In my post “Religion With Only One Calorie!” I talked about what happens when you begin to remove mystery and paradoxical symbols from religion. On one level, it seems like a self-perpetuating cycle in which symbolic language and thought is removed, thus preventing the next generation from properly interacting and experiencing it as a means of understanding the subconscious.

A reader pointed out that this isn’t quite a complete depiction of what happens though. Arizona suggested that we cycle back and forth from a

[…] rejection of the mystery by one generation and the wholehearted but unquestioning swallowing of the mystery by the next, and so on and on. You go from an arid cultural landscape to a chaotic jungle and back again.

I think this is a really fantastic point with really enormous implications culturally and historically. At first blush it seems like a refutation of what I’d said above, which basically indicated that we’d move into greater patterns of restriction. I think the part of my original statement I’m more interested in though is this idea that our ability to understand and utilize symbols and symbolic language becomes increasingly crippled as we throw out religious mysteries and replace them with logical constructs.

I’m of the more Jungian persuasion wherein in symbols and religion arise as a natural component of the human psyche - whether you want to call it archetypes or something else. While you might be able to squash religion as a social phenomenon, you’ll never be able to remove the underlying psychic principles which give rise to it. Thus, when you strip out the mystery-symbols from religious systems, you’re forcing people to find them elsewhere in sort of a willy-nilly fashion. Quasi-religious systems become cobbled together out of events and persons in one’s life, as archetypal contents become projected on and identified with various mundane things.

For the average person though, this “chaotic jungle” of symbols and mystery running loose becomes very dangerous - as they are not prepared to handle it, and don’t understand how it all works. My story-systems site is more or less an effort to speak to that trend and teach people basic primitive survival skills for living in this jungle. The vast majority of people though without symbolic survival skills will end up having the mystery-producing part of their minds cued up and encoded according to the dominant cultural signs and stories. You can see this today in the religious and completely irrational fixation that people have with terrorism and patriotism. The United States has taken over the archetypal position of God for many, and terrorism the Devil.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple years deconstructing religion in an effort to free myself and others from its strictures, so it’s always really interesting to me when I come up against completely legitimate worthwhile reasons to have religion. If we look at this whole idea of the “arid landscape” versus the “chaotic jungle”, religion tends to represent a middle - or at least and alternative - option. Religion can be used as a safeguard to maintain the proper functioning and relation to the subconscious, to symbols and mysteries contained there. They can help make sure that things that are sacred are maintained as sacred - rather than having mundane, worldly, or political stories used in their place. Admittedly, this doesn’t hold up especially well in real life. Most religions fail miserably to teach people to interact with their unconscious mind; and most religions become warped and twisted into furthering completely irreligious ends. But it’s wild to think that it doesn’t have to be like that, and if we actively cultivate that understanding in ourselves, we can bring it out into the world.