The Fifth Dimension
Explore the edge of consciousness, spirituality, and hidden truths with The Fifth Dimension, a podcast that delves into the mysteries that shape our world. Since 2019, host Evan McDermod has been engaging with thinkers, spiritualists, and experts worldwide to unravel the deep-rooted myths that obscure our perception of reality. From consciousness studies and personal awakening to UFO phenomena and societal transformations, each episode encourages listeners to question, reflect, and realign with a deeper sense of meaning. Discover perspectives that challenge the mainstream narrative and embrace the journey toward a more awakened understanding of self and society.
The Fifth Dimension
Stephen Jenkinson - Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work
304 - In a time when love has been reduced to performance, preference, and self-expression, what does it mean to remember its true nature?
In this conversation, Stephen Jenkinson — author of Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work — joins Evan McDermod to explore the deep spiritual crisis behind modern relationships and the ceremonial poverty of our culture. Once, to marry was to take up a spiritual labor — to be apprenticed to devotion, to bear witness before gods and community, to mother the culture through love’s endurance. Today, that mythic inheritance has nearly vanished.
Stephen and Evan dive into what has been lost and what can be remembered — not just about marriage, but about what it means to live meaningfully with one another. This is a dialogue about love as responsibility, language as invocation, and the return of ritual to our fractured world.
💔 Episode Themes & Insights
-Why matrimony has dissolved: Exploring how the loss of communal ritual and cultural literacy has left modern love unanchored.
-The mythic nature of sacred union: Understanding matrimony as the alchemy of opposites — the mothering of culture through devotion.
-The decline of true ceremony: Looking at how weddings became performances rather than initiations into service and responsibility.
-The heart’s work: Unpacking how love refines the soul through humility, vulnerability, and the willingness to be changed.
-Language as sacred technology: Reclaiming eloquence, vow, and the spoken word as acts of invocation that bind spirit to the world.
-Witnessing and community: Rediscovering the role of the village — how true ceremony demands presence, participation, and shared consequence.
-Marriage as cultural repair: Seeing union as an act of rebellion against isolation, and a call to rebuild kinship in a disconnected age.
-Love as responsibility: Remembering that love was never meant for personal gain, but as an offering to the soul of the world.
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