Against Ascension: On Yin, Villain Era, and What That Rises From Below

Ascension theology isn't only a claim about directionality. Ultimately, it’s a claim about rank. Up got built, as something superior to down, roughly the same centuries and the same contact through which white got built into a colour standing for purity, and dark into a colour standing for threat, or sin, or a savagery whiteness got to define. 

The missionaries who told the ones who came before me that their ancestor altar amounted to darkness needing illumination was reaching to file and rank souls, and that a colonial administration used to sort populations. Light meant civilized, correct, saved, clean. Dark meant backward, contaminated, wrong, damned. That sorting began with gender, and then through the belief that one’s belief is more up than another, that same sorting continued with race. Notice the load-bearing vocabulary in spiritual language that likes to describe itself, these days, as post-religious. Notice the sorting.

Contemporary spirituality tends to believe it left that assumption behind when it left the church. I don't think it did. I think it rebuilt the identical hierarchy just inside the exit, and called it vibration now, or frequency, a level a person is meant to be operating at, a number consciousness is meant to clear before anyone will grant that it's legitimate. New Age spirituality rewards rightness and politeness, guards comfort, and simultaneously avoids discomfort, particularly the harmed’s discomfort at all costs. Again, notice the sorting.