Folk, Faerie, Pagan, Catholic: Part 1

We need to talk about Puritanism.

St George Slaying the Dragon, Rosa Corder

for Ria

I don’t understand Puritanism. I don’t only mean the version that arose in England during the Reformation. I mean the kind that is essentially a sort of religious washing compulsion seeking to return all practices and observations to an imagined original state purified of all “corruption” or outside influence. Well, maybe it’s not that I don’t understand it: it’s more like I don’t understand the attraction.

The kind of Puritanism I’m talking about is the kind that tries to suck all the fun out of worldly existence. The actual Puritans were great ones at this, as they tried to—and, alas, did for a while—eradicate dancing, Whitsun ales (meaning “Pentecost keggers”), games on Sundays, the feasts associated with saints days, and even—the bastards!—Christmas. The Puritan party-poopers of early modern England were insistent that everyone participate in their misery to the point that James I issued The Book of Sports, a manual that specified which activities were acceptable on Sundays, including leaping (playing leap-frog), dancing, and archery as well as “having of May games, Whitsun ales and morris dances, and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used, so as the same may be had in due and convenient time without impediment or neglect of divine service, and that women shall have leave to carry rushes to church for the decorating of it.” Pastors were expected to read this from the pulpit, but many Puritan clergy refused. Eventually—and this is no exaggeration—this variety of kill-joying led to the English Civil Wars. I guess some people just can’t be happy unless everyone is miserable—to which our own secular puritanical landscape here in the West attests in numberless ways.

Protestant Puritanism was not sui generis by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, there was always a Puritanical stream in Christianity—from the debates over circumcision and Jewish dietary laws that drove St. Paul to distraction to the anxieties (and persecutions, leading to execution) over “heresy” regarding folk religious practices of the peasantry during the Catholic Middle Ages.

Some Puritans from the time of Jesus, kind of the DEI officers of late-antiquity:

H.J. Massingham, my spiritual father if ever I’ve had one, connects this Puritanism to the “demonization of nature” that has infected Christianity like a seasonal virus throughout its history. As he writes,

“Whether the Catholic Puritanism of the later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation was a survival or resuscitation of this demonization of nature by some of the Fathers or was the consequence of the growth of power-politics in the Church, it is quite certain that Puritanism, whether Catholic or Protestant, has always been the implacable enemy of nature, as by its urban origins Protestant Puritanism has always been hostile to the peasantry.”

To invoke Sistah Flannery, if Christianity sees nature as its enemy, then to hell with it.

I have a great contemporary example of this. Every year on our farm we host a May Day Festival (May 4^th this year at 3:00). A few years ago, my daughters and their friends were going to be my anchors for the dance around the May Pole, so we practiced a few times. But on May Day one of the girls held back—apparently some old busybody of a baggage at the SSPX parish she and her family attend caught wind of our festival and told the girls May Poles are demonic. Congratulations, Lady: You are now officially a Protestant! So go suck eggs—but make sure they’re not fertilized. We musn’t show approval for fertility! (Did I mention I have nine kids?)

Some may suggest that the May Pole is a fertility symbol. Okay. Also: So what? And since when was God against fertility? Have these people never read the Bible? (For a great book on this topic, check out Ellen Davis’s Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible.)

Actually, you know who hates fertility? Satan and his minions the Archons. Just look at how much they strive to destroy fertility in animals and plants as well as in humans. It is not hard to see.

Here’s an aside: Probably twenty-three years ago, my wife dragged three of our children along with her when she went to a midwife prenatal in preparation for the birth of our fourth (Aidan). When a young mother and her mom met my wife with three kids under the age of seven as she went to check on the status of numero quatro, the woman’s mom said, “Four kids? Are you guys like good Catholics or just oversexed?” To which my wife answered, “Both.”

As anyone familiar with my books, my old blog, or anything here on The Druid Stares Back will know, I don’t see much difference between a Christianity connected to nature (or, more properly, Creation) than what used to be maligned as “paganism” in times long past—and I even see modern neo-pagans as people who hanker for a Christianity deeply connected to Creation, but who can’t find anything remotely like that in the various offerings on the Christian menu. The Puritans, to appropriate the voice of Thomas Vaughan, have the day, not by weight but by number.

That said, the past thirty-plus years of my life have been in pursuit of what Massingham called “The Rural Christ” or what my friend Martin Shaw describes as the “Galilee Druid.” Indeed, my most recent book, Mythologies of the Wild of God, traces that journey in imaginative form. And “druid” is the operative term here, as it points to an earlier rewilding of God that profoundly enriched the world. As Christopher Dawson writes in The Making of Europe:

“Thus there was no sudden break between the old barbaric tradition and that of the Church, such as occurred elsewhere, and a unique fusion took place between the Church and the Celtic tribal society entirely unlike anything else in Western Europe.”

Others, notably Robert Graves in The White Goddess, have arrived at the same conclusion.

My claim is that the renewal of Christianity resides precisely in such a rewilding: a rewilding that will not come from ecclesial structures (if you haven’t recognized how absolutely compromised they are by this point—Eastern Orthodox as well as Catholic and Protestant—I really don’t know what to say). The rewilding, instead, will come from the ground up: “Now the green blade riseth.”

Massingham knew this, and when he writes of the British Church (which, for him, includes the Celtic Church writ large) he shows a way to return to “the first, spinning place”:

“Once God was expelled from nature and nature was no longer a divine ordinance, nature and man, her child, became automata and there was nothing else for it but that….

“If the British Church had survived, it is possible that the fissure between Christianity and nature, widening through the centuries, would not have cracked the unity of Western man’s attitude to the Universe.”

But cracked it is. But I believe such a vision can be restored.

Speaking of the British Church, some of you may know that tomorrow is St. George’s Day, St. George (whose very name means “earth-worker”) being the patron saint of England. This used to be an important feast day in England, but with the rise of the Puritans coming to power in the seventeenth century, celebrating a saint was deemed “too papistical” for morose religious authorities and its observances fell into obscurity. T.F. Thiselton-Dyer, writing in British Popular Customs, Present and Past (1876) observes, “St. George’s Day, though now passed over without notice, was formerly celebrated by feasts of cities and corporations.” This, even though Edmund Spenser tried to forge a secular and political (if exceedingly Puritan) appropriation of George’s legend in The Faerie Queene. (Another aside: though my doctorate is in early modern English literature, I despise Spenser. For one, he actively encouraged the genocide of Irish Catholics—my ancestors—from their homeland. In return, the Irish eventually set his castle to the torch. He deserved that and much more [sorry, Jon].)

The great contemporary British historian Ronald Hutton, in his wry way, puts it this way:

“[St. George’s Day] seems, therefore, to have gone into a quiet decline, leaving England in the curious position of having a day which honours the nation upon which everybody works, virtually no religious services are held, and the government itself does not pause for the slightest celebration. This is despite the wonderful irony that the cult of St George, so long tainted for the English by its Catholic associations, was abolished by the Church of Rome in the 1960s, leaving him with impeccably Anglican qualifications.”

I don’t know if anything could be as representative of the kind of disenchantment I am describing here.

To end, I turn once again to Saint Massingham, who even in 1943 saw the decline of the West as a result of the alienation of Christianity from Creation:

“The way to the restoration of the West is not, therefore, a yet more elaborate mechanism to kill it. It is an alternative to it and the dual one of the Christian and organic life is the only one there is….

“Everything that offends against the Doctrine of Creation is Church business; everything that affirms it, the love of nature, the craftsman’s job, the artist’s vision, the yeoman’s husbandry, responsible or creative work of any and every kind, all true zeal in interpreting that Doctrine whether by witness in art, by service in honourable labour or by devotion in resistance to anarchy or automatism, those enemies of godliness, should receive the holy blessing.”

And, to that end, I drink a health to St. George, earth-worker and slayer of the dragon, and to you, dear readers.

I might also plant some carrots.