The Hedge School: New Courses

I am now three weeks into my two courses on Shakespeare: one online for adults and another in-person—and in my yurt!—for homeschool kids. I could not be having more fun! I’ll be starting another one online next week for a homeschool co-op in Chicago. Shakespeare, who was born on 23 April 1564—May 3rd, my birthday, according to the Gregorian calendar. Not a coincidence! So let’s have nice a round of applause for Taurus poets!

But I have two more courses that will be held in the coming months at Stella Matutina Farm, home of The Center for Sophiological Studies.

The fee for the courses is $120 per individual or $150 per couple (assuming some people would like to bring a spouse). The farm is situated in the middle of Michigan’s Waterloo State Recreation Area which has plenty of camping spaces available as well as cabins to rent (though of more limited availability) and there are also other B&B accommodations in the area. Grass Lake is approximately 30 miles west of Ann Arbor and 15 miles east of Jackson, Michigan. Contact director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com to enroll.

The Heart of Sophiology

Friday, April 21, 2023, 7:00 pm & Saturday, April 22, 9:30-5:00

This will be a combination seminar and workshop, since Sophiology is more experiential than it is theoretical. Therefore, we will combine both lecture, phenomenological inquiry, and artistic work.

Recommended reading: The Heavenly Country: An Anthology of Primary Essays, Poetry, and Critical Essays on Sophiology

Biodynamic Farming and Gardening

Friday, May 19,2023, 7:00 pm & Saturday, May 20, 9:30-5:00

Biodynamics, while it has a solid theoretical framework underpinning it, is more than anything a hands on enterprise, so I intend to combine theoretical, practical, and, yes, artistic and festive aspects into the course. The idea is to have a lived experience of the implications of biodynamic farming and gardening and how such a way of being connects to the traditional year and the astronomical and mystical elements that inform it.

I am also planning online courses on The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Love and Romanticism in the near future—so keep in touch.

Come all ye!

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_

The Hedge School

In my book Transfiguration, a kind of manual of practical Sophiology, among other things I propose the idea that what the world needs now is to take up the idea of the hedge school. Hedge schools were part of Irish society when that brave nation was under the domination of Britain and the only schooling available to the Irish was an Anglo-version that did its best to erase Ireland’s culture, history, and religion from the Irish imagination. The British educational model, much like modern secular schools that promote the “gender spectrum” silliness or the residential schools to which Native Americans were subject, was essentially a program of propaganda and “social engineering.” The Irish weren’t having it and ran their clandestine hedge schools—illegal until Catholic emancipation in 1829—in barns and other places outside the panopticon of the Empire.

The hedge schools were a prime example of what later came to be called a “parallel polis” promoted by Válcav Havel and other Eastern European dissidents under Communism and which also included the idea of “the flying university” in Poland that had also been in existence from the late 19th century. I have written on the parallel polis here and you can hear my conversation with Mike Sauter on the topic from last summer.

The time is certainly ripe for the regeneration of the parallel polis and the hedge school. I have been in education for the past thirty years, and it is a toxic, disorganized mess. And that’s on a good day. On a bad day, and there are many, it is an environment inhospitable to creative or original thought, or any thought that deviates from a very narrowly proscribed set of allowed opinions. Not only have the alleged concerns for social justice (usually neither social nor just) compromised the educational project, but the diminishment of the humanities in higher education has almost wholesale destroyed the search for wisdom so inherent in the young. A generation or two ago, the study of the humanities was the core of higher education, while now the humanities have been reduced to a tragi-comic level of irrelevance. Not only that, but humanities departments have been disappearing at an astonishing rate from most liberal arts colleges and their presence has been profoundly reduced at state and private universities. Prior to the COVID pandemic, the majority of us in higher education thought most liberal arts colleges in the United States would soon be shuttered for good, demographic winter, excessive tuitions, and diminishing returns on the higher ed investment all taking their toll on a model that has outlived its usefulness. But “quantitative easing” and a flood of COVID cash that flushed through the educational system via government decree postponed the immanent fall of liberal arts colleges for a time—but they are once again facing difficult decisions—removing even tenured faculty, condensing or eliminating entire departments of disciplines as they try to find new ways to avoid the inevitable. But inevitable it is. And everybody knows it.

The predicament some of my own children are facing has also inspired me to think of educational alternatives. My eldest son is in business and attended but did not finish college. My next two sons and eldest daughter did go to college, the boys studying automotive design and biology respectively and my daughter studying music. But the next one, a gifted young man of intelligence and initiative, dropped out of college at Detroit’s Wayne State University recently because of the dreadful quality of the education he was receiving in mathematics and physics and his being unable to justify the return on his investment. It wasn’t worth the money. But the situation with the next two, young women now 18 and 19, really caused me to rethink the educational opportunities available to them. Neither one wants to attend college, though both have strong gifts in music and writing and interest in the world. They could use a hedge school—or even a number of hedge schools—in order to nourish their innate desire for truth, beauty, and goodness. And that is where we find ourselves.

Outside of the Matrix that is higher education and beyond the tyranny of so-called “accreditation” racket, the hedge school offers a forum that would allow an organic unfoldment of the in-born human impulse to seek wisdom. This is really a project of self-development and entry into what John Keats called “the vale of Soul-making.” For an education that does not feed the soul is no education at all.

Of course, this idea is nothing new, but cultural conditions, I think, call for a reimagination not only of the hedge school but of education writ large. And, besides the educational projects of the past already mentioned, there have been other initiatives—some still in existence, some relegated to posterity, and some modified in mission and scope.

The Lindisfarne Association, for example, started in 1972 by rogue academic William Irwin Thompson and a number of colleagues and drew a number of extraordinary members, including Christopher Bamford, James Lovelock, and the poet Gary Snyder. In the mid-eighties, I remember buying cassette tapes (!) of lectures held at their gatherings by the great poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine and geometer Keith Critchlow. I learned so much. I think some of Raine’s lectures have since been digitized and are available on YouTube.

Likewise, Schumacher College, named after and inspired by economist E.F. Schumacher (author of the classic text Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as is People Mattered), has been around since 1990 and offers courses in ecology and horticulture in the quest to find more sustainable methods of integrating human flourishing with that of Creation.

There is also the Temenos Academy, founded by Raine and others under the patronage of HRH The Prince of Wales, now HRH King Charles. They have published a journal, given conferences, and regularly sponsor lectures in London, including by contributor to Jesus the Imagination Jeremy Naydler. Their bedrock is the perennial philosophy that Raine so passionately defended. They do a better job of teaching philo-sophia as “love of Wisdom” than probably any university or college philosophy department now in existence.

None of these initiatives would be able to survive without the generosity of patrons (I mean, come on, when you have the King as a patron you have probably arrived at the top of the patronage food chain), Lindisfarne, for example, was at times supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Schumacher College is fortunate to be underwritten at least in part by The Dartington Trust. I think the Fetzer Institute may also have supported projects like this in the past.

More power to them, but this is not the model I have in mind when speaking of the Hedge School. For one, who pays the piper calls the tune and I would dread getting into the awkward relationship with a patron who might threaten to pull the plug on funding such a project over a disagreement once I became addicted to the money. It’s happened to others. And I think “addiction” is the correct metaphor.

Also, I want the Hedge School to more flexible than these other projects, allowing me to respond to needs of participants and demographics. By this I mean being able to offer courses or seminars for school-age children as well as to college-age students and lifelong learners. For example, just this past week I have been asked to give a seminar in Sophiology here on my farm (more below), give a mini-course on Biodynamic farming for interested parties in my immediate community, and give an online course to high school students in Goethean-Sophiological science. And that is in addition to the online course I’m starting next week on Shakespeare, Religion, and Magic (still a few spots available).

In addition to responding to requests and needs, I also want to offer courses that I think should be offered, such as “Romanticism and the Meaning of Love,” “The Metaphysical Poets,” “The Poetry of William Blake,” “Mysticism,” or “The Alternate Modernity.” Eventually—hopefully sooner rather than later—I will bring in other teachers (actually, I need to find a better word, like “druids” or something) to offer courses in myth, woodworking, being human in a transhuman world, creative writing, the festival year (okay, I might do that one), mushroom hunting, broom-making, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Celtic spirituality, sacred geometry—and so on and so forth. There is no limit to possibilities in the Hedge School.

As for now, I have a few courses already lined up—and more to come. Stay tuned.

Shakespeare, Magic, and Religion

Online. Fridays from 1:00-2:30 pm ET.

February 3-March 24, 2023

The Heart of Sophiology

In-person at Stella Matutina Farm.

Friday, April 21, 2023, 7:00 pm & Saturday, April 22, 9:30-5:00

Biodynamic Farming and Gardening

In-person at Stella Matutina Farm.

Friday, May 19,2023, 7:00 pm & Saturday, May 20, 9:30-5:00

You can read more here.

Oliver Cromwell was the unintended founder of the Irish hedge schools.

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_

News from the Edge of the World

A few thoughts and observations, possibly related, but not by design.

Stella Matutina Farm

Last week our CSA ended for the year (CSA, for those of you who might not know, stands for “Community Supported Agriculture”). Our last shares included onions, celery, winter squash, arugula, garlic, and the remnant of our hot and sweet peppers. I haven’t calculated how much produce we sent out over our nineteen weeks of the CSA, but it is certainly in thousands and thousands of pounds. We fed thirty-three families over this time—clean, biodynamically-grown, nutrient-dense produce. Our garden is only about ¾ of an acre. That’s a lot of people (not including my own family) who can be fed from a relatively small amount of land.

We practice what used to be called “the French intensive method” for growing and also observe “no-dig” approaches to cultivation. We almost never use heavy machinery. This was the seventh year of farming at this location, and the fertility and health of the farm are astounding. We had very few problems with insects—almost none at all—though we did have some rabbits poaching a few vegetables. But the creation of a biodynamic farm is the creation of a synergistic relationship with nature. That’s a long way of saying the farm is starting to come into its maturity. The being of the farm has shown itself to us.

That reminds me: I think I may have seen the Great Pan in the woods just beyond the garden a few weeks ago.

With the coming of the Fall, the rhythm of the farm changes. We haven’t been doing much in the garden (outside of harvesting), though I do need to plant garlic pretty soon. Instead, our attention turns more to getting through winter. To this end, we brought our lambs to the butcher and will process our geese next week (and I do have some older laying hens—no longer laying all that much—who need to follow them pretty soon thereafter and be turned into stewing hens). Our steer will move along sometime in late winter. And did I mention deer season is coming up? We’re still milking our cow, Fiona, and we’ve been trying to put up some butter and cheeses and will continue to do so. I also have been curing some pork bellies, rendering beeswax, and making meads and metheglins. In fact, I have a metheglin working right now I’ve flavored with juniper berries and spruce twigs—should be ready for Christmas. In the basement we have baskets and boxes full of potatoes, sweet potatoes, red and yellow onions, and winter squash and still have to pull the rutabaga, arugula, kohlrabi, and collards from the garden; but they should all be able to last in their beds for a few more weeks. Then we’ll plant spinach in the hoop house. And I haven’t even mentioned cutting up some fallen trees in the woods for use in the wood stove next year.

The take-home: scarcity is a myth.

Oh yeah, I’m a scholar. I almost forgot.

I recently delivered a keynote address for the “Pavel Florensky for the Twenty-first Century” conference sponsored by The Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at Cambridge University. The title of my talk was “The Colour Blue: On the Sophiology of Pavel Florensky” (note the British spelling!). I heard proceedings from the conference may be published in book form, but I haven’t heard anything about video of the talks being made available. Other speakers included my soul brothers John Milbank and Bruce Foltz. Many of my readers will be familiar with John, but, if you don’t know about Bruce, check out his very fine book The Noetics of Nature.

I will participating in a colloquium on The Brothers Karamazov in Washington, DC next month. This will happen right after the election. Last time I was in DC, it was for another colloquium just after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Women were still wearing their knitted “pussy hats.” I imagine this visit may be just as fun. Speaking of eye-rolling, I may do one touristy thing while I’m there: visit the Exorcist stairs!

In addition, I will also be giving a talk on Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot next month at the Detroit branch (though actually in Berkley) of The Theosophical Society on November 4th. Starts at 7:00.

Speaking of Meditations on the Tarot, Mike Sauter and I recently interviewed its English translator, astrosopher and spiritual researcher, Robert Powell about the book (and many other things) on The Regeneration Podcast, which you can listen to on Podbean, Podchaser, and Spotify or watch on YouTube. While you’re there, subscribe. We recently interviewed, among others, Dominic D’Souza, Mark Vernon, and Ronald Hutton--so check them out! Upcoming guests include David Bentley Hart, Jonathan Geltner (see below), and Matthew Milliner, whose Mother of the Lamb has just been published and is mandatory reading for anyone interested in Sophiology.

Oh...and I finally uploaded the video on my interview with biblical scholar and Methodist preacher Margaret Barker. which appeared in print in Jesus the Imagination, Volume 5: The Divine Feminine, to my YouTube channel.

Reading list: besides rereading Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, I have been reading Jonathan Geltner’s excellent Absolute Music. You should read it too. I also have a stack of books on Distributism, enclosure, agrarianism, and folk religion on hand as I plan on getting a book on these themes (and others) finished before the next CSA year gets into full swing in April.

If I do say so myself, I also wrote a lovely arrangement of (and departure from) Hubert Perry’s setting of Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time (Jerusalem)” which I would love to record one of these days.

Plant your love and let it grow.

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_