Eve Eurydice speaks with Rene Steinke of our growing hunger for spirituality. In a culture that mitigates the shock of our mortality through NFT Blockchain dream states and meta-sublimation rather than divine ritual in sync with the cycles of nature, a society that has replaced magic with coding, math, and disembodied commerce, people are looking for paths to transformation using repurposed religion (see the shallow sentimentality of TED talks). We all have the religious impulse, the crucible where we alchemically meet and merge into one. Love requires trust, faith, and self-abnegation. Humans reclaim faith by self-sacrifice. We give something up to gain god. We cleanse the pressure of culture to regenerate it. Pre-institutional religion is transgressive. ⚡️We have lived through the thesis of patriarchy for 6 millennia. We are now in anthithesis—in messy overexcess and in decline. The genius of art is that it sees that the contradictions do not exist. The way we resynthesize will be painful. It’s how transformation works. (Read Ovid.) We can only rediscover faith in each other, in God, in Nature, outside the names we now use and narratives we parrot. America was settled by people of profound religious purity. But religion can be turned into dogma and the need for salvation into social control to preserve the interests of obscene capital. The Mary Magdalene gospel found in the old scrolls didn’t make it into the canon. The feminist reclaiming of Christianity failed. Rene speaks of the artist Hilma af Klint and her relationship to religion and spirituality. Like Blavatsky in the Theosophical Society, she held seances with female friends seeking an intuitive vision outside of patriarchy. Art used to be religious. Post Enlightenment, art became commerce. Embroidery is still a meditative practice. So is Hand-writing. Both counterbalance our Computational Culture. Eurydice sees the primacy of Mind over Body as indicative of civilizational decline. Enjoy! ⚡️Rene Steinke is the author of the novels The Fires, Holy Skirts, and Friendswood. Holy Skirts, a novel based on the life of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, was an NBA finalist. ⚡️ For podcast, merch, art, go to https://Eurydice.net and https://SpeakwithEve.com For Apple podcast go to https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/speak-sex-w-eve/id1448261953?uo=4 ☀️For videos, go to https://YouTube.com/SpeakSexwithEveEurydice 💫 For depth writing, go to https://eurydice.substack.com/ Support Eurydice at at https://anchor.fm/speaksex/support?ref=radiopublic --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/speaksex/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/speaksex/support