Golgonooza

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The real imagined worlds of Algernon Blackwood

I cannot recall why I decided to read the stories of Algernon Blackwood, but having acquired the volume shown above, I set off on an extraordinary journey. It began with a visit to a haunted house occupied by the ghost of an obsessive lover and his victim, which I subsequently discovered was based on one of Blackwood's own researches as a member of the Society for Psychical Research, before encountering a village of witches, vengeful willows, a loving forest, and, most famously, an indigenous North American folk creature fond of a dangerous form of dancing! Strikingly, Blackwood claimed that his stories were based on real experiences, either of himself or trusted friends, which raises the question of how much of each story is grounded in ''actual" experience and how much is subsequent imaginative embellishment filtered through Blackwood's own framing beliefs, shaped by his interests in ''occult" thought and psychic research, and his membership both o...

Donald & His Seven Cows

Each day, except Sunday, which is the Sabbath, Maisie and her six companions are taken by Donald, their owner and companion, on a 'mile' long amble across his croft and common land to exercise, feed, rest, and fertilize the landscape. As this daily pattern unfolds, so does Donald's mind, accustomed to its place, roaming across and around time, remembering the stories that give him and the landscape, partly through him, their meaning and purpose. Once these purposes were shared in a wider community of knowing, but this lies sadly fragmented and steadily lost in the passage of 'progress'. The language, Gaelic, has faded away with the passage of time and generations, and the economic basis of life - crofting and the sea - has crumbled to be 'replaced' by the uncertainties of wind generation, a futuristic 'spaceport', holiday homes, and tourism. A shared faith, and Donald is a practicing Catholic, has frayed. Yet Donald never steps into the same worl...

Spiritual Lights in Benighted Times

As the journalist and biographer of Pope Francis, Paul Vallely noted in an article for the Church Times, the process of canonization in the contemporary era has been made more complicated because we know so much more in our promiscuous information age about any potential candidates, giving the Devil's Advocate an advantage in hindering any Promoter's efforts (let alone the reluctance of expert authorities especially medical ones to adduce a requsite miracle in our materialistic age). Thus, though Harry Oldmeadow suggests that none of his cloud of witnesses are saints in certain of his Catholic and Orthodox exemplars, only time will tell, as the wheels can move exceedingly slowly, St Charles de Foucauld, who might have been a fitting companion here, required more than a century to elapse before his election. Be that as it may, this is a compelling collection of essays on Christians in the twentieth and our own century who have aspired after holiness and who have reflec...

Darwin's Savages

When Charles Darwin first encountered the indigenous people of Tiera del Fuego (whom he characterized as the Fuegians), he was mortified by their ugliness, uncleanliness, and the habitation of what appeared to be a forlorn land, windswept, barren, and cold. Why would anyone, any human, want to live in this way? They were closer to beasts than humans and destined for 'extermination' in their encounter with that higher form of humanity that Darwin obviously represented. By 'extermination,' Darwin did not appear to mean a conscious act of genocide. On the Argentine mainland, he had witnessed the government's war against its indigenous population and strongly disapproved of its violence (as he too opposed the slavery he had seen in Brazil). He rather appeared to mean by the natural progress of mankind in what would become to be seen (and explained) as its progressive evolution, the strong driving out the weak. Indeed, Darwin was to be a lifelong contributor to the loc...

Close Encounters of a Multi-dimensional Kind.

In her previous book, American Cosmos https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2023/08/unidentified-flying-religions.html , Paskula, a religious studies professor, did a remarkable job of showing how the UFO ecosystem functioned and how it possessed the properties of an emerging religion. In this follow-up volume, she takes the advice of the distinguished UFO researcher, and West Coast venture capitalist Jacques Vallee, and returns to explore the experience of key experiencers of such phenomena. She discovers how our media mediated images of such encounters deviate from their living reality, often by excluding their spiritual/religious dimensions and their accompanying paranormal realities. I use the word 'realities' advisedly because though as a professional student of religion, Paskula concentrates on the phenomenology of people's life events and their emergent metaphysical and cosmological speculation, bracketing any view she takes as to their underlying truth or otherwise, y...

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Bird of the Spirit, 1943, by Morris Graves The Bird in the Tree by Ruth Pitter The tree, and its haunting bird, Are the loves of my heart; But where is the word, the word, Oh where is the art, To say, or even to see, For a moment of time, What the Tree and the Bird must be In the true sublime? They shine, listening to the soul, And the soul replies; But the inner love is not whole, and the moment dies. Oh give me before I die The grace to see With eternal, ultimate eye, The Bird and the Tree. The song in the living Green, The Tree and the Bird – Oh have they ever been seen, Ever been heard? Winter Bouquet, 1977, by Morris Graves