The Shamanistic Storytelling of Alan Garner

Contains spoilers for The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), The Moon of Gomrath (1963), The Owl Service (1967) and its 1969 Granada Television adaptation, Red Shift (1973) and its 1978 BBC Play for Today adaptation, and Boneland (2012)

 

 

Author Alan Garner

 

It really bugs me that, for the time being, I cannot trace which writer or academic wrote something like – “Alan Garner is a shamanistic storyteller, in that, through his fiction, he communes with deeper layers of the human psyche, the inner and outer spaces”, etc., etc. – or where they wrote it (it might be a misremembered reading of Manda Scott’s piece about Boneland in the Independent, but I’m sure it was in a book that I read it). It bugs me because I agree with this perspective, and would like to re-read this piece for a deeper understanding. You see, there was a time when Garner’s work, particularly the Alderley Edge series, utterly dominated my life. Reading Garner had been like reading a gramarye. It left me not quite the same person as before I picked the books up. It gave me a transcendental experience, a soul quest, a dreamtime vision. Suddenly I was aware of landscapes brought to life in the most profound and sometimes eerie ways, of the folkloric properties of plants and rocks and weather conditions, the minutiae of ‘old straight tracks’, constellations, small bodies of water, and of the devastating pull of history. It sounds mad, you know, I even sat up in bed once, half-asleep, outstretching my hand at some shape in the darkness, and shouting a series of cod-Latin, cod-Saxon words banished what I thought was an approaching evil. For what it’s worth, it seemed to work. It woke up my partner too, she wasn’t fazed (but she wasn’t impressed either, I do these waking nightmare things a lot). In the spirit of Discordianism (or perhaps the petit narrative of postmodernity), my reality became fitted with the Alan Garner lens – for about 6 months, before ebbing into the invisible regions of my soul – and in that time I internalised a great many lessons that shaped the pagan dimensions of my eco-spirituality. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, Alan Garner normalised paganism for me, and finally pulled me in. 

 

Rules

The thing about that waking nightmare I mentioned, was that despite the nonsense incantation I was barking out, the illusion was repelled. This dark cloud, a spreading cover of blackness, balked, contested, then retreated and evaporated. I talked about it with a colleague the next day, and they being an avid reader of fantasy, reminded me that it’s not the words that matter, it’s the intent behind them. Gibberish is as good as any Latin, as though the strength of feeling from the speaker generates a psionic field that repels the evil force (think The Curse of Fenric). In ceremonial ‘high’ magic, it is the dedication and exact detail of effort, coupled with strong vocal will, that commands spirits. Once commanded, they obey. It’s as though the rules of the game have been met. This is a very Jungian idea because it’s the ‘language’ of the collective unconscious, and therefore as a form of active imagination, can be made to work upon and affect the psyche. The Alderley Edge novels, particularly the original two, are full of these rules: do not look behind you as you retreat up the old straight track; wear the bracelet and the palugs cannot harm you; start a fire on this hill to summon the Hunt; search for this flower at this time. All characters, all creatures, obey the commands of the magic, and can be expelled by those commands, but the magic must be invoked strictly according to the rules set down. This is explored to death by Susan Cooper in her Dark Is Rising sequence, but it points to an almost autistic adherence to detail, organisation, ritual, pattern and routine. As an autistic person, I like this very much indeed. In my ‘folk wicca’, I know that adherence to steps, clarity of intention, awareness of space, and properties, and rules, will bring the ‘magic’, and command the unconscious. These steps organise the mind, strengthens the will, and focuses the thinking.

 

The Owl Service adaptation (1969)

 

 
Ignorance of the rules therefore, is detrimental. If the internal, subjective rules that govern your mind, shaped by upbringing and genetics, are not governed, it is easy to fall into disarray with yourself, and the world around you. Your Psyche falls further and further into imbalance, your shadow cannot reintegrate and the individuation process stalls, perhaps even atrophies completely. Symbolically, the same can be said of Garner’s characters. Ignorance of the rules would be catastrophic for the protagonists of Alderley Edge, while being nearly-catastrophic for Alison in The Owl Service, and outright ruinous for Tom in Red Shift. In Alison’s case, the rules were straightforward: she will become owls, or she will become flowers – the difference is determined by Roger and Gwyn. What the rules are not, is obvious and clear. The elder characters, Huw Halfbacon, Gwyn’s mother and Alison’s mother, do not communicate effectively to the younger characters, but instead seek to steer them against the grain (or in Halfbacon’s case, steer them in the right direction, just not with plain-speaking or coherent methods, at least until Gwyn has drawn closer to his heritage). As a result, Alison very nearly succumbs to calamity. In Red Shift, of the three male protagonists in each time zone, it is Tom in the then-present day who comes off worst, as he is the only one who doesn’t give himself over to the axe head when he finds it – he sells it for a train ticket, and thus to emotional turmoil.

The message isn’t OBEY THE RULES. The message is – know the rules, know the effects of working with them, and beware the effects of mismanaging them.  This is much my understanding of the Psyche.

The Mythical Substratum

In The Owl Service, Alison and Roger are English, but are no less susceptible to the mystical forces in the Welsh valley they are holidaying in than Gwyn, the local Welsh boy. Because you see, the forces that govern the universe really, really, really don’t give a shit who we are, where we are from, what blood we have or don’t have, where we live in time, how we talk, how we live, what we do or don’t do. It’s utterly, utterly arrogant of us to assume that because our local, cultural social constructs belong to one group or other, they won’t mimetically, psychologically, and culturally affect others that come into its proximity. The mythical landscape spares no-one. But see how Alison and Roger are brought to heel by the Welsh landscape. As Halfbacon says, the English may own the property he tends to legally, but they are not the hereditary ‘rulers’, they do not have the kinship as he and Gwyn do. By illustrating this, Garner gives the local Welsh their identity, their deep meaningful connection to the locality, but he also tells us that any human who falls into its influence is given identity within the localised framework. Myth and folklore are both unique and inclusive. It’s frankly not in our power to stop it. 

 

Alderley Edge

 

The thing that affects the three teenagers in The Owl Service, and that works its influence in all his works, is what Merlin Coverley, in his brilliant book Hauntology: Ghosts of Future Past, calls the ‘mythical substratum’. Coverley identifies in Garner’s work an ‘impact between topography and chronology’ (p145 of the 2020 paperback edition), and examines how events of the past shape, even scar the landscape, its after-effects influencing the present. He talks about Garner’s concepts of ‘inner time’, where your internal life bears the existence of and is driven by ‘engrams’ (that is, permanently-imprinted memory traces that evoke strong sensory and emotional reaction when triggered, and that through the successive generations populate the Jungian collective unconscious to haunt our descendants),  ‘outer time’, the external world beyond the human being that creates engrams, and ‘mythic time’, where time is the non-linear experience of events and concepts belonging to mythical cycles. For Garner, the resolution of engram ‘attacks’, where the inner time spills into the outer time, and past becomes present, is a traumatic psychological journey into the Dreamtime, a concept he acknowledges adopting from Altjira, an Aborigine practice (do we call this cultural appropriation on Garner’s part? Or do we take a wider view, and suggest there’s a universality among us human beings, and sometimes we’re asked to find the grammar for such experiences from others in order to appreciate better our own cultural folklore). Time in Garner’s stories is a repetition, where successive generations are forced to live them through again and again, reworking them to fit their contemporary circumstances, but always toward the same consequences. Place in these stories, is a nexus of energy that stores itself up and, through people as ‘receivers’, transmits itself. Not unlike the stone tape theory, history (sometimes even future events, as in Red Shift) imprint themselves on the physical environment, and humans (and animals) experience them like recordings, consciously as apparitions or visions, or unconsciously through their behaviours and actions. Place and Time are nebulous, situated in the mythic time, where yesterday is as today, tomorrow is as a thousand years ago, it makes no difference.
Through his Dreamtime work, Garner was able to pull through his engram assault and achieve this place/time unification and experience the mythic time, something he’d previously only ascribed as being reached exclusively by people without formal education (notice this white, Western, Cambridge-educated man romanticising rural working class people and aboriginal cultures – a common concept of Garner’s time, to ascribe insight and mystic awareness to under-privileged, indigenous groups). Interestingly, Garner was only able to achieve this through suffering and visionary work, connecting him to the shamanic tradition. Shaman, in accounts I have read, need to be ‘taken apart’ (spiritual death) in order to access the Dreamtime, or the Spirit World, and this may take the form of physical suffering (such as being stung by a swarm of bees in order to loosen the soul fibres, as in the Saxon tradition) or by mental disintegration. Upon reassembly, the shaman has transitioned to a new consciousness and state of being – they now occupy the mythic time, where the inner and outer are as one. Achieving this, says Garner in a fantastic flurry of New Age 1970s awakening, will allow us to fulfill our evolutionary potential. It correlates with Jesus’s ‘emptying’ (the Greek kenosis) in the Wilderness: the harsh process of individuation in Jungian parlance.

 

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

 

 
In the Alderley Edge novels, the mythic substratum is present in a very visceral way. The children Susan and Colin live it as direct experience. It’s there and immediate. The legends are real, as is the danger they present. The power in Garner’s writing here is to blend it with the everyday world. Although largely hidden from the mainstream human world, the realm of Fundindelve, and the larger fantastic reality it belongs to, is nonetheless in the same world as our own. It is a world where goddesses and evil wizards disguise themselves as ordinary locals or backpacking-wearing tourists, where svarts keep to the disused mines, where golden, expansive localities can arise from much small, more mundane places, before disappearing again. It absolutely infuses our world with magic, and overlays it with a mythical infrastructure by which all its inhabitants interact. 

When the Magic is Gone

But what happens when the magic is gone? Garner talks about his mental health issues, his depression. Many of us know the landscapes of depression: when it arises, all the magic gets sucked out of our world. There’s no wonder, there’s no Light. It’s just the cold concrete of reality, day to day. Even when we are surrounded by people, we are alone. The good times are in the past, your own future is cancelled. In Boneland, Garner presents us an adult Colin from the previous Alderley books, but much like the post-peak world of Prime Suspect 6, or the comedown of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we find ourselves in a world where the adventure is over. There are no alfars, no palugs, no wizards, no Morrigans, and no characters apart from Colin to have survived into the present time from the late 1960s. Alone, amnesiac, autistic, obsessed and adrift, Colin is searching for his missing sister Susan, and seeking to recover his lost memories. He sits in front of the rock that once led to the Sleeping King, but it never opens. He waits in the valley that once held so much magic, but is surrounded by nothing but stones and pebbles. The reader is left with the impression that Colin may have imagined the events of the first two books, that they never happened at all or, they did happen, but were not magical: villainous witch Selina Place could have been just a human child molester, and the whole mythical adventure was an imaginary coping mechanism. This says a lot about my own attraction to spirituality. Do my traumatic childhood experiences and autistic brain force into creation an imaginary, fantastical inner reality, so I can cope? Basically, yes. But then, that’s all religions, right? What’s important is that, Colin’s interactions with the mythic have a healing effect, they make him stable and give him purpose. Although he has no strict answers by the end, he is left with a renewed sense of magic. He has reconciled himself to the knowledge the world has changed, its access to magic and Fundindelve weaker than ever before (as was hinted to be happening in The Moon of Gomrath due to human pollution and activity), and that the physical, familial, social and cultural familiarities of childhood, have gone. It is strongly hinted that agents of Fundindelve have intervened to bring him to this peace and sense of responsibility. Again disguising themselves as ordinary people, the suggestion is that the Morrigan, or some aspect of the Goddess, has steered him where he needs to be. He finds the magic again, in this new world, and on his own terms. 

 

 

So what can we do when the magic is gone?

Go and get it back.

 

Light vs. Dark

As with Susan Cooper, Garner works with the duality of Light and Dark. Not just in his fiction, but in his personal writings. We are in battle both within ourselves (in Garnerian view, to overcome the bad engrams, or what Jung would call complexes and neuroses) and with external forces (that implant bad engrams). For Jung, Light and Dark are not independent, intelligent agencies, but are formed from within us, which then outwardly projected onto people, places and situations. There is no Devil, no Satan, no Absolute Evil but the evil we make. In the Alderley Edge novels, the Light and the Dark are in constant struggle, with representatives on each side. As with Cooper again, the Light never seems to have as many troops, isn’t as coordinated, isn’t as organised, isn’t as influential and far-reaching, as the Dark. And yet, when Light acts, it has only to fulfill a specific and much less sizable effort than the Dark will muster. 

Nastrond from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

 

Consider a match lit in a pitch black room. Immediately the dark retreats as the room becomes filled with light. Only one match is needed. 

 

 

The Shamanism of Alan Garner

In Boneland, he examines the inheritance of shamanistic burden. Starting with a prehistoric shaman in flashbacks that underscore events in the present time, we see a laboured individual working to keep the stars from falling. Eventually he passes the responsibility to a newcomer from a migrating tribe. The suggestion is, these responsibilities to keep the Dark from overcoming the Light, evolve throughout the ages to take on different forms. For the prehistoric shaman, it is his task to make sure day follows night. For Cadellin, epochs later, High Magic is used to prepare the Sleeping King for his last battle. For Colin in the present, it is astronomy and other minute actions (his autistic routines for example) that enables his shamanistic responsibilities to manifest. All three forms are vastly different from each other, and here Garner is telling us that there’s no absolutism in the methods, detail and aesthetics of the shaman’s struggle to keep back the Dark, but an underlying truth that shape-shifts through the countless generations, and across multiple cultural exchanges. It is a simple yet profound message, that wisdom falls back on universality to transmit itself – and from Garner the shaman himself. Consider how his mental anguishes (Attack of the Engrams!) brought him to mythic time. Consider also the fact that when he was a child, he was very ill and bedridden for months on end, year after year, to the point where he entered delirious dreamtimes and neared death. Such trauma is the bedrock of shamanic awakening, and as he reached adulthood and started to publish his books, Alan Garner initiated shamanistic storytelling to awaken his readers, bring them inner, outer and mythic time, and experience the violence of repeated histories. 

 

 

 

What is Spiritual Activism?

🌈☮🕊✞☯🛕💓🌍🌳🐬🛌 🌞🌙

 

Who is the spiritual activist? He, she or they could come from any background, any culture, faith or creed. What defines them is their burning awareness of injustice in the world, their realisation of its sacredness, and the desire to put their ideals into action.

Stonehenge, one of the spiritual centres of Britain, and one of the most political

Imagine you live in a small town in the countryside. You might be just out of school, or perhaps well into adulthood. Either way, you’ve been trained by various people across your life, family members, teachers, peers or colleagues, to conform to certain behaviours and expectations. You may have fallen in line easily, or perhaps you felt uncomfortable, never quite fitting in. Whichever path you came from, however, will not be as shattering and as fulfilling as the one to come.

True to your upbringing, you want to stand on your own two feet, have a good job, and accomplish something worthwhile. So when it’s announced that a new fulfilment centre is being built nearby, along with a major road, you go along to the town meeting about it. There are some residents who are unhappy about this, but the Company representatives pose offers that simply cannot be refused: thousands of jobs for locals at all levels and across multiple disciplines, apprenticeship schemes to massively alleviate unskilled unemployment within the town, funds to build a new school, new doctors’ surgeries, a state-of-the-art library, heritage centre, wildlife sanctuary, better roads, cheaper and more frequent buses, new parks, and even a new homes built and sold at discount for first-time buyers native to the area. It sounds incredible. You know the town, you know it’s depleted, needs investment, needs better amenities. You know that the quality of life here is low, general health is bad, education is lacking, there’s no aspiration. This could turn the town around completely.

Better still, you apply for a job with the Company, and get it.

Photo by Rob Reid, from Tomorrow's People

In short time both the fulfilment centre and the new road are built, and you begin work on-site. You start your role as a floor picker, maybe you’ll progress to another role in the Company as time goes on. It’s exciting at first, everything is big and busy and impressive. You make some friends there. The work’s hard, but doing a good day’s work feels meaningful, your money earnt.

Over time, however, things seem less and less reasonable. You’re asked to work overtime, or work through your lunch break, for no extra money, particularly if your pace of work is not meeting the targets. Yet, if you’re just a minute late to clock in, they dock you an hour’s wages. Toilet breaks are timed, there’s a supervisor constantly on your back, and you’re threatened with dismissal for the slightest infarction. And while you may be quite stoic, your colleagues around you seem to be breaking left, right and centre. Your aisle buddy, a father of two, tells you the supervisor has only giving him 17 hours this week, which means he’s only working 1 hour more than the minimum to receive his social security money – ultimately finding himself significantly worse off than if he’d just stayed on benefits. But the supervisor gave him a choice: either work the 17 hours, or be reported to the Job Centre as someone refusing work, sanctioning all benefit contributions for up to 6 months. Next you see an Estonian worker, bullied by the locals for being a foreigner, reduced to tears. You see women being perved over, objectified and harassed. You’ve seen vulnerable workers mercilessly teased and victimised by their more spiteful colleagues like it’s a school playground. On the whole, however, everyone both in the Company and in the town seem happy and in-line with the new system. The horrible things you are seeing seem not the register with most other people, and while you are only passively absorbing the things you witness or hear about, it’s quickly beginning to feel like you’re in a dystopian only you can see. But you don’t have to worry for long. Your hard work, lateral thinking skills and flare for action has not gone unnoticed, and soon enough you are promoted to an office job in logistics. Now in a shirt and tie, sitting at a desk, it all feels much more forgivable. You are still set to searing targets, but overall the new job’s much less soul-destroying.

 

Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, 1980s

You have more responsibility, more respect, more money. You want to do a good job but there’s a tugging feeling in your chest. You still spend time on the shop floor for evaluation purposes, and you still see those awful things happening. Worse, now you’re higher up the ladder, you see how the managers behave – their callous disregard for the workers, their harassment of the female admin staff, their daily ritual humiliation for whoever hasn’t met targets. More and more you just can’t ignore it. More and more you feel shattered and overcome by grief. Then, one day, you see something you can’t overlook. Maybe it was a female co-worker receiving inappropriate unwanted attention from a male colleague. Perhaps it was an older worker being belittled and threatened by a supervisor. Or it may even have been the ringleader of a bullying clique making their usual moves on their victim. You stop, turn around, and make a stand. This. Stops. Now.

You cause a scene. You disrupt the flow of the environment. No-one is used to you speaking truth. They don’t know how to act. Your manager takes you to a quiet room. ‘Your values are commendable,’ they say, ‘but this is the real world.’ Their tone is calm, patronising. There’s even a little backstage frankness – you both know you’re not playing 'the game' at the moment, and for a few minutes you talk not as players, but as human beings fully aware how fake the game really is.

 

Battle of Orgreave, 18 June 1984. The showdown of the miners' strike (and of a hundred years of labour empowerment), which saw a bought-for police force brutally suppress the working class's challenge to the British establishment. As of Dec 2022, the working class has not recovered.

 

You return to your normal working routine. The game resumes. But there’s a splinter in your mind now. You cannot go back to the way things were, even if you wanted to.

This is why, down the line, you refuse to follow your manager’s instruction to asses a time and motion study and select 15% of the shop floor workforce for dismissal. ‘It’s wrong,’ you offer, simply.

‘You’re fired,’ they reply.

You feel a mixture of humiliation and liberation. It’s strangely breath-taking. Security escort you off the grounds, but you walk tall, your chest lighter.

Back in town, your family and friends are miffed. You were fired because you made a moral decision? That’s not something that happens in your family. It’s a weird night. Everyone is gathered around you, the telly’s off, all phones are put aside. There’s a big discussion. Family members seem to have a renewed interest in you, sounding off you, using you as a capstone upon which to compare their own morals, or to denounce you as wrong. Some praise you. You stood your ground, they say, that’s good. Overall they realise you’ve brought them into a higher moral consciousness, even if it’s just for a couple of hours.

Black Lives Matter. For a time in the 1990s, it felt like the younger generations were overturning the racial prejudices of their parents' and uniting into a new post-colonial Britain of solidarity between its brow-beaten subjects: the old peasant class (white working class, as they call us now), Africans, Indians and Pakistanis of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim background, West Indians, Scots, Welsh, Irish... Sadly, the powers that be decided divide and conquer was a good tactic, and the media and politicians set to work sowing the seeds of fear, xenophobia and hatred. Anyone who isn't a Norman-descended landowner in Britain, is a subject of its imperial, authoritarian control - that's not just the English (their original serfs since 1066), but the Celts, Indians, Nigerians, West Indians, Pakistanis, and anyone else they conquered over the centuries. As such, we are all committed to walking the ruins of the British Empire, and we are all children of its oppression. It's time we united under that common purpose, and become children of the revolution.

 

The next day you walk around town. The Company has been around now for over two years, but unemployment hasn’t improved all that much – just as soon as someone’s recruited another is sacked. The library’s been scrapped, the heritage centre quietly forgotten, no new school, and only a very basic, very austere park with one small climbing frame and unfinished swings. It’s clear to you now that the Company was not the answer to the town’s needs. The Company, you realise, simply wants profit. That is the only motive for all its decisions.

Worse still, the resulting traffic has increased pollution in the area, children are developing respiratory problems more often, and the new roads have torn up the fields and woodlands, displacing the wildlife, and driving certain species out of their habitats completely. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Company plans to buy more land, expand the fulfilment centre, build more roads, bring in more lorries, more pollution, and squeeze its influence tighter around the town council and civic leaders.

You cannot unsee these things, you cannot unknow them. So you make your choice. You start making your opposition to these plans vocal, with increasing loudness. You attend marches, protests, you support strike action. You even start to sabotage equipment surveyors use to plan the Company’s expansion, or lodge appeal after appeal in regards to local fauna and flora that fall under preservation orders. You discover the Company are secretly killing the protected species preventing them from advancing, or bribing and blackmailing landowners to sell. You often fall foul of the Company’s heavies, but you’re not alone. Others are with you, others of the same honest conviction to do right. It feels like an endless fight that you will never win, but you keep fighting.

Photo by Rob Reid, from Tomorrow's People

All the while you do, your connection with your fellow human beings is deepening, your unity with the earth and its creatures strengthening and becoming sacred. You feel there’s something beyond you, a higher consciousness you are reaching toward, a Wholeness of Self. There’s an ocean of oneness, an interconnectedness of things that guide you along with an inexplicable synchronicity. More importantly, you are working in service to others. You may not even realise it at first, but everything you are doing is for the health, security, equality and happiness of all people, all animals, and the very Earth herself.

You don’t know why. You don’t know how you got these morals. It wasn’t all those schooldays of having the Bible shoved down your throat. Jesus was just some ancient bearded bloke who was born in a manger, told people to worship him or go to hell, died a brutal death, and came back from the dead (and something about Easter eggs). No, you’re the way you are because humans have evolved to be altruistic and cooperative, and in your case these characteristics are heightened for one reason or another. 

 

The 2010 student protests in London. The Coalition Government had announced the tripling of student fees as a means to disincentivise working class participation in higher education, and boost profits in the education sector.

And now you are walking in the footsteps of people all throughout time who have taken a stand against the darkness and firmly rejected it in service of the light. Socrates, Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, Emmeline Pankhurst, Che Guevara, and even Jesus (the real Jesus, the one they never told you about).  
    
This is spiritual activism. 

 

 

My Personal Beliefs

I was initially brought up an Anglican (not a very good one), although my childhood gradually gave way to total secularism. My various experiences have amounted to core set of spiritual beliefs, but I prefer to keep things vague because frankly I will never know anything for certain, and because sometimes keeping things out of focus keeps your life fluid and flowing. The Code I created for myself isn't a strict law, but has arisen from my own moral compass rather than imposed from without. As such, I can only fail myself if I break the Code, and only I can make amends.

At heart I guess I'm a humanist, as I believe that all religion, all spirituality arises from the human mind, and human interactions. Ideas of morality and ethics in an abstract, self-aware species such as ourselves means that all things start and end with the human being - and the onus is on us to take responsibility and save one another.

I understand spirituality and religious belief through the analytical psychology of Carl Jung. As such, I believe in the journey of individuation that brings us to the Wholeness of Self, and to the individuation of the collective (our society) into a balanced, equal, peaceful and utopian system. 

I also subscribe to Jung's theory that every human has a collective unconscious, a foundation substrata in our Psyche that influences our personal unconscious. It's a psychical dimension composed of 'archetypes' that find expression in our dreams often as mythological figures. It is what gives us our religions, folklore, etc.

New Age Spirituality

I have a very specific and defined personal understanding of what is meant when I identify as a New Age Seeker. I freely adopt the term because it's the best fit. It's my route to psychological wellbeing and positive action, and even if I don't exactly always believe everything about these beliefs are 'really-existing', and let myself be led by open-mindedness, critical thinking and my own 'mystical' experiences.

OK, so here's a quick rundown of my definition of New Age, formed in an English radical context:

• Rejects capitalist, class-based mainstream English society
• Relies of intuition, instinct, synchronicity/alignment and the inner voice to inform decision, judgements and choices in every day life (because we have evolved to be cooperative mammals that intuitively know right and wrong). It means in touch with your inner psychic landscape
  
• Anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist
• Expression in practice of theatre, music, carnival and poetic/prose writing
• Exists in the pagan chronotrope (Gaian time), following the Wheel of the Year, developing eco-spirituality, resonating with the land
  
• Seeking our true Self and seeking the Real behind the capitalist realist fantasy around us - leading to the New Age (Aquarian age, Nirvana, Kingdom of God, etc.) - particularly in anticipation of the coming climate apocalypse and societal breakdown
  
• Healing (as in psychological healing, and communal healing)
  
• Cosmological beliefs
• Autonomous spaces

 

Wheel of the Year

 

I also try to keep the festivals and traditions, organised into the Wheel of the Year, to remain mindful of the environment, the seasons, and the coming together of communities. These gatherings represent an expression of emancipation, of radicalism and political empowerment, and of peace, love and giving. Below is a list of traditions, each with a link to a BFI video on the subject:

 

Summer Solstice (Midsummer) - 21 June

Lammas - 1 August

Autumn Equinox (Harvest Festival) - 23 September  

Michaelmas - 29 September

All Hallows (Samhain/Halloween) - 31 October/1 November

Guy Fawkes (Bonfire Night) - 5 November

Winter Solstice (Yule) - 21 December

Christmas - 24 - 26 December

Twelfth Night - 5 January  

Wassailing (Epiphany) - 6 January

Plough Monday - Monday after Wassailing

Beating the Bounds (Candlemas/Imbolc) - 2 February

Easter - various dates between March and April 

Spring/Vernal Equinox (Ostara) - 21 March

May Day (Beltane) - 1 May 

...and back around to the Summer Solstice - 21 June 

 

 

 

Jung

 

 

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung provides a solid framework for understanding spirituality, and I work closely to explore his work (and professionals who have expanded on his work subsequently) in order to achieve an holistic understanding of religion, spirituality, mythology and folklore, and their effects and purposes, and prevent myself from permanently falling into narrow inroads defined by particular religions, denominations, doctrines, dogmas and traditions. 

 

Jung's belief was that our Psyche, the whole of our mind, is on a journey toward 'individuation', the balanced reconciliation of the opposing forces within ourselves, and that by doing so we seek to reach the Self - the higher state of consciousness. 

 

Briefly, the main components of his theory are:

 

 

 

A Jungian mind map (creator unknown to me)

    The Psyche (or Psychic World) - the whole of our mind, as much a part of, affected by, and influencing upon, any part of our body.

    The Conscious mind - the top-most layer of our Psyche, where the active and present psychic (mental) functions occur. 

    The Personal Unconscious - the next layer down, containing our stored memories, our neuroses and complexes, our shadow, and our opposing forces.

    The Collective Unconscious - the fixed blueprint buried at the foundational level of our mind. It contains the 'symbols' and 'archetypes', biological and cultural consciousnesses, and 'mana' personality (our religious mental state).

    Complexes and neuroses are what form when forces in our personal unconscious on not balanced.

    The Self (or God/Soul-image) - the Self is our highest state of mind, the endpoint of the individuation process, and the part of us that calls us to that process. Jung admitted that it's impossible for us to reach this: it's the journey that counts. The Self is 'God' - the divinity within us, our objective ideal, and while we cannot understand or comprehend it, it projects itself into our personal unconscious via the archetypes, particularly as a fatherly or godly figure.

    The Archetypes are personifications of the collective unconscious that take form in our dreams as people, places and events, and allow us to recognise certain symbols in our waking life. For example, dreaming of a goddess or enchanted motherly figure, represents the archetype of female divinity as recognised by cultures all across the world and throughout history.

    Instincts arise from the unconscious during our waking life, outside of the conscious mind's control, compelling us toward activities and decisions.

    The Ego is a little like a computer's RAM, providing our 'interface' and organising our thoughts, senses and feelings. It contains our sense of identity and is the centre of our conscious. Through the ego, we see the world, we understand the world, and we understand ourselves. It is the cockpit of our being we cannot exit.

    The Libido (or Ego-self axis) - the libido embodies our passions, will, interests and desires, and 'intercedes' between our ego and our personal unconscious. It 'runs' our brain like a CPU, pulling data from the unconscious into our conscious so we can complete tasks. However, because it is enslaved to the cyclical input-output nature of our ego and personal unconscious, the forces that generate it (survival instincts, sexual desires, social motivations, etc.), an unbalanced Psyche can lead to the libido launching a war with itself as two or more positions, some more developed than others, compete for dominance.

    Persona is the 'mask' your ego uses to protect itself and to function in external, mostly social situations. It is how we want others to see us, and how we wish to see ourselves. We may have more than one persona for different situations, and different personas may only have subtle variations.

    Projection is a key idea in Jung's thinking. It is the process by which we understand the world and others. Because we cannot exit our own brains, we cannot relate to anyone or anything by any other way than projecting what we know and understand about ourselves onto them. For example. if I take a dislike to someone, it is because I am projecting something I don't like about myself onto them that I have recognised.

    The Anima and Animus - that part of ourselves which is male or female (and in more recent thinking an androgynous position between the two), that we project onto others. Like everything else, these are just terms to understanding a psychic process, and in this case Jung (a man of his time) falls on dated generalisations. He posits that the anima is the caring, nurturing, creative and emotional side of the mind, the animus the strong, practical, logical side. We invoke the relevant force when we exercise the need for it (for example, if, as a man, I am painting a nice watercolour landscape, I'm invoking my anima), and when we fall in love, we project one or the other onto the person we desire - by casting my anima on a woman, thereby falling in love with her (or lusting after her), I am falling in love with myself. After all, we cannot exist outside our own heads, so love can only be experience internally (again, this does not detract from the beauty of love)

    The Shadow is that part of us that exists in our unconscious we keep repressed. It contains ideas we don't want to think about, flaws, our failures and shortcomings, our dark desires and thoughts of evil. It also contains empowering, life-affirming and benevolent aspects of ourselves, but ones we are nonetheless frightened of and want to keep buried. It is essential to unleash the forces of the shadow, to reckon with them, and bring our Psyche to balance. The overwhelming majority of people never do this. Even if we were to recognise and accept what's inside, dealing with it is shatteringly hard.

    Dreams and Visions - for me, the most interesting aspect of Jung's thinking. Dreams and waking dreams were very important to him, and he believed we can only reconcile of shadow and balance our Psyche by listening to what our personal unconscious is telling us, after all no-one is in a better position to know what's mentally difficult for them, than their own brain. To do this, we must listen to our dreams, analyze them, and listen to our stray waking thoughts, even engaging in meditative visualizations.

    Synchronicity is a fascinating proposition by Jung, and I have experienced it myself - almost daily. He felt that coincidences, sometimes, were just a little too coincidental to ignore. He'd dream of a kingfisher, and the next day a kingfisher (non-native to where he was living) would land dead in his garden, and so on. Synchronicity is when occurrences in the external world align with a person's internal world.

 

Another Jungian mind map (creator unknown)