The Structure of Superstition

Western Christians are easily the most superstitious folks I know.

The word “superstition” comes to us from Latin and implies a dread of the supernatural. Thus, much of Christian belief tends to be false, based on the heathen fears passed to our culture the Germanic hordes, not on the high intellectual culture of the Ancient Near East (ANE). The effect of Aristotelian logic stripped away the strong mystical roots of the ANE and left people wide open to all sorts of truly silly notions.

Did Aristotle and his friends imagine they could keep people away from genuine religion? The Jews managed to absorb the entire raft of his assumptions. While it did destroy their faith, turning it into an empty and legalistic religion, they did manage to keep some of their ancient savvy. They went after the early churches and succeeded in Judaizing them sufficiently to destroy the Christians’ ANE mystical approach. The Jews threw it away, rejected Christ’s call to come back to it, and insisted no one else resurrect it. Christian religion was mostly cerebral by AD 200.

Yet humanity is inherently mystical in nature. If you deny them a strong and forthright mysticism, they’ll be wide open to any heathen mythology.

Once the established church organizations capitulated to Roman politics under Constantine, it was just a matter of time. They didn’t adopt Constantine’s pagan solar worship, but when Roman political power collapsed under the onslaught of Germanic tribes, the only way for the Church to survive was to compromise with the new overlords. The official church organization embraced Germanic tribal mythology, at first as cultural and language. But when more and more Germanic nobles entered the Church hierarchy, it became fully paganized. Neither the Reformation nor the Enlightenment churches broke free. They simply assumed the Germanic view of reality was the default.

We who are connected to the Eternal One are so because of His election. Nothing in us could have wanted it, Paul warns in Romans. However, a dread and fear of God was not the default in his day. It came later. Virtually the entire range of pagan religion in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia held a strong respect for the supernatural, but a dark foreboding was actually quite rare. That’s more common among the Nordic races. Thus, Paul’s warning becomes dark and ugly only if you first assume that dreary atmosphere that dominates Beowulf.

We aren’t sure where the Germanic tribes got that fearful superstition, but it’s not the human default. However, it has become the Western default. Thus, the full range of Western Church History is replete with superstition masquerading as theology.

For example, today’s Charismatics teach a demonology based entirely on fear. You can’t afford to say the wrong words, touch or own the wrong objects, or read the wrong materials. Demons will seize you through those open doorways, as the Charismatics see it. The Devil is little more than some kind of Grendel, but with an almost equal footing with Christ. Review in your mind for a moment all the movies where terror or fright was a part of the storyline and you’ll see it’s a narrow cultural view of reality peculiar to Western superstitions. It also colors American religion a great deal.

On the one hand, if you immerse yourself in a certain type of literature, it will dominate your thinking. On the other hand, reading a single book by Aleister Crowley will not infect you with his demons. I note in passing that his brilliant mind did not grant him the power to walk in his own teaching because his heart was bound by a lack of full freedom. It’s not that he didn’t know about ANE thinking, because too much of his work shows it. Rather, he was trying every door except the one where Christ stood. His pursuit of all those other avenues is what left him open to demons and frustration. You don’t get his demons from his books like some kind of communicable disease. You get them by rejecting moral truth.

The same goes for any other “black magic” lore. If you approach it with a superstitious mind, your heart will not protect you very well from a fearful imagination. If you can climb back up into the high intellectual learning of the ANE, you realize how silly all that stuff is. Perhaps not totally wrong, since the most learned scholars of the alternative mystical approaches often come up with surprising accurate insights. Even Crowley understood that mere intellectual reason was a trap; he just didn’t have a clear view of what was above the intellect.

No, I’m not into tarot, numerology, arcane rituals for casting out demons, etc. I find Kabbalah is simply the secret sister of Judaism, still too much the result of Hellenism. They are all human efforts to reclaim the power of revelation without referring directly to revelation. In my personal view, they are probably quite entertaining, but largely harmless because they are powerless to do the one thing that matters most: change us into channels of our Creator’s glory. He’s not a grouch about pagan stuff; His character reflects precious little of the European mythical deities. That He was so demanding with Israel under the Covenant of Moses, as He explained through the prophets, was because they were easily the most fickle nation in human history, chasing every deity down dark alleys like a true hooker.

With us today, He’s there waiting for people to work their way through whatever it is in front of them until they realize nothing works like the Blood of His Son. Hint: That’s a parabolic symbol. There is no spiritual or moral power in anything that you can touch, see, name or understand, only in that living connection between our spirits and His Spirit.

Meanwhile, most of what evangelicals in general say about “black magic” is caricature, taking as viable sources some of the biggest frauds and tricksters in the market. They would hardly know the difference between a real wiccan and Wendy the cartoon witch. Remember that bogus satanic child abduction scare from the late 1980s? A surprisingly large number of evangelicals still believe that stuff. They also have no idea what folks like Crowley even taught. God has been pretty patient with Western Christians, too.

An awful lot of common evangelical Christian belief arises from the same superstitious background that they denigrate.