The Dark Sacred: Cormac McCarthy, Jung, and the Postsecular Numinous
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The Dark Sacred: Cormac McCarthy, Jung, and the Postsecular Numinous
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In this episode, I explore Cormac McCarthy’s dark, postsecular vision of the sacred alongside Carl Jung and David Tacey’s idea of the “darkening spirit.” I reflect on the sacred not as something safely contained by institutional religion or reduced to comfort, goodness, and light, but as the numinous: beautiful, violent, disruptive, terrifying, and transformative.
Drawing on Jung’s provocative claim that organized religion can protect us from a direct experience of God, I think through McCarthy’s landscapes, violence, longing, animals, grief, and mystery as places where the sacred returns after the collapse of easy belief and easy unbelief. This is not an anti-Christian reflection. I share how deeply I’ve been shaped by Christian symbols while also wrestling with why I can no longer affirm a vision of the divine that cannot face evil, shadow, and violence as real powers within the greater whole.