666

Ever since the Enlightenment humans have fallen into a secular cosmos emptied of its gods and God. Nietzsche’s famous “God is Dead!” is the cry of this nihilistic universe devoid of the sacred, emptied of all value and meaning. We are alone, and we are afraid. And yet the shadow of the ancient world did not so easily vanish, and for all the talk of Reason and Light the shadow of the religious view continued on in the world in the twisted forms of Gothic horror, Decadence, and the Occult counter-worlds that still roam our secular wastelands. As Becker puts is ancient man lived in a sacred cosmos, we don’t. We’ve lost that sense of communal self-renewal and the sense of transcendence and rebirth of self and culture: