Australian Indigenous writer, Tyson Yunkaporta tells us in Sand Talk, ‘The assistance people need is not learning about Aboriginal Knowledge but in remembering their own’. Seems you are on that track. Maester Eckhart is Otto add to your list. And more contemporary, Gregory Bateson, who brought together intellect and imagination
Thank you, Peter! That idea from Sand Talk makes a lot of sense to me. And I think it gets even more interesting when you consider that for the English, there is no “traditional” culture. The Celtic stories might have belonged to these lands, but Englishness is a later development. So while I love the Celtic myths, especially the Mabinogion, I’m wary of the impulse to re-source an English identity in them, and very interested in finding a living chain of imagination that’s more recent.
Ellie, I would say that tradition is not necessarily an unbroken lineage to the Stone Age. Traditions are living animals. 'Englishness' might be 'my village for the last ten generations'. Or it might be 'the song my Grandmother sang to me'. It might be 'that weed growing out of the crack in the concrete'. I can understand why people are chary about Englishness at this historical moment but I entirely agree with Yunkaporta- the 'Right Story' is to study one's own traditions, such as they be. For instance, here in Aotearoa I can learn and visit te Ao Māori (the Māori World) but I can't BE it: it is correct for me to inhabit and study my own traditions / cosmology. That said, culture and magic are probiotic and prone to cross-pollination. It's all very interesting!
Thanks so much for this, Rosie -- super interesting. And yes, I think I'd used the word "tradition" poorly there. I think I meant "tradition" as the contrast to "modernity," meaning, there's no "indigenous" Englishness. So when English people turn to the Celtic myths for a sense of identity and roots, that's a little like a modern American turning to Native American stories. There's so much those stories can teach and so many ways we need them. And yet it's still a foreign culture that we'll never truly inhabit.
And of course, that too is a crude way of looking at it, because a nation is a crude category and the individuals and communities within it will have all sorts of varied lineages.
New to your work, and I'm so intrigued by your research project of the last 3 years! I've been actively pondering similar issues (not so actively that I could call it research) triggered partly by Brexit I suppose, and inspired by Aurora Levins Morales' concept of "medicine stories" (histories excluded from mainstream narratives that bring a more whole perspective). In doing Sara Jolena Wolcott's "ReMembering for Life" course in 2020 - which tracks the origins of climate change in colonization, the witch hunts, and slavery, with a US-centric perspective - I began to wonder what a comparable history through a British lens would look like, and what looking further back (yes, to prehistory) might reveal about how we became capable of such horrors, and what other ways of being we might be capable of too.
This question of imaginal ancestors has got my brain (and perhaps less physical parts too) whirring. Both of those you've chosen are among mine too - though I haven't studied Julian of Norwich in detail, the first mystical experience I had at university found its closest reflection in her (rationally impossible to fathom) words "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well", as quoted by T.S. Eliot - who I suppose must be one of my imaginal ancestors, since I wouldn't know those words without him. His lines from The Waste Land which seem to describe a mystical experience also resonated deeply with me:
"I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence."
I've lived in south London for 25 years now and this area is Blake country. I read him a lot while going through various phases of breakdown / breakthrough at university, and I think the moment when an abyss-like depression first began to pivot towards a strange inner illumination came when I contemplated the details of a dead leaf on the pavement while thinking of his words "To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower / hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." Many years later, in Brixton market, there was a pizza shop / arts centre emblazoned above the entrance with a quote from Blake: "There is a jewel in Lambeth that Satan cannot find: it is translucent, and has many angles" (just mis-typed that as "angels" - not a coincidence I think).
That quote points towards the role of more-than-human ancestors, the intelligence of places. For me, the rivers Thames (in whose valley I have lived for almost all my 44 years) and the buried / sewered rivers of London including my local ones the Effra and the "Earl's Sluice"; the Wye (where my maternal grandmother's family came from); and the Chiltern hills (where I spent my earliest years and visited my paternal grandparents until their deaths) are some of the major ones, as well as the sea in general, especially the south coast. I also grew up hearing a lot of plant names from both my parents and consider the wildflowers, herbs and trees among my imaginal ancestors, as well as birds (robins, blue and great-tits, sparrows, the odd goldfinch, and the ubiquitous pigeons and seagulls are frequent visitors here in Camberwell) and the occasional animal (the persistence of foxes everywhere urban is somehow heartening, though I haven't seen a hedgehog since my childhood). Localised varieties of earth such as Surrey clay (my grandmother and uncle were / are potters) and the chalk of the Chilterns and Wiltshire (childhood fascination of both carving and drawing with it) come to mind too.
Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair are among the writers whose work introduced me to "psychogeography" and unseen aspects of the Thames and London.
Among the English imaginal ancestors closest to my heart (who for me sit beside Blake somehow as the "3 B's") are Gregory Bateson with his "pattern that connects" and "learning how to learn", and John Berger, whose concept of home (which I wrote about in a Dark Mountain essay back in 2012) might be relevant to the title of your publication. Another whose writings have meant a lot to me is Nicholas Mosley (the "Catastrophe Practice" series and "Hopeful Monsters"), a particularly English upper class kind of intellectual-mystical combo.
On a more collective level, I'd like to give a nod to the Rosary as an imaginal ancestor, as honoured in Clark Strand and Perdita Finn's book "The Way of the Rose". Though violently uprooted in England by the Reformation, before that it had preserved a connection to the divine feminine on the level of popular culture for many generations after the introduction of Christianity and in the face of entrenched patriarchy. In connection with this, the women condemned as witches for practising traditional forms of healing and spirituality also come to mind as important imaginal ancestors - although this brings us back to your first version of the history, since so many of them did die violently, and the trauma of this violence continues to shape limitations on who we are today - but still, "imagination" itself can't be killed, I suppose (only sent into hiding for a few centuries?)
I want to mention Shakespeare too, as my 7-year-old daughter (a self-described "history geek" thanks to the Horrible Histories series) is peculiarly fascinated with him and we've been to the Globe theatre twice this summer. As this video outlines (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBZOVQQLvEM) there are a ridiculous number of everyday phrases that come from Shakespeare, such that he's definitely a major imaginal ancestor for the English language as a whole. Although who he was and whether he was even one person seems to be in question (I've recently discovered Ros Barber's substack - an interesting scholar on this issue but I haven't explored it in depth). For me, King Lear which I studied at A-Level contained the level of multidimensional mystery and emotional impact that qualifies him for imaginal ancestry, and seeing him performed by a woman (the tiny yet thunderous Kathryn Hunter, circa 1997) was somehow even more soul-shocking.
Clearly I could go on and on about this - thanks for the nudge to reflect on it!!
Hannah, thank you so much for this. It made me cry -- I'm just so grateful to be having conversations like this, with people I've never met but who've been walking a similar path all this time. Thank you for such a generous read and response.
Absolutely YES to Shakespeare as an imaginal ancestor. I think it's always a mistake to try to tell Shakespeare what he's "about," but for me this is the truth that comes through time and again in his plays -- there is something else, and it's right there, and it's been there all along, and the rationalism that was then dawning will never be able to see or understand it, and that is so very dangerous. Amazing that your seven-year-old is already a fan!
Huge yes also to John Berger. I've not read Gregory Bateson but someone else has already mentioned him too! I'll definitely give him a look.
And thank you also for introducing me to the idea of medicine stories -- which is precisely what I've been seeking, without having a phrase for it.
I'm really excited to think more about and explore all you've shared. Thank you.
Hi Hannah, nice to see your mention of Hopeful Monsters. It was an important book for me when I first read it. I've never heard anyone else refer to it.
”Until finally we arrive at the pinnacle of this particular version of history: the Victorian stiff upper lip. Young English boys shipped off to boarding schools en masse to have their Big Feelings and their imaginations beaten out of them, so they could become little soldiers of empire.”
Both my father & I were educated in this system… My otherwise wonderful English teacher wrote of me when I was 11 ”just a pity he has no imagination”. This frightening double think is exactly what you describe in your earlier post.
Music became my chief consciousness conduit from that time onwards… I’m currently working on how classical music, while heavily tainted by its colonial context, nevertheless contains ways of connecting its practitioners (including listeners) with the lineage.
As far as my own guides, I find them in unusual places: Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert…. Definitely Arvo Pärt (I’ll soon be posting an article about his music on my own substack). And T S Eliot, but he has already been mentioned.
Mark, thank you SO MUCH for sharing some musicians of the imaginal. I’m an enthusiastic idiot when it comes to music, so really excited to learn and experience more. I’ve just signed up for your Substack.
It sounds like you’re doing something you love now, which seems like an amazing and really commendable escape from what boarding school can do to people. I hope that’s the case! Thank you for stopping by.
Ok. I just found your Substack and I’m fucking thrilled. Also love all the Ronald Hutton books. I’m from the American South, and my imaginal ancestor is Walter Inglis Anderson, an artist who lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But also—far more powerfully—are the beings who have visited me in my dreams. In my opinion, dreamwork is the most profound way to connect with the Imagination consciousness —-is that what you called it?—I call it the Otherworld—but words fail to describe the Mystery, the Numinous…I feel like I could write a ten thousand word comment but I will have to come back later and read more. I’ll. Be. Back.
Hi Stephanie! Sounds like we are idea-kin — so happy to read your comment. I love this about dreams. Confession — I am not as attuned to my dreams as I wish I was. My main access route to the imaginal comes from waking practice. I always have so much respect for people with committed dreamwork practices, because I think one reason I always end up backing off is that dreamwork feels like drinking from the imaginal firehose. Just SO MUCH information. Kudos to you for being able to receive it!
Oooo excited for this thread, thanks for another wild ride... Looking at my list I feel so sad that until my MA, not one formal teacher would contend fr imagination -initiators list!
Patti Smith. Her connection with the imaginal is so wonderfully unflinching. Of course, she's a Blakean.
Niel Young, Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix were early intiators. Something in the air of that time.
Rilke. A more recent discovery for me, he shocks my mind away from sidelining it's visions.
Bach and Scarlatti via, my Mothers playing. The architecture of holy things in thier music.
John ( my God- father) for taking time to talk to me as a child about big ideas, like reincarnation, the big bang, etc.
Martin Prectel and Tom Brown Junior, Annie Spencer for translating indigenous earth-based wisdoms into something I could begin to sense
All the teachers on the Poetics MA Dartington
Places and all the verdant life and critters there-in, honestly have been the best, though... oh, and the mushrooms....
Re. Blake, I would recommend John Higgs's excellent mystical biography William Blake Vs The World. Higgs is on Substack. His book on The KLF is also great-- I read the annotated-ten-years-later version that recently came out.
My heros are all those folks who put coins into jars and buried them only for the rational minds who dug them up to.term them hoards instead of sacrifices.
You're gonna have to talk about money at some point... And the way our relationship to it creates boundaries for the imagination.
Hi Jon! You probably hear this all the time, but that burn at the summer solstice ceremony stayed with me very powerfully.
Absolutely LOVE this insight about why treasure might have been buried in the past. Kind of reminds me of David Lewis-Williams’s work in pointing out present prejudices to poke massive holes in archaeological practice. Have you done any writing around that? Would love to read more.
I've not written anything academicy on it. It's more a numismatics/archaeology thing - I fell down a philosophy/metaphysics/theology money hole and haven't escaped.
I saw a coin 'hoard' at the British Museum about 15 years ago and the label had a little note wondering if it was a sacrifice. I've seen other work making similar claims/asking similar questions (can't recall off top of my head). But generally I think this questioning is quite a recent thing. I think archaeologists were trying to explain why sometimes coins seem to be buried in the same spot over a very long period.
I just knew it'd be great propaganda for a Money Burning Priest! Plus we have wishing wells and coin trees today. So the act of giving up/sacrificing money (albeit wrapped in a sort of transactional rationalisation) has never gone away - the great consciousness is really and truly breaking through as you say. xx
Love all this -- thank you so much for sharing your brilliance. Fwiw I would 100% read a book you wrote on this topic. And gods bless Mark Fisher. "Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics"—yep.
....See my rec above / below / somewhere else in this thread... John Higgs's book on The KLF, the central question being, Why did they burn a million pounds? (They were unable to say.)
Thank you for this beautiful exploration of the imaginal thread weaving past, present, and future. Ursula le Guin is a modern day imaginal ancestor for me. Her books are alchemical, and I had the privilege of attending her public memorial service, which included walking through the streets of Portland Oregon following a life-sized dragon animated by more than dozen a puppeteers 🐉🐲
Oh wow — how amazing, to have gone to her memorial. I’ve only read the most obvious Le Guins but it’s so clear how gifted she was at channeling major downloads from the imaginal. Thanks for bringing her into the lineage!
Yes me too! Le Guin for life! I wrote her a letter once, and she answered. Now I wear a button on my lapel with her name and face (in profile, like a coin), in hopes of attracting more Le Guin talk. I want everyone to read her
Your last few posts have really struck a chord Ellie, with me and lots of other people by the look of these comments.
I read a slim book, Listening for the Heartbeat of God , last year that fleshed out the Celtic and Roman Christian influences in your story. It focuses on the period when the Romans left around 400 CE and returned around 600 CE.
The author, Philip Newell, talked about an agreement to endorse the Roman Christian church over the Celtic church in England. It meant Earth-centred Celtic Christianity was pushed back to margins, leaving Roman Christianity, with its emphasis on human sin and words over experience, at the core of the English church.
It made sense to me, although I’m not particularly religious. Other readers may
Thank you for this, Terri. Listening for the Heartbeat of God sounds right up my street; going to add it to the list. Thank you so much.
And thank you for reading and commenting — and also for having been such a supporter of this Substack since its earlier days. Your support has meant a lot.
SO GOOD! Thank you. As a child of the colonies, who has never set foot in Europe (though that will change in a few months when I come to London for the first time), my ancestral channels are not place-based, but rather-- once I get back beyond the Great-Great-Grandparents or so-- entirely imaginal. The way I engage with my ancestry (apart from my deep interest in history and prehistory) is through folk music, specifically the singing of traditional folk songs. I feel that the past-people I engage with by singing are manifold. Every folk song is a much-handled artefact, changed, revised, multiplied-- kept alive by a river of breath. Folk songs are about whatever people felt needed to be memorialised or transmitted: they are the oral tradition of the British Isles. Song is powerful because it is a channel of feeling. Some of these songs are so moving that they are hard to sing. Others are hilarious. They are about war, poverty, beauty, defiance, comedy, subversion, travel, work, love, booze, the wild... Singing these songs is a way to bring history into the present and do honour to the collective dead.
Thank you so much for sharing, Rosie! I’ve been lucky enough to be around more and more folk singing, because it’s very popular where I live in the southwest of England. Totally agree with everything you’ve said here, and can’t wait to read your writing about it. Wishing you all the very best for your trip — I hope you find some deep rooting.
Great point, I feel this too. Music seems to provide an incredibly strong connection into the imaginal - I feel this every time I sing, particularly singing in a group, and I've also been very aware of it recently when dancing.
I have written fiction about this. The idea of an unbroken lineage of imagination lies so close to my heart....these barren times must call forth an eruption of reconnecting to the older ancestors. Keep going Ellie....
Well, the continual severance has led me to the usual bottle of red, so perhaps forgive that, but at least noting for my own purposes, let me write:
Do you understand craft? You request - but specify - examples of imaginational ancestry outwith craft; is that disembodied imagination not the very severance you decry? I am a Carpenter and my imaginal heritage is Earth-Woods-Habitat-Shelter-Home-Earth, bodily engaged at every stage.
Perhaps I will regret and feel embarrassed at these words for their misunderstanding and ignorance. I enjoyed the wine though; though it quenched my imagination.
Thank you so much for posting this — truly. Please don’t regret it or feel embarrassed by it. I’m really grateful to be pulled up on this. You’re absolutely right that the distinction I drew there was crude and unhelpful, and I’m really happy to have an opportunity to reflect more on it and figure out what I actually think. Thank you.
I think when I wrote the sentence about craft in the essay, even though I briefly referenced painting, I was really talking about literature almost exclusively. I’ve spent my whole life with the written word, so that’s just the gravitational pull of my thinking. And it is one of my faults these days that I tend to privilege the immediately divine/revelatory/mystical qualities of writing over the craft of language.
The background to this is that just before my life fell apart a few years ago, I spent five years writing a novel that was essentially just a collection of painstakingly crafted sentences (70k words of them!), with no movement or story or illumination in them. I wrote them through a very unhappy time, when I felt severed from imagination. I actually wrote them in a literal cupboard, but that’s another story. And then I put them in a drawer and that was painful too, and the whole experience made me begin to find a certain kind of very crafted sentence almost physically suffocating. My failed book was a particularly egregious example, but I see lots of literary books in bookshops that do a similar thing with language.
So that’s the background — but I think I’ve definitely taken this aversion too far, without really clocking that I was doing it, so thank you for pulling me up on it. The kind of craft you describe absolutely sounds like a very alive and connected form. And even in literature, I would benefit from more nuance — because as you so rightly point out, if the point is to reunite the material and earthly with the transcendent and numinous, that means paying very close attention to the vessel as well as the illumination.
I actually printed this out to read while on a solo camping trip in northwest Montana, near where I live but far enough to be offline and away from most people. It fit very well, both with those quiet hours with the river and fire and starlight, and with where a lot of my own thoughts and readings have taken me the last couple of years. Thank you for opening up this conversation so beautifully.
Oh Antonia, thank you so much for sharing this. It means so much to me to know that this piece accompanied you on your trip. You really made my day — thank you. x
A friend recently shared with me this clip of Leah Manaema talking about how unmoored westerners such as us can "locate ourselves through coordinates of belonging and coordinates of yearning" and so begin to reconstruct something akin to indigeneity. I've watched it about a dozen times, it is so rich and wise, and speaks to me so strongly:
This search for imaginal ancestors, and for an escape from the "consciousness contract" which the enlightenment straitjacketed us into, has been niggling me for the last couple of years, and your last two posts have really helped me to more clearly identify my yearning.
It's hard for me to reliably identify my own imaginal ancestors, stuck as I am in the padded cell erected by my scientific sceptical education. I keep thinking of folks who might count as such but, even though these are people who appear to have had revelatory mystical experiences, I am largely aware of them through their intellectualisation of these experiences (I'm thinking of people like Jung, Gurdjieff and, in the present day, Peter Kingsley).
Which also prompts me to wonder who _currently_ occupies this imaginal zone. The first person who springs to mind is Alan Garner: I can't really think of a stronger candidate as contemporary shaman of Englishness.
As others have commented, I feel that the land itself must be our most important teacher in this regard. Garner has a head start on most of us here, rooted as he is though generations of Cheshire Garners.
I – with my suburban London upbringing, parents from Somerset and Cheshire, forebears from everywhere and nowhere – have no such moorings. But my project of the last couple of years has been to make friends with my local hilltop and stream (the fact that my stream is called "Yearn Cleugh" is a bit on the nose; and it feels like the sources and corridors of water are particularly vital [pun unintended, but again on the nose]). I am waiting for the land to speak back to me – and I know that, in time, it will. I wrote a little about this here: https://peakrill.substack.com/p/playing-with-place
BTW I discovered your Substack via Thomas Sharp. Not sure what your involvement in The Idyllegy lecture was but, damn, that was a very special night!
Hello, and thanks for this incredibly rich comment. Sad we didn’t chat at the Idyllegy event! I helped Tom write the lecture component. It was such a fun night.
YES to Alan Garner and also a huge YES to your project to befriend Yearn Cleugh. Amazing.
I’m also from the suburbs of London. It’s a wildly deracinated and soulless place to come from, isn’t it? I wonder how far apart we were, both gasping as fish out of water all those years ago.
Do you still feel stuck in your scientific sceptical education? Sounds like you’ve stepped pretty far outside it.
Thanks Ellie! Did you go to the pub after the Idyllegy? If so, we may well have chatted... it's all a bit of a blur. ISTR spending much of the evening sprinkling rose petals (collected from those left uneaten) over our new Pan.
I grew up in Twickenham and Teddington in the 70s & 80s - felt like a very different place back then. Part of that may be because I'm sure childhood can enchant any well-explored environment, but since then London has become so monied that only millionaires can afford to live well there, and even they probably spend most of their time worrying about how to maintain that good life. London is tainted by the endless quest for money. I was very lucky to have Bushy Park on my doorstep, a comparative wilderness whose every tree my friends and I knew by name, but even that is now endemic with Leisure Activities. I pity the locals.
As to whether I'm stuck in my scientific education... I at least see the walls now, and I I've a sense of pushing them back, but there is a part of my mind which is beyond my conscious control, and which is still able to explain away everything in terms of physical causality and self-delusion. I think part of my problem is that the lecturer who introduced me to this way of thinking, Susan Blackmore (who I still hold in very high esteem) was herself a parapsychological researcher for many years, and she very much "wanted to believe", but repeated failure to find the effects she was looking for led her to posit alternative explanations, ones based upon materialism and, essentially, self-delusion. For over 20 years I was convinced that she had nailed it, and I'm still very persuaded by her arguments. I only really started moving away from this view a couple of years ago when I read Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things (a book which I have a lot of issues with, even though it has radically changed my model of the universe).
I did go to the pub afterwards! But I don’t think we chatted as I wasn’t involved in any petal sprinkling.
I grew up the other side of London to you — the suburbs going down into Kent, land of Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia. I wish I could even say I found a wilderness and learned it like the back of my hand, since there were definitely some pockets nearby. But no, instead I listened to a lot of angry music in my bedroom and got an early start on my alcoholism. Hey ho.
I’ve heard of Susan Blackmore but not read her. Should I? If so, where should I start? I haven’t read The Matter with Things, only The Master and his Emissary. Waiting until I’ve got a month or two to spare.
I'm not sure whether Sue Blackmore's stuff is worth reading - I haven't read any since the last millennium. As a lecturer and tutor though, she was incredibly inspiring. And this article about why she gave up parapsychology may be of interest: https://www.susanblackmore.uk/chapters/why-i-have-given-up/
Weirdly, after a couple of decades not really hearing much about her, she's cropped up a bit recently because she seems to be quite involved in Breaking Convention, the psychedelics conference, as are several friends of mine.
Confession: I haven't actually finished The Matter With Things. Despite starting it around 2 years ago. Every so often I struggle through another 20 pages or so, but it is SO dense, even more so than The Master and his Emissary. Part of the problem (I'm intuiting) seems to be that he got so much kick-back against that book that he devotes hundreds of pages to backing up his arguments, and to finding pretty much every scientist of philosopher who agrees with him and presenting their arguments at length, which is kinda informative, but essentially just reiterating the same things over page after page after page.
Despite all of that, I don't exactly trust him. There is one piece in the book, about the symmetry of snowflakes, which states that scientists haven't a clue why snowflakes should all be so different from one another, and yet so symmetrical. I was so impressed by this that I started to write a Substack post about it. And I googled around to check that I wasn't getting anything wrong, and... it turns out scientists have plenty of ideas about why snowflakes should be symmetrical. Having found that in a few minutes googling, I instantly began to distrust everything else that McGilchrist says.
But even so, like I said before, the book had a huge impact, introducing me to panentheism and the idea that consciousness rather than matter could form some kind of base layer to reality.
Oof, that’s a bit of a blow to this-corner-of-Substack’s-collectively-beloved Iain. I bizarrely just found myself typing out a bunch of possible (invented) excuses for him, which should probably make me worry about my credulity and critical thinking where an intellectual attachment figure is concerned.
Thank you for your amazingly engaging replies! What a joy, to be able to have conversations like this.
Yeah, it was a bit of a disheartening peek-behind-the-curtain for me - although I think what really turned me away from being a fanboi of his and into "appreciative but critical" were the videos he did with John Cleese where McGilchrist turns into a bit of a simpering idiot as Cleese lays into trans folk and "the Woke". I also find it funny (though mostly understandable) that The Master and His Emissary devolves into what I perceive as a very left-brain exercise in taxonomising historical periods and art movements into the ones McGilchrist approves of, vs the ones which are the fault of the left brain.
Ellie, this work is beautiful. I read it and think, ‘at last!’, and I am not alone in my long feathery trails of thinking and exploration. Thank you.
Ursula le Guin has been mentioned, I read her many years ago and heard the true note, saw the spring where the water that lives flourishes and flows.
JMW Turner, for his paintings of light and water and the gossamer places where these meet, and for his life fiercely devoted to painting.
Faure’s Requiem, listened to from childhood, with no knowledge of what a requiem was, but the soaring beauty of it , especially ‘In Paradisum’, but all of it really, points always for me to the cry of the human heart for openness, belonging, total connection with all that lives and has and will live.
And more recently, your teacher, Alice Oswald (because we are always finding ancestors), whose seeing and precision are clear light itself.
May your explorations continue long and deeply Ellie, you are making beauty, its dark and its light.
PS I have ordered The Mind in the Cave, and am looking forward hugely to reading it.
Penny, what a beautiful comment. Thank you. It moved me so much to read how deeply you’ve been moved by your imaginal ancestors. And yet again just to be having conversations like this with such beautiful and inspiring people. Thank you so much for sharing.
I think I mentioned elsewhere on this comment thread that I am an enthusiastic idiot when it comes to music, so I don’t have any conscious memory of having listened to Faure’s Requiem. But on the basis of your other imaginal ancestors, I know it will be beautiful. I can’t wait to listen. Thank you. x
Australian Indigenous writer, Tyson Yunkaporta tells us in Sand Talk, ‘The assistance people need is not learning about Aboriginal Knowledge but in remembering their own’. Seems you are on that track. Maester Eckhart is Otto add to your list. And more contemporary, Gregory Bateson, who brought together intellect and imagination
Thank you, Peter! That idea from Sand Talk makes a lot of sense to me. And I think it gets even more interesting when you consider that for the English, there is no “traditional” culture. The Celtic stories might have belonged to these lands, but Englishness is a later development. So while I love the Celtic myths, especially the Mabinogion, I’m wary of the impulse to re-source an English identity in them, and very interested in finding a living chain of imagination that’s more recent.
Ellie, I would say that tradition is not necessarily an unbroken lineage to the Stone Age. Traditions are living animals. 'Englishness' might be 'my village for the last ten generations'. Or it might be 'the song my Grandmother sang to me'. It might be 'that weed growing out of the crack in the concrete'. I can understand why people are chary about Englishness at this historical moment but I entirely agree with Yunkaporta- the 'Right Story' is to study one's own traditions, such as they be. For instance, here in Aotearoa I can learn and visit te Ao Māori (the Māori World) but I can't BE it: it is correct for me to inhabit and study my own traditions / cosmology. That said, culture and magic are probiotic and prone to cross-pollination. It's all very interesting!
Thanks so much for this, Rosie -- super interesting. And yes, I think I'd used the word "tradition" poorly there. I think I meant "tradition" as the contrast to "modernity," meaning, there's no "indigenous" Englishness. So when English people turn to the Celtic myths for a sense of identity and roots, that's a little like a modern American turning to Native American stories. There's so much those stories can teach and so many ways we need them. And yet it's still a foreign culture that we'll never truly inhabit.
And of course, that too is a crude way of looking at it, because a nation is a crude category and the individuals and communities within it will have all sorts of varied lineages.
New to your work, and I'm so intrigued by your research project of the last 3 years! I've been actively pondering similar issues (not so actively that I could call it research) triggered partly by Brexit I suppose, and inspired by Aurora Levins Morales' concept of "medicine stories" (histories excluded from mainstream narratives that bring a more whole perspective). In doing Sara Jolena Wolcott's "ReMembering for Life" course in 2020 - which tracks the origins of climate change in colonization, the witch hunts, and slavery, with a US-centric perspective - I began to wonder what a comparable history through a British lens would look like, and what looking further back (yes, to prehistory) might reveal about how we became capable of such horrors, and what other ways of being we might be capable of too.
This question of imaginal ancestors has got my brain (and perhaps less physical parts too) whirring. Both of those you've chosen are among mine too - though I haven't studied Julian of Norwich in detail, the first mystical experience I had at university found its closest reflection in her (rationally impossible to fathom) words "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well", as quoted by T.S. Eliot - who I suppose must be one of my imaginal ancestors, since I wouldn't know those words without him. His lines from The Waste Land which seem to describe a mystical experience also resonated deeply with me:
"I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence."
I've lived in south London for 25 years now and this area is Blake country. I read him a lot while going through various phases of breakdown / breakthrough at university, and I think the moment when an abyss-like depression first began to pivot towards a strange inner illumination came when I contemplated the details of a dead leaf on the pavement while thinking of his words "To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower / hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." Many years later, in Brixton market, there was a pizza shop / arts centre emblazoned above the entrance with a quote from Blake: "There is a jewel in Lambeth that Satan cannot find: it is translucent, and has many angles" (just mis-typed that as "angels" - not a coincidence I think).
That quote points towards the role of more-than-human ancestors, the intelligence of places. For me, the rivers Thames (in whose valley I have lived for almost all my 44 years) and the buried / sewered rivers of London including my local ones the Effra and the "Earl's Sluice"; the Wye (where my maternal grandmother's family came from); and the Chiltern hills (where I spent my earliest years and visited my paternal grandparents until their deaths) are some of the major ones, as well as the sea in general, especially the south coast. I also grew up hearing a lot of plant names from both my parents and consider the wildflowers, herbs and trees among my imaginal ancestors, as well as birds (robins, blue and great-tits, sparrows, the odd goldfinch, and the ubiquitous pigeons and seagulls are frequent visitors here in Camberwell) and the occasional animal (the persistence of foxes everywhere urban is somehow heartening, though I haven't seen a hedgehog since my childhood). Localised varieties of earth such as Surrey clay (my grandmother and uncle were / are potters) and the chalk of the Chilterns and Wiltshire (childhood fascination of both carving and drawing with it) come to mind too.
Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair are among the writers whose work introduced me to "psychogeography" and unseen aspects of the Thames and London.
Among the English imaginal ancestors closest to my heart (who for me sit beside Blake somehow as the "3 B's") are Gregory Bateson with his "pattern that connects" and "learning how to learn", and John Berger, whose concept of home (which I wrote about in a Dark Mountain essay back in 2012) might be relevant to the title of your publication. Another whose writings have meant a lot to me is Nicholas Mosley (the "Catastrophe Practice" series and "Hopeful Monsters"), a particularly English upper class kind of intellectual-mystical combo.
On a more collective level, I'd like to give a nod to the Rosary as an imaginal ancestor, as honoured in Clark Strand and Perdita Finn's book "The Way of the Rose". Though violently uprooted in England by the Reformation, before that it had preserved a connection to the divine feminine on the level of popular culture for many generations after the introduction of Christianity and in the face of entrenched patriarchy. In connection with this, the women condemned as witches for practising traditional forms of healing and spirituality also come to mind as important imaginal ancestors - although this brings us back to your first version of the history, since so many of them did die violently, and the trauma of this violence continues to shape limitations on who we are today - but still, "imagination" itself can't be killed, I suppose (only sent into hiding for a few centuries?)
I want to mention Shakespeare too, as my 7-year-old daughter (a self-described "history geek" thanks to the Horrible Histories series) is peculiarly fascinated with him and we've been to the Globe theatre twice this summer. As this video outlines (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBZOVQQLvEM) there are a ridiculous number of everyday phrases that come from Shakespeare, such that he's definitely a major imaginal ancestor for the English language as a whole. Although who he was and whether he was even one person seems to be in question (I've recently discovered Ros Barber's substack - an interesting scholar on this issue but I haven't explored it in depth). For me, King Lear which I studied at A-Level contained the level of multidimensional mystery and emotional impact that qualifies him for imaginal ancestry, and seeing him performed by a woman (the tiny yet thunderous Kathryn Hunter, circa 1997) was somehow even more soul-shocking.
Clearly I could go on and on about this - thanks for the nudge to reflect on it!!
Hannah, thank you so much for this. It made me cry -- I'm just so grateful to be having conversations like this, with people I've never met but who've been walking a similar path all this time. Thank you for such a generous read and response.
Absolutely YES to Shakespeare as an imaginal ancestor. I think it's always a mistake to try to tell Shakespeare what he's "about," but for me this is the truth that comes through time and again in his plays -- there is something else, and it's right there, and it's been there all along, and the rationalism that was then dawning will never be able to see or understand it, and that is so very dangerous. Amazing that your seven-year-old is already a fan!
Huge yes also to John Berger. I've not read Gregory Bateson but someone else has already mentioned him too! I'll definitely give him a look.
And thank you also for introducing me to the idea of medicine stories -- which is precisely what I've been seeking, without having a phrase for it.
I'm really excited to think more about and explore all you've shared. Thank you.
Hi Hannah, nice to see your mention of Hopeful Monsters. It was an important book for me when I first read it. I've never heard anyone else refer to it.
”Until finally we arrive at the pinnacle of this particular version of history: the Victorian stiff upper lip. Young English boys shipped off to boarding schools en masse to have their Big Feelings and their imaginations beaten out of them, so they could become little soldiers of empire.”
Both my father & I were educated in this system… My otherwise wonderful English teacher wrote of me when I was 11 ”just a pity he has no imagination”. This frightening double think is exactly what you describe in your earlier post.
Music became my chief consciousness conduit from that time onwards… I’m currently working on how classical music, while heavily tainted by its colonial context, nevertheless contains ways of connecting its practitioners (including listeners) with the lineage.
As far as my own guides, I find them in unusual places: Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert…. Definitely Arvo Pärt (I’ll soon be posting an article about his music on my own substack). And T S Eliot, but he has already been mentioned.
Mark, thank you SO MUCH for sharing some musicians of the imaginal. I’m an enthusiastic idiot when it comes to music, so really excited to learn and experience more. I’ve just signed up for your Substack.
It sounds like you’re doing something you love now, which seems like an amazing and really commendable escape from what boarding school can do to people. I hope that’s the case! Thank you for stopping by.
Rudolf Steiner and ... Merlin
Yes! Should have known the Rev Poston would be straight in there with some heavy hitters, haha. x
Jesus Christ (of course) embodied in his biography a fulcrum for the transformation of human consciousness but that's another story ... :) x
If I’d had you guiding me through Christianity as a kid, things might have turned out very differently.
Ok. I just found your Substack and I’m fucking thrilled. Also love all the Ronald Hutton books. I’m from the American South, and my imaginal ancestor is Walter Inglis Anderson, an artist who lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But also—far more powerfully—are the beings who have visited me in my dreams. In my opinion, dreamwork is the most profound way to connect with the Imagination consciousness —-is that what you called it?—I call it the Otherworld—but words fail to describe the Mystery, the Numinous…I feel like I could write a ten thousand word comment but I will have to come back later and read more. I’ll. Be. Back.
Hi Stephanie! Sounds like we are idea-kin — so happy to read your comment. I love this about dreams. Confession — I am not as attuned to my dreams as I wish I was. My main access route to the imaginal comes from waking practice. I always have so much respect for people with committed dreamwork practices, because I think one reason I always end up backing off is that dreamwork feels like drinking from the imaginal firehose. Just SO MUCH information. Kudos to you for being able to receive it!
Oooo excited for this thread, thanks for another wild ride... Looking at my list I feel so sad that until my MA, not one formal teacher would contend fr imagination -initiators list!
Patti Smith. Her connection with the imaginal is so wonderfully unflinching. Of course, she's a Blakean.
Niel Young, Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix were early intiators. Something in the air of that time.
Rilke. A more recent discovery for me, he shocks my mind away from sidelining it's visions.
Bach and Scarlatti via, my Mothers playing. The architecture of holy things in thier music.
John ( my God- father) for taking time to talk to me as a child about big ideas, like reincarnation, the big bang, etc.
Martin Prectel and Tom Brown Junior, Annie Spencer for translating indigenous earth-based wisdoms into something I could begin to sense
All the teachers on the Poetics MA Dartington
Places and all the verdant life and critters there-in, honestly have been the best, though... oh, and the mushrooms....
Yes! Love all these suggestions and can’t wait to chat about them with you soon. xx
Re. Blake, I would recommend John Higgs's excellent mystical biography William Blake Vs The World. Higgs is on Substack. His book on The KLF is also great-- I read the annotated-ten-years-later version that recently came out.
Been meaning to get to these — thank you for the reminder!
Hey Ellie, you're doing good work!
My heros are all those folks who put coins into jars and buried them only for the rational minds who dug them up to.term them hoards instead of sacrifices.
You're gonna have to talk about money at some point... And the way our relationship to it creates boundaries for the imagination.
A bit of Mark Fischer on this. https://jonone100.blogspot.com/2023/09/money-wisdom-512.html?m=1
Loving your work! Jon x
Hi Jon! You probably hear this all the time, but that burn at the summer solstice ceremony stayed with me very powerfully.
Absolutely LOVE this insight about why treasure might have been buried in the past. Kind of reminds me of David Lewis-Williams’s work in pointing out present prejudices to poke massive holes in archaeological practice. Have you done any writing around that? Would love to read more.
Should have known you’d be into Mark Fisher!
Ha! Wrong Fisher quote. Mobile phone fumble. This makes more sense in context.
https://jonone100.blogspot.com/2023/09/money-wisdom-513.html
I've not written anything academicy on it. It's more a numismatics/archaeology thing - I fell down a philosophy/metaphysics/theology money hole and haven't escaped.
I saw a coin 'hoard' at the British Museum about 15 years ago and the label had a little note wondering if it was a sacrifice. I've seen other work making similar claims/asking similar questions (can't recall off top of my head). But generally I think this questioning is quite a recent thing. I think archaeologists were trying to explain why sometimes coins seem to be buried in the same spot over a very long period.
I just knew it'd be great propaganda for a Money Burning Priest! Plus we have wishing wells and coin trees today. So the act of giving up/sacrificing money (albeit wrapped in a sort of transactional rationalisation) has never gone away - the great consciousness is really and truly breaking through as you say. xx
Love all this -- thank you so much for sharing your brilliance. Fwiw I would 100% read a book you wrote on this topic. And gods bless Mark Fisher. "Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics"—yep.
....See my rec above / below / somewhere else in this thread... John Higgs's book on The KLF, the central question being, Why did they burn a million pounds? (They were unable to say.)
I reckon Jon here might have an idea or two.
Higgs' KLF book is brilliant.. as his his book on Blake.
Also thank you! It's very kind of you to say that about the Burn! I can never get enough of hearing it!
Thank you for this beautiful exploration of the imaginal thread weaving past, present, and future. Ursula le Guin is a modern day imaginal ancestor for me. Her books are alchemical, and I had the privilege of attending her public memorial service, which included walking through the streets of Portland Oregon following a life-sized dragon animated by more than dozen a puppeteers 🐉🐲
Oh wow — how amazing, to have gone to her memorial. I’ve only read the most obvious Le Guins but it’s so clear how gifted she was at channeling major downloads from the imaginal. Thanks for bringing her into the lineage!
Yes me too! Le Guin for life! I wrote her a letter once, and she answered. Now I wear a button on my lapel with her name and face (in profile, like a coin), in hopes of attracting more Le Guin talk. I want everyone to read her
Oh wow -- so lovely to know that she answered, though somehow it doesn't surprise me. She definitely knew what's important.
Your last few posts have really struck a chord Ellie, with me and lots of other people by the look of these comments.
I read a slim book, Listening for the Heartbeat of God , last year that fleshed out the Celtic and Roman Christian influences in your story. It focuses on the period when the Romans left around 400 CE and returned around 600 CE.
The author, Philip Newell, talked about an agreement to endorse the Roman Christian church over the Celtic church in England. It meant Earth-centred Celtic Christianity was pushed back to margins, leaving Roman Christianity, with its emphasis on human sin and words over experience, at the core of the English church.
It made sense to me, although I’m not particularly religious. Other readers may
Know more.
Thank you for this, Terri. Listening for the Heartbeat of God sounds right up my street; going to add it to the list. Thank you so much.
And thank you for reading and commenting — and also for having been such a supporter of this Substack since its earlier days. Your support has meant a lot.
Mmm, Celtic Christianity seemed to have been a more holistic practice based on what I remember from Newell and pelagianism.
SO GOOD! Thank you. As a child of the colonies, who has never set foot in Europe (though that will change in a few months when I come to London for the first time), my ancestral channels are not place-based, but rather-- once I get back beyond the Great-Great-Grandparents or so-- entirely imaginal. The way I engage with my ancestry (apart from my deep interest in history and prehistory) is through folk music, specifically the singing of traditional folk songs. I feel that the past-people I engage with by singing are manifold. Every folk song is a much-handled artefact, changed, revised, multiplied-- kept alive by a river of breath. Folk songs are about whatever people felt needed to be memorialised or transmitted: they are the oral tradition of the British Isles. Song is powerful because it is a channel of feeling. Some of these songs are so moving that they are hard to sing. Others are hilarious. They are about war, poverty, beauty, defiance, comedy, subversion, travel, work, love, booze, the wild... Singing these songs is a way to bring history into the present and do honour to the collective dead.
I've written about folk-singing here: https://rosiewhinray.substack.com/p/on-being-galvanised-not-paralysed
And here: https://rosiewhinray.substack.com/p/folk-songs-and-folk-singers
Thank you so much for sharing, Rosie! I’ve been lucky enough to be around more and more folk singing, because it’s very popular where I live in the southwest of England. Totally agree with everything you’ve said here, and can’t wait to read your writing about it. Wishing you all the very best for your trip — I hope you find some deep rooting.
Great point, I feel this too. Music seems to provide an incredibly strong connection into the imaginal - I feel this every time I sing, particularly singing in a group, and I've also been very aware of it recently when dancing.
Wow, this is moving....
I have written fiction about this. The idea of an unbroken lineage of imagination lies so close to my heart....these barren times must call forth an eruption of reconnecting to the older ancestors. Keep going Ellie....
Absolutely. The older and newer ancestors. Thanks so much for reading and for your support, Bertus.
Well, the continual severance has led me to the usual bottle of red, so perhaps forgive that, but at least noting for my own purposes, let me write:
Do you understand craft? You request - but specify - examples of imaginational ancestry outwith craft; is that disembodied imagination not the very severance you decry? I am a Carpenter and my imaginal heritage is Earth-Woods-Habitat-Shelter-Home-Earth, bodily engaged at every stage.
Perhaps I will regret and feel embarrassed at these words for their misunderstanding and ignorance. I enjoyed the wine though; though it quenched my imagination.
Anyway, I love your thinking; thanks!
Thank you so much for posting this — truly. Please don’t regret it or feel embarrassed by it. I’m really grateful to be pulled up on this. You’re absolutely right that the distinction I drew there was crude and unhelpful, and I’m really happy to have an opportunity to reflect more on it and figure out what I actually think. Thank you.
I think when I wrote the sentence about craft in the essay, even though I briefly referenced painting, I was really talking about literature almost exclusively. I’ve spent my whole life with the written word, so that’s just the gravitational pull of my thinking. And it is one of my faults these days that I tend to privilege the immediately divine/revelatory/mystical qualities of writing over the craft of language.
The background to this is that just before my life fell apart a few years ago, I spent five years writing a novel that was essentially just a collection of painstakingly crafted sentences (70k words of them!), with no movement or story or illumination in them. I wrote them through a very unhappy time, when I felt severed from imagination. I actually wrote them in a literal cupboard, but that’s another story. And then I put them in a drawer and that was painful too, and the whole experience made me begin to find a certain kind of very crafted sentence almost physically suffocating. My failed book was a particularly egregious example, but I see lots of literary books in bookshops that do a similar thing with language.
So that’s the background — but I think I’ve definitely taken this aversion too far, without really clocking that I was doing it, so thank you for pulling me up on it. The kind of craft you describe absolutely sounds like a very alive and connected form. And even in literature, I would benefit from more nuance — because as you so rightly point out, if the point is to reunite the material and earthly with the transcendent and numinous, that means paying very close attention to the vessel as well as the illumination.
Thank you for writing.
I actually printed this out to read while on a solo camping trip in northwest Montana, near where I live but far enough to be offline and away from most people. It fit very well, both with those quiet hours with the river and fire and starlight, and with where a lot of my own thoughts and readings have taken me the last couple of years. Thank you for opening up this conversation so beautifully.
Oh Antonia, thank you so much for sharing this. It means so much to me to know that this piece accompanied you on your trip. You really made my day — thank you. x
A friend recently shared with me this clip of Leah Manaema talking about how unmoored westerners such as us can "locate ourselves through coordinates of belonging and coordinates of yearning" and so begin to reconstruct something akin to indigeneity. I've watched it about a dozen times, it is so rich and wise, and speaks to me so strongly:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5-mL_nR63v/
This search for imaginal ancestors, and for an escape from the "consciousness contract" which the enlightenment straitjacketed us into, has been niggling me for the last couple of years, and your last two posts have really helped me to more clearly identify my yearning.
It's hard for me to reliably identify my own imaginal ancestors, stuck as I am in the padded cell erected by my scientific sceptical education. I keep thinking of folks who might count as such but, even though these are people who appear to have had revelatory mystical experiences, I am largely aware of them through their intellectualisation of these experiences (I'm thinking of people like Jung, Gurdjieff and, in the present day, Peter Kingsley).
Which also prompts me to wonder who _currently_ occupies this imaginal zone. The first person who springs to mind is Alan Garner: I can't really think of a stronger candidate as contemporary shaman of Englishness.
As others have commented, I feel that the land itself must be our most important teacher in this regard. Garner has a head start on most of us here, rooted as he is though generations of Cheshire Garners.
I – with my suburban London upbringing, parents from Somerset and Cheshire, forebears from everywhere and nowhere – have no such moorings. But my project of the last couple of years has been to make friends with my local hilltop and stream (the fact that my stream is called "Yearn Cleugh" is a bit on the nose; and it feels like the sources and corridors of water are particularly vital [pun unintended, but again on the nose]). I am waiting for the land to speak back to me – and I know that, in time, it will. I wrote a little about this here: https://peakrill.substack.com/p/playing-with-place
BTW I discovered your Substack via Thomas Sharp. Not sure what your involvement in The Idyllegy lecture was but, damn, that was a very special night!
Hello, and thanks for this incredibly rich comment. Sad we didn’t chat at the Idyllegy event! I helped Tom write the lecture component. It was such a fun night.
YES to Alan Garner and also a huge YES to your project to befriend Yearn Cleugh. Amazing.
I’m also from the suburbs of London. It’s a wildly deracinated and soulless place to come from, isn’t it? I wonder how far apart we were, both gasping as fish out of water all those years ago.
Do you still feel stuck in your scientific sceptical education? Sounds like you’ve stepped pretty far outside it.
Thanks Ellie! Did you go to the pub after the Idyllegy? If so, we may well have chatted... it's all a bit of a blur. ISTR spending much of the evening sprinkling rose petals (collected from those left uneaten) over our new Pan.
I grew up in Twickenham and Teddington in the 70s & 80s - felt like a very different place back then. Part of that may be because I'm sure childhood can enchant any well-explored environment, but since then London has become so monied that only millionaires can afford to live well there, and even they probably spend most of their time worrying about how to maintain that good life. London is tainted by the endless quest for money. I was very lucky to have Bushy Park on my doorstep, a comparative wilderness whose every tree my friends and I knew by name, but even that is now endemic with Leisure Activities. I pity the locals.
As to whether I'm stuck in my scientific education... I at least see the walls now, and I I've a sense of pushing them back, but there is a part of my mind which is beyond my conscious control, and which is still able to explain away everything in terms of physical causality and self-delusion. I think part of my problem is that the lecturer who introduced me to this way of thinking, Susan Blackmore (who I still hold in very high esteem) was herself a parapsychological researcher for many years, and she very much "wanted to believe", but repeated failure to find the effects she was looking for led her to posit alternative explanations, ones based upon materialism and, essentially, self-delusion. For over 20 years I was convinced that she had nailed it, and I'm still very persuaded by her arguments. I only really started moving away from this view a couple of years ago when I read Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things (a book which I have a lot of issues with, even though it has radically changed my model of the universe).
I did go to the pub afterwards! But I don’t think we chatted as I wasn’t involved in any petal sprinkling.
I grew up the other side of London to you — the suburbs going down into Kent, land of Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia. I wish I could even say I found a wilderness and learned it like the back of my hand, since there were definitely some pockets nearby. But no, instead I listened to a lot of angry music in my bedroom and got an early start on my alcoholism. Hey ho.
I’ve heard of Susan Blackmore but not read her. Should I? If so, where should I start? I haven’t read The Matter with Things, only The Master and his Emissary. Waiting until I’ve got a month or two to spare.
I'm not sure whether Sue Blackmore's stuff is worth reading - I haven't read any since the last millennium. As a lecturer and tutor though, she was incredibly inspiring. And this article about why she gave up parapsychology may be of interest: https://www.susanblackmore.uk/chapters/why-i-have-given-up/
Weirdly, after a couple of decades not really hearing much about her, she's cropped up a bit recently because she seems to be quite involved in Breaking Convention, the psychedelics conference, as are several friends of mine.
Confession: I haven't actually finished The Matter With Things. Despite starting it around 2 years ago. Every so often I struggle through another 20 pages or so, but it is SO dense, even more so than The Master and his Emissary. Part of the problem (I'm intuiting) seems to be that he got so much kick-back against that book that he devotes hundreds of pages to backing up his arguments, and to finding pretty much every scientist of philosopher who agrees with him and presenting their arguments at length, which is kinda informative, but essentially just reiterating the same things over page after page after page.
Despite all of that, I don't exactly trust him. There is one piece in the book, about the symmetry of snowflakes, which states that scientists haven't a clue why snowflakes should all be so different from one another, and yet so symmetrical. I was so impressed by this that I started to write a Substack post about it. And I googled around to check that I wasn't getting anything wrong, and... it turns out scientists have plenty of ideas about why snowflakes should be symmetrical. Having found that in a few minutes googling, I instantly began to distrust everything else that McGilchrist says.
But even so, like I said before, the book had a huge impact, introducing me to panentheism and the idea that consciousness rather than matter could form some kind of base layer to reality.
Oof, that’s a bit of a blow to this-corner-of-Substack’s-collectively-beloved Iain. I bizarrely just found myself typing out a bunch of possible (invented) excuses for him, which should probably make me worry about my credulity and critical thinking where an intellectual attachment figure is concerned.
Thank you for your amazingly engaging replies! What a joy, to be able to have conversations like this.
Yeah, it was a bit of a disheartening peek-behind-the-curtain for me - although I think what really turned me away from being a fanboi of his and into "appreciative but critical" were the videos he did with John Cleese where McGilchrist turns into a bit of a simpering idiot as Cleese lays into trans folk and "the Woke". I also find it funny (though mostly understandable) that The Master and His Emissary devolves into what I perceive as a very left-brain exercise in taxonomising historical periods and art movements into the ones McGilchrist approves of, vs the ones which are the fault of the left brain.
Ellie, this work is beautiful. I read it and think, ‘at last!’, and I am not alone in my long feathery trails of thinking and exploration. Thank you.
Ursula le Guin has been mentioned, I read her many years ago and heard the true note, saw the spring where the water that lives flourishes and flows.
JMW Turner, for his paintings of light and water and the gossamer places where these meet, and for his life fiercely devoted to painting.
Faure’s Requiem, listened to from childhood, with no knowledge of what a requiem was, but the soaring beauty of it , especially ‘In Paradisum’, but all of it really, points always for me to the cry of the human heart for openness, belonging, total connection with all that lives and has and will live.
And more recently, your teacher, Alice Oswald (because we are always finding ancestors), whose seeing and precision are clear light itself.
May your explorations continue long and deeply Ellie, you are making beauty, its dark and its light.
PS I have ordered The Mind in the Cave, and am looking forward hugely to reading it.
Penny, what a beautiful comment. Thank you. It moved me so much to read how deeply you’ve been moved by your imaginal ancestors. And yet again just to be having conversations like this with such beautiful and inspiring people. Thank you so much for sharing.
I think I mentioned elsewhere on this comment thread that I am an enthusiastic idiot when it comes to music, so I don’t have any conscious memory of having listened to Faure’s Requiem. But on the basis of your other imaginal ancestors, I know it will be beautiful. I can’t wait to listen. Thank you. x