What We Make

We can now edit the genes we pass to our children. That single fact would have sounded like sorcery or blasphemy to almost every generation before ours. It shows how far the West has traveled from accepting what nature hands it—and yet old maps still guide us.

Freedom, and the Dread That Came With It

Religions, cults, and philosophies are the deep structures through which a society discovers and builds shared meaning; they both reflect and steer where it is going.

The modern West no longer passively depends on nature or fate. Medicine and technology have placed natural processes under deliberate human control. Genetic engineering lets us modify human DNA to prevent hereditary disease. In vitro fertilization frees conception from some of the limits of biology. CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and mRNA vaccines show our growing command over biological mechanisms once considered unchangeable (Doudna & Charpentier, 2014). Add artificial intelligence, which not only imitates human cognition but sometimes surpasses it, and the picture is clear: we have shifted from submitting to the rhythms of nature to actively mastering them. It is the fulfillment of Descartes’ ambition to make ourselves “masters and possessors of nature” through methodical inquiry and practical reason (Descartes, 1637/1998).

Yet this escape from fate has come at a cost. It is as if a curtain dropped and revealed that there was no solid ground beneath our old certainties. The result is existential dread—the anguish that rushes into the space left when old anchors of meaning wear away.

Friedrich Nietzsche announced the “death of God,” marking an era of nihilism in which traditional guarantees of meaning dissolve (Nietzsche, 1882/1974, §125). The modern West faces a universe that seems stripped of transcendent significance. Albert Camus named this the absurd: our demand for coherence colliding with the silent indifference of the cosmos, leaving us alienated (Camus, 1942/1955). Jean-Paul Sartre pushed further, arguing that existence precedes essence. We are thrown into the heavy freedom—and the accompanying anguish—of making our own way amid radical uncertainty (Sartre, 1943/1956).

Two Streams Beneath the Surface

But everything we gained through that emancipation also hands us unprecedented freedom. We can shape the world more profoundly than ever through deliberate vision, and we will inevitably shape our shared reality according to the archetypes we draw on and dream within. Actions don’t deliver final certainty, and they always carry the shadow of chance. Still, action is where meaningful striving happens. It is through dedicated practice that imagined worlds gradually become real.

That is why it’s worth examining the forces that still drive the modern Western vision. In my view, two stand out: Christianity, and the occult that grew up beside it. Both remain at work, subtly or overtly shaping what we think we can know, how we imagine morality, and what we expect from the future—often without anyone naming them.

One stream looks toward a final divine fulfillment and stays morally watchful while it waits. The other seeks hidden knowledge and the power to transform. Together they are woven through contemporary society, and they supply the lenses through which we interpret freedom, dread, and the urge to create.

The Christian Influence

Let’s start with Christianity. It has defined the West through its emphasis on truth. It often presents that truth as single-voiced and unchanging, but in practice it is a dynamic interpretive tradition, refracted through many divergent strands of Christian thought: from Thomistic rationalism to Reformed predestination, from mystical quietism to evangelical literalism.

The Protestant Reformation opened and intensified this interpretive pluralism. As I read it, the result was an ethos of economic and moral strictness that functioned almost as a survival strategy—a way to hold communities together when every alternative risked another unbridgeable schism and more violence. Max Weber’s classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism traces part of this story (Weber, 1905/2002). The Calvinist idea of a worldly “calling” (Beruf) and the disciplined, ascetic approach to work turned economic activity into a moral duty. Worldly success came to be read as a sign of divine election, while frugality, diligence, and delayed gratification fueled the accumulation of capital.

That rigor has a price. I see it in a slowness to adapt to cultural and technological change, a fixation on purity, a tendency to treat the economy as the ultimate end, and, at times, a violent resistance to change whenever it seems to threaten doctrinal or moral order.

Theology itself emerges from argument over interpretation, not from airtight proof. It cannot claim complete objectivity or exhaustive knowledge. Instead, it serves as the axis around which Christianity’s influence turns, constantly negotiating between claimed revelation and philosophical reasoning, between scripture and tradition.

Wealth as Stewardship

This epistemic posture—especially in its more dogmatic, closed forms—feeds an interesting economic trajectory. Increasingly, God is understood as favoring those who manage and command resources, sometimes to the point of expansion and dominion over others. This conviction, in my reading, runs deep in mainstream American Christianity, especially among evangelicals.

Financial advisor Dave Ramsey is a useful example. He frames wealth-building, pursued through disciplined stewardship according to biblical principles, as consistent with divine blessing (Ramsey, 1997). Alongside this runs the idea that Christians should be in the driver’s seat of the economy through accumulated wealth. Ramsey distances himself from prosperity theology proper, stressing personal responsibility over the idea that confessing the right words conjures wealth. But his framework echoes the broader prosperity gospel movement, which holds that faith, positive speech, and sacrificial giving bring material abundance as an expression of God’s covenant (Bowler, 2013).

Purity and Protection

At the same time, Christianity carries a strong emphasis on moral and protective thinking, rooted in a fear of polluting what is pure. Outside influences come to look like contaminants that could erode the holiness of the covenant community.

Some protective instinct is common to every culture and arguably necessary for any community to hold together. But I see this instinct in mainstream evangelical support for policies framed around purity and protection: restrictive immigration measures, seen as safeguarding cultural and national identity; strict anti-abortion laws, often without strong support structures after birth; and opposition to LGBTQ+ rights—while showing far less energy about other offenses, such as gluttony, which may sit more comfortably alongside the idea of material wealth as blessing. All of these are framed as defenses of family and social holiness (Pew Research Center, 2025; PRRI, 2025). Survey data suggests white evangelicals in particular express higher concern about border security and cultural change, and often interpret demographic shifts in terms of threat (Pew Research Center, 2024).

This mirrors a wider pattern of religious protectionism around the world. Across traditions, fundamentalist movements tend to put doctrinal purity ahead of pluralism, building walls against outside “contamination” to protect the sacred in-group (Almond et al., 2003).

Waiting for the End

The Christian influence reaches further still. Much of popular Christian thought is fixed on eschatology—the end times and the apocalyptic events that will bring perfection through Christ’s triumphant return. In my reading, this can make real stewardship of the non-monetary world seem irrelevant. At its worst, apocalyptic thinking tells us that no matter how badly we damage things, we will be rescued from our mistakes in the end.

As I see it, modern American Christianity orients itself toward a particular horizon: economic stability, expansion, and dominion understood as stewardship; a moral purity drawn from varied and sometimes conflicting scriptures but treated as one voice; a fervent sense of righteousness grounded in possessing “the truth”; and an expectant hope of rescue by divine intervention amid coming doom. In this picture, the present order is temporary—a testing ground where economic diligence and moral vigilance signal alignment with the coming kingdom. Yet those same virtues risk hardening into defensive postures that resist the very transformation the end times are supposed to promise.

Through this mix of truth-seeking, discipline, protective purity, and apocalyptic hope, Christianity reveals itself not as a dusty archive of doctrine but as a living framework that shapes the American imagination. It makes stability sacred and change suspect. It treats expansion and protection as vital. It dreads the future and longs for the end.

The Hidden Side of Things

If Christianity is broadly concerned with plainly revealed truths, the occult, simply put, is the pursuit of hidden ones: what lies beyond ordinary perception, concealed from the uninitiated.

Far from being a fringe oddity, this pursuit appears in every corner of the world, across eras and cultures. It can be understood as a perennial desire to go beyond established religion and orthodoxy—to gain power over unseen forces, uncover concealed truths, and cultivate a wisdom that bridges the everyday and the transcendent. It reflects the drive toward gnosis: intimate, experiential knowledge of the divine or the cosmic order. In various Hermetic traditions, the occult acts as a counterweight to public doctrine, creating a tension between revelation and secrecy (Hanegraaff, 2012).

From Pythagoras to Newton

The Pythagoreans illustrate this vividly. They were an ancient secret society that blended mathematical mysticism with ascetic ritual prohibitions—most famously, abstaining from beans, which were thought to harbor souls or disturb spiritual purity. They revered numbers as divine essences governing the cosmos and embodying its harmony (Burkert, 1972; O’Meara, 1989). Their founder was a figure wrapped in legend, credited with miraculous powers like being in two places at once and talking with animals. Under him, the community operated as a kind of proto-occult fraternity in which numerology intertwined with the transmigration of souls: mathematical principles were believed to underlie both the physical universe and the soul’s eternal journey (Kingsley, 1995). Their teachings, passed down orally to avoid profanation, influenced later esoteric lineages.

Centuries later, figures at the heart of the Scientific Revolution, such as Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, had clear occult interests, some inspired by the Pythagoreans, and folded esoteric pursuits into their supposedly purely rational inquiries. Newton, the very model of mechanistic science, dove deep into alchemy, searching for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. He also studied biblical prophecy, reading apocalyptic texts for hidden patterns in nature and scripture, and treated the universe as a divine code to be cracked through Hermetic principles (Westfall, 1980; Dobbs, 1975). His alchemical manuscripts, running to more than a million words, combine empirical experiment with occult symbolism and treat gravity and other forces as expressions of divine will acting through invisible agencies (Manuel, 1963). Bacon, similarly, explored natural magic as a way to harness unseen forces for practical ends. He advocated a reformed science that drew on Hermetic traditions to work with nature’s hidden qualities, helping lay the groundwork for the Royal Society while embedding esoteric methods in what became the Baconian method (Rossi, 1968; Eamon, 1994).

The Occult in America

America, a child of the Enlightenment, has been deeply shaped by occultism through the Freemasons and other secret societies. Esoteric symbols such as the all-seeing eye and the pyramid appear in foundational places, from the Great Seal of the United States to the architecture of Washington, D.C. Masonic networks influenced revolutionary leaders like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and created lasting fraternal bonds (Hieronimus, 2005; Bullock, 1996). Freemasonry grew out of working stonemasons’ guilds and was transformed into a speculative, esoteric tradition. It absorbed rituals from Rosicrucian and Hermetic lore and taught moral allegory through degrees of initiation that mirror alchemical transformation—while attracting accusations of secret political scheming (Jacob, 1981).

It’s tempting to picture the occult as nothing more than cloaked figures performing midnight rites. That caricature hides how thoroughly it is woven into social structures. Secret societies like the Freemasons have historically enabled intellectual exchange and reform, even while dealing with perceptions of elitism and secrecy (Stevenson, 1988).

Science as the New Occult

This leads to a provocative idea: that modern science and mathematics are a new form of occultism. Set against the often rigid, spiritually constrained thinking of American religion, empirical inquiry uncovers the hidden laws of the universe—something akin to alchemical transmutation or the Renaissance pursuit of natural magic (Asprem, 2012; Morrisson, 2007). The Scientific Revolution did not abolish occult qualities so much as reframe them within mechanistic models. Newton’s Hermetic influences on his theory of gravity are one example; the esoteric echoes some hear in quantum mechanics, where indeterminacy and entanglement recall ancient mystical ideas of interconnection, are another (Waddell, 2018; Moller, 2024). The mathematical roots of occult practice go back to ancient civilizations—for instance, the Lo Shu magic square in Chinese esotericism, which informed numerological systems that anticipated modern computational algorithms (Ellis, 2007; Melvin-Koushki, 2017).

Danger and Mastery

The occult is often portrayed as dangerous and destructive, the tool of power-hungry figures who exploit secret knowledge to dominate others. In modern form, that archetype extends to think tanks, corrupt politicians, and shadowy elites, where mathematics and algorithms—predictive analytics as a kind of data divination—are used to exert control, replacing traditional religious institutions as the arbiters of guidance and fate (Asprem, 2014).

But there is a counterweight. The search for hidden truth can also be deeply empowering and useful. The Lesser Key of Solomon, a grimoire, credits King Solomon with the art of commanding demons toward constructive ends, such as building the Temple, without being corrupted by them. He accomplished this through binding rituals that invoked divine authority and through sigils of power (Mathers, 1904; Peterson, 2001).

Modern scientists and inventors are, in a sense, Solomon’s heirs: binding unseen forces to build something, without being consumed by them.

In that light, modern scientists and inventors look like contemporary occult practitioners. They wield specialized, hidden knowledge—visible in breakthroughs like quantum computing and genetic engineering—to reshape reality for broad benefit, echoing Solomon’s mastery over the unseen while refusing its nefarious uses (Neal, 1999).

The occult remains a powerful force for change and discovery, driving paradigm shifts from Renaissance Hermeticism to postmodern esotericism. Its aims are harder to pin down than those of a large religion, because it is ultimately guided by the individual seeker, whether alone or in small groups. Individual intentions and actions determine whether it is turned toward enlightenment and social progress or toward malice, exploitation, and discord (Hanegraaff, 1996).

What We Make

The only adequate response to the ultimate dilemma of our existence is to act on what we think we know. Any alternative would require knowledge beyond our reach—knowledge that is, in the end, inaccessible.

Consider an analogy. Can an amoeba formulate Kant’s categorical imperative and test it for logical soundness? Given what we know about amoebas, the question is absurd and unanswerable. Our own situation mirrors the amoeba’s. We cannot definitively prove even our deepest beliefs against some absolute, external standard.

Yet we do live, and we do act. Whether shaped by Christian expectation of the end or by the occult’s quest for hidden mastery, we are all acting out our convictions and testing them against the world and against one another. Cut off from any sure connection to ultimate reality, we simply enact what we think. Over time, together, we learn what works and what doesn’t—not by proving ideas true in some transcendent sense, but by holding them as true enough within the limits of our understanding.

This is closer to virtue epistemology or a pragmatic ethic than to dogmatic certainty. Intellectual and practical excellences—whether the moral discipline of evangelical stewardship, the protective vigilance of apocalyptic faith, or the empowering discoveries of esoteric knowledge—guide us toward beliefs and actions that reliably produce meaningful results in lived experience.

We remain inside an epistemological “third wall” that surrounds us. Imagine an extreme case: we understand our universe so thoroughly that we can create whole new universes at will and travel between them. Even then, we would still be confined to our own horizon of experience, subject to the same limits. No vantage point gets entirely outside the box.

Using What We’ve Inherited

Here is where the thread connects back to the influences we’ve traced. Christianity and occultism run through our society in subtle, pervasive ways. Their archetypal ideas—eschatological hope and moral seriousness on one side, esoteric discovery and transformative mastery on the other—continue to inform modern culture, from economics to science, usually without acknowledgment.

Becoming aware of these forces helps us make sense of the paradoxes of our time: the tension between communal stability and individual innovation, between redemptive optimism and dangerous ambition, in our politics, our wars, and beyond. It also lets us use the best of each tradition wisely—Christianity’s ethical communalism and the occult’s creative ingenuity—and combine them into new visions that go beyond their original limits.

Both traditions, in their own ways, affirm that thought joined to dedicated action brings worlds into being. With the unprecedented freedom we now hold—freedom won from nature through medicine, technology, and inquiry—our task is not passive contemplation but determined action. What we think, pursued with integrity and tested through shared effort, becomes reality.

The curtain has fallen. The stage belongs to us. What shall we make?

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