The initial paragraphs raise the question of whether questions of appropriation might ultimately involve questions of attribution of the numinous properties of a place and/or phenomenon.
Yes, a lovely read this Easter morning, and a well that I have a soft spot for, particularly since its history and origin are fated to always remain a mystery. How... comforting !
It's lovely to be able to take a break from the onrolling grind of trying to DIS-COVER our origins.
I went to an exhibition about British and Irish "Big Houses" with my grandfather a long time ago and boy did he hate those places. It is hard for me to understand his view but he saw them only as symbols of oppression and exploitation. His family had lived in the shadow of one of them. I suppose that is the feeling which motivated the people who burned them down.
Mitchelstown Castle, built by the Kingston family, was about the biggest of the big houses, and duly destroyed in 1922. When we used to visit my grandparents in the town in the 1970s, the only traces were some substantial stone walls running along the side of the road.
It was only recently that I found that the Kingstons, despairing of ever returning, sold the rubble at the original kniockdown price to the Cistercian Order, who were extending their monastery at Mount Mellerary up in the Knockmealdown mountains 20 miles away. The stones were transported by horse and cart for the next 15 years and in the end the monks only found a use for about half of them.
My grandmother had a great reverence for Mt Melleray, and great pride too for a monument that her people had built rather than the invaders. Few visits ended without a drive out there, to the frustration of us children. How things change. I don’t imagine anyone wants to raze it to the ground - apart from a particularly visionary hotel - developer - but modern Ireland would see it as a site of similar exploitation and oppression. Poor unfortunate stones, to be connected to two crime scenes!
Thanks for your interesting comment. I read online that 275 houses were destroyed/burnt which seems like a lot. Paul could do another 275 posts, one on each. Might be a bit tricky to write about though.
The idea that some places are holy is important. We are I think moving away from that idea that the world is just inert stuff. We can begin to recognise that culture and psychology are inadequate anthropomorphic explanations. We can really say this is beautiful, this is scary, this is awe inspiring, this place is holy without meaning that it is all in the eye of the beholder. The world suddenly becomes a richer and far more interesting place.
Having been to holy places both in Italy and in Tibet, I can attest to their qualities. Some of these places have accumulated energy from centuries of prayer, and others are natural. I read a wonderful book by a Tibetan lama called Chagdud Tulku, I think it was called Lord of the Dance, and in it he described the interactive nature of the land with humans- the respect that humans have, or lack thereof, were part of a vast reciprocity. When I read it again years later, it seemed it had been edited a lot and I couldn't find most of the descriptions which had so impressed me. There were passages about rivers one had to not utter a word when crossing, or they would become rough. In our increasingly unresponsive world, we only get to see the gross effects of the lack of respect- disease and disharmony. Not to mention uglification.
Thank you for this, Paul! I’m in Sicily at the moment and tried to express a similar sentiment about the “Temple of Diana” in Cefalu - with somewhat less eloquence and brevity… The megalithic structure here features a similar basin draining into a grotto carved into the rock of the hillside. Very little research is available on the site, which remains “sacred” by dint of the thin veil and the impulse to curiosity many visitors feel.
A lovely read on this Easter morning. Having just returned from my first visit to Iona I’m particularly interested in your exploration of ‘thin places’.
I completely agree with your opening section, of course. In many places, Christians (usually directly disobeying their priests and bishops) continued to honor the old agreements the pagans had made with the spirits of place.
And of course, there were multiple waves of purifiers who would destroy those sites to uproot these continuations. The fact that puritan iconoclasts targeted holy wells and standing stones is extremely important for understanding how capitalism and our “machine age” came about, though of course they were hardly the first.
I have a radical proposition for you, which is the unstated core of my argument about religion and the machine. You get to be the first person to hear it.
By continuing those agreements (though often begrudgingly at best) the Church (both Orthodox and Catholic) kept the relationship between humans and the spirits stable for centuries. The Reformation in Europe was the end of that stability: the church self-purged in response to the reformers’ accusations, both sides abandoning those agreements.
What came next was the age we are in now, the capitalist/secular/machine era, and it was born from the end of those agreements and man’s belief he could master all of nature (and its spirits and forces).
A Christianity that re-establishes those agreements could help stabilize the world, which is why I respect your work so much as a pagan. Also, you’ll have much of Christianity itself against you in this work, or at least the Christianity of the last four hundred years, the one that has named all spirits as evil…
I think the roots of the money based capitalistic order can be traced back past the reformation to the time of Saint Francis who lived in the era of the beginnings of a money based reality. He renounced his merchant family background. Our banking system has its roots in medieval, early renaissance Italy. St Francis refused money donations accepting only material donations. Once someone left a bag of money on the altar in the church as a donation. Francis told one of his monks not to touch the bag with his hands but to carry with his teeth to the dung heap. The “love of money is the root of all evil” and money as being the measure of things grew from that time into the monstrosity we live in now where humanity and the earth is in thrall to short term profit making.
Sounds about right, but previous civilisations have been there and left traces in the record. That is where I think we get the concept of Jubilee / debt forgiveness from. There was a ruler called Solon I believe, who later attracted study by the Romans. Some American historians of money and debt are interesting; e.g. Zarlenga using study by 19thC Del Mar, for example. This time round though we got into digging out lots of energy to fuel the machine which kind of speeds things up.
I love your theory. This might be an older idea of stewardship. Perhaps the edenic "dominion" mandate, which is now largely understood to mean "utilize and commodify all the resources" may have once meant something more along your lines of keeping the balance.
I am thankful for the persistence of green thin places.
These are interesting thoughts. I am going to write something long here soon about Christianity and paganism. A lot of ducks to line up first though.
As you know, Christian and 'pagan' (I don't like that word) cosmologies are very different. You, like me, have experienced both in different forms. Whether a Christian could accept what you say about 'spirits of place' (as opposed to 'the spirit of a place', say) would depend on what you mean by 'spirits.' This in turn comes back to the nature of reality, which we've talked about before, and that in turn is why I keep coming back to the creation and the incarnation. It seems to me that the Christian story tells us of a divine plan for the world, of a moral order underpinning human life, and of an intervention by God, 2000 years ago, for a purpose: eternity entering time in order to change it. This in turns teaches us, sometimes elliptically, how to relate to this world and its denizens.
I've been thinking recently that maybe the real dividing line between Christianity and 'paganism' here is that for Christians this world is not our true home, and for pagans it is. For a Christian, we are always 'resident aliens' here. This was the thing that put me off Christianity for a long time, until it stopped appearing to me like a system or a philosophy, and suddenly appeared as a person. But that's another story.
For this reason, anyway, and as well attested, Christianity has often had little say about our relationship to place and nature (though I would suggest that the Eastern variant has said much more). Pagans like you are better at this. However, to a Christian, pagans fall down in telling the story of what a human life is for, and how we should relate to the One who brought forth everything in a great surge of love.
Sorry, I seem to be writing the essay already. I'll stop ...
Just one quick thought occurs in response yo your idea, and that is that the Reformation was of course quite localised, to the Roman church in Europe (and later its colonies.) The Orthodox world never experienced it. And of course much of the wider world has never been Christian at all. And yet a country like Russia, or even more so India (Hinduism still seems to respect those 'spirits of place') have very much fallen to the Machine too.
What a charming idea, and one worthy of serious consideration. Causation is always tricky in discussing historical trends, and the tendency is to look at whatever is new--ideas, technology, ideologies--in fixing the blame. But maybe you are correct, and it is loss of the agreements between the humans and the spirits which is real reason for all the disquiet we experience in the world. I think that it's even possible that the spirits act as a sort of leavening in reality, a hidden agent without which everything falls apart. Maybe turning our backs on the fairies has caused them to pick up their gold and find another game. I'm just riffing here, but I do think your idea invites further reflection.
"Leavening" is a great word for this, because the way we thought of yeast before the secular age was that there were spirits also responsible for the process.
That's not to say (and too many make this mistake) that we didn't understand yeast. It's just that we attributed an extra influence to the process of leavening (same goes for brewing and distilling-- that's why they're called "spirits"). Now, we think of it all as a mechanical process without that extra influence occurring: just add yeast and wait for a result.
In my view, the stripping of the spirits (or, specifically, no longer including them in our narrations) from all these natural "forces," "reactions," and "processes" is really how the disenchantment of the world came about. And it's very, very recent. Medieval Christians still dealt with spirits and even did what we would now call magic.
I could not agree with you more. In particular Capitalism destabilises the structures of Belonging and Place. Endless change and the demand for people to move away from the home place in order to avail of 'opportunities' means that the way we live in the time of the machine, is unstable and destabilised continuously and deliberately, so we do not attach strongly to our original home place and the other people of our homeplace - our 'tribe'. This leaves us with a sense of homelessness, no sense of belonging to a 'Place', ever. We are more easily manipulated and divided if we are just individuals with a bunch of other individuals, with no particular allegiance to a group. We are strong when we live as groups with deep connectedness.
In fact we are always attached to that primal place where we were reared and lived in our early lives, with our families. That early experience of the world and its meaning is fixed for us though we may not realise it. We are Swans of Lir. We may look like Swans and live on water, but inside is the real 'me', that is not 'swan'. The human child and person/adult, is not a swan, beneath the feathers and the skin. The world outside the skin, the foreign 'someplace', is always at odds with the migrant's insides. 'Always Dis-placed'. The 'who we are', from the early time of our life, remains in-place. The migrant experience is difficult. We are encouraged to be 'inclusive' of people of different 'places'. That's a good thing. I think it means ' be tolerant and accepting', of who they are really. Not 'you must become one of us and think like us and be like us.'
There is an orthodox Christian podcast that may interest you called The Lord of Spirits. Over time, I have been less satisfied with materialism, and Paul’s essay back in December on the Free Press inspired me to look deeper into the Christian understanding of the spiritual world.
I have found that podcast very helpful for understanding how interactions with spirits is real, and not all spirits are actively malevolent toward humans, though any that don’t serve the Most High are in rebellion and not to be trusted. Growing up Protestant, my worldview had been that any kind of spiritual contact that wasn’t the Holy Spirit was inherently deeply evil. Now I know that the good spirits of angels and saints are around us all the time, and I believe they are trying to point us back to the Lord, especially in these holy places.
Anthropology seems to tell us that concern for continuity is a human condition. Can I add that when it comes to recognition and belief, respect also has been a hallmark? (See also Ryd's comment.)
I know one putative bullaun in Northumberland, England, although it is cracked now. It sits on high ground alongside pre-historic ramparts and a scatter of much older rock-art. I have wondered what it would look like filled under a high summer moon.
PS I had warts covering my hands charmed away when I was 6 by a nurse in the early NHS. Smile.
Looking at the pictures of the bullauns, I as struck by the similarity of a stone I brought back from Japan with a small hollow for collecting water. I am soothed by looking at that small pool of water, the source of life. Off topic but in response to "It’s intriguing to think that these beautiful natural landscapes which appear so lonely to us were occupied hundreds – perhaps thousands – of years ago. It’s likely that they have changed very little over all that time," I recommend 2 excellent books. One is Topsoil and Civilization (Carter and Dale), the other is Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Montgomery). The above show how soil erosion has drastically changed many landscapes and affected the course of human history. As a small sheep farmer, soil and water are near and dear to me.
Ahhh you reached county cork ! And I must go see that little well.
On Castlefreke itself …. An interesting english woman called Mary carbery married into the family at the end of the 19 th century and was well known for being a kind and lovely person… she wrote a diary after being widowed which I found very illuminating and members of her family were well Known eccentrics . https://roaringwaterjournal.com/tag/lady-mary-carbery/
Thank you 🙏 what a lovely read this Easter 🐣 morning, like a gift .
The initial paragraphs raise the question of whether questions of appropriation might ultimately involve questions of attribution of the numinous properties of a place and/or phenomenon.
A wart healing well! How precise!
Yes, a lovely read this Easter morning, and a well that I have a soft spot for, particularly since its history and origin are fated to always remain a mystery. How... comforting !
It's lovely to be able to take a break from the onrolling grind of trying to DIS-COVER our origins.
Thank you, Paul.
I went to an exhibition about British and Irish "Big Houses" with my grandfather a long time ago and boy did he hate those places. It is hard for me to understand his view but he saw them only as symbols of oppression and exploitation. His family had lived in the shadow of one of them. I suppose that is the feeling which motivated the people who burned them down.
Mitchelstown Castle, built by the Kingston family, was about the biggest of the big houses, and duly destroyed in 1922. When we used to visit my grandparents in the town in the 1970s, the only traces were some substantial stone walls running along the side of the road.
It was only recently that I found that the Kingstons, despairing of ever returning, sold the rubble at the original kniockdown price to the Cistercian Order, who were extending their monastery at Mount Mellerary up in the Knockmealdown mountains 20 miles away. The stones were transported by horse and cart for the next 15 years and in the end the monks only found a use for about half of them.
My grandmother had a great reverence for Mt Melleray, and great pride too for a monument that her people had built rather than the invaders. Few visits ended without a drive out there, to the frustration of us children. How things change. I don’t imagine anyone wants to raze it to the ground - apart from a particularly visionary hotel - developer - but modern Ireland would see it as a site of similar exploitation and oppression. Poor unfortunate stones, to be connected to two crime scenes!
Thanks for your interesting comment. I read online that 275 houses were destroyed/burnt which seems like a lot. Paul could do another 275 posts, one on each. Might be a bit tricky to write about though.
What an amazing journey to a wart well! It bears a strong resemblance to the American folk remedy for warts, 'Stumpwater'...
https://kentuckwitch.tumblr.com/post/173315217549/day-212-healing-with-stumpwater
Being a KY native, this reminder is great. My husband was told that he had the power to remove warts by his grandfather.
LUCKY family! Enjoy your Mystic Hubby!! My Great Grandfather was a 'Root Doctor' - that's how I found out about a lot of these things...
The idea that some places are holy is important. We are I think moving away from that idea that the world is just inert stuff. We can begin to recognise that culture and psychology are inadequate anthropomorphic explanations. We can really say this is beautiful, this is scary, this is awe inspiring, this place is holy without meaning that it is all in the eye of the beholder. The world suddenly becomes a richer and far more interesting place.
Having been to holy places both in Italy and in Tibet, I can attest to their qualities. Some of these places have accumulated energy from centuries of prayer, and others are natural. I read a wonderful book by a Tibetan lama called Chagdud Tulku, I think it was called Lord of the Dance, and in it he described the interactive nature of the land with humans- the respect that humans have, or lack thereof, were part of a vast reciprocity. When I read it again years later, it seemed it had been edited a lot and I couldn't find most of the descriptions which had so impressed me. There were passages about rivers one had to not utter a word when crossing, or they would become rough. In our increasingly unresponsive world, we only get to see the gross effects of the lack of respect- disease and disharmony. Not to mention uglification.
Thank you for this, Paul! I’m in Sicily at the moment and tried to express a similar sentiment about the “Temple of Diana” in Cefalu - with somewhat less eloquence and brevity… The megalithic structure here features a similar basin draining into a grotto carved into the rock of the hillside. Very little research is available on the site, which remains “sacred” by dint of the thin veil and the impulse to curiosity many visitors feel.
A lovely read on this Easter morning. Having just returned from my first visit to Iona I’m particularly interested in your exploration of ‘thin places’.
I completely agree with your opening section, of course. In many places, Christians (usually directly disobeying their priests and bishops) continued to honor the old agreements the pagans had made with the spirits of place.
And of course, there were multiple waves of purifiers who would destroy those sites to uproot these continuations. The fact that puritan iconoclasts targeted holy wells and standing stones is extremely important for understanding how capitalism and our “machine age” came about, though of course they were hardly the first.
I have a radical proposition for you, which is the unstated core of my argument about religion and the machine. You get to be the first person to hear it.
By continuing those agreements (though often begrudgingly at best) the Church (both Orthodox and Catholic) kept the relationship between humans and the spirits stable for centuries. The Reformation in Europe was the end of that stability: the church self-purged in response to the reformers’ accusations, both sides abandoning those agreements.
What came next was the age we are in now, the capitalist/secular/machine era, and it was born from the end of those agreements and man’s belief he could master all of nature (and its spirits and forces).
A Christianity that re-establishes those agreements could help stabilize the world, which is why I respect your work so much as a pagan. Also, you’ll have much of Christianity itself against you in this work, or at least the Christianity of the last four hundred years, the one that has named all spirits as evil…
I think the roots of the money based capitalistic order can be traced back past the reformation to the time of Saint Francis who lived in the era of the beginnings of a money based reality. He renounced his merchant family background. Our banking system has its roots in medieval, early renaissance Italy. St Francis refused money donations accepting only material donations. Once someone left a bag of money on the altar in the church as a donation. Francis told one of his monks not to touch the bag with his hands but to carry with his teeth to the dung heap. The “love of money is the root of all evil” and money as being the measure of things grew from that time into the monstrosity we live in now where humanity and the earth is in thrall to short term profit making.
Sounds about right, but previous civilisations have been there and left traces in the record. That is where I think we get the concept of Jubilee / debt forgiveness from. There was a ruler called Solon I believe, who later attracted study by the Romans. Some American historians of money and debt are interesting; e.g. Zarlenga using study by 19thC Del Mar, for example. This time round though we got into digging out lots of energy to fuel the machine which kind of speeds things up.
I love your theory. This might be an older idea of stewardship. Perhaps the edenic "dominion" mandate, which is now largely understood to mean "utilize and commodify all the resources" may have once meant something more along your lines of keeping the balance.
I am thankful for the persistence of green thin places.
These are interesting thoughts. I am going to write something long here soon about Christianity and paganism. A lot of ducks to line up first though.
As you know, Christian and 'pagan' (I don't like that word) cosmologies are very different. You, like me, have experienced both in different forms. Whether a Christian could accept what you say about 'spirits of place' (as opposed to 'the spirit of a place', say) would depend on what you mean by 'spirits.' This in turn comes back to the nature of reality, which we've talked about before, and that in turn is why I keep coming back to the creation and the incarnation. It seems to me that the Christian story tells us of a divine plan for the world, of a moral order underpinning human life, and of an intervention by God, 2000 years ago, for a purpose: eternity entering time in order to change it. This in turns teaches us, sometimes elliptically, how to relate to this world and its denizens.
I've been thinking recently that maybe the real dividing line between Christianity and 'paganism' here is that for Christians this world is not our true home, and for pagans it is. For a Christian, we are always 'resident aliens' here. This was the thing that put me off Christianity for a long time, until it stopped appearing to me like a system or a philosophy, and suddenly appeared as a person. But that's another story.
For this reason, anyway, and as well attested, Christianity has often had little say about our relationship to place and nature (though I would suggest that the Eastern variant has said much more). Pagans like you are better at this. However, to a Christian, pagans fall down in telling the story of what a human life is for, and how we should relate to the One who brought forth everything in a great surge of love.
Sorry, I seem to be writing the essay already. I'll stop ...
Just one quick thought occurs in response yo your idea, and that is that the Reformation was of course quite localised, to the Roman church in Europe (and later its colonies.) The Orthodox world never experienced it. And of course much of the wider world has never been Christian at all. And yet a country like Russia, or even more so India (Hinduism still seems to respect those 'spirits of place') have very much fallen to the Machine too.
Thanks as ever for the engagement!
What a charming idea, and one worthy of serious consideration. Causation is always tricky in discussing historical trends, and the tendency is to look at whatever is new--ideas, technology, ideologies--in fixing the blame. But maybe you are correct, and it is loss of the agreements between the humans and the spirits which is real reason for all the disquiet we experience in the world. I think that it's even possible that the spirits act as a sort of leavening in reality, a hidden agent without which everything falls apart. Maybe turning our backs on the fairies has caused them to pick up their gold and find another game. I'm just riffing here, but I do think your idea invites further reflection.
"Leavening" is a great word for this, because the way we thought of yeast before the secular age was that there were spirits also responsible for the process.
That's not to say (and too many make this mistake) that we didn't understand yeast. It's just that we attributed an extra influence to the process of leavening (same goes for brewing and distilling-- that's why they're called "spirits"). Now, we think of it all as a mechanical process without that extra influence occurring: just add yeast and wait for a result.
In my view, the stripping of the spirits (or, specifically, no longer including them in our narrations) from all these natural "forces," "reactions," and "processes" is really how the disenchantment of the world came about. And it's very, very recent. Medieval Christians still dealt with spirits and even did what we would now call magic.
I could not agree with you more. In particular Capitalism destabilises the structures of Belonging and Place. Endless change and the demand for people to move away from the home place in order to avail of 'opportunities' means that the way we live in the time of the machine, is unstable and destabilised continuously and deliberately, so we do not attach strongly to our original home place and the other people of our homeplace - our 'tribe'. This leaves us with a sense of homelessness, no sense of belonging to a 'Place', ever. We are more easily manipulated and divided if we are just individuals with a bunch of other individuals, with no particular allegiance to a group. We are strong when we live as groups with deep connectedness.
In fact we are always attached to that primal place where we were reared and lived in our early lives, with our families. That early experience of the world and its meaning is fixed for us though we may not realise it. We are Swans of Lir. We may look like Swans and live on water, but inside is the real 'me', that is not 'swan'. The human child and person/adult, is not a swan, beneath the feathers and the skin. The world outside the skin, the foreign 'someplace', is always at odds with the migrant's insides. 'Always Dis-placed'. The 'who we are', from the early time of our life, remains in-place. The migrant experience is difficult. We are encouraged to be 'inclusive' of people of different 'places'. That's a good thing. I think it means ' be tolerant and accepting', of who they are really. Not 'you must become one of us and think like us and be like us.'
There is an orthodox Christian podcast that may interest you called The Lord of Spirits. Over time, I have been less satisfied with materialism, and Paul’s essay back in December on the Free Press inspired me to look deeper into the Christian understanding of the spiritual world.
I have found that podcast very helpful for understanding how interactions with spirits is real, and not all spirits are actively malevolent toward humans, though any that don’t serve the Most High are in rebellion and not to be trusted. Growing up Protestant, my worldview had been that any kind of spiritual contact that wasn’t the Holy Spirit was inherently deeply evil. Now I know that the good spirits of angels and saints are around us all the time, and I believe they are trying to point us back to the Lord, especially in these holy places.
Anthropology seems to tell us that concern for continuity is a human condition. Can I add that when it comes to recognition and belief, respect also has been a hallmark? (See also Ryd's comment.)
I know one putative bullaun in Northumberland, England, although it is cracked now. It sits on high ground alongside pre-historic ramparts and a scatter of much older rock-art. I have wondered what it would look like filled under a high summer moon.
PS I had warts covering my hands charmed away when I was 6 by a nurse in the early NHS. Smile.
Charm healing is an Appalchian tradition as well . My husband was told he had the gift and neither I, nor our children have had them.
Yes times ten thousand! Continuity is the key word. There are holy places, or where the veil between kairos and chronos is thin.
Looking at the pictures of the bullauns, I as struck by the similarity of a stone I brought back from Japan with a small hollow for collecting water. I am soothed by looking at that small pool of water, the source of life. Off topic but in response to "It’s intriguing to think that these beautiful natural landscapes which appear so lonely to us were occupied hundreds – perhaps thousands – of years ago. It’s likely that they have changed very little over all that time," I recommend 2 excellent books. One is Topsoil and Civilization (Carter and Dale), the other is Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Montgomery). The above show how soil erosion has drastically changed many landscapes and affected the course of human history. As a small sheep farmer, soil and water are near and dear to me.
Have a peaceful Easter!
Ahhh you reached county cork ! And I must go see that little well.
On Castlefreke itself …. An interesting english woman called Mary carbery married into the family at the end of the 19 th century and was well known for being a kind and lovely person… she wrote a diary after being widowed which I found very illuminating and members of her family were well Known eccentrics . https://roaringwaterjournal.com/tag/lady-mary-carbery/
"They are thin places."
I like that description. It would be hard to explain to someone what 'thin places' are.