Questions to contemplate:

“. . . how has it happened to mankind that many of its intelligent representatives—even its leaders and directors—have come to see in the brain not the instrument but the producer of consciousness, in chemistry not the instrument but producer of life, in the economic sphere not the instrument but producer of culture? How can it be that human intelligence has arrived—in so far as many of its representatives are concerned—at seeing man without a soul and the world without God? What secret and hidden force is at work pushing and forcing human intelligence to say first of all that the essential problems are insoluble—things transcending the senses and intelligible being unknowable—and then try to deny their very existence? In other words, how has it happened that human intelligence finds itself in a state of metaphysical eclipse?”

–Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, Letter XVIII, La Lune, 1985/2002, p. 518.