michael-dean-k/

In October of 2024 I sliced history into eras of my own. Prior to that, my historical timeline was built on sandy approximates. The challenge here is that so many historical eras have different time periods (10, 50, 250 years), and so it requires you to remember specific date ranges for specific things. Unless you’re a historian, you most definitely won’t.

I’ve been long drawn to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, and decided to use this as a historical map of even intervals. They break history into “saeculas,” 80-year cycles, the interval of an average human life, and perhaps not coincidentally, the interval between major world conflicts. They go back to the 1370s, I think, but I’m trying to work through the major milestones in the 400 years before that (which includes the Schism, the Crusades, the founding of Oxford, the Magna Cart, Thomas Aquinas, which all seem relevant to the millennia and the rise from the Dark Ages).

The point of a historical timelines of equal intervals is that (1) it’s easy to remember—and I’ve even given my own names to make them stick—so that (2) any new information, ie: ideas or people, can easily slot into that model. It helps to know the Renaissance Era is 1370, Discovery Era 1487, Scientific Era 1594, and Enlightenment Era 1704, so that when I come across Hobbes in 1600s, I know, oh, that’s the Scientific Era, which makes sense because Hobbes brought the first scientific understanding of political philosophy. Today I made some progress on updating my October 2024 map, which I started in 1095 (the Shism) and wrongly named “the scholastic era” (which is better for the following phase).

Instead I think the start should be in 962, and called “The Schism Era.” The new order (I) kicks off with Otto I becoming emperor through the Pope, which is significant because in the prior 75 years, there was no emperor due to the peak of viking/barbarian raids, and it was the biggest threat of Christianity being erased. Since Otto, the Holy Roman Empire stuck for 8 centuries, until dissolved by Napolean, so this really is a reconsolidation, the exit from the Dark Ages. The awakening (II) is a spiritual crisis, when Rome adds the “filioque” a term that alters the original trinity, this leads to (III) the Schism between Orthodox and Catholic church, and erupts in (IV) a civil war between the Church (the Pope) and the (Holy Roman) Empire at Canossa in 1077.

Then the “Cathedral Era” kicks off in 1095 with the Crusades, which is it’s own new world order, where a French faction of Catholicism (pope-aligned), helps launch (1) a cross-country military coalition that supports the church, which can (2) take back Jerusalem from turks, (3) prevent anti-pope revolutions, and (4) thrwart internal civil wars of feuding knights. This leads to Worms in 1112 (II), which is really the original separation of church and state (though really it’s like 2 separate governments, where the church still has laws and the right to kill). This period is marked by many crusades, the rise of cathedrals from this new order (church having a better military with more resources)—Saint-Denis, Cartres, Notre Dame, Cantebury. There are also “cathedrals of thought” maybe a stretch, but includes Aquinas’s unification of Aristotle and Christianity, along with proto-scholars that would lead to Oxford. Where in the last Era, Christianity had barely survived from Magyar raids, this Era is continent-wide flourishing of building, writing, thinking (and of course, conquering). The awakening (II) featured new religious ideas (Gothic, cults, scholasticism, classicism, exuberance), and the overall exubernace spiraled into crises of King John (IV). He taxed heavily to fund failed crusades, seized lands, and jailed nobles, so this resolved with the Magna Carta (1215), which bounds the king to laws.

Following is the Scholastic Era (1215 on), which coincides with Oxford officially incorporating at a university, but I can’t do that one now… I have to leave in 20 minutes to make it to my father-in-laws memorial on time. The point is, from this morning I now understand two historical cycles that were extremely fuzzy to me. Of course there is a lot more to learn, but I have a map that other things can lock into. Most relevantly, I have a sense of the different inner-saeculuar moves ()from I>II>III>IV), which help imagine possible scenarios for today (2026 is the predicted beginning of I, a new world order).

The full-stack of religion: cosmology > scripture > practice > ethics > liturgy. We have a metaphysical impulse to make sense of our reality, and in a moment of “gnosis” someone writes it down, and then builds a series of personal practices around it, which starts to answer the question of how to live, and these ethics are legible to others who then may join in their liturgies through a church. This captures the process from which metaphysical musings conglomerate into an institution.

Note: theology is nested within cosmology, as it’s a common experience to feel the presence of an anthropomorphic Creator, but you can also have models of your reality that are non-theistic.

Where atheists go wrong is that they challenge the cosmology, but then throw out the entire branch (no scripture, no practice, no liturgy), and assume individualist secular ethics don’t require the entire stack. Modern spirituality is possibly worse, because they also throw out the entire religious stack, but the ethics they vaguely aspire to are less rigorous than even an atheist.

Where I stand: that the architecture of religion is extremely important—we need religious institutions—but our existing religion have been faulty in their conception, and have been “captured.” The overall challenge in being a heretic, in a religiously-inspired eccentric lonewolf kind of way, is that it’s very hard to concretize your own musings into liturgy. It is an isolating thing. Unless, I suppose, your system works, to a degree that your ethics are so unique or so marveled at, or, you are just a good marketer of your own scripture, that you can get maybe 100 people to “follow” you, but at that point, what you really have is a small cult, and that’s a dangerous thing too.

And so the solution, I think, is to not actually invent some New Age religion, but to create new sects of existing religions, making them more participatory higher up in the stack. To me, this is about understanding the elements of, say, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and reworking them, recombining them, and then experimenting on the resulting scriptures, practices, and ethics, in an almost scientific way, and you’ll learn the flaws in your original conceptions, and then you have to return to the source and try again, over and over, slowly accumulating your own personal relationship to a larger, shared, historical universe, and of course any orthodox Christian, and probably most Catholics too, are very much against this.

I’m talking about questioning the root level assumptions, as in, maybe Christ did not literally resurrect, and maybe God is not a conscious agent that listens to us, and maybe there is no eternal Heaven, however, maybe Christ is a mythical embodiment of the supreme ethics we should all be living, and so what if there were a sect that very rigorously tries to live as Christ, while acknowledging he does not need to be anything beyond a historical-literary figure?

When someone is squeamish about this, it seems to me there’s a great deal of fear in the resistance, a fear that was dispelled, because a supernatural Christ is the answer to that painful and existential void of what happens after death, and I just wonder if there’s room for a rich, religious life, filled with agapic love and community service, that doesn’t require infinite existence in a Kingdom of souls.

In fact, the indefinite preservation of ego beyond death might be one of the most unChristly things I can conceive. To die for good means real stakes exist. Is not the Christ who permanently dies and still chooses love anyway far more radical? More selfless? Does the resurrection not cheapen the sacrifice? Is the crucifixion without the resurrection not the braver story? (If it turns out that Christ was actually modeled off of Jesua, the righteous leader of the Essene cult that was crucified along with all the men in their group in 83 BC, and they passively accepted it, then that may be the true and ultimate crucifixion.)

Personally I think it’s more romantic to dissolve my architecture of self back into the dirt, knowing I will become fertilizer to feed bugs, and then in 10s of millions of years, all my energy will be reincarnated into the matter that makes some other unknowable being, whether fauna or mammal ... And FWIW, I am by no means anti-supernatural. I am enamored by hallucinations and dreams, and equal part terrified. I think there is an afterlife, a 3-minute DMT-odyssey that feels like 300 years, equal parts heaven and hell, built into human biology (so long as you don’t disintegrate via nuclear annihilation), but I share this I suppose to show I’m not a square Cartesian. Or maybe, in some ways, if you follow rationality far enough, it eventually becomes inconceivable and super-natural. I think there's a big difference between a rationalist who poo-poos anything but known science, and a rationalist who uses reason to plunge into the numinous (ie: Pythagoras, the alchemists, Jung, etc.). Whether “hallucinations” are actually part of a materialist reality or an “antenna” matter less to me than the idea that non-rational states of consciousness are on par, if not more important to waking states …

Again, all this to say, these are the proto-musings of a Heretic. I do believe I’ve told Taylor once that I have a budding and embarrassing dream to start a new sect of Christianity. On reflecting on it more, it's also a dangerous position to take, more of a threat than an atheist or an outsider, for a non-believer is deemed a fool, but one who reinterprets the same source material is a deranged competitor.