The Invisible Country

I recently wrote about thinking I saw the Great Pan in the woods just beyond our garden here at the farm. But I didn’t explain. Now I will.

This kind of “seeing” occurs in a state of awareness that’s not exactly wide awake and definitely not sleeping, but in a space more accurately called “reverie.” The 20th century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote much about the importance of reverie, particularly in his book The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, and distinguishes reverie from dream:

“In contrast to a dream reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written,written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching on the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries. [1]

Poets often retain the ability to enter into reverie—Percy Bysshe Shelley certainly attests to this in his Defence of Poetry; and Thomas Traherne as well as Eleanor Farjeon, both of whom I write about in Sophia in Exile, are two exemplars of poets who lived in reverie by which they could enter a childlike state of radical amazement. I am also a poet, and I think the reason their work resonates so much with me is that I can attest to their witness from experience as opposed to ideology or theory. But back to my story.

On the day of the sighting, I had been checking on the yurt I built in our woods and which we rent out to visitors as an escape from the world. If I do say so myself, it is a beautiful spot. We had some lodgers coming later that day and I wanted to make sure it was tidy (as per directions from my wife). On the way back to the house, I stopped for a minute to look into the woods—I don’t know why—and, as it was a warm October afternoon with sunlight touching the multicolored leaves rustling in the breeze, it wasn’t very hard to make myself pause. It must have been just for a second or two, but in my reverie I saw Pan—or thought I did—but dismissed the notion right away. I started to walk back to the house, made it about ten steps on the way and thought to myself, “Wait...did I just see Pan?” He was standing still, not looking at me, but appearing to gaze off to my left toward the goose yard and the garden. The same thing happened when I saw (but wasn’t sure I did) a few green men traversing the tops of some poplars and maples when I was twenty-two or so (I also write about this in Sophia in Exile). Reverie, it is my claim, doesn’t allow us to see things that “aren’t really there.” Rather, it allows us to see into a parallel reality, the invisible world that co-inhabits the spaces we occupy.

Of course, I don’t know that what I saw was “the Great Pan,” but I do think these inhabitants of the invisible world take on forms that respond to our own imaginative vocabularies. That is, they take a form that is amenable to our conceptual framework. I recently found confirmation of this in a piece of writing by R. Ogilvie Crombie (aka, “Roc,” about whom I first heard mention in this clip from the film My Dinner with Andre), a physicist who was part of the original Findhorn community. Roc claims that the true forms of these types of nature spirits is more akin to light, but that they take on humanoid shapes as a courtesy to human perception and understanding. (You can read all about it in his collection Encountering Nature Spirits). In fact, there’s a great scene in Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth (one of the most Catholic movies ever) that shows precisely how this might work, as Ophelia, the protagonist, shows a faerie, which first appears insect-like, how it is supposed to look from one of her books on faeries. You can get the idea from the trailer:

Now, I don’t think I have any special powers about this. I am not exactly unique, and I am sure many, many people possess this ability (though “ability” is not quite the right word, as if saying I have some unique ability to taste salt or something). I can’t just turn it on. It just happens upon occasion. It’s probably closer to having an innate ability for mathematics (which I don’t) or music (which I do), and it is not, I think, confined to occasional peeks into the invisible world.

A couple of examples:

When I was training as a Waldorf teacher, one afternoon I was helping the teacher I was shadowing prepare a physics demonstration using magnets to be shown to his class on the next day. It was a very simple demonstration using bar magnets, a sheet of paper, and iron filings that could show the energy pattern of the magnetism at the poles (it’s a very beautiful image). He was using some brand-spanking new magnets, still at full potency—and I suddenly got really woozy. I said to him, “Can you feel that?” “Feel what?” “The energy coming from the magnets.” “I don’t feel anything….you must be a sensitive, Michael.” I guess! I was, quite literally, “mesmerized.” (Anton Mesmer, in case you didn’t know, made himself famous in the 18th century through the use of magnets in therapeutic situations.)

A few years before the magnet experience, my then girlfriend asked me if I wanted to attend a meeting of her “spiritual development” class being held through her school district’s community education outreach program one evening at a local high school. The class session was on seeing auras. I was a pretty naive twenty-two year old, so, always open to new experiences—and the class was all young women—I went.

The teacher, a small woman of about sixty, asked one of the students to come to the front of the class and stand before a blank white wall (so as better to be able to see her aura). She asked the class what they saw. Most of them, I recall, didn’t see much. But I saw all kinds of things. One thing I saw was a kind of dark orange, almost brown shape like a broken feather or crumpled ribbon coming from one of her shoulders. In front of the class, I asked if she had some kind of sharp pain or something like that near her collarbone. She did. I saw other things in other people, including that one woman was pregnant (the rest I don’t recall). The teacher came to me at the break and said, “You might not know this, but you have a real gift for this kind of thing.” Even though I knew the basics of aura theory, I had never tried to see them, nor was I working at “developing myself” in such a way. Some people just see this stuff, and some don’t. And it’s not like I see auras all the time or anything; I have to want to try to. I usually don’t. In fact, the only times I’ve tried over the last twenty-five years or so have been when I’m at performances or liturgies in which I am more of a spectator than a participant.

I could tell other stories—psychometry experiments in my late twenties, for example—or sensing the presence of the dead (which happens pretty frequently, even today), but I’ll set those aside for the moment—though my wife is pretty sure those MK Ultra guys would have snagged me as a kid had they known about my constitution. The point I’m trying to make is that some people just have a kind of natural sensitivity to the invisible worlds more so than others; but I also think, like carrying a tune or drawing, most people can do this at least a little. I also think our culture and education breed this ability out of us. But let’s go back to faeries.

I often talk about the possibility that faeries exist with my college students. Some are all in on the prospect, but most are pretty skeptical. To be honest, most are also pretty skeptical about the existence of God or angels. I use David Bentley Hart’s review essay, “The Secret Commonwealth,” first published in First Things exactly thirteen years ago, to open that discussion (as well as show them how to write a solid review essay). David, as many already know, is a true believer when it comes to faeries, as is John Milbank, not to mention my friend David Russell Mosley. There are more of us with terminal degrees who believe in the Secret Commonwealth than you might think.

In fact, in the recent Regeneration Podcast interview with David Bentley Hart about his novel Kenogaia and the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl upon which it is based, we discussed faeries a little. That night, my phone mysteriously disappeared from my dresser and ended up in the back of my English shepherd Sparrow’s cage a few feet away—though the cage is draped by a blanket, a deerskin, and boxes of seeds! I’m not saying faerie mischief contributed to its strange teleportation, but…

Some people—you might be one of them—may suggest that Pan and the faerie realm really belong to the dominion of evil, but I strongly disagree. In one of Crombie’s accounts, Pan asserts just the opposite: “I am a servant of Almighty God, and I and my subjects are willing to come to the aid of mankind, in spite of the way it has treated us and abused nature, if it affirms belief in us and asks our aid. ” [2] That doesn’t sound like a deal with the devil to me.

For Eleanor Farjeon (I love her so much it hurts), Pan (whose name means “All”) is symbolic of Christ Himself, the absolute Lord of the Dance. As she writes, “For since the divine Pagan dares to exist in harmony with the eternal spirit, trees, which are the temples of Pan, are also prophets of God. He laid his secret within all his creations as they passed through his hands.” [3] And, in a dispute she imagines between Pan and the stodgy and sclerotic god Chronos, Farjeon explains why:

“Have you then found a bigger star than mine?” cried the Old One in alarm. “With many moons and brighter hoops of fire? What were you doing while we were raking the firmament?”

“Dancing, Old Bones, dancing.”

“And where?”

“On earth, with man my brother.”

I could go on.

Over the decades, I have amassed a decent library of faerie lore and research, some fictional, some academic, some somewhere in-between. The works of the poet and visionary Æ (George William Russell) are a good place to begin, and perhaps the definitive work on the subject is still W.Y Evans-Wentz’s doctoral dissertation The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), not to mention the venerable The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (1691) by the Rev. Robert Kirk. Marjorie T. Johnson’s Seeing Fairies (2014) is exhaustive, but is a bit compromised by the jargon and assumptions of The Theosophical Society. Still, it is fascinating. And then there are The Little Grey Men (1942) and Down the Bright Stream (1948) by ‘BB’ (Denys Watkins-Pitchford)—ostensibly “children’s literature,” I think the author knew more about the Invisible Country than just about anyone.

So, next time you think you saw something in the woods…maybe you saw something in the woods.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. 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: Flesh & Spirit. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos (Beacon Press, 1969), 7.

2. R. Oglivie Crombie, Encounters with Nature Spirits (Findhorn Press, 20).

3. Eleanor Farjeon, Trees (London, 1914), 20.

The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse

I have a lot of books. Though I’ve never taken an inventory, my library probably totals in the low thousands, everything from farming to mead making and distilling, literature and literary criticism, arts and crafts, science, biography, theology, philosophy, psychology, history, not to mention many obscure works on magic, alchemy, astrology, and other esoteric subjects. I wrote my dissertation on a number of poets, mystics, and alchemists—John Donne, Henry Vaughan and his alchemist identical twin Thomas, Jane Lead, Sir Kenelm Digby, and John Dee—so there’s my excuse.

Recently, I was interviewed by the very generous Piers Kaniuka for his Youtube channel, Resistance Recovery. We were scheduled to discuss my latest book, Sophia in Exile, but we also spent a good chunk of our conversation talking about the various manifestations of Romanticism—in the 18th century and with the hippies in the 20th, for example—and the Occult Revival and the Celtic Twilight movements of the 19th century came up as an example of resistance to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the technocracies of its time.

When Marygrove College, where I used to work as a professor of English, philosophy, and religious studies, announced it would close at the end of the semester, the library started selling off its collection at 10 cents a piece. Tempt me not, Satan! I did my best to clear the joint. I loaded up on all kinds of books in my various disciplines. Among books by the great Continental philosophers and medieval mystics and theologians, I scored C.G. Jung’s Collected Works (though one volume is in absentia) and the 10-volume set of Donne’s Sermons—that was a good thing, too, because all of my notes from my dissertation research on the sermons were still inscribed in the margins. Don’t judge me: it was obviously all part of God’s plan. I meant to grab the collected works of Sigmund Freud, but the last day of the semester was a snow day and school was closed. I still have nightmares about it.

I have a number of collector’s items, though I used to have more. In my twenties I collected rare books. Let’s call it an investment strategy. Times were hard financially early in my marriage, however, so I ended up selling a lot of the books so we could buy stuff like, you know, food. But I still have a few treasures. I have first editions of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism and W.B. Yeats’s A Vision and I have a collection of The Spectator from 1714 that I picked up twenty years ago in a junk shop in, I think, Niagara Falls, Ontario or someplace thereabouts.

But one of the more curious books I own is one I picked up at Marygrove for a dime. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse was almost an afterthought. I write about poetry and mysticism, so I grabbed it as one might grab a candy bar at the grocery store checkout line. Impulse item. It sat on the shelf for a couple of years. Then I read it. Wow.

The book starts out, surprisingly, not with Cædmon, but with an incantation:

Amergin

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am the beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am the wild boar in valour,

I am the salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a word of science,

I am the point of a lance in battle,

I am the God who creates in the head the fire.

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?

Who announces the ages of the moon?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun?

Dang.

Actually, Cædmon never appears. Which is odd.

The book, which was published in 1921, features many of the poets one would expect: Southwell, the Metaphysicals, Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley (no Keats), Cardinal Newman, the Brownings, Tennyson, Whitman, George MacDonald, both Dante and Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Francis Thompson, G.K. Chesterton, and John Masefield. It also includes some lesser known poets, such as the Roman Catholic nun Augusta Theodosia Drane, the Pre-Raphaelite Arthur W. E. O’Shaughnessy, Yeats’s one-time love interest Katherine Tynan, and the great Canadian poet Bliss Carman. But then it gets really weird.

The big surprise (for me, anyway) was to find so many poets of the Occult Revival and the Celtic Twilight included. I expected Yeats of course—though he only gets two poems! This was, to be sure, before his late flowering and some of his strongest poems, such as “The Second Coming,” “Lapis Lazuli,” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” Here he is represented by “The Rose of Battle” and “To the Secret Rose.” Also included are Yeats’s countryman, the visionary, poet, and social reformer Æ (George Russell) and Yeats’s co-editor of Blake, Edmond Ellis. Alongside these more conventional poets, however, were some real eye-openers.

The collection includes three poems by the (almost entirely unknown today) mystical Freemason W. L. Wilmshurst and work by esoteric historian A.E. Waite, not to mention offerings from William Sharp (also known under the nom de plume Fiona Macleod), the spiritualist Elsa Barker, the Irish pantheist Edmond Holmes, the aforementioned Evelyn Underhill, as well as—wait for it—the magician and all-round naughty person Aleister Crowley—who gets more space than Yeats!

This all kind of blew me away—this was the Oxford University Press, after all. So I checked into the editors, D.H.S. Nicholson and A.H.F. Lee. Both, it turns out, were members of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—which kind of shatters Oxford’s reputation for propriety and decorum. But this explains many of the others included in the collection—Yeats, Sharp, Underhill, Waite, Wilmshurst, and (I think Barker)—were also members of the Golden Dawn. And in the same lodge! Not much else is known about Nicholson, he seems to have been independently wealthy, but Lee was an Anglican priest.

Still, how did these guys swing the editing gig? The plot, as they say, here thickens. As I discovered, a young editor then at the Oxford University Press hired the editors for the job. His name: Charles Williams. That’s right: the Inkling—but the edgy Inkling. Williams, not surprisingly, also belonged to the Golden Dawn for a period, so The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse then becomes a kind of in-group project, the Esoteric Squad, so to speak.

Another interesting tidbit: Late in the book, which moves chronologically, in the section in which the Golden Dawn poets appear, two poems attributed to “Anonymous” appear. Usually in these kinds of collections, the anonymous poems appear in the beginning, derived as they are from “the dark backward and abysm of time” in which names often become lost to us. These two poems, “At the Feet of Isis” and “A Ballade of the Centre,” then are curiously placed and curiously attributed. I haven’t been able to find any scholarly evidence yet, but my money says they belong to none other than Charles Williams himself. Here’s the closing stanza of “At the Feet of Isis,” chock full of sophianicity:

Her feet are in the darkness, but Her face

Is in high Heav’n—all Truth inhabits there;

All Knowledge and all Peace, and perfect grace,

And in the wonder of Her joy they share

Who, blindly clinging to Her feet erstwhile,

Obtained the priceless gift—the vision of Her smile.

Tell me this isn’t by the same guy who wrote The Figure of Beatrice.

Amazing what a dime can purchase nowadays.

Not in the book: but it should be!

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. 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 Divine Feminine.

Lady Day = Sophia Day

March 25th, as many people are no doubt aware, is the Feast of the Annunciation, known in much of the Anglosphere as Lady Day. It’s an important feast in the Christian year, marking, as it does, one of the quarters along with St. John’s Day, Michaelmas, and Christmas. The feast is so important that from early on in Christian history (6th century or thereabouts) the calendar year changed at Lady Day (and not on New Year’s Day) since the Annunciation recalibrated both history and time itself. It was sort of a Cosmic Reset Button, when salvation had at last come to the household of mankind. In the Eastern churches, if the Annunciation falls during the Holy Week its observation is not transferred (as it is in most Western churches), even if it falls on Good Friday or Easter. John Donne, a great lover of paradox, wrote of this great paradox in one of his finest poems, “Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling upon One Day”:

All this, and all between, this day hath shown, Th' abridgement of Christ's story, which makes one— As in plain maps, the furthest west is east— Of th’ angels Ave, and Consummatum est. How well the Church, God’s Court of Faculties, Deals, in sometimes, and seldom joining these. As by the self-fix’d Pole we never do Direct our course, but the next star thereto, Which shows where th’other is, and which we say —Because it strays not far—doth never stray, So God by His Church, nearest to him, we know, And stand firm, if we by her motion go.

As anyone familiar with this blog or my published work knows, the essence of Sophiology is, for me, centered on the recognition of the inherent unity of the natural and supernatural orders; and the metaxological center of that reality is the Virgin Mary, the incarnation of Sophia: she who makes the invisible Godhead manifest to the senses. The Annunciation is the feast celebrating this reality in harmony with the Feast of the Nativity—and it’s no accident that March 25th falls exactly nine months before Christmas. It’s a witness of nature’s marriage to the supernatural. This is spirituality. This is biology.

In the writings of Jacob Boehme, the role of the Virgin in the Incarnation is an office engaged in the regeneration of all things—nature as well as the human soul—an absolute participation in redemption. As he writes in Signatura Rerum:

“God became man and made man to God, the Seed of the Woman, that is, of the Heavenly Virginity, which disappeared in Adam, and also corrupted man’s Seed in the Anger, that is, Mary’s Seed, were formed into one Person, which was Christ; and the Seed of the Woman, that is, of the Virgin of God, understand the Heavenly Essentiality, should bruise the head of the Serpent, understand, the wrath of God in the Corrupted man; the head is the might of God’s Anger; the Divine man, understand the Divine property, should change the earthly into itself & turn the earth to heaven.” [1]

And he explicitly identifies the Mother of Jesus with the Sophia of Proverbs:

“Therefore we set it down here (according to our knowledge) that the pure chaste virgin (in which God was born [or generated]) is the chaste virgin [that is] in the presence of God: and it is an Eternal virgin; before ever Heaven and Earth was created, it was a virgin, and without blemish; and that pure chaste virgin of God put itself into Mary, in her Incarnation, and her new Man, was in the holy Element of God; and therefore she was blessed among all Women, and the Lord was with her, as the Angel said.” [2]

This sensibility is found throughout the sophiological literature—poetry as well as prose, science as well as mysticism—and sweetly phrased in these lines from William Everson’s (aka Brother Antoninus) “Canticle to the Great Mother of God”:

Clearly you are to us as God, who bring God to us.

Not otherwise than of those arms does grace emerge, blessing our birth-blank brow.

Wombed of earth’s wildness, flank darked and void, we have been healed in light,

Traced to the sweet mutation of those hands, a touch closing the anguish-actual stripe,

Whip-flashed the sin, lip-festered on our soul.

So much of our culture and times distances us from the Real that shimmers beneath above and between All Things, as infinity is found at both ends of a number line and between every number, every fraction. Our task, most especially now under the threat of an absolute technocracy, is to participate in the regenerative actuality of Christ and Sophia. This is our Annunciation, our affirmation, our entrance into the Mysterion of the Real.

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. Jacob Behmen (Jacob Boehme), Signatura Rerum: Or the Signature of all Things…translated by J. Ellistone (London, 1651), 11.11.

2. Jacob Behmen [Jacob Boehme], The Third Booke of the Author, being The High and Deepe Searching out of The Threefold Life of Man through [or according to] the Three Principles, translated by John Sparrow (London, 1650), 22.31.