Stephen explores the way our forebears used to experience epiphany, the direct experience of the spirit. He recounts the historical events which lead to its exclusion from the modern western world and how we came to eschew divination and the spirit world. “It was just this animating connection between the world and the individual that the Christian Church sought to destroy. Christians wanted the “obedience” of Pagans (Romans 15, 18-19). Apart from the torture of prophets at major shrines (Fox 673- 681), the triumphant Church of the 4th century did not persecute Pagans as such. Rather they destroyed the shrines and images, cut down the groves, despoiled the landscape and prohibited on pain of death the magical and oracular practices that gave the Gods a voice in the human world. As Eusebius recounted, they sent an iconoclastic emissary to “every pagan temple's re-cess and every gloomy cave.”
He goes on to examine the false splitting of our imagery into ‘Holy Spirit Imagery’ and ‘Psychic Imagery’.
Having explored this history, and the nature of the psychological crisis it has brought us, Stephen looks at the role of divination in the ‘old world’ and its relevance to us now. Particularly he examines Jung’s perceptions of the Yijing as a tool to explore the psyche. A solution to the moral opacity that the exclusion of symbolic thinking and the images of our deeper psyche has wrought upon us.
This article lays out the issues facing us and provides a context for the struggle many of us face in our attempts to orientate the Yijing in our culture.
The article is here.