religion.” It should be obvious that the more “modern” an education is, the less “sound”, for in education, “modernism” is as much a heresy as in religion. In both mediaevalism were a truer standard.”
So reads an extract from Irish Revolutionary Pádraig Pearse’s fiery polemic against the British education system in early 20th Century Ireland, The Murder Machine. Far from simply bemoaning Ireland’s subjugation, Pearse’s works exhibit an almost Lawrentian revolt against reason, and are staunchly antimodern. We are mistaken to see “soundness” and “liveliness” of religion as even compatible with modernism. Pearse’s works are (perhaps ironically) available in full online and I’d greatly encourage all to read them; he is one thinker whom I can credit with being entirely unambiguous as to the irreconcilability of modernity with the traditional, natural, and crucially in Pearse’s view, the spiritual. Pearse’s position that “Ireland was losing its soul to Great Britain's modernity” encapsulates an aspect of our general crisis; the seeming loss of, or loss of contact with, those elements of life that go beyond the merely quantitative and material to the onslaught of industrial modernity.
A “serviceable modern religion” is a neutered form of something that in theory ought to take absolute priority. Serviceability to a modern eye is, in this respect, the death of true religiosity. Religion becomes an impotent accessory to a life otherwise engaged; it may keep its estate in the corner and find ways to scrape some relevance through fitting itself to fashionable narratives, but it is, for all intents and purposes, dead. The question then arises, what does it mean for religion to live?
It is hardly a controversial statement that religion and modernity are opposed. The death of God and its consequences are familiar topics to us, with which a tremendous amount of 19th-21st Century thought is concerned. There is often among antimoderns an earnest and noble desire to practise and preserve extramodern religious customs (this term is preferred to premodern, which implicitly presupposes the inevitability of “progress”, and that a state resembling those prior to modernity can not exist in the future). I would absolutely encourage this, but it is upon us to recognise that our interactions with divinity are necessarily impaired by the world in which we live. Authentic religiosity is very difficult to achieve amidst the noise of modernity, as will be explored.
If modernity kills religion, then it is worth asking: “what births it?”; what is it about the extramodern world that invites the presence of the divine? It is tricky to speak of the “start” of a religion. Like a culture or a language, we are dealing with something dynamic and evolutive, of which an absolute point of origin is impossible to establish, and essentially meaningless. Just like with comparative linguistics, religious traditions can be analysed and their origins theorised on the basis of resemblances and shared features. Of course, more recent religious traditions, particularly Abrahamic ones, have firm dates at which we can say they began, but these only reflect a moment of codification; the spiritual feeling which inhabits these traditions stands in reference to a prior lineage in all cases; there is no out-of-the-vacuum religion. Our concern here is not with the inauguration of different formal religions, but rather we are searching for a picture of the emergence of religious feeling at its most primaeval.
Naturalism
One controversial answer to this query is that of “Religious Naturalism”; the conception of religion as metaphor or representation of nature and the natural world, in which men find meaning and significance. In many ways, this view is exactly guilty of Pearse’s charge - making religion “serviceable” to modernity. Gutting religion of the supernatural, and insisting upon its being purely symbolic, so as to accord with scientistic precepts. I will here compare this assessment of religion, and modern religious practice which reflects it, to the technological commodification of authenticity, discussed in an earlier essay.
“The desire for the spontaneous, un-engineered, alive and particular in all things has itself been technologised and sold back to the authenticity-starved population as hipster commodities, to sate their natural desire for the natural/traditional itself… But there’s a great hollowness to it all, it hums to high heaven of affectation and status-signalling, because what’s missing from the picture is the necessity for these items to be made in the way they are. It’s at best an imitation of true tradition. In the traditional world, bakery bread and handmade clothes aren’t “artisanal”, they’re just bread and clothes. In an identical way, any attempt to wring tradition out of a technological behemoth […] will not yield tradition, it will at best yield a sad facsimile.”
Crucially, modernity removes the necessity of religion, and of religious thinking. While the human soul needs religion as much as it pines for authentic living, both of these things have become opt-in luxuries for a niche crowd. Those who want religion can have it, but neutered of all its substance; of anything latent within it that might threaten modern absolutes. I am reminded of Slavoj Žižek’s notion of products containing their own negation: “fat-free chocolate” and so on. People want religion but minus the icky bits that make them feel guilty for going against the modern ideology. In the same way, naturalism is denatured religious thinking; a modern mind trying to account for religion, which evades modern understanding.
Bertrand Russell wrote in The Problems of Philosophy that “[...] as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science.” Philosophy, like religion, is concerned with those areas of life which cannot be given a straightforward one or zero. This is mirrored by the “God of the gaps” perspective in theology, in which the religious merely fill in every “gap” in our understanding of the universe not yet accounted for by science with God. While many use this to discredit religion, I will contend that scientism and the clockwork cosmology it entails are simply prescriptive models of being, which impose a single lens on the world. As Collin Cleary states “It is part of the modern mindset to insist that everything can be explained, that everything is penetrable and knowable.” It is precisely the mystery inherent to the world that feeds religious feeling. Modern man feels himself to exist in a demystified, clockwork cosmos, whose equations have been solved.
Divinity, like everything associated with this “mystery” exists in the realm of the unquantifiable. Modernity can produce artificial diamonds molecularly identical to the “real thing”, but the worth of a diamond was never only in its statistical properties (incidentally, realness is itself among the trendiest commodities of our age). Likewise, the divine exists in that subtle and discreet region alongside the value of the real; as Chad Haag would put it, in the hermeneutical gap between the subject and noumena. As such, when these gaps are plugged, the divine is withheld; “surplus to requirement” in modern thinking. Naturalism is perhaps an effort to wrench religion back from irrelevance, but it serves only as a confirmation of this.
Alongside his friend and teacher Georges Dumézil, the religious scholar Mircea Eliade was harshly critical of naturalism:
“... for religious man the supernatural is indissolubly connected with the natural, that nature always expresses something that transcends it. As we said earlier: a sacred stone is venerated because it is sacred, not because it is a stone; it is the sacrality manifested through the mode of being of the stone that reveals its true essence.”
Naturalists therefore get religion precisely backwards; in their attempts to reconcile the extramodern with the modern, they lose the sacred altogether, and all we are left with is a stone.
Religious Origins
There is, however, something enlightening to be gleaned from the approach of the naturalists, if not from their conclusions themselves. In particular I will reference the interpretive work of the somewhat obscure Rev. G.W. Cox, a Victorian historian and mythologist, and as far as paganism goes, a naturalist. In an essay prefacing his account of the myths of Ancient Greece, Cox proposes that many of the events in the myths are in fact idealisations of observed natural (principally solar) phenomena. He argues that myths emerged out of an originary scene without an extensive amount of abstract language, in which prevailed...
“[...] a condition of thought in which men were only awakening to a sense of the objects which surrounded them, and points to a time when the world was to them full of strange sights and sounds, some beautiful, some bewildering, some terrific, when, in short, they knew little of themselves beyond the vague consciousness of their existence, and nothing of the phenomena of the world without. In such a state they could not but attribute to all they saw or touched or heard a life which was like their own in its consciousness, its joys, and its sufferings.”
In this we can trace a naturalised account of divinity “revealing itself” to man. This attribution of consciousness to natural phenomena would then, according to Cox, give rise to phrases such as “the sun greeting his bride”, to describe sunlight upon a mountainside, or any number of natural occurrences with another phrase.
“These relics (phrases) exhibit in their germs the myths which afterwards became the legends of gods and heroes with human forms, and furnished the groundwork of the epic poems, whether of the Eastern or Western world.”
And so a poetic description of a phenomenon comes to animate it with an imagined life. These mythologised descriptions of nature remain fluid enough to take on personages and the central motif becomes embellished over time into a narrative. The origin, for Cox, is the phenomenon itself, and myth emerges out of a particular linguistic interpretation of that phenomenon. By contrast to this perspective, religious man would instead see the phenomena as ciphers for the sacred, not the inverse, but the key insight in Cox’s theory is the emergent awareness of divinity, as revealed through nature. More than this - through a kind of poetical understanding of nature; nature itself revealed through language. This theory can, therefore, be seen as an account of how man comes to perceive the gods, rather than to “invent” them.
A Disclosure of Being
“Das Glänzen der Natur ist höheres Erscheinen."
“Nature’s gleaming is higher revealing.”
A line from Friedrich Hölderlin’s wonderful poem Der Herbst, “the Autumn”, as translated by Heidegger scholar Richard Capobianco. This was a poem that captured Heidegger, and resonated with him philosophically, as much as literarily. Does this line not perfectly encapsulate that process to which Cox alluded? The higher, that is holy, is shown to man through nature’s gleaming, in a time when “That power of sympathising with nature which we are apt to regard as the peculiar gift of the poet, was then shared alike by all.”
In my essay on “unworlding”, I brought in Heidegger’s theory of Ereignis, which concerns the fundamentally “eventful” nature of being. “...what we encounter, what “there is” (es gibt), has the character of an “Ereignis,” a “happening” or “event” within lived experience ... In other words, things “happen” to us and address us; they are “events” of showing that we appropriate in language. As he (Heidegger) put it, “es weltet” - that is, the surrounding world ““worlds”; things “world” “everywhere and always.””
“...animated and guided by an exceptionally vivid sense of how things are manifest to us in an “eventful” way, how they address us and even “speak” to us, as it were … what truly interested and moved Heidegger was not so much that things are made-present by us (Husserl) as that things present themselves to us.”
Whether one is a naturalist or not, it is understood that a people’s gods are inferred through nature, and the ecological context of their worshippers. If horses could draw their gods they would be like horses. What is crucial is that this does not detract from the truth of these horse-gods. There is nothing arbitrary or invented in the horse’s gods. Awareness of them emerges from the horse’s own being in the world, from the way the horse understands reality. It is an organic revealing of divinity. The vital reality of this religion is not for the number of its adherents, or the codification of doctrine and ritual, but in the fact that it is living. It is an encounter with the divine, a mythic event. It exists as a process of being; an outgrowth of the real and tangible presence of the sacred in the world. In other words, everything which modernity blots out.
There is a fallacy to attribute modern arbitrariness to the past, and to measure tradition as if it were decided upon in a post-enlightenment fashion, and did not emerge gradually and organically in a given context. As Julius Evola put it, “in my philosophy(that of the World of Tradition), there is no arbitrariness”. It is essential to see that which is organic and that which is artificial as essentially distinct. Religion is often seen as “invented” by moderns, which is an absurdity. Religion is no more “invented” than language. It is a given part of our being as human beings, or Dasein. To view religion as some opt-in item on a shopping list of alternatives is entirely alien to the spirit of truly living religious tradition. In this sense, modern “religions” are truly arbitrary, as a denatured form of worship for the same reason that any engagements with the remnants of tradition suffer in our age. Their necessity is suspended. It is not that we must choose which traditions to return to, it is not an ideology among other ideologies. I neither know nor think it right to design any particularities of what will succeed our present state: this itself is viewing the extramodern through modern arbitrariness; as a choice among others.
As we have seen, mythology is revealed to man through his experience of the natural world. The world worlds for traditional man, it discloses itself through the composite experience of being - “things present themselves to us.” And this revealing is precisely not idle speculation and chaotic imagination of the unreal. Mythology necessarily discloses a truth to us, precisely because it emerges out of the necessities and strict limitations of a certain ecological and thus spiritual context. For this reason, it is folly to try and establish a “correct” mythology, and I hope I shall not have to bother explaining why pointing out the physical impossibility of myths is of absolutely no use, missing the point entirely. As Heidegger tells us:
“Truth abides in everything that abides.”
Religion in the state of nature, or the World of Tradition abides. A religion that was revealed in readily perceivable falsehood could not do so. In Greek myth, Phaethon, the mortal son of the sun-god Helios, attempts to ride his father’s chariot dragging the sun along, kicking and screaming, for the ride. Cox remarks: “In his brightness Phaethon resembles Helios, but he is not the same being; he lacks either his wisdom or his strength.” As a result, when ascending the mantle of godhood, Phaethon fails to control the horses of the sun-chariot, and so the Earth is variably frozen and scorched, due to the chariot going too high and low in the sky, the details of this varying greatly across different accounts of the myth. Cox renders this tale as a mythologisation of the phrase “One who cannot guide the fiery horses sits in the chariot of the sun.” “So ran the phrase which… rose naturally to the lips of men when all herbage was scorched and withered in times of drought.”
Not only is this myth, according to Cox at least, disclosed through the natural occurrence of drought, something of extreme salience to a people living in times of very high mortality, bound by strict laws of pre-technological limitation, but it also reveals a truth about cosmic order, and the dangers of those incapable of immortal responsibilities being given immortal powers. The myth hereby discloses through the worlding of the world a profound cosmological truth; the notion of dharma - of cosmic law. Of course, this is but one interpretation, but the interpretive distance between subject and phenomenon is the entire basis of religious life. It is not therefore, as the naturalist would have it, that these religious notions are simply symbols for drought, or ideas of misrule, but rather that the drought is a manifestation of those absolutes which it discloses to man, through the myths which arise out of its observation in the world. Nature’s gleaming is higher revealing. Erscheinen - notice Capobianco’s conscious choice to translate “erscheinen”, usually rendered as “appearing”, as “revealing”. There is no falsity or appearance, but a showing; a disclosure of truth: ἀλήθεια. This process of revealing takes place in a primordial, mythologically imbued landscape, where man exists in the tangible presence not only of the divine, as stated earlier, but of limitation. Once again, I credit Chad Haag’s philosophy with this notion and its terminology.
The truth of religion is like the truth in all natural beings, animals, plants, skies and mountains. It is through these mediums that this specific truth makes itself known. “There is no sophistry in my body”, says Ted Hughes’s roosting hawk. Indeed - there is no arbitrary fibre in him. A hawk is chiselled lightning, barrelling “direct through the bones of the living”, any profligacy of form is death and obsolescence to a finer hawk; to the more true hawk. Darwin’s laws are simply a modern iteration of the concept of natural law, temporalised and taken out of myth.
People often miss the wood for the trees with Darwinism. Too many profound philosophical implications of the theory have been missed. An essay unto itself is required to discuss them at length, but when one dispenses with a preoccupation with the long-term “evolutionary” aspect of Darwinism, and instead looks more closely at natural selection, one cannot find a more stark instantiation of natural laws or limitation. Limitation forms life itself, and the pressures exerted upon an organism, in a profound sense are that organism, as it reflects them dynamically when viewed in a metatemporal manner. There is truth in the perfection of nature; “in everything that abides”. When reality is contorted by the suspension of harsh ecological laws, things not only become unnatural but untrue.
This becomes even more visible if we consider convergent evolution. Extremely similar traits and body plans can be seen to resurface across wildly distinct and unrelated lineages many times over as a response to the same environmental pressures. Far from one arbitrary and random form among many, the shape and being of every organism comes about through the necessities and formative pressures of a given environment; there is truth in each specific pattern of life that “abides”. Similarly, the perception of the divine that emerges to a people will be influenced inevitably by the characteristics of their place in the world, and it will be true precisely due to its being revealed through these conditions, just as the shape of the hawk is true for its embodiment of the necessities of hawk-ness. Each revealed religion and each organism are true, not because they are themselves the same, but because they are formed out of and adhere to the same absolute.
What occurs, then, when “sophistry” is permitted to enter the body? When any can survive and proliferate? Furthermore; when any notion or idea of divinity or of anything else can extend itself without that check of absolute limitation which was the standard for truth? They become arbitrary, nightmarish and false, inevitably. What Nietzsche named the “nausea of the absurd” creeps in from all sides. Chaos floods in.
Mythology and Pseudoreligion
“Every Microcosm, every inhabited region, has a Centre; that is to say, a place that is sacred above all.”
This would be the axis mundi, the “navel” of the earth; where heaven meets the world. It is the foundation of a people’s orientation in the world; where the world “began”. As we have seen, the ecological (and thus spiritual) context of a given place governs how divinity will reveal itself there. We can equate the spiritual centre of the axis mundi to precisely this; the axis around which that world “worlds”, around which things make sense and are given form.
Outside of this “cosmos” lies “chaos”; that which is formless and populated with subjectivity, without any shared, founded “world” of absolutes; what Eliade names “objective reality”.
“Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent with his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralysed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion.”
This founded cosmos will not last forever and will eventually fall to chaos. Eliade states that this life can never be remade, but must instead be renewed through a reinstantiation of the cosmogony; the act of creation itself. Many myths are concerned with this process.
“On the last day of the year the universe was dissolved in the primordial waters. The marine monster Tiamat - symbol of darkness, of the formless, the non-manifested - revived and once again threatened. The world that had existed for a whole year really disappeared. Since Tiamat was again present, the cosmos was annulled; and Marduk was obliged to create it once again, after having once again conquered Tiamat.”
Our world today is an eerily close realisation of these prophecies. With the suspension of the conditions that give rise to a living religion, which could be compared to Eliade’s axis mundi, chaos has manifested in mental as well as physical forms. “Maladaptive” ideas, in evolutionary terms, are comorbid with mutations that proliferate during modern times, as genetic selection pressures are lessened by technology and science. Limitation is suspended and chaos creeps in.
Increasingly the sense of an inherited, common absolute reality, around a founded centre, is evaporating and we are left instead with a centreless and horizontally oriented maze of confusion - away from heaven. We are shunning our own navel; wishing that we were originally adrift and without any prior ties that impede us. The “hackable animal”, Modern Man, wants an unlimited state of individual satiation. He venerates the comfortable, subjective experience of the world because any notion of that former objective vision appears impossibly harsh and arbitrarily unjust. He has no salience of truth, as previously defined. Sophistry has entered his body and his mind and he may become a bloated and distended creature without form. Any attempt on the part of man to reinforce the natural mandate is interpreted by moderns as injustice and tyranny, as, for the time being, he does not have to act in a “traditional” manner. Only with an end to modernity itself can this be reversed. Only with the overthrow of chaos and a recreated world.
The description of modern and postmodern ideologies as “religions” is now so widespread as to be cliché, but it is not without truth in some sense. As the divine is no longer experienced, mankind’s religious impulse is populated with other objects of “worship”. Most of these, rather than according with the group-oriented tendency of religion, will tend instead to prioritise the individual in some way. Indeed, the tendency of Wiccans or other pseudo-pagans to select some god at whim from around the world and across history, to which they may not have any tangible connection whatsoever, is an example of the utter dissolution of proper religiosity.
The true object of worship in this paradigm is the self. It is wholly individualistically oriented, which means it is concerned with the lower world, where life, descended from its source in heaven, is disintegrated into mortal, perishable, individuals. In fact, it is only at best concerned with the middle-world (as earth is conceived in many cosmologies), as is seen in nature-worship, which is often based on a Naturalist conception of religion. The middle-world is where heaven and the underworld meet, the between place. Some of modernity’s pseudo-cults go further and explicitly venerate what would be identified with hell, the underworld or Útgarðr; the “outer-enclosure”. With the realm of chaos. When the arbitrariness of the outside conquers the cosmos, religion itself falls with everything else.
Onward to the Past
Though this experience of religion and of the world itself has been suspended, it will be restored in time. Indeed, just as the many revealed religions of the past knew that chaos would consume the world, they knew also that it would be vanquished and the world renewed. The lapse in limitation will eventually fold and amidst the immense suffering will be a new certainty. The test of belief and of the real will again be its alignment with natural order, not by some artifice or half-measure but by the stress of necessity. The skies will open up and show a bright and vital firmament to us once again, unchanged for the chaos that swallowed the earth. Man will once again feel the tangible presence of divinity in the sunshine on the hills, or its glint on the glass of industrial ruins. It is not for us to say or decide what will be revealed, that would be impious as much as it would be impossible.
Elaborate mythologies and cults will spring up with accounts of origins and hierophanies. The truth of these new traditions will not be in their legalistic adherence to some scripture (which is inherently perishable), but instead for their maintenance of the true life of religion. The religiosity of this time will be informed by the real presence of the divine as revealed in the “worlding” of the world. The “real” will come back.
P.S.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this. Thank you for taking the time. My prolonged absence from this blog as well as from my YouTube has been down to a number of causes, one of which being taking on a full-time job and the other being my desire to write a full-length book on the topics that I discuss on this blog.
Unfortunately, I have found myself time and again deterred as I repeatedly fall into the trap of trying to tie every connected thread in the multitude of things that interest me and are, I think, linked to the broad crisis of our times, into a single work. I have decided that it is much more sensible to complete a smaller book before trying to write something that big.
I am pleased to say that I think that the topic discussed in this blog post will form the basis of my first book. I do not know yet how I will publish it, but I felt myself itching to add more and more content and do more and more research for this essay (a draft of which has existed since November 2021) as I came back to it.
The initial spark in my interest in this subject came in the Summer of 2020, when I stumbled quite by accident on a book of Greek Myths in a charity shop. It was full of that gorgeous oakish smell of old book and at the front I found written in pen Tales of Ancient Greece, a prize for French, July 1873.
I had no idea at that time how much of an impact this book would have on me, but the sense of serendipity alone was thrilling. It seems very proper to me that such a contribution to this line of thought, all about the unpredictable and uncontrolled "showing forth" of things could have sprung in part from this stroke of luck.
Oh and the footnotes didn't copy over from Google Docs as usual and I cba to use Harvard lmao :p
All the best, I'll see you in the next one.
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