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In this rainy weather, and with a predicted rainy summer on its way, I sometimes wonder how it affects nature spirits. Do they shelter under shrubs or in burrows, do they huddle on branches like birds or do they simply slip out of body and wait it out in energy form?
Many years ago, I had an encounter with nature spirits in a National Park, and sense them now and then in my garden and wild areas.
A friend told me that she was once woken by a yeti (we call them yowies here in Australia) outside her van. It was looking at the mirrored window of her van, perhaps surprised to see itself. It couldn't see in, she said, but she saw it clearly before it disappeared, for she had turned on the outside light. This is not the first time a yowie has been seen on that mountain, either.
I wonder what other creatures of myth and folklore might share this planet with us, indeed, what terrestrial aliens or human-like creatures might be hiding in the shadows. Little people, for instance, faerie, elves and gnomes that live in dimensions that intersect with, and influence our reality, but operate according to their own natural laws. They are sometimes seen and can, it seems, manifest in our physical reality as either small or tall strange beings, but mostly they hide away from us.
According to the old stories, nature and earth spirits once took an interest in us and our wellbeing. Now, it is said, most of them are so disgusted with our treatment of earth and her creatures that they want nothing to do with us. To those who treat nature gently, with love, though, some of the less disillusioned nature spirits may speak and make themselves known.
Findhorn in Scotland, whose improbable gardens built on rocky ground once amazed botanists, might never have been without the active help and guidance of nature spirits and devas. We can, it seems, invite them into our gardens by leaving part of them to grow wild, untended, as nature grows them. I have such an area - not big, but wild - at the side of my house.
In our ignorance, we cocky westerners tend to dismiss such things as childish imaginings. Fortunately, there are some that don't, who are careful not to offend or harm the invisible folk and their places. Some still believe in the old tales of pretty girls or boys being stolen away as in the old ballad of Tam Lin, romances between faerie and human, and children born of those unions.
Almost half of Icelanders, it seems, believe in elves, and elf 'experts' are often consulted prior to roadworks and other constructions to determine whether elves live in that area and what to do about it. Iceland has elf gardens, elf whisperers, even an Elf school where one can learn all about elves!
What about little human or hominid people who live or have lived in our known physical world? Such populations have existed, and some still do.
To those of us raised on Celtic or Scandinavian stories of faerie folk, the Negritos of southeast Asia and Africa's pygmies may not seem much like faery, elves or gnomes, which is a pity for they might otherwise have been protected from mistreatment by their bigger neighbours. Yet they do have some notable fairy-like qualities. Left to themselves (which they no longer are), they were known to live peaceably; happy people who loved to dance and sing, and who were exceptionally sensitive to nature and her secrets, as are the faery folk. Their elders still retain an astonishingly deep knowledge of herbal lore.
Anthropologist Ian Turner wrote of the strangely magical qualities he found among the African pygmies. Late one night when all slept, he woke to see a man dancing alone beneath a full moon. When asked why he danced alone, he was told by the young man, who smiled radiantly, "I dance to the moon," something, I note, faerie and elves often did. Like the faerie, the pygmies also make hauntingly beautiful music. The American Indians tell of a magical race of little people who were so mistreated by the big ones that they hid, and that they still are hiding in the secret places of the earth, rarely seen.
Perhaps these races of little human people carry are part faerie, still carrying in their genes and consciousness traces of faerie ancestors who loved and mixed with humans. Anything's possible.
It was a great shock to the scientific establishment when evidence of a tiny human being was discovered.
I took a course on this latest human addition to hominids, Homo floresiensis, known as the Hobbit. There are indications that the Hobbit might have interacted with Homo sapiens (us) before disappearing off the face of the earth. Or maybe a few are still around. (See link below).
Then there is us, the genocidal hominid that annihilated our early relatives as readily as we destroy other human beings right now? Where did they go, the Neanderthal, the Denisovans (traces of whom were found in Siberia and whose genes exist in Australian Aboriginal and New Guinean populations); the Red Cave people (traces found in Red Cave, China), a hominid so far dubbed Enigma man also found in China, the little people popularly called Hobbits found in the Philippines and more archaic lines, including our accepted ancestor, Homo Erectus?
Some of these lines might have ended due to natural causes, but given our dark history of inhumane, murderous treatment of different races, I hold grave suspicions about the true reasons for us being the last remaining hominids.
The question remains, though, are we the only remaining human-like creature on the planet? Are there yetis, yowies or bigfoots in the wilderness wisely avoiding contact with human beings? Do small groups of human relatives or similar creatures still hide from us deep in the bellies of caves? Are there little people - or giants - who have watched in dread our clumsy civilizations rise and fall, waiting for us to truly evolve, not physiologically but intellectually, emotionally and spiritually into a human race that one can actually talk to without fear?
We might think that we can answer those questions, but the truth is, we just don't know. For me, the book is still wide open.
Read more:
Elves in Iceland https://faeriemagazine.com/seeking-elves-iceland/
Could 'Hobbit' still exist? http://www.rense.com/general58/exist.htm
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Henry Corbin (April 1903 - October 1978), a French philosopher, orientalist, mystic and a major interpreter and scholar of Persian mystical and philosophical writings, wrote this poem in 1932. (English translation by Tom Cheetham).
Theologie au bord du lac
Everything is only revelation; there can only be re-velation. But revelation comes from the Spirit, and there is no knowledge of the Spirit.
It will soon be dusk, but for now the clouds are still clear, the pines are not yet darkened, for the lake brightens them into transparency. And everything is green with a green that would be richer than if pulling all the organ stops in recital. It must be heard seated, very close to the Earth, arms crossed, eyes closed, pretending to sleep.
For it is not necessary to strut about like a conqueror and want to give a name to things, to everything; it is they who will tell you who they are, if you listen, yielding like a lover; for suddenly for you, in the untroubled peace of this forest of the North, the Earth has come to Thou, visible as an Angel that would perhaps be a woman, and in this apparition, this greatly green and thronging solitude, yes, the Angel too is robed in green, the green of dusk, of silence and of truth. Then there is within you all the sweetness present in surrender to an embrace that triumphs over you.
Earth, Angel, Woman, all of this is one thing that I adore and that is present in this forest. Dusk on the lake: my Annunciation. The mountain: a line. Listen! Something is happening! The anticipation is immense, the air is quivering under a fine and barely visible rain; the houses that stretch out along the ground, their wood red and rustic, their roofs of thatch, are there, there on the other side of the lake.
Something will begin this evening, something promised, in that I believe. Ah! This evening? When, then, this evening? If it were truly in a few hours, it would never be, because it would have to end, and then, begin again, and so would always end and never begin. Do you know what it means to wait, and do you know what it means to have faith?
The Mystery of Holy Communion where you will be ushered in, where all the beings will be present - yes, you can only say it in the future. Because at each moment where you read in truth as now what is there before you, where you hear the Angel, and the Earth and Woman, then you receive Everything, Everything, in your absolute poverty. But as soon as you have read and have received, as soon as you consider, as you want to understand, as you want to possess, to give a name and restrain, to explain and recover, ah! then there is only a cipher, and your judgment is pronounced.
For at every instant you are judged, and you must die. So you die, when your existence is decided and realized, for then it is over: what was is not - you want without renouncing, renounce without wanting.
No, you are the poor one, you are man; and he is God, and you cannot know God, or the Angel, or the Earth, or Woman. You must be encountered, taken, known, that they may speak, otherwise you are alone, and perhaps it is better thus, and will be always thus, always, that is, there would be no eternity for you. Because you were born in a sin that was sinned before you, and as Thou you have had fear, great fear, and you have cried, cried because the Earth is immense, cried because the Woman was too beautiful, cried because the Angel was invisible, and because as Thou you were Adam, and Adam would want to live.
Adam established Love, poetry, religion, for he wanted life, that is, he wanted-to be-God, and then to speak as he would want the three beings. To Question; Alas! and he alone responded. To listen; Alas! to give a concert to himself alone.
But then suddenly surging from this lake comes a cortege of beautiful beings. They sing the funeral chant of Adam; and because Adam is dead, it will be a chorale of blended voices with anguish in every instant: “Christ is born! Christ is Risen!”
Henry Corbin
Reading this was like a dream that I simply could not ignore.
Shortly before reading this poem in the middle of the first Covid scare, I dreamed that I was in a dark lake in the middle of a forest with other women, none of whom I knew, and we became aware of dark sinuous shapes under the surface. At first I thought they were big eels, so my immediate reaction was to swim for shore but I was told - in my head - to stay and be calm. As other women swam towards the shore, some of those sinuous shapes came closer to the surface and I saw that they were water sprites or mermaids, and I told the others, which calmed them. The water creatures warned that we must remain in the water … we must not step onto land for there was danger there, death. So we remained all through that night, many heads floating in the black lake.
At first I took this as a warning to keep away from the social discourse and fear of Covid by staying connected to deeper consciousness. But I was studying Jung at the time, and quickly saw connections to other texts I was studying.
For instance, I recognised in the dream the dark tangle of chaos described in the ancient Chinese alchemical text, Secret of the Golden flower: the innocent caught deep underwater, helpless, understanding nothing.... until ...
"In the midst of this darkness, the heavenly heart suddenly begins a movement. This is the return of the one light, the time when the child comes to life (Willhelm trans. GF 55)” ....
and rises to the quiet still place, still underwater but closer to the surface, rising towards sunlight in a state of surrender, a child peacefully sleeping in her unawareness, who eventually awakens, some new aspect of her arising like a lotus bud from the roots towards the sun to open there like a flower into a new personality. I have felt that.
My spiritual path has been one of small attainments and many reversals, needing to go back again and again in search of what I had lost or never really gained in the first place. And I have rarely felt on solid ground. I have felt more like one who, swimming in deep water, catches the tail of the ox that is swimming strong and with purpose, and she is pulled after it into some semblance of awareness. But in the moving water, she loses her grip, again and again.
But reading Corbin’s poem, I am struck hard by the beauty of the water beside the forest, how comfortable, how reassuring it feels. I am no longer sitting by the water, I am in it, floating, like a child, at ease. I float on the music of the mountain … it speaks to me. The Angel in green floats before me like the Star of the Sea, Stella Maris, Maria, like the Mother of the World, like Aphrodite goddess of Love.
My chest aches as my heart swells. I am not me. I am the water. I am the lake and I gladly surrender my Adamic self to its depths, surrender again and again, not to fire or to earth but to the lake, the water, and my soul sings, for the Christ consciousness within me is born again.
Maybe like in that dream, I am not yet ready to step onto dry land, to step into the forest, but need to float a while longer in the water..... Some part of me is not prepared to leave the unconscious, part of me that perhaps prefers the fluidity, the uncertainty of water, that is still wondering what is hiding in the depths that seeks to be brought into the light, onto solid ground.
For recently, I had a profound experience of total identification with water, and it was not just words or imagination. As I sat absent-mindedly wondering what it would feel like to be water, a particular stream that I like to sit by, suddenly, I Was the stream. I felt it, smelled it, tasted it in me, and it was totally different to how my body normally feels: slippery, muddy, dense, scary, dark, full of life, full of memories.
No words for it, but something deep within me was aroused.
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