Smash the Technocracy

Sophiology is about as far away from the idea of a technocracy as is conceivable. In my book Transfiguration I discuss this polarity in terms of Sophia and Ahriman. Sophia, as anyone familiar with my books or this blog knows, is the handmaid and coworker of the Lord, revealed in scripture, among other places, in Proverbs 8 where she describes herself in intimate terms with him: “when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman”(19-20) and in Luke 1 when the Virgin responds to the archangel that she is the “handmaid of the Lord” (38). Ahriman, on the other hand, is the Anti-Sophia who hates the Lord and wishes to turn everyone and everything into a data set ready to optimized and subsumed into the anti-cosmos. Rudolf Steiner, who used the Zoroastrian name “Ahriman” to identify the spirit working through the technological, described this phenomenon in these words:

“In his technical machines of the economic sphere the human being will perceive that, although he constructed and made them, they nevertheless gradually take on a life of their own—a life certainly which he can still deny because they manifest themselves to begin with only in the economic sphere. But he will notice more and more in what he himself creates that it gains a life of its own and that, despite the fact that he brought it forth from the intellect, the intellect itself can no longer comprehend it…. People will discover, in fact, how the objects of their industry (Wirtschaft) become the bearers of demons.” [1]

In recent news, transhumanism, which had been percolating under the cultural radar for decades, has been rebranded as a societal good, whether through various medical interventions to combat viruses, through similar medical interventions devised to alter one’s identity, or through other applications that seek to permanently connect human biology to the “internet of things.” Strangely, these developments are being proposed by the very powerful, and many people seem to be going along with it—ironically, these are the same people who were blaming these powerful figures for all the evils of Capitalism and the instrumentalization of human beings for control and profit not two years ago. For my part, I have rather a hard time believing that the people who’ve been destroying the planet and human societies for the past century will be the same people to save us from their disastrous projects. Only a fool could buy that. We have no shortage of fools, alas, but fear can make even the best of people do foolish things

In Transfiguration, I note that “as the World of Ahriman more and more encroaches upon the business of being human, more and more compromises being human and turns it into a business, the World of Sophia, the Wisdom that God poured forth upon all his works (Sirach 1:9), more and more reveals itself as the antidote to his madness.” But how do we access the World of Sophia?

First of all, by extricating ourselves from the World of Ahriman. Let’s turn the non serviam back on him. Extrication happens by non-participation, as our Amish brothers and sisters exemplify so well. The Amish, contrary to popular stereotypes, use telephones, even cellphones (the Amish carpenter who put my roof on has a nicer cellphone than I do). The difference is that they don’t let their phones use them.

Another method is by returning to the Creation. When we’ve been herded into virtual spaces, it’s easy to forget our connection to Natura. Learn how to pay attention to the Real. Develop an awareness of where the planets are in the heavens at any given moment of the day. You can start with just the moon. Where in the heavens above or below the earth is it right now? Do you know? What phase is it in? Note the subtle changes in your consciousness after doing this for a few weeks.

Attending to the subtle changes in the flora and fauna in your area works in a similar way. How is the apple tree (or grape vine, or rose bush, or lilac bush, and so forth) different today from yesterday? from last week? How does your attention alter your being?

Not participating in the World of Ahriman is the best medicine, though, of course, in this day and age, it is nearly impossible to completely divorce ourselves from the “net” (perhaps the perfect metaphor). But participation in the World of Sophia is without a doubt the antidote to the World of Ahriman. Maybe if we called the World of Sophia a vaccine more people would try it. At least post-menopausal women wouldn’t start having miraculous periods again (is anything more fitting an image of the diabolical parody of fertility, this anti-fertility?).

Another way, and perhaps one of the most practical, is to not participate in the “food” distributions system of the World of Ahriman. Join a biodynamic or organic CSA. Buy a stake in a herdshare to give yourself access to milk that’s still alive. Get to know farmers. Buy as much of your food as possible directly from them (farmers markets are okay, but they’re often of more benefit to the municipalities hosting them than to the farmers, who get fee’d to death by participating). Start a garden.

Once you start doing these kinds of things, you’ll notice you are less and less a part of the World of Ahriman and more and more a part of the World of Sophia. Sophia’s world is inhabited by people in community with animals, plants, and the land; by community with saints, angels, and God. Sophia is the bridge between these worlds.

The Ahrimanic, however, becomes enraged by such things. It wheels out various methods of curtailing life: taxes, regulations, any number of proscriptions intended to disable or destroy the wholesome and deliver the unwary into the waiting tentacles of the technocracy.

This way of smashing the technocracy boils down to generally ignoring it, or ignoring it as much as possible, and by loving each other, the land, and the beings which inhabit it in a gesture of absolute generosity and care. By so doing, we return to the place promised in Proverbs 8, when Sophia was “by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the children of men. Now therefore hearken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are they that keep my ways” (30-32).

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 Garden.

1. Rudolf Steiner, The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century, trans. Paul King (London / Hudson, NY: Rudolf Steiner Press / Anthroposophic Press, 1988), 82.

Celtic Christianity and Sophiology

John Duncan, St. Bride (1913)

Celtic Christianity has haunted my soul since my early youth, from at least the time when at the age of eighteen I bought a Celtic cross from the gift shop of The Detroit Institute of Arts and which has hung about my neck for most of the intervening forty years. That cross was the seed. Over a decade later, my wife and I chose Claddagh rings as wedding bands—for one, because they were relatively inexpensive and we were poor, and, more importantly, because Celtic spirituality spoke to our souls in a profound way. In addition, my five eldest children all have Celtic names—Brendan, Dylan, Thomas Gwynn, Mae, and Aidan—and Brendan was baptized with water from the Chalice Well in Glastonbury.

Inspired by the lives of the Celtic saints, in my first or second year as a Waldorf teacher I wrote a play, The Journey of St. Brendan the Navigator, for my students to perform. Our school’s eurythmy teacher, Brigitta (Bridget to us Celts) helped me turn it into a kind of Miracle Play, with my class performing the parts of Brendan and his monks, another class as the whale upon whose back Brendan and his companions celebrated Easter Mass, another class as the island of birds, and so on. The teachers even participated, and my dear friend Mary Jo played the role of the wise hermit Brendan met on the Isle of the Blessed. I still recall her face and gestures as her character told Brendan and his crew the time had not yet come to settle upon those shores. I wrote the play out in long hand, and I’m not even sure if I still have a copy, alas. Nevertheless, the entire thing was one of the most beautiful moments in my thirty years of teaching. It felt as if light filled the room. No one was untouched.

Certainly, among other things, what really appealed to me then (and continues to) is the synergy between the angelic and natural orders in Celtic spirituality. The Celtic churches, so difficult to perceive clearly through the mists of history, moved in such an awareness. The legends of the Celtic saints—Patrick, Brendan, Brigid, and Columba for example—are rich with a natural world barely touched by agriculture. It is also interesting to note that Celtic monasticism with its extraordinary emphasis on asceticism and learning arose in a geographical area almost complete devoid of urban centers. It may be precisely because of this that Celtic monks participated in the wildness of Creation in a manner almost entirely unknown in other contexts. The exquisite Welsh “Litany of the Creation” (c. 7th century) voices this beautifully:

I beseech the people of heaven with bright-armed Michael; I beseech you by the triad of wind, sun, and moon.

I beseech you by water and the cruel air; I beseech you by fire, I beseech you by earth.[1]

This sensibility inhabits so much of the liturgical, devotional, and mythic language of Celtic Christianity that it is hard to miss, as in this excerpt from one of the more powerful prayers in the Christian tradition, St. Patrick’s Breastplate, also known as The Deer’s Cry:

I arise today Through the strength of heaven; Light of sun, Radiance of moon, Splendour of fire, Speed of lightning, Swiftness of wind, Depth of sea, Stability of earth, Firmness of rock.

In Celtic spirituality, all of Creation participates in Divinity. As Christopher Bamford writes in the introduction to his outstanding collection (edited with William Parker Marsh), Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness, what we find in Celtic spirituality is “a continuity in cosmic process, that extended from its inception, Creation, to its conclusion, Deification.” [2]

When St. Patrick was asked by the Irish pagan royalty who this God he spoke of was, he had this to say:

“Our God is the God of all men, the God of heaven and earth, of sea and river, of sun and moon and stars, of the lofty mountain and the lowly valleys, the God above heaven and in heaven and under heaven; he has his dwelling round heaven and earth and sea and all that in them is. He inspires all, he quickens all, he dominates all, he sustains all. He lights the light of the sun; he furnishes the light of the light; he has made springs in the dry land and has set stars to minister to the greater lights. [3]

The Celtic Church was its own unique individuality, not Roman and not Byzantine, and not encumbered by the bureaucratic complications of hierarchical administration and the annoyances and interferences of ecclesial busybodies. (Those interested in this topic may want to check out F. E. Warren’s The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church, first published in 1881). The Irish Church, in particular, had no martyrs to speak of and was characterized by “its pastoral way, its uncomplicated fervour, the dislike of its representatives for all manner of officialdom and organization [which] was precisely what the men of Rome so disliked.” [4] The Celtic ethos took seriously Christ’s admonishment to “Preach the Gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). That sounds like my kind of church.

This all sounds a lot like Sophiology, too, of course, and for good reason (and I haven’t even mentioned the important place of women in Celtic religion and culture). And Sophiology, I claim, is the default position for Judeo-Christian ways of being—ways of being long since compromised by the designs of religious politicians and ecclesial people of power to the point of almost absolute disfigurement. As Margaret Barker argues, in the context of First Temple Judaism, “Those with the ‘biblical’ way of thinking saw the creation as the work of God, and felt that people who saw it in any other way were not liberated but deprived.” [5] Furthermore, “the covenant of creation bound everything in one system: the material world, living beings, human society, and the invisible forces they called angels or powers.” [6] I was right: this is Sophiology.

This is also, I claim, the Kingdom Christ proclaimed.

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 Garden.

1. Oliver Davies, trans. with Thomas O’Loughlin, Celtic Spirituality New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 298.

2. Christopher Bamford and William Parker Marsh, Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness (Lindisfarne, 1982), 12.

3. In H. J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 37-38.

4. Gerhard Herm, The Celts: The People Who Came out of the Darkness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 268.

5. Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 26.

6. Ibid., 111.

Jacob’s Ladder: Sophia and Creation

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Sophia in Exile.

Jacob named the site of his vision Beth-El, “the House of God,” and there is no reason to believe that every parcel of Creation is not a potential Bethel. Indeed, religious experiences tied to nature are too numerous to count, almost universal in their distribution. I would wager that they are among the most common of human experiences, though many if not most people lack a sufficient language for describing their experiences. Joan of Arc’s initial visionary experiences, for example, occurred at what was know as “The Ladies’ Tree” or “The Faeries’ Tree” in her village of Domremy. Some villagers even claimed to have seen faeries there, but Joan only claimed to have seen saints Catherine and Margaret and the Archangel Michael who “was not alone, but was accompanied by angels from heaven.”[1] Even the (at the time) hardened Marxist economist Sergei Bulgakov was not impervious to the glory shining through the landscape one sunset while traveling through the Caucasus:

“I started to wonder what would happen if the cosmos were not a desert and its beauty not a mask of deception—if nature were not death, but life. If he existed, the merciful and loving Father, if nature was the vesture of his love and glory, and if the pious feelings of my childhood, when I used to live in his presence, when I loved him and trembled because I was weak, were true, then the tears and inspiration of my adolescence, the sweetness of my prayers, my innocence, and all those emotions which I had rejected and trodden down would be vindicated, and my present outlook with its emptiness and deadness would appear nothing more than blindness and lies, and what a transformation it would bring to me!”[2]

But the Glory of the Lord doesn’t only shine through the beauties of nature. Bernadette Soubirous’s first vision of the Virgin Mary came in a small alcove near a garbage dump, and Jacob Boehme’s insight into the nature of God occurred through the reflection of light off a pewter dish. There is no place where grace cannot appear. Beth-El: You are here.

But you are also not here.

One thing that keeps us from the experience of the Real is our pathological drive to control everything from fertility, to illness, to our environments. We regulate fertility through artificial birth control, through abortion, through “waiting until we’ve established our careers.” Fertility, that is, terrifies us, so we treat it as a disease, even, in some cases, by comparing a growing fetus to a parasite. It terrifies us so much that fertility rates have been plummeting for decades though NGOs have nevertheless been advocating for a massive population decrease. If we learned anything through the Covid-19 panic, it has to be that people have fetishized antiseptic living into a demigod. When people used to get the flu, it was just one of those things. You took some over-the-counter medication or homeopathy and let the illness run its course. After Covid illness somehow became evidence of moral turpitude and selfishness. Another thing we learned is that it is “safer” to encounter others through virtual environments, like Zoom, than by interacting, by exchanging genetic information, in the face-to-face of a lived life. This is entirely neurotic.

These phenomena are merely symptomatic of a way of life (bios)completely divorced from Life (zoë). We live lives in which, as John Donne says, “‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” divorced as we are from the world of clouds, of plants, of animals, and from each other, from the cosmos, and because of these from from God. Indeed, the inverse is also true: we are distanced from the world of clouds, plants, and animals because we are distanced from God. The integral unity of life and purpose that we instinctively feel lacking is really a product of our disengagement from the calendar; and by this I mean from both the calendar of the seasons and the liturgical calendar, both of which reflected each other once upon a time. Enoch I is very clear about the repercussions of our disconnect from the cosmos and God:

“In those days the angel Uriel responded and said to me, ‘Behold, I have shown you everything, Enoch, and I have revealed everything to you [so that] you might see this sun, this moon, and those that guide the stars of heaven as well as those who interchange their activities and their seasons and rotate their processions.

“‘In respect to their days, the sinners and the winter are cut short. Their seeds shall lag behind in their lands and in their fertile fields, and in all their activities upon the earth. He will turn and appear in their time, and withhold rain, and the sky shall stand still at that time. Then the vegetable shall slacken and not grow in its season, and the fruit shall not be born in its season. The moon shall alter its order, and will not be seen according to its cycles.’” (80:1-5)

Surrounded by the scientific hubris that seeks to “improve” seed by genetic engineering and that attempts to dim the sun, the moon, and stars through the dispersal of calcium carbonate through the atmosphere (among many other foolish ideas)—things we have let happen through either ignorance or inertia—is it any wonder that our impact on the Creation grows more and more devastating? We operate not in a cooperative manner with nature, but stick to a paradigm characterized by suppression, dominance, and control, but above all by hubris. We shouldn’t ask why wildfires, droughts, and devastating hurricanes occur so often: we should ask why they don’t happen more.

The reason for this is that the world has a soul, the anima mundi. This is an idea found throughout history. Plato, in the Timaeus, describes it this way: “we may say that the world came into being—a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God.” [3]And because the world is a living creature endowed with soul, all things within it participate in this life. As Plotinus writes, “the work of soul is something awake, both that within it and in the same way that which goes out to something else. Soul therefore makes alive all the other things which do not live of themselves, and makes them live the sort of life by which it lives itself.” [4] The Judeo-Christian tradition has a proper name for the bearer of this soul: “Wisdom, the fashioner of all things” (Wisdom 7:22).

To live in accord with Wisdom is to live in accord with both creation and God. The poetic metaphysics of this understanding can be found, among others, in the symbolism of the harmonia mundi and of the tree.

The harmonia mundi, literally “harmonies of the world” but often rendered in English as “the Music of the Spheres” has a rich history in the West, probably stemming from Pythagoras and is alluded to by Plato in the Timaeus. Plotinus provides a very beautiful description:

“The harmonious adjustment of the souls to the order of this All of ours witnesses to this: they are not cut off from it, but fit themselves in in their descents and make one harmony with its circuit, so that their fortunes and their lives and their choices are indicated by the figures made by the heavenly bodies and they sing, as it were, with one voice and are never out of tune. (And this is more properly the hidden meaning of the doctrine that the heavenly spheres move musically and melodically.”[5]

Many Renaissance writers and thinkers touched on the idea, Robert Fludd and Johannes Kepler, for example, and Shakespeare in his play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. It is a very simple concept: to live in harmony with Creation and God is to be at one with All That Is. Conversely, to be out of harmony with Creation and God is to invite corruption, infertility, and desolation upon the world.

The image of the tree, as the Tree of Life, may be the symbol par excellence of Wisdom from antiquity. The Tree, of course, makes its first appearance in Genesis, but it was also a feature of First Temple Judaism as an icon of Wisdom before Her worship was banned under the reforms of Josiah and her devotees driven into exile. The Tree returns in Revelation at the restoration of All Things: “And he showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street thereof, and on both sides of the river, was the tree of life, bearing twelve fruits, yielding its fruits every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (22:1-2). Margaret Barker reads this restoration as the restoration of Wisdom, the Divine Sophia, to her proper place in Christian worship and understanding. For her, “The fate of the tree [is] the fate of Wisdom,” which is why she argues that the earliest Christian communities understood it in precisely this way: “When John saw the woman and the tree in the holy of holies [i.e., Revelation 22], he showed that the Christians were faithful to the older ways. Their temple was the ancient temple, and so the woman and her tree and everything they represented shaped their way of thinking. Wisdom/Miriam was the mother of the Messiah, and that is how the Christians told the story of the birth of Jesus.” [6]

This is the challenge presented to us at this point in history. We find ourselves confronted with a choice between the Real or a simulacra of the Real, what the kabbalah calls the qlipoth, the world of demonic powers. [7] Do we assist in the work of salvation by recognizing Sophia’s place in Creation, thereby calling her out of exile? Or do we follow the trajectory of death that has and will continue to wreak havoc on Creation and on our own souls as they descend into the technological and technocratic abyss of the qlipoth? Too often, Christians or any people of good will, leave the work of salvation to politicians or to an amorphous future event, the Coming of the Messiah. But our actions constitute a call, a summons. As Nikolai Berdyaev so stridently says, “My salvation is bound up with not only other men but also of animals, plants, minerals, of every blade of grass—all must be transfigured and brought into the Kingdom of God. And this depends upon my creative efforts.”[8] Salvation, that is, is not a spectator sport.

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 Garden.

1. W. S. Scott, trans, and ed., The Trial of Joan of Arc, Being a Verbatim Report of the Proceedings from the Orleans Manuscript (Westport, CT: Associated Booksellers, 1956), 78.

2. Sergius Bulgakov, A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov 1871 – 1944, trans. Natalie Duddington and James Pain, ed. James Pain and Nicolas Zernov (London: SPCK, 1976), 10–11.

3. 30c.

4. 4.3.36-38.

5. 4.3.20-29.

6. Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London; T & T Clark, 20100), 266, 265.

7. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans Ralph Manheim (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 114.

8. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 294.