The Numinous Neutered—How the Soul was Industrialized for Profit

[Level 1: Transitional] How the West sanitized the sacred and sold you the husk

Last month, I thought astrology was bullshit—sun sign memes, vague personality descriptions, nonsensical Co-Star messages, and blaming shitty behavior on balls of gas or rock millions of miles away.

But then I pulled my natal chart at the request of a dark retreat application form. “Why do they care?” I wondered. So I started digging into it for myself.

I read up on the aspects, the houses, the symbolism. As I did, the realization began to dawn on me—to my absolute disbelief and horror—

This isn’t woo. This is a complicated language.

None of the ladies at my yoga studio knew how to read this. I don’t either, but I’m learning.

A language for describing the architecture of embodied consciousness.

A language for mapping the inner landscape.

A language that’s been deliberately stripped of its depth, sanitized into Buzzfeed quizzes and coffee mugs, so that people don’t have to take it seriously.

Just like yoga.

Just like meditation.

Just like all of it.

And I’m furious about it. Not intellectually furious. Soul-level furious. Because this isn’t helping people. This is poisoning the water, selling “medicine” for profit, and convincing ourselves that the water was never safe to begin with.

We’re left with lifeless husks of once sacred frameworks that we now either:

• mindlessly consume like empty calories after a stressful day—a temporary fix that leaves us starving for substance.

• write off as “woo” and throw in the trash because the beating hearts have been ripped out

All without us even realizing it.

The pattern I’m seeing

Here’s what I’m noticing:

• Yoga: Union with the Divine → Exotic stretching with a soundtrack / physical workout

• Astrology: Sacred soul-mapping → “What’s your sign?” small talk / pop psychology

• MBTI: Jungian individuation → Corporate personality sorting / team-building

• Meditation: Communion with God → Stress relief app / mental wellness routine

Every single one followed the same path:

1. Sacred technology arrives in the West

2. It works (and people notice)

3. Power structures react (laws, ridicule, persecution)

4. It gets sanitized (remove the Divine, keep the “wellness”)

5. It gets commodified (sell it back as a product)

6. Cultural amnesia sets in (people forget what it was)

This isn’t conspiracy; this is documented history. And now that I’ve seen the pattern, I can’t unsee it and I can’t keep quiet about it with how much damage this has caused the Western psyche.

Let me show you what I mean

Aside from the previous example of Yoga in America in an earlier post, let’s examine two case studies on astrology, a common “woo” topic.

Case Study #1: Alan Leo, “father of modern (read: pop) astrology”

In 1917, theosophist and astrologer Alan Leo was convicted under the Vagrancy Act—a law originally designed to control the poor—for “fortune-telling.” Traditional astrology threatened the social order: if ordinary people could know their fate, who needed priests? Who needed authorities?

Leo, facing imprisonment after his second prosecution in three years, desperately rewrote hundreds of pages to “recast the whole system and make it run more along the lines of character reading and less as the assertion of an inevitable destiny.”

He stripped away:

• Prediction (knowing the future threatens control)

• Fate (accepting destiny undermines ego-based “free will”)

• Mathematical complexity (keeps the masses out)

• The numinous (the sacred can’t be commodified... until you remove the sacred)

What was left?

Sun sign astrology—vague enough to be harmless, simple enough to be profitable. Stripped of power, but retaining just enough flavor to keep people interested.

Sound familiar?

And here's the kicker—the stress of the frantic rewrite and persecution killed him; he died of a cerebral hemorrhage just weeks after the trial.

But the damage was done. To survive the law, astrology had to become psychology.

The modern result of sanitization: Vague directives delivered via push notification.

Case Study #2: MBTI—”corporate astrology”

Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers weren’t psychologists. They were Jungian enthusiasts who read Carl Jung’s work on individuation—the sacred process of integrating the unconscious and becoming whole—and thought: “How can we use this to sort factory workers during World War II?”

That’s not hyperbole. The MBTI was literally designed to sort women into “war-time jobs that would be most ‘comfortable and effective.’”

Not: “Which archetypal wounds are you here to heal?”

Not: “What does your psyche need to integrate?”

Just: “Which box should we put you in so you’re productive?”

Jung’s work on the collective unconscious—work that was meant to HEAL THE SOUL—has been reduced to corporate efficiency metrics.

The same framework that was supposed to help you integrate your shadow and encounter the Self (Jung’s term for God manifesting in the individual) now tells you whether you’re an “INTJ” or “ENFP” so HR can slot you into the right team.

We care only about the personality—the persona and ego—but not the shadow, not the unconscious, not the soul, and certainly not the Self. That’s what they really couldn’t sell—direct access to the Divine through your own psyche.

Look at this Jungian map of the psyche. MBTI only cares about the tiny slice labeled “Persona” and “Ego.” The rest—the Shadow, the Self—is ignored because HR can't monetize it.

We’ve stopped looking into the depths to heal. Instead, we assume we are fixed characters, molded to fit into the world like cogs in a machine—whether for the dating market or the corporate ladder.

This was by design to keep us in control. Fixed. Predictable. Limited.

What we lost

Here’s what was stolen:

• Real yoga isn’t exotic stretching.
  It’s an eightfold path to union with the Divine—where the physical postures are just ONE limb of a practice that includes breathwork, sense withdrawal, concentration, meditation, and ultimately: samadhi (dissolution into God).

• Real astrology isn’t “What’s your sign?”
  It’s a sacred blueprint for your soul’s journey through this life—a map of archetypal energies seeking integration, wounds seeking healing, gifts seeking expression.

• Real psychology (Jung’s work) isn’t personality typing.
  It’s individuation—the terrifying, sacred process of integrating your shadow, healing your inner splits, and becoming WHOLE.

But none of that is safe to systems of power and control ruled by egos.

None of that is profitable since it doesn’t keep you on the treadmill of consumption and lack. None of that keeps you turning to external authorities for guidance.

So it got stripped, sanitized, and sold as subscriptions, workshops, packages, and material goods.

And now? People think they’re “doing the work” when they:

• Go to yoga class

• Read their horoscope

• Take a personality test

• Meditate with an app

But they’re not.

They’re consuming the husk of what was once alive and wondering why they still lie awake at night feeling the hunger gnaw away at them.

They’re being sold the counterfeit of what could heal them—and they don’t even know what they’re missing.

To be clear: I’m not saying your yoga class is worthless or your meditation app is evil. I’m saying you’ve been sold a fraction of what these practices were designed to do—and convinced that the fraction is the whole.

Why this keeps happening

The West creates systems that prioritize profit and predictability. The real thing is dangerous to those systems because it cannot be scaled, packaged, or controlled.

The real thing requires you to:

• Change (not just “improve”)

• Surrender (not just “optimize”)

• Die to the ego (not just “find yourself”)

So it gets watered down, stripped of power, and sold as “self-care.”

People consume it thinking they’re “spiritual”—all while the actual pathway to the Divine remains hidden, mocked, or forgotten.

Wrapping up

I’m still learning the depths of these systems. But I don’t need a PhD to see the pattern. I just needed to pull my natal chart and ask: “Why does this feel sacred... and why was I told it was stupid?”

I’m documenting what I’m seeing:

• The systematic dismemberment of the soul’s language

• The deliberate neutering of sacred technologies

• The industrialization of pathways to the Divine—so they can be sold back to us as consumer products

This is the commodification of the Soul.

And if you’re reading this and feeling that same rage, that same grief, that same hunger for something of substance—

You’re not alone.

You’re not crazy.

You’re just remembering what was stolen.

The sacred technologies are still here. They’re just buried under branding, diluted into products, and sold back to you as “wellness.”

But you don’t have to buy the counterfeit.

So what now?

Pull your natal chart—not from Co-Star, but from a real astrologer or a traditional chart calculator. Read it as a map, not a meme.

Go to yoga—and ask yourself: “What if this wasn’t just stretching? What if this was preparing my body to hold God?”

Take the MBTI—and then read Jung (I highly recommend his Red Book). See what was stolen. Feel the difference between being sorted and becoming whole.

Better yet, test the hypothesis yourself.

I ran an experiment: I fed my birth chart (and my spouse’s) into an AI and asked it to derive our MBTI types based only on the planetary positions—zero personality questions asked.

To my shock, it correctly identified both instantly.

Why? Because the astrological chart is the source code. The MBTI is just a bloated user interface running on top of it. You don’t need the questionnaire if you have the blueprint. All those “do you often…?” questions can be boiled down to a single date, time, and pair of coordinates. (I know, WTAF?)

The sacred is still there. It’s just buried under the bullshit.

Start digging.

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