We must self-author the Sacred.
This, too, is URGENT in our resistance.
Humans have an innate tendency towards worship and divinity.
A fundamental part of our physiological make-up is meaning making, and (metaphorically) looking up at something beyond us.
The cool thing about this innate tendency for worship and divinity-seeking is that it doesn’t ever go away, no matter how much our overt connection to The Sacred is repressed and snuffed out by colonial capitalist powers.
(It’s got a whole lot to do with dopamine and adrenaline, I’ve written extensively about the physiology of this before, click here to get into that.)
In a nutshell though, it doesn’t matter how cold and rational someone thinks they are.
It doesn’t matter how evangelical someone is about their atheism.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve whole-heartedly rejected religion and spirituality and everything it represents.
You don’t get out of having an innate tendency towards divinity-seeking and worship.
You don’t get to opt out of being in worship to “divinity” in some form or other.
The only thing that happens when we try to opt out of divinity seeking and worship, is that we don’t have any agency over what we relate to as sacred, and who we worship as representations of it.
I’m sure you already see here how very, very damaging this is for liberating our minds and worldviews from the clutches of the white supremacist, colonial, capitalist, cisheteronormative patriarchy.
When you don’t consciously self-author your relationship to divinity and to The Sacred, you just end up “worshipping” the “deities” of the dominant culture.
In our case of course, these “deities” we end up accidentally “worshipping” are Whiteness, profit, hierarchy, conquest, hyper-individualism, and unrelenting greed.
Activism and The Sacred…
And what our relationship to The Sacred has to do with our anti-colonial liberationist work:
To regard something as Sacred is to decide that it’s deserving of great respect and reverence. It’s holy, don’t fuck with it too much, respect it as it is, it’s not there to be exploited or extracted from.
Another way of saying this is that which we hold in highest value and esteem.
What is sacred to an individual is the thing that gives them a sense of purpose, the thing they value above all the rest, the thing that all the rest of their existence rests on, the thing that makes everything else make sense. It’s the lens through which everything else passes - it’s how a worldview is formed.
What is sacred to a culture is much the same, on a collective scale.
Let’s look at the white supremacist colonial empire for example.
What does the empire define as sacred, and how is this transmitted in the consciousness of our culture?
Above all things, the empire values profit, conquest, and domination.
These values are what our culture has decided are “sacred”.
(Not that anyone would ever say this outright, mind you.)
Sacred in the sense that profit, conquest, and domination form the foundational purpose of life inside the empire, all of existence rests upon them, life inside the empire only makes sense through a lens of profit, conquest, and domination.
Inside the empire, our worldview forms around these sacred ideals.
When the empire decided that profit, conquest, and domination were sacred, it also declared that those values were holy - not to be fucked with, to be defended at all costs, and treated with great respect and reverence.
And as long as our minds are still colonised, there will always be a part of us that subtly (or overtly) reveres profit, conquest, domination.
Because again, we’ve got an innate tendency towards divinity-seeking and worship. It ain’t going anywhere. It just changes direction, and often without our knowledge or consent.
How did this happen?
Late-stage capitalism as we know and live it today (in terms of the values, the worldview, the relationship to reality) is something of a hangover from feudal Christianity.
A lot of the same themes are playing out. The script hasn’t changed, only the characters.
We’ve got an overarching, all-powerful, perfect, infallible overlord (first a patriarchal God, and now patriarchal Whiteness)…
…an obsession with transcendence (either rising up to heaven by obey the laws laid down by the patriarchal God, or rising up through the hierarchy via accumulation of wealth by obeying the laws set down by patriarchal Whiteness)…
…a disregard for “the earthly realm” or Nature’s resources (either because the “earthly realm” doesn’t really count anyway and it’s all about getting into heaven, or because Nature’s resources only exist to serve the needs and whims of patriarchal Whiteness)…
…an understanding that the common person is a bit shit and needs to “earn” the favour of the all-powerful one (either because we’re all sinners in the eyes of the Patriarchal God and only by his “grace” are we “saved”, or because we’re all replaceable commodities inside of capitalism and are only allowed to keep existing when patriarchal Whiteness deigns to employ, house, and feed us).
You get it. The script hasn’t changed at all. Our fundamental worldview hasn’t changed at all.
Except now, instead of worshipping at the altar of a patriarchal God, we now worship at the altar of colonial capitalist patriarchal Whiteness.
And when I say worship, I do mean that very literally.
The physiological effects and implications are identical.
The rush of meaning, the dizzying flash that everything in all of existence makes sense, a blissful connection to something “larger” than ourselves, a sense of giddy fulfilment, and the intoxicating sensation that there’s a Power out there, somewhere.
This is why for so, so very many, the need to accumulate more and more wealth goes so far beyond survival - or even contentment. The accumulation of wealth and profit is very literally, in a physiological sense, treated with reverence.
Our world has very literally deified greed.
We see this playing out too in the fanatical (and straight up bizarre) worship of celebrities, politicians, and the ruling class.
Celebrity worship is literally that. Worship.
Because of our innate, not-going-anywhere tendency for divinity-seeking and actual worship, when we’re not consciously self-authoring our relationship with the divine - we end up literally deifying people that embody the sacred values of the empire.
Ever criticised Taylor Swift to a Swiftie? Ever seen the online comments of some working class guy bending over backwards in defence of Elon Musk? Are you noticing how fucking weird it is that we’re all so utterly obsessed with the inner lives of Hollywood celebrities? Can you feel the mania there, the hopped-up-on-dopamine thrill present?
Worship. Straight up. Literal, physiological, worship.
It’s very sad, really. We used to worship the Goddess. Now we worship the ultra-wealthy.
It’s also, in a very grim and dark way, very very funny.
Because the colonial empire has apparently “moved beyond” spiritual nourishment and rhetoric. It thinks that because it’s declared there’s a “separation of church and state” that it can just expel and live outside of our innate need for worship and divinity.
Our need for divinity-seeking and meaning making isn’t a nourishment kind of need. It’s not like “we need this because life would be better if we had it”. I’m not making a case here for living a deeply spiritual life, or trying to persuade you into one kind of relationship with whatever divinity is over another.
It’s a need like we need to breathe and sleep and digest food. It’s part of being a living human being. It just happens in the background because it’s the kind of mammal we are.
It’s funny because by saying “we’ve gone beyond any kind of intentional connection with the divine, we’ve got other ways of finding answers now”, the empire is basically saying “we’ve redefined what is and isn’t sacred, we’ve decided what you’re going to call divinity now, and you didn’t even notice.”
I’m sure you’re feeling now how fucking vital it is to reconnect with our agency over our relationship with whatever we decide is divine.
Because when we don’t, we’re not opting out of a relationship with divinity as a whole. That’s impossible. It’d be like opting out of exhaling.
We’re only opting out of having any kind of autonomy in our own fundamental, base-layer worldview.
What do we do about it?
Literally decide right now what is sacred to you.
“Sacred” in the sense that you hold it in the highest value and esteem. The thing that gives all the rest of your life meaning. The thing that can’t be fucked with, because it’s holy. The thing that should be treated with reverence. What’s it all for? Decide now.
(Don’t freak out, I’m not asking you to dive all the way into living a full-on devotional spiritual life. Do that if you want, choose your own adventure, but what we’re talking about here is the philosophical inquiry of deciding what lives at the very bottom of your understanding of reality. What does everything else rest on?)
Remember that you’re not going to be asking your body or your mind to do anything different than what it’s already been doing all your life. We’re just redirecting the flow of it a bit.
Remember that you’ve always been in worship. Remember that being in worship and seeking divinity is just a stock-standard part of being a person.
All we’re doing here is deciding what it is we’re going to be in worship of, instead of letting it be decided for us by systems and powers that seek to oppress and dehumanise us.
Remember too that this might be a lifelong inquiry practice. That’s okay.
Notice here too what might be “running on autopilot”, so to speak.
Maybe you find after some inquiry that what you’ve been holding in highest esteem for a lot of your life is perfection. This might play itself out as a constant need to improve yourself in some way, and always feeling like you’re falling short.
What if you worshipped your humanity instead? What if you decided that you are sacred, as you are?
Maybe you find that you’ve been unconsciously holding momentum and efficiency in highest esteem. This could play itself out as a relentless need to be constantly doing something, and whenever you’re not doing, it feels like a “fall from grace”, or like you’re “sinning” (you probably won’t use those words for it, but you get the feeling I’m describing here.)
You might find that the part of your brain that holds these things as sacred is very, very defensive of them.
(Because of course, if something is sacred - can’t fuck with it. Gotta protect it.)
That part of your brain might fight you whenever you “slip up” on your constant efforts in striving for perfection. It might constantly list off for you all the reasons why you can’t ever stop. You might find that it gets pretty intense when challenged.
This is the power of meaning making, and ultimately, of our relationship with whatever we’ve decided is divine.
But the point of this little piece today is to remind you that you have agency.
You can decide what you relate to as divine.
You can re-write your relationship to divinity, right now.
You can decide that the earth is sacred. And if you are of the earth (you are), then you’re sacred too. If you are sacred as you are because the earth is sacred and you are of the earth, then you deserve to be treated with reverence and respect - even by you. You deserve protecting. You shouldn’t be fucked with. You’re holy.
You can decide that your humanity is sacred. And if your humanity is sacred, then your mind will fight to protect you from the shaming, homogenising, brutally oppressive forces of a paradigm that only sees the sacred in profit, conquest, and domination - and sees humanity as a threat to those sacred ideals.
You can decide that the primordial feminine is sacred. That mystery, creativity, rites of death and rebirth, nature itself, magick, rage, diversity, community, and all the things colonial capitalism and old-timey patriarchy before it tried to suppress and eliminate are deserving of deep reverence and respect.
Remember that what you relate to as sacred will form the basis of your entire worldview.
Embrace your agency and autonomy accordingly.
Come and actively re-write your relationship to The Sacred with us.
This lunar cycle inside REWILDING, we’re studying our deepest beliefs about who and why we are, we’re studying Void, and we’re studying something that’s archetypally called Crone Consciousness.
We are learning how to work with our experience of Inner Winter, or menstruation, to allow our colonised minds to fully die… and to sit in the Underworld of Void as we re-birth ourselves.
Working actively with the Blood Rites of Death and Rebirth is one of the most powerful and deeply transformative practices we can undertake when it comes to liberating ourselves fully from colonial patriarchy - all the way down to the roots of us.
Learn to work with each cycle as a Rite of Passage.
Learn how to sit in the maddening disillusionment of rebirth with intention (and without fucking yourself up).
Learn how to actively take part in building your understanding of who and why you are, beyond what this culture has told you to be.
Come redefine the sacred with us, with all of our liberation as the focus.
REWILDING is an intimate online community space dedicated to decolonising the mind and finding our roles in the revolution via radical cycle reclamation and mythwork.
It’s a once you’re in, you’re in for life situation. You choose what you pay, you pay once, and you’re in forever at no extra cost.
At the time of writing, there are 8 spots remaining to join us - and doors close with the full moon on October 17th.
Submit your application to join us today - because your liberation is sacred, and because you deserve to be held in a community of decolonising feminists.