The Chivalric Real: On Christian Masculinity

The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere by Julia Margaret Cameron

I have been thinking, in the midst of this confused and confusing cultural moment, about the possibility of a Christian masculinity.

I am well aware of what an anachronism such an idea might appear as we increasingly lurch toward a post-gender world, as absurd as such a notion is. But absurdity has never been a hindrance to human stupidity. Indeed, as we can see only too clearly, such is celebrated.

Both masculinity and femininity have been under attack for a good long while. Certainly it has been a constant presence in my life, but it has obviously achieved ludicrous speed over the past few years. Perhaps the anxieties promoted over the course of the pandemic (such as those just coming to light initiated by Britain’s despicable Matt Hancock’s “project fear”) have for some also loosened sexual identity to such a degree that “switching gender” (another absurdity) becomes a form of imagined empowerment (though it’s really enslavement) for some and participation in its Dionysian intoxication becomes a rite of expiation for many. This may, in fact, be an implication of René Girard’s mimetic theory that never would have occurred to the great thinker, though I doubt he would be surprised at the scapegoat mechanisms often triggered when people, for example, oppose sexualizing children through drag shows or indoctrinating them into gender ideology in elementary schools and kindergarten.

At least symbolically or rhetorically, our culture has more or less succeeded in disassociating gender from biology, including the notion of the terms “father” and “mother,” which appear to be on their way out of the postmodern lexicon. In his book, The Sibling Society, published in 1996, the late Robert Bly shares an observation he received from an acquaintance: “Having made it to the one-parent family, we are now on our way to the zero-parent family.” Here it comes. A world without parents is a world without mothers and fathers; and a world without mothers and fathers is a world without women and men.

What we are left with are simulacra of women and men: appearance without a corresponding reality, spiritual, psychological, or biological. It’s a lab leak of cosplay culture, and highly contagious.

This phenomenon has many cultural and societal implications, of which the Anglican Church’s recent proposal to “de-gender” God is but a symptom. As I have written many times before, the Church writ large is at least partially to blame for having omitted the sophianic from divine consideration, and the utterance of Genesis 1 “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...male and female created he them” is better understood if we adopt the perspective that God is here speaking to Sophia, which reinforces a sound gendered typology. Unfortunately, Christian anthropology and epistemology has never removed the spanner of this misinterpretation from the works. And we’re seeing its telos unfold in real time.

But my concern here is primarily with the masculine. We see many caricatures of the masculine, from the machismo of Andrew Tate to the practices among some Eastern Orthodox and Trad Catholic men to turn prayer and fasting into an Iron Man contest—“Yea, they have already received their reward.” We also see a symptom of the missing father, the missing masculine in the platoons of young men flocking to people like Jordan Peterson or taking up a Norse-themed neopaganism in order to access their inner warrior. I don’t think these are necessarily bad things, but I do often question the authenticity of such gestures.

There is also the polarity to these very butch expressions of masculinity. Bly, whom I met once in 1987 and made me really feel “met” as a man for perhaps the first time in my young life, was wont to call the counter to the butch masculine the “soft male,” a man feminized not by nature but by conditioning. Indeed, boys in many school settings are discouraged from, well, acting like boys. Climbing trees is “too dangerous.” Competition encourages “toxic masculinity.” And so forth. You’ve seen it. This obscene pedagogy is a recipe for neurosis and self-hate. It is no wonder, then, that so many young men are reluctant to enter the work force, or go to college, or leave the adolescent secure fantasy spaces of video games and pornography. They never grow up. Puer aeternus. And no one should be surprised, seeing the indoctrination in self-loathing they’ve been subject to.

In Jungian analysis, we might say that the hyper-butch masculine and its companionate soft male are both evidence of an unintegrated anima. That is, they are exaggerations masking the failure to integrate the feminine into the psyche. I think our culture is doing this at scale right now, and it seems to me that the rise and ready availability of medical services allowing men to “become” women (in no small part encouraged via propaganda) is a cosmetic intervention that ultimately fails to address the inner psychological need to integrate the feminine. I think this is why we see so many absolute caricatures of the feminine arise in this sphere, as if, in far too many cases, a Barbie doll is the essence of what it is to be a woman.

Maybe twenty years ago, a woman colleague of mine stopped me one day and said, “Michael, you have the most developed feminine side I’ve ever seen in a man.” I was a little taken aback, so I punched her. Just kidding. I don’t know if what she said is or was true, but I suspect it had something to do with my being a man who writes and loves poetry and literature, knows how to take care of flowers, is attracted to the Divine Sophia, and is comfortable talking to women. The first three are often construed as “feminine” qualities (I don’t know why), but my comfort among women has much more to do with growing up with sisters and a strong mother than it does with trying to develop any kind of lotharian skill set. But I also know how to work hard at manual labor, kill and butcher an animal, how to sacrifice, and how to be a husband and father.

I’ve known plenty of men who feign being feminists or “into the goddess” as a way to flatter women they plan on seducing. I’m sure you’ve met the type. I also know plenty that play the macho role to similarly impress women. I swear, sometimes it’s like a hetero Village People.

So, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of a Christian masculinity.

Yesterday, I took to Twitter to canvas people about what or who might be their ideal of a Christian masculinity. I didn’t get a ton of suggestions, but some were interesting. One guy nominated Aragorn, son of Arathorn (a good model), and another suggested Pa Ingalls from the Little House on the Prairie books and television series. A few people pointed to Richard Rohr’s work (which I’m not familiar with) and someone even pointed to Holy Week in the Orthodox Church. I even asked my two youngest sons (ages 12 and 14). The younger one chose Aragorn and his brother picked Kambei Shimada, the leader of the samurai in the classic film Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa (I thought that was a great choice). Only one woman joined the conversation! And she nominated chivalry.

I certainly share her admiration for chivalry, but not in the rather abstract way in which it is often sold. For me, the chivalric ideal gives way to what I might call “the chivalric real.” Its most complete realization is found in the character of Launcelot in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur.

Launcelot represents the most noble expression of Christian masculinity because he is fully aware of his inadequacy. His love for Guinevere, the wife of his best friend, is not evidence of hamartia, but of his true humanity—and it also serves as an indictment of arranged marriage, the abandonment of which Denys De Rougement in his odious Love in the Western World laments as a great loss.

Indeed, the figure of Launcelot has haunted me since childhood, and then my early twenties, when a few of the young women I knew were convinced I was the reincarnation of Launcelot after they’d read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, in which he is rather a John Donne-like character, crucified between the trees of love and religion. Recently, I wrote this poem about him (from a forthcoming book that is moving along at a very slow pace):

VOCATION

When first I saw him: beautiful, noble of both mien and of bearing,

standing upon sunrise at the lake, the sun behind him and the water

like fire of crimson and gold, the ripples like flame reaching to his feet

the wind in his dark hair and his arms full of rushes for bedclothes.

We always knew him fearless, but more than that he was kind, humble,

feeling himself somehow unworthy of the accolades, embarrassed even

by his contrition, by his weeping when he prayed for the life of young Urry;

even more by our amazement when the lad’s wounds vanished like smoke.

So, after a time, seeing him at enmity with his dearest friend we found ourselves

all at enmity, with ourselves, with the world, and those who died not from despair

in the search for something holy lived in disdain for the abject failure of the Good;

and in our anger at this betrayal all was lost in the lust of blood and fire and ruin.

The failure of this vocation led him to another, but even then he failed to find solace,

forgiveness cruelly eluding him in this broken cosmos where all that lives can only die.

We followed, thinking if we found no comfort, at least we would refrain from harm;

yet the barley and corn grew very thin and the heavens were ever masked in grey.

One night he was bidden in vision to Almesbury, where he found the beloved already dead.

The women wailed and struck up the dirge as he bore the corpse and laid it in the chapel

offering the Mass of Remembrance while wax candles melted under undulant flame.

Even this was a betrayal, for betrayal is as much a property of the world as love.

The cloister is also a fellowship, but the dangers here are within and not in the wolds

or on the fields of blood. His loves and friends had vanished, but his vocation yet held

him in thralldom to sorrow. And he slept and did not waken. Then angels, they say, bore him away to a lake of rippling waters with waves the colors of crimson and gold.

What I think is important about the chivalric real is something many might miss: its ability to contain and positively direct the potentially violent drives that are intrinsic to male biology. Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz describe this both beautifully and accurately in their book The Grail Legend:

“The knight represents—at least as a concept—a higher, more differentiated form of the warrior, even though the individual knight might in fact have been undifferentiated enough. What the ideal of chivalry meant to that age has been given expression by poets through the figures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. It is clear that a higher, nobler and more disciplined human being was indicated by the term knight. The virtues demanded of him—strength and skill in arms, valour, courage and loyalty, to the feudal lord in particular but also to the friend and even vis-à-vis the foe—were no small requirements. In the profoundest sense a religious idea was concealed behind all this. Arthur’s Round Table might therefore be looked upon as a symbol in which is mirrored the developing consciousness of Christian man in the first millennium.In those days the spread of Christianity was linked with the great civilizing task of subduing the aboriginal brutality and unconsciousness of the heathen peoples. This lent a higher meaning to the Christian knight’s aggressive masculinity, which was put to the service of a nobler ideal and a higher state of consciousness.”

This certainly seems a quality lacking in contemporary conversations about gender, where discipline of desires and urges is virtually non-existent and notions of loyalty and fidelity are all but invisible. And the lack of these things no doubt attracts mostly fatherless young men to the more severe forms of Eastern Orthodoxy and Latin Catholicism as well as to neopaganism, Freemasonry, or Jordan Peterson. Completely understandable.

Of course, I don’t expect Christian men to start buying swords or joining militias, though I do think acknowledging the violence beneath the surface is a healthy way to keep it in check, as a potential energy one might use at one’s disposal rather than be a victim of its unconscious psychic eruptions. I had to figure out what to do with this in my own biography. Though I do feel an attraction to an absolute Christian non-violence, I also know that if anyone came into my house intending to hurt my wife or children they would not succeed without a fight. I know people who would allow violence upon their own families rather than commit violence, but I know now that I am not of their number. And I am at peace with that, though it took a long time to arrive there.

Finally, I think it best to take the advice of one of the singing masters of my soul, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, certainly one of wisest of men, who offers this advice in his poem, “The Godlike”:

Noble be man, Helpful and good! For that alone Distinguisheth him From all the beings Unto us known.

One thing I do know is that a world without men is a world without women. And that’s not a world worth inhabiting.

Friendship, loyalty, forgiveness, stuff like that.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit and The Regeneration Podcast. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

Captive Minds

I have written before about how Czeslaw Milosz’s 1951 book The Captive Mind is one of the most important—and seldom read, alas—books of the twentieth century. The book is a taxonomy of the usually gradual (but absolute) capitulation to Communism of a number of Polish intellectuals familiar to Milosz following World War II. Intellectuals, in my experience, are the most prone to ideology, and the higher up the academic (BA, MA, Ph.D.) scale they are, the more inclined they are to an uncompromising resoluteness. As a biodynamic farmer with a doctorate in early modern English literature, I may have a unique perspective in that my life straddles the worlds of academia and the working-class / small business owners. I prefer the latter world. By a long shot.

I have often wondered what it is that makes academics so prone to ideology and so intolerant of those holding opinions opposite of theirs. Certainly, one contributing factor must be the conditioning centers of higher education, and especially graduate programs (particularly in the humanities--but please do not think this makes the sciences any more moral: see here). People in these programs are conditioned to at least act the part of the dutiful Progressive—at least until tenure. Even then they might be in danger of retribution if they step out of line. (You can read one account of the process here.) It didn’t use to be that way, and I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule. But this is pretty much what I saw during my twenty years in higher education.

Example: as a visiting professor years ago, I received an email I shouldn’t have received. The department hiring committee had been interviewing candidates who had done the rounds of MLA interview, campus visit, and sample lesson. It was down to two candidates: a progressive with a degree from the University of Michigan (the kind of person who began a lot of conversations at this Catholic liberal arts college with the phrase, “As an atheist...”) and a conservative Christian (I forget where he went). Everyone agreed that the Christian was more intellectually gifted, had great scholarly potential, and was a better teacher. The students in the sample lesson were not at all impressed by the U of M grad, but thought the Christian was fantastic. Nevertheless, though all these things were admitted in the email I received by accident, the Chair of the department recommended they hire the lesser candidate because the other was a conservative Christian. At the time, I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to have received the email, but minutes later the Chair burst into my office to tell me it wasn’t meant for me, that he had sent it to all the department by accident. He was actually a bit freaked out. They hired the lesser candidate. The students didn’t like her very much, but political hegemony of the department was assured. This is how the game is played.

Academics don’t typically think of themselves as the products of classical conditioning, but Pavlov was no dummy. Reward and punishment combined with resent (often repressed) at the process make for toxic psychological and social environments. Milosz was onto it as well. As he writes,

“The intellectual’s eyes twinkle with delight at the persecution of the bourgeoisie, and of the bourgeois mentality. It is a rich reward for the degradation he felt when he had to be part of the middle class, and when there seemed to be no way out of the cycle of life and death. Now he has moments of sheer intoxication when he sees the intelligentsia, unaccustomed to rigorously tough thinking, caught in the sphere of revolution. The peasants, burying hoarded gold and listening to foreign broadcasts in the hope that a war will save them from collectivization, certainly have no ally in him. Yet he is warm-hearted and good; he is a friend of mankind. Not mankind as it is, but as it should be. He is not unlike the inquisitor of the middle ages; but whereas the latter tortured the flesh in the belief that he was saving the individual soul, the intellectual of the New Faith is working for the salvation of the human species in general.” [1]

What we have here, then, is not a political problem so much as a psychological one.

After World War II and the horrors of Nazism, Fascism, and the Holocaust, Western culture engaged in a thoughtful interrogation of the psyche as many of the physicians, philosophers, and intellectuals engaged in a much needed examination of the collective conscience—people like Viktor Frankl (who survived the concentration camps), Hannah Arendt, Erich Neumann, and Milosz himself. Others played the tried and true intellectual’s game of “go along to get along.”

In my years of teaching college, a constant question I have posed to students is “How do you know if you’re brainwashed?” I ask students this in every course, in every semester, and often (depending on the course) show them the first installment of Adam Curtis’s masterful documentary The Century of the Self as an introduction to the topic. Twenty years ago, when I began my college-teaching career, I also talked much about transhumanism, an idea that at the time was dismissed by my students and colleagues alike as absurd, but now, due to its endorsement by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, has reached a level of cultural cache I never could have imagined in my lifetime. I attribute some of it to a dreadful lack of critical thinking in the public square, but even more to the classic technique used by both corporations and political parties known as “the engineering of consent.” Has your consent been engineered?

As I said, what we’re dealing with here is only secondarily about politics. It’s primary phenomenon is psychological and we would do well to consider Jung’s notions of the individual and collective shadow (discussed in the clip below by Marie-Louise von Franz) and do a little critical self-examination of our own. Think about when you feel tempted to project your anger (much of it built up over almost a year of destabilization) on the Other dealing with his own shadow and being overcome by the Zeitgeist. How do you know if you’re brainwashed?

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (Vintage, 1953), 10-11.

Eros, Telos, and the Chymical Wedding

René Magritte, 'The Lovers'

What follows is an excerpt from the concluding essay from my recently published edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, entitled “Marriage and the Chymical Wedding: A Consideration.”

Coniunctio oppositorum

Charles Williams argues that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman “is, or at least is capable of being, in a remote but real sense, a symbol of the Crucifixion. There is no other human experience, except Death, which so enters into the life of the body; there is no other human experience which so binds the body to another human being.”1 As Pope Francis has instructed, “the sacrament of marriage flows from the incar­nation and the paschal mystery.”2 Marriage, moreover, as the Book of Revelation and even the Greek mysteries witness, is a telos but without its elevation to mysticism it inhabits a realm that is neither mysterious nor sacred and becomes a fraud, a sham, a carcass: something in need of regeneration. “Marriage as a sacrament, mystical marriage,” writes Nicolas Berdyaev, “is by its very meaning eternal and indissoluble. This is an absolute truth. But most marriages have no mystical meaning and have nothing to do with eternity. The Christian consciousness must recognize this.”3 This is a hard saying.

In the alchemical literature, the coniunctio oppositorum (conjunction of opposites) emblematizes an important paradigm of human flourishing: it is only by uniting opposites that the miracle can occur and the work be accomplished. As The Golden Tract has it:

“Know that the secret of the work consists in male and female, i.e., an active and a passive principle. In lead is found the male, in orpiment the female. The male rejoices when the female is brought to it, and the female receives from the male a tinging seed, and is coloured thereby.”4

This telos, indeed, reaches beyond the grave and realizes its promise in the glorified body, which the alchemists were so bold as to assay with their materia this side of the Parousia. It is no surprise then that the marriages of alchemical practitioners Kenelm Digby and Thomas Vaughan figure so strongly in their own work. Digby, whose wife Venetia predeceased him by over thirty years, considers her glorification with scientific candor: “I can not place the resurrection of our bodies among miracles, but do reckon it the last worke and periode of nature; to the comprehension of which, examples and reason may carry us a great way.”5 Vaughan’s wife Rebecca (whom he referred to as “Thalia” in much of his writing)6 served not only as his life partner, but also as his partner in alchemical experimentation; and she continued to inspire him and his work through his dream-life following her untimely death at the age of twenty-seven in 1658. As Donald R. Dickson describes it, for Thomas, even after her death Rebecca served as “tutelary spirit through the medium of his dreams, as spiritual lover who teaches him the sublime mysteries of eternal versus earthly love…and as idealized muse.”7 The idea of a “chymical wedding” certainly had other than materialistic applications for Digby and Vaughan.8

The mystical understanding of marriage, albeit now compromised by legalistic and absolutely un-erotic determinations conditioned by a ghastly parody of the chymical wedding joining neoliberalism, socialism, and capitalism, persists in some quarters of contemporary culture not under obligation to religious or political ideology. In Lindsay Clarke’s novel The Chymical Wedding (inspired by the life and work of Maryann Atwood),9 for example, the narrator Alex Darken explains the importance of such a gendered typology: “many alchemists had worked with a female assistant—a soror mystica—for the Art required that both aspects of human nature, the male and female, the solar and lunar, be reconciled in harmonious union if the chymical wedding was to be celebrated.”10 Likewise, in the climax (note the apt metaphor) of Wim Wenders’s film Der Himmel über Berlin (known to English-speaking audiences as Wings of Desire), the trapeze artist Marion instructs her beloved, the newly incarnated in the flesh angel Damiel, regarding the significance of such a union:

“You and I are now time itself. Not only the whole city—the whole world is taking part in our decision. We’re more than just the two of us now. We embody something. We’re sitting in Das Platz des Volkes. And the whole place is full of people with the same dream as ours. We are defining the game for everyone. I’m ready. Now it’s your turn. You hold the game in your hand. It’s now…or never. You need me. You will need me. There is no greater story than ours, that of man and woman. It will be a story of giants... invisible... transposable... a story of new ancestors. Look…my eyes. They are the image of necessity, of the future of everyone in the place. Last night…I dreamed of a stranger... of my man. Only with him could I be alone, open up to him, wholly open, wholly for him… welcome him wholly into me. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know... it’s you.”

Indeed, the union of the mortal Marion and the incarnated angel Damiel, marriage of matter and spirit, is nothing if not an image from the pages of alchemical tracts of the seventeenth century, only translated into a postmodern idiom filtered through the language of Rilke. And I have nothing but admiration for Wenders when we hear the applause (ostensibly for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) at precisely the moment when Marion and Damiel kiss.

Jung, in searching for a model for psychic well-being, looked to the integration of male and female (animus and anima) as the goal of psychology. He called this “a higher union….an indispensable prerequisite for wholeness,”11 and his long fascination with alchemy certainly bears witness to this insight. Of this union—which is a true communion—he writes:

“They therefore represent a supreme pair of opposites, not hopelessly divided by logical contradiction but, because of the mutual attraction between them, giving promise of union and actually making it possible. The coniunctio oppositorum engaged the speculations of the alchemists in the form of the ‘Chymical Wedding,’ and those of the cabalists in the form of Tifereth and Malchuth or God and the Shekinah, not to speak of the marriage of the Lamb.”12

Adding to Jung’s examples we might point to the creative participation of Sophia with God depicted in the biblical literature: unfortunately, most of the Fathers and the greater part of the theologians to follow have preferred to keep her in the exile of personification—perhaps the source of the psychic unrest that pervades western civilization at our own cultural moment. As Margaret Barker has argued, it was not always thus.13 But, as we all know only too well, gendered typology has not had an easy go of it of late.

Alchemical literature often includes hermaphroditic images, which some might wish to hold up as more fitting emblems of our times than the chymical wedding and the coniunctio oppositorum. But this would be a mistake. The hermaphrodite, the Rebis or Lapis Philosophorum in other imaginative constellations, represents, as Jung rightly asserts, not only the achieved union of opposites but “a symbol of the self…a union of conscious (masculine) and unconscious (feminine).”14 There are no hermaphrodites in Andreae’s tale. The hermaphrodite is an interior reality, an interior integration. Sans integration, it is pathology, a pathology projected onto and manifesting in the tableau of culture. It has nowhere else to go.

Every marriage, therefore, needs to be a chymical marriage, a mystical marriage. For it is the case that, as Berdyaev argues, “the eternity and indissolubility of marriage is an ontological and not a social truth.”15 Otherwise, we have nothing but pathology: a caricature of marriage and not a metaphysical truth. Only a marriage between a man and a woman can embody this. A marriage that does not realize the union of a man and a woman, the coniunctio oppositorum, cannot properly be construed a marriage despite the presence of its political or ideological justification, for the political and the ideological are simply pathology writ large—and this can be true as well of heterosexual arrangements that do not manifest their union to this degree. Indeed, the existence of bad heterosexual marriages in no way delegitimizes the ontological reality of what marriage is. This too is a hard saying.

Marriage, that is, is an ontological and metaphysical reality; in the language of the Schoolmen, a universal. Nominalism, the tutelary philosophy of our age, cannot alter this reality, though it tries to avoid its truth by dismissing it as “culturally constructed” or as simply a reflection of a society’s norms. Disturbingly, such malaise indicates all too well that we are party to an “implicit teleology of the gradual exclusion of all otherness.”16 Laws and customs may change, dictionaries may change: ontology and metaphysics do not. As Paul Evdokimov argued, “Without a metaphysic, without a return to the beginning, the human being can never be grasped; there will always remain a residue that is irreducible to history and pure phenomenology. Only then will we be able to deal with the archetypal constitution of man and the distinction between the charismatic conditions of man and woman.”17 To understand marriage—between the Bridegroom and the Bride, between God and Sophia, between man and woman—as the archetypal constitution underpinning all biological, somatic, psychic, pneumatic, and supernatural existence is imperative to human flourishing. For the world is, indeed, a wedding;18 and each wedding has the potential to become the world. We must return to the beginning that is always already happening, the kairotic moment that acknowledges “the birth of the simple light / In the first, spinning place” when “it was all / Shining” when “it was Adam and maiden.”19

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1 Charles Williams, Outlines of Romantic Theology with which is reprinted “Religion and Love in Dante: The Theology of Romantic Love,” ed. Alice Mary Hadfield (Berkeley, CA: The Apocryphile Press, 2005), 24.

2 Pope Francis, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation: Amoris Lætitia, 74

3 Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper Torchbooks/The Cloister Library, 1960), 234.

4 In Hermetic Museum, 1:14.

5 Vittorio Gabrieli, ed., “A New Digby Letter-Book: ‘In Praise of Venetia,’” National Library of Wales Journal 9, no. 2 (1955): 455.

6 After the muse of comedy and idyllic poetry. Her name means “the flourishing.”

7 Donald R. Dickson, Introduction to Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan’s Aqua Vitæ: Non Vitis (British Library MS, Sloane 1741), ed. and trans. Donald R. Dickson (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), xxxi.

8 The notion also persists in the legend of the alchemical undertakings of Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel.

9 Atwood (1817–1910) was the author of one of the most curious works on alchemy written since the seventeenth century: A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, with a Dissertation on the more Celebrated Alchemical Philosophers, being an Attempt towards the Recovery of the Ancient Experiment of Nature (Belfast: William Tait, 1918).

10 Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 162.

11 C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2nd ed., Bollingen Series XX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 32.

12 C.G. Jung, Aion, 268.

13 Margaret Barker, The Mother of the Lord, Volume I: The Lady in the Temple (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

14 Ibid.

15 Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, 235.

16 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 32.

17 Paul Evdokimov, Woman and the Salvation of the World: A Christian Anthropology on the Charisms of Women, trans Anthony P. Gythiel (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983), 16.

18 See A.M. Allchin, The World is a Wedding: Explorations in Christian Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

19 Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill,” lines 33–34, 29–30.