what we’ve briefly covered here is something like this. everyone, and their “group”, has concepts and ideas about the universe, but they’re rarely articulated. occasionally some weirdo will rise from their ranks and take these intuitions and cohesively encode them into something.

a crystal takes a complicated structure and puts it all into a single aesthetic package. everything has a place in it. its reflective and clear: you can see other things in it and through it. its also easy to handle: you can just pick all that up, no problem. https://hell.twtr.plus/media/72e847b79c431a456b11adbfe4a9f775668f0bbe82d995835bbd7021cf06ad57.file

in ‘signs and symbols in christian art’ by george ferguson, he says the renaissance aesthetic became eternal in western culture because its a total crystallization of western man’s spiritual experience. that word, crystallization, is really perfect. https://hell.twtr.plus/media/65d474c94c256f07104863162497412295cb296d6c92197b455b5c1b3b365508.file

america doesn’t embrace its odd spiritual creations, its embarrassed by them. they’re freaks. please put them in the other room, or the dumpster so if there is any uniquely american spiritual expression, its a safe bet normal people view it as a kind of embarrassing bizarre joke https://hell.twtr.plus/media/a09cd5e2e20e15402b56467af558dfcf6c9b95e9f7cc61c2376695e716a041f7.file

america specializes in making weird, atypical, spiritual views. christian offshoots, new denominations, new religious movements, cults, thats our speciality. no one else does it like us. not even close. that’s america. but the thing about america is: it hates these things.

i used to be very into hunter s. thompson. one of his things was going on a quest for the heart of america, to find the american dream, to find “america”. im unclear if he thought he succeeded. thing is, he wasn’t into religion. america is a religion place. maybe that’s my bias.

in this way, spiritual “forms” often seem to just rise up from a people - in ways you would often not expect. an academic analysis of a small country’s folk religions might include a chapter on basket weaving, or dining: those things express these otherwise hidden views of life. https://hell.twtr.plus/media/4c42ee389de7867cf5f3060b0a06b74afff1210816cbf12b4934abafe90da401.file

the folk beliefs of a people are interesting. they “just happen”. generally, no one tells normal people to go out and develop a cohesive cosmology and understanding of life, and to embed this into various cultural forms. they just do it - generally without realizing it.

this also having an inverse process on the other end: as one gets older and gets closer to leaving the world, they attempt to un-dirty themselves, preparing to re-enter that pure state. thus old people who previously would have done “bad things” slowly develop a distaste for them https://hell.twtr.plus/media/459f9886cacdc7ba7118fb0a3d008b5c6acddc33fefc4fffae37a7c6f1f2b299.file