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.

Into Darkness: A Meditation on the Winter Solstice and the Birth of Christ

The various late-classical sects falling under the catchall term “Gnostics” were nothing if not some of the most impressive practitioners of mythopoesis the world has ever seen. Drawing on biblical, platonic, and Zoroastrian antecedents, their various mythologies—which have influenced scores of poets, thinkers, writers, and artists from Jacob Boehme to William Blake, from Cormac McCarthy to Terrence Malick—are extraordinarily rich and imaginative explorations of the human condition, a condition often depicted as the journey of a being, whether human or angelic, lost in a world of chaos, madness, and cruelty. In the age of the imprisonment and torture of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, of kangaroo courts, of the apotheosis of political and corporate propaganda, and of the alternate realities of social media, the internet, and gaming, the Gnostic imaginary, well, is not too hard to imagine as a reality. But a reality lacking in anything truly participating in the Real.

One of my favorite (and certainly the most accessible—Gnostic myths can be very complex) iterations of this mythopoetic motif is found in The Hymn of the Pearl, a fable attributed to the Apostle Thomas and appended to The Gospel of Thomas. The Hymn tells the story of a king’s son who is sent into the world to retrieve a pearl in the keeping of a serpent. He leaves his family and sojourns into the Land of Egypt, where, as he is just about to complete his mission, he is distracted by friends he’s made and, as the story relates, “I forgot that I was a King’s son, / And became a slave to their king. / I forgot all concerning the Pearl / For which my Parents had sent me; / And from the weight of their victuals / I sank down into a deep sleep.”

Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups, based on The Hymn of the Pearl

Elsewhere in the Gnostic corpus, our divine origin is spoken of in terms of a spark enclosed in darkness (this is a theme, incidentally, of Metaphysical Poet Henry Vaughan’s 1650–55 collection Silex Scintillans—“the sparking flint”). Such is a recurrent theme in literature, not to mention film. And we have all had moments when we found this in our own biographies. No one is immune. As Psalm 82 describes it, “They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.” I think this an accurate description of our own times; indeed, of all times. We walk on in darkness.

At this time of the Winter Solstice, the festival of the light literally overcoming the darkness, to which was later added the Feast of Christmas (even though Jesus was probably born in April), the festival of the Light of the World (though the world comprehendeth it not), I think it a good thing to contemplate our own lostness in the wasteland of Egypt (though on the surface it seems so rich) and remember from whence we came and whither we are called.

The protagonist of The Hymn of the Pearl comes to himself when he receives a letter from his Father: “Up and arise from thy sleep, / Give ear to the words of Our Letter! / Remember that thou art a King’s son; / See whom thou hast served in thy slavedom. / Bethink thyself of the Pearl / For which thou didst journey to Egypt.” Psalm 82 uses much the same language: “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.” Jesus is our letter from the Father.

So at this time of the light’s victory over darkness, may we also remember why we were sent into the Land of Egypt.

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.

An Advent Gift: A Course on the Metaphysical Poets

The Traherne Windows, Hereford Cathedral

As we make our way through Advent in anticipation of the Great Feast of Christmas, I am making available my Metaphysical Poets online course for free, though for a limited time. I will have it available until at least Twelfth Night, and I hope you enjoy it. The intended sequence of the course is "On Agapeic Criticism," "Metaphysical Poets: Introduction and Background," and then John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne—but you certainly can pick and choose which lectures you want to see and in whatever order you like. It's all available on my YouTube page.

Wishing you a blessed Advent and a happy Christmas.

Henry Vaughan, Part 2

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.