Ignorant as the Dawn
In 1922 Rudolf Steiner wrote “a new stream of spirituality is now ready to pour into man's earthly existence.” I have written much on the need for humanity to rediscover its spiritual self in this decaying time. The only future that is left for humanity is to recover its lost understanding of the spiritual nature of the cosmos, and humanity within it, not because this will ensure our survival, though it may, but more importantly because it will return humanity to its true path: proper reverence for the divine. I have, however, until now refrained from attempting to articulate a practical path toward recovering that understanding.
From the outset, and for reasons that will presently become clear, I will stipulate that by using the word “spiritual,” I do not imply an opposition with the “material,” preferring instead, where dichotomies are desired or perhaps useful, to contrast the “sacred” with the “profane.” While the latter denies the presence of the divine in the world, and as we have seen in the last several decades, increasingly, in the absence of divinity, denies the value of anything that is not human, the former finds the material world to be suffused with spiritual energies and powers. The pre-modern spiritual world and contemporary traditional communities, and even the spiritual world of many of the monotheisms and abrahamic religions, insists and depends upon an understanding that the spiritual is alive within the material. Ritual, in this context, is not a representative act but rather a recreative act. As Mircea Eliade points out, by ritually recreating the acts of the gods, we sacralize the actions of our lives. Our present moment, in which so much of profane society lies in crisis, grants us an opportunity to begin the work of resacralizing the world.
We are currently seeing the limits inherent in the types of understanding gained through rationality and technics. While there may have been a moment when it could be reasonably argued that new developments in the intellectual products of humanity were oriented towards the improvement of human life, there can now be no doubt that these have facilitated greater levels of immiseration and despair than ever before imagined. It is time to recover previous ways of understanding the world and our place in it. As Rudolf Steiner writes:
“We must begin to acquire knowledge in a different way… The sciences of physics, chemistry and biology which are pursued nowadays provide mankind with a vast amount of popular information. What they actually do is explain how sense observation, interpreted by the intellect, sees the world. But the time has come when mankind must rediscover what lies behind the knowledge provided by external observation and intellectual interpretation.”
Or as W.B. Yeats puts it so powerfully, “I would be ignorant as the dawn.” We have not been well served by our intellectual prowess. Our current modern perception sees the universe as a mere depository of matter interacting in various mechanical ways, without agency or identity. No surprise then that we regard the world as nothing more than raw material to be used as we will, whether by capitalist greed or socialist need, it matters little.
The pre-modern vision of the cosmos as inhabited by powers and spirits is absolutely universal. In the traditional world view, natural phenomena and every aspect of the landscape is understood to be both alive and animated by will and desire. In other words, the cosmos is seen as populated by more-than-human individual personages. We may readily think of the ‘little people’ or ‘good neighbors’ of the British Isles as emblematic in this regard. As we have been conditioned to see the material world merely in terms of its physical expression, Steiner reminds us that:
“everything of a solid, earthen nature has as its foundation an elemental spirituality. Today's ‘enlightened’ people may laugh when reminded that older folks used to see gnomes in everything earthy. However, when knowledge is no longer obtained by means of combining abstract, logical thoughts, but by uniting ourselves through our thinking with the world rhythm, then we shall rediscover the elemental beings contained in everything of a solid earthy nature.”
Steiner’s emphasis on reconnecting with the rhythms of the cosmos here is significant. One perceives the cosmos as vibrant and alive when one lives in accordance with its processes. It should hardly be wondered that we moderns experience the world as sterile and coldly rational when the way we live is completely detached from the cycles of the natural world. As the moderns deified the rational intellect, the elemental spirits fled from our perception of things. The less we engage with nature, the less occasion we have to engage with the spiritual. As our activity became oriented less and less toward the material and the bodily and more toward the realm of the theoretical, the ideational, and the abstract, the elemental spirits abandoned us. For such things deny them and are displeasing to them.
To digress slightly, one may be surprised that I characterize the modern and even the current techno industrial world as hostile toward the material. In fact, as I have argued above, the modern world does not set up the material in opposition to the spiritual, more potently and wickedly, it denies the divinity of both and asserts value only in terms of human profit or need. So, of course, in our world, billions suffer crushing physical toil. So too do they seek distraction from their misery in fleeting physical pleasures. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that just as our world has been utterly robbed of its spirituality, it has materially degraded in the same degree.
Now the profane world is waning in power as its internal contradictions rip it apart. We are perhaps beginning to see the consequences of what we have sown and for those who are ready, we may turn away from the realm of the rational intellect and return to a divine perception of the world. To do so means to recover the experience of a universe replete and fertile, populated by innumerable powers and identities and personages. What does this mean practically? Simply put, I believe we all can sense, deep down, when our actions please the spirits and when they do not. What is good for the soul and body is what pleases them and their pleasure brings us joy and contentment. We all know how it feels to spend our days in abstract thinking and joyless labor. In the words of Yeats “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.” If we might only separate ourselves from the cacophony of human society, we would find this silence waiting and our elemental companions with it.
By digging in the dirt, doing the sacred work of planting and harvesting, we honor the gods and please the spirits.
By cutting and splitting wood for our fires, honoring the gift of warmth, we honor the gods and please the spirits.
By making the body strong, feeling the burning fire of life coursing through muscle and sinew, we honor the gods and please the spirits.
By engaging in lovemaking, experiencing joy and passion in the manifestation of the most divine forces of love and creation, we honor the gods and please the spirits.
By caring for the home and hearth, making it a place for spirits to dwell, we honor the gods and please the spirits.
By singing and making art, filling the world with beauty and reverence for the cosmos, we honor the gods and please the spirits.
By baking the bread to feed and nurture our kin, we honor the gods and please the spirits.
By raising animals, welcoming them into life and then sacrificing them in death, we honor the gods and please the spirits.
By living life according to the divine strength of our hands and the divine wisdom of the heart, we honor the gods and please the spirits.
I do not speak metaphorically of these things.
Human society changes, it gets better, it gets worse. Let it pass you by. Let us find our strength and joy not in the empty and soulless pleasures of society, nor lose ourselves in despair when that society falls apart. Only by living a life devoted to the reverence of the sacred will we find fulfillment. We begin to see now that our entire conception of humanity and the cosmos engendered by the modern worldview is transient. We must return our orientation to what is beyond the temporal, to what is eternal.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.
-- W.B. Yeats
RAMON ELANI
Ramon Elani is an acausal, anti-modern, heathen poet and author. He holds a PhD in literature and philosophy. He lives with his family among mountains and rivers in Western New England. He follows the way of wyrd.