Eve Eurydice speaks with Rene Steinke of our growing hunger for spirituality. In a culture that mitigates the shock of our mortality through NFT Blockchain dream states and meta-sublimation rather than divine ritual in sync with the cycles of nature, that has replaced magic with coding, math, and disembodied commerce, religious people, creative people, spiritual people, ethical people, wellness people are looking for paths to transformation using repurposed languages of religion (see the shallow sentimentality of TED talks). We all have the religious impulse. Love is a crucible where we alchemically meet and merge into one; love requires trust, faith, and self-abnegation. Humans can only reclaim faith by self-sacrifice. We give something up to gain god. We cleanse the pressure of culture to regenerate it. Pre-institutional religion is transgressive. We have lived through the thesis of patriarchy for 6 millennia. We are now in anthithesis. Now there is messy overexcess because we are in decline. and Art can clarify that. The genius of art is that it sees that the contradictions do not exist. The way we resynthesize must be painful. It’s how transformation works; it’s painful. (Read Ovid.) We can only rediscover faith in each other, in God, in Nature, outside the names we now use and narratives we parrot. America was settled by people of profound religious need and purity. Evangelicals’ literal reading of biblical texts and willful ignorance of the poor in favor of ME ME ME individualism is a textbook example of how religion can be turned into dogma and the need for salvation into social control. The anti-elite sentiment of born again believers is capitalized to preserve the interests of obscene capital. The early Christian pre-organized community was matriarchal. The Mary Magdalene gospel found in the old scrolls didn’t make it into the canon. The feminist reclaiming of Christianity failed. Rene speaks of the artist Hilma af Klint and her relationship to religion and spirituality. Like Blavatsky in the Theosophical Society, she held seances with female friends seeking an intuitive vision outside of patriarchy. Art used to be religious. Post Enlightenment, art became commerce. Embroidery is still a meditative practice. Hand-writing is still a meditative practice. Both counterbalance our Computational Culture. Eurydice sees the primacy of Mind over Body as detrimental to our culture and indicative of civilizational decline. Rene Steinke is the author of the novels The Fires, Holy Skirts, and Friendswood. Holy Skirts, a novel based on the life of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, was a finalist for the 2005 NBA.
Nice episode. Keep them coming