Paganism in the Shadows

There are many religions out there opposed to Christianity, but they all have a common theme.

This is the theme that appears absolutely everywhere. The uniting of opposites, the uniting of the soul with God, of the macrocosm with the microcosm, of the female with the male, of the ego with the non-ego. That's one of the reasons that our guest teacher today believes that there are only two religions in the world, Christianity and paganism. Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. Peter Jones explains how he comes to that conclusion by surveying the fundamental religious convictions that drive modern culture. At the outset, you're going to hear him refer to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, whose work has had a profound impact on the way our society thinks. I'm going to ask the question in this lecture, what is the evidence for the truth of the biographer of Jung who said that Jung succeeded where Julian, the apostate emperor, failed?

That's what I want to look at. What was the impact of Jung on modern Western culture? That man, David Miller, whom I mentioned, spoke about the death of God as the liberation of the West from the tyrannical imperialism of monotheism, opening up our culture to new dimensions of spirituality and human life. What's the evidence for that actually taking place in what I would call the triumph of pagan one-ism in our once Christian culture? I ask myself, was Jung an innovator or one among many? And the answer is obviously yes and no. He was an innovator in tying the arising interest in the spirituality of paganism to a new psychological methodology.

In that, he was creatively unique. No, in that what he was proposing was actually paganism, which is as old as the hills. And even though our progressives talk about their new vision, it's really as old as the hills. So don't buy that framing of the issue.

It is not true. And we have become a sort of modern day Athens where our culture is full of idols. Are we entering uncharted territory that the human race has not seen before? Does this kind of spirituality, which we now see emerge from nowhere? Or is it the reappearance of ancient pagan traditions that have been known throughout human history, you might say from the fall onwards? Along these lines, researchers of contemporary spirituality at the University of Nottingham in the UK state, we suspect, these are researchers, that the spiritual awareness we are uncovering has always been there, but is only now coming to light. What is happening, you see, is this spirituality that was undercover, esoteric, is now coming onto the surface, and we are beginning to see it.

And we're beginning to see that what was somewhat secretive and esoteric is now becoming quite public. And I began to discover a number of ways of referring to this pagan spirituality that I hadn't noticed before, and it was as our culture changes that this became clear. The 19th century British playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was, oddly enough, a pro-Stalinist socialist who hated Christianity, argued that there is only one religion, but there are hundreds of versions of it. Only one religion.

What is that religion? Well, what Jung discovered, and promised to us as healing, actually was the power of classic pagan spirituality. Jung himself was an expert in Gnosticism, in Hinduism, in Buddhism, he dabbled in medieval alchemy, and occult German mysticism. If you read books about him, it is amazing what this man didn't know about the reach of pagan spirituality. For many centuries, this kind of thinking was driven underground by the early triumph of Christianity.

Remember we referenced Julian the Apostate, who tried to bring that back into a powerful expression in the Roman Empire and failed. But from that time on, paganism was driven underground, mostly known by its initiates with a series of coded terms, which really show that this material we're looking at now is as ancient as the hills. It turns out that this syncretistic belief system of the new spirituality that we are facing is hoary with age, and underlines my basic thesis that I'm sort of defending before you, that there are only two religions. Certainly there are hundreds of variations of this one religion, but the essential commitments of it are shared by them all.

Which means that we are looking at the face-off of two radically opposed ways of looking at the world, as the Apostle Paul said so clearly in Romans 1.25. In the second century AD, worshipers of the pagan goddess Isis spoke of, quote, the true religion that should be veiled in deep silence. The second century Gnostic so-called Christians, who sought to worship Isis, did so in order to understand, quote, the great mystery. These were Gnostic Christians who attended the mystery religions cults in order to get beyond Christianity and understand the great mystery, which of course the great mystery is the mystery of God within. And those Gnostics held the belief that all religions are co-witnesses to the secret principle, which was present at the beginning of the world, the omnipresence of the divine principle and the power of Gnosis. Gnosis means knowledge, the knowledge of the self as divine.

You move along a bit and you find other phrases. The Freemasons cherish the sacred secret or the ageless wisdom, defining it as, quote, the religion in which all men agree. You see this one religion shows up in many expressions. They also call it the true religion of mankind, the ancient universal mysteries.

There's so much agreement when you begin to just scratch the surface of these various expressions of this kind of thinking. Madame Blovetsky at the end of the 19th century was the founder of the Theosophical Society, which is a highly intellectual occultic movement that does very well today, spoke about and wrote about the secret teaching of all the ages, the secret doctrine. Her immediate successor, Alice Bailey, also a Theosophist, spoke of the mystery of the ages which has been hidden from the beginning. You see that same theme, that somewhere deep down there is this essential religious knowledge that the initiates know, to which they point. Many consider the Holy Grail as the same kind of reference. The Wiccans, that is modern day witches, speak of the old wisdom. And that old wisdom is encapsulated in the phrase, as above, so below. That's a very interesting phrase. It's a very oneistic kind of phrase that the above and the below are the same.

The joining, if you like, of the opposites into one. And that phrase that's used by modern day Wiccans, and also in Freemasonry by the way, also was used in the ancient world in Gnosticism, so-called Christian Gnosticism. The Gospel of Philip has Jesus say, I came to make the things below like the things above. And this phrase, as above, so below, is to be found in the ancient Hermetic religion, a form of Gnosticism coming from the second century A.D. That same phrase can be found. And I found it in the artist of places. I was asked by the Christian Science Monitor to write a review of that best-selling popular book by Rhonda Byrne entitled The Secret.

Did you ever hear of that? In the front of this book, she speaks of the emerald tablet from 3000 B.C., on which is etched the phrase, as above, so below. It's just incredible to see the connections of all these things going throughout the ages. You find this among modern Sufists.

The Russian occultist George Gurdjieff employed the occult principle as above, so below. So you can see that these phrases really seem to be relating to the same material. Other phrases include the forgotten truth or the primordial tradition that goes back to the Tower of Babel. This was said by Houston Smith, the history of religion scholar who was seeing this relationship. The eternal script is another phrase.

The eternal writing, the eternal script. The Buddhists speak of the great enlightenment. Jung himself spoke of the collective unconscious. Some of you have probably heard of that. These mythic archetypes are all brought together and expressed as the collective unconscious into which we all plug our own psyches to get the wisdom to do exactly what we want to do.

Thank you very much. A Jungian scholar speaks about the monomyth, the soul myth, and the primordial wholeness, interesting one used by June Singer, whom I mentioned earlier, who was a disciple of Jung. All that's going to be joined to the Arcanum Arcanorum, the mystery of mysteries, the ultimate secret that lies behind all astrology, alchemy, magic, and all forms of the occult, otherwise known as the old religion. One phrase that I came across that intrigued me was the phrase, the great work. And it's known in a number of ways, but in particular, it's the term opus, opus.

You've heard of the term opus, the work of a pianist or a musician. And you find it in medieval alchemy. Their great opus is to join the human and the divine. And Carl Jung himself wrote, for the alchemist, the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. Man takes upon himself the duty of carrying out the redeeming opus. This great work that's the challenge placed before pagan thinking is described as the great work. But I came across this particular phrase seemingly innocuously expressed in a work by an environmentalist, an ecologist.

Not your run of the mill, though, kind. This was Thomas Berry, an apostate Roman Catholic theologian who died a couple of years ago, who called himself not a theologian, but a geologian. He was a spokesman for the geo, the earth.

He had ditched the notion of God and was now worshipping the earth. But his book is a bestseller, and it's all about ecology. It's entitled The Great Work, Our Way into the Future, published in 1999.

So this is a call, you see, for the saving of the planet. And he describes the historical mission or the great work of our time, get this, is to reinvent the human at the species level by means of shared dream experiences. You see the appeal there to mysticism, dream experiences, and to Jung. But the very hubris of thinking that we can reinvent the human being at the species level indicates the goal where this opus wants to take us. The work he refers to, he claims, is that done in ancient shamanic times and believes that our contemporary calling is to carry on, quote, the great work of the first peoples, the American Indians. So the classic example for us in our time is to follow the traditions and the spirituality of the American Indians, those who first inhabited this continent. I don't know how Thomas Berry, by the way, he's lectured all over the place, especially in the United Nations. He's a real favorite among those globalists who celebrate his work. But certainly that term, the great work, he's picking up from the occultic theosophists.

Thomas Bailey, in the 40s of the last century, says, there is a great and glorious unfolding plan for the destiny of the nations, which he sees in the goal of the United Nations. God's plan for the evolution of humanity and the preparation of teachers to guide it, a plan called within the esoteric traditions the great work. So this phrase is not just an any old term to talk about a challenge that somebody might have, but it finds its origin, she says, in the esoteric traditions of the great work. And it's true that the Rosicrucians, the spiritual alchemists in the Middle Ages, all use this term. Later occultic traditions of this hermetic variety used it. For instance, Eliphaz Levi, 1810 to 1875, one of the leaders of a very occult movement called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I'm sorry, these are very sort of unknown groups, but they have tremendous power, states, the great work is before all things the creation of man by himself. That is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future, especially the perfect emancipation of his will.

Do you see that changing the human being at the species level? It's appearing already in this, an entire conquest of his faculties. This could have been said by Jung, as could a further definition given by the occultist Satanist Aleister Crowley, a member of the same hermetic order. I wasn't aware of this until some of the folks I was working with last week indicated to me that Aleister Crowley, who was this satanic occultist of this hermetic movement, appears on the cover of the Beatle Sergeant Pepper. Actually Jung cites a famous phrase of Aleister Crowley, I sold my soul to the devil. This morning I was looking at something and came across the name Baphomet, which is the name of Satan. I know what it is. It was the satanic group that wanted to put the statue of Baphomet in the Oklahoma State Capitol right next to the Ten Commandments.

This is equality, folks. The joining of good and evil, I suppose. And Baphomet is the picture of Satan that Aleister Crowley was worshiping the androgynous god, and it's a figure who is both male and female. Well Aleister Crowley says, the great work is the uniting of opposites.

Remember what I told you? This is the theme that appears absolutely everywhere. The uniting of opposites, the uniting of the soul with God, of the macrocosm with the microcosm, of the female with the male, of the ego with the non-ego. Needless to say, this term was also used by Jung.

The great work, he says, is no longer to be a Christian, but to seek a new ordering of human affairs. So he's very much into that tradition of the great work. I have one final category of this terminology, and I'm not sure you've heard of it. It's called the perennial philosophy. Philosophia perennis et universalis. The perennial philosophy.

This is a further coded term, commonly used by those in the inner circle of these esoteric movements. One of the most famous adherents of this perennial philosophy is my own future king, Prince Charles. He is the patron of the Temenos Academy, which is dedicated to the central ideas of the perennial philosophy. Of course, knowing what I'm telling you, the perennial philosophy is indeed the fundamental notion that nature is divine, all right?

Now, what does Charles say in a speech recently, in 2006, actually? Only this great tradition, its sacralization of nature, will solve the environmental crisis of the 21st century. So this tradition isn't dead by any means.

This is our only hope for the future, apparently. This term is believed to have been coined in the 17th and 18th centuries, but it surely has an ear that goes back to the midst of time. A scholar I was reading speaks about the perennial philosophy as that fundamental agreement of all these different religions on this one point. I'll quote him. It's a book entitled The Joy of Sects.

I'm trying to pronounce that exactly the way it's written. Sects. Under and through each of the great traditions runs a stream, a single stream that feeds each of these traditions from a single source, the perennial philosophy.

Philip Goldberg, whom I mentioned, who describes the Hinduization of America, says that Eastern Hinduism and Western perennialism are the same. At the depth of being, though they seem different, the domain associated with mysticism, where the individual soul meets the all-encompassing divine, men and women of every spiritual orientation have encountered oneness in remarkable similar ways. I have one minute left to tell you that the man who is considered the continuator of Jung in our time, Stanislaw Grof, G-R-O-F, who practices this transpersonal psychology, also identifies himself with the perennial philosophy, as does the Gnostic Bishop of Los Angeles, Stephen Heller, who argues that the perennial philosophy is another term for Gnosticism. So here we have a whole series of terms that suggest that what we're seeing today, while Jung knew how to present it to the modern world, goes deep into time as an expression of, you might say, timeless paganism.

It's amazing, isn't it? It seems like there are many religions out there, when in reality they're simply the latest manifestations of ancient pagan traditions. Those ancient philosophies share the same essential commitments as their modern counterparts. Dr. Peter Jones has been our teacher today here on Renewing Your Mind. He is a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and the executive director of Truth Exchange.

His series, Only Two Religions, is a thorough examination of the varied religious convictions that we see around us, and his conclusions help us see that in the end there can be only Christianity and paganism. We'd like for you to have this 12-part teaching series on two DVDs. We will send them to you for your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343.

You can also give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. Understanding world religions is an important part of our theological study. When we come in contact with people from different parts of the world who have different worldviews, it allows us to introduce the gospel to them in ways they can understand. I went to tabletalkmagazine.com and did a quick word search of paganism and found nearly 70 articles available. You can continue your own study there at the website, and subscribe to our monthly Bible study magazine.

The website again is tabletalkmagazine.com. In the 1960s, there was an explosion of interest in Eastern religions. Christianity's influence faded during that time, and alternative spiritualities filled the void. Tomorrow, Dr. Jones returns with a message titled, Paganism in the Spotlight. That's Thursday, here on Renewing Your Mind.