While growing up in the late 20th Century was, in the great scheme of things, a doddle I can’t help but look back and wonder what it was about the 1970s, 80s and 90s that seemed to made spirituality such a difficult matter.
Coming, as I did, from a relatively rural background the question of ‘spirit’ was fraught with confusion. We lived on the edge of a city in which there were few people of any background other than that of a fairly comfortable middle-class white and rurally sheltered persuasion. I can vividly remember the first time I saw a Black person in the city, for instance, for it was a major and rather startling experience. Although I never realised just how latent racism could be at the time, our pointing and staring at these people was memorable.
Spirituality, then, offered two official positions: on the one hand there was the positivist ideology of scientism and atheism; on the other there was the stuffiness and tradition of the local Church of England chapel. Neither, as it turned out, measured up to my own needs.
Scientism’s Illusion
Scientism, the curious idea that science will lead us into a bright and amazing future through the inevitable triumph of human inquiry and experiment, was apparently struggling even in the 1970s. For me, however, growing up in the blaze of atheist positivism within both the home and school, the ideals of the great scientists were at first attractive. I can remember, quite clearly, thinking how simple it all was going to be as I grew up into this increasingly modern and technologically free world. Of course, as many philosophers and scientists now admit, ‘Tomorrow’s World‘ was less to be about jet packs and liberty and more about economic capitalism and the failure of humanity to turn away from selfishness.
For me it was Margaret Thatcher’s vision of Britain in the 1980s that showed me just how selfish the human spirit was generally going to remain. Put aside the evidence of the two massive World Wars to put to flight the hopes of the Enlightenment and the dream of Scientism, the repeated beating of the hopes of a generation into the dust through Tory policy was enough to expose the truth of ‘The Running Man‘: “Killian is lying to you.”
Society was, and in my mind still is, living a lie. Yes, we have unpicked the nature of the human genome but many of us have yet to realise that the material is not enough. Watching my teachers strike, my education denied the time and attention I was promised, and my parent’s falling out because the money was tight was enough to show me that life was not as ‘positive’ as people were claiming.
It was an illusion. A lie.
Christianity’s Stifling Limitations
When I was about 11 years old I was faced with a choice: either move from the Cubs to join the Scouts, and all the continued humiliation that this implied, or to join the local church choir. Despite the ridicule and accusations of becoming obviously homosexual for doing so, I took the latter choice.
The Church of England in the 1980s, at least in our community, was a strange entity. There was a lovely and quite ancient Saxon chapel built around a Saxon round tower at the heart of the village which was serviced by a Vicar and (eventually) two Curates. One of the Curates was the father of my then best friend.
The attraction of the Church was two things: escaping the overly-masculine bullshit of the Scouts whilst being able to spend time in a largely all-female church choir. For an emerging teen-aged boy the pretty girls and the lack of outdoors activities was appealing. I took to things very naturally, enjoying the damp smelling books and quiet solitude of the church very deeply.
Of course, Christianity remained a mystery to me, despite the weekly attendance at church. I sang hymns, I said prayers, I listened to monologues (in-between conversations held using British Sign Language in the pews), but generally understood very little of it all. As I turned 14, and was invited to become an Altar Boy, I was required to be baptised and confirmed… and so, dutifully, I went through these largely meaningless rituals of belonging. Certainly I felt part of something, but I wasn’t quite sure what.
It all came to head as my best friend’s father, the Curate you’ll remember, finally broke off his marriage of many years and moved in with the woman he’d been having an affair with for many months. Observing that the church seemed largely unconcerned with the matter, simply shipping him off to a larger role within another rural community, it seemed to me that the best way to get promoted in the Church of England was to break most of the teachings of the organisation’s founder.
It was an illusion. A lie.
Seeking In My Own Way
Scientism and Christianity both seemed a lie to me. There I was, in my mid-teens, feeling very much disillusioned. To add to matters, from age 16, I got a part-time job working at the local McDonald’s. It wasn’t cool, it was very sweaty and smelly, but it paid better than did choirboy. I essentially drifted away from the church.
The period between age 15 and 18, when I went to University, consisted of experimentation. I imagine that for most people this is not something unusual. Yet, and this is important, for me it was an experimentation of the spirit more than of the body or mind.
I went searching for something different. Naturally, having assessed the field, I went first to that which was forbidden. No, not drugs or even booze at first… but to runes, tarot and ritual magick. All of these things were forbidden. All of them attractive, mysterious and exciting.
I read Crowley and I worked rituals. I sought to make pacts with spirits and demons. I wanted to be able to predict the future, control other people, and make sense of the biggest question of all: “who am I, what is my purpose?”
One by one, I explored and unpicked the ‘secrets’, the occult (that which is hidden). In those days getting hold of books and knowledge was difficult, especially for a teenager. These days it seems as if every bookstore is awash with materials… but that is now. Back then, it was illicit and it was probably dangerous. I loved it… and I discovered that much of it seemed to work.
Is it any wonder, then, that by the time I got to University I was fairly convinced that everything that science and Christianity had told me was bogus? There was little that these two institutions of knowledge, filled with claims but evidenced as being organisations of hypocrisy, could really teach me. Selfish humanity seemed committed to hiding behind the walls of ‘progress’ and ‘tradition’… and I was having nothing of that.
Tune in next time as I begin to unpick the fascination of Runes, Tarot and Ritual Magick, while asking ‘what is spirituality anyway?’
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