The Death and Rebirth of Awakening
Aug 26, 2025
With every cult, sect and political wing describing its followers as “awoken” let us track the metaphysical underpinnings of our society and take a taste of the long history of this idea. Let’s dive into paranoia, politics, Shamanism, conspiracy and more. . .
-1- The Celestial Awakening
Once, to awaken was to pierce the veil. That is, to expand one’s vision beyond the worldly, beyond the material, beyond the secular and the mundane and to enter into the perception of the angelic machinery which silently whirrs outside the normal human frame of reference. This is an ascent of conscious viewpoint to see more than what is practically necessary. An ecstatic vision of sacred cosmology. A revelation.
Undisputed number two to the Queen of England’s head wizard ⟨a certain Mr. John Dee⟩, a mad necromancer named Edward Kelley polishes his Shewstone. Hoping to contact the spirit world, the pair begin to engrave sacred symbols upon the black glass.
John Dee spent seven years engaged with the process of speaking to Angels alongside Edward Kelley; the pair finally broke it off after a series of unbelievably literary misadventures. They tried to ask the Angels for monetary loans, Kelley reported to Dee that the Angels wished him to sleep with Dee’s wife, both of them were briefly exiled from the English court, Kelley told Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia that he was able to make gold via alchemy and was imprisoned when he could not live up to his promise. An occult comedy of errors. A magical tragedy. The two had noble intentions but worldly concerns infected and destroyed their partnership. Dee needed Kelley because he was too much the sharp-witted rationalist to have his own experiences of descent into the imaginative world, which the likely schizophrenic and confirmed alcoholic Edward Kelley could casually do on a daily basis. They reached for the sky but their heads became stuck in the clouds.
-2- The Shamanic Descent
Shamanic cultures are defined by a search for vision. The shamanic cultures are those who have inherited the most ancient of religious practices. They seek visionary epiphany. The Shaman is often a high-IQ and neurodivergent individual with a mediator-type personality and strong intuition. He or, the Shaman or Shamanka, visits the spirit world, enters psychedelic neuroplastic states, consumes psychoactive substances in a deliberate ritualistic way, or undergoes extreme ordeals often involving intense pain or the deliberate ingestion of poison. Horrifying pain and excruciating fear left the Shaman or those s/he guided ready to “turn over a new leaf.” Psychonaut Terrence McKenna opined that for the latter cultures, psychedelics would have been far easier, had they been available.
The Shaman, then, returns from that state, which is often described as a kind of death: the death of the «Ego» or of visiting the «Spirit World». Mircea Eliade describes the death of the Shaman himself, a vision of dying, the body of the Shaman is withered and destroyed, he is reduced to bones and ash, before he reforms and returns, as if returning from the dead. This is the lived experience of the Shaman himself. After the journey, he is renewed with wisdom and he brings this back to the tribe. This is the most ancient, and therefore successful, religious practices so much so, that it is practiced by stone age cultures to this day. Indeed it blasted back into our culture in 1967 and again around 2017, siring millions of adopters across the world in almost every country. Shamanism seeks new vision, new perspectives, new insights. Intuitional Dynamite.
-3- A Secular Inversion
Today the word has been inverted. To «wake up» in the twenty-first century is no longer to marvel but to mistrust. It is the revelation not of angels but of algorithms, not of prophecy but of plots, not of stars but of satellites. To awaken now is to believe that they are lying to you — whoever they are. It is to wander the labyrinth of surveillance, to trace shadows in statistics, to pierce not heaven’s dome but the bureaucratic ceiling of manipulated consent. Awakening has become suspicion; wonder has been replaced by paranoia. The «awakened» are not enlightened nor inspired, except to be sleepless sentinels, seeing a predator in every shadow and a conspirator behind every coincidence. To wake up is to spot or conjecture the malevolence between the mysteries. Crushed individualism and the paranoid mind. A desire for secret knowledge that no other knows.
Of course, every age believes it is the first to awaken, and each offers it with a different cultural-contextual flair. Our age sells the identity of «awakened» with none of the spiritual self-work.
Self-help prophets on YouTube promise gnosis for $19.99 a month. Gurus sell «masterclasses» in freedom. Politicians brand themselves as the «party of woke» conspiracists as the «movement of awakening.»
Russell Brand greets his audience as «my millions of awakening wonders» — a phrase both warm and weaponised, comfy as the cradle meanwhile the word «awakening» is no longer an event, it is an obtainable label. Or a subscription.
So, whilst «Awake» is now a brand, no pun intended, «woke» is now a slur for the most deluded parts of a failed worldview; however, both are shrapnel from the same explosion: the loss of true transcendent sight.
-4- Double Vision
Our confusion with the near-infinite complexity of the world leaves us nonetheless longing to see. To see beyond the marketing and the madness, to see through delusion and disenchantment, to see truthfully the tracks in front of us which few else can perceive. To be the possessor of sacred and secret knowledge and gnosis which will guide us uniquely to the peak of whichever mountain we wish to ascend with grace and glamour.
Perhaps this cynicism is a sign of the times: the secular cycle (see previous article Future History I) and the intense skepticism and distrust that characterises our hustling, bustling, nigh bursting culture. Enlightenment for the disenchanted. YouTubers as mutilated mystics.
Perhaps, in our day and age and in the future that is rapidly arriving, to awaken will be to have a double-vision. It will not lie in choosing between naïve wonder and corrosive suspicion. It will lie in holding both: the monk’s awe at the stars and the cynic’s vigilance toward power. The angel in the algorithm. The constellation within the code. To marvel at mystery without surrendering to manipulation, to mistrust without collapsing into paranoia.
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