The Loss of Hierophany

On Sacrality, Mystery, and Re-Enchantment

“And so we dream, not of going back, but of going forward. We dream to remind ourselves of what we truly desire in our waking existence, of what we long for our world to be, and of what that reveals about who we truly are.” — Tom van der Linden of Like Stories of Old, “The Defining Story of Our Time”

Inside the Neolithic Mind by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce aims to describe the spiritual and religious transformation that seems to have taken place in concert with the advent of agriculture, speculating that perhaps agriculture was a side effect of religious practice, such as animal sacrifice, burial, and other ritualistic human behavior. They explain that since there is such universality to human perceptions of altered states of consciousness, continuity in ancient religious stories, and similar themes in dreams, hallucinations, and near death experiences, that there must be, simply, a biological reason for all of it. They confidently declare that any supernatural phenomena or connective thread between us and the rest of life are merely “neurologically generated mystical states” that have no bearing whatever on reality.¹ Transcendent or religious experiences are, therefore, figments of our imagination (stated as such to denigrate imagination) only. Beliefs that arise from such experiences are “intellectually elaborated… to order and explain engendered religious experiences.”²

The assumption borne out of the Enlightenment is that man has the power to make all of nature legible to him. Armed with this belief, the authors of this book declare that the universality of human beliefs “cannot be explained in any other way than by the functioning of the universal human nervous system.”³ This declaration is made, of course, in spite of the universal agreement that we, as a species, have no idea what consciousness even is, or how the brain truly works, let alone what these transcendent experiences are. It’s the same as declaring that we know for a fact what happens after death. As psychologist and professor, Sheldon Solomon, said to us, “the only proper stance would be an agnostic one” rather than “arrogantly proclaim[ing] that which you could never know.”

My copy of Inside the Neolithic Mind

My reaction to all of this has been surprising to me because I’ve almost been taking it personally that the authors of this book seem so insistent on familiarizing and explaining away mysterious content. As if it’s not bad enough that there is no sense of sacred in the modern world, the authors seem to feel that we need to go back and strip it from our ancestors and fellow humans who did and still do experience animacy and mystery. It feels like its taking what is vibrant and ineffable, making it sterile and dead.

This disenchantment is imbued in so many things — the clothing we buy, the furniture we fill our homes with, the movies we watch, the books we read, the food we eat, etc. Meaning has been stripped from everything, and sacredness is something we have to seek as we wade through the constant striving for certainty, explainability, and order. Call it the Walmart-ing of the world, or the IKEA-ification of the world — call it what you want. We all know what it means to feel surrounded by stuff without substance or animacy. It’s the way the world has been built around us, and is part of why modern civilization is so alienating. We’re so surrounded by stuff we’ve made that we can hardly even marvel at what isn’t ours to claim. Light pollution blocks our view to the heavens that are not of our own creation. The mystery of the universe is slowly being invisibilized in a deluge of manmade nonsense while our brightest minds seek relentlessly to demystify all that we do not know.

Before my grandmother died, I had a supernatural experience. Jake and I were living in her house at the time, helping to get it cleaned up and ready to sell. My grandma was a very private woman, never wearing her heart on her sleeve. Whether it was a Cancerian protectiveness, or a wall that had been built brick by brick over her many decades, I did not know. Prying for information about her past was always fruitless, even as her life was nearing its close. She always dodged my probing questions in her sweet, considered way.

So, while alone in her home, I snooped. I wanted to find something that might give me a modicum of insight into who she was those many years before I was born, before I was a twinkle in her daughter’s eye. Before boxing up journals, I’d peek into them just to see. One was from 1999, when my little brother was just a baby. She wrote with a pragmatic detachment, explaining in bullet points what she did that day.

“Picked up Christian from Steph’s. Had a phone call with Joyce. Went to the grocery store.”

I learned some things through this exercise, but nothing that was answering my burning question — why is she so closed off? I started to get frustrated, exasperated. Over the course of the next week, Jake and I became distracted by other things, but I during that time I noticed that the door to my grandmother’s bedroom kept opening itself. I would shut it, and find it open again the next time I passed the door. I asked Jake why he was going in there, and he told me he wasn’t. I checked the door and found it to be perfectly sturdy. I jokingly decided to write a little note to myself in order to really catch the ghost in the act. Something like, “I, Maren Morgan, closed this door at 4:13 pm” on whatever day it was.

As I was taping the note to the door, words passed through my mind that were not my own. “There’s something in there you need to find,” the voice said. This stopped me in my tracks. I get chills thinking of it today, thinking of that moment where the mundane, disenchanted world was filled with mystery yet again.