Legends of the Fall

Into the Void, part two

sum thing is cuman

We know now that the modern world is coming to an end . . . at the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies . . . Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another . . . the world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.

- Romano Guardini, ‘The End of the Modern World’

Back in April, there was a strange incident in central London. Five military horses were being exercised near Buckingham Palace, home of the British monarch, where they are regularly used in ceremonies like the trooping of the colour. Suddenly, four of the horses, apparently spooked by some noise on the street, threw their riders and began racing through the city; the fifth horse joined them. They ran down shopping streets and pedestrianised alleys - and they ran, too, directly into traffic. Two of them hit vehicles, and were bloodied by the impact, but they kept running.

On one level this was an unimportant little news item, but on another - well, something felt weird about it. Probably that was because of the accompanying photos. Almost all of them featured the same image: one white horse and one black, both riderless, the white one covered in blood. Together they galloped down the streets of a city of ten million which looked almost entirely empty of life.

The horse incident took place almost exactly one year after the coronation of Britain’s new King, Charles III. Three weeks after it, the King publicly unveiled his new official portrait:

Perhaps the King in this image has been smeared with the horse's blood. Or perhaps he is standing in the fire coming to consume his nation. Either way, ‘infernal’ would seem an appropriate adjective.

Two months later, the country erupted in an orgy of street rioting.

It can be unwise to spend too much time seeking patterns in everything. This can quickly can lead to paranoia or a conspiratorial mindset, especially in the age of the Internet, which exists to monetise that sort of thing. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Still: twin bloodied, riderless horses; a monarch standing in the flames; the streets of a nation on fire - neither a druid nor an apostle would have had much trouble, in times past, interpreting symbols like these. All the world, as we have previously discussed, is myth. But there are some periods in history during which the myths seem to float more obviously to the surface of the waters.

In 1936, Carl Jung wrote an essay about Hitler, which argued that the world should stop treating National Socialism as a political phenomenon. In Jung’s view, it was something entirely different, and very much worse. ‘A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather,’ he wrote. ‘A god has taken possession of the Germans.’

But which god?

We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors. But if we may forget for a moment that we are living in the year of Our Lord 1936, and, laying aside our well-meaning, all-too-human reasonableness, may burden God or the gods with the responsibility for contemporary events instead of man, we would find Wotan quite suitable as a casual hypothesis. In fact, I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together.

Jung believed that the ancient Germanic war god Wotan, leader of the wild hunt, ‘an ancient god of storm and frenzy’ who had been ‘long quiescent’, had been awakened by Hitler. Now, the god had possessed the man. Naturally, such a notion would have seemed ludicrous to the centrist dads who ran the world, and still do, but Jung had no time for their materialist hand-waving. The ongoing failure of both politicians and soldiers to contain the phenomenon of National Socialism, he argued, was due to their failure to comprehend it:

Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit — a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler– which has indeed actually happened — he is really the only explanation.

To Jung, who along with Freud was pioneering what he believed was the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis, gods like Wotan were not real metaphysical entities (a notion he dismissed as ‘childish’). But neither were they simply figments of the imagination, or mere ‘social constructs’, as the lingo would now have it. Rather, they were manifestations of powerful and ancient unconscious forces - archetypes - which existed not only in the psyches of individuals but also of human collectives, such as nations. Why, he asked, had Germany apparently gone mad? No rational explanation would cut it:

It seems to me that Wotan hits the mark as an hypothesis. Apparently he really was only asleep in the Kyffhauser mountain until the ravens called him and announced the break of day. He is a fundamental attribute of the German psyche, an irrational psychic factor which acts on the high pressure of civilisation like a cyclone and blows it away. Despite their crankiness, the Wotan-worshippers seem to have judged things more correctly than the worshippers of reason.

Adolf Hitler was born in 1889. That same year, the German artist Franz von Stuck produced a painting of Wotan leading his wild hunt. Astride a black beast, wielding a sword, and trailed by what looks for all the world like a legion of mutilated corpses, the Germanic berserker rages across the sky. When we look at the painting now, we find that the god’s face looks strangely … familiar …

The Wild Hunt, Franz von Stuck, 1889

Cult and Culture

Can a culture really become possessed? In the first part of this essay, I suggested that today’s West, while obviously no longer Christian, was not really pagan either, if by ‘pagan’ we imply an alternative spiritual map which is taken seriously by its navigators. Instead, we are living in a Void: a nowhere-place. We believe in nothing at all, at least with any conviction. That’s not to say that individuals or collectives within the West do not have religious beliefs or practices - obviously they do. But there is no spiritual core to this ‘West’ as a whole, assuming it can even be said to exist anymore.

Nature, though, abhors a vacuum. A void will in the end be filled. All cultures must have a set of spiritual beliefs and practices undergirding them if they are to survive. This, in fact, is what a culture is at root: a cult. Social norms, architectural styles, family arrangements, legal systems, moral frameworks, even the shape and nature of nations and states - these are by-products of the religious system they grow out of, which is itself a product of religious experience. Culture is downstream from faith. Faith is downstream from mysticism.

The summary: if we have no cult, we have no culture, and there is no point whining about the fact; it is better to simply face it. This is where we are. The ongoing ‘culture war’ is thus the equivalent of two bald men fighting over a comb. The important question now is what - or who - will rush into the Void. Who will come to sit on our empty throne?

If we take Jung’s analysis of 1930s Germany seriously, we are offered a disturbing possibility: that whatever fills our Void may not happen as a result of any conscious choice on our part. We nice educated Western liberals are still infected with the notion that humans are primarily rational beings; or at any rate, I am. But what if another kind of force runs the world? That force could be Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’, teeming with ‘archetypes’ of ancient deities. Or Jung could be wrong, in a very modern way, to try and psychologise those deities, who may be real beings. Either way, the conclusion would be the same: that a spiritual void is not filled by a human collective making a rational choice to construct something called a ‘religion.’ Rather, it is possessed by an external something of much greater - and much less explicable - power.

This notion, which seems so ‘irrational’ and ‘evidence-free’ to us today, is far closer to the understanding that most cultures in the past have had about the way the universe operates. Christianity, for instance, posits a giant, ongoing cosmic war between the Creator and His ‘adversary’, who wishes to usurp Him, and who uses humans as pawns in his battle plan. Other monotheisms, like Islam and Judaism, paint a not dissimilar picture. On all of these spiritual maps we find legions of strange and often frightening beings, some of them on the side of good, and others of evil: seraphim, cherubim, nephilim, fallen angels, demons, golems, djinn. This, for example, is how a passage from the Jewish Talmud describes our everyday life in the world:

It has been taught: Abba Benjamin says, If the eye had the power to see them, no creature could endure the demons. Abaye says: They are more numerous than we are and they surround us like the ridge around a field. R. Huna says: Every one among us has a thousand on his left hand and ten thousand on his right hand. Raba says: The crushing of the crowd in the Kallah [yearly public] lectures comes from them. Fatigue in the knees comes from them. The wearing out of the clothes of the scholars is due to their rubbing against them. The bruising of the feet comes from them.

As for the pantheistic worldviews: who could count the number of Hindu gods; or indeed the multitude of nature spirits and lurking entities, both good and evil, in indigenous cosmologies? Even Buddhism, which liberal Western types like my former self consider to be a ‘rational’ system free from religious nonsense, contains teachings about multiple layers of hell, hungry ghosts, demons, reincarnation and an endless battle by the human soul to free itself from the misery - Samsara - of embodied existence.

To put it another way: everyone in the world, before the eighteenth century in Europe, was aware of the ongoing reality of spiritual warfare. ‘For we are not contending against flesh and blood,’ wrote St Paul, explaining to his newly Christian followers what they were up against, ‘but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.’ Paul and the early Christians did not see their faith as a matter of good behaviour, moral improvement or correct ritual. They saw themselves as fighting that spiritual war. God had just intervened in history; he had freed the dead from their chains and shackled God’s adversary instead. Soon he would return to usher in the promised Kingdom. In the meantime, there was no room for complacency. Battle lines had been drawn. Everybody had to choose sides.

Good and evil are not concepts; not in this older worldview. Neither are they ‘relative’, as only modern people believe. How they are viewed and what they are caused by may be disputed, but their existence is not. Christians tend to see the world, in C. S. Lewis’s words, as ‘enemy-occupied territory.’ Prayer is a clearing in a dark forest. A monastery is a fortress and keep. The Eucharist is a candle lit in a pitch-black cave. Close down the monasteries, give up on the prayers, blow out the candle, and all the spirits of the dark forest will come roaring back in, perhaps via Bambi Thug’s beloved ouija board. Society itself will become a giant ouija board, and the wild hunt will rage over it every night.

Trapped in a Story

Here is another way to understand the Western Void: it was Christ who once possessed us - but then we exorcised him. Now we are a Christian culture without Christ. What does this mean? Spiritually it means we are lost, wandering and vulnerable to new kinds of possession. Mythologically, it means we have no story to bind or direct us. Or rather, we think we have no story. In fact, the exorcism was incomplete. You can’t shrug off a foundational story that easily: a culture cannot survive without one. In reality, Western culture remains, at some fundamental, and even unconscious level, Christian. We are in a spiritual holding pattern, endlessly circling the airport but never landing.

What precisely is this ‘Christian story’? It is the story of our rebellion against God. At its very beginning is an event which is paralleled in myths and religions around the world, and which appears in a book - Genesis - which long predates Christianity. We call this event ‘the Fall.’ At some cosmic level, it tells us, humanity was created to be one thing, but chose to be another. We were created to circle around the good - the selfless God, the loving life force, Elohim, the Father of Lights - but chose instead the path of the rebellious ego: self-love, material accumulation, conflict, resistance. Created to follow God, we tried instead to be gods ourselves. This is the source of the world’s woes, and ours.

At this point God’s son, Jesus the Christ, arrives on Earth to put things right. The Christ conquers death and its master, the adversary of God (the Hebrew word for ‘adversary’ being śāṭān) on our behalf. These two forces had held humanity in slavery since the Fall, which the adversary, God’s libertarian enemy, had provoked in the first place. Christ thus freed humans to be what they were meant to be: children of God. We can now walk towards theosis, union with God, in this life and the next. We can go back to the Garden or forward to the heavenly Jerusalem, and it may be that these are the same destination.

Fall - rescue - repentance - redemption. This is the Christian arc, and is thus the story that all Western people are marinated in, whether they know it or not. These days, we like to tell ourselves that we are on a rationally-driven quest for ‘Progress’. In Jung’s words, we like to emphasise the ‘economic, political, and psychological factors’ of this quest. In fact, the myth of Progress is an unconscious immanentisation of the Christian story. We do not await the coming of God’s Kingdom today, though. Instead, we are trying to build it ourselves, here in this Fallen world. In doing so, we are creating the circumstances for our own future possession.

I can see this us retelling the Christian story everyday, on three different levels.

Level One: The Snake in the Garden

The adversary’s offer to Eve in the Garden is eternal and universal: disobey the creator and ‘you shall become like gods, knowing good and evil.’ The Christian story presents this rebellion as the source of all human woes, but the Void offers it back to us inverted. Rebellion, for centuries now, has been the West’s raison d’etre. The reason that play-acting devil worship is so uncontroversial now is that the devil is increasingly seen to be the good guy. The thing the modern West hates most is authority, hierarchy, structure and rules: in short, being told what to do. Rebellion to us is inherently good, and thus the ultimate and primal rebel - ‘the satan’ - may in fact have been on our side all along.

As long ago as the nineteenth century, popular occultist Helena Blavatsky was explaining that we should ‘view Satan, the serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind’, because ‘Mankind was taught wisdom and the hidden knowledge by the Fallen Angel.’ This same notion undergirds one of the best-selling children’s trilogies of all time, Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, in which God, rebranded as ‘the Authority’, is a weak and tyrannical old man, and the heroes are those who defeat him. ‘My books are about killing God’, explains Pullman, a noisy public atheist. And so we are back in the Garden, eating the fruit again - but this time, with defiance. Now we worship the ego, unashamed. Self-love is the driver of our economy and the seed of what passes for our culture. As such, we are becoming, in quite literal terms, a Satanic society.

Level Two: The City of Cain

Self-worship and hedonism are fun for a while, but they quickly pall. Humans need meaning. In the Void, meaning no longer comes from seeking the Kingdom of God, but building the Kingdom of Man. As the Christian faith was pushed out of the centre of our lives, so politics, and especially revolutionary politics, arrived to replace it. Since 1789 at least, Western people have sought to create heaven on Earth, primarily through our substitute for religion: ideology. The twentieth century saw the triumph of this pseudo-religion, as the great world-spanning ideologies of nationalism, fascism, communism and socialism battled it out for control of our souls. The tally of the resulting dead is in the hundreds of millions, but still we battle on. Today, the contemporary pseudo-religion of progressive wokeness, which has colonised the Anglosphere, resembles a Christian heresy: the Sermon on the Mount minus love, forgiveness and God. That’s a terrible sermon, but it’s still a sermon; and, in its avowed concern for society’s victims, a recognisably Christian one.

Level Three: The Tower of Babel

The serpent’s promise was that by rebelling against our Father we could become ‘as gods.’ How could we do this? By doing what gods do. And what do gods do? They create. If self-worship is the base layer of our anti-Christian and yet still Christian culture, and ideology its means of organisation and source of meaning, then the ultimate step is the creation of a whole new world - not simply through politics, but through technology. The remaking of matter and mind is our mission now - and this is where we come full circle, back to the notion of possession.

I wrote at length about the transhumanist project in my series on the Machine. You can read the two most pertinent essays here and here. The headline is that our technological culture is at this point openly working to ‘build God.’ We believe we can rebuild matter itself from the atomic level, defeat death and upload our minds (read: souls) into a technological ‘heaven’ that will allow us to experience eternal life. This story - the eschatology of Silicon Valley - is almost a word-for-word retelling of the Christian story, only with humanity in place of God. Now, as we build machines to replace ourselves, we will in turn be possessed by our machines - or what they may be channelling. A new god may rise indeed: but it will not be us.

What now?

This, then, seems to me to be the state of play in the post-God Void. Believing ourselves to be rational creatures possessed of free will and limitless choice, we are in fact continuing to play out strange and twisted variants on the Christian story. The result is that we are putty in the hands of dark forces that we once believed in and now pretend not to. Whether you understand those forces as metaphysical beings, or prefer to rationalise them as aspects of the collective unconscious, the result is much the same, and it is the one Jung warned his readers fruitlessly about nearly a century back: we are in danger of being possessed by something that, in our weakened state, we will have no defence against.

It could be that, through the screens and keypads of our silicon ouija board, the possession has already begun. This is my hunch, anyway. Perhaps this is what all those omens are about. Whatever is quite happening, the times are weird and they are going to get weirder - and more dangerous. Reality is bending, but not to our will, or our liking. Next time, in the third and final part of this series, I want to think about how survive the consequences.