Abstracting divinity

The definition has two halves that run in opposite directions. In the first, conscious and will, which Marsh treats as real properties of the living, are disguised, denied and abstracted into ideas and institutions until they belong to governance, religion and science rather than to people. She gives concrete instances: conscious is abstracted into what she calls the black box words imagination and nothing, and will is abstracted into black box words of its own, terms with no real definition that stand in for a meaning the authoritative reality would rather not name. Disturbances of self, life, will or consciousness are reclassified as bodily ailments. In each case the living property is not destroyed but relocated and renamed, moved out of the person and into an institution or an empty word that now administers it.

The second half is the way back. The living reach universal conscious and will again through anima banks, ritual and divination. Marsh names the experience of divinity directly as the experience of universal conscious, reached through visions, devotion and ritual. So the term holds both movements at once: the abstraction that carries conscious and will away into institutions and empty words, and the practices by which people try to reach them again.

The idea that human powers are projected onto an external authority and then served has older cousins. Ludwig Feuerbach argued in 1841 that God is humanity's own nature projected outward and worshipped as if it came from elsewhere. Marx asked who profits from that projection, and Max Weber traced how personal authority hardens into faceless bureaucracy. Marsh's account differs in what is taken: not an idea but conscious and will themselves, abstracted into institutions and into empty words, with science standing beside church and state as one of the abstracting powers.