An Archaic Revival or Classical Rebirth?
The Renaissance, Neoplatonism and the Magical un-Making of the Mystery Schools
A chapter from my latest book, A Renaissance or New Middle Ages: Magic, Mystery and the Trance Formation of the West
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.
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.
