History and the Otherworld

So I’ve been reading the Mabinogion.

One of my favorite books through the course of my adult life is The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenknreutz, written, or so they say, by Lutheran pastor Johann Valentin von Andreae in the early years of the seventeenth century. My fascination with the book, at first, was that I was interested in what “secrets” it might divulge. Many, many readers of the book over the centuries had claimed to have discovered the book’s secrets—but they all came to different conclusions! Nevertheless, it is a rollicking fantasy and includes not a little bit of satire, much of it aimed at precisely those kind of individuals who claim to have found secrets in books like The Chymical Wedding! Umberto Eco, one of the most perceptive readers of the twentieth century, got the joke and his “occult novel” Foucault’s Pendulum is precisely the kind of send-up Andreae had in mind, though couched in a very postmodern idiom.

Some years ago, a good friend of mine from graduate school recommended that I write an article or something on The Chymical Wedding. He thought I’d be the perfect person to do so. In 2019, I took him up on his suggestion and ended up editing an edition of the book with a couple of essays thrown in for good measure. (You can check it out here). But I didn’t want to just issue another esoteric interpretation (which would be BORING). Andreae, when asked about the book years after he wrote it, called The Chymical Wedding a ludubrium, that is, a joke or game. So I decided to approach the book as a joke or game—something that occurred to very few commentators on the book. The result was liberating—certainly for me, and hopefully for other readers of the tale.

Recently, I have been reading the Mabinogion before bed. I like to read fairy-tales or legends before going to sleep. It just seems to get me into a better psychic state before wandering through the astral realm for a few hours. I have read parts of the Mabinogion before (one of my sons, Dylan, is named after a character in one of the tales), but had never read it cover-to-cover.

The book is fascinating in that there is an abundance of commerce between what we could call “our world” (which is a hopelessly impoverished way of describing it) and the Otherworld. The figures in the tale also have a habit of saying things very Christian-sounding, such as “God reward your friendship” or “I swear by my confession to God” and suchlike. Critics, and Jeffrey Gantz, the translator and editor of the edition I am reading is no different, interpret these kinds of phrases as later recensions inserted by anxious monks recording the tales in the scriptoria of the ancient Celtic Church. However, that is a received interpretation, part of an interpretive tradition, that usually passes by us, in our Enlightenment-haunted cultural milieu, without further question or interrogation.

Interpretive traditions, though, are not only a characteristic of the Enlightenment (which word means pretty much the opposite of what it says), but are also a feature of any culture, religious or secular. For example, as I have written many times before, the Wisdom figure of Proverbs 8 in the Bible (not to mention in Sirach and the Book of Wisdom) has been interpreted by Christian tradition as a cipher for Christ, the Logos—even though Wisdom is clearly a feminine figure in the literature. And while I don’t know exactly how this interpretation came about, one cannot rule out the endemic misogyny the Church Fathers absorbed from their Neoplatonic contemporaries for whom they harbored an overpowering anxiety of influence.

The same is the case with the Song of Songs. The interpretive tradition of this book, both Jewish and Christian, has been to read it as a poem about God’s love for Israel or the Church. Who amongst us hasn’t read lines like

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—
for your love is more delightful than wine.
Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
your name is like perfume poured out.
No wonder the young women love you!
Take me away with you—let us hurry!
Let the king bring me into his chambers.

and not thought of God and the Church right away? The answer: absolutely no one. Yet Christian and Jewish exegesis is replete with every interpretation of this poem but the most obvious one.

So interpretive traditions have been much on my mind while reading the Mabinogion.

My method here (if method it can be called) is no doubt rooted in my practice of what I have called “agapeic reading” or a phenomenological openness to a text. In phenomenology, the practice of epoche, trying as much as one can to bracket one’s prior knowledge and personal/cultural assumptions about things (doesn’t have to be a text: it could be a tree, or a salamander, or the stars, for that matter) is the starting point in the process of knowing. So pushing the interpretive traditions we have all been immersed in to the side is an important ingredient in discovery. It might not be easy, at least at first, but, with practice, it is a skill anyone can develop.

Magic is a chief feature of the tales in the Mabinogion. For instance, in the tale of “Manawydan, Son of Llŷr,” the title character captures a mouse which he intends to hang as a thief. After a spell of his enemies killed all the domesticated animals, Manawydan and his family rely on hunting and growing grain, but the mouse and legions of its comrades have been destroying all of his corn. He was able to catch the mouse due to its overwhelming weight, which slowed it down compared to the other mice. A priest and then a bishop try to talk him out of killing the little beastie, such an unmanly deed. But he refuses even their offers of gold. The bishop, as it turns out, is really Llwyd, son of Kil Coed, and the mouse is in reality his pregnant wife. After some negotiations (including Llwyd’s release of Manawydan’s wife Rhiannon from enchantment), Manawydan returns Llwyd’s wife to her proper form.

Now, I am not saying that the ancient Celts could really change themselves or their enemies into mice; and I’m also not not saying that. There is also the possibility that this shape-shifting could be due to the power of suggestion, which, even in terms of propaganda, is one of the more powerful forms of magic known to us.

On the other hand, the journeys to and commerce with the Otherworld which are featured in the Mabinogion and Celtic lore in general suggest to me something more accessible to our own imaginations and experience. As W. Y. Evans-Wentz writes in The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries,

“The Heaven-World of the ancient Celts, unlike that of the Christians, was not situated in some distant, unknown region of planetary space, but here on our own earth.... Sometimes, as is usual today in fairy-lore, it was a subterranean world entered through caverns, or hills, or mountains, and inhabited by many races and orders of invisible beings, such as demons, shades, fairies, or even gods…. More frequently, in the old Irish manuscripts, the Celtic Otherworld was located in the midst of the Western Ocean, as though it were the ‘double’ of the lost Atlantis…. And fairy women came from the mid-Atlantic in magic boats like spirit boats, to charm away such mortal men as in their love they chose, or else to take great Arthur wounded unto death.”

These stories of the Otherworld I am inclined to read as “history,” or at least as a kind of history. I also believe that seeing into this world is much more common than we might think and that it was much more common, if not universal, in times before the recording of what we understand as history. Even Atlantis, which most dismiss as a “myth,” is attested to in non-mythic terms by Plato and some even argue that the Tuatha de Dannan were originally refugees in Ireland after the destruction of Atlantis. For history, as we know it, is also an interpretive tradition.

Evans-Wentz, who published The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries in 1911, reports of sightings of Hy Brasil (not to be confused with the South American country) off the coast of Western Ireland in 1908. Hy Brasil was (is) a kind of phantom island which only appeared for one day every seven years—it even appears on many maps of Europe, even up to the nineteenth century. Curiously, an internet search brought no mention of the 1908 appearance (though some slightly earlier reports showed up). Mysterious lands to the west are a feature of Celtic lore as well as in the Voyage of Saint Brendan and, of course, the Undying Lands described by J. R. R. Tolkien.

I haven’t even mentioned stories of giants or dragons (I could—and have), but you get the idea. We are all at the mercy of these interpretive traditions. We would do well to break free of their spell. Talk about magic and suggestion!

So what do you think? Let me know in the comments.