Michael Horton’s new book Shaman and Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual But Not Religious” in Antiquity, is really two studies in one. The first is historical: as book one of a planned three-volume project, Shaman and Sage is a massive, deeply researched intellectual exploration of the Western esoteric tradition, from its origins in Egyptian and Indo-European mysticism all the way up into the early Middle Ages. The second, however, is even more interesting. Horton’s volume—as its subtitle might imply—is as much a theological intervention as a historical one, seeking to confront the deep roots of a seemingly contemporary theological problem. Why do so many people think they don’t need “organized religion” to seek God—or the “divine”?
Where Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World was journalistic and observational, Horton’s approach is genealogical. And that genealogy leads him to an interesting place: for Horton, the modern shift to an individuated, anti-institutional spirituality is not a historical novelty, but merely the latest outbreak of a long-gestating intellectual phenomenon. The provocative thesis at the heart of Horton’s study is that the Western tradition—and ipso facto the Christian tradition—has, since basically its origins, incubated “Orphism,” a theological-philosophical tradition that, in Horton’s telling, is fundamentally opposed to orthodox Christian thought. And it is this latent Orphism that underpins what today’s millennials mean when they call themselves “spiritual but not religious.”
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