Toward Ecosophy

Maybe it's just an idiosyncrasy of mine, but the older I get, the more my interests focus on making the most of the ideas and interests and commitments I've already got, rather than zooming off into new territory. It's as though when I was young, I spent my time collecting raw materials, and now that I've got a good collection it's time to do something with them. 

That gradual shift of focus has sent me back to the books that influenced me most powerfully in my teens and twenties. A few evenings ago, as part of that, I pulled my battered old first edition copies of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy down from my bookshelves for the first time in something like thirty years. 

I suspect most of my readers have at least heard of the trilogy in question. For those who haven't, it's a giddy satirical romp of a tale in which two New York cops start on the trail of the uber-conspiracy to end all conspiracies, the Bavarian Illuminati, and quickly get entangled in a preposterous set of events in which a giant golden submarine crewed by anarchists, a Las Vegas pimp, the number 23, H.P. Lovecraft, the head of all organized crime in North America, a plague that could end all life on earth, talking dolphins, Nazi zombies, Yog-Sothoth, fnord, and the ruins of ancient Atlantis all play parts -- and that's just for starters.

It's very much a product of its time, full of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll back when those hadn't become quite so hackneyed in literature and the downsides of the counterculture's habits were still easy to ignore. It's also got the very odd attitude you so often saw in fiction written by men during that era, in which women who were "liberated" inevitably demonstrated that by making themselves sexually available to every man in sight. (Rereading the series has given me a little more insight into the forces that made 1970s feminism inevitable.) The writing is uneven, and the nonlinear narrative -- very fashionable in avant-garde fiction in those days -- doesn't always work. Nonetheless, it was (and is) a lively read, and it had a huge influence on a very broad swath of late 20th century alternative culture. 

It also had a huge influence on me. I'm not an original thinker; my imagination needs an existing stock of ideas to work with, which is why my most successful fiction was riffing off either Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (Retrotopia) or Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos (The Weird of Hali and its associated novels), and why my best occult writing always involves starting from an existing body of tradition and then doing new things with it. One of the reasons I've been reading the books that shaped my imagination in my younger days is precisely to trace some of my ideas to their roots. I found quite a number of those ideas in the three volumes of Illuminatus! -- including a good many whose source I'd forgotten. My readers will doubtless have seen me noting that belief in coincidence is the most common superstition of the age of science; that was nearly a word-for-word quote from one of the trilogy's characters. 

The thing that struck me most forcefully, though, was the extent to which my whole venture into tentacle fiction was subconsciously shaped by the Illuminatus! trilogy.  The central theme of the Haliverse, the confrontation between the arrogance of human reason and the reality of a universe too vast and intricate for us to understand, is also central to the trilogy; the Radiance, my world-dominating secret society of mad rationalists, is a recognizable descendant of Shea's and Wilson's Bavarian Illuminati; and there are dozens of other subtler references and reflections. I hadn't remembered, for that matter, just how much of the Cthulhu mythos Shea and Wilson put into their work -- of course I didn't know the mythos anything like as well back then as I do now. Still, the fact remains that in a certain sense, my tentacle novels can be seen as a commentary on the Illuminatus! trilogy -- and in another sense, somewhere out there in the morgenheutegesternwelt, the Illuminatus! trilogy can be seen as a commentary on The Weird of Hali. 

And of course it was also a trip back a good many decades, to the days when I finally had the chance to close the door on a mostly unhappy childhood and stretch my horizons a bit -- but I suppose plenty of aging people have similar feelings when looking back on the enthusiasms of their own younger selves. 

I recently heard of the passing of one of the teachers with whom I studied occultism in my teens.

Back in the late 1970s, when I lived with my dad and stepmother in a generic south Seattle suburb, the University of Washington had a program called the Experimental College, which offered classes on basically anything and everything for the general public. It was a wondrous thing, with a lot of practical classes but a good-sized helping of what wasn't yet called New Age material as well, and these latter reliably blended utter malarkey and genuine wisdom into a heady brew. I adored it, and took class after class after class. 

One fall I signed up for a class titled "Moon Letters of Lorien: Secret Lore of the Faerie Kingdom," and duly caught the bus to an apartment building in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood -- and that's how I met Guenn: the Rev. Guenn D. Eona, as she was then -- the "Nimue" came later. Her teachings were a free mix of Theosophy, Celtic traditions, material from the nascent New Age movement, and the products of her own trance mediumship. She was the one who introduced me to Findhorn and the writings and teachings that came out of it, and she's also the one who first got me thinking about the intersection between spirituality and ecology. 

I took some classes from her, and then moved to Bellingham to start my college education, and my life and my spiritual work went down different roads. Guenn and I corresponded briefly many years later, when I was head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America; I visited her website, Anglamarke, from time to time; and her youngest son contacted me a few days ago to let me know that she'd died. 

Though my path turned out to be very different from hers, as I look back on those days, I can see the roots of some of the most important themes in my work in that little Capitol Hill apartment, with a cup of herb tea in one hand and a pen in another, part of a circle of students listening to Guenn's vivid accounts of her inner experiences. 

Farewell, Guenn. May the Great Ones welcome you into the halls of Light.