An Archaic Revival or Classical Rebirth?

The Renaissance, Neoplatonism and the Magical un-Making of the Mystery Schools

A new instalment from the final section of my forthcoming book, A Renaissance or New Middle Ages: The Magic, Mystery and Making of the Modern West. Subscribers can read previous instalments here and here. And if you haven’t watched it yet, here’s our latest fireside chat on literature’s monumental comeback and the New Sublime.

With the replacement of the Pantheon and Rome’s vast array of mystery schools by Nicene Christianity, the soothsayers, astrologists, magicians and medicine men of old seemed to have been kicked to the curb for good. Further, with the Judeo-Christian notion of man as imago viva dei and capax dei revitalized and further elaborated during the Florentine Renaissance, the human intellect seemed to have triumphed over the most elaborate forms of archaic magic, Medieval sooth-saying and Delphic divination.

Or so we thought.

Initially, the revolution was exemplified by Renaissance geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci who could conceive of the sacred Trinitarian relationship between man and God with revolutionary new artistic and scientific insights; the architect of a small Florentine city-state like Brunelleschi could build church domes greater than those constructed by history’s most celebrated empires; and a Tuscan poet like Dante could compose epic cycles whose philosophical vision and moral clarity would have been admired and admitted by the most stringent philosopher kings of Plato’s ideal Republic.

Perspective diagram, “The Last Supper.”

A coincidence between man and God, the microcosm and macrocosm, became a visceral reality, dwarfing the earlier forms of “magic.”

But while the occult mystery schools of ancient times, with their archaic myth-makers, weather-modifying Chaldean oracles, and soothe-saying spellcasters may have taken a back seat to the modern making of Western civilization, a closer examination of the true story of the Renaissance suggests the clever rain-makers and soothe-saying operators of old never really went away.

In reality, Western civilization’s current-day struggle for survival in the face of post-industrial despair, cultural degeneration and spiritual perversion can be traced back to the fact that there were not one but two Renaissances during the 15th century. As we’ll see, these two currents have been at war ever since, and are duking it out at this very moment, even as you read these lines.

What follows is a new chapter on the unfinished story of modern Western civilization and the ongoing efforts to unmake one of the greatest transformations in history.

The Haunting of Modern Man?

I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were, a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal.
—Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 18 (Letter to Sigmund Freud)

It’s become commonplace to describe man and the modern world as “haunted,” with most of humankind soullessly drifting without any roots or history, condemned to the blind worship of material prosperity and security, without any sense of its own divine nature. Perhaps no one articulated this view more effectively in the twentieth century than a famous occultist and black magician who doubled as a popular psychoanalyst, Carl Jung.

Jung gave a series of lectures on “Modern Man and his Search for a Soul” where he opined that:

“The modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother, and set up in their place the ideals of material security, general welfare and humaneness. But it takes more than an ordinary dose of optimism to make it appear that these ideals are still unshaken. Material security, even, has gone by the board, for the 'modern man begins to see that every step in material ‘progress’ adds just so much force to the threat of a more stupendous catastrophe. The very picture terrorizes the imagination. What are we to imagine when cities today perfect measures of defense against poison-gas attacks, and practice them in ‘dress rehearsals’”

Overlooking the many agencies, agendas and political operations used to actively unmake modern Western civilization and the fruits of its progress, Jung’s arguments have come to be associated with a wide range of “Traditionalist”, esoteric, and mysticism-prone ideological groupings who believe the modern world is essentially incompatible with man’s true “spiritual” nature. These currents have risen to great influence on both the ostensible “Right” and “Left” sides of the political spectrum.

Under the duress of a collapsing Western monetary system and the modern malaise perpetuated by a nearly terminal cancerous financial growth that has attached itself to the West’s vital organs, a new Medieval romanticism has rooted itself in the imaginations of many diverse and seemingly opposed ideological currents. From eco-terrorists like Ted Kaczynski and self-styled traditionalist, orthodox, neo-monarchist and neo-paganist influencers to secular, environmentalist, New Age, and Accelerationist gurus—all have expressed their longing to see mankind cast off the artificial yoke of modern civilization—and therefore regain the “magic” of earlier times.

Consider why Carl Jung describes man’s leap from the Middle Ages into the modern world as something akin to a “Promethean sin”. As an avid enthusiast of ancient occultism, Neoplatonism, alchemy and Gnosticism, Jung remarked that the life of modern man was stripped of the “magic” and “mystery” which had animated the life of his medieval brothers and archaic ancestors.

Jung argues:

“In the face of such a picture we may well grow humble again. It is true that modern man is a culmination, but tomorrow he will be surpassed; he is indeed the end-product of an age-old development, but he is at the same time the worst conceivable disappointment of the hopes of humankind. The modern man is aware of this. He has seen how beneficial are science, technology and organization, but also how catastrophic they can be. He has likewise seen that well-meaning governments have so thoroughly paved the way for peace on the principle “in time of peace prepare for war,” that Europe has nearly gone to rack and ruin. And as for ideals, the Christian church, the brotherhood of man, international social democracy and the solidarity of economic interests have all failed to stand the baptism of fire—the test of reality.”

The suppression of the dark, numinous and intuitive forces prominent among archaic civilizations now haunted modern “rationalist” man, Jung believed. It was the source of war, strife and societal discontent. This “Promethean sin”—the emergence of the belief in a divine order governed by Reason, absent an irrational and arbitrary will—left man spiritually void. And while the modern mind could not admit magic into his system, Jung enjoyed using his psychoanalytic theories to diagnose the sabotaging, rankled modern mind, which struggled to comprehend the seemingly irrational outbursts of the psyche—despite his best rational efforts.

Jung believed only a reconnection with the occult, mystical and mysteries of old would give man the tools to reconnect with the deeper, divine and intuitive realm of the human psyche which was the supposed source of man’s sacred energy.

Jung writes:

“By means of the secular practice of the naïve projection which is, as we have seen, nothing else than a veiled or indirect real-transference (through the spiritual, through the logos), Christian training has produced a widespread weakening of the animal nature so that a great part of the strength of the impulses could be set free for the work of social preservation and fruitfulness. This abundance of libido, to make use of this singular expression, pursues with a budding renaissance (for example Petrarch) a course which outgoing antiquity had already sketched out as religious; viz., the way of the transference to nature. The transformation of this libidinous interest is in great part due to the Mithraic worship, which was a nature religion in the best sense of the word; while the primitive Christians exhibited throughout an antagonistic attitude to the beauties of this world.” (The Psychology of the Unconscious, Carl Jung)

The vital energies of man became fragmented and compartmentalized in the interest of a more “civilized” and “rational order.” This was also Freud’s conclusion, though he and Jung differed on solutions.

However, while Christianity and modern civilization were inextricably wed for Jung, given their emphasis on Reason, other “traditionalist” strands on the nominally Christian side of the ideological spectrum have echoed the same Medieval romanticism.

How could this be?

Writing in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and First World War, the Russian orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev offered a similar, though ostensibly Christian critique of the modern world and its origins in the Renaissance. Characterizing the height of Western scientific and technological progress of his time as a sign of the ultimate unmaking of the modern world and the beginnings of a “New Middle Ages”, Berdyaev foretold of a new “barbarization of Europe; after the refined corruption which marked the highest point of European culture the barbarian invasion has its turn… There may be a new chaos of peoples; the feudalization of Europe is a possibility. There is no such thing in the history of mankind as a continual progress upward in a straight line…”

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In his collected works, The End of Our Times, which has inspired orthodox influencers like Alexander Dugin, Berdyaev writes, “The Renaissance began with the affirmation of man’s creative individuality; it has ended with its denial. Man without God is no longer man: that is the religious meaning of the internal dialectic of modern history, the history of the grander and of the dissipation of humanist illusions.” The end of the Renaissance and historical day would give way to what Berdyaev called the “universal night”, which entailed “the passage from modern rationalism to an irrationalism, or better to a super-rationalism, of the medieval type.”

A self-styled orthodox thinker much like Alexander Dugin, Berdyaev ironically foreshadowed today’s “Accelerationism” which encourages the accelerated decline of the modern world in order to make way for a new set of values.

Berdyaev, like Jung, along with many Traditionalists and neo-reactionaries somewhat gleefully welcomes the chaos, heralding it as a Providential restoration of divine order and the natural “darkness” that enshrouded and enchanted earlier Christian civilization. “And here we may well remind ourselves that the most terrible wars and revolutions, wrecking of civilizations, fall of empires, are not due solely to man’s ill-will but are also in a measure the work of divine providence,” writes Berdyaev.

Jung likewise argued that despite the undoubtably great achievements of modern civilization, from Classical Greece to Nicene Christianity, the Renaissance to the industrial revolution, modern man was as much a failure as a success:

“Now there is the danger that consciousness of the present may lead to an elation based upon illusion: the illusion, namely, that we are the culmination of the history of mankind, the fulfillment and the end-product of countless centuries. If we grant this, we should understand that is no more than the proud acknowledgement of our destitution: we are also the disappointment of the hopes and expectations of the ages. Think of nearly two thousand years of Christian ideals followed, instead of by the return of the Messiah and the heavenly millennium, by the World War among Christian nations and its barbed-wire and poison-gas. What a catastrophe in heaven and on earth!”

In the same way Berdyaev prognosticates the end of modern Western civilization using pseudo-spiritual and pseudo-philosophical arguments, Jung offers a pseudo-psychological assessment which ignores all the causal historical factors and agencies that have actively worked to subvert and unmake the modern world—many of them associated with occult schools of learning and banking syndicates tied to the most ancient oligarchical centers of power in the West.

Each in their own way believed in a divine darkness that had as much a place and power as the light (if not more); and that the way out of the modern crisis lay in a return to darkness, away from the direction of Reason illuminated by the 15^th Renaissance. Whether ostensibly Christian (i.e. Medieval Christianity) or Gnostic, Pagan, Chaldean, Neoplatonic or Mithraic, all are united in their conviction that Reason must be dethroned, and the legacy of the Renaissance undone.

Near the end of one of his philosophical memoirs, Jung writes:

“At last I had found confirmation that there were or had been people who saw evil and its universal power, and--more important—the mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering. To that extent Goethe became, in my eyes, a prophet. But I could not forgive him for having dismissed Mephistopheles by a mere trick, by a bit of jiggery-pokery. * For me that was too theological, too frivolous and irresponsible, and I was deeply sorry that Goethe too had fallen for those cunning devices by which evil is rendered innocuous. In reading the drama I had discovered that Faust had been a philosopher of sorts, and although he turned away from philosophy, he had obviously learned from it a certain receptivity to the truth. Hitherto I had heard virtually nothing of philosophy, and now a new hope dawned. Perhaps, I thought, there were philosophers who had grappled with these questions and could shed light on them for me.” (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections., p. 537)

The Science of the Jungle, or the Revenge of the Medicine Men

“Magic is the science of the jungle”

In one of his lectures, Jung recounts the memorable experience he had navigating the tropical forests of Africa:

“One must imagine the velvety blue of a tropical night, the overhanging black masses of gigantic trees standing in a virgin forest, the mysterious voices of the nocturnal spaces, a lonely fire with loaded rifles stacked beside it, mosquito-nets, boiled swamp-water to drink, and above all the conviction expressed by an old Afrikander who knew what he Was saying : ‘This isn't man's country-it's God's country.’ There man is not king ; it is rather nature - the animals, plants and microbes. Given the mood that goes with the place, one understands how it is that we found a dawning significance in things that anywhere else would provoke a smile. That is the world of unrestrained, capricious powers with which primitive man has to deal day by day. The extraordinary event is no joke to him. He draws his own conclusions. ‘It is not a good place’-‘The day is unfavourable’-and who knows what dangers he avoids by following such warnings?” (Archaic Man, p. 139-140)

Jung contrasted “the magic of the jungle” with the supposedly artificial world modern man had created for himself, one that he naively believed could insulate him from those arbitrary forces which shaped the faith and fate of all earlier primitive, archaic and ancient societies, that is, those periods during which the sorcerers, medicine men, rain-makers and oracles still ruled.

“A recent investigator has ventured the statement: ‘Magic is the science of the jungle.’ Astrology and other methods of divination may undoubtedly be called the science of antiquity. What happens regularly is easily observed because we are prepared for it. Knowledge and skill are only needed in situations where the course of events is arbitrarily disrupted in a way hard to fathom. Generally it is one of the cleverest and shrewdest men of the tribe who is entrusted with the observation of events. His knowledge must suffice to explain all unusual occurrences, and his art to combat them. He is the scholar, the specialist, the expert on the subject of chance occurrences, and at the same time the keeper of the archives of the tribe's traditional lore. Surrounded by respect and fear, he enjoys great authority, yet not so great but that his tribe is secretly convinced that their neighbours have a sorcerer who is stronger than theirs.” (Archaic Man, p. 135-136)

Like tribes advised by the rain-maker who knew to build villages on hills in order to benefit from more favorable weather patterns, or the psychoanalyst who recognized the benefits of confession, these ancient minds had not yet been differentiated, with the external and internal happenings of the world still divinely intertwined in one cosmic mystery.

The Soothsayer – Simon Vouet (1617)