It may be rubbish, but By Jingo it's English rubbish!

 

A bit of light relief from 1962: this record is new to me today, but exactly the kind of 'rubbish' I most enjoy... 

(As my brother said: "Young men with a dry sense of humour larking about – you cannot beat it!")

The Resurrection Business - Michael Martin's 'Jesus the Imagination'

Michael Martin is a remarkable man, and Jesus the Imagination - subtitled 'a journal of spiritual revolution' - is a remarkable publication. Martin is a poet, professor, and musician, who lives on a small organic farm in Michigan with his wife and nine children. It was on this farm, on the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene in 2016, that Jesus the Imagination was conceived, 'in temperatures,' as he tells us in his introduction, 'sweltering to ninety-seven degrees. That evening we chanted Divine Liturgy in the barn, broke bread, and swam beneath the stars in the darkness of the pond. Some of the participants of that conference are represented in these pages, some were present in spirit, and some were somehow awakened to the impulse by methods quite beyond my knowing. Our intention was then, and is now, not altogether modest: the regeneration of Christian art and culture.'

Born into a working-class milieu in Detroit, Martin is a Byzantine Rite Catholic who taught at a Waldorf Steiner school for eighteen years. This breadth and depth of spiritual interest and experience comes across clearly in the contributions to Jesus the Imagination (Volume One), published by Angelico Press in July 2017. The journal is a beautifully designed paperback of 103 pages, containing poems, essays and drawings, all pulling together towards Martin's vision of artistic and cultural renewal. As he writes: 

'Sri Aurobindo, the Indian philosopher and poet, was adamant about the prophetic role of the arts. Writing in the second decade of the twentieth-century, he argued that "all art worth the name must go beyond the visible, must show us something that is hidden, and in its total effect not reproduce but create." William Blake, preceding Aurobindo by more than two hundred years, articulated a position even more pointed: "Let every Christian as much is in him lies engage himself openly and publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem." Is there any other way to be a Christian? I think not.'

'Art has the potential to create a new Gospel every day,' Martin continues. 'Not a different one, but a new one ...' It is the Incarnation, Martin believes, which makes this creativity possible. The centrality of the Incarnation and what this means regarding how we relate to the Earth and to each other is powerfully conveyed in a number of essays. Yurodivy, a meditation on the Russian concept of the Holy Fool by Therese Schroeder-Sheker, stands out in this respect, as does Scott F. Martin's The Benthic and the Celestial, a reflection on the great sea of life surrounding us, which our limited human vision fails to perceive, from the microcosmic to the angelic. Perhaps the most notable contribution here is Little Green Men Against Muddy Red Creatures by Sebastian Montiel and Aaron Riches. The authors compare Pope Francis's encyclical, Laudato Si - an example of a God-centred ecology, with men and women as stewards of God's creation - with Antoine de Saint-Exupery's fable, Le Petit Prince, which offers a superficially attractive, yet ultimately a less grounded and much colder vision of our relationship with the environment.

Jesus the Imagination, as these essays illustrate, is a profoundly anti-gnostic publication. For Martin and his fellow-contributors, the world is intrinsically good and the God who made it is good. It is not designed to torment and imprison us. Neither was it fashioned by a corrupt and spiteful demiurge. Nor were we thrown into it without rhyme or reason, condemned to scrabble around for scraps of subjective meaning in a universe which has no objective meaning. No. The fault lies in ourselves, not the world. We have let our spiritual vision become occluded. We fail to recognise and act upon the signs of God's presence in his creation. Jesus the Imagination is an attempt to cleanse and renew these 'doors of perception', restoring the connection between the human and the Divine, and repairing the links (damaged by ourselves, not God) which keep us, as the Book of Common Prayer says, 'in the knowledge and the love of God, and of his son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.'

The journal, consequently, has a strong emphasis on the natural world, but this comes together with a celebration of our intellectual and creative faculties, and an appreciation of how crucial they are in our 'mental fight' against the 'dark Satanic mills' of our time. Some of the best essays in Jesus the Imagination explore this theme (e.g. Michael Sauter's, Ultimate Reality and the Matter of John Cowper Powys, and A Spring Ending for The Winter's Tale by Father Jonathan Tobias) but none better, in my view, than Word Hunger by Elias Crim, which nails with pinpoint clarity the nature of the spiritual malaise assailing us today:

'... the danger we face turns out not to be Orwellian, that is, a world of book burning and externally imposed repression, perhaps leading to the gulag. It is instead Huxleyan, a soma-imbibing dreamscape in which there is no reason to ban a book because no-one wants to read one. Instead of Orwell's censorship, Huxley saw us drowning in information leading to passivity and mere egoism. Not a captive culture so much as a trvial culture, built upon an almost infinite appetite for distraction.'

Crim's remedy is what he calls 'deep reading', a slow, prayerful encounter with the sacred texts of Christianity in their original languages. He gives the example of Simone Weil, whose 'fierce love of Ancient Greek finally brought her to the Our Father in that language, after which she made it her life prayer, becoming for her a vehicle of regular mystical experience ... Sacred language surely has an incarnational dimension which insists we at certain times avoid ersatz bread (translations) in order to dine on 'panis angelicus' ... '

Here we see another characteristic of Jesus the Imagination. It is rooted in tradition, but doesn't lionise the past or try to recapture the glories of a former age. Quite the reverse. It boldly looks  forward, as Martin declares in his introduction: 'The regeneration of Christian art and culture ... is always already happening; it calls us into the future and cautions us against retreating into the past. For backwards is the way of the fearful. St. Peter almost drowned following that approach. The Lord bids us walk with him on the sea.'

This comes over especially clearly in the journal's centrepiece, a previously unpublished interview with Owen Barfield by James R. Whetmore, tellingly titled, On the Edge of the Unthinkable. The great French metaphysician, René Guénon (1886-1951) and the Traditionalist school of writers he inspired are much discussed in this conversation. Barfield's courteous but firm rebuttal of their narrative of cyclical decline and renewal is both energising and inspiring. While acknowledging the spiritual darkness of our epoch, Barfield restores agency to the individual, who, in Guénon's schemata, has no role to play in the drama of our times except sit on his or her hands and wait for the Iron Age to end and the new Golden Age to begin. Charles Upton, in his poem Messiah (also featured in Jesus the Imagination), asks all the relevant questions here. The contribution we can make in the Great Battle between good and evil might not always be clear or obvious, but each of us is a child of God with a unique, probably surprising, never unimportant destiny to fulfill. As Upton enquires:

Who are we
Who were born at the end?
Are we the best, or the worst of men?
Latter-day saints,
Or demons in human form?
What bitter, medicinal juice
Was destined to be twisted out of us
That we came here to breathe, and walk
In this time
And at this place?

We are stewards. Stewards of our souls and stewards of the land with big jobs to do. That's my response to Upton's questions, and I feel that's the answer Jesus the Imagination makes too. Whetmore's interview reminds us that despite current difficulties, there is still everything to play for spiritually. Our age, in fact, might be less about apocalypse and more to do with arrested development, a spiritual and mental stage akin to adolescence which God is asking us to transcend. In pre-modern times men and women felt close to God in an intuitive, often unconscious, and usually highly collective fashion. We have lost that bond today but we are called to regain it, not by 'following an antique drum' as T.S. Eliot says in Little Gidding but by actively choosing the Good - which we now have the capability to do - and becoming fully conscious partners with the Divine in a way that our less individualised ancestors never could. We have to find a way of letting this individualised consciousness lead us closer to God rather than further away.

The great problem today, however, is that an excess of individual liberty - with 'choice' seen as the sole and supreme good - is corroding the political and social foundations of the West. We are ruled by an increasingly illiberal form of liberalism which lacks coherence (politicians and commentators, for instance, championing LGBT rights and an increased Islamic presence) and seems bent on undermining any sense of objective standards and values. It is not surprising, in such a climate, that many Christians are advocating a complete withdrawal from the secular world and the creation of alternative, 'underground' networks of co-religionists as the only way traditional faith-based communities can weather the storm and build for a more sympathetic future.

Rod Dreher's famous book, The Benedict Option (2017), is the best-known example of this. While Michael Martin has sympathy for Dreher's position, Jesus the Imagination chooses a different path, which Martin calls the Sophia Option. 'My contention,' he writes on his blog is that if we begin with joy and love for the Risen One and train ourselves to recognise his Wisdom (Sophia) in Creation we will be carrying the seeds of spiritual and cultural regeneration within us and spreading them throughout the world ... We need to be in the resurrection business.'

'The Sophia Option,' Martin goes on, 'is a response to the most fundamental of questions: what is the best way to live? It is not a flight from the world. Nor is it something so radically new as to be incomprehensible. Rather, the Sophia Option seeks to take the essence of the tradition, the essence of Christendom, and practice it as a lived reality mindful of our vocation to renew the world, a world in constant need of renewal.'

'We need to be in the resurrection business.' That, for me, is the key sentence. It's no good hunkering down, going 'off grid' and hoping that the illiberal liberal state will somehow ignore us. It's pointless planting seeds for better times ahead if all we can offer in tough times is a defensive posture and a surrender of the public square to the enemy. It's always better, surely to goodness, to go to the place of attack and live out our faith with such verve and panache that our faces shine and people cry out in astonishment, 'I never knew that that's what being a Christian was all about.' The 'living water' Christ offers the Samaritan woman in the Fourth Gospel is offered to ourselves too. It contains everything we need and want - from the wildest ecstasy to the profoundest peace, and more besides - the healing of harms and the fulfilment of our deepest, most secret desire - that all-consuming passion for Reality and Truth, which is hard to articulate, leads us down blind alleys at times, expresses itself oddly at others, and which the mind forgets but the heart remembers and stores up in itself, waiting for One to come to speak the Word of power, break the dam and bring the whole lot flooding out. Only then do we become Real. Only then does the living water flow; in ourselves and in our communities. The Waste Land is healed and life begins anew. This is the resurrection business, and this is what Jesus the Imagination brings to the table.

'Come,' says the woman of Samaria. 'See a man, which told me all things that ever I did.' She might have added, 'and all the joys, sorrows, hopes, fears, thoughts and dreams that ever I had.' If people could come to understand - not just intellectually, but in their bones - that this is the heart of Christianity - this level of intimacy, empathy and encounter - then the false paths to fulfilment offered by the world would lose their allure and we could begin to talk seriously at last about the possibility of a Christian renaissance.

Getting from here to there isn't easy though. It calls for daring, audacity, and a radical shake up in how we convey the Christian story, finding the balance between remaining rooted in tradition and taking to heart Christ's statement of intent in Revelation - 'Behold, I make all things new.'

This is the tightrope that Jesus the Imagination walks, and it does it with panache, style, and no little success. It's publication is a massive step in the right direction. It is not without its faults, of course. Some of the poetry lacks a bit of edge, while one or two of the essays read like they have been translated from a foreign language, and not very well either. But these are trifling caveats when set against the largeness of vision and the passion, flair, and sheer spiritual vitality that bristles between its covers.

The only questions that remain are for the readers of this blog. Jesus the Imagination is universal in its themes but naturally tends to speak with a North American voice. What then would a British-based equivalent look and feel like? What would be its raison d'être? How might it get its point across? What could we expect to find on its contents page? Does anyone see value in such a venture and feel ready to risk taking it on? Our thanks are very much due to Michael Martin then, for showing us what can and indeed must be done at this hour.

*

Jesus the Imagination Volume One can be purchased at the Angelico Press site here.

Volume Two has recently been published and can be purchased at the same site here. Its theme is 'the being of marriage', and features an interview with legendary Liverpool music collective, The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. As a sample of their work, check out what they do with R.S. Thomas's poem, The Bright Field, in this beautiful clip.

Jesus the Imagination also has a Facebook group which can be found here.

My Snake Stories

Bruce Charlton's last post has given me the excuse to write something I've wanted to do for a while but never found the right moment for since it is not really related to the basic spiritual theme of most of my endeavours. I suppose it could be said to be peripherally related but even that might be stretching a point.

Between 1980 and 1985 I lived in southern India just outside a town called Yercaud which is 5,000 feet up in the Shevaroy Hills in Tamil Nadu. It's coffee plantation country though with plenty of surrounding forest and jungle as well. I lived in a Victorian bungalow which had been owned at one time by two English spinsters who were the daughters of a missionary who had worked in the district. They had remained behind after Indian Independence in 1947 and apparently become increasingly isolated from the modern world. The flowers in their garden were exclusively various types of white lily, and they would borrow books from the local club (clubs were a mainstay of British India and many carried on after they left) and literally cut out any romantic bits with a pair of scissors. Since none of the books had been published after the 1940s, these must have been pretty mild by today's standards. The sisters, tolerated as local eccentrics, had died in the 1970s and the property had been left unoccupied for several years. 

It was built on the side of a hill and consisted of three levels as terraces had been cut into the slope. The bottom level, adjacent to the road, had a well and a couple of sheds which might have been servants' quarters at one time. Then on the first level there was a small bungalow, which we used as a guest house, and the top level had another, larger bungalow where we lived. Behind that the hill stretched up and it was covered by a sort of scrub jungle. The builders had cut into the granite rock under the vegetation leaving a rough cliff about a dozen or so feet high at the back of the house. Between this cliff and the house was a concrete gulley which ran the length of the house and then down the slope at the side before petering out in the undergrowth below. It had been constructed to take away the waste water from the kitchen and bathing areas which were situated at the rear of the house. This gulley was about 6 inches deep and wide, and open to the sun. 

One day at around midday I was in the kitchen preparing lunch. There was a door at the back of the kitchen which was around 5 feet in width, twice the width of a normal door probably to air the place more effectively. This was wide open since it was a hot day and there was no other ventilation. I was standing at the far end of the kitchen and had my back to the door. Suddenly there was a loud crashing noise. I turned round to discover that a python had fallen down the cliff behind the bungalow and its momentum had carried it forward through the door and almost up to my feet. I estimated it was about 9-10 feet long. There followed one of those time stands still moments. I looked into the python's eyes and it looked right back at me. It was the strangest sensation. I seemed to be looking at something incredibly ancient and completely alien. I understood the mixture of veneration and fear that many cultures had for this reptile. It was a complete mystery. This lasted a brief moment. Then the snake turned round and shot out of the kitchen through the back door, and I did the same but in the opposite direction. But almost immediately I regretted my cowardly retreat and turned back to chase the snake. It was slithering down the gulley. I went after it but it moved incredibly quickly, faster than I could run and was off into the undergrowth before I could catch it up. But I was left with the memory of that brief moment when I had, in some indefinable way, communicated with something totally other. In that instant when the snake and I had looked into each other's eyes all my attention had been focused on that one thing, concentrated on a single point outside of which nothing else existed. For a second there had been no fear because there was complete fascination.

On another occasion one of the guests at our guest house came running up to the bungalow saying there was a cobra in her bathroom and could I do something about it. A spider I thought I could manage but I wasn't sure about this. The bathrooms in these bungalows were fairly primitive. There was no bath or shower or, indeed, basin for that matter. The facilities consisted of a couple of buckets of water and a small area in which to throw the water over oneself which was enclosed by a little ledge about six inches high to stop the water slopping about all over the place. The water drained away through a hole in the wall next to which there was a door leading to the outside through which the servants had come in the old days to collect the unmentionables. We, however, had moved into the modern world to the extent of fitting proper lavatories as opposed to the traditional so-called thunder box. Anyway, a cobra had crawled in through this drainage hole, presumably to escape the heat. It was lying in the washing area. I had a stick and my idea was to open the latch on the door with the stick and then somehow encourage the snake to leave. I did eventually manage to flick the latch and open the door but the snake showed no desire to vacate the premises. I wasn't helped by the fact that our cleaner was shrieking "Pambu! Pambu!" which is Tamil for snake.

Now, I believe in invisible helpers. I sent up a little prayer for assistance and the thought came into my mind to talk to the snake. So I did. I can't remember exactly what I said but it was something banal along the lines of "Please Mr Snake, would you mind leaving as we can't use the bathroom while you're here". I think the cleaner thought I'd gone mad. The snake didn't budge but I carried on talking and then he finally slithered away out of the door though, if I'm honest, that was probably because of the hysterical behaviour of the cleaner. To her credit, though, she had at least stayed with me in the bathroom while the guest remained safely outside.

When I spoke to this cobra I didn't have the feeling of primeval connection that I had had with the python, possibly because the encounter was not so sudden. But I still felt that here was something almost not of this world, and I again understood why snakes have been objects of religious worship.

The snake has a dual significance in spiritual tradition. On the one hand, it is a symbol of evil as shown so clearly by its presence in the Garden of Eden and its responsibility for the Fall when it tempted Eve to sin. But, on the other hand, it symbolises wisdom. The cobra in Tamil is called nulla pambu or good snake, and this comes from a story that it raised itself up and protected the Buddha from the heat of the sun with its hood when he was deep in meditation. The upraised cobra on a Pharaoh's headdress is the emblem of his divine authority.

Might the evil aspect be the snake on its belly close to the earth while the wisdom aspect comes into play when the snake is raised or lifted up? And is there, in fact, a correspondence between this and the energy of life, the fiery energy that is within us all and which can either be dully focused on earthly things or, when it is lifted up, directed towards the spiritual? The serpent connects the most ancient mysteries of the earth with spiritual enlightenment, and this comparison was even made by Jesus when he said in John 3:14, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up." I am not saying that good and evil are two sides of the same coin here. Rather that the true spiritual goal is not to leave matter for spirit, as the Gnostics thought, but to unite the energies within matter and spirit to make something new, and the snake in its two modes is a symbol of that. This is perhaps why we must be born in a material world in a material body if we are to reach full spiritual potential. There is something in the root of matter, represented by the snake, that can be transformed into conscious light when brought into line with transcendent spirit.

William Arkle and the telepathic adder - the nature of modern English magic

From Colin Wilson's Strange Powers, 1975:

William Arkle told me how the snakes in his garden seemed to respond to his thoughts. 

He bought himself a huge house - it used to be a monastery - on a hill top overlooking Weston-super-Mare. The garden turned out to be full of adders and grass snakes. One adder made a habit of wandering along beside Bill Arkle when he walked down the drive. He found it coiled in the middle of the drive one day, in such a position that he couldn't drive the car past without killing it. 

He got out of the car and prodded it awake with a stick; it hissed and declined to move. He decided that he had better kill it in case it bit one of the children; as soon as he moved towards it with this intention, it hissed violently at him. 

Being by nature a gentle mystic, he decided to let it live; the snake immediately moved to the side of the driveway, and went back to sleep.

All he told me made clear that the thing was telepathic.


This story is, of course, totally unconvincing to a materialist, when understood to be presented as 'evidence' of telepathic communication with animals - all these things could be 'explained-away' using biological arguments.

Nonetheless, if our metaphysical assumptions are different, this this is the exactly kind of thing we would expect from a world which began with an immersive consciousness of the nature experienced by (apparently) all young children, and by some hunter gatherers. As Wilson goes on to say 'We exist in a kind of psychic ether of which we are unaware.'

Owen Barfield explains why and how human consciousness separated-itself-out from this 'psychic ether' so as to become free, agent, and more fully divine; this separation has both historical and personal-developmental aspects - but the fact is that we do, both socially and personally, seem to be 'stuck' at a point when we yearn to escape alienation and return to the kind of connection wit the world described above.

Why - since we live in this primal 'etheric' state of connection with all things, is the fact not more obvious? Why is it not easier for us to recover this communication?

The Arkle story shows that such 'magical' things may just-happen, unconsciously and unintentionally; but when people try to alter reality purposively, to make a reliable science of magic, then it doesn't work.

And we should be grateful for that - considering the many unsavoury people who are attracted to magic, and what they would do with it if they could make it work! Imagine if the rulers of modern Britain were able to do magic - horrible idea.

(My understanding is that the ruling elites do indeed attempt to practice all kinds of magic, dark rituals and symbolism abound. The Jimmy Savile affair lifted a corner on this aspect of the Establishment, its extent and depravity. But the effect of all this black magic is - it seems - primarily for the rulers to corrupt themselves, to deliver and bind their souls to serve the dark powers.)

And that is, perhaps, the answer. When we are better people, such that we will not abuse our power, we will again become magical. But until then, there is a barrier erected for our own good.

Tolkien's great parable of this is Numenor. In the Second Age of the world; Men were given the magical power of elves, and used it - at first - in appreciation of life, in art and learning. But soon they began to use their magic in technology - and then in warfare applied to expanding their power, conquering weaker peoples, and finally assaulting the Valar (gods) in the futile attempt to wrest immortality from them - and the paradise island of Numenor was drowned and destroyed.

Since then, it is implied, such power, such magic, has been withdrawn from Men - for our own good; and modern Men (of the Fourth Age) are mundane. Magic, enchantment, has departed from our world.

But enchantment, including magic, can and will return, whenever we are worthy of it. This means that, under present conditions and for most people, it can only be infrequent, brief and mostly unplanned.

However, it would be valuable to notice and remember (but not necessarily to talk about it) when magic does happen in our personal lives - and not just ignore magic because it is not under our command.

Mock Christianity

It has been a strange experience over the last week to see so many people falling over themselves to praise the overblown performance of Bishop Michael Curry at the recent royal wedding. I didn't see it at the time myself but was curious enough to look at it following the media enthusiasm.  My suspicions (because the media weren't going to praise it if it really was spiritually sound, were they?) were confirmed.  A lot of heat but very little light. The fact is this preacher was not talking from a position of real Christianity. He was preaching a worldly, easy version of it, and doing so in a style in which hyperbole replaced substance and emotionalism made up for proper doctrine. He preached a Christianity that fully accepts you as you are at the moment. You are not an egotist and a sinner and you don't have to repent because you are basically quite good enough right now. You are not required to give up your ego or reject the world in order to find the narrow way which is the only way that leads to God. Nothing but love is required though for our preacher love appeared to be merely a kind of feel good, everyone's wonderful kind of emotion that is quite naturally directed to the soul in its fallen state. The more profound aspects of love which include sacrifice, service and suffering were skimmed over. You might say that it's a wedding so why should they be mentioned? But they are in the traditional Solemnisation of Matrimony which is, as this sermon was not, a proper spiritual document.

 I saw a clip afterwards in which the Archbishop of Canterbury was praising this performance (which is what it was) as being a breath of fresh air. No wonder modern Christianity is so enfeebled. It has no sense of depth or real spiritual knowledge which is why it replaces the metaphysical with the political as Bishop Curry did with his facile talk of love eradicating poverty. That is not what Jesus taught. You only have to read the Gospels to see that Jesus did not come to make the world a better place for human beings to live in here and now. He came to prepare them for entry into higher consciousness, the higher world of God's kingdom. Anyone who reduces Jesus's message to social matters is betraying his spirit, and, if a religious leader does that, then he is misleading his flock. The blind leading the blind. There are no two ways about this. Jesus did die for us because of love. Yes, absolutely. But that death was to make a crooked thing straight again not to leave it crooked because, well, crooked is good if that is what you are. God loves us but not as we are now in our present unrepentant state. If that is not made crystal clear then all talk of love is just an excuse to do nothing, and might even serve the devil.

Contemporary Christianity is emasculated because it lays too much stress on love. Obviously I'm not denying love is the foundation of the universe. But if love becomes an excuse to ignore or deny real metaphysical knowledge and proper theological understanding then it leads to the neglect of intellect which is our participation in the mind of God. Besides, it is not actually real love that is taught but a shallow, sentimentalised version of it that is more about personal feelings. That is not love. Love is not the all men are equal, warm and fuzzy thing this preacher appeared to be talking about and which seeks to make the kingdom of heaven in this world. It is the light of spirit which burns away all worldly falsehood and draws us upwards. The bishop did compare love to fire but his fire only seemed to burn in this world. Its flames did not rise above the clichéd platitudes of liberal ideology.

It seems to me that Christianity can be conceived of vertically and horizontally. It can be a religion that aspires to the pure air of divine being and spiritual truth as in, for example, the Gothic cathedrals and lives of the saints, and as in deep prayer and contemplation. Or it can be more of a social thing that may be religious but is not truly spiritual in any deep sense. This sort may be more immediate but it tends to seek to excite the emotions rather than pacify and go beyond them, and it relies for its effect on hyperbole and emotionalism. It is a crude approach to the mysteries of our being because it speaks to the lower parts of our nature, the emotions and even the physical body, rather than to mind and soul. It is more concerned with social justice in this world than salvation in the next.

Very possibly I will be thought uncharitable in making these comments but if anyone believes this sermon promoted the real teachings of Christ they are mistaken. There can be no real love until there has been full repentance and renunciation of worldliness. The politically correct is practically always spiritually incorrect.

Restoration of English magic

 A neolithic temple ('rems of'), near Bolam Lake, Northumberland

One of the best books I have read is the novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004). This seems to be one of those very long novels that some people love, and others find dull - for me it is a sheer delight, from start to finish.

The underlying theme of the book concerns the restoration of magic to England; once the most magical of all countries when the North was ruled by The Raven King up to about 1400, but after he disappeared, magic incrementally dwindled to nothing. The novel is set around 1800, the depths of the 'Enlightenment' era, when magic begins to return.

Reading ancient sources, it is clear that England (including Wales) was indeed one of the most magical of places for a very long time. Our rural landscape is studded with 'lumps and bumps' - the remains of burial chambers, standing stones and stone circles, causeways and earthworks; going back anything up to 8000 years ago (the hunter gatherer 'mesolithic' era).  And almost all of these remains are religious or spiritual - what the archaeologists call 'ritual'.

Our ancestors, who we assume lived a life of extreme simplicity, frugality, and physical hardship - were also living a life of immersion in the world of spirit - that is what they seem to have cared about more than anything.

When the Romans first invaded under Julius Caesar, England seems to have been the religious centre of Western Europe, and the site of its druidic colleges. When Christianity arrived, it is possible that Glastonbury was one of the first centres outside the Holy Land; and from then onwards the religion was never eradicated - surviving the Dark Ages in the Westermost parts of the island (and in Ireland) before joining-up with the Anglo Saxons when they had converted - the old and new meeting and converging again at Glastonbury.

Anyway; religion was apparently The Most Important Thing for the people of England for a long time... but it did become very authoritarian in the Middle Ages (an instrument of Norman oppression) and after the industrial revolution, in particular, England became one of the least religious (and least spiritual) countries in the world (perhaps rivalled only by France); known for its practical, common sense, shopkeepers mentality - and the development of the atheistic and ultra-materialist materialistic anti-religions of socialism and communism.

Nowadays, our public life is of almost indescribable sordidness, shallowness, spite and hedonism.

And yet, and yet - knowing all this; I only need to drive out a few miles and take a walk in Northumberland, Country Durham or Cumbria and I am spontaneously, almost effortlessly and irresistibly, reconnected with that ancient spirit of the place.

None of this has much to do with the people - although I still do meet quite of lot of ordinary people who have a good but latent - deep buried - side of implicit, goodness and spiritual connection about them...

My point is that this side of Albion, which seems to emanate from the actual structure of the land, remains very powerful; so powerful that its intoxication can and does make me forget all the other and horrible stuff.

To the point that I sometimes feel that 'all we need to do' is bring this to articulation', raise it from an implicit feeling to explicit knowing; and we have Done It: done what needs to be done>

It is as if the Raven King is watching and waiting, and might return at any moment, when the time is ready, when asked.

But not any kind of return to a former state - but as a significant part of it, a new, mystical connection with all of those relics and residues I mentioned - with what is currently abstract history and archaeology; a direct apprehension of the ancestral spirit which makes up the very stones, vegetation and spiritual bones of the country. 

What to do when our instincts are corrupt

People often talk as if 'doing what comes naturally', would be the answer, the way ahead... Sometimes William Blake is interpreted as-if he said this, and other later Romantics did indeed say it - for example it used to be the way that DH Lawrence wrote; and was a kind of mantra among the 'beats' of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s and 70s.

But what if our instincts were not merely insufficient (as ought to be obvious) but also corrupt? What if our 'gut feeling's' had become corrupted so that they did not lead us towards survival, power, sex, life, fertility; but in the opposite direction?

Such is the argument of my current post at the Notions blog...

And I suggest what we might do instead:

We need to go as deep as our primary (metaphysical) assumptions, to know them; discern and decide - decide not not by common sense, nor by instinct - which is gut feeling; but by intuition which is the discernment of fully conscious, primary thinking of the real and divine self.

Indeed, before we can even attempt this, we each need to have decided that it is coherent and possible; that there is a part of ourself which is divine and which can know - know directly and without mediation - the truth of things.

We must - that is - be able to distinguish between instinct - which is thing of the animal in us; and intuition, which is a thing of the divine in us.

Instinct cannot save us - but will, on the contrary, direct and drive us into damnation and death; but divine intuition can save us; and it is the only thing that can save us.