Magic, Mythos & The Fellowship of The Liminal Web
As I've let the mythos of The Lord of The Rings speak to and through me I’ve begun sensing deeper confluences between the mythos of Tolkien, (his friend C.S Lewis) and the liminal web. For readers unaware, the liminal web is a network of artists, wisdom-seekers, channels, and creators who are holding humanity in ‘liminality’. It’s the space between what was and what is in, a space in which we are in some ways compelled to surrender in order to begin navigating chaos. In this piece, we’ll go on a journey to discover how the liminal web and a magical mythos meet.
The recent episode of the Emerald podcast ‘For the intuitives’ brought to life in a profoundly artful way the reality and necessity of seers, visions, channels and various forms of knowing that live beyond the pale of modern thinking.
The podcast explored how these forms of knowing were first subjected to suppression by the church and later by scientistic culture which eradicated other forms of knowing. The message of the Emerald was that these suppressions were unsuccessful; these ways of knowing and the realities they point to did not go away. He argues that these individuals with unrecognised capacities are often pushed into mentally illness and other maladies arising from unfulfilled gifts.
In the past year I received several first hand accounts from women who personally experienced or had family members with ‘unique psychic abilities’. They were things like speaking in tongues and seeing or speaking with the dead. These capacities seemed to be present and manifest in them children and later cut off or suppressed as part of becoming ‘normal’. In one story, this cutting off seemed to directly lead to negative impact on the person’s health.
When Tolkien and C.S Lewis published over 70 years ago they forged worlds of magic out of the ashes of two industrial world wars. It remains a profound achievement at the height of modernity. In their worlds visions, myths, dreams and magic form the very substance of the characters lives. These aspects of reality often become known when I character steps into into the unknown but often times the unknown comes knocking first.
In this piece, I’m weaving the significance of mythos, seers and the collective crisis that the liminal web has emerged to help us navigate. I believe that today we are on the runway into an 'eye of the needle' for humanity. Our very sense beingness and context as humans will soon be thrown into question by God-like technologies. Simultaneously, our God-like capacities for industry threaten to destroy our home and ‘kill our mother’. It is this crisis of the ages that the ‘liminal web’ and humanity are called to address. The ‘all seeing eye’ of sauron in the LOTR, a totalising society in which every single movement is tracked, controlled analysed by an AI surveillance state, has never been more possible.
For the past 4 years I've tracked the profound ‘meta-conversation’ (of many interconnected dialogues) within the liminal web. In that conversation, a faith that humanity can pass through this eye of the needle has been fostered alongside a recognition that our prevailing ways of thinking and being cannot. There is some combination of innovation in consciousness and a deep remembering of things lost that are now necessary. It is needed in order to access the collective spirit and intelligence required to overcome the spiral into dystopia. Sensemaking is the embodied concept that expresses this; calling upon different practices, psychotechnologies (plant medicine, water, meditation fasting), indigenous/ancestral intelligence, the power of ‘we-space’ (dialogos and other practices) and metaphysical aid (god, spirit, faith) to navigate from a deeper, more intuitive and connected place.
However, Mythos remains the slowest developing part of the conversation. I believe, based on these discussions, that it may be one of the most important pieces. The liminal web opened a space ‘in between worlds’ where individuals called to transformation in consciousness could find community. In these powerful, immersive, and emergent social spaces, we have been training to become more skilled and creativity amidst not-knowing. However, without a greater felt-sense story and living in mythos we remain insufficient to the paramount tasks of the age. Perhaps then for all the years of innovation we are still only in the pre-dawn hours of a new story.
I believe when we get down to the core, story remains the lifeblood of human beings. It was not by accident that the early early-christians spoke of story as akin to ‘bread’ or ‘living water’. Without bread and water, peoples perish. Religion as a ‘binding together’ held a way of transmitting story and the ‘bread of the (sacred) word’ to those hungry. Today we are not only bereft of story we are living on a diet of insufficient, fragmented and debased stories. We never rid ourselves of the need for story we replace it just as when we reject heirarchy, our attention inevitably still get's organised by some 'highest'. We always serve something, and we always elevate some value.
I propose that the Liminal web, in it’s greater destiny, is the band of spiritual genius misfits who, being discontent with the dying story, together create the space in which story itself can be born and re-born. That our work developing the capacity for uncertainty, liminality dialogos and oration are preparing the ground for something more. I expect you share some my skepticism and trepidation about any kind of predominating story new or old; and yet, it is precisely a culture of story that I feel emerging now. The great fruits of the Zoom revolution is still ripening on the vine.
When we think about a story that holds a lot of moreness there are few greater tales than that of Tolkien’s Fellowship. We can learn from this banding together of the courageous small creatures. From this richly aesthetic and lore based-world in which single acts of kindness and mercy can re-shape the course of all things. In which the courage of the small can surpass the totalizing and all seeing gaze of the great.
There have been many great conversations and conferences these past years which land on uncertain crescendos like 'how can the wisdom commons grow?', 'how can practices or plant medicines become mainstream?', 'how can spiritual community grow?', 'how can new ways of being spread through culture?'.The fellowship of the ring offers us a humble and powerful answer to that question scale. The nine that set out from Rivendell are in every sense small in number but their smallness allows them to weave a powerful path through the great currents of the age. The wisdom of the fellowship is able to move in dynamic relationship with the changing tides of war and collective efforts of legions of elves, men and dead ancestors fighting the battles of the age. At critical moments, the wisdom of the fellowship helps to overtly and covertly redirect these greater energies, giving counsel & performing acts of magic (Gandalf with Theoden), appealing to the men’s better angels (Frodo with Faramir) and subverting the great powers (Pippin at Minas Tirith)
The liminal web’s leadership can follow accordingly. Rather than attempting to scale into a major social force, it can engage in a dynamic living stewarding, alchemising and redirecting the energies of the age far beyond it's visible capacity.
We are at the very threshold of a disintegration in our worldview and perhaps a world order. Things will get crazy and crazier still. We are both already in it and taking in the deep breath before a deeper plunge. There will be profound pain, confusion and unrest as the birth contractions of planetary shift take place. There will be chaos. The function of liminal leadership, in its greater fulfilment, will be to help digest and direct these energies for the good. To make small and powerful nudges, while practicing the art of healing and fellowship. The great ‘field work’ of we-space, the myriad forms of body energy ‘clearing’ that are being cultivated, will constitute the foundation of a haven of reason and deep sensing during what may collectively feel like a fire in the mad house.
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A to X
Just as the third book of C.S Lewis’ Cosmos trilogy evolves from a rather quotidian boring university life into an entirely novel unleashing of archaic and celestial mythic forces, we too are entering a strangening. The science-fiction of C.S Lewis described extradimensional and extraterrestrial encounters in poetic, imaginative and theological terms. Perhaps unthinkable when it was written, today it offers a helpful preparation for what we may confront in this century. Liminal storytellers will draw upon Lewis and others to weave new and ancient stories in the cracks of the ever-fraying tapestry of modernity. As we weave in those cracks, the form of the tapestry itself begins to evolve into something almost unrecognisable and beautiful.
In the same Lewis book, the character Jane begins having prophetic and revelatory dreams that disrupt her qoutidian normal life. She is disturbed by them and wishes to be rid of them, seeking out wise counsel to find out what is going on inside her. However, she cannot be rid of them. Instead, with the aid of a ‘fellowship of the good’ her capacities are able to be held and understood in the context of a great happening. Instead of being consigned to mental illness or having her gifts captured by dark forces, she becomes a part of this larger movement. Today, I believe there are many such ‘Janes’ who need a door to walk through when their reality cracks open, that need a space that can recognise their capacity as a ‘seer’ and shepard it in service of humanities journey through the unknown.
There is no A-B through the metacrisis. Waves cover the horizon, we are navigating on faith and stars. We’re recognising that the shift needed is not from doing things to doing other things but at the very level of how we act, see and be. We are finding that we can only get from A-X by the aid of forces beyond us.
Our human gifts awakened in the hour of crisis, are doorways to tap into intelligences and spirits greater than our own, to remember ancient guidances. As we accommodate a space for this in culture, we must have some space in language too. The worlds of lore, dream and magic hold this space for us.
As so often expressed by Charles Eisenstein the way it can 'get done' cannot be planned. A synchronicity, a dream, and intuition bring about possibilities that were not on the maps. We can find a different kind of agency and lend ourselves to things 'wanting to happen'. For those with ears to hear, listen! For those without ears to hear, listen still! It is the re-awakening and space-making for lore that will allow those who don't hear to leave a pocket of space for those who do.
The meeting of the liminal web and the fellowship of the ring is a kind of liminal fellowship. A body of christ consciousness on earth which holds sufficiently high resonance in its collective field that it can send reverberations through the culture at large. The power of it's music can integrate the discord and shift us beyond polarity into a new place-re-directing the intensities of rupture and violence in service of light.
I know many of us lose touch with the importance of what we're doing but take heed. This practice of liminality, of sensing and being is the preparation for the next wave of crisis. So that when it comes, we can hold a space of deep listening, a space of suspended judgement, of careful reasoning and of timely decisiveness. The COVID years showed in the initial that we can maintain a space of free unfolding discourse, of re-examination while the mainstream culture collapses into fearful false certainties and destructive forms of informational control.
It’s not always apparent to us what we’re cultivating until the crisis hits. The person building the raft on the shore seems rather silly until the day of the flood. Gandalf plays a decisive role in stewarding the fate of all of middle earth, yet much of the time he lives in relative obscurity, sometimes welcomed and other times suspect. Strider as the king yet to return is distrusted by the common people who prefer to keep their distance, wary of his unrealised power. Middle Earth doesn’t appreciate the need for a Gandalf until. the dark hour, it doesn't appreciate the value of Bilbo Baggins adventurousness until a quest is needed, the return of the king remains a passing fantasy until it becomes precisely what is needed to save us all.
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This past week’s premiere SENSESPACE Live explored The Lord of The Rings and the Reality of Myth. The event included an opening mythos invocation, exploration of the redemption of man, mythos in ayahuasca stories and the core messages of Tolkien for our time on courage, fellowship and the corruption of total power.