Sophianic Economies

I was really looking forward to the new Dune movie. Not that I’m this giant Frank Herbert fan. I’ve only read the original book—the first time thirty years ago—but the trailer looked good. But apparently Covid can do what no sandworm could and defeated the launch of the film which has now been postponed from November 2020 to October 2021. So, since I couldn’t see the film, I read the book (I didn’t have a copy of it, but my son gave me one for Christmas).

One section of the book really struck me this time. In about the middle of the book, shorn by his enemies of his stillsuit (the contraption that allows his to recycle his own body’s water and sustain him in the harsh desert environment of the planet Arrakis) and becoming delirious from heat exhaustion and dehydration, the Freman planetologist, Liet Kynes, starts to hallucinate (or does he?). “The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape,” his meandering consciousness utters, “how we take part in that basic source of civilization—agriculture” [1]. Then, in his delirium, he hears the voice of his deceased father, also a planetologist:

“The more life there is within a system, the more riches there are for life…. Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life…. Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism.” [2]

These notions did not jump out at me at that first reading all those years ago, but they certainly did this time. What Herbert ventriloquizes through Kynes is essentially a dictum of biodynamic agriculture (and all sound agriculture). Rather than the anxious, greedy, and decidedly neurotic attempts by governments and corporations to encourage monoculture and grand scale farming, biodynamics and COMMON SENSE encourage diversity—of plants, animals, woodlands, waterways, pasture, insect life—as a key to life. It is a closed system (ideally, nothing is brought in off of the farm to augment this fertility), but it is a very different kind of closed system from those of monoculture or factory farming—which are systems closed to life. Call them Zombie Farming.

It just so happens that while I’ve been reading Dune, I’ve also been reading the radical agrarian pamphleteer and Member of Parliament William Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (1822). Cobbett, God bless him!, was so radical he had to flee the country a few times, and he wanted to turn back the enclosure laws that so decimated English farmers and turned them into mere wage-earners. He gives very practical advice on farming for self-sufficiency and he rails against the Christian (I assume Catholic) embrace of poverty as a tool the wealthy and powerful use to keep the lower classes quiet and under their control. He was particularly disgusted with what it had done to the Irish peasantry (he was one of the few British MPs of his time, along with William Wilberforce, to support Catholic emancipation).

Cobbett endorses a way of living both sensible and healthy:

“From a very small piece of ground a large part of the food of a considerable family may be raised, the very act of raising it will be the best possible foundation of education of the children of the labourer; that it will teach them a great number of useful things, add greatly to their value when they go forth from their father’s home, make them start in life with all possible advantages, and give them the best chance of leading happy lives. And is it not much more rational for parents to be employed in teaching their children how to cultivate a garden, to feed and rear animals, to make bread, beer, bacon, butter and cheese, and to be able to do these things for themselves, or for others, than to leave them to prowl about the lanes and commons, or to mope at the heels of some crafty, sleekheaded pretended saint, who while he extracts the last penny from their pockets, bid them be contented with their misery, and promises them, in exchange for their pence, everlasting glory in the world to come? It is upon the hungry and the wretched that the fanatic works.” [3]

Fanatics, of course, continue to work upon the hungry and wretched as well as upon, as recent events have emphasized, the fearful.

Ever the idealist, Cobbett also thought things would improve. They have not. As John Lennon sings in “Working Class Hero,”:

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV And you think you’re so clever and classless and free But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see

In the early twentieth century, a number of rural reformers, distributists, and communitarians tried to revive a sensible approach to economy, anticipating and trying to avoid the overwhelming deluge that would become the military-industrial-governmental-pharmaceutical complex. Besides Chesterton and Belloc, H.J Massingham and George William Russell (also known as the poet, A.E.) pushed for a more human economy. For Massingham, the failure of the human economy was directly attributable to the failure of Christendom to be Christian, and he hoped for a return to a time when “religion, learning, the arts and crafts, agriculture and the contemplation of wild nature as the manifestation of God, were integrated as aspects of one whole.” [4] If that sounds like Sophiology, gentle reader, you are not mistaken.

George Russell, for his part, though his proposal for rural regeneration is very practical, nevertheless waxes very poetic in his description of his vision:

“God’s world—all the light, the glory, the beauty which the earth puts forth to her children—the dawn over the hills, the green grass, the odour and incense of flowers, the smell of the turned-up sod, trees, hills, the multitudinous magnificence of nature—are all being deserted by humanity because humanity cannot exist on the earth and cultivate it, and maintain thereon an equal life. If they remain they are poor, they are ignorant, they are beset by hostile forces, they are enslaved, and they give up their inheritance as heirs of the ages and the spoils which man has ransacked from time.” [5]

Notice how the sophianic reality of the world becomes disfigured by our disengagement from the Real as Russell describes it here.

Of course, the ruralists, communitarians, and distributists also failed. But the war isn’t over yet.

Now, as we see, the richest men on earth are swallowing up farmland at a disturbing rate, the newest form of enclosure, now in a corporate guise and under government sanction. They might have all the power and wealth, but they don’t have either truth or reality. At the same time, the proponents of The Great Reset are pushing for hyperurbanization and a technocratic dystopia (not their word, but actually the deal).

A sophianic economy (by whatever name one calls it) offers the only path by which sanity may be reached. It could also salvage the wreckage that is Christianity. This will probably entail some sort of upheaval (or, better, ignoring of) the dominant power structures in both of those domains.

Just don’t let the technocrats win.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.

1. Frank Herbert, Dune (Penguin, 2018), 345.

2. Ibid., 346.

3. William Cobbett, Cottage Economy, to which is added, The Poor Man’s Friend (New York, 1833), 11.

4. H.J. Massignham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 47.

5. George William Russell (A. E.), Co-operation and Nationality (Dublin, 1912), 22.

Christian Neo-Paganism’s Greatest Hits

Ever since childhood, I have been enthralled by music, especially in its traditional or folk idioms, poetry, God, and Nature. I’ve never grown out of this inclination, and music that combines all of these is that I hold dearest to my heart.

So, given my absolute delight in the music that combines these, here is my list of what I’m calling “Christian Neo-Paganism’s Greatest Hits.” Feel free to recommend others in the comments!

Summer Is Acumin In

Nothing beats a canon (or round) sung in Middle English. Middle English is such a beautiful language. I fell in love with it in graduate school while studying medieval English mysticism (Walter Hilton, The Cloud of Unknowing, my beloved Julian of Norwich, and their contemporaries). This version by Elizabeth Mitchell captures not only the language but the spirit of folk celebrations of the Wheel of the Year.

Meet on the Ledge

Richard Thompson wrote this song for his band Fairport Convention when he was nineteen. Not bad for a rookie! I’ve loved it since I saw Fairport (without Thompson, alas) in about 1985. They end every show with it. I hope when I die I will meet my friends on the ledge to drink one for the road. Here’s Thompson doing a solo version that is chilling. He’s not nineteen anymore. And neither am I.

Tam Lin

There are many different versions of this elfin knight tale, a fine version by Robert Burns among them. Fairport does a great one, but I recently fell in love with this one by Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer. The song is also a great meditation on marriage.

The Pan Within / The Christ in You (counts as one)

Mike Scott, leader and songwriter for The Waterboys, from what I recall, lived at least for a while at Findhorn, the visionary community in Scotland. These two songs, in my take, offer two faces of the Christian Neo-Pagan vibe.

Morning Has Broken

This song was all over the radio in the 1970s. I may have had the single as a kid. It wasn’t until decades later that I discovered the lyrics were written by Eleanor Farjeon, the English poet and writer. I’m writing a chapter on her for my forthcoming book, Sophia in Exile. I love her so much it hurts.

John Barleycorn

Let’s have a nice round of applause for the death, resurrection, and triumph of John Barleycorn. Sir James Frazer and Jessie Weston, represent! Nobody does this one better then Steve Winwood.

The Mummers’ Dance

Loreena McKennitt could sing the phone book and make it sound mystical. I love this song. When I was a Waldorf teacher, by the way, I revised the Mummers’ Play and had my class perform it. It’s a comic take on the death and resurrection motif.

Theme from Harry’s Game

I don’t know what’s in the water up there in Donegal, but pour me glass, will ye? Clannad moved from straight trad music in the early 70s to a kind of atmospheric trad-jazz-New Age amalgam later. They’ve been together for over fifty years. A dreadful consequence of the PANDEMIC™ is that they cancelled their tour and my wife and I couldn’t see them. This is one of those songs that makes people cry and not know why.

Now the Green Blade Riseth

Speaking of death and resurrection—here’s a hymn from the Anglican tradition that more closely than any other ties the death and resurrection of Nature to the death and resurrection of Christ. My family and I do a take on this one I arranged every year during Holy Week. Steve Winwood’s version, which is spookily like mine (I did mine first!) is perfect.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.

The Vanishing of the Faeries

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Sophia in Exile.

In the early twentieth century, there was a veritable faerie craze, an artifact of which is Peter Pan, a rousing success in both print and in the theatre—not to mention the early silent film version from 1924. Not only Barrie’s work, but the discovery of the Cottingley Faeries who became cause célèbre in 1917—even though most (but not all) of the photographs of faeries captured by two Yorkshire lassies were later admitted to have been faked—contributed to what was by that point a far-reaching cultural phenomenon. A little earlier, in the 1880s, a young William Butler Yeats had combed the libraries of England and the cottages and libraries of Ireland for folk- and fairy-tales of the Irish, later published in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892), a research project which profoundly impacted his own poetry, as in “The Wanderings of Oisin” or “The Stolen Child” with its tragic and mournful refrain:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

In the milieu of burgeoning industrialization and even World War I, the desire to recapture at least some of what was vanishing can clearly be seen in the period’s widespread interest in faeries.

A scholarly dissertation on faeries was even undertaken during the first decade of the twentieth century by a young American, W. Y. Evans-Wentz, while at Oxford, later published in book form in 1911 as The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Evans-Wentz’s book is to date the most comprehensive and rigorous exploration of the belief in faeries. Timing is everything, though, as finding a peasantry enmeshed in the world of nature and close to the invisible worlds would have been far easier in the days before the arrival of electricity and the radio, let alone multi-national corporations and the internet. Evans-Wentz collected much of the material for his book from interviewing the peasantry of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, The Isle of Man, Cornwall, and Brittany, and what he found among the disparate cultures had much in common, so much so that he proposes that “the evidence is so clear that little or no comment is necessary.” [1] As he writes further:

“Most of the evidence also points so much in one direction that the only verdict which seems reasonable is that the Fairy-Faith belongs to a doctrine of souls; that is to say, that Fairyland is a state or condition, realm or place, very much like, if not the same as, that wherein civilized and uncivilized men alike place the souls of the dead, in company with other invisible beings such as gods, daemons, and all sorts of good and bad spirits. Not only do both educated and uneducated Celtic seers so conceive Fairyland, but they go much further, and say that Fairyland actually exists as an invisible world within which the visible world is immersed like an island in an unexplored ocean, and that it is peopled by more species of living beings than this world, because incomparably more vast and varied in its possibilities.”

Allow me to emphasize: this was at Oxford. Evans-Wentz’s examiners at Oxford were the great Celticist Sir John Rhys and Andrew Lang, the much beloved collector of fairy- and folktales. I imagine he would be hard-pressed to find such congenial professors were he to undertake the project today, unless he could somehow bend his study to the will of theory. Thank God he worked when he did.

A little early 20th century cosplay.

Among the interviews Evans-Wentz features in the book, one is presented as “An Irish Mystic’s Testimony.” We now know this mystic was the poet, artist, and social activist George William Russell, known better under the pseudonym A. E. To Russell’s perception, the faeries, whom he calls by the Irish term the Sidhe or “the shining ones,” exist in a metaxu, “the mid-world,” which lies between the earth-world and the heaven-world. He also believed that these beings do not possess a sense of individuality as humans do. “Theirs is a collective life, so unindividualized and so calm that I might have more varied thoughts in five minutes than they would have in five years; and yet one feels an extraordinary purity and exaltation about their life…. A hive of bees has been described as a single organism with disconnected cells; and some of these tribes of shining beings seem to be little more than one being manifesting itself in many beautiful forms.” [2]

One of the more fascinating studies of the invisible country prior to Evans-Wentz’s magisterial study was the Rev. Robert Kirk’s seventeenth century manuscript The Secret Commonwealth, which Andrew Lang in the introduction to the edition he prepared calls “a kind of metaphysic of the Fairy world.” [3] Kirk’s book, like Evans-Wentz’s, is a scholar’s account, though, like his fellow investigator’s, reflective of the scholarly conventions of his time. He simply collates the extant material pertinent to his research—which was considerable—and does so without condemnation or bias in a very matter-of-fact, methodical manner. Churchmen, especially rural churchmen like Kirk, connected and accustomed to the attitudes and thoughts of the peasantry, have been some of the more interested in these abstruse studies through the centuries; though with the disappearance of the peasantry, increasing urbanization and the, ahem, “sophistication” that comes with it have made such figures rare indeed.

I have often wondered why sightings into the invisible world, or at least interest in such sightings, have all but disappeared from the general cultural imaginary, though they lurk at the margins. When Evans-Wentz interviewed the then seventy-three-year-old Neil Colton of Donegal, the old gentleman remarked on the diminished population of the shining ones, saying, “These races were terribly plentiful a hundred years ago, and they’ll come back again.” [4] Did they? They certainly didn’t go away entirely, as accounts of faerie sighting proliferated throughout the twentieth century, often given by children or by adults recounting experiences from childhood, but plenty of adults reported seeing the shining ones as well, not to mention my own account. [5] Nevertheless, there does seem to be a dearth of faerie sightings during postmodernity. Some would certainly argue that belief in faeries is inconsistent with modernity, let alone postmodernity; but people have also argued religious faith, and Christianity in particular, is inconsistent with modernity. I do not buy into these assumptions.

There are, to be sure, many people who claim to see into the secret commonwealth. Just a simple internet search will lead to dozens, if not hundreds, of links that promise instruction in faerie communication, their language often sounding like the spiritual-but-not-religious version of the hard sell: “Read on, fairy lovers, to learn how to see fairies in the garden and communicate with the Fair Folk of your local area!” I am skeptical of such claims. It’s not that I don’t believe in the existence of the fair folk; it’s just that I have a hard time getting past the cultivated personas (or avatars) that often accompany such promises and the almost requisite alt-spirituality cosplay that goes along with them, replete with flowing skirts, thumb-rings, and scarves. Lots and lots of scarves. This is a far cry from the rustic and unlettered farmers and cottagers with whom Yeats and Evans-Wentz spoke. Not that the cosplayers are without merit: clearly they hunger for something of which our culture deprives them. I understand their hunger for a world re-enchanted. I simply don’t think it requires a costume.

Of course, the disenchantment the faeish cosplayers attempt to remedy is at its core also a lament for the exile of God, of angels, and of the presence of the dead in the era of technocracy and transhumanism. In that, they are not unlike the Romantics who rejected the antiseptic and icy values of the Enlightenment and embraced the possibilities of a more human civilization; and they would without a doubt hope with Yeats that this condition may come to pass and “an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation... come in its place.” [6] But the problem the Romantics faced is the same, in essence, that we see in faerie cosplay: the dissipation into Gothic silliness. Enter the Goth vampires and the faeries that look like Barbie dolls. This is what happens with a spirituality not moored by a relationship to Creation and grounded in the Real.

I have often wondered, typically when I’m working in the garden on my farm, how it is that the denizens of the secret commonwealth are so seldom seen when compared to times past. Part of it, as I have noted, is surely due to the disenchantment of modernity. The hubris of modernity seems impervious to self-reflection. All cultures throughout all times save the last two-hundred years have held to the existence of the invisible worlds, and many still do, though that belief in an invisible world is more and more transferred to the magical world of the internet and the more immediate satisfactions to fancy it offers. Paul Devereux relates the story of German cultural anthropologist Christian Rätsch. who in order to understand the lifeway of a Lacandon tribe in southern Mexico entered into it as a participant and not as the “impartial observer” so lauded by Western academic standards. Rätsch learned their language, and the Indians taught him how to hunt, gather, and farm according to their ways. One day, when Rätsch was keeping guard over the village corn crop in order to drive away predators, a bird landed on the branch of a tree nearby which he saw fit for a meal and shot. When he went to retrieve the bird, he was in for a surprise. “There was not the corpse of a bird;” he said, “there was not a single feather! Then I looked up into the tree and there was not even the branch!” When he told the village elder what had happened, the man laughed and told him that such things happened sometimes, and that it was just the jungle spirits teasing him. [7] I’m sure they were.

Despite the epistemological and social conventions of modernity, I also wonder how its paraphernalia itself might be destructive to the secret commonwealth, or at least our ability to perceive it. For one thing, electricity may pose a hindrance, particularly the power grid that almost invisibly strikes its lines over the land. It might negatively impact the invisible realm; and it might also impact our own capacities of perception. And one can only speculate about the impact of 5G towers and the almost numberless satellites constantly filling the air with their silent presence and radiations. This is to say nothing of plastic, the bane of Creation. While finding a stray shard of plastic while weeding my garden, I often wonder if the faeries are allergic to it and that’s why they’ve been disappearing. Plastics only arrived in the early 20th century (I think of the wonderful scene in the motion picture The Graduate when a well-meaning middle-classer has one word to say to the graduate, Benjamin: “Plastics”), and, while correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation, I have nevertheless wondered how the two phenomena might be related. Plastic has certainly contributed to the disenchantment of the world in other ways. What I offer here is speculation, of course, but I think what I speak here possesses at the very least a poetic truth.

A beautiful take on the classic faerie ballad.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.

1. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911; reprt., University Books, 1966), 18.

2. Ibid., 62-63.

3. Andrew Lang, Introduction to Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (1893; reprt. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2008), 15.

4. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, 73.

5. An exhaustive collection of such reports can be found in Marjorie T. Johnson’s Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society, Authentic Reports in Modern Times (San Antonio, TX: Anomalist Books, 2014)

6. William Butler Yeats, “The Body of Father Christian Rosencrux (1895)” in Essays and Introductions (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961), 197.

7. Paul Devereux, Re-Visioning the Earth: A Guide to Opening eh Healing Channels between Mind and Nature (New York: Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1996), 29.