The War Against Reality

St. Brigid's Well

Okay, so the Gnostics were right: we live in a world created by evil beings and nothing we see is reality. Of course, that depends on what it is we see.

The news the past few weeks has been dizzying—and depressing. While most everyone’s attention is on the never-ending story of C0VID, the Archons of BigTech and BigScience continue to propose developments that glitter with all the warmth of a computer screen and promise a digital utopia. It sounds too bad to be true, but they really think this is a good thing. Skipping the odiousness that is “The Metaverse,” here are few examples:

1) Elon Musk is looking to hire a clinical trial director for Neuralink, the company he formed with the intention of inserting digital chips in every human brain. What fun! Now you, too, can be a part of the Internet of Bodies™ as Musk’s SpaceX satellites sell your soul to the gods of e-commerce. Musk has a habit of playing both sides of the “Dangers of AI” argument—but don’t be a fool. Investments speak louder than words.

2) Speaking of souls, you don’t have one. At least according to Yuval Harari (another guy speaking out both sides of his mouth). For Harari, the jig is up, the game is over. Human biology is now poised to enter into a polyamorous marriage with BigData and BigTech and the understanding of the human as a being of body-soul-spirit and freewill is over. At least that’s how he sees it. This is transhumanism writ large. Have a listen:

3) The BigTech guys are also pushing the idea of replacing women with synthetic wombs. Yes, you’re right, just like in Brave New World, in which the terms “parent,” “father” and, especially, “mother” are considered “smut”:

“‘In brief,’ the Director summed up, ‘the parents were the father and mother.’ The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys’ eye-avoiding silence. ‘Mother,’ he repeated loudly, rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, ‘These,’ he said gravely, ‘ are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then historical facts are unpleasant.’” [1]

Think about this when your children or grandchildren have to apply for a breeder’s license in order to procreate. “Mother” will at first become (as I think it has already started to) a glittering generality—a word that doesn’t really attach to any real meaning—then it will become something avoided in polite company.

4) And in concert with these developments, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry is pushing that “the private notion of children” is now become passé. In the language of BNW, “everyone belongs to everyone.”

5) I could go on.

The world these various figures extol is not a world worth inhabiting. Because it is impossible to inhabit such a world. Because it’s not a world. The Gnostics were right.

As I have been warning in my writing and teaching for most of the past thirty years, the transhumanist project is at last upon us. I have to admit that this war against reality has been waged in a very clever and strategic way. I was puzzled, for instance, when corporations and governments became solid proponents of gay marriage and trans-rights. Corporations, from my long years of observation, are not interested in the commonweal: they’re interested in making money. Governments are interested in control, but are so inured to corporate will that they are really foot soldiers more than generals. I don’t think either one really cares about gay or trans people. What they care about is the suite of technologies to be devised and implemented, the demographics to be exploited, more than they care about the common good. But these were the vanguard, the reconnaissance squad leading to the real tech telos: the technological colonization of the human person. Coming to a body near you as your biology is invited to build itself back better. iHuman.

This incredible display of human scientific and technological hubris is inherently destructive. I think we all intuitively know this—or at least did as children before it was beat out of us by a deadening education. Look around: almost all of the problems we face—environmental degradation not least among them—are the result of science and technology: the end result of the Cartesian myth that we are objective observers of Creation and not implicit to it in our observing. We have, unconsciously for the most part, fallen into an abusive and idolotrous relationship with science and technology. This is obvious by how absolutely it isolates us and alienates us from the Creation. As Margaret Barker writes in her outstanding book Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment, “Worshipping the work of human hands—think of this now in the sense of current human achievements and aspirations such as political systems, economic systems, management methods—is the certain way to destroy the bonds of creation.” [2]

As we can see, this war against reality is in essence a war against women, against the feminine. The increasing incidences of biological males competing as women—and triumphing—in women’s sports attests to this, as does the specter of the synthetic womb. Women, that is, are becoming superfluous. And the war against women is, at its core, a war against Sophia. And a war against Sophia is a war against God.

It is not hard to see, then, how this war against reality, this war against women, against Sophia and against God, is a war against nature, or, better yet, against the Creation. This is what the Gnostics got wrong. Creation, as Genesis tells us, is good, however fallen. Just like us.

Though not a biblical literalist, I do believe that Creation fell with the Fall of Man. So, to my way of thinking, we humans have a responsibility in the work of restoration, Tikkun Olam, the Hebrew term meaning “the repair of all things” or “the repair of the world.” The world’s brokenness, evidenced by the rise of the transhumanist technocracy, is nearing its nadir. Or at least I hope it is.

The entire project of Sophiology—in my conception anyway—is to offer a way out of this technocratic nightmare. It is a very simple way. And it isn’t a matter of creating intellectual, philosophical or theological paradigms or structures. It’s a matter of living. The technocracy promises many things. Life isn’t one of them.

1. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; Harper Perennial, 1998), 24.

2. Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (T&T Clark, 2010), 54.

Rudolf Steiner and Sophiology

Last week I had the extreme pleasure of giving a lecture to the Ann Arbor Branch of the Anthroposophical Society in America. The original idea was to do it in person, but with COVID concerns and an ongoing construction project at the Society’s building, it was decided to go online in a Zoom format. Now, clearly, we all would have preferred in-person—the presence of soul available in person cannot be duplicated in an online environment, no matter how congenial; but we did what we had to do. Of course, no doubt in revenge for my many warnings about AI and the encroaching reach of Ahriman, the internet connection here at my rural farm dropped out, so I continued on my phone! Then the internet returned and I reconnected, only, having forgotten to disconnect the Zoom app on my phone, we were all entertained by a few seconds of creepy feedback. Good times! None of these technical challenges compromised our interaction, however, (there were probably about fifty participants) and our Q & A session went on for over an hour. Following my talk, participants inquired whether I could share my notes. Notes?! I never use notes, even when lecturing in colleges. All I need is two cups of coffee and I can talk about anything. So, kidding aside, what follows is a kind of outline of my talk.

Background

Sophiology is, as the title of one of my books asserts, a “submerged reality” in Western history, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Nevertheless, Sophia has not always been submerged in the long trajectory from antiquity to postmodernity. Indeed, she makes a number of appearances in the Hebrew Bible, perhaps nowhere more beautifully than in Proverbs 8:

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning.

I was set up from eternity, and of old, before the earth was made.

The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived, neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out.

The mountains, with their huge bulk, had not as yet been established: before the hills, I was brought forth:

He had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world.

When he prepared the heavens, I was present: when with a certain law, and compass, he enclosed the depths:

When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters:

When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits: when he balanced the foundations of the earth;

I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times;

Playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men. (22-31)

Biblical scholar and theological maverick Margaret Barker in a number of books has been arguing that Sophia (Wisdom, Hokmah in Hebrew) was a central feature of First Temple Judaism and whose veneration was widespread prior to the reforms (some might say persecutions) of King Josiah. Nevertheless, communities of the Jewish diaspora living in Alexandria kept her memory (and veneration) alive, evidence of which can be found in the biblical books of Wisdom and Sirach among other places.

Sophia also appears in the elaborate mythologies of Gnosticism, which seem at least in part to draw on the Jewish traditions and may in some ways allude to Josiah’s exile of Sophia in Judaism by way of the exile of Sophia in the Gnostic mythos.

The Church Fathers, particularly Irenaeus and Hippolytus, discuss Gnostic theologies at length (condemning it, of course) and for centuries their criticisms were just about all anyone knew of Gnostic beliefs. The primary problem with Gnosticism—then and now—is its condemnation of the created world as a structure of evil made by an evil god as a kind of prison. Sophiology does not support this message. Nevertheless, the notion of Sophia in exile—and nowhere as significantly as in the human heart—is a tremendously useful imagination. In one Gnostic myth, Jesus rescues Sophia from exile and brings her to Reality, the Reality of the Kingdom of God. This is a reality we all wish to attain.

From there, my talk moved ahead fourteen centuries to Jacob Boehme. Curiously, Anthroposophist Paul Marshall Allen in his book Vladimir Solovyov: Russian Mystic, calls Solovyov “the Father of Sophiology in the East” (which is certainly true) and calls Rudolf Steiner “the Father of Sophiology in the West” (which is not). Even though Steiner is an enormously important figure in Sophiology, the title of “Father” can go to no one but Boehme. Modern Sophiology begins with Boehme, and from him it flows to Russia to England and to everywhere else. He’s the fountainhead.

Importantly, Boehme identifies the Virgin Mary as the Incarnation of Sophia. As Sophia makes the Glory of God palpable to sensory perception in Nature, in art, in liturgy, so the Virgin Mary quite literally makes God present to sensory perception as the Mother of Christ. It doesn’t get any more sophiological than that, and Boehme—at great risk to himself—was bold enough to say so, the consequences be damned.

Then my talk touched on Boehme’s influence in early Rosicrucianism (17th century) and on thinkers like Robert Fludd, Thomas and Henry Vaughan, and on German Pietism. He was also influential in English religious movements, like that of The Philadelphian Society (John Pordage, Lane Lead, and Thomas Bromley, among others), on the nonjuror William Law, and on poet and visionary William Blake. Boehme likewise had a deep impact on German Romanticism and Idealism, particularly with Novalis, Goethe, Franz von Baader, and Hegel. From Romanticism, Boehme reached Russia in the late nineteenth century, influencing Solovyov who then inspired the Russian theologians Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky, not to mention Boehme’s primary Russian devotee, the radical philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. Of course I’ve written about all of these things, not only in this blog, but also in my books, especially The Submerged Reality.

Enter Rudolf Steiner

Steiner arose at the ideal moment to take in all of this. A deep student of Goethe, he absorbed an integral Sophiology from his immersion in Goethe’s phenomenology (Steiner as a young scholar edited Goethe’s scientific writings for the Weimar edition of Goethe’s collected works). He likewise drank in Rosicrucian ideas from the various esoteric currents then percolating in Europe (Goethe was also interested in Rosicrucianism, which, at least in its earliest forms, was interested in preserving a spiritually scientific understanding of Creation in resistance the scientific materialism then appearing in the wake of Descartes and Francis Bacon. Steiner, who called his method “Spiritual Science,” was, as they say “all about this”). And, as a philosopher, Steiner was trained in German Idealism, which still shimmered with spiritual power and the influence of Boehme. In addition, when Steiner began lecturing to audiences involved in The Theosophical Society in the first years of the twentieth century, he found an audience open to his insights. But The Theosophical Society was too narrow an environment for such a man as Rudolf Steiner. In 1912, Steiner broke with the Theosophists after they tried to sell the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as the reincarnation of Christ (Krishnamurti would later follow suit) and called his new initiative Anthroposophy.

Steiner’s initiative grew enormously. He gave lectures, mostly on esoteric subjects in a Christian theosophical idiom. But then World War I happened. Had Steiner died before the Great War, he would probably only be remembered as an Austrian philosopher and Goethe scholar who then went esoteric. But with the cataclysm of war, Steiner rose to the occasion.

The occasion he rose to was by way of his introduction of some incredibly significant cultural contributions. They can only be called gifts. Each of them is inherently sophiological in the ways by which Steiner discloses the Glory of the Lord in practical application. Among these gifts are Waldorf education Biodynamic agriculture and beekeeping, Anthroposophically-extended medicine, and what he called the Three-Fold Social Order. By their fruits you will know them, and the fruits of Steiner’s contributions are increasingly hard to ignore.

In addition to this implicit Sophiology in Steiner’s career, he did, upon occasion, make explicit his ideas concerning Sophia. Following are a number of his sophiological statements over time. Notice how his definitions are never ossified into dead concepts, but that he imbues the conceptual realm with fluidity. (All the quotes can be found in Christoher Bamford’s exceptional collection of Steiner’s writings on Sophia, Isis-Mary-Sophia: Her Mission and Ours.

“Since the consciousness soul is the principle in which the Spirit the Spirit Self has evolved, we call it the ‘mother of Christ’ or, in the esoteric schools, the ‘Virgin Sophia.’ Through the fecundation of the Virgin Sophia, the Christ could be born in Jesus of Nazareth.” ~ 5 November 1906

“The spiritualized mother of Jesus is the Gospel [of John] itself. She is wisdom, leading humanity to the highest insights. The disciple gave us Mother Sophia, meaning he wrote a Gospel for us that allows anyone who looks into it to learn to know Christ, who is the source and goal of this great movement (spiritual science).” 25 November 1907

“The spiritualized mother of Jesus is the Gospel [of John] itself. She is wisdom, leading humanity to the highest insights. The disciple gave us Mother Sophia, meaning he wrote a Gospel for us that allows anyone who looks into it to learn to know Christ, who is the source and goal of this great movement (spiritual science).” ~ 25 November 1907

“Sophia becomes the being who directly enlightens human beings. After Sophia has entered human beings, she must take their being with her and present it to them outwardly, objectively. Thus, Sophia will be drawn into the human soul and arrive at the point of being so inwardly connected with it that a love poem as beautiful as the one Dante wrote may be written about her.

“Sophia will become objective again, but she will take with her what humanity is, and objectively present herself in this form. Thus she will present herself not only as Sophia, but as Anthroposophia—as the very being of the human being, henceforth bears that being within her. And in this form she will confront enlightened human beings as the objective being Sophia who once stood before the Greeks.” ~ 3 February 1913

“At the time of the Mystery of Golgatha, the being that enables humans to behold the world cognitively worked in a twofold way as the Divine Sophia, the wisdom that sees through the world. Divine Sophia, Heavenly Wisdom, was present in the double revelation: to the poor shepherds in the fields and to the wise men from the East.” ~ 24 December 1920

“We must realize that through the forces of the Christ we must find an inner astronomy that will show us again the cosmos moving and working by the power of the spirit. When we have this insight into the cosmos that is awakened through the newfound Isis power of the Christ—which is now the power of the Divine Sophia—then Christ, united with the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha, will become active within us, because then we shall know him. It is not the Christ that we lack, but the knowledge and wisdom of Isis, the Sophia of the Christ.” ~ 24 December 1920

“Christ will appear in spiritual form during the twentieth century not simply because something happens outwardly, but to the extent that we find the power represented by holy Sophia. Our time tends to lose this Isis-power, this power of Mary. It was killed by all that arose with the modern consciousness of humankind. New forms of religion have, in part, killed just this view of Mary.

“This is the mystery of modern humanity. Mary-Isis has been killed, and she must be sought, just as Isis sought Osiris. But she must be sought in the wide space of heaven, with the power that Christ can awaken in us, if we give ourselves to him aright.” ~ 24 December 1920

Finally, I will leave you with a verse Steiner gave, that draws on the Gnostic mythos while Christening it with Christian theosophy:

Isis-Sophia

Wisdom of God:

Lucifer has slain her,

And on the wings of cosmic forces

Carried her hence into the depths of space.

Christ-Will

Working in man:

Shall wrest her from Lucifer

And on the grounds of Spirit-knowledge

Call to new life in souls of man

Isis-Sophia

Wisdom of God. ~ 25 December 1920

Christopher Bamford, interviewed for the documentary The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.

The Hypostasis of the Archons: Politics

In the study of Sophiology, one inevitably encounters the vast, complex, often confusing mythologies of Gnosticism. Gnosticism borrows freely from Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Platonism and Neoplationism, and any number of systems available to late-classical era investigation. As a Sophiologist, however, I’ve never thought much of the Gnostic and later Manichaean and, even later, Catharist/Albigensian thought regarding Creation as the work of a deluded demiurge. If Sophiology has anything at all of worth to say, it is that Creation, as Genesis 1 tells us, is good. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

This is not to say that I dismiss the Gnostic mythos root and branch. Far from it. Indeed, I think the Gnostic mythos is the ideal diagnostic tool for deciphering the worlds we create or, better, the worlds created around us and which we then, often unconsciously and, for the most part, voluntarily, inhabit and take for the Real. The Gnostic text The Hypostasis of the Archons (also known as The Nature of the Rulers) accurately describes such a “world.” Here are its opening paragraphs:

“Concerning the hypostasis of the archons, the great apostle, through the Spirit of the Father of Truth, referred to the ‘authorities [archons] of the darkness’ [Colossians 1:13] and told us ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the authorities of the world and the spirits of wickedness‘ [Ephesians 6:12]. I have sent you this work because you inquire about the hyspostasis of the Archons.

“Their leader is blind. Because of his power and ignorance, because of his arrogance, he said, with power, ‘It is I who am God; there is no other.’

“When he said this, he sinned against the Realm of the All [the Pleroma]. His boast rose up to Incorruptibility, and a voice answered from Incorruptibility, saying, ‘You are wrong, Samael’ (a name that means ‘god of the blind.’)” [1]

Is this not among the temptations all leaders face, one also offered to Christ in the desert? Are we not all wandering in this desert?

Another person fascinated by Gnosticism and its societal implications (and applications, for that matter) was science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick. Dick’s work is an extended meditation on individuals caught in a reality that isn’t real, of men and women deceived by simulacra, and of figures manipulated by brainwashing and other forms of social engineering. For Dick, the primary philosophical and spiritual problem facing humanity resides in knowing what is Real. He is likewise acutely sensitive to the possibility that we might be manipulated by maleficent powers interested in exploitation and control under the pretext of upholding the common good. He is a popular writer now (he died in 1982, basically penniless), but he has much to say to populations living under various permutations of the surveillance state. He predicted all of it.

Philip K. Dick

In 1974, Dick came to some realizations about the Constitutional crisis surrounding then President Nixon and the shenanigans at Watergate that certainly bear some relevance to our own time:

“The Constitutional guarantees of our country have been suspended for some time now, and an assault has begun on the checks and balances structure of the government. The Republic is in peril; the Republic has been in peril for several years and is now cut away almost to a shadow of itself, barely functioning. I think they are carving it up in their minds, deciding who sits where forever and ever, now. In the face of this, no one notices that virtually everything we believed in is dead: mysteriously killed. It’s best not to talk about this. I’ve tried to list several things to talk about, but so far I can’t find any. I’m trying to list the safe things to talk about, but so far I can’t find any. I’m trying to learn what the Lie is or what the Lies are, but I can’t discern that anymore. Perhaps I sense the Lie is gone from the world because evil is so strong now that it can step forth as it is without deception. The masks are off.”[2]

With the exception of that last sentence (!) he could have written this yesterday.

Dick, however, was no defeatist. Inspired by some mystical experiences he had at around this time, he saw that hope yet persisted. As we writes,

“But nevertheless something shines in the dark ahead that is alive and makes no sound. We saw it once before, but that was a long time ago, or maybe our first ancestors did. Or we did as small children. It spoke to us and directed and educated us then; now perhaps it does so again. It sought us out, in the climax of peril. There was no way we could find it; we had to wait for it to come to us.”

This insight is in content not all that different from those realized by Thomas Traherne or by the multifarious languages of Sophiology: The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Unless you become as a little child, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. How like an Angel came I down!

It is important for us as we slog through the hypostasis of our current archons to hold to this fundamental human insight. The Gnostic Hypostasis of the Archons describes it in a beautiful imagination:

“You, together with your offspring, are from the Primeval Father; from Above, out of the imperishable Light, their souls are come. Thus the Archons cannot approach them because of the Spirit of Truth within them; and all who have become acquainted with this Way exist deathless in the midst of dying Mankind.”

The great French poet Guillaume Apollinaire paints a similar picture toward the end of his poem “Un Fantome de Nuees”:

The little saltimbanque turned a cart-wheel

With so much harmony

That the organ stopped playing

And the organist hid his face in his hands

With fingers like the descendants of his destiny

Small foetuses which came out of his beard

New Indian cries

The angelic music of trees

The disappearance of the child

The saltimbanques lifted the great dumb-bells in their arms

And juggled with the weights

But each spectator looked in himself for the miraculous child

Century O century of clouds [3]

Look for the miraculous child.

A scene from Blade Runner 2049 (based on Philip K. Dick's work)

1. A mix of translations from two editions and my own editing. See The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. Robinson (Harper & Row, 1977) and The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, ed. Meyer (HarperOne, 2007).

2. Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis, ed. Jackson and Leithem (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 21.

3. Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Writings, trans. Roger Shattuck (New Directions, 1971).

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.