Cults of Rebirth
The creation of rooted spiritual practice as antithesis to oppression
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” – Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science”, Book III Section 125 Tr. Walter Kaufmann
Though philosophically, the idea of the death of God did not originate with Nietzsche, it is this passage which has been transmitted most, and which has been misinterpreted most also. While often it is portrayed as a kind of atheistic celebration of the rational, secular, “informed” human, Nietzsche wrote it gravely. While he himself may have believed that Christianity was a scourge, giving of a kind of “slave morality”, he understood that the fundamental culture and morality of Europe was built atop its foundations, and that without it, culture and morality would crumble. Nietzsche was not optimistic about the resolve of most individuals, and he was aware that a lack of basis for a strong moral foundation was likely to result in those who had a stronger impetus to consolidating power imposing their own moral foundation on the individuals who had been left without their own to guide them. Nietzsche wrote The Gay Science in 1882. It is likely that he saw the writing on the wall, as other philosophers did, for the inevitable results of Enlightenment thinking: the rise of a new kind of authoritarianism, and of fascism. Those who wished to consolidate power in the early 20th century could no longer rely on claims of the divine right of kings to rule and create empire, as many rulers before them had, but they had a new weapon: rationality. Perhaps harder to dispute than divine right, these rulers created rational narratives that convinced a recently secularized population to not only accept their authority, but clamor for it. These men were the new gods, their science the new religion, and the identity of their constituents no longer related to culture in the historical sense, but culture in the national sense, defined largely by one’s political affiliations and leanings.
The world would never be the same, and you know how this story is playing out, for here we are.
While I am not an enormous proponent of much of Nietzsche’s philosophy, finding it much too focused on a kind of hyperindividual approach to overcoming spiritual and societal oppression, I would be remiss to not include this most famous of phrases at the genesis of this conversation on our modern existential crisis, and the ways in which I see us moving forward through it.
In the wake of the death of god, we find ourselves desperate for something beyond rational justification. We are existentially educated beyond those thinkers of the Enlightenment who so naively thought that this thing called “reason” would enable us access to Truth. Much of the philosophy of the 20thand 21st centuries is a direct response to it, and much of it leads us down rabbit holes of existentialism, absurdism, and relativism. It leaves us with questions, but not many answers, as many of the philosophers attempt to reason their way out of reason—a cyclical pursuit, worthy of pursuing, yet nearly incomprehensible to most of us today. Or, perhaps the issue is greater: we understand it, but we don’t know what to do with it.
We exist in a world of sound bites, memes, and internet hot takes on the fundamental questions of our existence, leaving us more disjointed and adrift than even if we had simply read the writings of those philosophers who have tried to answer to reason and its shortcomings. Context is stripped away again and again, the source divested from the material, everything made consumable, digestible, easy. We are no longer in the age of reason, but somewhere beyond, in an age of relativism and hyperindividualism, able to live in entirely different universes of truths than even our friends and relatives, living with the consequences of rationality but not with rationality itself.
Perhaps it is true, that we can never arrive at Truth with a capital T, and yet something nags at us. The Divine is calling to us, begging us to listen once again. Begging us to stop pretending that it is this faculty of rationality divorced from the rest of what it is to be that is the way—the Divine1 asks us to find a way to reconnect to our purpose, to reconnect with humility, with one another. Though we may not have satisfactory philosophical answers to why we exist, it is apparent that we must exist for a reason, and maybe less apparent that we may have strayed from it. If we thought there was no answer to this question, why would we be asking it?
It is not clear where to go, for if it were we would go there. Many are attempting to show the way, to find the way themselves. Yet I think that in general, most of the attempts are restricted by our tendency to rebuild the culture that we are embedded in despite our best efforts at creating something new. This isn’t necessarily negative, though it becomes so when we are too resistant to admit that we are rebuilding the culture we are embedded in, and become delusioned or deceitful.
I see examples of such attempts everywhere: in neo-pagan/pagan reconstructionist spaces, in the New Age spirituality that is so often used as a kind of drug, in fundamentalist spaces that are reactionary to the liberalization of the surrounding culture, and so on. To go too deeply into these examples may make this much too long, so I will rely on you to understand what I mean when I say that these kinds of attempts to create or find a spiritual system in our modern world exist atop delusions, coersion, or deceit. Perhaps I can go more deeply into them in a future post. For now, the point is that most of these attempts at creating, reconstructing, or seeking spirituality within our modern world tend to recreate the oppressive structures of that world—bastardizing their own purpose and leaving their followers just as empty and adrift as ever. Perhaps even more so for the illusion of something to believe in standing in for the realization that there is nothing but consumerism and dogma beneath it, the dogma of Empire.
What, then, do we seek? Not the rebirth of God with a capital “G”, not the rebirth of Abrahamically derived religions that also themselves recreated the oppressive structures of authoritarianism under kingdom and papacy, certainly. There is no potential for true belief in these kinds of religions for most of us, anyway. No, what we seek is the recreation of the cult.
Merriam-Webster lists as their first definition of the word “cult”: “A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader.”Yet this is a very post-1960’s take on a word that avoids concrete definition. To be clear,when I say “cult” I do not mean the Manson Family or People’s Temple, but something more akin to the cults of Mithras or Isis, long before the age of Antiquity. In other words: we must recreate legitimate, connected, real life communities of people that share a practiced, internally transmissable set of actions and beliefs.
When I say we must recreate the cult, one thing must absolutely be clear: we must stray from the desire to simply throw together an eclectic system of disparate ideas and rituals and call it our own personal spirituality (I personally believe we must throw out such superficial approaches to being altogether). What feels “valid” and real to one person means little: and is often the catalyst for authoritarian cults such as the Manson Family or People’s Temple being formed in the first place when the creator of the beliefs is aware of and has the will to manipulate others into believing that their system is Truth. If all beliefs are equally valid, why not die or kill for mine if it makes you feel inclined to do so, and if I make you feel seen?
This approach: “whatever works for me is valid” is the default in many neo-pagan and magick oriented spaces today. This approach is a mere recreation of the rugged individualism of the US and the “West”—and further, it provides the illusion of freedom because it is one item in aspecific set of personal identifiers that we have the power to create and use to define ourselves by. If whatever spirituality “feels” right to us is as real as, say, Hinduism or any other established cultural system, what are we saying about how we really feel about other cultures and their beliefs? The underlying belief seems to me to be that religion and spiritual systems and culture, ultimately, is entirely arbitrary, and that its role is to make us feel good. While there is a significant amount of bigotry that underlies this belief, I wish to not digress too far from the role of this text, and so I will simply call it out for now.
No, all beliefs are not valid, and the role of culture, religion, and spirituality are not to make you feel good. Their role is also not to help you rationalize your own set of poor behaviors, to provide you atonement for them, or to rationalize your superiority in some way. On the contrary, to truly engage with the Divine, we must find within ourselves and embed within the cultures we create a kind of humility and willingness to listen. An old friend who no longer walks with us, when sharing about the experience of being deeply embedded in a ceremony with a plant medicine indigenous to his homeland was told “you are just a human being” by the spirits the plant medicine revealed, and I have heard this sentiment echoed by others who have engaged in these ceremonies. We seek gnosis, but by definition the seeking of knowledge and connection with Divine asserts that we ourselves are not The Divine, or God, but rather a piece of the Divine. It is not your duty to create gods from pure imagination and fancy (or from your own personality), but to seek them and share the knowledge with others who are likewise seeking.
So now we come to the question, a question which I will attempt to provide answers to—answers which, I must say, are not whole answers, for I, too, am simply a human being, and I am still seeking better answers—how do we create these cults? What do we base them off of? How might we practice, how might we live? Must we all believe the same things? If we shouldn’t all just create our own reality, then what reality?
While I disagree with reconstructionism for a variety of reasons, I think that we must seek ancestral guides—living or nonliving, accessed via language or spiritual communication. There is necessity to combine ancient knowledge that can ground our communities in something shared, something that has been accessed and learned before our sense modes of access had been hijacked by the socialization of an age that asserts that all is knowable empirically and all else is nonsense, with the perceptive data from existence in the world as it Is Right Now. Utilizing ancestral guidance, we may move forward to practice, understanding the underlying principles of their practices and using these principles to create our own set of ritual actions. What is universal? As an example: consciousness alteration2 and meditation3 (which are sometimes one in the same but not always) are two universal underlying principles of religious practice. I personally have never heard of a spiritual system that does not utilize both, though some religions call them differently (I.e: “prayer” as opposed to “meditation” in the Christian tradition). Why? Because we have known for hundreds of thousands of years to access aethereal realms4 to seek guidance from spirit and the Divine.
Practical questions for the creation of our communal spiritual practices, then, may include questions like: What spiritual guidance does our community need? What emphasis do we place on seeking out our ancestral spirits and communicating with them? What are the results of early attempts to do so? How often do we think we should engage in communal rituals based around consciousness alteration,and what are our intentions for doing so?
This kind of questioning, punctuated by intentional access to spiritual guides (ancestral and otherwise) to seek clarity, and then rigorously evaluating the impact of our practices on the community as a whole and our own spiritual development is the process by which we are creating our spiritual system here at Rancho de la Libertad. It is very much a work in progress: an ongoing process that we should continue perhaps for our entire lives, and then allow our progeny to continue in turn.
What we need is not the creation of many disparate, individual, insular religions, per se, because ultimately we are seeking to connect with the same truth. What we lack are communities within which we are capable of having the space and guidance to connect with this truth. In other words: we should seek to create or join such communities and cultivate the practices together. Alone, in isolation, we create what makes us feel good, what validates our individual identity as is defined by its relationship to Empire, not by its relationship to the rhizomatic whole of the material and spiritual world. Shifting our perspective of spiritual practice to that which exists entirely within a context: our family, our friends, our landbase, as opposed to that which exists solely by and for us, we are able to create practices that are transmissable and rooted, and therefore more real.
This is an enormous change: not just in theory but in praxis. If you wish to create such a practice, you must ready yourself for the legitimate possibility that the way you have structured your life may need to fundamentally change. I understand that it is not just likely but simply the case that most of the readers of this post (now and in the future) will reject it for this reason. Because how often do we only agree with the thing that agrees with us? Because do I, the author, realize what I am truly saying? I do, for what it’s worth. I’m living it.
The recreation of the cult, the communal entity through which we live in shared practice and utilize one another’s shared belief to access Divinity and gnosis, is an enormous and perhaps daunting endeavor. And yet, how necessary. We exist in a world where we are the “empowered” prisoners, isolating ourselves further from one another and from any kind of shared truth through this dogma of hyperindividual identity. Through our consumption, our work, our external appearances, and our spirituality, we enforce the conformity of ourselves and those around us. To exist in context, to build meaning that is rooted, shareable, that doesn’t simply confirm our existing biases and futher assert our “identity” as a member of an Empire, enables us to create value systems that have a hope of defying the goals of such an Empire: goals which include at least our oppression, our subservience to its ends. Perhaps that does require the abandonment of some of our goals, of some of our “identity”—and yet, what if those goals serve Empire the way our identity does? What if the best thing that could happen to us is the abandonment of the goals of accumulation and consumptive self-expression in exchange for the goals of gnosis and spiritual attainment?
I’ll leave you with this, a question, as I often do. If you have any questions for me, I’d love to hear them.
Until next time ~
Notes:
- When I say “Divine” with a capital “D”, I am referring to that which is underlying generative and destructive force. You may call this “the universe”, “God”, “the All”, “the Gods”, or one of thousands of other names that attempt to describe the indescribable. Land based animist practices may refer to this as “the Earth”, “the Land”, “Spirit”, and so on, but I believe that “Land” encompasses beyond just this planet.
- Consciousness alteration is not always the result of imbibing in substances. Examples of consciousness alteration techniques not related to substance ingestion include but are not limited to: sensory deprivation, body modification, chants, extensive meditation, fasting, ecstatic dance or movement, ritual social isolation, heat, the burning of certain plants nearby, animal sacrifice and the ritual actions leading up to it. Many of these techniques or rituals lead to access to the same symbols and communications as the imbibing of psychedelic or other psychoactive ritual substances.
- Meditation is a blanket term that suggests an innumerable amount of different practices related to a) focus and b) the shifting of the mind to a different state of consciousness. Sometimes it is both, and sometimes it is a practice related to focus only. Meditation without an emphasis on focus is not meditation.
- I say “aethereal realms” here to describe the extraperceptory. You may disagree with my language and call this something else: to access Spirit, other dimensions, some collective unconscious, deeper layers of our psyche, or something else. I truly believe that the debates over what we’re accessing are semantic debates only and that while we all know we’re accessing something and we seem to have a sense that that something is generally, in our day to day life, outside of our perception, and that it seems to be some kind of current that runs through everything whether we’re in touch with it at that moment or not, language simply fails to allow us to transmit this sense well. I think that if we’re honest with ourselves and one another, though, we’re generally saying the same thing.