What is a “being” anyway? There are individual bees which are pretty unintelligent on their own, but which take on a new, more profound intelligence when they function as a hive. Then there are human beings, but strip away their culture, their language, their collective knowledge and intelligence, and they become feral and inarticulate, barely able to feed themselves or protect themselves from the cold. So, if the human “meta-organism” has a life of it’s own, why can there not be cultural currents and sub-currents—zeitgeists, if you will, that come upon us like a “spirit,” or even gods?
Once, when I was on a ship in Funchal Bay a Portuguese warship anchored next to us, eclipsing us in it’s shade. It was carrying soldiers back from the war in Biafra, and as each contingent waited their turn to go ashore for a few hour’s liberty, their comrades still aboard would send up a lusty cheer as they came and went. When their comrades returned the salute, an even deeper, more manly, more martial cheer would boom up from the ship like a volley of cannon. It set one’s very spine to vibrating, until you had to stop whatever you were doing and come above deck and join in the spirit. Every man on deck raised his arm and cheered, which only sent up gales of cheering from the warship. Back and forth, it grew to a hurricane, until we were all swept away in the emotion like a cork upon a stormy ocean.
It was as if a door had opened and we were being pulled through, into the bloodlust of the distant past—the Colosseum of Rome, and to battle fields even more distant and ancient. We were in an immortal Presence, something very old, something very pagan, something awaiting only the right spark to awaken it. It was the voice of Ares as the ancients had described it: the thumos rising in our chests, drawing us unbidden, and almost involuntarily, into communion with something transcendent, collective, and divine. Had we had swords and shields, I have no doubt that we would have all rushed headlong into a holy conflagration until the enemy before us was consumed by the flame that thundered in our chests, until we gradually emerged from the fog of war and became aware of the blood and gore all over us, and there was no stirring on the field except our own.
Oh you arrogant Christians, there are gods much older and mightier than yours. You pale, pursed-lipped book-thumpers, you passionless secular humanists, you soul-denying atheists, how quickly you throw off your sweetness and light, and your compassionate weeping Christ, and your civilized morality when a collective anger overtakes you. It is to Us, the gods of this world, you offer up your Golden Calves when you make war. It is from the forges of Hephaestus that you take up your beautiful weapons, and from Aphrodite that you take the trophies of your victory. And it is the breath of Ares hot upon your neck that gives you the courage to charge into the spears and bayonets of the opposing force.
Consider also the Great God Eros, who courses through the veins of every living thing that ruts and thrusts and lusts for life, the thundering river of blood that traces back from son to father, to grandfather, all the way back to the primordial slime. Eros is the guiding hand of evolution as it expresses itself in the particulars human attraction; it is the primordial lust that all men feel; a lust that impels them to hurl themselves upstream against all of survival’s adversities. Eros is the strength and courage of one’s ancestors coursing through your veins; it is a god to which all men pay secret homage, and in that climactic moment of these rituals, one’s individual self falls away and one communes with the very Lifeforce itself. No wonder your pale and sexless God eschews all things erotic.
Let us not forget the great God Gaia. Is she a living “being” like ourselves? No, as a being she is nothing like us. She is much, much more. We are a part of her living body; our thoughts are her thoughts; and, through her, we partake of her son Eros and the Great Chain of Being. Does Gaia love us? What a stupid question! She is Love; she is Life itself. By what human arrogance do we fail to regard her as a living being? By what intellectual prejudice do we deny she is a god? And by what hubris do we claim dominion over her, the right to poison her?
While we’re at it, let’s also consider the great God Chaos, the deep mathematical order that suffuses all of existence; the fractal structure of the universe and of consciousness itself. The Greeks were on to something when they told of Gaia being the consort of Chaos, and their offspring being Eros. Life is suffused through and through with fractal structure. Next to insights we have gained into elegant and majestic workings of Chaos, your jealous desert gods, with their genocidal pacts and their wrathful demands for slavish obedience, seem nothing more than grubby, disgusting impertinences.
What do we mean by “supernatural”? If you look at Gaia, Chaos, Eros, Ares, etc., you will see that each has a life of it’s own. They can not be immediately explained by natural forces any more than “music” can be explained by the vibration of strings and reeds. They are transcendent forces that live in and through us. In this respect, they are like titanic forces of nature, only they do not act on nature; they act on human societies and culture. In the new biology, you could call them “meta-organisms” or “memeplexes.” You could further describe them as parasites on the human cultural organism, since they do tend to propagate virally, like epidemics.
Such terminological innovations may seem to purge these phenomena of the spooky, mystical baggage we associate with spirits and gods. But, not really. Simply naming or re-naming a thing does not give one power over it. The fact is, our sense of morality is a memeplex too. But putting it in such natural-historical terms does not make it any less compelling, or make our relationship to it any more optional. Our morality and our sense of spirituality are one in the same thing; they are also part and parcel of our evolution as a species. And there is a certain utility in recasting the language of human spirituality in terms of an ecologically responsible morality. There is something sacred about human dignity, about the obligation to act in good faith, and the need to ensure the survival of the planet and all that dwells upon it.
Our morality and our humanity are also transcendent “spiritual” phenomena. They live through us, and to a minor extent are affected by us, but they have an immortal evolving life of their own. The sense of awe we feel before the transcendent and the spiritual is purposeful and functional, insofar as it keeps us appropriately humble, respectful of, and attentive to the larger Spirit(s) that we live within and which lives individually and collectively through us.
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