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 4th 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 11th 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.
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.