Angie Speaks
The Counterfeit Spirit

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in spirituality. Britain is said to be experiencing a “quiet” Christian revival, while American dissidents promote “trad cath” lifestyles as counterculture. Narrations of such turns identify a growing dissatisfaction with the limits of rational meaning-making, as well as religion’s illusory proximity to politics.

Yet these explanations cannot account for the shadowy aspects of faith that lie beyond the reactionary or opportunistic. The author and essayist Angie Speaks proposes that they should be understood as the epiphenomena of a prevailing “counterfeit spirit” — the distorted double of the sacred — which has survived into late modernity. This spirit manifests in the present as a mix of religious orthodoxy, sacralised politics, lifestyle mysticism, and cultic rationalism.

The excesses of today’s psychedelic renaissance, therapeutic industry, and spiritual influencer culture point to a world gorged in spectacle but starved for meaning — a condition which Speaks describes as Late-Stage Babylon. Reflecting on the work of Carl Jung, Speaks notes the current moment’s psychic breakdown, in which the unresolved conflicts of faith and knowledge, spirit and matter, or order and chaos manifest as ideological or technocratic possession. 

Join Speaks in a conversation with the philosopher Nina Power as they scrutinise the past decade’s “ontological shock”, the rise of the Jungian Antichrist, techno-eschatology, and ways to reintegrate society’s repressed shadow.

Attendees will be able to purchase a copy of Late-Stage Babylon at a special discount.