Roar of the Sacred Uprising

A theory on the source of all our troubles

March of Progress by Mark Henson

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

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

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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.

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.