Sacred Magic and the Western Death Cult

'The Empress' by Katrin Welz-Stein

Over the past couple of months I have been enjoying a couple of unrelated online discussion forums studying Valentin Tomberg’s extraordinary text Meditations on the Tarot. In one recent conversation with Shari Suter and Nate Hile at the Grail Country channel on Youtube, we discussed the third letter of the book on the card The Empress. (You can watch it here).

I don’t know exactly how many times I’ve read this book, but it is definitely in the double-digits, and every time I read it I find new riches. One thing that jumped out at me this time—and which came up in our conversation—is what Tomberg describes as the role of “sacred magic” in the world through the symbol of the Tree of life which he contrasts to the methods of science since the seventeenth century. “For the practical aspect of the scientific ideal, “writes Tomberg, “is the domination of Nature by means of putting into play the principle of destruction or death.” [1] This was not a new insight of Tomberg’s: Goethe and Rudolf Steiner had said much the same things (as did Robert Fludd and Thomas Vaughan before them), and closer to our own time Mary Midgley, Pierre Hadot, Rupert Sheldrake, and David Bohm have stood in general agreement with this claim, which is in its essence a very sophiological intuition. He continues:

“Imagine, dear Unknown Friend, efforts and discoveries in the opposite direction, in the direction of construction or life. Imagine, not an explosion, but the blossoming out of a constructive ‘atomic bomb.’ It is not too difficult to imagine, because each little acorn is such a ‘constructive bomb’ and the oak is only the result of the slow ‘explosion’—or blossoming out—of this ‘bomb.’ Imagine it, and you will have the ideal of the great work or the idea of the Tree of Life. The image itself of the tree comprises the negation of the technical and mechanical element.”

The subtitle of Tomberg’s masterpiece is “A Journey into Christian Hermeticism,” and by “Hermeticism” Tomberg means a Christian synthesis of art, science, and religion. This was evident in pre-Reformation Western Christian culture in, for example, the imagery of the microcosm and its relationship to the macrocosm or in the signatura rerum, the signatures of things (plants, minerals, animals, stars, planets) and the spiritual realities to which they point. This Hermeticism, I claim, is almost identical to Sophiology.

“Now the ideal of Hermeticism is contrary to that of science. Instead of aspiring to power over the forces of Nature by means of destruction of matter, Hermeticism aspires to conscious participation with the constructive forces of the world on the basis of an alliance and a cordial communion with them. Science wants to compel Nature to obedience to the will of man such as it is; Hermeticism—or the philosophy of sacred magic—on the contrary wants to purify, illumine, and change the will of man in order to bring them into harmony with the creative principle of Nature (natura naturans) and to render them capable of receiving its willingly bestowed revelation. The ‘great work,’ as an ideal, is therefore the state of the human being who is in peace, harmony, and collaboration with life. This is the ‘fruit’ of the Tree of Life.”

Biodynamic farming is a great example of this kind of Hermetic cooperation with Natura. On the other hand, modern science, for the most part, continues to operate along the lines of compulsion (which we can by extrapolation define by the, alas, too-often heard term “mandate”). If anything over the past two-plus years, we have seen the apotheosis of a “science of the mandate,” in its grasping for a totalizing and absolute dominion over all aspects of human life. This is the way of death.

In fact, as my interlocutor Mr. Hile recently observed, what we have all around us is a “death cult,” and I would add that institutional science is the high priest of this religion.

Central to this religion—though rarely admitted openly—is a hostility to fecundity, which we can see in the cult’s hostility to fertility. And this fecundity touches all domains:

“The third Arcanum of the Tarot, being an arcanum of sacred magic, is by this very fact the arcanum of generation. For generation is only as aspect of sacred magic, If sacred magic is the union of two wills—human and divine—from which a miracle results, generation itself also presupposes the trinity of the generator, the generant, and the generated. Now, the generated is the miracle resulting from the union of the principles of generator and generant. Whether it is a matter of a new idea, a work of art, the birth of a child, is not important; it is always the same law of generation which operates; it is always the same arcanum—that of fecundity—which is at play; and it is always the same mystery of the Incarnation of the Word which is the divine prototype here.

“We have said above that sacred magic is life such as it was before the Fall. As life is always generative, the arcanum of sacred magic is at the same time that of generation before the Fall—vertical generation, from a higher plane to a lower one—instead of horizontal generation, which is accomplished on a single plane.” [2]

So, what we have is fecundity versus the Western Death Cult, as I have recently written on the gradual opening to the possibility of socially acceptable infanticide. And the presence of the Death Cult is nowhere more apparent than in its constant attacks on Nature—most vividly shown in its attack on the feminine.

Examples of these attacks are rampant, particularly in the rhetorical games (and I’m an English and philosophy professor—I know about rhetorical games) currently at play by the Enemy. One absolutely tragi-comic example is the recent story in which midwives in the UK’s Brighton and Sussex Hospitals were told by higher ups to stop using “vagina” when referring to a woman’s reproductive organ and, instead, adopt “‘front hole’ or ‘genital opening’”—an idea that surely is the product of some woke administrator’s back hole. Such innovations would be unthinkable without the interventions of Science, Inc. Just as Huxley predicted in Brave New World, the word “mother” is now increasingly equated with the most vulgar profanity. A similar word game now coming into common parlance is to replace “pedophile” with “minor attracted person.” O brave new world that has such people in it.

Tomberg’s exact contemporary Lewis Mumford also saw what was happening and what was coming. Writing in 1964 (very close to the time at which Tomberg wrote on The Empress), Mumford had this to say about the march of technology:

“The danger springs from the fact that, since Francis Bacon and Galileo defined new methods and objectives of technics, our great physical transformations have been effected by a system that deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, overplays the role of abstract intelligence, and makes control of physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of existence….

“The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communications, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires.

“…. Once our authoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquillizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: life itself will not survive, except what is filtered through the mechanical collective. The spread of a sterilized scientific intelligence over the planet would not, as Teilhard de Chardin so innocently imagined, be the happy consummation of divine purpose: it would rather ensure the final arrest of any further human development.” [3]

Medical, technological, and rhetorical attempts to control Nature are ultimately attempts to control the Real. Attempts to control Nature and the Real, therefore, are assaults on both the feminine and the masculine, as well as on the family. Assaults on the feminine and the masculine and the family, then, are finally assaults on the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine—and they’re not on a spectrum.

It is a matter of what kind of science one wants: a science based upon the will to power, or a science of collaboration with life. It doesn’t seem like a very difficult choice.

Scene from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. He certainly understands Sophiology.

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.

1. Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (Amity House, 1985), 68.

2. Ibid., 72-73.

3. Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (Winter 1964); 1-8, at 6-7.

The New Demons

In early modern England, a playgoer and diarist recorded an extraordinary special effect during a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:

“Certaine Players at Exeter, acting upon the stage the tragical storie of Dr. Faustus the Conjurer; as a certaine number of Devels kept everie one his circle there, and as Faustus was busie in his magicall invocations, on a sudden they were all dasht, every one harkning other in the eare, for they were all perswaded, there was one devell too many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further with this matter; the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of dores.” [1]

Reportedly, this was not the solitary instance of the appearance of unaccounted-for players at performances of the play. But was it an actual supernatural occurrence, or only some over-the-top PR devised by some Elizabethan theatrical impresario? Nobody knows for sure, but I wouldn’t rule anything out. Always remember: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If you call them, they will come.

The early modern period, though it was also the time of the first stirrings of Bacon, Descartes, and the Scientific Revolution, was still a period of widespread belief in the supernatural, a belief which even found its way into what we might now call scholarly research. In my book Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation, I explore this phenomenon in relation to John Dee and his alleged conversation with angels in a chapter entitled “John Dee: Religious Experience and the Technology of Idolatry.” My argument there is that the various occult technologies employed by Dee and his assistant Edward Kelly actually worked toward deluding him (or assisting the spirits with which he was conversing toward deluding him) and resulted in a kind of Maronian lapse into idolatry. It is a tragic and cautionary tale that should make anyone think twice (or more) about using any kind of paraphernalia for attempting converse with supernatural beings. It never ends well. Not a good idea. Don’t do it. But these types of experiences hardly ended with the arrival of the Enlightenment.

On the first day of Easter 1898, for example, the Russian philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyov encountered a demon while on ship. It appeared “in the form of a shaggy beast,” and he asked it, “But you know that Christ is risen?” “He may very well have risen,” the beast is said to have replied, “but I will make an end of you all the same” and attacked him. According to Sergey Solovyov, the philosopher’s nephew and biographer, Solovyov was later “found stretched on the floor senseless.” [2] But he lived.

I’ve seen or experienced such things at first hand a number of times over the years, the last time about a year ago. Here’s an entry from my notebook: “My daughter is being bothered by a spirit. It won’t let her sleep. Every time it visits, always late at night, she awakens me in tears and asks me to bless her room. I pray Psalm 68 and sprinkle the room with holy water, and then the entire house, the younger children sleeping in their beds, and I anoint her with chrism. One night the spirit returns and is very reluctant to leave. After removing it from my daughter’s room, it disturbs my sleeping wife who awakens and tells me “Michael, you need to get rid of it,” in a very forthright manner as if telling me to wash the dishes. I anoint her, cleanse the room with holy water., and she goes back to sleep. When I go back to bed I pray the rosary. I finish praying, and start to fall asleep when it attacks me, pushing me down on the mattress by the shoulders. I struggle to breathe, to awaken and rise; but finally yell, “Go!” and I can get up. I anoint myself. It leaves for a time.”

I’ve told other people about what happened, and I have been (and haven’t been, at the same time) surprised to find that such is not as uncommon as one might believe. Perhaps we are not as modern as we have let ourselves believe.

Of course, none of us should really be surprised: the Gospels are full of stories about Christ casting out demons. Unfortunately, many contemporary Christians try to interpret the demons Christ encounters as manifestations of psychiatric disorders, or quirks. Or something. Maybe anxiety.

Maybe.

I say all this, not to wax sensational but only to say that our own cultural moment for the last few years seems to me increasingly to give evidence of a kind of widespread demonolatry, but for the most part masked by a sort of postmodern secular ennui. Or, as Shakespeare says in The Tempest: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!” I mean, just look around.

As we see in scripture, notably in the temptations of Eve in Genesis and Jesus in the gospel accounts, the demonic is the origin of false advertising. The subject is promised all kinds of goods—power, wealth, longevity, prosperity—but the delivered product never lives up to the hype. Just the opposite. These promises continue in our own day, though the chosen medium is not via supernatural “magic” in the manner in which it may have been understood from ancient to early modern times, but through medical and technological interventions aided and abetted by governmental policy and popular acclaim. The recently much-touted transhumanism is but one example of this with its accompanying slogan of “You’ll own nothing and be happy” and other Utopian currencies of false coinage. Demons may offer freedom or liberation, but what they deliver is slavery. Every. Single. Time.

Importantly, these interventions—not all at once, but over time and, ultimately, totalizing—distance the subject from nature. We end up imprisoned in a technological-pharmaceutical-bureaucratic Otherworld This was the long-game of urbanization—and the kinds of transhumanist phenomena I’m speaking about are nothing other than afflictions attendant to urbanization. You don’t see it happening with people in the countryside. As Jacques Ellul writes, “The city person is separated from the natural environment and, as a consequence, the sacred significations [of connection to the natural world and its rhythms] no longer have any point of contact with experience.” [3]

I don’t have a precise taxonomy for these various spiritual beings afflicting individuals and the world, but they both seem different in kind and identical in aims. I think this works initially at the individual level, exploiting the traumas and anxieties of good people who have given in to despair and hopelessness, who think something must be wrong with them and that the magic of pharmacology or technology or politics can deliver them. This is a very subtle and sneaky form of idolatry—it happens without one knowing it. But, as happened in many of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and as we are witnessing today, this free-floating anxiety can metastasize into the body politic (the demonic parody of the Mystical Body) and infect entire societies with various forms of possession.

This is why Ellul described our post-Christian era in terms of “the new demons.” Even though our societies in the West are post-Christian, they still retain the assumptions of Christianity, though their allegiances have been unconsciously transferred to other gods. “Post-Christian society,” he writes, “has been deeply affected by Christianity, and bears the latter’s mark: the mark of original sin, of the desire for salvation, hope, and a kingdom of God, of the conviction that a Savior is needed, of the society those who are aware of radical guilt yet know they cannot pardon themselves.” [4] I can’t even read these words without images of the past decade’s ongoing secular fundamentalism—the canceling, the shaming, the iconoclasm, the calls for repentance (but never for those calling for it)—rising before me. But, as Ellul would say, these are demonic parodies of Christianity.

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. There are also a few spots open in the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path course being offered at the end of April. See more here.

1. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1923), 3:423-24.

2. Sergey M. Solovyov, Vladimir Solovyov: His Life and Creative Evolution, trans. Aleksey Gibson (Eastern Christian Publications, 2000), 464.

3. Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (Seabury Press, 1975), 62.

4. Ibid., 24.

The War Against Reality

St. Brigid's Well

Okay, so the Gnostics were right: we live in a world created by evil beings and nothing we see is reality. Of course, that depends on what it is we see.

The news the past few weeks has been dizzying—and depressing. While most everyone’s attention is on the never-ending story of C0VID, the Archons of BigTech and BigScience continue to propose developments that glitter with all the warmth of a computer screen and promise a digital utopia. It sounds too bad to be true, but they really think this is a good thing. Skipping the odiousness that is “The Metaverse,” here are few examples:

1) Elon Musk is looking to hire a clinical trial director for Neuralink, the company he formed with the intention of inserting digital chips in every human brain. What fun! Now you, too, can be a part of the Internet of Bodies™ as Musk’s SpaceX satellites sell your soul to the gods of e-commerce. Musk has a habit of playing both sides of the “Dangers of AI” argument—but don’t be a fool. Investments speak louder than words.

2) Speaking of souls, you don’t have one. At least according to Yuval Harari (another guy speaking out both sides of his mouth). For Harari, the jig is up, the game is over. Human biology is now poised to enter into a polyamorous marriage with BigData and BigTech and the understanding of the human as a being of body-soul-spirit and freewill is over. At least that’s how he sees it. This is transhumanism writ large. Have a listen:

3) The BigTech guys are also pushing the idea of replacing women with synthetic wombs. Yes, you’re right, just like in Brave New World, in which the terms “parent,” “father” and, especially, “mother” are considered “smut”:

“‘In brief,’ the Director summed up, ‘the parents were the father and mother.’ The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys’ eye-avoiding silence. ‘Mother,’ he repeated loudly, rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, ‘These,’ he said gravely, ‘ are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then historical facts are unpleasant.’” [1]

Think about this when your children or grandchildren have to apply for a breeder’s license in order to procreate. “Mother” will at first become (as I think it has already started to) a glittering generality—a word that doesn’t really attach to any real meaning—then it will become something avoided in polite company.

4) And in concert with these developments, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry is pushing that “the private notion of children” is now become passé. In the language of BNW, “everyone belongs to everyone.”

5) I could go on.

The world these various figures extol is not a world worth inhabiting. Because it is impossible to inhabit such a world. Because it’s not a world. The Gnostics were right.

As I have been warning in my writing and teaching for most of the past thirty years, the transhumanist project is at last upon us. I have to admit that this war against reality has been waged in a very clever and strategic way. I was puzzled, for instance, when corporations and governments became solid proponents of gay marriage and trans-rights. Corporations, from my long years of observation, are not interested in the commonweal: they’re interested in making money. Governments are interested in control, but are so inured to corporate will that they are really foot soldiers more than generals. I don’t think either one really cares about gay or trans people. What they care about is the suite of technologies to be devised and implemented, the demographics to be exploited, more than they care about the common good. But these were the vanguard, the reconnaissance squad leading to the real tech telos: the technological colonization of the human person. Coming to a body near you as your biology is invited to build itself back better. iHuman.

This incredible display of human scientific and technological hubris is inherently destructive. I think we all intuitively know this—or at least did as children before it was beat out of us by a deadening education. Look around: almost all of the problems we face—environmental degradation not least among them—are the result of science and technology: the end result of the Cartesian myth that we are objective observers of Creation and not implicit to it in our observing. We have, unconsciously for the most part, fallen into an abusive and idolotrous relationship with science and technology. This is obvious by how absolutely it isolates us and alienates us from the Creation. As Margaret Barker writes in her outstanding book Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment, “Worshipping the work of human hands—think of this now in the sense of current human achievements and aspirations such as political systems, economic systems, management methods—is the certain way to destroy the bonds of creation.” [2]

As we can see, this war against reality is in essence a war against women, against the feminine. The increasing incidences of biological males competing as women—and triumphing—in women’s sports attests to this, as does the specter of the synthetic womb. Women, that is, are becoming superfluous. And the war against women is, at its core, a war against Sophia. And a war against Sophia is a war against God.

It is not hard to see, then, how this war against reality, this war against women, against Sophia and against God, is a war against nature, or, better yet, against the Creation. This is what the Gnostics got wrong. Creation, as Genesis tells us, is good, however fallen. Just like us.

Though not a biblical literalist, I do believe that Creation fell with the Fall of Man. So, to my way of thinking, we humans have a responsibility in the work of restoration, Tikkun Olam, the Hebrew term meaning “the repair of all things” or “the repair of the world.” The world’s brokenness, evidenced by the rise of the transhumanist technocracy, is nearing its nadir. Or at least I hope it is.

The entire project of Sophiology—in my conception anyway—is to offer a way out of this technocratic nightmare. It is a very simple way. And it isn’t a matter of creating intellectual, philosophical or theological paradigms or structures. It’s a matter of living. The technocracy promises many things. Life isn’t one of them.

1. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; Harper Perennial, 1998), 24.

2. Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (T&T Clark, 2010), 54.