Spirits, Poets, and Fools

William Butler Yeats

In mid-November of this year I was in Washington, DC for a conference. It was really a great conference (on The Brothers Karamazov) and one of the things that was nice about it was that we participants were given a few hours downtime in the afternoons. The conference was held at a hotel in Georgetown, so in my time off I’d walk around a bit (it was unseasonably warm and hospitable to perambulation). One thing I did was visit “the Exorcist stairs,” the site of the final scene of the most terrifying film ever made when Fr. Damien Karras tells the devil to take him and leave the possessed girl before jumping out of a window to his death at the bottom of these stairs. It ended up being the most un-touristy thing in the world. In fact, I passed it twice while trying to find it. The stairs empty onto a pretty abandoned-looking parking lot and one would never guess the place to hold such an iconic place in the history of cinema. Nevertheless, I took a few photos (see below) and met two Irish women about my age who were also taking pictures. We joked that after the film had so traumatized us as teenagers, visiting the scene of the crime was a psychological necessity.

Photo credit: me

The rest of the downtime I spent cruising Georgetown’s used bookstores. Outside of my farm and the Boarshead Tavern in Stratford, Ontario, there is no place I feel more at home as in a used bookstore, a place where old and good books don’t go to die but to be reborn. And let’s face it: Kindle is the devil. When it all goes down, so will your digital library. Hoard books: humanity depends on you.

Well, on one such used bookstore sojourn, I found a copy of James Merrill’s magnum opus, The Changing Light at Sandover. I used to own this book, but I must have sold it or given it away somewhere along the years, but I never read much of it. Initially, I was intrigued by the book because Harold Bloom had nominated it for inclusion in the canon. (You can read some of Bloom and Merrill’s correspondence here.) More recently, my friend, the novelist and translator Jonathan Geltner and I were talking (okay, eyerolling) about the Catholic traddie adulation for formal verse and how poetry could use a rediscovery of the epic when Merrill’s book came up—which, we agreed, is certainly not the formal verse or epic Catholic traddies would have in mind, let alone add to the canon. The reason The Changing Light at Sandover is not the formal verse they would want is a simple one: much of the text was transmitted to Merrill and his partner David Jackson through the agency of a Ouija board.

Changing Light is rather a virtuoso piece as a collection of formal verse, wherein Merrill (and his interlocutors?) takes turns at blank verse, terza rima, the sonnet, brace octave, alexandrines, sestina, and so on—he literally pulls out all the stops. But despite Bloom’s enthusiasm, the poetry itself leaves me pretty cold, flat, uninspired. Nevertheless, I read the entire thing, all 623 pages of it. I am probably eligible for an award.

I can’t help but read Changing Light without thinking of William Butler Yeats’s A Vision, a work of metaphysical speculation also produced with the aid of supernatural interlocutors, this time by way of Yeats’s wife Georgie’s experiments in automatic writing, at first, and later by way of trance or somnabulistic locutions. (John Michael Greer recently wrote a very good piece on the Yeatses). In the 1980s I bought a first American edition of the book (1938)—I still have it—but could never quite assimilate its complicated and obscure system of symbolism. To be honest, I still can’t, as I just read through it once again after finishing Changing Light. I am sure, given time and effort, one could get to the bottom of Yeats’s system—much in the way one does through the heroic task of comprehending his master Blake’s. But it isn’t gonna be easy.

One thing is for sure: after reading through Changing Light, encountering Yeats’s prose dropped like of draught of new wine after gorging on Kool-Aid. He was a masterful poet and a stunning essayist and the letter to Ezra Pound and short comic narrative that precede his explanation of the system he received are delightful immersions in the aura of a man at the height of his literary powers. Indeed, I didn’t realize how truly impoverished was Merrill’s language until following it with Yeats’s. But, really, who could measure up?

Interestingly, Yeats (or should I say “Yeats”?) makes an appearance in Merrill’s text as on of his interlocutors, though W.H. Auden (“W.H. Auden”) plays a much more prominent role. The entities with which Merrill interacts, in fact, deliver a diagram not unlike the gyres Yeats received from his. (Incidentally, these cones or gyres are very similar to the inverted or double pyramids found in the diagrams of the 17th century Paracelsian physician and Rosicrucian apologist Robert Fludd—I write about this in both Religion and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England and The Submerged Reality).

In addition, Merrill’s “Yeats” delivers some Yeatsian verse that sounds like a very bad imitation of WBY:

O SHINING AUDIENCE, IF AN OLD MAN’S SPEECH

STIFF FROM LONG SILENCE CAN NO LONGER STRETCH

TO THAT TOP SHELF OF RIGHTFUL BARD’S APPAREL

FOR WYSTAN AUDEN & JAMES MEREL

WHO HAVE REFASHIOINED US BY FASHIONING THIS,

MAY THE YOUNG SINGER HEARD ABOVE

THE SPINNING GYRES OF HER TRUE LOVE

CLOAK THEM IN HEAVEN’S AIRLOOM HARMONIES.

I’m sure the dead Yeats would rather live than be associated with such doggerel, a veritable Yeatsian parody. Whatever the case, is it not telling that Bloom failed to detect Merrill’s agon with Yeats in what may be one of the most illustrative examples of his “anxiety of influence”? Yet even Homer nods.

One has to wonder why poets—or anyone, for that matter—would take to these sort of supernatural devices for seeking wisdom. Often they happen somewhat unexpectedly, as was the case with Yeats and his wife, but to take up a Ouija board some intentionality is certainly involved. But what’s behind such intention? Curiosity? Vanity? For Yeats, anyway, his aims were clearly revealed by his interlocutors: “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.” It would not be wrong to wonder whether or not this voice was a projection of Yeats’s own desires—or, just as possible, the desires of Mrs. Yeats to keep her husband attentive to their marriage, as even she admitted, though she subsequently avowed that the experiment exceeded beyond that humble ambition. But, clearly, Yeats’s experiment did yield substantial metaphors for poetry, whereas Merrill’s produced but idle forms of distraction for the monied and entitled class to which he belonged with little genuine poetry added in the bargain. To Yeats’s investigations we owe thanks for one of the finest poems in the language, “The Second Coming,” from which I quote:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

These lines would never have come into being had not Yeats seriously pursued these metaphors.

These were not my first encounters with supernatural communication, even at second hand. In my early twenties, I, too, undertook similar experiments at the instigation of a woman I was dating. Neither one of us expected it to work. But it did, and our experience was very similar to those of the Yeatses and Merrill, though we were given no system of metaphor. My wife knew people undertaking similar experiments at around the same time (we did not know each other then) and the wine glass that group used as a planchette moved of its own accord. I don’t think there is a purely psychological or materialist explanation for such phenomena that could hold water.

Much later, I wrote about the similar experiences of advisor to Elizabeth I, the polymath and magician John Dee in my dissertation, later published as Religion and the Encounter with God. My take there is that Dee used the various technologies available to him—an obsidian crystal ball, various fumigations, incantations/prayers, and tables—to gain access to hidden knowledge known only to angels. Or so he thought. Among other dangers (the sapping of etheric vitality not the least of them), trying to contact spirits by these technological means—and, believe it or not, a Ouija board is a piece of technology—though they “work,” is by no means a guarantee that the information or the informants are reliable. In fact, what happened with Merrill, Dee, and the Yeatses gibes very well with my own experiences: initial profitable experiences and interesting information gradually give way to the strangeness, insincerity, and ridicule. But, often by that point, the unwitting victims of the ridicule have already swallowed the bait and are on the hook. This clearly happened with Dee, who violated some of the core values of the Christian faith he held so very sincerely at the instigation of the spirits with which he communicated. And it is also evident that this is what happened with Merrill, especially in the way his interlocutors often degenerate into parodic versions of their earlier rhetorical selves. Indeed, at one point they have Merrill and Jones convinced they’re conversing with a unicorn from the age of Atlantis. Apparently My Little Pony was otherwise occupied.

Yeats seems to have been less deceived—but even he was fooled. Some of his interlocutors, he later discovered, were leading him down a garden path; and these he later identified as “Frustrators.” As they once told him, “Remember we will deceive you if we can.” Merrill and Dee did not appear to be so discerning (though Dee’s assistant Edward Kelley was certainly suspicious and even quit working with Dee for a while because of it).

Among other things, Merrill’s spirits foretell a “GREAT THINNING” of the human population on the horizon, an aim also announced by the Georgia Guidestones and, let’s face it, the WEF and Bill Gates (draw your own conclusions). Merrill and Jackson conducted their conversations during the heyday of the “population bomb” hysteria in the halcyon days of promised death by “THE COMING ICE AGE,” and the spirits with which they spoke seemed to have adopted, at least to some degree, the lingua franca of the time and of the ruling classes.

Valentin Tomberg offers practical insight into this phenomena. Demons, “the hierarchy of the left,” as he calls them, do not lack faith in God, they lack faith in Man. As such some of them look for ways to ridicule the pride of men. One such demon he identifies as Mephistopheles, who uses ridicule as his primary accusatory method and “it is primarily human pretension and snobbery that he turns into ridicule” as a way to castigate “spiritual snobs.” This is precisely what happened with Merrill (who never saw it) and Dee (who probably did, but too late). Yeats seems to have been a little wiser and more honest with and about himself, which is what, I think, helped him avoid the ridicule of demons; but even he was not entirely unscathed.

Finally, look around, especially on social media and in the news media. There you will find demons ridiculing men and women at scale. But since we are in a post-Christian age, an age of decline, as a culture we have no vocabulary or diagnostic tools available to us for discerning the state in which we find ourselves. And we are all made to look like fools.

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. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

The Children of Men

I have been thinking a lot about fertility.

Fertility, of course, is important to a farmer—fertility of the soil made possible through the use of compost and green manures, fertility of the animals on the farm, of honeybees and other pollinators, and of the plants which the farmer grows. Clean water also supports fertility, as does clean air. This is not hard to figure out.

The fertility of Creation, some might say “of the ecology” or “of the environment,” is also important to human fertility and procreation. Procreation, that is, is very Pro-Creation: it fulfills the terms of the contract for living in the Kingdom: “Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth’”(Gen 1:28). And the means to this end follow: “Then the Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it” (Gen 2:15).

Many commentators have read the language of Genesis—“subdue it; and have dominion over it”—as a kind of protocapitalist formula for exploitation. But ancient Hebraic culture was hardly a capitalist enterprise, as if this needs to be explained. Margaret Barker, for one, has suggested that the word “subdue” used here does not exactly capture the import of the Hebrew word kbš which also implies a bond, as in “being bound to” [1]. What’s important here is that Adam and the earth were bound to each other in a reciprocity of flourishing and fertility: for flourishing and fertility are spiritually, biologically, and economically enmeshed. Without the one, you cannot have the other.

But we live in a world hostile to fertility, and therefore hostile to flourishing.

This came to mind this week when I caught part of New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s remarks this week that the United States needs to allow as many immigrants (illegal or legal) into the country as possible because “we’re short of workers and we have a population that is not reproducing on its own.” I will pass over that the good senator supports abortion up until the moment of birth, which clearly would contribute to a population decline. I will also pass over that all-cause mortality is up drastically over the last two years and that thousands upon thousands of healthy young people have either died or been incapacitated due to a “mysterious cause” (that we all know). I will also pass over that this was on the heels of Bill Gates promoting the idea of death panels at the Cop27 meeting. And I won't even mention the now widespread enactment of laws that allow juveniles to self-sterlize without parental consent, as happened recently in my home state of Michigan.

But I will not pass over that fertility rates have been plummeting for decades and that this decline is accelerating. According to this report, sperm counts have plunged over 62% in under fifty years. Add to that the mounting evidence that C0vid v@ccines are probably contributing to infertility, especially in women, not to mention an alarming increase in miscarriages in vaccinated pregnant women, then we have a recipe for demographic disaster.

Given these developments, I decided to take a nostalgic peek into P. D. James’s masterful apocalyptic novel, The Children of Men. Written in the early-1990s and set in 2021, James tells the story of a world in which human fertility is no longer possible. Fertility, worldwide, suddenly stops. As a result, the surviving population watches as the world becomes incrementally more empty of souls, older and older. One character in the book, the Oxford historian of the Victorian age Theodore Faron marks the antecedents of the fall:

“Much of this I can trace to the early 1990s: the search for alternative medicine, the perfumed oils, the massage, the smoking and anointing, the crystal-holding, the non-penetrative sex. Pornography and sexual violence in film, on television, in books, in life, had increased and become more explicit but less and less in the West we made love and bred children. It seemed a welcome development in a world grossly polluted by over-population. As a historian I see it as the beginning of the end.” [2]

First a drastic drop in birthrate (not unlike we’re seeing at the moment) was followed by a zero birthrate:

“Overnight, it seemed, the human race had lost its power to breed. The discovery in July 1994 that even the frozen sperm stored for experiment and artificial insemination had lost its potency was a peculiar horror casting over Omega the pall of superstitious awe, of witchcraft, of divine intervention. The old gods reappeared, terrible in their power.” [3]

One of the eerier elements to The Children of Men is the post-Omega (the date fertility stopped) fad of women pushing prams bearing dolls instead of babies, a stunning psychological mechanism of the simulacra. The fad passes, as fads do, but makes a resurgence that Faron observes:

“It had been years since he had seen a doll thus paraded, but they had been common twenty years ago, had become something of a craze. Doll-making was the only section of the toy industry which, with the production of prams, had for a decade flourished; it had produced dolls for the whole range of frustrated maternal desire, some cheap and tawdry but some of remarkable craftsmanship and beauty which, but for the Omega which originated them, could have become cherished heirlooms….. At one time it wasn’t possible to walk down High Street without being encumbered by their prams, by groups of admiring quasi-mothers. He seemed to remember that there had been pseudo-births and that broken dolls were buried with ceremony in consecrated ground. Wasn’t it one of the minor ecclesiastical disputes of the early 2000s whether churches could legitimately be used for these charades and even whether ordained priests could take part?” [4]

I don’t exactly expect to witness anything like what James describes in her book; she was not a prophetess. She was, however, incredibly perceptive and, though she speaks in metaphor, hers is an apt metaphor for a culture rich in sex but impoverished in love and fertility. But this is what happens when sex and procreation are unmoored from marriage in the cultural imaginary.

I wish I could say I’ve been shocked by the general ennui with which our governmental and corporate institutions—including the media—have treated our falling fertility rates and the added pressures of possible, likely true, v@x-related infertility and miscarriages. But I’m not. They seem to welcome such a development. It may even be part of the plan, as many physicians and other experts have been been warning for over two years that infertility and miscarriage were very real possibilities for an unproven and rushed mRNA product. They weren’t prophets either, just people looking to the canons of their tradition and employing a little common sense. Anyway, the indifference of the usual gatekeepers is appalling.

In his very interesting book The Function of the Orgasm, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich claimed to have found a kind of energy implicit to the orgasm that he also detected in various atmospheric conditions. He would come to call this phenomenon orgone energy, and it seems to have some resonances with the Vedic concept of prana or the classical Greek idea of zoë (life)—concepts materialist science dismisses. He ends his book with this observation:

“Having come at the conclusion of this book, the reader, like the author himself, will not be able to avoid the impression that the study of the orgasm, the stepchild of natural science, has led us deep into the secrets of nature. The investigation of living matter went beyond the confines of depth psychology and physiology and enter unexplored biological territory. Sexuality and the living process became identical, and a new avenue of approach to the problem of biogenesis was opened. What was psychology became biophysics and a part of genuine, experimental natural science. Its core remains, as always, the enigma of love, to which we owe our being.” [5]

Could it be that the energy Reich discovered (but that was always there) has been compromised in its functioning by the absolutely degraded diets to which the industrial west has subjected itself, and that, combined with the soup of toxins we breathe and ingest every day, we have primed our biology for collapse via the introduction of foreign and synthetic substances the repercussions of which we know not? There are certainly other conclusions to which one could arrive; but the apathy of the gatekeepers and their abdication of anything resembling concern for the commonweal suggests that the reality may be far more sinister than even imaginable.

Reich’s pronouncement, that the core remains in the enigma of love to which we owe our being, does give me some comfort. For I find it to be a truly sophiological insight congruent with one of the key utterances of sophiological truth:

When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth:

When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep:

When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth:

Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;

Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the children of men. (Proverbs 8:27-31)

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. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

1. Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (T&T Clark, 2010), 122.

2. P. D. James, The Children of Men (Knopf, 1992), 7-8.

3. Ibid., 8.

4. Ibid., 34-45.

5. Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1942; Souvenir Press, 1973), 386.

Astrology and the Election

Things are about to get weird.

I know what you’re thinking: things are already weird, Michael. But it’s about to get even weirder with the election. The heavens are declaring it.

On November 8th, Election Day here in the “land of democracy” [sic], we will see some significant portents as regards the positions of the planets and their relationship to one another.

First of all, it’s the day of a full lunar eclipse which will be visible in North America and will be fully visible in Washington, DC (which is significant) from roughly 3:00 – 6:00 a.m. Lunar eclipses typically act as release valves that loose the tension brought by a solar eclipse that typically anticipates it by two weeks. In this case we will have a partial solar eclipse on October 25th that will be visible in most of Europe (including Ukraine and eastern Russia) and the Middle East. That’s fun. Things may get very tense in that area of the world next week (not that they aren’t already—but just wait).

So that’s one thing.

In addition to this, the Sun and Mercury will be in an exact conjunction (meaning: at the same spot in the sky). Among other things, Mercury rules communication and acts as a triggering mechanism in astrological movements. This by itself is not necessarily a big deal. Mercury is not all that far from the Sun (it is the closest planet after all) so such a conjunction is not all that uncommon, this being the fourth such conjunction this year. The kicker is Uranus, which will be in exact conjunction to the Moon during this eclipse. This means that Sun-Mercury will be in exact opposition to Moon-Uranus. Uranus, which rules electronics, technology, and innovation, is also a bit of a loose cannon: you never know what it’s going to do, but you know it will do something. This is a real “expect the unexpected” deal, and, so, prediction becomes a bit of a challenge. As an aside, last year when Uranus was conjunct my Moon while Saturn squared it, I expected my aged mother, who suffers from advanced vascular dementia, to die (the Moon, among other things, represents the archetypal mother). She didn’t die, though she did get very ill. What happened, however, was that my wife developed rapid-onset uterine cancer, which we suspect was due to shedding from a v@xxed relative. My wife is healthy and cancer-free now, praise God. But I digress.

But wait, there’s more!

Not only will also this action be taking place in the sky, but Saturn also wants to play. Saturn, known as the Greater Malefic to the medieval astrologers, is the cosmic badass, the archetypal father and ruler of authority, structure, stability, and stuff like that. It often represents the father in the horoscope. So, anyway, Saturn will be in square (a ninety-degree angle) to both Sun-Mercury and Moon-Uranus, a configuration known as a T-square. (Another aside: my birth chart is just crummy with these things. I don’t recommend trying this at home.)

Oh, but that’s not weird enough. In addition, the Sun-Mercury conjunction will also be in exact conjunction to the fixed star Zubenelgenubi, one of the scales of justice in the sign of Libra (though some astrologers think of as one malevolent motherscratcher).

The take-home: though Uranus acts as a bit of a wildcard here, I can imagine there will be weird stuff happening with voting machines or even power outages (Uranus triggered by the energy of the Moon and Mercury), though I think Saturn will act as a check to this getting too out of hand. Does this mean State power will intervene? Or does it mean that tradition will prevail? Those are important questions, because I think this is precisely what is at stake in this election. Whatever the case, I think it is very possible there will probably be some potentially violent (and without a doubt emotional) protests or other kinds of (almost) spontaneous eruptions (definitely the right word) on November 8th. You probably don’t need astrology to predict that. But, because of Saturn’s role, I would guess that a conservative victory is coming. I could be wrong, of course, but that seems to be what the stars are saying.

One more thing.

November 8th is an important day on the liturgical calendar of the Eastern churches: The Feast of St. Michael the Archangel and All the Bodiless Powers of Heaven. THIS. IS. BIG. Valentin Tomberg calls St. Michael “the Archistrategist,” and even identifies Tuesday as the day of the week under his rulership and, in keeping with Hermetic tradition, associates him as the representative of the Sun. This gives me tremendous hope. But don’t kid yourself: we really are in a battle between good and evil. And St. Michael, Commander of the Heavenly Hosts, is on the job.

But things are still gonna get weird, at least for a little while.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit. Twitter: @Sophiologist_