Hey, ancestors, I want to talk to you about mom. You all know she’s in assisted living and on hospice care now. She knows the end is in sight, though we can’t judge the distance. I think she felt that nearness yesterday after a visit with one of the hospice folks. I called her last night. She’s afraid she’ll die and go to Hell.

We know that fear is groundless, but she very much does not. I feel a bit useless to her here because, although I can speak that language, my words don’t carry a lot of weight since I’m not a Christian in any way she recognizes. So I’ve encouraged her to talk to one of her preacher friends and the hospice chaplain.

At the moment, the thing I most want to do is rage against the evils of religion. I want to put down that voice inside telling me to be patient and fair. I don’t want to be fair. The devil is real and I know a few of his names. I want to curse all of them, from the daintily-dressed, incense-scented priests to the sweaty, screaming backwoods preachers. All of those with cruel hearts instilling hell-belief in pious, trusting, fearful souls.

… But I wait, and the rage passes. Now I’m just sad and tired.

The prospect of death is the true test of any worldview. I’ll do what I can to comfort her, and call on others with more credibility to talk to her. But what if, in a moment of sincere openness, she asked me what I had to offer in the face of death?

Images, really. Instincts. That feeling when something opens in me and beauty closes my mouth and quiets my mind.

So fluffy, right? Some of you are rolling your eyes at me. Look, I’m willing to be wrong; some of you—sure as hell—were wrong in your lifetimes.

When I think of you, ancestors, I imagine some of you as still sleeping; perhaps you recently passed through the ordeal of death and need some rest. I imagine some of you as the restless dead, who may have died suddenly or unjustly and are not yet willing to accept what has happened. I imagine some of you in sorrow, regretting the words, actions, or choices of your life. I imagine some of you taking those sorrowful ones by the hand and cooing comfort as you lead them toward healing. I imagine some of you as the mighty dead: ancient, fully healed ancestors who exercise authority with a benevolent watchfulness.

I do not imagine any of you burning. The thought would be ridiculous if it wasn’t so gruesome.

Ancestors, I have not taught my daughter hell-belief. Rather, I have told her it is a cruel idea. I have told her that if anything lies at the heart of the universe, it is love. If I have my way, mom will be the last of our line to have her final days darkened by hell-belief.

Ancestors, go to her now. Meet her in memories and dreams. Draw her out of this darkness and calm her fears. May she hear your voices again as you call her onward.

From Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over the fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Based on Albert E. Brumley’s All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground: Traditional Songs and Recipes

• 2 tbsp flour
• 1 tbsp cornstarch
• ½ cup white sugar
• ½ cup brown sugar
• ¼ cup sorghum
• ½ cup cider vinegar
• 4 eggs
• 1 tbsp melted butter
• pinch salt
• ¼ tsp nutmeg
• ½ tsp vanilla
• Cinnamon for sprinkling

Heat oven to 350 and grease a casserole dish. 9x13 makes a thin custard but it bakes uniformly and quickly; a smaller dish would give you a thicker custard but the baking might be trickier.

Mix all ingredients except cinnamon until smooth. Pour into dish. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until center is slightly wobbly. Sprinkle with cinnamon.

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality:

Modern depth psychology came about because the daimons would no longer be ignored. They made themselves felt in neurotic symptoms, in obsessions and psychoses. Freud and his followers documented the complexes which cried out from within us with alien voices; Jung followed their call into the depths, beyond the personal, beyond even the human, to the world of archetypal psychological principles in which he saw the gods returning in a new guise. Freud could not follow him down. He feared the daimons of the unconscious, demonized them, warning Jung that he must set up a bulwark “against the black tide of mud” of “occultism.” But Jung dared to make his own journey into the collective unconscious and found there something altogether different, something — as we will see — unimaginable. Other schools of psychology became increasingly materialistic and reductive, treating the daimons as if they were purely physiological. Soul was reduced to mind, and mind to brain. The daimons were not so much demonized as medicalized. “The gods have become diseases,” Jung was fond of lamenting.

Why do we rarely hear of sightings of the elder folk here in the United States? The next time you see one of those poor souls taken up by the latest online obsession or some young person so bound by anxiety they can’t leave the house or a successful entrepreneur eating uppers just to keep going one more day or an older man so consumed with anger his kids can’t stand to be around him—perhaps that’s a sighting. Whatever is repressed returns as symptom.

After my recent post, I decided to look into the context of the Lewis quote on the longaevi from The Discarded Image. What follows is a summary, not intended to be thorough and, as usual, aimed at unapologetically pillaging ideas for my own use.

To begin with, here is Lewis describing some fundamentals of the medieval model, into which he will later situate the longaevi:

In the Mundas which God built of that raw material [the four contraries of hot, cold, moist, and dry] we find them only in combination. They combine to form the four elements. The union of hot and dry becomes fire; that of hot and moist, air; of cold and moist, water; of cold and dry, earth. (In the human body they combine with a different result, as we shall see later.) There is also a Fifth Element or Quintessence, the aether; but that is found only above the Moon and we mortals have no experience of it.

In the sublunary world—Nature in the strict sense—the four elements have all sorted themselves out into their ‘kindly stedes.’ Earth, the heaviest, has gathered itself together at the centre. On it lies the lighter water; above that, the still lighter air. Fire, the lightest of all, whenever it was free, has flown up to the circumference of Nature and forms a sphere just below the orbit of the Moon.

Lewis says the longlivers (let’s dispense with the Latin) are ambiguously understood to belong between air and Earth.

In a sense, if I may risk the oxymoron, their unimportance is their importance. They are marginal, fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model does not assign, as it were, an official status. Herein lies their imaginative value. They soften the classic severity of the huge design. They intrude a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into a universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory, too luminous.

The longlivers, as the name implies, have longer lives than humans but are not immortal. They are “innocent” and have “bodies of elemental purity.”

Lewis then proceeds to place these uncategorizable beings into three categories, based on three extracts from Milton that illustrate three possible understandings of “fairies”:

1. Swart Faery. Horrors. Enemies of God. Elves, ettins, giants, nymphs. “Fayre fiendes that cause my hayres to stand upright.” This dark view of fairies, Lewis says, “gained ground, I think, in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth century—an unusually hag-ridden period.”
2. Small creatures, though their degree of smallness is always vague. They seem to range (even within the same story!) from insect sized to the size of a short human. More importantly, though, these fairies are intent on dancing and mirth, having almost nothing to do with humans. These fairies are more afraid of humans than humans are of them.
3. High fairies. Unlike in the second understanding, these fairies often seek out humans—sometimes for amorous purposes. These are human-sized, beautiful, and possessing material splendor. They can also be elusive when they want to be. I’m reminded of Tolkien’s elves here.

Lewis then goes on to outline four theories about the nature of longlivers:

1. A third rational species distinct from angels and men. Long-lived but mortal. Sometimes associated with the four classical elements, i.e., elementals (undines, sylphs, gnomes, salamanders).
2. Demoted (not fallen) angels. They did not follow Lucifer in rebellion but were sympathetic to him. They were banished to the lower, airy regions to await final judgment.
3. A special class of the dead. There is some inconsistency here. Some of the dead are found to be consorting with fairies. Some became fairies. Some never died but were whisked off to Fairyland. If I may insert my own theorizing here: the connection with the dead makes sense when you consider the long association of the burial of the dead with the fruitfulness of the land. The land is fed and in turns feeds.
4. Fallen angels, i.e., devils. “This becomes almost the official view after the accession of James I. … This view, which is closely connected with the later Renaissance phobia about witches, goes far to explain the degradation of the Fairies from their medieval vitality into the kickshaws of Drayton or William Browne. A churchyard or a brimstone smell came to hang about any treatment of them that was not obviously playful. … One might have expected the High Fairies to have been expelled by science; I think they were actually expelled by a darkening of superstition.” Obviously, fairies as demons is the most dreadfully boring option of all.

I bring this up because it is a valuable wrestling with the phenomena in Christian and classical lands. I don’t have any interest in the royal court as a metaphor for the sacred; it was valuable in its time but I prefer an ecological model like animism. Nevertheless, these are good thoughts to think with.

I also want to linger on Lewis’ comment that it was superstition, not science, that expelled the fairies. The witch craze was a pseudo-science claiming to reveal and stamp out a scourge of goatish Sabbats. They had tests! Court trials! Books published on the latest findings! Yet in the end, it was all aircraft grade superstition. Sixteenth century conspiracy theory. Human fear, not facts, killed the fairies.

Likewise, we children of the Enlightenment, full of our own fanciful ideas, assume the mass of humanity throughout history is obviously wrong about the elder folk. We write off everyone, everywhere as naive or unscientific or demonically deceived and then wonder why we feel lonely and the world disenchanted.

“They intrude a welcome hint of wildness,” says Lewis—and this is what we need. Our worldviews are entirely too tame. No matter how loudly various blowhards defend “the truth,” it’s dogs fighting over scraps.

You want a more enchanted cosmos? It’s not hard. Find a place where the water bubbles up from the underworld and listen with the trees as they lean in.

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. They are not only strange to him, as a literary historian and Christian apologist, but they are also at odds with the cosmology he is outlining - a world even more precise and orderly than our own worldview. Following the Roman writer Martianus Capella, he calls these beings longaevi (presumably “long-lived ones”) - “dancing companies” of which “haunt woods, glades, and groves, and lakes, and springs and brooks; whose names are Pans, Fauns, … Satyrs, Silvans, Nymphs.” They are, of course, our daimons.

“In a sense,” says Lewis, “their unimportance is their importance. They are marginal fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model [i.e. the medieval cosmos] does not assign, as it were, an official status.” And this is as true of our own model of the cosmos as it was then. It is the nature of the daimons to be always unofficial, constituting a stumbling block to the orderly structures by which we envisage Creation. To his credit, Lewis does not disapprove of them. “Herein lies their imaginative value,” he says. “They introduce a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into the universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory, too luminous.” Lewis’s private attempt to reconcile the daimons with a Christian cosmos took the form of his famous Narnia books for children of all ages.

… The process of demonization [i.e., the reduction of daimons to demons] took on new impetus with the Reformation. The Protestants were in no mood to accommodate the daimons; nor were their Catholic counterparts, the new breed of narrow counter-reformationists. Both sides quoted the early Christian Fathers, who had identified the pagan gods with devils, to support their own identification of fairies with demons. By 1584, Reginald Scot could complain loudly in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (vii, xv) that “our mothers' maids have so terrified us with … spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, … dwarfs, giants, nymphs, Incubus, Robin Good Fellow, … and other such bugs.” Here we see the fear and exasperation of a mind which has ceased to discriminate between daimons and is merely oppressed, lumping them all together in a demonic body. With the accession of James I to the throne in 1603, together with the rise of Puritanism, the demonization of fairies was all but complete in educated circles.

… What really did for the fairies, however, was their association with witches. … The history of witchcraft in Europe is extremely complex. (I will touch on the subject later on.) It’s enough to say here that, as the sixteenth century drew to a close, it became increasingly hag-ridden. Daimons, and fairies in particular, were implicated in the hysteria, phobia, and paranoia which surrounded witchcraft and the persecution of its alleged practitioners. This was also a period, of course, which saw the rise of empiricism which led eventually to the modern, essentially scientific, view of the world. On the face of it, this view could be seen as responsible for the ensuing decay of daimonic beliefs. But I am inclined to agree with C. S. Lewis when he says: “One might have expected the High Fairies to have been expelled by science; I think they were actually expelled by a darkening of superstition.”

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.

Lost River is such a sinking stream, originating in Washington County and then disappearing and reappearing in a series of locations in Orange County before flowing into Driftwood River (a.k.a., the East Fork of the White River). According to Wikipedia, 23 of its 87 miles are in underground caverns.

Reading about chthonic waters recently, my mind turned toward the Lost River. Not thirty minutes from my house flows a river between the worlds.

Orangeville Rise

But first, a groundhog. Just after crossing Driftwood River on Highway 37, a groundhog came galloping across the road. I hit the brakes and veered left. The groundhog safely crossed and I drove on, appreciating the (somewhat dangerous, especially to the groundhog) synchronicity of this encounter with a chthonic being.

The day was heating up by the time I parked in the little pull-off by the Orangeville Rise. The river flows back up to the surface at the base of a limestone wall and then flows on between steep banks. I noticed a couple of paths down to the water that are better suited for energetic young people. I contented myself with a spot several yards from the rise where I could see both it and the river downstream. After spending some time watching the rise, the river, and dozens of ebony jewelwings, I introduced myself and left my offering, with a promise to come back soon.

The road crossed the Lost River a bit south of the rise, past some Amish farms, at this wonderful old iron bridge. I will admit to a bit of a pause before crossing, before deciding it was probably more solid than many modern bridges.

Wesley Chapel Gulf

The Orangeville rise was nice. The Wesley Chapel Gulf was stunning.

The water in the gulf is part of the Lost River at one of its underground points. The gulf itself was formed when a sinkhole at the then-surface spectacularly collapsed. This would not have been one of our usual sinkhole collapses; rather, this one formed essentially a box canyon where the Lost River bubbles up (this, I’m told, can be seen and heard at times of heavy rain) and drains again in several spots within the gulf. I posted a video on YouTube if you want to hear the draining and birdsong.

Down a long flight of steps the Lady went into a deep green hollow, through which ran murmuring the silver stream that issued from the fountain on the hill. At the bottom, upon a low pedestal carved like a branching tree, stood a basin of silver, wide and shallow, and beside it stood a silver ewer.

With water from the stream Galadriel filled the basin to the brim, and breathed on it, and when the water was still again she spoke. “Here is the Mirror of Galadriel,” she said. “I have brought you here so that you may look in it, if you will.”

The gulf is a special place. As you descend into it, you feel the temperature drop. The wood lark, whose song always gives a feeling of mystery to the woods, sounds even more ethereal here. The banks are half mud, half sand, and fully dangerous; I’m bringing a walking stick next time. The limestone walls rise high above the water and strange watery sounds can be heard from time to time. Minnows swim in small schools in the shallow edges. Out of sight on both ends are drains where floating material can be seen spinning above the drop back into the caverns below. Along the bank, trees lean in toward the water, their roots exposed. A sort of precarious attention.

This is a place that will reward attention. Another offering, another promise, and I head home.

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.

Thus do we render ourselves ever more numb. Ever more deaf to the anguished cries of other creatures, ever more oblivious to the vanishing of species, ever more inured to the steady flattening of the Real. Ever more calloused and closed to the shuddering pain of the biosphere, breathing.

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. Only agency imparts meaning.

In a full cosmos, many persons–to repeat, only some of whom are human–are acting according to various interests. What’s more, many human persons thought to be fully responsible agents are ridden by bandit powers. Co-creation in relationship (consciously or unconsciously) is the law of a full cosmos.

In an empty cosmos, agency is too heavy a weight for a single person to bear. In an empty cosmos, it is indeed true that “the greatest misfortune that ever befell a primate was rational self-awareness.” What a tragedy if I am acting alone! How am I to bear the responsibility in a time of always-on awareness of world events? How am I to avoid despair when some human persons have vastly more power than me?

In a full cosmos, I am aware that other, greater-than-human powers exist–some of whom I can call on. And shaped as I am by the teachings of Jesus, I believe love is ultimately directing its unfolding. I can find peace when I learn to trust the unfolding.

The cosmos is a roiling ocean of powers operating at scales and for purposes unfathomable to me, but my role is not to penetrate these mysteries. I have been told by the master teacher to “take no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Or in the words of Julian of Norwich, “All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.”

A full cosmos makes my individual actions less central but no less crucial. My actions are less central because I am one of many agents. The fate of the world is not solely in human hands, much less my hands.

But my actions are crucial because they are part of the ongoing co-creation. In that process, as Elrond said, even small hands can move the wheels of the world. My responsibility is only to find (in the phrase that spread like a codeword from Gigi Coyle to Charles Eisenstein to Gordon White and beyond) “what is mine to do?” What is mine to do is not a puzzle; it is what I find when I turn in the direction of love and beauty. What I find there is my place in the community of beings, working together toward ends we cannot imagine.

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?”

He hesitated a moment, and then, grinning, said, “The Kingdom of God.”

David Benjamin Blower, “Same Old Day”

The age to come is beneath your feet
Hidden in the soil where nobody planted it
Resting, buried like treasure under snow and rain.
Underneath the rotten leaves
Underneath your dreams again
Breathes like a lake of time welling on the underside
Sees like a gentle eye
Nobody to please now
Grieves with the patience of nature, fasting
Outlasting the days of the gaolers

I write to you from within a constrained world.
Caring for my elderly, injured mother,
thinking only of the next task,
I make phone calls
and listen for her stirring in the night.

What do I have to do with the world
of presidents and wars?
I dimly recall the Strait of Hormuz
as I fill my gas tank and worry
about Medicare coverage.

There was a spot on Stumphole Bridge Road
where long ago (last week?)
the world opened up.
Wide farmland stretching up to misted hills,
folding and folding and folding into the horizon.

I am the cosmos unfolding
along purposeful, hidden paths.
It is my small, bright secret.
Like the woman and her coin,
I sometimes lose track of it.

I’ve swept the floor and lit a lamp.
I’ve just caught a glimmer
in the corner of my eye.