The Hieros Institute Vision

Arthur Versluis

When we founded Hieros as a non-profit 501(c)3 American organization, we had a vision for what it could become. And now, as we launch its new, expanding Hieros Institute online presence, live on July 4, 2024—Independence Day—it’s time for us to articulate more of that vision. 

We are all familiar with the sense that so much, culturally, seems to be disintegrating around us. As W. B. Yeats put it, things fall apart, and the center cannot hold. There are many who eloquently articulate critiques of the dominant system in which we find ourselves; and there are a few places where the brave and perceptive analyze exactly how and why social and cultural disintegration is happening. With a little effort, and some courage, you can find out a great deal about what has gone wrong, to whose benefit, and at whose loss. Not everyone has the courage, but those who do, can find their way to the truth. But knowing what’s wrong is not enough.

While it is valuable to learn about the obvious decline around us, in the end, that awareness and knowledge in itself doesn’t provide a clear path forward, and often feeds into a self-reinforcing pessimistic cycle. Of course cogent critiques of the prevailing system are essential. But simply being aware of what’s wrong is not enough, and we see this in the relative ineffectiveness of dissidence whereby, however much more you know about what is wrong, nothing really changes. Why not? One major reason is there’s no animating aspirational vision for the future. 

What we need is vision that looks past the pervasive corruption of the regnant bureaucratic managerial regimes, past all that is going wrong now, toward what can be. The currently dominant paradigm cannot endure indefinitely because it is more and more disconnected from nature, from spirituality, from ancestral truths, from what it means to be fully human. But it is not enough to catalogue our alienation from nature, from one another, from our own ancestral traditions, from ourselves and our own spiritual nature. We need to find paths forward. We need to create new communities with renewed, shared vision. 

Hieros was founded in order to provide a forum for articulating aspirational vision for the future, and to encourage means of realizing it. You can’t so easily change a corrupted national government, or corrupted and degraded existing institutions, but you can create new ways of being where you are, new communities, and new institutions.   

There is a prevailing paradigm in contemporary societies: it is fundamentally materialistic and tyrannical. It relies on propaganda and top-down managerial power to enforce a materialistic belief system and whatever lies the system’s managers deem. It is cut off from nature. It is cut off from, and seeks to sever our ties with, our own ancestral past. This is what “modernity” is, actually. It is atomizing. It dissolves tradition and replaces it with materialistic nihilism, veiled by illusion and artifice. We see this at work in China. In the Soviet Union. In America, in Canada, in Australia, and in Europe. 

But there is a very different paradigm as well. This other paradigm can express itself in different religious traditions, and takes different cultural forms depending on the nature of the locale and its people. It is, of course, not materialistic. It naturally includes the recognition that both the natural and human realms have spiritual dimensions and are profoundly interconnected. This recognition is sometimes termed pagan, and it is also termed folk tradition. Historically, it was transmitted orally within tribes and families, and carried on within religious traditions, including monotheistic ones rhetorically opposed to it.

In this other paradigm, people see the world quite differently than materialists. For them, nature is not just a collection of objects or “resources” to be excavated or exploited, but the home of beings both visible and invisible. In this other paradigm, the natural world is alive with cognizant presences both visible and invisible. By recognizing this, by giving reciprocal offerings and participating in seasonal rituals, people help assure the harmonious integration of natural, human, and divine realms. 

This other paradigm is not materialistic—that is, those who participate in it don’t believe that only the material realm is real. This other paradigm is also not nihilistic, but rather affirms what is good, true, and beautiful in human and natural worlds. It affirms the continuity of consciousness after physical death, and includes practices to ensure a good death and afterlife. It holds that there are all manner of non-physical beings of many different kinds, including divinities, and it seeks to maintain harmony with them. 

Interestingly, those who adhere to the materialistic paradigm often often are filled with a righteous indignation that others hold to an archaic spiritual understanding and view of the natural world and of human beings. You see this in the materialistic, atheistic, and nihilistic quasi-religious fury directed against those who espouse or even acknowledge how people traditionally understood themselves and their world. The materialist can brook no other views. The materialistic nihilist isn’t content with his own materialism, but feels it necessary to ban, or eliminate, explicitly and even implicitly challenging alternatives.

This is also true in contemporary academia, of course, where variants of the same mentality dominate. Censorship, self-censorship, and an implicit or explicit materialistic nihilism reign. For a host of reasons, most contemporary academic institutions have become unmoored from their own past and have lost their way. What’s worse, there seems to be no way of correcting what has gone wrong from inside them. Even without knowing how far higher educational institutions have truly fallen, the public increasingly (and rightly) has come to doubt their value. 

We urgently need new approaches to inclusive knowledge that includes, not excludes, the sacred. Our vision for Hieros is that it offer a space for more profound and ancient ways of understanding, and for those who seek community of like mind. Our vision is of courses, workshops, conferences, and events that encourage exploring and engaging in practices for themselves. 

Of course, there are predecessors and models, the most important of which are Buddhist. Buddhism has held educational traditions for millennia. Buddhism has long had a model for higher education that, to a greater or lesser degree, did not oppose theory to practice, or logic to the transcendence of logic, but rather recognized the value of both in an integrated model that included also ritual traditions and practices for recognizing and harmonizing relations with natural and spiritual realms and beings.

What we envision is futuristic, or perhaps, archeo-futuristic. We look toward the future, beyond the current systems, which because they are disconnected from and hostile to our ancestral pasts and spirituality, cannot last indefinitely, and cannot form the basis for authentic and fully integrated cultures, but rather oppose and seek to suppress them. An integrated, complete, and balanced way of being in the world requires fundamental changes in worldview. What we envision takes advantage of technology that allows people of like mind to connect, share, explore, and learn from anywhere, and in this sense also is futuristic, but is also perennial, centered in that which is lasting, good, beautiful, and true. 

How do lasting cultures centered in the good, the beautiful, and the true come into being? What characterizes authentic, balanced, organic culture in harmony with nature, including both visible and invisible aspects and beings? Whether you term such a culture “pagan” or use some other appellation, it answers to these characteristics. The purpose of Hieros is to explore, to encourage exploration, and to apply our shared understanding in these areas. 

This is why there is a practical, or applied aspect to our courses and to what we offer. Our course on sacred gardens is not simply providing knowledge about existing gardens. It has at its center creating your own garden where you are. Our course on the humanities and consciousness—Becoming Conscious—is based in your exploration of the great humanities tradition in light of developing our awareness of ourselves and of the natural world. Our course on mysticism is centered on how to engage in a unique contemplative path within the Christian mystical tradition. Our course in alchemical practice is also centered in how to engage in it. All our courses share this emphasis. 

Beyond individual courses, fellowships, events, articles, podcasts, videos, and other resources, our guiding aspiration is to encourage the development of spiritually centered individuals and communities. By nature, these are each distinct, flourishing in particular locales. Our vision emphasizes the local, rooted, and specific. Our vision recognizes the folk who belong to those places, whose ancestral home is there. It recognizes the tribal and shamanic aspects of presence in a particular land. It encourages new, more balanced, more rooted, more profound ways of being in the world. 

This is not our entire vision, of course. Rather, it indicates the gist of what we are about. It indicates where we seek to go, and the uniqueness of what we intend to create and encourage. It is about how our shared past can illuminate our future where you are. If you feel the call, then please support Hieros Institute, so we can continue to expand our capacity to support those who are engaged in this kind of vital work for the future.