The Kingdom Is Asleep: Stories & Spells (Part I)
In the story of Briar Rose, we find a kingdom that has fallen asleep under a spell. The kingdom is surrounded by a briar thorn hedge that no one can seem to penetrate.
Perhaps you see it too; a world under a spell. Or many spells.
It’s good not to be naive about the number of spells we are under these days and how costly it is to break them.
But I’d like to wonder a bit about the relationship between stories and spells.
In her book The Celtic Spirit, Caitlin Matthews, Celtic scholar and author, poses the question like this:
“She tells that when Merlin is exposed to the terrible carnage of the battle of Arfderwydd he becomes mad and runs into the depths of the forest. Within the forest’s embrace, he becomes one with the trees and seasons and puts aside the terrible sights he has seen to focus upon the gifts of the wild world, becoming rusticated and “uncivilized.”
Ever pertinent and prophetic, he sees through the pretexts and pretensions of those who come to lure him back to civilization with the sure instinct of an animal.
He does not respond to anyone except his friend, the Welsh poet, Taliesin who comes to sit with him. Only then does Merlin respond, asking the odd question, “Why do we have weather?”
We see here a man deep in trauma — a sort of fracturing of the mind. A fractured mind is wide open to all manner of spells. Sometimes spells come from the outside but sometimes they are a decision we make that becomes a spell, forged in the emotional intensity of the moment. I could imagine Merlin carrying the spells of, “There is no more beauty in the world of humans” or “Humans can’t be trusted”.
And so Merlin is not only traumatized but under spells.
We will come back to them towards the end and how stories might be used to heal trauma and free people of their spells.
I’m not stuck on semantics.
I know that, for some people, ‘story’ can mean ‘lie’ or ‘untruth’ or ‘didn’t really happen’. I know that, for some people, the word spell has many beautiful and powerful connotations.
To say anything at all on this, I’ve had to find two words — story and spell — and press them into a service that I think they were built for. I hope I am right and that I’ve not asked too much of them. What I am laying out are two different ways of proceeding through life, two sets of tools that might be used: the path of stories and the road of spells. If you have different names for those two or a more nuanced understanding, and if you use or understand these words differently, bless that too.
Are spells the same as blessings, prayers, hexes, charms, conjurings and curses or incantations and enchantments of all kinds? For the sake of this piece, I am saying, ‘no’. For the sake of this piece, I am using the word ‘spell’ to mean something in particular to become free of; a sort of temporary, energetic projection and imposition of the human will on the world that binds the world and must be broken.
When I say ‘story’, I don’t mean Aesops fables — the predigested pablum with the moral handed to you so that the story itself becomes unnecessary. I mean the good stories. The folklore. The old tales.
In short, I want to make the case that stories help us see the world more clearly and become more human and spells prevent us from doing so.
It must also be said that there is more going on in this world than storytelling and spell casting. There’s more to the world than listening (or not) to stories and being put under someone’s spell (or resisting it).
The binary notion that the world divides into two opposing sides may be one of the greatest spells of our time.
So, with those provisos and a heaping portion of ‘maybe’, I offer up this wondering on some of the differences between culture and civilization to set the table properly.
Culture and Civilization
From Stephen Jenkinson, I learned the following formulation that begins with his wondering of what a tool is.
Tools are such a deeply human thing. You can find them in every human culture.
They extend the function and range of the human hand and they do it in a way that the hand can still recognize itself. But then, what of machine? Is machine just the exponential increase of tool? Or could it be that machine, while it can extend the range of the human hand (or ear, or eye or nose or mouth) does so in a way that the human body no longer recognizes itself? If so, perhaps this is because a machine’s function is not really to extend the human hand but rather to extend the human will.
By the time that machine becomes AI, we have lost all reference to the human body. We face an utterly disembodied extension of our will and imagination.
The human hand has its limits. But the human will and imagination? We’ve yet to find the limits for those.
To deepen this a step further: It seems that all deeply achieved human cultures find roots in their willingness to obey the limits granted to them by life and all civilizations, without exception, find themselves uprooted by their unwillingness to do so. The willingness to submit to limits is what creates the requisite grief and gratitudes of being a human being while seeing those same limits as the enemy of our freedoms creates grievance instead.
And so on the one hand we have: tool, hand, culture and grief.
On the other hand we have: machine, will, civilization and grievance.
This is what I remember hearing from Stephen. I hope I’ve rendered it faithfully for you here.
And, if I might be so bold, I’ll add one more to the list.
That which feeds the memory in humans to obey the limits and ways of life is ‘story’.
That which feeds the entitlement of humans to trample over every limit, boundary and ending they find, and which whispers to humans, ‘Those don’t belong. They shouldn’t be there.’ are ‘spells’.
Stories are a kind of deep reportage. Spells seem to be a kind of argument with how things are.
The truth of the world is that everything ends, everyone dies, nothing is forever and nothing is inevitable. Story gives voice to this. Spells conceal this from us.
Stories are the food of culture.
Spells might just be the synthetic drugs and processes — the antibiotics, steroids, the uppers and downers, the pasteurization and preservatives — that allow civilization to continue long past its due date.
To say it another way, spells are the undoing of culture. Stories are the undoing of civilization.
To read the rest of this series:
The Kingdom Is Asleep: Stories & Spells (Part II)
The Kingdom Is Asleep: Stories & Spells (Part III)
The Kingdom Is Asleep: Stories & Spells (Part IV)
I am basking in the aftermath of reading another brilliant missive from you, Tad, thank you...and there is a part 2 yet to read, wow.
I've been studying and experimenting with something that gets called Memetic Engineering, memes being to intellectual bodies what genes are to physical bodies. As genes get together to create body parts, functions, biological reality, so do memes get together to become thoughtforms such as stories, spells, beliefs, opinions, etc.
I appreciate so much your discerning, your questions, your possibilities, and the openness and integrity with which you offer them.
Love Nicole
Bless your kind words and encouragement to keep going <3