A Talk by R J (Bob) Stewart
Friday, April 2, 1993


  Recently I attended a talk by R J Stewart, and then a 
weekend workshop over which he and John Matthews presided.  
It's true that I'm going to review them both, but this time 
I'll do them separately, and follow a slightly different 
format from my last effort.

  Friday evening found myself and one of my companions from 
the John Matthews talk of last November (the Lung Men Taoist 
was pulling night duty and could not attend) wandering the 
campus of Seattle University on a quest for the Engineering 
auditorium.  A Filipina undergraduate insisted that we 
wanted to attend "the pow-wow;" and when we finally 
acquiesced (after some evidently unconvincing attempts to 
explain that we were looking for a talk by R J Stewart), she 
directed us to the right place, though we entered by the 
wrong door, and had to cross the back of the auditorium to 
get tickets, which cost $15 (US) per person.

  At the bottom of the steeply-pitched chairs were some 
tables of books and tapes -- no tapes, unfortunately, of RJ 
Stewart's material, which to date must still be ordered from 
him in England, with all the attendant nuisance of small-
scale of currency transfer.  (This situation, however, 
should soon be changing:  US distribution is being set up.)  
This time, I knew several other people as well, some of whom 
I hadn't expected to see there, and we all ended up sitting 
more or less together.

  Shortly after 7:30 pm, the program began with a brief 
introduction of our speaker as a writer and musician who had 
inherited the Sight from his grandmother.

  Stewart himself, a gentleman of utterly canonical and 
normal height (perhaps 5'8" or 5'9", weighing some 155 to 
160 pounds) with graying blond hair gathered into a pony-
tail that hung somewhat below his shoulders, wore a flowered 
vest, and spoke with a mild Scots accent (I can't identify 
it more closely than that).  He began by announcing his 
plan:  to speak at random for a while, and then to respond 
to questions or arguments from the audience.  He had, he 
said, no notes or agenda to get through:  things would go as 
the audience impelled.

  The subject, he, said, was "The Power Within the Land," 
which he would talk about as found in some older traditions 
in Scotland and Ireland, and to some extent in England -- 
and how this collection of traditions can work for us today.  
"Collection of traditions" rather than "tradition," since it 
is in fact not one coherent, consistent tradition.  The 
general theme is that spirituality is not found by rising up 
to heaven and leaving earth behind, but by increasing one's 
awareness of the earth and one's contact with the land as a 
living being.  This is, essentially, a pre-Christian 
tradition, though it is found also in early Christianity 
(though it was later suppressed for political reasons).  The 
consequence is the idea that through certain visions, 
stories, and so on, it is possible to alter one's 
relationship with the land.

  You need only to go back two or three generations to find 
that our Celtic ancestors, however, were actually doing 
their best to get rid of this kind of contact, which at one 
time was so widespread that the main thing they wanted to do 
was to avoid it.  In the 1690's, the Reverend Robert Kirk, 
an Episcopalian minister in the Gaelic midlands of Scotland, 
noted that seers spent much of their time trying to get rid 
of the Sight and of fairy allies.  The "Irish," as Kirk 
called the Highlanders, were seen in church only at the four 
great festivals, when they hid there to avoid the company of 
the migrating fairies.

  {I recalled here Yeats' tale, in response to some 
"psychological" interpretation of fairy lore, of the Irish 
farmer who complained about being frequently turned out of 
bed and thrashed by the fairies.}

  In the Gaelic and Nordic areas, and in the early Greek and 
Roman religions, the Sacred was of the land.  This can be 
seen in what Stewart called "one of my favorite diagrams," 
three concentric circles divided horizontally by a line 
representing the surface of the earth.   From the line 
upward were the realms of ordinary awareness, emphasized by 
the "orthodox" religious traditions, especially with respect 
to the aim of fleeing the earth.  But the pre-Christian 
traditions give equal value to the subterranean realms -- 
unlike the "New Age" attitudes that (since they are largely 
derived from Christianity, with aspects of Hinduism and 
Islam) emphasize "the realms of Light".

  The first realm above the line is that of the "sublunar 
world" of the Renaissance -- the realm of human beings and 
daemones (those advice-giving spirits who have recently 
become once again fashionable).  The first realm below the 
line is the realm of heroes, fairy beings, and ancestors.  
The second realm above the line is that of the sun and 
planets, or planetary angels; the second realm below the 
line is that of the deeper aspects of the realm of heroes 
and ancestors, the real of increasing gravity and weight, 
and of certain underworld deities.  The third realm above is 
that of universal divinity, while the third below was that 
of niversal being.  There are stars within the earth as 
well as above:  these are the primal ancestors, the Titans, 
and the giant sleeper at the heart of the planet.

  Now, the old traditions were largely preserved by oral 
transmission, in songs, ballads, and practices, but some 
were also preserved in written sources:  observations, 
anecdotes, or personal records (e.g., Kirk's book) or 
folklore researchers.  These written records survive from as 
far back as the eighth century in Ireland, were they were 
made by monastic scribes.  From that time on, much was 
written down, eventually coming to constitute what is now 
called Celtic literature.  The Arthurian side of this is 
Matthews' province; there is less of it, Stewart said, in 
his own books since he knows less about it.

  The core theme is this:  By going into the land, or into 
the earth, we encounter transformations and the beings that 
effect them, and emerge with a new consciousness and 
understanding.  The oldest levels of this enterprise are 
ritualistic and structured, as we can see from the passage 
graves (which are paralleled in the Classical world by the 
tombs and chambers of the ancestors and heroes).  Many of 
the old gods and goddesses became absorbed into the world of 
faery, and of ancestral tales.

  There is a tendency nowadays still to over-structure and 
over-rationalize older traditions, rather than accept them 
as they are, with all their paradoxes and contradictions; 
this was especially prevalent among the Victorians, who 
tried to iron out all irregularities.  We, on the other 
hand, have become more able to accept our inability to 
establish a definitive, final account of any of these 
"systems".

  There is another theme that is extremely prevalent in 
these traditions.  It is tied in with what might be called 
the idea of "the creatures," birds, animals, and fishes.  
The message is this:  that human beings, far from being a 
superior spiritual elite, are in fact incomplete.  
Completion comes through the three-fold alliance or balance 
of human, fairy and creaturely worlds

  At this point, Stewart decided to stop talking and start 
responding to questions.  {I insert my own remarks within 
these twisty brackets.--L}

Question:  You have talked about the third realm, that of 
Lucifer or the sleeping giant, of which Christianity has a 
very negative concept.  What of the original Lucifer?

Answer:  What we're probably looking at is the result of the 
remaking, in the Judeo-Christian context, of an old myth.  
There are some traces in the early Celtic church of what 
it might have been:  something akin to the tale of the 
Titans.  The story is that Lucifer, a being of light, fell 
out of the heavenly realms and became embodied in earth.  
At that time, others fell too -- those who became the 
  fairy races.  This is a creation myth about the pre-human 
  phases of existence, occurring at a deep level of 
  planetary consciousness -- which is itself an aspect of 
  universal consciousness, which is not somewhere "out 
  there," but is *right here*.

  The figure of Lucifer, however, was deliberately confused 
  with that of Satan, the Adversary, who was first the 
  Tempter of God (as in Job), and later of humanity.  The 
  older theme was thus overlaid with a dualistic idea, then 
  rationalized into the tale of the Fall through pride, for 
  political reasons.  That version is just not sufficient 
  nowadays -- it is a dogmatic propaganda that is not 
  necessary now ... if it ever was.

Q:  There has recently been a renaissance of interest in the 
Demon Lover ballads, which were also significant for 
Romantics.  What could you say about them?

A:  These ballads are found mainly in English and Scottish 
English, but not in the Highlands, in Ireland, or the 
Western or Northern Islands.  Only in the Midlands, 
Lowlands, and Northern England.  It is an important faery 
theme, involving a description of the Otherworld or 
Underworld, a way of getting there, the types of beings 
one encounters (Fairy Queen, Demon Lover -- who is the 
Daemon, or advisory spirit).

The Demon Lover ballad has been strongly Christianized.  
The correct way to understand it is to approach it via 
Graves' iconotropic method, in which one takes each stage 
of the story as a picture or icon, and asks what the 
original pictures were about.  Thus:  it begins with a 
woman in the human world; a being comes out of the sea; he 
takes her below the sea; someone tries to bring her back.  
It is the theme of the otherworld courtship.  The actual 
ballad, ending with her drowning, is mere propagandizing.

These Faery beings are ambiguous.  The Fairy Queen can be 
dark and sinister (as in Tam Lin, where she curses Tam Lin 
when he is rescued), or benevolent (as in the story of 
True Thomas, in which she initiates him and returns him).   
The story of Tam Lin may have been revised by 
Christianizing propaganda, but it does carry over a real 
theme:  that in the underworld there is a goddess of death 
and regeneration who is disturbing -- not corrupting -- 
and transforming.  An example of this is Sulis, a goddess 
of cursing, prophecy, and childbirth:  of taking and 
regeneration, in local form.  (Stewart noted that he lives 
over a site sacred to Sulis, in Bath.)  What we know about 
such well-attested figures can guide us in understanding 
traditional lore.

Q:  What is the relationship between Merlin and tonight's 
  subject?

A:  In earlier Sources about Merlin -- especially Geoffrey 
of Monmouth --  his most important appearances are as a 
boy who is a prophetic diviner or semi-divine child, whose 
prophecies reach from the beginning of the earth to the 
end of the solar system some time in the early 21st 
century.

The story of Vortigern and Merlin (which Stewart 
summarized briefly but vividly) are similar to the stories 
of Apollo wrestling with the python, and thereby acquiring 
prophetic power.  And the Greeks did say that Apollo came 
to them from the Celtic realms.  There is an ancient ink 
with some prophetic deity of light within the earth, the 
Sun in the Underworld.  This is the link of Merlin with 
the underworld.  The story of Thomas the Rhymer is 
similar:  he too acquired a prophetic gift from his visit 
to the underworld..

Q:  How does this theme connect with that of the descent of 
Christ into the underworld, the Harrowing of Hell?

A:  There is a theme of underworld transformation in 
Christian tradition, but it is rather glossed over.  In 
the original story of the Harrowing of Hell, the early 
Christians taught that the spirit of Christ went into the 
body of the land and did something with the ancestral 
spirits there.  There is a link with the idea of semi-
divine heroes, and the idea that the tomb is the cave of 
resurection.  Stewart added, after a moment's hesitation, 
that Jakob Boehme, drawing on an earlier tradition, that 
in a pre-human phase of planetary consciousness (Lucifer), 
Adam and Eve appeared to establish a new mode of 
consciousness -- but they failed, and thus the Redeemer 
was necessary.  Thus one has:  early consciousness, human 
consciousness, and the universal redeemer, all to be 
unified in a new way in the coming age.

Fiona McLeod says somewhere (whether on her own or 
reporting a genuine tradition) that it is said in the 
Western Isles that the next coming of Jesus will be as a 
woman.  This is a forerunner of the idea of the resurgence 
of the feminine in the new spiritual understandings of our 
time, but, Stewart said, he was not sure whether it was in 
fact an old Celtic tradition.

{It is of course an old enough English -- and American -- 
tradition:  The founder of the Shakers in fact claimed 
that she was the second coming of Christ, and I remember 
seeing this idea in more than one place in histories of 
the various dissenting movements of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries.  I think in fact Jane Lead had some 
connection with these ideas, though memory may play me 
  false here.)

Q:  What about the traditions of courtship between mortal 
and fairy?

A:  Kirk notes that many people did not come to church on 
Sundays because they were exhausted after sleeping out 
with their fairy lovers -- a custom that has sadly become 
lost in the 20th century, though it was then seemingly an 
everyday situation.  It hides a deeper theme of 
interaction and exchange between the races.  The fairy 
races are of an earlier and different consciousness -- but 
there is an idea that the races can blend and produce 
offspring, such as Merlin.

Q:  Could you expand on this idea of brining the fairy and 
human realms into balance?

A:  In old traditions, there are techniques for joining with 
and separating from fairy contacts; some are ceremonies, 
and some are family traditions.  They can be reworked for 
modern use.  To do this, one begins by taking the old 
methods in an imaginative sense.

{There are old grimoires that have recipes for fairy 
contacts:  Robert Herrick refers to some of these methods 
in his poems, as Cabell knew, and it was EM Butler who 
pointed out that the continental grimoires underwent a 
faery transformation on reaching the British Isles -- a 
tradition not unknown or unappreciated even by AE Waite.  
Scot's _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, in fact, contains 
several of these methods, though few have written up their 
experiments with them.  I cannot remember, though, where 
one finds techniques for ending these contacts, though 
certainly if the contact is a swan or seal one may let it 
find the swan or seal guise one carefully hid at the 
beginning of the relationship...}

Q:  There are prayers in the Western Isles that start off, 
"In the Power of the Three," though this would seem to be 
connected with the Triple Goddess rather than the 
Christian Trinity.  But wasn't the feminine repressed in 
Christianity?

A:  It is likely that the triple forces in the old prayers 
refer to the Triple Bridget, an important saint in the 
Celtic Church.  She was the goddess of the threefold fire:  
of poetic inspiration, or transformative therapy, and 
smithcraft.

Q:  The Celtic tradition is unique for its comfortable shift 
into Christianity.  When did the relationship between the 
two become a problem?

A:  To a certain extent this is a misrepresentation.  The 
  ancient world was, actually, fairly tolerant.  The Romans 
  only banned two religions, the Druids and the Christians, 
  both for political reasons.  The real problem came when 
  Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire -- 
  there was a drive to get other forms of Christianity 
  understate control.

Q:  Is there any equivalent to Adam and Eve eating of the 
Tree of Knowledge?

A:  The idea of the Tree that links worlds, bearing powerful 
fruit, the eating of which causes changes within 
ourselves, is widespread.  The idea is of a powerful thing 
that, if you take it in one way, destroys you, but if you 
take it in the right way, transforms you.  Much like being 
in the world in general, as a matter of fact.  But this 
theme is handled less divisively in the older traditions.

To find light, you must first go through the regenerative 
darkness.  I have a feeling (said Stewart) that many 
current spiritual practices will come to be seen as being 
unnatural and harmful as the current methods of raising 
battery hens and force-fed plants.  Earth traditions are 
about going down into the land and achieving balance.

Q:  How is the triune alliance of humans, fairies and 
creatures  brought into the world and used?

A:  I'll have to become, reluctantly, metaphysical here.  
Think of three circles in an equilateral triangle
    o        in balanced interaction.  It is not a matter 
of domination, or a matter of graciously bringing
  /    \      a spiritual dimension into the lives of the 
spiritually deprived.  Each type of being has its
o      o    own strong points.  When all three get 
together, a complete balance results.  Human beings are 
traditionally said to comprise 4 elements, with a central 
fifth, which is being.  Fairy beings are said to be 
composed of three elements (though of course each element 
actually has all four within it):  "they have the power of 
Love but not the human emotion".  Animals have two 
elements; elemental beings have one.

4+3+2+1=10, the complete Tree, or, more appropriately, the 
Pythagorean tetractys.  The theme is one of completion.  
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had for a while the 
practice of forcing marriages with fairy beings to 
compensate for weak spots in certain members, though this 
has not been widely reported.  Many problems arose from 
this practice, many imbalances and energetic problems.  
The problems resulted from the root attitude, derived from 
the dogmatic and authoritarian attitudes of the age, that 
fairy beings were to be ordered about.  I can't remember 
where it was -- can you John?  In some book about the 
  Golden Dawn.

  {One of the charming implications of Jonson's _Alchemist_ 
  is that it was at least a believable plot gimmick that con 
  artists would trick someone into believing that he was 
  going to be able to marry the Queen of the Fairies -- for 
  an appropriate fee.}

Q:  What about feminine manifestations of Lucifer, or 
Lucifer as an androgynous being?

A:  Polarity emerges more as one comes closer to the 
surface.  At the deepest levels, things approach Unity.  
Separation and polarization increase as one rises toward 
the surface.  But nevertheless, every part has an 
androgynous whole within it.  In fairy experiences, beings 
may change form, or be androgynous.

Q:  Merlin at one point asks his sister to build an 
observatory, but when she does, her husband dies.  What 
does he die of?  What kind of metaphor is this?

A:  I'm not sure I see it as a metaphor.  In the _Vita 
Merlini_,, there is a square of personae, linked with the 
seasons and directions.  Merlin is linked with Winter and 
the North; his wife ...Gwendolena?  I forget! --.. is 
linked with East and Spring; his brother-in-law Rhydderch 
is linked with Summer and South; his sister Ganieda is 
linked with West and Autumn.  This provides a balanced 
square of seasons and elements, though it should not be 
taken too rigidly.  Rydderch is the Fairy King of the 
Summer Lands; at his death, there is an elegy for him as 
having been everything that is kingly.  His death probably 
has to do with the turning of the wheel of the seasons, 
and the elegy is like the laments for Tammuz or Orpheus.

Q:  Rhydderch is seen as a Good King, but when his wife 
undertakes spiritual work, he dies, she leaves her 
children, and so on.

A:  She is a human persona of a goddess figure:  not a 
helper or apprentice to Merlin, but the one who gives him 
his power.

Q:  Are there parallels between Merlin's brother-in-law and 
Arthur?

A:  I don't know.  Some, perhaps.  Perhaps you should ask 
John?

Q:  Is this an inner drama perhaps paralleling the outer 
drama of Arthur?

A:  (Matthews)  I don't know.  Ganieda does become Nimue, 
  who sets out to control Merlin.  What began as a brother-
  sister relationship goes bad.

A:  (Stewart)  There is also the important theme of Sleepers 
Within The Land, awaiting their time of awakening.  It has 
something to do with collective awareness.  The Titans, 
Arthur, Merlin, Barbarossa, Charlemagne, Snow White 
(guarded by rings of humans, animals, and powerful dwarfs -- 
not the Disney version!), Kronos, Lucifer.  Basically, 
though, the sleep is ours, not theirs.  They only appear 
to be sleeping to us, because of the mirroring effect of 
the inner realms.  The collapse of Communism is one 
example of the awakening of a sleeper:  deep changes often 
ferment through as difficulties.  When Sleepers wake up, 
things change -- whether we like it or not.

Q:  A modern parallel exists in conspiracy folklore--

A:  Yes:  Kennedy, Elvis...

Q:  What about dragons and Merlin?

A:  Dragons represent energies within the land, as in 
Chinese tradition, and Norse and Celtic traditions too.  
The interactions of dragons can cause changes in the 
energy.  Prophecy is the awakening of dragons.  This is 
the old underworld idea of prophecy.

Q:  What about the process of summoning the ancestors?

A:  Mixed with the idea of fairy beings is the idea of 
ancestors.  All of humanity is linked within the planet.  
We can encounter the ancestors within the body of the land -- 
not as dead beings, as in spiritualist contacts with the 
Summerland, but as living consciousnesses.  It is a 
continuum of being that obviates all ideas of time and 
space.  When we visit the underworld, we can find 
ourselves being ancestors to those from our future.  Time, 
the past and future:  they are, from the underworld 
perspective, fictions.  It is all now.

{This was the last exchange of the evening.  We gathered 
ourselves up, and wandered off into the night.}

                           Remarks

  Here I'll just make some preliminary remarks, saving a 
general summary for the second part of this report, covering 
the workshop.  Stewart's presentation was calm,gracious and 
in control -- I had rather expected, from certain passages 
in his book, a choleric personage somewhat like Donald Duck 
on a bad day.  His stage presence is practiced and 
effectie.

  I found his historical remarks somewhat off the mark, more 
in tune with modern legend than with the complexities of 
real history.  He did not, it is true, come across as one of 
those people who complains with a straight face about how 
dreadful it was when the Pope burned 93 billion witches in 
Salem, but he definitely echoed the Mind Control Conspiracy 
theory of history shared by the Two Bills (Burroughs and 
Gray, each of course in their own way).

  It may well be of course that my own lack of aversion to 
Christianity comes from my minimal daily contact with it:  
no one in my household but myself could give even the 
vaguest account of Christianity (or any other Western 
religion), though the Lung Men Taoist once ended up at a 
Catholic Mass and politely took communion with everyone 
else, exhibiting a truly Taoist ability to go with the 
demands of the moment.  To me, Christianity has long been 
something one reconstructs, like Celtic Voodoo, Arthurian 
Shamanism, or Aztec Pizza Parties, from books and 
sympathetic speculation, and I am a poor judge of what it 
must be like to live daily surrounded by Presbyterians.

  It is often the case that the farther a religion is, the 
better it seems:  thus the charm of Indian or Chinese 
religions to Europeans or Americans, who have no idea all 
what it means to live in the societies from which those 
religions come.  One thinks, too, of the admirers of 
Amazonian shamanism for whom Amazonian life is at most 
something one samples every decade of so for a few months (I 
except Kurt Nimuendaju, whose attitudes were no doubt so 
reprehensible that he was able to live as an Amazonian 
without regret, though not without sending ethnographic 
reports back to the other world).

  It is hard to assess, of course, the full context of a 
practice from a single lecture.  It does seem though that 
Stewart has, as one says, stood the pessimist gnosis on its 
head, taking as the Black Iron Prison not the world of 
matter with its underworld appanages, but rather the jejune 
and oppressive world of Light, presided over by Old 
Nobodaddy, evil archangels manifesting as the owners of 
large commercial record companies, and corrupting angelic 
hosts of advertising agencies.

  Now, I'm not at all unsympathetic to the notion that one 
of the first steps in spiritual life, as in ordinary 
childhood, is to Just Say No; but one cannot be two years 
old forever, and eventually one wants to say other things -- 
and even, from time to time, to say Yes (if only under that 
old Spanish wall...).

  But I will break off here, and reserve further 
observations for a later time.



--LeGrand Cinq-Mars
rjb@u.washington.edu