Humility and Love

 Humility and love are considered two of the primary Christian virtues. They are present in other religions, of course, but not emphasised to the same degree. It is this insistence on humility and love that sometimes gets Christianity accused of being an effeminate religion that promotes a slave morality, a religion that makes men less manly.

But what if there was a deeper reason behind this? What if the emphasis on these two virtues was because Christianity was a religion intended for a masculine people with a strong sense of self? Then, far from being an effeminate religion, it would be a spiritual corrective, something that counterbalanced innate tendencies and raised the qualities of its destined group of people to a spiritual plane. Christianity is often claimed to be a universal religion but really for most of its existence it has been a European one. Even the near Easterners and North Africans of its early days had a strong European component in their makeup, and for the bulk of the last 2,000 years Christianity has been an almost exclusively European religion, lived and developed by people of European origin wherever they might be in the world.

Religions are not the same but most have similar recommendations for behaviour. None, though, stress humility and love as Christianity does, and certainly not the Judaic religion from which Christianity emerged. I believe that Christianity was always intended for the European people, and though these people adapted it for their purposes, the core of it was fundamental. Firstly, the focus on Christ the resurrected Son of God, and secondly, the essential teachings of humility and love. These were there partly because they are true, that goes without saying, but also because they could temper the warrior spirit of the Europeans and transform that into a spiritual energy. The blood stained sword of battle becomes St Michael's gleaming sword of light. St Michael may be an archangel but he is also a chieftain or war leader in the Indo-European style. Warriors become soldiers of God who battle against evil and we see this in various groups throughout the Middle Ages from the Templars onwards. Believers are not just monks who retire from the world. They are also active in the world to a degree you do not see with Hindus or Buddhists or even Muslims. However, their activity is under the aegis of God, and it is the religious focus on humility and love that transforms the fighting mentality of the pagan Europeans into that of a warrior for truth.

The Heliand is an epic poem from the 9th century written in Old Saxon. Heliand means saviour and the poem is a version of the Gospel story that presents Jesus in a form acceptable to the Northern European mind so he is something like a chieftain while his disciples are the band of warriors that surround and support him. For example, the unknown author used the word treuwa to describe faith. This word must be related to our word true and it means faithfulness rather than faith or loyalty rather than belief. So the poet is saying that you are saved by faithfulness to Jesus not simply by believing in him. This would appeal to the pagan mindset of the time much more and, to my way of thinking, is a better way of describing how spiritual transformation may be brought about. 

I mention this to show the type of person early Christianity had to deal with and, so to speak, bring to the table.  If Jesus had been presented as a soft pacifist who was captured and crucified by his enemies that would not be appealing, but show him as a king and warrior who voluntarily underwent torture and death to redeem his men and you make him worthy of being followed and, if necessary, of dying for. Once your leader is revealed as a valiant hero you are more open to his teachings of humility and love.

 The trouble now is that humility and love have been weaponised and used to undermine a more complete or properly developed spiritual consciousness. The victim becomes the hero and the hero the oppressor. Humility and love are certainly primary spiritual virtues but so are wisdom and strength, and the former must be seen in the context of the latter if you are to reach a true spiritual state of being. The soft virtues without the hard ones become spiritually corrosive.

Christ came as the revealer of divine love. He, the greatest of all, humbled himself, allowing himself to be killed on the cross, a shameful end. His teaching of humility and love is the key that opens the door to heaven. But that does not mean that we should focus on these to the exclusion of other qualities which are equally important. Besides, all real love derives from love of God which is love of truth so you cannot use supposed love to deny truth as often happens in these times. As for humility, that is only there to remove pride. It is not a matter of encouraging weakness but points out that true strength is in God.

Humility and love were enjoined on the Europeans not because of any defects they might have but to balance their positive qualities which were to do with a developed sense of the individual self. This is then lifted up to become a creative contributor to spiritual life. The European type is not interested in passive absorption into oneness but wants to be an active participant in the glories of creation, but for that to be his ego must be made clean. Hence humility and love.

Who Was St John?

 Christine Hartley (1897-1985) was a pupil of Dion Fortune and an important figure in the revival of the Western Mystery Tradition. In later life she even wrote a book with that title. There, nestled among stories of Merlin and Arthur and the Tuatha da Danaan and the Druids, there is a short chapter called St John the Kelt. When I first read this many years ago I felt that rush of recognition you experience when something you knew but don't know you knew breaks through into the realm of conscious thought. It made complete sense.

Christine Hartley gives some reasons for this, on the face of it, unlikely assertion, and while they are plausible they certainly don't prove that the beloved apostle really was a Celt. But that is besides the point for this is more an inner plane reality than something that is factually true in the outer world - which is not to say it is not outwardly true as well. She says that the original Celts came from the mountains around Ararat and Persia and migrated westwards, but that there may have been some who remained behind at various stages of the journey. I don't think this is currently accepted by modern scholars but the Celtic people were certainly travellers and there is no reason why some may not have ended up in the Holy Land. More to the point, she says that the Celt is a mystic who thinks symbolically. He is a poet and a dreamer. His spirituality is shot through with magic and mystery, and his view of the created world is that it still shines with God's glory if you look at it right. All of this is in St John. None of it is in the rest of the New Testament nor is it part of the Jewish religious temperament which is based on law and the hard reality of this world. 

St John's Gospel and the Book of Revelation stand apart from everything else in the Bible. Their spiritual approach is mystical in a way that makes other parts of the Bible seem prosaic and earthbound. They glisten with an inner light that is typically Celtic. The imagery of the Apocalypse, its expansive visionary quality and prophetic fire, might have partial roots in the Book of Daniel but, as Christine Hartley says, "Here is the poetry and imagery of the Kelt from the first word to the last - the whole of the great Vision lies before us in a glowing tapestry of Angels and Jewels and Riders upon Horses...so superbly described...that it is almost possible to catch a glimpse of the reality that lies behind them".

Nowhere in traditional Jewish writing is there a sense of the spiritual nature of God one finds in the opening words of St John's Gospel. This is unprecedented and separates him from the other Apostles who, for all their qualities, seem dull and heavy in comparison, unable to transcend the material nature of the world and see spirit in the pure form conveyed by St John. And then, as Christine Hartley points out,  John "invariably writes 'The Jews', as though they were to him foreigners" implying that he is, at the very least, from another background.

Then you have the traditional representation of St John. Obviously, the images we have of him and St Peter and Jesus himself were not drawn from nature, but they might have come from oral tradition and, if we accept that Christianity is a divinely inspired religion, we should have no difficulty in believing that these images could also have been inspirational in origin. Peter is always a burly, bearded, rather fierce man of passion and energy, practical and tough, and somewhat bullish. St John is almost the opposite. He is youthful, sensitive and often fair-haired. A dreamy, almost ethereal quality comes from his pictures as in this one from the 19th century. This is a Celtic poet.

If Christianity was destined to spread beyond the Jewish world, as we must assume it was, then it would make sense to have a non-Jew as one of Jesus's closest disciples, someone who would then write about him from the perspective of an outsider to the very insular Jewish world. This writing would appeal more to the imagination of the intended audience and help bring them on board with the new, what was intended to be, universal religion. Its internal content and unstated but inherent cultural signatures would resonate with them and help make Christianity a European religion not a Jewish one which was its destiny.

None of this can be proved as the world seeks proof but I maintain that on the level of myth and intuition it shines out with the clarity of real truth. St John was the primary medium through whom the Christian message was transmitted to the Indo-European people, and he was one of them. The Christ he revealed was the warrior king of Revelation, the Lord and Ruler of all Creation whose face shines with the glory of the sun, the incarnation of a solar God much more than the Old Testament Jehovah.

If You Do What is Right You Can Never Lose

Naive, sentimental, careless, self-hating, jaded, nihilistic, decadent, downright stupid, all these and more are words that can be used to describe the current state of the West which has signed its death warrant with its embrace of mass immigration. Certain sections of the populace are realising this and refusing to be cowed by the usual epithets of racism and fascism that are thrown around to shut down serious debate and reflection. There are even calls for deportations in England and the USA.

But what if there really were deportations on a mass scale which may seem unlikely at present but is theoretically possible? Where would the West be then? Would it have solved its problems? It might redress the overwhelming of the indigenous population by alien people with very different priorities and loyalties, something that is apparent as their numbers increase so removing any need to assimilate. However, without a serious spiritual revival the countries of the West would simply be back to where they were 30 or 40 years ago with all the spiritual sicknesses they had then. They might have saved themselves as ethnicities, and even from potential civil wars, but they would be still suffering from all the problems that brought them to where they currently are.The faults, both spiritual and intellectual, that caused their current plight would still be in place and their state would be little better.

Things have come to such a pass that no secular approach can put off the day of reckoning for the West. Intelligent political action would bring some benefits but cannot address a more deep-seated malaise. At the same time, it is certainly better to try to do something even if you think that will only scratch the surface of the problem. Defeatism is weakness by another name.

Nevertheless, the truth is civilisations run their course, and ours has. We still have choices though. We can go with the decay, be part of it, or we can see it and resist it even if we know this resistance may be too late because the rot is too deep. Even if that is the case there is still much to play for in spiritual terms. Outer circumstances will be what they are but fighting against them, even if that is only within your own soul, will bring results. In fact, for most people the focus should be inwards. The benefit of living at a time of spiritual collapse such as now is that by standing apart from it you fortify your soul. You develop your spiritual muscles by having to swim against the tide. In a Golden Age you are spiritual by default. In a Dark Age you must earn your spirituality but that means it is yours and cannot be lost.

However, watch that word spiritual. One of the problems of living in an age of materialism and atheism is that when people do turn to the spiritual they often turn to all kinds of false spiritualities, and now there are many. As alway, it is your motivation that matters. A pure heart and a love of truth will guide you to the right place. If you seek the spiritual for personal benefit, you will not be so guided and may end up down one of the many blind alleys that seem to promise enlightenment, wisdom and power but only offer shallow imitations of these things. 

Is it worth fighting when you know you are going to lose? Absolutely it is, because although you may not gain the outer victory, if you fight for truth you cannot lose. The victory will be in your own soul. Furthermore, resisting darkness creates a light of its own which light will shine out for others, inspiring them to fight and gain their own inner victories. The outer always passes but the inner remains. If you fight for truth, ultimate victory is assured.

The moral of this story is that ongoing decline is inevitable because of the nature of these times but that does not mean we should do nothing to try to arrest decline. It may be that we plant the seeds for eventual rebirth. 

Christ is Qualitatively Different to Every Other Spiritual Being

 It cannot be denied that every serious religion has produced its share of saintly men and women, and also that bad things have been done in the name of every religion. In both cases some more than others but still the point stands. Does this mean that every religion is equally valid and that they all come from God and have the same divine stamp of approval? That they simply represent different expressions of divine truth and are intended for different groupings of people?

My answer to this is a definite no. There is a hierarchy in religion as there is in everything else and top of the hierarchy is Christianity. That is because Christ is the one perfect divine revelation because he is indeed the Son of God and Saviour of Mankind.

Most religions probably have some kind of divine input and if they don't at the beginning then they become influenced by truth from on high as they develop and grow. I say most not all because some now passed and more localised are clearly demonic in origin. But of the great religions in the world which have spread significantly beyond their point of origin I would say all contain in part the presence of God. He can be seen, again in part, through the window of the religion.

However, this presence is always veiled except in the case of Christ where it is seen directly. This is because Christ was not a prophet or avatar or incarnated spiritual being of some kind sent from God, all of which are in some degree limited if not contaminated by appearing in the world of matter. Christ was the pure essence of God and there was no limitation or contamination in him. This is what without sin means. He was the naked truth of spirit shining directly, unimpeded by matter. And his teaching was twofold. First, there was the basic teaching which in many ways was not dissimilar to other spiritual teaching even if it was more direct and to the point. But then, and more importantly, there was his person. Christ taught through the medium of his person. He was (and is) the truth, and when he said no man comes to God except through him that is also the truth.

Now, Christ can appear in non-Christian religions through inhabiting with his spirit aspects of those religions, and this is why members of those religions can become saints if they follow the Christ-inhabited aspects of their religion. But, even so, this is not as direct an approach as through the image of Christ that has come down to us through scripture, tradition and art, all divinely inspired. But Christ also lives or can live in our hearts and anyone can meet him there if they open themselves up to his holy person. This then transforms the individual from the worldly material self to a spiritual being. Furthermore, it is the only thing that can do that.

Christ is qualitatively different to every other spiritual being because they partake of him but he only partakes of himself.

Food

 In his book Mere Christianity, first published in 1952 but deriving from lectures given during the Second World War, C.S. Lewis has a chapter entitled Sexual Morality in which he considers what the Christian approach should be to this vexed subject, and specifically the virtue of chastity. He was writing before the sexual revolution of the 1960s but that didn't come out of nowhere and really just meant that what had been going on, or at least discussed, in certain circles of society spread throughout the whole of it.

Lewis makes the point that the sexual instinct, good and natural in itself, has gone wrong, and says that Christianity does not believe that sex is bad, an accusation often aimed at it, but that the state into which the sexual instinct has got is the problem. It has become corrupted and that is what is bad. Something often forgotten is that the idea of romantic love only really developed in the Christian West, and if that love was idealised on occasion it could be said that this reflected the sense that the human love between a man and a woman could be lifted up into the Christian Heaven and, as a result, transformed into a divine state.

But this piece is not about sex. In the course of this chapter Lewis illustrates the degenerated state of the sexual instinct by the example of a striptease act where men gather to ogle a woman undressing. He says suppose you went to a country where you could draw a crowd by slowly lifting the lid off a plate of mutton chops or bacon, wouldn't you think there was something wrong with the people of that country and that the normal healthy appetite for food had become exaggerated and corrupted? He writes this in the sure knowledge that his audience would think it absurd.

But this is more or less what we have today! Our excessive preoccupation with food shows itself everywhere. The number of restaurants and fast food outlets on every high street, the constant advertisements for all things edible, the TV schedules with their endless programmes about food and competitions for those who cook or bake it, the lionising of chefs as though they were great artists. We have become obsessed with food, not so much from the point of view of our stomachs as from that of our tastebuds and the desire to stimulate them unceasingly. This is a sure sign of decadence. There is nothing wrong with enjoying food. One should enjoy it. It is one of the comforts God has given us to make life in the physical world more bearable. But there is a difference between healthy enjoyment and gluttony, and we have forgotten the age old truth that indulging the pleasures of the flesh deadens us to the spiritual. The body is part of what we are but if we give it too much prominence it will become all of what we are, and that is what our modern obsession with food is doing.

I'm not recommending we put on hair shirts and live on stale bread and water, even if that is a good practice sometimes. It's a question of priorities and proportion, and we have gone much too far down the road of physical indulgence. There is a decadent sensuality where food is concerned just as there is in the case of sex, and it too is spiritually destructive.

The pleasures of the body have their place but that place in a spiritually aware culture is a subordinate one. The more attention you pay to these pleasures, the more you try to cultivate them or seek to stimulate the desires associated with them, the more you lose all connection to the spiritual. Man is not an animal but if he indulges the animal side of his nature, something animals don't do, he sinks lower than the animal because he has sinned against both spirit and nature.

Food is good but a good exaggerated or given a place above its merits becomes an evil. This is what has happened with food in our world. There was an episode recently when a well-known journalist and 'media personality' opined that the pleasures of foreign cuisine was compensation for the indigenous people to effectively lose their country. The spiritual state of such an individual is pitiful.

Daily Life in Yercaud

(More on my life in India in the 1980s.)

Our life in Yercaud was simple. We rose at 6.00 every morning, had a drink of hot lime juice and honey and then meditated for around 45 minutes. After that it was breakfast which was porridge and toast with a cup of tea. Then I generally worked in the garden or sorted out whatever needed to be sorted out in the guesthouse. After lunch, which I cooked and was basically the same every day, yellow dahl with a mix of vegetables such as onion, brinjal (aubergine or eggplant), tomatoes, potatoes, lady's fingers (okra) and a leafy green vegetable similar to spinach called keerai, all served with rice, Michael had a nap and I read for an hour or so before going back to garden and/or guesthouse duties. 

I flavoured this concoction with a teaspoonful of curry powder. Indians rarely use curry powder. We found a large black granite mortar and pestle in the bungalow when we moved in. This was what the lady of the house used to grind spices every morning, but it remained idle while we were its custodians. You might wonder how, if Indians rarely use curry powder, we got hold of it. The answer is we bought it from a spice shop in Salem, the large town in the plains below Yercaud, where it probably only existed for decadent lazybones like us. A spice shop in India is a lovely thing. Full of strange and exotic smells obviously, but the array of various fresh and dried and powdered plants and roots and seeds and leaves and fruits, either hanging on strings or in sacks or contained in glass jars, makes it a visual treat too. Many other shops were similarly aesthetically pleasing - see the photos below. Traditionally, Indians led lives that were almost like works of art in their simplicity and elegance though that time is passing now, a victim of modernisation and democracy. I may be accused of glamorising poverty to regret this but there is a spiritual poverty that is more degrading than any material poverty that is not absolute penury.

Later on in the afternoon I would go for a walk of a few miles in the hills and local jungle, and then in the early evening Michael and I went shopping at the village bazaar. There was a vegetable market which mostly involved the vendors spreading their wares on a sack while they sat cross-legged to one side. A few people had stalls but many just sold one or two types of produce, onions, tomatoes, whatever, all grown in the area. We caused much amusement by buying a single onion every day but it suited us to do a daily shop. We then went to the baker where we were the only people who wanted wholemeal bread. We would buy the wheat in unground form from a state government supplier and the baker would then grind it and make us a loaf every day. He only had white flour himself and could not understand why we wanted brown bread, but was happy to indulge the foreigners with their strange tastes. In similar vein, it was hard to get brown rice. For that we had to go to Salem to a wholesale rice merchant in the town. Food shops did not stock it.

The next stage on our regular shop was a trip to Mr Padma's. Mr Padma ran a general grocery store where we bought everything that wasn't vegetables, bread, fruit or eggs or a few other things I will come to later. So, items like tea, soap, tinned cheese (yes, tinned cheese, it wasn't bad) and Champion porridge oats. We would always have a chat with Mr Padma who would stand by the entrance to his shop surveying the scene outside as though he were above it all. He was of a higher caste than the other shopkeepers and he made sure people understood this. Not in an arrogant way but simply as someone who wished to preserve the necessary formalities of life.

The last call on our shopping trip was to buy eggs. Our dinner every night was the same thing, two boiled eggs with a couple of slices of bread followed by curds, banana and honey, all sourced locally like practically everything else. We made the curds ourselves from a culture we had been given. Each evening we had a delivery of milk from Major Manuel, an ex-Indian army man who had retired to Yercaud. He had one cow which was milked at 6pm precisely every day. His servant then brought us a litre or whatever it was for a couple of rupees. We knew that Major Manuel did not water his milk whereas if you bought milk in the village it would have had water added as a matter of course. We then boiled the milk to sterilise it and when it had cooled down to a certain temperature, still warm but no longer hot, we added half of it to a teaspoon of culture we had preserved from the previous day. You could do this for months until you had to get a new culture. When that had started to set we transferred it to a small clay pot which we put in the fridge.

Except we didn't have a fridge. What we had instead and what we called our fridge was another clay pot, large this time. It was actually two pots, one of which was placed inside the other. You put the item you wished to keep cool in the smaller of the two and then poured cold water into the larger before placing the smaller pot inside that and putting on a lid. This was surprisingly effective when kept in the pantry, a windowless room just off the kitchen with a tall ceiling and thick walls to keep out the heat. For a day or two anyway.

I was learning a bit of Tamil at this time though, as I discovered later when I tried to show off to a cultured Brahmin in Madras, the Tamil I learnt was of a very crude sort. It would come out as something like, for an English equivalent, "'ello mite, 'ow yer doin'?". I had bought a dictionary that used the Roman alphabet since I never got to grips with the Tamil, but my accent and sentence structure came from interacting with local villagers so left a good deal to be desired. Nonetheless, I thought my vocabulary was reasonable. So when I bought the eggs for dinner I would ask for nalu mittai which means four eggs. There were always several young men behind the counter and they would all laugh and smile before giving me the eggs. I thought they were just being friendly. This went on for several months until the more senior of the servers who spoke English decided to intervene. He explained that the reason they all laughed every time I asked for eggs was that I was actually asking for four sweets. Eggs was muttai not mittai. I no longer smile at foreigners who mispronounce English.

The milk for the curds came from Major Manuel. The honey we added to the curds came from a local cooperative. This was run by our friend Tharyan Matthews and he was the one who suggested that I should keep bees myself. As we had a garden full of flowers this seemed a good idea. I started with a couple of hives, just wooden boxes with rectangular frames in which the bees would make their honeycombs, and I was given a swarm to get me going. I've written about this before so won't repeat myself here except to reproduce the two pictures I have that relate to the subject of honey.

This is a photo of me with the beekeeper's cooperative. Major Manuel is second from the right in the front row and Tharayan Matthews is the mafioso-like figure at the centre which is generally where he liked to be. Tharyan was a tremendous egotist and did sometimes behave like a godfather, but I liked him because he was a larger than life character and full of energy and enthusiasm. He always wore a little woollen hat as in the picture, even in the hottest weather, presumably because he was completely bald. He had a loud booming voice which he employed in church to add a descant to hymns that practically drowned out the rest of the congregation singing the main melody. Tharyan and his wife Elizabeth were Syrian Christians from Kerala but they attended the Anglican affiliated Church of South India services which Michael and I also went to on most Sundays. He had worked for Nestlé and had travelled quite extensively in Europe during the course of his career so had a sophistication that most people in the area, even the educated ones, lacked. He and Elizabeth were always kind to us even if they did help themselves to quite a large sum of Michael's money when we left Yercaud, but that's another story.

Yercaud Beekeepers Cooperative 1982

This picture shows me in our garden in front of flowering coffee plants which produce a very distinctive flavoured honey. In the background are some banana plants. I am in my Sunday best because I had just come from church. The tie was a present from Elizabeth, not necessarily one I would have chosen myself. The trousers come from a suit I had had made in the village by the local tailor. I think it cost a few pounds, including material and a rather fancy blue lining for the jacket.

Me with flowering coffee plants.

I mentioned we bought wheat to give to the baker to make our wholemeal bread. At that time in Tamil Nadu certain items were rationed and we had to get them from a government store. These included wheat and sugar and also kerosene which was useful for cooking and to put in lamps when there were power cuts which was a frequent occurrence. We bought the wheat in the form of whole grain which we would have to spread out in the sun and then sift for the small stones there would always be present, whether to increase its weight or just part of the harvesting process I never knew but I suspected the former as we had to do the same for dahl and rice. Once we had sifted out the stones we took the wheat to the baker who made us a fresh loaf every day.

Roughly once a week we caught a bus down to Salem to buy those few things we needed that were not available in Yercaud, and also just for the pleasure. Salem was a bustling town, typical of South India and still largely traditional in temperament and appearance. There were very few high rise building and almost everyone wore Indian rather than Western clothes, saris for women and dhotis or lungis for men. It was not on the tourist trial as there were no particularly interesting temples there as in towns like Madurai or Thanjavur, but in a way that made it more interesting. I hardly ever saw another Westerner there and we were figures of curiosity.  Here are a few pictures to give a flavour of a South Indian town at that time. I believe they were taken in 1982 by Michael's cousin when he came out to visit us.

A street in Salem

A South Indian bull

Flower stall

Orange stall.
I am carrying wood for a table I was making. 

When we got back from our shopping trip we had another 45 minute meditation which was followed by a light dinner, some more reading and then bed by 10. There was no TV or radio for the first couple of years though Michael did eventually get a tiny transistor so he could listen to the news on The BBC World Service each morning. I got quite used to the Lilliburlero theme tune and the announcement that it was 02 hours Greenwich Mean Time. The only TV I saw in 5 years was of some athletics at the 1984 Olympics which I watched at the Yercaud Club, an institution I shall return to in a later post.

God, the World and the Soul

 The three realities of human existence are God, the world and the soul which is to say the inner subject, the outer object and that from which both of these derive. These can be seen as three points of a triangle with God at the apex. The tragedy of modern man is that the apex point is either denied or, if accepted, seen in the light of some part of the base line. In fact, this point is the only thing that can give meaning and reality to the other two points. Without not just acknowledging God but seeing him as the root of the other two, these two, Man and the World, amount to nothing but confusion and chaos, hence the nihilistic state in which we live even if we cover that up with all kinds of distractions.

Man can only know himself through interaction with the world of objective existence. In his early stages he remains embedded in nature and does not know himself as a free agent. He is still in the arms of the Mother, subject to her moods and seasons. It is the great achievement of Western man that he broke free of Nature and began to master it. The initial phases of this are recorded in myth as the hero fights various monsters, many of these symbolic of the devouring mother that would drag him back down to the pre-conscious state of non-individuality. The rupture with nature brought freedom but also separation and loss. What humanity has achieved is extraordinary but it comes at a cost. When Odin, who can be said to represent Western man, memorably in his guise as Wotan as depicted in Wagner's Ring Cycle, sacrifices his eye in return for wisdom, this signifies the closing down of clairvoyant faculties as the intellectual mind starts to awaken and the free individual asserts himself in subjective consciousness. This is a necessary and vital stage in the evolution of the soul and it was achieved by Western Man more than any other grouping of human beings. However, although it is an evolutionary advance, it leads to eventual calamity, the Gotterdammerung suffered by Wotan and the gods, as individuality goes too far and mastery of nature leads to destruction. Man has conquered the world but lost himself in the process.

We are at that twilight of the gods stage now and all the remedies proposed are useless because they come from within the system. Remaining where we are is alienation and death, but restoring past religion is no good either because it was religion for the herd not the full individuals we have become.  A return to nature is not feasible for the self-conscious beings we now are, and if we try that it will be fake, performative. We cannot go back to the mother and the embryonic bliss of unselfconsciousness. We cannot go back, we cannot stay where we are, we must go through and on. The only solution is to reach for transcendence which means to acknowledge God, but this acknowledgement needs to be twofold. We must see God as the transcendent Creator but also as the ground of our own being and we must align our individual self with that ground. In this way, we eventually become gods ourselves. Not in the way promised by the serpent which offered the temptation of the perfectibility of the separate self, but in and through Christ who raises the self sacrificed in his name up to his own divine state.

The world as we know it is coming to an end. The soul can follow the world or it can follow God. It can identify itself with the world and take the path the world is taking or it can start to identify itself with God and so move out of this world into divine being. This is the choice of our time.