Pagans 'R' Us

Lest we forget that early 21st-century western culture is anything but "advanced," former President of the C. G. Jung Foundation, Jeffrey Burke Satinover reminded us:

...pagan society is pantheistic or animistic: gods and goddesses inhabit the natural world and are one with it; nature itself is worshipped as divine; there is no serious distinction between creature and creator. Again, on a practical level, this means that men worship not only the nature "out there," they also worship their own nature, which is to say, their instincts: e.g., hunger, sex, and aggression, and more generally, pleasure. In thus spiritualizing the instincts, pagan worship therefore tends naturally to the violent, the hedonistic, and the orgiastic. Pagan religious ritual arouses the instincts, especially sexuality and aggression, to the keenest possible pitch. In the subsequent gratification of these instincts, the greatest possible pleasure and hence also the highest level of religious ecstasy is meant to be achieved. Violent intoxication, temple prostitution, the ritual slaughter of enemies, self-mutilation, even child sacrifice: all these historical phenomena can be understood not as pathological, but as predictable end-points to the unfettering of human nature. Not recognizing how thin and easily cracked is our present veneer of Judeo- Christian culture, we tend loftily to think of such practices as ancient and utterly alien. (We have, after all, "progressed" beyond them.) But we need only look to television, or to the current literature of child abuse, or a few years back to the Holocaust to understand how entirely unexceptional they are.

-- Jungians and Gnostics (1994)

Here and here are evidence of the fraying edges of western culture, what Saint Paul gave an astute taxonomy of in Galatians 5, and what we are loathe to see and understand about the recrudescence of paganism and polytheism devoid of the Revelation vouchsafed by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. It is the fallen, default position of human culture; what René Girard deemed "the primitive Sacred." Without conversion to Catholic truth, it is the horrific realm of Satan we see our world reverting to with rapidity, cruelty, and cravenness.

May I suggest a careful reading of The Dionysus Mandate? It may direct your attention to the depth of the wisdom of the Catholic faith, with faithful commentary by René Girard and Gil Bailie, servants of the Magisterium and Our Lord, the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ.