Dr. Craig Chalquist
Chalquist.com
October 2026
Whether we accept it or not, the influence of the patriarchal religions is fading. Given humanity's long fascination with spirituality, what might replace them? What would a healthy and mature spiritual revolution need to be like?
When did the stories of God become a story of totality, of a closed system, of a One? To what corner of human longing does the story of the One belong? As the motors of fundamentalism in all of the religions of One God race on the fuel of battered bodies and broken hearts, the logic of the One chokes on itself like a stone in the mouth.
—Laurel Schneider, Beyond Monotheism
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings...
—Shakespeare, Richard II
For as far back as we find evidence of the human presence, we find the signs of spirituality. Even societies that do not worship officially literalized gods display reverence, ritual, sacred stories, and reflective disciplines. In old myths, ancient texts, artistic images, schizophrenic hallucinations, and dreams of people from all over the world, psychiatrist C. G. Jung noted a ceaseless and pervasive flow of spiritual symbolism. He would have recognized the endeavor to upload human consciousness into some digital paradise as a religious project: one of countless examples of how we act out spiritual impulses unconsciously.
When we study religious membership, however, the picture is very different: one of decrease in many parts of the world, especially places long under religious authority. Where religions are expanding, the converts are often young, uneducated, and subjected to aggressive evangelizing. Elsewhere, membership is declining steadily. In the United States, even at a time when Christian nationalists control and censor large sectors of the media, "Nones"—mostly the "spiritual but not religious," with relatively few agnostics and atheists mixed in—are now the largest group by population, and it's growing. It has been for decades.
This does not mean that the materialist worldview—matter is all there is, no gods exist, nothing but physics drives the creation of stars and galaxies—is winning. It means that enormous numbers of people are falling into what psychiatrist Viktor Frankl called the existential vacuum: an abyss of alienation and meaninglessness widening as spiritual needs—for meaning, purpose, a framework of devotion, a sense of the sacred—go unrecognized and unmet.
In response, three of the most common socially sanctioned palliatives resorted to for keeping all this unconscious are automaton conformity (live a false life; shop 'til you drop), destructiveness, and authoritarianism, as Erich Fromm observed. Those overlap. The choice isn't whether to have or forego higher needs: it's to repress them and have symptoms, or to give those needs satisfying creative expressions.
For growing numbers of us, the materialist worldview is unsatisfying, and traditional patriarchal religion no longer serves. However, both harbor important if partial truths. Materialism is often linked to science, and science works. It remains one of our best methods for finding things out. But vital swathes of subjective experience—including the visionary—remain beyond its scope, forcing investigators to reduce spiritual states to the materiality of spun-up brains. Science as presently conceived reduces interior experiences to exterior causes.
The truths in religion are of a different order, metaphorical rather than literal, and carry their own durability. As a sacred tale, for example, the Jesus mythos will outlive the death of Christianity, an ideology so hollowed out by centuries of hypocrisy and violence that authentic Jesus followers increasingly refuse to call themselves Christians. (In the States, it is quite a spectacle for hatred, greed, racism, sexism, homophobia, cruelty, war, and tyranny to masquerade as the message of the loving Prince of Peace, a man who fed the poor, healed the sick, taught women, rejected judgmentalism, and died at the hands of murderous despots.)
The old bottles of authority-driven religion are broken, the wine skins worn out, the tattered vestments unpatchable. The moment is ripe for rebottling the wine of living truths. In fact, it is already pouring forth and has been for some time.
It is widely thought that we live in a time of disenchantment. The old gods are dead or dying, their sacred places paved over. Faith has given way to expediency and explanation. As the planet overheats, governments fall to the lure of authoritarianism. All this is true. But it neglects how an ancient form of enchantment is coming back to life.
In my novel Heartlander, the protagonist Simeon Mackenzie poses the question: What was the original religion of humanity?
There was not, of course, any one-size-fits-all faith, not even among early shamans and medicine people. Variety, always. But our best evidence points to a set of shared characteristics. A core characteristic is animism, the sense of everything enspirited, ensouled, and conscious in its own way. That is different from the dictionary's vitalistic definition of things having an immaterial spirit. In animistic cultures, a rock, a stream, a grove do not possess some animating being lurking behind them: they are themselves animate. The dualism is ours, not the animist's.
Animism is a modernist term for what people once knew as vigorous presences rather than dead objects. The Polynesian and Melanesian experience-concept of mana, a power or energy that can live in just about anything, has echoes all over the world: chi, qi, kami, prana, nyama, ashe, ntu, baraka, ni, manitou, wakan, orenda, itsi, ruach, grace... That each term has a specific cultural meaning matters but does not erase the obvious parallels. Learning some of this from Joseph Campbell, Star Wars creator George Lucas called this pervasive power of being the Force.
Terrapsychology, the study of how the things of the world (whether natural or built, large or small) live inside us—as moods, dream figures, conflicts, and many other forms—takes no stand on why things address us, but observes an intersubjective animism at work: the unconscious acts as though places, for example, are enspirited or ensouled. It's not that rocks think like we do, something that would require flesh, a nervous system, culture, and a human upbringing; it's that they have what Teilhard de Chardin called the "within of things," an interiority that runs down through matter and perhaps beyond. The philosophy of panpsychism (or panexperientialism) makes a similar point. So have many of the world's greatest scientists and philosophers.
Animism is found in an ancient vintage of spiritual ingredients that also include trust in sacred experience and expanded states, participation mystique (a higher state of consciousness, not a lower one), wisdom tales, sacred art, egalitarianism and matriarchy (not exclusive gynarchy), guided initiation into maturity, embodied ritual and celebration, holistic practices, dream interpretation, and protective reverence for nature. All these continue in some of today's cultures, indigenous ones in particular. Little of this will be news to practitioners of alternative or holistic spirituality.
A contemporary term for this spiritual blend enriched by centuries of science and millennia of art, piety, philosophy, literature, reflection, ecology, and creativity is the Participatory Worldview, fittingly symbolized by the image of Earthrise. It is participatory in how it emphasizes that embodied consciousness, including ours, is entangled with nature, matter, Earth, and cosmos. We can't stand apart from what we study; deep knowing is not just intellectual, but with one's entire self, a self not split from the world, as colonial projects would insist through violence and theft, but in ongoing intimacy with our surround. Other qualities associated with the Participatory Worldview include intellectual openness, fluidity of ideas and practices, welcoming of the symbolic and archetypal dimensions of life, continuing exploration of the dynamic unconscious, appreciating cultural and other differences, valuing the sacred through many paths, refusing to see all in nature as a commodity for sale, and reattaching to nature outside as well as inside us: we too are part of the natural world, not its owners or masters.
Much led up to the Participatory Worldview, including East-West wisdom exchanges going back to the early 1900s, the Bengal Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance, the Human Potential Movement, feminism and the Civil Rights Movement, the Goddess Movement and ecofeminism, the Green Belt Movement, Jungian and organismic psychology, ecopsychology and ecotherapy, the push for Indigenous rights, movements for queer rights, Liberation Theology and Psychology, Process Philosophy and Theology, the Human Energy Project, terrapsychology, and many other invigorating cultural currents.
Because what is emerging influences nearly every sector of human culture and consciousness around the world, I think of it as a vast world-girdling current of reenchantimism: a felt, deep, life-transforming sense that we are always in a larger conversation than the human, and both our complexities and our delights increase when we realize it. Reenchantimism is the alternative to either arid materialism or brutally repressive religion. Reenchantimism sees through monocreedism, the reduction of all difference to sterile unity. In many parts of the world, this reenchanting and reanimating current is swelling into a wave.
"Extinction burst" is a common term for the Great Backlash (as Linda Buzzell puts it) of authoritarianism taking hold of frightened people seeking certainty and panicked by complexity: people who want a commanding dad figure to tell them what to do even though they live in adult bodies. An extinction burst is a sharp, temporary increase of an action once the reward is withdrawn. When the lights do not change at a crosswalk, for example, some people press the button repeatedly, thinking that will help. It doesn't.
In the case of patriarchy, large portions of humanity have moved beyond it inwardly; its days seem numbered. As a result, we are reaching the end of monocreedism: a worldview in which monolithic unity dominates difference and diversity: one God, one dogma, one faith, one master race, one master gender, one ruling class, one nation, or one universal cause or substance behind everything. That all we know, that the universe itself, might well emanate from one primal energy or mystery is not inherently monolithic. Denying the importance of the many is.
Of course, we've also been hearing for a long while about a New Age in human affairs: from darkness to enlightenment, from Pisces to Aquarius, from unchecked industrial destruction to what the Earth Charter calls Earth Community. Fragmented perceptions giving way to integral holistic consciousness, intolerance and hate falling before inclusivity and love. However much the announcers of all this have been naive about the strength of opposition to it, it's happening nevertheless. I've referred to its counterpart in the nature-honoring spiritualities of the United States going all the way back to primal times as Statesight. Collectively, in fits and starts, we are waking up to the participatory dance.
But a shadowy lingering flaw hampers attempts at spiritual revolution.
Like many people seeking absolute certainty, Rene Descartes had sustained a lifetime of losses. His mother died a year after he was born. His emotionally and geographically distant father left him in the care of his grandmother within a Catholic family in a Protestant region of France. He joined the army despite precarious health, tried to be the attorney his father wanted him to be, was forced to enter Leiden University under a false name, was accused of plagiarism (as brilliant students sometimes are), had a daughter out of wedlock who died young of scarlet fever. He moved a lot. Is it any wonder he sought something absolute to believe in? (After his death, even his remains were moved around.)
Descartes is relevant here because he stands with one foot in traditional religion and the other in early science. Both fed his need for solid ground to stand on. Remember, religion of a certain rigidity seeks absolute truth, and science emerged from religion. Science's earliest self-knowing practitioners were religious. Descartes is the prototype of the anxiously unmoored modern individual seeking belief in what is sure.
Psychologically, the need for absolute certainty is a trauma response which the search for belief is made to serve. The emotionally healthy and mature have firm convictions but are able to change their minds when necessary. By contrast, the insecure need things to be true for all time and in every situation. Belief is then more important than fact, reason, evidence, compassion, or self-honesty. It must be absolute.
And literal. The Genesis story cannot symbolize new beginnings or the dawning light of consciousness or be held as one creation tale among many: it must historically have happened. Here, though, is where belief becomes selective. Jesus' teaching to remove the beam from our own eye before fussing with the splinter in our brother's clearly can't refer to two-by-fours or actual eyes, but this clear warning against what we now call projection isn't brought up much at the pulpit. Parables are allegorized into one-dimensional lessons. Literal truths are cherry-picked to fit one's worldview—and the insatiable need for total certainty.
Clinging to belief ends all negotiation and inquiry. It also curtails experience, especially spiritual experience, otherwise known as gnosis. Belief says: This is absolute truth for all time. Gnosis replies: Truth is an experience we find and share. No one enjoys exclusive access to it, so no authority can dictate it to us. Truth is not a rule book, it is what we continually discover and try to live by.
Developmentally, clinging to certainty is akin to what young children display when insisting that the rules of a game can never be changed. Below a certain age, children take metaphors literally. Symbolically informed perception emerges only later, if at all. Because we all carry gaps in our maturity no matter how satisfying our upbringing, we all fall into literal-mindedness at times. Authoritarian religions and dogmatic scientism play on that.
Literal belief has leaked into what goes by various names as an alternative to traditional religion: New Age, Holistic Spirituality, Mindfulness, Wellness, Manifesting, and so on. The Pleiadians, Sirians, Andromedans, Ascended Masters, Space Brothers, and their multifarious equipment, such as vibrations, energies, rays, frequencies, and manifestations, are taken very literally instead of as having a subtler symbolic value or meaning. So it was in American Theosophy, the origin (along with New Thought) of much of the mind-power emphasis on personal improvement.
Like the vocabulary, which is abstract, vague, and borrowed, the level of thought involved clings to the stiffened mechanical metaphors of past centuries. Our spiritual efforts are not strengthened by disguising them in scientific terms like "quantum." Physics envy is a self-defeating psychology that has long needed outgrowing; it's time to update our language. Our experiences and ideas can stand on their own at this point without chasing an acceptance that will never appear, least of all from anyone still stuck in a materialist worldview, unaware of humanity's long and persistent history of spirituality, and lacking any conscious sense of the numinous.
We have more valuable work on the way to spiritual revolution—like learning to take our spiritual perceptions seriously.
Let's learn a valuable lesson from C. G. Jung, who spent so many years justifying his visionary encounters by draping them in scientific terminology, only to be told by one imaginal character (probably Sophia): Let the science go.
This was no criticism of science, which works well in its own proper place. She was warning him about how much time and trouble he was putting into working out "empirical" concepts and theories and terms for experiential material far beyond the reach of any science still stuck to materialism. Jung even leaned on former patient and quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli to write scientifically about synchronicities: those meaningful "coincidences" in which events that do not cause one another—say, a death dream and someone dying—appear meaningfully together.
He need not have bothered. People determined to see such events as coincidental aren't convinced by scientific terminology. They suffer from what Lionel Corbett called a Scrooge Defense, a need to discount the extraordinary because it undermines their guiding story about how the world works. We see the same disparagement throughout the history of religion: fear of the power of visions to topple orthodoxy and ideology. The more close-minded among the clergy didn't like Jung's visions either. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, or a depth psychologist either.
A part of Jung's project that bore fruit was his discovery that many of his spiritual perceptions carried themes from ancient traditions like Gnosticism and Hermeticism. He was not lost in a sea of confusing images: they appeared like landmarks above the mist to help navigate a mystical ocean.
Lance Owens writes about the "hermeneutics of vision" whereby spiritual perceptions reread and interpret (the "hermeneutics" part) the traditions they echo or come out of. Because the visions source a truer, deeper tradition that is timeless, they need nothing outside them to authenticate them. No authority, human or written or dogmatic, is qualified to pass judgment on them: “In the vision tradition, the ‘lifting up’ [a root of ‘anagoge’] occurred specifically through the imaginative power of vision," not a rational, intellectual or discursive process, let alone an act of belief.
One way to understand this is by realizing that a certain kind of imagination midwifes the experiential insights at the origin of every spiritual and religious tradition. These insights are forgotten, even repressed, once the ambitious, controlling, and spiritually blind institutionalize the tradition and kidnap it. They then claim to represent it even as its spiritual strength departs from behind the hardening ramparts and belief pushes aside experience, dogma shoulders out openness, and power corrupts absolutely.
Traditions that take imagination as a way of deep knowing distinguish "true imagination," as the physician-alchemist Paracelsus put it, and false, misleading, or dangerous imagination of the kind that in our day has unwisely literalized the dreaded homunculus of alchemy into AI. Imagination misused for power or other selfish drives shows up in folklore as a kind of dark sorcery. "For healthful I can be," says Mercurius, a guiding spirit of alchemy in the ancient texts, "but also poisonous." A lot depends on intent. Not just surface intent, but all the way down.
This difference in the uses of imagination might be the kernel of truth in the equation of spiritual or visionary perception with madness. It is true that the psychotic sometimes see true things missed by the rest of us (the film Jupiter's Wife comes to mind), but the question, "How do you know you're not crazy?" is not asked of scientists who build dangerous weapons or lethal technologies. Psychotic inflation and visionary encounter are two very different psychologies. Psychotics claiming to, let us say, kill someone because God told them to take the "command" literally and are unable to doubt themselves, whereas saner people seized by the spirit often fear they are losing their marbles and are open to multiple interpretations of what they experienced.
If we can hold what we perceive beyond the ordinary ken very lightly, we stand a better chance of receiving its multiple lessons and blessings than by taking it literally: another reason for not seeking official validation, for officials who validate always literalize and reduce. Besides, how often does such an official accept radically new perceptions? Won't they always be suspect? The only real purpose for authorities that decide which visions are true is to keep the organization safe from any that challenge its foundations or direction.
Another sanity indicator is learning discernment about whom to share with. Indigenous societies tend to have a wise person or healer one can consult about whether to share widely, closely, or not at all, and whether the vision, perception, dream, or encounter is intended more for oneself. A useful system; in its absence we might at least ask ourselves such questions.
Let the term imaginal liberty be present here: the self-evident truth of a right to be guided by one’s own carefully tended visions. This includes respecting the autonomy of the imaginal as its own realm of being with its own forms of presence, preference, and organization. The imaginal depths are not an open-pit mine, but a source of wisdom for creative living. We do well to let these sacred wells breathe, free of premature enclosure in clunky concepts or literalized claims. They share water of life on their terms.
It used to be that only a relative handful of quirky people were subjected to conscious confrontations with presences, insights, and images beyond the norm. Now millions are. What's to be done about it?
So yes, this revolution—or evolution—is happening, inside us and around us. What can we bring to it to help it play out creatively and humanely?
To recap and augment, a good enough (supportive, healthy, inclusive, and relevant, though not perfect) spiritual revolution for our time would be characterized by, at the very least:
An animistic, participatory, Earth-honoring worldview / guiding story / loreway, including an updated creation story or even a set of them. My "Brief Cosmic Story" gives a summary that could be unfolded into a much fuller and more evocative creation tale.
An emphasis on story, experience, and inspiration over literal-minded belief. Total certainty is a desert mirage that retreats as we grope toward it. And all those silly arguments about whose mirage is correct! On whose authority? That of the thirsty blocking others from finding water. Absolute belief divides absolutely. Then we all wind up parched.
Recognition that spiritual experience needs a new vocabulary. The old borrowed language of circuits, vibes, and hydraulics is exhausted. We need a poetic language of presences that can stay close to our experiences. Sacred experience longs for sacred expression.
Education about the patriarchal idealizing of father figures—clergy, gurus, charismatic leaders—as pathologically regressive. Idealizing is normal in childhood, but in adulthood it needs to be healed in psychodynamic therapy, not acted upon. Narcissists easily take advantage of it to build cults and cultlike followings.
Space for healthy, humane, and self-authenticating visionary states. There is a clear psychological difference between authentic spiritual insights and perceptions and hallucinations or delusions. Sacred encounters are not invented: they happen in ways that might trouble our creeds and their keepers but ultimately bring needed realignments on many levels.
Appreciation for and openness to the world's visionary traditions. The Human Potential Movement was one of several forces that embraced this. Although perennialism began as an attempt to locate pre-Christianity in various religions, a deeper idea took over: that a core cluster of certain experiences power spirituality wherever found and in whatever cultural expression.
Imaginal liberty, in both senses: freedom to imagine freely and deeply, and respect for the imaginal as its own realm of being. This autonomy of the imaginal shows up in various traditions, including Alexandrian alchemy and Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Islamic gnosis (including the School of Illumination and Ibn al-Arabi), American Transcendentalism (one offspring of Statesight), German Idealist philosophy, Jungian psychology, and terrapsychology.
Faith in the highest possibilities of human nature. Abraham Maslow was right: we sell human nature short, especially when we selectively see only its shadow side. Evil is not a primary drive, but a frustration and misdirection of the self-actualizing tendency found in everyone. Evil is a diminishment of our humanity, not intrinsic to it.
An ethic of care. Philosophical trolley problems and lifeboat dilemmas were thought up by people in clean rooms isolated from real injustice. When all goes well, we all grow up to care for one another; you can see it even in young children. Any decent person with a decent heart will feed you when you are starving and pull you out of the way of a traffic accident. The world needs more decent people, not more abstract principles or books of rules.
Justice and accountability. Not revenge or retribution, which are symptomatic of emotional immaturity, but standards of fairness that hold the violent, greedy, and exploitative accountable for their harm. A world with both utter wealth and utter poverty: that, as MLK and Gandhi pointed out, is a form of systemic violence. We need societies in which everyone counts and nobody is left behind, as Christ, the Buddha, Muhammad, and many other spiritual teachers have insisted. Whatever our politics, we ought always to be on the side of the oppressed and victimized. Nonpartisan is not neutral.
Enjoyment of and insistence on diversity: of sex and gender, of ways to love, of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other dimensions too often pushed to one side. Unity without difference is totalitarianism. On the other hand, emphasizing only difference can lead to social and psychological fragmentation. Unity and difference belong together and enrich one another.
Collective celebrations and rituals. We should all be honoring Diwali, Kwanzaa, Samhain, the Day of the Dead, Chinese New Year, and many traditional festive occasions as well as Pride, Earth Day, and other more recent gatherings. "But then we'd be celebrating every day"—good! Let our entire life become celebratory. It is tragic that so many die regretting how much living they missed because of having to work so much.
A mood of wonder, joy, inspiration, and reenchantment. My "Declaration of Enchantment" describes that capacity as a human right. What good is living without at least an occasional feeling of magic? To feel none, to lose wonder and enthusiasm, to never feel joy, ought to be considered signs of something terribly wrong. Sick societies, nations, religions, and governments are identifiable by their joylessness.
Notice that the list above does not emphasize logistics, planning, or implementing. Those are important, but the world has never known a shortage of people who are good at them. "Building a boat," Saint-Expuery observes in Citadelle, "isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea." Without implementers we might have temporary visionary confusion, but without visionaries and the longings they entice we have nothing.
A Ragnarok terror whistles through accelerating winds. So much is ending that we counted on.
But in the story of Ragnarok, after the final collapse and the death of the old gods, the World Tree still stands and Earth rises in renewal. New ways to be and live walk the land. Survivors gather outdoors. The winds gradually abate.
The world is not ending; the monocreedal worldview is. The rule of bullies gives way, at first in unconnected pockets of conflict, to the forces for justice and sanity. We could use a spirituality, a mythology, a worldview adequate to the challenges we face as we help the world repair itself.
If the guiding stories of this planetary mythology—a mythology locally grown and internationally linked: unity and difference, difference and unity!—are to be post-literal, post-patriarchal, and post-heroic, of what will they consist?
Inspiring fictions, perhaps. Jack Zipes writes that science fiction stories are the fairytales of our time. Extend that into speculative fantasy: not only SF, which not everyone likes, but fantasy, magical realism, wonder tales, even reignited myths and legends, folktales and fables from every culture on Earth. Maybe it's not a question of eradicating the old tellings (which only return to life, like Hydra's heads, when we try), but of dreaming the myth onward, as Jung puts it, by giving it modern dress.
Romantic movement philosopher-artists like Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel, and Schelling were early heralds calling for a new mythology. It would serve as a philosophical worldview, especially for Schlegel and Schelling; but the stories came first. They were ahead of the time which is now ours.
For fiction and imagination allow us to reimagine everything. Given imaginal liberty, the depths produce new creations and solutions, approaches and insights, we do not expect.
Some time back while writing Soulmapper, my first novel, I was surprised by the emergence of the strange seedling of a new fictional religion. My fiction is speculative. So in sixty years or so, aided by two queer women, a Palestinian immigrant New Yorker named Mariam Najjar will found a post-patriarchal religion called Lamplight carried not by doctrine or hierarchy or belief, but by inspiration, care, storytelling, and hope. As Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler demonstrated, realism and its arguments are less effective at times than fiction in finding our way forward.
Do I believe Lamplight or the Powers that its stories describe? No, but I believe in them. I believe in Simeon's grief and eventual joy when the gods he took so literally withdraw, leaving mostly their force of presence behind. For this too appears in the old tales, as when Jesus says: I must go, but the Comforter you will have always. Tragic, how often his point is missed. If he did literally return, he might replace the Cross with a ray of light, or with the blue rose of his companion in deep work, Mary Magdalene.
Fiction can be a powerful motivator: more powerful in some ways than arguments, beliefs, debates, mountains of data, or storyless facts in the raw. As I mentioned as a panelist at the World Fantasy Convention in 2026, the imaginal presences in our fictions speak from beyond the conscious mind to animate our characters, complexes, imaginings, symbols, symptoms, intuitions, and dreams.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the Stone that the builders rejected, the salvific medicine for our troubled time, waited for release in that most unlikely of spurned alleys of being: the heartfully liberated imagination.
Further Reading:
Beacons at the Edge: How Story, Inspiration, and Love Change the World
Dreaming Up a Reenchanting Worldview
Earthrise: Decoding the Speech of the Planet
From Confining to Spacious: Monocreedism vs. Lamplight
From Worship to Apprenticeship: Gods and Archetypes as Threshold Guardians
How Imagination and Play Move Us Forward
The Dream Sky Is Weeping Crosses: The Fall of Monocreedism
More here.