Have We Been Spiritual but Not Religious Forever? – Religion & Liberty Online

Michael Horton’s Shaman & Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” is not a quick read, which means that for the past few months, I’ve been carrying the book around and taking it out to read in spare moments: at coffee shops, sandlot baseball practices, the playground, etc., not to mention airplanes and trains. The title, I found, attracted a startling amount of attention from a startlingly wide range of people: tattooed, cropped-headed baristas; suburban dads at the park; Roman Catholic priests; middle-aged women waiting at the hair salon. People were curious about the book, and when I explained the premise, many of them had further thoughts or follow-up questions, even though they (as they explained themselves) didn’t read much or have a background in philosophy or history. I don’t live in a particularly intellectual urban area; most of the people in my small city are accountants, lawyers, and consultants, not professors or artists. But something about the words “shaman” and “spiritual” caught their eye and sparked their interest.

In other words, Horton is onto something here. In this dense (but readable), thoroughly researched academic survey, he gives an account of a theoretical tension that lies at the heart of human experience and that is becoming an increasingly common part of day-to-day life even for people who have never picked up and read a single history of ideas. Shaman & Sage is the first of a trilogy titled “The Divine Self,” which is being published over several years by Eerdmans. The second in the trilogy, Magician & Mechanics, came out earlier this year (I’ll be reviewing it here soon), and the third is scheduled for release in spring 2027. Horton is a Christian in the Reformed tradition, and he teaches systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary in California. Shaman & Sage, however, does not have that inimitable Reformed flavor to it; this is an academic book interested in making an academic argument, not a creedal one.

Horton’s argument in Shaman & Sage is deceptively simple: The contemporary distinction between “spiritual” and “religious” is not new but rather an explicit acknowledgement of a distinction—one might even call it a division—that has existed in human thought, action, and desire for millennia. Beginning with the communal religions of the Bronze Age, Horton traces the emergence and regularization of the human impulse to be “saved,” to experience some kind of individual encounter with the transcendent, unmitigated by religious rituals and authorities. Horton takes us on a strange and fascinating journey through Egyptian myths and practices, the Orphic cults, shaman initiation ceremonies, and the heady theurgies of Kabbalists and Neo-Platonists. In this weird company, however, we begin gradually to recognize not only our era’s Instagram prophets and TikTok seers but also the inchoate longings of our own souls.

The “shaman” part of Horton’s argument likely won’t encounter much disagreement from the majority of readers, I suspect, because the details of shamanism are not particularly well known even among philosophy-of-ideas students. While the major Egyptian gods are fairly familiar from popular culture, and the Greek myths continue to exert at least some force on most Western imaginations, my guess is most readers will not be acquainted with the Marduk Ordeal, Parmenides’s mystical backstory of Zeus and his encounter with Night, or the basics of Chaldean magic. I read Shaman & Sage on the heels of a fascinating study of the life of Genghis Khan, and Horton’s careful study of shamanism shed light on some of the more obscure elements of the great Khan’s religious and spiritual practice. (Genghis participated in a shamanistic ancestor-worship religion that incorporated elements of Christianity, specifically Nestorian Christianity, a mélange Horton explores.) Horton exposes a strange but vital nerve that has been lying deep in the consciousness of the West for millennia but all too often is overlooked because of its apparent primitive nature, secrecy, and sheer weirdness.

Perhaps the most enchanting part of the pre-Platonic section of the book is the chapter “Dancing for Dionysius: New Myths for the Utopian Stage.” Horton traces the emergence of Dionysius as a god who transcended local cults and religious rites, one who promised more than civil order and actually offered to guide an initiate through the throes of death and out the other side. Horton does not delve too deeply here (though perhaps there will be more on this in Magician & Mechanic, the second volume), but by the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, there was a clear symbolic link between Dionysius and Christ (a link, I must add, quite dear to my favorite historical oddball, Francois Rabelais, who consistently makes the connection between being drunk on wine and being drunk in the Spirit). Digging into the roots of the Dionysian myth, however, will illustrate just how Christians could find in Dionysius, the god of madness, drunkenness, fertility, and theater, a proto-evangelion.

Once Plato enters the picture, readers may find more to disagree with. Horton proposes that the philosophy advocated by the great Pre-Socratics, Socrates himself, and Plato is in itself a continuation of the Dionysian theme of salvation through abandonment. In this case, the abandonment is of the body. Horton painstakingly shows how all the early Greek philosophers embrace the panentheism that is best known under the rubric “Gnosticism.” The central problem these philosophers faces is a metaphysical one: the metaphysical problem, in fact, the problem that Zeus, in The Iliad, phrases in his question to Night, a primal force that shapes spirit and matter, as “How may I have all things one and each one separate?” In other words, is God one with his creation, or are there many distinct things? Significant philosophical and religious problems arise from any way of approaching this question. Horton proposes that the inevitable answer, no matter how cleverly disguised, for pre-Christian philosophers was that all things are One, and are bound to return to the One.

The question of whether all things are one or whether there are genuinely distinct beings in existence is more vital than it may seem at the outset; it governs all manner of other questions with far-reaching consequences. For example, if all things are truly one, then any distinction is an illusion, including the inherent distinction we experience between physical bodies. The “real” person is an unembodied spirit that merely inhabits a body for a short time before being freed from its bonds to the merely physical. Salvation (which, in this view, is often simply defined as self-fulfillment) can be attained by overcoming, ignoring, or mitigating all the restrictions, limitations, and demands of the body. This is the metaphysical reasoning that undergirds the contemporary insistence on birth control on demand, instant access to sex-change hormones and operations, and even medical aid in dying and the transhumanist efforts to upload consciousness to a computer. All these movements insist that the “real” person is distinct from the body, and the body itself is simply a burden to be shed. In contrast, of course, there is the Christian view (articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas) that humanity is a composite of body and soul, and that salvation will touch our bodies as much as our souls—hence the insistence in the Creed that we believe “in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Horton does not make all these connections for us in Shaman & Sage; rather, he expects his readers to be sharp enough to make the connections themselves.

The book itself is cleanly written, with only a few typos and errors, and almost without exception he gives a fair hearing to his sources. The only instance that strikes me as reductive is his passing description of Leszek Kołakowski, whose magisterial Main Currents of Marxism is scrupulously interested in the same question Horton puts in the mouth of Zeus, as a “Marxist historian”—a description about as helpful as saying Socrates was a political agitator.

Horton is an academic, though, and a careful one; he does not spell these things out. He sticks to his area. I kept expecting him to slip and show his own (Reformed) hand, but he does not. The book, despite its bulk, is disciplined, restricting itself to the central argument that “spiritual but not religious” is a key thread in Western thought, not a contemporary anomaly.

I was fortunate enough to be reading this book during Holy Week, and the insights in Shaman & Sage offered a new understanding of how Christ’s Passion could speak directly to the people of the day. For example, a shaman initiation ritual usually includes a figurative dismemberment and a literal burying in a cave; when the shaman emerges from the cave, he has gained the right to travel up and down the tree of the world and to make demands of the gods at the top, the humans in the middle, and death itself at the roots—he has even gained the power to raise the dead. This doesn’t reduce Christ to merely some kind of arch-shaman figure; rather, it illustrates how Christ’s coming was prefigured in myth around the world. He was, as the old hymn says, truly the “desire of nations.” I came away from Shaman & Sage eager to read the second in the trilogy and, more importantly, newly attentive to the ways that Christ’s Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection are the answer to the longing in every human heart—even the weird and wild ones.