In my previous article, I summarized the core ideas in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories” dealing with what fairy-stories are, fantasy, enchantment, magic, and sub-creation. In this article, I will be dealing with Tolkien’s defense of fairy-stories, which provides us with important resources for re-enchantment. Tolkien lists three: recovery, escape, and consolation.

Recovery

Recovery refers to the way fantasy can reveal the reality we often miss in the mundane world. The fact is, in the words of Coleridge, we don’t see what is right in front of us because of “the lethargy of custom and the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude”—we are so familiar with things that we take them for granted, or we only view them in terms of how we can use them. But by encountering normal, mundane things in Fantasy, we can recover a sense of what they are and see the enchantment in them. Tolkien explains:

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of [Sigurd’s sword] Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.

And actually fairy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting.

A personal anecdote: My family and I were traveling to Hungary in November 1999. After an overnight train, we arrived at the station in Budapest and had a choice of which train to take to Pécs, our destination. We could either cross Budapest to a different station and take a direct train, or we could stay in our station and take a train to Dombravar and change there to a train to Pécs. Since I don’t speak Hungarian, I didn’t want to try to figure out how to get to the other station, so we opted for to take the train from the station where we arrived. As it turns out, that was the wrong choice.

We had arrived in the middle of a freak snowstorm. The train to Dombravar was an unheated commuter train. It was supposed to have a dining car and my kids hadn’t had breakfast, so I took my seven-year-old son for an explore. That was a story in itself, but the bottom line is that there was no dining car. We returned to my wife and ten-year-old daughter and I said, “Well, it looks like we’re on an adventure. You know what Bilbo said about them: they’re nasty, unpleasant things that make you late for breakfast.” (Yes, I know, he said late for dinner, but in these circumstances you adapt.)

I was trying to make a joke about the situation, but what I found out years later from my daughter is that this reframed the entire situation in her mind. She was now on an adventure like Bilbo, and that made everything alright and maybe even exciting.

That’s how recovery works for situations. It also does it for objects. For example, when we encounter bread and wine in a fairy-story (or in the Eucharist), it changes the way we perceive these everyday things. They become enchanted. We recover a new appreciation for them as we connect them through our imagination with the story, and we see their higher significance in the Sacrament.

Just as importantly, fairy-stories can remind us about the nature of good and evil. Tolkien is clear that these are universals. To quote Aragon: “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.” Fairy-stories can help illustrate this and help us recover such character traits as humility, honor, honesty, prudence, and other virtues.

Escape

Critics often dismiss fairy-stories as escapist; Tolkien’s response is that they are absolutely escapist, and that is a good thing. As he explains:

In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it…. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

He then goes on to dismiss the rather silly objection that fairy-stories don’t reflect reality because they don’t have things like streetlights:

Fairy-stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about. Lightning, for example. The escapist is not so subservient to the whims of evanescent fashion as these opponents. He does not make things (which it may be quite rational to regard as bad) his masters or his gods by worshipping them as inevitable, even “inexorable.”

So fairy-stories connect us to fundamental things—things that are part of creation rather than sub-creation. He continues by commenting on our technology compared to creation or the fantastic elements of our sub-creations:

The notion that motor-cars are more “alive” than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more “real” than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm-tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!

Escape is also part of his “desire for dragons” as explained by the quotation I included in the previous article:

The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faerie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft.

Escape thus moves us out of our colorless, bland, mechanistic world and brings us to “fundamental things” in a world occupied by creatures both real and fantastic. In this way, it engages our imagination to bring color, wonder, excitement, and enchantment into our lives.

Consolation

The final benefit of fairy-stories according to Tolkien is consolation. This overlaps with escape since fairy-stories have many examples of “the Great Escape: the Escape from Death.” More important than that, however, is the “Consolation of the Happy Ending.” This is tied closely to eucatastrophe, a concept and a word coiled by Tolkien in this essay. In fact, Tolkien says that eucatastrophe is an essential element of all complete fairy-stories.

The eucatastrophe is the sudden, joyous “turn” that takes what seems certain defeat and turns it into victory. It is an unrepeatable, “miraculous grace,” that “denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal, final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the confines of the world, poignant as grief.”

Tolkien’s use of the word evangelium (good news, or gospel) is no accident. In the Epilogue, he notes that the Gospels contain all the elements of a fairy-story, but with the difference that it happened in history and in the primary world. Like a good fairy-story, the Gospels are artistic, beautiful, moving, and mythic, and they contain the essential element of eucatastrophe. As he puts it, “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.” It is the story we would most desire to be true, and rejecting it leads only to sorrow or wrath.

As he and Hugo Dyson explained to C.S. Lewis about myths, Tolkien saw fairy-stories as a shadow of the gospel, and therein is part of their value. Story and fantasy will continue, and as Tolkien suggests in “Leaf by Niggle,” they may be redeemed, completed, and perfected in the world to come, just as we, fallen as we are in this world, will be made perfect in the next. In Tolkien’s words, we may hope that “all tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.”

So that is the vision Tolkien offers of fairy-stories and their potential to contribute to our lives. Unlike much modern fantasy, Tolkien gives us in his work a clear, absolute picture of good and evil and thus something to aspire to, though contrary to some criticisms of his writing, he presents characters that are morally complex or conflicted (Thorin, Boromir, Saruman, Smeagol/Gollum, and others). In this way, Tolkien brings Faërie into the primary world; in contrast, much modern fantasy brings the primary world into Faërie where it doesn’t belong.

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As I continue my forays into the area of imagination, stories, and re-enchantment, it is time to bring in J.R.R. Tolkien, the man whose writings re-enchanted my imagination as a college freshman 50 years ago. Rather than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, however, I am going to explore his seminal essay, “On Fairy-stories.” Although probably most often cited for his ideas about sub-creation and eucatastrophe, the essay has much to say to us about re-enchantment. Before getting there, however, it will be helpful to understand what he means by fairy-stories, how they relate to the mundane world, and the process of sub-creation. These are the topics of this article. In the next, I will look at Tolkien’s ideas about what fairy-stories do for us with a particular focus on their potential for helping us re-enchant our way of seeing the world.

Fairy-stories

We should begin with Tolkien’s definition of fairy-stories, and with it, his definition of fairies. For Tolkien, fairies are essentially the same as elves. They are not the diminutive things of popular imagination since the Victorian period but can be as tall or taller than humans. They can often change their shape or appear to be other than what they are.

Tolkien also argues that fairies are not supernatural except perhaps if “super” is taken as a prefix meaning superlative. If anything, humans are the supernatural ones: we will continue into eternity, whereas fairies are so tied to the world that when it ends, they do too. This seems to be the fate of the elves in Tolkien’s legendarium, though there is some uncertainty about that. They do not naturally die but they may only exist for as long as Middle Earth does. In contrast, Tolkien is clear that in Middle Earth, humans die, but their souls will continue on past the end of world into eternity.

Tolkien and Lewis both believed that the fairies may exist. They thought that people who had lived and farmed for generations on the same land were more likely to see fairies since they were literally made from the land the fae inhabited. This again highlights that fairies are natural, not supernatural.

One would think that fairy-stories would be stories about fairies, but that isn’t primarily what Tolkien has in mind. While such stories exist, Tolkien says they aren’t very good. Instead, fairy-stories deal with the adventures of mortals who stray into Faërie, the “perilous realm” where elves and other preternatural creatures exist.

Sub-creation and Imagination

Where do such stories, and even the concept of Faërie, come from? They are a product of what Tolkien called sub-creation. God created the primary world ex nihilo. We, made in His image, are also creators, but cannot create out of nothing. Instead, we work within the primary world to sub-create secondary worlds, ideally with an “inner consistency of reality.” If this is successful, it produces secondary belief, which he described as the willful suspension of disbelief in the secondary world. Tolkien was thus influenced by Coleridge’s idea of primary and secondary imagination, but he took it in different directions.

Speaking of the imagination, although Tolkien acknowledged that the word “imagination” has multiple meetings, he preferred to stick to its original definition of the mental power of creating images. Art is the bridge between imagination (the images in our mind) and sub-creation. Through art, the sub-creator expresses and brings “the inner consistency of reality” to the images created by the imagination, thus producing secondary belief along the way.

Fantasy and Faërie

Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation applies to any art, but in his essay he is particularly concerned with stories that involve fantasy. Fantasy is art which includes the fantastic, that is, things that do not exist in the primary world. Its orientation is thus fundamentally other-worldly. Fantasy is an essential element of stories about Faërie, which Tolkien sees as the highest, most pure form of art. As an illustration of Faërie, Tolkien discussed dragons:

The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faërie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft.

Fantasy and Faërie may be other-worldly, but they can’t be too other-worldly. To work, they must include plenty of elements from primary reality. As Tolkien explains, “For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it.” Fantasy of necessity deviates from primary reality, but the further it strays from it, the more difficult it is to achieve inner consistency and Secondary Belief.

There is another, very important, reason for including elements of the primary world in fantasy: by connecting to primary reality, the story can become a vehicle for what Tolkien calls “recovery,” which is an important element of re-enchantment. I will discuss that in the second part of this article.

Enchantment and Magic

Fairy-stories often incorporate enchantment and magic. Tolkien drew a sharp distinction between these two terms. For him, enchantment is the “elvish craft” of creating a secondary world that both sub-creator and reader can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while inside. An example of this in Middle Earth comes from “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings:

The next day at the hour of sunset Aragorn walked alone in the woods, and his heart was high within him; and he sang [a part of the Lay of Lúthien which tells of the meeting of Lúthien and Beren in the forest of Neldoreth], for he was full of hope and the world was fair. And suddenly even as he sang he saw a maiden walking on a greensward among the white stems of the birches; and he halted amazed, thinking that he had strayed into a dream, or else that he had received the gift of the Elf-minstrels, who can make the things of which they sing appear before the eyes of those that listen.

Elf song thus creates a secondary reality such that all who hear are drawn into the song “to the satisfaction of their senses” of hearing and sight. This is a paradigm for elvish enchantment: they take what is purely natural and bring out the nature of what it is, and by so doing it becomes preternatural. We see this in elven cloaks, elven boats, and all the other examples of elven craft we find in the legendarium

Magic, in contrast, is the use of technique to change the primary world rather than draw out its intrinsic nature. The magician twists the natural world to his purposes, making it conform to his will rather than doing what it is naturally meant to do. Similarly, the magician seeks to impose his will on others, not by threats or violence, but by taking control of their wills. Thus, for example, a love potion compels another’s will, and thus it is, by traditional definitions of such things, a form of black magic. Ultimately, magic is fundamentally unnatural and is fueled by a lust for power. Tolkien rejects all such practices as evil.

The contrast between enchantment and magic is addressed by a somewhat perplexed Galadriel talking to Sam at the Mirror of Galadriel:

“… this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?”

As an aside, Tolkien’s concept of magic as technique with the goal of imposing your will on the world is not much different from Francis Bacon’s ideas about science. Bacon said we should “torture” nature to force it to give up its secrets so that we can manipulate them for our purposes. This idea promoted by the father of empiricism and one of the key figures of the Scientific Revolution, continues today in much of our work in biotechnology, transhumanism, and other high-tech fields. It’s clear where Tolkien would stand on these. It’s less clear that we have thought through the implications of these technologies in light of Tolkien’s implicit critique of them.

So far, I’ve covered some of the highlights of Tolkien’s thought about the sub-creative process, fantasy, and Faërie. The essay continues with Tolkien’s defense of fairy-stories centering on recovery, escape, and consolation. This is where the essay most directly addresses issues of re-enchantment. The next article will thus explore these themes.

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Coleridge and Clarkson

Malcolm Guite often tells the story of an encounter between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson essentially started the abolitionist movement in England. William Wilberforce is better known since he led the charge against abolition in Parliament, but we often forget that Clarkson recruited Wilberforce and did much of the legwork that fueled Wilberforce’s arguments. He deserves to be better known.

The abolitionist cause took decades to come to fruition. Along the way, after years of work and no signs of progress, Clarkson was burned out and had a nervous breakdown. He retired from the abolitionist campaign and moved to the Lakes District to rest and recuperate. It was there that he met Coleridge. Coleridge was an ardent supporter of the abolitionist cause, and he looked up to Clarkson as something of a hero. After they met, Clarkson wrote a letter to Coleridge saying that he wasn’t just losing faith in the campaign, he was losing faith. He confessed that he “no longer had any idea of the Divine.”

Coleridge wrote back, saying “My dear Clarkson, do not worry that you have no idea of the Divine, but never forget that you are a divine idea.” God loved Clarkson and had him in mind since before the creation of the world; He waited millennia until the time was right to speak him into existence. Coleridge said that we are all logoi of the Logos, that is, little words spoken by the divine Word, and added that God wasn’t finished saying to the world what he wanted to say through Thomas Clarkson. And then Coleridge ends the letter, “Try not to be an impediment to the speech of Christ.”

I love that last line.

Is God Still Speaking?

This is a great, maybe even an inspiring story, but is it good theology? I got a question about this in my last post about Coleridge when I referenced his idea about God continuing to speak the world into existence. After all, we know that in the beginning God created the world by His word, but then we are told that He rested from His labors. So isn’t He finished speaking the world?

The short answer is yes, He has finished speaking the initial creation of the universe, but no, He isn’t finished speaking the world into continuing existence. Hebrews 1:3 tells us that Christ, the Logos, “uphold[s] all things by His powerful word.” Apart from the Son’s speaking, the universe blinks out of existence. The mind-boggling thing about this is that it even applies while Jesus was on earth, as Athanasius points out in On the Incarnation. Even while Jesus was an infant (a word coming from the Latin meaning unable to speak), His divine nature was still upholding the world by His word.

We also get a hint of this in John’s Gospel. When attacked for healing on the Sabbath, Jesus answers, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” This points to the fact that God’s rest does not mean the cessation of all activity since God continues His work of sustaining the world, His work of redemption, and other kinds of work as well. Jesus’ healing was an extension of the work the Father was doing, but in light of Hebrews 1:3, we can see additional implications to His working as well.

The notion that God spoke the world into existence and then stopped speaking sounds good on the surface, but it is a fundamentally Deistic way of seeing the world, as if the creation could function or even exist without God being actively involved in sustaining it.

Free Will and God’s Story

If Jesus is upholding all things with His powerful word, then He is upholding us as well. And this means that our lives are stories God is telling, with our decisions and choices working into God’s story. But if our lives are a story told God, how can our decisions and actions have any significance? Aren’t we just working from the script He’s written without us knowing the ending or even the next scene?

I like the way Tolkien deals with this in The Silmarillion. The first section of the book, “The Music of the Ainur,” is Tolkien’s creation story. Eru Ilúvatar, Tolkien’s name for God, creates from His thought the Ainur, essentially the angelic hosts. He then begins making the Great Music, with each of the Ainur contributing his or her own part out of the nature given them by Ilúvatar. But Melkor, one of the most powerful of the Ainur, decided he wanted to glorify himself and so began singing a discordant theme that through the Ainur around him into confusion. Ilúvatar raised his hand, and a new theme arose that absorbed Melkor’s into a richer, more complex harmony. Melkor tried again with a still more discordant theme, and Ilúvatar raised His other hand and introduced a third theme, more somber and complex than the others. When the music reached its climax, Ilúvatar raised both hands, and the music comes to an end with a powerful chord.

Here’s the key: Ilúvatar tells Melkor that no one can alter the Music against His will. Melkor can stubbornly go his own way in rebellion against what he perceives of Ilúvatar’s music, but in the end Ilúvatar will incorporate Melkor’s themes into a richer, deeper Music that is His own. Melkor’s free choices, even made in opposition to Ilúvatar, will in the end nonetheless serve His Maker’s purposes.

In the same way, our individual decisions, choices, even sins are worked into God’s purposes for the world. A biblical example would be Joseph’s brothers, who sinned grievously in selling him into slavery and lying to Jacob about what happened to his favorite son. And yet that was itself woven into God’s plan when Joseph rose to become second to Pharaoh in Egypt and so was in a position to save his family and thus the line of promise. What does Joseph tell his brothers? “What you intended for evil, God intended for good.”

An even bigger example is the Crucifixion. This was the greatest sin ever perpetrated, yet it is turned by God into the means of our redemption.

Underworld Experiences

Returning to Thomas Clarkson, his work on abolition seemed fruitless. The cause that he had dedicated his life to seemed a failure. In Martin Shaw’s terminology, he was in the Underworld at this point in his life. Coleridge’s letter gave him some hope, however, and he gradually recovered his physical and mental health. After some years, he returned to the fight for abolition with renewed vigor. He continued his anti-slavery efforts even after slavery was abolished in the British Empire.

The lesson here is that even in our apparent failures, even in our depression, even in our physical and emotional collapse, and yes, even in our sin, God is writing our story, and we don’t know the ending—but He promises that He will work all things, even these things, for good.

Our Stories Matter

What’s more, because Christians are united to Christ, we are at the center of things. We are part of God’s great work of redemption and restoration of our fallen and damaged world. Our story matters because it is a part of God’s Great Story. Like Clarkson, we are a divine idea, and God has begun revealing our part of His story in our own time and place. And He hasn’t finished saying to the world what He wants to say through us.

You might think that God will be finished with our story when we die, but I don’t think so. What He is saying in us will carry on in all the people we leave behind and in everyone that we influence. And directly or indirectly, that influence can span generations. We will not know fully the impact of our lives, what God is telling the world through us, until we see it in eternity.

The rabbis say God made man because He loves stories. Your life is a story God is telling the world. Our goal in life is to try not to be an impediment to His speech.

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A short post this week: I’m visiting my daughter and her family and I am needed for grandparent duty.

Two Types of Storytelling

In his book Mimesis, literary critic Erich Auerbach discusses an incident in the Odyssey that would make it into Nolan’s film: an old serving woman recognizes Odysseus from a scar on his leg, and then Homer goes into an extended explanation of how he got the scar hunting a boar. Auerbach contrasts this with the biblical story of Abraham offering Isaac on Mount Moriah. Rather than giving the kind of description we see in Homer, Genesis tells us none of the details of the story. We have no explanations of what Abraham or Isaac was thinking but instead have nothing but a spare, bare bones narrative of what happened. This is characteristic of most biblical stories. We are not told what people think; we are told what they do and say, but that’s about it. Descriptions of locations only include the details necessary to explain the action. For Auerbach, Western literature existed in the tension between these two: “fullness of expression” as my Greek teacher described it, vs. sparse biblical narrative.

I love Homer. Some of my favorite academic memories of my undergraduate program revolve around translating Homer in the now gone horticultural garden of Michigan State. But it is worth noting that most folktales and fairytales use a similar approach to the Bible. Rather than spelling out all the details the way Homer does, they narrate the story and let the reader or hearer fill in the details.

Theological Considerations

In the case of the Bible, I think the stories are told the way they are for two reasons. The first is theological. Scripture tells us that the only One who knows what we are thinking and especially what is going on in our hearts is God. We don’t even know this ourselves according to Jeremiah 17:9. We conceal our real motivations for doing what we do even from ourselves. Since we cannot know even our own hearts, how much less can we know another’s? And who can really say what another person is thinking? Thus, Scripture does not discuss such things with very few exceptions, and even then, only in very general terms.

An Invitation into the Story

The second reason is in many ways more interesting. Not explaining all the details in the narrative is a way of inviting us into the story. To take Auerbach’s example, if we spend any time thinking about the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, we will inevitably ask questions: why did Abraham obey God? What was he thinking or feeling during the trip to Mount Moriah and at the site of the sacrifice? Did he tell Sarah? If so, how did she react? If not, why not? What was Isaac thinking? What would I have done if I were Abraham or Isaac?

The lack of explanation calls us to think about these kinds of questions, and more, it encourages us to put ourselves into the story, to imagine it and to occupy the different characters to understand their motivations. And by so doing, we can discover things about ourselves and gain perspective on the challenges we are facing and the circumstances of our lives.

The result of this is that different people may come to different conclusions about the issues not addressed directly by the text. And that’s okay. In our left-brain, analytical society, we often want the definitive answer to these questions, but if we were meant to have them, we would have been given them. Instead, God invites us to use our imagination in reading these stories. Put differently, imagination is a valid and necessary tool for interpreting Scripture and incorporating its lessons into our lives.

Oral Storytelling

Martin Shaw says the same thing applies to oral storytelling. In his Summer School, he told us that in oral storytelling, it is important not to give people too many details. Don’t tell your listeners what people are thinking or why they are doing what they do. Instead, tell them what they do and say and leave it there. Similarly, don’t describe a scene in great detail. Let your listeners’ imagination fill in the picture and supply the characters’ thoughts and motivations. This will keep them far more engaged with the story than they would be if you explained everything. In novels, perhaps, you can get away with filling in all the details, but not in oral storytelling—nor, as it turns out, in Scripture.

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Truth was tired and discouraged. He had been travelling around, knocking on doors and trying to talk to people. But anyone who saw him coming turned the other way and fled. People seemed ashamed and afraid of him, and they didn’t want anything to do with Truth.

One day, as Truth was huddled alone in the doorway of a ruined house, Story came by. Story was an old friend of Truth, but unlike Truth he wore brightly colored clothes and was welcomed everywhere he went. He saw Truth sitting miserably in the doorway and went over to find out what was wrong.

Truth told him that no one welcomed or listened to him. He was too old, he said, and people just hid their eyes or turned their backs on him when he tried to talk with them. There was no point in trying to meet people anymore, and the only thing left to him was to sit alone away from any companionship.

“Nonsense!” said Story. “You just need to change your approach. You’re right, people don’t want to hear Truth directly, but here, take my coat, and see what happens. You’ll find that people will want to hear what you have today.”

Truth was skeptical, but he put on the coat of story and went out. At first he approached people hesitantly, thinking he would be rebuffed, but everyone was interested and even eager to hear what he had to say. He was welcomed in the streets, in the town squares, and in people’s homes. Because, it turned out, people were not interested in the naked Truth but they were eager to hear Truth wrapped in Story.

This is a rabbinic parable first told by Yankev Krantz, the Maggid of Dubno, Ukraine. (A Maggid is a storyteller and a preacher.) I first heard it on Sunday, July 12, of this year in a church service in St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall. My wife and I were touring the castle, which is still occupied by the family that owns it. As we entered the castle proper, we heard there was going to be a church service in five minutes. We asked if we could attend, and so we ended up getting the last two seats in the chapel.

When the priest began his homily with this story, I thought it was a remarkable synchronicity. The next day, Lynn and I were going to drive to Devon for Martin Shaw’s Summer School on myth and storytelling.

Martin opened Summer School with another rabbinical story:

A crisis came to a community, and so the elders lit the sacred flame, went to the sacred grove in the woods, and performed the ritual prayers. A few months later, things got better.

Sixty years later, there was another crisis. They had forgotten how to light the sacred flame, but they went to the sacred grove and performed the prayers. A few months later, things got better.

Decades later, another crisis arose. They had forgotten where the sacred grove was, but they still performed the prayers. A few months later, things got better.

Then decades later, there was yet another crisis. This time, no one remembered the prayers. Someone simply said to God, “I do not know how to light the sacred flame or where the sacred grove is; I do not even remember the prayers. All I can do is tell you the story.” And a few months later, things got better.

It turns out, God loves a story.

Over the next few days, Martin Shaw told us stories coming from cultures from Ireland to Siberia and gave us storytelling tips and exercises. Along with the stories, he gave us questions to help us understand what the story might be saying to us personally. More on that shortly.

History and Storytelling

Listening to the stories and the things he asked us to think led me to ponder the difference between the stories that I told as a historian and the kinds of stories Martin Shaw tells. A lot of my students had bad experiences with history teachers and thought that history was all about names and dates. I would tell them that those kinds of things weren’t what history was any more than the periodic table was what chemistry was. Rather, just like the periodic table was the raw material that chemists use in their research, names and dates are the raw material historians use in their work. As an academic historian, I would tell them that history isn’t so much about what happened as why it happened.

Of course, that means you have to know what happened.

So when I taught, I would use stories whenever possible. Most of these were historical, but sometimes I would tell personal stories as well. I had several reasons for this. The stories illustrated the points I wanted them to learn; if I could supply them with a colorful story, they were more likely to remember it. The personal stories sometimes highlighted points from the lecture, but I also used them to try to establish a connection between me and the students. And frankly, like God, I just like stories.

The stories Martin Shaw tells aren’t like the stories I told. Some are jokes or humor, but many are drawn from myths, sagas, legends, folktales, and fairytales. Unlike my stories, they are not concerned about facts; they rely far more on the imagination of both the storyteller and the listener. They are also open-ended. They survived the centuries because something in the story resonated with people across cultures and eras, but this was not typically a specific lesson. Even in fairytales, there is more going on than just the “moral” of the story. Often, seemingly small elements in the stories might be enormously significant to different individuals and cultures. Thus, the story speaks to different people in different ways. And so after telling a story, Shaw will ask questions to help his hearers ponder the story’s message to them.

Hearing the Message

For me, this was the difficult part of Shaw’s teaching. I am used to listening to stories to remember the details and reproduce them, and I am good at that. But learning to go beyond that, to ask what the story is saying to me is a different matter. I am used to consuming stories as simply stories or for the worldview they espouse without probing for deeper meanings, and my historical stories reinforced this tendency. A major reason for me to go to Shaw’s Summer School was to start learning how to do this. Honestly, I made some progress, but I still have a long way to go.

The best analogy I can come up with for how Shaw approaches stories is Jesus’ parables: we know that these aren’t about the surface meaning but that the story points beyond itself to spiritual truth. But we are looking for “the” point (singular) of the parable. But the history of the interpretation of the parables shows that they are more open-ended than that. For example, people of different eras have drawn out different lessons from parables like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.

Traditional tales function like parables: they have deeper significance than just the surface events. In an earlier article, I mentioned an ancient Athenian who memorized the Iliad and the Odyssey because his father told him it would make him a better man. It isn’t the plot that does that: his father expected him to learn lessons about life from the story. We don’t typically know how to read Homer that way.

Bigger Stories

Compared to my stories, Martin Shaw’s are bigger: They have vastly more far-reaching implications. There is, of course, a place for both kinds of stories; they serve different purposes. But for re-enchantment, the kinds of stories Shaw tells are invaluable. As Shaw points out, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like a good story (even God!). Myth, folktale, fairytale, all engage the imagination—the organ of meaning, as Lewis reminds us—and so can sneak past the watchful dragons of cynicism and skepticism and help us recover a sense of meaning in the circumstances of our lives.

As the story of the Naked Truth tells us, Truth is best received when clothed in story.

But we need to learn to go past the plot, to ask questions of ourselves and of the stories if they are going to have the impact on our lives that they could have. I’ve got a lot to learn about this, but I will be sharing what I learn in future articles.

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Recovering the Christian imagination is a critical area for re-enchantment. I plan to explore some aspects of this in upcoming articles. Here, I begin by asking the questions what is the imagination, and how does it connect to truth. Our guide here will be Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but to get there, we’ll start with C.S. Lewis.

One of my favorite quotes by C.S. Lewis concerns the importance of the imagination. He says that for him as a rationalist, reason is the natural organ of truth, that is, reason enables us to ascertain facts, which as a rationalist Lewis takes as truth. But, he adds, imagination is the natural organ of meaning.

There’s a lot we could explore in that quotation in terms of its relevance for Lewis’s conversion and his apologetics, but for this article I want to focus on what he said next. He said that even reason depends on imagination, since at its base, all reason is built upon metaphors supplied by the imagination. Thus, imagination is necessary for finding truth even though that is the primary responsibility of reason.

Why is reason built on metaphor? Perhaps the simplest way of seeing this is to consider how words work. All language about concrete objects consists of metaphors—the word “apple” is not itself an apple but a symbol or metaphor that we use to point to the apple. Since all our reasoning, and indeed all our thinking, depends on words, reason is based on metaphor.

Most of us probably don’t think of the imagination this way. For us, imagination is either false, as in “it’s just your imagination,” or connected with make believe or the creation of stories or art. Yet Lewis doesn’t use it that way. He sees imagination as operating at two levels, providing both a basis for reasoning via its creation of metaphors and revealing the meaning of facts.

Lewis’s understanding of imagination was heavily influenced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose works he studied and heavily annotated. Coleridge’s ideas on the imagination are sophisticated and complex and shed light on Lewis’s ideas. They are thus worth exploring in some detail.

Coleridge on Imagination

We should start with the classic definition of the imagination. The imagination is the faculty that enables us to create images in our mind. This may sound simple and relatively unimportant, but it is anything but. When we look at a tree, for example, what is in our mind is not the tree itself but an image of the tree. The imagination is thus central to our ability to perceive the world.

Coleridge develops this idea further. He distinguishes between the primary and secondary imagination. The primary imagination is involved in perceiving the world, but for Coleridge, that involves much more than meets the eye.

Primary Imagination

The primary imagination is the living Power and prime Agent in perception. In other words, it doesn’t just passively receive input from the senses and construct images from them. Rather, it actively uses our senses, reaching out through them to perceive the world.

Today, we would probably think of this more as attention than imagination. We notice what we pay attention to and miss much of what we don’t, though sometimes unexpected things catch our attention. Coleridge saw all of this as our imagination taking hold of our sense perceptions, filtering out those things that it is uninterested in, and using the rest to build our image of the world.

But perception involves more than just our senses; as Sherlock Holmes said to Watson, “you see but you do not perceive.” Perception involves understanding the meaning of what we see. For Coleridge, this is more than a cognitive assessment (“that tree is a white pine”). It connects with something far more profound, the language of God Himself.

The Language of God

Coleridge believed that God spoke the universe into existence as taught by Genesis 1 and John 1. But he went further: since the Logos, the Word of God, “upholds everything by His word of power” (Hebrews 1:3), he argued that the world is continually being created since God is continuing to speak the world into existence. He described this as the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

But since God is continually speaking the world into being the world itself is a kind of language, a set of symbols or metaphors for divine realities. We see this in his poem “Frost at Midnight” where he speaks of his hope for his son (emphasis added):

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

The world is sacramental: it points beyond itself to divine realities and to God Himself. In this way, God speaks through nature, and the primary imagination enables us to perceive what God is saying through the world.

The Secondary Imagination

Of course, most of us today even more than in Coleridge’s day don’t understand this language. Coleridge himself identified the problem in the introduction to Lyrical Ballads as the lethargy of custom and the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude—the last of these meaning “that we solicit or demand from the world all its goods and resources for our own selfish ends, without considering its own intrinsic being or purpose.”^[1]

The solution to this problem is found in the secondary imagination. Coleridge described this as an echo of the primary imagination, doing the same kinds of things but at a lower level and in different ways. Unlike the primary imagination, which operates subconsciously and intuitively, the secondary imagination co-exists with the conscious will. Rather than perceiving the world directly, the secondary imagination takes materials from the primary imagination—perceptions of both the world and its meaning—and synthesizes them to create (or, as Coleridge said, re-create) a work of art that expresses the truth in a new, fresh way. In this way, artistic expression can awaken us from the lethargy of custom and strip away the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude that blind our primary imagination to the deep truths that shine through the world.

The secondary imagination, often today called the poetic imagination, is what most of us probably think of as creativity or perhaps simply the imagination.

Fancy

Coleridge distinguishes the secondary imagination from fancy, which he defines as no other than Memory emancipated from the order of time and space. In other words, fancy takes existing elements from our memory and rearranges them without fundamentally changing them. In contrast, the secondary imagination dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates the elements drawn from the primary imagination, digesting and synthesizing them into the artistic creation; it doesn’t simply rearrange them. Both have their place, but the secondary imagination is clearly the superior faculty.

Imagination, Truth, and Modernity

The essential point here is that imagination is a vehicle for truth, understood more broadly than in Lewis’s definition of it as a rationalist. The primary imagination is the foundation of all knowledge as suggested by Lewis as well as being “the organ of meaning.” The secondary imagination expresses the truths and meaning from the primary imagination in ways that cut through our habitual ways of seeing the world to reveal its deeper significance.

With the rationalism that accompanies modernity, we have devalued the imagination, thinking it only deals with imaginary things. But this distorted and diminished understanding of the imagination has led us straight to the crisis of meaning in our society today. Recovering a full-orbed appreciation of the centrality of imagination is thus critical for our society’s mental health, and an apologetic of the imagination will be an important tool for reaching with the gospel those lost in the meaninglessness of modernity.

^[1] Malcolm Guite, Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God (Square Halo Books, 2021), 12.

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Last week, my wife and I attended Martin Shaw’s Summer School in Devon (not pictured above!). A lot happened that I’m still processing. I expect to incorporate some of what I learned in the next theme I’ll be exploring here, imagination as a vehicle for meaning and truth.

One of the remarkable things about the Summer School is the range of people who come. I met a number of Orthodox Christians, Catholics, an evangelical pastor, a woman studying to be a priest in the Church of Ireland, a man who manages an ayahuasca clinic in Costa Rica, a yoga teacher, a woman who wrote musicals, a husband and wife who were professional musicians, a storyteller, and people involved in various forms of New Spirituality, among others. Despite the diversity, everyone got along well and many of us were sorry when it ended because of the friendships we formed.

Since I have recently written about ayahuasca as a potential means to enter into the unseen realm and interact with beings there, I was particularly interested in talking to one of the Orthodox men there who had used ayahuasca before his conversion and to the man who runs the clinic. I had not planned to write more about this, but they confirmed what I had suspected about ayahuasca and gave me far more information about it than I had before.

Hang on tight, because things are going to get weird.

Disclaimer

Before I get started, let me be clear: nothing I write here is to be taken as an endorsement of ayahuasca. Frankly, it’s dangerous and no one should try it. Steer clear of it.

How Ayahuasca Works

With that said, let’s start with the less weird part. The psychedelic in ayahuasca is DMT. Ingesting DMT, however, won’t produce psychedelic effects because it is rapidly broken down in the body by monoamine oxidase (MAO) in your digestive system before it enters the bloodstream. As a result, DMT is often smoked or injected.

Ayahuasca, however, is produced by processing two plants. One contains DMT, the other contains an MAO inhibitor that prevents the DMT from breaking down. That’s why ayahuasca works as a psychedelic. How the Amazonian natives figured out this combination is something of a mystery, though the rest of the story may help explain this.

Shamanic Medicine

In the Amazon, ayahuasca is used in shamanic medicine. Both the patients and the shamans, known in modern clinics as maestros, take ayahuasca. The patients typically end up vomiting, shaking, and otherwise purging themselves—Leo (not his real name), the now Orthodox Christian, said that this is the nervous system clearing toxins.

When everyone is in a psychedelic state, the maestros go patient to patient looking at the patterns revealed through the psychedelics, finding blockages or tangles, and clearing them by singing. Afterwards, the maestros themselves undergo a kind of cleansing so that the things they have cleared do not attach themselves to them.

Results

This may sound like a lot of nonsense, but Ian (not his real name), the man who runs the clinic in Costa Rica, was healed of Crohn’s disease through ayahuasca. So at least sometimes, the healing works.

On the other hand, Leo, the Orthodox Christian, had used ayahuasca twice before his conversion. The first time, he described it as beautiful and almost like heaven, but he met a being there whom he identified as Ayahuasca. She told him, “This is not your medicine. Don’t do this again.” When he took it the second time, he said it was like going through hell; he even said he died. Ayahuasca appeared to him again and said she had told him not to take it again. He recovered and never used ayahuasca again, though he did work in the clinic.

I asked Leo about the accounts I had read of encountering otherworldly beings while on ayahuasca, and even different people meeting the same being. His response was that it was supremely likely. His own experience and that of others he had worked with aligned closely with what I had described.

Training the Maestros

Ian, the man who runs the clinic, was enthusiastic about ayahuasca and wanted to tell me more about it. He explained to me key elements of the training of the maestros. The maestro would fast on a specific diet of bland food—nothing too exciting—and live in celibacy for a time ranging from weeks to a full year seeking to make contact with the spirit of a plant, which would then guide him in his healing songs. Alternately, he could fast to gain the knowledge of a willing maestro, which would be passed along psychically, not through teaching.

Christian Maestros?

Knowing I am a Christian, Ian told me about a maestro who was 82 years old at the time he met him. This maestro had fasted for a year four times to gain knowledge from four different maestros. As a result, he became very powerful—so powerful that the other maestros became jealous of him. This led to conflicts, and he got so discouraged he gave up doing ayahuasca healings. He ended up going to a church and spent a year fasting to gain knowledge from the Bible—again psychically. According to Ian, he became a Christian. (Ian knows little about Christianity and talked about other maestros who had fasted and obtained a connection with “Christ-consciousness.”)

Sometime later, the maestro’s cousin arrived and begged him to heal him. He refused, saying he didn’t do that anymore. The cousin camped out in front of his house for weeks until the maestro’s wife told him he needed to do what he asked. The maestro did the ceremony; all his songs were prayers, the visions were qualitatively different and more beautiful than they had ever been, and his cousin was healed.

Make of that what you will.

Leo, who is now Orthodox, said that Jesus had met him while on one of his ayahuasca trips, though he acknowledges that it might have been a demon impersonating Him.

Again, make of that what you will.

The Cost

There is a cost to being a maestro. Ian told me about some American doctors who went to study the ayahuasca ceremonies to try to understand what was happening. The maestro steadfastly refused to answer any of their questions. The doctors were frustrated by this, but on the day before they left, the maestro told them that he would explain things to them, but not in the way they expected. As reported to me, that night, they had a vision of the maestro with two spirits, one in the form of a hippopotamus (in South or Central America?!) and one in the form of a crocodile. The hippo spirit was smoking like a chimney and the crocodile was drinking. The maestro said these were the spirits who guided his healing.

The still darker side of this is that the maestro had to drink and smoke constantly to feed the spirits. He ended up dying of cardiac problems as a result.

Leo heard this story with me and later explained that the relationship between the spirits and the maestros was transactional—the spirits don’t help the maestros out of the goodness of their hearts (if they have them) but they do it to get something out of it themselves.

I don’t understand what the spirits get out of smoking and drinking. In Mongolia, the shamans I have spoken to told me that drinking puts you in an altered state of consciousness that facilitates being possessed by spirits. Still, what Ian described wasn’t that. The maestros’ altered state of consciousness comes from ayahuasca, not the alcohol. No, somehow the spirits exact a price from the maestros in return for their guidance in healing, and in the end this can cost the maestro his or her life.

My Assessment

So what are we to make of all this?

The Medicine

In its original cultural context, ayahuasca is used as shamanic medicine, and in some cases, it works. It is not about spiritual adventurism though people from outside the culture are increasingly using it that way.

The scientific community will explain away what happens while using ayahuasca as brain chemistry, hallucinations, and the like, and the healings as the placebo effect. But that explanation assumes the invisible world isn’t real. Get rid of that assumption and you have to take seriously the explanations and experiences of the maestros and the users.

Spiritual Dimensions

Personally, I am convinced that ayahuasca opens the door to interacting with beings we don’t normally have access to, and that these are involved in the healings. The people I talked to certainly believe this.

If this is the case, are the spirits the maestros are in touch with demonic? I’m not sure, but they certainly aren’t angels. I have argued elsewhere that the invisible world has more kinds of creatures in it than angels and demons. Early modern witch hunting manuals make the case that demons can heal as part of a larger program of evil. That may be happening here, though it might not be quite that simple. There may be other types of spirits involved that aren’t strictly demons.

What do we do with the “Christian” maestros and Leo, who believes he met Jesus while on ayahuasca? I don’t know, but it’s good to remember that Jesus is lord and is present in whatever realm ayahuasca gives you access to. Consider that Jesus has appeared to many Muslims in dreams to call them to Himself. Is this something similar? It seems possible

In any event, another thought occurred to me as I thought about this: our resurrected bodies may have access to realms and dimensions beyond what we normally have in this life, including the one ayahuasca seems to access. I suspect that’s true, which is another way that the next life is going to be way beyond what we know now.

Fasting

Interestingly, fasting is integral to accessing spirits by the maestros. This resonates in some ways with the New Testament. In some manuscripts, Jesus says that certain types of demons can only be driven out by prayer and fasting; this suggests that fasting can be a source of spiritual power. Fasting has been practiced in various ways in church history and continues to be a cornerstone discipline in the Orthodox world. Asceticism thus seems to be related to spiritual growth and power cross-culturally, suggesting that this may be part of the fabric of reality that God established in the world.

The Disclaimer Again

Again, let me emphasize that I do not in any way endorse ayahuasca and I would discourage anyone from trying it. As Leo repeatedly said, “This is not your medicine.” The point here is to offer a glimpse into a portion of the unseen realm that was and is a living part of indigenous cultures in the Amazon in order to help us recognize the reality of the invisible world and its impact on the visible. This is an essential element of a properly enchanted Christian worldview.

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In a previous article, I mentioned that I might do an article on dragons and other biblical cryptids. I got a request to do that, so to wrap up at least for the time being my articles on denizens of the invisible world and related subjects, I will survey those remaining creatures I haven’t covered in other articles.

Translation Problems

Before I get to dragons, there are a few things that show up in the King James translation that deserve at least a brief mention.

Unicorns

Let’s start with unicorns. The word appears nine times in the KJV:

· Numbers 23:22 and 24:8 — Strength of a unicorn (comparing God’s power).

· Deuteronomy 33:17 — Horns like unicorns (plural, associated with tribes of Israel); horns in Scripture symbolize strength.

· Job 39:9-12 — Questions whether the unicorn can be tamed or used for plowing, emphasizing that the animal is wild.

· Psalm 22:21, 29:6, 92:10 — Symbolic references to power or deliverance.

· Isaiah 34:7 — Unicorns descending with other powerful animals in judgment.

The Hebrew word is re’em. It was translated into Greek as monokeros, meaning one-horned, and thus into Latin as unicornis, one-horned, and from there to the English unicorn.

This is clearly a translation error. Re’em refers to a wild, powerful, horned animal. Modern translations typically translate it as wild ox, or more specifically, aurochs. It is not a unicorn in any sense, and certainly not the unicorn of European folklore

Cockatrices

Another creature mentioned in the KJV is the cockatrice. It appears in 4 places:

· Isaiah 11:8 — “And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den” (the Peaceable Kingdom passage).

· Isaiah 14:29 — “...for out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.”

· Isaiah 59:5 — “They hatch cockatrice’ eggs, and weave the spider’s web...”

· Jeremiah 8:17 — “For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed...”

In European folklore, a cockatrice is a small two-legged or serpentine reptile with a rooster’s head whose gaze can petrify victims, who has poisonous breath or bite, or who as toxic feathers. That isn’t what is being described here.

The Hebrew word is tsepha’ or tsephoni and refers to a deadly, venomous serpent. Since the translators did not know the specific identity of tsepha’, they opted for a term that would convey the sense of the Hebrew word without the full mythic connotations of the cockatrice. Modern translators use adder, viper, cobra, or sometimes basilisk (for the same reason that cockatrice was used earlier).

Bottom line: this too does not refer to a cryptid or mythological creature, but to a physical animal with characteristics identifiable from the context.

Dragons

This brings us to dragons and three named creatures in Scripture: Rahab, Leviathan, and Behemoth. We’ll start with the word sometimes translated dragon, tannin, pl. tanninim.

First, a quick note. In some places, the KJV translators confused tannin and tannim, the latter meaning a howling desert creature. That’s why some of the KJV references to dragons become jackals in more modern translations.

Tannin itself covers a variety of creatures, and trying to sort out what is going on in the various references can be confusing. In passages like Genesis 1:21, Psalm 148:7, and probably Job 7:12, it refers to great sea creatures. But in Exodus 7, the rods of Aaron and the Egyptian magicians turn into tanninim; this is not the same word used in Exodus 4:3 where Moses’ rod turns into a serpent. Rather, it indicates something bigger and more dangerous than a simple snake. Yet here it isn’t a great sea creature.

Tanninim can also live on land, as in Deuteronomy 32:33 where they live in the wilderness and their poison is paralleled with an adder’s. In Psalm 91:13, lion and adder are paralleled with young lion and tannin. The tannin thus corresponds to the adder as a venomous snake living on land.

Despite these verses, tanninim were mostly associated with the sea. Along with positive references such as Genesis 1:21 and Psalm 148:7, tanninim parallel the chaos monsters of ancient near eastern myth that live in the seas and are defeated by the chief god of the pantheons. In Scripture, rather than being defeated by Baal or Marduk, the tanninim are destroyed by God, who unlike the near eastern gods is sovereign over the waters and everything in them (Psalm 74:13; Isaiah 51:9).

Eschatologically, God will destroy the great sea monster finally and definitively (Isaiah 27:1). This usage likely influences the image of the Beast rising from the sea in Revelation 13:1 which was summoned by the Dragon (Revelation 12:17b) and ultimately sent to the Lake of Fire by Christ.

The Dragon and Beast from the sea in Revelation echo another way tannin is used in Scripture. The Beast in Revelation symbolizes earthly powers and empires, and perhaps an eschatological tyrant who will try to impose his will on the saints. In the Old Testament, we see tannin used in a similar way. In Isaiah 51:9-10, God’s defeat of the dragon Rahab is associated with the Exodus; Rahab and the dragon are thus symbolic of Egypt and pharaoh. In Ezekiel 29:3 and 32:2, pharaoh is explicitly described as a tannin, a powerful monster that bursts from the sea into the Nile and pollutes the waters with its feet.

But it isn’t only pharaoh. Jeremiah compares the King of Babylon to a tannin that swallows him whole (Jeremiah 51:34).

Tannin thus covers a lot of territory. It is a sea creature created by God; it is a poisonous serpent on land; it is the chaos monster of myth; it symbolizes earthly rulers who oppress God’s people. The word does not seem to refer to a specific creature by our classification system but to a variety of types of scaly creatures generally connected to serpents but larger—in some cases, much larger—and more powerful. It seems likely to me that tanninim are mostly known animals today that we may not put into a single genus or species.

Rahab, Leviathan, and Behemoth

Moving to specific, named creatures, we have already seen Rahab, a dragon associated with pharaoh and Egypt. Although in the passages we’ve looked at, this identification is in the context of judgment, in Psalm 87:4, Rahab symbolizes Egypt but rather than judgment Rahab becomes part of the eschatological people of God.

There is much more about Leviathan than there is about Rahab. Leviathan is a tannin and like the tannin it is portrayed both positively and negatively. On the one hand, in Psalm 104:26, God formed Leviathan to play in the sea, making it a creature in which God delights much like the tannin of Genesis 1:21 and Psalm 148:7. On the other, Leviathan is a sea monster that the Lord will destroy. We see this in the already cited Isaiah 27:1, but also in Psalm 74:13-14, where Leviathan is a sea monster that after being slain was paradoxically given to the animals in the wilderness—generally referring to the desert—for food.

The most detailed passage about Leviathan is Job 41:1-34. Read the text. Leviathan is absolutely terrifying: it is invulnerable to weapons, breathes fire and smoke, boils the sea and leaves a white wake behind; it is completely untamable and “the king of all the children of pride.”

Leviathan certainly sounds like a dragon to me.

Before we look at options for understanding Leviathan, let’s look at Behemoth, its counterpart in the previous chapter of Job.

The description of Behemoth is much shorter than that of Leviathan, but there are important contrasts and points of comparison. Leviathan is described as having teeth of terror, suggesting he is a carnivore; Behemoth is an herbivore. Nonetheless, he is powerfully built, with a tail stiff like a cedar, bones of bronze and limbs of iron. He grazes on the mountains yet is equally comfortable in rivers and marshes. Behemoth is thus a land animal in contrast to Leviathan, the dragon of the sea. Where Leviathan is actively dangerous, Behemoth is strong and unbothered.

So what are we to make of these two animals?

There are three main interpretations for them which are not mutually exclusive. The first is a naturalistic interpretation. Leviathan is a crocodile, whale, or aquatic reptile, perhaps an extinct species like a mosasaur or a plesiosaur; Behemoth is a hippopotamus, elephant, or dinosaur (e.g. a sauropod with a “tail stiff like a cedar”). Elements that do not fit such as breathing fire are interpreted as exaggerations to emphasize Leviathan’s power, perhaps inspired by mist (“smoke”) coming from the nostrils of the animal.

A second interpretation is mythological and symbolic. Leviathan is the biblical counterpart of the ancient dragon of Mesopotamian mythology (e.g. Tiamat in Babylon or Lotan in Ugarit), symbolizing the forces of chaos that we see in Job are actually under God’s control. Behemoth, which is unique to Job, represents the primal forces of order and stability in the world.

The third interpretation is theological: whether we are dealing with the forces of law or chaos, land or sea, God alone can master them.

This last is undoubtedly correct and overlaps considerably with the second. But what about the first? Are these purely symbolic or mythological creatures that never actually existed? Or are we dealing with a poetic description of an identifiable animal or a cryptid?

God treats Leviathan and Behemoth as real animals that Job knew or had heard of; Psalm 104:26 likewise sees Leviathan as a living creature, describing it almost as God’s pet. And if Leviathan is a living creature, Behemoth must be as well.

So what are they? No living animals fit the description of either of them, even taking into account hyperbole. The description of Behemoth’s tail as being stiff like a cedar does not fit hippos or elephants, the main options suggested. Hippos also do not gather their food from the mountains. I can only conclude it refers to an extinct animal, perhaps like a dinosaur; I’m hard pressed to think of a mammal with a tail like a cedar.

Leviathan likewise is a real creature, but it also has symbolic significance related to God’s judgment in the past (Ps. 74:13-14) and the future (Is. 27:1). My guess is that this is because the sea represents chaos and death in the ancient near east, and Leviathan is the greatest creature in the sea; as a result, it can be associated with the chaos dragons of middle eastern myth.

If you read Job 41:18-21 literally, Leviathan is a fire-breathing dragon of the type found in various mythologies around the world. One would think that this idea would have been borrowed from middle eastern myth, but Tiamat and the other chaos dragons did not breathe fire. Their weapons are their teeth and poison. The Old Testament mentions fiery serpents in various places (see my discussion of the seraphim). In those cases, the idea may be that their venom burns like fire but the description in Job doesn’t seem to allow for that interpretation.

So Leviathan is either a fire-breathing sea dragon, and thus the prototype for all fire breathing dragons in world myth and legend, or these verses are hyperbolic, intending to show how dangerous and destructive Leviathan could be. Though to modern eyes this second interpretation would seem obvious, there have been people past and present who believe it is referring to a real fire-breathing dragon.

Assuming we are not dealing with a dragon, what other animal could it be? The description of essentially an armor plated back and an underside like a threshing sledge does not fit any creatures alive today, and especially not aquatic creatures. This again suggests an extinct creature. It sounds rather reptilian, so perhaps it would be similar to an aquatic dinosaur. But the bottom line, as with Behemoth, is that we don’t know; nothing we do know about fits the descriptions.

Are There Cryptids in Scripture?

So where does this leave us with biblical cryptids? The Old Testament uses words we do not fully understand. Tannin, which in modern Hebrew means “crocodile,” seems to refer not to a specific creature but to a variety of serpentine creatures rather than cryptids.

One exception is Leviathan, a tannin whom God created to play in the seas. Yet Leviathan is also a picture of chaos and is destroyed in God’s judgment. It is powerful and dangerous: it is even described as a fire-breathing sea dragon. Even if fire-breathing is metaphor or hyperbole, the description of Leviathan does not correspond to any known animal.

The same is true of Behemoth, which is not a tannin but another creature whose description does not fit anything known today.

So our best bet for finding biblical cryptids is these two creatures. We are left with a few choices: they aren’t real animals but are symbolic and/or mythological; Leviathan is (or was) a real fire-breathing dragon; they are natural animals, either existing creaatures like crocodiles and elephants described hyperbolically or extinct animals, probably reptilians, perhaps like dinosaurs. I leave it to you to decide which.

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In previous articles, I have looked at angels, demons, Nephilim, and other denizens of the unseen world described in Scripture. This poses a question: do the Scriptures exhaustively catalogue all beings or at least all categories of creatures in the invisible realm? Is everything either a holy angel or a demon?

I don’t think there’s any reason to think it does. The impression I get from Scripture is that the unseen world is every bit as complicated as the visible, and maybe more so. We are told what we need to know about it concerning our relationship with God, but I do not think it covers “all things visible and invisible.” The biblical worldview includes a robust belief in the unseen world, and while we aren’t obligated to believe in things in this realm other than angels and demons, I don’t think we ought to dismiss the possibility that there is more there than Scripture reveals.

So what else might be out there? And what is the evidence?

Nature Spirits and Liminal Beings

Every culture around the world has stories about nature spirits of various kinds such as dryads and naiads in Greece or some of the kami in Japan. Some are benevolent, some are malevolent, and some are mischievous. There are also stories of liminal beings such as the Celtic fey existing on the borderland between spirit and matter. The medieval world interpreted them in various ways—ghosts, angels that tried to stay neutral in Satan’s rebellion, and others—but the majority view was that they were a third rational species along with angels (pure spirit) and humans (material). (For more on this, see the chapter on the longaevi in C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image.)

The modern world has rejected their existence since we have not found scientific evidence of them. But that assumes that our senses or our scientific instruments are capable of detecting everything that exists. This is the kind of materialistic reductionism that would also reject the testimony of Scripture about the existence of angels and demons: they cannot be detected by our technologies either, yet Scripture is clear that they exist.

The modernist rejection of the possibility of such spirits is ultimately based on the rather arrogant assumption that we know better than all other cultures throughout the world and across history, including many that still exist today.

I know a pastor from Sierra Leone who tells me that there are water spirits in the rivers and in the ocean around the country. They act as protectors, drowning people who do not belong in the water or who have evil intentions. He even says that he has seen this happen. Our instinctive reaction to this is that it can’t be, that it’s superstition. But can we be so sure?

While not everyone can see such spirits, people with “second sight” claim to be able to. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien have a theory about this. People in the past frequently lived for generations on the same piece of ground and ate its produce. In a very literal way, they were made of the land they lived on. People like this, they suggest, were more likely to see the nature spirits of their land. In the modern world, where we eat food from all over and are generally not tied to the land, we are far less likely to have the sight.

Still, I know at least two very well-educated people who say they regularly see angels and demons, though I haven’t heard them speak of other kinds of beings. Evidently, some people today do have the gift of being able to see at least parts of the invisible world.

Reports from people who claim to have encountered Sasquatch suggest that it may be a liminal being—part spiritual, part physical. And it is possible that the “goat demons” discussed in my last article may fall into this category as well, especially if we take Jerome’s account of them seriously. The more I think about them, the less they seem like demons (the word only shows up in English translations, not in the original Hebrew or in Greek translations) and the more like nature spirits or liminal beings.

If nature spirits do exist, we need to think about the impact of environmental degradation on them. It may be that the destruction of forests and industrial development have driven them into hiding or worse.

Psychedelics

Another potential category of denizens of the unseen world relates to the experiences of people on psychedelics, particularly ayahuasca and other DMT-based drugs. People on ayahuasca trips independently report meeting the same types of beings such as the “machine elves” identified by Terence McKenna and others. In some cases, people without contact with each other have reported meeting the same non-human individual while on ayahuasca trips. And in at least one case I read about, someone met a being who told her, “you don’t belong here.” This raises the possibility that DMT opens people up to part of the invisible world that is normally closed off to us. Yes, I realize these are trips on psychedelics, but the common experiences that people using these drugs have raise the possibility that they are encountering real beings in some sort of alternate dimension. Medievals would have believed this; can we be so sure they’d be wrong?

Technopaganism

Moving on from there, we come to the unseen beings in what I call Technopaganism: emerging religions surrounding AI and UFO/UAPs. A number of tech gurus claim to have received “downloads” from non-human intelligences (NHIs) that have led them to important tech breakthroughs, including developing medical devices and designing the architecture of AI systems. These “downloads” are not very different from channeling, though put in language borrowed from computers. Keep that in mind: we’ll come back to it shortly.

AI

Some key figures in AI also believe that AI is a means by which NHIs communicate with us. No one really knows how AI systems work at a deep level or why they do some of the things that they do (and in some cases that they were specifically programmed not to do). While some AI is clearly simply algorithmic, with much of it there is more going on than we understand. The possibility that some form of NHI may be working through it has to be taken seriously. After all, as Christians we believe in NHIs such as angels and demons. Why couldn’t something use AI to communicate with us or manipulate us?

UFO/UAP

And that brings us to the whole UFO/UAP problem. This deserves its own article, so here I’ll confine myself to just a few comments. If you’re interested in more, check out religious studies professor Diana Pasulka’s books American Cosmic and Encounters.

First, the people in the government, military, intelligence agencies, and the tech world who pay close attention to these things do not think they are space aliens. Rather, they see them as transdimensional NHIs that are trying to make contact with us.

Second, UAPs aren’t just one kind of thing. The sister of a friend of mine is regularly followed by orbs of light; I’ve seen the photos. They don’t do anything but follow her around. Then there’s a man named Chris Bledsoe who can summon these orbs and has done so on video. He claims to have telepathic communication with several types of beings in these orbs, some of which have been involved in apparently miraculous healings. His on-going experiences with these orbs have been studied by the CIA, DIA, NASA, and military/intelligence branches of the government, so it is difficult to dismiss him out of hand as a crackpot or fraudster.

But beyond these non-physical encounters, there are reported UFO crash sites. Pasulka was taken to one with Professor Gary Nolan, an immunologist from Stanford who has emerged as one of the most credible mainstream scientists publicly researching UAPs. Nolan recovered “anomalous material” from the crash site that his analysis shows could not be produced by any known manufacturing or natural processes. His conclusion is that it shows signs of being engineered, but he knows of no way this could be done with current technologies.

This raises the possibility that our hard-and-fast distinction between the physical and spiritual may not adequately deal with the world around us. We may be dealing with something along the lines of technological longaevi. In other words, there may be beings in the liminal areas between the physical and spiritual, some of which produce high tech objects beyond our understanding.

And that brings us to Jacques Vallée, a French-American computer scientist, astrophysicist, venture capitalist, author, and one of the most rigorous, data driven researchers of UAPs. He’s been at it a long time—nearly 60 years.

Vallée notes that accounts of encounters with UFOs bear a striking resemblance to traditional reports of encounters with fairies from around the world; Pasulka noticed the same in medieval saints’ lives. Vallée believes that encounters with what we now label UAPs have been going on for a very long time but have been interpreted according to the current cultural worldview. Thus, in the past they were fairies; in recent years, they were space aliens; today they are transdimensional NHIs connected to AI and “downloads.”

Vallée also believes the beings are malevolent. He thinks they are out to deceive us by manipulating our perceptions and belief systems. The goal is to push us toward irrationality, dependence on them, and viewing them as saviors.

Others?

There are a range of other types of beings that may exist as well. I have personally dealt with poltergeist phenomena and what seemed to be a ghost (I am non-committal on what it actually was); I also had a decidedly unpleasant experience one night in a castle reputed to be haunted. I am forced to agree with Hamlet: “there are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

But whatever beings may exist in the unseen or liminal realms, Scripture tells us we should not try to seek information (“downloads”) from them, not try to contact them, and in general as far as possible to have nothing to do with them. If we should encounter them, we should invoke the name of Jesus. In at least some cases, reports are that if we do this, they will just disappear. There are other ways of dealing with them covered in books on spiritual warfare, though these tend to assume you’re dealing with demons which may not actually be the case.

Should such an encounter happen, whatever the results, we need not fear anything we encounter from the unseen or liminal worlds. Christ is Lord of all things visible and invisible, and in Him we are spiritually protected. We must guard against deception, but as long as we do, we are secure in Him.

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I have written several articles covering different aspects of the invisible world revealed in Scripture, supplemented in some cases by church tradition. I want to deal with some of the other inhabitants of the invisible world here, but before I do, it will be helpful to review the key points that I’ve covered so far.

What We’ve Seen So Far

For most Christians, the invisible world consists of angels and demons, the latter of which are identified with fallen angels—meaning that everything in the invisible world is either a holy or an unholy angel. But this is not supported by Scripture.

Angels as beings who at least initially served in the courts of heaven. Scripture lists a variety of types of angels (at least, that’s how the terms have traditionally been understood), some of which rebelled against God. Some angelic beings have spiritual authority over nations—for example the “princes” of Persia and Greece mentioned in Daniel, who are paralleled by the archangel Michael, the “prince” in charge of Israel.

It is tempting to consider these princes the shedim (translated “demons”), which are the gods of the nations. In Second Temple Judaism, however, these were not considered angels but another type of supernatural being. The difference would seem to be that they were closely associated with this world rather than the heavenly courts. Since they were the gods of the nations, these presumably existed in a hierarchy with some more important and powerful than others. It seems likely to me that at the top of these hierarchies were the angelic “princes” mentioned above, but that does not mean everything in the hierarchy was angelic.

That brings us to the evil spirits—also described as demons—in the Gospels. Nowhere are they called fallen angels. In fact, in Second Temple Judaism, they were believed to be the spirits of the Nephilim killed in the Flood. They are under Beelzebul, who is associated with Satan—another example of non-angelic beings under a fallen angel.

Despite objections to this view, Scripture presents the Nephilim as angelic-human hybrids. There are a few possibilities of how this could have happened, but since I have covered this elsewhere I will not go over them again.

Goat Demons and Satyrs

Scripture tells us of other demonic beings that don’t fit any of the categories above. One of these is the sĕʿîrîm, generally translated “goat demon” in Leviticus 17:7 and 2 Chronicles 11:15, where people are warned about sacrificing to or worshipping them. In Isaiah 13:21 sĕʿîrîm are dancing in the ruins of Babylon, though rather than translating it consistently with the earlier usages, modern translations render it “wild goats.” Similarly, in Isaiah 34:14, the sĕʿîrîm call to each other in the ruins of Edom. The only reason I can see for the change in how the term is translated is that other natural animals are mentioned in the passages, probably combined with an assumption that goat demons don’t dance (and maybe don’t exist).

On the other hand, the Septuagint translates sĕʿîrîm as satyrs. In Greek mythology, satyrs were half human, half goat creatures that inhabited wilderness areas and were known among other things for dancing and lust. Conceptually, sĕʿîrîm are very similar to satyrs, and some have even suggested that the Hebrew word may be connected as a loan word to the Greek. So maybe goat demons do dance.

Incidentally, Isaiah 34:17 also refers to lilit, which is sometimes translated as a night bird or screech owl and at other times as a demon. Given that lilitu is a Mesopotamian night demon, it is likely that lilit refers to some kind of night hag or demon in this passage.

In any event, Scripture affirms the existence of satyrs or satyr-like beings. They are seen as demons, but among the church fathers, there was another way of looking at them.

St. Jerome, in the Life of Paul of Thebes, describes a satyr who met St. Antony. This creature says:

I am a mortal being and one of those inhabitants of the desert whom the Gentiles, deluded by various forms of error, worship under the names of Fauns, Satyrs, and Incubi. I am sent to represent my tribe. We pray you in our behalf to entreat the favor of your Lord and ours, who, we have learnt, came once to save the world, and ‘whose sound has gone forth into all the earth.

Hearing this confession of faith from a faun, Anthony’s “cheeks streamed with tears, the marks of his deep feeling, which he shed in the fullness of his joy,” and he called out in prayer that humans might follow this example, forsaking their pagan past and joining in the worship of the true God. At this the satyr, apparently satisfied by the saint’s response, disappears into the wilderness “as if on wings.”

Jerome assures his readers that Anthony’s encounter with this repentant satyr should be understood literally:

Let no one scruple to believe this incident; its truth is supported by what took place when Constantine was on the throne, a matter of which the whole world was witness. For a man of that kind was brought alive to Alexandria and shown as a wonderful sight to the people. Afterwards his lifeless body, to prevent its decay through the summer heat, was preserved in salt and brought to Antioch that the Emperor might see it.

This contrasts with Jerome’s account of a meeting of St. Antony with a donkey-centaur. About this encounter, Jerome is a bit more cautious: “whether the devil took this shape to terrify him, or whether it be that the desert which is known to abound in monstrous animals engenders that kind of creature also, we cannot decide.”

The satyr’s body may have been preserved in salt, but we are entitled to take the whole story with a grain of salt and conclude that Jerome was being too credulous. Whatever we may make of Jerome’s claims, however, Scripture does affirm the existence of some sort of goat demon.

Incidentally, satyrs and goat demons are the basis for the image of Baphomet in modern paganism.

Azazel

Another demon mentioned in Scripture, perhaps connected to the sĕʿîrîm, is Azazel. In the ritual for the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16, there are two goats. One is offered as a sacrificed to the LORD, the other is released in the wilderness “for Azazel.” This is sometimes translated as “for a scapegoat.” Others believe Azazel refers to a cliff in the wilderness over which the goat would be thrown. But given the parallel between the goat for Azazel and the goat given to the LORD, it seems likely that it is the name of a demon. The theology of this is murky: why would the sins be sent to a demon? Still, it seems likely that is what Azazel is.

Stoicheia (Elemental Spirits)

Then there are the stoicheia, translated in Galatians 4:3, 9 and Colossians 2:8, 20 as “elementary principles” or “elementary spirits.” In secular Greek, the word was associated with the basic elements of earth, air, fire, and water. The New Testament term thus might be associated with beings such as the angel of the waters in Revelation 16:5. Stoicheia in secular Greek also referred to astral deities, so it is not surprising that in the New Testament, they are associated with astrology and false philosophy as well as legalism. There are other potential meanings of the term as well. Exactly what it meant in the New Testament is unclear, but the language points to some type of spiritual being that operated at a fundamental level in the world.

Dragons and Such

Along with these, the Bible refers in a number of passages to what we might call biblical cryptids, notably dragons, including Leviathan and Rahab, and Behemoth. These are creatures of the visible world, so they do not fit the theme of this article. I may write about them later.

Are There Others?

This covers the range of demons and beings in the invisible world found in Scripture. Are there others that Scripture doesn’t talk about?

I think it’s very likely. I think that the invisible world is at least as complex as the visible world and Scripture only reveals what we need to know in connection to our relationship with God. So what else might there be? And what is the evidence? That will be the topic of the next article.

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According to my neighbors, my house is built on a former Christmas tree farm. The house is surrounded by pines, spruces, and firs. While I doubt that most of them are older than I am, some in the neighborhood may be. But though they might not be as old as I am, they were here in this place before me and will almost certainly be here long after I am gone.

So who owns the land, me or the trees?

Actually, the answer is neither. The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof. I am a temporary steward of this piece of land, and it is my responsibility to take care of it, recognizing as Calvin said that it is my responsibility to pass it on in as good or better condition than I received it. (Yes, he said that in his commentary on Genesis 2:15. So much for Calvin as responsible for ecological exploitation.)

But what about the trees?

Tolkien had a thing for trees. It turns out that he may have been onto more than he realized.

The Hidden Life of Trees

In 2015, German forester Peter Wohlleben published The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World, in which he explained some of what science has discovered about trees.

Trees talk to each other.

Actually, trees have a lot to say. They communicate through scents released through the air and through electrical impulses and chemicals transmitted tree to tree through their roots, sometimes through direct contact but often via mushrooms as intermediaries. Trees also respond to light, sound, and touch and register pain when injured or pruned.

Trees take care of each other. They feed each other, passing on nutrients to the young—often specifically to those genetically related to them—and to sick or injured trees. A grove will actually help regulate the climate to encourage the health of the trees. They thus take care of their families and each other. Some species even pass on nutrients to trees of different species. Much of this happens through mushrooms, which of course take their cut of the nutrients. Trees are even known to work selectively with mushrooms and to punish mushrooms who cheat and keep more than they should by sharing fewer nutrients with them.

Trees also warn each other of trouble. Trees attacked by insects send chemical signals through the mushrooms and through the air to warn other trees, which then ramp up their defenses. When leaves are grazed, a tree could signal other trees to produce bitter compounds in the leaves, making them harder to digest and discouraging further grazing.

And when a tree is dying, it may send out large amounts of carbon into the soil to help other trees and plants before it dies. In this way, it provides for the young and the next generations.

The idea of trees talking to each other and taking care of each other sounds like something out of fantasy, but everything I just described has been documented, not only among trees but among some other plants as well.

And don’t even get me started on mushrooms. They are stranger and spookier than just about anything else on the planet.

Wohlleben concludes from all this that trees are social beings that have feelings, friendships and memories. His critics object that he is anthropomorphizing trees, attributing to them human characteristics that they don’t have.

But is this criticism fair?

Other Kinds of Consciousness?

Trees certainly communicate with each other using a language of chemical signals and electrical impulses that is very different from human methods of communication; that does not mean it isn’t a kind of speech. They are clearly sending and receiving messages from each other, often with the mushrooms as an intermediary.

Trees show preferences for related trees much like we do with our own families, though some work altruistically in supporting other species of trees. They feed the young, care for the sick, and warn each other of danger.

In light of all this, isn’t it possible that trees have a kind of consciousness very different from our own but with elements and even motivations we can recognize?

Maybe there are a lot more kinds of consciousness in the world than we can see.

The Logos

John 1 tells us that God created the world through the Logos, a word that we translate as “Word” but that implies much more than that. Logos is the root word for logic, pointing to divine reason. In Neo-Platonic philosophy, the logos is the creative principle through which the world was made. In Stoic philosophy, it is the law that governs the universe. John is telling us that the world is not an accident, that there is a mind that created and structured it. Further, Paul tells us in Colossians 1 that in Christ, the Logos, all things hold together.

If the Logos holds all things together, doesn’t that imply that everything that exists participates in some way and in some measure in divine reason?

Orthodox Panentheism

Some Eastern Orthodox thinkers see this in terms of panentheism, in other words, that all things are in God and He penetrates all things through His uncreated energies. (This is different from other forms of panentheism which see the universe as the body of God; that version of panentheism is clearly off the table for Christians.) We cannot participate in God’s essence, which is transcendent and unknowable, but we do participate in His energies. Working from this idea, Maximus the Confessor posits logoi, divine principles, that exist within the Logos and that function like blueprints, giving each thing its identity and purpose. The question then is the extent that a kind of consciousness is part of the logoi or divine energies in the various created beings.

We know that animals communicate and many sustain long-term or permanent relations with each other. The same is true of birds. Some, like crows, are amazingly smart and can develop relationships with people. We know that ants, bees, and other insects communicate. We know that bees can recognize individual people. We also know that trees communicate with each other, as do other kinds of plants. Because they speak, this suggests to me that all these living things have a kind of consciousness.

The Inanimate World

But Scripture tells us the so-called inanimate world also speaks:

The heavens declare the glory of God,

and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours out speech,

and night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words,

whose voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out through all the earth,

and their words to the end of the world. (Ps. 19:1-4a)

We are quick to dismiss this and similar passages that talk about the rivers and trees clapping their hands and the mountains singing as nothing more than poetic imagery. And no doubt there is some truth to that. But what is the imagery supposed to say to us if not that the Creation itself is alive and responds to God’s purposes?

We even see this in the Gospels: when Jesus speaks to the wind and the waves, they listen. If they were nothing more than moving air and water, how could they hear and respond to Him?

Panpsychism?

At this point, we are venturing perilously close to panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is at the foundation of reality and that all things have a form of consciousness appropriate to their place in the cosmic order. I don’t think we can go there—the only consciousness at the foundation of reality is the Logos. But I am beginning to suspect that more things in Creation participate in the Logos as the Living Word in ways that give them life and, yes, forms of consciousness so foreign to us as to be unrecognizable apart from deep study and imagination.

Stewardship and My Trees

So where does that leave my trees?

They seem to have a for of consciousness and they are doing exactly what God created them to do (unlike me). Still, God assigned to humanity the task of exercising His authority over the earth. Thus, it is my duty to steward the 1/3 acre I have title to, and that means I am responsible for everything in it, including the trees. It may be necessary to take down trees at times to protect the property, to enable other things to grow, or to beautify it or make it more useful as part of my stewardship. But in the end, the trees will be here when I am gone. That gives them a kind of claim that it seems to me hard to dismiss arbitrarily.

At the end of the day, my job is to present all my work, including the yard, to God to inspect my stewardship of what he has entrusted to me. I am not the owner, only the caretaker. And that means I have to take very seriously the interests of the trees and the overall health of the yard. And if that is so, the trees may well have a legitimate claim to the land that I need to take into account in my stewardship.

All photos were taken in my yard, June 23, 2026.

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In the past year or so, I’ve written articles on demons (here) and several on the Nephilim (here, here, and here). I will probably need to revisit the issue of demons and evil spirits at some point, but here, I’d like to take a look at angels.

Some Preliminaries

To understand angels, we need to begin with a basic point that we often miss. We tend to draw a line between the physical and the spiritual world, with God, angels, and demons inhabiting the latter.

This is a fundamental mistake.

Biblical metaphysics draws the line between God the Creator and everything else in Creation, including angels and demons. This means that in creation, we have more in common with the Four Living Creatures of Revelation 4 or the cherubim in Ezekiel 1 than we have with God—we are all finite, contingent, created beings, but God is infinite, necessary, and the uncreated Creator.

Christ’s Incarnation changes this—God now shares in our nature and so in Christ we have more in common with God than the seraphim, cherubim, or any other beings in the invisible realm. That’s an amazing truth that explains why angels are here to serve us (Hebrews 1:14) and that we will ultimately judge them (1 Corinthians 6:3).

The created world has two sides: the visible and the invisible. The invisible permeates the visible, and the two influence each other since they are all part of the same creation.

Angel Basics

This brings us to angels. The biblical terms for “angel” in both the Old and the New Testament (Hebrew malak and the Greek angelos) mean “messenger.” The word is used in two ways. In the narrow sense, angels are created beings who act as messengers and carry out God’s purposes in the world. In the broader sense, it is a generic term for spiritual beings who are or were divine attendants in the heavenly court.

There are a few things in that definition that I should clarify. First, the term spiritual has traditionally been taken to mean non-corporeal. Although angels are in specific places, the assumption has been that they have no bodies. However, it is clear from Scripture that angels can take on physical bodies. They are with Abraham, seized Lot and pulled him indoors, took Lot and his wife by the hand as they lead them out of Sodom, prepared food for Elijah, and kicked (“struck”). Peter to wake him up (Acts 12:7). In view of all this, I think we need to be a bit cautious about drawing too sharp a distinction between the physical and spiritual.

Second, I said angels in the broad sense are spiritual beings who are or were divine attendants in the heavenly court. Usually, when we talk about angels, we are referring to the good ones, the ones who are today serving God. But as we look at the different categories of angels, we need to keep in mind that some of them, even high up in the hierarchy, are fallen. They were made to be part of the hosts of heaven, but they chose to go their own way. These make up some, though not all, of the demons spoken of in Scripture.

With those preliminaries out of the way, let’s move on to classifications of angels and what they do.

Classifications of Angels

Second Temple Judaism began developing a hierarchy of angels which included archangels, angels, Watchers, angelic beings over kingdoms and nature, Angels of the Presence such as angels acting in a priestly role in heaven and throne guardians including seraphim, cherubim, ophanim (literally, wheels), and hayyot (living creatures), and other types as well. This helped lay the foundation for New Testament teaching on angels particularly in Paul’s letters.

As we’ll see below, Paul lists quite a few types of angels, but Scripture doesn’t define their roles precisely. The elaboration on Paul’s lists comes from The Celestial Hierarchy, a late-5^th or early-6^th century work written under the pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of Paul in Athens. Pseudo-Dionysius, as he’s known to scholars, preserved an older tradition that shows the influence of Second Temple Jewish angelology. Some of the descriptions of the specific ranks of angels are disputed, but the basic structure laid out in The Celestial Hierarchy is plausible and is a likely explanation of Paul’s terminology.

Pseudo-Dionysius lays out nine choirs of angels set up in three triads.

The First Triad

The first triad are angels who serve in heaven, corresponding to the Angels of the Presence in Second Temple Judaism.

Seraphim

The highest order of angels is the seraphim or the burning ones. These are the beings who surround the throne of God in Isaiah 6 and Revelation 4 and who continually proclaim “holy, holy, holy is the LORD God Almighty.”

The depiction of seraphim changed over time. Early on, they were presented as winged serpents parallel to the Egyptian winged uraeus. Numbers 21:6 and Deuteronomy 8:15 reference “fiery serpents” (nahashim seraphim); similarly, Isaiah 14:29 and 30:6 both refer to fiery (seraphim) winged (or dark) serpents.

Winged Uraeus (Egyptian)

Israelite Seal with Winged Serpent/Seraph

This raises an interesting question about the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Was it a seraph? Does that explain why Eve wasn’t surprised at it talking to her and why she trusted it? Does it explain the judgment on the serpent that he would crawl on his belly, getting his wings clipped as it were? Scripture doesn’t make this identification, but it is an interesting possibility. We do know that the serpent is Satan and the Dragon in Revelation (Revelation 12:9).

Over time, the way seraphim were depicted changed to the six-winged figures we see in Isaiah and Revelation.

Cherubim

The second choir in this first triad are the cherubim. These are throne guardians in heaven and, in Genesis 3:24, the guardians placed at the entrance of Eden after the Fall. It is worth noting that as throne guardians, the cherubim are not protecting God but the unworthy who might attempt to approach God’s throne; similarly, the cherubim guarding Eden was protecting people from accessing the Tree of Life and so living eternally in sin and misery.

Cherubim were originally depicted as winged sphinxes or winged bulls with human heads as was common to throne guardians in other cultures in the ancient Near East.

As had happened with seraphim, the image of the cherub changed over time. Thus, in Ezekiel, they are humanoid but have four wings and four faces (a lion and a bull corresponding to their older depictions, and an eagle and a man) with legs like a calf (Ezekiel 1:5-11; note that they are described as cherubim in Ezekiel 10:1). So seraphim have six wings and cherubim four.

In Ezekiel 28:13-14, the Prince of Tyre, the spiritual being behind the city, is said to have been an anointed guardian cherub who walked in Eden. This is often identified as Satan, which would imply that Satan was not a seraph as suggested above. It seems possible to me, however, that this cherub was not in fact Satan but joined him in his rebellion. Tyre was an important city, but hardly the most important even in the Near East let alone the world. Satan may not have been directly involved there. It is also possible that the seraph identification may be wrong and the Prince of Tyre is Satan. We don’t have enough information to come up with a definitive answer.

Thrones

The third type of angel in the first triad are the thrones (Colossians 1:16). Pseudo-Dionysius and some earlier Christian writers identify these with the ophanim, the “wheels within wheels” of Ezekiel 1. (Ophanim comes from the Hebrew word meaning to turn.) These are associated with God’s throne-chariot (Hebrew Merkabah), and so they were considered throne guardians with the cherubim. As such, they are often depicted as winged wheels intersecting other wheels, covered with eyes.

On the other hand, Colossians doesn’t make that connection, so it seems to me possible that it refers to beings like the 24 elders seated on thrones in Revelation 4 and thus part of the divine council. If this is correct, it’s similar to the way we use “throne” to refer to the office of king. Tradition is against me in this interpretation, but again, Scripture does not give a clear definition, so we’ll have to leave it there.

The Second Triad

This takes us through the first triad. The second triad, including the fourth through sixth choirs of angels, involves those who govern the universe, including overseeing lower angels.

The first of these are the dominions (Colossians 1:16). Their responsibilities traditionally include regulating lower ranks of angels and maintaining order. Another possibility that has been suggested is that they are responsible for overseeing large geographic territories on earth above the level of nations.

After the dominions we have the virtues (Ephesians 1:21). The Greek word here is dunamis, a word meaning power and the source of our word “dynamite.” This helps explain what virtues do: they perform miracles, one Greek word for which is dunamis; they grant courage, oversee natural laws, inspire heroic virtue, and infuse creation with divine strength.

The sixth choir are the powers or authorities. The Greek word is exousia, which is the word used to describe Jesus having or teaching with authority. Traditionally, their role is to combat evil forces, protect against demonic powers, and enforce divine justice.

The Third Triad

The third triad, the seventh to ninth choirs, are angels involved in human affairs.

Principalities and Shedim

The first of these are the principalities (Colossians 1:16; Ephesians 1:20-21, 3:10, 6:12). Principalities are the angels who oversee nations. We see these beings referred to in Ezekiel (the Prince of Tyre discussed above) and in Daniel (references to the Prince of Persia and the Prince of Greece, and Michael as Prince over Israel).

In Second Temple Judaism, there was a separate, non-angelic class of supernatural beings who also oversaw the nations. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 says that God divided mankind “according to the number of the sons of God.” (There is a textual variant here, but this is almost certainly the correct reading. See my article on demons for more on this.) The phrase “sons of God” in this verse is bene elohim, which is used consistently in Scripture for spiritual beings. Since these were not part of the heavenly court, they were not considered angels. In verse 17, these are referred to as shedim, translated as demons. In Jewish thought, the shedim fell at Babel in the second great rebellion of spiritual beings against God’s purposes (the first being in Eden).

In 1 Corinthians 10:20-21, Paul says that pagan sacrifices to idols are sacrifices to demons. The idol itself is nothing as taught in Isaiah and the Psalms, but Paul indicates that behind those idols are genuine demonic beings. Now consider what this means. In pagan cultures, the gods exist in a hierarchy, which suggests that the shedim, the gods of the nations, also exist in a hierarchy, with some—the greater and more powerful—ruling over others. It is quite possible that the shedim aligned themselves under the angelic principalities for their own reasons; one way or another, they are following Satan.

Archangels

Although Michael is the Prince over Israel, he is not classified with the principalities but has that position as a special assignment from God, who reserved the people of Israel for Himself. Michael belongs to the next choir, the archangels. The word archangel means a chief angel. The only archangel named as such in Scripture is Michael, though Gabriel mentioned in both Daniel and Luke and Raphael mentioned in Tobit are traditionally named as archangels as well. Uriel is added to the list as a fourth, and sometimes three others of varying names are also included. Each has a different brief.

Michael (“Who is like God?) is the leader of the heavenly armies and the protector of Israel. In Deuteronomy 32, God assigns the nations to the bene elohim but keeps Israel as His own. Michael is then tasked with being the Prince over them (Daniel 10:21, 12:1). In Revelation 12, he leads the angelic armies in casting Satan down from heaven.

Gabriel (“God is my strength”) is a messenger (angel) of God’s who brings particularly important revelations. He is mentioned in Daniel 8:16 and 9:21 and in Luke 1.

Raphael (“God heals”) is a healer and a guide in the book of Tobit. He is the patron of the sick, of healers, and of travelers.

Uriel (“God is my light” or “Fire of God”) appears in 1 Enoch and other intertestamental literature. He is described as the one who warned Noah about the Flood and was in charge of the world and of Tartarus (the deepest place in Hell where the rebellious Watchers are imprisoned). He is also a divine instructor in both 1 Enoch and 2 Esdras.

Four is a number of completion in Scripture, so some accounts of the archangels end here. Seven is also a number that points to fulness and completion, so three other archangels of varying names are also sometimes included. If there’s interest, I’ll cover the various options in a future post.

Angels

The last choir of angels are … just angels. This includes guardian angels (implied in Matthew 18:10 and Acts 12:13-15). These are probably the ones that Hebrews 1:14 tells us are “ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation.” Even angels in this last choir are immensely powerful, and the way they minister on our behalf can be shocking. 2 Chronicles 32:21 tells us that “… the LORD sent an angel who cut off all the mighty warriors and commanders and officers in the camp of the king of Assyria.” 2 Kings19:35 says this happened overnight, and 185,000 were killed. Even today, there are accounts of angels looking like armed soldiers or bodyguards appearing to people planning on attacking believers and scaring them off.

Ockham’s Razor?

The late theologian John Rankin, a good friend of mine, argued that God answers prayer by sending angels. He based this primarily on Daniel 10:10-12, where an angel was sent to Daniel to answer his prayer as soon as it came before God. Whether or not this is true in all cases, it brings up an important point that we in our modern world can overlook. In my experience, most Protestants (except Pentecostals) tend to downplay angels, focusing instead exclusively on God and His power to do whatever He wills directly. As a result, they use Ockham’s Razor and ignore how often angels appear in Scripture. This leads them to extreme skepticism of any account of angelic activity today.

This is a disenchanted way of seeing the world and ignores the many ways God acts through angels in Scripture. Given what it tells us, Ockham’s Razor doesn’t apply.

What we see in Scripture is that both the holy and the fallen angels are very active in this world, influencing nations and people either toward or away from God. Our disenchanted worldviews even in the church are skeptical of any claims that this is still going on, but this is an unbiblical outlook. A properly re-enchanted Christian worldview should at the very least be open to the work of angels, both holy and fallen, in the world around us today.

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When I talk about re-enchantment, I am using the term as the counter to Max Weber’s description of the modern world as disenchanted. He explained that modern science and the materialistic metaphysic that reduced the world to matter and energy had stripped the world of meaning and purpose. We can debate the degree to which this is the case. After all, particularly in America, Christianity has had a good run, and there have been lots of occult and esoteric groups operating on the margins over the last centuries. But at the same time, secularism has shaped what most of us think about the world and what is possible. Many people entertain superstitions or the idea of the supernatural, but they don’t really believe they’re real. That’s even true in many churches. When it comes to divine intervention, we pray for it but don’t really expect it or even recognize when our prayers are answered.

And that is why stories matter.

We all see ourselves as part of a story. That story is complex and addresses a host of questions: who are we personally? What is our place, real, imagined, or desired, in our community? What is our community? What impact does our ancestry or progeny have on our story? How does our story fit into the larger story of the world? What does my life, or anything for that matter, mean?

Many things shape how we see our story. Our family. How we were raised. Our education. What books we’ve read or media we’ve consumed. Our temperament. Our desires. Our hopes and dreams.

Although all of these things are important, culture and education have an outsized impact on the social imaginary and what we consider possible and plausible. The stories these tell are the myths worlds are built around for better or for worse.

The Materialist Myth

Let’s look first at the materialist creation myth that underpinned so much of modernity.

The universe exploded into existence out of nothing, at which point time, space, and the laws of physics came to be. We can’t understand why because the conditions that were before time—if we can even talk like that—are unknown and inaccessible to us.

As space expanded, matter congealed out of energy, and by the laws of physics it eventually formed up as stars, galaxies, planets, and other bodies. On at least one of the planets, following the laws of physics and chemistry, organic molecules emerged. The chemicals combined in complex ways, and then, even though the first law of biology is that life does not come from non-life, in this case it did.

Once biological life was formed, DNA emerged containing highly complex information on cell division. Even though the only source we know that produces such information is intelligence, in this case we know that it wasn’t—it was simply physics, chemistry, and biology in action. Then by a process we typically describe as random though again ultimately governed by the laws of physics, all forms of life that we know developed, including human beings. Our brains, which are a product of this process, arose by purposeless, “random” changes in DNA.

All along the way, even though there is an appearance of design, we know there was nothing guiding the process. Everything happened by chance or scientific laws. There is no purpose or meaning in the universe, and human beings are essentially no different from other animals.

This creation myth is rarely spelled out in this much detail, but the overall story is essentially what has been taught in schools and accepted as truth in modernity. But there are some things about the myth that are a little harder to swallow:

Even though our brains developed purely to enable us to survive, we can trust them to find truth, but only in the realm of understanding the world. Anything else—aesthetics, morality, spirituality, purpose, meaning, and the like—has no objective existence and thus is either false or a matter of opinion and preference.

Most people are willing to accept that science yields truth about the physical world and will even give lip service to ideas like cultural and moral relativism, but they don’t live that way. We accept as true things like that slavery or torture are wrong or that sex should be consensual even though the materialist creation myth can’t support them. To the consistent materialist, these moral intuitions are not objectively true but are purely arbitrary or culturally determined. Fortunately, most materialists aren’t that consistent.

The Story We Tell Our Children

Partly because of this tension, the postmodern world reacted against modernity and so tells a different story. But before we get there, I need to address another story we tell our children, one deeply embedded in American culture.

You are special. You can be anything you want to be; you can achieve anything you want; you can do anything you want to do.

This is accompanied by a related story accepted by parents and teachers, that doing anything to hurt a child’s self-esteem will permanently scar them. As a result, it is important that children be affirmed and praised constantly and that they not be permitted to fail or lose in anything. This leads to education built around the lowest common denominator, resources poured into remedial work, and frequently shortchanging advanced students or canceling advanced courses.

These stories tell children that their desires—what they want—are paramount and that anything that thwarts them is unjust. It also sets up the story that leads to transgenderism once postmodernism is added to the mix. The stories also fail to build resilience in children and the ability to learn from and overcome setbacks and challenges.

And, of course, there are limits on what anyone can accomplish. No matter how hard I tried, I could never be a pro athlete in any sport nor a professional musician nor any number of other things. Telling children they can be anything they want is simply a lie. Frankly, our kids need better stories than these.

The Postmodern Story

This brings us to the story postmodernism tells. Postmodernism, at least in its most common form, tells us that objective truth is impossible; all claims to truth are nothing but power games, and even our ideas of what counts as “knowledge” are one of the means elites use to maintain their power. Those with power got it by taking it away from others, and so those with power are guilty and those without it are innocent. Further, guilt and innocence are determined by group identity not individual actions or attitudes. Lastly, oppressed groups are justified in using any means necessary to take power back from those who took it from them. This means that white, heterosexual, Christian boys and men are the problem, and people are virtuous to the degree that they are not part of these categories.

To sustain itself, this story relies on an ever-expanding list of oppressed people. Although since it sees all claims to truth as power games, it rejects the idea of meaning in the world even more than modernism does, the story does provide purpose in the “liberation” of “oppressed groups”—as long as you belong to one of these oppressed groups. But for the “oppressors,” the white, heterosexual, Christian boys and men, it offers them nothing but guilt for things they have nothing to do with. And so this group has begun to look to other stories in which they are the oppressed heroes, driving them to the alt-right, Germanic neo-paganism, or white Christian nationalism.

And that is why we need better stories for boys and girls, men and women, of all races.

Imagination and Meaning

Although we can and should provide a better story of a universe created very good but broken, an account of good and evil centered on the human heart, and a message of redemption and restoration, we can also counter the lies in our culture’s stories in more subtle, less dramatic ways. One of the keys to this is understanding the role of imagination.

C.S. Lewis said that reason is the organ of truth (by which he meant discerning facts), but imagination is the organ of meaning. Lewis meant a number of things by this. He talked, for example, about the imagination creating metaphors, a process which he argued was a necessary precondition of reason. On a higher level, the imagination takes facts and derives meaning from them.

This means that our crisis of meaning is a crisis of imagination.

Discovering Meaning in the World

Let’s pursue this a bit further. If the universe is devoid of meaning, our lives are as well. That is where materialism leads us. But if there is meaning in the universe, how do you find it? The way Scripture tells us of the meaning of the universe is through similes and metaphors: the righteous man is like a tree; the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed or a bit of leaven; the Lord’s righteousness is like the mountains of God and His judgments like the deep. In other words, we use the organ of imagination to see or find the metaphors that give meaning to the world.

Sanctifying the Mundane

One way to do this is through story. Classic fairytales inhabit a world infused with meaning. And yet, they also contain things from daily life. The story thus connects normal, mundane items and activities with the imaginative world and thus give those things significance.

For a contemporary example, I know several people who have taken up pipe smoking because of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. By smoking the pipe, they connect themselves to the story and the world of Middle Earth. The story captured their imagination, and the pipe becomes a way of participating in it.

Tolkien is a good example of storytelling that can counter the modern and postmodern worlds. It gives examples of courage and virtuous masculinity, of deep love and friendship between men without devolving into homosexuality, of sacrifice, of failure and redemption, of good and evil, wisdom and folly. It offers especially men a vision of what they can be that counters the stories of our culture.

The Great Stories

The great stories open our imagination to the meaning of the world and give us a different vision of who we are and how we are to live than our culture does. We need to exercise discernment, of course, since not all stories lead us to truth or offer good lessons about life. Yet read with care, even pagan myths can offer us and our children pictures of courage and resilience that can capture the imagination and so dilute the lies of the culture.

To get the most out of stories, we need to learn to read for more than the plot. That is a topic I plan to take up later this summer. In the meantime, I recommend Martin Shaw’s Substack The House of Beasts and Vines and his book Liturgies of the Wild (see here for my review) for examples of reading stories for meaning rather than just for plot. This is particularly helpful when looking at folktales and fairytales, but it carries over to other kinds of stories as well.

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In the Arthurian legends, the quest for the Grail is not only about attaining the Grail. Just as importantly, it is about healing the Fisher King and thus the land from the Dolorous Stroke. This is a theme introduced by Chrétien de Troyes at the first telling of the story of the Grail Quest.

Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal takes the Grail story in a different direction from the English version that comes to us from in the French Vulgate Cycle through Malory, Tennyson, and most recently Malcolm Guite. In this article, I will focus on the history behind the Grail Quest in this more familiar English telling of the tale. It’s a complicated story with a lot of moving parts, but it’s a central element of the Arthurian legends and has important spiritual dimensions and lessons for us.

The Story

The story begins with a poor knight from Northumbria named Balin. We first meet him in Arthur’s court after he spent 6 months in prison for killing Arthur’s cousin. A damsel came to the court with a sword that she claimed could only be drawn by a truly virtuous knight. After the other knights and even Arthur himself tried and failed, Balin stepped forward and drew the sword. The damsel asked him to return the sword, but Balin refused. She left, but only after warning Balin that the sword would lead to his destruction.

We find out later that the damsel with the sword was a traitor who sought to use the sword in a revenge plot against the knight who slew her brother. The wielder of the sword was destined to kill his own brother.

Shortly thereafter, the Lady of the Lake, who had given Arthur Excalibur, arrived. Because she had a feud with Balin’s family, she asked for his head as payment for Excalibur. Arthur offered to pay her for Excalibur but he refused to give her Balin’s head. But the feud was serious: she had caused Balin’s mother to be burned to death, so in revenge and in answer to her demand of his head, Balin promptly beheaded her. Arthur was livid at this. Not only was he in the Lady’s debt for Excalibur, but attacking a guest at a feast was a severe violation of the laws of hospitality, dishonoring Arthur himself. And so Balin was exiled from the court.

Balin had a number of adventures in his exile, mostly with his brother Balan. He carried both his original sword and the sword he received from the damsel. At one point a knight traveling with him back to Arthur’s court was slain by an invisible knight—a cowardly and dishonorable act. In his dying breath, the knight named his killer as Sir Garlot.

Upon hearing that Sir Garlot was going to be at a feast held in Carbonek, Balin made his way there to avenge the unchivalrous murder of his companion. Carbonek was the castle of King Pellam, a descendant of Joseph of Arimathea and the keeper of the Grail.

At the feast, Balin asked his neighbor to point out Sir Garlot. Garlot noticed Balin staring at him, so he went over to Balin, slapped him, and told him to get on with the feast. Balin then rose and drawing a sword killed Garlot—again killing someone during a feast.

Garlot was Pellam’s brother, and the king and his men quickly armed themselves to avenge Garlot’s death. Balin parried an attack from Pellam, but the king’s sword sheared off Balin’s at the hilt. Breaking away, Balin fled, looking for a weapon to defend himself.

As he ran through the castle, he heard unearthly music and a voice warning him to go no further. He eventually found his way into a room containing the Grail and a spear which continually dripped blood. Balin didn’t know this, but this was the spear of Longinus that pierced Christ’s heart during the crucifixion. Seizing the spear, he turned just as Pellam came upon him and struck the king in the groin—the Dolorous Stroke.

As soon as he had done so, the castle went black and collapsed around Balin and Pellam, killing everyone inside except those two. Three days later, Merlin dug Pellam and Balin out and sent Balin away.

The Dolorous Stroke turned the land for three kingdoms around the castle into a wasteland. Formerly fertile fields became deserts, the cattle no longer bore young, and there was desolation everywhere. The stroke which maimed the king maimed the land as well.

Balin eventually made his way out of the wasteland. In the end, he encountered his brother Balan; neither recognized the other and they fought, killing each other. Merlin took the sword Balin received from the damsel and put it into a stone, from which Galahad would eventually draw it.

Meanwhile, Pellam became known as the Maimed King or the Fisher King. Since he couldn’t move well, he would sit in a boat and fish, waiting for the one to come who would heal him through asking the right questions or by anointing the wound with the blood dripping from the spear.

Things to Learn

There is much worth pondering in this entire tale. Classic stories survive because the themes continue to resonate over time and there are lessons we can learn from them. Let’s look at some of these.

Balin’s Story

The story of the Dolorous Stroke is primarily Balin’s. Overall, he seems a decent man—the original test suggests he was virtuous, though the test itself was a trap. Yet he was caught in a curse because of his desire for the magic sword even after being warned of the consequences of keeping it. In light of this, we might ask ourselves whether there are things we hold onto in our own lives even though we know they’re destructive. In Balin’s case, it was a sword and it took quite a while to bring about his destruction; in our lives, it could be habits or addictions which can operate similarly for us.

Balin pursues honorable ends during his adventures leading up to the Grail castle, yet he violated hospitality by killing someone in a feast not once but twice. In both cases he did this out of a desire for revenge, or justice as he saw it. This is a good illustration of the Augustinian idea that we do evil out of a distorted idea of the Good, which again raises questions relevant to our own lives. And most importantly, he ignored the warnings as he approached the Grail chapel, seized the spear, and used it on his host in a third violent violation of the laws of hospitality, with disastrous results. As with the Holy of Holies in the Old Testament Temple, we trespass on the holy at our peril.

Balin’s story is a tragedy. He was a decent man, but in deciding to keep the sword he sealed his fate. And his impetuosity in killing the Lady of the Lake and Sir Garlot set in motion the events that devastated a kingdom.

The Fisher King’s Story

The story of the aftermath of the Dolorous Stroke is the Fisher King’s. The king’s wound, described euphemistically in some sources as in the thigh but actually in the groin, led to the devastation of the land. The damage to the fertility of the king destroyed the fertility of the kingdom.

This is commonly recognized as an element of the pre-Christian Celtic belief that the king had a spiritual connection to the land such that wounding the king wounds the kingdom. This is married to Christian symbolism through the Grail and the spear of Longinus. The Dolorous Stroke in this context symbolizes the entry of sin—the words for “fisher” and “sinner” in medieval French were homophones—and with it, spiritual decay and the breaking of sacral kingship, which is why it can only be healed by a holy knight.

Although the connection of the king to the land spiritually is an element of pre-Christian Celtic paganism, it has strong resonances with Scripture. In the Minor Prophets, for example, judgment falls on the kingdoms of Israel and Judah largely because of their kings and leaders. It was the kings and queens—Solomon, Jeroboam, Ahab, Jezebel, and others—who brought idolatry into Israel. It was the rich and the leaders who oppressed the poor and filled the land with violence. If we pay attention, one of the lessons of the Minor Prophets is that the land was judged because of corrupt leaders—a principle that should give us chills today.

But it wasn’t just Israel.

When God made Adam and Eve, they were given dominion over the world. Unpacking what that means would require another article, but in essence they were stewards of the world, not owners. After all, the earth is the Lord’s, not ours (Ps. 24:1). Their dominion was thus limited by God’s purposes for them and the world.

But they decided to go their own way rather than follow the one constraint that God had placed upon them. In the process, they separated themselves from the Source of life, taking a wound that would ultimately prove fatal. Since the creation was under their authority, it too suffered a wound. It no longer yielded its bounty to Adam’s labor but fought him and resisted his efforts to exercise dominion. Even more, the creation was subjected to futility—it could not fulfill its purposes—until the true Galahad, the One who was pure, holy, and worthy, came to redeem it, to heal the fallen Fisher Kings, and to restore them to full life (Romans 8:19-22).

Healing the King and the Land

In the tales that include Galahad, he heals the Fisher King by applying the blood of Christ dripping from Longinus’s spear to his wound, This shows that the physical wound is symbolic of the spiritual wound we all suffered at the Fall which can only be healed by the Blood of Christ.

In the other tales, the king is healed by a question. This is frequently “who is served by the Grail,” though there are other possibilities such as “what is the meaning of these things” in reference to the procession in the castle of the spear and the Grail. The first points to Christ’s death as the source of healing of those served by Christ (“as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup you show forth the Lord’s death until He comes” 1 Cor. 11:26); the second, asking the meaning of the Grail and the spear, similarly looks to the meaning of Christ’s death .

Redeeming a Myth

In the story of the Dolorous Stroke and the Fisher King, we see how the writers took a theme drawn from paganism—the connection of the king to the land—and showed how it pointed to Christian truth, finding its fulfilment in the story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration found in the Scriptures. Tolkien and Lewis argued that the pagan myths were “splintered light,” that by common grace the pagan world caught glimpses of the story of redemption. The development of the Fisher King in the medieval romances shows how this can work out in practice.

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In April of this year, Anglican priest, theologian, and poet Malcolm Guite published Galahad and the Grail, the first of a projected four volume epic poem about King Arthur and “the Matter of Britain.” I had thought of doing a review of the book, but frankly, I don’t think I could begin to do it justice. It’s that good. Instead, I thought it would be interesting to look at the history that Guite draws upon surrounding Arthur and especially the creation and development of the Grail legend. That story is fascinating and likely not what you think it is.

The story of Arthur evolved over time. We cannot be sure he is an actual historical figure, though I think it is far more likely that he is than that he is made up out of whole cloth. Arthur, which means “bear,” was probably his war name rather than his given name. There has been all kinds of speculation and claims about his identity, and I’m not going to enter that debate.

He lived in the late 400s to early 500s, probably in Wales. Welsh sources, possibly dating as far back as the late 600s, portray him as a powerful warrior and the leader of a war band rather than a king. The first reference to Arthur we can date with confidence comes from the ninth-century Welsh monk Nennius, who likewise pictures him as a war leader who led a coalition of kings against the Saxons and halted their advance across Britain. Nennius lists 12 battles that Arthur fought and won, including at Badon. Prior to Nennius, this battle was mentioned by Gildas, a late sixth century Scottish monk, and by the Venerable Bede, though neither mentions Arthur.

The historic Arthur was a Romanized Briton, and as such a Christian. Christianity was an important theme in Arthurian lore though starting in the mid-twentieth century it was often replaced with secular, pagan, or New Age themes.

The legend of King Arthur really got going with Geoffrey of Monmouth, another Welsh cleric, whose History of the Kings of Britain of around 1137 introduced many of the stories of Arthur we know today. Geoffrey transformed Arthur from an obscure British war leader into a great and mighty Christian king.

Geoffrey also brought Merlin into the story. Merlin was originally Myrddin Wyllt, Myrddin the Wild, a bard and seer from southern Scotland who went mad after the battle of Arfderydd (c. 573) and fled to the forest as a wild man with prophetic gifts. Geoffrey merged Myrddin with another figure, Ambrosius Aurelianus, a boy-prophet who advised the British king Vortigern, to create Merlin Emrys or Merlin Ambrosius, a powerful prophet, shapeshifter, and magician.

Geoffrey’s book was extremely popular and spread Arthur’s legend widely across continental Europe.

In France, the legend of Arthur went through additional transformations. The most important of these were introduced by trouvère poet Chrétien de Troys. Chrétien wrote five romances about Arthur that introduced themes of Courtly Love and chivalry, plot developments and characters, including Lancelot and his adulterous affair with Arthur’s wife Guenevere, and the story of Perceval and the Grail Quest.

Although there is much else worth discussing found in Chrétien’s work, for this article, the Grail Quest is the most important. The quest begins at Pentecost, and of all the knights of Camelot, Perceval comes the closest to achieving the Grail. He becomes a guest of the wounded Fisher King whose land lies desolate. During the course of a feast, the Grail—a jewel-encrusted, gold serving dish—and a bleeding lance are paraded through the hall. Perceval fails to ask about them; had he done so, it would have healed the Fisher King and his land. Perceval later meets a hermit who explains this and tells him the Grail contains a single consecrated host, which keeps the Fisher King alive. On hearing this, Perceval vows to continue the quest and make good his mistake.

Chrétien left the story of the Grail Quest unfinished. The grail was for him one wonder among many in his stories. Other writers picked up the tale and continued it. The Grail evolves in these stories in some surprising ways. For example, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, the grail is a stone from heaven that provides whatever food or drink is desired. In what will become the main tradition, Robert de Boron turned Chrétien’s Grail into the Holy Grail, the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper.

In the story’s final form, Joseph of Arimathea took the chalice and caught Jesus’ blood as it dripped from him during the crucifixion. Joseph later brought the Grail to England and established the first church in Britain at Glastonbury. He planted his staff there, and it took root and became the Glastonbury thorn, the only hawthorns that bloom twice a year, in spring like normal hawthorns and again at Christmas. Joseph also either washed or hid the Grail in what is now known as the Chalice Well, which has run red ever since. His descendants became the Grail kings at Carbonek, the Grail castle, where the Grail and the Holy Lance that pierced Christ’s side were kept.

As the story developed, Lancelot may have been the ultimate chivalrous knight, but because of his sin with Guenevere, he was unworthy to complete the Grail Quest. What was needed was a knight who not only was chivalrous and powerful, but holy as well. And so the romance writers introduced a new character, Galahad. He was the son of Lancelot and the Lady Elaine, a descendant of Joseph of Arimathea. Galahad was the perfect knight, the only one to beat Lancelot in a joust, completely courteous and chivalrous, and also holy in all his conduct. Only such as he was worthy of achieving the Grail.

What are we to make of the transformation of the Grail and the invention of Galahad?

The story of the Holy Grail developed in the late-twelfth and thirteenth centuries at the same time as the development of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The two are connected. The evolution of the Grail from a serving dish containing a single consecrated host to the Holy Grail used by Christ at the Last Supper which caught His blood as He bled on the cross is closely associated with the idea that the bread and wine of the Eucharist become Christ’s physical body and blood. In a sense, every chalice that contains consecrated wine is another Holy Grail. Since only priests handled the elements in the Eucharist, the Grail story became a way to explore how laymen might be worthy to have direct access to the holy mystery of the Eucharist. The line of Joseph of Arimathea has a unique relationship with the Grail, but otherwise the story tells us that only a uniquely called and gifted layman would be worthy to achieve the quest. Since that isn’t us, we can only experience the Eucharist from the hands of a priest or vicariously through the person of Galahad.

Still, that can be immensely satisfying as Malcolm Guite shows us in Galahad and the Grail. Guite takes up the tale from the sources mentioned above as well as Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and other English language sources to create a delightful and moving poem that highlights the profoundly Christian themes of the Grail Quest. Don’t be put off by the idea of an epic poem. Guite’s poetry is easy to read and accessible. It’s particularly enjoyable to read out loud. And the illustrations by my friend Stephen Crotts add to the delight of the poem. Quite simply, it’s one of the best books I have read in years. It has also become number 50 of the top sellers at Amazon, so I’m not alone. If you haven’t gotten and read it yet, what are you waiting for?

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Last year, I wrote an article on the Nephilim arguing on exegetical grounds that the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 were angels, and thus that the Nephilim were angelic-human hybrids. A few weeks ago, I added a supplement pointing to hierogamy as a possible source for the Nephilim, especially post-Flood. In hierogamy, a god was invited to participate spiritually in procreation so that the child was understood functionally to have three parents and to be 1/3 god and 2/3 human. (I incorrectly said in that article that this is true of Gilgamesh, however the numbers should have been 2/3 god and 1/3 human. He thus isn’t a typical product of hierogamy.)

I thought I was done with the topic for the foreseeable future, but I got a number of comments and questions, so I did some more research and I’m back at it for another round.

The sources I will be using are extra-biblical, and so they should not be taken as inspired and authoritative. Still, they provide some of the intellectual context for the New Testament authors.

The Nephilim in Second Temple Judaism

In Second Temple Judaism, the pre-Flood Nephilim were explained in one of two ways. In 1 Enoch and Jubilees, the sons of God involved are from a class of angels known as Watchers, also mentioned in Daniel 4. They take physical form and marry/sleep with women, resulting in the Nephilim.

In The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, however, the Nephilim are the product of something like hierogamy, though without the ritual magic. Women seduced the angels, who were attracted to them and appeared to them in a vision. The women lusted after them and their beauty while having sexual relations with their husbands; since the angels appeared as tall as the sky, the women gave birth to giants.

In context, this account is a warning against cosmetics, seduction, and lust, the consequences of which were dire. It is worth noting that rather than blaming the sons of God as the instigators of the transgression that we see in Genesis 6, this work blames the women for seeking, seducing, and lusting for the angels.

I suspect that this explanation for the Nephilim came from cultural knowledge of hierogamy. The lack of reference to ritual magic may be because of the logical problem of where that knowledge would have come from. In 1 Enoch and Jubilees, knowledge of magic and other dark practices was given to humanity by the fallen Watchers; in the story told in The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, however, the Watchers cannot be the source of the ritual magic practiced in later hierogamy—they were seduced by the women, not the other way around.

The Flood and the Nephilim

All three works see the emergence of the Nephilim as the cause of the Flood. They differ, however, about the results of the Flood.

In 1 Enoch, the Watchers who fell are imprisoned in the lowest part of Sheol as reflected in 1 Peter and Jude. The Nephilim died in the Flood, but because of the angelic part of their nature, their spirits did not end up in Sheol. Rather, they wander the earth as evil spirits seeking bodies to inhabit. These are the demons that Jesus encountered and cast out.

Jubilees follows this account with a few wrinkles. In the third week after the Flood, the evil spirits of the Nephilim began to lead Noah’s grandchildren astray. Noah appealed to God to bind them, but their leader, Mastema, asked God to leave some of the evil spirits free to tempt humanity. God agreed to leave 10% of these spirits in the world while the rest went to the place of punishment.

The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs likewise says that the Watchers were cursed after the Flood because of the Nephilim. Because its focus is on moral exhortation, however, it doesn’t say much about the fate of the Nephilim themselves.

Evil Spirits

On the whole, as I argued in my first article, I think 1 Enoch’s explanation of the origin of the Nephilim is the best reading of Genesis 6, though I am not convinced about the connection between the spirits of the Nephilim and the evil spirits of the New Testament. In Second Temple Judaism, evil spirits were not considered fallen angels, and that seems correct. Given the power of angels as depicted in Scripture, evil spirits seem too weak to be angels. They are called demons, but the Greek word daimōn refers to divinities of any sort up to lesser gods. The word translated “demon” in connection with evil spirits in the New Testament is daimonion, a diminutive form of daimōn, thus saying they were minor spiritual entities. Beelzebul is the prince of this sort of demon, rather like Mastema in Jubilees. Nowhere are we told that these demons are fallen angels. It is possible that evil spirits may be lower-level angels, but they could be something else entirely. I think they could be a different sort of being than angels, but we simply don’t know.

Giants after the Flood

Another question is the continued existence of Nephilim after the Flood. Genesis 6:4 tells us that the Nephilim were in the earth “in those days [before the Flood] and also afterward.” This explains Numbers 13:33, which tells us that the Anakim come from the Nephilim. But if the Nephilim were killed in the Flood, how did they continue to exist afterwards?

Strangely, Second Temple Judaism did not address this question.

Michael Heiser offered three possible explanations for the continued existence of Nephilim. The first is that the Flood was not worldwide but local, wiping out the corrupt population in Canaan. The phrase “the whole world” sometimes designates the known world, so we do not need to think of it as a global flood. That is why the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 only covers the nations in that region. After the Flood, Nephilim from elsewhere migrated back into the land.

This isn’t Heiser’s preferred explanation, but he thinks it is possible. I don’t think it works. Aside from the question of whether the Flood was global, if the Nephilim were the problem that caused the Flood in the first place, why did God not wipe them out in other parts of the world as well as the Middle East?

A second explanation offered by Heiser is that one or more people in Noah’s family—Noah’s wife or his sons’ wives—carried Nephilim genes. Heiser notes that there was some Jewish speculation about this in the midrash, but he doesn’t think it is likely given that Genesis emphasizes Noah’s righteousness and freedom from corruption. Granted, this suggestion involves his family, but Heiser thinks that the way Noah is portrayed makes this implausible. Still, I think it is a possibility.

The third explanation, and the one Heiser prefers, is that history repeated itself and supernatural beings again mated with humans. These would not be the original Watchers, who were in Tartarus, but other divine beings. Heiser has them assuming physical bodies like the Watchers, but hierogamy is another way this could have happened. I think this is a strong possibility, though it raises the question of why we don’t see Nephilim continuing to be born throughout history. A limited gene pool of Nephilim, perhaps through Ham’s wife, could explain why we see them in Canaan and why we don’t see them anymore after David’s era.

EDIT: It has been pointed out to me by several readers that there are plenty of stories of giants and fairy abductions and impregnations of women in folklore from around the world. That is absolutely correct, and it answers my question about this theory. I’m a bit embarrassed that I overlooked these stories, many of which I knew. Thanks to those of you who contacted me about it.

How Big Were They?

However we understand where they came from, Heiser notes that these Nephilim were not necessarily identical with those in Genesis 6—they are described as coming from the Nephilim. Nonetheless, the Anakim, the Rephaim, and others were giants for their time. Most people at the time of the Conquest were between 5 feet and 5 feet 6 inches tall. Estimates of the size of the Anakim vary, but it is likely they were between 7 and 10 feet tall. If Og’s bed was actually his bed and not a ritual implement, he would have been about 10 feet tall. But even if they were just the size of an NFL or NBA player, they would have been considered giants. Add weapons and armor, and they were fearsome opponents.

The Conquest of Canaan

Heiser believes that the commands to wipe out the inhabitants of Canaan was particularly aimed at the giant clans. This is in keeping with his understanding of the supernatural war which was being waged in Joshua’s conquest. On the other hand, the text itself commands the Israelites to wipe out everyone. Yet they didn’t do that, and not only out of disobedience. I can’t go into the whole argument here, but essentially Heiser is right that there was a supernatural war going on in the Conquest, but it was being waged against Canaanite gods, not the Nephilim. When a Canaanite such as Rahab, a Kenite such as Caleb, or a Moabite such as Ruth decided to abandon their ancestral gods and worship Yahweh, they were welcomed into Israel.

In any event, after the Conquest, the Anakim were eliminated from Israelite territory and only survive in the Philistine cities of Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod (Joshua 11:22). Goliath from Gath, and he and the five other Philistine giants are likely descendants of those mentioned in Joshua. The five, including Goliath’s brother, are specifically described as Rephaim (descendants of Rapha), a group associated with the Anakim. David’s defeat of Goliath and his men’s defeat of the other giants is thus the culmination of God’s long war against the Nephilim in Scripture.

What Do You Think? And Why?

So there you have a survey of Second Temple ideas about the Nephilim and Heiser’s suggestions about how to understand the post-Flood giants. We don’t have clear teaching in Scripture about any of this and so we have to consider all of this speculative. I’ve given my assessment of the different views, but as I said in the first article I wrote about the Nephilim, the most important part of this is how you approach the question. Which options are in the realm of possibility? Since Scripture doesn’t speak on these questions, whatever you rule out as impossible reveals something about your worldview assumptions about the relationship between the visible and invisible worlds.

2 Peter and Jude reflect (and correct) some of the ideas in 1 Enoch, so that was part of their understanding of the world. Do you share in this at least to the point of viewing this understanding of the Nephilim and the Watchers as possible? If not, why not? Do we know more about the invisible world than they did? Or has modernity so shaped your thinking that you do not share the supernatural worldview of the authors of Scripture? If you like 1 Enoch’s answers, why? Is it because they’re cool? Your answers to the questions of the origin and survival of the Nephilim are far less important than how you got them.

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I think it’s fair to say that most people think that science banished magic as an explanation for how the world works. But what if they aren’t so very different from each other?

Natural and Ceremonial Magic

We need to start with a definition of magic as understood in the Middle Ages and especially the Renaissance. In these periods, there were multiple ways of classifying magic. For present purposes, the most important of these is the distinction made in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy between natural magic and ceremonial magic. Natural magic is the magic that was built into the Creation by God. It operates through manipulating “occult” (Latin for “hidden”) forces in nature. Ceremonial magic involved rituals, invocations, circles, names of power, and summoning or interacting with spirits (angels, demons, intelligences, or other entities).

Natural magic was mostly considered acceptable by both church and state; after all, it was based on forces God Himself put into the world. Ceremonial magic, however, was associated with sorcery, necromancy, and heresy. Although some practitioners tried to defend theurgy (summoning and interaction with angels and benevolent spirits), all ceremonial magic was generally condemned under both ecclesiastical and civil law.

I may return to ceremonial magic in a later article, but here, I want to take a closer look at natural magic.

Types of Natural Magic

Natural magic was a broad field. It included the work of smiths who could transmute the properties of metals by, for example, quenching steel, and gardeners who could force a plant to bloom early or late. How to do these things was not obvious and thus they were accomplished through using the occult (hidden) properties in the metal or the plant.

Natural magic also played an important role in medicine. The doctrine of signatures said that herbs and plants that looked like an organ would be good for treating that organ. Thus, lungwort, which is shaped like lungs, was thought to be good for respiratory problems, or walnuts, which resemble brains, were thought to be good for headaches or mental conditions.

The doctrine of signatures reflects the idea of sympathies, that is, that like cures like; an alternative is antipathies, the idea that opposites counteract or repel each other. Thus, one might treat a fever by putting the patient in a cold bath, counteracting the hot and dry fever with cold and wet.

Astrology was another important category of natural magic. While using astrology to predict the future was condemned along with other forms of fortunetelling, astrology in the period had other uses. For example, the first thing a university-trained physician would do was draw up an astrological chart for the patient since it was believed that this would reveal important things about the patient’s constitution and could thus guide treatment.

Beyond astrology, astral magic was a means to channel the influence of the stars and planets into people’s lives. For example, Italian Renaissance scholar Marsiglio Ficino was a depressive, which he associated with being overly influenced by Saturn. To counteract that, he wanted to channel the influence of Jupiter (associated with jollity) and Venus (associated with pleasure and harmony) into his life. He did this through producing talismans made of materials sympathetic to these planets that were engraved with Jupiter and Venus’s astrological symbols and prepared at astrologically favorable times. Along with talismans, he surrounded himself with things associated with the Sun, Jupiter, and Venus, such as gold, saffron, green plants, pleasant scents, clean air, and music; at the same time, he avoided Saturnian elements such as lead, dark colors, and isolation.

These are just some examples of natural magic in operation. More broadly, natural magic theory understood the universe as being governed largely by occult forces. Astral magic is a good example of how at least some of these occult forces worked. The planets could exert their influences over vast distances through symbols and sympathies rather than by any physical connection with the earth. This is technically known as “action at a distance,” and we will return to it shortly.

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Where Did the Knowledge Come From?

“The wise” could seek out and manipulate occult forces for their purposes. But this raised a question: How did natural magicians find out about how to harness these forces? In some cases, such as quenching steel or forcing blooms, the knowledge was passed down for generations; in others, such as herbal medicine, it was based on the widely recognized doctrine of signatures. But in others, it was not so clear. Where did the knowledge come from? Did it come from a spirit through ceremonial magic? Or if it came from a teacher, how did he learn it? If it ultimately came from a demonic source, it might work, but why did the demon reveal it? It had to have its own reasons to do so, and they couldn’t be good. So while natural magic was generally seen as permissible, it could raise moral and theological questions, particularly surrounding the source of the knowledge.

Mechanical Philosophy

What does all this have to do with science?

By the seventeenth century, a reaction was brewing against this magical understanding of the universe. A movement known as mechanical philosophy developed which had as its goal the elimination of magic defined as action at a distance. Mechanical philosophers argued that everything that happened in the physical world could be explained by mechanical interactions between bodies—pushing, pulling, rubbing, collision, etc.

René Descartes, for example, developed an explanation for optics and color based on mechanical philosophy. Descartes’s methodology was purely deductive, so he did not need to present evidence for his model but only to offer an explanation of how light works. His solution was completely wrong, but it serves as a good illustration of the ambitions of mechanical philosophy to explain all physical phenomena mechanically.

Other mechanical philosophers include Pierre Gassendi, Robert Boyle, and up to a point, Isaac Newton. Newton is a particularly interesting case because although he is best remembered for his work in physics and mathematics, he actually did more work in alchemy, speculative biblical interpretation, and various occult areas. In fact, John Maynard Keynes planned to do a biography of Newton which he was going to call The First Scientist; after studying his life, he changed the title to The Last Magician.

Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which introduced the laws of gravity, was rejected by many mechanical philosophers since gravity was effectively action at a distance; in other words, it reintroduced magic. Newton tried to find a mechanical explanation for gravity, but when he couldn’t, he said his job was to describe what happens not why it happens. This was a cop out, but in the end, he won the day because his math was so convincing.

Empiricism and Experimentation

Alongside the development of mechanical philosophy, we see the development of empiricism as exemplified by Francis Bacon. Bacon argued that we need to rely on observation and experimentation as the foundation for understanding the natural world, and that that we needed to “torture” nature to get it to yield up its secrets. His famous quote, “Knowledge is power” comes in this context: As we gain knowledge of nature, we gain power over it and can use it for our own purposes.

Bacon seems to have seen this as part of the dominion mandate in Genesis 1; we are to exert power over nature for the benefit of humanity. Although some think Bacon’s religious rhetoric was a smokescreen to hide his atheism, given the lack of evidence for atheism in general in his period, I think it more likely that he was serious in his appeal to human dominion. I’m no expert on Bacon, though, so you can take this with a grain of salt.

Natural Magic and the Scientific Revolution

Let’s return at this point to natural magic. If instead of “occult forces” we substitute “hidden properties,” there is surprisingly little difference with Bacon torturing nature to reveal its secrets and natural magic. The goal is the same: find the hidden forces/properties in this world and use that knowledge to force nature to do our will. The main difference is in methodology, though it is worth noting that natural magicians also relied in part on experimentation to uncover occult forces.

Then there’s the question of action at a distance, the main impetus for rejecting natural magic. Mechanical interaction was the only way mechanical philosophers thought they could eliminate action at a distance, and so they developed various theoretical ways this might work. Their assumption or hope that every physical phenomenon could be explained mechanically was wrong. In the end, they even failed to get rid of action at a distance thanks to Newton’s laws of gravitation.

It’s worth adding at this point that the thinkers of the Scientific Revolution didn’t call what they were doing science. They called it natural philosophy, a term which encompassed observation, reason, metaphysics, and sometimes theology. Natural magic practitioners likewise saw what they were doing as the highest form of natural philosophy. In other words, they were competing approaches to the very same field.

The punchline is that the Scientific Revolution wasn’t as far from natural magic as we tend to think it was. It had a reduced methodology and a restricted role for action at a distance, but beyond those the similarities between the two are striking.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

A final note worth considering. One of the concerns about natural magic was where the information came from. If it was obtained from an otherworldly being, it was forbidden as spiritually dangerous even if the information was otherwise true and useful. Today, according to Professor of Religion Diana Pasulka, there are people in the high-tech world who have gotten designs for things like medical devices and AI architecture from “downloads” from Non-Human Intelligences (NHI)—in other words, by channeling. In an interview, Pasulka, who is a medieval church historian by training and a Catholic, said that she was offered a download but turned it down to keep her intellectual independence.

In view of this, the concerns of medieval theologians and canon lawyers and early modern witch hunting manuals have continuing relevance today. We should be asking what is going on with these downloads and whether the NHI offering them are actually benevolent. Jacques Vallée, the dean of UFO/UAP studies, is convinced that they are not. He thinks the NHI are malevolent and are seeking to manipulate humanity for their own purposes. In view of this, it would be worthwhile to revisit the earlier warnings about the proper limits of magic rather than simply writing them all off as products of a superstitious age.

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