Old Stones and Green Men

Metaphysical conservatism, orthodoxy, and the need for re-enchantment.

The Green Man, via Wikipedia.

I haven’t posted for a few weeks because I’ve been wrestling with the concept of (re)enchantment and its foundational importance to the field of applied metaphysics. Hopefully that post will be completed soon. In the meantime, This Green and Growing Earth—a recent post by

Sam Kriss

at

Numb at the Lodge

—is a great illustration of a significant obstacle that needs to be addressed before we can talk about re-enchantment.

Sam is one of the best writers working today. He’ll regularly bust out a turn of phrase or an observation so well-honed that it makes me feel like I should just quit writing. Beyond just analytical insight and technical prowess, his perspective is particularly interesting, because it confronts a familiar kind of disenchantment.

There’s an as-yet-unresolved tension in his writing. His acerbic style is born from a typical postmodern ironic distance—but it can’t entirely suppress the weird glimmers of something eldritch in his imagination. Sam keeps his cards close to his vest. It’s unclear whether these haunting turns are just for aesthetic effect, or if they’re the product of some deeper recognition. He’s interested in dreams, as evidenced in Strange News From Another Star, his collective dream journal; still, it’s unclear (at least to me) whether his interest is just in the bizarre detritus of the psyche, or if he’s sifting for artifacts of wider metaphysical significance. He seems to be returning to the rituals of Judaism, grudgingly, while mocking his own intellectual hypocrisy for doing so. All of which is to say that Sam seems deeply uncomfortable with the public performance of “belief”—or, as I will insist on calling it, the “applied metaphysics” of art-magic-religion-folklore¹.

This unresolved tension was on full display in “This Green and Growing Earth.” The subject of the post was the Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green, which Sam attended in person. Upon seeing a Trotskyite placard held up in the middle of the pagan celebration, Sam offers this reflection:

Once, I might have been the guy trudging with the placard. This time, I made a costume out of leaves and twigs. I gave myself a beard of ivy and two horns coming out my temples. I was pretty proud of how it turned out.

He includes a proof-of-life photo of himself in the mask (which does look great). In the canon of his work, this counts as a shockingly earnest display of candor. Still, without this admission—judging from his deadpan expression and basilisk gaze in the picture—we might think he was frog-marched to Hastings with a gun barrel pressed against his spine. (It’s a still image, so we can’t tell if he was blinking T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code.)

His essay makes it clear that he wasn’t there as an uncritical participant. (It seems like Sam hasn’t done anything uncritically since he was ten years old.) The leafy mask is a disguise. He’s there undercover, to blow the lid off this quaint regional festival.

Sam wonders rhetorically: what is the Jack in the Green celebration? An ancient pagan fertility ritual? Not so fast:

The fertility cult and the ritual slaughter are totally real folk traditions. They’re just recent folk traditions. They date back to 1983… That was the year the first Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green was held, organised by a traditional dance troupe called Mad Jack’s Morris. The Jack in the Green began as a few weird friends doing weird things with leaves; the first ceremony was attended by barely a dozen people. By 1985 there were a few curious townsfolk coming out to watch them; by the 1990s it had already become a local institution. People noticed it was fun. But I think a big part of the fun comes from the idea that you’re participating in a hoary, gory fertility rite.

Just some whimsical villagers having fun, it turns out. By this point in the essay, Sam has already dispensed with the Green Man’s connection to pre-Christian religion: despite “some weird relics lying around England”—foliate heads carved into cathedrals, the Green Man’s appearance in Gawain and the Green Knight—there’s “absolutely nothing to suggest” that these were pagan survivals in a Christianized world. From here, Sam goes on to posit that “it makes sense to imagine that the Jack in the Green might be an ancient pagan remnant” because our cultural imagination has been stealthily transformed by James Frazer and The Golden Bough. “Everyone [everyone?] is an instinctive Frazerian when it comes to anthropology,” says Sam:

Through books and films and video games, this academic theory has turned into a new kind of folk knowledge. We take it for granted that myth is calcified magic, and it all ultimately has to do with ensuring a bountiful harvest. Something about sacrifice, right? You have to sacrifice someone, preferably a king or a god, so the crops will grow. So when a troupe of morris dancers decided to bring back a nineteenth-century festival, they gave it a heavy extra sprinkling of agricultural magic. Because that’s what ancient folk traditions have always been made of, ever since 1890.

For Sam, this well-intentioned but ultimately false pantomime is further underlined by the festival’s screening of The Wicker Man from 1973:

The Wicker Man is an incredibly prescient film. Anthony Shaffer read The Golden Bough while he was writing the screenplay; he instantly understood that this book had nothing to do with the past, it was all about the future. What distinguishes The Wicker Man from ordinary folk horror is that the ancient folk traditions it depicts all turn out to be fake: they were made up by an entrepreneurial Victorian agronomist. If they think they need to kill a virgin with the power of a king to make their crops grow, it’s because the first Lord Summerisle read something like The Golden Bough. [Emphasis mine.]

Ultimately, Sam brings all this to a conclusion that I think I might actually agree with, in a way—if only the analysis wasn’t so reflexively cynical that it bends itself into a paradoxical pretzel. “Tradition is fake. Invention is real”:

Most of the human activity of the past consists of people just doing stuff. The fourteenth-century stonemasons who filled English churches with faces made from leaves weren’t referring to an ancient Celtic tree-cult, they were just doing stuff. They were exploring the world, its wealth of possible forms. The stonemasons two centuries before them who carved the La Tène heads were also just doing stuff. The London chimney-sweeps who started tottering around in a cone of leaves were just doing stuff too. They didn’t need a reason. It didn’t need to be part of anything ancient. They were having fun. Just doing stuff is beautiful.

So, in summary: we shouldn’t be hidebound by the traditions of the past, because many of those were themselves—by the lights of modern scholarship—relatively recent inventions, rather than ancient survivals from some mythic antiquity. The people who came up with these symbolic interfaces were just doing stuff, i.e. enjoying the aesthetic forms for their own sake, and not trying to keep an atavistic power alive in the modern world. It’s all a game—just having fun—so don’t get hung up on the strictures of “tradition.”

Again, I would almost agree with this. I think Sam has identified something important—but it’s being misapplied, because of a metaphysical conservatism centered around the idea of authenticity.

---

Ironically, this conservatism is one area in which secular modernity and authoritarian religion are in perfect accord. There is an inherent materialism in the way the Church and the Academy enforce boundaries around applied metaphysics: both maintain a narrative in which all our real encounters with the numinous happened in the distant past. There must be an officially-recognized chain of custody from the time when Weird Stuff Happened until the present day. If there’s not a consistent historical record of these forms traveling forward into the present—in archeology, or mythology, or uninterrupted cultural practice—then any attempt at contact is illegitimate. We’re warned against this in the same way that we’re cautioned against homeopathy and faith healing: whether it’s cynical fraud or naive pastiche, modern people must be on guard against inauthentic forms of metaphysical praxis, because they don’t have the power they claim.

This conservatism is forgivable among rational materialists, because they never believed in the underlying reality of applied metaphysics anyway. But progressive academics traveling in this direction will quickly find themselves on thin ice. When we look at ancient cultures, or their contemporary survivals among indigenous people—in order for these symbolic interfaces to exist—somebody had to be the first to “make something up.” Are we prepared to claim that Amazonian shamans or Paleolithic cave-painters (or Biblical prophets) were, in Sam’s formulation, just doing stuff? Were they just “exploring the world and its wealth of possible forms”? Just “having fun”?

Or were they building an interface with something they recognized as real?

If so—we might dismiss their belief as simply delusion. (For self-styled progressives: good luck articulating this in a way that’s not flatly racist.) Or we can accept their contention that the entities they invoked, through art and ritual devotion and magic, have some sort of objective existence. And if that’s the case, then it doesn’t matter if we can trace a continuity from the past to the present, in a way that would satisfy materialists. Whenever we enact the right symbolic interfaces—even if it looks like we’re just “making stuff up” in the modern world—we’re still invoking those older powers, legitimately, because their existence transcends the cultural forms we create for them.

Meanwhile, pity the poor Church, which is compelled to enforce this same type of conservatism while simultaneously defending the objective reality of the numinous. The Church is founded on the objective existence of spiritual beings, and of human contact with them. And yet—for cultural and political reasons—it’s very important for spontaneous contact to remain carefully regulated, kept firmly in the proper historical (materialist) context². Like the Academy, and often with its cooperation, the Church’s doctrine is founded on a verifiable through-line from the distant past, when Weird Stuff Happened, up to the present. In fact, from its earliest days, the Church as an administrative body has existed to preserve that chain of custody: to decide who gets to be a Saint and who doesn’t; which miracles are genuine and which aren’t; who is a prophet to be revered, and who is a heretic to be burned.

The past was full of flaming bushes and wrestling angels and flickering messages from God—but that’s all over and done with now. Libraries have been filled with religious apologetics about why God no longer deigns to speak to us directly in any way that might contradict established dogma. God was downright chatty a few thousand years ago, and has since gone silent; all that’s left for us now is to continue observing the rituals He laid down in the desert days, and keep the faith.

Tradition, in this sense, is often a stalking-horse for orthodoxy—the accusation that we can’t verify the reality of these things for ourselves, or develop our own unsanctioned symbolic interfaces for working with them. We find this same form of orthodoxy among secular academics and religious traditionalists alike. Both insist that if we don’t follow the accepted lines of transmission, we’re committing some form of heresy: the priests warn of idolatry, while scholars declaim the evils of cultural appropriation and academic misconduct.

This type of tradition-as-orthodoxy also finds its way into the neopagan movement. Modern people who are sincerely trying to re-enchant the world seem to be anticipating these charges of heresy, even though they’re building an alternative set of practices outside the status quo. Neopaganism seems to operate in a defensive crouch: in order to be recognized as legitimate, it must also prove its pedigree, and trace a direct lineage back to the time when Weird Stuff Happened. And so we end up with historically-dubious reconstructions—cargo cults that try to recreate the aesthetics of ancient spiritual practice, without much care for whether the old symbolic interfaces still retain the magic that the original culture built up.

Sam correctly observes that these were once thoroughly practical operations—“just doing stuff”—for people to invoke the powers they recognized. The culturally-contingent forms they took is incidental; trying to hot-wire the same practices without concern for whether they can still be re-enchanted by modern people leaves them with nothing but nostalgic pageantry. This makes them vulnerable to exactly the kind of historical critique that Sam brings to bear. If Gerald Gardner wasn’t plugged into an ancient witch cult—if the Celts didn’t use the ogham tree alphabet in the way we imagine—if the Barbarous Names were just unfortunate clerical mistakes—then neopagan claims to historical authenticity turn into a house of cards.

But is historical authenticity really where these symbolic interfaces draw their power?

It certainly is for mainstream religion. Fully half of the world’s eight billion people subscribe to a tradition that relies on real, historical, flesh-and-blood figures as the vital link between humanity and the Divine. Since God doesn’t engage in two-way communication with humans, the biographies of the prophets become enormously important: what did they say? When did they say it? Were they really acting at God’s behest when they made their pronouncements? These questions are inseparable from the ritual structures and religious doctrines of these traditions, which is why atheists take such pleasure in chipping away at their historical foundations.

Orthodoxy is the solution to this problem. Faith is an intellectual exercise: if the growing chasm between historical fact and dogmatic narrative gets too wide—if cognitive dissonance saps the razzle-dazzle away from the old rituals—then the solution is to reassert the narrative with exegesis and apologetics, making ex post facto modifications to the canonical text. (“Of course, Scripture says this, but what it actually means is this…”) Much of the heavy lifting in exoteric religion is in recapitulating the actions of one historical figure; if that ever proves to be inconsistent, it’s up to the individual practitioner to educate themselves, and correct their own misguided thinking. The idea that the symbolic interface itself might have lost its enchantment is anathema.

We have ample case studies for what happens when disenchantment turns people away from mainstream religion and toward their own freelance re-enchantment: witchcraft, occultism, and sorcery. There are plenty of esoteric practices based on the logical assumption that—if these entities really do have their own objective metaphysical existence—ordinary people should be able to invoke them independently. Many of the classical grimoires call on the authority of God and the angels to bind the demons summoned in their operations. Plenty of syncretic folk-magic systems recognize the Saints (even Jesus!) as dependable figures who can be summoned up for all sorts of favors. Practitioners of these systems are often more fervent in their devotion than their mainstream counterparts, and claim actual results in higher numbers. You’d think the Church would be cheering this as a revival of faith, celebrating every new connection with Divinity as a victory in the battle against godlessness.

But no. Claiming that there’s anything ineffectual about the ritual framework of religion means a loss of faith. You’re opening yourself up to the Devil’s wiles if you try to hook up your own connection. Stay within the safe confines of the Church. Beatings will continue until morale improves.

We’re in trouble if we allow that metaphysical conservatism to stand unchallenged. It belies the fact that all these symbolic interfaces are human creations that can lose their magic over time. If we’re not allowed to renew them with fresh sacrifices—new outbursts of impulsive vision, burning up the inert matter of rationality as offerings to the Big Mystery—then we’re left stranded in the present world, aimless and adrift.

So, yes. From that perspective, when Sam says that tradition can become boring and potentially dangerous, I agree with him. We shouldn’t remain hidebound to the old forms, just because they claim some lineage to a distant past when Weird Stuff Happened.

But I disagree with the idea that all the old symbolic interfaces are equally empty—just “people doing stuff”—and that we’re only indulging in aesthetic pretense when we try to revivify them.

Weird Stuff Happens now too. And some of those old interfaces still have gas left in the tank.

---

Both the Academy and the Church see the horror in The Wicker Man. The idea that someone could be murdered for the sake of one man’s pagan pastiche—not even a real ancient ritual—is exactly the kind of campfire story that justifies the modern ethos. The movie is a kind of pagan Reefer Madness, dramatizing the superstitious savagery that modernity’s safeguards—both religious and secular—were built to prevent.

But this conceals an even deeper horror for modern rationalists: what if something like the “fake” ritual invented by Lord Summerisle—contemporary, ahistorical, illegitimate—could actually work?

What if there are forces at play in the universe, unrecognized by scholars and denounced by priests, that can be effectively channeled by the half-baked exhortations of weekend pretenders in tennis shoes?

At the end of his essay, Sam wants to find some purchase for his mystic inclinations, even though he can only see the Hastings Traditional Jack in Green as “just” contemporary make-believe. He returns to the image of a homemade seagull costume in the parade, which had drawn his attention earlier:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the seagull god. That’s my name for it, obviously; really it’s just a puppet of a seagull with some foliage sprouting from its head. Unlike the Jack, it doesn’t make any claims towards antiquity. It’s not associated with any great tradition. It doesn’t even have any particular meaning… in the procession, the shape of the seagull became totemic. It had the intensity of a symbol, without needing to symbolise anything in particular. Another word for a symbol that burns through any referent is a god. I wasn’t kidding when I said I felt the faint urge to worship it… Invention, just doing stuff, is the nebula that nurses newborn gods.

With his characteristic cynicism—equal parts charming and frustrating—he staunchly refuses to apply this same logic to the central figure of the celebration. Maybe he’s right, and there is no evidence that the Green Man is a persistent survival from some pre-Christian pagan cult. Maybe the organizers of the original celebration couldn’t articulate exactly what they were doing, back in 1983, apart from an irrational urge toward a particular form. Maybe they got their history wrong.

But maybe that doesn’t matter.

There seems to be plenty of evidence that the Green Man is some kind of real. Over the past thousand years at least, for some reason, people find themselves sculpting him into cathedrals, writing him into poems and putting him into movies. His historical indeterminacy doesn’t seem to affect the eldritch power he has in the material world. Maybe he really can make the crops grow if he we bring him back: not in some Hollywood-special-effects way, but by shifting human behavior enough to nudge things in the right direction. Maybe introducing the dream of the Green Man to the collective unconscious will have some unexpected results. From that perspective, the organizers and participants of the Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green aren’t just doing stuff: they’re intentionally doing real magic, enchanting the old symbolic interfaces with new power, even if it’s not a verifiable return to some ancient tradition.

Invention—“just doing stuff”—might be “the nebula the nurses newborn gods.”

It might also re-build the portals that will bring back the old ones when we need them.

We won’t know unless we try.

1. I feel like I still haven’t fully fleshed out a definition of “applied metaphysics”—but I’ll keep using it to point out the cultural and linguistic myopia in suggesting that “art,” “magic,” “religion,” and “folklore” are all separate and distinct cultural institutions—rather than different interfaces for the same underlying impulse, which regularly seep into one another because they’re all drawing water from the same well.

2. This is evident in the Catholic Church’s ongoing attempts to regulate supernatural apparitions. New guidelines, just announced this week, will prevent bishops from acting independently in their official recognition of these apparitions; instead, they must consult the Vatican. This, of course, only applies to outwardly holy apparitions, since all the others are automatically regarded as Satan’s pranks on vulnerable people. There is something hilarious about the Church trying to differentiate between ‘real’ apparitions and those that are ‘merely the product of someone’s imagination, desire for novelty, tendency to fabricate falsehoods (mythomania), or inclination toward lying’—when, by their own admission, the Otherworld is right next door, chock-a-block with angels and demons and restless spirits, all trying to insinuate themselves into our reality as part of the Great Cosmic Tug-of-War. Still, we must stay vigilant against these fabrications, because somebody might use them to gain ‘“profit, power, fame, social recognition, or other personal interest” and may harm the faithful, potentially even to the extent of “exerting control over people or carrying out abuses.”’ Can you imagine if the Catholic Church wasn’t around to keep that from happening?