Nietzsche believed that the death of God would produce cataclysmic upheavals in the Western world — including, as he prophesied in Will to Power, the death of millions at the hands of utopian communism. God is dead, and the hole He left behind is a vacuum in the human soul, filled carelessly and dangerously by ideology, motivated by intellectual inertia, arrogance, resentment and deceit. Dostoevsky believed the same thing, detailing out his beliefs in his great novels, most particularly Crime and Punishment and The Devils (or The Possessed).

I wrote Maps of Meaning during my sojourns at three universities: Alberta, McGill and Harvard. While teaching at the latter, I met Irina Vayl, a Russian physicist and poet (see, for example, http://bit.ly/2ev6cOY ). Irina and her husband Vladimir spent years translating Maps of Meaning. We tried to find a publisher in Russia, but this proved impossible, for many reasons.

Yesterday, I saw the following video, featuring the libertarian Stefan Molyneux and a Danish journalist, Iben Thranholm: http://bit.ly/2evaHcB. In this video, the claim is made that Russia has undergone a re-conversion to Orthodox Christianity, taking the precise path out of the nihilism and totalitarianism attendant upon the Death of God recommended by Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, as well as Dostoevsky. I was struck very hard by this video, which also indicates — correctly, in my opinion — that we are in the midst of a profound spiritual battle.

The human psyche has many levels. What is religious exists at the very deepest of those levels. What is religious is what is fundamental. People are religious, whether they know it or not, because they must have fundamental beliefs. Otherwise they cannot act. They can’t even perceive. They can be very confused about the nature of those fundamentals. Their psyches can be fractured, disjointed and incoherent. Without axiomatic beliefs, however, we cannot simplify the world enough to act within it.

Maps of Meaning is about the fundamental levels of the human psyche. It’s about the Christianity upon which the West is, and must be, founded. It’s a call to a new way of being and, simultaneously, a reunion with the past. It is the responsibility of every man to rescue his dead father from the underworld. That’s the oldest story of mankind. Without that, there is only chaos. Maps of Meaning unites neuropsychology with ancient mythology, from the Mesopotamian, through the Egyptian and Judaic, to the Christian, with detours into Taoism and other profound faiths. It’s strongly influenced by the thinking of Carl Jung and his student, Erich Neumann, as well as Freud, Rogers and the other great 20th century clinical thinkers.