During Advent, when the Church prepares herself for Christmas, her members enter a time of mortification and penance as they long for the coming of the child Jesus. Frequent invitations to drink mulled wine and eat mince pies with brandy butter in the weeks preceding Christmas Day can make this difficult. One way to observe Advent, however, is to eat less meat. Fortunately, during that very time of the year, easily hunted mushrooms—beings that belong to a kingdom between the animal and plant kingdoms—appear across much of the countryside. Recently, I strolled into a well-manured grassland to discover hundreds of field blewits. There they were, great jellyish saucers standing on purple stems in terrific fairy rings across the green pasture.
The fairies have obviously been gathering at night for their hibernal celebrations. They dance and laugh, play tricks on one another, and fall about amid the ribaldry that is the inevitable effect of those pixie draughts from fermented hawthorn berries. The evidence of this was all around me. Those mushrooms marked the sacred circles of the sprites with whom we share our landscape, whose rights and entitlements we disregard.
Due to the fog of late modernity that incrementally distorted our vision, we grew blind to the iconographic character of the world around us, and so the fairies disappeared. Slowly, we ceased to see that things are not only substances but symbols. Moderns would never call a fungal formation of spore scattering fruits from a complex underground mycelial web a ‘fairy ring.’ Just as moderns, when carving a pathway for horseless carriages through the rustic countryside that our ancestors gifted us, do not call it ‘Hollybush Road’ or ‘Brown Cow Lane’ or ‘The Great Eastern Way’ or some other such name, but they call it the ‘M650’ or the ‘A14.’ Everything in late modernity is instrumental rather than meaningful, formulaic rather than poetic, and consequently grey rather than colourful. We reduced all insight, inspiration, understanding, comprehension, contemplation, appreciation, observation, discernment, and awareness to the one quantitative category of ‘information,’ and thereby emptied our minds of all that really matters—and the world we’ve made around us reflects this.
Many Christian philosophers and theologians have attempted to rectify this situation by arguing in defence of telos. They say that if you can see that substances, at least living ones, develop and act for an end—that is, they have a telos—then from this principle you can retrieve meaning and purpose. Certain Humean and analytic philosophers with truncated imaginations—and hence truncated minds—have called such teleological arguments “magical thinking.” But in fact, such arguments are not magical at all, and that is precisely their problem. In my view, attempting to retrieve meaning and purpose in late modernity by appealing to teleology is not problematic because it is magical, but because it is not magical enough.
I can state the end for which mushrooms exist, namely to spread spores for the perpetuation of the mycelium of which they are upward hanging fruits—but no part of that account requires the existence of fairies. When our ancestors saw mushrooms in a circle in a field, they didn’t just see what those mushrooms were for, but they saw symbols. The reason for this, I suggest, is because they understood that knowing the end for which mushrooms appear is insufficient to know why God wanted a universe in which mushrooms exist at all. For that, you need a symbolic, or iconographic account of the cosmos, by which you can see creation as divine language—that is, as an expression of the Eternal Word.
For pre-moderns, the cosmos wasn’t merely composed of substances that acted for some end, but those substances in different ways were words of God, as He conveyed His inner life. Deciphering the iconography of creation was essential in the pre-modern view to understanding the world as participating in, and emanating from, the Divine Mind.
To give one example, it is not obvious what the telos of a rainbow is. (Try to forget for a moment the unfortunate connotations of rainbows in our own age.) A rainbow, of course, isn’t a substance at all. It is an effect of refracted light entering the eye, which is itself an effect of multiple conditions of various substances coming together. One can indicate what a philosopher might call the ‘efficient causes’ at play for the rainbow to come about as an effect. But the man of pre-modern intellectual habits wants to ask: what did God want to convey by creating a world in which rainbows were possible at all?
The Biblical answer to the above question is: His own benignity. It is fortunate that a Biblical answer is available, but otherwise such answers are open neither to the scientist nor to the philosopher. But to the seeker of mystical gnosis, the seeker of the inner meaning of the world as a divine language and a realm of iconographic meaning, such answers are the most important answers. For such a seeker, if he can understand that ‘language’—that still small voice heard by Elijah on Mount Horeb—then he can learn to speak it in the silent idiom of his heart in harmony with He whose language it is.
At Christmas, children the world over receive gifts from a flying saint dressed in a bright red outfit, who is pulled across the earth a hundred feet above its surface by a small herd of reindeer. This yuletide god of the north was likely first seen by the ancestors of the Sami. The peoples of Lapland used to feed red mushrooms with white spots—that is, the fly agaric mushroom—to their reindeer and then drink the urine. All the psychoactive properties of those toadstools were still in the urine without any of the dangerous toxicity, which had been neutralised by the reindeers’ kidneys. After those rounds of cervine piss, the Laplanders saw reindeer flying around them, dragging a man dressed as a fly agaric mushroom. And these visions disclosed to them something of the world’s inner meaning. They peered into a realm where divinised spirits constantly interact with the natural world, transforming it, guiding the lives of lesser beings, and causing creation to glorify its Creator in a chorus of incalculable voices.
That same world, however, is also racked and frustrated by sin, darkness, and suffering, and this truth presents to the theocentric mind the most menacing challenge to its vision. And yet it is to this point that the Christmas story is the greatest possible answer. The whole universe, down to the tiniest particle, is afflicted by sin. Sin is creation’s failure to glorify the Creator—its failure to speak the divine language—a failure, according to the Christian account, that we wove into the cosmos with the fabric of our pride.
In the Christmas story, God, beholding His creation’s endarkening, commissioned one of the innumerable angelic spirits that are operating everywhere and at all times. And God sent that living force to a part of His creation that He, in a fit of heavenly insanity, had plucked up from the mire of the earth. At the very moment of its inception, He had elevated that speck of the universe above all hate and envy and guile, and thus above all death. That is, God chose an imperceptible fragment of His creation, which was also creation’s perfection, and, from all eternity, He called it by the name of Mary—thereafter, all generations would call her blessed. From that maiden, hidden in obscurity, the inner language of the Godhead, the Eternal Word itself, from which all existence derives its intelligibility, drew the whole cosmos back into itself in a moment of embodiment both celestial and terrestrial.
The whole cosmos was concentrated and completed in one young lady, and from her the Eternal Word—Itself pouring forth from the amorous communion of the Godhead—drew created nature. By so doing, the Incarnation burst into creation like a lightning bolt flashing across a midnight landscape. No artist has captured this better than Tintoretto with his Annunciation (1587), in which, as the Archangel Gabriel appears before Mary, all the darkness, decay, and devastation of a world haunted by disobedience and self-destruction is flooded with divine love.
Nine months later, magicians, conjurers of the hidden language, who could read the symbolic universe, deciphered the grammar of the stars. And they meditated upon visitations experienced when wandering in the dreamworld. Those enigmatic men walked in piety across the dunes, obedient to the language of creation and the spirits that animate and recreate it at every moment. And at the end of their pilgrimage, they met the Centre of History as it lay there in a trough, whimpering and shivering amid stinking livestock, under the protection of the cosmic Magna Mater. Those royal magicians of the Eastern mysteries knew what they beheld because they understood the symbolism of the universe, that cosmic icon that conveyed to them the Mystery that now struggled incarnate within their gaze. And they responded with symbols, which they lay before their vulnerable and helpless Creator.
Late modernity is a kind of hex on the human mind, and it has produced a people who can no longer read—let alone speak—the divine communication. When modernity split the world into the res cogitans and the res extensa—the inner world of meaning and the external world of atoms—in one sweep it silenced the divine language, or rather it blocked up our senses. For us, the world stopped speaking and became lifeless stuff.
First, the sacred places lost their sanctity, for the only sacrality was deemed that of the inner man. The grottos, the holy wells, and the sanctuaries became neglected. A concrete warehouse was judged as good a church as a gothic masterpiece, for ultimately they were both just heaps of atoms. What mattered, it was thought, was holy feelings, not holy places. The whole world was eventually emptied of its holiness, and one day we looked up and surveyed the panorama and all we could see was stuff. And all that stuff was grey. “Never mind,” we thought, and we turned inward to take refuge in the holiness of the inner man, but to our horror and ongoing despair, we discovered that nothing was actually there.
In one of the hagiographies of St. Neot—a woodland saint of old England—we read that near to where the saint lived in the deep woods, there was “an angel, who loved to hover in hallowed places, and to breathe an atmosphere which was sanctified by the devotions of God’s saints.” This was the world that our ancestors inhabited. They saw beyond that which is only disclosed to the body’s eyes. The land was covered in glades and groves consecrated by the rituals of holy men and women, and powerful spirits delighted in dwelling in those places so pleasing to God. Those sacred hollows are now under motorways and carparks, and everything has become stuff. Now, we think that fairy parties at mushroom rings and flying reindeer carrying saints are things out of which eventually we must grow, when in fact they belong to the realm inhabited only by those who are mature enough to understand the world for what it is: one great cathedral in which a billion cosmic liturgies are celebrated. There in the nave of creation, the ultimate imperative is to join our voices to the anthems of praise. That world is still there, we have only to let the scales fall from our eyes. There is a black spell on the human mind—that much is clear—but fear not: it can be broken by the magic of Christmas.
