Beyond Religion The Cultural Evolution of the Sense of the Sacred from Shamanism to Religion to Post-Religious Spirituality by William Irwin Thompson. Lindisfarne Books 2013, 89 pages
A review by Frederick J. Dennehy One of the guilty pleasures of reading Owen Barfield is to delight in the arch manner in which he disposes of unexamined or pretentious ideas. For instance, in commenting upon the assumptions of many nineteenth century historians of myth, Barfield observes: The remoter ancestors of Homer, we are given to understand, observing that it was darker in Winter than in Summer, immediately decided there must be some ‘cause’ for this ‘phenomenon,’ and had no difficulty in tossing off the ‘theory’ of, say, Demeter and Persephone, to account for it. A good name for this kind of banality -- the fruit, as it is, of ‘projecting post-logical thoughts back into a pre-logical age -- would perhaps be Logomorphism.’1
Further on, in speaking of philosophers and historians who equate all thinking with judging, and limit “ideas” to the products of judging, he writes: It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that ‘Realism’, in the sense of an hypostatization of such ideas, must be merely one step further into the realm of unreality. For it is a step into the realm of shadows of shadows. Such hypostatization is today commonly attributed to, e.g., Plato, and that not only by amateurs in philosophy, but even by those who have made it their principal task to interpret him to others, and who, following Kant, regard it as a matter of course that they know what the author of Timaeus meant better than he did himself. Thus, it may be remarked… that logomorphism is always to be suspected in the writing of modern commentators, etc., upon ancient philosophy or literature…. So ubiquitous is the Königsberg ghost that it is, in my opinion, wise to assume every modern writer on every subject to be guilty of Logomorphism, unless he has actually produced some evidence of his innocence.2 1 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, (Wesleyan University Press 1973), p. 90. 2 Id., at 196.
Barfield’s lifelong interest was the evolution of consciousness, and in the passages quoted above, besides having a great deal of fun, he acknowledges the difficulty inherent in speaking of (let alone apprehending) an older form of consciousness out of the understandings and the vocabulary of a contemporary one. The difficulty is formidable, but not insuperable. The reality of the evolution of consciousness is a critical historical insight. We should not “pass over it in silence.” But to talk about it, we need a sensitivity to the changing nature of language, the creative truth of metaphor and the power of mythopoeia, and a strengthened capacity for imagination. And sometimes we just have to coin new words. The evolution of consciousness is also a principal theme of William Irwin Thompson’s Beyond Religion: The Cultural Evolution of the Sense of the Sacred from Shamanism to Religion to Post-Religious Spirituality. Thompson, who has read both Rudolf Steiner William Irwin Thompson and Owen Barfield extensively, and admires them, nonetheless follows the outline of the evolution of consciousness depicted by Jean Gebser in The Ever Present Origin, which identifies the successive historical stages of consciousness as archaic, magical mythical, mental/rational, and integral. It is difficult, if not impossible, to map Gebser’s system onto either Steiner’s or Barfield’s. “Origin,” for Gebser, is not an exclusively temporal concept, and means something more like an always present divine or spiritual reality, not unlike the Greek word “arche.” The “archaic” structure, and the “magical” structure, appear to be similar to the condition of “original participation” posited by Barfield. Gebser’s “mythic” structure is likely related to Steiner’s third post-Atlantean epoch, or “sen-
summer issue 2014
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