Into the West

Why do I feel an affinity for this song right now? Why do I feel that it speaks to the state of my soul?

(This version of O Elbereth Gilthoniel is not exactly the same as Tolkien's original, but pretty close in spirit. This is the movie version, which I like no less for that.) 

Tolkien's elves themselves are but a broken reflection of the elves of European mythology: the elves that got diffracted by pagans and Christians until they were only a shadow. The "original elves" weren't even elves, their elfhood was retroactively placed upon them in the process of their being wiped out. They were the Tuatha de Danann, the original folk of Ireland who were displaced by invaders from Continental Europe.

You may see a pattern here. Some millennia in the future, perhaps some retroactive elfhood will be placed upon the Native Americans as they existed before the blessings of Western Civilization were forced upon them. They went into the Earth too, not metaphorically. The Tuatha de Danann, the legendary people who were retroactively made elves, in myth were given the lands underneath the Earth as part of a crooked deal with the invading Milesians. The invaders got the land above the earth, the Tuatha de Danann were given the land underneath the barrows, the mounds that enshrine the remains of the dead. Which is probably just a nice way of saying they were betrayed and killed.

Tolkien's elves are immortal, but they are compelled to go into the West: to leave Middle Earth. The West has been the metaphorical direction of the Afterlife for many cultures - the Elysium of the Greeks was originally thought to be just a place in the real world that was so far west it was impossible to sail there, where heroes went when they died. Over time Elysium became a place in the Underworld. Tolkien's elves are compelled to leave Middle Earth because essentially an age of Darkness has descended on it (the Age of Man) and their time there has gone. They either have to go into the West or stop being elves. There was some intimation on Tolkien's part that if they did not leave, they would become shadows of sorts: barely visible, secretive, not unlike what some Icelanders think of elves today. The Hidden People.

I am about to say something contradictory:

that there never were any "historical elves" and that

paradoxically I feel a deep spiritual connection with them. 

Elves were never precisely some stray branch on the tree of Homo Sapiens that got wiped out in prehistory. They are, if you will, members of an archetype of Edenic humanity: of a humanity that has never severed its connection with the World. As such, they may instantiate to some degree in real people or real peoples but never completely. They exist in the Dreaming. The guys in Iceland who see elves or their effects, if they are truly seeing elves, are not seeing them with mundane eyes. They are seeing them in the Dreaming. Thus I can say I feel a spiritual lineage to the elves myself, and not say that they are historical in any normal sense. The story of the Tuatha de Danann may indeed be a story of a more "edenic" culture being wiped out by a more "advanced" culture - the Milesians were Greeks according to some interpretations, and so even then the "advanced" label would certainly apply. Theirs was the cradle of the scorpion which is now worldwide: Western Civilization. Western Civ has been putting "less advanced" people into the barrows ever since. 

All of this is roundabout to my main message really, but you have to understand it to understand what I say next. I too am going "into the West." I am going to Elysium, the Elysium of my visions, not the Greek one. That is why the song resonates with me.

No, don't worry, I am not going today probably. I am working on my health in fact, exercising more than probably ever, I even joined Nicotine Anonymous to quit smoking and hope to quit soon. But I am 56, will be 57 in a month. As I work on all this, I wonder, what is the point really? To live a bit longer in a world that makes me profoundly sad? To live a bit longer in a world that is going to continue to make me even more sad every day, as it spirals away from anything that could remotely be called sanity? This too was a peril that Tolkien's elves lived with: profound sadness. To live to see the destruction of everything I love? To live to witness yet more tragedies as greed devours the Earth? Why?

I cannot change this Age of Darkness, any more than Tolkien's elves could keep the Age of Man from coming. Am I only presiding over my own diminishment, like Tolkien's fading elves who resist the call to the West? Indeed I already diminish, despite my relative health, as does the Earth I love. Why ought I stick around for all that? I am looking for reasons.

It is not that anyone reads or at least understands my words, I cannot hope to change hearts and even if I did, for what? That they may suffer as I do? That their eyes may open to the horror? Should I not indeed wish that their eyes remain closed and go like peaceful lambs to the slaughter? I suppose I write these blog posts not to open eyes that are closed but to comfort eyes that are open, but there seem few of those. Who am I leaving this testament, this my entire blog, for? God forbid that some as yet young or unborn should be "gifted" in the same way as I am, that they can be even more a creature out of place than I am. So that they can sorrow even more than I do. 

This is a question I will put to my "people", my fathers and mothers, over coming days because only they can answer it. I have a powerful resistance to the idea of self-slaughter, which is probably the only reason why I am still alive, but that's not the question. I am not questioning whether or not I should kill myself. The question is why should I be alive? 

Am I just going through the motions like dumb cattle because I don't know anything better to do? These things I know: that my mind and strength will diminish, that the destruction of the planet I love cannot be reversed, that the ignorance of the masses cannot be cured, that I will find few or no kindred spirits on this Earth to share my suffering at this point. Given these truths, why do I live?

I will be asking these questions to those who can tell me over coming days and months. Perhaps there is indeed an answer. 

Why Abstract Gods?

I revere the Sun, Sky, Earth and Water, and I don't think they need other names than that.

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.”

-Hubert Reeves

It strikes me as very strange that throughout history, Man has shown a preference for gods that are at the same time both abstract (not strongly connected with the observable world) and personal (like human beings.) In almost every case where people start to approach the idea of "gods' as the real things that keep the world alive and keep them alive - the Sun, water, Earth, the atmosphere, plants - they seem to almost immediately distance themselves again. They put it behind a layer of abstraction. Actual grains become the goddess of the grains (Ceres in Roman mythology). The actual Sun becomes the sun god (Apollo for the Greeks, Sol for the Romans, Ra or Aten for the Egyptians), who is essentially a dude with a personal history and family rivalries and so on. This is not completely universal but certainly so prevalent that you could be excused for thinking of it as universal.

I would be tempted to think of this as a symptom of "advanced" religion. By advanced religion I actually mean decayed religion or religion properly speaking as opposed to a way of life in which spirituality cannot be separated from everyday existence. The idea is that as religions continue through time they become more and more abstract so as to remove their "gods" from the suspicion that they have failed or are otherwise imperfect. The iconoclastic (image-destroying, "idol" destroying) nature of later Protestant and Puritan religious innovations and of Islam very much connect with this: that God must be removed from any taint of the material. That God must be wholly abstract and removed from any possibility of human interaction.

However the temptation to think of this as entirely a function of historical development is probably inaccurate: it has probably been there in some form all along. Archaeologists are tempted to think of the figure of the Venus of Willendorf, a figure made 27,000 years ago, as a religious figure: if so, it is clearly the distorted image of a human being. If it truly represents a god in our sense of the word, it represents a personal god. A human-like god. Since it is an intangible human-like being, it would also be an abstract god. Again, supposing all this to be true, it would represent a god not utterly different from gods that were common 25,000 years later and even in some corners of the world today.

Venus of Willendorf, image by Matthias Kabel

Is it really so difficult to accept the idea that the actual things that actually allow life to exist at all physically are gods? That for instance the Sun is a god. Water is a god. Earth herself is a god. Of course for modern people, this would require a reinterpretation of what it means to be physical, the nature of stuff, because for modern people the physical is utterly deprecated and to say that your god is a ball of plasma undergoing fusion seems to degrade the holy to the extreme. We are infected with the Western philosophical conceit that self is wholly different from the world it exists in, that matter is base and unimportant and minds or souls are lofty and important. That mind is the master and body merely its humble and base carriage. This reached a low in the Christian era with Rene Descartes declaring that minds and bodies were totally dissimilar substances and that all things except human souls were mere machines. Descartes was clearly not a pet owner, as he held to the pernicious idea that animals have no feelings and no subjective experience. Afterwards this reached a new low in the "post-Christian" era with the scientific reductionist declaration that everything is a machine, that you too were a machine, thus continuing the denigration of the physical while now including everything in this degraded classification. Modern atheists and scientific materialists and reductionists are thus truly children of Descartes, but with the troublesome issue of soul removed.

I could digress on how convenient this worldview is for those who wish to exploit the world and other people - Western societies being the all-time champs on knowing how to exploit Nature, animals and other people. To clear-cut a forest, one must first of all not know it as it really is, but objectify it. You don't see the birds, you don't see the flowers, you don't even really see the trees. It is nothing, mere mass. To exploit workers in the Third World, or to go to war with them, one must of course view them as not quite like us. What one would destroy, one must first desecrate, de-sanctify, un-know. But I digress.

In between the pit of Descartes and the new pit of universal physical nihilism, there are some dissenting voices, though this is somewhat outside our discussion. In the early 1700's Bishop George Berkeley posited in contrast to Descartes that everything was in fact mind, that matter was in fact mind, that there isn't a hard and fast line between things thought of as mental and things thought of as physical, that even objective physical measurement of such things as dimension and motion were in fact neither objective nor physical. Modern philosophers who ponder on the fact that "physical" reality on a subatomic level starts looking distinctly non-physical; symbolic, that even "reality" as we know it is squishy and things can be in states in-between real and non-real. Delving deeper on this is a topic for books, not blog posts.

I will merely put it to you as something to mull over that our categories of physical, mental and spiritual do not exist, and nor do our categories of self and other have any objective reality. Rather than the scientific view that all things are "dead" (spiritless), I rather put it to you that all things are alive and that you are a part of a whole from which you cannot be extracted any more than you could live should I extract your liver or brain with a scalpel. That your sense of ego-self is an illusion and that you are inextricably connected to a whole, the whole universe and beyond perhaps. So for me, to say that the Sun or the Moon or water are some of my gods is not strange, not denigrating to the holy but in fact the real holy. Everything is either sacred or desecrated, and the ones that do the desecrating are us. The Sun, Water and the rest give me life and give Life to all of life, and despite all our attempts to close our eyes to Life, despite our attempts to dull our senses in order to better exploit the world and avoid the suffering of knowing how we actually are, Life is still there waiting for us and still as mysterious as it ever was.

This is not your granddad's spiritual world. It is not a comfortable spiritual world, it is in fact a strange, chaotic, violent yet beautiful world, the real world. I am on a journey to reconsecrate the real world, not that it needs my reconsecration but that we might need it. To see the world with new eyes, eyes so radical that at first what they see is nonsense to worldly eyes. I hope one day you may join me on this, the voyage to rediscover the real world.