The Mystery of the Filly Loo

Apparently, no one knows where the name comes from. The ‘Filly Loo’ has however taken place on the Friday closest to the Summer Solstice every year for centuries. On the day, hundreds of people from surrounding settlements descend on the tiny village of Ashmore in Dorset, which incidentally is believed by some to be the oldest continuously inhabited village in Britain, possibly settled sometime during the Roman occupation two millennia ago. Ashmore now consists of a population of 170 people living among a few cottages and houses, a medieval church, and some farms, all scattered around a large dew pond in the centre, inhabited by some well-fed ducks.

Some folk speculate that the name ‘Filly Loo’ comes from a lost local dialect, and they make an educated guess based on other dialects of the West Country that it meant ‘uproar’ or ‘celebration’. Others, perhaps more convincingly, say that it’s a corruption of ‘Filbert Louis’, the nickname of a local gentleman called Louis Rideout who was especially zealous in keeping the festival going at times when it faced suppression. Still others suggest it could derive from the French “La Fille de l’Eau” (‘the maiden of the water’), referring to local lore concerning a water sprite who is believed to dwell in the dew pond, with the festival being thrown in her honour to keep her happy. This last theory may be the most credible, given that villagers to this day claim that on certain mornings a water nymph’s ghostly appearance can be spotted above the pond.

How old the Filly Loo is, remains unknown. There are medieval records alluding to the festival, specifically to the climactic dance—the Horn Dance—which proves that the Filly Loo is at least 700 years old. The festival is believed, however, to be far older, and may even be pre-Christian. Perhaps it was an annual harvest celebration that was ‘baptised’ during the evangelisation of these Isles and consequently connected in the local imagination with the veneration of John the Baptist, the animal-hide covered, insect-eating wild saint and cousin of the Lord.

The Filly Loo could thus predate the arrival of Augustine’s mission in 597 AD, and maybe was encountered by Roman missionaries as they travelled west or Celtic missionaries as they travelled East. It may have been attended by St Wite, Dorset’s patron saint, whose relics remain untouched by the Reformation in an ancient casket near the Jurassic coast, or perhaps by King Alfred who resided at Shaftesbury, a nearby town where Alfred’s daughter was Mother Abbess of the Abbey of St Mary—a vast religious house behind the castle where Alfred planned to make his last stand if the Danelaw pushed south to crush embryonic England.

At numerous moments in history the Filly Loo has ceased, but never for long, for it was always revived by the villagers of Ashmore at the first opportunity. Notably, it disappeared during the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. This was probably when he was sending Roundhead soldiers to the West Country to threaten with violence anyone who practised wassailing (the ancient custom—still very much alive—of singing to orchards to protect the trees from evil spirits and guarantee decent cider from the apples), or beat up those who celebrated the May Day festivals or any of the other folk traditions of which the Puritans were deeply suspicious. Interestingly, records show that Cromwellian denunciations of such things deployed the words ‘Popish’ and ‘heathen’ synonymously, probably because Puritans intuited that all such things (many of which did and do have pagan origins) had been seamlessly accommodated by Catholicism’s sacramental view of the cosmos, a view of creation that the rising Protestant sects entirely rejected.

Waking the Green Man

My family and I arrived at Ashmore in the late afternoon, and as we approached in our car, a couple of farmers directed us into a large pasture field where vehicles could be left. We walked awhile until we arrived at the pond in the centre of the village. A couple of hundred people had already arrived. Several locals were cooking sausages and burgers over an arrangement of barbeques, local breweries and cideries had set up tents and almost everyone seemed to have a pint in hand. Some people had brought herbs and vegetables from their gardens to sell, from others handmade clothes and bags could be purchased, and an old lady stood at a table stacked with homemade cakes.

A large wooden 19th century farming wagon stood in the middle of the road, on which were assembled a folk septet playing and singing old folk songs from Dorset and other West Country shires. At one point the band’s lead introduced the next song, saying with a perfectly straight face, “The next piece is a song I picked up as a young man whilst wandering in the East”. It turned out to be a folksong from Wiltshire.

The event didn’t officially begin until the arrival of the Green Man. He appeared, covered in leaves and branches over long green strips of fabric, and silently he stood in our midst. The band began to play, and a group of children gathered around him and danced, intermittently charging up to him and shouting “Filly Loo!”, at which he would shake and shudder. On the tenth time of being roused from his slumber, the Green Man jumped into the air and then ran around the village as all the children chased him. With the Green Man awake, Nature had symbolically emerged from its wintertime dormition, and now was the time of colour and joy. The Filly Loo had officially begun.

Two large Morris sides competed, with one side focusing on the refined Cotswold Morris and the other on the boisterous Border Morris. People sat on the grass around the pond, listening to the music and watching the dancing. There are few things that please me as much as Morris dancing. The Cotswold Morris style reflects the gentle agrarian life of that region. The Border Morris, with its aggressive movements, stick-clashing, stomping, and yelling, reflects the turbulent relationship of England and Wales from whose border it derives its name, and the painted faces of the dancers—intended as a disguise, so that the dances could be performed as a way of begging without bringing shame on the families of those dancing—indicate the terrible economic challenges of that region down the ages. The almost mechanical Molly Morris style from the Fens reflects the determination of that region’s people and their complex struggle with industrialisation down the centuries. Almost every culture in the world has a sword dance of some kind in its folk tradition, and the English are no different, with their longsword and rapper-sword Morris dances (though admittedly we’re unique in not celebrating such things, and often even mocking them). Each style and each dance is thus a treasury of ancestral knowledge and experience, expressed theatrically and re-lived communally through the artistic endeavour.

The Filly Loo attracted a wonderful selection of West Country life that evening. Local farmers in tattersall shirts drank cider alongside gentlemen in herringbone Nehru gilets, families with young children danced to the music with hippies who’d journeyed from Glastonbury. A caller moved about describing the next dance, and an ever-growing number of people joined the twirling between the band and the booze tents. The joy and laughter intensified through the evening and at some point it occurred to me that I had found myself in possibly the closest real event to Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday party.

As nightfall approached, all went quiet. The caller ascended the stage of the wooden wagon whereon the band had been playing and asked the crowd for silence. “Now is the moment”, she announced, “please turn off your mobile phones, take no photographs or videos, and be as quiet as possible; this is the moment to do nothing but enter the magic of what is about to happen; I invite you to enter the magic of the Filly Loo”.

We—a few hundred of us—stood in perfect muteness. Flaming torches appeared atop the various streets of the village that wound towards the pond. It was children, processing down from all directions to Ashmore’s centre, holding above their heads flames that alone now illumined the village. Slowly walking with the torchbearers was a drummer and a fiddler, who together played the ancient and eery tune of the Filly Loo. And behind them came the Horn Dancers: six antlered men danced slowly towards the village centre until they arrived in front of the wagon; they were followed by characters of the deep English imagination: a Wizard, a Harlequin (or Fool), a Saracen on a hobby horse, and Robin Hood. There in our midst, accompanied by these avatars of English eccentricity, the Horn Dancers performed what I can only describe as a stylised stags’ rut, while the captivated audience—who had hitherto been cast into much fun and laughter—remained motionless and entranced.

As the mystical dance came to an end, the torchbearers processed around the pond and planted their flaming lamps equally spaced apart around the water, and all present joined hands and sung Auld Lang Syne, as the British peoples are wont to do when they don’t know how else to conclude an evening. And as that final song finished, without further ado, all departed to their vehicles. By midnight, the little ancient village of Ashmore was wrapped in dark and silent tranquillity.

The Magic of the Divine Imagination

Driving in the twilight back from the Filly loo through the winding arboreal tunnels of Dorsetshire, it seemed that the enchantment of the event had settled upon the landscape. The woodland silhouettes appeared to tremble against the moonlight with the power of what had occurred that evening. As I drove, I recalled something I’d read earlier that day, a passage from the last work of the English writer Stratford Caldecott, entitled The Radiance of Being, wherein he reflects on the thought of the German mystic Jacob Boehme:

To create the world, according to Boehme, was an act of divine freedom motivated by love alone. The word he uses is ‘Magic’, referring to an outbirth of God’s eternal nature formed by the divine Will through the divine Imagination.

Such a view of the created order is very far from that endorsed by Martin Luther. But the philosopher Wolfgang Smith, who had an especial interest in Boehme, asserted that this unique thinker who had combined the life of a religious seer and with that of a cobbler, and whose life straddled the 16th and 17th centuries, was a Lutheran only due to an accident of geography. Had Boehme been born in a Catholic part of Mitteleuropa, he likely would have made a great Franciscan mystic of the Third Order tradition—though with his temperament and character, he probably still would have had some run-ins with the Inquisition.

In any case, Boehme was an emanationist, but not in the sense of negating divine freedom. As Caldecott comments, for Boehme creation was an act of divine freedom motivated by divine love. Another way to say this is that, from all eternity, God conceived of the cosmos in His divine mind, and beholding it there, He loved it, and hence willed that it be. Born from God’s own inner life, the cosmos unfolded out of the divine mind by an act of the divine heart, a single-eternal act which Caldecott is content to call a work of ‘divine Imagination’ (and no doubt he enjoyed watching his Oxfordian colleagues at Blackfriars wince at such a phrase).

Notably, Caldecott highlights that Boehmean language expresses this theistic emanationism with the term ‘Magic’. The physicist’s world of atomic and sub-atomic particle formations is not the corporeal world of our experience. It is at best a mere mathematical analysis of prime-matter-in-becoming in its reception of substantial forms—forms that themselves must be accounted for somehow, namely as created essences that reflect the ideas in the divine mind. And when it becomes apparent that the world of the physicist only makes sense within an emanationist ontology like that of many classical and Patristic thinkers, you then at once realise that the cosmos with which we’re surrounded and of which we are a part, is not a massive jumble of lumps of stuff, but a magical order ever being sung into being by the Eternal Present.

Magic, in this sense, has two meanings. In Boehme’s idiom, Magic is the name for the underlying reality of the natural phenomena we encounter through our senses, the foundation of the corporeal world. But Magic is also analogised to mean the affective response to God’s outpouring of Himself in His creative act. Magic, then, is both divine emanation and creaturely participation. Magic is the gods speaking God back to God. What ancient Christianity claimed, and what was so repugnant to the iconoclastic Puritans who railed against the old folk traditions of deep England, was that the Incarnation’s ultimate effect was that all who shared in its power became themselves gods upon the earth, who thus confidently spoke God back to God.

The God of Deep Wessex

Whatever the origins of the Filly Loo—whether pagan or Christian, or a synthesis of both—there is a reason why the old Christianity of these Isles conserved this festival and fostered it down the centuries until a new Christianity in the 17th century sought to abolish it. The reason being that this new form of Christianity wasn’t Christianity at all, but a fanatical materialism that tried to maintain a sentimental attachment to a romanticised ‘Biblical Jesus’ whilst conceding all cosmological ground to the re-emerging Democritean atomism of that century, promulgated by John Locke here and Rene Descartes abroad. And these new sentimental materialists, whose heirs have since dominated the world and established what is roundly termed ‘modernity’, were content to kill anyone and destroy anything that conserved the Magic of the sacramental cosmos.

A bunch of children chasing a Green Man around a Dorsetshire village while a group of farmers swig locally brewed ale to the backdrop of competing Morris dancers may sound like a lot of frivolity, but there’s actually something very profound going on. Such a scene is a total affront to the modern world and all on which it is contingent. Such festivity is not instrumental, it’s not productive, it’s not ideological, it’s not corrupting. In short, it’s not modern. It is pure Magic.

When the Horn Dancers arrive, crowned with the antlers of great fallow harts that once roamed the nearby Cranborne Chase, an ancient royal hunting ground whereon these bucks roared and collided amid the Autumn rut, those dancers liturgise the great natural drama of the landscape that has flowed forth from the Ground of Being. Hence, they offer that drama back to the realm of meaning in an act of speaking God to God. Whether any of the participants in the Filly Loo understand the deeper meaning of what transpires therein is irrelevant. Most of what we do throughout life is done intuitively rather than understandingly, which is how it ought to be. Even when we pray, we simply render explicit what is already always the case, namely that we are because we are willed, and merely by being we are already in a love affair with the One who willed that we be.

As noted, the Filly Loo begins with the rousing of the Green Man, the English embodiment of what Hildegard of Bingen called the ‘divine viridity’, and we might say that the evening ends with a return of all visitors to the landscape where they might spot the Green Man waiting for them among the trees, or in the streams and rivers, or along the coast, or in the fields, or wandering on the footpaths. Among the regions of England, deep Wessex is perhaps where the natural and the supernatural remain most chaotically and yet intricately entwined, for the redemption of the former and the greening of the latter.

It shouldn’t therefore surprise us that Oliver Cromwell’s regime was especially harsh in that part of England, forced as it was to endure a concentrated military occupation and a terrible crackdown following the 1655 Penruddock Uprising against his tyranny. From Salisbury westward, England was heavily royalist and hence was a constant target for harassment by the New Model Army. And it wouldn’t surprise me if that noble Moonraker John Penruddock wanted to see the restoration of the Stuart monarchy as much as he did that of the Filly Loo. Cromwell was, in essence, a genuinely modern man, and there was and is just so much about Wessex that is very unmodern. Wessex feels unmodern because it remains Magical, and never is that more obvious than when reeling with the Green Man at the Filly Loo.

The Documentary

When the King of the United Kingdom and head of the Commonwealth nations makes a film with the aid of Amazon, one of the most successful companies in history—if not the most—and solicits the help of various celebrities to feature in it, including narration delivered by actress Kate Winslet, one expects a rather loud reception. But since King Charles III’s film Finding Harmony: A King's Vision was released at the beginning of this year, we’ve heard little more than crickets.

Those who decided to pay it some attention have not exactly been kind, with one Guardian columnist describing it as little more than a tedious vanity project.1 That same article drew attention to the fact that underpinning the film’s case for a renewed ecological ethics to address widespread environmental degradation is a philosophy that comes across as “nebulous” and “woo-woo”. The philosophy in question is what Charles himself refers to as ‘Harmony’.

The fact is that, however much I might want to disagree with the snarky prose of a Guardian columnist, the diagnosis of the documentary is more or less fair. The film tries to do two incompatible things at once, namely convey the King’s philosophy of Harmony whilst simultaneously refusing to explore the spiritual dimension of that philosophy, which—if you read anything that King Charles has written on the topic over the years—is the fundamental foundation of his entire worldview. Hence, the film struggles for ninety minutes to express a metaphysic that it concurrently appears to be deeply embarrassed about.

After the initial third of the film, which is a sustained apologia for what at times have been judged the eccentricities of Charles (talking to plants, biodynamic farming, etc.), and before the final third on the issue of widespread ecological devastation, there is a very odd intermezzo that tiptoes around Charles’s spirituality through the prism of his interest in the sacred geometry. One is left confused as to why the film has been interrupted with this odd focus on what’s seemingly just one of Charles’s pet hobbies or interests. This section ends with a story about a school for the study of sacred geometry that was established in Kabul, Afghanistan, under the auspices of the King’s charities. And for anyone who doesn’t know what the King really thinks, the take home lesson is that we should all be appreciative of the King’s peculiar interests, for if he didn’t have them there wouldn’t be twenty or so new jobs in Kabul.

This strange intermezzo illustrates the fundamental flaw of Amazon’s Harmony documentary. The problem with it is not that it’s an otherwise interesting documentary, just ruined due to being plagued by recurring mentions of a “nebulous” philosophy comprising little more that “woo-woo”. Rather, the problem is that it didn’t lean into the woo-woo enough, so to speak.

Had the film been bolder about King Charles’s religio-philosophical worldview and its extremely sophisticated synthesis of various ancient wisdom traditions, it would have greatly displeased some people and hugely pleased others, rather than doing what the film actually did, which was bore everyone who bothered to watch it. Well, not everyone. I, for instance, found it fascinating, but that’s because I was likely among a comparative few to have read Charles’s 2010 book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, co-authored with Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, and also to have read a large number of his essays and addresses. Without having some considerable familiarity with his thought, however, Charles’s sophianic yet opaque analysis in the film just seems, as noted, like woo-woo.

Despoiling the Egyptians

King Charles is, in essence, a Christian Neoplatonist. He believes that the world of our experience—the corporeal world—is actuated from the pure potency of materia prima by the reception of likenesses of the divine ideas emanated from the Divine Mind in ever-present God’s creative act. He thus thinks that the universality of the Eternal can only be known by us in a highly developed sensitivity to the particular. As the 20th century perennialists who have had such an influence on Charles’s thought extensively demonstrated, some variant of such a view of the Creator-creation relation was not only the undergirding ontology of Aquinas and other Christian philosophers, but of all great sapiential traditions.

So, when the documentary portrays King Charles talking about the imperative to preserve “heritage variety” root vegetables because, it seems, he just loves crispy skins on his roast potatoes, there may in fact be something much deeper going on than mere preferences concerning his Sunday roast. That different peoples have unique cultures, unique foods, unique ways of relating to the land, and so forth, is all part of how the Timeless and the Universal self-communicates through the temporal and the particular. And the degree to which we undermine that particularity is the degree to which we, as it were, silence the Creator amid His own self-communication.

There is a significant and rare moment in the film wherein King Charles walks the camera crew to his chapel, called The Sanctuary, in the gardens of his Highgrove Estate in Gloucestershire. He explains that the building instantiates the Universal in the particular. The building, he explains, is localist in the extreme, comprising only earth, straw, and some other materials from the very estate on whose grounds it sits, but is constructed on the universal patterns of the sacred geometry that is treasured by every great and ancient sapiential tradition. This concern for reconciling the universal and the particular by manifesting the former in the latter is expressly explored by him in that scene:

How do you link the two together? Because we are a microcosm of the macrocosm. There are these universal principles which seem to apply. All our bodies and everything are constituted around these proportionate systems, as is all the rest of nature.

Then Kate Winslet’s narration takes over: “Meeting the King, you get the feeling that he believes strongly in the physical and even spiritual connection we all share with nature”…No shit. This little nugget of script perfectly exemplifies how the film attempts to do two irreconcilable things at once: convey the King’s spiritual vision of reality whilst simultaneously attempting to downplay that same spiritual vision.

In truth, the King’s philosophy of Harmony is essentially built upon a cosmology of theophany. Indeed, in his book of the same name, after describing at length the “timeless principles” that underpin all truly sacred architecture, he writes of holy buildings:

These principles also inform their religious symbolism and open up a clear experience of a deeply anchored view of the cosmos and of humanity’s spiritual role within creation. It is this traditional insight that I firmly believe could be of such help in our own troubled and philosophically impoverished times.2

For Charles, principles conveyed not didactically or catechetically, but symbolically, convey to us—in a way that’s deeper than language—our spiritual vocation and how to live in right relation with the rest of the created order. To the degree a philosophical system cannot accommodate such a sacred symbology, it is, Charles claims, impoverished.

In this shamefully understudied book, the King offers a dizzying whirlwind analysis of Egyptian mysteries, Pythagorean initiatic wisdom, Platonic cosmology, spiritual alchemy, Sufi mysticism, and ever traces God’s own self-communication as understood in these sapiential pathways, repeatedly contrasting what he calls the “grammar of harmony” with the “grammar of the Enlightenment”.

After asserting that “Many aspects of our culture have their deepest roots in the land that clings to the banks of the River Nile”, he writes the following passage:

It is clear that the tomb paintings and papyrus texts they left behind were created by a people alive to their meaning in a way that is hard for us to imagine. As they mapped out those murals in black and red inks the artists who created them attached symbolic importance to absolutely every stroke they painted. Their work was ‘sacred’ art. It was a form of prayer, a vision of the universe conveyed in a pictorial language that did not depict the ‘outside world’. It mapped their experience of the inner realm, which was supremely important to ancient civilizations, to the extent that they considered the inner world the very ground of reality. It was the source that informed the ‘lower’ realm of form and matter and where everything begins. To depict this inner, or higher, reality was to activate the soul and to draw down the qualities of this higher, inner reality. In other words they were bringing alive the realm of spiritual reality in order to empower the lower, mundane world of space and time and things with spiritual significance. This has always been the purpose of sacred art and architecture. It is the process of ‘earthing’ Heaven and is just as alive today as it was 3,500 years ago, for instance in the world of artists who paint icons for a Greek or Russian Orthodox church.3

This astonishingly rich excerpt implicitly distinguishes sacred art from religious art. The latter is generally produced to cause some affective response in the observer, like works so widely produced in the baroque age. Sacred art is quite different, and as Charles highlights, its purpose is not only to express the prayer of its author but to re-create an image of the cosmos in its archetypal, transcendent condition in the Divine Mind. That eternal cosmos is encountered through the ‘outer world’ but known in the ‘inner world’ of our souls, by our spiritual ascent to contemplation of the Creator.

Sacred art, then, manifests in the corporeal world that which is the Ground of Being and hence the foundation of that corporeal world. By so doing, sacred art bestows upon the realities of our experience a spiritual significance that they wouldn’t ordinarily have, and which they come to possess through the sacerdotal agency of mankind. Sacred art is, then, a kind of magic in the best sense of the word, incarnating heaven in the earth.

The King’s Perennialism

When we unlearn how to sacralise reality in this way, the execution of which is the vocation of man and the finality of the whole creation, our relationship with the created order falls into disarray. “Only the seductive allure of the level of materialism that now drives modern consumerism”, King Charles tells us, “has distorted this perception of the way the world works.”4 This materialism that has so distorted our perception of the world may be called the ‘reign of quantity’, to use the famous phrase of the philosopher and esotericist René Guénon, a thinker so important to Charles that he has delivered addresses on Guénon’s writings.

The modern reign of quantity is rooted in the misidentification of what number denotes. Number has denoted measurement and quantity ever since the time of Galileo and Descartes, two thinkers at whom King Charles takes aim repeatedly throughout his book. This association of number with quantity is in fact due to a displacement of a much older conception of number, one that Pythagoras learned in the mystery schools of the ancient Egyptian priesthood, and which was fundamentally centred on the qualities of the Divine Mind:

For Pythagoras … the nature of number went far beyond being simply a means of calculating quantity. He held that the nearest the human mind could get to the Divine Mind was through number and, thereby, the principles of proportion and harmony. In this way we should guard against treating the Pythagorean teachings as merely technical matters. They give insight into both the practical world and the immortality of the soul. Number has a living, qualitative value and was symbolic of the higher realms of reality, those levels of reality that lie beyond the touchable, ‘actual’ world. It may seem an odd thing to say in this day and age, but Pythagoras taught that number expressed divine quality. Not only is the natural world constructed according to a precise mathematics, Pythagoras suggested that if we contemplate its patterns deeply we are led into communion with the very source of number itself, which is unity.5

Again, in this passage the same theme occurs: the world we encounter through our senses is the incarnation of the ideas or qualities that exists eternally in the Divine Mind. As long as we do not grasp this, we close off the world from that of which it is a communication, and consequently we sever it from its meaning and its purpose. The practical result of such spiritual blindness is that number ceases to express the order, coherence, and goodness bestowed upon creation by its Author, and instead becomes inverted: a mere means for measuring the purposeless stuff with which we’re surrounded, and of which we no longer consider ourselves a part. In turn, the world spirals into a paradigm of fragmentation as we reap havoc upon it due to our inability to grasp what it is. Having forgotten that in our interaction with the world we are always venturing into the sacred, we proceed on a path of desecration. Every aspect of chaotic modernity follows from this, whether it is malpractice in healing, toxifying in agriculture, discord in politics, desolation in ecology, uglification in urban planning, or anything else.

Reconciling the Esoteric with the Exoteric

This is the fundamental teaching of King Charles: that somehow we must reconcile our exotericism with our esotericism. The exoteric is how we relate to the world, in our building, cultivating, healing, and so forth; the esoteric is why we must relate to it through the prism of Harmony, the understanding that our interrelation with creation is a form of intercourse with our Creator, and thus a sacerdotal and sapiential enterprise.

In a striking passage, following a profoundly deferential appraisal of Thomas Aquinas’s contribution to the Western intellectual tradition, Charles reflects on the damage done by medieval nominalism as a preamble, as it were, to the so-called Scientific Revolution:

In time it [nominalism] framed the outlook that allowed science to make its clean break from religion and forge ahead towards modernity. It effectively shattered the organic unity of reality, which could be traced back to Plato and Pythagoras and, before them, the Egyptians and the start of the Vedic tradition in India. At the heart of things, within a very short space of time, that all-important, timeless principle of participation in the ‘being’ of things was eliminated from mainstream Western thinking. Or, to put it more graphically, with God separate from His Creation, humanity likewise became separate from Nature.6

For King Charles, whatever its relative benefits, modernity—what that term both denotes and connotes, namely the machine-reality in which we’ve all found ourselves—really did require a clean break with everything that had preceded it; in short, a rejection of thousands of years of accumulated wisdom, alongside a concurrent denunciation of that wisdom as mere backwardness and superstition. The entire emanation-participation ontology, that had undergirded a philosophy centred on being as that one principle which could be predicated analogously of both God and creatures, was discarded for a nihilistic worldview centred of a universe of meaningless, purposeless stuff, to be utilised by isolated, insulated, atomised selves, severed from the corporeal world with which we were meant to subsist in a creative unity.

There is sometimes critical talk among some Christians concerning King Charles’s syncretistic views on religion, and no doubt some of that criticism is well-founded. Certainly, I have my own misgivings about some opinions he has expressed regarding the supposed need for our civilisation to accommodate Islam, and his repeated insistence that negative views of Muhammed and Islamic history are due to ignorance. (After all, many people develop such negative views on account of increasing their learning.) Be that as it may, it is clear that he thinks modernity, with all its nihilism, materialism, reductionism, instrumentalism, and every other pernicious ism you can think of, is fundamentally incompatible with Christianity, and he commends the Catholic Church for never accepting modernity’s ideational paradigm:

By the end of that volatile and bloody period in European history during the seventeenth century a messy divorce between science and religion had occurred. What had been a purposeful and unified understanding of Nature was replaced by a purely scientific, mechanistic conception of Nature. It is interesting that the Catholic Church has never accepted this reductive view of creation but, even so, the Christian Church in general has struggled to keep science within the larger unified view of Nature, not least because the majority of Christians have been swept along by the scientific view of the natural world regardless of the Christian view.7

Here, King Charles highlights a crucial problem that plagues the Church in the modern age. It is, at bottom, an institution collapsing in on itself. At the level of its doctrine and its intellectual and moral tradition, the Church holds to a worldview that is entirely at odds with the modern paradigm. But its faithful largely, though unwittingly, reject the Church’s core ontology and deem her wisdom to pertain only to the interior, ‘spiritual’ sense of selfhood, not one that encompasses all reality. Beyond that sense of interior ‘spirituality’, which is so easily subjectivised into thin air, it is assumed by most Christians that only the scientistic account can say anything meaningful. Indeed, there are many movements within the Church now that aim to reinterpret Christian revelation in the light of contemporary science, which often means not science at all, just bad, physicalist philosophy. I might add that, having adopted the ideology of ‘pastoralism’, the institutional Church appears to hold that in order to adapt to the requirements of its modernised flock, it must performatively repudiate its own tradition, a disastrous trajectory that is especially observable in its widespread liturgical desecration.

Speaking of those few remaining communities across the globe who have, for various reasons, resisted the more harmful and deracinating effects of modernity—what Charles calls ‘primary people’—the King writes the following:

Just as Plato did 2,400 years ago, or the later ‘Neoplatonists’ like Plotinus of Alexandria, primary people today see … everything they do in the world to be an event formed first in the spiritual realm, where everything has its source. Back in the third century Plotinus was very clear about this. He was in no doubt that consciousness gives rise to matter, not the other way round.8

Whereas the ancients taught that being cannot come from non-being, and that matter cannot spontaneously produce consciousness, modernity requires us to believe—wholly against reason—that being comes from non-being, that effect can be produced without a cause, that contingent being need not be contingent upon anything, and that both life and consciousness can ‘evolve’ from inanimate matter, whilst providing no satisfactory answer for how such things can be the case.

In the excerpt above, Platonic and Neoplatonic thought are linked to the providentialist conception of human life. Thereby, one’s being is understood as unfolding along with all reality out of the Divine Mind. That reality being, in essence, the manifestation of the divine logoi through the reception of substantial form in materia prima, giving rise to the corporeal world of our experience, with which—given its sacral nature—we are called to be in a loving and contemplative relation. That loving and contemplative relation is one Charles goes on to describe in poignant terms:

Reverence is not science-based. It is not knowledge. It is an experience induced by love, and love comes from relationship. Without reverence and love, without a spiritual relationship, it seems to me that we are little more than a chance group of isolated, self-obsessed individuals, unmoved by love and un-anchored by any sense of duty to the thing that deserves our reverence.9

This, if you like, is the wholesome esoterica of King Charles’s philosophy of Harmony. As the Emerald Tablet famously states, as above so below, and so it is indeed clear that Charles deems the corporeal world to be a true and holy icon of the Deity. Grasping the veracity of this pre-modern worldview is the key, he believes, to bringing about an attitudinal change in us, one that will allow us to approach the created order with reverence and love. Accordingly, one might say that the corollary of as above so below is as within so without.

It is fair to call the King’s approach esoteric, and not merely metaphysical, because he seeks to transmute his listeners’ interior lives by an initiatic process of inducting them into a deeper, spiritual tradition than the one ordinarily available to them in the modern age. The desired effect of this initiatic process is something like the rise of a ‘Green Man Spirituality’, of the kind celebrated in Europe’s medieval cathedrals, which King Charles has indeed found creative ways of retrieving.10

Why It Failed

Whilst it brings me no pleasure to point it out, it is for the reasons detailed above that the Amazon documentary named Harmony was such a flop: it failed to convey what is actually interesting about Charles’s ecological ethics. It was utterly unsuccessful in conveying what radically differentiates his philosophy of Harmony from the ideology of any ‘green’ NGO or World Economic Forum racket, namely that it is not a progressivist vision but a backward-looking vision—in the best possible sense. His philosophy of Harmony privileges the world’s great sapiential traditions, especially the spiritual and intellectual tradition of the pre-modern West, as the indispensable key to amending our otherwise ever-worsening relation with God’s creation.

In a Preface to a volume entitled A Sacred Trust: Ecology and Spiritual Vision, published in 2002 by the scholarly community The Temenos Academy, of which King Charles is patron, he indicated the reason for the apparent embarrassment, that simmers under the surface of this documentary, concerning his religiosity:

Occasionally I pluck up enough courage to speak about the Sacred. It is interesting that when I do a strange, palpable silence descends upon the audience. You can tell that there is a subtle, harmonious chord that links us all on a deeper level and yet most of us are terrified to admit to feelings that might be considered ‘odd’ or, indeed, slightly mad.11

Perhaps, as I say, this quotation from a much earlier work than the one from which I’ve been hitherto quoting offers some indication for the reticence about the deeper, mystical, esoteric aspects of Charles’s philosophy of Harmony. But if that’s the case, then the film’s makers have entirely failed to tell the time. Perhaps never in the modern age has there been a more widespread and demanding appetite for a reappraisal of scientism, the Enlightenment, materialism, and all the devastating effects that together may be called ‘modernity’. King Charles’s sacramental cosmology underpins everything he has to say, including his teachings on architecture. Indeed, this has always been the case. For example, in his 1989 book entitled A Vision of Britain, he quoted St Catherine of Siena:

The city is the image of the soul, the surrounding walls being the frontier between the outward and inward life. The gates are the faculties or senses connecting the life of the soul with the outward world. Living springs of water rise within it. And in the centre, where beats the heart, stands the holy sanctuary.12

For Charles, the order and patterns that are traceable in the natural world and recur in disparate and diverse forms are the reflection of, and self-declaration of, the one timeless moment of the Eternal, conveying the very Logos of the Godhead. By assuming those patterns into our creative activity as qualities that bestow beauty on the forms we impress upon stone, wood, metal, and glass, we speak God back to God. In this way, our creative construction of the cityscape becomes the expression of our own mystical response to God’s creative act. This is the key to understanding Charles’s fascination with sacred geometry as the pathway to contemplation of the Divine Mind and its reflection in God’s own self-communication through the created order.

Now, had the Harmony documentary been honest about just how radical Charles’s sapiential vision really is, it certainly would have attracted a lot of adverse attention, but such attention would have been dwarfed by the enthusiastic reception by those who see modernity for what it is—and that’s an ever-growing population of people. As things stand, the film has been more or less ignored, and will likely continue to be. Hopefully, though, a few people will pick up his writings and study them, and a future generation will discover what an admirable philosopher in the strictest sense of the term—a true lover of wisdom—reigned over the United Kingdom in Charles III.

The image of The One is the Two:

And if you wish to see the reality of this mystery, then you should see the wonderful representation of the intercourse that takes place between the male and the female … In that moment, the female receives the strength of the male; the male, for his part, receives the strength of the female…

—Hermes to his son Asclepius1

Eve after Adam

Whatever is other than God must have particular features and so is within duality—it is both principle and possibility:

In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

—Genesis 1:27

That which appears to be one, is therefore revealed to be two:

Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

—Genesis 2:22

The Life within the Logos in John 1 parallels the emergence of Eve from Adam in Genesis 2:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with The God [ho theon], and the Word was divine/god [theos]. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

—1 John 1-5

The image of Eve coming from the side of Adam presents the female spatially on the level of the male, rather than constituting a lower level of emanated reality, so to speak. The latter mistake occurs in systems that imagine The One emanating a Universal Intellect which in turn emanates a lower Universal Soul, these being “masculine” and “feminine” respectively, where masculinity is ontologically prior to femininity rather than necessarily coupled to femininity.

In reality, The One is followed by a primordial duality, for nothing but God is One: As soon as something has definite features (which it must if it is other than the Absolute) it is participating in duality. If we truly grasp a principle, we have also grasped that it exists as a set of possibilities; we understand it not only as static monad but as range of movements (male form and female flux), even if the former appears first (by analogy, the public sphere is man’s, woman’s the hearth, and some authors describe esotericism as feminine).

Church After Christ

When we behold Christ, we are seeing his Church as well. For this reason, Proclus was correct to disagree with certain fellow Platonists concerning the existence of a single, unique, principle after the One. To the contrary, “after” the One is already the pair, Peras and Apeiron (Son and Spirit) as it appears in multitude possible combinations (henads).

Therefore does Christ return not as androgyne, but as a Bridegroom ready to marry his Bride. Like Even from Adam, the Church comes forth from his side upon the cross, an outflowing that heals the blindness of Longinus (whose healing is a figure for conversion, transformation, Church). Christ does not heal Adam’s original wound of differentiation, but re-experiences it as wound (that is, from within the perspective of fallen humanity) and then reveals it as itself the healing miracle.

In a sense being speared is the traumatic realisation that we are porous: that we must conceive ideal forms as porous rather than hermetically sealed-off (the ideal house has windows, the ideal body has eyes, etc.). Eve coming from Adam’s side is an Edenic image for what gets experienced as side “piercing” from the fallen state, and whose meaning is then set right. The paradisal state—neo-Edenic, citizenship in the New Jerusalem—is more properly represented by a dyad, marriage, sexual embrace of man and woman, than by an “original” androgyne, therefore, because the former bears fuller (apophatic) witness to The One God.

Sex and Eschaton

In Indian tradition, the Vishnu Purana and Bhagavatam Purana describe the highest Heavenly estate, called Vaikuntha, as home to spiritually liberated spouses. In Vaikuntha dwell “devotees of Vishnu along with their beautiful wives in the aerial vessels” (Bhagavatam Purana 3.15:17). These are beyond change. Their pleasures are not mere respite before another incarnation on earth (as is the case of lower heavens). A portion of the self participates in pleasure while anchored in contemplation of God without contradiction:

the goddess of Wealth (Lakshmi) of beautiful form … stays (permanently) in Hari’s [The Lord’s] residence …in her own garden, the goddess Lakshmi attended upon by her maid-servants, was worshipping the Lord

—Bhagavatam Purana 3.15:21

Therefore do we find descriptions of “damsels of big hips and beautifully smiling faces” who nonetheless “cannot with their beguiling smiles and other allurements, excite passion in those devotees whose minds are fixed on Krishna” (Bhagavatam Purana 3.15:20).

The prudish idea you sometimes find in Vaishnavist texts according to which lovemaking in the Vaikuntha must be limited to Vishnu and Lakshmi as distinct entities from their devotees is, in one sense, correct, if understood to mean that the saint, having attained to the changeless worlds, realises himself as Vishnu in relation to Laksmi, or vice-versa. A Heaven populated by units consisting of spouses on aerial vehicles in contemplation of the Divine couple, is meant as a fractal image. To contemplate the Divine couple is to become it. As the apocryphal Gospel of Philip teaches:

Bridegrooms and brides belong to the bridal chamber. No one shall be able to see the bridegroom with the bride unless he become such a one.

—Gospel of Philip 82:7 –83:2

In line with Christianity, Vaishnavism teaches that formless, contemplative absorption in the Absolute is not the highest ideal. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches that renunciation and formless contemplation is an inferior path to that of remaining active in the world and worshiping God through forms.2 Divine simplicity is not a substance at the beginning of a causal chain, but can be contemplated at any point along the Great Chain of Being which it manifests. A state of absorption in which God is known as featureless balm is not “truer” than the perception of God through form, in act.

Professor of Indian Religions, Edwin Bryant, summarizes the doctrine according to which devotees “receive Brahman minds, forms and relationships, and situations in the Vaikuntha realm that reflect the nature of their Bhakti [devotion to God].” This can be understood as “merging into Krishna’s actual body and relishing the bliss of this (Bhagavat-sayunja)” becoming a little Demiurge, as Iamblichus describes it, a co-heir with Christ, per St. Paul. According to Bryant, in Vaishnavism, “God too has a divine bodily form, or more precisely, being unlimited, has unlimited divine forms, and these inhabit divine abodes, also unlimited,” which are “inconceivable: they cannot be fathomed or conceived of by the rational mind.”3 The saint’s body is a theophany, therefore, one of the “divine forms.” A sarupya body, as it is called, allows “dual Moksha” (dual liberation), a mode of spiritual liberation that maintains the duality of subject-object. The highest contemplation of God, then, includes the possibility of interacting with other selves.

The Zoroastrian Bundahishn (30:26) states that in the Resurrection “all men become immortal forever and everlasting … they give to everyone his wife, and show him his children with the wife; so they act as now in the world, but there is no begetting of children.” This seems to mean that married spouses are in familial proximity to their descendants without creating new children although they “act as now in the world” (presumably having relations). Their possibilities (children) are fully present to them. They are not given in marriage but are already united upon entering that state and are changeless in that state (hence the analogy to angels in Matthew 22:30).

On the topic of sex, St. Thomas Aquinas points out that sex is not a deficiency and, therefore, resurrected bodies will be sexed (Question 81, Article 3 of the Summa Theologica): “men will rise again … of different sex … it is in the intention of universal nature, which requires both sexes for the perfection of the human species.” Adding, however, that “there will be no lust to invite them to shameful deeds which are the cause of shame.”

Heavenly Maidens

We may understand D.H. Lawrence when, according to John Milbank, he

worried about Christianity because it appeared to him illogically (and differently from Islam in this respect) to exclude sexual relationship from the life of the resurrected body … [but] the pre-Cartesian Catholic metaphysical vision permits a much more literally sexy account of the universal possibility of love.4

Milbank also references Jean-Louis Chretien’s Symbolique du Corps to the effect that the sexual imagery of the Song of Songs is not to be taken metaphorically.

The Islamic image of Heaven, in which the male believer may engage in sexual congress with heavenly maidens or houris, and the female believer with her husband, while fully conscious of the existence of (and therefore in submission to) Allah, is actually the subtler doctrine compared to the understanding of spiritual elevation as indistinct formless entropic bliss. Abdal Hakim Murad (Tim Winter) writes in his Commentary on the Eleventh Contentions: “Our Paradise shows that the Dionysian mysteries were proleptic” (1:63) and “Unless there is Paradise, eros is a trick” (9:11).

And ibn-‘Arabi writes the following in his al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya:

The consummation of sexual intercourse is itself commended in the Law … and the sexual act of the one in this spiritual station is like the sexual union of the people of Paradise, only for the sake of pleasure, for it is the greatest manifestation which has been hidden from men and jinn, except for those servants whom God has specially chosen for it … If it did not have complete nobility indicating the weakness appropriate to servanthood, it would not have such an overwhelming pleasure which causes a person to pass away from his own strength and pretensions. It is a pleasurable subjugation, although subjugation precludes pleasure in the one who is subjugated … except in this act in particular. This nobility has escaped people, who have made it an animalistic passion from which they refrain … So what they have deemed ugly with regard to themselves is the very thing that is praiseworthy for the perfect.5

Ibn-‘Arabi’s statement that heavenly intercourse is not mere means to the end of procreation or liberation but “only for the sake of pleasure,” corresponds to the Zoroastrian Bundahishn’s “they act as now in the world, but there is no begetting of children,” for their children already are. We are not in the stream of earthly, historical disclosure but in a realm where time is more transparent to the transcendent, so to speak.

Transgression?

For ibn-Arabi, erotic enjoyment is a goal in itself and for this reason can be spiritually liberated (rather than liberating, that is, spiritual liberation occurs in it, as it, not only through it). We do not contrast the means of spiritual liberation in a Tantric sense from non-Tantric intercourse where pleasure is a legitimate end but remains distinct from spiritual liberation.6 This is not what D. D. Shulman calls the “barren eroticism”7 of (early) Tantric practices where magical-spiritual operations do not aim at enjoyment but liberation (as they understood it). It is instead consistent with certain latter-day Tantric traditions in which bhukti is mukti, pleasure is liberation.

The approximately 10^th century architectural treaty the Shilpa Prakasha presents this late, less transgressive, Tantrism, no longer interested is breaking social taboo or psychological limits as supposed path to liberation. This text in particular helps explain the erotic sculptures in temples such as Khajuraho and Konarak, which, as Oxford University Professor of Hindu Studies, Gavin Flood, notes, do not seem to be like Christian cathedral grotesques, meant to ward off obscenity by depicting it, but are actually beautiful.

The Shilpa Prakasha recommends depictions of celestial maidens, the Surasundari, like the Buddhist Yakshi, equivalent to the Muslim Houris, Greek Kóres Sōteíras, even Norse Valkyries. Without these, it says, a temple will yield no fruit, and further recommends the presence of love images (kama kala) between maithuna couples whose absence would render a place worthy of being shunned.8 However, it does not consider actual depictions of penetrative coitus appropriate in this context, which reminds us of its non-transgressive (although the depictions of the temples mentioned do include examples that go beyond what the Shilpa Prakasha recommends). Flood concludes beautifully:

…what is significant is that maithuna couples are here directly linked to the kamasastra [pleasure], an important shift in relocating eroticism to a context of aesthetics. With the erotic carvings on temple walls, eroticism is stripped of its violence and link with death that we find in early Tantric appeasement and taboo-breaking. The depiction of the body on temple walls is a representation of the body in an idealised eroticism that is grounded in text; an eroticism which rejoices in the body yet which points beyond itself to a divine transcendence. The body’s representation here is divinised and textualised in a way that goes beyond transgression or protection. Indeed, such representation points to the sexualised body as a manifestation of the deity, as other deities on temple facades are manifestations: the temple is the body of the deity and is not devoid of sexuality.9

Apocalypse

William Blake provides a vision of triumphal, apocalyptic union. First, the narrow ego is defeated, revealed for non-entity: “The Druid Spectre was Annihilate, loud thund’ring, rejoicing terrific … and at the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect.” This marks the coming of the host of beatific Eros:

The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appear’d in Heaven

…A Sun of blood red wrath surrounding heaven on all sides around,

Glorious, incomprehensible by Mortal Man, and each Chariot was Sexual Twofold.

And every Man stood Fourfold, each Four Faces had, One to the west

One toward the East One to the South One to the North. the Horses Fourfold10

Blake’s “Four Faces” remind of the Indian story of the patriarch Svayambhuva Manu who grows four faces in order to gaze always on the beauty of his wife Shatarupa, no matter what direction she goes in. He thus transforms into an encompassing, universal being. And Blake’s chariots are like the Indian Vimana whereon heavenly spouses contemplate the Divine. As in the Persian Bundahishn, the Gospel of Philip, the Qur’an and currents of Indian tradition, for Blakean Christianity salvation is sexual.

The seventy-two nations listed in Genesis and elsewhere are divisible by the twelve gates of the Heavenly city in the Apocalypse, which implies their integral inclusion. They are the constituents of ideal humanity personified as Bride, even as Islamic tradition speaks of seventy-two houris in Paradise. There is a hadith according to which women condemned to hell may enter heaven through soteriological marriage to a saved man, so that seventy of the believer’s seventy-two wives are said to proceed from those women sent to hell. Of course hadiths are generally spurious, and often contradict the Qur’an, but these can be interpreted according to metaphysical principles, where plurality, or the feminine, is redeemed along with singularity, the masculine, in its being indexed to the singular, so to speak. Diversity as witness to unity.

Love, Eros

Of course centrality and harmony are not only expressed in conjugal union. Love as movement of relatedness of peripheries to centers, always encompassing, always exceeding occurs in filial piety or martial fealty, etc. In Vaishnavist terms, these can even constitute different Bhava (meaning “loving relationships” to God, like parent to child, friend to friend, lover to lover, etc.).11 In erotic love, however, one partner does not generate or potentially become the other. They are, rather, the means of bringing life about together (unlike the love between brothers or charitable love or universal love towards all things).12

Divine oneness is not itself masculine or feminine, God is not the principle of centrality any more than that of harmonious relationality; not the center (which is everywhere) any more than the circumference (which is nowhere), but He manifests as both, to paraphrase Cusa. The Divine couple in visions of Vaikuntha is both. Neither man nor woman exhausts the divine oneness, which is why we should either leave the center of sacred images empty (like the empty space at the center of the Rose-Cross or the hollow of a seed) or represent it as a two things embraced, per some Buddhist mandalas—God’s “image” as man and woman.

It no longer seems controversial to claim that we live in a time both of ecclesiastical and civilisational crisis. All around us, old certainties are disappearing and structures of life disintegrating. But this is a crisis a long time in the making. Some suggest that many of our maladies began with the Reformation, with Luther’s rebellion against authority. But in attempting to identify a point in time at which everything started to go wrong, we simply continue what the reformers themselves set out to do, namely identify some golden age of a “pure Church” to which Christians should return. More radical movements engaged in perhaps the first case of year zero thinking in which absolutely everything, even down to foundational moral questions—such as polygamy—would need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

This twofold practice of trying to identify a pivotal time in history at which the West’s trajectory suddenly took a negative turn and also trying to identify beliefs and practices that have been lost has turned into a veritable cottage industry both within and without the Catholic communion. Enjoyable new academic pastimes have emerged tracing the genealogy of our modern malaise to various scholastic disputes, with particular attention paid towards the introduction of nominalist tendencies in metaphysics. Ockham’s name often rears its head, more recently joined by Scotus—particularly among a group of maverick Anglicans who come under the moniker “Radical Orthodoxy”—who have been at various times accused of misreading the Subtle Doctor. We also see two faces of St. Thomas Aquinas emerge, Aristotelian and Neoplatonic, leading to different schools of thought with suspicions about the pathological effects of the other’s misreading contributing to further divisions. Lively debates about the place of Hermeticism within the Christian tradition have also emerged, partly informed by the growing interest in Neoplatonism.

Similar projects have taken place in the study of ethics—with Alistair McIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) introducing the idea that we have gone through a cultural cataclysm of such proportions that we are no longer capable of talking about ethics as our mediaeval forefathers did. As a result, our struggles over questions of the meaning of marriage, contraception, and the value of unborn life suffer from a stunted language and a deformed philosophical paradigm. The economic sphere is not untouched by these questions either, with usury lurking behind debates over competing forms of capitalism.

But it is not only the conservative-minded who are looking for the cause of our troubles. The liberally inclined Dominicans of early 20th century France rejected the dry and lifeless scholasticism which they saw as being partially responsible for laying the groundwork for the Great War. They beheld the ashes of a Christian European civilisation which had been destroyed entirely by civilised Christian Europeans. In response, they felt that a new theology needed to arise, one that would seek to go back to the pure age of the Church Fathers. Manual texts which had been the medium by which generations of clergy had encountered ancient Christianity were seen as distorting the true spiritual vibrancy of the Early Church, a vibrancy to which they thought we must return. The genius of Thomas Aquinas also needed to be freed from the stranglehold of a scholastic tradition divorced from all historical perspective; Thomism, many felt, had slowly lost track of the true Thomas.

A certain optimism crept in as it seemed that an earlier and purer Church was reappearing on earth again. In the 1960s, this led to the simplification of the Roman Rite at the itchy fingers of committees inspired by Pope John XXIII’s call for a new openness towards the modern world. But at the same time, the reforms were seen as a return to an older, purer, and simpler form of worship. For a time, the full weight of the Church’s scholarly endeavours was thrown at demonstrating this, and churches all over the Western world went through a catastrophic series of “renovations” in which decades if not centuries of church architecture and design were destroyed. Unbelievably, this wanton destruction of sacred heritage was at times funded by the selling of valuable church properties.

A recurring theme concerns the identification of a bygone time when some truth had been grasped but is now lost. Each loss is felt to be the removal of a blessing which in turn reveals my underlying theme: fading blessings, or the imposition of a curse. Before further investigating a key thread in my interest—namely the place of the curse in Christianity—it would be worth noting that most of the points of loss identified, or times at which a key error emerges, occur after the extraordinary moment in 1054 when the two great halves of Christendom exchanged mutual anathemas, placing a curse upon each other’s houses. Blessing’s dark and forgotten sibling, namely malediction, has a long and distinguished history in both the Old and New Testament and in the age of the Church, each of which we shall now briefly consider before delving further into understanding why it is necessary and why without it there can be no proper understanding of blessing either.

My attention was first brought to this subject matter when in 2021 I stumbled across an article entitled “Bring Back the Imprecatory Psalms” in which the author laments the loss, from the liturgy of the hours, of these important and divinely sanctioned prayers which give voice to the cries of rage and despair which good people at times legitimately feel. In this article, particular attention was given to the fact that the loss of this scriptural and prayerful outlet of anger—particularly at the wickedness of evil men—has come at a time when the Churches institutional hierarchy has been embroiled in the most heinous corruption and scandals of abuse. When one reads some of the curse-like invocations of these Psalms, one is wielding a spiritual weapon against evildoers, a weapon that until recently had been wielded widely both informally by people of God and by formal authority in liturgical settings. Let us consider the history of this practice.

It should come as no surprise that the most obvious examples of curses uttered by God’s people or by God himself are found in the Old Testament, which is often caricatured for its wrathful God. Some of the very first recorded actions of God Himself would see him curse the ground after the sin of Adam and cursing Eve for eating the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3:16-17). God then curses Cain for killing his brother, and as an act of mercy promises to curse anyone who would kill Cain as he lived out his accursed fate (Genesis 4). The curses continue with God delivering a curse upon any who would curse Abram (Genesis 12). Further curses are delivered to the wicked and to Israel and to all those who do not honour the Lord’s name throughout the books of Proverbs and Malachi.

But it is not only God who curses but also his servants. In a story whose deep and spiritual inner meaning has surely been lost in the sands of time we find the prophet Elisha curse a group of youths in God’s name for making fun of his bald head. Not one to be seen as tardy in following through with His servant’s maledictions, God immediately prompts two bears to savage forty-two of the young men to death. This is particularly interesting because it is a curse made for a personal offence rather than as an action in the cosmic battle between good and evil. Elisha’s master, Elijah, curses the whole land of Israel so that it will not receive any nourishing rain until he gives his word (1 Kings 17:1), showing that the hand of God will turn in collective punishment against his people when they stray from faithfulness.

Jeremiah contains one of the most interesting curses in the Old Testament. God commands Jeremiah to take up a potters earthenware jug and to break it in the sight of all those of Israel, including the elders and priests, as a curse and a sign that Israel will be broken: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: so will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potters vessel, so that it can never be mended.”

The rest of Jeremiah’s speech is worth reading. What is easily missed to the contemporary reader, however, is that at the time that Jeremiah was alive it was common practice outside of Israel to curse one’s enemies with a ritual which included the destruction of an earthen vessel or figurine. Thus, Jeremiah was practising divinely mandated magic.

In the New Testament, Jesus famously curses the fig tree which bore no fruit. Contemporary reactions to this verse vary from confusion to nervous avoidance—the latter particularly in the case of those who know that in the Old Testament a fig tree was often seen as a deeply spiritual metaphor for Israel herself. Jesus Christ’s lesson to the faithful: look at the power of the faithful man’s prayer, with the Son of God Himself deciding that no better example could be given than that of a curse. The cities of Tyre and Sidon, Bethsaida and Chorazin appear to come under the curses of Christ when he cries, reprimanding “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (Matthew 11:21—22).

This is legitimately interpreted as predictive, yet the text is clear with us that Christ is reprimanding, upbraiding the cities, giving some insight into the prescriptive/descriptive ambiguity that so many of these curses of both the Old and New Testaments fall into, not so much undermining the teaching of the text but rather our contemporary preoccupations. None of this should really come as a surprise to those of us who believe that the imprecatory Psalms are the words of the pre-incarnate Christ, the Eternal Logos who speaks through all Sacred Scripture.

We don’t have to wait long for the first papal curse. In Acts, chapter 8, we find the rock on which the Church was built curse the first simoniac, Simon Magus, with the words:

May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money! You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and the chains of wickedness.

Not only do we hear an echo of the Jeremiah curse mentioned earlier, where what happens to one thing happens to another by analogy, but scholars have pointed out similarities between Peter’s words and the contemporary practices of analogical sorcery; just as with the destruction of A, so it is with the destruction of B. Furthermore, explicit curses on behalf of the apostles also appear in Acts 13.

Finally in the Book of Revelation, we see beneath the great altar of the Lord all of those who had been redeemed, calling out for vengeance and asking how long the Lord would wait before taking vengeance. Among these saints would be many from the post-apostolic period, and as we now turn to the age of the Church we shall see the curses continue as a major aspect of Christian spirituality.

Historians have noted a rich tradition of cursing in the British Isles and Ireland in particular. St. Patrick is recorded as cursing on a number of occasions, with one record giving us the detail that he raised his left hand (the right hand is the hand of blessing) whilst saying “may this impious one who blasphemes your name now be lifted away and quickly slain.” St. Berach can be found in a cursing exchange with a local druid, during which the saint says “May the wretched cursing man lose the use of his tongue lest he should try to offer even more blasphemous words to the true and living God.” A number of curses are to be found in the 9th century law of the innocents written by the Abbot of Iona, St. Adamnan, where we find the key phrase “May the curse of God be on you.”

In a practice which mirrors the blessing of objects, monastic scribes would protect the books they were writing with a written curse, with one example reading “May an anathema slay anyone who steals this book away.” There is little evidence that either the cursing saints or their later recorders felt the need to justify any of these actions; curses were simply the other face of blessings.

That curses were sanctioned by the official structures of the Church is also important. Council documents are littered with extraordinary condemnations of heresiarchs, but it is in connection with the practice of excommunication that the harshest curses can be found. The most extreme form of excommunication was conjoined with an anathema which the 17th century French Jesuit Jacques Eveillon described in the following way:

Anathema augments the punishments of excommunication beyond what simple excommunication does, such that the anathematised is more deprived of the protection of God, and more absolutely exposed and abandoned to the rage and violence of this furious enemy, and by virtue of the malediction that the Church pronounces against him; and for the same reasons it is called in the canons of excommunication “maledictus.”

The normative mediaeval rite for this type of excommunication was frightening enough: the Bishop, with twelve priests, all carrying candles would come together and solemnly pronounce the words: “We declare him excommunicated and anathematised and we judge and condemn to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the Demon, do penance and satisfy the Church.”

Other rites were more severe still. St. Maedoc pronounced “five diseases the Son of God inflicts on those whom I excommunicate, all who outraged: consumption, cholera, paralysis, sudden death, and hell.” Similar practices could be found in early France. The explicit nature of the curses associated with excommunication could not be clearer than in the proclamation of Pope Benedict VIII in 1014 who declared:

May they be cursed in the East, disinherited in the West, interdicted in the North, and excommunicated in the South. May they be cursed in the day and excommunicated at night. May they be cursed at home and excommunicated one away, cursed in standing and excommunicated in sitting. May they be cursed in the spring and excommunicated in the summer, cursed in the autumn and excommunicated in the winter.

The Malediction of Bishop Ernulphus of Rochester, dated around 1124, is a record of an ancient Anglo-Saxon rite of excommunication which reads:

By the authority of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and of all the holy canons, and of the undefiled Virgin Mary, mother and patroness of our Saviour, and all the celestial virtues, angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, powers, cherubim, and seraphim … We excommunicate and anathematise this malefactor … May the Father who created him, curse him. May the Son who suffered for us, curse him. May the Holy Ghost, who was given to us in baptism, curse him …

The curses continue in a long litany with everyone from the Virgin Mary and the Apostles to the very heavens and the earth being invoked to curse the individual. Later it continues:

May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, standing, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in bloodletting. May he be cursed in all the faculties of his body. May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly! May he be cursed in the hair of his head! May he be cursed in his brains…

It continues line after line when finally it finishes: “and may heaven with all the powers that move therein, rise up against him, curse and damn him unless he repent and make satisfaction. Amen.” There is such a rich history of Christian cursing in both the formal liturgical sense and in the tradition of spontaneous outbursts that we must simply move on in order to understand the broader point.

It should be clear by now that the practice of cursing has a time-honoured place in the Christian religion, and yet for a clearer understanding of its position in Christianity we must turn to the great “type” of God’s redemptive act in the Old Testament book of Numbers. In this mysterious text, God punishes his people for their sins by sending fiery seraph-snakes (nāchāš śārāph) among them which bite and kill many (the word is the same in the Hebrew as that for the seraphim of Isaiah, chapter 6). When Moses cries out to God for deliverance, he is commanded to make a fiery serpent (or seraph) from brass, that the people might look to it and be cured of the deadly bites.

The narrative that unfolds in the Book of Numbers gives us a vivid spiritual symbol of God’s salvation plan which would one day come to completion on the cross when God incarnate would become a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). But what is most striking is that the blessings that men receive at the foot of the fiery serpent on the pole are mirrored by the curses that they have received from the fiery seraphim sent by God. Both the blessing and the curse come from the same source—the fiery serpent-seraphim. The polar entanglements of blessing and curse are tied together in the singular figure of Love Himself precisely because its effects manifest in the type of reception found. To put it more plainly, the crucified Christ is a blessing for those who believe and a curse for those who reject him.

The modern world presents us with a picture of love which has become almost entirely sentimentalised. In the Anglophone world this is compounded by the fact that our language often lacks subtlety in areas of discussion where subtlety is required, and hence we find ourselves unable to express the many different forms of love clearly and distinctly. Greek famously has (at least) four loves, and many other languages exhibit similar insights into the various forms, but to the modern Anglo mind the different kinds of love have become increasingly difficult to distinguish from mere niceness on the one hand and superficial (but perhaps intense) emotion on the other. The ancient Neoplatonists understood that the One was like a transcendent and ultimate Sun emanating the light of reality, thereby giving the gift of existence wherever its light reached. In baptising this great ancient strain of philosophy, Christianity personalised this emanating Being by showing the face of its burning fire to be Love Himself. Without any hint of sentimentalism, this vision of God as Love brings clarity to the notion of God as a consuming fire radiating light into the darkness and causing burning discomfort to those who love the darkness.

In this context, it becomes clear that the command to love one’s enemies is not to be taken in the trivial sense of just being nice to people who want to destroy you, but rather following in the Way, to make your presence a full gift of self—mirroring the gift of the One—and in doing so, in some circumstances, this may take the form of a curse. It is clear that such a curse must still entail willing the good of the other, even in the formal curses which we have considered, because the intention is always for the repentance of the wicked.

The fiery serpent which Moses lifts for the people to look upon is intended to remedy the curse which itself has come from fiery serpents. The people must experience the dreadful spiritual state they are in by being exposed to the fiery seraphim emanating from God’s holiness, precisely so that they do not stay in their spiritual darkness eventually to fall into the outer darkness itself. The God who is Light of Light wrestles with us to stop us turning back to look at the nothingness from whence we came, presenting us with blessings and curses along the way. The blessing itself, of the fiery serpent on the pole, Christ the slain lamb, has no coherent position outside a worldview that accepts the reality of curses. Where you find one, you will find the other. As one of the thieves on the cross by Christ’s side experiences the redemptive act as a curse, mocking and blaspheming unto his own destruction, his companion exposed to the same fiery seraph is healed. Without the blessing and the curse, you have only the sinning children of God slipping away from Being to non-being.

Returning to the anathemas with which the eastern and western wings of the Church cursed each other, it is now clear why all the other catastrophes—intellectual, spiritual, and societal—are rooted here. Bishops, wielding the authority of the pectoral cross—the symbol of both blessing and curse—brought down fiery serpents upon each other and since then we have all suffered the consequences.

Ironically however as we appear to be reaching the end of the road of dissolution which largely started in that fateful century, we no longer recognise the power of the curse at all, just as we stand in confusion concerning the very purpose and power of blessing. Entangled in a shallow understanding of love, which now dominates our shared imaginative landscape, most Christians and most ecclesial bodies consider it unthinkable to issue a curse against anyone—either within or without the Body of Christ. Yet the imperative to curse must be seen as a simple consequence of the terrifying reality of the crucifixion, for to reject the fiery serpents of the curse is to reject the very same fiery Serpent who gives healing and blessing.

Living in a land which has been blessed by uncountable Holy Masses, whose grace infuses the very ground on which we have built our civilisation, among forests which still remember the unending praise of the monks and nuns, generation after generation, lifting up nature herself to receive the blessing of the Creator, the Church must take more seriously its power to curse God’s enemies. It must do this for their own sake, as well as ours. The curses which the Church may bestow amount to a powerful and terrifying weapon, which should not be wielded lightly. It is a measure to which few applications spring to mind yet, there are options to consider.

That this land should now find itself with many institutions which—under the protection of the law—allow for the destruction of innocent unborn human life, executed in the name of freedom and flourishing no less, is one of the most unacceptable state of affairs to Christian people. A variety of strategies have been tested, the chief of which, namely prayer, has become increasingly difficult to exercise within certain local boundaries. The full force of the state has turned to protecting the system even from those who would silently pray. It is perhaps time to consider the forgotten instruments of Christian action to bring about justice for the most defenceless of God’s children.

A second potential theatre of implementation is seemingly close. Consider that we live in a time where every tribal hatred and every foreign war must play out on the streets of every Western capital. The press and politicians scramble to take the correct positions, delivering speeches condemning aggressors and so on and so forth. Yet one of the world’s oldest Christian nations, Armenia, which has undergone genocide in living memory, stands on the precipice of annihilation, and the same political and media classes meet this catastrophe with silence. Perhaps it is time for the bishops—and if the bishops refused to wield their authority, the laity and lesser clerics—to raise an earthenware jar waiting in anticipation for wicked men who “sits in ambush in the villages; in hiding places to murder the innocent. With eyes stealthily watching for the hapless…lurking that they may seize the poor…thinking in their heart, ‘God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it’.” (Psalm 10).

Let the Apostles’ Successors hold the earthenware jar with its Azerbaijani name and pray “Arise, O Lord; God, lift up thy hand; forget not the afflicted. Why does the wicked say in his heart “thou will not be called to account? Break down the arm of the wicked and evil doer...Do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that the man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.”

And if, in their folly, wicked men take the sword to this ancient Christian people, let the people of God leave hold of the earthenware jar, letting it fall to the earth with the speed of a fiery seraph.

There is a terrible problem with esotericism. People will tell you that the problem with esotericism, or the ‘occult’, is that the study and practice of it leads ultimately to demonic obsession and even possession. But as Valentin Tomberg pointed out in Meditations on the Tarot, this is rarely so. (As it happens, the curious case of St Mariam Baouardy, the 19th-century Carmelite nun from Galilee who spent a considerable amount of time possessed by demons—undergoing the affliction for the salvation of souls—shows that demonic possession can be as much an indication of sanctity as of sinfulness.1)

Tomberg notes that, not demonic interference but megalomania is the typical risk of pursuing esoteric knowledge. In his words:

The practising occultist, esotericist or Hermeticist (if he is not practising, he is only a metaphysician or reformer) experiences the higher forces which work beyond his consciousness and which make their entrance there. At what price? ... Either at the price of worshipping on his knees—or otherwise at the price of the identification of self with these higher forces, which results in megalomania.2

Such megalomania arises from a structural problem concerning esotericism itself. Esotericism entails some hidden, secret, or at least deeper knowledge which can only be gained by a process of initiation, and which is inaccessible outside the fold of initiates. Hence, if an esotericist teaches something or makes some claim that doesn’t compel the intellect of the hearer, that hearer has two options: he can either accept the esotericist’s claim on his authority alone, or he can reject it and thus prove that he hasn’t been initiated into the deeper mysteries, for surely he would accept the teaching if he had been so initiated. Either way, the esotericist can be satisfied that he stands correct in his teaching.

In turn, the esotericist is fundamentally unable to be in error according to the structure of his own thought-world; he is necessarily an infallible source of truth and revelation. It is not difficult to see how such an assumption will lead to the self-idolatry of megalomania, and why the demons will happily leave such a person alone: he’s comprehensively damned himself without much help from them. Esotericism is consequently replete with charlatanism, with ‘gurus’ and ‘adepts’ of every kind claiming to teach some hidden or secret doctrine, the veracity of which cannot be denied—at least not by the supposed initiate.

In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, the philosopher Karl Popper made relevant observations about Freudianism and Marxism, calling them ‘pseudo-scientific’ because they couldn’t pass his ‘falsification’ test.3 If the Freudian says that you have ‘daddy issues’, for example, then you either accept what he’s telling you or you don’t, thereby proving that you’re in a ‘state of denial’. Either way, the Freudian is right. If the Marxist says that you must liberate yourself (and the rest of the proletariat) from the tyranny of the bourgeoise, you either agree with him or you don’t, thereby proving you’ve ‘internalised the regime of your own oppressor’. Either way, the Marxist is right. For Popper, any ‘system’ that could not be falsified was not to be trusted. There are of course problems with the alternative: any system that is inherently falsifiable cannot in principle possess certainty about anything. Hence, the falsification test has its obvious limitations, but also its utility, especially against the claims of self-appointed gurus.

It is this structural flaw in esotericism—that it cannot be falsified and leads to a ‘guru’ culture of megalomaniacal charlatans—that makes the works of Valentin Tomberg, Jean Hani, Wolfgang Smith, and Jean Borella, among some others, so very important.4 For as philosophers, theologians, scientists, and social historians—all sharing a devout Christian faith alongside an openness to knowledge that can be gleaned from initiatic pathways—together they show that esotericism can and should be exposed to the same scrutiny, and subjected to the same requirements of rigour, as any other humane discipline and practice. But then the question remains: why would such engagement with esotericism be deemed necessary or beneficial at all?

In answering this question, it is worth considering a very helpful passage from Jean Borella’s The Crisis of Religious Symbolism, extracted from a discussion therein on the significance of the European Renaissance:

What characterises the Renaissance for us was, first, a massive disoccultation of doctrines rather esoteric in nature: it witnessed the publication of multiple works … which dealt not only with a knowledge mysterious in itself, in its own nature, but even hidden from the unqualified masses, according to both senses of the term ‘occult’. This disoccultation should be clearly understood however. There is actually a paradox in making public what, by nature, should remain unknown, and in declaring openly that a philosophy is occult. But this hidden knowledge was, in fact, somehow constrained, because of the progressive change in episteme, to show itself as such to the very extent that it was inexorably ‘marginalised’ by the cultural revolution.5

As Borella observes, during the Renaissance, with figures such as Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Abbot Johannes Trithemius among others, there was an enthusiastic movement to present and argue for doctrines and practices that were what today would commonly be called ‘esoteric’ or ‘occult’ or ‘initiatic’. These included everything from astrology; practical angelology; the synthesis of Rabbinical Kabbalah, Hermetic Qabalah and Christian Cabbala;6 and investigations into the healing properties of the mineral and vegetative realms, to the philosophical recovery of Pythagorean cosmology and Neoplatonic ontology at the Florentine court of the Medici and beyond.7

Borella, though, is raising the historiographical question of why this happened at that particular period. One may want to point to the Council of Florence in 1439, and suggest that Renaissance esotericism was the consequence of Hermetic and Platonic texts arriving from Byzantium during that event.8 But the medievals had already developed a Platonic cosmology and ontology from their study of the Timaeus among many other texts, foremost among which were those of Dionysius the Areopagite, and medieval writers were writing on all manner of ‘esoteric’ topics and practices, as is evinced by the masters of the School of Chartres and the works of Hildegard of Bingen, and those of Albert the Great in the next century, as well as so many others. What emerges in the Renaissance among the so-called ‘esotericists’ was not a new set of doctrines or practices, but a new way of talking and thinking about them, bolstered by certain newly arrived texts from the East.

What Borella suggests is that the Renaissance in fact marked a revolutionary change in ‘episteme’. The European mind was changing. What was happening was not so much the birth of the occult, but the birth of rationalism. And when this new episteme was applied to the true religion of the Catholic Church, it had the effect of stripping it of all those initiatic elements that had been baptised, healed, elevated, and given a home in the Christian Mystery. Thusly isolated, these orphaned initiatic elements of Christendom’s once integrated theotic gnosis were collated and they progressively formed a counter-religion. Borella explains:

The Renaissance was the period when western culture ‘rid’ itself of its ‘esoteric impurities’, and therefore when these, like weeping sores on a face, appeared most visibly. But this appearance should not mislead us: the epistemic tissue forming just below the surface is a tissue of mathematical rationality.9

Western culture, Borella suggests, was being ensnared by rationalism—by ‘mathematical rationality’—which could not contain within its purview those initiatic elements that, by virtue of being initiatic, resisted reduction to abstract propositional formulae. Naturally, those who saw this rationalistic turn for the epistemic truncation that it was, were keen to defend the initiatic pathways. Hence, we apparently observe a rise of new esotericists in the Renaissance, when in fact we’re really witnessing the last cry of the medievals. For as Borella convincingly claims, the same esoteric knowledge is present in the preceding centuries, but differs in that it is fully integrated with a unified and holistic Christian mind, rather than fragmented and fractured away from the spiritual centre:

This same esoteric knowledge, in course of the preceding period, is much harder to glimpse to the very extent that it formed part—much more closely than we are told—of the official culture, and even to such a point that it is not always easy to distinguish between official and esoteric. Thus, to cite only the most illustrious case, the reputation of St Albert the Great as a magician is based on the exceptional importance that the Master himself attributes to the hermetic tradition, in the person of its eponymous ‘founder’: Hermes Trismegistus.10

Put bluntly, and at the risk of losing some nuance, it was the rise of rationalism that created esotericism. And it is not just medieval intellectual culture that had achieved a healthy and dynamic integration of the esoteric into the institutional, making it hard if not impossible to distinguish them; material culture had achieved the same. In the 13th-century Wells Cathedral, there is a foliate corbel atop a pillar near the entrance of the chapter house, on which is sculpted a salamander crawling forth from flames. This image is not a biblical image, but an alchemical one. Whilst not denying the transmutational power of alchemy, this initiatic discipline was reinterpreted by the medievals to be part of a wider spiritual repertoire that took seriously the purificatory experience required for spiritual transformation, wherein the soul emerges into new life from the fires of purgation. To appeal to alchemical wisdom—which has its origins in the mystery schools of India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt—was considered neither eccentric nor demonic by the monastic masters of Wells and the other spiritual centres of Christendom. On the contrary, it was a way by which to keep such mysteries in their proper spiritual sphere.

For the same reason, Albert the Great among many others ardently studied the Hermetic texts, to the point that Albert in particular was universally deemed a great magus, so deep was his initiation into Hermeticism. The American scholar David Porreca has highlighted that Albert was familiar with, and directly quoted, seven Hermetic texts: Asclepius, Alchimia, De imaginibus et annulis et speculis Veneris et sigillis daemonum, Libri incantationum, De minerali virtute, De secreis Aristotleis, and De secreto sectretissimorum suorum.11 Altogether, he quoted these texts ninety-four times in his writings, only three times dissenting from their content rather than deploying them as authorities in support of his arguments. Moreover, those are only cases when Albert uses texts recognised openly by him as authored by Hermes; were we to take into account statements that modern scholars have identified as having their origin in works attributed to Hermes, Albert’s Hermetic quotations would number many hundreds. So indebted to Hermes did Albert consider his own philosophy that he reverently refers to the Thrice Great as “Antiquissimi Patris”, “Pater Philosophorum” and “Pater Alchemiae”: Most Ancient Father of Philosophy and Alchemy.

As the example of the ‘Doctor Universalis’ and the Corpus Hermeticum indicates, great holy men and women of medieval Christendom did not deem what we would now call ‘esotericism’ to be demonic and spiritually corrupting. That ‘esotericism’ was no ism at all, for it was fully integrated with the sacramental transformation of human nature that comes by the Christian Mystery as imparted to the earth by Jesus Christ through His Church. Precisely on account of this integration of the initiatic pathways with true religion, those pathways were not polluted by the charlatanism and megalomania that is commonly and rightly associated with esotericism in our own epoch. Nor were they subjected to the denunciations of rationalists, since the epistemic scourge of rationalism was yet to plague the West. Borella goes on to explain further:

The close relationship that the esoteric traditions harboured with theology and religion maintained them in a properly spiritual sphere. … While the marginalisation of these same traditions in the Renaissance, by distancing them from the Christian spiritual tradition, caused them to lose, in part, their supernatural character, and risked allowing them to be imbued with the ambient vitalist naturalism, so that the hermetic, alchemical, kabbalistic, astrological, etc. doctrines were degraded into a common magia naturalis. … Of all that the Renaissance would often retain only recipes for increasing one’s power, and would occasionally end up in the lowest kind of sorcery.12

The initiatic pathways were severed from true religion due to the incremental colonisation of the Western mind by the rationalism that is, in the final analysis, far more hostile to the Christian Mystery than those very pathways with which it once enjoyed a harmonious relationship. And once severed, they were frequently collated into a kind of synthetic ‘natural magic’ which, as Borella stresses, often collapsed into the power-craving and sorcery which may be denoted by the word ‘goetia’. Such is to be expected, given that all nature, once removed from Christ’s jurisdiction, falls under the principality of the devil. (One need only think of what has happened to the natural good of sexual intimacy, now that it has been removed from the sacramental order by that malignant combination of vice and technology.)

From the 16th century, Protestants snatched the political and social spheres from Christ’s Kingdom, declaring themselves free of the Church’s authority; then, beholding un-Christianised nature’s diabolical character, they denounced all nature as “totally depraved”. Likewise, today’s Catholics, when looking upon the initiatic pathways severed from the Christian Mystery, seeing them replete with charlatanism and judging them to be a kind of counter-religion of diabolical character, typically condemn them outright as outrages. In doing so, they are often deploring their own spiritual inheritance, which has been swept away from them by the tide of rationalism, an epistemic framework which they themselves have often unwittingly accepted. Indeed, it’s unsurprising that a fear and hysteria concerning the ‘occult’—which groups together everything from devil-worship and witchcraft to the alchemical and zodiacal traditions beloved by our medieval ancestors—has coincided with an acute protestantisation of Catholicism. Whereas a medieval Catholic might place an alchemical image atop a pillar in a cathedral, his coreligionists today would likely be horrified by any suggestion that we do the same; they apparently sympathise more with those Puritans who took hammers to all such supposed ‘abominations’.

It is sometimes said that these initiatic pathways are downstream from the Pythagorean cosmology that Pythagoras himself learned in the Egyptian mystery schools of the 6th century BC, and that the West would have remained in the mire of such thinking had the ‘Aristotelian revolution’ of the 13th-century schoolmen not taken place. There was, however, no such ‘Aristotelian revolution’, which is an illusory projection of 19th- and early 20th-century intellectual historians (as I demonstrated in my book The World as God’s Icon).13

Those who continue to believe this erroneous historiography see the Pythagorean tradition, in all its millennia-long development and integration into the Christian intellectual tradition, as one and the same as the rationalism of which I complain. They say that Pythagoreanism, with its fixation on mathematics and geometry, reduces all to number, measurement, and quantity. There is a half-truth in this account; for it is rather the case that Pythagoreanism is the proper structure of the Western mind, and when the Western mind is deadened by rationalism, it does indeed reduce all to number, measurement, and quantity—all that might be termed epistemic modernity. But when Pythagoreanism is held by a living mind, patterns in creation are seen as manifestations of an ordered and good Divine Mind, giving rise to a participation account that sees creation as in receipt of the qualities that actuate it into ‘cosmos’—a unified whole—whose order and goodness below come from above. And within such a theocentric and theophanic framework, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and all the other so-called ‘Aristotelian revolutionaries’ developed their metaphysics.

Those like Borella who are engaging with so-called ‘esotericism’, endeavouring to resituate the initiatic pathways in a harmonious relationship with true religion are not syncretising Christianity with the occult in any reprehensible sense. On the contrary, they may be among the last in the West who still live and think with the integrated, theotic gnosis that once characterised the common mind of Christendom. Such people are Christian thinkers and practitioners who refuse to concede anything to the forces that would strive to undo the Christian Mystery and its transformation of creation, whether they be modern rationalists masquerading as Catholic traditionalists, or charlatanic and megalomaniacal ‘gurus’ who peddle an ‘occult’ doctrine which is really self-worship. Indeed, such thinkers and practitioners are, it might be said, the last remaining medievals.

Part Two, Shinto and the Saints, also by Carlos Perona, can be found here]

By Carlos Perona (Europos)

Drums are pounded.

Raised clay is matted down by the easy yoke of reverence.

Priests recite names of them whose ethereal presence they would render palpable to the hushed assembly. Invisibly, kami join the human crowd.

Salt is swung on purified soil.

Wrestlers bow.

Perhaps one of the few yet-to-be disenchanted examples of sacred combat, at least in the developed world, is Japanese Sumo.

Heaven’s War

As with the sky and earth deities that founded the sport, their latter-day human avatars balance opposing forces: power and prowess in a frame at once capable of explosive forward advance and the agility of judo-like reversals.

It was the clash of Takemikazuchi and Takeminakata that inaugurated Sumo. A thunder-wielding being born from the blood of a rebellious fire demon brought low by Heaven, and an earthly warrior presiding over agriculture, water, wind, respectively. Takemikazuchi was born after the war between Olympians and Titans, as Greek tradition remembers it. The great carnage that preceded the human age in which Æsir faced off against giants in Norse accounts, devas against asuras, in which Lucifer was cast down.

Following the inevitable angelic victory, however, the infant earth was in a state of chaos. The celestials had to subdue the Ashihara no Nakatsukuni, Midgard, “Middle Earth.” Order had to be established, to which end Takemikazuchi was deployed.

But this conquest was not to be unilateral. The lower portion was out of sync with the higher, in need of subduing—but would be glorified thereby.

Takemikazuchi descended and went forth to the telluric deity Ōkuninushi, asking that he relinquish the realm. Everything was now to be brought into alignment with heaven. But of Ōkuninushi’s children, one refused. Takeminakata would not see his race of nature-spirits deposed. Therefore did the two face off, and although Takeminakata was ultimately defeated, he was awarded a position of honour all the same. The similarity of their names suggests they represent corresponding principles, two forms of one principle.

Takemikazuchi then went on to aid Emperor Jimmu—the foundational ancient emperor of the Japanese people—in his conquests, helping establish a politically pacified human dominion: the defeat of rebellious spirits and the pacification of the Earth makes room for the vice-regent of Heaven on Earth, human centre of creation.

Each Sumo wrestler is both Takemikazuchi and Takeminakata. When an athlete competes, he struggles against himself, ordering inner impulses unto outward ordeal. The desire to veer from diet and routine, lethargy to skip an exercise, compulsion to overtrain, nervousness on the day—these are the rebellious earthly Takeminakata.

But in defeat, he is a prince.

The body acquires the habits we inculcate. Eventually, it drills the movements we’ve taught it as a second nature.

This idea is widespread. In the Kerala region of India, for example, the ritual fighting style of Kalaripayattu is said to originate from Parashurama, the sixth avatar of the god Vishnu, reclaiming land from the sea on which Kerala was established. He then taught this martial art to its inhabitants that they might protect their country. As in the Japanese case, combat is a reclaiming and ordering of nature.

In Sumo, this is present from the outset. Consider how a match begins: both wrestlers place their hands on the ground. Although they want to start from a position of stability and readiness, knowing that as soon as their opponent is likewise positioned they will get only a fraction of a second to react, they must calm their impulses long enough to coordinate with the man in front of them.

Our Patron, Heracles

In Europe, Greco-Roman wrestling and Pankration have both been attributed to Heracles and Theseus, being the set of techniques that, according to various accounts, were used by them during their respective quests.

In particular, they originate from the defeat of Antaeus, son of Gaia, by Heracles. One is heavenly, a champion of Olympus; the other an earthly fighter, disordered nature, an oppressive giant who has to be put in his place.

We should also remember Theseus’ facing-off against the Minotaur as a mythic example of Pankration. And, of course, Zeus defeating Typhon, in a sense integrating the serpent-dragon into the natural order, and Apollo doing the same to Python, are more remote examples of the same principle.

Focusing on Antaeus, however, it is said that he was the son of Poseidon and Gaia, the ocean and earth as disordered, inhospitable nature, and that he was a tyrant who would challenge whoever travelled through his North African realm. Once he defeated them in a wrestling match he would murder the unfortunate wayfarer and use his bones to build up a macabre temple to his father, a demonic Poseidon, tribute to the waters of chaos. But his stronger connection was to his mother Gaia, for whenever he would touch the ground he would draw up power from her and for this reason could not be bested. Even if an opponent succeeded in throwing him down, this would only revitalise him thereby.

We read about Antaeus and his contest with Heracles in the work of Diodorus and Apollodorus, for example. One reading of this myth suggests that language about his mother being the Earth—such that he could draw up power from being on the ground—is describing the technique of a grappler specialising in groundwork. For one unskilled in this, such a wrestler would indeed seem to counterintuitively gain strength from being cast down.

Philostratus in Imagines (II) describes this:

Antaeus, whom the Earth bore to do mischief to strangers by practicing, I fancy, a practical style of wrestling.

When Heracles faced Antaeus, then, he had to figure out how to keep a lock on the grappler while lifting him so that the son of Gaia would not come into contact with the ground. Facing the tyrant’s unique technique, the hero had to improvise, inventing a new fighting style.

Pankration also involves striking, but this event may be the mythic origin of grappling. Heracles could already wrestle, as we read concerning his defeat of the Nemean lion, to which he applied a rear naked choke after clobbering it with his club and so disorienting the beast. This is discussed by Theocritus in his Idylls.

With Antaeus, however, he had to rely on grappling alone, and it was grappling of another order. He could not pin his opponent to the ground, not could he knock the giant down as with the lion, or rely on striking without risking causing Antaeus to regain his strength after getting knocked to the ground.

The Gaia connection is interesting because grappling is, in a sense, the yin or feminine component of fighting compared to striking, the yang or masculine component. At least this is one possible conceptualisation. In The Tao of War by Mikel Abdul Latif we read:

The yin of the grappler envelops the one, becomes many, as the one grappler becomes many limbs. The yang of the striker penetrates: the many becomes one, as the many limbs of the striker gather into a single fist.

Antaeus’s earthly maternal Gaia-given grounded grappling is the use of nearness, envelopment, femininity for the sake not of honourable combat, but combat forced upon travellers, a ruthless violation of hospitality, and not ending in honourable defeat but in murder. It is an image of corrupted nature, corrupted femininity, and, that half-imagined matriarchal human-sacrificing period in the remote past which Heracles is credited with putting an end to. Robert Graves speculates as much in the context of other myths around Hercules. Of course, Antaeus sacrifices to Poseidon, the male as raging ocean—corrupted masculinity. Wherever we encounter the corrupted feminine we have the corrupted masculine as well. Babylon and Beast.

Being a giant, Antaeus symbolises old forces improperly manifesting in human form—big, tyrannical ideas, hypertrophic distortions of the human scale: the Nephilim giants of the Bible and an echo of the more remote Titanic rebellion. Heracles, correspondingly, is a David figure.

It is significant that the defeat of Antaeus comes before Heracles goes on to secure the apples of the Hesperides, the fruit of immortality, and so seems to mark the final perfecting of his ability as a martial artist. By this point in his journey Heracles has acquired all the necessary techniques to pacify the earth, corresponding to the pacification of the inner nature. After this, he will deal with one more giant, Geryon, and then the dragon Ladon.

The hero’s wrestling style, which must now incorporate and perfect grappling in order to defeat and balance yin and yang—feminine grappling and masculine striking, nearness and distance—is the ordering of nature, putting her in proper relation to humanity: no longer as source of vicious murderous strength.

It isn’t the defeat of Gaia but of Gaia’s evil son. It’s not yang against yin, striking against grappling, but the harmonising, the complementarity, of these. Our nature is properly aligned, like the serpent on Moses’ staff or the straightening of the dragon Typhon after its defeat by Zeus that it may provide heat to the holy volcanoes of Etna and Cumae, Sicily and Naples.

The defeat of Antaeus is also similar to the myth according to which Heracles had to hold Proteus, the shape-shifting god, in place with a firm grip despite the many forms that this god took. Through his many transformations Hercules had to keep him fixed. Through the many oscillations of the mind, the spiritual hero must keep his attention, his focus.

Forward

Europe and the West are in need of a renewed folklore, I would argue—a connection with the past, especially when it comes to taming lower nature, the instincts.

Mechanically, technically, any modern combat sport would have to be a species of mixed martial arts. But the specific rules and overarching ritualism can be made reverential. This could include pageantry and an element of theatre expressive of the founding myth—like a spiritually elevated wrestling entertainment. A Western MMA turned sacred combat, where Heracles and Antaeus (or Heracles and Proteus, and Theseus and the Minotaur, Apollo and Python, Zeus and Typhon) are its patrons, should be part of the work to renew and reinvent ourselves.

(Donations to the Benedictine community at New Norcia can be made here.)

It is typically assumed that the movement of Christianity into Europe was a kind of dethroning or usurpation of a former pantheon of deities (Graeco-Roman or Germanic) and the replacement of these with a new one—specifically the ‘Desert God’ of the Semitic peoples. However, it will be argued here that the real situation was much more nuanced, and that there was, in fact, a fundamental continuity between the concept of Divinity (and humanity, for that matter) between the earlier faiths and creeds of the European peoples and Christianity.

In order to demonstrate this, we shall first consider the conception of a unique and supreme Divinity in both Graeco-Roman and Germanic theologies. Following this, the continuity of the Christian ‘Deus’ or ‘Gott/God’ with the European conception of a supreme and transcendent Divinity will be demonstrated.

The distinction or differentiation between polytheistic and monotheistic theologies is, in reality, far from clear cut. Essentially, it is contingent upon how one defines ‘God’ or ‘god(s)’. If a god is simply understood as indicating a spiritual being which is not subject to physical aging or death, then, in a certain sense, the angels, saints and even devils of Christianity could be called ‘gods.’ But if the term ‘God’ is reserved for one ultimate, eternal and supreme Being, utterly beyond all attributes and limitations (as it is in the Christian tradition), then clearly, and, indeed, by definition, there is and can be One only. For this reason, although Christian tradition affords non-physical and non-mortal status to angels, saints, and devils, it does not call them ‘gods’, but rather, the term ‘God’ is reserved for the supreme, transcendental, self-sufficient and eternal Reality, “I-am-who-am.” (Ex 3:14)

It is suggested that this distinction can be applied equally to the pre-Christian theologies, which are typically labelled as ‘polytheistic’. Yes, there were various spirits or manifestation and forces (Aphrodite, Apollo, Thor, etc.) who were believed to be non-physical and immortal, and super-human in terms of intelligence and power. In this sense, they were considered ‘gods.’ Yet they were not held to be ‘God’ in the sense of a supreme, transcendental and eternal Reality, or a ‘First Mover’. As noted, by definition ‘God’ in this sense could logically only ever be One.

Hence it is natural that expression of essential unity and uniqueness of the Supreme Divinity, a primordial Logos, abound within Graeco-Roman philosophy and mysticism, without an incongruity with the veneration of a pantheon of other ‘gods’, in the lesser sense of immortal, spiritual beings. Aristotle affirms: “A First Mover, then, exists of necessity; and because it exists by necessity, its mode of being is the Good, and it is in this sense a first principle.”1

Likewise, Proclus argues:

It is necessary, then, that the First Cause should be one; for the Monad presides over all multitude, excelling all things in power and goodness, and on this account it is necessary that all things should participate in its nature.2

Expressed in this way, such a perspective accords perfectly with the transcendental monotheism of Christianity, which Aquinas expresses in terms of a Godhead which is “ipsum esse subsistens” (‘being in itself’), something which could only ever be One. Clearly, the Greeks and Romans did not consider this fundamental unity of the transcendent God to conflict or be incongruent with the mythological elaboration and veneration of other ‘gods’—understood either as allegorical figures or symbols, or quasi-independent spiritual entities.

Even Zeus, the supreme Deity, could be understood either in a mythical, anthropomorphic form, as the King of the Olympian Court and subject to a range of quasi-human and even capricious emotions; or in more a philosophical and mystical way, as the supreme Unity, the ipsum esse subsistens, in whom “we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) This dichotomy in imagery, reflecting the variance between popular piety and philosophical theology, is, arguably, equally evident in the Christian approach to God, which ranges from highly anthropomorphic to more purely mystical. Furthermore, a plausible analogy could be drawn here between the co-existence of belief in one supreme God and a pantheon of other, lesser spiritual beings (‘the gods’), and the Christian doctrine of the one God, which does not preclude the veneration and invocation of non-supreme, non-eternal spiritual entities, such as angels and saints.

Sources of the pre-Christian conception of God for the Germanic peoples are far fewer than for the Graeco-Romans. The most detailed and best-known literary records of Nordic mythology (such as the Elder Edda and Prose Edda) are, in fact, productions of Christian authors, dating, in the redactions we possess, to no earlier than the late Middle Ages. Tacitus, in his Germania, declares that: “neque in ullam humani oris speciem adsimulare ex magnitudine caelestium arbitrantur.” (They [the Germanic peoples] judge it to be impossible for any human mouth to express a [fitting] comparison for the majesty of the Heavenly realities.’)3 Other Roman records we have speak of the Germanic peoples as believing in an ‘All-Father’ (Alföðr), whose name was represented by a range of orthographical forms—Odin, Woden, and most significantly for the discussion here, Godan.

The word used today to signify the unique Supreme Deity in Christian discourse in the Germanic languages is God/Gott (and similar cognates). This is very clearly a form or adaptation of Godan/Woden/Odin. Indeed, the name God was already in use to designate the ‘All-Father’ (Godan/Woden/Odin) by the Anglo-Saxons in pre-Christian times. And in Latin, the official language of the Roman Catholic Church, the word Deus (translated as God) is a direct transliteration of the Greek name, Ζεύς (Zeus).4

These relationships, or rather identities, of name are not of merely etymological interest, but point to a fundamental continuity in understanding of the God of Christianity with the Supreme Deity for both the Germanic and Graeco-Roman peoples. All of them may with justification be identified with what Julius Evola terms the ‘Dietas solis’ (‘Solar Godhead’),5 the All-Father of the Occidental races. Interesting, the name Jupiter is a contraction of the term Diespiter or ‘Father of the Day,’ virtually identical to the designation ‘Father of Lights,’ used as a title for the Divinity in the New Testament (Js 1:17).

This concurrence and harmony is, when considered objectively, not at all surprising. For any conception of a unique Supreme Being must recognize the universal nature of such a reality, as is reflected, to some degree, even in the Hebrew Scriptures, the “God of every tribe, tongue and nation.” (Daniel 7:14). The interesting implication is that the acceptance of the Christian faith would not have involved any abandoning or renunciation of Deus/ Ζεύς or Godan/Woden/Odin, but rather an essential continuity, a process which was natural and evolutionary, rather than revolutionary and disruptive. It would certainly not have necessitated discarding an ‘old God(s)’ in favour of a ‘new God’, any more than the conversion of Jew or Muslim to Christianity would involve such a process—perhaps, indeed, even less so.

Here, it is pertinent to consider the sources which shaped Christ’s own thinking and language of the Deity. Arguably, since (according to Christian belief) he was himself an Incarnation of God, he already possessed perfect and complete knowledge, as it were, first-hand. Nevertheless, the reality of his humanity means that cultural and intellectual influences were not irrelevant to his understanding, and therefore cannot be disregarded. Undeniably, he was familiar with the monotheistic traditions of the Middle East, including the customs and writings of the Jewish people (although, as a Galilean, he was strictly speaking, not a Jew at all, for the Galileans were regarded as goyim or outsider by the Jews themselves, and this is the very meaning of the word ‘Galilean’). But the Jewish (or, more correctly, Middle Eastern) conception of God had undergone, and was continuing to undergo during the time of Christ, a considerable transformation and fragmentation. On the one hand, there was a discernible movement towards the theology of a unique, transcendental Supreme Being, reflecting, without doubt, a Hellenic influence, and fully consistent with the approach of Christ; but on the other hand, remnants of the jealous, tribal ‘desert deity’, requiring blood sacrifices for appeasement and imposing arbitrary laws of sabbath observance and ritual cleansing, still persisted. This duality was expressed strikingly, if perhaps in somewhat extreme fashion, by Kaiser Wilhelm II:

Our Christian God, the merciful, forgiving God, the personification of eternal love, our father, as Christ has taught us, had absolutely not the slightest thing in common with the vengeful bloodthirsty, angry old Jahweh of the Jews.6

The view that the God proclaimed and incarnated in Christ was different, and even in diametric opposition to, the deity of the Jews had considerable currency in the early Christian period. It was adopted by many of the Gnostic sects, who posited that the God of the Old Testament was a demiurge, the same as the ‘Ruler of this World’ spoke of by Christ (cf. Jn 14:30). Although this view, from a theological perspective, is erroneous, it does point to a genuine disparity in values between the God of Christ and laws and practices of Jewish tradition. The Church teaches that the Gods of the New and the Old Testaments are one and the same; yet acknowledges that the Old Testament presents only a limited and imperfect insight into God’s true nature, which finds its true expression in the person of Christ.

It is historically untenable to imagine that Christ was unfamiliar with European thought and literature. The Gospels (all originally written in Greek) tell us that he spent his youth, his years of formation and education, in Egypt, at the time a Greek-speaking, culturally diverse part of the Empire—a veritable ‘melting pot’ of philosophical and spiritual schools from all corners of the world, including sages from the distant East and traders and adventurers from the far North. Moreover, the Gospels show that Christ was perfectly capable of conversing with educated Greek-speaking officials and officers (who were drawn from all parts of the Empire), with whom his words clearly had genuine and fascinating resonance. Consider, for example, Pontius Pilates’ profound question: “Truth—what is that?” (Jn 18:38) The colloquy of which this is part demonstrates that Christ was seen as, among other things, “a wise philosopher,”7 by educated Europeans of his time. When he spoke of the Divinity, his words evidently resounded strongly and naturally with Roman soldiers and officials, and apparently more so than they did with the Jewish officials. This would not have occurred unless these European ‘gentiles’ recognized the God of whom Christ spoke as fundamentally one and the same as the unseen ‘Father of the Day’ to whom they already aspired and related.

The essential continuity between the God of the Christian faith and the already existent European conceptions of a Supreme Being sheds a remarkable illumination and clarity on a number of historical facts. Firstly, and most importantly, the conversion of the peoples of Europe to Christianity was remarkably free of resistance and violence. The peoples generally readily embraced the teachings of Christ, without coercion, or spiritual or cultural catastrophe. This would not have happened if it demanded a complete and radical renunciation of their previous beliefs and values. On the other hand, if an essential continuity was perceived, and the Gospel seen as a development, strengthening and clarification of their own native values and spiritual aspirations, then it makes perfect sense. A case in point is the emperor Constantine the Great, who was converted to Christianity and declared it to the be official faith of the Empire. Prior to this, he had been an ardent devotee of the Sol Invictus, the ‘unconquered Sun.’ He did not actually abandon this devotion, which really amounted to a form of transcendent monotheism; rather he saw Christianity as more perfect expression of it.8

If the hypothesis that the God of Christ was understood as the same as the Supreme Deity already believed in by the European peoples then it follows that the authentic European spirit finds in fullest and truest expression, rather than an abnegation or suppression, in the Christian faith—and that this faith is not a ‘foreign imposition’ but rather an expression of its own highest and holiest aspirations and values.

By Carlos Perona (Europos)

When the Japanese arrived at Hawaii as immigrants, they opened Shinto temples for their faithful. Shinto observance generally requires that shrines be consecrated to the local “Kami” (spirits, deities) and, in the case of the U.S., the newcomers settled on George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (as well as King Kamehameha and others for Hawaii specifically).

From the Daijingu Temple’s website:

The kami enshrined in the Hawaii Daijingu Temple are many; The Sun Goddess Amaterasu…the national father George Washington, the nation’s restorer Abraham Lincoln…King Kamehameha, King Kalakaua, and other men and women of great services to the state of Hawaii.

Obviously, give the contemporary breakdown of cultural consensuses, trying to identify national kami today would degenerate into endless debate, but the exercise is a fruitful one.

Not to worship, but to understand where we are: The story into which we have entered. “Kami,” whatever we mean by the word, shouldn’t be in the place of worship—the sacrum sanctorum is for the Absolute, the Divine Mystery, “The One”—but at its gates, slaying the gargoyles that adorn its exterior.

That’s how we should position the “pagan” in relation to “monotheism.”

Nor is this isn’t alien to Shinto itself. The 13th century Shinto Gobusho records the words of Yamato-hime Mikoto Seiki, daughter of Emperor Suinin and establisher of the Ise shrine, as follows: “The consciousness-god is the fundamental basis of heaven and earth.” Shinto itself contains a current of monotheism, as Dr. Kegan Chandler has explored.

Kami against the Monoculture

Nations, like professions and orders of every sort, come about in the wake of founders. They exist under the aegis of certain ordering symbols. We could take up the work of myth-making and culture-creation in isolation, apart from our Kami, outside any tradition, but that deprives us of deep roots worth tapping, condemns us to shallow growth, to reinventing the wheel and, anyway, there’s more glory in taking up and giving fresh coherence to the past.

Just as we know who our father is and what household we belong to by virtue of our last name, we need to acknowledge the patriarchs. patrons and prophets who guided our piece of the human commonwealth—our jurisdiction within the earthly and cosmic harmony, “Church,” “Ecumene.” Recognising these falls under the “honour your father and your mother” species of piety.

One cannot, for example, govern Italy without tacitly taking the 5th/6th century Theodoric the Great and his Regnum Italiae for granted. But actually becoming conscious of this means governing as a steward of something specific, not as a denaturing, merely technocratic administrator.

When Shinto priest Ogasawara Shōzō (1892–1970) advised the Japanese imperial government on how to administer occupied Korea’s religious affairs, he thought it natural that a grand Shrine be dedicated to Dangun, Korea’s mythical founder. The military government, however, opted for Amaterasu, sun-goddess and ancestor of the imperial family. The Japanese empire, alas, would go on to centralise and dominate, not reproduce its centre abroad to constitute a wider, encompassing harmony. Ogasawara might also have had other, not altogether flattering opinions about Koreans, but his approach to “ecclesiology,” at least, points to an alternative vision of empire, empire-as-ecumene rather than dominant state atop subordinate ones. (We might find something similar in the work of war-time Japanese anthropologist Torii Ryūzō.)

Apocalypse Kings

Concerning this idea of empire as ecumene, we encounter a blazing vision of ordered diversity in John’s Apocalypse when the nations are healed and their “kings” brought into the Heavenly City. These glorified kings, I suggest, are the true “kami” of the nations. Of course, historic Christianity did not always live up to this apocalyptic project. We have not always succeeded in healing and feeding the nations with the lead and fruit of the Tree of Life. Consider the semi-mythical person of Numa Pompilius, Rome’s early king, for example, who is so obviously holy that St. Augustine’s imputations against him (and general desire to condemn Roman origins) cannot but feel like slander, like a wanton amputation of sacred history.

We should be hiero-historians, looking for sacred patterns and persons in our past. We have examples such as Snorri Sturluson or Dante, especially when the latter places certain pagans in the same heavenly sphere as king David (only the Florentine does not go far enough). We have Christian histories of Mexico during the Spanish viceregency in which the pre-Columbian founder of the Aztec Triple-Alliance, prince Nezahualcoyotl, is identified as a righteous worshipper of the true God. This desire to produce something like a deutero-scripture encompassing the history of the nations was also present in the Romantics.

In general, the Christian view is that the gods of the nations were demons (Psalm 95:5). Those “sons of El” assigned to the nations and who became corrupt (Deuteronomy 32 according to the Qumran text). St. Pseudo-Dionysus, however, argues that the angels who steward the nations (whose characters the nations manifest, as I would put it) cannot truly fall. The nations must image something good if they are ultimately not abolished but glorified (as Isaiah 19 and Apocalypse 21 and 22 show us). The “demonic” gods are therefore the lower portion of the angelic ministry, “sub-lunary” (in traditional terms) agents subject to change. Indeed, to judge from Plutarch’s On The Failure of Oracles, the daemones who mediate between men and gods were faltering in his era (he presents this as one hypothesis for the phenomenon of increasingly scant or un-reliable oracular guidance).

It is for us to fill in that daemonic, imaginal space between human and angelic, therefore, and to do it without corruption, that is, without idolatry (and not for the purpose of divination, so often condemned in scripture, but which was so often the purpose of ancient congress with daemons). The daemonic realm is a grosser rung of the angelic, and a subtler portion of the human. We might therefore participate in it. Correcting and weaving it back into the angelic hierarchy might precisely be what Japanese holy men intended when they went about “discovering” what Boddhisattva lay behind what kami. We have patron saints, of course, but there is much of folklore and secular history that is also covertly saintly, there to be discovered.

We should pray for Heaven to activate the forms we love as loci of theophany.

—Friedrich Schiller, extracts from “The Gods of Greece”, 1788

It has been a century since Max Weber published his premature eulogy for the enchanted cosmos. Yet, despite the supposed triumph of the mechanistic worldview, the universe that contemporary science is uncovering has become ever weirder: Newton the alchemist buries Newton the mechanist. Quantum physics, non-locality and exotic states of matter have captured the public’s attention and in recent years plasma physics has unveiled a truly strange cosmic vision—the vastness of space filled with giant life-like entities collectively performing a symphony of creation. Just as quantum theory resuscitated Aristotle’s causal paradigm, the study of plasma by astrophysicists increasingly lends weight to the idea that the Neoplatonic ‘great chain of being’ not only exists but that cutting-edge science has detected the lower rungs of its ascending ladder of subtlety, reasonably proposing a hierarchy of higher beings involved in creative and causal activities, which we can observe with scientific instruments, upon the gross matter in which we dwell (I shall pursue this in a future essay).

Despite the heady intellectual environment offered to us by the scientific priesthood, our institutional spiritual guides have firmly clung to their fading 17th century watchmaker analogies, thinking that if they impress museum piece science popularisers like Richard Dawkins, they may be given respectable invitations to society parties and unwatched regime propaganda ‘Science and Religion’ trivia on television. Recently, however, the winds of change stirred amongst the Christian intellectuals of the West, and terms such as ‘reenchantment’ have captured the churchgoing imaginary. Yet, careful steps have been taken to avoid association with those who never fell for the dead universe theory in the first place, particularly New-Agers and Perennialists.

Rarely does reenchantment offer a practical program beyond a charming back-to-the-land, hobbit aesthetic but to me it seems there needs to be a more radical set of proposals to really bring the celestial Fire back to our dead Earth. The longer I contemplate what this might look like the more I have come under the spell of the Japanese exception. What I mean by this is that Japan seems to have maintained a natural mysticism through its modernisation, and that despite having developed a cutting-edge technological aspect to its society, at heart the animistic attitude of Shinto prevails. From earliest times, the Japanese nation has worshipped Kami. Kami can be the spirits of a particular place or they can be natural forces like wind, rivers, and mountains. In their pre-Buddhist form they had no anthropomorphic qualities nor were they simply the embodiment of moral principles.

I remember traveling through the country a decade ago and being enormously impressed by the natural inclination to the sacred which the Japanese people have maintained from time immemorial. Purification gates guard the entrance to towns and villages, and shrines to the local kami adorn forest and hillside alike. The spirits of the water too are not forgotten, with the great torii gate of Miyajima, the Itsukushima Shrine, where kami and humans pass from mundane to sacred space.

When asked if they are religious, most Japanese people say no, which would seem to be a counterpoint to my belief that they are the most religious people I’ve ever met. But I suspect that the word religion is a flat and crude instrument with which to analyse this question. And even seasoned Japanologists report that there is a curious wall of silence around discussing Shinto with foreigners.

Ritual and ceremony are everywhere in Japan, there is of course the famous Japanese tea ceremony, in order for which one must study for three years at one of the specialist colleges in order to be able to perform properly. I was able to witness this firsthand, the extraordinary attention and intention to which this otherwise simple process was subject. To be in the presence of a ritual which elevates something otherwise normal has a transformative effect. Attention, intention and ritual are of course deeply magical qualities, sacramental qualities one might add, and in setting aside utilitarian and efficient concerns, foregrounding devotion in such a small thing, the common priesthood of mankind is illuminated. All things can be given their share in glory, glimpses of the light transcendent emerge in the smallest act. The Japanese have held onto these truths from a long past golden age.

The reality is that the revelation which we in the West were given through the incarnated Logos does not share categorical space with the structured, ritual reverence for nature found in Shinto.

If we imagine Christian civilisation as a pyramid, with Christ and his cult as the great medicine for mankind, the golden capstone, the base of this structure is formed by philosophy and the reverent love for the harmonies of the cosmos, a reality that every great people has intuited. And it is this base which I believe we once had and are now missing.

As we contemplate Japan, with its many shrines and purifying architectures, what occurs to us? It offers us, perhaps, a model for recognising the sacrality of the natural world, not the anti-civilisational despair of men like Paul Kingsnorth and Theodore Kaczynski, but instead a truly re-enchanted Anglo-Celtic Catholicism, that restores the principle of harmony to the great endeavour of civilisation building.

So what can the West learn from Shinto, its opacities notwithstanding? That the very architecture we erect must be built in harmony with the natural energies of the earth, and that correctly ordering our artifice of stone and wood is as important for keeping away evil spirits as the exorcisms of priests and holy water.

For this, we must restore our own tradition of Christian animism, the great tradition of Chartres, the insights of the Doctors of the Church like St John Henry Newman. We begin by recalling that the cosmos is a great animal animated by a soul, as we are told by the great 12th century theologian Bernardus Sylvestris:

The life and well-being of the universe depend on sovereign and ancient causes: spirit, sentience, a source of motivation, and a source of order. Noys [nous] and the divine exemplars live eternal; without their life the visible creation would not live everlastingly. Hyle was in existence before it, preexistent in the substance and in the spirit of an eternal vitality. For it is not to be believed that the wise creator of insensate matter did not first establish a basis for it in a living source. The universe is an animal, and one may not detect the substance of animal life apart from the soul. Moreover, many things spring from the earth, but without the stimulus of a principle of growth neither tree nor shoot nor anything else would thrive. Thus from the life of the divine mind, from the spirit of Silva [hyle], from the world soul, from the growth-principle of created life, the eternity of the universe has its rise.

And so in this great animal understanding and awareness thrive, and draw nourishment from their antecedent principles. The firmament learns from the divine mind, the stars from the firmament and the universe from the stars, whence their life derives and how they may discern the course of existence. For the universe is a continuum, a chain in which nothing is out of order or broken off.1

Sylvestris goes on to describe the details of this great chain of beings which span the infinite distance between our lowly sublunar world and the highest Heaven. He explains through the voice of Urania, the celestial principal, that even at the lowest parts of the chain, in the nature within which we dwell, there are also spirits:

The first rank of spirits I call the guardians, those intermediary the interpreters, and the lowest the renegade angels. Consider now those earthly beings who inhabit the world. Wherever earth is most delightful, rejoicing in green hill, flowery mountainside, and river, or clothed in woodland greenery, there Silvans, Pans, and Nerei, who know only innocence, draw out the term of their long life. Their bodies are of elemental purity: yet these too succumb at last, in the season of their dissolution.

Sylvesteris is speaking in the tradition of the School of Alexandria, infused with Neoplatonism and hermetic doctrines, a tradition that continued until the time of the great illuminate of the 19th century, St John Henry Newman. In his autobiography Newman explicitly cites the school as having a profound influence on his own metaphysics and so the Doctor, already living in the devastation visited by the enlightenment, tried to remind his congregation of the spirits of the natural world, which science was desecrating:

But if such a one proceeds to imagine that, because he knows something of this world’s wonderful order, he therefore knows how things really go on, if he treats the miracles of Nature (so to call them) as mere mechanical processes, continuing their course by themselves,—as works of man’s contriving (a clock, for instance) are set in motion, and go on, as it were, of themselves,—if in consequence he is, what may be called, irreverent in his conduct towards Nature, thinking (if I may so speak) that it does not hear him, and see how he is bearing himself towards it; and if, moreover, he conceives that the Order of Nature, which he partially discerns, will stand in the place of the God who made it, and that all things continue and move on, not by His will and power, and the agency of the thousands and ten thousands of His unseen Servants, but by fixed laws, self-caused and self-sustained, what a poor weak worm and miserable sinner he becomes! Yet such, I fear, is the condition of many men nowadays, who talk loudly, and appear to themselves and others to be oracles of science, and, as far as the detail of facts goes, do know much more about the operations of Nature than any of us.

He wished to turn our minds back to a state of reverence and awe in the face of Nature, to become religiously disposed to its sacred currents:

Now let us consider what the real state of the case is. Supposing the inquirer I have been describing, when examining a flower, or a herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible things he was inspecting, who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God’s instrument for the purpose, nay whose robe and ornaments those wondrous objects were, which he was so eager to analyse, what would be his thoughts? Should we but accidentally show a rudeness of manner towards our fellow-man, tread on the hem of his garment, or brush roughly against him, are we not vexed, not as if we had hurt him, but from the fear we may have been disrespectful?

…

When then we walk abroad, and “meditate in the field at the even-tide,” how much has every herb and flower in it to surprise and overwhelm us! For, even did we know as much about them as the wisest of men, yet there are those around us, though unseen, to whom our greatest knowledge is as ignorance; and, when we converse on subjects of Nature scientifically, repeating the names of plants and earths, and describing their properties, we should do so religiously, as in the hearing of the great Servants of God, with the sort of diffidence which we always feel when speaking before the learned and wise of our own mortal race, as poor beginners in intellectual knowledge, as well as in moral attainments.2

This degree of sensitivity to the spiritual landscape is what we must recover, and would be deeply harmonious with the view of the world expressed in Shinto culture. Christianity risks, at times, holding an overly simplistic black and white binary vision of the cosmos and its spirits, those which are wholly good and those which are wholly evil, which does not fit quite so well in a landscape of Kami capable of mischief and ambiguous goodness, but St John Henry Newman reminds us that there are also many spirits which are partially fallen but still partially good and whom govern so much of this world:

Also, besides the hosts of evil spirits, I considered there was a middle race, neither in heaven, nor in hell ; partially fallen, capricious, wayward ; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. They gave a sort of inspiration or intelligence to races, nations, and classes of men. Hence the action of bodies politic and associations, which is so different often from that of the individuals who compose them. Hence the character and the instinct of states and governments, of religious communities and communions. I thought they were inhabited by unseen intelligences.3

If therefore the world is filled with good spirits and other spirits which are good but flawed why can we not honour them? We honour the good angels of course but we also honour our nations which are governed by flawed spirits, we put up statues and shrines to complex men like Napoleon and Caesar it seems to me no great leap to put up a shrine to the great and difficult spirit of the Thames, of Nottingham Forest or Snowden. It would be no offense to the Christian religion to perform rituals of blessing and exorcism at these shrines in order that the spiritual landscape too partakes in the blessing and Sacramental order over which Man has been placed as governor. It would likewise be no bad thing for our civic and cultural life to be reintegrated with sacral practice just as the Shinto practice of sumo maintains.

In 2025, for only the second time ever, the official sumo wrestling league held a tournament outside of Japan. Held at the Royal Albert Hall, just as it had been twenty-five years ago, I was fortunate enough to spectate at one of Japan’s great cultural expressions. I was not prepared, however, for the fact that I would also be participating in a religious ceremony, for sumo wrestling is not a simply sporting competition but rather an ancient Shinto ritual.

For at least three and a half thousand years, warriors have been engaging in ritual combat in order to bring about peace, prosperity and for the abundance of food harvests. As I sat in the hall I became drawn in to the rituals of exorcism which our little part of London underwent, with priests and holy salt. Each fighter before each bout would throw blessed salt onto the platform before him in order to scare away evil spirits, likewise the ritual stamping. By the end of the evening’s competition—repeated for a week—London had undergone more exorcisms than it perhaps any other time in its history! Every element of the competition was expressed with ceremonial elegance and precision and though the wrestling itself was greatly exciting I was overwhelmed by the sense of seeing a truly integrated socio-religious event. Here we had the cleansing of the land of bad spirits and the blessing of the harvest, competition between Warriors, the bringing of peace to the polity, the recognition of a sacred cosmos and the sacramental nature of the embodied world. All of this was performed with deep sobriety and sincerity.

How would we go about recovering our own spiritually rich cosmic vision, our animist Christianity? I am not proposing some gauche appropriation of Japanese practices and aesthetics, neither the building of Follies in imitation of the Victorian aristocrats. Shinto is precisely the complete and organic expression of total Japaneseness throughout every sphere of society, and so it rightfully belongs to them alone. What I wish to discover is what our own natural spiritual genius analogous to Shinto is as Anglo-celts. Of course this would be Christian. Christianity is the capstone and purifying agent of the natural genius which has almost disappeared, replaced by the corrupting structures of scientism, liberal democracy and capitalism—none of which of the expressions of natural spiritual genius. This does not mean that there cannot be an incorporation or synthesis of foreign elements of genius.

Japan itself exhibits this at its best, whether it’s its own form of Confucianism, or feng shui adapted to its own insights or perhaps most telling for our current exercise the tea ceremony itself. It is long-believed that the tea ceremony was originally developed as a response to the Roman Catholic mass which the Japanese observed and adapted its modes and rituals to an act of simple hospitality which is both thoroughly Japanese but built on partaking in a genius not originally its own. This ritual offers us the template for how we can again, in turn, learn and adapt the spiritual insights of this great and ancient animist civilisation as we turn to the task of restoring and inventing a new our own veneration of and reintegration with the Nature which God has given us to serve and to guard.

(Donations to the Benedictine community at New Norcia can be made here.)

Among modern Christians, it is often assumed without much critical reflection that “Jesus was a Jew”. This position, indeed, is very frequently asserted emphatically by scholars, pedagogues and pastors—presumably often intended to reverse or apologise for the Church’s historical attitude towards the “perfidious Jews” (a term which continued to appear in the official texts of Roman Catholic liturgies until the mid-20^th century.) Yet was Jesus really a Jew at all? This article looks at the question objectively, endeavouring to evaluate the evidence which is available. It is not the intention of the author to arrive at anything like a definitive or conclusive answer, but merely to indicate the ambiguities surrounding this complex issue.

Galilea versus Judea

The Gospels clearly and specifically identify Christ as Galilean (Mt 4:18-22; Mk 1:16-20, Lk 4:16-30, etc.). So strong was this identification that even in the 4^th century, the Roman emperor, Julian the Philosopher, wrote a polemical work against Christianity with the title Contra Galilaeos (‘Against the Galileans’). The region of Galilea lies well to the north of Jerusalem (at least a week’s journey in the 1^st century), with large portions of it in what is now Lebanon and occupied Syria. Shortly before His death, He predicted to His apostles, who were also Galileans, “After I have been raised from the dead, I will go ahead of you to Galilee and meet you there” (Mt 26:32).

There is incontrovertible evidence within the Gospels that the Jews during the time of Christ considered the Galileans to be non-Jews (goyim) and that they viewed them as inferiors and outsiders. Galilee itself is referred to in the Old Testament (Is 9:1) and the New (Matt 4: 15) as ‘Galilee of the Nations’ (or ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’). The Hebrew word found in Isaiah, rendered as ‘nations’ or ‘gentiles,’ is גויים (goyim), a term which served then (as it does now) as a derogatory appellation for non-Jews, emphasising cultural and ethnic alterity.

At one point in the Gospel, when Nicodemus, described as a leader among the Jews and a secret believer in Christ, defends the right of Jesus to a fair hearing and trial, the Jews reply to him: “Are you also from Galilee? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee” (Jn 7:52). Clearly, the Jews knew Nicodemus and his origins well, so the question of whether he was also from Galilee can only be understood as derisory.

We see an instance in which certain Jews accuse Christ of being a Samaritan, another group, who, though also monotheistic, were similarly regarded as goyim. Whether this was a genuine mistake or an intended insult, the comment manifests the fact the Jesus was identified as a non-Jew by the Jews themselves.

An objective reading of the Gospels (particularly that of John) show that Jesus is consistently framed in the dynamic of the narration as an outsider to the Jews. In John 5:15-18, one reads: The man [who had been cured of blindness] departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed. And so the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought to slay him, because he had done these things on the sabbath day. But Jesus answered them, “My Father keeps on working, and so I work”. Because of this the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, thus making himself equal with God.

Consistently throughout the Gospels, Christ, along with His Galilean apostles, are shown from differing from the Jews in many customs and observances. They mixed freely with the Samaritans, travelling through their villages and teaching them (Jn 4:4-42); but the Gospels state explicitly that “Jews do not mix with Samaritans” (Jn 4:9). Moreover, Jesus and his original disciples are reproached by the Jews on multiple occasions for their non-observances of Jewish customs regarding the Sabbath and washing of hands, etc.

So was Jesus really Jewish at all? The answer to this question depends upon how the term ‘Jewish’ is defined. At least as far as the authors of the Gospels were concerned, the Jews were a quite separate group of people to Christ and his original band of followers, and generally hostile towards them. Christ and His followers indeed believed in one, supreme God. But most of the goyim, who included Samaritans and Galileans, also believed in one Supreme God. For that matter, most educated Romans and Greeks had adopted a position that, ultimately, there was ultimately One Supreme Deity (the Platonic ‘Form of the Good’), the so-called “philosophical monotheism” expressed so beautifully by Plutarch:

But God is, we must declare; and is with reference to no time, but with reference to the eternal, the immovable, timeless, and indeclinable; that which there is nothing before nor after, nor more, nor past, nor older nor younger, but He being One with the one ‘Now,’ hath filled up the ‘Ever;’ and that which really is, alone is with reference to Him; neither born, nor about to be, nor growing, nor to have an end. In this way, therefore, ought we, when worshipping, to salute Him, and to address Him, or even, truly, as some of the ancients did, ‘Thou art One!’1

And it is highly significant that it was a Roman centurion (St. Longinus, according to tradition) who, upon witnessing Christ’s heroism in the face of the crucifixion, declared, “Truly, this man is a Son of God” (Mt 27:54).

The so-called goyim (including the Galileans), like almost all civilized cultures, believed in a system of ethical dealings congruent with the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would want them do to you,” which included, naturally, prohibitions of murder, theft, violence, etc., and also imperatives or exhortations to mutual charity, justice, and mercy—in short, the “essence of the law and the prophets” (Mt 7:12). Certainly, Jesus was ‘Jewish’ if the definition of Jewishness to extended to the point of simply believing in one God and teaching a system of ethics broadly congruent with this. But if the definition of Jewishness is to be broadened so far, then all Muslims, Christians, and, indeed, most philosophical Greeks and Romans, would have to be classed as ‘Jewish’—a position which is more than patently absurd.

What Language(s) did Jesus Speak?

In the ancient Mediterranean world, the ability to speak several languages was commonplace. Countless languages and dialects were in circulation, but the lingua franca, at the time of Christ, was Greek. Hence it is that all of the New Testament texts were originally written in Greek.

Did Jesus Himself speak Greek? Many contemporary scholars assume a negative answer to this question, but the evidence that He did is well-nigh overwhelming. He conversed with Pontius Pilate and Roman soldiers. The version of the Scripture he cites are all from the Septuagint, or Greek version of the Old Testament. He spent his childhood in Roman Egypt, (Mt 2:13–23) where the standard language, and especially the language of education and business, was Greek.

It is true that occasionally in the New Testament, specific words which Christ spoke are cited in Aramaic (e.g. Mk 5:41 & 14:36). But if this was the norm rather than the exception for him, why then would the Evangelists feel it necessary to cite and quote specific instances in the manner in which they do?

Is there a Conflict Between the Christian and Jewish Weltanschauungen?

This is an undeniably complex and, at present, sensitive question. While it is not readily answered, it is useful to reflect deeply upon it. Certain writers have portrayed or imaged Christ as simply a continuation or extension of a typically Judaic world-view and system of values. This position is exemplified in the early writings of Julius Evola:

The spread of Semitic influences in the Graeco-Roman, and later Nordic, world [was] largely due to Christianity. [….] The spirit of Israel, which had already instilled a collective sense of ‘guilt’ and ‘atonement’, became more prominent after the defeat and enslavement of the ‘chosen people.’[….] These forces, which acted in early Christianity, destroyed the European spirit.2

From this perspective, Christianity is generally portrayed as a ‘slave morality’, advocating conformism, collectivism, legalism, and surrender. Yet, the present author would argue, an examination of the actual life and teachings of Christ reveal the very opposite to be the case.

Such a position, i.e. that Christianity is not a ‘slave morality’ at all but its diametrical antithesis, was expressed by Richard Wagner, who also cites the ‘otherness’ of Christ, as a Galilean, to the Jews.

It is more than doubtful if Jesus himself was of Jewish extraction, since the dwellers of Galilee were despised by the Jews on express account of their impure origin, we may leave this point [……] to the historian. For us, it is sufficient to derive the ruin of the Christian religion from its drawing upon Judaism.3

Houston Steward Chamberlain likewise described Christianity, in its true and original form, as “a negation of Judaism,” and characterised the mission of Christ, who “transformed Judaism into its antithesis,” as:

To plant the flag of idealism on this ancient consecrated seat of the most obstinate materialism! To transform, as if by magic, the God of vengeance and war into a God of love and peace.4

Conclusion

It is the hope of the author that this short exploration of this question will offer the reader new and thought-provoking material for reflection and further reading. Whether or not one accepts the Christian faith and Christ as the perfect expression and incarnation of the eternal Logos, he must be acknowledged as an immense force, perhaps the greatest force of all, in the formation of our Western culture. At this point in history, the question of who Christ really has arguably never been more important and more critical for determining the future of humanity—and especially in recapturing of the inner Divinity of our nature, in and through which all that is good, noble, strong and free, exemplified par excellence in the person of Christ, subsists.

These ancient stories of curses by holy men, in which the punishment is to become a wolf-man or a werewolf—literally vir-wolf—illuminate a very interesting theme within the Christian scriptures.

Whereas the men entrusted by Christ to govern his Church are given the name of bishop, which can also be translated as shepherd—those who herd the sheep, the flock of the Lord—the evildoers, by implication the threats to the sheep, are wolves. Throughout the Scriptures, wolves are metaphors for the enemies of God’s people.

Ezekiel writes: Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get dishonest gain. (Ezek 22:27) And Christ, near the end of his ministry, tells his disciples: Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves… (Matt 10:16).

Yet as modern people we are often inclined to interpret stories of werewolves, when recounted in the lives of the Saints, through metaphorical lenses. The secular world has its own peculiar use of wolves for analogical purposes, particularly in the idea of a “lone wolf”, usually invoked to refer to isolated and potentially dangerous young white men who have taken against the liberal order.

Just as Scripture uses these images as metaphor, so too, we assume, do these ancient stories. Yet reports of lycanthropy are too widespread across both time and culture to dismiss so easily. In Constantinople 1542 AD werewolves became such a plague that Solyman II, called “the Magnificent”, personally led his Janissaries in skirmishes against them throughout the streets of the city “killing” at least 150 of these unnatural beasts.

Early 16th century France suffered similarly from a flood of cases, inducing the inquisition to step in. Maitre Jean Boin, OP., S.T.D., Prior of the Dominican convent at Poligny and Inquisitor General for Besancon provided over the trial of Pierre Burgot who confessed to striking a deal with three black robbed horsemen to save the lives of his sheep during an intense thunder and hail storm in which he agreed to acknowledge the chief horseman as lord and master, on his knees before the demon rider, renouncing God, Our Lady, the Saints and his baptism. Kissing the demon’s black hand his sheep were saved but his entrance into a desecrated life had only just begun. Years later a certain Michel Verdun would invite him to a secret sabbat wizards in the woods near Chateau Charlou where he was stripped naked and anointed with an ointment he experienced the transformation into a wolf-like creature. After this Pierre and Michel slaughtered many innocents including women and children. Many further trials have been left to us in the history books.

Throughout the mediaeval and early modern period monks, bishops and learned men discussed the nature of the werewolf and how to incorporate it within theological and philosophical frameworks. An old Poenitentiale Ecclesiarum Germaniae contains the following:

Hast thou believed what some were once wont to hold, namely that those who are commonly called Parcae can effect what they are often supposed to effect, namely that when a man is born they can direct and achieve his destiny, and moreover by a magic spell when-soever certain men will they are able to transform themselves into wolves, and such a one of this kind is called (teutonica) Werewulff, or else they transform themselves into an other animal shape as they list. If thou hast believed that Man made in God’s Image and Likeness can be essentially changed into another species or form by any power save that of Almighty God alone, thou must fast therefor ten days on bread and water.

A similar text is found in a Penitential of Bartholomew Iscanus, Bishop of Exeter, who died 1184. William of Auvergne a 13th century Bishop of Paris and an expert on the occult who coined the term “natural magic” wrote extensively of werewolfism in De Universo (pars. II, iii, cap 13) in which he discusses it as a species of demonic possession. Jean Bodin, one time Carmelite friar, jurist, professor of law and political theorist, made significant time in his intensely busy life to study particular cases of lycanthropy. In book II, c. VI of De La Demonomanie des Sorciers he opines, citing St Thomas Aquinas and others as authorities, that Demons can really and materially transform the body of a man into that of an animal.

To this very day, reliable witnesses recount strange occurrences involving wolf-men, and the bizarre testimonies of preternatural phenomena surrounding cursed land, such as Skinwalker Ranch in Uinta Basin, Utah, include tales of unnatural wolves. The particularly interesting thing about Skinwalker Ranch is what has been described as the “hitchhiker effect”: visitors to the ranch who engage in investigation often bring unwanted visitors back with them to their hometowns—all of which could easily be explained by hysteria and other psychological phenomena were it not for the fact that these “hitchhikers” are also experienced by individuals who know nothing of investigations at the ranch and merely come into contact with those who have visited.

A particularly striking set of testimonies involves people, sometimes children, who after spending time with investigators begin to notice themselves being watched from outside their homes by silent, standing wolf-men, whose sinister presence would have been interpreted as a curse in more theologically vibrant times.

The ancient religions, from Egypt to Babylon to that of the Hebrews, understood spiritual beings manifested as combinations of humanoid form and animal features. Though always terrifying, a certain sublimity accompanied these mysterious angelic beings whenever they were understood as intermediaries or messengers of transcendent light. But terror comes in different flavours, and with some of these beings neither glory nor the sublime reveals itself, but rather an existential dread, as though one were in the presence of a fracture in the order of reality itself. It is this latter perception which invariably follows stories of unnaturally large wolves and wolf-men.

Throughout history, men like Nebuchadnezzar, through their own fault, or others through accident of birth or circumstance, find themselves plagued by these spiritual parasites which bind themselves to the subtle bodies of men, obscuring their nature and their hearts. However, what can afflict men can also afflict greater corporate bodies, such as nations. One reading, by Diego Hernan Rossello, of Hobbes’s Leviathan (where the idea of homo homini lupus est—man is a wolf to man—appears) argues that seventeenth-century scholars were concerned with real lycanthropy, a melancholic syndrome that could transform humans into animals, and that Hobbes’ invocation of the wolf is rather less metaphorical than the modern interpretation might suggest. After all, who is less harmonious with the body politic than the howling, unhappy man, unable or unwilling to participate in the smooth running of the state?

We cannot be sure what kind of disordered gods enslaved the men who lived in the ancient near East but we do know that the great baptism that the region underwent in the early centuries of the first millennium was so effective, and its Demons so well exorcised that the land became home to some of the greatest spiritual centres and theological schools of the early church. The school of Nissibis in the culturally Mesopotamian area of modern-day Turkey, and the great school of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, a handful of miles from modern day Baghdad, are two examples of the widespread rich theological and philosophical culture of the newly Christianising West and central-south Asia. The darkness had been lifted and light was illuminating the hearts of an ancient and sophisticated civilisation. Unfortunately, the casting out of the evil spirits is not always the end of the story, as Christ tells us:

And when an unclean spirit is gone out of a man he walketh through dry places seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith: I will return into my house from whence I came out. And coming he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then he goeth, and taketh with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is made worse than the first. So shall it be also to this wicked generation. (Matt 12:43-45)

Before the seeds planted could reach their full maturity, the armies of the “light of Islam” salted the spiritual earth and brought about an emptying of the house of the East. This vacuum did not go unnoticed: the spirits returned and the devouring wolves took possession of the deserts. Following in the footsteps of the cult of Lykaean Zeus of which Plato speaks in the Republic, book VIII, when Socrates tells us that:

…anyone who tastes the one piece of human innards that’s chopped up with those of other sacrificial victims must inevitably become a wolf. Haven’t you heard that story?

Ever since predation of the weak and the young became the law of the sand, lupine spirits took possession of the men of these foreign lands forming them in their own likeness. In the stomach-turning practice of the Bacha Bazi for instance we see an exact representation of the lupine predation described by Strato:

By night, on pleasure bent, my dinner o’er,

Like to a wolf, I came before the door

Of Aristocidus, and then I saw

His lamb-like son, and unto him I swore

To give him many gifts, and plighted troth

To him with kisses twain; now am I loath

Do vine-bred fancey were indeed the growth.

Now these tribesmen have come to our shores and Britain has entered her great passion. They’ve come devouring children and women, they’ve come as a flood, wolves among sheep. The rape genocide of Britain would be bad enough where it not for the fact that our elite class have also become wolves. Plato also warned about this as his dialogue continues:

Then doesn’t the same happen with a leader of the people who dominates a docile mob and doesn’t restrain himself from spilling kindred blood? He brings someone to trial on false charges and murders him (as tyrants so often do), and, by thus blotting out a human life, his impious tongue and lips taste kindred citizen blood. He banishes some, kills others, and drops hints to the people about the cancellation of debts and the redistribution of land. And because of these things, isn’t a man like that inevitably fated either to be killed by his enemies or to be transformed from a man into a wolf by becoming a tyrant? (Republic, Book VIII)

Since parliament gave license to the killing of unborn children, millions of little ones have been slaughtered, devoured by the wolves of our New World. Unlike the blood lust of war here we are confronted by the taste of “kindred citizen blood” and the emergence of tyranny. Surrounded by enemies without and within, the tribes of this island are scattered and demoralised, desperately in need of shepherds. What great shepherds we have had in the past; just as sometimes the spiritual wolves manifest in physical phenomena, so too have the bishops wielded their spiritual sword on the physical plain taking up arms to defend Christian women and children.

One thinks of the illustrious Saint-Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg, who oversaw the protection of his city against the repeated attacks of the Magyars leading the defence with bravery and honour. Likewise, Saint Heahmund, ninth century Bishop of Sherborne, a warrior who died fighting alongside the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred I of Wessex and the future King Alfred the Great defending these hallowed lands against the Danes. Carrying a sword to defend his flock, the church recognised him as a martyr.

But you, bishops of this modern world, are you all hired hands? (let the reader understand). Are you all bought and paid for by the enemy? Or is there any among you who stand for your flock as the children of Europe who are being devoured by foreign wolves?

My purpose here is not to demonise wolves, I believe them to be extraordinary, noble creatures. Many Saints forged friendships with wolves. Saint Francis and Saint Ruan who had such an affinity that—ironically in the context of this piece—while in Brittany he was accused of being a wolf in disguise! When Saint Edmund of East Anglia was brutally murdered by the Danes in 869AD it was a wolf who discovered his severed head and protected it from scavengers. When the party searching for the Saint discovered the wolf it was holding the head between its paws, crying out “Hic, hic, hic…” and they marvelled and praised God and honoured the wolf.

The lupine spiritual creatures we are dealing with in this piece are instead the manifestation of the fallen face of wolf-nature, the wolf as lost in the wilderness and whose condition is exacerbated by man’s priestly abdication. The learned Jesuit Cornelius a Lapide, wrote that the evening wolves are demons who “prowl abroad in the dark hours, and urge man to every kind of lust and murder, and to other infinite crimes”. So intimate is this association of the wolf with evil that in early English the word Wolf is used interchangeably with the devil—the wolf of hell.

The ancient constitutions of the West already lay out what must be done to Wolf Men. One early Norman law proclaimed that for certain heinous crimes (no doubt rape genocide would be included), a man is to be declared wargus esto—become a wolf, homo sacer—and is to be hunted and slain by those who love peace and goodness. The laws laid down by Saint Edward the Confessor continued this line of thought:

Concerning Those Who Flee the Peace of the Church… And if thereafter he shall be found and can be taken, let him be delivered to the king, or let him defend his head [i.e. save his life]; for from the day of his outlawry he shall bear a wolf’s head, which is called among the English wluesheued. And this sentence is common to all outlaws.

Stand up Shepherds of God and protect the sheep for it is not the spirit of the age you answer to but to the Consuming Fire. Fear Him who has a store house of millstones for those who allow the little ones to stumble. Protect us from the tyrannical wolves in power who lust for the blood of the weak, protect us from the wolf invaders who are devouring our children, take up the sword that the Lord has given you and bring peace back to this hallowed land.