It is predawn here, and I am finished with the wine glasses from last night's party. It is so rich, all of this, unfolding, here and there, here at my mother's, there in a cottage with flickering candles and a rich, so rich, conversation. Ah, the reenchantment of this lovely, ever-enchanting world, at such a time of dismal human destruction.......
Do we really take it seriously, when the sun shows up again, and the patterned beings of this lovely dance skimmer around as if permanently present some place always?
It is a newish dance step that is presently being unveiled with our latest precision instruments.
"We are all hard-wired for God," says Lisa Miller, as she explains from her kayak how the geese are actually speaking to her.... not in the mythopoetic way of 'ah, announcing our place in the world', but more "hey, sister, ya, I am talkin' to you".
It is at this inver river of confluence that the magical thing happens.... there is this glorious ribbon where we live.... a ribbon where the organizing dance of everything has spawned us!
It is such a trick of magic, this conjuring, we wonder who notices it anymore. The trick is too big for us to notice it at some points.... but I love to think also, that we are 'hard-wired' for this noticing....
Was it CS or whoever said.... 'the natural depth of each one of us is the whole of creation'.... My mother would repeat that often, writing it down and taping it above the sink. Pay attention, she seemed to hint, Something miraculous is afoot. "The Phenomenon of Man" ..... old Teilhard with his Man language.... she did not mind, she could see through that bend in the patriarchal world. She had always had a direct experience of the Lord. No one could ever take that away from her.
A direct experience of the Lord. Like the weird little opossum that wandered through the yard last week. The Lord like that. Take it serious, drink it in, like Alexandra leaving, and the impossibility of the whole carnival in the first place.
Thank you, though I lack the erudition and education of many here , I’m able to get a sense that the window might not be opaque but of stained glass and that I might still find comfort on the pews of my childhood.
“Animism makes the world a courteous company and a delighted dance but also a shimmering veil through which constantly the light of a further meaning is shining” Malcolm Guite is a national treasure . Thank you for sharing.
This is Penuel-stuff here. That last talk about baptism, chief bards and such was a rock under my head the last few sleeps and this is a right wrestle with the ghost of Messiah Past for me. My trajectory was the opposite polarity. Animism was the fullfilment of everything holy in the gospel and the Tanach. The roundest pagans I know are refugees from Jerusalem. I have so many old haunts rising and so many wonderings and maybe a leg sweep or two for this once close-as-kin Angel facing hopefully the border I slipped over many nights back. I also wonder if I might need a hip lesson. Not sure where to begin but there it is....
Hey Martin. I deleted a first answer at this because it was too much I think. You asked me what books are dearest and I think I wondered off into books with dear ideas. The two most touched books the last years for me are John Felstiner's Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew and his Selected works of Celan. Some poets (like Mandelstam) have yet to find their English translator but Felstiner brings English into Celan's world and makes it better for it. Osip Mandelstam's life retold by Nadezdha in Hope against Hope is also scripture-esque in my shelter. Hannah Arendt The Human Condition and Camus' Resistance, Rebellion and Death are motherland and fatherland. Hugo's the Hunchback of Notre Dam and Delint's Someplace to Be Flying are the village (the Coer de Miracle) and the user's manual (be a shapeshifter). Wiesel's The Gates of the Forest is ancestral. Lately I prize much of Eduardo de Castro's work in Cannibal Metaphysics and Willerslev's Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs for echos of the animist culture at the roots of our lost way. Truth be told the final two dearest bits are the work of decoding Paleolithic poetics being done by the Gimbutas' mentored thinker James Harrod and your stuff (no bullshit). Stories seem more important than books as the night comes on though. I have a set of Cossack fairy tales that I need and lately the Six Swans has me by the soul. It felt good to be asked this. Thanks for that.
Dear Martin, What riches you bring us today...delighting in the inspiration from the marvelous and mischievous Malcolm Guite...I am intrigued and invited into magical realms..thank you
So excited by this rich conversation with M. GUITE about spiritual conversion, CS Lewis and the importance of myth and imagination to marry the mind and heart soul. I might define myself as a Born Again Christian-Pagan.
The idea of Christ being a bridge connector between myths and science, heart and mind, earth and the Vedic milky ocean of time . Thank you so much.
I've come to know everything thing has soul, from a rock, a river, a blade of grass, the leap of fire, the vocal crow cawing in the morning sun on the beach.
To see the essence, the be-ingness of all things, to see its innate spirit is being able to see beyond the veil of dulled conciousness. Hence the need to step away at times, to step outside the daily struggle for existence, to retreat, to be able to 'see' clearly.
Everything is part of this universal energy and conciousness, vibrating at its own frequency yet part of the greater whole. Let's call that God, Great Spirit, whatever your word for that conciousness is.
I am an animist, I connect with spirits of the land and those beings in all things that have something to say to me, to teach me. Some might say I'm heathen too, as I have a living relationship with both Odin the one eye and Freya; Innana too speaks so very clearly these last two years, she is having a revival. I also have a meaningful Buddhist name given to me by a monk in Solo, Java decades ago, and over the years have spent time in Buddhist practice.
At the same time I spend, have spent, a lot of time in churches on my own terms. Something keeps drawing me. Perhaps because they are very alive in spirit, even if a little unloved, especially in rural areas, impoverished in upkeep with ageing dwindling congregations, and rather frayed around the edges. There is still something beyond the veil in each.
Some have a very heavy quality, others are light as a feather. They all contain the cross of Jesus. Usually the Virgin Mary, a handful of saints, and quite often but not always, the Mary Magdalene. They also contain the many layers and remnants of our pagan past.
I've come to sense that one can be at the same time animist and have an affinity to the divine energies of different faith, Christ conciousness included...it doesn't have to be a choice, one or the other. Though I can see that may be necessary for many, I do think they can exist together. The light that eminates jointly from Yeshua and the Magdalene, can be carried in our heart equally alongside the even more ancient forces at play.
I think this is why I'm curious to hear some of the Bible stories told afresh.
***
Yesterday I found myself in the Catholic church of St Mary Magdalene, Bexhill on Sea, a rather sleepy seaside town in Sussex, with a wonderful Art Deco theatre and arts centre. I arrived in the church not by design, perhaps by divine intervention maybe.
A late Victorian stone church, filled with wondrous stained glass, a marble altar and a rather wonderful set of art deco wooden stations of the Cross lining the walls. Somewhat reminiscent of those created for the only Catholic church ever designed by sculptor Eric Gill in Gorleston, Norfolk. All the statues were covered for Holy Week, veiled in purple and their beauty hidden. I was there lighting the last of 40 candles I'd lit daily since Ash Wednesday. A heart based ritual I'd set myself which was insightful, inspiring and also challenging.
I'd arrived at this church after tramping around the beautiful lake at Ashburnham Place, in a landscape designed by Capability Brown in 1777. I'd sat in the Orangery drinking tea next to the oldest Camelia bushes in the UK, they'd been growing there since 1833. One of my favourite flowering trees, these venerable specimens were certainly full of spirit.
I'd woken up that morning with Ashburnham Place on my lips. I'd never been, though driven past many times. I felt compelled to visit. Ashburnham had been a private aristocratic estate for a milennia, but the old grand house was hit by insurmountable inheritance tax and dry rot after the second world war. The vicar who had inherited the estate decided to sell the contents, pay the bills and tear down most of the rotten house to create a Christian retreat centre with the ground open to the public. God had spoken to him through his reading of the scriptures.
The rather sturdy but attractive 14th C village church next door was rebuilt in 1665, the interior barely altered from that time. A pair of goats were grazing amongst the worn and weathered headstones. This was the very same church where my 3rd great grandfather was baptized in 1813. A farming family, his father Moses would no doubt have been working the estate lands. They moved about in the area before grandpa X3 migrated to Brighton in the industrial revolution years to become a baker and for a time, an early policeman!
So I'm walking through this landscape, listening to Martin's recorded conversation when I find the LadySpring grotto, covered in moss pouring forth its precious water into a stone trough and then flowing down the valley into the lake. There was such a gentle energy there, fizzing away, I could sense the nature spirits, and there were crosses everywhere I looked...Christ and the pagan together.
So what is the energy of Christ and Mary Magdalene alongside my animism, that speaks to me?
They are another expression of that divine energy, and I think an expression of light, the lightness of being that is accessible to all of us, that we all carry in our hearts. So perhaps this is about a home coming to the heart. To really be in daily living connection with our heart and its inner chambers. To be fully alive and concious to life and death, as what lies beyond the veil is even brighter. A light so bright that our own earth bound souls in this incarnation, can only just glimpse flashes of here and there. I'm brought back to the veiled statues in the Passion, the great symbolic death before resurrection. Veiled as a reminder that the light is bright but we have to walk through death to reach it.
"It is only through our own death that the veil is lifted and we are finally able to see the beauty of everything in our lives."
Oh my leaping heart! Being able to identify with the imagination of CS Lewis is quite special. Being able to go one step further and identify with his processing of Paganism and Christ consciousness is exquisite!
What a gift this is! Sitting at the kitchen table on Sunday morning , seeing blue skies and hearing the birds busy with springtime listening to this. I have listened several times since. You both talk of the very things I have been mulling over in my mind for some weeks now, these themes speak to those I hope to delve into in my dissertation. Wonderful stuff indeed - thank you! 💚
It is predawn here, and I am finished with the wine glasses from last night's party. It is so rich, all of this, unfolding, here and there, here at my mother's, there in a cottage with flickering candles and a rich, so rich, conversation. Ah, the reenchantment of this lovely, ever-enchanting world, at such a time of dismal human destruction.......
Do we really take it seriously, when the sun shows up again, and the patterned beings of this lovely dance skimmer around as if permanently present some place always?
It is a newish dance step that is presently being unveiled with our latest precision instruments.
"We are all hard-wired for God," says Lisa Miller, as she explains from her kayak how the geese are actually speaking to her.... not in the mythopoetic way of 'ah, announcing our place in the world', but more "hey, sister, ya, I am talkin' to you".
It is at this inver river of confluence that the magical thing happens.... there is this glorious ribbon where we live.... a ribbon where the organizing dance of everything has spawned us!
It is such a trick of magic, this conjuring, we wonder who notices it anymore. The trick is too big for us to notice it at some points.... but I love to think also, that we are 'hard-wired' for this noticing....
Was it CS or whoever said.... 'the natural depth of each one of us is the whole of creation'.... My mother would repeat that often, writing it down and taping it above the sink. Pay attention, she seemed to hint, Something miraculous is afoot. "The Phenomenon of Man" ..... old Teilhard with his Man language.... she did not mind, she could see through that bend in the patriarchal world. She had always had a direct experience of the Lord. No one could ever take that away from her.
A direct experience of the Lord. Like the weird little opossum that wandered through the yard last week. The Lord like that. Take it serious, drink it in, like Alexandra leaving, and the impossibility of the whole carnival in the first place.
Oh, I must put grouchy old Van on for a while, 'the one great magician who turns water into wine'..... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5vkZPOdKOI
thanks for sharing this delightful conversation.
Ah, Van on a early, grey Monday morning in England. Light through the clouds! Thank you Jane.
Thank you, though I lack the erudition and education of many here , I’m able to get a sense that the window might not be opaque but of stained glass and that I might still find comfort on the pews of my childhood.
Good cheer Maf, that's good to read. Let's see where this adventure takes us.
“Animism makes the world a courteous company and a delighted dance but also a shimmering veil through which constantly the light of a further meaning is shining” Malcolm Guite is a national treasure . Thank you for sharing.
He absolutely is! A great mind that meanders through poetry, laughter, devotion and lot's of walking.
This is Penuel-stuff here. That last talk about baptism, chief bards and such was a rock under my head the last few sleeps and this is a right wrestle with the ghost of Messiah Past for me. My trajectory was the opposite polarity. Animism was the fullfilment of everything holy in the gospel and the Tanach. The roundest pagans I know are refugees from Jerusalem. I have so many old haunts rising and so many wonderings and maybe a leg sweep or two for this once close-as-kin Angel facing hopefully the border I slipped over many nights back. I also wonder if I might need a hip lesson. Not sure where to begin but there it is....
Thank's Andrew. What books are dearest to you? 'The roundest pagans I know are refugees from Jerusalem' is a thunderous and fabulous line.
Hey Martin. I deleted a first answer at this because it was too much I think. You asked me what books are dearest and I think I wondered off into books with dear ideas. The two most touched books the last years for me are John Felstiner's Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew and his Selected works of Celan. Some poets (like Mandelstam) have yet to find their English translator but Felstiner brings English into Celan's world and makes it better for it. Osip Mandelstam's life retold by Nadezdha in Hope against Hope is also scripture-esque in my shelter. Hannah Arendt The Human Condition and Camus' Resistance, Rebellion and Death are motherland and fatherland. Hugo's the Hunchback of Notre Dam and Delint's Someplace to Be Flying are the village (the Coer de Miracle) and the user's manual (be a shapeshifter). Wiesel's The Gates of the Forest is ancestral. Lately I prize much of Eduardo de Castro's work in Cannibal Metaphysics and Willerslev's Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs for echos of the animist culture at the roots of our lost way. Truth be told the final two dearest bits are the work of decoding Paleolithic poetics being done by the Gimbutas' mentored thinker James Harrod and your stuff (no bullshit). Stories seem more important than books as the night comes on though. I have a set of Cossack fairy tales that I need and lately the Six Swans has me by the soul. It felt good to be asked this. Thanks for that.
Dear Martin, What riches you bring us today...delighting in the inspiration from the marvelous and mischievous Malcolm Guite...I am intrigued and invited into magical realms..thank you
Thank's Lakshmi - he's a great and original source and I have met no one - no one - with such a resource of memorised poetry in his furry jaw.
So excited by this rich conversation with M. GUITE about spiritual conversion, CS Lewis and the importance of myth and imagination to marry the mind and heart soul. I might define myself as a Born Again Christian-Pagan.
The idea of Christ being a bridge connector between myths and science, heart and mind, earth and the Vedic milky ocean of time . Thank you so much.
blessings for you both.
Beyond the veil
I've come to know everything thing has soul, from a rock, a river, a blade of grass, the leap of fire, the vocal crow cawing in the morning sun on the beach.
To see the essence, the be-ingness of all things, to see its innate spirit is being able to see beyond the veil of dulled conciousness. Hence the need to step away at times, to step outside the daily struggle for existence, to retreat, to be able to 'see' clearly.
Everything is part of this universal energy and conciousness, vibrating at its own frequency yet part of the greater whole. Let's call that God, Great Spirit, whatever your word for that conciousness is.
I am an animist, I connect with spirits of the land and those beings in all things that have something to say to me, to teach me. Some might say I'm heathen too, as I have a living relationship with both Odin the one eye and Freya; Innana too speaks so very clearly these last two years, she is having a revival. I also have a meaningful Buddhist name given to me by a monk in Solo, Java decades ago, and over the years have spent time in Buddhist practice.
At the same time I spend, have spent, a lot of time in churches on my own terms. Something keeps drawing me. Perhaps because they are very alive in spirit, even if a little unloved, especially in rural areas, impoverished in upkeep with ageing dwindling congregations, and rather frayed around the edges. There is still something beyond the veil in each.
Some have a very heavy quality, others are light as a feather. They all contain the cross of Jesus. Usually the Virgin Mary, a handful of saints, and quite often but not always, the Mary Magdalene. They also contain the many layers and remnants of our pagan past.
I've come to sense that one can be at the same time animist and have an affinity to the divine energies of different faith, Christ conciousness included...it doesn't have to be a choice, one or the other. Though I can see that may be necessary for many, I do think they can exist together. The light that eminates jointly from Yeshua and the Magdalene, can be carried in our heart equally alongside the even more ancient forces at play.
I think this is why I'm curious to hear some of the Bible stories told afresh.
***
Yesterday I found myself in the Catholic church of St Mary Magdalene, Bexhill on Sea, a rather sleepy seaside town in Sussex, with a wonderful Art Deco theatre and arts centre. I arrived in the church not by design, perhaps by divine intervention maybe.
A late Victorian stone church, filled with wondrous stained glass, a marble altar and a rather wonderful set of art deco wooden stations of the Cross lining the walls. Somewhat reminiscent of those created for the only Catholic church ever designed by sculptor Eric Gill in Gorleston, Norfolk. All the statues were covered for Holy Week, veiled in purple and their beauty hidden. I was there lighting the last of 40 candles I'd lit daily since Ash Wednesday. A heart based ritual I'd set myself which was insightful, inspiring and also challenging.
I'd arrived at this church after tramping around the beautiful lake at Ashburnham Place, in a landscape designed by Capability Brown in 1777. I'd sat in the Orangery drinking tea next to the oldest Camelia bushes in the UK, they'd been growing there since 1833. One of my favourite flowering trees, these venerable specimens were certainly full of spirit.
I'd woken up that morning with Ashburnham Place on my lips. I'd never been, though driven past many times. I felt compelled to visit. Ashburnham had been a private aristocratic estate for a milennia, but the old grand house was hit by insurmountable inheritance tax and dry rot after the second world war. The vicar who had inherited the estate decided to sell the contents, pay the bills and tear down most of the rotten house to create a Christian retreat centre with the ground open to the public. God had spoken to him through his reading of the scriptures.
The rather sturdy but attractive 14th C village church next door was rebuilt in 1665, the interior barely altered from that time. A pair of goats were grazing amongst the worn and weathered headstones. This was the very same church where my 3rd great grandfather was baptized in 1813. A farming family, his father Moses would no doubt have been working the estate lands. They moved about in the area before grandpa X3 migrated to Brighton in the industrial revolution years to become a baker and for a time, an early policeman!
So I'm walking through this landscape, listening to Martin's recorded conversation when I find the LadySpring grotto, covered in moss pouring forth its precious water into a stone trough and then flowing down the valley into the lake. There was such a gentle energy there, fizzing away, I could sense the nature spirits, and there were crosses everywhere I looked...Christ and the pagan together.
So what is the energy of Christ and Mary Magdalene alongside my animism, that speaks to me?
They are another expression of that divine energy, and I think an expression of light, the lightness of being that is accessible to all of us, that we all carry in our hearts. So perhaps this is about a home coming to the heart. To really be in daily living connection with our heart and its inner chambers. To be fully alive and concious to life and death, as what lies beyond the veil is even brighter. A light so bright that our own earth bound souls in this incarnation, can only just glimpse flashes of here and there. I'm brought back to the veiled statues in the Passion, the great symbolic death before resurrection. Veiled as a reminder that the light is bright but we have to walk through death to reach it.
"It is only through our own death that the veil is lifted and we are finally able to see the beauty of everything in our lives."
Oh my leaping heart! Being able to identify with the imagination of CS Lewis is quite special. Being able to go one step further and identify with his processing of Paganism and Christ consciousness is exquisite!
Utterly insightful nourishing discourse for my weary mind. Loved listening to this!
What a pleasure to listen to on Good Friday. Thankyou Malcolm and Martin.
What a gift this is! Sitting at the kitchen table on Sunday morning , seeing blue skies and hearing the birds busy with springtime listening to this. I have listened several times since. You both talk of the very things I have been mulling over in my mind for some weeks now, these themes speak to those I hope to delve into in my dissertation. Wonderful stuff indeed - thank you! 💚