Our Deeper Bodies, the Pagan Christ, and the Defeat of the Machine

A child wakes on an early autumn morning in a world long-vanished: the world of the henge-builders in southern England. She listens to the song of migrating birds, tastes the first chill in the air; she sees the sun rising through a bank of mist over the forest, whose mantle is just turning crimson, that covers the land beyond her village of thatched, wattle-and-daub huts. She drinks water from a waterskin, brushes hair back from her forehead; she watches, for a moment, her grandmother as she sings a prayer and kindles the hearthfire, hears the lowing of cattle who she knows will soon be culled for winter and the joyful squeals of children as they play, absently cradles a corn dolly.

I am imagining it — but there really was such a girl. She is gone; her life — her growth, her sicknesses, her joys, her loves, her children, her labor, her wonder, her death, but more, infinitely more, the felt, experienced reality of all these and of her entire life-world bound into an unfathomable whole called her “soul” — is forgotten, lost in an absolute abyss of time. My spiritual and imaginative labor to grasp it consciously, when I consider it, has spanned my whole life, from my childhood awakening of feeling for and curiosity about ancient things (enflamed first of all by the traditional music of Brittany, Scotland, and Ireland), to my own travels in the lands of my ancestors, to all the accumulated knowledge and experience that has provided the canvas on which my imagination can invoke her. A life’s labor — true, such a joyful and deeply desired labor that it hardly seems appropriate to call it “labor.”

As I awaken this vision in my heart and mind, it feels so tenuous, like the barest glimpse caught of a ghost — fleeting but heavy with feeling — out of the corner of my eye. Even reading some of the great imaginative masterworks of historical fiction that can evoke lost worlds with such poignancy and power can still feel pale compared to my own present embodied reality.

And yet I have a deeper connection to this girl. She is a grandmother. Between her and me, there is a literal, physical continuity. But there is more than a merely physical continuity, and a soul-link deeper than my own imaginative power.

What Is Real?

To divert for a moment into a piece of pragmatic metaphysics, I believe that the final realities of the world are qualities, and that the original and final mode of knowledge is feeling, not thought (though in the roots, it is probably impossible to disentangle thought and feeling — or perhaps, “thinking” in its integrity is merely a specific kind of feeling). When moderns judge qualia in the philosophical sense to be “epiphenomena” of an underlying “reality,” this is precisely an inversion. The logical, cognitive, rational, and in the case of modern science, mathematical “realities” are derivative; they are abstractions from reality. Reality is what is experienced, what appears, what is felt, what manifests itself to us.

Even for a scientist bent over his instruments, the reality is not the abstraction specified by the mathematical structures he records; the reality is his sensuous apprehension of the instruments. More deeply, the reality is his entire reception of a flux of human felt experience that preceded his birth and into which he has entered as a participant, feeling the feelings of those who have gone before him in this stream (that of “natural science”) — that is, this reality is a complex of perceived qualities that belong to a human (and more-than-human) community. And that complex includes so much beyond the experience of desire and endeavor and knowledge that we call “natural science” — it includes the entire affective experience of that community as it has coalesced and flowed into him: the loves, fears, frustrations, aspirations, dreams, desires, and historical and cultural triumphs and traumas of all those who have also lived in this stream. He has received so much, for good and ill, so much of which he is reflectively utterly unaware, and indeed, of which it is impossible for him ever to become fully aware, in spite of the nobility of any effort to bring this experience into reflective and critical consciousness.

He is an embodied member of a continuum of communal human experience, receiving the integrated complex of felt qualities from that entire continuum, and re-expressing it again in his own life and activity, with his own particular genius — receiving, feeling, metabolizing, questioning, creating, transforming, and offering (to some degree intentionally, but mostly without conscious intention) the fruit of this lifelong process of becoming back to the communities of which he is a member.

This is the real meaning of “tradition.” A “tradition,” etymologically, is what is “handed on.” We usually frame “tradition” in terms of things — objects and events of language, patterns of craft or skill, behavioral patterns such as religious rituals or mating customs. But the real meaning of “tradition” is altogether deeper: it is, in philosophical terms, “non-thematic.” Our bodies are literally “tradition.” Our felt experience, our “soul” as a holistic, creative reception of its world, is also “tradition,” because every human being, whether explicitly or implicitly, whether at the level of speech or at the level of presence (and who knows how deep and subtle the world of “presence” really is), contributes the totality of their life of felt experience to the streams in which they live and move — and we receive them through those streams, as well as passing them on to all with whom we are, in turn, in relationship. I emphasize again: all this is beneath and prior to conscious awareness, though it can rise to that awareness to varying degrees.

Tradition Cannot Die

This unfathomably rich gestalt of feeling we thus receive, creatively integrate, and pass on to the human, non-human, and more-than-human world that surrounds us finds expression in all the human arts: in music, in story, in folkways, in visual and plastic arts, in practical crafts luminously shot through with aesthetic sense and devotion, in the ritual praxis that condenses all these into an incandescence: a magnifying glass focusing the sun on a single point and kindling it to flame. Thus expressed, transmitted, ever preserved, ever transformed, it is living tradition. “Tradition” as a merely specific and discrete transmission of reflective thought-structures may die or become unrecognizable, but as this received gestalt, it never dies — or perhaps, more cautiously, it is vastly longer-lived.

It has a great weight, this tradition: not a weight in the sense of something difficult to carry or to bear — in that sense it can also be supremely light and easy. Its weight is its depth — a richness of accumulation so far beyond our individual incarnate life as to stagger and confound our quotidian senses and powers of reasoning. Every movement of feeling we have is lived through and in it. When you feel a pulse of anger, or desire, or wonder, your feeling is travelling an ancient road, one blazed long before human beings ever appeared on earth. You are quite literally feeling the world as it was felt by ancestral beings who lived billions of years ago — indeed, to give some credence to the hylozoists who see “experience” as aboriginal to the universe, you are feeling the world in a way that rhymes with the feelings of the simplest beings which existed in some kind of primordial chaos. Within your living feeling, all the rage and longing and joy of your ancestors (both physical and spiritual) is present — more, the rages and longings and joys of your ancestors: the very specifity of their lives living still in you.

What burden, and what grace! You can thank them, you can curse them; what you cannot do, what you literally cannot do, is ignore them. But you can find within yourself, at a depth just as impenetrably shrouded in mystery, a response of creative integration and aspiration. Aspiration towards what? I would simply say, aspiration towards God: aspiration to faithful movement, for yourself and for all to whom your act will come (in the end, for the entire cosmos), towards greater appreciative awareness of the richness of felt value in the world, towards an inclusion of the whole of this “tradition” and all its bearers, towards an inner expansion into wholeness. An aspiration to feel more. An aspiration to open your heart.

Hostility and Integration

I rarely discuss politics, but some deep and unpalatable political and metapolitical themes are constant presences in my experience and thought. Many of these have to do with identity. As you might guess from all the preceding reflections, as intellectually elaborate as they may be in my autodidactic mode, I love my folk, and I love my “tradition” in the sense in which I expressed it above. I am a mongrel Amerikaner son of Europe. My father’s folk are from Austria, my mother’s folk from the British Isles. My deep ancestry is in central Europe and southern Scandinavia. My Y-DNA indicates a direct male line that predates the arrival of the Kurgan (Aryan) tribes to Europe. I carry around my neck, from time to time, when so moved, a cave-bear bone from a site in Austria where, 30,000 years ago, humans and cave bears both lived. Those caves, the caves of Ice Age Europe, the lost cathedrals of my people’s Dreamtime, were the Cuiviénen of my folk, where we awoke to gaze at the stars above us and within us and within the Earth (yes, in our ancient tradition, there are stars within the Earth).

This is the stream within which I was born and nurtured — religious, mythical, artistic, and yes, biological. My experience of it is an experience of quality, of the true fundamental “stuff” of which the universe is made. My response to it is one voice in a choir that spans the ages, a song from heart, bone, and blood. It is a response to value, to what I feel, appreciatively perceive, as precious, worthy of devotion, worthy of sacrifice, not because sacrifice is some kind of good in itself, but because in the presence of that holy reality, I go out of myself towards something elementally beautiful. Here, the truncated notion of “tradition” proposed by exoteric religions appears particularly pale and bloodless. No one sane will live or die for a syllogism. But for the specific, intangible yet supremely concrete, incarnate, pulsing life that is the soil in which grow our deepest loves? Yes, we will live and die for that — and it is good that we will. No argument is possible or needed here. Either you have this depth experience or you don’t. To those who don’t, those who do can only gesture — tell them a story, sing them a song, sit silently with them and watch the migrating birds. And above all, tell the stories, sing the songs, sit silently with our children.

Yet, we live in a world where the bearers of these fathomless gestalts of quality, value, meaning, and beauty, face one another with knives, guns, and fire. I do not hesitate to say that I experience the presence in the world of a malign power that wants the soul-reality of my folk to die. It wants us to be obliterated. It wants the value that we feel, that we “perceive” through every gross and subtle faculty, to be destroyed. It wants the distinctiveness and incommensurability of that value to disappear. It promotes with tireless, gnawing ruthlessness a “Colours of Benetton” world in which “differences” are celebrated within the ruling mandate of a supremely superficial devotion to ersatz “values” promoted by commercial interests. Literally, it wants my folk, as a folk, to disappear, and all our greatest treasures with us.

(If there is a Satan, this is Satan. “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” Money is Mammon, a universal solvent to render commensurate the incommensurable. The marketplace of all things, in which all values are reducible to monetary “value,” laid the first foundation of the phenomenon of AI.)

Yet, as a human being, I have a still deeper faculty than that of my feeling of value: in the depths of my soul, I can feel and attend to a momentary flash of imaginative charity which tells me that when another human being faces me across the barricade of hostility and destruction, he also is the bearer of a “tradition” — he also is the bearer of an unfathomable depth of human experience, of a gestalt of human apprehension of something supremely specific, precious, and beautiful that has been handed on to him, physically, culturally, spiritually, by all his ancestors.

Now: the crowning creative act, it seems to me, is not to quench that “momentary flash of imaginative charity,” but to accept it and to act from it, to seek a new creative synthesis of my experience as it widens through this charity.

A concrete example, the example in fact which prompted all of these reflections. I found myself sitting in the breakast bar of a Holiday Inn in southern California — a supremely multicultural “economic zone” in the “propositional nation” (a contradiction in terms) of the United States of America. A Mexican father, wearing Red Wings (therefore a construction worker who likely feeds his family by building other people’s homes), was guiding his little son to the pancakes and Lucky Charms. In a moment I saw his regal ancestors, tribal leaders in ancient Mexico, felt the vastness and beauty and terror of an ancient life-world wholly unknown to me, and felt his concrete rootedness in that world — which lives in him, as I noted above, whether he knows it or not. To whatever degree he and his tradition also, like me and mine, are in the process of mastication and digestion by the “Colours of Benetton” world of autonomous, deracinated capital (i.e. Mammon),¹ they are also, inescapably, like us, the bearer of a vast gestalt: yes, a gestalt of feeling, value, and beauty, alien as it is to me. The same is true for everyone I might see as an “other.”

I can’t now feel it: but then, most likely, he can’t either. I have spent a lifetime, in one way or another, outfitting and training my soul to be able to dive into the ocean of my own tradition and bring up pearls to conscious awareness. What would I have to learn, how would I have to live, to be able to do the same for his tradition, in any meaningful way? I can’t even speak Spanish, let alone Nahuatl. But as limited as my achievements might be in the effort, they would not be nothing. At the very least I could glimpse Xochitlalpan from afar and venerate the Virgin of Guadalupe with deeper sensitivity and reverence.

Answering the Machine

To this end, the malign force I am describing, which hereinafter I will designate with the shorthand of “the Machine,” but which others in other times have called by other names,² has two basic stratagems that it deploys tactically, according to the prevailing circumstances. These stratagems could be thought of as fundamental cultural temptations.

The first is to create and encourage situations which foment hostility, which bring the tribes into acute or chronic states of warfare with one another. Conquest, subjugation, civil war, colonization, and slavery are the manifestations when we respond to this temptation. Mass migration is the current overwhelming form.

The second is the obverse of the first: it is the encouragement of the direction of our vital energy towards vacuous cultural superficialities, all deracinated — the lowest common denominator universe of mass media, social media, fake corporate art, cultural (and racial) homogeneity, mass feeling through artificial spectacles, electronically distributed norms of thought, judgment, feeling, pleasure, and rage (though of course, never rage directed against itself), inculcated psychoses like the trans phenomenon. It is essentially the generation of a false tradition whose purpose and function is not the transmission of genuine values, but the transmission of empty and valueless counter-values to the genuine, living values it supplants.

AI “creations” are the apotheosis of this soulless, false “tradition” — “creations” that do not originate in the creative response of a soul to felt values. The issue is not so much that AI instances do not think, though of course they do not. The ultimate issue is that they do not feel.

What then is the response of integrity — integrity of soul in the sense indicated above, that is, the unfathomable whole within which our entire creative reception of tradition is synthesized — to the assault of the Machine on everything good, true, and beautiful?

Living Against the Machine, For and In the Heart

It seems to me that our response to this radical threat must be twofold, in parallel to the two dimensions of the Machine’s assault: one directed against the “traditions” themselves, as indescribably rich gestalts of felt meaning, faithfully received and creatively integrated and transmitted; the other directed against the willingness of the bearers of these traditions to give themselves to creative communion with the Other in order to broaden and deepen their own capacity for appreciative awareness of value.

At the risk of being misunderstood, but speaking (of course) out of my own tradition, I will identify these two dimensions of an integral heart-response to the threat of the Machine as the Pagan and the Christic.

The Pagan response is the response which turns in tender awe and ardor towards tradition: to receive it, to receive it more deeply, to receive it faithfully, to hold it in the heart, to plant it and water it and cultivate it, to turn to it in preference to anything offered from outside, perhaps not without a kind of valorous jealousy and pride rooted like hickory in its incomparable beauty that speaks to the heart: “deep calleth unto deep.” To bleed for it if necessary: to sweat for it: to go hungry and thirsty for it: to feel it as our mother and our child, our beloved homeland, for which we long when the ocean stands between us and our heart’s desire.

To which the Christic response adds, contradicting nothing, that there is a wellspring at the roots, from which everything in the Cosmos draws its birth and its becoming:

Ask veit ek standa, heitir Yggdrasill,
hár baðmr, ausinn hvíta auri;
þaðan koma dǫggvar, þærs í dala falla;
stendr æ yfir, grœnn, Urðar brunni.
(Vǫluspá 19)

“An ash I know standing, ‘tis called Yggdrasil,
a high tree sprinkled with shining drops;
come dews therefrom which fall in the dales;
it stands ever green o’er the Well of Wyrd.”

What I am calling “the Christic response” is the vision of the source of my tradition, and all traditions, and the becoming of my tradition, and all traditions, and the mutual openness of all traditions, the openness of the living heart that across the gulf of my love for “my own” depths — so great a love, an agony of love! — will see and feel and open to the Other, admit him to fellowship, sit with him at the fire and share his treasures as he shares ours with us, and thus create what is new and ancient, creative and faithful. The Ursprung of all things.

Perhaps it seems strange to quote the greatest monument of European Heathen prophecy to describe the “Christic” dimension, but it makes perfect sense to me. Wyrd is the web of becoming that connects all things. The sensitivity to Wyrd, the attentiveness to it, which opens us to what is strange and new, to creative transformation, to the reception of new universes of feeling we have not hitherto suspected, is the foundation of all our feeling — the feeling of the impossible richness of those loves rooted in our own soil, and the movement of the heart to expand, in risk, in uncertainty, in unknowing, towards the Strange and the Stranger.

When Jesus speaks in the Gospels, I recognize in his voice the voice of the Christ. If the Well of Wyrd had words, it would speak his words. I recognize the voice which says: “Love, and do not be afraid. Put out into the deep waters, the waters of creative and open reception.” And I see a human model of faithfulness to this venture, even as the rulers of this world put it to a bloody end. I will confess that this is not a certainty for me, but rather a hope — I see the victory of the Risen Christ over Hell and Death. I hear the intransigent demands of this Christ: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

I do not believe this claim merely as some arbitrarily asserted dogma. I perceive that it is an ineluctable and necessary fact. Unless we devote ourselves to the Christ, to the Christ within ourselves, to the Christic impulse in Creation, with the sincerity and totality Jesus demands, we are ranging ourselves against the very source of every good we think we might love more. And unless we devote ourselves to our tradition, in the sense in which I have defined it here — the gestalt of our people’s felt experience and embodied knowledge of the world: specific, concrete, incarnate, embodied in song, story, mores, crafts, arts, wisdom, lifeways, folkways, and the “inarticulate speech of the heart” — we are ranging ourselves against the very goods that the Christ has structured the world to evoke. “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.”

This, in brief, is why I believe that to respond with integrity to the moment, to this apocalypse (unveiling) of the Machine, requires of me, if I were to say it in two words, Christian Druidry, or perhaps (ideally) Christic Druidry. For “Druidry” substitute whatever term you prefer for the magical inheritance of body, soul, and culture that you feel — however tenuously you feel it! Name it if and when you can. But whether you can name it or not, feel it. Feel it more.

Where the Machine offers you ersatz substitutes, where the Machine pushes you relentlessly into the proximate dissolution of a life focused on Mammon and into the more immediate and direct dissolution of a life lost in AI, turn back to the embodied tradition that lives in your heart and your bones. Read the stories. Tell them to your children. Sing the songs. Learn the crafts. Practice the ways. Be like the noble men and women of old. Venerate the ancestors. Leave the “broken cisterns” hewed by the Adversary and his minions and return to the “fountain of living waters.”

And where the Machine finally turns your attention to the desolation of your soul that it itself has wrought, and whispers to you to hate the Other because he is the cause of your desolation, open your hands and your heart and your mind to offer and receive, knowing that this act — stepping out on the wild waters to walk where it is impossible to walk — is to evoke the deepest magic of all, the magic of the Enchanter who sang the world out of chaos.

These are the mythic times, and we are the heroes of old. Let us live accordingly.

This post was not written using AI. AI would have used shorter sentences and fewer big words.

1. Capital (Mammon) is the egregore of the Machine: see below.

2. For example, the ancient gnostics called its architects “Archons,” and the modern chthonic gnostic, Ludwig Klages, called it Geist in distinction from Seele.