THIS MUST BE THE PLACE
This must be the place. Ah yes.
Where the River turns and the mist rises
On one side there are fields of vines
And on the other the hills rise to the Wild Wood
And the Tumulus of the Druids
Here in the River Bend where River runs from hill to ocean
Here at this place in the rich clay that was used to make the porcelain
Here, where the ships, boats, barks, stopped to trade
For a thousand and a thousand and a thousand years
Here, where the river runs:
A twist of Fate
This is the place
It must be the place
Because it’s where we are
Here, things took a turn
It was totally unexpected and totally inevitable
It happened very very slowly and then all at once
And here one day we woke up and it was not the same world
That we had known before
And yet it was exactly the same as it had always been
And here, after weeks and weeks of drought
The long-awaited rain has come
Here in Périgord, which is the land of the Petro-Chorii
The People of the Four Tribes
There is a strange coincidence of names
Because the Petre-chori, in Gaulish
Rings weirdly with the “petrichor”, in Latin
Which is the sound… not the sound
Which is the feeling, not the feeling
Which is the sight no not the sight
The ichor the essence the smell
Petrichor: the smell of the warm stone after the rain
Here, things take a turn
In Greek, that’s “trope”: somewhat of a cliché
That all you have to do is let go
And instead of falling
Fly…
One day last week, I walked along the Riverside, and stood and looked upon the Bend in the River, for which this place is named, at the mist and the silvery light on the water that shimmered as I arrived and threw up my arms in hieratic pose, declaring : “Buon’auguri ! Dimmi !” And lo, they did! A flight of Cranes rose up from the bank below me, previously unseen, and wheeled out across the River.
There is a magic here, a bones-deep, earth-borne enchantment. There is a mystery, and a charm, in the rich black clay, the church-bell’s chime, the wandering backroads, the innumerable streams that wend between the houses; the Old Port, with the upright cannons planted in front of one carriage-gate, the projecting, timbered upper floors. There is a strange alchemy in the high, narrow bridge across the Dordonia, and the overgrown, invisible arches of the Viaduct; there is a susurrus of strangeness in the History: here were Castles, Old and New, here were Treaties signed, to end the War of Lovers; here were a Marquis and his brother, a disputed fief, and preachers, teachers, and theologians of the New Faith.
Here, in the little enclave of artisans in the bourg, as was, we have come to live in the Old Faïencerie (a name to conjure with: does it not sound like Divination of – or by – the Fae? The word comes from Faenza in Italy: perhaps “The Peaceful Place”; perhaps “Place of the Shining Ones” …): the Porcelain Works, which was, in its time, also a vineyard, and a bakery (the bread-oven is still there), a farm; in more recent times, held by six generations of a family whose men were Cavalry Officers, whose women practiced all the crafts: apothecaries (there are cabinets for the herbs and simples, the concoctions and decoctions, still set into the walls), seamstresses, goose-wives, brewers, cowherds and dairy-women; they ran boarding-houses; they made things, and mended; they created, and provided. It was bought by a woman, for a daughter who was to marry a widower with children from a previous marriage, so that she might not be disinherited. It was bought in gold coins, Louis d’Or, for the price of a team of oxen (a great price indeed). It has passed down through the mother-line ever since. Across the road, on the corner, a statue of the Lady watches over the crossroads. She watches over us, she does, said the Lady of the House, who sold it to us. Are you a believer, she said to me. I said, that depends, but yes, one might say: yes. And she told me that in her Cult of the Mothers, she would pray to her mothers and foremothers and that Great Mother, her Lady, to make sure this place passed on to someone who was … right. And it was. We were. We are. Not just the sale of a house. The transmission of … Something. A Tradition. Their father, the Old Colonel, who would run the flag up and trumpet a clarion on Bastille Day, had built them a Guignol Puppet Theatre: they have passed it on to our children. Their mother had made the girls, by hand, dozens of outfits for their 1960s Barbie dolls, in two neat little suitcases. She said, I would like your little girl to have them now: we have no children, none of us. And so it is.
This is not the same kind of place as the Lost Domaine: there, one might be rapt with beauty, one might be lost to the World, in that Enchanted Wood, alone, and perhaps have one’s head quite turned, by the magic and the intoxicating roar of the wind in the trees, your trees, your land, your Demesne. One might go days without seeing another human person, and sit and brood among the ruins of the house, brood on the glories of days gone by, and on the time when all as far as the eye could see belonged to Us. One might stride the measure of the vineyards, and wonder why they should not be Ours. One might beat the boundaries in time, and begin to fall into the roles of a dashing, arrogant, cruel and distant Lord and Lady of the Manor. Needless to say, one attempted to be friendly to the neighbours. Needless to say, one is not, by nature, arrogant or haughty. But as soon as they found out (and they had always-already known) that we were from the Château, they were wary, and tight-lipped, and closed. Things are different here.
This house, this place, is full of honest work, of quiet industry, of good cheer and good will; of decency. The people here are strange: they are welcoming, warm, curious about us; they are proud of their village, and that it has a bakery, a tobacconist, a post-office, a grocery, a hall, a restaurant! A chess-club and a bookshop and a theatre-company and a historical society! They lack for nothing. They are glad to be here. They are glad to have us, too. This is not very French, all of this. But it is … welcome. We are welcome. I thought we might be Strange, here. But the more I meet the people, and I see the little signs and hear the watchwords, I realise: we are far from the only ones. It is like the cosy, wholesome version of the Folk-Horror tale: we are the ones they have been waiting for. This Place will make you most welcome. You may never want to leave. But unlike in the tropes of Horror, we see the signs of strangeness and eeriness with delight and recognition. It’s all we’ve ever wanted.
We walked, that day, in the paces of the opening scenes of a certain type of horror film: opening the shutters, the children running through the rooms and claiming theirs; “where does that staircase lead? What’s behind the locked door? What is in the hidden room, the woodshed, the barn after dark, the wine-cellar?” Yes, there is a funny smell. What are those strange etchings left on the walls? What strange flowers are set to bloom in Spring? But all is well. All will be well. This house is haunted, yes. Charged, full, humming with History, and the Days and Works of Hands. But the ghosts here are so gentle, so benevolent, so full of love, and humour, and quirky ways. We meet them at every turn, each oddly cobbled-together piece of handiwork, each place where that confident and elegant hand had written labels on the rows and rows of old iron keys, on the shelves of mouldering books that the Lady of the House saw fit to leave to me. Here Gardening, here Ancient History, Military Strategy, and rows and rows of Romance novels. The old man’s brass-framed bed in this secret study, for the taking of a sneaky nap or two. They left me that as well. The Lady of the House is a Librarian, wouldn’t you know, who wrote about the Merlin Myths. The Younger Sister is a Gardener, a tender of plants. The Younger Brother is a wastrel, poor fellow. He tried everything, and never amounted, in any way at all. A drunkard working in a vineyard. A rebel in the army. A man quite out of time, and out of place, who would have made a rather good dissolute younger son of a fortuned family of gentry in the World that is Lost. But sadly, he had not even a fortune to waste.
And then, as we engage in our settling-in, our home-making, our husbandry, our midwifery of the new life we wish to see, ushering it into the World, invoking it, inviting it, making clear the way for it, laying a place for it, inventing it – well, something starts to happen. All the seeds we’ve planted, in so many other ways, begin to spring up, to sprout, to flower, to fruit, to spread their petals to the Sun. If we are a garden (and one might say we are), then all this lying fallow has not been in vain. For to say “fallow” is not to say “barren”. And gone to seed, and overgrown, and running wild, unkempt, unharrowed: these are not what they once were. We are a haven now, for bees, and small wild things. We were never the kind to prune and preen and roll and mow. We were never the sort who planted thinking of the yields and harvests, no. We let things go, and gently grow. We buried our wishes and desires in hollow places, and in sheltered places, and we only prayed they might one day flourish. It was not much of a garden, never mind an orchard or a farm. There are fruit trees, yes, but gnarled and nearly exhausted ones, that only by a miracle will give us bounty one more time. But we will give a gentle hand to growing things, and passing things. And so it is, with Life. We have not been ones for Plans. We have not much thought of efficiency, and yield, and the size of the prize-winning squash we shall bring to the fair; no, we think rather of which would be a pleasant sunny corner where to doze an afternoon away, for cats. We think of where we might place a lovely, twisted stump, from the Old Place, or scatter the seeds of the wildflowers of my Country, to bring a little bit of There to Here. I like to think of field-mice, badgers, foxes, finding Sanctuary here. We are planting hedges, full of ever-changing reds and golds, to go with all the greens. I have put in Blackthorn, and Hawthorn, especially. To invite Good Neighbours to tarry here.
And, all unknown to us, there was this deep pink Quince of Japan, that was already here, and that bloomed in magnificent profusion as the very Depths of Winter had their very first inkling of the coming Spring.
Something happened, here (many things, in fact): a message in a bottle sent out many years ago, has made it home. A phone-call, a strange set of circumstances, a voice from the past. Who knew? Who knows! There might be a chance here, we never thought we had. Who knows? What strange enchantment might not be, here, now. In this Place. In this Time. Is it merely luck? To be in the Right Place at the Right Time? Are we merely a happy accident of collocation and coincidence?
So I kept saying to myself; and yet, it’s not that simple. You see, the Road to the Right Place and the Right Time has been very very long. It has taken us twenty years and more to get to Here. There have been obstacles, and tragedies, and there has been much hard work, below the surface, that might not even have looked like work at the time. That might have looked like inaction, sadness, drifting, dreaming. Work went on below the surface. The swan’s glide comes only at the expense of furious, unlovely pedalling below …
RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW
What does it mean to be in the Right Place at the Right Time?
One might say, that This Time is always the Right Time, for it’s the only one we have; but there is a difference, isn’t there?
Between the Ordinary Time, that creeps in its petty pace from day to day, as they say, and on to the last syllable of Recorded Time…
There is time that’s measured out in coffee spoons, and dusty rooms, and etherised upon a table, or pinned to a page like collected coleopterae?
These words ring like a bell, don’t they?
They do to us.
But I had been thinking, last year, very much of Right Times, and Special Times; those times that are set apart, that are not counted in the ordinary calendar of days, that seem to stand out brightly burning against a long procession of the quotidian.
I would say my thought on this was nourished by my reading of Frank Kermode’s A Sense of an Ending. I would here possibly cite Beckett’s That Time, I would give scholarly sources; but this is not that kind of text; my books are still packed up in dozens of boxes; the bookshelves are not yet built. We must be content without the footnotes, and the scholarly rigour; surely, it’s not for nothing that I left that life: surely, I should be allowed to have my fun, now that those obligations are no more, and with them, all of the advantages?
I read something in A Sense of an Ending about this; it was one of my talismanic scholarly texts: something written with deep insight into literature and life, before the rot set in and academic texts divorced themselves wholesale from Life. There are still, occasionally, scholars like this writing, but they tend to do so outside the Ivory Towers and the Well-Kept Gates. I am one of theirs now. Itinerant scholars, Masters of the Hedge-School! Rejoice!
O Children! Lift up your voice!
So, this: the difference between Kronos and Kairos, between simple chronological time that creeps in its petty pace, and That Time, that time that’s set apart and strange, in which all takes on that feeling of Extraordinary Significance. A Time of great deeds, of tribulations, of heightened experience. I had been discussing this with friends, one of whom has made it her business to create the Kosmic Kalindars of Sacred Time. We all agreed, the Time is Out of Joint: but is that not an invitation to Great Deeds? To Significance …? Nothing is, but What is Not. All’s changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. How strange and wonderful to have one’s whole life-experience informed by these drifting fragments of poetry and scripture, both secular and sacred (like the Time) which are our inheritance! …these fragments, shored up against these ruins; yes indeed, yes indeed.
It seemed a time of Gods and Monsters, a Crucible, in which we must go to die and be reborn. Alchemical dissolution, reformation, resurrection. One of the things that had haunted me was this statue, beneath the cloisters of the Invisible College where I worked. A robed and hooded Lady, seated, holding an open book: I could not help but see in her the Papesse, the High Priestess of the Tarot. In her joined hands there was a hollow, in which I (as others had before, and will again) would sometimes, arriving very early on the campus, place a flower for her to hold, a symbol of the Mystery of Things. I have found out since that she is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, whose mysticism and sacred life were dedicated, justement, to that mystery and holiness of small things, of the day-to-day. Each day, when I passed her, Mysterious Lady with a wise smile and an open book, I would bless her, and ask her blessing in return. And on the plinth (or on the pages of the book? I misremember), were written words that seemed to resonate with all I felt, was going through. They spoke of “Illo tempore”: That Time. Eventually, I managed to properly decipher them and take the time to look them up:
In illo tempore respondens Jesus dixit : Confiteor tibi, Pater, Domine cæli et terræ, quia abscondisti hæc a sapientibus, et prudentibus, et revelasti ea parvulis.
Which, as I found, means:
“At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.”
And I thought: How wonderful, for this inscription to be written in the book held by the Lady, in the Hallowed Halls of Learning, here, in this Place. There is so much that is hidden from us, the wise and prudent, the Professors. And the young ones, here, have so much revealed to them that we ignore. May we always be open to that learning.
I went then (and it seemed fitting, in a place so imbued with the wisdom and learning of the Church, but a kinder, now, a gentler version, without the tyrannies and terrors of the Dark Ages, which lasted elsewhere until now, and still persist), and I read the rest of the chapter, Mathew 11, in the King James version, and I found there lines I knew, lines among the ones that float in this substrate of language and scripture that we know, those of us born to it, whether we embrace it or no. It is of That Time, when Jesus and John the Baptist first learn of each other. Of what it means to be a prophet, and more than a prophet. Of the rejection by society of John for his austere and wild ways; of the rejection of Jesus for his more urbane and community-oriented ways. And of the Young, how they, without the prejudices and expectations of their Elders, may have much to teach us, must be listened to. And, to end:
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
And I remember reading that in bright Winter sunshine, in the Court of the Fountain…
“In the Court of the Fountain, where the water endlessly falls, where the sunlight in the leaves seems to ask and answer an eternal question that is Who You Are… A single tree has blossomed, dreams of Spring”
My own poetry, my own fragments, now float up in my mind’s-eye’s Vision, all imbricated with other writings, other images, other scraps of paper, floating messages in bottles, paper boats all bobbing endlessly downstream, endlessly falling, endlessly gone, never to return, forever coming Home … (“dark brown is the River, golden is the sand …”)
Do I seem to make sense? Do I make sense to myself?
I read those words, and wept. For I did not know who was speaking.
Someone is speaking. She doesn’t know he’s there.
Who is this, who offers to give rest? Shall I finally have rest? Or am I the one that speaks? Shall I be meek, and lowly in heart? Shall I offer rest to others, and to share their burdens? Who shall help me shoulder mine?
It was an overwrought and passionate time, it could not last.
I must, in the end, collapse, all restraint forgotten, fall, crash, dissolve, dissipate; Solve.
And, in that Rich Earth on which I fell, a Richer Dust concealed … Coagula.
But shall I cast myself upon the rocks, or in the thorny, tangled Waste?
How shall we find the rich, good Earth in which we might take root once more?
ON THE SPIRIT OF PLACE
This is the Reflection, then, of all these things. When I am given the leisure finally to sit and look upon still water, and contemplate the Depths of Things which I have learned and known.
In the Lost Domaine, there was, as I saw it, a Genius Loci; indeed, there was a chief one, and many others below Him in authority and importance. As far as I can figure out, the Genius of a Place is a Spirit that is inborn: it is inherent to the Place, and it always has been. This is a Spirit of Nature, something almost elemental in its power, but not its being: when we speak of Elementals, we tend to think of Paracelsian Gnomes, Undines, Salamanders, Sylphs. A host of Spirits that embody the pure expression of each of the Classical Elements; however, this seems to me rather theoretical. The elements are somewhat abstract, and cannot really exist in the Sensible World in their pure form. They are an Idea; but then again, so are Angels and Demons. It does not mean they do notexist. But the Spirit of a Place is an inborn, indwelling spirit, much like a Daemon; one imagines that it has its birth and being contemporaneously with the “birth” of the place itself. Now of course, because “Place” is more than simply a set of co-ordinates, but rather the sum of all the geography, topography, natural and built scenery, even the weather and the sunlight, this Genius will perhaps be gradually “born”, as the place becomes itself. In the Lost Domaine, the Presiding Genius was the Great Big Cedar, a gigantic tree over a hundred meters tall, probably close to five hundred years old: His graceful silhouette could be seen, on its eminence, for miles around. It was the symbol and the signal of the Domaine, that once was. Two other cedars made a row with it, but they had been decapitated, for one, by lightning, and the other had suffered too, and was also slightly smaller. Up in the Wood, on the hill across from the manor-house itself, was a gigantic Parasol Pine as well, which was the complement and consigliere to the Great Cedar: both, I’m told, had a secret symbolism during the Wars of Religion, saying to those that saw them, who had eyes to see: “This is a Place of Sanctuary”. Many other Spirits inhered in that Domaine: those of the well, the mere, the rose-garden, the ruins, the orchard. Many other spirits lived there too, or were passing through: those of Green Folk, and the Dead, the Animal Gods, the Wild; the crumbling stony spirits of the battlements that once were; the Dread Lady of the Undercroft. But together, they made a sort of Gestalt, and the Presiding Genius, the Genius Loci, as I said, was embodied physically by that Eminence of Cedar.
I see these denizens, from an animist perspective, as fully-personed entities, which co-exist with, and embody, the very essence of the place itself. They interact with, represent even, the other Spirit inhabitants, but they are Not Them. They are the Spirit of the Place, the one co-equal, co-existing, not quite co-terminous, not always co-dependent, though to a large extent. They are the Rulers of the Place, and its owners, and thus must be honoured, recognised, propitiated, if one wishes to live in that Place, and be in Right Relation.
Thus, in discussion with colleagues, we agreed: the Spirit of Place is certainly best and most simply expressed as Genius Loci and that is that. However, we sought something else: what might we call the Spirit of a Place that is created ? In particular, that is created by the human investment of the place, and in the place: the human activity, and building, and ceremony that creates, in a place, that sacredness, that set-apart-ness. A sacred space perhaps has some special quality in its Genius Loci, and in its situation, that inspires the human investment; but they are not the same. It is the human activity, the human performance of ceremony, of sacredness, of pilgrimage, perhaps, of tabu, also, that transforms what is before a geographic location into a place of heightened presence. The question was, what do we call that spirit?
Now, first of all, we might think of the Temple: the set-aside space of the place of worship. The Latin “templum” or the Greek “temenos” come from this root that means “cut off”: this place is marked as separate; we do things different there. However, this refers to the actual physical space set apart itself; what we are seeking here is something more. There is a Spirit, and we all recognise that this is so, which arises in the place that is set aside as sacred. What is its name? I plunged into half-remembered languages, and their roots; I have a passing familiarity with several; little Latin and less Greek, like the Bard himself, but that does not mean none: just very little. And a little learning is a dangerous thing, for it allows me to jump to conclusions without getting weighed down in too many facts: a spark flies between words and meanings, and I follow it. Only afterwards do I try to shore up my fragments with the necessary knowledge; but by then, the spark has caught, the bridge is burning; shall we cross it, nonetheless?
It struck me then, that we might play with words applied to Time, for Space, as this is often a fruitful exercise; was there a word, for example, equivalent to Zeitgeist, but for Place? And indeed, there is, as it happens: the word is “Ortgeist”. The Spirit of Place, once more, but in German is strikes us slightly differently: Zeitgeist seems to me to capture a sense of the Atmosphere of an Age in a way that there is no word for in English (doubtless why we use the German). The Germans are clever that way, their portmanteaux containing many different items of clothing, that can be combined at will to make an Outfit. In English, we are not so quick to compound our troubles thus, although it’s been known. Where would we be without Schadenfreude? Or Weltschmerz? Weltanschauung? Lebensraum has sinister connotations, but we are pleased to be able to talk about Bildungsromane, or the Ding an Sich … Or is that just me? In any case, Ortgeist seemed closer to what we sought, but still … Because of how we use Zeitgeist, it seems to have come to mean a pervasive atmosphere, ambiance, vibe. It’s something that is “dans l’air du temps”, and not exactly a personified entity in itself. Of course, Geist does mean spirit, and we’re all aware of how particular the noisy Poltergeist kind can be. But the Zeitgeist, and so the Ortgeist, must rather be a more general feel of a place. But it seems not to be a Person, or a Personality. And that is rather what we sought.
It occurred to me then, that perhaps we might rather look to Ancient Greek (one of my great regrets in life is that I neither studied Latin nor Greek in school; my year was the first they cancelled the classes, “due to lack of interest”; they were never held again. I had chosen them, but was instead shunted into German and Business Studies; they told me these would be more “useful”; I can tell you now, I have only ever spent 24 hours in Germany, and while, yes, I did have to dredge up the phrase “Welche Gleis für Solingen, bitte?” from my memory as I ran from one train platform to another, I have never ever needed it before or since; as for Business Studies, I’m sure the pains that Mr Donovan went to inculcate double-entry book-keeping in me were well-intended; but alas, I have never had any money to enter into books, and so, that too has eluded my scope of living. Had they known that I was destined to be a Professor of Literature with Troubling Esoteric Tendencies, they might have given me permission to study the Dead Languages at the posh private school down the road. No doubt I would have gotten into many fights, and it might have been character-building for me. Alas! A Classical Education is no longer available. I have had to make do with the modern one I made for myself, which, while broad in scope, has been singularly lacking in depth and rigour). In Ancient Greek, it seems, are found the Secrets of the Soul, if one has grown up in Western Europe. They named most of our things first, and we inherit much that is best in us, from them.
The first thought: well, let us work off the same distinction that exists between Kairos and Kronos: if Mikhail Bakhtin (who had come back into fashion in Paris when I did my graduate studies, but has doubtless fallen off again) can theorise the “Chronotope” as the way that discourse deals with “Time-Space”, the particular moment in time and place where “something is taking its course” (see? Beckett! I told you), then might we not, by extension, theorise a “Kairotope”, a place that partakes of that heightened moment, that illo Tempore of the Kairos? And indeed, we are not the first to think so: though the term is not yet widely used, we see it cited in, among other things, theoretical work on the role of paramedics, musings on the Anthropocene, and some literary reflections in German … And yet, and yet … This is still not quite what we’re looking for, is it? The Kairotope may well describe that “set apart” that Sacred Temenos, in a particular moment. But that still is not the Created Spirit, the Begotten Persona of the Holy Site.
Finally, my meandering thoughts led me to the notion of the Egregore, well-known in particular to those who practice Chaos Magick. The idea being, that this Being is created by human symbolic behaviour and given power and status by human belief. To put it into context: a single Magician may create a Servitor: an artificial spirit-construct that is usually made to perform one specific task, which it will do ad infinitum, until deactivated. One thinks of Mickey Mouse in Fantasia “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, as the archetypal example of the Servitor gone bad. It usually requires some form of vessel and of simple feeding, but nothing particularly personal. One must just remember how to find the Off-switch. The ethics of creating Servitors, which are in a sense Spirit-Robots, with the original connotation of “robot” as “slave”, are perhaps murky. But let us continue: the next level of Created Spirit is what is known as a Tulpa. Now, the actual term is a bit troublesome, for it comes into the European Imaginary through Alexandra David-Neel, that wonderful adventurer, who came across such a thing in her travels in Tibet (long before such travels were even a possibility as far as most Europeans, let alone a solitary woman, were concerned). However, I’ve learned that in fact her experience, from which she generalised, was neither typical nor, perhaps, completely true; we shall leave this to the experts, of which I am not one. But the idea of a Tulpa, as it has entered Western Esoteric Consciousness, is that of an “Awakened Spirit”, often proceeding from the desire or the art or the magic of an individual: they create this spirit, but it is then completely independent, and has its own needs, desires, personality, and so on. One might think, perhaps, of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his own statue, which Aphrodite brings to life. In his tale, as in life, one imagines, his muse, work of art, awakened statue, Real Doll (named Galatea in later sources) was not necessarily completely happy to have been borne and brought to consciousness for the sole purpose of flattering a man’s ego. Just as, in Shaw’s version, Eliza Doolittle is not too enamoured of the motives of Henry Higgins, in her own Awakening. But a Tulpa, nonetheless, in this inauthentic usage of the word, is still a personal spirit, awakened by a person.
What happens at the next level of sophistication is the Egregore: this is a Gestalt (thanks again, German!) Spirit, that is the product of a Collective imagination, and a collective symbolic action, and spiritual attention. One might cite the fact that among Chaos Magicians, the more thoughtful kind anyway, there is the notion that a magical working group generates, almost spontaneously, a Group Egregore, which is the Spirit of the Collective, and of their magical workings. Careful Chaotes (as if such a thing existed!) will try to guide the formation of the Egregore, to make it useful and benevolent; I’m sure we all can think of groups whose Egregore is formed unconsciously where it becomes almost monstrous. One thinks of a Mob-Mentality (which seems more, and worse, than the sum of its parts), but one also thinks of a “Team Spirit”, which is a metaphorical term we can take as literal (or rather, they mean “spirit” as we have treated “Geist”, above: more of a vibe; we mean, no, literally, there is an actual Spirit Being given life by the team; imagine how much more this is when we speak of a famous professional team of whatever kind: imagine the Spirit of Liverpool FC, the Spirit of Real Madrid; the Spirit of the Dallas Cowboys, or Glasgow Celtic). This brings us smoothly on to where we’re going: one might refer to Yuval Noah Harari’s idea of “Collective Fictions”, and think about things like international brands (Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Starbucks) and what their Egregore is like; one might go even further and think of countries, or even of concepts like money, or law; Capitalism or Communism; or even Liberty, Justice, Truth; Evil; Love. These, according to the Egregore paradigm, are Spirits that come into being due to human symbolic activity; they are fed, they are maintained, by the particular cathexis of the attention that is given them: one might even compare it to worship, and the Egregores to the Gods. Indeed, some will go that far, and say that a God is merely an Ancient Egregore that has transcended its original creation and become an Autonomous Power. The best discussion of this theory remains Terry Pratchett’s wonderful, humane, hilarious, and profound book Small Gods. If you feel like having a little weep for yourself, you may also see one of the most moving expressions of this concept in the story of “The God of Arepo” (which started as a Tumblr writing prompt, and has resulted in its own mythology, beautifully illustrated here : https://reimenayee.com/the-god-of-arepo/).
So we see, this is a very promising trail we’re on: this is much the kind of thing we mean, only for a place, specifically. When we think of the “Egregore of a City”, we’re getting very close indeed. What might we call the Spirit that is Begotten of symbolic human interaction with a Place? Then, as I am wont to do, I started doing the research after I had emitted the theory. I suppose that’s just the scientific method, yes? I had my hypothesis. Now to find the proof, retrospectively.
First of all, the etymology of Egregore: and it transpires that AHA! There is something interesting here: it is related by its root to the Grigori, the famous “Watchers” of Biblical Apocrypha (the Book of Enoch, I believe), those who “looked upon the Daughters of Men, and saw that they were fair, and had sons with them” … Which, if I’m not mistaken, were the Nephilim. These were strange creatures, half-way between Earth and Heaven. Fallen Angels? Giants? It is not clear. But they are at the source of some excellent mythology, including their being the Witch-Ancestors, who gave to the Daughters of Men the secrets of metallurgy, herbalism, and magic. Now what was fascinating in particular was that the root word egrḗgoros is translated as “watchful”, and so these are “the Watchers”, but in fact it can also be read as “wakeful” or “awakened” …! So they are the Awakened Ones, called up from our deep Mythic Unconscious, from Anima Mundi, because we needed them, no doubt.
This is the point: the Spirit of which we speak is not the Spirit that inheres in the place, and it is not the general Spiritual tone of the place, nor is it just the “set apart” in Time and Space nature of the Sacred Space: no, we speak of an actual Spiritual Being which is “awakened” by human symbolic activity and attention. And so, this gives us a prefix; where to find a good word for “place”? Topos, as we’ve seen, is … adequate; but we are looking for more than just adequate, we are seeking the Poetic. And “Egregotopos” just does not sound cool.
Therefore, on what instinct I know not, I did a little more digging at the site of my excavations, confident that there was another artifact or two to be unearthed. I can’t quite remember how I came to that place, how I stumbled upon it; but I knew it when I saw it: the word I found was “meros”. It means part, or portion, or that which is allotted. It plunges back to ancient roots, and touches on the ideas of memory and rightful share (from Indo-European “mer-”, expressed in Latin memoria, as in “memorial”, or “commemorate”, or mereo, to deserve, as in our “merit”). It is a part, a plot, a designated piece of land, a place, but it is also that which we have earned, or inherited, or even our honour and reputation; a survey of its uses in the Koine Greek New Testament will unearth all of these and more.
And so, the coinage that I have discovered, in this rich black Earth I’ve found: its style is ancient, but its wording is new: it is an anomaly. I am its begetter, though thousands of years of history and etymology give rise to it. I propose that the Spirit that is Begotten by the sacred acts and the symbolic activity, by the human ceremony and belief, the rites of seasons, Solstice and Equinox, the pilgrimages, the interdictions, the pattern-walking: the awesome thrill that greets us, which we have fostered, when we step within the circle of stones, or into the vast and shadowy temple, or simply stumble on the solitary holy well, lost within the wood, but where we feel the ages of belief, and prayer for cures and curses : that this be called GRIGOMEROS, or, in Common English, “Grigomere”. For a mere, a mere trifle, is only that: a little pond or pool or lake, and that, as much as anything, can be the end of our Reflection.
We have come, at last, to the place where we began. We have come to sit by the still, clear pool in the forest glade, and to reflect. It is not so much our own shadowy face in the water’s surface that enraptures us, no: it is that the merest touch of a hand, here, sends ripples out in ever concentric rings, expanding and rebounding, troubling the surface, interrupting our Reflection, with wave and turbulence, and surface tension, harmonics, echoes, resonance. So it is, when we brush a hand across the surface of Language, and Soul, and where they meet; the eternal, ever-changing substrate in which we swim blossoms, with rings within rings, all ever-interlinked, ever-expanding, resounding, confounding, interfering. The water turns opaque; eventually, it stills, and reflects the sky, the trees around, once more. We have troubled the Infinite. It will survive us; and, in it, we will survive.
This must be the place.
We are here.
MARK DEVLIN
Born in Australia to Irish parents, Mark Devlin spent most of his childhood in Ireland, with occasional spells in the United States. As a child, he was obsessed with fantasy literature and roleplaying games, but kicked the habit in his mid-teens, when he realised that sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and being a Dungeon Master, were mutually exclusive. He would still read The Earthsea Trilogy at least once a year, but he didn’t talk about it. After studying English and Philosophy at University College Cork, he became a secondary school teacher in an all-girls Catholic school and started a theatre company. When his nerves couldn’t take it anymore, he applied for a position as a lecteur in English literature at Université de Paris-Nouvelle Athènes. One thing led to another, and he ended up getting sucked in by academia again. Initial enthusiasm gave way to diffidence and procrastination, and he defended his very pedestrian thesis in 2015, after spending five years researching irrelevant and esoteric topics in the dark corners of the internet and furtively reading RPG forums, and one year desperately typing the thing that he ended up calling his dissertation.
Eventually, he gave up pretending and started writing a fantasy novel. He very much enjoys hiking and camping, and communing with Nature. He lives in Montmartre with his wife and two children. He works as a Passeur, a Guide and Translator, a Smuggler across borders of people, ideas, culture.
