The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.

--Albert Einstein, Speech to the German League of Human Rights, 1932

From one vantage point when we are considering Crowlean Aeonology, we can say that the first phase of the Aeon of Horus is modernity (the explosive drive for progress or total transformation), but the transformations created by this push lead to a chaos which erodes the very linear concepts of progress which set the whole thing in motion (the notion of "progress" is actually an extenuation of the faith which was the spiritual formula of the former Aeon, that of Osiris/Christ). The new state, then, is Postmodernity. This is the collapse of concepts and value systems through over-miscegenation and the inability of the mind to adjust to change. What we then have is a morass. Nobody seems to know what is going on, and yet the whole machinery of civilization keeps on going, through sheer momentum and we don't think we can take control of it. Through the apparent chaos set off by innovations in every sphere reacting to one another in unpredictable ways, an eerie sort of order seems to be apparent when we look through our intellectual scrying mirrors. Hence we come to conclude that something as seeminly concrete as the physical universe can come into being through the ghostly machinations of quantum particles. Godel, Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger shake our certainty in everything. Chaos theory, fractals, psychedelics all suggest that what we understand as chaos and order are the same thing. We must therefore make a shift in awareness if we are to regain "control" of civilization which is skidding ever faster towards catastrophe.

If the priest is the spiritual exemplar of the Old Aeon, then the Shaman is the exemplar of the New. In one sense, this is a return to a much older current, but as Gnosis is always novel, the Shamanism of the New Aeon is not a simple return to that of a former epoch, although the particularization and compartmentalization characteristic of Postmodernity are a revived anismism, a poststructuralist fragmentation or souling of every point (the particular is seen as more real than the structure). Faith was the spiritual formula of Osiris, an age that was typified by homogenity of belief within cultures. So one's certainty in the symbol of Christ, for instance, was the fuel needed to start the spiritual engine. In the global village, where one is constantly confronted with alien viewpoints, the formula of faith becomes more and more difficult to utilize. The shaman, however, is the walker between concepts and worlds. Because ey is able to adapt at a moment's notice and function between interpretations, ey is better equipped than is the priest to navigate through the darkness of Postmodernity to the illumination beyond; as alchemist, ey can take any material and transmute it into the Philosopher's Stone, even the degregations that are pop culture, if need be. Although the former shamans were immersed in the jungles of nature, we are immersed in the jungles of information. If we are to rectify the collective nightmare that is History by fully conscious entry into the Dreamtime, we must develop new faculties, or reaccess lost ones, to scan the fields for information that will prevent social and ecological extermination. [+]