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Origins of the Sacred

Introduction

p.XVII The World is Too Much With Us, William Wordsworth.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature 'that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The Winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not-Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

p.XVII

OsS: The power of beauty and imaginative powers are animal powers.

p.XVIII

The argument for rediscovering our original religious history is that as secular culture we are having an identity crisis (don't know who we are) and are riddled with fallacy, self-deception and mental disorder.

The argument is that we are human animals and as such are physically and spiritually imbued with animal power that is above all concerned with sex and violence, and that we are mismanaging sex and violence because we have lost the mystery of spirit (the imagination of a mythology of our natural spirit—pneuma).

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