The Stolen World

Modernity has a unique gift—that of generating its opposite. In the sterile wake of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the Romantic philosophers and poets, especially those of Germany and England, resisted the totalizing demands of “science” and “progress” and sought to restore a vision of human flourishing mindful of mystery, of nature, and of the imagination. In the bleak aftermath of industrialization and rapacious streams of Capitalism in the late 19th century, people turned to alternative methods of inquiry in movements as diverse as the Celtic Twilight, The Theosophical Society, the Occult Renaissance, and a renewed fascination with the World of Faerie. All of these various movements hide within themselves the often unspoken admission that modernity (and postmodernity) leaves much unspoken and more unaddressed.

We live in such times, times that are always-already happening.

In the early modern period, hermetic thinkers like Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Robert Fludd, as well as the Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan and his twin brother, the Anglican priest and alchemist Thomas, resisted the abstractions of Descartes and the world he was creating (creating by ignoring half of it) that directly led to the disenchanted and dismal landscape we now inhabit. In the transition from the 18th to the 19th centuries, William Blake’s poetic railing against all forms of slavery—both of physical servitude as well as of mental and imaginative enthrallment—did much the same thing. They all may have been on the losing side of history, but they were not on the wrong side.

In the late 19th and into the 20th centuries, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats straddled all of these worlds. A folklorist, hermetic magician, mystic, and politician as well as a poet, Yeats upheld the value of what might be called the Great Tradition, which encompassed not only Neoplatonism and medieval sensibilities of the microcosm and the macrocosm, but also folk traditions he found in the Irish peasantry, particularly the belief in faerie and the magical properties of stones and plants. Indeed, the desire for a society more closely connected to the visible and palpable world as well as the invisible worlds that coincide and shine through it is characteristic of those facing the abyss of modernity’s false promises of progress. The Cottingly Fairies, for instance, became cause célèbre in face of the inhumanities and horrors of World War I (the 1997 film Fairy Tale: A True Story illustrates this beautifully), echoing the popularity of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan just a decade earlier. All were responses to the crowning features of alienation and confusion that is modernity: “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand,” in Yeats’s apt phrase.

We live in such a time.

Yet, it is still a time of hope, a time of creating a new world, reimagining where we are and examining how we arrived here. Unfortunately, not everyone in the reimagining business is interested in hope so much as in control, and I am as concerned as anyone about people in whom I have no trust (politicians for the most part) exerting power in a moment of distress. Nevertheless, I find great comfort in Yeats’s short meditation “The Body of Father Christian Rosencrux,” first published in 1895 and later gathered in the collection, Ideas of Good and Evil (and which I later published in The Heavenly Country):

The followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old tradition, wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it under the house of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all things in heaven and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set about him inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation after generation, until other students of the order came upon the tomb by chance. It seems to me that the imagination has had no very different history during the last two hundred years, but has been laid in a great tomb of criticism, and had set over it inextinguishable magical lamps of wisdom and romance, and has been altogether so nobly housed and apparelled that we have forgotten that its wizard lips are closed, or but opened for the complaining of some melancholy and ghostly voice. The ancients and the Elizabethans abandoned themselves to imagination as a woman abandons herself to love, and created great beings who made the people of this world seem but shadows, and great passions which made our loves and hatreds appear but ephemeral and trivial phantasies; but now it is not the great persons, or the great passions we imagine, which absorb us, for the persons and passions in our poems are mainly reflections our mirror has caught from older poems or from the life about us, but the wise comments we make upon them, the criticism of life we wring from their fortunes. Arthur and his Court are nothing, but the many-coloured lights that play about them are as beautiful as the lights from cathedral windows; Pompilia and Guido are but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and expositions which climax in the mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of the Christian age. I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in a supersensual world is at hand again; and when the notion that we are “phantoms of the earth and water” has gone down the wind, we will trust our own being and all it desires to invent; and when the external world is no more the standard of reality, we will learn again that the great Passions are angels of God, and that to embody them “uncurbed in their eternal glory,” even in their labour for the ending of man’s peace and prosperity, is more than to comment, however wisely, upon the tendencies of our time, or to express the socialistic, or humanitarian, or other forces of our time, or even ‘to sum up’ our time, as the phrase is; for Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life of the artist is in the old saying, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the spirit.”

Neither can I get it out of my mind that this age is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation, about to come in its place.

William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child” set to music by Mike Scott of The Waterboys

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand 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.

Christian Neopaganism for Dummies

The Feast of Saint John, by Jules Breton (1875)

for Tyler

Happy Solstice.

It was on this day in the Year of Our Lord One-Thousand and Ninety-Two that my very pregnant wife (she was four months along, but looked ten) and I attended a “Summer Greeting Rite” at the invitation of a friend, a millionaire composer and esotericist (I almost wrote “esoterrorist”) and his wife, a professor of psychology. The Rite, I was told, was brought to Canada by British expatriates who still practiced “the Old Religion” (meaning some sort of pre-Christian folk religion) and who wanted to preserve the Rite by releasing it to outsiders. It was kind of a Mummers Play thing, and I was chosen to play a character along the lines of Jack o’ Green or the Fool (no laughing!), more or less the emcee and director of festivities. I don’t recall all of the characters in the play/rite, but I do recall the Lord and Lady of Summer (our hosts). The Rite was followed by feasting, music, drinking, and finally by a game of hide-and-seek wherein the men were to try and catch the Lady and the women the Lord. Whoever caught their targets first were then to reign as Lord and Lady the following year. As it turned out, I caught the Lady and my wife—who was not really participating due to the enormity of her size—almost “accidentally” caught the Lord. As it also turned out, I subsequently had a falling out with my friend and my wife and I were not invited back the following year. So I guess, according to the august and venerable regula of the Rite, we must still be Lord and Lady. Huzzah!

The Rite had a very PG-13 Wicker Man vibe to it (without the human sacrifice, of course) and, while I have my doubts about whether it was some ancient relic of English folk religion or wonder if it was instead a modern imaginative reconstruction of what one might have looked like (there are boatloads of historical research from which to draw, Sir James Frazer’s exhaustive The Golden Bough, though certainly superseded in the interim, effectively provided a vocabulary for the genre), it certainly was a great deal of fun.

Of course, such elements of folk religion need not be understood as antedating the arrival of Christianity in Western Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter). In fact, they were to a profound degree intertwined (Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400 – 1700 is a classic text on the subject). Indeed, the English poet and Anglican priest Robert Herrick’s Hesperides & Noble Numbers (1648) fairly serves as an instruction manual for mixing Christian (particularly Catholic) along with pagan (as in Roman) and folk religious modes. It’s a chaotic mix, but, like life itself, what a glorious chaos it is. (I write about Herrick in the chapter entitled “Robert Herrick, Little Gidding, and Spectres of an Old Religion” in my book The Incarnation of the Poetic Word). Herrick, who was kicked out from his living as a pastor in Devon when the killjoy Puritans came to power, well knew the value of what we would now call the neopagan elements of rural English Christianity in the seventeenth century, as he writes in his famous poem, “Corinna’s Going a-Maying”:

Rise; and put on your Foliage, and be seene

To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene;

And sweet as Flora. Take no care

For Jewels for your Gowne, or Haire:

Feare not; the leaves will strew

Gemms in abundance upon you.

Every year at our farm (Stella Matutina), my wife and I host a May Festival (as well as a Michaelmas Festival in September) and for a couple of sessions prior to the event I teach the children who will be in attendance a brace of Maypole dances. At one practice, a couple of the girls, sisters who were usually very enthusiastic, became standoffish. I later discovered that when they told someone at their parish what they would be doing that afternoon (they attend a traditionalist church) they were upbraided by Saint Holyroller for participating in paganism and devil worship. The warmth. Of course, this was exactly the charge laid on Catholics maintaining folk religious customs in early modern England by the Puritan religious police. Alas for reincarnated partypoopers, even if they wear mantillas.

I’ve known many neopagans over the years. Perhaps my favorite was a woman (and her long deceased husband) who hired me as her gardener right about the time my wife became pregnant with our first. Seeing all the tricks I had for helping plants thrive (nettle teas, a deft hand at encouraging recurrent bloom in roses, a gift for pruning trees that borders on mysticism, etc.)—even though she knew I was a practicing Byzantine Catholic, one day she told me, “Michael, you’re more pagan than anyone I’ve ever met.” I hold it as a great compliment.

So, let’s just say I get highly annoyed when any of my religious confreres talk smack about “pagans” or use “pagan” as a pejorative. Neopagans, as far as I’m concerned, are trying to recapture what Christianity, to its shame, has lost: a connection not only to a community and to divinity, but a connection to the cosmos. And by “cosmos” I don’t only mean the stars and the planets, I also mean clouds and soil, birds and animals, rivers and meadows. As I write in The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, “Tragically, Wiccans and Neopagans, sensing the loss of something sacred in a cultural milieu surreptitiously poisoned by Enlightenment values, have appropriated for themselves a host of (previously) Christian customs, stripping them of their Christian elements in the process. One can hardly blame them.”1

One of the central insights of Sophiology is that the spiritual and created orders are not so distant as we may have been led to believe. Folk customs, like those mentioned here, tend to acknowledge their coinciding. Christianity, alas, has become more an intellectual or political position-taking or identity than a lived experience. We have replaced life with explanations (... “if you don’t believe in Purgatory yet, just wait until you’ve run through ten weeks of RCIA.”)

It does not need to be this way. I find comfort in the ancient story in Plutarch that, at the moment of the Crucifixion of Christ, a sailor named Thamus heard a voice coming across the sea, crying “Great Pan is dead!”2 Some, like Eusebius, interpreted this as referring to Satan and his power being broken (look around—do you buy this?) but others interpreted it as an evocation of Christ, the God of All (“pan” meaning “all” in Greek).

So, if I’ve learned one thing from Sophiology, it may be that it is nearly impossible to be a good Christian without also being a good pagan, that is, a person connected to the cosmos as well as to community and divinity. Anything else, it seems to me, is simply pathology.

But at my house, we don’t celebrate the Solstice. Our celebration takes place on St John’s Day, the moment the strength of the sun begins to wane; or, in the language of the gospel, when “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

I hope that your joy will be complete.

Blessings.

Everyone's favorite neopagan folk-rock band.

Michael's latest book is 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, including courses on Sophiology and Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot.

1 Page 171.

2 De Oraculorum Defectu, 419b-d

The Redemption Business: Easter and Biodynamic Farming

This article, in slightly different form, originally appeared in Church Life Journal.

Biodynamic farming, though it possesses many practical benefits—such as raw milk, fresh vegetables, fresh meats and eggs—has always been for me a kind of sacred activity. This sacredness resides in one undeniable fact: the blood of Christ saturated the earth on Golgotha. This is not some minor, locally-interesting detail. Rather, it is a supernatural event of the highest importance for the entire planet; and, indeed, for the cosmos. He makes all things new.

When I work the land, I am mindful that this soil has been redeemed along with all of Creation by Christ’s blood. This is not some piece of abstract doctrine for me, but a scientific truth. However, this is a truth I must not fully understand: if I did, I’m afraid I’d be too awestruck to do anything. Nevertheless, His blood saturated the soil and its power still enlivens it. My job, as I see it, is simply to help the vegetables and forage crops I plant find access to that power. This care implies tending: planning, planting, weeding, composting. In Genesis, God sets Adam and Eve in a garden, a cultivated space. As beautiful as the woods are, He does not place them in a forest. The Resurrection takes place in the Garden of Gethsemane. Symbol is reality.

Christ the Redeemer Greenman in Philadelphia, from "A Life in Philadelphia" blog

In the parables, Jesus never uses forest analogies. What he does, at least in many of them, is speak in the language of farming and animal husbandry: the sower, the mustard seed, the vineyard, the vine-dresser, the shepherd, the flock. He emphasizes the necessity of cultivation in our faith. Our spiritual lives need to be cultivated just as much as a garden does. Otherwise, all will go to waste and be prey to the Evil One. This is as true of the soil as it is of the soul.

Easter underscores the being of the biodynamic farm: for the farm, in its modest way, participates in Christ’s work of redeeming Creation. I don’t mean to suggest that biodynamic farming will save us from our sins, of course, only that it participates in the enlivening action of Christ’s blood when it soaked the ground at Golgotha.

As we are now only too aware, conventional farming—with its intensive use of pesticides, herbicides, and glyphosate on plants and vaccines and antibiotics on animals—envenoms the land, weakens animal life (look what’s happened to the honeybee), and seasons our foods with poisons. This is big business, BigAg, and, quite frankly, the work of the devil. It turns farms into green deserts, places void of natural life. Biodynamic farming is nothing if not pro-life. There’s a reason biodynamic practices are called “sustainable”: because chemical farming is not.

The problem with the BigAg approach is that it treats the earth as something to be exploited, not as something sacred. It embodies an ethos of rape. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis laments this horrid mistreatment of our common home, the earth:

This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22).

“Sustainable” practices of farming certainly represent a sane alternative to the pathologies currently part of the mainstream, but they will not prove sustainable unless they can be transformed by the sacred, unless farming itself becomes a sacred vocation. How else could sustainability be sustained?

But the sacred often doesn’t make sense in a market economy governed by neoliberalism and scientific materialism. The cosmos is a sacred space, not an indifferent, cold, hostile backdrop to our sinful characters. With this understanding, in biodynamic farming we attend to the movements and phases of the moon in regard to planting. Some may think this unnecessary. Some may think it weird. But I belong to a religion that celebrates the Resurrection on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox: planting by the moon sounds pretty normal to me.

The Church’s calendar, like the biodynamic one, is cosmologically configured: it recognizes the relationship of the heavens to what happens on the earth. Prior to modernity, this was even more the case. The Church year then, especially in Europe, acknowledged the harmonies between the agricultural year and the holiness of the liturgical cycle. Ploughs were blessed, fields were blessed, greenery was brought to church on Pentecost, fires burned on St. John’s Day, the first bread of the year was blessed at Lammas (“Loaf Mass”) in the beginning of August, and the dead were remembered on All Soul’s. Most of these customs have fallen into disuse long since; and our culture is impoverished for it.

Though this has not always been the case, one of the scars of modernity is that the sacredness of life and of the year are not connected to our lives in any real way in a cultural context. At best, for those of a Christian sacramental sensibility, it is merely reserved for the miracle of the Eucharist on Sundays. The rest of the week, most people seem pretty content to go along with the cultural trajectory set by the Enlightenment and neoliberalism. We trust in science for the working days and God on Sundays. But a science without God will not save us. As one-hundred years of chemical farming have shown, the promises of the Enlightenment and neoliberalism when applied to farming have, at best, short-term benefits, but many long-term detriments. Science, that is, (and farming is the earliest kind of science we have) needs God.

What I’m saying is that biodynamic farming is a branch of the redemption business, the business of Easter. The point is not simply to provide nutritious foods, raise healthy animals, and behave in a “sustainable” manner. The point is to restore life (zoë rather than bios) to the organism of the farm. This restoration is not the work of the farmer, however. The work of restoration is the province of the blood of Christ.

I realize that what I profess here might strike some as weird. But I think those kinds of perceptions are really inimical to a truly Christian epistemology. The earth, as the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov argued, contains a mystical (yet ultimately scientific) significance due to the blood that flowed on Golgotha. The earth, he says, is the Holy Grail:

The whole world is the Holy Grail, for it has received into itself and contains Christ’s precious blood and water. The whole world is the chalice of Christ’s blood and water; the whole world partook of them in communion at the hour of Christ’s death. And the whole world hides the blood and water within itself. A drop of Christ’s blood dripped upon Adam’s head redeemed Adam, but also all the blood and water of Christ that flowed forth into the world sanctified the world. The blood and water made the world a place of the presence of Christ’s power, prepared for the world for its future transfiguration, for the meeting with Christ come in glory…. The world has become Christ, for it is the holy chalice, the Holy Grail.

The biodynamic farmer, then, participates in serving this chalice; and, thereby, the vocation of the farmer becomes a kind of priesthood: a priesthood, like the sacramental one, that doesn’t make any sense without the presence of Easter.