The search for modern spiritualism in an age of reason
If there is one thing that we can learn from the 21st Century entertainment industry, it is that modern people have a near insatiable appetite for ancient myths. Our digital screens are filled with all kinds of mythic beings adapted from historic literature. Not only Gods but wizards, angels, demons, and many other magical entities. Myth making is present in almost all popular forms of entertainment from fantasy novels, movies, and video games. Aside from Western culture, fantasy entertainment is popular in other parts of the world. Retelling epic narratives from India, China, and even the Middle East. The enduring strength of such myths is all around us, but probably most evident of all with superheroes.
Superheroes mostly began as American war propaganda during World War 2. With both Superman and Captain America depicted leading armies of American soldiers against the Nazis. Though the earliest comics drew on a legacy of already popular science fiction and detective stories, they later developed into the much more epic good-versus-evil narratives during the war before later becoming the ubiquitous Hollywood movies that we all know today. Like the heroes of Greek myths, superheroes are humans with supernatural powers. Except that instead of divine favour this happens through the magic of chemical serums, radioactive experiments, or alien science. Also, like Greek heroes, superheroes often struggle to use their powers for good and must constantly resist temptations that would turn them towards evil.
Just like our culture has modern folk deities in entertainment, it also has ritual forms of worship that have taken over from archaic religion for many young people. Astrology - also an important focus of Greek science - is today more widely practiced than perhaps at any point in history. Degrees in astrology are currently offered online and some make thousands of dollars fortune telling and matchmaking for single women seeking a faithful partner. Apart from astrology, modern culture has acquired a few other features of pagan spiritualism like alternative medicine, healing crystals, and a conscious universe. These are all features of a kind of neoshamanism that has become the reservoir of spirituality in our increasingly digital age.
What this suggests is that people have a very deep need for the more mystic forms of religion, which is not satisfied simply by an appeal to the scientific method. While an older generation is still able to find solace in the sermons of Christian priests, a younger generation is increasingly searching elsewhere.
Not surprisingly many younger people turn towards Buddhism and the other religions of the east to find this mysticism. With its traditions of meditation, and spiritual rebirth, Buddhism appeals to many modern people as an antidote to their fast paced and isolated lives. Christianity once contained a much stronger spiritual tradition involving fasting and self-flagellation, but this mystical side was increasingly diminished over the centuries. Europe’s emphasis on the material world helped it create most of modern science, but the spiritual realm was perhaps left underdeveloped in Western philosophy as a result.
The problem with trying to develop a more modern spiritualism is that modern science is opposed to most of the things that make spiritual philosophy exciting. Mythologies and mystical experiences rely on folk stories, hallucinations, and artistic motifs. While they may be useful to us as entertainment, it is an entirely different matter for people to believe in them as truth.
There is an additional problem that most spiritual philosophies are rooted in certain places at certain times and defy attempts to generalise them into a single system. However, there were several historical attempts to integrate different mythologies into a kind of 'religion for all mankind.' Examining them in detail is probably worthwhile when confronting the problem of modern spiritualism.
Perfect Forms
After Alexander the Great spread Hellenistic philosophy from Athens to Lahore, he left behind many schools that would try to unify the beliefs of the Greeks with their new subjects. The schools of Lucretius, The Stoics, and the Epicureans, all developed increasingly complicated systems of thought that could integrate all of humanity though most of them did not involve deities. Another view was adopted by the Neoplatonists, a group who saw this world as a corrupted version of a more perfect world that humans could one day return to.
This worldview came to dominate an early Christian group known as the Gnostics. Who believed that the physical world was a sinful creation of fallen angels, ruled over by an evil lion headed snake deity called the Demiurge. And that humans could only return to the higher worlds through self-reflection and moral behaviour.
These beliefs later influenced other schools like Manichaeism which tried to integrate Christianity and Buddhism, adopting many of the Gnostic teachings of a realm of light in permanent conflict with a realm of darkness.
While both movements eventually died out in medieval Europe, their mantle was inherited by a movement called Hermeticism. The movement takes its name from the Greek messenger God, Hermes, but claims to possess the knowledge from the Egyptian God, Thoth. The Hermetics were a product of scholars in Alexandria who combined Greek and Egyptian mysticism. They taught a kind of outlawed magic which used astronomy, alchemy, spell casting, and reincarnation which became popular in 16th century Europe. As science advanced, many became attracted to what they saw as ancient magical practices outlawed by the church.
The Hermetic movement has all the cliche trappings of witches and wizards using astrolabes and crystal balls which are almost universally popularized today by Harry Potter and other works of fiction. Later the movement appropriated sets of playing cards from Egypt and used them to predict people’s fortunes. Today we recognise them as the tarot cards used by fortune tellers in our time.
What all these small mystic movements show is that spiritual practices were often driven underground because of their outlawing by the church which claimed a monopoly on magic. The occult was never quite as popular in Europe as people imagine, belonging instead to a few upper-class groups in the 17th century who saw it as a kind of scientific magic. As science came to replace religion, people sought harder to find magic elsewhere, believing that it must reside in other, less common practices.
In the 18th century these occult practices developed into a set of secret societies like the Rosicrusians, The Order of the Golden Dawn, and the FreeMasons, all of which drew on the same spiritual knowledge that could be traced back to the Hermeticists. Today they form the building blocks of most popular conspiracy theories, only updated to powerful financial groups.
However powerful these groups were in their time they never took on the mass appeal of actual religions. The most audacious attempt to create a rational spiritualism was likely the French Revolution, where churches were converted into 'Temples of Reason', complete with Reason Gods and sacred prophets like Voltaire and Isaac Newton; festivals of Reason that worshipped a vaguely defined Supreme Being.
The revolution ended by executing tens of thousands of citizens, followed by a series of large wars in the name of liberty and science. Such experiences were later repeated by both Communists and the Fascists in the 20th century who also tried to create rational belief systems to replace religion.
The fact that past attempts at developing atheistic religions so often involved mass killing is not usually addressed by modern humanists, who often assume either that past atrocities do not represent true humanism or that modern followers have learned from the mistakes of the past. The problem with this belief is that we have very little understanding of how moral systems evolve over time and how moral teachings proliferate. In a time when atheism is the fastest spreading belief worldwide, the assumption that a benign morality based on secular humanism will emerge may be completely wrong.
Mostly, however, new spiritual movements seem harmless, and it is questionable how seriously practitioners take them. People cannot make themselves believe in ideas they have abandoned, no matter how much they like the idea of cosplaying as an ancient Odin worshipper, or a native American shaman. These activities, while perhaps not serious, are still more successful than organised religions over the last few decades. Almost all the ones that have emerged in the last twenty years are either Christian cults in east Asia, forms of neopaganism, or parody religions like the Satanists, the Spaghetti Monster Church, and Jediism.
Perhaps it is only natural that a new form of spiritualism seems to have emerged from the self-help movement. Encompassing entire floors of bookshops, self-help writers today draw crowds of tens of thousands and have millions of followers online. The internet and video streaming has opened the doors to a new kind of sermon, where therapists and motivational speakers have taken over the roles that priests once had. It may be that in the 21st century, belief systems will simply look like the decentralised movements that we currently observe.
Such speakers are surely a positive development. Except that they often lack the colour, charm and charisma of past mystics. A more mature form of this kind of experience may develop out of what is currently being occupied by neoshamanism.
There are other fringe movements that have the trappings of religions. The transhumanists display slogans like 'the singularity is near' on their websites. Predicting that, in the near future, the final phase of humanity will be reached when everyone will be uploaded onto computers and merged into an AI consciousness.
Whatever the future holds, mass delusions and unconscious constructions will play a larger role in our culture, no matter how rational we think we are. Which means the development of better moral systems is something that it would be foolhardy for societies not to engage in.