Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

2nd – 3rd April, 2011. University of Kent at Canterbury. Confirmed speakers include Luis Eduardo Luna, Paul Devereux, Mike Jay, Rick Doblin, Andy Roberts, Amanda Fielding, Andy Letcher. Plus films and music.

It’s a good number of years since the UK has seen a psychedelics-oriented conference like this, and it’s sure to be an intensely stimulating gathering. See you there?

Facebook, plus more details and registration.

Royal Academy Schools, 1-2 October 2010

Researching a series of unexplained incidents at this historic building, artist Blue Firth uncovered a first-hand account of apparent poltergeist activity in the artists’ studios.

While patrolling the 18th century corridors one night in 2008, Red Collar guard Nathan Phillips experienced something that prevented him from finishing his shift: “When I got back to where the skeletons are kept, the doors all slammed shut — like boom, boom, boom one after another. I tried to make out what it could be and checked all the doors again. I got to the same point in the same sequence and the bangs happened all over again. I didn’t finish my patrol that night.”

To make sense of what happened to Nathan, Blue has collaborated with parapsychologist Dr David Luke and writer Mark Pilkington. As preparatory research they undertook investigative training sessions with the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP).

Bringing together their knowledge and experience of the paranormal and arts fields, the trio have devised an event that merges Blue’s art practice with David and Mark’s expertise in making sense of the unexplained. The end result is a unique participatory experiment in which the audience are both observers and the observed, the haunters and the haunted.

Participants will be asked to complete psychological and physiological assessments before and after entering the site of the haunting, which will be monitored for any unusual occurrences. The vigil will take place under carefully controlled conditions and in total darkness.

Combining authentic investigative procedures with subtle performative aspects, Vigil examines and subverts the roles of audience expectation, spectatorship and belief.

Spaces for both nights are extremely limited so we advise reserving your position soon.

Visit the Royal Academy web site to buy tickets.

I’m very excited, and damnably lucky, to have been granted a press pass for this year’s World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland (21st to 24th March). I’ll be interviewing a number of the luminaries and “rising researchers” there, and using these interviews as the basis for an in-depth feature for Dreamflesh Journal (as well as posting the full interviews here).

I’m looking forward to seeing for the first time Stanislav Grof, Dennis McKenna and Ralph Metzner. Hopefully I’ll get round to interviewing Jeremy Narby, after nearly doing so a couple of times. And if Christian Rätsch rustles up anything approaching his impression of himself turning into a panther on his first acid trip that he did at Bath in 2004, I’ll be more than content.

Of course, as with all conferences, the real gems will be found hidden away in unexpected encounters between scheduled events, buried deep in late-night conviviality, and crystallized out of nowhere by the cumulative force of the ideas surrounding you.

I know of the people behind the event, the Gaia Media Foundation, from back in the ’90s—they used to stock Towards 2012. It’s great that they’re still going, stronger than ever, and putting together such catalytic gatherings.

by Gyrus

Most of the writings in this book were written during a very strange, obsessive and fruitful time in my life. I was, as ever, experimenting with various ways of altering consciousness and interacting with the environment in magical ways. My own trip, the various complexes that I’d become aware of in my psyche, seemed to resonate uncannily with certain aspects of the prehistoric landscapes I was exploring—for the most part, Ilkley Moor and the Avebury monuments. As I dug deeper into their histories and associations, it sometimes felt like I was unearthing buried contents of my own mind.

There’s no certain outcome from getting into stuff like this. You can go off the rails a bit; you can publish some very dubious theories that say more about you than prehistory. My own approach was to keep my critical mind alert, but to embrace the fact that there’s a grey area between digging into your own unconscious and unearthing the realities of prehistoric life. How could it be otherwise, if we shake off the modern illusion of individual isolation, and accept that all our roots tangle together in the deep past?

There’s a long tradition of overlap between psychology and the study of the past. Carl Jung wanted to study archaeology, but his family couldn’t afford to send him to a university that taught the subject. So, he ended up doing medicine, which led him to psychiatry. The metaphor of archaeology remained with him, though. The crucial dream of 1909 that led to his theory of the collective unconscious involved him descending into the lowest level of the basement underneath a house, passing through a Roman level before encountering scattered bones. “This must be a prehistoric cave!” he exclaimed before waking up.

Oddly enough, my own plunge into the past was largely triggered by something above, in the sky. I had a nasty experience with chemicals at Glastonbury Festival—as you do—where I saw a vortex in the sky that threatened to drag me into it, to my death. The image of the vortex haunted me for years.

Looking back, with a playful eye for the movements of fate, I wonder… What led me after that experience to move to Leeds, a short bus ride from Ilkley Moor? And what led me to Ilkley Moor, where I was gobsmacked to find oodles of prehistoric rock art, the type of exotic and mysterious creations that part of me assumed were confined to caves in the Australian desert?

I had already written most of my essay The Devil & The Goddess, which takes ancient snake goddesses as a central theme, when I discovered by chance that a Romano-Celtic snake goddess—Verbeia—was worshipped as an embodiment of the River Wharfe, which runs past the moors and through Ilkley. I delved deep into etymology, and found that both “Verbeia” and “Wharfe” had potential roots in words referring to turning, swirling, and vortices. I quickly made connections with the turning, swirling Swastika Stone carving on the moor, and the vortex-like concentric circles of the common cup-and-ring marks carved onto many of the moor’s stones. Endless details, myriad connections, all gave me the vertiginous sense that I had psychically meshed with the local landscape and its history. My own association of the vortex with death and altered states permeated my reading of the rock carvings. I railed against the narrow-mindedness of academia (without having actually read much academic research, of course), and proffered my own visionary interpretations in the small press.

Before long, I was reading Richard Bradley’s book on the predominantly cup-and-ring rock art of Atlantic Europe. This was around 1997. Almost a decade before, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson had caused a storm in archaeological circles with their paper, ‘The Signs of All Times’, which proposed that much Palaeolithic art was inspired by shamanic trance states. Drawing on their ideas about geometric shapes—grids, spirals, dots, and so on—representing the hallucinations from the early stages of trance, archaeologists like Bradley started to speculate about the Neolithic and Bronze Age cup-and-rings. Could they represent these early parts of the shamanic altered state? Lab tests had shown that vortex-like imagery was common as people were drawn into the deeper levels of trance. And entry into the Otherworld was frequently associated with death by shamanic cultures. Could the occurrence of spirals and cup-and-rings at the entrances to Irish passage graves be explained by this connection?

Well, of course it could. I’m all for keeping an open mind about prehistory, this vast period that we’ll never be certain about. But the logic and coherence of the “shamanic trance” theory of rock art, while it obviously can’t be applied anywhere and everywhere, means to me that it has to be placed in the foreground of our collection of possible models for the origins of this art.

Now, I’m really interested in how I managed to come to this conclusion independently, after a few years of messing around with strange drugs and staggering about West Yorkshire’s moors, when earnest academics had taken most of their careers of diligent study to get there. Does this mean that we can throw all our books away and get to the truth of the past by wrenching the lids off our minds? Sadly not. However, I’m not entirely convinced that it was blind luck that led me to this theory that academia has now validated. There really is something to be said for getting down to the basic structures of the psyche through experimentation, and using the data gathered from this first-hand experience to speculate about that period when these basic structures were being laid down—and, for the first time, expressed in material artifacts. It’ll never be an exact science, but it can function as an extremely valuable adjunct to scientific exploration. Some common-sense participation in the ways of magic, animism and altered states could, I believe, help ground abstract theories in the realities of the human body and the many qualities of the human mind that persist through changing historical circumstances. Anthropologists often go a bit native and live their subject’s life a little; why not archaeologists too?

If personal experience can contribute to the study of the past, what can the past contribute to our experience now? For me, history was always my worst subject at school. I’m still pretty patchy on all that stuff that happened between the Romans and the 20th century. My route into the past was Terence McKenna’s theories about the role of psychedelic mushrooms in the origins of human consciousness. Suddenly, someone was drawing compelling links between the direct experiences in my life that fascinated and inspired me, and the grander, often bewildering sweep of human history.

Recently, Andy Letcher’s book Shroom has taken this type of theory to task, heavily criticizing modern psychedelic culture for projecting its own agendas back onto the past. And many pagans, lead by Ronald Hutton, who was a big inspiration for Letcher, have for a while been taking apart the historical fantasies of Wiccans and others who believe themselves to be continuing a genuine lineage of magical practice. Why should we need validation for our current activities so much that we’re prepared to delude ourselves about history?

I do value the hard information and refreshing cynicism of Letcher and Hutton’s work—it’s priceless among subcultures that often succumb to insular illusions. But I think their views can be seen as the flip-side to the fantasies of historical validation that they try to demolish. To polarize things a bit: one side is so blindly in need of validation, that they are prepared to be certain about things that are up in the air; but the other side seems to carry itself with a kind of modern intellectual machismo that believes this need for validation from the past can be disposed of entirely. Science is the watchword, and despite the archaeological cliché that “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”, if hard proof isn’t forthcoming, we have to turn away. This seems to be as modern as Wiccan revivalism, and at least as damaging as they believe any uncritical reconstruction of past beliefs is.

We can’t just believe what we want about the past. But I feel we can’t just leave it be, or accept the “hard evidence” of orthodox archaeology as all that remains. The past is alive, and constantly expresses itself through the present, into the future. This isn’t determinism, it’s just the way things are. You can take a more complex angle if you want, and say that it’s our relationship to the past that is alive. The imagination is one of the most potent forces in human life, and it loves the past. Especially ancient times. It seems wise to engage consciously with this love, to nurture it and guard against its excesses, rather than decry it and hope it goes away.

Dreams, as Jung found, are particularly enthused about the past. Nothing is simple and straightforward in dreams; their metaphoric nature and tricksterish layering of meaning always defy any rational attempt to codify and delineate them. But they respond eagerly when you feed your head with images and stories of ancient things. The outward forms of prehistory, when they permeate your waking life, can seep into your dream world and help give shape to long-neglected patterns in your personal history.

Anyone’s deeper complexes can be as uncertain and hard to pin down as the forever lost—but deeply resonant—rituals of prehistoric tribes. Just as we can’t pin down such archaic events with archaeological certainty, the precise identification of our own ancient moments of significance may forever elude us.

But likewise, just as the lingering, intangible traces of these moments can profoundly shape our lives from behind the scenes, we will never be able to fully wipe away our subtle bonds to the deep past of the species. In both personal and collective psychohistory, our unceasing curiosity should be tempered by a light touch that respects the reality and the importance of the past’s essential unknowability. The lack of hope for solid conclusions needn’t be a cause of despair; it can animate our investigations with a playful delight, and a respect for irreducible mystery.

[audio:2007-11-06-metageum-pauldevereux.mp3]
(Download 99 MB MP3)

The Metageum conference in Malta, “exploring the megalithic mind”, from which I’ve recently returned, was quite an event.

Certainly over-ambitious, it scheduled nine successive 13-hour days of talks, workshops, field trips, art exhibits, trance dances and performances, with contributions from a diverse array of academics, independent researchers, popular authors, artists, musicians and earth mystics. There were many dramas, organisational snafus, last-minute schedule changes, and the conference was unfortunately under-attended.

However, it was also one of the most inspiring pools of people I’ve swum in, and it was great to have such a leisurely dip. The schedule necessitated missing a morning here and an evening there, just to process things and relax into the pleasant Mediterranean November. But over the week I discerned a “conference conversation” welling up, with ideas criss-crossing between formal presentations, parties and dreams of their own accord. The boundaries between science, art, mysticism and daily life became pretty permeable. Peter Lloyd, Susan Waitt, and everyone else who helped organise and facilitate the event deserve recognition for staging such a fertile experiment.

I did plan to do a full “review” on returning, but it was just too unwieldy an experience to capture in a concise summing-up. I’ll content myself with nods towards some of the great people I met, plus some MP3s I recorded while there. Oh, you can also check out my photos (mostly of the astonishing Maltese Neolithic temples).

Archaeoacoustics

It was great to spend some time with Charla and Paul Devereux. I’ve been threatening to interview Paul for some years now, and it’s just not happened. Oddly, I was uninspired to do so during Metageum. One day…

Paul was at Metageum to talk about his latest cause, archaeoacoustics: the study of sound’s role in ancient monuments, sites and art. Together with Thomas Anderson (an inspiring sonics enthusiast / physicist / skate dude from Nashville, involved with Paul in the International Consciousness Research Laboratory), he also made use of his time in Malta to do some assessments of the famed Hypogeum, an underground Neolithic tomb complex with undoubtedly interesting acoustic properties. Paul classes the nascent field of archaeoacoustics as being where archaeoastronomy was in the ’60s. Given his exemplary record of trail-blazing in archaeology, we should keep an eye (or ear) out for this.

Paul’s research in this area is pretty cutting-edge, so while I did record his formal presentation, before posting it I’m waiting for him to check it over in case there’s anything in it he doesn’t want published in a half-baked form. Watch this space…

UPDATE: Paul’s talk can now be heard and/or downloaded here.

Also keep an eye out for Time & Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness & Culture, a new peer-reviewed publication edited by Paul and Neil Mortimer (former editor of 3rd Stone). Contributions come from esteemed Mayanists Dennis and Babara Tedlock (reappraising beliefs in “earth changes” in 2012), Benny Shanon (on psychotropic plants and the Old Testament), Jeremy Harte (on the age of the Devil in Dartmoor), Robert Wallis (on animism and rock art), and many more. If Metageum wasn’t enough, the launch of this journal surely tells us that something is in the air. Subscriptions are currently being offered at a reduced rate until the end of 2007, so get in there!

Art from Atlantis

Erik Davis arrived with his old friend Christopher Fülling, who gave a presentation on his involvement in creating the Atlantis-themed opera for the Burning Man festival. As one who spent very little time among the wackiness of Atlantis theories before deciding they were of mild interest to social anthropologists at best, it was a disarming thrill to be captivated and charmed by Christopher’s exposition of his Atlantis trip, a fascinating mixture of knowing New Age lurve, exhuberant Playa bacchanalia, and respectful postmodern art appropriation.

Trying to subvert the New Age’s lack of conscious political responsibility as well as our culture’s frequently puritanical cynicism, the project looked like a load of fun. Christopher also gave a demonstration of his 3-dimensional “Atlantean tarot”, an octahedron supplemented by four pyramids to form a larger pyramid, each facet decorated with images and glyphs drawn from a consciously fabricated Atlantean symbol system. I’d been party to a personal reading at a party a few nights before, which I have to say was great. I’d been deeply disturbed by a stupendously screwed-up dream the previous night, and Christopher’s divination helped unearth the enlightening side of it. In such consultations, the person doing the reading performs a crucial mediatory role between the querent and the symbol system, treading a subtle balance between guiding and stepping back to give the querent permission to allow their own unconscious wisdom to unfold. Christopher proved to be a dab hand.

The motivations behind the Atlantean opera seem to have moved on for him, though, and he’s currently involved in an amazing-looking project to create an “Art Monastery” in a converted convent in northern Italy.

The entheogens panel

Sadly, Benny Shanon couldn’t make to do his talk about ayahuasca and artistic creativity. I mentioned to Peter Lloyd that there were a number of notable people with interests in psychedelics and art there anyway, so why not have an impromptu panel discussion?

Come Wednesday evening, I happened across Erik Davis, Laurence Caruana and others just about to order food at a restaurant near the conference venue. (A number of artists and photographers had work exhibited during the conference, but the pieces that stood out most for me were Laurence’s vivid, syncretic works that blended myths and symbols with a Gnostic eye for hidden harmonies—see above.) Erik and Laurence each rolled their fingertips together and said, “Ahhhhh, Gyrus!” in a conspiratorial tone. I immediately guessed they were “the impromptu panel”, and wanted to rope me in to fill things out. I was feeling good and breezy, so I assented.

The panel wasn’t exactly structured, and it was held in the intimate setting of the Shisha bar in the upper reaches of the venue, so it turned into more of a group discussion. It threatened to descend into knotty philosophizing at one point, but some interesting ideas were broached. Note that my mike was directed towards the panel, and as I was engaged with this I didn’t have the time to point it at audience members when they spoke—these bits are a little quiet. Peter Lloyd introduces, Erik talks first, then Laurence, then me.

[audio:2007-11-07-metageum-entheogens.mp3]
(Download 95 MB MP3)

The archaeologists

Respect has to be paid to Simon Stoddart and Caroline Malone, two leading archaeologists who have spent much of the past 20 years excavating the so-called Brochtorff Circle, another hypogeum or Neolithic funerary catacomb, as part of the Gozo Project. They presented their laboriously elaborated datasets of bone and artifact categorization and placement with clarity and enthusiasm, doing a job of mediation between bewildering esoteric information and the wider community that’s probably as tricky in its own way as any shaman’s task.

Their tentative efforts at interpretation were a little disappointing, but conjuring interpretations that appeal to people like me is obviously not their forté, probably not even their job. They’re just finalizing the final results of their exhaustive data gathering, so it’s early days for interpretation; and at least they had a few stabs.

Some finds—such as the apparently prime placement of three male corpses at the lowest level of a large communal burial—caused friction with the strong Goddess contingent at the conference. And I have to say I felt that some of their interpretive moves were as much motivated by reaction to Goddess worshippers as these Gimbutas-inspired people are motivated by reaction to current patriarchy. Objectivity, as Erik showed in his talk, is less to do with which individual has gained the most “balanced” perspective than it has to do with the collective apprehension of complexity manifested over time by diverse groups pooling and debating their ideas.

It was encouraging to find such rigorous data-fiends as Simon and Caroline mixing with more wayward researchers, and pleasant to find them so good-humoured and charming to boot.

Chanting in the Hypogeum

After a couple of false starts in trying to fulfill the booking I’d made to visit the Hypogeum, it was great to find myself in a relatively intimate bunch of people (myself, Erik, Christopher, and three women), which included Wende Bartley, a very capable musician and vocalist who led us in a semi-improvised chanting and toning session.

The Hypogeum isn’t the only underground Neolithic tomb in Malta, but it’s the best preserved and most famed. It’s surreal to walk in off a typical urban Maltese street (see picture), through an entrance like your typical modern museum, then down a walkway into an ancient tomb complex carved out of the living rock, a bewitching combination of rough stone tunnelling, exquisitely fashioned chambers, and wild spiralling red ochre art on the roof. None of the images of it I’ve seen give any real sense of the space, like the architected large intestine of a partially artificial stone beast.

Here’s the full recording of our chanting session:

[audio:2007-11-09-hypogeum.mp3]
(Download 67 MB MP3)

If you’ve not got time to make your way through that, the finale is worth a listen at least. Christopher—an operatic tenor—led me and Erik in a chant as the women did their thing in another part of the complex. It’s amazing how perfectly you can hear the women’s voice merge in—effects like this, it is speculated, may have been designed. I’m a little off here I think, but it’s pretty cool for a spontaneous performance:

[audio:2007-11-09-hypogeum-finale.mp3]
(Download 3 MB MP3)

Wrapping up

Erik Davis gave the final talk of the proceedings, a virtuosic and impassioned attempt to fold the conference’s many threads into a multi-dimensional image of engaged, collective apprehension of prehistory:

[audio:2007-11-11-metageum-erikdavis.mp3]
(Download 72 MB MP3)

A couple of vids

I loved the rock-cut tombs at Xemxija. The earliest human constructs in Malta, they’re tiny caves cut into a rocky hillside. Only marked by small piles of rocks, you can squeeze through the tiny holes and check them out first-hand. They’re so small that photos would never convey anything of them, so I shot a little video on my snapshot camera. It’s dingy but it gives some atmosphere, and someone does some good toning at the end…

And, just for fun, here’s a taste of the rough-but-fun ferry crossing when we went on a day trip to Gozo, the smaller island next to Malta:

We know from the biological sciences that humans have evolved from other animals, and we know from our own direct experience that humans have consciousness. Given these two facts, it makes sense to assume that human consciousness evolved from pre-human consciousness. In other words, other animals are sentient, aware beings just like us. Thus, understanding animal consciousness may help reveal our own origins and the dynamics of our minds.

Actually this isn’t wholly a blindspot. For example, Richard Dawkins admirably puts his money where his mouth is in his support for The Great Ape Project, which aims to extend basic legal rights to our closest cousins.

Still, the specter of Christianity and humanism’s obsession with our “special status” in the scheme of life, and Descarte’s mechanical animals vision, continue to haunt our general paradigm for relating psyche and consciousness to other-than-human life. With brilliant minds like David Abram and Jeremy Narby as advisors, CIR looks very interesting indeed.

The ever-clued-up Bob Trubshaw just brought an exciting-looking week-long conference in Malta to my attention:

Metageum 2007: Exploring the Megalithic Mind
An inter-disciplinary international conference on approaches to understanding the origins of our megalithic legacy
- The Caraffa Stores, Birgu, Island of Malta
- 3rd-11th November 2007

Speakers that I’m familiar with include earth mysteries maestro Paul Devereux, ayahuasca phenomenologist Benny Shanon and neo-shamanism scholar Robert Wallis. I’m sure there’ll be some good surprises alongside them.

Besides the chance to explore Malta’s astonishing megalithic monuments, there’s a fantastic openness to “experiential” goings-on in evidence. Especially exciting are New York’s Body Temple troupe, who are facilitating trance-dance workshops throughout the week.

I’ve signed up. Maybe see you there?

Today I went to cast some offerings into the River Avon as part of some ritual work I’m doing. I eyed my umbrella on the way out, but it seemed like a bright, placid day, so I left it hanging there (rarely a good idea in a West Country winter). Down by the river, I watched from a footbridge as some people walked round the jetty I work on. Some little fish seemed to be jumping in the water; or at least, that’s what it looked like until I saw how prevalent the ripples were…

I held my palm out and felt no drops of rain. Could it really be raining just over there and not here? Indeed, a bank of light drizzle was moving towards me, at such a slow rate that it took about 30 seconds to traverse the 10 feet or so between me and the bank. Noticing that the people I’d seen had moved along, I walked down to my spot.

It started getting a little heavier as I sat there, so after I’d done my thing, I walked off before I started getting drenched. By the time I was walking along the road towards the Clifton suspension bridge, the rain was abating, and had stopped by the time I was walking up the Zig Zag path. A vast rainbow arced over Clifton, from the Observatory on the downs over to the city centre.

It’s happened before for me, this synchronicity between outdoor ritual work and the weather. I suspect it’s common. Sometimes it doesn’t need ritual, it’s just an unfolding interaction between the flow of consciousness and emotion and the elements. Nothing that could be charted to satisfy the scientific urge; even so, something that strikes the attentive mind and heart as stepping out of the private realm in a way that renders terms like “fancy” and “projection” naggingly redundant.

Weather magic, often in the form of the “rain dance”, is one of the more common forms of magic to have penetrated the popular Western imagination. Like love spells, it deals with a system so complex that modern science genuinely seems to have hit the limits of its predictive and manipulative power, leaving it shrouded in a cloak of irreducible mystery, and thus ripe for a magical approach.

But it’s something less specific I’m getting at here; none of my experiences of weather changes accompanying rituals have involved any intent to affect the weather. Rather, the weather seems to have played a role in reflecting the energy of the ritual itself, an affirmative dance between the two.

I once headed to the Badger Stone on Ilkley Moor to offer some blood (my own) to the river goddess Verbeia. My sense was that she was connected somehow to the moors as well as the river, and I decided to petition the goddess herself for help in uncovering the connection. As I approached the stone, rain started to fall. By the time I got there, it became sleety. As the ritual peaked, it started hailing, and the wind from behind me (from the south) became so strong that as I looked at the cup-mark on the stone where I’d dripped blood, hail was hitting the back of my head and creating an intense tunnel effect in my vision. I wound things down, and the hail softened. As I walked away from the stone, the rain stopped altogether.

(I later discovered that the weather was more tightly bound to this ad hoc rite than I suspected. In Scotland, similar cup-marked stones are sites where libations—usually milk—were frequently offered to gruagach, elemental spirits. One rock in Colonsay was called “the well of the south wind”, referring to the power it gave the chief of the MacPhees to summon this wind at will.)

In art, when an expression imputes attributes like feeling and intent to non-human phenomena, it is known as a “pathetic fallacy”. Coined by John Ruskin in an 1856 volume of his Modern Painters, this term has sat in a corner of my mind, ever since it found its way in there in some English lesson, as a withering condemnation of anthropomorphism in general, not just in art. (And no, I couldn’t resist anthropomorphising the term itself.) It’s been an education to look more deeply at it in order to write this.

Even though a certain university’s “glossary of literary theory” bills it as “a term used by John Ruskin to decry the ascription of human attributes, traits, feelings, and so forth to nonhuman objects”, Ruskin himself is less simplistic. As an artistic device, he knows it makes no sense to decry it outright. However, both informed and slightly befuddled by his strong Victorian dualism between intellect and feeling, he distinguishes several classes of poet according to how they are able to negotiate this rather dubious exchange of feeling between the human and the environment:

So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself—a little flower, apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be, that crowd around it.

There’s a certain three-step resonance with one of those hard-to-source Oriental sayings: “Before I studied Zen, a mountain was just a mountain. After I began to study Zen, a mountain was no longer just a mountain. Then, when I completed my studies, the mountain became a mountain again.” The pathetic fallacy is only decried by Ruskin when it’s insincere or when it seems to be overwhelming the poet, i.e. when the emotion involved is either absent or fumbled.

The greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties, acuteness of feeling, and command of it.

Yet if Ruskin intended to coin a potentially positive, or at least neutral term, why “pathetic”, and why “fallacy”?

In Ruskin’s day, “pathetic” mostly held to its Greek origins in pathos, and meant “relating to the emotions”. The fact that pathos also seems to refer to suffering as well as feeling in general could probably inspire several psychohistorical studies. For now, it’s interesting to note the modern evolution of the word “pathetic“:

Meaning “arousing pity, pitiful” is first recorded 1737. Colloquial sense of “so miserable as to be ridiculous” is attested from 1937.

My Concise Oxford Dictionary (1990) lists it as a “British colloquialism” meaning “miserably inadequate”. It would be glib, but not entirely without grounds, to see here the cumulative influence of the notorious English contempt for strong emotions—nurtured by puritanical religion, science’s lust for impassive “objectivity”, and the Industrial Revolution’s demands on everyday life.

One suspects that despite his obvious intelligence, Ruskin was very much a man of his times, and of his country. While he chose “pathetic” as a technically correct term, his age’s growing distrust of emotional truth and dismissal of animism (outside the patrolled confines of art) found an outlet in his choice of this word, which was carrying more and more negative baggage in the popular mind.

So, why “fallacy”? Simply, Ruskin thought that any feelings, intentions, or other attributes reserved for humans can only be imputed by us to non-human phenomena. Even though the artistic use of this imputation may be praised as the work of genius, it is nevertheless false.

Ramsey Dukes, in S.S.O.T.B.M.E. and elsewhere, has written of the four “cultures”, or modes of apprehending the world: Art, Religion, Science and Magic. To simplify the work of a very subtle writer, he sees them as being discreet, to an extent. They’re not (or needn’t be) in competition with each other: they’re like apples and oranges (and pears and kumquats). However, he does see them as successive reigning principles in a cyclic process, at least in Western culture.

That we have recently been living through a scientific phase needs little debate, and it is clearly Ruskin’s place in the early part of this phase that leads him to use the word “fallacy”. Anthropomorphism is scientifically invalid; so much so, that we may as well drop the “scientifically” bit. Science is “common sense”, the triumphant arbiter of truth itself.

In talking of the classes of poet he feels he has discerned in examining the pathetic fallacy, Ruskin says:

I separate these classes, in order that their character may be clearly understood; but of course they are united each to the other by imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, according to the influences to which it is subjected, passes at different times into the various states. Still, the difference between the great and less man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of alterability. (emphasis in original)

To me this has clear resonance with Dukes’ concept of the magician as one who integrates in himself all four “cultures” (Art, Religion, Science & Magic) or elements (Earth, Air, Fire & Water—but do note that Dukes does not equate particular “cultures” with particular elements). The point is to be flexible.

This emphasis on “alterability”, for me, exists in a certain tension with Ruskin’s final conclusion, which largely amounts to distinguishing between the pathetic fallacy with and without the distancing use of “as if” or “like”—similar to what we’re taught as the difference between a simile and metaphor. For Ruskin, forgoing “as if” testifies to a weakness of character that is unable to resist being engulfed by the emotions that suffuse both the body and the perceived environment.

So much for “alterability”; the lines are clearly drawn, and giving in to the full force of emotions is a one-way trip for morbid romantics.

While science teachers may worry about animism creeping into their lessons, they may not fully appreciate that their fear is not of an alien intruder. Anthropology has taught us that the psyche of Homo sapiens is naturally animist, and fear of animism in modern science is fear of a weakening of the rational structure hastily erected on top of this sturdy baseline granted us by evolution. Only feebly integrated with its psychobiological foundations, it creaks in the wind and bolsters itself with paranoia.

Modern linguistics and philosophy also teaches us that some things that science has been fearful of are actually hard-wired into our foundations:

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

“Air” and “spirit” are synonymous in most ancient languages, so perhaps it is no surprise that the weather attends to, reflects and participates in our magico-spiritual acts. And in perceiving this as such, in accepting our direct experience of these phenomena, in recognising our rational apprehension of them as an abstracted superimposition—valid only in a limited sense—we connect with what it means to be human.

As we become conscious of the unseen depths that surround us, the inwardness or interiority that we have come to associate with the personal psyche begins to be encountered in the world at large; we feel ourselves enveloped, immersed, caught up within the sensuous world. This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate.

David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous

I wonder where climate change will leave our conception of ourselves and the world?