Who are your imaginal ancestors?—The one where imagination never really died.

Now we must tell the alternative history of consciousness—trace the unbroken chain that was there all along.

William Blake, Glad Day

[Hello! There’s a recording of this piece above, again. My voice is a little strange at the moment because I’m feeling physically electrocuted by ideas, so please forgive any throatiness. There’s also some weird chair creaking at various points in the background, and I’m still using my iPhone because I haven’t had a chance to follow up on your super helpful suggestions about better ways to record. And now I’m going to stop apologising for myself in this extremely English way.]

Well, that was a surprise. Welcome to all the new subscribers who’ve joined since last time. The comment thread on my last essay has brought me so much joy. It feels like someone turned the light on and showed me that this room I’m in has been full of people all along.

The reason I’m in this room with you all—the reason I’ve been thinking so much about John Dee and dreaming and the Reformation and cave paintings and the medieval mystics and consciousness—is that for three years, I’ve been desperate to figure out what the hell happened in England, and specifically the part of it I’m from, southeast England. Three years ago, I moved back here after eleven years abroad, and I was terrified. Over the eleven years that I’d been away, I’d come to see that my early life—the years I’d spent here up to the age of 26—had been spent in something like an allergic reaction to Englishness. I’ll spare you the details—suffice it to say that being a child with Big Feelings in a regional and class culture where Big Feelings were feared and forbidden left me in a bit of a pickle, and now I spend several hours a week in addiction-recovery meetings. (I want to add that that’s no fault of my wonderful parents or teachers or any of the other adults around me back then. Everyone did their best. I just happened to be a very intense child, living in a culture that was wrong for me and seems to be wrong for a whole lot of other people too.)

And yet three years ago, England was calling me back. I needed to come home. And if I was going to come home, I was going to have to be a grown-up about it. Instead of feeling sorry for myself or acting out again, I was going to have to try to understand what had happened, not just to me, but to my culture and my country—because I knew by this point that my own struggles were a drop in the ocean of the pain this particular version of Englishness had caused. I knew that not being allowed to feel Big Feelings was somehow part of the same detachment from full, feeling, imaginative humanity that had enabled my country to colonize a quarter of the world, get rich on human trafficking i.e. the slave trade, spark the Industrial Revolution, and so much more.

If I was going to live here, I was going to need to understand how and why all this happened. And so that’s what I’ve been researching, for three years. And I’ve found that there’s one version of the story that goes a little like the following. We’ll get to the alternative version in just a minute. (Please note that what follows is necessarily a wildly truncated and incomplete version of events. It is probably “powerfully flawed,” per a comment on my last post that made me laugh out loud. This is just a working map of the story that I’m still in the process of putting together for myself.)

• There might have been humans in England for up to a million years, but the evidence suggests that humans have consistently occupied the region since the end of the last major ice age, about 12–13,000 years ago. We can’t really know what life was like for those earliest people, of course, but I have a lot of time for Sean Kane’s ideas about the cosmologies of Paleolithic and Mesolithic societies, which he writes about (among other things) in his book Wisdom of the Mythtellers. Here’s a little sample:

Our present civilization, with its fields full of rice and wheat and corn and livestock, is based on the Neolithic technique of actually managing food into being. Without leaving that world of managed natural resources, it is practically impossible to feel our way to the spirituality of human beings who lived without agriculture. These were people who greeted all forms of life on earth as intelligent kin and, as far as we can tell, saw themselves as just another species sharing a habitat. The hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic participated in a vast ecology in which the bodies occupied by essentially spiritual beings—the body-masks—were borrowed for food. The plants and animals would give of themselves for food, so long as certain rules were followed and an attitude of respect for the providers was maintained.

• As that quote suggests, the severance from spirit and belonging and kinship might well have begun around 4000 BCE, when agriculture arrived on this island, forever altering the human relationship with the living world. This agricultural severance might have been particularly marked in Britain, because the arrival of agriculture coincided with the arrival of the Beaker People, who seem to have almost completely replaced the population living here before them.

• Bla bla, I know a lot of people don’t care much about prehistory, but here’s something we do need to note. It’s common for English people seeking their roots to look to Celtic cultures, and particularly to the Welsh myths like those now collected in the Mabinogion. This makes sense, since we know that the cultures now described as Celtic (which is a complicated term) spread across this whole island, including England, before the Romans arrived. And yet it’s worth noting that what we now think of as the Celtic age maps onto the Iron Age, i.e. an era beginning around 800 BCE—by which time Great Britain had been consistently occupied for well over 10,000 years and seems to have already had its population wiped out and replaced at least once. When you look at it this way, the Celts were blow-ins too. And it would be a mistake to think that Iron Age/Celtic Britain was some sort of dandelion-worshipping idyll. It seems to have been a highly stratified and warlike society. If violence indicates a society that feels a degree of unsafety and unbelonging (and I don’t see how it could indicate anything else, personally), then the unbelonging on this isle seems to have set in before Caesar ever set his sights on Blighty.

• Then of course came the Roman invasion, which began with Caesar’s thwarted attempt in 55 BCE and then hit full-force in 43 CE. There were attempts to bargain. There were bloody rebellions. There was Boudica. And some parts of the island held strong, notably in the west and north, giving Wales and Cornwall and Scotland their remaining connection to the Celtic culture. But not in my part. In the southeast, we were thoroughly colonized and Romanized, and a gulf began to open between us and the rest of the country. I believe that this was an important inflection point in the severance we’ve been tracking.

• Which left the people of this land in a real pickle, of course, when Rome began to fall and the Romans withdrew from England in around 410 CE. And this moment of ruin and devastation is where English identity as we know it begins. We all know this story: after Rome fell, the Angles and Saxons and Jutes poured in, bringing their Germanic language and their highly hierarchical kinship structure with them.

• I’ve spent quite a lot of my life studying the Anglo-Saxons, and the main thing I’ve concluded is that I definitely would not have liked to live among them. This culture at the root of modern Englishness seems to have been absolutely fucking miserable, if you ask me. These were new arrivals in a land they didn’t understand, a land that was cold and windy and barren and a long way from their gods, and where they had to fight off the remaining Celts and Romanised British. Before long, the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity, and though I’m sure there was comfort in that, there was also even more to lament about their lot. Because now they found themselves teetering at the farthest reach of the Christian empire (the centre of the world being in Rome yet again), ever at risk of falling out of God’s favour and back into the heathen wilds. If you want to know more about this era of Englishness, I’d highly recommend Tim Flight’s book Basilisks and Beowulf.

• I’m going to have to get quicker, or this is going to be a 10,000-word essay.

• Next: English identity proper was formed as a defence mechanism. For hundreds of years, Anglo-Saxon England was a ragged collection of separate and often warring and, as I’ve noted, probably fucking miserable kingdoms. There was no such thing as Englishness. Then King Alfred waged a culture war to unify England under one tongue and one ruler (namely, himself), in response to the threat from Viking invaders. Which means that the unified English identity was a weapon of war, wielded by a people whose literature and culture were founded on a sense of alienation and unbelonging. So that’s a promising start, isn’t it?

• There’s also lots to be said here about literacy and writing and the way they impact a sense of belonging to the land and actively shrink the consciousness contract, but I don’t have space to go into it here. I’ll save it for a future essay.

• Let’s skip a few hundred years to the Norman Conquest. This dispossessed the ordinary English—the people Alfred had not-so-long-since united under the English identity—and brought them under the power of an Anglo-Norman elite, in a brutally feudal society. As far as I can tell, this was the moment when England’s class system really solidified.

• But look. Though the Norman Conquest was the end of a certain kind of world for the English, I’m not going to tell you that the English Middle Ages were a time of deadened imagination. This isn’t a neatly linear story. And in fact—maybe precisely because of the very firm class system?—folk practices seem to have flourished in the Middle Ages. This was when English culture got its folk heroes like Robin Hood. The deeply devout Christianity that had now thoroughly taken hold here gave us homegrown mystics like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, and folk and Christian rites combined to create a deeply ritualized structure to the year, in which people were constantly in and out of ritual time—meaning, in and out of altered consciousness.

• And of course, there was all sorts of bloody and awful stuff going on too. The Crusades. The expulsion of England’s Jewish population. England’s murderous treatment of our neighbours on the British Isles. The beginning of the enclosure of the commons, which further severed people from land. Terrible battles of succession. Crop failures and famines. The plague, which before modern medicine was often interpreted as a curse or evidence of human evil or of the fundamental unsafety of the living world.

• In my reckoning, these warring instincts, this polarity of expansiveness and fear/violence, led us right to the turning point I discussed in my last essay: the early modern moment and the birth of modern rationalism, meaning the solidification of a shrunken consciousness contract and the increasing recognition of rational waking consciousness as the only real domain.

• From there, it’s a hop, skip, and jump through Puritanism, the final stamping out of folk ways, the fall of Merry England, and perhaps most famously, witch trials.

• Through, too, the growth of empire, which as we saw last time is a result of a restricted consciousness contract. Worse—once we started perpetrating the atrocities of colonialism on the world, we HAD to stay in shrunken consciousness, so as not to feel the horror of what we were doing.

• With unfeeling rationalism now thoroughly on the ascendant, we move through the “Enlightenment” or scientific revolution, and on to the Industrial Revolution.

• Until finally we arrive at the pinnacle of this particular version of history: the Victorian stiff upper lip. Young English boys shipped off to boarding schools en masse to have their Big Feelings and their imaginations beaten out of them, so they could become little soldiers of empire.

That’s one (patchy! Whistlestop! Incomplete! Powerfully flawed!) way of telling this story.

That’s the version I’ve been stuck in for the past few years.

But now, I’m beginning to see that it’s actually the wrong story, or at least far from the full story. I’m beginning to see that it’s guilty of a version of what Mark Fisher, may he rest in peace, would have called capitalist realism, in that it doesn’t allow for any alternative. It attempts to reject the tightening of England’s consciousness contract—but it fails, because it accepts the impoverished terms of that straitened contract. It simply looks at those terms from the other side.

What I’m trying to say is, there’s no imagination in it.

And if we’re going to step outside of the story, we’re going to have to use our imaginations—and look back to the lineage of people who never forgot how to use theirs, even as the straitjacket seemed to tighten.

All of which, really, is a very long preamble to this:

There was another history all along.

Imagination—the great consciousness—was not just trying to break through but really and truly breaking through all along.

And the work now is to find the unbroken chain of imagination. To honour the great consciousness by recognizing that she’s always been here. I can’t really explain why, but I know in my bones that we will never successfully live into the present opportunity to expand the consciousness contract unless we honour the full lineage of our imaginal ancestors.

(And by the way, if I seem to be using the terms “imagination” and “consciousness” interchangeably, that’s because in my conception, they’re very closely related.)

So who are those imaginal ancestors? Who are the links in the unbroken chain?

I’m only going to offer two of my own. Partly because I want to hear who yours are. And partly because this essay is already turning into a bloody encyclopaedia.

I’ve chosen both of these imaginal ancestors precisely because they lived at moments when the consciousness contract was closing, was tightening—but instead of capitulating to the ambient fear or short-sighted rationalism, they became blazing channels of imagination.

In fact, I suspect these mystics might have blazed so brightly specifically because of all the ambient tightening of the consciousness contract. The great consciousness once flowed through to the material realm easily, through widespread human openness. But when she found her routes restricted, she had to pour forth copiously in the few channels that remained open. That’s why it seems to have been so painful to be, for instance, William Blake.

In any case, let me offer to you two imaginal ancestors, two links in this unbroken chain:

Julian of Norwich

I’ll admit it’s taken me a while to accept Julian as an imaginal ancestor. I guess I couldn’t quite get my head around choosing to lock yourself up. She was born in 1342, about five years before the first outbreak of plague in England, though of course the plague would recur for centuries. Some scholars believe that Julian lost her child and husband in a later outbreak, and that that was part of what prompted her to become an anchorite. Around the age of thirty, she had a series of mystical experiences—direct knowings of god—and spent the rest of her life locked up in a cell attached to a cathedral in Norwich, unfolding and being with those visions.

What’s striking about her is that despite probably having lost her husband and infant, her mystical insight—the thing revealed to her by the great consciousness, and which she spent her entire life unfolding for the greater good—was that divine love is the animating force of the universe and the deepest truth of all things.

Remember that this was at a time when many of her contemporaries were turning to self-flagellation, so convinced were they that the plague was a punishment from god for their sins.

I’ve come to see the strength of Julian’s visions as evidence of how intensely the great consciousness wants us to know its truth: that it is a life-giving rather than a life-denying force. And I’ve embraced Julian as an imaginal ancestor because after her bereavement, it would have been so easy for her to shut down and choose the path of fear and pain. Instead, she opened up—and consciousness chose her as a conduit.

William Blake

I know Blake is an imaginal ancestor because last year, I had my own mystical experience while reading his work; something I wrote about here. This mystical experience came courtesy of the teaching of Valentin Gerlier, the best teacher of Blake around.

Poor old Blake was born at the height of the Enlightenment, and lived his life in a culture that wanted nothing more than to shine the bright light of rationalist enquiry on everything. Like Julian, he seemed to be surrounded by people who worshipped a punisher god conceived out of fear and denial of life—a Nobodaddy, as Blake put it. This was a time of severely restricted consciousness contract—and then along comes Blake, having visions and writing prophecies and championing a god who embodied imagination itself. It’s plain to me that the ferocity of his imagination was directly related to the imaginal barrenness of his time. (Incidentally, the later Romantics don’t get to be in my personal imaginal ancestry. Well, Coleridge might have had one or two very brief moments. But Wordsworth can piss right off.)

Anyway. In case you were in any doubt about Blake, here’s what happened to Allen Ginsberg after one Blake-reading session. He started having auditory hallucinations, and then saw that “some hand had placed the whole universe in front of me”:

Not that some hand had placed the sky but that the sky was the living blue hand itself. Or that God was in front of my eyes—existence itself was God… What I was seeing was a visionary thing, it was a lightness in my body… my body suddenly felt light, and a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise.

Now that’s an imaginal ancestor.

Who does the same for you? Who are your ancestors—be they writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, anything? I don’t mean craftsmen who knew how to paint a good nude or turn a good sentence. I mean the conduits of the great consciousness herself. Help me honour that consciousness and her unflagging efforts, by tracing the links of this unbroken chain.

Love,

xx Ellie

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Bibliography:

• Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain

• Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England

• Ronald Hutton, The Witch

• Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers

• Tim Flight, Basilisks and Beowulf

• Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

• Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

• William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books