Stranger Years
Thoughts on the resurgence of faith, mysticism, occultism, and the re-enchantment.
A series of souls bow their heads as they pass before Christ, who blesses them with his right hand. Above the procession are two massive dials that show the day and the month and the positions of the sun and the moon and the signs of the zodiac dressed in gold. Each day at noon, chimes send these figures circulating across the face of a towering astronomical clock housed within St. Mary’s Chapel of the Dead in Lübeck, Germany, where mortal footfalls echo with the weight of centuries beneath stained glass windows on which rich and poor and noble and common and young and old and paupers and popes and squires and sacristans play and weep and rage over a burning city.
I stood at the foot of this contraption a few years ago. The original was built around 1561 and destroyed in 1942 when a British air raid on the night of Palm Sunday almost razed the nearly 700-year-old basilica. There is a set of enormous ancient bells shattered in a crater nearby. They last rang while racing toward the floor of the South Tower. The new horologium was finished in 1967 by Paul Behrens, an artisan who maintained it until the day he died. It gives you the impression that the creator wanted to capture the totality of this life and the cosmos in which it is contained, like a pilgrim who stood outside of it and brought back a glimpse to show us other ways of seeing.
Amy Tripp looks up and witnesses the turning wheel of fortune in the stars. In August of 2020, Tripp predicted that Kamala Harris would run for president in four years. She was right. On July 11, 2024, Tripp announced that Joe Biden would be forced to resign on July 21. Right again, down to the exact date. She also said later that July that Donald Trump would return to the White House and that we are in the midst of a “Pluto return,” an event that has coincided with the rise and fall of empires. The last time the United States experienced one was during the Revolutionary War. But I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure it’s nothing.
People are returning to church and turning toward the strange and spiritual these days partly due to what has been referred to as “the re-enchantment of the world,” a concept that, as far as I can tell, originated with a book of the same name by Morris Berman. He argues that the triumph of science reduced man to “an alienated observer” of nature and a cosmos in which he had once been “a direct participant in its drama.” The problem, according to Berman, is that the scientific worldview cannot explain the things that truly matter—that is to say, it cannot supply us with meaning, the single most essential part of the human experience and human psyche. Secularization attempted to take man out of the sacred but could not extinguish man’s drive toward the sacred. Re-enchantment feels a bit like a strange wind stirring up leaves that covered things that they could not kill but only suffocate for a time.
The currents Berman identified have been hastened (his book came out in 1981) by the recent and rapid collapse in institutional trust, in the disillusionment with our grand, rational sensemaking apparatus. Some people point to the pandemic, a period that threw open the floodgates of alternative news, media, and modes of interpreting the world around us. Indeed, things like tarot card readings and astrology experienced renewed popularity in the West and around the world during this time. Financial planning firm Empower found that one in four millennials is consulting a fortune teller for financial advice.
Gen Z is more into gazing at the stars.
In 2021, spending on astrology-related products and services was around $12 billion, according to Allied Market Research. That figure is expected to balloon to more than $22 billion by 2031, with demand largely driven by zoomers.
Some of this is to be expected, given the state of things. James Alcock, a professor of psychology at York University who studies parapsychological beliefs, has pointed out that uncertainty has often steered people toward mysticism and the occult, and these are very uncertain days.
“This anxiety cries out for some kind of answer about the future, and [the occult] provides an avenue where people can get some kind of answer about the future,” Alcock told CNN. “When you go to a tarot reader or a fortune teller or you look at your horoscope, you never get any precise predictions about the future.” Amy Tripp has made some pretty accurate calls.
Alcock is right about spiritualism, though. The German veteran and author Ernst Jünger, during his militant nationalist phase, conceived of mortal combat as unlocking an “aesthetic experience” that, as David Pan put it, “can only be appreciated from the god-like perspective of a kind of Nietzschean individual.” War as an expression, as a sacred inner experience beyond the ken of materialists. The warrior who dares, regardless of whether he lives or dies, is an artist engaged in the highest form of artistry, betting all he has against the wheel of fate. It calls to mind a line from Archilochus of Paros, an ancient Greek poet and soldier: “I have a high art: I hurt with cruelty those who would wound me.” When his killer, Calondas, went before the Pythia, she is said to have rebuked him for slaying “the servant of the Muses,” and demanded he leave the temple of Apollo at Delphi. It seemed an unusual fate, as Calondas had defeated Archilochus in a fair fight. Yet he was punished by the gods, who regarded the poet’s gift as sacred.
Jünger, also a poet, seemed to view violence as a parareligious phenomenon with the power to provide a contrast that reveals and re-enchants a secularizing world. War served as a baptism of horror that provided new sight and stirred awake the individual as though he were a sleeper. Jünger described his awakening in the crucible of World War I in his poetic memoir, War as Inner Experience:
Every day that I still breathe is a gift, a great, divine, undeserved gift that must be savored in long, intoxicating sips, like delicious wine.
I jump up and stick my head into the water. The towel had a delicate scent, reminiscent of beautiful, manicured female hands. Putting on the shirt is a solemn act, a crowning of my new incarnation. How electrifying, white linen caresses the body, so soothing and stimulating at the same time. Life is really full of precious things, of pleasures that can only now be appreciated. We owe this to the war, this need to lower every little inch of our being into life in order to grasp it in all its splendor. To do this, one must know decay, for only those who know night can appreciate the light.
Jünger’s nationalist phase waned with the publication of The Adventurous Heart in 1938, which saw him depart from the shores of political radicalism and in the direction of apoliteia—the cultivation of inner sovereignty in defense of the human spirit.
In their introduction to The Adventurous Heart, Eliah Bures and Elliot Neaman characterize Jünger’s innovative writing style as a forerunner of “magical realism” and liken it to “poetic synesthesia.” Jünger develops “small models of another way of seeing things” by subjecting the ordinary to the acid bath of “stereoscopic” perception, defined by him as “extracting two sensual qualities from one and the same object, through, and this is essential, the same sense organ.” Someone experiencing synesthesia might, for example, see colors when they hear music. The musician Billie Eilish reportedly has it.
“So for instance, every day of the week has a color, a number, a shape,” she explained on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. “Sometimes things have a smell that I can think of or a temperature or a texture.”
Some speculate that Vincent Van Gogh was a synesthete, and it occurred to me that perhaps that was why True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto made Rustin “Rust” Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) a synesthetic cop who suggests that he could have been a painter in another life. Of course, Pizzolatto was also a painter before he became a writer. But art has a mind and story of its own.
Cohle’s synesthesia unlocks “another way of seeing things” that enables him to solve tough cases with uncanny powers of perception. Years of hard drug use as an undercover officer appear to have enhanced his abilities. What he calls “chemical flashbacks” look more like peaks behind the veil of existence (Jünger, interestingly enough, became something of a psychonaut later in life, believing that certain intoxicants could facilitate access to liminal dimensions of experience that are otherwise sealed off to us). Cohle describes himself as a philosophical pessimist and harbors a deep resentment for “god botherers”—overly zealous Christians whose words and deeds do not align. And yet, he seems sensitive to worlds beyond our own. “Little priest,” his enemies call him. A fitting epithet for a man who can extract confessions from people by reading what is written on their souls.
The season in which Cohle appears draws heavily from The King in Yellow, a short story collection by Robert Chambers. Pizzolato provided an introduction for The Poisoned Pen edition of the book in which he mentions its influence on True Detective. He highlights the unsettling nature of Chambers’ work and the eponymous fictional play that links the stories together. It is a forbidden text that drives everyone who encounters it insane, and it is only ever alluded to obliquely throughout. You catch mere glimpses here and there. They are haunting enough that they might have actually provoked insanity in some readers, which has earned the book a unique reputation as perhaps something stranger than a mere piece of fiction. Something touched by the supernatural. Pizzolato writes:
Books of supposedly secret knowledge and magic have this sort of reputation, and in my experience it is earned.
Readers may be interested to know there are very real currents of the occult practiced by lodges in the Typhonian and Voudon traditions which view Hastur and the King in Yellow as actual entities, as they do Lovecraft’s Old Ones: nightmares that were channeled through artists and sensitives who were unaware their fictions represented the influence of actual para-terrestrial intelligences. Such occultists have spent the better part of the last century using ritual and ceremonial magic to ostensibly communicate with such entities and “hold open the gateways” for same. Transcriptions of communication from these entities constitute illuminated manuscripts to members of these lodges, many of whom believe that the Sign of Protection will shield them as the chthonic forces from a broken universe exert influence in our dimension. Speaking of mental illness.
Then again, the above has been taking place throughout the most brutally transformative, chaotic, and devastating century of our species. World Wars, mass killings, the advent of serial murderers and active shooters, to say nothing of technology as fantastical and horrifying as the atomic bomb or the internet…
I should get back to the topic at hand, which I think had something to do with stories as viral delivery devices that produce specific symptoms in an audience…
When he mentions “viral delivery devices that produce specific symptoms in an audience,” Pizzolato is referring to memes, and none would doubt their spell-like power to “induce apoplectic rage or shattering fear” with little effort.
A lot of people are familiar with one Nietzschean line in particular from the show that has been associated with Cohle: “Time is a flat circle.” But Cohle hears it first from the mouth of a cultist who tells him, “I’ve seen you in my dreams. We’ll do this again. Time is a flat circle.” Cohle repeats it years later after apparently internalizing it, though he initially dismissed the man who said it to him.
“Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again,” Cohle says, long after the cultist has died, yet touched by his influence.
Ideas are like viruses. They penetrate the blood-brain barrier and change the structure of our consciousness. But for ideas to really take root, there has to be something in us that is receptive to them. A red door in the dark awaiting a knock or a scratch. Perhaps this is also at the back of the re-enchantment, our innate sensitivity to things long suppressed by rationalism. We outsourced so many of our faculties to sensemaking institutions and mechanisms. As they failed in their charge or lost the credibility so essential to creating consensus, the rapping at the door by intuition, instinct, and myth grew louder, no longer drowned out by the cold hum of modern life as the machine broke down. The silence is much like the night, which, as Jünger pointed out, heightens our senses.
“One perceives a kind of fluid that radiates from things and concepts, the expression of a terrible meaning,” he wrote. “This was often quite clear to me in dreams, in noises and as a child when I was afraid. Later I laughed about it.”
Jünger went on to become “convinced of the material,” which offered a kind of scientific certainty—and comfort—in his understanding of the world. The war disabused him of that illusion. Different forces stirred and revealed themselves. He began to suspect “that everything that surrounds us is not at all clear and purposeful, but very mysterious, and this awareness already indicates the first step in a completely new direction.”
I’m just not sure it was “completely new” in the end. Time, after all, is a flat circle, and the stars follow a predictable pattern, “like carts on a track,” to quote the detective.
The kind of "faith" I've seen rising is not exactly of the sincere kind. Mostly it's a status marker among online sub-cultures to appear "trad" (Catholicism) or "ultratrad" (Orthodoxy). I've seen very little resurgence of actual penance, thanksgiving, charity, etc. So you know, as always in our fake world, it's just talk the talk without much walking the walk.
My understanding of the various ideologies swirling the Western internet today are derivations upon derivations of Christianity. Even your scientific atheists are “christians” since they assume right and wrong, without acknowledging the poetic basis for its origin, deciding not to personify a “man in the sky”, instead wrapping it in terms like “common sense.” I would say that Locke’s impact on the Americans was just another theology, only rights-based. The right-to-life crowd and pro-choice (right to privacy) crowds are no different than shiite and sunni muslims arguing over who’s the true heir of the Prophet. Which, sorry Jefferson, rights are not self-evident. At least Hobbes had the mind to root equality in our mutual ability to kill one another, instead of add his two cents to the reformation like Locke, creating forever reformations like eternally recurring revolutions. I think a great deal of this interest in the other poetries stems from a “Last-manism” from liberalism as a product of Christiandom - that it too will collapse upon the hollow weight of itself and its easily poked dogmas. Christiandom grew by absorbing, wearing the clothing of its pagan ancestors as a kind of psychological pantheism that was able to maintain a unity by Roman coffers. People now are realizing the futility of laws to effectuate desired ends in humans. I saw that as a JD. Laws really do not help you unless you have money. Even if you are affluent, how is any wrongful death suit money equivalent to a grandfather I never knew due to asbestos-induced mesothelioma. Westerners today are remembering that poetry, with its multifaceted methods to view the Divine, prove to be a much better way to influence behavior. People are healthier when they view themselves as spirits, even beholden some lower diety or demon, than to the nihilism of a 9 to 5, with consumerism to numb the pain. Christianity’s insistence not to read the “less savory” influences of other traditions in its own canon is coming to an end. One’s interest and embrace of life-affirmation returns when he sees polytheism in the Bible, nods to reincarnation by Jesus in regard to Elijah, numerology rampant, zodiacs, connection between Revelation’s seals and Kundalini. The test is power, where the less savory forms of poetry can still be fought off by might to make right, to make the remake the World in the image of something more beautiful, where pedastry is condemned to death for example. As Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil, every philsophy, including the Stoics, seek to evangelize the world, remaking in its own image. Thus, as the false veil of materialistic liberalism is lifted, we each must carve out our own good in the world, guided by a war between poetries. For what Socrates tried to do in saving Athens from men like him, there’s now a Socrates on every corner and every podcast. The cat is out of the bag on corrupters to social order - we’re all that now. What remains is this lie still trotted out, for thee but not for me, that assumes there’s this overarching principle of justice we all aim toward, more or less. The lie must be shaken that right makes might, for might truly makes right. Socrates knew that when he fooled Thrasymachus. The false dilemma that Christiandom left us is whether there is God, or no God. Truly, the real question is which God. If you believe YHWH is the true God, the correct understanding of what is Divine and Beautiful, and his word makes right, then you already endorse the true definition of justice. Otherwise, you come out one the other side of the Euthyphro problem where you should sympathize with the Babylonians of Genesis, united as a species. All this to say, whether it was Covid madness, Pluto entering Aquarius, or both and more, energies are shifting, seen and unseen.