Michael Martin’s book The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, published in 2015 by Angelico Press, argues that within the Western spiritual tradition there has grown a preference for rationalistic theologising which has ultimately undermined Western spirituality itself. Martin describes this species of rationalism in the neuroscientific terms popularised by Iain McGilchrist, calling it a predilection for “left-brain theology.” It is a way of approaching the sacred mysteries which privileges ratio over intellectus, the inverse of the approach of the ancients. However you want to describe this cognitive phenomenon—or as Martin sees it, cognitive corruption—it is obvious that it has happened and that we’re stuck in its paradigm; this reversal has greatly contributed to making the West the spiritual wasteland it is today.
The trouble is, attempting to argue our way out of rationalism with watertight syllogisms and unassailable demonstrations only further ensnares us in its trap. What Martin believes we need is the intuitive, “sophianic cognition” that great spiritual teachers—like Jacob Boehme, Robert Fludd, Rudolf Steiner, Vladimir Solovyov, Sergius Bulgakov, and Valentin Tomberg—have been trying to teach us down the ages. Whilst this sophianic cognition can only be really understood by living it, it can be roughly defined as the enchanted vision of Being in all its radiance and multiplicity, to see reality as ‘theophany’ and thus as it really is, free from the Cartesian prejudices against which Martin rails in The Submerged Reality. Such a vision of reality comes not by deliberation and debate, but by awakening.
For this purpose, it seems, Martin has given us a new gift in his collection of poems entitled Mythologies of the Wild of God, published earlier this year also by Angelico Press. It ought to be recalled that in classical or traditional civilisations, the poet or bard was cherished and afforded the status of an oracular presence amid the community. There is a simple reason for this: the more meaning-focused a society, the more poetic it is. Whereas the more utility-focused a society, the less poetic and the more technical and abstractionist it is.
As the aforementioned McGilchrist once said to me, “poetry is language outwitting itself.” That is to say, the moment we speak, our speech abstracts its content from the reality it attempts to address, and thus isolates it from the relations and conditions that are essential to its real existence. Poetry, on the other hand, re-roots language in experience, in all its mysteriousness and concreteness. Hence Martin’s poems lead us through an initiatory pathway into ultimate reality, and he is well-placed to do this, for after years of studying the Rosicrucian, theosophical, and anthroposophical movements in the light of his Catholic faith, ‘initiation’ is very much his thing. In short, while The Submerged Reality—alongside other important works by him, such as Transfiguration and Sophia in Exile—argues for the primacy of the sophianic vision of reality, Mythologies of the Wild of God initiates us into that vision.
For a long while I had been an admirer of Michael Martin’s thought, and it was largely through his work that I had developed an interest in the ‘submerged’ sophianic tradition of Western spirituality. A short time ago, I was elated to learn from a friend that Martin, on his X/Twitter account, was encouraging his followers to read my material, especially endorsing an essay of mine published in this very journal entitled The Theurgy of Deer Stalking. Soon, I was on his Regeneration Podcast discussing the content of that essay, among other things. What I had not known until that moment was that Michael Martin and I do not only share a conviction that the West needs a titanic spiritual renewal and that mystical transfiguration more than catechetical instruction is the way to begin this renewal, but we are also both enthusiastic hunters.
As it happens, most of Martin’s poems were written from his deerstalker’s hide (or in American English, ‘deer-hunter’s blind’) on his biodynamic farmstead in deepest darkest rural U.S., while he waited for a whitetail deer to, as he likes to put it, “offer itself” to him. Through his union with the landscape with which he communes as both farmer and hunter, Martin daily encounters the God who is present in creation, and Who calls us into union with Himself not through some gnostic ascent out of the world of experience, but by meeting Him deep in the realm of our experience. For Martin, the mundane world we daily encounter isn’t mundane at all, but alive with the presence of Sophia, the divine wisdom. Martin offers us an invitation to join him in his vision of the world, however we might be able, beyond the sham world of virtual reality. He wants us to enter the Wild of God:
Before Tiananmen Square, before Berlin, before w
Found ourselves placed in the possession of the Archons;
Before we were digitalised, before we were silenced,
Before we were formed in the image and the likeness
Of a digital god in a garden of nothing.
Just as ‘virtual reality’ equivocates on ‘reality’ to the point of lying to us, so too the reconstruction of our very selves in modernity by a “digital god” lands us in a “garden of nothing,” which is no garden at all but a desert, a spiritual desert. But as Martin warns us in the same poem, entitled “The Blue God,” our complacency and self-satisfaction is now being shaken by “deep thunder as the storm comes creeping closer.” And finally, Martin cries out to us, pleading with us to wake up:
There is no wisdom in tempting nature, no matter
How poetic the blade one holds. And yet I wonder
If the blue god still breaks the waves of the universe,
He who will kill by the millions the thieves and the rogues
Who have dared to dress as kings in this Age of Darkness.
We have tempted nature, trying to subdue her and deface her, and now we have turned on ourselves as the last part of nature that has yet to be dominated by our Baconian frenzy. But the thunder can be heard and the storm in coming. The blue god who moves the tides, now speaks. His voice shatters the world of our own contrivance in which we have adorned ourselves as kings whilst stumbling in the dark. Not kings, but thieves and rogues we have revealed ourselves to be, and now death is at the door. It is time to wake up. A spiritual renewal, nay a transfiguration, is needed—for we can take no more of this age’s hubris.
Martin thinks we must meet God in creation, and only then will we begin to respect again what He has made. This is not a call to see the world as a precious ‘resource’ or ourselves as a virus, or anything else proposed by the rapacious elites who posture as leading ‘green warriors.’ This is a call for spiritual transformation, which entails rediscovering ourselves as having a moral relation with the world that God has entrusted to us.
Having “opened apple trees to air and light / With a pruning knife, revealing cathedrals,” Martin learned “Contemplation and received a transfigured face.” There, in his poem “Trees. Water. Fire.” we behold that Martin has discovered the true cosmos, which isn’t a meaningless void within which bits and pieces of matter collide and abate without reason or purpose. Rather, creation is a cathedral, within which innumerable voices praise its Creator in an endless cosmic liturgy. To see it as such, we must encounter Sophia, the sacred wisdom unveiled in the created order:
But above all, I know only one tree:
A curled and arching catalpa
That shadowed the corner of a graveyard
In the twilight of a distant age:
Where first the beloved came to me, her hair
Veiling me with streams of chestnut and light;
Where she anointed me with the balm of life,
A liquid fashioned from her own tenderness.
And all the world rejoiced.
It was then I returned from the dead,
Like a poet given to fire.
Amid this graveyard, an ancient tree—the hidden tradition to which we were meant to be heirs—stood strong but nonetheless “curled and arching.” And there, Sophia appears, and from the slumber into which all fall who are entangled in modernity, she wakes us up. The difference between the sophianic and the mechanistic visions is that between life and death.
In his previous book mentioned above, The Submerged Reality, when assessing the history of Marian mysticism, Martin writes that a “sophiological sensibility … shows itself to be indispensable from veneration of the Virgin Mother of God.” After all, Mary is the one from whom the Eternal Logos assumed human nature, and by extension the whole created order which He entered history to redeem. Mary is, then, the true Earth Mother, and as the philosopher Jean Hani has demonstrated at length, no devotion better conveys this than that of the Black Virgins of Europe. For this reason, as Martin inducts us into the sophianic path of initiation, in his poem entitled “The Age of Legends” he places us “Under the protective mantle of the Black Lady.”
Joseph de Maistre, in his Saint Petersburg Dialogues, characterised modern man—that is, man in retreat from God’s grace—as a “monstrous centaur.” For Maistre, modern man is centaurial in that he is a divided creature. Still a man by appearance, he is ever led this way and that by the impulses of a brute beast. Such a conception of man’s condition greatly influenced the Catholic Hermeticist Valentin Tomberg, who wrote the following in his work Lazarus, Come Forth!:
With the intellectual enlightenment, the danger threatening to break in upon human beings was that of the centaur. Human beings would have been turned into a kind of centaur—a being consisting of head and limbs (intellect and will), but without heart—that is, a ‘clever beast.’
Adopting Maistre’s terminology, Tomberg tells us that man, in this centaurial condition, is still in full possession of his intellect and will—that is, he is still fully human—but the heart has been eclipsed. In short, what makes him not merely human, but a person, which is irreducible to the intellective and volitional powers, has been veiled and replaced with something monstrous.
Standing in this tradition, in his poem “Killing the Centaur,” Martin tells us that in this debased condition, man is enmeshed in “Hoofprint and bedding, pornography and piss,” and must be liberated. If we are to undergo the spiritual transformation we need, we must hunt down and kill the centaur. The quarry, though, is not without but within:
Subtle prey, subtle praxis:
The chase inverted, the trial by psyche.
Take then a mirror, take incantation, take rumor.
Behold the violent side of spiritual transformation: dying to self. This is made all the more challenging by the Cartesian division of the world into two realities, namely the dead-matter realm of the res extensa and the inner cogitating realm of meaning. Modern man knows not how to die to self because to him the self is all there is, and by this error he perpetuates his centaurial condition. But:
One cloudy afternoon in spring he will stumble
Into the open, bewildered at his own monstrosity,
The fool of the form and vapor of his invented self.
However, it’s in his poem “The Veil” that Martin, as it were, unveils the path forward. Only with the deepest encounter with reality in all its splendour can each of us receive a heart again. Only by this immersion in the life of the God as unfolding in his creation, which is an emanation of Himself, can we be healed:
The old man of the woods met me at the body
And opened the breast without violence.
He reached within the silent tabernacle
And, with his hand outstretched in offering,
Bade me take the heart.
Whose breast is opened? It is Sophia’s breast, the divine presence in the created order, the “great white bird” who appears as “Beautiful and silent, like a ship from God.” Here, Martin opts for a hunting analogy quite different to that deployed in relation to the centaur. For while the hunting of the centaur is a hunt for the “invented self,” to do violence to it, the hunt for Sophia is “without violence.” It is akin to that described by Jean Hani in his meditation on ‘God as hunter’ found in his book Divine Craftsmanship:
The symbol here expresses the very condition of man and of every creature in the world, a condition in which it is impossible for them in any way to escape God. To become aware of this situation and perhaps to accept it can be, moreover, the starting point of the spiritual path, which explains how such a path may sometimes be compared to a hunt in which the soul is, as it were, ‘being tracked’ by God, or, inversely, is ‘ardently hunting its prey, Christ’ (Eckhart).
In much of the alchemical literature which Martin well knows, the spiritual alchemy of transforming the base leaden self of illusion into the selfless gold of rebirth—an interior pathway that accompanies exoteric alchemical metalwork—is often described as “learning the language of the birds.” And as the esotericist Bernard Roger has shown in his work The Initiatory Path in Fairy Tales: The Alchemical Secrets of Mother Goose, the language of the birds is a mystery woven into the common culture of the West, as even our most elementary story-telling points to spiritual renewal as the purpose of our existence. (Indeed, this tradition of the mystical bird-language lives on in the works of Tolkien, with the dwarves being aided by a thrush in The Hobbit, and Gandalf the Grey communicating with the great eagles, winged servants of the god Manwë, in The Lord of the Rings.)
In his poem “Byosios,” Martin invites us to enter this mystery, the sacred mystery to which all his writing points, through attending to the language of the birds:
The language of the birds: the bark of a crow, a rooster’s arrogant call,
the lilting peal of robins, a hammering woodpecker, starlings and their
mechanical rasp, redwings whistling in the marsh … and I remember the
fallen sparrow’s nest under the white pine with strands of my grey hair
cushioning the chalice
It is when we learn the language of the birds, the divine language sung in the created order, that we discover, as Martin writes at the conclusion of the poem, “the holiness of all singing.”
“Adam Coedmon,” Martin’s poem named after the first world of creation in the Kabbalic mythology, again invites us into the mystery of reality as unfolding all around us:
The moss-covered rocks, bright with green and dazzling beyond measure,
The lonely call of the owl, the riversong, the wind—
All inhabited my song—the love of man and woman, of God and Man,
Of Nature and Grace, and of Creatures All.
Angels spoke through the wind in the leaves.
Faeries tickled the ground with dance.
Lovers bore the sap with the ancient laughter of God
And the Sun, Moon, and Stars all rejoiced.
How often I have been wandering in the woods or the fields, hunting for quarry or hiking with my dog, and suddenly become aware of the divine language coming through the rustling leaves dancing in the breeze. The creation, as I look up from my self-absorbed slumber, vibrates with “the ancient laughter of God” and all rejoices as it reveals itself to be music incarnate. And this is the apprehension towards which Martin’s collection of poems meanders: the mystic awakening to the Logos unfolding in the creation that was made through Him:
Christ of yew tree.
Christ of holly.
Christ of maple.
Christ of beech.
Christ of cherry.
Christ of cedar.
Christ of willow.
Christ of larch.
Christ of alder.
Christ of apple.
Christ of oak tree.
Christ of birch.
Earlier this year, I was in the Great Karoo of South Africa with my camera team to meet with farmers, conservationists, hunters, and community leaders. I was there to make a film as part of the “Symposia” series for The European Conservative’s YouTube channel. Among the books I brought with me into that African desert was Michael Martin’s Mythologies of the Wild of God. After a long morning of tracking wildebeest, we settled down by a river to build a fire and cook some antelope sausage for our lunch. There, by that river, I opened this wonderful collection of poems and read to my companions “The Huntsman.” This is perhaps my favourite poem in the whole collection, and best captures what I so deeply love about throwing myself into the world’s cycle through fieldsporting pursuits; the latter half of the poem I reproduce below:
Deep in the beech woods beyond the silent bog
I found a glad on the sleeping giant of
The moraine’s back: a wide circle of bent grass
Of moss and of lichen, of oak leaves and of standing stones.
In the center stood a cross made from a young oak
Still green and rooted in the teeming earth
Whereupon hung a man transfixed and shimmering
His head that of an ancient and terrible stag
Antlers branching and twining, tines reaching through all Things
The dry leaves, the hedgerows, the gardens and the ponds
And at last to a place where elemental fires and stars sing
The greenness, the life and the dark, the light and the hearing
Of all that can be and ever shall be, forever. Amen.
At the centre of the cosmos stands the cross on which Christ hangs.
The final poem of the collection, entitled “He Praises the Wild of God,” is a glorious canticle of praise in honour of all the ways that God is present in creation, and how creation in turn glorifies Him. Martin makes his own the spirit of the prophet Daniel and cries out in thanksgiving to the Wild of God, inviting us to join our voices to his. I shall quote none of it here, as I leave that final poem as gift yet to be discovered by the reader.
Poetry is of course a mysterious art. It is, to quote McGilchrist again, language outwitting itself. Indeed, in seeking to interpret Martin’s poetry, by my musings it has undoubtedly lost much of the meaning that is hidden in its many layers. And I have of course brought to the fore what his poetic craft has meant to me, and thereby coloured it with my own prejudices and assumptions. All I should say at this stage, then, is that I encourage the reader to purchase a volume of these poems: sit with them, meditate on them, allow them to work their magic in the hidden recesses of your soul, and by steps enter the Sacred Mystery towards which all Michael Martin’s writings point.
