With this faith we will go out and adjourn the counsel of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. We will rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the end it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines out it will shine out the clearer… Folk in those stories kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.

J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

The audio for this essay is also available as a podcast episode

Dreaming of Blue Sky

Hello my friends. It’s been a long time since I wrote here. Almost a year and a half. Perhaps you don’t even remember subscribing.

One day, I may speak about what I have learned in this period of silence. But that is not my immediate reason for returning to writing. The trigger was Israel’s attack on Iran, something some of us saw coming years ago.

I first wrote about it here in July 2023, months before the Hamas attacks of October 7^th:

Netanyahu knows this is the moment of truth. He fears the US might strike a new diplomatic deal, which would provide cover for the Iranians as before. In his far right coalition, he has political allies who wouldn’t just support but might even salivate over a strike. Faced with destiny’s final call, I believe he will act.

Of course October 7^th provided Netanyahu with his overt excuse, one which I could never have anticipated. Beyond that, the dynamics I identified were right. And act he did.

It is not the first of my weather forecasts that has borne out. In February 2022, I wrote that Putin would undoubtedly invade Ukraine, which could lead to a Third World War and even nuclear conflict. At the time, most people were sceptical to put it politely. And yet here we are: nuclear threats are now a regular occurrence and we’re being told to stock up on tinned food.

I feel like a passenger on board a ship who knew storms were ahead, albeit far off. Helpless to influence our course, we steamed forward, oblivious. We’ve hit one, then another – but there are more in the making: financial crisis, ecological collapse, the rise of fascism, Taiwan… maybe even our very own civil war. Just a few years ago, such disasters seemed inconceivable. Now many of them seem unavoidable.

This time I want to tell you about something else, something different, that I have seen on the horizon, albeit again a great distance away. I hope that my record means you will take it seriously. For I can see the end of the storms, of these violent seas. Peace and the promise of blue skies.

No doubt that feels as unreal as my predictions of chaos did before. Even to me, the possibility we’ll make it there seems incredibly remote, almost impossible. Almost – but not quite.

Here’s the thing: the force that will decide our fate is you. Yes, you. Standing at the bus stop, or sitting on the toilet or staring at your screen in that hushed office. It all depends on you, and on me, on every one of us to shake off the torpor of apathy, banish the enchantment that says we are powerless and help create a movement that will steer us through the storms.

In this essay, I will show you a glimpse of what I think that movement looks like. Of course, we’re not going to solve the world’s problems in a few thousand words. But we can perhaps lay down the first brushstrokes of a new vision for our future.

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At the Bottom of the Box

First, let’s check in. How do these words strike you? Optimistic, naïve – at best just empty rhetoric?

I wouldn’t be surprised; hope is so out of style. Just to speak of it is to be accused of spreading “hopium”, a drug to ease the pain on the road to inevitable disaster. That’s not where the cool kids are at, with their cultivated social-media cynicism and shallow swipe-won wisdom. Thanks to the internet, everyone thinks they know the truth, they’ve personally figured it out (and yes, I do recognise the irony that this essay might seem to fit the same mould!)

What’s perhaps surprising is that, whatever our personal vision of doom – whether it’s the climate or AI or the replacement of our population by a migrant horde – we often reach the same conclusion about our impotence; nothing can be done, it’s too late, the decisions are being made elsewhere; it’s out of our hands.

This tendency becomes personal for me over breakfast, bizarrely. It is a tough time and not only because of the ferocious tussles between my daughters (now aged four and two) over who will get the green bowl and who the yellow for their Weetabix.

It’s because as they sit there, bathed in the dawn’s light, full of passionate tears and joy over the simplest things, in the background the radio intones an endless cycle of atrocity, stupidity, disaster – coupled with our complete inability ever to meet it effectively.

Faced with the dissonance between their innocence and our annihilation of the world they will inherit, what can I do? What power do I have? Only turn the radio off. Stick my head in the sand.

Well, that’s not enough any longer. Having no hope is a luxury you simply cannot afford when you have children. Sure, I know what the science says and I know how the trends look and I despair of the state we find ourselves in too. But for my girls’ sake, I cannot just quietly accept that my only choice is to pour out the milk and put on the toast while we await the moment when the lottery of catastrophe picks us too.

I will bet that none of those willing to wait for collapse, or worse, wish for it to hurry up and get here, have any idea of what it’s actually like to live through. I have glimpsed the process in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gaza (a decade before today’s annihilatory war) and Yemen and Syria. Those insights into the scorching reality make me determined to do everything in my power to protect my girls from it.

And those places also offer a source of solace that the radio rarely reports: the incredible capacity of human beings for kindness, courage, hope and humour in the face of horror. In the worst of times, I have witnessed the best of what we are capable of. That makes me believe in us, in human beings, in our power to ride out the storms and make it to a new land, together.

Finally, there’s something I know in the depths of my bones, a knowledge that can’t be gleaned from surfing the web: that there are things science cannot behold; deeper mysteries that we may have forgotten but which have not gone away, because they are fundamental to the oceans of life. I first started writing this Substack to highlight them.

The people who dwell in despair are severed from those mysteries; what we might call mythic ground. The mythic ground that says miracles can happen. That says even the worst of stories usually have a happy ending. That reminds us that hope always perseveres even if lost deep within Pandora’s box.

The Almost Impossible Alternative

So let’s stick with the metaphor of our society as a ship – hopefully not the Titanic – and imagine for a moment how we might better our chances of weathering the huge seas ahead.

First, look to the crew: the people with their hands on the wheel and engine, who are reading the maps and plotting our course – our politicians. Say no more, right? Though we might disagree on the reasons, whether it’s because they’re corrupt, idiotic, impotent or incompetent, surely everyone’s conclusion is the same: they cannot be trusted with our lives.

It’s not only the ones in power or just out of power but also those trying to capitalise on the current ineptitude, like Farage or Zack Polanski of the Green Party, making familiar promises, “Oh, we’ll be different. We’ll do this and that and then it’ll be calm seas and plain sailing”. I’m sure some of their lines are heartfelt and, of course, they are designed to appeal to one end of our spectrum or the other. But we have been here before, so many times. Einstein’s famous definition of madness.

Even our short memories know that the promised salvation never appears. In fact, things just carry on in much the old way or worse. The truth is that the ship is not easy to turn. Their promises cannot make the seas any less wild. And for all their heartfelt intentions, most of the crew just do not have the experience or the vision or they’re too susceptible to a backhander to do what’s right for the voyage.

But if not them, who else could possibly pilot the ship?

It’s simple: us. The passengers. The people ourselves.

After all, the ship was built for us. Sure, the owners just see it as a way to enrich themselves and everyone in first class. But it’s our money that pays for the thing to sail. And it would not exist if it were not for us; to get us where we’re going.

Think of the collective wisdom among us: people with experience of every kind of storm; who’ve been sailing ships all their lives, or who know how to swim in ice cold seas, or who have bold, innovative visions for our navigation. But as the ship currently runs, that energy and knowledge does not come to bear. Partly because our only influence is to elect a new crew every four years on the basis of their lies and our desperation. No wonder so few of us even bother to vote.

But there’s another obvious problem: instead of plotting our course together, we’re busy fighting on deck.

Your identity today is in part defined by who you choose to blame. It’s the fascists, it’s the woke, it’s the immigrants, it’s the bankers, it’s the Muslims, it’s the Christian fundamentalists, it’s the pro-Palestine lot, it’s the Israelis, it’s the experts, it’s the hippies. It’s always the other side and if only our side were in charge, the waves would miraculously part for our progress.

So in a sense beyond the jargon, the reasoned arguments and marshalled evidence presented by any and all sides, the answers share the same fundamental essence: they’re tribal. And just as every tribe’s conviction of their own rightness is unshakeable, so is their certainty in their enemy’s idiocy, inhumanity or even straight evil.

In truth, this can only lead to one thing: to war.

We may pray that war is only ever be fought with words and memes; but it is still war nonetheless: uncompromising, violent, merciless. Wars are rarely limited to words. The longer that conflict remains the way of life for our culture and society, the more we slide towards a point where our debates will be settled on the streets. Look at the riots last year, or the confrontations in America, or the rumours of the establishment’s fears of social breakdown. Our divisions will only become more dangerous as the storms blow harder and ever more is at stake.

Of course there is an alternative to all this: peace.

But peace would make demands on us that seem genuinely impossible in our times: to admit that our side might not have a monopoly on the truth; that everyone might have a need and a right to be heard; that instead of two armies locked in battle, we might be a choir in which every voice has an essential part.

I know how difficult that would be for me personally to admit. But in my heart, I know this is what we need if the horrors of war are to be avoided. We have to rediscover our capacity for empathy, understanding, openness. To see another’s point of view, no matter how abhorrent it may appear at first glance. We must find a way to talk and listen to each other again despite the depth of our differences, to tap into the vast common sense of our people as a whole and hammer out a course that we all can accept. That is real democracy and I still believe in it.

Believe me, as hard and unpalatable as this may appear, the alternative is far far worse.

Thankfully, a mechanism already exists through which we might actually be able to achieve all of that: Citizens’ Assemblies[1].

Power to the People

I’ll only offer the briefest outline of the mechanism[2], as you could write a whole book about it and plenty of people have. A Citizens’ Assembly applies the spirit of jury service to politics. A representative group of the people is selected. A significant divisive issue is chosen – the issue of legalising abortion in Ireland is a key example. As in a jury trial, expert witnesses are called to present different sides of the argument and possible policy approaches. All sides are given a fair hearing. The assembly then debates and agrees on the way forward.

Now of course, beyond this simplified portrait, there’s great complexity. Just as with any nascent idea, the form is in flux: a new planet being born from primordial elements.

Almost more important than the mechanics are the principles that these Assemblies embody: that we trust people; that everyone deserves respect, dignity and a right to be heard; that we can overcome our divisions through dialogue; that we can insulate our democracy from the corruption of money and media; that we can agree on a way forward together.

Those qualities mean that Citizens Assemblies have the power to craft decisions on the most divisive issues we face, from immigration to taxation to nature and climate change. When those decisions are made, because people trust the Assembly process, they enjoy a legitimacy of which most politicians can only dream. In this way, they become our way through the unbearable choices we have to make.

Don’t believe me? Read the Economist here, or the Guardian here, or listen to Mark Rylance here or Rory Stewart here - even William Hague here.

But if they are such an answer to our problems, why are they not everywhere already?

Again, it is quite simple: our crew, the politicians, don’t want them, because they mean the end of the system that gives them their power and and all the perks that go with it. So while they might occasionally whisper about them when they’re in their election-hour seduction, by the morning after, those promises are forgotten or denied (along with everything else). It’s no real surprise; turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

There has been a lot of debate within the deliberative democracy movement (jargon for those pushing for Citizens Assemblies and similar systems change) about what to do about this. And, over-simplifying the discussions a little, many agree the best way forward is to develop Citizens Assemblies at grassroots and local level, slowly raising public awareness and support by demonstrating them in action.

Obviously there are lots of merits to this approach. But personally, I am not sure we have time for it to work. I think we should offer a different, faster pathway to the systems change we need, as the edge of the next storm may be closer than we think.

What is that faster pathway? The same one that there has always been for people confronted by a system that will not listen and will not change. We need to take power and make it happen ourselves.

We need a revolution.

The Constitution of Hope

Not like the revolution you may be thinking of. No bombs, no riots, no lists for retribution. This will be a democratic revolution, peaceful and bloodless.

For that, we need a new political party. One made up of ordinary people, that stands for all the people of this country. And yes, I really do mean all – white, Asian, black, the rich, the poor, the middle, old, young, Reform voters, Labour voters, Christians, Muslims, Jews, ravers, accountants, squaddies, brickies, traders, scientists, North, South, East, West. I can’t list them all but everyone, everyone, every single one of us.

That is what we - at present just a small group of committed people - intend to build. Our founding principle will be radical inclusivity. It goes with our name: We The People.

Our single aim will be for a democratic revolution in this country. So our platform is focused on one single policy: to use the power of the state to install Citizens’ Assemblies alongside every level of government from national on down. These Assemblies will tackle the issues that divide our communities at every scale, feeding through the people’s decisions to the politicians to execute.

So yes, politicians will still exist, except in a revised role as managers and technocrats (which most of them already are in all but name). Their role will be limited to keeping the ship ticking over and delivering on the course determined by the Citizens Assemblies. That leads to two other pillars of our platform.

First: that we will write a constitution for this country, the first written constitution that we have ever had. It will enshrine this new system so that it cannot be undone.

Second, that every politician on taking office must swear an oath that they will strive to their utmost ability to fulfil the will of the people expressed through the Citizens Assembly process – just as a witness swears to tell the whole truth in a jury trial, with legal consequences if they fail to do so.

Now in an essay largely about the impossible, this might be the point where you crack. Set up a new party? Allow everyone in? Try to win an election in four years? Time to lay off that mushroom tea, Ed.

But is it really so outlandish? People are already trying to bring Citizens Assemblies to life in their local communities or even on a national scale. New political parties are springing up on right and left to fill the void left by the inadequacies of the old party system. The difference is that I’m proposing we do not put our energy into creating just another new tribal faction; instead transcend tribalism itself.

Easily said, I know. Sometimes I’ll be sitting on the floor, and I haven’t slept more than three hours, and my youngest daughter is refusing to change her nappy, and my older daughter is in a huff because she can’t have chocolate for breakfast, and I was supposed to be in the office an hour ago and just getting these girls to nursery seems like mission impossible, let alone democratic revolution.

But there are other times. When I’ve finished reading their bedtime story – probably Cinderella, for the thousandth time. And they’ve fallen asleep and they lie there like little angels in the dark. At those times, I feel tears sting my eyes. As they’re stinging them now as I write this. Tears that say no. I will not accept that the lives of my girls will just be one long journey into night. I’m going to make sure they too have a chance to live happily ever after.

I truly believe that is the deep call to us, the grown-ups of these times, whether we have children of our own or not. The call to do the impossible. To do it together.

Light the Beacon

So far, this movement is no more than a handful of people with a hundred other commitments, though infinitely serious about the undertaking. The odds are stacked against us. So join us.

Here’s our first principle: since We The People is for everyone, everyone in the country will already be considered a member. The only choice is whether you’re an active or passive participant.

Anyone who wishes to work with the movement, will have to sign a declaration: that whatever their tribe, political affiliation, personal viewpoint or the policies they wish to see adopted, they will hold all of that secondary to securing this democratic revolution for us all.

It’s simple really: you sign up to put the needs of humanity first.

Here’s our second principle: come as you are. You don’t need to be anyone other than who you are, with your life, your views, your experience, your mistakes, your passions, your grief and your joy. Even politicians can sign up, as long as they sign the declaration. Bottom line: if you are committed to our principles, you are welcome.

Beyond that? Well, that’s why we need you. We need your help with dreaming, designing, organising, messaging, fundraising – even just spreading the word in your community that something new is coming. A beacon has been lit. Will you light your own?

Obviously, this movement may get nowhere. The pressures of life, the conditioning that we are powerless, there’s so many pitfalls in the path. But as I said at the start, I saw Iran coming, I saw Ukraine. And I’m telling you: war will come to us too unless we do something. That’s your motivation.

And won’t there be something beautiful in the fact that you tried? When your children ask what you did in the 2020s when the world was on fire and our fate hung in the balance, you fought for the future even though change seemed impossible.

As the mythologist Martin Shaw writes:

As individuals we may feel vulnerable and doubtful of our ability to change anything. The seemingly overwhelming images of disaster we are confronted with can freeze us like rabbits in the headlights… [but] I am reminded of someone at a conference asking the poet Gary Snyder why bother to save the planet. He replied with a grin. “Because it’s a matter of character and a matter of style!” Boudica would stand up. Arthur would stand up. Crazy Horse would stand up. Bridgit would stand up. Robin Hood would stand up.

You never know. If a few of us, or all of us stood up, perhaps extraordinary things would happen. For I believe people across the country are desperate for a new story. A positive one. Of peace. Of hope. Of unity.

Not so long ago, I stood having coffee and biscuits at my mother’s church, an ancient stone building lodged in a little clifftop village in Dorset. One of the octogenarian ladies from the choir struck up a conversation with me about the state of everything. After sadly shaking our heads, I asked what she thought came next. She firmly set her cup on her saucer and fixed me with a determined stare.

“Well there’ll just have to be a revolution dear.”

If she can see it, if she could believe in it, well maybe every one of us can.

Even you.

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[1] I’m using this term as that’s how they’re described in most of the public discourse. Overall, I am not fond of this description. The word “Citizen” seems exclusionary and “Assembly” reminds me of school. “Council of the People” sounds much more inclusive and dynamic to me.

[2] For those wanting a deeper dive try this or this or this.

“The sacred has become frenetic, urgent, insistent, fed up with things, which is what I think lies at the bottom of the upheaval in the world at the moment: the upheaval comes because the sacred is not being included and it wants to be included, but it has no way in.”

I’m glad to be bursting back into your consciousness with the second Fragments of Light podcast episode – and even better, for once, you’re going to hear from someone else, rather than just me pontificating as usual.

Earlier this month, I was delighted to have a conversation with David Tacey, an Australian professor now aged 70, who has written fourteen books about the sacred, understandings that he’s come to through a fusion of Carl Jung, Aboriginal Australian beliefs and modern spirituality.

For me, David has really been something of a guiding light; he’s the person whose writings introduced me to the idea of postsecular theory, the movement to try and find a new synthesis of modern science and ancient spiritual understanding. Reading his writing, I felt that at last I was not alone in my searching.

As you’ll hear, there’s much common ground between David’s writing and my own understanding about how the sacred works and its role in our lives and the world - above all, the urgency which defines our relationship to it.

David has kindly agreed to share his email so that any of you can contact him directly to follow up on any aspects of this episode: D.Tacey@latrobe.edu.au.

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The “best minds” of modernity declare religion and cosmology to be dead or irrelevant. Gradually however a darkness settles over society and the bright hope of modernity is diminished. The makers of modernity have overlooked an important fact: the spiritual forces do not go away because we stop believing in them.

David Tacey, The Darkening Spirit

They told the people they could dance a new world into being. There would be landslides, earthquakes, and big winds. Hills would pile up on each other. The earth would roll up like a carpet with all the white man's ugly things – the stinking new animals, sheep and pigs, the fences, the telegraph poles, the mines and factories. Underneath would be the wonderful old-new world as it had been before the white fat-takers came. ...The white men will be rolled up, disappear, go back to their own continent.

Lame Deer, Lakota Medicine Man

The audio for this essay can now be found as a separate podcast episode

Seeking the Source

This essay has been a long time coming. I could blame the melee of life and there would be truth in that. Yet at heart the delay is rooted in a fear that grows stronger with every new Fragment I write.

To talk openly of the sacred in our world invites such disbelief, ridicule or worse. That is how the orthodoxies of a culture are maintained: through the punishment or exile of anyone who challenges them. And in their isolation and loneliness these last years of my life have felt like a form of exile, even if partially self-imposed.

Now I stand like a long last castaway staggering onto the shores of home, wild and ragged, babbling of the wonders I have seen out there and their power to breathe new life into our old world. Yet I have no potatoes, nothing solid and real, to prove the existence of the land beyond the sea. Only primitive stories. No wonder I can seem a bit mad.

I am still human; those judgments sting. And it’s not just my own name at stake. I know my wife stands beside me, she wants to believe, yet steadfast as she is, it’s not easy for her if her friends and family worry that her husband has actually lost his mind. And there are my girls; I don’t want my words to haunt our relationship when they’re older.

There is another fear too. The worst: that what I write might actually be real and true. That fear could not be stronger than in the theme of this essay. Yet that possibility is also exactly why I must go on.

For things are not exactly cheering up out there. I’ve been working on this essay for two months. This paragraph has always been the place where I list the latest instances of our insanity. Yet every day I have to rewrite it because there’s new things to add. I cannot keep up.

Whether it’s the savagery with which Israeli forces perpetrate genocide in Gaza or the West’s utterly blind support of it, whether it’s the abandonment of Ukraine by the right-wing in America or the growing list of impotent airstrikes by the US across the Middle East or the reports that Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war with South Korea and perhaps even Japan, it seems the world has not yet hit peak crazy.

And it’s not just these events, though they’re bad enough. It’s the way people see them; how they speak of them. As I have highlighted often in these Fragments, the thing all these conflicts have in common is how often one side or both see these conflicts as some kind of mythical struggle, forces of light against forces of darkness, often at the end of the world.

Netanyahu labelled the Palestinians as Israel’s biblical enemies, the Amalek. Russia believes it is fighting the Antichrist. Donald Trump is seen by some as a messiah and even the unlikeliest of bedfellows, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and American evangelical Christians believe we’re living in the End Times.

For months, I was baffled by this. Was this some kind of collective insanity? If so, how could it reach out to touch such wildly different groups so far apart, and make them believe the same thing?

Then suddenly I had an insight, an idea, that seemed to explain everything. And I don’t mean on the surface layer, the drivers of the tumult in politics, diplomacy, economics and war. We have enough experts pontificating away about all of that. I mean what is happening to us at the deepest layer: the source of it all.

The idea seemed radical even for these Fragments, which is why it has taken me so long to pluck up the courage to say it.

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Sacred Checkmate

It is this: I realised that God, Mother Earth, the Great Spirit, the sacred force whose presence I have oh-so-gently tried to help you to see and acknowledge – well, that sacred power is rising against us and our civilization. She has had enough. Now she is moving us towards cataclysm: an act of sacred destruction.

So those who we, as citizens of sensible society, ridicule may actually be intuiting something real. This may indeed be a form of mythical end time.

Let’s use a pop culture parable. Think of that bit in Independence Day when the alien spaceships are mysteriously moving around and everyone is trying to figure out what they are doing and what they want. But Jeff Goldblum finds a signal the aliens have secretly hidden in our satellites: a countdown.

It’s like in chess. First, you strategically position your pieces and when the timing is right you strike. They’re using this signal to synchronise their efforts and when the countdown is over… Checkmate.

In this case, the satellites that the sacred is using are our own minds. And the signal is our insanity. We all know the phrase, “those who the gods would destroy they first drive mad.” Yet the first known version of the phrase, which appears in Sophocles’ play Antigone, written in 441 BC, is even more apposite: “Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction.”

To me, that single sentence encapsulates the essence of our shared madness, whether it manifests in Putin or Joe Biden, the Israelis or Hamas, Donald Trump or even the insanity shared by our own little old Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer in their utter failure to address the desperate needs of our people in Britain.

This is the spell the sacred is weaving. And for her, our heartfelt human divisions do not matter. She does not see our different sides. For her the struggle is simple. The enemy is us: human civilization, at least in its current form. So everything and everyone could be a tool for her divine purpose. We are all just witless pawns in a game of chess we don’t even know we’re playing against the universe itself.

She’s moving us into position. And when the timing is right, it will come down to one kind of instrument. The only one that she needs. Nuclear war. Checkmate.

Going Bankrupt

At this point, my wife will want me to insert a disclaimer. So here is an all-purpose “it is only my belief that / it feels like / maybe it will, maybe it won’t /of course I could be wrong” or just make up your own and apply it to everything I have said and will say from now until the ends of eternity.

The truth is that this is more than just a hunch or a nightmarish eureka. The root of this insight lies in a story from five years ago. When I tell you it, the sceptics among you will think it’s more batshit than ever. But those who have ears should listen.

The truth is I believe this is what is happening because the sacred herself told me this is what she would do.

Five years ago, deep in an ayahuasca ceremony, I had a conversation with that Being, Force, intelligence, God, whatever you want to call it. She showed me our history – the history of Western civilization I mean: the destruction we had wrought on the Earth; the genocide of the peoples who once honoured her; how more than ever we were now in thrall to the darkest forces, gods of iron and gold.

She said if we did not find a way to change and if we did not atone, she would sweep the world clean with fire.

Afterwards, those ceremonies always feel like a dream. And like any dream, their messages seem less convincing in the bright light of day. The story, the imagery, seemed to belong to a children’s cartoon and not a particularly original one at that. In that way, the waking consciousness of our rational egos devalues the revelations of night.

And there was another thing. Bizarre as it will sound, for most of my life, I have believed I would live to see a nuclear war. I distinctly remember being at a New Year’s Eve party, aged eight, telling my bewildered friends that I was not sure that we would make it through the following year. God knows why. There’s no rational psychological explanation I have ever been able to fathom.

Given that the words of the sacred seemed to echo that long-held belief, I dismissed them as nothing more than echoes of a hellish personal delusion; just my subconscious talking.

Obviously the fire never did come. It may never come. Occasionally however, through the years, I’d hear echoes in unlikely places and remember.

God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water, but fire next time

I would shrug it off as coincidence.

And yet.

Through the course of my life, have I watched the world move, slowly yet inexorably, towards nuclear collision, like the Titanic lumbering across the night ocean. Today I am far from the only one to see the iceberg in sight.

The looming defeat of Ukraine; the growing public discourse on the possibility of our own direct war with Russia; the dehumanisation of our enemies; indeed, the belief that they embody irredeemable evil. These are all precursors essential to that collision.

And what of us, the common folk, we who have no voice in these decisions yet who will pay the price for them? In the decades of imaging the worst, I often wondered how a nuclear war could ever begin. Surely there would be a popular uprising to stop it, protests, blockades…

Now I have my answer: we are all too busy looking at our phones. We have Taylor Swift to think about, or the football, or the latest on Love Island, or a thousand bits of news all presented as if they were just as consequential as our cruise to annihilation. And in our slumber, I see the hand of the sacred too, gently lulling us into a false sense of security, like those who believed the hype that the Titanic was unsinkable until it sunk.

Here's what you may not have heard.

That the sober minds of the Danish intelligence service have said they believe Russia is planning to use actual military force against NATO in the near future.

That Putin spoke in January about the persecution of Russians in the Baltic states (which are part of NATO) just as he did about Ukraine before he attacked it.

That the US is moving nuclear weapons back to Britain supposedly to “deter” Russia, not realising that Russia is long past deterrence.

That Russia will, in all likelihood, threaten us with a nuclear strike on the very first day of any war, because it knows the only way it can defeat NATO is to terrify us into submission.

No? Well, don’t feel bad that you missed it. You’re under a spell, an an enchantment, that hides what matters most to your future amid infinite insignificant noise. Yet war is coming in the same way as Hemingway said you go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.

A Forgotten Revelation

Now you sceptics and believers may both be equally up in arms at this dire vision. Yet given that the sceptics are unlikely ever to accept any of this, I will focus on what I suspect may be some of the objections of the believers.

Often, even those who think themselves of spiritual in a modern sense are only happy to engage with the sacred on their terms, in their chosen time of prayer, meditation or yoga. They might accept that our current malaise is due to the absence of spiritual values in our lives yet ultimately still see the sacred as a passive resource, one that it is ultimately up to us to pick and choose.

The idea of the divine instead as a furious, self-directed wild beast which seeks to break into the village, tear us to shreds and burn the whole place down sits less well with the cultural assumption that human agency trumps all.

And the capacity which I am suggesting for sacred violence offends another central tenet of our vision of the holy in the West: that it embodies peace and love.

That’s because, as much as we like to think we have outgrown it, our culture is still in thrall to the Christian vision of God as benevolent, kind and all loving. Even New Age spirituality, which stepped into the vacuum left by the church, is suffused with it, demanding a focus solely on the light, the positive. Suffice to say some of those who take the sacred seriously recognise this is a distortion.

I must admit that I too was influenced by this tradition. In my previous essays where I started to excavate the spiritual roots behind Nazism or our current chaos, I blamed a separate being – whether demon, devil or Antichrist – for the inrush of evil into the world. Yet now I see that there is no separation. It’s all part of the sacred power, just a facet of it we deny or try to ignore.

Someone who did face it was the great pioneer of modern spiritual life, Carl Jung. As I mentioned in a previous essay, he wrote a book on the subject, Answer to Job, which he regarded as the most important thing he ever wrote. Quite a statement for a man whose life was replete with ground-breaking work.

The book carries the essence of his life’s mission to “dream the myth of Christianity anew”, and make it relevant to the modern world. Central to this was creating a vision of God that encompassed his capacity for darkness, for jealousy and rage.

Jung showed how this nature was actually present even in the Christian New Testament, as it begins with the loving message of the gospels yet ends with the Book of Revelation, a blood-soaked counterweight to the harmony preached by Christ.

God has a terrible double aspect: a sea of grace is met by a seething lake of fire, and the light of love glows with a fierce dark heat [which] burns but gives no light. That is the eternal as distinct from the temporal gospel: one can love God but must fear him.

The book of Revelation, rightly placed at the End of the New Testament, reaches beyond it into a future that is all too palpably close with its apocalyptic terrors. The decision of an ill-considered moment can suffice to unleash the world cataclysm… This is simple another manner of speaking for what John [author of Revelation] called “the wrath of God”.

As always, Jung was only reconnecting Western consciousness with wisdom that other cultures have known all along.

The god Kali in Hinduism, though most often known through fearsome depictions, embodies both creation and destruction, with kindness and love in her nature alongside a wild, violent side. It might not be a coincidence that Hindus believe we live in the Kali Yuga, the Age of Kali.

The famous Taoist symbol shows an equal balance between both yin and yang, dark and light, two halves of a whole, in its depiction of the Tao. And of course First Nations have long recognised the sacred as encompassing everything, dark and light, love and cruelty, the power to bring peace and to destroy.

As Jung saw it, the West ignores its own tradition of sacred knowledge held in the Bible. Of course, we scoff; no-one in their right mind would read that any more. Even if we did, we’d be unlikely to turn to the Old Testament, to read Genesis, Jeremiah, Jonah, or Isiah. If we did, we would find visions of the sacred darkness that we have forgotten.

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. – Isiah 45:7

In the depictions of civilizations that were threatened with sacred destruction - in Sodom and Gomorrah, in Nineveh, in the world before it rained for forty days and nights - you might find more than an echo of the world we live in today. The most important of these being that all these civilizations had forgotten the honour they owed God. For as Jung also believed, somehow this relationship - ours to the sacred - matters to both sides.

We are lost without her but in some simple way she needs us too. Nothing too fancy or elaborate. She just needs to be seen and honoured and remembered as the source of all things. Yet, if you just notice your own reaction in reading these words, you’ll experience for yourself how far we have come from that belief.

In this way above all, we meet the threshold for sacred destruction.

Signs of the Times

We have also lost the ability to read omens and signs. If we did, we might see them all around, speaking through earthquake, wind and fire.

We would see the orcas attacking our boats and know what it meant. We would notice that the most famous hotel in Dubai - a city which more than any other stands as a testament to the arrogance of civilization, sustained in the desert like a mirage by the power of our technology – was called Atlantis and understand what inspired its creators to give it this name.

The closest thing our society has to a shaman, priest or medicine man are the artists who, by dint of their work, have more access to the sacred than most other professions, though they call it inspiration, the muse, or a thousand other names.

Take a look at the cinema and the metric of Wikipedia’s list of apocalyptic films. Before 1950, there were four. In the sixties, 24. In the 2010s, there were 124. Hell, even the Lego Movie 2 is about an incoming cataclysm called Armamageddon.

And of course you could search your own dreams. Images of fire, flood, disaster or devastation might all be you tuning in to what is at hand.

Of course the notion that some form of prophetic vision is possible must rank among the more outlandish propositions of these Fragments. Once again, we are forced to turn to Jung as a credible modern voice to substantiate it.

Jung’s life work was inspired by a series of visions he had in 1913 of the land across Europe drowning in blood. When the First World War broke out, he realised that he had had a premonition of this catastrophe and set about trying to find out how. From this endeavour sprung many of the foundations of modern psychology.

Of course, there are some people who have always held onto the primordial understanding that Jung sought to exhume: the First Nations.

The prophecies of one of these peoples, the Hopi Indians of Utah, frame a famous 1982 documentary Koyaanisqatsi about the insanity of modern civilization. The name itself means crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living. The film includes these words of Hopi prophecy at the end:

If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.

A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans.

Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky.

I often think of those words when I look up into our sky.

The Covid pandemic may itself have been an omen: an effort to communicate by the sacred power. For the sacred rarely communicates neatly in English. Instead her language is symbol, metaphor, images planted in nature or our dreams. Seen in this light, Covid was a warning. Perhaps the last one.

For she showed us a world where we were gone. Where the skies were unscarred by our planes and the only sound in the air was birdsong. Swans and dolphins retook their rightful place in the rivers. The noise of our desperation, the drumbeat of our machines and our footsteps stopped. The earth fell quiet. In that silence, it began to heal.

This silence was also our opportunity. For she was showing us that it was possible for us to stop. It was in our power. We could still repent of our ways.

The Roar

Of course, we ignored it. Deaf to the message, we rushed helter-skelter to carry on, only worse than before. But not for long now. It shall not be for long.

I received another message around my birthday in September last year. I had just finished a fast, my longest ever, five days without food. Fasting is such a subtle, mysterious process, it’s hard to define how it changes you. Only that it leaves you open, so much more open, to communication from the depths of the world.

My last stop on the way back to London and life was a place called the Fairy Glen. It’s often the way that these cutesy little names are the means by which sacred corners of our land here in Britain can be identified.

If you look at the tourist info about the Glen, you’ll see it pictured as a smooth, pretty little stream. That was what I was expecting when I pulled up in a dark grey light. There seemed to be no signs or car park. Only a hole in the bushes that led down to where the Glen should be. I followed it. Yet below I did not find the quaint little stream.

Instead it was a raging torrent. The little stream, swelled by titanic rains, had become a roaring, thundering avalanche of churning water through the rocky gorge. Branches had been ripped from the banks. The rocks seemed to tremble beneath my feet at the fury of the water. I was afraid. If I slipped and fell in, I would certainly be killed.

I followed the path that ran the length of the gorge. As I walked, I suddenly understood what she was trying to tell me. Out of our sight, behind the trees, in the deep parts of the earth, the river of the sacred is roaring in fury.

In the way that she does, she led me to a path up and out of the gorge. When I stepped back onto the road, the first thing I saw was a hillside mechanically stripped of its trees. Nothing but hundreds of shivering stumps remained, and the earth cut deep by the tracks of the diggers.

Rage and desecration juxtaposed. That was what she wanted me to see.

Some of you will laugh at this. You’ll say it’s just a coincidence and that it’s only my mind constructing this meaning. You probably think there is no meaning out there in the world but what we ourselves make. But that is because you do not speak the language. You simply do not know.

The Hope in Our Defeat

When I started writing this Substack, I chose as a subheading, “The search for hope in the crisis of our civilization.” That was because, even though I had barely paddled in the ocean, I have seen enough of the sacred to know that, in partnership with it, the impossible is possible.

We could turn our swords into ploughshares, the storms would subside, the Earth cool and we would find our humanity again, even a new humane way to run our affairs: true democracy.

Yet now I think I made a mistake.

As is the way in our culture, I was thinking only of what the sacred could do for us, not what we should do for it, what we owed her. In truth, I did not want to believe that our relationship was so irrevocably broken. In this, I think I was wrong.

Things have now gone beyond simply honouring her to make amends. Our way of being, our enslavement by machines, our addiction to extraction and destruction and our denial of the sacred are so deeply engrained, only a global catastrophe can shake us out of it back into balance. I am not sure if hundreds, even thousands, of us fell to our knees, apologised and repented for what we have done, even if we begged for forgiveness it would be enough. In any case, what are the chances of that happening?

Old stories from across human cultures share a notion of how such a rupture in relations with the gods can be healed: through sacrifice. But this time, we may not have a single man willing to die for our sins. Instead, we may be called upon to be the sacrifice ourselves, in our tens of millions. For this is the deeper meaning behind the word holocaust; it once meant a burnt offering to God.

And yet. If we can somehow lay this horror to one side and try to take a cosmic perspective, there may be a higher purpose to this catastrophe. For if we understand the sacred is all things, we can almost comprehend that she is loving at the moment she is cruel, kind at the moment she is full of wrath. Then we might fumble at an understanding that this cataclysm might be too a gift for us: an initiation for mankind.

That word is banded around a lot these days yet its true meaning has been diluted. Ask Wikipedia and it’ll tell you it is “a rite of passage marking entrance or acceptance into a group or society” or “formal admission to adulthood” or can even “signify a transformation in which the initiate is 'reborn' into a new role.” It is those things, yet far far more.

In its truest form it was often a crisis, the destruction or removal of any structure of comfort or support to leave us naked and alone before the world. For that raw, helpless state actually helped to facilitate an encounter: a meeting with sacred power.

That encounter often takes the form of a defeat: a defeat for the ego, of human pride and arrogance. You realise just quite how small, helpless and feeble we are when you come into contact with that power. The Titanic hits the iceberg; we learn our place.

That quality of defeat is why initiation (for men especially) occurred in the teenage years in traditional cultures. As a young person steps into the flush of youthful strength, beauty and energy, when their pride and confidence spikes, initiation helps to put all that power in perspective: to understand that all the things in which we take such pride are in truth a gift given by the sacred and should be exercised in her service.

This initiation, this knowing, is what we modern humans lack. So like puffed-up teenagers inflated with our own talents, we deny that our sacred parent gave us anything, believe we are the sole originators of our wondrous talents and that, as such, they need only serve our own interests, not those of the cosmos of which we are but one part.

This war, this disaster, may be the means by which we grow up. We will perhaps at last learn the humility, respect and dignity that are essential qualities of character to allow us to step towards adulthood and become worthy of the powers the sacred has bestowed.

For there will be survivors. The irony is that those countries with the most power and money today will bear the brunt of this war: the global north. I believe the global south may remain relatively unscathed by the bombs. Then it shall be our refugee boats fleeing to their shores; let’s hope they treat us more kindly than we have done them.

When I named this publication Fragments of Light, I thought it was for the shards of illumination that it might shed on the sacred, that long-neglected yet fundamental part of the world. Now I wonder if the name might mean something more.

For if in some way this prediction does manifest, those of you who have read these Fragments and survived will carry the memory of these ideas into the dawn.

In that way you yourselves may become the Fragments of Light, the voices for a new understanding and relationship with the sacred, flickering candles of understanding in a fathomless night. And from those fragile flames, the light of a new culture and a new covenant may be born.

I’ll leave you with the final sequence from Koyaanisqatsi, whose makers too understood the power of symbol.

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Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

Traditional Nursery Rhyme

PROSPERO: You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And – like the baseless fabric of this vision –
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe, A Dream Within a Dream

Audio version:

This is the eighth original essay on Fragments of Light, if you can believe it. And I know, my dear readers, that in some ways it has been hard going. Hands up who made it past the second essay on Russia?

In my defence, I might call on Tupac Shakur who sung, “Don’t blame me, I was given this world, I didn’t make it.” Or perhaps I’ll quote the great comedian Bill Hicks who once said: “this is the material that has kept me virtually anonymous for the past 15 years… but I had to have this weird thing about trying to illuminate the collective unconscious and help humanity. Fucking moron.”

Still, the last thing I want is to keep beating madly on the same tinny note, like my eleventh-month-old with her Fisher-Price piano. High time for a change of tune. To madly mix my metaphors, it’s not like you want to go to a restaurant week after week and find only the same 16 ounce slice of nuclear war on the menu, with a side of messianic death cult. After all, the trees are sparkling in Caffe Nero. It must be almost Christmas.

So this time, I want to give you an early present. Something to fit the season. And it is…. A story.

You’re probably giving me one of those polite British smiles that says, “Right. A Christmas story? I think I’ve heard them all. About ten thousand times.” Trust me, this story is different. It’s a gift. In fact, if I could only prove to you that the story was true, as I believe it to be, it would be the greatest gift you’ll ever receive in your life. As good as finding out Santa Claus really was born of someone’s hallucination on red and white fly agaric mushrooms.  

Actually to say it’s a story might be overselling it. It’s just an anecdote. Blissful and brief.

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So this anecdote takes place in autumn last year. I had just fallen short of completing a five day solo fast alone on the high plains of Dartmoor. What the hell did I think I was doing? I intend to write more on this practice someday. But the short answer is that I have come to understand that times in the wilderness are one of the best ways for us to connect with the sacred depths of life and their dance with the deepest truths of ourselves.

There was just one problem: it was so cold! So lonely! So very desolate. I had chosen a place on the dun coloured waves of the plain, far past the last steadfast tree. I sat for three days beneath heavy clouds in a circle of stones, retreating to my tent when the rain grew too strong or the wind blew too hard, which it did most of the time. And though I did just for a moment catch the whisper of God (again, a story for another day), most of the time my mind was obsessed only with eating the emergency cashew nuts I had in my pocket and wondering what the holy fuck I was doing with my life.

On the morning of the fourth day, I admitted defeat, scoffed the cashews and stumbled back to my car, pleading with the universe to forgive my lack of staying power. This time, I heard no answer, no forgiveness. Not even a whisper. Like Atlas trying to hold aloft the weight of my shame, I decided I would try to salvage something by travelling to Avebury, the largest stone circle in Britain, and scoffing the other consumable I had in my pocket - a handful of foraged magic mushrooms - before making my chastened way home.

Yet it was not chastened that I would return. Rather, set free.

For those who haven’t been, Avebury is the heart of one of our most extraordinary sacred landscapes, albeit one gashed with roads, fettered with gift shops and subdued by the National Trust’s efforts to tame its ancient wild soul. Like a ghost haunting the crowds of gentle tourists, I swallowed the mushrooms and made my slow way down the great avenue of standing stones towards Silbury hill. I had not got far when my body started to tingle, my jaw came loose and the stones started to sway like the long grass in the breeze. I lay down.

Don’t worry, I know there’s nothing more tedious than hearing about someone else’s psychedelic journey. I’ll spare you another effort to describe in words what words can never describe. The most important thing was that somewhere in my slow-moving sail through a valley of rainbows, my Dad appears. And that was not nothing as, by that point, he had been dead for two years.

Most of you will have never met my Dad. There is so much I could say about him. To give you an idea, I’ve fileted the following words from the eulogy I wrote for his funeral, but they hardly scratch the surface: “He made you feel alive. He could make the weather forecast into the funniest thing you had ever seen. He could make a trip to the newsagent an epic to rival the Iliad. In all my years in the film and TV world, I’ve never met a storyteller that is his match.”

When we meet behind my closed eyes on that hillside, my Dad is laughing, laughing as he always does and always did. I am crying because I miss him, I miss him and I’m glad to see him, so glad. Now we’re both laughing.

“Don’t take everything so fucking seriously,” he says laughing, something he always said but I start laughing too because I know more than ever, at that moment I know, that this is the absolute truth. “The fears and troubles, it’s all ridiculous. Write that in your bloody journal,” he laughs. Everything melts away and then there is joy and then there is laughter and everything melts away. Later, I did indeed write in my journal that I was blessed to fall into absolute truth.

Someone else has come up with a phrase to capture that truth which I found in speaking to my Dad on that grey afternoon: the peace of God that passes all understanding. That peace is what I felt. I irrefutably knew, somewhere deeper than the marrow of my bones, that in the end, all the pain and the suffering, everything that troubles and weighs us so deeply in this life is all no more real than a dream or a game we are playing. And like a dream or a game, when it is over, the pain goes with it too and there is only peace and everything shining.

As anyone who has taken psychedelics knows, when you are in that place, reconnecting with things you know so deeply, it’s impossible to believe you could ever forget them. But then you blink. What is that? Oh, those must be my legs. I’m lying on the grass. The wind’s blowing, sprinkling rain. My skin feels itchy. Like an old suit I’m putting on again. You feel yourself returning and the fears and the worries reassemble and become real again. For we forget, we have to forget. That is a rule of the game.

I close my eyes one more time to say goodbye. I hug my Dad, crying again. I don’t want to go back, can’t I stay? Not for now, he says, along with the others that are with him. Not till the end. Don’t worry, he laughs. We’ll be waiting.

There are people now who say the revelations gathered on psychedelics are nothing more than comforting delusions. These people tend to be white men calcified in a rational mentality who are accorded expert status because someone equally ignorant paid them to write a book. These men proclaim proudly that their rudimentary explorations in this realm “didn't lead me any closer to a belief in God or cosmic consciousness or anything magical or supernatural.” They view psychedelics, along with everything else in this world, as only relevant to themselves.

It is testament to the continuity of our colonial mindset that the view of these men are accorded authority, rather than the people of the First Nations for whom the use of psychedelics has been a foundational part of culture for millennia.

Those ancient people might tell you that the real world actually lies behind this one, and that what we see here is something like a shadow from that world. Or a dream. We visit the real world every night in our sleep, or through the use of psychedelics, a place where we may access the deepest knowing about ourselves, our communities and the earth.

I believe nothing is more important than this revelation for us right now. The search for this world will be the urgent focus for these Fragments over the coming year.

But no, you cry! Our civilized brains cannot possibly accommodate such a Copernican upending of our notions of reality. Instead, for centuries, the pathfinders of civilization have annihilated the keepers of this wisdom with guns, institutional religion and socially-sanctioned poisons like alcohol. Genocide clears space for our white-coated experts to set foot on the shore of a continent whose shape and size are utterly unknown to us, plant a flag and declare the entire land to be ours. In that way, and so many others, our arrogance births our profound blindness and ignorance.

Thankfully, there are a handful of heretics among us, the preachers shouting in the shadows of the city streets, whom we hurry past, believing to be mad. One I’ve mentioned already is the stand-up comedian Bill Hicks. He finished one of his sets with these words:

“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly coloured, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?"

And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people.

"Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.”

There are other respectable voices, stretching across the ages, who play with the same idea. An ancient Chinese parable, told by the Taoist sage Chang-tzu, describes a man’s dream of being a fluttering butterfly and the butterfly’s dream of life in more ponderous human form. On waking, the man wonders:

Which was truly real and which was the dream – himself as butterfly or himself as a man, waiting for his students to come and drag him out into the light of day? How did he know that what he was experiencing now was not the dream? He almost laughed out loud. Imagine if I shared this with my students, he thought. He slowly rose from his bed and, stretching out his arms above him like the slow unfolding of butterfly wings, went forth into the day.

In his memoires, the pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Jung described a night-time dream in which he came upon a small chapel and, inside, a yogi in lotus position in deep meditation.

When I looked at him more closely. I realised that he had my face. I started in profound fright and awoke with the thought: “Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream and I am it.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.

Shakespeare put the idea in the mouth of Prospero. My daughter sings it in a nursery rhyme in the bath. Hell, even Beyoncé herself, the goddess incarnate, agrees life is but a dream. Something, somewhere, may be dreaming us into being.

Perhaps this strikes you as frivolous speculation or worse, a notion that can only come from horrific privilege. For sure, it’s easy to spin a lyrical fallacy about life when the worse that your dream contains is waking at 6am for your commute, or waiting for the woman to approve your age at the self-checkout, or washing the ice cream out of your daughter’s dungarees. But how dare I call it a dream when some people starve to death, or die in the night frozen to a concrete pavement, or witness their family wiped out without warning by an airstrike?

This is one of our oldest and most vital questions. One to which I would never imagine having a complete answer. Yet in an essay to come I will explore it.

The intention of these words is not to suggest the dream is a free-for-all. It is not a call for unbridled hedonism. I believe there is a morality that underpins the game, though it’s something different from the crude accounting system of Christianity. Equally, I’m not saying that what we do here doesn’t matter. Quite the opposite.

At heart, this idea relates to our meeting with death, that unbreakable appointment and surely our greatest fear. Imagine for a moment, what impact it might have on your life if, long before you died, you could know that the message of my story was true? If some of the mystery and thereby the fear of death was assuaged. What would you do? Would you stay sitting where you are right now, staring at this screen?

I’ll tell you what this story did for me: in some inscrutable way, it seeded fearlessness in me. Gave me the courage to finally and definitively follow my deepest calling, to turn aside from a career I had worked at all my adult life, just at the moment when I finally attained some of the success and respect for which I had hungered for so long. It helped me to finally walk out towards the wilderness, turning my back on home other than to send postcards from my wanderings in the form of these Fragments.

For once I knew I was living in a dream, suddenly I did stop taking things so fucking seriously, as my Dad said. The burden of life lightened; my strivings ceased to matter so much. I felt empowered to risk everything, face my deepest fears, chase the greatest of visions of the possibilities for my life because, after all, what is the worst that could happen? I know that in the end, all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, as a mystic once wrote.

This is my last essay of the year. After this, I will go into hibernation to prepare for the year to come. For if this year has been hard, the next will be harder. The far right is resurgent, war is back in fashion, our planet is unravelling and that’s before we’ve even thought of the second coming of Trump. More than ever, we will need to be without fear as we face the dark, waiting in hope for a dawn. 

Yet whatever lies ahead, for now my dear friends, wherever you are, if you are in pain, if you are lonely, if your heart fills with despair at the state of all things, please let me put my arm around you. Take heart from my tale. Listen when I tell you, it’s ok, it is really ok, it is all a dream and we will laugh about it someday when we wake in a place where everything’s shining. Of course this too might only be a dream. But it’s not a bad one to live by.

Merry Christmas – and shanti shanti shanti.

In the darkness of the night, I decided to repost this, the first public essay I wrote, long before Fragments of Light came into being. It was published on February 17^th 2022, five days before Russia invaded Ukraine. I repost it now because I believe it resonates with our perilous moment today.

I see now the essay did not deliver on the promise of its title. It was too limited in its scope, focusing purely on Russia and Ukraine not the other global tinderboxes that are now on the verge of ignition. But flawed though it may be, it still holds the kernel of a truth that may come to define all our lives: that irrational mythic forces are on the march, driving the world into fire.

As I write these words, an Iranian-backed militia group in Iraq has just announced it will seek to force all foreign militaries out of the country. Ballistic missiles fly towards Israel from Yemen, thousands of miles away. Israeli atrocities in Gaza mount; the Iranian Foreign Minister warns that if they are not stopped a new explosion is coming. A Western fleet gathers in the waters of the Middle East greater than any seen in decades. At the same time, a large Chinese fleet has started unannounced naval exercises around Taiwan. They are at the very least a rehearsal, if not the pretext, for invasion.

At such a moment, the opening words of my old essay bear repeating:

On the night of 27th June 1914, no-one would have gone to bed thinking, “Tomorrow the greatest war in history will begin.” Even the terrorists who plotted to assassinate the Archduke of Austro-Hungary in Sarajevo the following morning could hardly have conceived that their act would spark a cataclysmic four year slaughter that would destroy the world as they’d known it and scar humanity forever…

The truth is that I believe we are now like those slumbering people of June 1914. We have watched tensions between the Great Powers of our day — the US, Russia and China — gradually intensify. People might consider the possibility of a war between them but, at heart, no-one really thinks it will happen. As in 1914, we have bought into the illusion of deterrence.

Like them, we are wrong. I believe we may be weeks, days, even hours away from the triggering of a chain reaction that would lead to the outbreak of the Third World War. A conflict in which the use of nuclear weapons is not only likely, but a certainty. The greatest catastrophe in the history of mankind.

It is not insignificant that in 1914 it was a terrorist attack, out of the blue, that was sufficient to trigger the chain reaction for a global war.

As I write, the news said a storm is coming to Britain tonight. The worst to hit us in decades. The windows of our home already shudder in the wind; the first drops of rain claw at the glass.

I think of the families huddled in the darkness in hospitals in Gaza. The pilots whirling overhead. I think of fighters crouching, guns in hand, in sight of barbed wire fences in Iraq, in Syria, on the Lebanese border. I think of the sailors, American, British, Chinese, Iranian staring into the darkness of the deep. I think of the leaders up late into the night, wondering what to do next. I think of my daughters asleep upstairs in their beds.

And I wonder what all of us will face come the morning.

Causes of the Third World War

On the night of 27th June 1914, no-one would have gone to bed thinking, “Tomorrow the greatest war in history will begin.” Even the terrorists who plotted to assassinate the Archduke of Austro-Hungary in Sarajevo the following morning could hardly have conceived that their act would spark a cataclysmic four year slaughter that would destroy the world as they’d known it and scar humanity forever.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Every year, thousands of history students write essays on “The Causes of the First World War”, piecing together the various factors that would light the fuse. These include the years of growing tension between the Great Powers; crises that came close but never quite tipped over; the development of weapons whose destructive power had changed the nature of warfare more than anyone realised. To us now, it all seems obvious and inevitable where it would lead.

And yet we have been lulled into thinking that history like this cannot happen to us.

The truth is that I believe we are now like those slumbering people of June 1914. We have watched tensions between the Great Powers of our day — the US, Russia and China — gradually intensify. People might consider the possibility of a war between them but, at heart, no-one really thinks it will happen. As in 1914, we have bought into the illusion of deterrence.

Like them, we are wrong. I believe we may be weeks, days, even hours away from the triggering of a chain reaction that would lead to the outbreak of the Third World War. A conflict in which the use of nuclear weapons is not only likely, but a certainty. The greatest catastrophe in the history of mankind.

You may think this claim is ludicrous. Frankly, I hope it is! But as a historian and filmmaker with over fifteen years’ experience covering conflict and humanitarian disasters, I cannot shake the feeling that I am now living through a history essay of the future.

So this is my effort to write it out. I’m not pretending to be able to predict what is to come: rather to highlight how many potential triggers exist. It will only take one.

That is even without considering the Great Power tensions over North Korea, Taiwan, the South China Sea and the Iran nuclear programme, all of which could light the touch paper soon enough. But for now, I will lay those all to one side to focus on the immediate danger: Russia’s threatened assault on Ukraine.

Predicting the chain reaction comes down to three essential questions, which provide the framework for the argument:

1. Will Russia invade?

2. If they do, will NATO be drawn in?

3. If we are, will the conflict ‘go nuclear’ (to use that horrific phrase)?

Will Russia invade?

This is the question that the finest diplomatic minds in every Western nation are trying to puzzle out. As I write this morning, still nobody knows. Putin said Russia was open to diplomacy and that its troops were withdrawing, while Western intelligence agencies say the opposite is happening. We all pray a peaceful way out of the crisis is possible.

Yet there are two reasons why I think an invasion is by far the likelier outcome.

First, as others have said, Putin has gathered too much military force not to use it. Russian troops have travelled thousands of miles, across the entire country, to assemble on Ukraine’s border. Ammunition for the country’s heaviest missile systems has been stockpiled. The costs of moving men and material on this scale is astronomic. You would only do it if the decision had been made months ago: total war against Ukraine.

And there is a deeper, more troubling piece of the puzzle, hiding in plain sight. In July last year, Putin wrote an essay that we can now see is his causus belli. It was sent to every soldier in the Russian army. It articulates his belief that Ukraine as a nation is a false entity, sustained only by the machinations of anti-Russian powers who wish to split the historic Russian homeland. In justifying this view, he calls back through 1,000 years of history, to Vladimir the Great, leader of the Rus people in the 10th century, whose capital was Kyiv.

When a leader of a nation starts calling back to its ancient history, it’s clear that they have moved from a rational to a mythic vision of the world, something we in the West have forgotten is possible. Someone in the grip of myth tends to be infused with a sense of divine purpose. We can see it in both Hitler and Churchill during the Second World War, Hitler in his vision of the ‘1,000 year Reich’ and Churchill in his famous “finest hour” speech, in which he referred to the British Empire lasting 1,000 years.

Similarly, it seems Putin has become convinced of his own historical significance: the avenger for the wrongs committed to Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse. A man who is thinking in such epic terms is unlikely to be persuaded to abandon his crusade by a number of technical agreements on troop numbers and limitations on missiles. I believe this explains his series of demands to NATO, which have left everyone baffled as they are impossible to fulfil. They are the twenty-first century equivalent of a defiant battle-cry before the charge.

If they invade, will NATO be drawn in?

This really is a life or death question for millions of unsuspecting people right now. Yet, unlike the first question, hardly anyone is discussing it. Perhaps because we blindly accept out leaders’ assurances that our forces will not directly fight for Ukraine so we’ll be safe. The alternative is quite literally unthinkable.

Yet even before the present crisis, experts were highlighting the increased number of near misses between Russian and NATO forces near Ukraine, warning how easily an incident could get out of hand. Almost every day now, Western planes are being scrambled to intercept Russian bombers testing our defences or watch Russian warships circling our waters.

If the invasion of Ukraine begins, those encounters will be infused with an almost unbearable tension. War is a force that, once unleashed, will take on a life of its own; a force that takes the unthinkable and makes it real.

As things stand, I can see at least six troubling potential scenarios that could draw us in.

I. The Humanitarian Catastrophe

In the last twenty years, we have only had hints of the destructive power of modern weapons: the Syrian cities shattered by Russia’s airstrikes; the Malaysia Airways jet shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft missile over Ukraine in 2014.

The last large scale invasion of a country was Iraq in 2003. Think: that was four years before the first iPhone rolled off the production lines. Think of how much technology has advanced since then. Then reflect: the weapons makers will have been just as busy in that time too.

From Chechnya to Syria, Russia under Putin has shown it has zero qualms about inflicting civilian casualties. Even in the first hours of an assault, a hail of airstrikes, artillery and missile bombardment could kill thousands. Perhaps tens of thousands in the first week.

Would we be able to stand by, helplessly watching the slaughter, confining our reprisals to strong words and financial sanctions of dubious efficacy? Would Joe Biden in his weakness be able to resist the calls of American hawks to take stronger action or go down in history as a new Neville Chamberlain?

Even if we did stand by, one could imagine a situation where tens of thousands of refugees flee towards the EU and NATO. The pressure of that influx might be reason alone for us to take stronger action. You only have to think of the crisis between Poland and Belarus last year, which almost led to direct clashes, which was over a few thousand Iraqi refugees.

II. We Are Already Involved

It’s all very well for our leaders to say our troops would not become directly involved. And it is true that the small numbers of US and UK advisers working with the Ukrainian armed forces have reportedly been withdrawn.

But NATO is also the backbone of Ukraine’s intelligence gathering and reconnaissance. NATO spy planes and drones roam through Ukraine’s skies, mapping the disposition of Russian forces and feeding the information directly back to Ukrainian military commanders. For its part, as part of the gathering of its strike force, Russia has moved equipment into position to jam and interfere with these capabilities. There are reports of three incidents over this last weekend of Russian aviation buzzing these spy planes.

What happens when the shooting starts? Will we withdraw our spying capabilities just when the Ukrainians need them most? Or will our planes continue to fly in Ukrainian airspace, ducking out of the way of Russian jets? What if the Russians went further and decided to shoot down a NATO drone, or two or ten? Would we keep sending them in to be shot down — or pull them out altogether? If we did the latter, it would look as if Putin had beaten us. An unacceptable impression for Biden to give.

As that is another frightening aspect of this perfect storm: the weakness of both Biden and Boris Johnson. The Prime Minister barely clings to power by his fingertips while the President is already being written off as a failure by his supporters, let alone the other side. This is a man who hoped to build a new league of democracies against authoritarian powers like Russia. Can you imagine the pressure on him to respond to a Russian blitzkrieg?

The importance of drones to modern warfare is immense. Last year, for example, drones allowed the Azerbaijani government to rout Armenian tank divisions for the first time in their long and bloody feud — a lesson not lost on the Russians who support Armenia.

Yet no-one really knows what the consequences will be if Russia starts shooting NATO drones out of the sky.

III. Our Weapons

Even if our personnel and our drones are removed from the battlefield, our weapons remain. The UK and US have sent large numbers of antitank missiles. Poland has supplied portable anti-aircraft missiles, while the Czech Republic and Baltic states are sending huge quantities of ammunition and offering to treat injured Ukrainian soldiers.

What happens if the Ukrainians use these weapons effectively? If they start shooting Russian jets out of the sky and devastating Russian tanks? People perhaps assume the situation would play out like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, when America provided Stinger missiles to the anti-Russian resistance without triggering a confrontation between the superpowers. But Afghanistan mattered a lot less to Russia than Ukraine. And in the 1980s, the leaders of both superpowers were united in their horror of nuclear war. That is not the case today, as I discuss later.

Even if our weapons were not directly and identifiably killing Russian servicemen, if Putin’s invasion did not go to plan he would waste no time in blaming us. He already is blaming us for the crisis.

Anything less than a swift, easy victory could be personally dangerous for him. There are signs already that members of the Russian elite are very nervous about his plans and they are the ultimate source of power for his regime. If the offensive bogs down, he will need to find scapegoats and fast.

He will retaliate against us. And whatever form that retaliation takes — in the form of cyber-attacks for example — we will slip into a dangerous cycle of escalation, in which there will be huge pressure on us to respond.

IV: The Baltics

The Baltic countries (and to a ever-so-slightly lesser extent Poland and the Czech Republic) are the most vociferous in demanding robust NATO support for Ukraine. It’s easy to understand why. The Baltic States have already been subject to cyber-attacks, abductions of their soldiers and air incursions by Russia’s forces. NATO ensures this would never threaten their sovereignty itself.

But if Ukraine falls, they fear they may share the same fate. Defeat for Ukraine is defeat for NATO, no matter how much we pretend otherwise. The Alliance itself might fall apart, depriving the Baltic states of their shield. In such a febrile, nervous position, they might take rash action to provoke a wider confrontation with the Russians, while the Alliance and its obligations to defend them are still intact.

V: Erdogan & Turkey

The President of Turkey is a complete wild card. Despite flirting with Putin over the years, a deep enmity exists in the bones of Russian and Turkish people. They fought a war over Crimea (with our involvement) in the middle of the 19th century. In the early stages of the Syrian revolution, a Turkish jet shot down a Russian fighter — the only time a NATO country has directly attacked the Russians. For their part, Russian forces had killed a number of Turkish troops in Syria at the start of 2020, before the pandemic put that conflict on ice.

No-one can guess how Erdogan will respond in the event of a Russian invasion. But anything he does implicates us all in the name of NATO.

VI: Accidents

Thucydides, the great historian of the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BC wrote, “Think, too, of the great part that is played by the unpredictable in war: think of it now, before you are actually committed to war. The longer a war lasts, the more things tend to depend on accidents. Neither you nor we can see into them: we have to abide their outcome in the dark.”

This is perhaps the greatest risk of them all — the accidents, the mistakes, the hinterland of the unexpected and unknown, a collision of circumstances that no-one can yet foresee that would provide the spark.

The tinderbox is ready. A huge number of Russian and NATO vessels will be in close proximity in the Black Sea and Mediterranean throughout February. If a violent conflict is raging in Ukraine, those boats will be on a hair trigger for any threat from the other side. In times like those, it is hard for those in charge to keep their nerve — if Russian fighters staged mock bombing runs as they did to a British destroyer last year for example.

The US invasion of Vietnam was justified by the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 in which a US destroyer was allegedly attacked by a North Vietnamese submarine. Years later, the then US Defence chief Robert McNamara admitted that the attack probably never took place. It was just a misreading of the sonar in a time of intense tension. And yet that incident led to the US onslaught which cost hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the potential risks. But I hope its message is clear: there are a number of ways in which direct fighting between NATO and Russia could begin. The atmosphere around an invasion would be perilous and remain so for weeks.

Which brings us to question three.

Would a clash between NATO and Russia go nuclear?

As I said earlier, the horror of a nuclear war seems so obvious, we might ask how could any rational human being, no matter how mythic his thinking, ever launch one?

And even if they could, they would surely know that the devastation brought down upon one’s own country by the enemy’s retaliation would mean the utter destruction of the people you profess to defend. This is the basis of deterrence.

Yet just as deterrence failed in 1914, I believe it will do so again, even with nuclear weapons.

In Errol Morris’ seminal documentary, “The Fog of War”, Robert McNamara, the US Defence Secretary at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, describes a conversation he had with Fidel Castro decades after the crisis. In it, Castro revealed he had encouraged the Soviet Union to attack America with nuclear weapons, knowing that his own country of Cuba would have been totally destroyed in the retaliatory strike. Any concern for his own people was forgotten, eclipsed by the determination to destroy his enemy.

Morris entitles this section of the documentary, “Rationality will not save us”. It points to the fact that as human beings we are prone to take actions driven by impulse and emotion all the time in our day-to-day lives. We do not always take the rational path. As it it with individuals, so it is with nations.

Then consider that the decision over whether to use nuclear weapons rests with one human being. Vladimir Putin.

Putin has spoken of how, in the 2014 crisis over Crimea, he was ready to put his nuclear forces on alert. At the end of his press conference with Macron this week, he said Russia would have to use nuclear weapons in any war with NATO, in order to stand a chance. And in his nuclear modernisation programme, the development of horrific new hypersonic and undersea delivery vehicles, he is clearly a man who has decided that he would be willing to use these weapons.

Even worse, there is a terrifying military rationale to pushing the button first. You would have a far greater chance of destroying an opponent’s weapons before they could be fired or taking out key members of the enemy leadership before they can order their own retaliatory strike.

This is the horrific logic of war. As long as these weapons exist, people will be tempted to use them, especially if they are losing. In a crisis where every second is significant, this temptation will override all concerns about morality or human life. Putin has said as much: ‘The streets of Leningrad taught me one thing: if a fight’s inevitable, strike first.”

A few years ago, a filmmaker created a fake news broadcast, depicting how a shooting war with NATO could quickly go nuclear. Though obviously fictional, it does I believe give an accurate sense of how quickly the cycle of escalation could intensify:

I do pray that this picture I have painted proves to be false. That we skate the precipice and come back to our senses. But I hope I have gone some way to making you see how close we are, at the very moment you are reading this.

“What can we do?” you may ask. The way I see it we have two options.

We could kiss our children goodnight, stick Netflix on the TV, scroll through our phones, pour our last glass of wine before going to bed, sleeping what Orwell called the “Deep, deep sleep of England from which I fear we will only be wakened by the sound of falling bombs.”

Or we could get up, get out on the streets and build the biggest anti-war movement the world has ever seen.

It seems that there is a force or power at the very root of the creative process that works towards its corruption and fall. Only the overthrow of all that is just, beautiful and conducive to the advancement of society in goodness and love will satisfy its Moloch-like greed.

Martin Israel, The Pearl of Great Price

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

This essay is also available in audio:

You might say this series on the Rising of the Storm is now redundant. For the storm is already here.

The devastating violence in Israel-Palestine has woken the world to the ever-intensifying danger of a Third World War. And even if the full force of that catastrophe has not yet been unleashed on those of us who live in the West, many of our fellow human beings are already in its inferno. Palestinians, Israelis, Syrians and Ukrainians are only the most obvious examples. Just last month, 100,000 Armenians were ethnically cleansed by Azerbaijan from the land where they had lived for millennia. Yet who among us even noticed?

The fate of these peoples may offer a premonition of what may be in store for many of us if the worst comes to pass. Which is why, strange as it may seem, I do not believe what we need at this moment is yet another discourse on who is right or wrong. This essay will not add to the social media slanging match. Instead, it seeks to look beneath the storm-wracked sea in search of the deeper tides driving the tumult on the surface.

For the purpose of these Fragments was never to indulge in wafty esoteric rumination, despite any appearances to the contrary. Instead, it was born of a hunch that the loss of our relationship to what I call the sacred dimension of reality somehow underpins every facet of our meta-crisis. That loss has profoundly practical implications for our lives.

That’s why this project is always evolving, a work-in-progress that runs in parallel to real world events, reflecting on what light they shed on the sacred and vice versa. That work grows more urgent every day.

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For the irrational forces that I have sought to call out in this series – this is their moment. The fate of the Middle East and the world is probably more in their hands than under the conscious control of those nominally in charge. Those supposed leaders are merely castaways, swept along by currents they cannot see or do not understand.

In Part 2 of this series, I looked at how such irrational mythic forces had taken hold of both Israel’s Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu and his sworn enemy, Iran’s Islamist government. Those forces are on full display in the current crisis.

Take the language of Netanyahu. It is full of messianic rhetoric inspired by mythic vision. In a tweet deleted after the tragedy of the al-Ahli hospital blast, he wrote, “We are the children of light, they are the children of darkness”. He repeated this framing in a speech announcing the imminent ground invasion of Gaza and then went on to evoke religious prophecy, “[the Jewish people] shall fulfil the prophecy of Isiah. There will no longer be stealing at your borders and your gates will be of glory.”

The line appears to be a reference to Isiah 60:18 which says, “Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or destruction within your borders; you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.”

Just stop and think of the implications of this: that the leader of Israel should so openly see a military operation in Biblical terms, as the fulfilment of a prophecy thousands of years old. Does that remind you of anyone? Does it give you confidence that such a person might listen to rational calls for restraint? That they would plot a measured course through the geopolitical perils of the moment?

Thousands in Israel are calling for Netanyahu to resign, though most only once the war in Gaza is over. By then it will be too late. A key part of Netanyahu’s vision is that he must lead the final decisive struggle against Iran. This is his last and perhaps best chance and it will be extraordinary if he does not take it. By doing so, as some Israelis point out, he will “lead his country to suicide”. This is the man to whom our own leaders offer blind support.

For their part, one can only wonder to what extent the Hamas attacks of October 7^th,, and the increasing violence by Iranian-supported militias across the Middle East, also represent a manifestation of what I traced in Part 2.

The Iranian regime and its Revolutionary Guard have long sought to sow chaos to usher in the end of days and the coming of their messiah, the 12^th Imam. Their current rhetoric drips with religious fervour, just like Netanyahu’s. The Commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard recently declared, “Gaza is the staff of Moses that will devour the Pharaohs if they enter on the ground”. Even their unmanned attack drones are all religiously named either after companions of the Prophet or, more ominously, the destroyer of Jewish fortresses.

Against this, the rational analysts reassure us that Iran does not want war, as it would not serve their geopolitical interests. We have been here before. Once again, the mythic understanding is missing, just as it was with Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. We know that rational concerns are quickly cast aside in the prosecution of holy war.

The question, as my two-year old daughter would put it, is why? As with every child’s question, the simplicity of it is actually quite hard to answer. Can we, the supposed adults, really understand what has brought us to this apocalyptic place? And now we are here, what can we – ordinary people like you and me – do about it?

To answer those questions we must understand what we are up against. For it is only by trying to understand the deeper reasons for our strife that we can divine an appropriate way to meet it. I feel in my bones that somewhere way down in their deepest essence all the world’s diverse conflicts are connected, despite their apparently unique contexts. We have to search for the source.

So what clues do we have?

The first quality that unites them is the stripping of humanity from the other side. Ukrainians call Russians “orcs”, unredeemable beasts of evil from Tolkien’s fantasy world. The Russians in return label Ukrainians as Nazis or Satanists. Hamas claims to distinguish between Zionists and Jews yet this nuance seems to have made little difference in the indiscriminate massacres of October 7^th. For their part, time and again Israel’s political and military leadership have said they’re fighting “human animals” or that all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are culpable for Hamas’s crimes. They, of all people, should know where such rhetoric leads.

For me, the touchstone is the treatment of children. Violence directed against the truly innocent surely transcends the moral relativism of so many of our wars and divisions. I’ve yet to encounter a cause that could ever justify the killing of a baby, whether by knives, guns, bombs or siege.

But taking the devastation in Israel-Palestine as the most pressing example, there appears to be a disturbing dilution of this most basic principle depending on your choice of side. Thus the kidnapping or murder of Israeli babies might be excused as a reaction against apartheid and occupation; the slaughter of Palestinian children as a tolerable by-product of Israel’s right to self-defence.

In some quarters the views are much worse. There are actually voices which declare publicly that the children dying in these wars somehow deserve it. That they have brought death on themselves.

Of course, some would say it has always been this way. Violence is part of human nature, plus ca change. I don’t believe this is true. For me, the tide of human cruelty ebbs and flows throughout history. Our times are a high water mark.

We are witnessing an epidemic of savagery, in which no-one even pretends to abide by the rules any more, performative as they long might have been. Places held as sanctuaries for centuries like hospitals, churches, even schools have become killing grounds. We no longer hold the belief that all life is sacred, far from it. All life has become a legitimate target.

We do have a word to describe this phenomenon. And no, it’s not “collateral damage”, barbaric euphemisms like “mowing the lawn”, not even “civilian casualty” or any of the other apparently dry jargon used to mask the reality of a baby whose ten day old body has been lacerated by shrapnel or a child tied up and shot in cold blood.

The proper word for such actions is evil.

Did you just recoil at the term? That’s understandable. For as our sense of the sacred has dwindled, the notion of evil has gone out of fashion too, such that it feels applicable to cartoon villains, nothing more. A group of philosophers and psychologists now exist who are labelled “evil-sceptics”. True to our culture’s secular perspective, they call for the concept to be discarded completely because its mysterious, metaphysical implications are unacceptable. They believe all behaviour, even the worst, is explicable in human terms.

Like many of the subjects covered in these Fragments, you probably will not believe something until you have experienced it yourself. So it is easy to discount the notion of evil from the corridors of academia or an office, where the worst thing you ever have to face is a horrible video posted online that makes you wince as you sip your morning coffee. Yet the philosophical arguments of these secular sceptics are divorced from reality.

In my own career, I have seen the consequences of acts of such tremendous, unjustified cruelty, they should properly be called evil: two toddlers paralysed from the neck down when fighters from a rebel group tried to physically twist their heads off in Congo; the trauma of teenage girls sold into sexual slavery by the Islamic State; Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets at medics carrying a stretcher on which my wounded friend lay; the use of chlorine gas against Syrian children. Trust me; evil exists.

The language we use implies an acceptance of this truth even as the philosophers quibble about it. Take the phrase “pure evil”. Have you noticed how often that phrase is used in our world today, to describe everything from the Hamas attacks to sadistic serial killers? Even the relatively unremarkable Polish politician Donald Tusk was described as pure evil by his right-wing opponents in their recent election. It’s interesting to note that every example of the phrase “pure evil” cited in the Collins online dictionary dates from the twenty-first century.

It suggests that something persists even in the modern world that forces us to reach for a spiritual language, as much as we would like to believe we had outgrown it. We feel in our bones, even if we deny in our minds, that there is a quality of wrongdoing that goes beyond human terms. It is a spiritual quality. An absolute.

The example of Donald Tusk is weirdly revealing. For when he took office, Tusk too declared that his opponents’ loss was “the end of evil times”. Both sides claimed the election was existential for Poland. How best to explain that two political sides, who after all share the same language and land, who eat the same food and breathe the same air, could have come to view each other as the embodiment of absolute evil?

What is more, similar existential divisions seem to be everywhere. Humanity is shattered into pieces and increasingly we see our opponents as something inhuman. How has that happened? And how could it have spread, as it appears, to the ends of the earth?

Analysts and academics, rooted in a secular paradigm, would offer a wide range of explanations: it’s social media, algorithms that thrive on hatred, right-wing populism, left-wing wokery, Covid-19, economic pressures, immigration pressures, climate change. You could fill in more I’m sure. Yet are any of those explanations sufficient to explain a plague so virulent and so widespread? You might think so; I don’t. For me, a satisfactory explanation constantly recedes from our grasp, like the end of a malevolent rainbow.

This was the point of my previous essay about Hitler. The accepted understanding asks us to believe that because Hitler was beaten up by his Dad as a boy, or because he was angry at Germany’s wartime defeat, or because of the economic humiliation he saw his country suffer, he was willing to lead that same country he loved into utter devastation, to fight to the end and murder millions of men, women and children in the process. As I said, for me, these explanations cannot hope to account for horror of such magnitude.

Yet even people who read that essay and found its argument compelling still ultimately recoiled from its conclusion: that something else was at work. Yet ultimately their position is itself a matter of faith; faith in our current cultural paradigm which reassures us that forces of evil do not exist.

I know that for most of you turning to this explanation is the intellectual equivalent of blaming our troubles on invaders from Mars. But I hope that you wouldn’t even be reading these Fragments unless you had an open mind. So perhaps come with me on one of those little thought experiments, even if this one reads more like a myth or a fairy tale.  

The first thing worth noting is that if you look at human cultures across time and space, you’ll find this central assumption of our own civilization is in the minority. It is actually an expression of our Western arrogance that we are convinced we know more about reality than almost every other human that ever lived.

Most other human societies would not even ponder the question. For them, it was simply accepted that man shared the world with a wide variety of non-human forces and that these could work to malign as much as benign ends. Such forces were constantly seeking to find a way into our mundane world to wreak havoc from the personal to political scale. From this perspective, Hitler and the Nazis were a moment when they openly showed their hand. Could today be another?

For it is not just our politics that is charged with inhumanity. I see it on my own streets. Just yesterday, I watched crowds hurry past a homeless man who was howling, literally howling, for help, as he sat on a stone pavement in the pouring rain. “Will nobody help me?” he pleaded. “Does no-one have a heart? Everyone is just walking past!” A mother with a pram and a daughter in uniform were waiting at the lights just a couple of feet away. They were chatting and joking as if the howling man did not exist, though his cries must have drowned out their voices.

The materialists would say it’s absurd to suggest that the callous disregard of a man in distress and the brutal wars of our time are connected. Maybe so. Certainly none of the politicians, academics or experts in the West would take such an idea seriously any more, except perhaps the odd Republican president.

Among artists it is a different story.

I mentioned Joseph Roth and his book on The Antichrist last time. Roth’s portrayal of a malevolent force was particularly interesting as he saw its manifestations throughout his society, from advances in technology to corruption in the media all the way down to the blind hatred he encountered in individuals.

Roth was Jewish with a strong affection for Catholicism, which might explain how he came to his views. Yet belief in such a force is not confined to the religiously minded alone. In his most famous poem, the beat poet Alan Ginsberg famously ascribed the ills of his generation to the Canaanite demon of child sacrifice, Moloch.

He saw its manifestations everywhere.

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!...

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

Moloch also makes an appearance in one the most celebrated films of the silent era, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Encountering the underworld where workers slave to power his father’s glittering city, the hero has a terrible vision of the demon’s presence behind the machines’ surface appearance. The film is a powerful allegory of the way our capitalist society operates right to the present day.

I can almost hear you shouting, it’s a metaphor, Ed! Don’t be so literal. You cannot seriously believe in Moloch or the Antichrist. Cancel my subscription forthwith!

Well before you go, can I just point out that we have the same problem here as we did in the Introduction to these Fragments. Just as the names of the sacred are manifold, so too are those of the cosmic forces of evil arrayed against us – the names of demons like Azrael and Moloch, Antichrist and the devil. Some even call it Progress itself. Yet any name we turn to is already a laughable cliché, thanks to the centuries of associations that come with it.

I would humbly suggest that the limitations of our language do not prove that these forces do not exist. Instead, they reflect the central premise and challenge of these Fragments. First, to ask if there is more to this world than our current cultural paradigm allows? And, if there is, how can we talk about it in a way that makes sense to our times?

It will take a while to arrive at the answers to those questions. So, for now, let us just play the myth out to its end.

Let us make believe that the ancient understandings still hold true: that forces of spiritual evil exist, even in our world of glass and steel. That across time we, the human race, have an enemy. An eternal sacred adversary.

Imagine if we could say with certainty that the violence, the hatred, the inhumanity sweeping our world was being sown by that unseen adversary. That it sought to encourage us to destroy each other and the world, everything indeed that it is our sacred duty to nurture and defend. Might that not explain a few things that otherwise appear incomprehensible?

One thing would be clear: if the object of its malice is us, human beings, it is not going to restrict itself to one side or the other. No, it’ll work through Israelis and Palestinians, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and atheists, any race, any party or creed. It would explore every avenue to further its purpose: to confound us, to divide us, to debase us and desecrate all that we should hold dear. Its victory comes when we abandon our principles, our humanity, and are cruel to one another. It is, in essence, anti-life.

A few surprisingly practical principles would flow from this knowledge.

It would help us realise that behind all our wars lies a spiritual war. A clash between something more ancient than any ethnic or political or national cause. We would no longer blindly take sides. Instead we would look to the actions and words of those we encountered and ask: does this person stand with life or against it?

For our motto would once again be that all life is sacred. That human beings are created equal. That the life of one is just as precious as that of any other, just as the death of any one is as tragic.

We would know that peoples on all sides would need need help to remove the anti-life forces from their midst. We would empower those voices that hold on to a vision of life, one that fosters unity not division, love and not hatred, a longing for peace based on mutual respect. Such voices have been heard, even in the midst of the chaos, yet they have swiftly been silenced or shouted down.

We would also know that though our fellow human beings might be capable of evil, that though they might wittingly or unwittingly serve our adversary, the evil does not belong to them. It is not inherent in their nature. Rather they have been outwitted, brainwashed, even possessed by our enemy.

And while we would know that it might take conflict and violence to banish the adversary from their midst, we would not question or denigrate the humanity of our opponents even when at war. We would do all we could to preserve life on our side and theirs. Once they had been released from the spell, compassion, forgiveness and magnanimity would be the watchwords for how we treated them.

These principles would be the starting point for a movement to challenge this sacred adversary. To give us a guiding light by which we could navigate the storm. To build the army the world truly needs and yet couldn’t be more lacking: an army in service of Life.

Of course, the deeper I go into this work on the sacred, the more I have realised the impossibility of ever saying anything definitive about any of it. We will never have certainty about the unseen and that is something our culture will always struggle with. We do not believe anything unless it is backed up by data.

Yet the only real fact is that we will never know. The sacred dimension of life is sophisticated, its subtlety eludes us. That is its glorious mystery.

Time may give us more clues. For if some truth does lurk in these Fragments, then the tensions and conflicts we see now are – unbelievably – only the overture. Israel-Palestine will not be the only place where our adversary makes a home. In the struggle to come, there may be no simple sides, no goodies or baddies, just baddies of different degrees.

So I would end by saying that you do not have to believe in the myth to take the principles to heart. Whether seen through a sacred or a secular lens, they enshrine the same thing: humanity. A faith in it, a trust in it, a determination to uphold it, to see it as something precious, even holy. Indeed, even in this horrific conflict, flickers of that faith have already been seen, most movingly among Israeli relatives of those taken hostage.

If the worst comes to pass, if the great war comes, the principles of this essay and of humanity will cease to be a dreamy ideal, an academic exercise or an opportunity to virtue signal on social media. They will come to be our hope in the struggle.

A struggle that will test them by fire.

Audio version

** PLEASE NOTE: this essay includes an image of a victim of the Hiroshima atomic bomb that will be upsetting **

Ladies and gentlemen, this week I am delighted to lift the curtain on the first instalment of the Fragments of Light Film Club.

Cinema references already pepper this project, partly as mementos from my previous life, but more importantly because I still believe cinema is the pre-eminent art form of our time, both in its beauty and its degradation.

So every now and then, we’ll lean back, dim the lights and stop to take a long look at a key cinematic work, from ancient classics to modern blockbusters, to ask what light it might shed on this project’s focus: the presence of a sacred dimension in our lives – or lack of it.

I want to begin with Oppenheimer, not just because it’s an intriguing work in itself but because it has so much bearing on what I believe to be one of the most important issues of our time: the world’s stumble towards nuclear war.

Stop for a second and think how extraordinary that is. Director Christopher Nolan had wanted to make a film on this subject for decades. The project was green lit before the world had any intimations that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine. Yet it arrives at exactly the moment when that war has made it more relevant than ever, as we all face renewed threats from what Oppenheimer calls the “divine force” of nuclear weapons. For these timings to work out is like firing an arrow up into space only for it to fall back to earth years later and hit a bullseye.

This often happens with works of art; projects that have gestated unseen sometimes for decades appear just when we most need them. It’s my proposition that such moments are not an accident or coincidence. That’s the Mystery at work. It is trying to communicate something. But what?

Before we get stuck in, I should say that I know from hard experience how easy it is for people to throw tomatoes from the stands rather than face the bull in the ring. I have a lot of sympathy with the view that you shouldn’t judge another’s creative endeavours; instead support any artist doing their best to make something of meaning. In that light, the only appropriate response is surely just to salute Nolan for bringing such a difficult subject to the screen and engaging such a huge audience. Bravo.

But wait. Given that Nolan is so greatly fêted and that he is one of a tiny handful of filmmakers who would be trusted with the millions necessary to tell this story, it is surely also fair for us to expect a certain minimum standard in his work: that he will see the story’s real essence, understand what it means for his audience, and impart that truth in a way that they will carry it beyond the theatre and into their lives.

Would it be too much to suggest, given the potential significance of this story for us at this moment, that such expectations are more than just an idealistic wish but reflect a profound and solemn duty? For the story is not Nolan’s personal plaything; it belongs to humanity as a whole. At a deep level, we entrust it to him on the basis that he will tell it right.

You can probably tell already I believe he failed in that duty.

The quick response is, well that’s just your opinion. We live in a time where everyone has an opinion, which we are all free to dismiss if it runs counter to our own. There is no absolute truth; it is all relative. I disagree: only a culture as broken, as lost, as uprooted as our own could believe that. 

Because like it or not, quality exists. Beauty, truth, they do exist in a way that can transcend our individualistic tastes or culture. Of course, you cannot define them. Like a rainbow, you cannot touch them, cannot take hold of them in your hands through strict definitions or categorisation. Yet that does not mean they are not real. You feel them when they’re there. And I would argue those are the qualities that inspire our love of certain works of art or the deep connections we make with our favourite books or films. For me, I encounter it in films as far apart as Pan’s Labyrinth and La Grande Bellezza, in The Virgin Suicides and Seven Samurai. That’s why we say they touch our hearts. As many ancient cultures attest, the heart is the organ of perception for things that the intellect cannot reach.

Our fact-based culture struggles with such qualities because they defy quantification. We prefer to point to things that can be measured. In film terms, that means things like number of screens on which a film opens, how long it stays in the cinemas or, best of all, box office takings. Money has become our supreme value, overriding more pesky intangibles like integrity, beauty or soul. So the papers celebrate when Oppenheimer hits almost a billion dollars in revenue, nine times more than it cost to make, as that means it must be good when in fact the film and indeed such reporting itself only provides further evidence of our degeneracy.

I should say that previous drafts of this essay included sections on Nolan’s ridiculously white male take on a story that involved the lives of so many men and women of different colours and cultures around the world. Some have excused this failing by claiming it is technically brilliant; it’s not. Previous drafts also went into a long breakdown of the technical reasons why Nolan’s work fails, from the pacing to the music to the way it assumes knowledge in its audience. It’s something I feel qualified to discuss, as I spent most of my filmmaking life trying to turn real life stories into compelling documentary films. In that light, Nolan makes a whole series of rookie errors, the kind documentary makers learn to avoid right at the start of their careers. Here’s a sample:

Any film clocking in at three hours better be sure every minute of that marathon is necessary. Here it is clearly not. Nolan blunders by doing what an old boss of mine called “covering the waterfront”, trying to cram in all the history of Oppenheimer’s biography rather than select what really matters. We’re 43 minutes in before the real story of the Manhattan project actually gets going.

That means there are almost no scenes in this first three quarters of an hour. There are just clips of speech, stapled together with breathless cuts. The clips are almost all of the same curt duration so that the pace is both relentless and monotonous; there is no shifting rhythm, which is the way a skilful filmmaker communicates to an audience what is significant and what is less so. As a result, confusion reigns.

A dead giveaway is the music. Again, a basic trick taught at the start of any filmmaking career is that if you have a lot of material that is fundamentally boring, full of facts not feeling, if you lack any real scenes or ways to engage an audience’s emotions, the last resort is to paper music across the cracks, hoping to create the illusion of emotion and coherence. Oppenheimer ‘s music is incessant throughout for precisely this reason.

And more: the film is constantly telling us things, not showing them, another basic violation of cinematic storytelling. I lost count of the significant events that were reported through dialogue, with images used as wallpaper to cover them. This approach is unavoidable in documentary filmmaking, where interviews are so often the only way to tell key parts of a story. But we always try to keep it to a minimum and use “actuality” or real unfolding scenes where possible. The joy of scripted filmmaking it that it allows you to go beyond such limitations, and actually show not tell the audience what has happened. The kindest interpretation is that Nolan has forgotten this basic tenet.

Honestly, I could go on and on. This is barely the half of it. Yet trying to include all the failings and mistakes made this essay thousands of words long! So I decided to do what Nolan himself failed to do: focus on the heart of the tale.

Not for nothing is the Director of a film called the guardian of the story. It is her or his job to hold its essence in mind amid the countless competing perspectives of all the people involved in making a film, so that the core qualities at stake are conveyed to the audience through the screen.

In the case of Oppenheimer, the essence of this story is surely easy to see. A man driven by both egotistical ambition and the noble desire to defeat the evil of Nazism ushers into the world a force powerful enough to bring about mankind’s own destruction. He spends the rest of his life trying to come to terms and atone for what he has done. It is the story of a human claiming the power of the Gods and the consequences of that transgression. The film is based on a book called American Prometheus, suggesting the original authors at least understood the mythic architecture that lies beneath this human life.

I think it is obvious that Nolan misses the point from the epigraph right at the start of his film. For though he mentions Prometheus’s theft of fire, he goes on to emphasise the eternal torture decreed as punishment for this transgression. This illustrates Nolan’s focal point in this story is on Oppenheimer the man, and the ill-treatment he suffered, not the original theft of divine power itself. Through Nolan’s lens, the consequences for humanity will play second if not third fiddle to the personal troubles of one individual. Brilliant that individual may be but in that simple choice of focus, Nolan hollows out his project.

The choice means a vast amount of screen time is devoted to Oppenheimer’s supposed “persecution” for his tangential communist links and the veracity of the accusations. Even more time is devoted to the architect of this character assassination, an unknown historical personage called Admiral Strauss. But there’s a problem here: what actually is at stake? Nothing more than Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Nolan does his best to invest this administrative detail with huge symbolic significance, portraying its revocation as akin to the annihilation of Oppenheimer’s reputation. It’s a stretch to put it politely.

Because honestly how can we care, why should we care, what does any of that really matter when we are talking about the annihilation of two Japanese cities, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the unleashing of the force that could lead to the deaths of tens of millions more, including in a terrible irony all the people watching at the cinema?

Many have pointed out that Nolan deliberately excludes any real images of the impact of Oppenheimer’s “work” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seen in the light of Nolan’s focus this becomes something greater than the sin of omission; rather, it becomes the crime of manipulation.

For if the audience were confronted with the images of the victims, their sympathy with Nolan’s hero and his various bureaucratic challenges would evaporate as fast as the innocent people caught in the bomb’s hypocentre. Oh, Oppenheimer had a rough few days at the office did he? Poor guy. Contrast that with the fate of this schoolgirl burned in the Hiroshima blast:

I am sorry to confront you with such a devastating image. However I have long believed that withholding such images is an act of condescension, infantilising the audience. No, this is too much for you, the filmmaker says, I know what’s best for you. Yet without that crucial visual evidence presented, how can an audience reach a fair conclusion on the decisions a character has made in a story?

This was the principal that underpinned Waad al-Kateab’s and my decision to show the devastating scenes of destruction that she had captured in Aleppo to the audience of For Sama, including images of children who had been killed by the Assad regime and their Russian allies. For how could audiences understand the agony of her own dilemma – whether to stay in the city or not – unless they could share in the visceral nature of the threat to her daughter that she had to face every day?

Every time Nolan has an opportunity to present the broader human context, he prioritises Oppenheimer’s suffering. So when a slideshow of the destruction is presented off camera, it’s Oppenheimer’s face we focus on, his anguish we’re invited to sympathise with. Even in the actual last minute, when Nolan makes his first reference to the present tense danger of a global nuclear war, it’s in the context of a nightmarish vision inside his hero’s head, one that shuts off as soon as Oppenheimer closes his eyes. Throughout, Nolan’s storytelling is interested in a single man, not mankind.

I believe Oppenheimer himself would have baulked at this portrayal. He had a strong sense of the cosmic scale of the transgression at Los Alamos. This awareness is best seen at his famous citing of Hindu scripture in an interview about the Trinity test. In a single minute it says more than Nolan does in three hours:

Contrast the weight, the power of that statement with the way Nolan first uses it in his film: as a bizarre overlay to a gratuitous sex scene, severed from the actual Trinity test by well over an hour of screen time. Doing so not only deprives the words of their real resonance; it betrays a colonial attitude to the holiest of holy Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita, which Nolan is happy to debase, stripping it of any significance other than as evidence of Oppenheimer’s scholarly learning.

Adrift from its appropriate context, Nolan fails to honour the insight and understanding of the man who this whole film is designed to laud, a failing that is not rectified by hearing the disembodied words repeated again over the test itself.

Contrast also Oppenheimer’s description of what actually happened at the Trinity test with Nolan’s portrayal. In the film, we see no-one cry and hardly anyone silent; they swiftly all break into conventional cheering and whooping. Oppenheimer is then born aloft on the shoulders of his co-workers carried before the American flag, as a glorious hero. I watched this shot in amazement: there was no irony there at all.

A storyteller with heart would know that the Trinity bomb test should be the turning point for Oppenheimer as a character, the point at which his life undergoes a total shift in direction. Usually a revelation of this magnitude occurs halfway through a film, the midpoint in screenwriting shorthand. It is often the fulcrum around which the whole film pivots, where the protagonist’s priorities decisively change. Often the change is from personal ambition, the desires of the ego, to acts of wider service to the community as a whole - or what you might dare to call values of the soul.

Oppenheimer’s real life perfectly lends itself to this structure. Yet Nolan makes a mess of it. Rather than using the Trinity bomb test as the hinge around which his story turns, the test occurs two thirds of the way through. And though we do see scenes of a chastened and doubtful Oppenheimer afterwards, these scenes are lost amid a deluge of further dull, distracting and befuddled sequences around the security clearance hearing and Strauss’s vendetta.

We are told that Oppenheimer tried to campaign for a safer world but we hardly see this on screen, other than the mild objections we see him raise to the development of the hydrogen bomb. If we do not see it, in cinema terms, it effectively did not happen. So Oppenheimer’s real life arc of repentance is muddied and lost in this portrayal.

Thus, when granted the chance to tell a story of great meaning, Nolan failed. He created a piece of work that is unenduring. For why would you ever return to this? What human truth or beauty is revealed here? Nothing. It is heartless.

But the sad truth is that doesn’t matter to anyone in power in the biz; the box office does. In defying the marketing logic and making so much money with a supposedly intelligent film, Nolan is unassailable. We will undoubtedly be forced to watch him triumph at all the awards, just another Emperor with new clothes. Our culture is full of them.

Yet this metric and the film’s success depends on people Nolan gives little thought to: his audience. For I think there is another reason why audiences have still flocked to a film that is so manifestly poor, other than the blind adulation of the critics.

I believe people across the world find themselves called to watch this film without quite knowing why. Subconsciously we sense danger, like rats detecting the stirrings of a leak on board ship. That danger is close, closer than we are being told, like an asteroid about to skim the Earth that our scientists either have not seen yet or deny exists. In our depths, a part of us knows nuclear weapons are a force that is present in our lives again – and the threat is different now from the past, in ways we cannot quite understand.

So we go to Oppenheimer to try to make sense of these intuitions, perhaps to understand a little better the mysterious fear that screams silently at our senses. Sadly little insight is on offer. As noted already, Nolan throws in a nod to the implications for us all at the very last minute, but it is little more than an afterthought. Perhaps he has a suspicion that if the worst comes to pass, he’ll be fine, tucked up in a bunker with some of his multimillionaire friends. It is us, the audience, who will have to face the final settling of accounts with his hero’s transgression.

I cannot help but feel that this film is more than just an artistic failure. It is a betrayal of trust, of duty. A betrayal of us. No-one before and likely for long after will have the opportunity Nolan did to make us face the reality of the horror of nuclear weapons anew in our times. Perhaps if had done his job, we might then have been led to ask why we need them at all, whether they belong to a time in the past, not our own. Who knows where such questions might have led.

All Nolan had to do was follow his own character’s lead, to show not conceal what these weapons mean, what they do, what they are. And at a deeper level, I believe he was being asked to make the change always demanded by a midpoint revelation: to shift the orientation of his priorities from selfish ego concerns to an acceptance of his wider responsibility to the human community as a whole. To make his work an act of service. Ironically, his failure in this will deprive him of any chance to be truly great. The opportunity squandered, we his audience leave the theatre unenlightened, with nothing to take home but our foreboding.

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Well, that’s it for this first cheery instalment of Film Club! You’ll probably be delighted to hear that I’ll stop talking about nuclear weapons soon. Next time, we’ll close out the Rising of the Storm series by looking at where we stand today. Then I’m delighted to say we may move on to some brighter fragments.

But one last thing, if you don’t mind me asking. Many of you have been kind enough to respond to my essays directly via email or text, sharing your thoughts or criticisms. It would be wonderful if you felt comfortable enough to leave your comments and reactions below, on the essay itself, so others can join in the conversation and I can convince people – maybe even myself – that I’m not shouting into a void.

So I’ll look forward to hearing your reactions to this one. Until next time.

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Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.  
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know  
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Extract from The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.

The Usual Suspects (1995) dir. Bryan Singer

Here’s the audio version of this essay:

Leaving the oasis of the last essay behind, we face the desert of the world once more. The stirrings of hope have not dissipated; in just the last fortnight the Syrian revolution has shown tentative signs of reigniting.

Yet heaviness has returned to my heart too. Much looks bleak, from the messianic fervour surrounding Donald Trump’s possible comeback to the burning winter of the southern hemisphere, devastating the baby chicks of Emperor penguins.

Indeed, it is horror that has touched me most acutely during the course of writing this. Human Rights Watch reported that Saudi border guards are slaughtering refugees trying to reach the Kingdom, even using mortars against columns of unarmed men, women and children. It’s a story that means a lot to me as I traced this exodus in a documentary over a decade ago (you can watch it here).

I still remember the dignity of those Ethiopians and Somalis I met who had endured such extraordinary hardship on their flight from the Horn of Africa, across the Gulf of Aden, only then to face the long walk across the desert to cross the mountains between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

The idea that the Saudi regime is busy funnelling tens of millions to already overpaid sports stars in the West while machine-gunning some of the poorest people on earth at the last stage of an already pitiless journey defies belief. Yet paradoxically it is also too easy to believe; it seems to encapsulate the spirit of our times: the cruelty; the inhumanity; the insanity.

It is here that the mission of these Fragments, and all other efforts to gain a postsecular perspective, becomes urgent and essential. For I have an inkling that these atrocities cannot solely be blamed on “bad people” or a “bad regime”, as much as those things do play a part.

Instead, something deeper is at work, something that may lie behind all the barbarity that is increasingly manifesting across our planet, from the Ukrainian steppe to the slopes of the Sarawut mountains. I believe the roots of these horrors lie in the spiritual or sacred dimension of reality.

Of course, even to the spiritually minded this could seem far-fetched. Yet if we look at our own history, in the light of these Fragments, we can see it has happened before.

Indeed the historical example is so glaring and obvious, it is testament to our determined secular blindness that we fail to see it. Yet in doing so, by failing to identify the forces of the spiritual realm that drove this historical catastrophe, we fail to heed the true warning of the past.

I am of course talking about Hitler and the Nazis.

Spare me the eye rolls. It is another of our civilization’s blind spots that this most devastating epoch of humanity’s history is now fit for nothing but comic book portrayals like Jojo Rabbit or sensationalist late night TV junk like Nazi Megastructures. It feels that the book of scholarship has closed on the Nazi regime; what more could there be to say? Well, seen through a postsecular lens, a hell of a lot.

We believe that the disaster of Nazism arose because of a specific set of rationally identifiable historical factors, unique to their time and place. As long as these do not repeat again, we believe we are safe. What we fail to see is that the deeper forces that lay behind those events have not gone away, have not changed their nature and are in fact, constantly seeking new paths to manifestation that would bring about similar bloodshed today.

The spiritual trappings of Nazism are of course impossible to ignore: the swastika itself was once a eastern holy symbol. In his book Black Sun, the pre-eminent historian of the influence of mystical ideas under the Nazis, Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke wrote:

The religious and mythic elements of German National Socialism often made the Third Reich resemble a cult in power… huge congregations, banners, sacred flames, a style of popular and radical preaching, prayers-and-responses, were all essential props for the cult of race and nation. The messianic figure of Adolf Hitler, the saviour of Germany, towered over the whole project.

Goodrich-Clarke recognises that after the war, it was easy to look at this regime and its atrocities “outside of a purely secular frame of reference. Nazism was felt to be the embodiment of evil in a modern twentieth-century regime.” In particular, “the destructiveness of Nazism and the macabre irrationality of the Holocaust begged a religious interpretation involving a dualistic war in heaven, satanic inspiration and the use of dark forces.”

Goodrich-Clarke dismisses these ideas as “fanciful demonisation”. And they have indeed led to all sorts of lurid stories and films about Nazi Satanism and Hitler and his generals’ pursuit of occult artefacts or secret Tibetan texts, most of which is obviously bunkum. Other writers make the valid point that “to blame Nazism on otherworldly forces is to exonerate the prosaic causes that brought Hitler to power in the first place.”

These dismissals are all underpinned by the same central assumption: such forces cannot and do not exist. Therefore any suggestion of Hitler’s connection to them is logically false. If one adopts a different assumption, the one that underpins these Fragments – that something is there, even if we do not know what it is – things look very different.

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In the endless analysis that has been done about Hitler’s regime, historians always face two significant analytical “leaps” that do not lend themselves easily to rational explanation. The first is how a man who was a lowly, down-and-out artist before the First World War could, in the space of three decades, rise to become unassailable dictator of one of the most powerful countries in Europe – the sort of fantastic transformation that belongs more to myth rather than history.

The second is the difference often noted by contemporaries between the Hitler of ordinary life and that of the frenzied orator and Führer of the masses. Those not under his spell encountered, often to their surprise, a small, pallid, almost comical figure, one who in private often seemed boorish, inconsistent and petty, who had little interest in detail and spent hours lazing about, lost in fantasies or even asleep. They simply could not reconcile this mediocre person with the catastrophic magnitude of his influence and his power over a population of millions.

Facing the first of these mysteries, rational historians ascribe Hitler’s rise to various influences that are beyond dispute: the harsh treatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar hyperinflation crisis or the economic devastation engendered by the Great Crash of 1929. In so doing, as I have said, they root their explanations in specific conditions of time and place. Yet Albert Speer, who has long been regarded as one of the sanest members of the Nazi leader’s inner circle, rebuts such explanations:

The whole demonic figure of the man can never be explained simply as the product of these events [WWI and the aftermath for Germany]. They could just as easily have found expression in a national leader of mediocre stature. For Hitler was one of those inexplicable historical phenomena which emerge at rare intervals among mankind. His person determined the fate of the nation…The nation was spellbound by him as a people has rarely been in the whole of history.

For Speer therefore the first mystery is only explicable through the second: Hitler’s unique nature. Yet here rational historians are at more of a loss to explain how such a personally underwhelming human being could have commanded such power. So you will often see references to Hitler’s “charisma”, as if that single word explained it all. Yet one would expect “charisma” in the modern sense of the word to be an engrained personal trait, as alive round the dinner table as in the auditorium. That definitely does not seem to be true in Hitler’s case.

The word “charisma” itself may hold a clue. For it has a second definition beyond the commonplace modern usage. It can refer to “divinely conferred power or talent”. Long before Hitler, famed German sociologist Max Weber defined it as “the quality of a personality held to be out of the ordinary (and originally thought to have magical sources) on account of which the person is evaluated as being gifted with supernatural or superhuman powers not accessible to everybody.”

Inadvertently therefore, even a rationalist’s use of the “charisma” explanation may point to otherworldly roots of Hitler’s influence and power. Indeed, many of Hitler’s contemporaries found themselves turning to the language of magic and mysticism in order to convey the impression he made.

One of the finest of many examples of this comes from the pioneer of modern psychology Carl Jung. In an interview with an American journalist in 1938, he said:

With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with a nation?

In another article, written in 1936, Jung wrote that the ancient spiritual force he believed was being channelled through Hitler was the old Germanic God Wotan:

An ancient god of storm and frenzy has awoken, like an extinct volcano, to new activity in a civilized country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages… 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 – [Wotan] is really the only explanation.

This is hugely significant for anyone who arrives from a postsecular perspective and takes the existence of such forces seriously. For it finally offers an explanation to bridge the gap between the apparently mediocre man and the magnitude of the force that he commanded. As Jung puts it:

Hitler is like a man who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a whispered voice from a mysterious source and then acts upon them. In our case, even if occasionally our unconscious does reach us through dreams, we have too much rationality, too much cerebrum to obey it – but Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always led. We can see it work in him. He himself has referred to his Voice… Hitler’s power is not political – it is magic.

Jung has a significant corroborating witness for his conclusions: Hitler himself.

Throughout his life, Hitler was explicit about the power and presence of this inner “Voice”. He credited it with saving his life in the trenches of the First World War, when the Voice told him to move away from where his comrades were eating, all of whom were killed when a mortar landed on their position seconds later. Moments like this convinced Hitler he was being protected by a divine source that he named Providence, which was not only preserving him for a special destiny but granting him extraordinary powers.

He talked about this presence openly in hundreds of speeches and official state communiqués. For example, during an open air speech before a massive audience at Würzburg in 1937, Hitler declared:

However weak each single man finally is in his being and actions before almighty Providence and Its will, he will become immeasurably strong the moment he acts in accordance with this Providence. Then a force pours down into him, which is the hallmark of all great personalities the world has known. And when I look back on the five years we have behind us, then I think that I may say: ‘This was not the work of men alone!’

A psychological profile of Hitler carried out by the CIA in 1943 also came to the conclusion that, in order to understand the Hitler phenomenon, one had to take into account his profound faith in his divine powers:

A survey of all the evidence forces us to conclude that Hitler believes himself destined to become an Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be the New Deliverer of Germany and the Founder of a new social order for the world. He firmly believes this and is certain that in spite of all the trials and tribulations through which he must pass he will finally attain that goal. The one condition is that he follow the dictates of the inner voice that have guided and protected him in the past.

Even military figures, who might be expected to be more sober in their assessments, repeatedly echoed the same feeling. SS-General Walter Schellenberg wrote in his memoirs: “Hitler was ruled by the demonic forces driving him…” Ulrich de Maizière, a General Staff Officer, testified: “A difficult to describe demonic power emanated from Hitler, and few were able not to fall under his spell. It was an influence which affected all soldiers in the same way and which is difficult to understand if one has not experienced it oneself.”

Another fascinating if controversial contemporary account was written by Hermann Rauschning, a high-ranking member of the German nobility, who wrote even before the outbreak of war that:

Hitler was abandoning himself to forces which were carrying him away – forces of dark and destructive violence. He imagined that he still had freedom of choice but he had long been in bondage to a magic which might have been described, not only in metaphor but in literal fact – as that of evil spirits.

For decades, in our materialist culture, no-one would take such an assertion seriously. Yet a postsecular view suggests that such impressions are within the bounds of possibility: that they may be real. The understanding offered by such a perspective takes us back to the intuitions of our ancestors: that such a man may have become possessed or acting as a channel for an immaterial being. In this case, one characterised by savagery and violence.  

Further disturbing evidence came to light in a study carried out in 2003 of the books that Hitler had in his library. He owned more than 130 books on religious and spiritual subjects, in many of which he had highlighted sections of significance to him. One of the most heavily-marked was a mysterious volume by Dr. Ernst Schertel called “Magic: History, Theory, and Practice.”

Hitler’s annotations here are deeply revealing. The book harkened back to a time before institutional Christianity had decreed a universal morality to when the “rule of life was given by the will of the tribal God.” The god or his channel could govern in an “utterly autocratic fashion” and demand “blood and destruction”. In another place Hitler had underscored “all men of genius possessed the ability to harness demonic forces”. The book went on to articulate ways in which such forces could be contacted and harnessed.

There is far more evidence available; this essay can only provide a snapshot. I have listed works by historians brave enough to pursue this analysis at the end of this essay.

Yet accepting this explanation for Hitler’s power is challenging even to those who accept the reality of a spiritual dimension to life. Modern spirituality has a tendency to see all spiritual forces as inherently good, only twisted or maligned by human abuse or neglect. This is the viewpoint portrayed in the film Moana, which I discussed last time.

Surprisingly, some ancient religions echo this perspective. The wrath of the God of the Old Testament, for example, is usually provoked by the arrogance of humanity, who have neglected to worship and honour him. Greek literature and myth too is replete with stories of the devastating anger of the Gods. Yet it is always in response to defiance or neglect by humans who have become enamoured with their own power and forgotten their rightful, humble place. Our modern word “hubris” is in fact the ancient Greek term for this state of prideful being.

Yet I am not convinced that this perspective accounts for the force that moved through Hitler. One might, at a stretch, accept how the sacred presence, slighted and ignored, might visit us with disasters, even floods or fires, to remind us of its power. But would it really resort to the sort of cruelty we saw perpetrated by the Nazis? The impossible industrial barbarity of the Holocaust or the sadism of the experiments on human prisoners? In my heart, I feel something else must be at work.

This is the feeling Yeats encountered and captured in his poem “The Second Coming”, which is perhaps quoted more often than any other to encapsulate our times. Yet it is interesting that the famous lines of the first verse are what modern writers tend to focus on: “things fall apart”, “the centre cannot hold” or “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I have deliberately left this verse out above to highlight the often overlooked second verse.

It is this part of the poem that connects with what I am tentatively proposing: that in the spirit realm, there are things – entities, presences, forces, their exact nature will always be unknowable – that are, in plain fact, evil. That now, in a reversal of the Christian vision of a Second Coming, we are instead witnessing the coming into the world of an infernal presence, one whose birth is bringing about a new era of brutality and devastation.

Next time, in the fourth and final essay of this series, I will attempt to highlight the evidence that I believe shows such a force may be present in our midst. Of course, these assertions will strike many of you as absurd. Yet it is useful always to remember that few people recognised the true nature of the Hitler regime until right after the end of the war when the horror of the Holocaust was revealed.

One of the few who did pinpoint the essence of Nazism early on was the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth who wrote in his diary in 1933:

People have not yet understood, not even today, that National Socialism is not a political but an infernal movement. It cannot change its intentions because from the first only one intention was instilled into it according to the unfathomable will of the Eternal: the intention to destroy. The man [i.e. Hitler] is one of the hundred thousand tails of Satan, the scourges of God. Every word from his mouth is spoken by the tongue of Lucifer personally.

Roth died just before the Second World War began and therefore did not live to see how his intuitions over Nazism would be proved right. Yet as early as 1934 he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel whose warnings may be useful to us today. It was called “The Antichrist” (though he was Jewish) and sought to show that:

The Antichrist has come: so disguised that we who have been expecting him for years cannot recognise him. Already he lives in our midst, among us… Long has he been pouring poison into the innocent souls of our children. But we do not notice! For we have been struck with blindness, with the blindness that it is written will befall us at the end of time. In fact, for a long time now we have not been able to recognise the name and face of things that we encounter… So we who have been blinded make ourselves believe that the Antichrist is not in the world, that we are not burning in the fire of his eyes, that we are not standing in the shadow of his wings.

Perhaps Roth and Yeats are right. Perhaps there are things on the move, things whose names we have forgotten or do not take seriously any more. They are recorded in stories we tell to our children before we tuck them into bed, yet when we close the covers and put the book away, we are confident that those presences remain on the shelf, not out here in our adult world of mortgages and emails and glasses of white wine.

Perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps the stories speak of something that will not stay confined between the leaves of the book. A presence seeping from our nightmares into the real world.

In the next essay, I will show you why I think that may be the case: to offer some of the evidence that I believe shows that presence in the shadows; to try to cure us of the blindness that Roth spoke of, before it is too late.

Further reading:

-        Kurlander, Eric. Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (2017)

-        Redles, David. Hitler’s Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation (2005)

-        Sickinger, Raymond. Hitler and the Occult: The Magical Thinking of Adolf Hitler (2004) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.0022-3840.2000.3402_107.x  

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Our road may have to take a great swerve, that seems like a retrogression… We must make a great swerve in our onward-going life-course now, to gather up again the savage mysteries… But this does not mean going back on ourselves. We can’t go back.

D H Lawrence

They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well

Here is the audio for this essay:

Cry Havoc

Tomorrow, my family and I will fly into the arms of Charon, the mythical boatman who ferries souls across the River Styx to the land of the dead. At least, that is the nickname given to the worst heatwave ever to occur in Italy’s history. It comes hard on the heels of Cerberus, another heatwave given a mythic title, this time the three-headed dog that guards the gates of the underworld. Europe’s extreme onslaughts of heat now have far more epic identities than storms, who have had to settle for more prosaic names like Colin, Betsy and Eunice. This trend began in 2017 with an anticyclone of high pressure simply called “Lucifer”.

Of course, you might just ascribe the dramatic christening of these infernos to typical media sensationalism. I believe there may be something more going on. For a student of the unseen like me, such names do not enter our consciousness by accident just because someone thought they sounded cool. Instead, they suggest that part of us, though forgotten, is still able to tune into a deeper understanding of these disasters, to pick up on something genuinely mythic in their essence. This awareness hints that their causes may be more complicated than statistics on carbon emissions or scientific papers on the fluctuations of the jet stream would suggest.

It is not just the heatwaves straight out of hell: in the fortnight since my last essay, the chaos of our planet’s climate has intensified in the most extraordinary way. Unprecedented rainstorms have struck places as far away as New York, Spain, India and Japan; two months of rain fell on Vermont in just two days; on 4^th July the planet was hotter than it has been in over 100,000 years.

This is all happening faster, sooner and in more erratic ways than any of the models predicted. Again, this confirms my conviction that we have far from a full understanding of what is going on.

For this reason, I decided this time to take a break from my Rising of the Storm series, the rather gloomy excavation of the irrational in our world’s geopolitics. In this essay, I wish to offer an oasis from the searing heat and chaos out there. A chance to breathe before we continue our journey.

At the Dawn

As we sit by the water, in the oasis’s cool shade, you may still feel despair in thinking of the ravaged desert outside to which we must return. I’ve seen this in many of the climate activists or scientists whose work I follow: a sense that the disaster they’ve long warned of is now upon us; that it’s only going to get worse; and yet our society’s response is to more desperately deny it, double down on the profits of extracting more fossil fuels or to literally pull our cars over to punch activists in the head.

I know those feelings of despair well. Yet strangely, despite all the disasters piling up, I do not despair any more. For though I do not have anything more than the first inklings of answers yet, I feel deep in my heart that somehow this work, this Fragments of Light project and others like it, holds the promise of a path out of this mess, though probably as tenuous and fragile as Ariadne’s string leading through the labyrinth.

Part of that hope comes from the discovery that I am not alone. Indeed, there is even a respectable sounding theory for what this project is trying to do, to restore recognition and connection to a sacred side of reality: the theory of postsecularism.

I know jargon like this can make the mind glaze over. It’s hardly a word to inspire a heroic assault on the castle walls – “Once more for postsecularism, dear friends, once more!” – yet its implications are genuinely revolutionary.

Wikipedia defines it as “a range of theories regarding the persistence or resurgence of religious beliefs or practices in the present.” The term was coined by an eminent German philosopher and social theorist, Jurgen Habermas, initially as a response to the attacks of September 11^th 2001. Islamist-inspired terrorism showed people were still willing to wreak havoc and die in the name of beliefs that our Western rationality and science should have rendered irrelevant.

Yet it was not only in sociology or politics that the sacred seems resurgent. A surprising number of disciplines are coming into contact with phenomena that can only make sense through a framework that is more mystical in nature.

Australian academic David Tacey wrote in his seminal book, “The Postsecular Sacred” that:

As the new sense of the sacred emerges as much from philosophy and science as it does from theology, the secular arsenal is rendered incapable of dismissing it in the way it would like… As Derrida and others have commented, when postsecularity posits the ‘return of the religious’, it is by no means clear what it is that returns, because the cultural forms are not established. We are dealing with a nascent, pre-formed phenomenon.

The argument is, in a nutshell, that the sacred is an essential aspect of reality, independent of the institutions that lay claim to it. That is why so many different disciplines of human exploration bump up against it. Called or uncalled, God is present, as the oracle at Delphi would put it.

For the last three hundred years since the Enlightenment, we have tried to shed old belief systems that we believed to be superstitious and unscientific. Yet though more people than ever in Britain say they are of “no religion”, increasingly we have to face the fact that the worldview that underpinned those systems has its roots in reality. Like it or not, the postsecular is coming your way. Tacey again:

The postsecular is not merely another fad or popular fashion. It is something that is being forced on us by powers beyond our control… What we find hard to grasp, especially those coming from a humanist perspective, is that the sacred is not just a human construct but an autonomous reality in which we live and move and have our being… it is not a matter of our choosing.

Our situation seems to me to be captured in the Turner picture Dawn After The Wreck above. We too stand on a deserted shore after the wreck in the night. The beach is empty; few traces of the lost ship remain. Yet like the lone dog on the sand, we stand barking out to sea, calling to what we feel is still there, though now disappeared beneath the waves.

We do not know how long we will have to wait, watching the tides come and go. Yet the sliver of moon visible in the first light offers the promise that something watches over our vigil. What was once known in the night will rise into our consciousness once more. So we stand at the dawn.

Return of the Jedi

Yet there is a fundamental challenge at the heart of this work: even in the unlikely event you are open to its existence, we have no certainty over what “It” - the sacred, spiritual or divine dimension of life - is, let alone have language to describe it. Tacey suggests:

Religion has morphed into something other than what it was; heaven is not a place in the sky but a metaphor for a transcendence found in creation, God is not a magisterial being out there but the incarnational spirit of the world, the cosmology of religion has been deconstructed, and a mystical vision of the closeness of the sacred has replaced the distant divinity of the past….

This is his take and it certainly captures common themes among modern believers, whether quantum physicists or followers of an established tradition. Yet with the disintegration of a shared framework of meaning that the church once represented, we are free to pick, mix and agree with whatever we like or even create our own personal forms.

So some, like esteemed writers on this platform, have chosen to excavate back through established traditions, trying to find a form that felt like it had an authentic connection to “It”. That seems to be why more and more ex-Christians are turning to the Orthodox church. Others seek to find authentic expression through ancient Eastern religions like Buddhism, Zen or the Hindu pantheon, while those who prefer something closer to home yet non-Christian have turned to visions of Celtic paganism or their interpretation of indigenous shamanism, often seen as our ancestors’ universal religion.

It’s interesting that in the absence of tradition, everyone still looks to the past, seeking the credibility won by centuries for their point of view. No-one seems to heed the words of D H Lawrence in the epigraph – “we can’t go back” – and have the gumption to seek a new form.

It was exactly this situation that led me to use “the Force” as a concept in my Introduction. Flippant or ridiculous it may seem, but it is at least a metaphor which speaks to our modern culture and age while wearing its associations lightly, without hundreds of years of hypocrisy or murder to its name.

Of course much of how the Force is envisaged in the films is hokum, a problem that grew worse the more George Lucas tried to define it. One only has to look at the soulless confusion of the franchise’s last incarnations to know that whatever echoes of truth may have been present at the beginning, they are now definitively lost.

Yet in at least one vital way the Force offers a more sophisticated imagining of the sacred “Other” than many other modern forms, as it includes the notion that It – whatever It is – has a dark side.

This understanding was the life project of another pioneer of the postsecular (though he did not call it that) the psychotherapist Carl Jung, whose book Answer to Job sought to replace the one-sided Christian God image with one that encompassed evil within it:

If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of God if the Godhead himself attends to only one half of him?

That’s why, for now, I will hold to the Force as a metaphor.

Holy Communion

Of course, living your life, you may not readily come into contact with the kind of quantum science, depth psychology or even psychedelic research that might lead to the view that postsecular understanding is essential.

For you, the notion that there was a ship lost at sea at all is a delusion, perhaps a projection of what we wish were true. You see the endless waves of an indifferent sea and conclude nothing lies in the depths of the water. To think otherwise you believe to be outlandish, if not insane.

In truth, from the start of this project you are the ones I’ve been talking to. Even though I knew my readership covered the spectrum from diehard sceptics to true believers, I assumed the majority of my first readers would be in the former camp, given my background in film-making and journalism. It’s probably still true. After all, that is the accepted wisdom of our times.

For that reason, I believed it was more important to try to open your minds to the possibilities, rather than those who already had some notion of the sacred, as that would be the best way I could contribute to a shift in our culture.

Interestingly, by addressing my writing predominantly to the sceptical end of the spectrum, it may have fallen somewhat flat with the believers. “Yeah and?” Some said, “We already know all of this. What is your point?”

And in spite of my efforts, the sceptics remained bewildered by even my gentlest hints of a lost transcendental truth and felt much more comfortable with the more journalistic approach adopted in the last two essays.

Perhaps therefore by trying to talk to everyone, I did not speak effectively to anyone.

I have come to realise that in taking this approach, I have had to water down some of my ideas and be more tentative in making assertions. This draws from a character trait that will be familiar to many of you too: people-pleasing; the fear of rejection, ridicule, or even exile for making statements that are heretical to the prevailing culture of the day.

I understand that by taking a new tack, I risk all of those things. But I’ve decided to embrace the full implications of the war cry: fuck it. From this point on, I will hold nothing back.

That is because, to labour the point, I truly believe a postsecular framework will help us to explain the unfathomable wars, ecological disasters and social disintegration that appears to be gathering steam on every side. These horrors that we bewail are all entirely comprehensible in light of the sacred, as I hope to show. But it’s even more than that: cinema, art, archaeology, politics, the mental health crisis, in fact almost every arena of modern human existence is illuminated with new understandings when seen through a postsecular lens.

At this turning point, I want to address the sceptics one last time, especially those I know personally:

I love you guys. You are some of the smartest people I know and I do not blame you for your disbelief. I am not trying to alienate you, in fact, quite the opposite. I want you to come with me. For what I advocate is not a rejection of science or materialism at all. Science has its place in unravelling the mysteries that our universe presents.

Yet science has forgotten that the sacred comes first. It is the source of the puzzles we seek to untangle and we need to rebalance our knowledge to respect that. Science and the sacred were once brothers; one of the purposes of these Fragments is to bring them back into communion with each other.

For like the left and right hemispheres of the brain, or the conscious and unconscious, the ego and soul, one cannot live without the other and it is only through the collaboration of both that we can find our way through.

For this reason, I hope you will stay with me, no matter how absurd my assertions may strike you from now on. Perhaps you could treat this project as you would Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. On reading, you step into another world, one of enchantment and mystery. Through the journey, I hope you will come to realise that this extraordinary world is in fact the one you inhabit.

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At the End of the Rainbow

Postsecular vision is filled with profound hope. For in rising above a mechanistic view of the world, far more becomes possible. To put it simply, miracles might happen. Let me give you an example, as ever inspired by a film.

In the 2016 Disney film Moana, an egotistical male demigod Maui steals the heart of the nature goddess Te Fiti so as to give mankind the power of creation. Te Fiti disintegrates and a volcanic demon Te Ka appears in her place, spreading blight and destruction over the world. In the end, Moana, the daughter of a chief, realises that the demon is Te Fiti herself, warped and corrupted without her heart. Once the heart is restored, Te Fiti returns to herself and the earth blooms once more.

The story was derived from Polynesian myths yet many of our myths or fairy-tales contain similar stories of transgressions and their dark consequences. Do not eat the fairy food; do not go into the witch’s garden; don’t touch the gold. Invariably humans always do and bring ruin down on their heads.

If you take these stories not as fantasies disconnected from real life but as clues to sacred truth, suddenly we have a new explanation for why our climate is unravelling so fast: we have broken too many of our covenants with the spirit side of the world. It has tried to be patient, given us every opportunity to change course and we have ignored it, even denied it exists. Now we face very real consequences for our lack of respect.

If truth lies in this, then it also offers hope that we can rebuild our relationship, atone for what we have done and remake our covenants once more. If we achieve this, perhaps the fires would subside and the oceans cool as fast as they have warmed. Perhaps the winds would calm, the Spirit move through the earth and a rainbow be set in the sky. Ideas for how that could be done await us down the road. For now what is important is to recognise the promise of a postsecular world.

So ends our moment in this oasis. Though it is time to move on and deep darkness lies ahead, we can perhaps face the path with renewed courage. For these understandings equip us better to know, understand and navigate some of the shadows that lie ahead.

And we can take heart; we do not do so alone.

The audio version of this essay is here:

Unforeseen Icebergs

The recent upheaval in Russia reminded me of an old screenwriting adage: no-one knows anything. Neither I nor any other of the thousands of analysts, journalists and academics who study Russia seems to have anticipated the mutiny of mercenary boss Yevgeni Prigozhin and his march on Moscow. Possibly even Prigozhin himself did not expect or intend things to fall out as they did.

A US intelligence officer tried to explain this oversight: “It’s so hard to tell how much is talk and how much is real… The tension had been building for so long without anything actually happening.” Remember these words. This essay will show how they may become relevant to others too, in time.

At heart, the mutiny seems to prove once again that life is violently unpredictable. Something similar is happening with the climate this month: the seas are heating and the ice at both poles melting faster than any model predicted. Something has shifted and invisible processes that we did not even see, let alone understand, are running away with our fate.

That truth goes to the heart of my intention with this project. Not to be “right” or predict the future; that’s impossible. Instead, I want only to expand our perceptions to take in currents of thought and belief that our culture overlooks, yet which nonetheless have power. For as I have said, an appreciation of these forces can make the inexplicable comprehensible and – if not identify the exact iceberg in our path – at least help us to know better the nature of the sea through which we sail.

Part I explored the ideology of the Katechon in Russia and the ways it might explain some of Russia’s extraordinarily violent behaviour. In Part II, I will consider three other countries who I believe may also be in the grip of wild, irrational visions that we do not heed.

The parallels with Putin are manifold, the evidence once again in plain sight: a calling back through history spanning thousands of years; the leaders’ conviction of their own historical significance; a sense of divine purpose.

As for us, the West, we stand much as we did before Ukraine: eyes shut to the nature of the danger; ears closed to the howls of warning; caught in a slumber from which we will only wake when another leader answers his inner calling and makes a calamitous leap.

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Iran’s Second Coming

The first stop is Iran and a crisis that once again has nuclear weapons at its heart.

I will briefly sketch out the background, though you’re probably familiar with it: for years, Iran has had a nuclear energy programme which it insists is purely for peaceful civilian ends, yet which many in the West suspect is cover for the development of weapons. In the last decade. a delicate diplomatic dance took place allowing the Iranians to proceed while monitoring their activity closely for signs of anything more menacing. Donald Trump cancelled that deal in 2018 and, despite recent rumours of its resurrection, it has not yet been restored.

In the years since, many suspect the Iranians intensified their progress towards weapons capability, a fear apparently confirmed in February this year when UN inspectors discovered uranium enriched to 84%, just shy of the 90% required to make a bomb. Other troubling activity has been noted, including the construction of a facility alongside one of Iran’s key nuclear sites that is buried so deep underground it is impervious to even America’s biggest conventional bombs. Iran’s hardline Islamic regime have dismissed any allegations of impropriety as a conspiracy.

You probably know too that the regime is barbaric and cruel, even poisoning hundreds of schoolgirls as a means of terrorising recent protests led by women and girls against their oppressive rule. Yet what you might not yet be aware of is that they too have an apocalyptic ideology of the End Times, with extraordinary parallels to the Russian theology of the “Katechon”, one that has possessed their religious and military elites.    

The doctrine prophesies the return of a messianic figure known as the Twelfth or Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, a vision with echoes of the Christian second coming. Just as in the Book of Revelations, the Mahdi’s return will be presaged by a time of bloodshed, disease and disaster, culminating in a final apocalyptic battle in which the forces of light will conquer those of darkness and usher in a golden age of peace.

There is significant evidence that those at the top of the Iranian regime not only embrace this vision, but believe it is their duty to pave the wave for the Mahdi’s return by challenging the evil powers that stand in his way. Just as in Russia, they see us, the West, as that evil.

Once again, thanks to the blind spot of our rationality, we ignore the doctrine’s power to our peril. Iranian analyst Saeed Ghasseminejad echoes my warnings about Russia almost exactly:

“While many experts tell us Iran is a rational, pragmatic regime like any other in the world, all the facts shout that it is not. A large number of Iranian officials and decision makers have deeply rooted apocalyptic beliefs… This apocalyptic aspect of the Islamic regime in Tehran is usually overlooked by analysts in the West probably because God is more or less dead among the elite in the West, and it is hard for them to imagine that apocalyptic religious thought can turn into actual policies pursued by the State. Ignoring it leads to misinterpretation of Tehran's decisions.”

As terrifying as this is, it is not the only mythic thinking that colours this crisis. The other, perhaps even more significant, is found in Iran’s nemesis, Israel, and its current leader Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.

Churchill’s Ghost

Israel has every reason to fear Iran. Since the 1979 revolution that put it into power, the Iranian regime has used rhetoric that would have not been out of place in Nazi Germany in terms of its hatred of Israel and the Jews. “Death to Israel” is a staple chant of government rallies. Their Supreme Leader has referred to Israel as a “cancerous tumour” that will be destroyed. The familiarity of this language may have actually lulled many observers into missing how the rise of the Mahdi doctrine has elevated the threat to new heights, for it has become a core tenet of the regime’s ideology that Israel must be eradicated before the Twelfth Imam can return.

Since the 1960s, Israel itself has possessed nuclear weapons as an ultimate guarantor of its existence, trusting that however much it may be hated, no rational state would dare attack it too forcefully for fear of annihilation. Yet, as we saw in Russia, an ideology like Mahdism sweeps those guarantees away. There is no deterrence against someone who believes they are already fighting the final, apocalyptic holy war.

Netanyahu has been obsessively warning of the threat from Iran from as far back as 1993. The country’s longest serving Prime Minister, his time in office has been marked by corruption, conflict and colonial brutality against the Palestinians. Yet the significance of even these traits may ultimately be eclipsed by his vision of his own mythic role.

Benjamin lived in the shadow of his father, Benzion, a historian whose life’s work was devoted to arguing that, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, Jews were always too slow to heed the violent omens and act to save themselves. This mantra has been thoroughly inculcated in his son who asserted in his recent autobiography:

A necessity for any living organism is the ability to identify danger in time to do something about it, a quality that was lost to our people over the course of centuries in exile. That is why I led the effort and took boundless risks to [tackle] Iran…

Netanyahu believes he personally has the responsibility to break this ancient cycle of pogrom, perhaps taking too literally the English-translation of his name: “God-given”. In an interview he gave in June 2022, he said:

“You are either charged with an historical mission or you're not. I was, and still am. And it's largely due from [my father’s] influence without a question… it's very hard to be a leader of consequence if you don't have historic purpose.”

Netanyahu sees himself as a second Winston Churchill, who spent years in the wilderness warning of the danger of Hitler when such views were deeply unpopular, yet who achieved vindication and ultimately led the forces of civilization to victory. For decades, Netanyahu has sought to characterise Iran as the Nazi Germany of the 21^st century, which would perpetrate a second holocaust if they had the means. And as we have seen, he may not be wrong.

Yet his vision goes beyond even that. In echoes of the doctrines of the Mahdi or Katechon, his rhetoric suggests he too sees the stand-off in apocalyptic terms, more than just Iran versus Israel, rather a decisive confrontation between archetypal forces over the fate of mankind.

“For today, a great battle is being waged between the modern and the medieval. The medieval forces of radical Islam… are bent on world conquest. They want to destroy Israel, Europe, America. They want to extinguish freedom. They want to end the modern world. I am sure of one thing. Ultimately they will fail. Ultimately, light will penetrate the darkness.”

On the wall of many government offices in Israel hangs a photograph of Israeli F-15s flying over the gates of Auschwitz, a symbol of the faith in Israel’s military power to prevent a second Holocaust. To that end, Israel has struck the nuclear programmes of its neighbours before, in Iraq and Syria. For decades, Netanyahu has threatened to do the same to Iran. By several criteria, time has run out.

For example, there is the red line that Netanyahu physically drew during a speech at the UN in 2012, declaring that he would never allow the Iranians to reach 90% enrichment. As we’ve seen, that point may be within reach. Yet even more significantly, he must suspect his moment has almost passed.

When Netanyahu’s previous 12 year run in the top job ended in June 2021, many thought it was the end of him, as he was indicted for fraud and accepting bribes in a pile-up of scandals.

To pull off the miracle of returning to power in December last year, he literally went to extremes, allying himself with fanatical Jewish nationalist parties that many decried as a threat to Israeli democracy. Within weeks of taking power, they ignited the largest protests in the country’s history over new legislation to dilute the judiciary’s powers over the government.

With these scandals and unrest, Netanyahu must know that these four years are likely to be his last in office. That makes it his last chance to fulfil his God-given mission to save his country, his people and the world from the forces of darkness. He has made clear his belief that no-one else, not even America, has the guts to do what must be done. The words of Churchill must be ringing in his ears: “History will cast its verdict with those terrible, chilling words: too late.”

The drums now beating for war are deafening; yet they have sounded loudly before and nothing happened. As ever, the experts provide comforting rational reasons why it never will: a strike against Iran would be impossibly difficult, involve multiple waves of attacks, mid-air refuelling, to say nothing of the likely ferocity of Iranian retaliation. No sane Israeli leader would risk it. Once again, they drastically underestimate the propellant force of mythic vision.

Netanyahu knows this is the moment of truth . He fears the US might strike a new diplomatic deal, which would provide cover for the Iranians as before. In his far right coalition, he has political allies who wouldn’t just support but might even salivate over a strike. Faced with destiny’s final call, I believe he will act.

The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev wrote to President Kennedy in the months after the Cuban Missile Crisis:

“Any fool can start a war, and once he's done so, even the wisest of men are helpless to stop it… I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence."

Inflamed by the vision of the Mahdi, Iran would strike back with everything: missiles, suicide bombers, perhaps even chemical or biological weapons. Such a fight would quickly become existential for both sides and in such a clash, Israel itself might resort to nuclear weapons to survive. In such a way, the prophecy of terrible catastrophe might come to pass.

Hero

Can you take any more? If so, we come to the last of our trouble spots: Taiwan.

Here at least you might think we can breathe a sigh of relief as there seem to be no religious fanatics in sight. Yet in China’s leader Xi Jinping, I believe we face a man whose sense of mythic destiny is as strong as any zealot. A man who has ensured that his vision will direct the destiny of his vast nation.

Xi has set about claiming greater power than any Chinese leader since Chairman Mao, demolishing checks and balances specifically put in place after Mao’s era to prevent an egotistical leader leading the country into disaster. He has ruthlessly purged all internal sources of opposition, overseen brutal crackdowns in autonomous regions from Xinjiang to Hong Kong, as well as imposing the world’s most draconian system of Covid control. A man does not exercise power in this way for no reason.

The motivations of China’s political leaders have always been opaque, even for expert analysis. Under Xi, this has intensified to the point that “insights into decision-making are harder to get than they have been for 50 years.” Faced by this vacuum, I would like to offer a theory, though I’d never claim to be an expert. True to my roots, my starting point is one of the most successful Chinese films of all time, Hero (2002).

Hero offers a striking window into ancient currents of Chinese thought. Helmed by the country’s most famous director, Zhang Yimou, it is set at one of the most significant historical moments in Chinese history, the end of the warring states period, which lasted from 475 to 221 BC. It is hard to overstate the influence of this time on the Chinese imagination, an epoch in which most of its most significant poets and philosophers lived, from Confucius to Lao Tzu.

The film tells the story of a plot to assassinate the King of Qin, the brutal leader of the most powerful of the warring kingdoms, who was the first historical ruler to unite the kingdoms of China into the territory that we could recognise as the core of the modern state. He was the ruler who built the Great Wall.

Here comes a spoiler: at the critical moment when the lead assassin has managed to come close enough to the King to kill him, he holds back and lets the King live, persuaded that he is the only one who can bring centuries of war to an end by unifying the country. Many read the film as a vindication of authoritarian rule, though Zhang Yimou always denied it had a political message. Yet for the sake of this essay, the crucial detail is what the film presents as the instrument of peace: unification.

Throughout its history, the great prize for any Chinese leader is to emulate the glory of the King of Qin and bind the country together, though the notion of what that territory should include has expanded. The principal is known as the “Great Unification” or Dayitong 大一統 in Chinese, an idea as ancient and intertwined with the idea of “China” or “All under Heaven” itself1[1]. The idea is articulated as far back as 221 BC, when a scholar Li Si praised the King by saying, “It is entirely possible to complete the Emperor’s great undertaking and realize the ‘Great Unification’ of ‘all-under-Heaven.’ This is a unique moment in history.”

This principal serves as fuel for the militant Chinese nationalism and hatred of the West prevalent in China today. The last time China was united was two hundred years ago under the Qing dynasty. Then, in the nineteenth century, Western colonial powers, and Britain in particular, conspired to shatter that unity, plunder the country and take profitable parts for themselves. It’s worthy to note that one way we sought to achieve this was through drug-running, pushing hundreds of thousands of Chinese to become addicted to opium, the base substance of heroin.

We conveniently do not dwell on this aspect of our illustrious imperial past. But the Chinese have not forgotten. Xi himself spoke of this history in 2021, referring to the Opium War of 1839-42 in which he said China was “gradually reduced by foreign powers to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society that suffered greater ravages than ever before”, bringing “intense humiliation for the country” and “great pain for its people.”

Xi clearly sees righting this wrong as his historic mission. In his very first speech after securing an unprecedented third term as president, he announced that the “essence” of his great rejuvenation campaign for China was “the unification of the motherland.” Our ears, accustomed to the bland aspirations of our technocratic politicians do not hear the mythic resonance of this goal for the Chinese. In invoking this principal, Xi is positioning himself as heir to the greatest of China’s Emperors, who will achieve unification after the centuries of division and chaos caused by Western intervention. Not even Mao achieved this.

This vision wraps a very different context around Taiwan, the island that has been effectively independent from the mainland since the remnants of right-wing nationalist forces fled from Mao’s conquering armies to seek refuge there at the end of the Chinese civil war. We see it as an admirable, liberal democracy whose rights of self-determination should be respected. Yet for Xi it is the last missing piece in his vision, the only part of the Qing Empire not under his control. And once again, it is the West that is interfering and promoting dismemberment, as he sees it.

Xi consistently stresses he prefers peaceful reunification, while emphasising that force will always remain an option. Yet what is non-negotiable in his vision is that he will have Taiwan back.

His own actions have made the path of violence more likely. Witnessing his draconian style of government, notably his brutal crackdown on Hong Kong where democratic rights were meant to be enshrined, fewer Taiwanese than ever seem willing to submit to his rule. Yet in this way, Xi is also following the path laid down by history. In two thousand years, force is the only way that unification has ever been achieved.

Two Evils

Where does this leave us, as the West? We face terrible choices. Yet there is an opportunity here, albeit deeply unpalatable.

It is the tendency of Western analysts to assume China seeks to supplant America as the world’s new superpower. Yet this assumption betrays the persistence of our own colonial mindset. We assume every country wants to conquer and dominate as we did. This perspective assumes Taiwan would only be the first to fall as China marched forth to subjugate the region, in the manner of a nineteenth century Western power. A similar misreading of Ho Chi Ming’s motivations led to America’s disastrous intervention in Vietnam.

My theory suggests a different myth drives Xi Jinping. If his goal is restoration, not conquest, then Taiwan could be the end of his ambitions for actual territory2. By signalling that we will physically defend the island, as some experts advise, we will not deter him. As we have seen, there is no deterrence against a man driven by myth and it certainly seems that Xi, like the Emperors before him, has little care for how many Chinese are sacrificed for the fulfilment of his vision. In this way, by once again fatally misreading the other side’s mindset, we are making war inevitable.

If my analysis is correct, there is another way. Perhaps diplomacy could create new peaceful possibilities to speak to Xi’s vision while safeguarding Taiwan’s future. A timeline for reunification of mainland and island could be outlined over decades or include the strictest guarantees of freedoms, hoping that Xi’s successor would be more likely to honour them.

Some would decry this approach as appeasing a dictator, but terrible choices must be made in the effort to avoid world war. We could still offer all the support we could, short of military intervention, as we have done to other places that have suffered under Xi’s iron grip like Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. It is a sorrowful choice, but I believe those who advocate a more bellicose approach to Taiwan fail to appreciate what war would mean.

As with Iran and Israel, a conflict between China and the United States would quickly become existential for both sides. Like all dictatorships, Xi would know that his regime could not survive defeat. Yet even if America managed to beat back their invasion, it would undoubtedly incur a terrible cost, perhaps the loss of aircraft carriers or, at the very least, tens of thousands of casualties. The definitive end of the era of America’s dominance would beckon. With so much at stake, both sides would be unbearably tempted to use nuclear weapons to stave off defeat.

It seems China is preparing for just such a scenario. The Pentagon has alleged that Beijing is pushing forward with a massive expansion of its nuclear arsenal, seeking to have 1,500 weapons by 2030. Satellite pictures show huge new missile fields under construction.

Again, I fear we may be running out of time to stop what is coming. For if Xi has concluded war is inevitable, he must also be aware that an attack sooner rather than later would be to China’s advantage. US stockpiles of munitions have been heavily depleted by the war in Ukraine but it is beginning to wake up to the deficiencies in its manufacturing base. At this moment, China has a significant material advantage but every year that passes will see the United States catch up. There is a terrible logic for Xi to strike before his head start is eroded too far.

Chain Reaction

Inside a nuclear chain reaction, when the first atom is split, a few charged particles smash into other nuclear material, causing those atoms to split and hit others, all at incredible speed, causing the bomb to explode. This is a good metaphor for our world. For while this series has looked at three of our most precarious flashpoints in isolation, we have not considered how each one might crash into another, creating a chain reaction that explodes into world war.

The first atom split in Ukraine and its particles are still rippling out. Before the war, China declared a “no limits” partnership with Russia and, recently, rumours have swirled it is preparing to follow through on that promise and supply Russia with military aid to bolster its flagging invasion. At the very least, China has done a great deal to soften the blow of Western sanctions by buying Russian oil. “China has chosen a side,” the US announced earlier this year.

Iran for its part has more decisively cast its lot in with Russia. US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby described “unprecedented defence cooperation” between the two countries, with Iran providing suicide drones to strike Ukrainian cities in return for billions of dollars of military equipment, including fighter jets. China too has a close diplomatic relationship with Iran and proved pivotal in brokering an astonishing peace deal between Iran and another of its diehard adversaries, Saudi Arabia.

Thus you can already see the contours of the global conflict to come: an alliance of Russia, China and Iran, along with any other state who hates America and the West – a coalition that could include North Korea, possibly South Africa and even Brazil under President Lula, alongside others.

Of course, the experts would say this argument is a gross oversimplification, riding roughshod over the intricacies of the relationships between nations on either side of the divide. Netanyahu, for example, is friends with Putin. For years, the Russians and Israelis have operated a working relationship that gives a free pass for Israel to strike Russia’s allies, including Iranian forces, in Syria. For this reason, Israel has been notably silent about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite Iran’s involvement.

Yet war is the most powerful tribalizing force known to man. The adage that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” ultimately matters more than the intricate theories of international relations. Should another atom split on a faultline between the two blocs, it would hasten the day when everyone picks a side. So even if Israel attacked Iran without American help, the Iranian retaliation would very probably target US forces in the Middle East too, dragging them into the firestorm.

And there is one final devastating aspect of the chain reaction that I believe has been overlooked. For the US now faces two nuclear-armed opponents. In the event that a conflict with either one goes nuclear, a terrifying logic dictates that America retaliation should strike the other too, even if it was not directly involved; for the US could not risk being devastated by a strike from one direction only to face the second power still at full strength. A similar logic drove Germany’s decision to attack France at the start of the First World War, though only Russia had officially declared war on them.

So it would spread: if China faced a massive strike from the US, it would likely launch against India too, as not so long ago Indian and Chinese soldiers beat each other to death on the high mountain passes that link their two countries. Thus China would destroy India for the very same reasons it had been hit by America: to avoid leaving a potential nuclear aggressor unharmed. If India faced Chinese missiles, they would strike Pakistan for the very same reason, on and on into a chain reaction that would engulf much of the world.

Wither Hope

You probably need a drink right now. And in the embrace of a wine or a whiskey, you might ask in all fairness what is the point of writing all this? Even if my analysis is accurate, it stands little hope of reaching those with the power to affect events, if indeed anyone does. And if I am right, well, won’t we all be dead anyway? There’ll be no-one around for me to say, “Told you so.”

That chimes with the main criticism levelled at my last essay, which was not over any of its arguments or evidence, but rather that the promise of this Substack was to search for hope and yet I had found precious little. Some said they were left feeling helpless, in despair, that faced with such a nightmare they could only turn away. If you’re falling from that skyscraper, at least enjoy the view on the way down.

It’s funny but I think the Force I mentioned in my introduction may, in its inimitable way, just have given me an answer. For when I went looking for the image above, probably the only memorable thing in the film Terminator 3, I happened to hear these words in the main character’s final speech, “I should have realised our destiny was never to stop Judgment Day. It was merely to survive it… together.”

In truth, that is my deep message to you in this series. For while the scenario I have outlined may be unlikely, it is not impossible; the risk is real. Yet through these essays, you have something very few people will get: a warning.

With that warning, you also have an opportunity few others will have: time to prepare.

For it is also a myth to believe that no-one will survive a nuclear war. Many will, more than we imagine. We all stand a chance, more so if you make yourself ready now3. For though the survivors will have endured the greatest ordeal, they will immediately face another even greater: the struggle to rebuild from the ruins. I hope that some of us may do so together.

But even if, as we all hope, this nightmare never happens, at the very least what I hope these essays have shown is that our current frameworks of understanding are profoundly limited.

This does not just apply to geopolitical tensions; if you look at almost any of the terrifying ways in which our world is unravelling , from climate breakdown to all-consuming technology, from the pandemic of depression to ever-intensifying fanaticism, you discover the same thing: bewilderment at what is happening and our apparent inability to stop it. In a nutshell: why have we gone so wrong?

The third essay in this series will propose one possible answer to that question, one that will probably demand a drastic shift in your view of the world. Yet by piecing together the clues, we may be able to discern shapes in the shadows and gain new insights into what lies behind our troubles. And if we can see it clearly at last, there is hope that we will find new ways to face it, perhaps even to change it, before history casts its verdict “too late”.

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It is the story of a man who fell from a 50 storey building. As he fell past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: “So far, so good.” “So far, so good.” But is not the fall that matters. It’s the landing.

La Haine (1995) directed by Mathieu Kassovitz

No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible.

Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once – once for all.”

Winston Churchill recalling discussions over the threat of world war in 1911

This essay is far, far longer than I intended it to be. so click on the title to go to the web version, or read it in the Substack App, if your email client cuts it off. Despite the length, I hope you will read or listen to the end. If you do, I think you will see why it needed to be this long. 

The length also means I have split the audio version into two parts:

The Incoming Tide

For those of you who have read my Introduction, this essay may seem like a sharp left turn, if no less forthright and controversial. In time, I will show how the pieces fit together.

In some ways, this fragment is where it all began, an inkling that called me to the search for a new way of seeing the world. At the start of my research for it, I had no idea what I would discover, if anything, to substantiate what was then no more than a hunch.

Now, I can say that I have found much more than I feared: discoveries that are more terrifying than I could have imagined. I promise I am not being alarmist. The scariest thing is how few people seem to realise the extent of the danger.

This is my fear: you, me, all of us today are living in a house on top of a cliff that is slowly being eaten away by the sea. We busy ourselves with our lives and plans, oblivious in both waking and dreaming that out of sight the waves scrape away the ground beneath our feet, slowly yet inexorably drawing us to the day when the land gives way and we tumble into the sea.

I am not talking about climate change this time; I am talking about nuclear war.

I imagine this warning must seem a little less absurd than it did before Russia’s President Putin ordered the full scale invasion of Ukraine. Yet, even so, a nuclear war? You’d be forgiven for thinking I was exaggerating, delusional or ill-informed. Not even that maniac would be so deranged as to push the button and consign our civilization to oblivion.

You’ll be relieved to hear most experts agree. Invariably, you’ll read the verdict of esteemed analysts or journalists that there is “no incentive for Putin to deploy nuclear weapons because they would serve no military purpose” or that “Putin is not entirely stupid. He knows he’d never win a fight with NATO, let alone survive nuclear warfare”.

These are reasonable, rational conclusions. I believe they are also catastrophically wrong; that we are misreading Putin's nuclear threats because we do not recognise or respect the cultural and spiritual context which gives rise to them. In this way, we may be drifting towards a holocaust.

Mythic Times

This belief is founded on the different kind of knowing that I outlined in my Introduction, the kind you will rarely find in our newspapers or the pages of Foreign Policy.

For there are moments in history when people and nations act in ways that cannot be explained by the machinations of diplomacy or national interest, not by economics, politics, psychology or any of the other rational explanations that let us sleep soundly at night. People fight, they slaughter, they torture, they die for reasons the rational mind can barely comprehend: for values that are spiritual in nature. For love of a notion of people or country; for senseless hate; for a story that spans thousands of years; even for God. Such moments I think of as mythic times.

The majority in the secular West do not honour these motivations any more. We laugh at them or shake our heads, think them ridiculous, insane, or, at best, as a calculated cover story for the achievement of more intelligible Machiavellian aims. This is our culture’s great blind spot. It means we cannot see the storm rushing in, whose edges are already upon us.  

This essay will be my attempt to pull you out of the house and onto the cliff edge to feel the wind gusting in, to point to the churning sea and show you the danger we’re in. For a day may be coming when your worries and your cares, everything you hold dear – your marriage, the kids, the mortgage, the bills, the price of eggs, your sex life, the leaking roof, your choice of holiday, your nightmare boss, even your cancer diagnosis – all of it dissolves into blinding white light.

In this essay, I will outline my take on why and how this could happen. Ideally, you’d need a book to lay it all out but I do not believe there is time left for that. Not that I could ever predict when the defining crisis will occur; perhaps not for years, though it could be months or even weeks away.

I have come to learn that the tides of history tend to move more slowly than I expect, even if their overall course remains clear. Needless to say, I hope against hope it never happens.

I know experts and academics will find plenty to nit-pick here: details I have got wrong; subtle nuances I have missed; crucial aspects of the situation I have overlooked. I welcome all those corrections. I am not seeking to paint a perfect picture of all the waves, rather to dive beneath the surface, to the essence, the deep current of this moment to show the direction it is flowing. To be aware of the danger, even if it never materialises, gives us strength.

This will be the first in a series of essays that will outline how, in at least three of earth’s most tense geopolitical stand-offs, there are signs that mythical thinking is taking hold and wild irrational forces are seeping into the destiny of nations. Once this process is far enough advanced, once rational considerations are set aside, the unimaginable becomes possible – violence, invasion, even ultimately annihilation.

Part I will focus on the most terrifying example: Russia.

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An Invasion of Insanity

This is not the first time I have written on the subject. Last year, I wrote an essay to outline my belief that Russia would attack Ukraine, NATO would be ever more embroiled, and my fear that eventually this dynamic could escalate into nuclear conflict.

The essay was published seven days before the war began, though it had been brewing for much longer. It is hard to remember but at that point, right up to the moment Russian tanks crossed the border, people still doubted President Putin would attack despite the huge military build-up underway. Articles entitled “No, Russia won’t invade Ukraine” encapsulate the attitude, concluding that “a large scale military operation does not fit into Moscow’s cost-benefit analysis”. The prospect of invasion seemed quite simply insane. Yet still he went ahead.

I do not claim any particular clairvoyance that made me so certain that war was coming. Rather, I was using the logic of mythic times:

When a leader of a nation starts calling back to its ancient history, it’s clear that they have moved from a rational to a mythic vision of the world, something we in the West have forgotten is possible. Someone in the grip of myth tends to be infused with a sense of divine purpose… A man who is thinking in such epic terms is unlikely to be persuaded to abandon his crusade by a number of technical agreements on troop numbers and limitations on missiles.

Gripped by a mythic fantasy, dreams of easy victories, flower-strewn welcomes for his troops and a new apogee of Russian glory and greatness, Putin sent his army lumbering over the Ukrainian border where it crunched into the profane realities of anti-tank rockets, guided multi-launch missiles and mines. Iron was always an antidote to the delusions of fairytales.

Yet, if I was right to predict that the invasion would happen, in the most crucial respect I was wrong. We are still here. There has been no nuclear war. An old friend even posted on our mutual Whatsapp group that everyone should stop asking me for my opinion on the course of the conflict as “We’re all alive now and that’s a win!” he wrote.

My answer was a quote from the 1995 film La Haine shown at the start of this piece: “Jusqu’ici, tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien… So far so good, so far so good…” says the man falling from the 50 storey building as he passes each floor. It’s not the fall that matters; it’s the landing.

So Far, So Good

Since the outset of the invasion, Putin and his officials have warned they are willing to use nuclear weapons against anyone who interfered – meaning us, the West, and our military alliance NATO. Examples are almost too numerous to cite. Many are delivered by the former President Dmitri Medvedev who said just last month that Western supplies of weapons to Ukraine brought nuclear apocalypse closer, shortly after he had said that British politicians were legitimate military targets. The messaging, from politicians to media, has been clear: if we continue to supply Ukraine with weapons, they will attack us.

Opinion on these threats is divided. Some dismiss them as cheap talk, exemplified by the analysis of the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall that “Kremlin warnings of retaliation and direct confrontation rarely amount to much in practice. The Russians huff and puff – but mostly bluff.”

Through this lens, such threats amount to no more than coercive diplomacy, the “madman” approach, trying to frighten us from supplying the weapons that Ukraine needs with no intention to follow through. In this way, experts argue, our fear has needlessly prolonged the war’s suffering. Many now clamour for this policy to change, for us to ramp up the provision of arms and give Ukraine everything it needs to win decisively.

Others, including US President Joe Biden, seem to respect the threats a little more. Yet even so, hesitantly, with caution and delay, we have continued to cross one red line after another. Don’t send tanks, they said. And we did. Do not provide long range missiles, they said. And we have. We won’t let our weapons be used inside Russian territory, we promised. And they have been. Advanced fighter aircraft may be next, security guarantees or even an official path to Ukraine’s NATO accession, one of the primary reasons Russia claims it went to war. The direction of policy caused the Russian ambassador to Washington to complain in exasperation that “the current generation of NATO politicians does not take the nuclear threat seriously”.

Let me be unequivocal at this point: I believe our policy is right. I have been personally arguing that we should have stood up to Russia long ago, in particular over its intervention in Syria, the subject of my Oscar-nominated film. History shows that failing to stand up to aggressive dictators only emboldens them to aim bigger next time and so it has proved. We must and cannot abandon the people of Ukraine, as we did the people of Syria. What am I arguing is that we must not make our stand ignorant of the price it may ask of us.

Thankfully, thus far, commentators like Tisdall have been proved right: none of the direst threats have been followed through. The worst the Russians have done is suspend participation in New START, the last remaining treaty with the US governing the countries’ nuclear arsenals, and to move tactical nuclear weapons into its satellite, Belarus. Worrying signs of course, but ones that fall somewhat short of Armageddon. In this way, Putin appears to be endlessly crying wolf.

The explanations for this usually boil down to the same thing: he has too much to lose. Any kind of direct strike against us, conventional or otherwise, and he knows we’d sweep the Russian military from the earth. As for nuclear weapons? He’s not stupid; that would be suicide for him and his country. “There are no winners in a nuclear war” goes the rational argument of mutually-assured destruction. As fearsome as it may be, it kept the peace between Great Powers for decades.

So far, so good.

The Rational Choice

Yet even a few respectable rationalists see a potential path of escalation that could lead to nuclear war.

As I write these words, we are just days into a long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive, spearheaded by NATO-trained troops using Western weaponry, intelligence and advice. At this moment, it’s impossible to see how it will unfold. The Ukrainians have clearly suffered losses already; the Russians, at the very least, a senior commander.

Much rides on the outcome. Even those pushing for negotiations agree that Ukraine must do so from a position of strength. If Ukraine cannot achieve it with the weapons it has now, the clamour will grow for us to provide more and more until the Russians retreat. In many ways, we in the West have the final say over what level of success the Ukrainians will achieve, even if we don’t agree ourselves yet what it should be.

Yet while there is heated debate for example over whether Crimea should or should not be included on the list for liberation, it strikes me that a crunch point will come before that is at stake. For Putin has already formally absorbed four semi-occupied regions into the Russian state, promising to use nuclear weapons to defend them. Whether that threat is bluff and bluster, it emphasises that with every inch of soil the Ukrainians liberate, Putin faces more than just military defeat. In his self-proclaimed vision of the world, he is losing part of Russia itself.

Earlier this year, in an interview marking the first anniversary of the invasion, Putin accused the West of trying to “dismember” the country, an allegation he has often repeated despite our denials. His wording is very deliberate and significant, as Russia's official nuclear doctrine allows for the use of a nuclear response even to a conventional assault if "the very existence of the state" is threatened.

Thus he has, rhetorically at least, asserted the legal basis for the use of nuclear weapons under Russian law, something that matters even in a dictatorship like Russia’s. This could theoretically justify the use of atomic weapons over the threatened loss of the four annexed regions too. Take note: not the loss, but just the threat of loss might be sufficient.

Putin’s framing of the conflict as existential for Russia might not be an exaggeration. There is historical precedent. Defeat in the First World War led to the Russian civil war of 1917-22. Defeat in Afghanistan contributed to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Some analysts salivate over the territorial break-up of Russia after this war too. Even though this is probably the last thing our governments want, defeat might provoke a chain reaction of unravelling that we would be powerless to prevent even if we wanted to.

The cynic in you might say this is all an elaborate cover story for self-preservation. Putin knows too well what would likely be the consequences of defeat for him personally. Though nuclear weapon states have been on the losing side of wars before, never have the very lives of their leadership been on the line, as potentially is true in this case.

So here is the rationalists’ view of the road to destruction: to save his own skin and stave off defeat, Putin might use a so-called “tactical” – that is a relatively small – nuclear weapon in Ukraine, to tip the tide of battle in Russia’s favour or frighten the government in Kyiv to come to terms, perhaps at the same time persuading us to stop calling his bluffs.

Of course, the logic of global power is that we would be compelled to respond in some way or give a green light to nuclear blackmail the world over. Yet any response by us, even with conventional weapons, risks sparking a spiral of escalation that ends in a holocaust. That scenario is terrifying enough. Yet even it is hamstrung by our blind spot: our rationality.

To the best of my knowledge, never once have the Russians threatened the use of a specifically tactical weapon. In fact, they have often been at pains to deny it. Their threats are far larger in scale: against us and our homes. Yet our rational minds will not let us take those words at face value. They cannot possibly mean what they say. That would be suicide.

So everyone takes Russia’s threats, filters them through our rational lens and concludes that what they must really mean is the so-called “limited” use of a tactical weapon inside Ukraine. Everyone, that is, who is not Russian1. This is our interpretation of their threat. It is also our fatal mistake.

I do not think a tactical strike is what Putin has in mind. Instead, I take him at his word: that in the event of defeat, or more likely the process of defeat, he is contemplating a significant strike directly against us in the West or against one of our NATO allies.

He is willing to risk the spiral of escalation that could provoke. Indeed, he is preparing himself and his people psychologically, spiritually and probably even operationally for total nuclear war. It is the ultimate nightmare: a leader prepared to sacrifice his entire people and his country for what he believes to be a higher cause.

If this were true, the entire system that kept the world safe during the Cold War is kaput. Against such a man, there is no deterrence.

Shouting through the Fence

I know what you are feeling reading those words. Your inner sceptic is in uproar and that’s natural; it’s human to recoil from such horror. I agree that, from a Western perspective, this analysis seems ridiculous or even insane.

To understand it, you will have to step with me through the looking glass into a mythic way of viewing the world, a form of vision whose power we have forgotten to our great danger and cost. For in the light of the myth guiding Russia’s leadership today, the scenario not only makes perfect sense, it might even be the lesser of two evils.

In a sense, we too are living in our own mythic times, we just don’t recognise it. Ours is an illusion of peace. We in Europe and America have known peace for so long, we feel it will last forever. It doesn’t occur to us that war could ever ravage us again. War is what happens “out there” and only ever reaches us through our screens.

The irony is that in this way Russia too has lost deterrent power. We have stopped listening. This is incredibly dangerous; they may soon feel compelled to do something more dramatic to get our attention.

Don’t take my word for it; read the words of Dmitri Trenin, a Russian academic and former colonel who was head of the Carnegie Moscow Centre for fourteen years, until relations were severed by his endorsement of the invasion of Ukraine. Questioned recently as to why America and its allies do not respect Russia’s red lines, Trenin replied:

I will go back to the idea of fear again, because nothing else can deter our adversaries in all seriousness. I think the U.S. strategy… is based on the belief that Russia will not use nuclear weapons: either [because] it will be afraid, or it will feel that the destruction of civilization is too high a price to pay for maintaining its position. And here, in my view, lies a potential fatal miscalculation for all humanity.

Further he said:

This "fear factor," which existed in the public consciousness of Western countries, especially in Europe, during the Cold War, has practically stopped playing any significant role. NATO’s indirect war with nuclear superpower Russia is no longer perceived as something really dangerous in the US and Europe. The reasons are apparent: a decision by the Russian leadership to launch a nuclear strike against the US, or NATO member-states is considered to be unthinkable, due to the obviously suicidal nature of such a decision.

To take these words seriously would, in the eyes of the more swashbuckling commentators, be falling for the bluff, kowtowing to hollow threats. Yet given the stakes, should we not at least consider the possibility that such statements by Trenin – or even Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov who said that the danger of nuclear war is “serious, real, and we must not underestimate it" – are actually an attempt by more sober people on the Russian side not to coerce us, but to warn us of the possibility of catastrophe?

Yes, we should. And I will show you why.

But a quick aside: I am writing this at home; the summer sun is pouring through the window; downstairs, I can hear my two year old daughter laughing as she dances in front of our six month old. The clink of glasses, of happy voices and laughter rises from the wine bar on the street outside. It is a beautiful evening. I don’t want any of this to be true.

I can’t help thinking of this scene in Terminator 2. Sarah Connor has a dream when she walks up to a playground and tries to shout at the children playing, “Run, run, you have to run.” That is what I want to do too: to lift my window and scream. In the film, no-one can hear her. And the bomb explodes.

The film famously states, “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.” Of course, that is true. What I will show you here is only one scenario among many: the worst of all worlds.

But I hope you can hear me. And I hope you will tell everybody you know.

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The Katechon

I do not claim to be an expert on Russia. All the evidence I will present here has been gathered from people who are. What I do know and respect is the irrational side of reality, the mythic realm, and its power to move mankind. What I will present here is the evidence that is most significant through that lens.

For something has happened in Russia. I was barely conscious of it until I started deeply researching this essay. For the most part, it goes unreported in our news, other than when someone derides Putin for another “deranged” or “quasi-mystical” speech. Our scorn means we rarely study the detail, but the answers are all there.

In fact, Putin’s speeches, those of his subordinates and advisors, the bizarre often brutal behaviour of Russian soldiers and people and even its nuclear threats are entirely consistent with an overarching mythical vision that seems to have possessed the engines of power in Russia itself.

This vision is apocalyptic, messianic, imperial, racist and nationalistic – sound familiar? It should. That echo is our warning from history. If the worst comes to pass, whoever is left will no doubt scrutinise this ideology to the extent that Nazism is studied today, trying to understand how it could be that a similarly savage philosophy took hold of a great nation and dragged the world into the abyss once again.

For now, what is extraordinary is the extent to which it appears to have been overlooked in the West, perhaps as a result of our spiritual blind spot. Perhaps also because of the extraordinary fact that it is, nominally at least, Christian2.

So let me be perhaps the first to introduce you to the Katechon.

As I said, it will take libraries of books one day to map this phenomenon effectively so the most I can do here is offer a preliminary sketch of its essence and its terrifying significance for our crisis today.

The word “Katechon” comes from the New Testament. In St Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, he uses the word to describe a force that stands between the world and the apocalypse in the End Times, a figure that holds back evil and chaos and restrains the emergence of the antichrist. This is the Biblical passage:

[The Second Coming of Christ will not come] until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction [ie the Antichrist]. And now you know what is holding him back, the Katechon, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back, the Katechon, will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.

In translation: the second coming of Jesus will not happen until the Antichrist has taken over the world. The only thing stopping the total ascendancy of this ultimate evil is a force known as the Katechon, who fulfils a divine role of restraining the darkness until the time appointed by God.

To our Western ears, this passage sounds more like what you’d expect to be shouted through a megaphone on a street corner than the foundation of a national vision. Yet through a complex web of influences, from his own genuine faith3, the promotion of the Russian Orthodox Church in the post-Soviet space and the influential thought of ideologues like Alexander Dugin, the vision of being the Katechon seems to have infused Russia’s President Putin to his bones.

One of the advantages of the concept is that it can apply to both an individual and an entity, like a country or people. So Putin and ultimately Russia itself both embody the Katechon, the great force of light holding back the forces of darkness in the last days of mankind, in the eyes of Putin, some Russians and, most importantly, the Russian Orthodox Church.

I can almost hear you scoffing, incredulous. The best our secular cynicism might allow is that this “vision” is a ruse, a crafted political ideology to shore up Putin’s power. As a culture, we have forgotten that it is possible to be seized by profound spiritual feeling – and what that can lead you to do.

The concept naturally aligns with some of the deepest trends in Russia’s mythic identity. Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev once claimed that “Messianic consciousness is more characteristic of the Russians than of any other people except the Jews.”

It manifests in the belief that Russians are a chosen people, the “Third Rome”, heir to Rome and Constantinople, with a unique historical role as the force of salvation for the Christian world, indeed of all of humanity, “shining with light” against the forces of barbarism. Disturbingly, a key thread in this self-image is the acceptance of self-sacrifice, even in the millions, for the salvation of mankind from darkness. In this way, they see themselves acting as Jesus did.

This vision provides an underlying mythical framework for all of Russia’s great wars across the centuries, from resisting the Mongol Horde in medieval times, to Napoleon, Nazi Germany and into the present day.

Modern articulators of the vision now see us, the West, as the forces of ultimate darkness: our liberal politics, our technology and capitalism itself as the embodiment of “absolute evil”. That is a quote by the way, from an article published just last week by Alexander Dugin on a website that happens to be called “katehon.com”. It was entitled “Ukraine as a Field of Armageddon”:

Never has Western civilization, even in modern times, been so close to a direct and blatant embodiment of the kingdom of the Antichrist. Religion and its truths were abandoned by the West long ago, moving on to aggressive secularism and an atheistic materialistic worldview, taken henceforth as the absolute truth. But it had never yet encroached on human nature itself, deprived it of sex, of family, and soon, of human nature itself… This is why more and more often we speak of Armageddon, the last decisive battle between the armies of God and Satan.

Holy War

Dugin is not a peripheral internet nutjob. He has famously been called “Putin’s Rasputin” or “Putin’s brain” and though some deny he has any influence at all, compare his language above to the following excerpts of the speech by President Putin himself announcing the annexation of the four regions of Ukraine:

Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies… This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism.

The ongoing collapse of Western hegemony is irreversible…The battlefield to which destiny and history have called us is a battlefield for our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We must protect them against enslavement and monstrous experiments that are designed to cripple their minds and souls.

[In the words of Ivan Ilyin]…I believe in the spiritual strength of the Russian people. His spirit is my spirit; his fate is my fate; his suffering is my grief; its flowering is my joy. Behind these words stands a glorious spiritual choice, which, for more than a thousand years was followed by many generations of our ancestors… to be with the Motherland, victorious!

This is the language of Holy War.

In the West, we’re inclined to laugh at what appears to be bizarre spiritual hokum. We should instead take it deadly seriously. As decades of war in the Middle East have taught us, a man who believes he is fighting a holy war is capable of extraordinary acts of fanaticism – including suicide bombing.

These ideas are regularly reinforced by Russia’s spiritual leader, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. At his own birthday celebration in November last year, Kirill called on the Church to play an active role in “the struggle of our Fatherland against this movement of the Antichrist, which is capable of destroying both the entire world and Russia.” All the forces of the Antichrist, he claimed, would be directed against Russia, because Russia was the “restraining force” – the Katechon. To die in this struggle against evil washes away all sins, he said. A theology of martyrdom.

To see the conflict in Ukraine in transcendental terms, as they appear to do, may seem extraordinary and bizarre yet it certainly explains a lot of things. It means that in their eyes the invasion was not an attempt to acquire territory for economic or political ends or even as a form of bellicose nostalgia for the land of the old Soviet Union. It is a sacred mission, to reclaim what they see as the spiritual home of the Rus people, the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, and free what they see as a brother that has been seized by proxies of the forces of darkness – that is, by us, the West.

Suddenly Crimea’s significance swells from being one of pride or strategic value to being a sacred site, the place of baptism of Holy Prince Vladimir who brought Christianity to Russia that Putin himself has said is as important to Russia as the Temple Mount is to Muslims and Jews.

This may seem utterly insane to us, and patently untrue. Yet what if they sincerely believe it?

There are signs the rhetoric has flowed down the chain of command. Social media clips of Russian soldiers in the field have shown commanders telling their troops that they are fighting people “who say their God is Satan”, or write “Christ is risen!” on rockets destined to bombard Ukraine over an Easter weekend, reminiscent of how Islamic fighters chanted “Allah Akbar!” as they detonated their bombs.

State TV is also on message when at the start of this year the main host declared, “We are going into Holy War mode against 50 countries that are united by Satanism.” The divine nature of the war is emphasised in films like this, made by a Russian director who even won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film in 1995. Though the BBC journalist describes the film as “laughable”, it should turn the blood cold. It purports to show the discovery of a “Z”, the symbol of Russia’s invasion, carved into the stone of a two hundred year old church. The message: the Lord is with us.

Faced by true believers in this apocalyptic faith, even if only at the highest levels of government, risk-reward calculations go out the window. Codes of war, rules of morality may equally be set aside in the struggle to overcome a demonic enemy, an argument by the way which we ourselves accepted as justifying the firebombing of German cities and the use of nuclear weapons on Japan. Vast loss of life on either side becomes quickly acceptable, even necessary, in the struggle for “light” to prevail.

The outcome of all this might be the strongest ideological fusion of warlike Christianity with actual military force since the medieval Crusades.

It has its own iconography, illustrated in an exhibition “We are Russia – God is With Us!” currently showing in a prestigious art gallery opposite the Kremlin. Patriarch Kirill attended the opening and it is replete with images intertwining Christian symbols with Russian battles across the centuries, from the Mongols through both World Wars up to the war in Ukraine.

Heavenly Protector of the Russian Land. Vasily Nesterenko, 2017

This movement even has its own central temple, the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, in which Russia’s wars throughout the ages are again portrayed as sacred struggles, watched over by angelic forces.

Photo credit: Konstantin Boulich

And this notion takes the myth into its final, devastating practical form.

Thermonuclear Angels

My understanding in this section rests heavily on the work of an Israeli political scientist, Dmitry Adamsky, whose book Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy is of such significance it should be read by everyone involved in this crisis today.

For if the implications of the ideology of Katechon has not received nearly the attention they deserve in the West, something even more dangerous seems to have largely escaped our attention: the theocratization of Russia’s nuclear forces. In this way, the ideology of holy war connects directly to the men who execute the orders to launch.

Adamsky traces how the once persecuted church made itself indispensable to Russia’s nuclear forces by providing them with legitimacy as they faced a catastrophic loss of funding and social prestige at the end of the Cold War. Even more, in declaring Russia’s weapons as a divinely-ordained gift from God, they gave a powerful mythic identity to a community in existential crisis over its raison d'être.

Three decades later, the church is intertwined throughout the Russian military, but in the nuclear branch above all. Each leg of the nuclear triad – air, land and sea-based – even has a patron saint. Nuclear weapons are blessed with holy water4; there are sacred spaces everywhere from field churches for the strategic missile force to underwater temples on nuclear submarines. Icons, religious banners and relics adorn cockpits and control rooms and priests have, in Adamsky’s words, “penetrated all levels of command” down to the lowliest level. The nuclear forces, he says, “now meet all the criteria for a religious military organisation”.

This may well have practical consequences for the prosecution of nuclear war. For one of the greatest fears of any nuclear commander determined to use his weapons is that someone in the chain of command will refuse to obey, thinking of the devastating consequences for the world. In Russia, nuclear priests are already closely involved in human reliability and morale programmes. One can imagine the hesitations of a weapons operator being smoothed away by an older priest, a father figure who he trusts, reassuring him that he is doing God’s work by turning the key.

The relationship of Church to nuclear weapons finds its clearest expression on earth in the town of Sarov, a “nuclear-spiritual sanctuary” which is both the heart of Russia’s nuclear weapons complex and the home of one of Russia’s most beloved saints, St. Seraphim, whose prophecies include (you guessed it) Russia’s role as the mighty bulwark against Antichrist in the End Times. Both Church and military pointed to the geographical coincidence as another sign of divine blessing.

Perhaps it is another coincidence that the saint’s name, Seraphim, comes from the Hebrew for “burning” and also appears in medieval Christian imagination as fiery angels with the power to purify sins.

US nuclear military test, “Castle Romeo” 1954

This characterisation appears on the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces website, this time in describing their icon of the Archangel Michael:

Archangel Michael is both a heavenly messenger, announcing the imminent end of the world, and a guardian of the Kingdom of Heaven, and a warrior-defender of all Christians from Satan … A spear topped with a cross in his right hand is aimed at the water, in which fire flares up on impact, incinerating cities.

The doctrine of nuclear weapons and Church being twin pillars of the Russian state is so established in Russian discourse it has its own name: Nuclear Orthodoxy. The weapons defend Russia from physical attack as the Church protects against spiritual incursions, namely Western liberal, materialistic ideas that many Russians blame for their collapse and degradation at the end of the Cold War.

We must recognise what all of this means. This ideology transfigures nuclear weapons, from how we see them in the West – as a horrific tool of mass destruction whose use must be avoided at all cost – into something sacred and holy. It turns them into divine tools.

The promotion of this vision seems to have made the Russian people far more comfortable with the possible use of these tools. On a weekly basis, State TV bombards its audience with fantasies about the obliteration of countries in the West, in particular America and Britain. Adamsky reports that “several Russian defence intellectuals and nuclear experts have been shocked by the unbearable nuclear lightness among the Russian public” over a full-scale war.

The veneration of the bomb has even invaded popular culture, as in this illustrative example by a popular rock singer: an anthem of praise for Russia’s newest class of intercontinental ballistic missile, ironically known in the West as Satan-2.

This outline can only scratch the surface of this phenomenon. There is much more to be found if you look. Yet by now, you’ll already see that this is the stuff of our nightmares, what Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr Strangelove explored: what happens when those who hold our world in their hands go insane, possessed by an irrational story that makes them cease to believe these weapons are abhorrent, but instead makes them the object of reverence, even joy.

Dr Strangelove (1964), dir. Stanley Kubrick

End Times

To be clear, I am not saying that Putin wants or has already decided to bring about this disaster. Rather that it is within the range of outcomes he would be willing to accept. He said so himself, in infamous comments made before the Ukraine war.

In a 2018 documentary, he said, “As a citizen of Russia and the head of the Russian state, I must ask myself: ‘Why would we want a world without Russia?” Elaborating days later, he added “As martyrs, we will go to heaven and they [Russia’s enemies] will just croak, because they won’t even have time to repent.”

These comments take on dark new menace in the context of the messianic worldview this essay has explored. Indeed, there are Russians who are worried. Former head of Carnegie Moscow, Dmitri Trenin, again:

“Putin’s phrase from 2018 that “we don’t need a world without Russia” somehow stuck with me. I always remember it. But I don't think it's taken that seriously by many people in the United States, for example…. I can’t think of any other situation [in history] that resembles the Ukraine crisis. And we're heading for a head-on collision.”

This collision will not happen instantly, out-of-the-blue; we will have at least some days or weeks of warning. While it’s obviously impossible to predict exactly what will happen, presuming that the dynamics of the war do not substantially change and Western support continues at this level or higher, at some point the Russians will do something to signal to us, and in particular to the US, that they are serious about striking us at home, if we do not stop.

It could be a nuclear test or at the very least the movement or preparation of strategic weapons. The only thing that is certain is that it will be more than just talk, as we have proved deaf to all verbal warnings.

Two days before this essay was published, another Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov, who was an advisor5 to both President Yeltsin and Putin, published his own piece that so strikingly encapsulates the findings here that I thought I would quote it at length. The title alone stands out: “The use of nuclear weapons can save humanity from a global catastrophe.”

Karagnov’s argument is that because we in the West have lost our fear, the world is in greater danger of stumbling into all-out thermonuclear war. The way to restore that fear, in his barbaric argument, is to use nuclear weapons on a smaller target. He cites Poznan, a Polish city of half a million people. In that way, he argues that the world will actually avoid Armageddon as we in the West will take Russia’s threats seriously again and cease our support for Ukraine.

I have been studying the history of nuclear strategy for many years and have come to an unequivocal, albeit not quite scientific sounding, conclusion. The appearance of nuclear weapons is the result of the intervention of the Almighty, who was horrified when he saw that people… unleashed two world wars over the course of one generation… and handed over to mankind the weapon of Armageddon, to show those who had lost their fear of hell that He exists. On this fear rested the relative peace of the last three-quarters of a century. Now that fear is gone…

[A peaceful outcome to the Ukraine war] is possible only if and when we can break the will of the West to support the Kyiv regime… [in that way] we will not only save ourselves, finally liberate the world from the Western yoke that has lasted five centuries, but we will also save all of humanity…

We will have to restore the credibility of nuclear deterrence by lowering the unacceptably high threshold for the use of nuclear weapons… Only if a madman sits in the White House, would America decide to strike in “defence" of Europeans, and thereby incur a response, sacrificing a hypothetical Boston for the sake of a hypothetical Poznan…

If a weapon was used and “successfully”, the nuclear taboo - the idea that such weapons should never be used and that their use is a direct path to nuclear Armageddon - will be watered down…

But what if they don't back down? [If they have] completely lost their sense of self-preservation? Then you will have to hit a group of targets in a number of countries in order to bring those who have lost their minds to their senses. This is a morally terrible choice - we use the weapons of God, dooming ourselves to severe spiritual losses. But if this is not done, not only Russia may perish, but, most likely, the entire human civilization will end.

In these words we see familiar ideas: the apocalyptic end times; the messianic role of Russia; the willingness to sacrifice millions of lives; the blessings of God on these weapons. We see how those ideas might merge into what people most feared through the long years of the Cold War: the combination of insanity and logic that leads to the end of the world.

What this argument assumes – other than its embrace of mass murder – is that we would not retaliate in defence of our ally, Poland, for fear that our own cities would burn: Paris, London, New York, Manchester, Washington, Los Angeles, Marseille. I believe that assumption is wrong. For if we did not strike back, our alliance is broken, our credibility lost, our deterrent made out of paper. The pressure to respond would be overwhelming.

At the Going Down of the Sun

It does not need to come anywhere near Karaganov’s hellish vision for a defining crisis to unfold. Whether it be weeks or years away, if Russia only makes a show of taking physical steps to strike us or our allies, there would be precious little we could do in response. It would be similar to the days leading up to the invasion, when we watched tanks, troops and artillery gather on Ukraine’s borders and went on debating exactly what Putin intended to do.

Similarly, Putin could go right up to the line, moving the weapons, preparing them, even loading warheads onto their launchers, and we would still not know if it was a bluff or not until they were in the air. No-one in the West would ever risk launching a pre-emptive strike, for fear it would provoke the very onslaught it sought to prevent. So we would have to wait, without breathing, for Putin’s decision, desperately trusting in our powers of deterrence, perhaps finally waking up to the fact that they no longer held sway over the other side.

This is what makes this crisis unlike any other in history, far worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis when rational people were in charge. In Kennedy and Khrushchev, we had leaders with a shared memory of the reality and horror of war, both of whom were desperate to avoid it. Not, as in this case, a leader who believed he was facing the final showdown with the Antichrist. In one respect however, the most dangerous component of the Cuban Crisis would reoccur: neither side could be seen to bow to the other’s pressure and back down.

In this way, history has us caught in an apocalyptic Catch-22. We must defeat Russia’s war of aggression, otherwise the world as we’ve known it is over. And yet that defeat could bring about the same end.

Those who say negotiations could help fail to understand the nature of the Enemy, modern day Chamberlains facing Hitler. Diplomacy cannot end holy war, which must by its nature be total and fought till the end. Whatever you offer, whatever territory you concede, it will only ever be a temporary pause.

And if you harbour any hope that removing Putin might save us, I give you the words of Adamsky: “Although Putin has endorsed Russia’s nuclear orthodoxy, he is a symptom and not a source of the phenomenon. Whatever happens to him, the national security elite is likely to continue merging messianic rhetoric and escalatory signalling to maintain ambiguity and increase Western confusion.” In short, this will go on until Russia is shaken from its violent reverie.

The aspiration of this Substack is to search for hope and, I admit, in this case it is hard to find. Of course, no-one knows what will happen. Perhaps aliens will land or a miracle occur or perhaps I have got all of this wrong. We all hope so.

Yet if this nightmare does come to pass, at least I have opened your eyes to the danger. That is something. My fear is that our leaders do not see it. Like the experts chained within the rational paradigm, they believe no-one would do anything crazy, until they do.

If that were different, there are things we could do to prepare. We could try to re-activate our country’s civil defence, as it was in the Cold War, start medical and emergency contingency planning, assess which of our old shelters could still be used. We should be on a war footing because, feel it or not, we are at war. Moscow upgraded its bomb shelters as recently as 2016 and ran attack drills to teach its population to survive.

More important than these practical steps, we could prepare psychologically and spiritually for what might be to come. For all of you reading this, everyone you know, everyone you work with or pass on the street may face the greatest darkness humanity has ever seen. If this is our fate, we can still turn to the force that human beings have called on for thousands of years: courage. Though we face the longest night, we do not do so alone.

Putin believes at heart we are weak and afraid. If he saw that we understood his threat, took it seriously and were nonetheless resolved not to fold but to face him, perhaps that would – if anything could – give him pause.

I have two baby daughters. I cannot tuck them quietly into bed, accepting that they will not see the morning. I will fight to keep them alive in the hope that, if this happens and we survive, they will be part of the generation that rebuilds our world from the ruins. I believe they would build it more wisely, with more love, in greater harmony with the earth and each other than we have done. No matter how long the night, there is always a dawn. That, if nothing else, gives me hope.

Scene from the Apocalypse, Francis Danby 1829

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“Thou art a miracle of deafness," Pilar said, her big face harsh and broad in the candlelight. "It is not that thou art stupid. Thou art simply deaf. One who is deaf cannot hear music. Neither can he hear the radio. So he might say, never having heard them, that such things do not exist.

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls

Many people in the contemplation of nature or communication with other living beings become aware of this force or something behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us… and they call it God or whatever, depending on their particular disposition…

Quote from “21-87” the documentary that inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars

This essay is also available in audio:

Is All Lost?

No-one needs to go to the cinema to see a disaster film any more. We are living in one.

Whatever your chosen genre of catastrophe, the world today has you covered: floods, war, famine, mass extinction, apocalyptic storms, injustice, inequality and greed are just some of the storylines on offer. Then just when it seemed things could not get any worse, AI appears, and it feels that films like the Matrix and Terminator have walked off the screens and into our lives.

If our history were a screenplay, we just hit what’s called the “All is Lost” moment. That’s when, around two thirds of the way through a story, the protagonist’s life goes to hell: he’s ruined his last chance at love or her mentor’s been killed; she’s turned to prostitution to fund her coke habit or the Emperor has discovered their plot and arrested and murdered their friends. Rock bottom.

And yet, as any good screenwriter will tell you, this is the moment before awakening, before the breakthrough when hope will be found, and the character finally accepts a truth they have been denying all along. The truth that carries salvation.

That truth, that hope, is what this Substack is all about. And it’s not just a Hollywood fantasy, I promise.

The Reveal

If you’re willing to humour me, you’re probably wondering which tenuous source of salvation I place my faith in. Is it carbon capture or breakthrough technologies, eco-activism or revolution or perhaps even a mass exodus to Mars. I’ll go along with anything, you think, but if he says Keir Starmer I’ll cry.

If you were over at our place having dinner, this is the moment I would take a deep breath, look over at my wife and ask with my eyes, “shall I go there?” She would sigh, shrug and smile: fuck it. Fuck it in its most glorious sense. The fuck it of why not, carpe diem, what more have we got to lose.

Ok, brace yourself… Suppose I told you that Star Wars was true?

And just like that, I’ve lost you. He had me going there, you think, I thought he was going to be serious, say something political, at the very least real. He broke his promise, no fantasy.  

I get it. Talk to me nine years ago and I felt exactly the same way. But something happened to me over that time that led me to look at Star Wars – and lots of other things – in a new light.

I encountered something. A source of hope, one that is difficult to name and almost impossible to define. Each of us meets it in our own way, specific to us, expressed through the imagery of our land or culture or the idiosyncrasies of our own heart. Yet, at heart, we speak to the same thing.

Our efforts to name it include the Universe, the Tao, the Otherworld, Mother Nature, the Collective Unconscious, the Atman, the Quantum Field, the Spiritual Realm, Dreamtime, Mystery, Great Spirit and, yes, even “The Force”1. The only word I will avoid for now is God as, for so many, it provokes reflex revulsion.

The familiarity and troubling associations of many of these names masks what really matters. It exists. It is intelligent. It is alive.

The Elephant in the Universe

Are you still there? Probably not. A belief in this presence must seem like the most outlandish suggestion of all. No-one but your octogenarian Granny and a few fundamentalist maniacs in the Saudi desert or North Dakota believe in such things any more. We2 know better.

Don’t panic, I have not been radicalised. I am just feeling my way towards something and it’s definitely not institutional religion. Though I believe all religions offer paths for engagement with “it” – this Force – I can only speak of my experience of Anglican Christianity in which any kind of living, breathing communication has long dried out in words recited by rote. What remains is worship of a taxidermy version of the original teachings, that can be safely placed in the corner as an occasional talking-point, far from the snarling bear that once threatened to eat you alive.

Neither is this a new perennial philosophy, as defined by Aldous Huxley and his acolytes, the idea that all religions boil down to the same simple truths. Rather I prefer the notion of “one ocean, many shores”. In describing the Pacific, for example, you would find a very different account given by an Inuit in Alaska, faced by icy winds, sea lions and salmon, than that of a Solomon Islander, used to cyclones, sharks and manta rays. Yet neither description invalidates the other; rather they complement one another to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of that vast body of sea.

Consider the poet Sylvia Plath – whose husband Ted Hughes said had “access to depths formerly reserved for primitive ecstatic priests, shamans and holy men”. She once wrote:

This is the kingdom of the fading apparition…
Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld,
A world we lose by merely waking up.
Trailing its telltale tatters only at the outermost
Fringe of mundane vision, this ghost goes
Hand aloft, goodbye, goodbye, not down
Into the rocky gizzard of the earth,
But toward a region where our thick atmosphere
Diminishes, and God knows what is there.

Compare that with the words of Maria Sabina, a Mexican sabia, “one who knows”.

“There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible. And that is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is already known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says.”

Bring to mind the ancient tale of the blind men and the elephant, each with a fragment of the reality of what an elephant is. I believe such stories have been given to us (as Star Wars was given to George Lucas) by it, this Force, as clues to the truth. It’s playful like that. Even so, the core message of the elephant story is often overlooked: that what the blind men are seeking to describe is a living thing.

We are Han Solo

This may sound like hippy, New Age nonsense. Well, I don’t expect you to be persuaded yet, perhaps not even for a long time. Every adult, including me, starts out agreeing with Han Solo that “I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other… and I’ve never seen anything to make me believe that there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything.”

But stop for a moment: are you sure that is true?

Have you ever had goosebumps or a shiver down your spine? Ever had a lucky break or a coincidence too strange to explain? How did you meet your partner or get that new job - was it by chance? Did you know from the very first moment that the love or the work was meant to be? Did you not feel a surge at the first sight of your newborn or have you ever felt awe at the dawn? Ever had a meaningful dream? Ever tripped out at a rave when the roof lifted off and the stars danced by your side? What did you feel when you kissed that person for the first time or when you sat beside someone you loved who was dying?

This is my proposition: that those were moments when you touched It and It touched you.

By its nature, this Force is invisible. Mystery is its lifeblood. Psychedelics are one of the most accessible ways to lift off the veil that conceals it, but there are others like those I’ve mentioned – fleeting moments when the fish becomes aware of the sea.

A part of you, somewhere in your bones or deeper still, recognises what I am describing. It remembers what you knew before you were born.

A Vision

But you don’t have to believe any of this to come along for the ride. Instead, think of it as a game, an experiment in perspective.

In these pages, I intend to look at the desperate real-life crises we face, from the war in Ukraine to the doldrums of Britain, from climate chaos to the corruption of cinema, through this new – or perhaps I should say ancient – lens. To ask if an explanation rooted in this Force might explain what otherwise defies rational sense, offer answers of which we have not even conceived. To ponder what Yoda would say of our times.

I don’t mean to sound flippant about such serious things but the truth is I’m only half joking. After all, Einstein himself said, “We can’t solve our problems by the same kind of thinking that we used when we created them”. We need to reach for a different kind of knowing, long since discredited in the materialist West, though one that until recently was respected everywhere else.

Knowledge that is given, not taken: the guidance of dreams, of visions, of communications with the unseen. The language and knowing of revelation.

What I offer in these pages is far from a neat or complete vision. That’s why they are fragments. The nature of this Force is that in all our attempts to know it, we will never achieve the complete knowledge we crave. My hope is that we may at least pick up a shard here, a sliver there, as if sifting through the debris of a shattered stained glass window. Ever so slowly, we will put the pieces together into a new image to let the light in. One of beauty.

This is not a construction of our own design rather the revealing of something hidden yet always there. If you’ll forgive a pile-up of metaphors, I hope this may be like one of those old Magic Eye pictures, where you stare at a flat, incoherent pattern, and stare at it, until something clicks and you suddenly see the coherent three-dimensional image concealed all along. Of course, it’s worth remembering that some people will never be able to see any image and fanatically deny it is there.

Where appropriate, I’ll tell you of some my own experiences, the encounters that slowly turned me from die-hard sceptic into a student of the Dreamtime. I will also show you that I am not alone, but that others – people you respect, far outside mainstream religion – have touched it too, from Yeats to Jung, Plato to Blake, Terence Malik3 to Herman Hesse, philosophers and politicians, artists and poets, and more than a handful of scientists.

Ultimately, these pages will also be a voyage of discovery. For while I want to report on what I have seen and heard, I know I’m barely paddling in the shallows. The wild sea lies beyond, with so much more to be found. I’d rather not go out there alone.

Flawed Protagonist

Now, you might ask if you do come along, what makes me qualified as a tour guide.

From the outset, I should be clear what I am not: I am not putting myself forward as a guru or wisdom keeper or shaman either of the genuine or the white man’s sort. I have not spent twenty years learning from a tribe in the upper reaches of the Amazon, nor jogged barefoot around the Arctic, neither have I spent my career in an institute dosing people up on psilocybin.

You may not believe it after reading my wacky suggestions, but for most of my life I was a filmmaker and journalist, feet firmly planted in facts. I specialised in films about the very real wars, tyrannies and humanitarian crises people around the world had to face, hoping to help those less privileged than me.

Along the way, my work won awards, including an Oscar nomination, a BAFTA, two Emmys and the prize for Best Documentary at Cannes. I don’t say that to brag, only as a vague bid for credibility, which may come too late after everything else I have said.

The truth is my greatest qualification is that I am just like you. A human being. Flawed, uncertain, juggling work, kids, a marriage and a mortgage as I stumble forward in the dark. Yet I have felt this thing. I have encountered it, I have communicated with it. What I’m hoping to persuade you is that you have too, though you probably ascribed it to something else, like daydreams, luck or coincidence.

So these pages will not only consider epic events; they will be personal too. For the nature of this Force is that it is active in all things from the turning of galaxies down to the growth of each blade of grass.

It dances with every one of us, in life and death, peace and war, sorrow and ecstasy, in the stories you love, in the films you watch, touching everything from the minute details of your life to the history of your town, your country, your people, to the rocks and the rivers and the trees. It affects you whether you believe in it or not, just like gravity, and it binds us together, beyond time or distance, the power that moves all things.

Sure, it sounds fantastic. That’s why they call it the infinite.

My dream is, if I can persuade you of any of this, that this might become a community, a space for you to share your encounters with it too. For that is how we will restore our relationship with it, perhaps even – if you’ll forgive the phrase – to restore the covenants we have broken. For it is nothing if not democratic; no-one is special and everyone is. I have come to believe we all have the possibility of the same connection to it, unmediated by messiahs or priests.

If understandably you find this all too hard to swallow then it’s time for one of those experiments in perspective: imagine, just for a moment, if this were true, what it would mean for your life and our world.

Deus Ex Machina

In a screenplay, even after the All is Lost moment has arrived, once the hero has accepted the truth that she has shied away from throughout, she still faces the hardest part of all: to embody it out there in the world.

In this, our culture conspires against us. We are conditioned to believe that we are weak and brutal and crude. To believe that a drink, a pizza, and the new series on Netflix may be the closest we’ll get to transcendence. It is not true.

Yet it is not easy to shake off comfort for truth. The process of change is hard and it is painful. Once we have cast off the goose-down jackets that our civilization swaddles us in, the wind will blister our soft skin. This path is not for everyone yet it leads up the mountain, to the next stage of our evolution.

Time has almost run out. We stand one crisis, one trigger pull, from the most devastating war the human race has ever seen. And even if by some miracle we swerve that fate, the collapse of the Earth’s life support systems or the rise of the robots lie in wait.

I believe that we cannot overcome these crises alone. Like an alcoholic on the threshold of a 12-step program, we must ask ourselves if we have it in us to control our excesses without the help of Step 2, a “higher power”. When we believe ourselves to be the highest form of intelligence, we have no-one but our own ingenuity to rely on. And though ingenious we certainly are, we have barely begun to understand the complexity of the interwoven web of life that our greed and ignorance has broken. If our car breaks down, we might tinker with repairs to the best of our knowledge. But sooner or later, we may need to turn to the manufacturer for help.

Yet the potential is far greater than simply repairing the damage. Free of suffocating institutions and invisible chains, through a connection renewed for our times, partnership with this Force may help us rediscover the knowledge of our rightful place in the world, and our strength and dignity as human beings.

You’ve come this far so let me send you off with one last thought to outrage the sceptic in you: that these words do not come from me but from it, this entity, this Force. This is one of those moments you’ve met it.

It wants you to know that life is more beautiful, more alive, more full of hope than you’ve come to believe. It wants you to know that it knows you - yes, you personally. You are seen, you are valued, your life has meaning. You were made for these times.

I hope you’ll come along for this wild ride. Despite all the darkness, it’s going to be fun.

Edward Scarlett-Watts

London
May 2023