Secular Spirituality: A Brief History

According to a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center,

Most American adults self-identify as Christians. But many Christians also hold what are sometimes characterized as “New Age” beliefs—including belief in reincarnation, astrology, psychics and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects like mountains or trees. . . . Overall, roughly six-in-ten American adults accept at least one of these New Age beliefs.1

This percentage is the same for professing Christians (and 47 percent of evangelicals) and “nones” alike. Seventy percent of Roman Catholics in the United States hold at least one of these New Age beliefs. Yet instead of replacing traditional religious doctrines, New Age ideas are blended in with them. “Religious” or not, most Americans are “spiritual”—creating their own playlist. With roots in theosophy, the New Age movement glories in exchanging religious dogma and rules for an à la carte menu of spiritual therapies.

Contrary to what many have assumed, the United States is not exceptional in this respect. Surveys of religion in Europe confirm a similar trend, although with higher percentages of atheism. Yet, European leaders flock to psychics. More Europeans are likely to believe in reincarnation than in the resurrection of the dead and to say that they believe in a spirit or higher power (38 percent) than in the God of the Bible (27 percent).2 Despite their empty churches, beliefs and practices that their pulpits would once have identified as “pagan superstition” are on the rise.3

The actual practice of the denizens of former Christendom defies the central myth of modernity—namely, that the steady march of reason and science (that is, progress) would eventually extinguish any culturally significant embers of “superstition” (that is, belief in the supernatural). Instead, it appears that Western culture is experiencing a revival of an indigenous “paganism” that has always existed beneath the patina of Christendom.

As Friedrich Nietzsche presaged, the passing of the Triune God of Christian theism has led not to atheism as much as to a “rain of gods.” “In all my lectures,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.”4 Catherine L. Albanese observes that Emerson’s “antitraditional individualism” drew many young Americans into the search for a new spirituality in which “the Each was taken up in the All.”5 She adds,

Today we still can find a species of mysticism in the voices that come to us both from the center’s right flank, as in fundamentalism, and from the left outside the center, as in those nonaffiliates who are drawn to the New Age.6

Journey to the Origins of “Spiritual, Not Religious”

This article is the first salvo in my forthcoming three-volume project on modernity, each gravitating around a particular city: Alexandria is our departure city, Florence is the connection city, and Las Vegas is the destination. Like many travels, we leave the city for the suburbs in each case, tracking formative movements elsewhere, but I have found it useful as well as intriguing to gather my material around these hubs. One of my main goals in this project is to pull this thread further back, beyond the theosophists and transcendentalists to radical Christian mystics who preserved the myth of a perennial philosophy grounded in the more “magical” universe of theurgic Neoplatonism. With the eclectic mixture of the formally religious and informally spiritual documented above, we may discern the throbbing heart of the past in our present. What we call “New Age spirituality” is not an odd effluence from the “flower power” generation of the 1960s, but a perennial tradition in Western civilization.

Throughout this study, we will attend especially to five distinct motifs or themes, each of which depends on the one that precedes it:

1. Supernatural naturalism (or vice versa). A theological cosmology whose dualism is inscribed in an even deeper monism.
2. A perpetual search for a “new mythology.” The production of stories concerning the gods and how the world, with us in it, came to be, how we fell, and how we return.
3. Mystical rationalism. Seeking saving gnôsis or knowledge—of the inner self as divine or as one with divinity—by an intellectual-spiritual ascent that is simultaneously through contemplation or theurgic magic (or both).
4. Esoteric. An emphasis on such knowledge being a secret, belonging only to a circle of elites who are worthy of it; sometimes, in fact, as a unique and private experience, but only rarely as public knowledge communicated to oneself externally (exoteric).
5. Perennial philosophy. The insistence that such secret knowledge, though eluding (and excluding) most of one’s contemporaries, belongs to a hoary chain of sages reaching into the deep past and across cultures.

Alexandria

Our story begins with third-century Alexandria, a thrilling and exotic bazaar of religious influences shaped by the interaction of hellenized Egyptians, Jews, Persians, Indians, and Middle Easterners. In this place, at this time, arose Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism—as well as a school of Christianity, whose openness to such influences gave rise to a tradition of Christian philosophy that would provoke admiration and controversy for centuries to come.

Gilles Quispel observed, “It is a curious paradox that modernity originated in Egyptian magic.”7 Like Whitehead’s famous aphorism that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, this verdict by a renowned philologist is an exaggeration. But it is an exaggeration with a story tied to its tail, and it is this story that forms the dominant thread of this work. As a historian of ancient Greek philosophy, Peter Kingsley explains, “A correct assessment of the nature and function of ancient esoterism is essential for a correct assessment not only of religious history in the West but also, ultimately, of what we now are as individuals in the modern western world.”8

The horizon of all the movements of third-century Alexandria was Platonism, with generous contributions by Persian astrology, Indian philosophy, and Egyptian ritual magic. Yet none was more radical in its myth of the human soul as trapped in the material world of an alien God (who turns out to be Yahweh, the Creator God of the Bible).

Although gnostic sects barely survived medieval pogroms, their influence may be seen in the radical Anabaptists of the sixteenth century and radical Pietists later. Hans Blumenberg (The Gnostic Religion) has pointed up gnostic influences in modernity, while Eric Voegelin argued that modernity is basically gnostic. Whether in its transcendentalized form (such as original Gnosticism) or immanentized (as in Marxism, Nazism, and other utopian movements), the basic idea is that man is alienated from an essentially evil creation and must either escape it or re-create it. The Christian eschaton has been brought forward into history as the work of the “ones-in-the-know”: that is, the gnostic Übermensch (“Superman”). We do not have to accept all of the parallels, much less assumptions of direct influence, to recognize the enduring option that Gnosticism represents in our age.

Florence

Next on our itinerary is Florence. The Renaissance to a large extent was sparked by the rediscovery of pagan Neoplatonism (especially Hermeticism), which had already attracted the interest of important and controversial Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages. Steeped in these sources, radical Protestants blended magic, secrecy, and utopianism with their hopes for a “new reformation” that would reconcile all religions and branches of learning with the end of improving human life. Here we observe the slow and not always complete transformation of alchemists into chemists, astrologers into astronomers, and magicians into mechanics.

Typically passed over as harmless flies in the ointment of the myth of progress, Hermetic magical doctrines and practices were as important in the thinking of scientists from Ptolemy to Newton as were calculus and physics. In fact, it was all part of the same discipline of natural philosophy. In some ways, the Hermetic outlook inhibited the growth of early modern science, but in other ways it was an essential catalyst. The grand Hermetic vision of man as magus—a magi who learns to harness the powers of heaven and earth and transform nature into a higher, more useful form of existence—spurred invention in medicine and toxicology, engineering, botany, astronomy, and other fields. The alchemist’s close laboratory study of the interaction of opposite elements, properties, and chemicals helped to shift the modern mind from timeless ideas (rationalism) in books to timely operations in labs (empiricism). More than anything else, the Hermetic imagination shaped the practical aim of scientific endeavor toward transforming nature for the benefit of human well-being.

The great Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino translated these texts and dedicated himself to practicing their magic. Combing through the various genealogical legends, Ficino in his foreword to the Corpus Hermeticum adds to the lore concerning the “Thrice-Great” Hermes (Latin for Mercury):

At the time of Moses’ birth, there lived Atlas, the astrologer, who was the brother of the physicist Prometheus and, on the mother’s side, the grandfather of the elder Mercury, whose grandson was Mercury Trismegistus. Augustine wrote this concerning him [Ficino cleverly omitting Augustine’s appraisal], while Cicero and Lactantius were of the opinion that this Mercury was the fifth, and that it was the fifth Mercury who was called Theut by the Egyptians and Trismegistus by the Greeks.9

Hermes built Hermapolis and was the priest-king of Egypt, continues Ficino:

As the first philosopher, he turned from natural and mathematical things to contemplation of the divine. . . . He was followed by Orpheus, . . . Pythagoras, [and finally] Philolaus, who was the teacher of our divine Plato.

There thus arose a single, internally consistent primal theology (prisca theologia), from six theologians in wonderful order, which had its beginnings in Mercury and its fulfillment in Plato.10

Like other Hermetic texts, the Asclepius is a conversation of Hermes and his son, but in this instance with two other figures, Asclepius and Ammon. They are discussing the thesis that “all is part of one, or one is all.” Florian Ebeling states: “This hen kai pan (‘one and all’) is the pantheistic connecting thread of the text, for even ‘God [is] one and all.’”11 These myths, doctrines, and ritual practices will be “revived” (or better, reconstructed) by leading Renaissance thinkers and in the Romantic and Transcendentalist movements that continue to attract wide interest in our own day.

The idea of man as magus—even a mighty god in his own right—would be revived centuries later in Pico’s famous charter of modernity, “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (1486). It was here, in third-century Alexandria, where the legendary Hermes Trismegistus became the avatar in whom various streams of perennial wisdom met, blending mysticism and magic that would endure through the Middle Ages and erupt powerfully in the Renaissance. In fact, one of its formative figures, Ficino, declared,

In things pertaining to theology there were in former times six great teachers expounding similar doctrines. The first was Zoroaster, the chief of the Magi; the second Hermes Trismegistus, the head of the Egyptian priesthood; Orpheus succeeded Hermes; Aglaophamus was initiated into the sacred mysteries of Orpheus; Pythagoras was initiated into theology by Aglaophamus; and Plato by Pythagoras. Plato summed up the whole of their wisdom in his letters.12

As Wouter J. Hanegraaff suggests,

As has been well formulated by Peter Brown, what caught the enthusiasm of our platonic Renaissance humanists was “not the Plato of the modern classical scholar, but the living Plato of the religious thinkers of Late Antiquity.”

[It sought] the attainment of a salvational gnosis by which the soul could be liberated from its material entanglement and regain its unity with the divine Mind. Allowing for the great differences between various systems, this is what the gnostic, hermetic, and theurgical currents of late antiquity all had in common; and to an extent that has not always been sufficiently recognized, this is what platonism came to mean for its Renaissance admirers.13

This “flight to Egypt” became an obsession among many Renaissance figures throughout Europe. Many of the founders of modern science straddled the two worlds of magic and science, alchemy and chemistry, astrology and astronomy, because for them they were in fact one and the same world of discourse.

From Lactantius to the Cambridge Platonists, the Corpus Hermeticum was appealed to as evidence of an often secret but perennial tradition that prepared the way for Christianity as its purest expression. Others, such as Giordano Bruno, considered pagan Neoplatonism (especially the religion of Hermes) to be better than Christianity. Still others, following Augustine, regarded contemporary Hermeticists as quacks at best and demonic conjurors at worst (hence, the legend around Johan Faust).

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, disciples of Renaissance magi Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa seemed to come out of the woodwork: Böehme, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Jane Leade, and many others, all the way to Isaac Newton, “the last sorcerer.”14 As R. T. Wallis observed, magic was not an aberration of a few obscure figures but belonged to the mainstream of early modern philosophy and science:

Renaissance enthusiasm did not confine itself to the least fantastic aspects of Neoplatonism; a taste for the occult was characteristic of the time, not least among many pioneers of modern science, Paracelsus and Kepler being notable examples. Thirdly, and linked with the last-mentioned point, until Casaubon’s dating of the Hermetica in 1614 the Platonic tradition was regarded as a later development of the pristine Egyptian wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus, the supposed original source of the philosophy perennis. And, finally, and in contrast to literary humanists like Petrarch, Renaissance Neoplatonism was by no means invariably hostile to either Aristotle or to Medieval Scholasticism.15

In magnificent mosaic crafted in 1488, Hermes Trismegistus found a home in the Sienna Cathedral, depicted as a contemporary of Moses. At the turn of the sixteenth century, the Borgia pope Alexander VI (a fan of Ficino and Pico) had the papal apartments decorated lavishly with imagery and lore of Hermes Trismegistus, where he held elaborate occult ceremonies. It was the sixteenth-century Vatican librarian Hermetist and anti-Reformation polemicist Agostino Steuco who coined the term “perennial philosophy” (philosophia perennis). Combining with the millennial utopianism of the twelfth-century mystic Joachim of Fiore, the early modern era was eagerly expecting the dawning of the “Age of the Spirit,” when there would be no more ministry of preaching and sacrament. Everyone would know God directly, immediately and intuitively within. This fit perfectly with a revived Hermetic ideal of a “perennial philosophy” or “pure religion” that unites all peoples.

Although the Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli shared Erasmus’s appreciation for Origen, Martin Luther and John Calvin identified explicitly with Irenaeus over Origen.16 Of Pseudo-Dionysius, Luther quipped, “He platonizes more than he christianizes,” and Calvin remarked, “One would have thought he had returned from heaven to tell us of these things.”

Curiously, Luther not only translated the Neoplatonic-mystical treatises of Johann Tauler, but he also considered the Theologia Germanica second only to the Bible itself. It was the Anabaptist radicals, however, who were most deeply immersed in the gnostic (Manichean) metaphysics that had survived the Inquisition’s purges through the Middle Ages. Their sharp opposition between inner and outer, spiritual and material, worlds extended in the thought of Anabaptist writers such as Menno Simons (founder of the Mennonites) to the doctrine that Christ, instead of assuming his humanity from the Virgin Mary, wore a “celestial flesh,” and that in the resurrection believers too would exchange their human bodies for the same. Reformed leaders such as Jan Łaski and Calvin attacked this teaching as a denial of the incarnation. In fact, Calvin referred to Anabaptists as “strange alchemists” in their Christological speculations. Nevertheless, Hermeticism appealed to more mainstream humanists, including Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, translator of the French Corpus Hermeticum, who had been influential in Calvin’s early development. (However, Calvin was more suspicious of Hermetic mysticism, which was never as entrenched in his native northern France as it was in Germany and the Low Lands.)

In 1614, a crucial event occurred. Although questions about authenticity had been raised from time to time in antiquity, the Hermetic texts were generally received as predating the writings of Moses and the pre-Socratic philosophers, until the textual criticism of Isaac Casaubon, a young colleague of Theodore Beza at the Academy in Geneva. Regarded by many as the leading philologist (especially of Greek texts), the Calvinist professor was appointed royal librarian to King Henri IV of France and was subsequently lured to England by Francis Bacon and King James I. There he dedicated himself to a lengthy critique of the Roman Catholic Church historian Caesar Baronius that appealed to the Corpus Hermeticum for support of his claims.

Casaubon demonstrated that the sacred oracles of Hermes Trismegistus were written in second-century Alexandria, probably by gnostic-inclined Christians. While many of the tracts are free of gnostic influence, Casaubon’s learned intuition was justified by the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, in which various gnostic texts were bound together with Hermetic treatises. However, just as the fifteenth-century discovery regarding Dionysius the Areopagite (namely, that he was not Paul’s convert in Acts 17:34 but a fifth-century Syrian monk) did not erase his immense influence, so Casaubon’s labors did not quench the search for the philosopher’s stone.

In fact, in the immediate aftermath of his findings, Lutheran Pietists such as Johann Valentin Andreae sought to fuse evangelical faith with Hermeticism. For many in these circles, the “alchemy” needed in this hour of religious wars was another Reformation—less of divisive doctrine than of an activistic piety that could unite the confessions under the banner of practical Christianity and brotherhood. Drawing on the narrative of a “perennial tradition” beneath the layers of contemporary accretions, this “Rosy-Cross Order” was a largely informal network of like-minded ecumenists, educators, theologians, pastors, and scientists. These writers were fascinated by “Egyptian” mysteries, Kabballah, and a modernized fusion of magic and science that Hermeticism represented in their minds.

Complaining that the official churches of Protestantism seemed to them as hopelessly committed as Rome to dogma over the improvement of the self and the world, much of this energy went into the formation of loose trans-European networks of what they often called the “Invisible Church”—which are the foundations of modern Masonry. It is difficult to overstate the influence of this nebulous but well-documented constellation of brilliant, pietistic esoterists on the rise of modern states, science, education, religion, and other fields. Cambridge Platonists such as Ralph Cudworth dismissed the impact of Casaubon’s research: even if the Hermetic texts themselves are not as ancient as once thought, the ideas are pure, true, and reach back to the hoary and misty past.

The combination of influences from pagan and Christian Neoplatonism (especially various gnostic and Hermetic texts, as well as Eckhart and Anabaptist leader Caspar Schwenckfeld) was exhibited with imaginative originality by a Pietist cobbler, Jakob Böhme. Böhme in turn became the muse for F. W. J. Schelling, G.W. F. Hegel, William Blake, and other Romantic thinkers. Goethe was not only enamored of the legendary Faust, but he also practiced alchemy in his attic. M. H. Abrams captures the Romantic cosmology well in his phrase “natural supernaturalism.”17

The catch phrase of Hermeticism—hen kai pan (Greek term meaning “one and all”)—became the slogan for Lessing and the German absolute idealists. Being essentially pantheistic (or at least panentheistic), the Hermetic worldview has no room for miracles, per se. The “supernatural” refers not to a God who is qualitatively different from the world, who created it ex nihilo, but to the divinity of nature itself. Astrology, alchemy, Kabballah, and other forms of natural magic are just that: natural. The magus brings down the energy in the stars (considered to be embodied gods) to create the philosopher’s stone (that is, the true gnosis) according to prescribed rules. The whole business is perfectly natural, involving supernatural agents (angels and demons), who nevertheless belong to the “All” that is simultaneously natural and divine.

In fact, it was in Romanticism that the controversy over Spinoza’s pantheism was revived. Excommunicated from his Amsterdam synagogue, Spinoza (1632–77) disdained the God of the Jews and considered the Reformed church the embodiment of ecclesiastical domination of society. Nursing his wounds among an eclectic circle of Arminians, Baptists, Quakers, and Freethinkers alienated from the “people’s church,” Spinoza found support for his modernized Stoicism. Everything (and every person) is a modification of the single, undivided Divine Being—namely, the material world. Absent any ex nihilo creation, the world possesses no real contingency; everything that happens must happen. There is no freedom of God from the world or for it, much less for human beings in the world.

For Spinoza and his close circle of confidants, this was—as Einstein would conclude three centuries later—the most beautiful system ever devised. But for most of Europe, it was quite scandalous on every level: theological, ethical, and political. Spinozism had to wait for the Romantic period to ripen. Notes Jason A. Josephson-Storm:

It was the Catholic theologian Franz von Baader (1765–1841), an acquaintance of Hegel, Schelling, and Jacobi, who recovered [Meister] Eckhart from near obscurity and placed him alongside Böhme and others to suggest a mystical tradition, which Baader contrasted with what he saw as the destructive rationalism of enlightenment.

In effect, mysticism was constructed to be a third term reconnecting humanity and God, or philosophy and nature.18

Besides hailing Böhme as “the first German philosopher,” Hegel is the likely author of “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism” (1796), which revives the theme of “disenchantment” and calls for a “new mythology.” Hegel’s direct and explicit dependence on Plotinus, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism has been documented at length by specialists.19

Hegel also laments that Christianity had “emptied Valhalla, felled the sacred groves, [and] extirpated the national imagery as a shameful superstition.” For Hegel (Philosophy of History), disenchantment begins with Judaism, where God is distinguished from the world.20 Hegel complained that “men are regarded as individuals, not as incarnations of God; sun as sun, mountains as mountains, not as possessing Geist and will.”21 Hegel’s deep debt to Hermeticism, Eckhart, and Böhme has been fully explored.22

The future will not be a simple return to a pagan past but the past in a higher key: a re-enchantment with new myths to replace the worn-out ones. Novalis called it “magical idealism” (Magischer Idealismus), a new nature-mysticism. Comparisons of Eckhart and Indian Buddhism have been frequently made, especially by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). In fact, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and as Representation (1819) draws deeply from the well of Indian Hinduism (and Buddhism), linking it to the esoteric Western heritage (via Eckhart).

So it wasn’t physics but philosophy that invented the idea of “the modern” and “the myth of disenchantment.” And it wasn’t a triumphant anthem, but a somber requiem. Most often it was a lament for a fading mysticism, as the higher magic surrendered to the dead and mechanical materialism of positivistic science. This lament for a lost perennial wisdom from traditional (pagan, pre-Christian) cultures continues to be heard among theosophists and New Agers today.

We arrive at the nineteenth century where there appears to have been another renaissance of Neoplatonic, gnostic, and Hermetic ideas. A century after Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) had revived Christian Neoplatonism in America to stem the tide of deism, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) shaped the young nineteenth century by reconstructing their own version of pantheistic Neoplatonism as nature-mysticism.

Ironically, this is the century in which science was supposed to have triumphed over superstition and Nietzsche pronounced God dead. However, materialism’s atrophy of the soul merely encouraged a significant backlash. Nietzsche was certainly interested in a “new mythology,” particularly a rediscovery of the Greeks and the pagan folk religion seething beneath the last floor planks of Christendom. Yet what he disdained most were the elements of Christian theology that seemed hardest to eradicate from modern philosophy. He seems to stand in the shadows of all of these attempts to substitute a vague natural-supernaturalism for Christian theism, asking, “When will all these shadows of God no longer darken us? When will we have completely de-deified nature?” (The Happy Science, 1882). Josephson-Storm states the situation well:

Although the God of monotheism may have taken a few knocks—if not actually “died”—in the nineteenth-century European story of “the disenchantment of the world,” the gods and other agents inhabiting practices of so-called “superstition” have never died anywhere.23

Las Vegas

Finally, we arrive at the neon city in the desert, Las Vegas, where simulacra (simulated phenomena) reign and embody the loves and lives of late modernity. Here there is no correspondence between the lower and upper worlds; present moments do not participate in a whole divine plan, but are ephemeral and self-contained units of experience to be enjoyed and, if possible, repeated. “New York, New York” is not a sign of something real (namely, “the city that never sleeps”); rather, the simulation becomes the reality. There is no real society or community here on the Strip; only a lonely antinomianism whose “worldliness” masks a desire to escape the real world itself: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Nothing here is a sign of something transcendent, but merely of other mundane signs. There are no “signatures” of the divine in nature or a humanist “brotherhood of man.” Yet, is this City of the Sun drained completely of spiritual refreshment? Not at all. It is one of the most spiritual—indeed, religious—places we have encountered thus far.

As in the past, cries are heard of nihilism and disenchantment. According to political scientist Randall L. Schweller, the international order “is moving toward a state of entropy.” Like many experts, he speaks of “global ennui,” especially in the network of modern states:

Chaos and randomness abound [as] the story of world politics unfolds without coherence, . . . a plotless postmodern world . . . subsumed by the inexorable forces of randomness, tipped off its axis, swirling in a cloud of information overload.24

Every now and again in the long and winding history of the West, a similar ennui sets in, celebrated by some and lamented by others, but mostly in an inchoate sense of metaphysical and existential disorientation. The one thing we cannot do is live without a myth—some shared narrative in which our own life stories have meaning.

The lament for the gods of Greece and Rome became a familiar topos (a literary traditional theme or formula) at seminal moments in Western history: from late Roman Alexandria to the sack of Rome, the Renaissance, Romanticism, and in contemporary trends ranging from the Frankfurt School to the New Age movement. In the wake of the First World War, the renowned poet and theosophist W. B. Yeats famously reprised in “The Second Coming” the angst expressed by John Donne three centuries earlier:

In fact, Yeats’s combination of themes from Christianity (the second coming) and Platonism (the Spiritus Mundi) is a major thread of my project. In spite of having different gods and myths, modernists and anti-modernists alike sound the alarm that they are dying with no apparent replacements. Such “laments for the gods” (or their modern equivalents) punctuate periods of particular anxiety and ennui among cultures and societies. We will meet them at every major turning point in the narrative that I explore in this project.

Conclusion

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Of course, in none of these episodes was the “revival” a mere repristination; the past is always read through the lens of the particular cultures that interpret and invoke it. Yet what they share in common are several important features that became embedded genetically in what we call modernity.

I should divulge at the outset that by “modernity” I mean a particular culture with its own founding narratives together with the languages, doctrines, institutions, and practices that inculcate a specific way of being in the world. Modernity is neither an inevitable fate nor a mere style that individuals adopt by choice, but a culture—specifically, a Western one that has emerged and is still emerging out of a long and fascinating tradition. As much as we talk about “globalism” today, what we really mean is modernity, and by modernity we really mean the spread of habits of thinking, feeling, and acting, as well as institutions of cultural formation that are peculiarly Western.

Like previous conquests, particularly of Alexander, modernity is to some extent a two-way street. An upwardly mobile New Yorker may feel more cosmopolitan than ever, with better connections to contacts in Delhi, Singapore, and Nairobi than to cousins who live in rural America. An elite culture emerges across the empire, simultaneously assimilating the local cultures of the “barbarians” to its ostensibly universal techniques and presuppositions, while also being transformed in the process. These quasi-borrowings from conquered cultures, however, become mere spices in the dominant culture of globalism. However much we might privilege ourselves historically by invoking the label “postmodern,” the cultural hegemony of Western modernity appears as secure as ever, colonizing traditional societies with its post-Enlightenment modes of thought and behaviors.

At the heart of our modern self-consciousness is the assumption that we are “disenchanted,” whether we regard this as a decline or an advance. I take issue with this widely held assumption, arguing that modernity is less a break from than a continuation of so-called pre-modern myths and practices. In fact, I don’t really believe in modernity (or postmodernity) at all. “The Modern Story” is familiar to us: Once upon a time, people were superstitious, but then we discovered the natural causes of things; it was gradual, but eventually science and reason triumphed. This is not a myth, we tell ourselves, but the inexorable march of progress. Who can deny that what used to be attributed to supernatural beings—whether God or Satan, angels or demons—now are seen to have purely natural explanations and solutions? Not even highly religious people live as though this world is filled with supernatural influences. We are now secular. Ironically, this Modern Story is presupposed by secularists and fundamentalists alike, whether as a narrative of progress or of decline.

But this is a myth—not necessarily in the sense of being entirely fabulous, but of being an interpretation of our history in light of a presupposed telos—goal or end-point—of it all and of our place in that story. While we acknowledge that there are a few exotic characters along the way, the culture-shaping forces have been increasingly rationalistic and materialistic. This story does not stand up to close scrutiny, however. We have always been enchanted, most of all when we hear laments of disenchantment. Laments (as well as triumphant announcements) of disenchantment themselves belong to that shared horizon down to our present day. Within that shared horizon, different interpretations of founding myths created assimilation, conflict, and boundaries that still define us today.

By myth, I do not mean fiction as opposed to nonfiction, but the narratives that generate the largely subconscious, communal, and ineluctable pre-understandings in which we live and move and have our being. I don’t mean that there is just one such myth; on the contrary, there are several. But like streams, they flow in and out of each other, and in so doing form the distinct yet variegated terrain of our lives as modern Westerners. As Mircea Eliade (d. 1986) argued, myth and ritual are not merely ways of commemorating past hierophanies but also of participating in them.26

The “search for a new mythology” is a trope of the Western imagination. Already with Socrates and Plato we find the explicit program of “producing new stories” that will form (and reform) individuals and society, instead of reinforcing mischief on the basis of the behavior of the Olympic divinities as constructed by the poets (that is, theologians). Pythagoras and Plato even turned to Egypt and the East—India and Persia—to find resources for their religious imagination, much as moderns do today. This program recurs again and again in the Renaissance, then in German Idealism and Romanticism, and becomes a refrain from Nietzsche to the New Age movement.

Christianity only barely evangelized the major cities, much less vast reaches, of a religiously syncretistic empire. Once it spread its domain over public life and culture, with imperial support, the one Church provided the rhythms and disciplines that ensured at least superficial participation in the gospel narrative. The church was visibly in the center of the town or city; even the illiterate majority could “read” the Bible’s familiar narrative on its walls. Yet despite its importance, the gospel was incorporated into a broader horizon of a Neoplatonist cosmology and theurgic practices buttressed by a social, economic, and political hierarchy that reinforced the Ptolemaic astronomy in which medieval and Byzantine cultures were born.

The West has lost its religion, if we are talking about Christianity, but it is as spiritual as ever—beliefs, assumptions, and practices that previous generations would have regarded as “pagan superstition” are thriving in the desert of late modernity. What we find is less a break between premodern and modern (much less postmodern) thinking than a long history of combining natural philosophy (the old name for “science”) and a pantheistic or panentheistic vitalism that rejects or at least diverges from a traditional theistic framework. The result is what M. H. Abrams calls “natural supernaturalism.” Born in the late Roman period, this worldview was revived and propelled in a more utopian direction by the Renaissance and fostered by the pioneers of modern science and the leaders of Romanticism and Idealism. Even in our “enlightened” age, where the secularizing trend in the West continues unabated, disbelief in traditional theism goes hand-in-hand less with outright atheism or agnosticism than with rising interest in the occult.

The Austrian clairvoyant, philosopher, social reformer, architect, economist, and literary critic Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) is but one example of what it means to be “spiritual, not religious” in the desert of calculative reasoning and mechanistic materialism. The range of his contributions is typical of the Hermetic-theosophical mind, which sees all of reality as connected as a pulsing, living organism. Steiner said, “It does not surprise me to be condemned from one side as a ‘Mystic’ and from the other as a ‘Materialist.’ . . . Whoever goes his own road, as I do, must needs allow many a misunderstanding about himself to pass.”27

There is no need, however, for mystic materialists to feel lonely and misunderstood. Steiner’s is actually the road most travelled wherever modernity has taken root; in fact, imagining oneself as a lone ranger is intrinsic to the self-identity of Westerners. “Materialist mystic” is about the best way I can think of describing the average Westerner who in surveys self-identifies as “spiritual, not religious.” And pulling on that thread, all the way back to its sources, is a significant part of what this project aims at. It goes against the usual story of the gradual replacement of religion, mysticism, and magic with reason and science—a story that, ironically, is often presupposed by secularists and fundamentalists alike.

Those familiar with C. S. Lewis may recall at this point his “Materialist Magician” in The Screwtape Letters. Here Screwtape instructs his junior demon that their real triumph over “the Enemy” will not be atheism straight-up but a mixture of science and superstition that offers religion without gods—at least without personal ones that live and act in the world of human affairs. Screwtape explains,

I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The “Life Force” . . . may here prove useful. . . . If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of spirits—then the end of our war will be in sight.28

A society of this type will at last “hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”29

Theosophists such as Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, René Guénon, and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy were part of a larger group of scholars who staunchly opposed the materialistic reductionism of science ever since the triumph of mechanical philosophy. Eliminating the spirit from the cosmos, such materialism has led to the “disenchanting of the world.” It was in the “‘mixed intellectual and spiritual vacuum’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century” that “the not insignificant influences of neo-Gnostic thought” were revived, having been part of Western thought all along.30

Given its immersion in materialism, rationalism and empiricism, however, the purer streams of gnosis are to be found in India, according to these scholars. “The Indian tradition,” writes Coomaraswamy, “is one of the forms of the Philosophia Perennis, and as such, embodies those universal truths to which no one people or age can make exclusive claim.”31 Similarly Guénon, who was raised a strict Jesuit but then joined a French Masonic order and eventually converted to Sufi Islam, writes,

If Religion is necessarily one with Truth, then religions can only be but deviations of the primordial doctrine.32

Coomaraswamy, like Origen and like the Hellenistic Gnostics with their categories of hylic, psychic, and pneumatic [physical, soulish, and spiritual], also held the view that canonical religious and premodern philosophical texts and systems could be interpreted variously; that is, that meanings were multivalent and directly commensurate to the perceptive ability of the interpreter.33

Only the spiritual elites can decipher the secret knowledge encoded in the literal sense of various scriptural texts. In his Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, Guénon distinguished between “exoterism” (elementary teachings accessible to everyone via sacred texts) and “esoterism” (a higher order of knowledge communicated orally by a master).34 It is precisely such distinctions that Origen proposed in his distinction between the literal sense of Scripture and its allegorical sense. Frances Yates observes:

Thus that religion of the world which runs as an undercurrent in much of Greek thought, particularly in Platonism and Stoicism, becomes in Hermeticism actually a religion, a cult without temples or liturgy, followed in the mind alone, a religious philosophy or philosophical religion containing a gnosis.35

Max Müller (1823–1900), known as the founder of Indian studies as well as the field of comparative religion, was a Vedantist who argued in his Gifford Lectures that theosophy was the highest stage in religious evolution. It would take us too far afield to recognize the number of formative thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—scientists, artists, philosophers, sociologists, historians, and theologians—who rallied around the lament of “disenchantment” and the call for a re-enchantment of the cosmos through a revival of Hermeticism and Gnosticism.

In the twentieth century, we have clear evidence of belief in what Christians would have called “superstition.” Attempting a Darwinian Hermeticism rooted in Kant, Baron Carl du Prel (1839–99) was hailed by Sigmund Freud as a “brilliant mystic.” Indeed, after early disagreements with self-proclaimed gnostic Carl Jung, Freud himself came to embrace magic. Du Prel was also read eagerly by William James.36

Max Weber is often credited with coining the phrase “disenchantment of the world,” but it goes back all the way to the seventeenth century. This hand-wringing over “disenchantment” continued into the twentieth century, and the list of twentieth-century magi reads like a Who’s Who of modernity: besides Weber himself, this includes philosophers William James, Ludwig Klages, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, and the influential Jewish gnostic Gershom Scholem, psychologist Carl Jung (and the later Freud), pioneering physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Hans Thirring, as well as Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Julius Wagner-Jauregg, mathematicians Richard von Mises and Kurt Gödel, and artists such as Wassily Kandinsky.

These figures often met in what is called the Cosmic Circle and later the Eranos Circle. The liberal theologian and historian of religion Ernst Troeltsch “not only wrote on mysticism, but—as he confessed to his student Gertrud von Le Fort—was also himself a mystic in the model of Jakob Böhme.”37 Einstein too said that the religion that comes closest to his own view is Spinoza’s pantheism.38 This is but a partial list of celebrated thinkers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were fascinated with Eastern religions and the esoteric, gnostic, and hermetic traditions of the West.39 Justifiably, Josephson-Storm concludes,

Disenchantment is a myth. The majority of people in the heartland of disenchantment believe in magic or spirits today, and it appears that they did so at the high point of modernity. . . . Secularization and disenchantment are not correlated. Moreover, it is easy to show that, almost no matter how you define the terms, there are few figures in the history of the academic disciplines that cannot be shown to have had some relation or engagement with what their own epoch saw as magic or animating forces. . . . For example, the influence of theosophy, witchcraft (Wicca), and neo-paganism on all three waves of feminist movements has been well studied. That artistic and literary movements often went together with magical rituals and spirit summoning should also be no surprise: the occult can be found from the Harlem Renaissance to the Surrealists, from Wassily Kandinsky to Victor Hugo to W. B. Yeats.40

Josephson-Storm continues, “Biologists like Alfred Russell Wallace and inventors like Thomas Edison, Nobel Prize-winning physicists from Marie Curie to Jean Baptiste Perrin to Brian Josephson have often been interested in parapsychology.” Even computer scientists such as Alan Turing believed in psychical powers. Moreover, despite the laments of the new materialists, panpsychism has been a persistent countercurrent in philosophical circles, as well-known thinkers—including Spinoza, Leibniz, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Margaret Cavendish, Julien La Mettrie, Gustav Fechner, Ernst Mach, Henry David Thoreau, C. S. Pierce, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, Henri Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Charles Strong, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Albert Schweitzer, Arthur Koestler, and Gregory Bateson—all argued that the material universe should be thought of as thoroughly animated or possessed of mind and awareness. Mechanism has long had established enemies. This list barely scratches the surface.41 Josephson-Storm adds,

When combined with survey after survey that suggests popular belief in the supernatural, miracles, witchcraft, spirits, and the mysterious, it makes it hard to countenance the idea that disenchantment is the central feature of the history of the industrialized “West.” As I interpret Max Weber, we live in a disenchanting world in which magic is embattled and intermittently contained within its own cultural sphere, but not a disenchanted one in which magic is gone. Restated, magic never vanished.42

The early proponents of the new physics, Wolfgang Pauli and J. Robert Oppenheimer, looked for “the turn to Oriental religion and mysticism that would later be popularized by New Age thinkers.”43 Ironically, many pioneers and contemporary leaders in the field of religious studies belong to this long train of perennial theosophists whose “secularism” stands in contrast to traditional Christianity, but not to myth, ritual, and spirituality. Wherever this outlook dominates, even secularism appears to be abuzz with rumors of angels.

If disenchantment has been so central to the Modern Story, then perhaps modernity itself is a myth, which implies that postmodernity is one also. We tell ourselves stories that we assume to be true but run against the grain of the actual history of our time. Josephson-Storm relates that the German philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz (Die Krisis der europäischen Kulture) coined the term in 1917. He writes:

The postmodern man is an encrusted mollusk, a happy medium of decadent and barbarian swarming out from the natal whirlpool of the grand decadence of the radical revolution of European nihilism.44

Yet all of these laments have been heard before. The Story that there is no myth is itself a myth. Again, Josephson-Storm observes,

But there is plenty of evidence that there have been bureaucracies fully committed to magic and ritual, that capitalism has the capacity to absorb all the magic of the world, that mythopoesis can be constant and no less alienating, and that technology and enchantment can be intertwined. Magic and secularism are not opposites.45

We can exchange one myth for another, gradually or in a revolution, but we cannot—we do not—live without myths. Even in Las Vegas, we can be—indeed, we must be—“spiritual, not religious.”

Michael S. Horton is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.