Retelling the Story of Western Civilization (so it makes sense)

300 A.D.

Constantine acquires Gospels from natural philosophers, staples them together and invents Christianity. He silences Arius the alchemist and adopts Athanasius’s take on scripture. (Newton and Locke followed Arius’ take, that it is alchemy.)

The Jesus narratives of the Gospels tell us of an organ system in our bodies that fulfills the functions of healer and Storyteller for the body, the body’s community, and the world. The Vagus Nerve wanders the body healing and curing ailments and psychic and emotional wounds. It heals cells with cells from other parts, it heals broken hearts with calm and quiet, a little time not to think about our lives and just to feel them and feel who we are. It comforts us as we slowly move toward words for what has befallen us. Without knowing about it until the 1980’s, we have all received this healing from this unknown, and therefore frighteningly forbidden, part of us.

The authors of the Gospels had a beautiful subject to weave into Stories—a loving, feisty, inscrutable, perky protagonist who hangs out with friends telling Stories and being kind. He’s got some serious mystery going on right up to the last, and then some, minute of his life. And what a great ending—that part with the rose garden. Nice touch. They even told the Stories from varying perspectives at times, always a great thing to remember when it comes to Stories: there’s always a few more sides. The closer you read, the more increasingly clear it becomes that Jesus isn’t pro-empire anything, and that this stance on events relates to divinity. The Vagus Nerve is divine because it is the human mechanism for Story-listening and Storytelling at cellular, community, and cosmic levels. It’s how we belong here with everybody else.

We’re a Story. And a Story requires imagination. You know that life-bestowing gift there in your body that fills you with light in your darkest hour. Pretend it isn’t there and as for the imagination it produces, empiricism took care of that back in 1790 when suddenly a philosophy that is not in connection with nature started writing doctrines, formerly an act reserved for the church. But there it is, now, isn’t it. As of the year of our Lord 1790, science was now the only path to God, and therefore science was the only church. A tiny, little, delusional church.

Constantine had his Gospels, his Nicaean Creed, and his Prayer of Athanasius all set to take back to his home and launch an empire, an empire that could spread like the mustard seed someone mentions in his book. That is, if nobody finds out that the Gospels are a metaphysiological textbook about a body part that houses a mirror neuron sharing a reflection with God.

Is it possible that Constantine had no clue that the bustling alchemical activity of Alexandria was a smaller iteration of the scene in Iraq and the Levant? Levant meaning “to rise,” as we do when we are feeling safe and supported in our Polyvagal halo—not to forget we can enact levity from inside matter, with practice of course through steady practice in Storytelling whereby we bind ourselves to the greater powers of nature because Storytelling is the universal consciousness—it just spits numbers from time to time to make sure we’re paying close attention. No, not to forget that.

762 A.D.

Muslim scholars laid the foundation of Hermetic Alchemy, the branch of study that would travel through Europe to the Royal Society translated into Latin, with the Arabic part of the Story deleted, and the alienation of our superior scholars begun . In 762, the Abbasid caliphate established Baghdad. The city energizes scholarship and art, the two branches extending from alchemy’s earth-given root that we, too, share. The Golden Age of Islam had begun. It will share centuries with the Crusades. The Muslims protecting and continuing natural philosophy which does not threaten non-fundamentalist Islam and is the foundation of Sufi tradition. The only religion on earth that alchemy does threaten is Christianity, the very pages of which are the embodiment of alchemy’s magnum opus, the transformation of body into soul.

662-1258 A.D,

The Islamic Golden Age was predicated on alchemy and the new form of science it spawned, chemistry. As with Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Celtic Alchemy, you get the idea, Islam accepts that matter and spirit are. They aren’t a theory or a fringe science. We have and are both. The purpose of religious practice is to get a handle on this, to know how the gadgetry responds in our spherical, infinite existences.

1096-1300

The Christian Crusades enact military campaigns against Muslims because the Muslims have a shit ton of alchemical knowledge and writings about the Vagus Nerve, the Creative System, and if anyone sees them, it will be clear that Jesus is a body part, an amazing, miraculous, life-saving, and planet-saving body part, but a body part. And so are all prophets and patriarchs going all the way back through time. Every religion and practice and wisdom knows this, has known this forever, and we once knew it, too.

The more familiar narrative works here, too. They want a place on earth called Zion, which is a metaphor in the Stories for everlasting safety, kindness, and creativity, a place we call home. This place is within. We find it through peace and generosity, and the courage to look within and transform our pain into song and Story.

1317 A.D.

Pope John XXII: spondent quas non exhibent outlaws alchemy in 1317 even though predecessor Pope Boniface VIII practiced alchemy

Alchemy was/is a form of reasoning. Poetic reasoning is mentioned in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry” and in Edgar Allan Poe’s essay, “The Poetic Principle.” It’s a spherical form of reason liberated from time and space. As found during the creative process, nature speaks through an artist or poet’s materials. This is not limited to the studio or even city. Once entered, the creative process arises within both the artist-poet and the world of matter. Everything changes into a magical world peppered with sweet signals and astonishing surprises. This is the world the alchemists occupied going back through the Iron Age and beyond. This is the world we still occupy. We’ve just been trained and medicated not to speak of it, and, even worse, not to see it at all.

In alchemy, also called natural philosophy, echoes and parallax verify intuition. Francis Bacon and Newton’s work with the scientific method emerged from a desire for something more practical than echoes and parallax to prove the echoes and parallax. They were grounding tens of thousands of years of natural philosophy in concert with funding by the queen.

Creative Imagination + emotion = art

Creative Imagination + curiosity= science

Still the same source: nature. Not us.

1688

Protestant William invades England, takes throne from Catholic James II. William called this “The Glorious Revolution.” There wasn’t a battle. It was managed by lords sick of James’ authoritarianism. William on the throne meant Protestants didn’t lose their positions or jobs.

Protestantism embraced science that “contested” scripture. But scripture is science as allegory, as science was until 1650s. Newton and Royal Society worked with alchemical books. Scientific method just helped them “test” the alchemical operations. These operations would be written in words, as they all were, though sometimes only pictures such as Mutus Liber, the Book of Silence.

The practice would have been multi-layered, omni-dimensional—the secret fire of imagination trained upon both ideas and matter. Seen from Enlightenment, which buried it, alchemy conjures wincing and superiority, “Oh those deranged dark ages—so thankful science saved us.” We forget that humanity did quite well keeping the species going for more than 50,000 years before 1690, whereas in a mere three hundred we’ve tanked the planet and have billionaires fleecing the federal government insisting private rockets are for everyone.

1689

One year after William takes the throne, Sir Isaac Newton appears in a seat in House of Parliament at the king’s pleasure. Alchemy vanishes from Western science which forges ahead without any system of checks or balances with natural world. In three hundred years, Western culture will destroy the earth and forego care and compassion for money.

1969

The father of Modern Economic Theory wins one of Sir Isaac Newton’s trunks in an auction and discovers that the trunks contain Newton’s work on levity a function of alchemical process whereby in telling our Stories we lighten up in fermentation. He dies before he can deliver his speech, so his brother shares it, ending with the words, “To many Sir Isaac Newton was the first scientist. To me, he was the last of the magicians.” Shortly after, The Newton Project is launched in multiple universities around the world where portions of the more than ten million words of the last magician’s alchemy, theology, poetry, and translations, unknown to the 2025 eye that to the alchemists, these are all the same things.

1980s

Expressive Writing arises from Psychology when Dr. James Pennebaker discovers all his freshman students have experienced trauma. He proves that when people write their trauma down in four 15-minute sessions, they are healthier and more resilient than those who keep it inside. Also in the 1980s, Neuroscience comes on the scene. For the first time we have evidence that the left-brain-right-brain model is entirely wrong. Instead, we learn we have networks that reconfigure for different tasks. We also discover The Creative Brain where connections are stronger, brighter, and far greater in number. We’re still trying to figure out what it’s good for, aside from the usual problem-solving.

2006-7

Narrative Medicine of Dr. Rita Charon MD PhD of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Coyote Medicine (Originally Narrative Medicine) of Lakota-Cherokee-Scots Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona MD PhD launch books within months of each other.

2021

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America publishes a study entitled “Storytelling increases oxytocin and positive emotions and decreases cortisol and pain in hospitalized children.” The authors write, “Our findings provide a psychophysiological basis for the short-term benefits of Storytelling and suggest that a simple and inexpensive intervention may help alleviate the physical and psychological pain of hospitalized children on the day of the intervention. “This is one of thousands of studies reintroducing Storytelling into clinical medical practice. (The real solution? Put professional storytellers in the hospitals rather than making a drug that seeks to mimic them.)

2025

By telling our Stories and listening to each other’s Stories, we can recenter our humanity. From the Western perspective that got us into this mess, a Story is nothing special, but from the  natural-philosophy perspective, Stories are supernatural, and so are we.

In Constantine’s time, books were painstakingly copied by hand. He must have felt entirely confident his empire’s descendants would not invent an internet. Little did he know we would be so unconsciously driven by the need to know our Story that we’d create our own sick form of universal consciousness and put to an end our ceaseless hunger for belonging and simple, sustainable happiness.