The Magical Underground

Magic as the Perennial Foil to Power

This essay concludes the “Christianity and the Fall of Rome” section of the System Failure constellation of ideas. The central notion is that Christianity started as a magical rebellion against imperial authority, only to calcify into a similar authority during the Middle Ages. That Medieval authority then faced its own magical rebellion in the guise of Renaissance magic. The Inquisition, then, parallels the Roman practice of executing Christians in arenas. Both were responses to magical challenges to authority.

Magic vs. Power

Christianity started as a magical revolt against the cruel economic hierarchy of the Roman Empire. It was magical because Christians believed in miracles, of course, but also because early Christian practices emulated the old Greco-Roman Mystery Schools, where mounting evidence suggests that psychoactive substances were ritualistically consumed. These drugs were the precursors to the Christian Eucharist. The visionary experiences induced by these substances revealed to Mystery School initiates (and likely early Christians) that the self and the physical world are merely mental constructs, rather than the bedrock realities we usually take them for.

These magical insights are perennial foils to power. The authorities want us to believe unquestioningly in the material world they control, not regard it as an illusion. They want us to report to work every morning and make them money, not achieve transcendence. People who believe the physical world is an illusion don’t make for very reliable workers.

Furthermore, a population that regards the self as an illusion is impossible to control. The story of the Crucifixion vividly illustrates the point. When the Roman state cracked down on Christians, some were inspired by that story to copy Jesus and volunteer themselves for martyrdom. Their selflessness caused the crackdown to advance the notoriety of the new faith, rather than having the intended effect of suppressing it. All the might of Rome proved powerless against the magical story of Christ.

St. Augustine

As Christianity conquered the Roman Empire and became its official state religion, the Roman Empire simultaneously conquered Christianity. For its first few centuries, debt forgiveness was a central idea of that faith. Christ warned of an impending apocalypse and preached that forgiveness was the only hope of salvation.

The economics of debt forgiveness could have prevented Rome's collapse by softening the wealth inequality that tore it apart. But that solution would have come at a significant cost to the oligarchy, which would have been obliged to forgive debts owed to it.

So, the oligarchy embraced an alternative interpretation of Christianity from Augustine of Hippo, who had lived a wild life in his youth. To Augustine, the forgiveness promised by Christ was the antidote to the sexual incontinence that plagued his conscience, not the solution to Rome’s dangerous maldistribution of wealth. The Roman oligarchy seized upon Augustine’s economically convenient definition of forgiveness and formalized it as the Christianity we recognize today.

Alexandria

Alexandria on the Nile Delta was a bustling trading port during Roman times. The Great Pharos Lighthouse guided merchant ships in from the Mediterranean. Across town, the Great Library of Alexandria housed a trove of pre-Christian wisdom.

Alexandria was the intellectual crossroads of the ancient world. On its busy streets, Neoplatonists, Gnostics, and Hermeticists brushed shoulders with Christians on their way to their respective schools of philosophy and faith. Ideas cross-pollinated between these diverse traditions. While the broader Roman Empire lapsed into decay, an intellectual flowering occurred in Alexandria during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD.

The Greek philosopher and mathematician Hypatia called Alexandria home during this period. She was a significant figure in the Neoplatonist school of philosophy. A wild story about Hypatia can be found in the Souda, the 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia. When one of her students fell in love with her, she lifted her skirt and said, "This symbol of unclean generation is what you are in love with, and not anything beautiful." In 1885, the English painter Charles William Mitchell dramatized the moment. His work serves as the title card for this essay.

The Demolition of Antiquity

It is the great irony of Christianity that, after it became the state religion of the Roman Empire, it began persecuting non-Christians, just as it had once been persecuted. The Christian emperors of Rome sought to wash away the pagan past, so there could be no going back; it was a consolidation of political power.

Nowhere was this demolition of Antiquity more evident than in Alexandria. The destruction of the Great Library was, “a tragedy of some moment,” wrote Will and Ariel Durant in The Age of Faith, “for it was believed to contain the complete published works of Æschylus, Sophocles, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, and a hundred others, who have come down to us in mangled form; full texts of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who survive only in snatches; and thousands of volumes of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman history, science, literature, and philosophy.”

The destruction of non-Christian and pre-Christian literature wasn’t quite comprehensive. According to the new Christian authorities, the bouquet of ideas that perfumed Alexandria's intellectual landscape was illegal heresy. But some defiant souls preserved those ideas, risking prosecution to keep them alive underground for the next thousand years.

Monopoly

Christianity began as a magical revolt against authority, but eventually became the same authority it once opposed. The new Christian authorities cracked down on any alternatives to their state religion, including pagan precursors and rival interpretations of Christianity. As the Middle Ages began, the Roman Catholic Church established itself as the exclusive way to access the divine. Going forward, the Christian Eucharist was the only way to enjoy God’s forgiveness.

The Church became fabulously wealthy during the Middle Ages by monetizing this monopoly. The infamous Sales of Indulgences are a case in point. The Medieval church promoted a conception of reality in which it made sense for people to remit their sins by transferring their wealth to the church. Christianity had fully ossified into the corrupt authority it once opposed.

By the end of the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was so corrupt that it was ripe for a magical challenge to its authority, just as it had once been a magical challenge to Roman authority. Alexandria's Neoplatonists, Gnostics, and Hermeticists' heretical beliefs resurfaced as Renaissance magic. Renaissance magic, like alchemy, informed the Scientific Revolution, ultimately toppling Christian authority during the Protestant Reformation.

Conclusion

As the curtain fell on Antiquity, Christianity rose from magical rebellion to established authority. After it assumed control and became the dominant power during the Middle Ages, Christianity abandoned its support for the poor and downtrodden and began serving the already-wealthy instead. This set up the Christian authorities for a confrontation with a new magical rebellion during the Renaissance.

Further Materials

Chemistry and alchemy went hand in hand, with Alexandria as their center. The alchemists were generally sincere investigators; they employed experimental methods more faithfully than any other scientists of antiquity; they substantially advanced the chemistry of metals and alloys; and we can not be sure that the future will not justify their aims. Astrology too had an honest base; nearly everybody took it for granted that the stars, as well as the sun and moon, affected terrestrial events. But upon these foundations quackery raised a weird ziggurat of magic, divination, and planetary abracadabra. Horoscopes were even more fashionable in medieval cities than in New York or Paris today. St. Augustine tells of two friends who noted carefully the position of the constellations at the birth of their domestic animals. Much of the nonsense of Arabic astrology and alchemy was part of Islam's Greek heritage.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith, 1950, page 122

In AD 392, the same year Emperor Theodosius outlawed the Mysteries, Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria led a rabid mob into “the most beautiful building in the world” and razed it to the ground. It’s unclear if Theophilus (Greek for “beloved of God”) and the Christians he urged on were really after the glimmering statue of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, or the vast library collection that was cached in his temple precinct. Either way, Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World—which framed this investigation in the first chapter—lends exquisite detail to the annihilation of the “world’s first public library” and its “hundreds of thousands of volumes.”
Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020, page 56