Spiritus Mundu

You can also check out the video coverage of Michael’s talk at Coalition for Canceled Priests webpage here.  

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Last year, when I spoke at this conference, I spoke on the theme “Hope in the Desert.”  In my speech, I gave notes from Scripture and the Fathers of the Church on the meaning of the desert in a theological context, and I discussed a few Scriptural references to the desert, giving particular focus on the Woman found in the Apocalypse who first retreats into the Wilderness and then into the Desert.  She did this in order to escape the world, becoming less attached and less dependent upon the world and more united to and reliant upon God.  The very idea of fleeing into the desert to escape the perils of the world seems counter intuitive, but the history of Our Faith is filled with examples of salvation being found in and then coming out of the desert.

Moses, for instance, led the Israelites out of Egypt (which represents the world) and into the desert.  In the third book of Kings, the prophet Elias fled the wrath of Jezebel into the desert.  St. Athanasius took refuge in the desert during the Arian crisis.

The crux of my talk last year was to show that by stripping off the things of this world, and hiding in the desert, we grow strong in the Holy Spirit where God perfects us and nourishes us with a zeal for the salvation of souls.  This year, I want to take a slightly different tack.  The devil, who completely lacks a creative imagination, is capable ONLY of imitating God.  Our Blessed Lord wandered in the desert for 40 days to fast and pray before He began His public ministry.  Similarly, we can expect the devil to emerge from the desert also, and to illustrate this point, I’m going to turn to a rather unlikely source.

William Butler Yeats was a highly respected poet of the early 20^th century, who even won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.  But what is less known about Yeats is that he was steeped in the world of the occult.  His practice of sorcery and divination was more important to him than anything else, and as a result, his dalliances with the devil have had a very clear influence on his poems and plays.

Yeats wrote frankly about his vocation as a magician in several memoirs, as well as his treatise on astrology (which took him 20 years to complete) titled, A Vision.  In 1892, when the Irish patriot John O’Leary admonished the twenty-seven-year-old poet for his devotion to magic at the expense of “The Cause,” Yeats answered:

“Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me “weak” or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life…If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book [The Works of William Blake, with Edwin Ellis, 1893], nor would The Countess Kathleen [stage play, 1892] have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

At the age of twenty, he chaired the first meeting of the Dublin Hermetic Society, whose agenda was “the wonders of Eastern philosophy.” Shortly thereafter, he joined the Theosophical Society, a religious cult based in Hinduism and Buddhism, founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. It was there that he was introduced to Rosicrucianism, and in 1890, Yeats became a member of the Masonic organization called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose other notable members included Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the notorious Aleister Crowley.

In November of 1920, Yeats’ published his most famous poem, which is titled “The Second Coming.”  Now, when considering a poem of this title, our minds automatically turn toward the return of Our Blessed Lord at the end of the world – but Yeats’ poem has the return of something else.  I’m going to read you the poem and emphasize a few key elements, and then give you some thoughts on it:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Bearing in mind that the Great War had ended just two years earlier, it can seem that this poem is a reflection on the current state of affairs.  But this poem provides heavy apocalyptic overtones and reads more like a hell-inspired vision than a poem. And when you consider the works and influence of Jesuit priest, Pierre Tielhard de Chardan, this poem may be more vision than poem.

Several things struck me about this poem.

The opening of the poem mentions a widening gyre, which is a growing whirlwind, and out of this whirlwind he describes a vision of decay and ruin in society – Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.  It almost reads like the news ever since the end of 2019.

Yeats wrote that the “ceremony of innocence is drowned.”  It’s a very interesting phrase, as we can now see that a tidal wave of filth has flooded the entire world, destroying innocence everywhere.

He then mentions the lack of conviction of “the best” and the intensity of the worst.  Who are the best of us in a very real sense who are not priests and bishops?  The “elite,” as Our Lord referenced them, are those who bring Christ to the faithful through the sacraments – so Yeats’ line about the “best” lacking all conviction is rather prophetic.  And correlating with this, Yeats said that the “worst are full of passionate intensity.”  If the best are the priests and bishops, then the worst are apostate priests and bishops.  As the saying goes, “The corruption of the best is the worst.”  And don’t we see that on full display today?

But the most intriguing aspect of Yeats’ poem was his mention of the Spiritus Mundi in the “waste of desert sand.”  The reason this is intriguing is because it strongly resembles the experience of a Catholic priest who was in the Ordos desert, which is in Northeast China near Mongolia, almost a year before.

Remember, Yeats’ poem was published in November of 1920 – but we don’t know when he actually wrote it.  But a little over a year prior, in August of 1919, Jesuit priest, Fr. Tielhard de Chardan, wrote about an experience in his memoirs wherein he encountered something that called itself the “Spirit of the World” while he was in the desert.  What is very strange about this encounter is that When de Chardin wrote it, he wrote it in the third person.  This is how he described his initial encounter with the Spirit of the World, which he called “The Thing.”

“The man was walking in the desert, followed by his companion, when the Thing swooped down on him.

From afar it had appeared to him, quite small, gliding over the sand, no bigger than the palm of a child’s hand — as a pale, fleeting shadow like a wavering flight of quail over the blue sea before sunrise or a cloud of gnats dancing in the sun at evening or a whirlwind of dust at midday sweeping over the plain.”

Already, we can see the similarity with Yeats’ poem, who wrote about seeing the “Spiritus Mundi” coming out of the desert in a whirlwind and in the shadows of a flight of birds.

But here’s where it gets interesting.  After indicating that Tielhard had summoned the thing, it told him:

“You had need of me in order to grow; and I was waiting for you in order to be made holy.

“Always you have, without knowing it, desired me; and always I have been drawing you to me.

“And now I am established on you for life, or for death. You can never go back, never return to commonplace gratifications or untroubled worship. He who has once seen me can never forget me: he must either damn himself with me or save me with himself.”

After this introduction, Tielhard asks what the thing’s name is.  It said:

“I am the fire that consumes and the water that overthrows; I am the love that initiates and the truth that passes away. All that compels acceptance and all that brings renewal; all that breaks apart and all that binds together; power, experiment, progress — matter: all this am I.

Because in my violence I sometimes slay my lovers; because he who touches me never knows what power he is unleashing, wise men fear me and curse me. They speak of me with scorn, calling me beggar-woman or witch or harlot; but their words are at variance with life, and the pharisees who condemn me, waste away in the outlook to which they confine themselves; they die of inanition and their disciples desert them because I am the essence of all that is tangible, and men cannot do without me.

“You who have grasped that the world — the world beloved of God — has, even more than individuals, a soul to be redeemed, lay your whole being wide open to my inspiration, and receive the spirit of the earth which is to be saved.”

After lengthy discussion with this thing, Tielhard (always referring to himself in the third person) described it entering into him, saying, “The wind, having at first penetrated and pervaded him stealthily, like a philtre, had now become aggressive, hostile.”

There is a lot to say about these two men, and the experiences described in their writings.  Let’s go back to Yeats’ poem.

He said, “anarchy is loosed upon the world,” which speaks of revolution.  Have we not seen constant revolution throughout the world since October of 2019?  He wrote, “the ceremony of innocence is drowned,” which seems to indicate rampant sexual impurity.  Have we not witnessed an intense assault on the innocence of children through the LGBT movement – especially drag queen events – since 2019?

But then, he says something very interesting.  He said, “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight.”

Spiritus Mundi is literally “Spirit of the world.”

And just a year earlier, Tielhard had written about his encounter with the “spirit of the earth.”

And this “Spirit of the earth” told Tielhard that it was waiting for him “in order to be made holy.”  That he “must either damn himself” with it or save it with him.

This thing could not have been God because God does not need man to be made Holy.  But look at how the thing answered when Tielhard asked its name.  This Spirit of the World, mocking God began its response by saying, “I am …”  And carrying this mockery further, since God told Moses, “I Am” from the burning bush, this thing said, “I am the fire that consumes,” as opposed to the fire of the burning bush, which does not consume.  Further, it said that it is “the water that overthrows,” calling to mind the Apocalypse 12:15, where the serpent “cast out of its mouth after her woman, water as it were a river, that he might cause her to be carried away by the river.”

The thing said that it is “the love that initiates,” which is temptation.  God is Love which consummates.  The thing said it is “the truth that passes away,” whereas Our Lord said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass.”

This spirit of the world is everything that Christ is not.  In a word, this Spiritus Mundi is the very embodiment of antichrist.  And this thing approached Tielhard, looking to be saved.

After revealing itself as the spirit of the world, the thing told Tielhard the following:

“The supreme key to the enigma, the dazzling utterance which is inscribed on my brow and which henceforth will burn into your eyes even though you close them, is this: Nothing is precious save what is yourself in others and others in yourself . In heaven, all things are but one. In heaven all is one.”

The “dazzling utterance” inscribed “on the brow” of this thing calls to mind the beast in the 13^th chapter of the Apocalypse, which had “upon its heads, names of blasphemy.”  The claim that “Nothing is precious save what is yourself in others and others in yourself” is pure blasphemy, for truly, NOTHING is precious save God, The Immaculate Mother, the angels and the saints.

But this line, “nothing is precious save what is yourself in others and others in yourself” calls to mind the steady drumbeat of “unity” and “ecumenical brotherhood,” or a “universal brotherhood” as called for in the encyclical, Fratelli Tutti.  And it is echoed in every “interfaith dialogue,” social cooperation, and movement for so-called “social justice.”

It should be noted that Tielhard de Chardin made the following different statements, which led to his censure by the Church.  These statements, which were the initial cause of his having been silenced, represent a rather pervasive attitude now throughout all of Christendom.  De Chardin said:

• “I do not think God should be worshipped.”

• Do we not now hear priests and even bishops say that the Mass is not about worshipping Christ in the Eucharist?

• De Chardin said, “Very definitely there was no Adam and Eve and no Original Sin.”

• How many NON-canceled priests today do we hear preaching the notion of universal salvation while claiming that Adam and Eve were mere myths?

• De Chardin: “Rome does not want me to return to my professorship. They do not seem to have taken a dislike to me, far from it; but they want to save Religion…..I would take enormous delight in breaking all ties (the reference here is to breaking all ties to traditional Catholic belief, and the Church as a whole).
• What increasingly dominates my interest is the effort to establish within myself, and to diffuse around me, a new religion (let’s call it an improved Christianity if you like) whose personal God is no longer the great neolithic landowner of times gone by, but the Soul of the world.”

• Did you catch that?  De Chardin would have liked to have broken ties with the Church, but he would not be able to accomplish his goals if he had.  And his goal, as stated, was to reinvent the faith in such a way as to get man to worship the “soul of the world,” or – as we’ve already identified it – the Spiritus Mundi.

• Back to de Chardin. He said, “Christ saves. But must we not hasten to add that Christ, too, is saved by evolution?”
• On September 24, 1947, de Chardin wrote a letter wherein he remarks on his numerous disciples in positions of great influence in the Church, which would certainly appear to have been borne out by the accolades given to de Chardin during the Council. He said in his letter: “I have got so many friends in good strategic positions, that I feel quite safe about the future.”

• I should add that Pope Francis included a footnote that cited de Chardin in his encyclical Laudato Si – the very first time de Chardin had EVER been mentioned in an official Church document that did not carry a condemnation.  Other popes have praised him in some capacity, but never in an encyclical.  And isn’t it fitting that the mention should come in a document that heavily suggests global governance united in service to the earth?

• De Chardin: “I want to teach people how to see God everywhere, to see Him in all that is hidden, most solid, and most ultimate in the world. I am essentially Pantheist in my thinking and in my temperament.”

• The NON-canceled modernists in the Church are spreading similar nonsense far and wide.

• And lastly, de Chardin said this: “Since once again, Lord, I have neither bread nor wine nor altar  I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar, and on it will offer you all the labors and suffering of the world.”

That last statement immediately brought to my mind that horrible sacrilege that took place in Maria Geburt parish in Aschaffenburg, Germany in October of 2021.  You may recall that altar was replaced with a giant mound of dirt, and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was offered on that mound of dirt instead of a proper altar.

Now, consider this for a moment … Tielhard de Chardin had his experience with the Spirit of the Earth in August 1919, and a little over a year later, the occultist William Butler Yeats wrote a poem about the Spiritus Mundi that very closely resembles de Chardin’s experience.  A little over 100 years after de Chardin encountered the spirit of the earth, in October 2019, a representation of the spirit of the world in the form of a small wooden idol called the “Pachamama” was both venerated and ritualistically buried in the Vatican gardens in the presence of the Pope. And ever since then, as Yeats wrote,

Things are indeed falling apart; and because we are not unified – because so many of us who should be united in fighting the world, the flesh, and the devil – the centre cannot hold.

Ever since the Pachademon was venerated in Rome, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

There can be no doubt that “The best lack all conviction,” or else we would not be here now honoring these brave priests who refuse to bow to the Spiritus Mundi!  And certainly, Since that day of blasphemy and sacrilege in Rome, the worst – like James Martin, Cardinal McElroy, Cardinal Parolin, Cardinal Roche, and so many others of their ilk – Are full of passionate intensity.

It seems to me that Yeats, in his dalliance with the demonic, was given a glimpse of what Tielhard de Chardin loosed upon the earth and within the Church, and the terrible consequences that come with an antichrist that “slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.”

But there is a single word of hope in Yeats’ poem.  In referencing this beast, he said that its HOUR had come round at last.  It’s HOUR!

As Fulton Sheen so often pointed out, the devil is only ever given an hour, while God has His day!  If the remedy against pride is the exercise of humility, then the counter to the hour of the demonic is the hour of adoration and reparation to Our Lord!  My dear friends, there is not a single one of us who is not called to make reparation, and the power found in the consolation of the Most Sacred heart of Jesus, which is already so deeply offended, is infinitely greater than the worst afflictions and exiles set upon us and our faithful Canceled priests.