Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: In his book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis tries to depict the universe as it was seen through the eyes of a medieval person. He describes their view of the heavens, with its precise system of crystalline spheres towering like a great cathedral, vast but finite, into space. And he is just about to describe their view of Earth and its inhabitants who occupy the lower end of the Great Chain of Being, which stretches down from God and the angels, to man, animals, vegetables, and even stones, when he finds himself obliged to pause and consider an anomalous class of beings.

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The dark chthonic waters – essentially ancestral waters – rise from the unseen land of the dead into light and become visible. This process is controlled by ancestral agency, the waters becoming a medium through which ancestral presence surfaces and circulates. (Mark Nemglan) The part of southern Indiana I belong to is characterized by karst topography, where water flows through soluble limestone and forms sinkholes and caves. Sometimes the water even disappears underground in what is called a sinking stream.

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In an echo of Bruno Latour’s “we have never been modern”, David Abram argues “we are still animist.” We have built devices that speak to us, even have conversations with us, in an attempt to find our way back to the living landscape of our ancestors. Yet these devices are not radically other; they are only extensions of human consciousness. Our living landscape is thus only ever human, thinning our experience, dulling our senses, and pushing us deeper and deeper into artificial environments.

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Robinson Jeffers: As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from. How does living in a full cosmos affect my daily life? As dear old Robinson says, it unhumanizes my views a little; it de-centers me. In an empty cosmos, humans alone have agency. Humans can be acted upon by impersonal forces, certainly, but those actions are definitionally meaningless.

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Wendell Berry, “Two Economies”: Some time ago, in conversation with Wes Jackson in which we were laboring to define the causes of the modern ruination of farmland, we finally got around to the money economy. I said that an economy based on energy would be more benign because it would be more comprehen­sive. Wes would not agree. “An energy economy still wouldn’t be comprehensive enough.” “Well,” I said, “then what kind of economy would be comprehensive enough?

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