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The illusion of a pagan West Modernity has descended into a spiritual void

Druid King Arthur Uther Pendragon travels on the London Underground (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Druid King Arthur Uther Pendragon travels on the London Underground (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)


September 6, 2024   11 mins

Inside the Colosseum, in central Rome, stands a giant cross. Erected in 2000 by Pope John Paul II to commemorate the thousands of Christians martyred there, it’s not what you might expect to see on visiting the building once known as the Flavian Amphitheatre, named for the Imperial dynasty which built it.

The building of the Colosseum was overseen by the father-and-son Emperors Vespasian and Titus, to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem, which they had personally directed. In response to the rebellion known as the Great Jewish Revolt, which began in 66AD, Titus, who was not yet Emperor, laid siege to Jerusalem, putting the city and its Second Temple to the torch. To hammer home his victory, he enslaved thousands of Jewish prisoners and took them back to Rome, where they were forced to build the Colosseum. Titus had his victory commemorated in style on a triumphal arch that still stands, not far from the remains of his family’s amphitheatre.

I visited the Colosseum this summer. It was as crowded as I expected — which is to say that it was barely possible to move — but it was bigger than I had imagined. The sheer scale of the stones that Titus had his Jewish slaves shift (while quietly bedding the Jewish queen Berenice) was astonishing. The fact that, 2,000 years on, it is one of the most recognisable ruins in the world probably ought to tell us something. But what?

This question wandered around my head as I wandered around Rome. What is it about ancient Rome that still speaks to us? Why has everybody heard of Nero, Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius? Why do we all still know, two millennia later, about Roman baths, gladiators, straight roads, centurions, Vestal virgins and the Colosseum? I like to spend my holidays developing spurious and lightly evidenced theories about human culture while I drink my espresso. It’s my idea of fun. This time around, my theory was simple and unoriginal: the Roman empire never actually ended.

“What is it about ancient Rome that still speaks to us?”

Yes, Rome itself “fell” to barbarian invaders in the 5th century, but that, as every Orthodox Christian knows even if no-one else does, was not the end of the Roman Empire, which by then already had a new capital in Constantinople. There was a Roman Emperor reigning until that city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, which was when the Empire technically ended. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that today’s “West” is really just Rome under another name. Not just because the Western Christian Church was and is quartered in the old Imperial city, and behaved like an imperial power itself for much of the Middle Ages. Not just because, for that reason, “the West” was in many ways ruled from Rome until the modern period. It’s something bigger than that, and yet also more nebulous. It’s the fact that, despite the Christian or pseudo-Christian, veneer, Western culture still really has many of the same values as those of Rome.

True, we don’t take slaves anymore, or throw people to lions, or crucify them, and all that is due to the legacy of the most famous man ever to be crucified. But we’re still, in some ways, Roman. We still valorise power and straight lines. We still have Emperors, even if we call them Presidents, and we still have Empires, even if we pretend we don’t. We still build vast amphitheatres for entertainment, even if the entertainment is an AC/DC concert or a Premier League match instead of a lions-vs-slaves face off. We still use Corinthian columns to demonstrate our social status. And we still make endless films and write endless books about the Romans — rather than, say, the Greeks or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or the Ottomans — because, deep down, we think we are their heirs.

Very near to the Colosseum, you can also visit the ruins of the Forum and the Palatine Hill, which are much less crowded. Walking around the Forum in summer will take it out of you. Fortunately, there is a cafe on the site. I took my children into it to buy a drink, and came out with some more evidence to back up my half-formed holiday theory. The young woman behind the counter, who took my money with a cheery smile, was covered in tattoos and piercings, but this wasn’t what made her stand out. That stuff is barely worth mentioning in the 2020s. It was her T-shirt that said the quiet part out loud, and it was quite a contrast to the optimistic cross which peered over the lip of the massacredome next door.

On the woman’s chest was emblazoned a giant inverted pentagram. In case you were in any doubt as to what this was supposed to convey, the words below it read: DEICIDE 666. “That will be €20 please”, she said, still smiling. Being English, I smiled back.

Deicide turns out to be the name of a bad metal band which began life when I was a teenager in the late Eighties. As a semi-metaller myself back then, I was more than familiar with the anti-Christian iconography that was required by any band that wanted to make a splash in the metal scene. From Black Sabbath onwards, if you weren’t praising Satan, wearing inverted crosses and pentagrams and writing songs with titles like “Death to Jesus” and “F**k Your God” (both stone-cold Deicide classics), you were in danger of being left behind. But we all knew it was an act. Nobody really believed it, so it was all OK. Most of these guys were probably playing golf in their spare time.

That was a long time ago, though. Since then, the Satanic, witchy and openly neo-pagan iconography has crept steadily out of the crepuscular corners of the culture and into its centre. In recent years, in fact, there has been no creeping about it — it has been a sprint. This, for example, was Ireland’s entrant for this year’s Eurovision song contest: Bambi Thug.

Bambi is an openly anti-Christian “non-binary” witch who performs what she calls “ouija pop”. Her songs include spells and hexes, and in her spare time she likes to practise “blood magic”. All of this makes her almost entirely uncontroversial in 2024. In fact, unlike the God-hating pioneers of the Seventies and Eighties, it makes her pretty mainstream. After all, other mainstream musical acts like Sam Smith and Lil Nas X have also been working hard to push the pagan-Satan-witch thing to the max.

What is the connection between Bambi Thug, Deicide and our continued fascination with ancient Rome? Pretty obviously, the answer is that none of these things are Christian. In fact, they are all openly anti-Christian, and we are increasingly obviously an anti-Christian culture. It is often suggested that the modern West is “anti-religious” in a more general sense, but this is not really true. Witness, for example, the easy ride given to Islam by progressive elites, or the open arms extended to Buddhism and neo-paganism, or indeed the patronising tolerance extended to the Bambi Thugs of the world. The West is not really against religion. What it is against is its own heritage. And that heritage happens to be Christian.

In my series of essays on the Machine, I wrote at some length about what I called the culture of inversion which now governs us. This is, at root, quite a simple thing, and it is not a novelty either. Ancient Rome went through something similar after the Christians almost miraculously captured its Imperial centre and the Empire turned, in a remarkably short time, against its ancestral gods and towards the new one that would supplant them.

Today’s culture of inversion is the result of the 20th century social and cultural revolution which some have likened to a new Reformation. It has manifested in the sexual revolution of the Sixties, and an accelerating trend towards individualism, radical liberation and technological solutionism. It is resulting in the reshaping of nations, families, cultures and values of all kinds. Most of all, it has manifested in a rejection, conscious or unconscious, of the religion — Christianity — which built the West. For better or for worse, that “West” is now being superseded. We are leaving what we were behind.

Where, though, does this leave us spiritually? As we reject our Christian past we leave an empty throne at the heart of our culture. An empty throne will always attract candidates to be the new king. Who, in the age of Bambi Thug, is vying for it now?

One notion that is currently doing the rounds is that the post-Christian West is “repaganising”. The argument is simple and in many ways convincing. “Paganism”, in this reading, is the default state of humanity, and now that Christianity is receding, it is returning. Paganism is here defined, in Louise Perry’s words, as “an orientation towards the immanent”; a definition with which most Christian theologians would probably agree. If the word “pagan” is frustratingly vague (it basically means “not Christian”), the religious systems it tends to refer to find their object of worship or veneration in this world, among created things.

To Christians, this is a terrible category error. But it is also an understandable one. Worshipping, making sacrifices to, or performing rituals with the things we can see — trees, mountains, fire, the sun — makes intuitive sense, in a way that Christianity, which looks beyond this world, does not. This is why Christianity is a genuinely revolutionary faith; something we tend to forget due to our familiarity with it. But paganism often ends up making practical sense in more sinister ways too, whether by justifying infanticide, sacrificing animals or humans to capricious nature-bound “gods”, or simply by reducing us to the base level of our humanity, as our passions and desires are justified or promoted by deities who personify them. This, it is argued, is where we are headed as we move further and further away from our Christian past.

I think there is a lot to this argument; and yet I don’t think it is quite right, for two reasons. The first is that there are a lot of people around these days who call themselves “pagans”, and they would all reject the values that this argument ascribes to them. The reason for this, ironically, is that most of our new “pagans” are in fact Christians in disguise. Their values — human rights, feminism, ecological sensitivity, and broadly liberal views — are derived from Christianity, and the “old gods” they claim to worship often have suspiciously modern attitudes. It’s true that there is a minority of far-Right pagan types who hang around on the fringes, blathering about the volk and the “old gods” of the Aryans, but the fact that they are roundly rejected by the majority of modern pagans just helps to prove my point.

This brings me to the second reason. Say what you like about modern paganism, but however you quite define the word, it implies religious belief. Pagans and Christians might tear chunks off each other for all sorts of reasons, but they are essentially fighting over the nature of the divine. They — we — are all religious people.

If we were really “re-paganising”, then, we would be returning to the worship of the old gods. And yet, despite all the Satanic witchery of popular culture, we are not actually doing so. What we are seeing with the likes of Bambi Thug, Sam Smith and the rest is not the resurgence of a threatening new (or old) religion. It is an aesthetic. Nobody would die for it. Nobody would fight for it. It is LARPing and play-acting. Rather than signifying a sinister new development or threatening new faith, it is a flimsy veil drawn over a gaping void.

As evidence for this claim, I offer you an image of the notorious drag queen parody of the Last Supper which was part of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. This featured a large lesbian in place of Christ, and Dionysius, god of dark drunken revelries, in place of the Eucharist. A pure product of the culture of inversion, this very public, very global tableau, was as anti-Christian an insult as could possibly be made on the world stage.

Or was it? It was hard to tell because, as soon as mass complaints began and sponsors began withdrawing, and nations began demanding explanations from the French Ambassador, our brave iconoclasts swiftly copped out. Lesbian Christ deleted the tweet in which she had described the tableau as the “new gay testament”, complete with an image of Da Vinci’s famous painting, and the organiser of the show put out a new story. Rather than being a parody of Christianity, this was in fact something called “the feast of the gods”. In the twinkling of an eye, as is the way of the things on social media, all right-thinking progressive people swung in behind this new message. After a few days, everything died down, and people began looking elsewhere for something to be outraged about.

“In the twinkling of an eye, as is the way of the things on social media, all right-thinking progressive people swung in behind this new message.”

Were these people “pagans”? Not if that word denotes religious belief. If this had really been a “pagan” tableau — if these people had been true believers in and worshippers of the god Dionysius, for example — then they would have stood by it. They would have damned the offended, and defended their gods. They would have made a case for paganism and its metaphysics. They would probably have been quite popular in some elite quarters had they done so.

But they didn’t: instead, they ran away. They did that because they did not, in fact, believe in or respect the “gods” that they were portraying at all. They were just playing with images that meant nothing to them, but which in some way seemed “queer” or “subversive” or “brave”. The fact that the images were none of these things did not seem to register. In some way, they were on autopilot: blaspheming against the God of a long-dead culture, but not believing in the ones they pretended to put in its place. They certainly weren’t wrestling with the implications of what Dionysian worship would actually mean for society.

Some theologians hold that hell is the result of getting everything you want. If the choice we are faced with is between following God’s will and following our own, and if we no longer believe in God, where does that leave us? It leaves us here. But “here” is not a new pagan age. Not yet, anyway. Neither is it a “secular” age. We dwell, rather, among the consequences of our liberation. We got everything we wanted. Now we have to live with it.

In the West today, this means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing. Most significantly, we are now even ceasing to believe in the ideas which arose to replace all religions in the age of “Enlightenment”. Reason, progress, liberalism, freedom of speech, democracy, the enlightened rational individual, the scientific process as a means of determining truth: everywhere, these “secular” beliefs, which were supposed to replace religion worldwide, are either under fire or have already fallen too.

Is this an atheist age, then? In one obvious sense, yes. We are perhaps the first godless culture in human history. Religious cosmologies have differed vastly across time and space, but no society has ever existed without one. Ours has tried to, for a brief, violent and explosive time. I don’t think that time has long to run. So yes, we are living in an atheist age — and yet, that’s not quite the full picture either.

Atheism, like religion, implies some sort of confidence; some sort of actual stance. A-theism is a position. It states: there is no God, and it can state that because it has a set of alternative beliefs, usually those which emerged from the European “age of reason”: the ability of science to demonstrate universal truth; the objectivity of rational thought; the knowability of reality. Atheism often also refuses religion on moral grounds: religions, it is said, are archaic, irrational, unjust and oppressive. Some version of “humanism” is a better and fairer fit for the modern world.

All of these are positions. They are statements of faith in the world working in a certain way, and in the way that it should work, and should be arranged. Atheism can even amount to a quasi-religious system itself. Orthodox convert Seraphim Rose, formerly a committed atheist himself, once wrote that “atheism, true ‘existential’ atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God”.

Does our age believe this? Hardly. These days even Richard Dawkins publicly regrets the results of the ignorant anti-Christian fatwa he helped to lead. So no, this is not an atheist age either. It is not any kind of “age” at all. It has no shape, no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is simply a vacuum, a void.

This is what I have taken to calling the time we live in now, here in the post-everything West: the Void. The Void is our new Colosseum: both bounded and empty, a place of entertainment and terror. In the Void, nothing is real, nothing has meaning, and nothing leads us in any direction but inward. When we get there, all we find is our passions, and they drag us in every direction we can think of. We have no idea who to turn to for help, and despair rises all around us as a result. In this culture, Satan is cool, but not because we believe in him: precisely because we don’t. In the Void, we all hate Christianity, but not that much. It is barely worth hating. Nothing much is worth hating, or loving anymore.

In the Void, we can believe anything we want. And so, we believe in nothing at all.

This can all sound apocalyptic: but what, after all, is an apocalypse? It is a revelation, an unveiling, a reflection of the failure of something. What is it that has failed us? The “Enlightenment”? The “West”? Some pseudo-Christianity we mistook for the real thing? It is probably too early to say. Perhaps we will never know.

No matter: here we are. And despite it all, we should be of good cheer. For the Void is, by its nature, a time-limited phenomenon. Precisely because it is empty, it cannot last. The Void is a phase; it is the place you come to after the end of a culture, and after the end of a theology. The challenge now is not to mourn, to cling or to look back. We are not in charge of this thing, after all. The challenge for us is to think about what comes next — and how to live in, through and with it.

***

A version of this article first appeared on Paul’s Substack, The Abbey of Misrule.


Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist and essayist. His latest novel Alexandria is published by Faber. He also has a Substack: The Abbey of Misrule.


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J Bryant
J Bryant
3 months ago

I’m a great admirer of Paul Kingsnorth, but this essay is not one of his best efforts, imo. It is little more than a lengthy restatement of the “God-shaped hole” argument that he, and others, has made many times before.
The somewhat novel part of the essay doesn’t occur until midway with the paragraph beginning, “One notion that is currently doing the rounds is that the post-Christian West is ‘repaganising’.” He then proceeds to debunk that myth. But, as we can all see without the need for deep insight, it’s true that the “pagans” don’t really believe in paganism. Their whole schtick is performative acting out.
Maybe I’m just too jaded.

Brett H
Brett H
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I don’t think i’ve read anything of Kingsnorth before, but I found this reasonably interesting. There’s an art in stringing these different observation together which makes it interesting reading. But the problem is that at a certain age you’ve seen this sort of thing a hundred times, a lot more in fact. And in the end it’s just entertaining but not very informative about what it’s alluding to, which is always about what might be but never is.

J Bryant
J Bryant
3 months ago
Reply to  Brett H

He is certainly a talented writer. If you click on his picture at the top of the article there’s a long list of articles he’s written for Unherd.

RM Parker
RM Parker
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Yes – I also very much enjoyed his novels, “The Wake”, “Beast” and “Alexandria” (these actually comprise a trilogy). Worth reading if you’ve not already encountered them.

Seb Dakin
Seb Dakin
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I rather enjoyed it myself. I thought the comments on that Last Supper parody at the Olympics in particular were bang on.

Helen Nevitt
Helen Nevitt
3 months ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

I kind of believe in Bacchus. In a CS Lewis way. He’s a good guy in Narnia but as one of the kids notes – you wouldn’t like to meet him without Aslan around.

It seems to me the Inklings understood Paganism. Which is more than modern day Pagans do.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Well he is saying some substantial things about the extent our culture is post-Christian, remains downstream of Christianity, is truly on some sort of pagan continuum with Rome, or is just anomic and antinomian.
So it’s broader than ‘God shaped hole’, filled by various substitutes.
It might be the case that current western culture is just extremely fragmentary, rather than an all-encompassing Vaccuum!
All interesting to ponder.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I agree with you. It’s all juvenile cosplay, especially silly when performers are middle-aged.

iulia Gherman
iulia Gherman
3 months ago

Maybe we are re-paganising, just not with the old gods – after all, what power does the sun have over us when we can create night, day, warmth and cold without it? More likely our new pagan gods are technology (particularly on the medical side), AI, machines. They inspire awe and a blind faith and a desire to sacrifice (limbs, loved ones etc).

Brett H
Brett H
3 months ago
Reply to  iulia Gherman

“what power does the sun have over us when we can create night, day, warmth and cold without it”
Well it does do a bit more than give us comfort.

RM Parker
RM Parker
3 months ago
Reply to  Brett H

Agreed: without it, we wouldn’t have food or any meaningful energy sources for probably nine tenths or so of our population (if that). I always return to Carl Sagan’s “small blue dot” film: it’s easy to find on YouTube and quite humbling.

Obadiah B Long
Obadiah B Long
3 months ago
Reply to  Brett H

It’s a rhetorical question to point out that we have dismissed that “bit more” from our collective consciousness.

Douglas Redmayne
Douglas Redmayne
3 months ago
Reply to  iulia Gherman

That’s right

Obadiah B Long
Obadiah B Long
3 months ago
Reply to  iulia Gherman

Excellent point. The article is incomplete without this point. And I would add that these are human inventions, products of the human brain. Therefore we are God, in our conception. We don’t say that explicitly very often because it sounds ludicrous. But we have (we think) taken over the role of the divine.
Opinion: It’s not going to work out well.

leonard o'reilly
leonard o'reilly
3 months ago

“We dwell, rather, among the consequences of our liberation. We got everything we wanted. Now we have to live with it.”
This seems true enough to me. But what did we want? What did this liberation entail? Something like that justice manqué called ‘social justice’, probably, but what we got was the sacralization of the marginal and, willy nilly, the weird.
In the biblical parable, the united human race decided to build a city and a tower to avoid being scattered upon the face of the whole earth. There is speculation that the tower may have been a ziggurat. They never completed the tower because the Lord was displeased at this ambition, so He confused their languages and, true to their worst fears, scattered them upon the face of the earth.
But now we live in inverted times. ( That word had a very different connotation, back in the day. ) So hat tip to Paul Kingsnorth.
According to one of Franz Kafka’s own many wonderful parables, we are not building the Tower of Babel, we are digging the Pit of Babel. Barrel of laughs, sometimes, that K.
But pace both Kafka and the Bible, neither has it quite right. We are building the Ziggurat of Babel, and we are building it upside down. This is not the most stable way to orient a ziggurat or to order a society. It is, however, the inevitable structure of a Hyperdemocracy.
The building of this inverted ziggurat must entail the decapitation, and thence the inversion of all hierarchies, which are the source of all oppression. The people must rule. Wasn’t if foretold that it should be so?
The base of this structure, those layers with the smallest dimensions, support those of ever-broadening girth. It is the supreme irony of an age itself saturated in ironies that it is precisely this state of affairs that is unsustainable.
The purple-haired ‘pagan’, covered in tattoos and bristling with piercings, the Bambi Thugs and the heavy metal bands, are not making a political statement, much less a religious one. They are making a mockery of a hollowed out society that doesn’t even have the conviction to pay them any mind. They are not serious people, of course, but then they don’t pretend to be.

IATDE
IATDE
3 months ago

I agree with what you have said, except with regard to decapitating hierarchies. Even after chaotic inversions, and sometimes as the source of them, new hierarchies replace the old if they are to be anything more than an ephemeral event. Most societal protest movements, and all that last any time at all, have a hierarchy that either arises or is disclosed.
BLM adherents quickly organized chartered non-profits to accept tax free donations. Even Antifa has organizational hierarchy at local levels. The belief in any “people’s movements” existing with any size or ability to last for more than a season as a hierarchy free democratic organization that shares power in every member is a fairy tale.
“We’re all in this equally together” good intentions are overcome by the need for organization, logistics, hierarchy, etc. to utilize numbers of people to achieve the stated goals. This sacrifice is initially justified as necessary to achieve the goal and then those at the top of the hierarchy realize they like being at the top, or only they are smart enough, good enough, strong enough leader, etc. to be trusted to be at the top. And a new demagogue is born.

Graeme Archer
Graeme Archer
3 months ago

“despite it all, we should be of good cheer. For the Void is, by its nature, a time-limited phenomenon. Precisely because it is empty, it cannot last”

I wish I could believe any form of that: either that the nihilistic filth which is our new culture won’t last, or, that if Paul is right and it doesn’t, that it will be replaced by something worthwhile. I loved this article despite my gloom; thank you for it.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
3 months ago
Reply to  Graeme Archer

People have replaced their faith and deep feeling for the divine, the transcendant & the sacred with a passing interest in Mickey Mouse

Damon Hager
Damon Hager
3 months ago

The closest thing the contemporary West has to a religious artefact is the smartphone screen. The modern Western masses just want entertainment to stimulate their increasingly jaded palates, so in a sense, they’re not that different from the ancient Roman mob.
Reflective, devout Christians are a small minority, but really, weren’t they/we always?

Douglas Redmayne
Douglas Redmayne
3 months ago
Reply to  Graeme Archer

Christians are despised because some of them sytidently moralise and use phrases like ” nihilistic filth” and then seek to impose their views on others. Until that behaviour changes your despair will continue.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
3 months ago

Christians have no power to “impose their views on others”. Even many of our churches don’t follow the tenets of Christianity anymore.
The institutions that do have that power and use it unrelentingly are the ones stridently forcing their beliefs on others, and they certainly aren’t Christian.

Adam Bartlett
Adam Bartlett
3 months ago
Reply to  Graeme Archer

Have faith brother! If you’re the sort who puts stock in science based projections, you might want to google “the religious shall inherit the earth”. Even 15 years back, it was clear to demographers that the “Age of unbelief” was already in its last few decades. Atheists and moderate believers had well below sub-replacement fertility rates, where as deeply religious families often have four children or more. As of 2024 these plaent wide trends are even more pronounced. Already said to be profoundly changing the culture in some parts of the world (e.g. Israel) though sadly may be another 3-4 decades before a new age of faith takes hold here in UK.

G M
G M
3 months ago
Reply to  Adam Bartlett

Those who have more children will inherit the earth.

James McKay
James McKay
3 months ago

A “paganism” that has to do with beliefs and spirituality is just Christianity lite. I serve Hermes and Apollo, who really don’t mind that I don’t “believe in” them. Why would any deity worth worshipping care what the hairless monkeys think? Why would any healthy-minded hairless monkey choose to think that fairy-stories about other worlds are somehow more important than the material world we all inhabit, whether we like it or not?

IATDE
IATDE
3 months ago
Reply to  James McKay

Perhaps because the hairless monkeys are smart enough to realize that existence does not arise from nothing, and that even the Big Bang Theory assumes a starting point of super condensed/hot matter/energy, for which there is no rational, scientific, material explanation. The rational, scientific and material explanations only start once oyu accept that something already existed. Where did THAT come from?
Indeed, science today, does not posit that in the beginning there was nothing. Almost everyone seems to miss that detail.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
3 months ago
Reply to  IATDE

Nonsense. Physicists acknowledge they don’t have a theory of “prior to the big bang”, whilst there’s plenty of evidence to support that kind of event (microwave background radiation, etc.)
Those of a religious bent who push their “god” into that space do so entirely out of superstition which arose from a time when none of this was possible to investigate.
The onus will always be on those who claim their god exists to demonstrate it’s anything more than self-delusion.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Surely gods exist in the same way that numbers exist – they’re (personifications of) organising principles which regulate our behaviour and the rest of life in the universe. Baal the god of storms, Maat the goddess of justice etc. As personifications they speak to an emotional, storytelling part of us that isn’t catered for by rational analysis or by empirical observation, which are also valid. Sometimes the imaginative personification makes it easier for us to deal with an empirical situation than an accurate rational analysis alone would. Soldiers have their regimental colours and their regimental traditions which in the end they would die for. These make them a far more effective fighting force than simply the rational requirements of King’s Regulations.

AC Harper
AC Harper
3 months ago

I am not much moved by the essay. Yes, you can argue that organised religion is fading in the West and that ‘Roman’ attitudes persist.
Restate the data available. Romans started out as farmers using spirits of the place as memory aids in an illiterate world to regulate farming activities. Even as these spirits were elaborated into an organised cluster of pagan gods it didn’t stop the Roman state and later empire from doing practical things like building aqueducts rather than just praying for rain. The pagan gods and later Christianity were just cultural froth on top of a very pragmatic outlook.
Nowadays we have a much better (but still not complete) grasp of practical matters like sanitation, medicine, mathematics, applied technology. There is less of a gap for the gods to inhabit.
So what persists is not the Roman attitude to Religion but the Roman attitude to pragmatism.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
3 months ago
Reply to  AC Harper

Very well argued. I never cease to be amazed at the convolutions those inclined to religiosity will go to, to try to maintain their self-deceit. Kingsnorth is merely their arbiter.

Graeme Macdonald
Graeme Macdonald
3 months ago

Spring Equinox next year: Ekpyrosis

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

If you’re going for Stoic philosophy, I’d say 13th July next year and 20th Feb 2026, according to the cosmic cycles. (I’m sure the ancient Stoics would have incorporated planet Neptune, which I’m using, if they’d known of it.) The combination of the fiery equinox point and the watery planet on these dates collapses Berossus’ regular alternation of renewal by fire and renewal by flood, as we’ll be faced with both together. Catastrophe theorists might anticipate nuclear conflagration plus a watery deluge – but I think I’ll wait for something more subtle and symbolic, recognisable of course only post facto.

William Amos
William Amos
3 months ago

A very long piece but not without it’s insights.
Having lived in countries where ‘actually-existing-paganism’ still flourishes I have noted that there are two abiding signs of paganism taking root. Ancestor worship and Nature worship. Between Poppy veneration and Environmentalism we are well on the way here, across the political divide.
As far as ‘anti-Christian’ rather than anti-religion goes, I think the writer has a point.
With the inverted hierarchy which now dominates public morality we will only truly know we are in a ‘post-Christian’ country when a complaint of ‘offending Christians’ is automatically taken seriously by the authorities.
Then we will know that ‘Christian’ has truly become an ‘out-group’ and therefore deserving of protection. Because of course the ‘in-group’ – the ethnic and cultural legacy majority – is fair game to any and all mockery.
I thought this the other day when I saw ‘Satanic’ jewellery being displayed mockingly on old Bibles in Covent Garden and compared it with the same being done on other Holy Books – the Police would be in attendance quicker than you could say ‘Wakefield and Batley’.
Incidentally you notice a similar phenomenon with church visitors. Women who would respectfully don the hijab in visiting a Mosque or the chunni in a Gudwara often make a point of ignoring similar conventions of dress when visiting a site of Christian worship.
I think it all comes down to a hatred of the father. Or perhaps the Father!

Will D. Mann
Will D. Mann
3 months ago
Reply to  William Amos

While researching the Wells and Springs associated with early Christian saints in South West England it’s very apparent from archeological evidence that many of them were holy sites long before Christianity arrived on these shores. It seems that many pagan gods simply morphed into Christian saints and local people continued to honor them, with incantations, gifts and sometimes sacrifices as they always had done. Some of these customs, well dressing and so on persist to this day.

Victor James
Victor James
3 months ago

Everything written here is pointless because there is no ‘we’. There’s them, and us.

Point of Information
Point of Information
3 months ago

“This is what I have taken to calling the time we live in now, here in the post-everything West: the Void. The Void is our new Colosseum: both bounded and empty, a place of entertainment and terror.”

Kingsnorth had these thoughts while having a drink, in a cafe, with his family, on holiday, in Rome.

I don’t for a second believe that Kingsnorth believes his life now – in “The Void” – is existentially more miserable than that of a pagan or Christian peasant at any time in the last two or more millenia, merely because he or the people around him have less faith.

IATDE
IATDE
3 months ago

I must have missed that Kingsnorth said his life was existentially more miserable than anyone else’s at any time.

Douglas Redmayne
Douglas Redmayne
3 months ago

Try yoga and meditation if you wish to connect to spirit

Duane M
Duane M
3 months ago

Why would anyone vote down a simple suggestion like yoga and meditation? Silent meditation, which I practice, is a form of prayer. And prayer in medieval times was much like that; read “The Cloud of Unknowing”. Yoga promotes flexibility and muscular relaxation, which facilitates meditation. Meditation entails no preconceptions or dogmas; it is a good way to make friends with your own mind.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
3 months ago

Love this writer.

Will D. Mann
Will D. Mann
3 months ago

The pantheon of squabbling and amoral gods of the ancient Greek and Roman Republic were not well suited to the absolute power welded by the Emperors of imperial Rome. One God and a strict set of absolute moral rules reflected and reinforced the hierarchical societies which existed from that time up until the present.
Many of the early Christian testaments did not accord very well with Imperial preference and consequently were removed by the Emperor Constantine, resulting in the doctrines celebrating obedience, patriarchy and unquestioning faith which have persisted for centuries.
It might be that the more democratic, plauralist and anti deferential societies of Western Europe and (parts) of the US have less use for such a structured religion, maybe a looser more pantheistic faith would be a better fit, however a strict fundamentalist version of Christianity appears to be gaining ground amongst those who feel they have something to lose from a less hierarchical fluid society.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago
Reply to  Will D. Mann

There is a theory that Constantine adopted Christianity precisely in order to unify the disparate cultures and ethnicities of the Roman empire. The monism and proto-monotheism of the philosophers was too abstract for the masses, but a simple straightforward slave religion like Christianity had wide popular appeal.

Peter West
Peter West
3 months ago

Fantastic article, Paul. In a short space you summed up our strange religious culture (indeed, overall culture) so incisively and dead-on. Please, drink more espresso and make spurious social observations.

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
3 months ago

I think it would help to inject a spot of Nietzsche: God is dead and we have killed him. Then comes decadence, nihilism, the revaluation of all values. And the Übermensch, the chappie that leads us into a new Promised Land.
In our case, I believe, the universe of mechanism and logic and reason is dead. because relativity, quantum mechanics, uncertainty principle killed it. But the new science has raised the question of the ultiimate reality again, in a new form.
We humans have never known the meaning of life, the universe, everything. That’s why we invented God, as a stand-in.

Karl Juhnke
Karl Juhnke
1 month ago

Nor will we ever know.

Simon Templar
Simon Templar
3 months ago

I enjoyed the read. The Bible book of Daniel substantiates Kingsnorth’s conjecture that we are Roman citizens.
In Daniel chapter 2, the prophet Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of a giant statue (head of gold, chest of silver, hips of bronze, legs of iron, feet of iron and clay) which accurately predicted the subsequent great empires that conquered the world: Babylonian, then Persian, Greek, Roman and divided Roman empire. Then, in the vision, came a rock which struck the statue on its feet and destroyed it (Christianity), then became a mountain that filled the whole earth.
That is what indeed happened.
We are still living in the time of the divided Roman empire. The radical doctrine of Christianity (the rock) has periodically been the driving force of civilization (restorative justice, fair punishment, hospitals, universities, free speech, abolishing slavery, granting universal suffrage, human rights, even technology which lifts people out of menial labor). All these things stem from a NT understanding of society (see Acts 17:24ff ) which were unknown or vestigial in other cultures
Against Christianity stands the ancient foe of liberty, the tyranny of concentrated power (like Rome, like Caesar). Christ was tempted by Satan in the wilderness to accept lordship over the whole world: a one-world autocracy with Jesus at it’s head, but done Satan’s way, by force. Jesus declined that, and taught a new way, a different kingdom where leaders were servants
. But Satan hasn’t given up. He currently inhabits scientific humanism / Marxism which is the spirit of this age to resist the inward rule of Jesus. It’s not a void. It’s the latest elite-led counterfeit utopia. But it is all built on illusion – lies – deceit – spin – misdirection – gaslighting – censorship. Christian-sounding clothes, but just tyranny dressed up.

Duane M
Duane M
3 months ago

The crux of the matter, which Kingsnorth senses but does not quite state, is that our modern industrial civilization does have a religion, which is based on faith in science. Call it Scientism.

Scientism has a lot of empirical evidence in its favor; all sorts of phenomena that once seemed mysterious can now be explained through the regularities of Physics and Chemistry (often these regularities are called laws).

The source of the present difficulty, to which Kingsnorth refers as the Void, is that Scientism is based on tangibility. Everything we know through science, we know through the evidence of repeatable experiences that can be observed and measured. In that sense, science describes the tangible world. And I have heard academic psychologists claim that all psychological phenomena can also be measured, in principle if not yet in actuality. Of course, they say that because they want Psychology to be grouped in the Sciences.

But all the experiences that matter most deeply to us are intangible. I mean, for example, joy, sorrow, fear, courage, gratitude, grief, happiness, and above all, love. Science has nothing to say about these, because they are entirely subjective and not available to observation and measurement.

Scientism is then a false religion, because faith in Scientism leads to the delusion that we are nothing more than our molecules, and Scientism causes those who believe in it to have a reduced, material perception of their own lives, which in turn leads them to seek relief from inner pain in material sources, whether by consumption, accumulation, control, or destruction. Even the new fad of seeking Life Experiences is merely substituting tangible sensory adventures (travel, dining, trekking, skydiving) for ownership of material goods. Kingsnorth’s Void of modern life is the Tyranny of the Tangible.

At the end of the day (or comment), I believe the Fox put it best :

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

(Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince)

Karl Juhnke
Karl Juhnke
2 months ago
Reply to  Duane M

I like your thinking on this.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

Of course the largest fact is omitted here: in Rome last month I was honoured to visit the city’s catacombs, filled with Muslim believers insulted by Meloni’s Christian zeal, their hearts filled with God’s love. In hoc signo vinces!