Imagine something stirring, shifting as it raises a hoary head. It huffs awake, breath simultaneously freezing and burning, and with rolling eyes and crack of jaw being opened we may see a tongue feverishly slither over dolmen-teeth. We may feel something stir in the fields, under the skin of valleys; rivers may flex in their beds and giants stir in their cliffs-beds.
Folks from all walks of life may begin to feel something stir in their bones as the pressures of life and the uncertainties of the future begin to gather on the horizons like ominous stormclouds. Some of those feeling the stirrings of something old and and terrible might try the old words out for size. Words like sovereignty, phrases like will of the people, making things great again.
They might employ language, thought and image, to reawaken dark dreams of so-called purity and to summon up the root-stock of imperialism. Or they might speak of the times and tides of myriads of incomers absorbed into this land over the aeons, of inventiveness and the glorious variety which enriches us all.
Apparently wise and distant commentators might put the source of such a sudden profusion of narratives down to fear, down to a longing for some imagined golden age when everything was Right and Good – a nostalgia which is is being whipped up by various agents on all sides of the political spectrum, whether cynically or within a grounding of fanaticism. Perhaps it is furthered by good-hearted folk swept up by tides of emotion and sentiment, who are so entranced by the felt-sense of being part of something larger that they fail to see the consequences.
Perhaps.
Perhaps some, feeling this connection, this swelling of rawer experience, use its justification to embrace tribalism and primitivism, flirting coquettishly with savagery like unaffected tourists enjoying disaster tourism, right up until disaster irrupts into their lives – until they are unable to deny that some portion of the multitudinous hordes of Others, those barbarians they fear touches them and contaminates their own idea of purity.
Perhaps.
Yet, in the face of the cracking of the veneer of so-called civilization, where climate change and surety of access to necessary resources combines with political uncertainty to create a heady cocktail of fear, uncertainty and anger, the roots remain embedded in the land. The land, and its Powers and Presences, remains. The stars, the cold night above, these remain, just as they always did, describing their own shapes and paths in Kosmic journeys which pull this planet along in train. The emmanations and radiations of such heavenly bodies bombard us with cosmic rays, absorbed by the atmosphere we are slowly poisoning.
While we may be now capable of disrupting the planet’s own rhythms faster than ever before, we are still incapable of disrupting the stars in any meaningful fashion. To view ourselves as apart from the ever-living Pandaemonic kosmos is our fatal mistake – to view ourselves as not subject to the rhythms of our planet is not only the height of arrogance, but manifestly mistaken. This mistake is being corrected, slowly but surely, by circumstances.
Survival always has been about working within the interplay of these rhythms, In making use of one flow of energy to achieve another goal before feeding back the result. In order to do this, we must acknowledge that their are things larger than us, indisputably capable of disrupting our apparent environment.
Cries of sovereignty, urges to make things Great again? These are understandable reactions – urges to reassert the authority of a pre-existing order which is being confronted with a threat it cannot force to kotow. A stirring of giants, which are larger than the reductionisms of modernity and its children, a Hydra of chaotic complexity which erupts from beneath a mere half millennium of accreted arrogance.
A friend asked why British folklore and myth seemed resurgent. There are, of course, many reasons, but one of them is that myth and folklore develops out of the interaction between human and environment. The less certain, or wilder the environment becomes, the less certain a hegemony of a particular inflammation of perception becomes. People once again return to stories and narratives of the weird and strange because they are and were engendered when there were other ways of seeing and being.
Localized strains of epistemology compete for usefulness – the prominence of a particular epistemological oeuvre which has distinct localized origin combined with the legacy of colonialism is understandable when the political class appear to be awaking old reactionary dreams which provided justification for that same colonialism.
Yet, on a psycho-spiritual level, we might argue that despite competing dreams, what remains is not the immune response, but that which inspires it.
Whether that of fascistic isolationism or massively ableist so-called “Green” primitivism, or the wiser Albionic invocation and evocation of Foolish People’s Armageddon Gospels, or the sidereal folkloric histories and ways of Hookland, and even the biting social satire of Scarfolk Council – all of these are inspired by memory and experience which was engendered by the interaction with the land and its human inhabitants.
These same inhabitants are shaped by their own histories, their own memories and stories, to act and react in certain ways, generating more stories which shape how the land and its Presences and Powers are reacted to.
This land has seen many a giant-killer in its time, and yet there’s always one more that escapes. As a long distant cousin to young Jack the lad, Cornish giant-killer extraordinare, I know this as one Cornishman to another. Hell, even Odin didn’t cull them all in Norse myth, and often tested his wisdom against theirs.
Reaching past and through the second hand stories to interact with the place we dwell, to live our lives by participating in its rhythms, even if it’s the things and beings in your house, your garden, your streets. To tell our own stories to each other, and understand how they interlink with the places and people we have been with, are with, and may yet be with. To sit and feel and know that which manifests in our minds and bodies is to also do so with our environments; teeth filled with local isotypes, thirst quenched by coffee from distant lands brought from a local business who tells tales of the local farmers he interacts with on distant journey, brewed with water that has been drawn through local soil.
“In such societies, the sacred and the mundane are not easily distinguished and may not even be seen as separable from one another. The land is often seen as being infused with the sacred history of the people living on it. It may, for example, contain metaphysical creation stories, such as those of a valley being formed from a god’s footprint, or a cliff being an ancient spirit turned to stone.
The community sees itself as sharing the landscape with the local flora and fauna, the dwelling places of their dead ancestors, and the sanctuaries of spirits and gods.
Stories and taboos are then used to explain and preserve this relationship between people, their history, and the seen and unseen landscape.
As a result, mundane farming techniques, political rituals, hunting practices, day-to-day life and interactions with the unseen go hand in hand. Mythology and history have no clear dividing line…Law, religion, and morality similarly are entwined with traditions and taboos that serve to maintain social and (the perceived) natural order.”
– Ascending the Steps to Hliðskjálf The Cult of Óðinn in Early Scandinavian Aristocracy, Joshua Rood
The reason I have long witten about this, the reason I have called this place, this space and conflux of ideas, COLD ALBION is because it draws people in – one cannot exist with it passively. It is in interaction with that which inspires myth and folklore that we are nourished, that we may, if we are so inclined, develop and participate in rhythms and Mysteries which provide a continual upwelling and nourishment for the Soul. In an interconnected world, the nourishment of one, ultimately, leads to the nourishment of others – because one cannot survive without others.
So while uncertainties breed, and the complexities of chaos mathematics are revealed and show an interconnected world to those with eyes to see, our only certainty is in that same primordial ever-changing complexity which we inhabit and participate every day.
Albion abides. It was here before demagoguery. It was here before empires. It nourishes its inhabitants in subtle ways most do not notice, and for those who do, layer after layer of those who have gone before speak the lie to fixed eternities and civilizations. Its raw existence, its power to inspire exists without exertion.
To steal from two great creative forces, William Blake and J Michael Strazcynski, if the giant Albion were to speak I suspect it would echo the words of the inscrutable Ambassador Kosh in the tv show Babylon 5:
“I have always been here.”
It’s also intriguing in this vein to consider his words to Captain Sheridan on repeated occasions, who can be seen as a metaphor for King Arthur in a fallen Camelot:
“You have always been here.”
As manifestation and agent of the Land, Arthur as sacral monarch who does not die but will awaken when needed, echoes various King in the Mountain myths, returning to the Land only to awaken at a special or needful time. Over and over again, mythic time is held to be that space-time which nourishes and regenerates in new, endlessly changing forms.
Eternity is endless spiralling flux.
Albion abides. The pavement cracks, the forest revealed in city streets and farms and valleys alike.
Then, when he had all the knowledge he needed, all the secret places, all
the unspoken promises, all the wished and fleshed depressions, the power
that lurked … surged free.
(It had been there all along.)
(Since the dawn of time, it had been there.)
(It had always existed.)The universe moves toward godhood. It started there and it wishes to
return there.— Harlan Ellison, “The Region Between”
Albion abides. Be seeing you.