Ship of Fools

All aboard!

Well, it’s about time.

I was very pleased recently when my spiritual soul-brother Paul Kingsnorth finally came out in a series of blogposts and interviews that he thinks the world is sinking precipitously toward totalitarianism through the advent of the v@ccine passports and mandates that become more alarming by the minute, especially in Germany, Austria, and the Great Ahriman, Australia, but also in Ireland (where the Brit Kingsnorth makes his home) and a bewildering array of other countries, states, and municipalities such as California and New York. Enough, argues Kingsnorth in his own inimitable way, is enough.

Even Rod Dreher has finally come around and seen fit to comment on this concerning development. He did it using Kingsnorth’s epiphany as a screen in a recent post, though I don’t think he’s entered this fray heretofore. At least not that I’ve found. Must be a slow news week in Hungary.

I honestly don’t understand why it’s taken them so long.

I saw this coming from the proverbial mile away, as early as spring of 2020. It was not hard to predict—and many I know, even good friends, told me I was being paranoid and that such things could never happen. They’re happening. My astounding insight (jk) was not the product of anything remotely resembling spiritual vision, but due to the fact that I’ve been an English professor teaching students the ABCs of rhetoric and its evil stepsister propaganda for twenty-some years. Using texts from Plato’s Gorgias to Huxley and Orwell to to the novels of Philip K. Dick to Adam Curtis’s eye-opening Century of the Self series (and so many things besides) throughout my academic career I’ve been asking students to examine the toxic environment of words within which we are constantly saturated and bombarded. But solid teaching, it seems, is no match for the technocracy. Technocracy is here, and its winning.

I suppose it is a poet’s curse. As a poet and songwriter, I am keenly attuned to language and meaning, to text, context, and subtext. I’m attentive to the hypnotic cadences of lines and the insidious ways messages insert themselves into our awareness—and into our subconscious. I am sure you, gentle reader, could rattle off any number of advertising jingles from your earliest childhood without making a mistake—I was born in the early 60s, and I’m sure I could drop dozens without coming up for air. Political speech operates in the same register: “Just say no,” “I believe in a place called Hope,” “Change has come to America,” “Believe women,” “Make America Great Again,” and let’s not forget the New World Anthem, “Build Back Better.” None of these slogans mean a damn thing, their only quality is how they inject a feel-good soporific into the body politic while the social engineers and technocrats proceed apace in toward their goal of total control, a goal nearing its realization, as governments everywhere, but especially in the “democratic West,” move ever closer to the digital promised land of a social credit system.

People may wonder what this has to do with Sophiology. Everything, actually. As anyone familiar with my work would know (minuscule though that coterie is), my claim is that technocracy is the anti-Sophia (Kingsnorth calls it “The Machine”). It is (as I’ve written) completely Ahrimanic (a term I do not use in a dogmatic anthroposophical sense—so spare me the complaints). Simply put, my vehemence on this subject is a direct outgrowth of my Sophiology—for I see an inverse relationship between the sophiological and the technocratic: the more technocratic the world grows, the less room is there for Sophia to appear.

I felt this technocratic specter rising long ago, far earlier than my earliest attempt at capturing this in writing when I wrote about Blade Runner and transhumanism almost twenty years ago. I’ve been watching it approach and wrote my sophiological works at least in part as a way to alter that trajectory. I’ve failed, obviously, though I take some strange comfort in knowing that the technocrats see my work as enough of a threat to quash traffic to my various internet platforms. Maybe this is why Kingsnorth and Dreher (among others, certainly) have been so reluctant until now to speak up. I hope others join them.

I suspect things may come to a head on or around the twenty-fourth of this month, when Saturn and Uranus form a hard square from Aquarius to Taurus. This square suggests a breaking down of power structures and a tension between authority and technology. I remember, as you might, when the internet was a much more democratic digital environment—and not the Thought Police of the World Archons it is now. Saturn and Uranus were conjunct in 1989—the year the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Bloc Communism started to crumble. I remember how hopeful I was (my eldest son was born that year) that the world would be a better place. What a chump I was! Communism somehow became cool! When Saturn and Uranus were square in 2000, the world was in a financial crisis (remember Enron?) accompanied by the Y2K panic (computers). When the planets were in opposition—2008—finance and technocrats were in full-on “screw the proletariat” mode with the housing crisis and the tanking of the global economy. I fully expect a financial component to this one (Taurus), but there is also the possibility of something new coming into being (Aquarius). It could get ugly for a minute, but—and this depends on people of good will—that ugliness could turn to beauty.

If my life has taught me anything, it is that the Archons—at whatever level—may be clever, but they’re also entirely lacking in wisdom, which is to say stupid. This is nothing new, of course. Originating in Plato in the Republic, but very popular from the medieval through the early modern periods, the emblem of “The Ship of Fools” has born witness to the incredible folly of the human race, and especially of those assuming the reins of power. Here is Plato’s telling:

“There’s the shipowner, larger and stronger than everyone in the ship, but somewhat deaf and rather short-sighted, with a knowledge of sailing to match his eyesight. The sailors are quarrelling among themselves over captaincy of the ship, each one thinking that he ought to be captain, though he has never learnt that skill, nor can he point to the person who taught him or a time when he was learning it. On top of which they say it can’t be taught. In fact they’re prepared to cut to pieces anyone who says it can. The shipowner himself is always surrounded by them. They beg him and do everything they can to make him hand over the tiller to them. Sometimes, if other people can persuade him and they can’t, they kill those others or throw them overboard. Then they immobilise their worthy shipowner with drugs or drink or by some other means, and take control of the ship, helping themselves to what it is carrying. Drinking and feasting, they sail in the way you’d expect people like that to sail. More than that, if someone is good at finding them ways of persuading or compelling the shipowner to let them take control, they call him a real seaman, a real captain, and say he really knows about ships. Anyone who can’t do this they treat with contempt, calling him useless. They don’t even begin to understand that if he is to be truly fit to take command of a ship a real ship’s captain must of necessity be thoroughly familiar with the seasons of the year, the stars in the sky, the winds, and everything to do with his art. As for how he is going to steer the ship—regardless of whether anyone wants him to or not—they do not regard this as an additional skill or study which can be acquired over and above the art of being a ship’s captain. If this is the situation on board, don’t you think the person who is genuinely equipped to be captain will be called a stargazer, a chatterer, of no use to them, by those who sail in ships with this kind of crew?” (Book VI)

The past twenty-some months clearly bear this out. People haven’t changed all that much.

Hopefully, those who survive the coming madness (not to mention the current madness) will be able to bring wisdom back into the center of human striving and flourishing. We’d be fools not to.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

Post-Christianity: How Christianity Failed and Continues to Fail

I think I surprised an interviewer recently when I was asked about the prophetic vocation of Sophiology in my own work and the role Nikolai Berdyaev has in such a project. The last chapter of my recent book Sophia in Exile is on Berdyaev and I think the scathing critiques of Christianity he delivered in the 1930s and 40s are just as salient today as they were when he issued them. In fact, seeing that we are now in an unapologetically post-Christian era, I’d say his criticisms are even more cogent; especially since they were so accurate. The following few paragraphs are excerpted from the book:

For Berdyaev, though, the rise of the technological colonization of man did not simply happen by accident. Rather, it is the result of the breakdown of culture and the failure of Christianity to transfigure society. Influenced by Solovyov’s conviction that Western Christianity, while it created a culture, did not create a Christian culture, whereas Eastern Christianity failed to create a culture at all, though its society was Christian, Berdyaev lays the blame at the feet of a Christianity mired in its many sins and more invested in preservation of the past than concern about the future. His critique is scathing:

“We are witnessing a judgement not on history alone, but upon Christian humanity…. The task of creating a more just and humane social order has fallen into the hands of anti-Christians, rather than Christians themselves. The divine has been torn apart from the human. This is the basis of all judgement in the moral sphere, now being passed upon Christianity.” [1]

Christianity, furthermore, failed to save culture, because it failed to be Christian:

“In this visible world there is no external unity in the Church; its œcumenicity is not completely actualized. Not only the division of the Churches and the multiplicity of Christian confessions but the very fact that there are non-Christian religions in the world at all, and that there is, besides, an anti-Christian world, proves that the Church is still in a merely potential state and that its actualization is still incomplete.” [2]

In addition, Christianity, for Berdyaev, is too enamored of its own past, thereby neglecting its true vocation:

“In historical Christianity the prophetic element inherent in it has become enfeebled and this is why it ceases to play an active and leading role in history. We no longer look to anything but the past and to past illumination. But it is the future which needs lighting up.” [3]

And not only has the prophetic element become enfeebled, but, because it has, so has Christianity tout court:

“Christianity in the course of its history has too often been submissive to brute facts; the leaders of the churches have too often adapted themselves to various political and social orders, and the judgement of the Church is only pronounced after the event. The result of this has been a loss of messianic consciousness and an exclusive turning towards the past.” [4]

Even the accommodationist approach to Christianity’s “engagement with the world” focused on the present proves sterile: “The adapting of Christianity to the social structure and to the forces which dominated it has disfigured Christianity in the course of history and naturally provoked resentment. The spiritual depths of Christianity are no longer to be seen.” [5] The picture he paints is a dire one rendered in a pallet of grey.

Faced with the realities of Christian history and culture and the impending demonic technicization of man, Berdyaev can only conclude that, “Either a new epoch in Christianity is in store for us and a Christian renaissance will take place, or Christianity is doomed to perish,” though he knows full well that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. [6] Berdyaev wagers on behalf of the Church Triumphant, but he condemns degenerate Christianity when he sees it because he knows a failure of culture is at its core a failure of Christianity. He recognizes the paradox.

The paradox is that only Christianity can save the world from Christianity. Thus Berdyaev prophesizes the arrival of “the new Christianity” which will “rehumanize man and society, culture and the world” because “[o]nly in Divine-humanity, the Body of Christ, can man be saved.” [7] But such regeneration is not without conditions:

“The future depends upon our will and upon our spiritual efforts. This must be said about the future of the entire world. The part to be played by Christianity will certainly be enormous on condition that its old fictitious forms are left behind and that its prophetic aspect is revealed as the source of a different attitude towards the social problem.” [8]

Unfortunately, people have a hard time releasing themselves from the fictitious forms that enthrall them.

My interviewer, I think, was surprised that I was not more optimistic about the future of Christianity. But I have been cursed by the gift of clear-thinking. And while I am more than convinced that only Sophiology can save Christianity from its long, slow, and more or less tragi-comic death, I also realize that most of those who go by the name of Christian are not only content to ignore Sophiology whole-cloth but are even more at home with the technocratic paradigm now enveloping them with darkness and the promises of a golden age of security. The leaders of nearly every church or religion have adopted one or another version of the “Build Back Better” chicanery and their followers have traded Christianity for a palliative Utilitarianism in which everyone belongs to everyone in a wash of insipid sloganeering and pop-compassion. It’s The Church of Bono.

So, no, I am not optimistic. I take no pleasure in watching this decay and take no pleasure in watching these various caricatures of Christianity choke on the vomit of their own absurdity. The technocrats are winning. I guess that’s how it’s going to be. Christians like convenience; and technocracy promises all kinds of convenience. I still listen to other voices, however, just as Berdyaev did before me. Like William Butler Yeats, Berdyaev was attentive to the tragic nature of revelation as it destroys the falsity of our various temptations and our bourgeois complacencies; for, “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” It is so strange to watch all this unfold, to see Christianity absorbed into the technocratic realm of Ahriman. Only a god can save us.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Watch for his Sophia in Exile, due momently from Angelico Press.

1. The Fate of Man in the Modern World, 118 and 122.

2. Freedom and the Spirit, 348.

3. Towards a New Epoch, 36.

4. Ibid., 117.

5. Ibid., 37.

6. Freedom and the Spirit, 46.

7. The Fate of Man in the Modern World, 129.

8. Towards a New Epoch, 117.

The God of the Technocrats

In the Zoroastrian mythos, Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu) is the spiritual power who opposes Ahura Mazdao (or Ormazd), the Creator, whose name means “Lord of Wisdom.” In his early novel Cosmic Puppets (1957),Philip K. Dick uses the Ahura Mazdao/Ahriman binary in the story of the battle between spiritual and cosmic evil and good played out in small town Virginia; it was kind of a precursor to Dick’s later fascination with Gnostic dualism and in no small part influenced his thoughts on what we would now call mass surveillance and transhumanism.

The concept of Ahriman also appears in the writing of the great Russian radical Christian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev and became a fundamental idea in the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner. For both Berdyaev and Steiner, Ahriman represents the technological, the materialistic, and the technocratic, that which seeks always to turn human beings into collectivist and efficient machines: emotionless, unfeeling, and inartistic—like the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In the introduction to The Meaning of the Creative Act (1914), Berdyaev confesses himself a dualist (with some serious qualifications):

“I confess an almost manichean dualism. So be it. “The world” is evil, it is without God and not created by Him. We must go out of the world, overcome it completely: the world must be consumed, it is of the nature of Ariman, Freedom from the world is the pathos of this book. There is an objective source of evil, against which we must wage an heroic war. The necessity of the given world and the given world itself are of Ariman.” [1]

And then the qualifications:

“Over against this stands freedom in the spirit, life in divine love, life in the Pleroma. And I also confess an almost pantheistic monism. The world is divine in its very nature. Man is, by his nature, divine. The world-process is self-revelation of Divinity, it is taking place within Divinity. God is immanent in the world and in man. The world and man are immanent in God. Everything which happens with man happens with God. There is no dualism of divine and extra-divine nature, of God's absolute transcendence of the world and of man.”

He is completely aware of the antinomy and embraces it.

In The Meaning of History (1923), Berdyaev returns to the Zoroastrian understanding of Ahriman is his consideration of history and, what is always a preoccupation of his, eschatology:

“The conflict between Ormuz and Ariman is resolved by a catastrophe which brings about the end of history and the beginning of something else. Without this sense of an end, the process cannot be conceived as historical movement. Without this eschatological perspective progression cannot be considered as history, for it lacks inner purpose, significance, and fulfillment.” [2]

The Eschaton, I think it’s spiritually healthy to say, is always already happening. It’s only that sometimes it is easier to perceive.

My guess is that Berdyaev first became intrigued by the religious and sociological implications of the concept of Ahriman during the period of his interest in Rudolf Steiner. Berdyaev’s friend, the poet and novelist Andrei Bely (real name Boris Bukarev) was an early Russian enthusiast of Steiner’s and encouraged his friend to read some of the Austrian philosopher’s work, and even entreated him to attend lectures of Steiner’s in Helsingfors, Finland in 1913. Berdyaev was never completely sold on Steiner, but neither did he completely dismiss him. He returns to Steiner often in his work, sometimes in approval and sometimes in critique. But he takes him seriously.

Steiner’s treatment of Ahriman is much more developed and complex than Berdyaev’s. Clearly inspired by Hegelian dialectic, Steiner reads Ahriman as part of a polarity with Christ as the mediator:

“To gain a right conception of the historical evolution of mankind over approximately 6000 years, one must grasp that at the one pole stands an incarnation of Lucifer, in the center the incarnation of Christ, and at the other pole the incarnation of Ahriman. Lucifer is the power that stirs up all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces in human beings, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes people dry, prosaic, philistine—that ossifies them and brings them in the superstition of materialism. And the true nature and being of man is essentially the effort to hold the balance between the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman; the Christ impulse helps present humanity to establish this equilibrium.” [3]

One way to think of this is to turn to basic human psychology. Say a person is drawn to an extreme self-expression characterized by a very narcissistic interpretation of “freedom”—which is how Steiner understands the workings of Lucifer. Well, just desiring this freedom might not be enough to actualize it without medical or technological interventions, so the person in question undergoes such intervention, often resulting in a lifelong dependency on various drugs or other chemical therapies or even mechanical manipulation of the body. This is what Steiner would call an ahrimanic gesture: the capitualtion to the technological (or technocratic). So we can see how the luciferic tendency can deliver the individual into the clutches of the ahrimanic. The desire for freedom, then, leads one into a life of slavery.

Speaking in 1919, Steiner explains how this tendency not only impacts individual human persons, but can also impact societies:

“Ahriman has the greatest possible interest in instructing men in mathematics, but not in instructing them that mathematical-mechanistic concepts of the universe are merely illusions. He is intensely interested in teaching us the concepts of chemistry, physics, biology and so on, as they are presented today in all their remarkable effects, and in making us believe that these are absolute truths, not that they are only points of view, like photographs taken from one side. If you photograph a tree from one side, it can be a correct photograph, yet it does not give a picture of the whole tree. If you photograph a tree from one side, it can be a true likeness, yet it does not give a picture of the whole tree as can be gained from photographing it from four sides. Ahriman has the greatest interest in concealing from mankind that in modern intellectual, rationalistic science, in superstitious empiricism, one is dealing with a great illusion, a deception—that men should not recognize this is of the greatest possible interest to Ahriman. It would be a triumphant experience for him if the scientific superstition which infiltrates all areas of life today and which human beings even try to use as a template for the social sciences should prevail into the third millennium. He would have the greatest success if he could then arrive in western civilization in human form and find the scientific superstition as prevailing dogma.” [4]

Here we are.

And, in a stirring piece of prophecy, Steiner describes the method of Ahriman:

“The second means that he employs is to stir up all the emotions that fragment people into small groups—groups that attack one another. You need only look at all the conflicting parties that exist today, and if you are unprejudiced you will recognize that the explanation is not to be found in human nature alone. If people honestly try to explain this so-called universal warfare through human disharmonies, they will realize that it cannot in fact be attributed to physical humanity. It is precisely here that ‘super-sensible’ powers, ahrimanic powers, have been at work.” [5]

In short, the desire for luciferian freedom has led to advent of ahrimanic transhumanism.

I have been teaching and writing about transhumanism, the great leap forward in human evolution by integration of biology with technology, for about twenty years. When I first started thinking about the topic and discussing its ramifications with my students, most of them seemed to think I was making a big deal out of nothing. This could never happen, they said. It’s just science fiction or a wet dream for computer nerds. Well, it’s happening. It began with promises of liberation and ends with a kind of slavery, whether to pharmacological, governmental, or corporate hegemony (and most effectively when the three are united). Transhumanism is only one tool of technocracy.

I write at length in my book Transfiguration about Ahriman in contrast to Sophia. In fact, to find an alternative to this dreadful state of affairs proposed by the threat of transhumanism is part of what drew me to Sophiology, which is, to my mind, the only antidote to the ghastly scenarios promised by technocracy, whether ushered in by a “Great Reset,” the lure of universal basic income, or any other promise of Utopia, a promise of freedom—from constraint, financial hardship, from illness, from worry—that invariably results in slavery.

What I’m saying, then, is that what we are in the middle of is a spiritual battle, a battle between the ahrimanic black magic of the technocrats and what we can call the white magic of Sophia. The late Ioan Couliano figured this out a long time ago:

“Nowadays the magician busies himself with public relations, propaganda, market research, sociological surveys, publicity, information, counterinformation and misinformation, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography—a science which in the sixteenth century was a branch of magic.... Historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the advent of ‘quantitative science.’ The latter simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and its goals by means of technology.” [6]

Sound familiar?

I doubt most technocrats believe in the existence of Ahriman (or God for that matter, not to mention Sophia) and they certainly don’t pray to him. But there is no doubt that they worship him.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (New York, 1962), 15.

2. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of History, trans. George Reavey (New York, 1962), 40.

3. Rudolf Steiner, The Incarnation of Ahriman: The Embodiment of Evil on Earth: Seven Lectures, trans. Matthew Barton (Forest Row, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2006), 17–18.

4. Ibid., 22.

5. Ibid., 23.

6. Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 109.