Encounters with the Deep Past

A series for paid subscribers

Etching from the collection Una Vida Surrealista, by Leonora Carrington (1917- 2011)

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Hello dear readers,

I’m excited to start this new series of Sunday entries with you all! The vision is to share more of my journey, both past and present, in search of the the wisdoms of the ancient world. My encounters with the deep past, as it were.

The series will comprise an archive and a resource for anyone interested in the origins of religious experience, the fabulous animistic cosmologies of our earliest ancestors, academic evidence for prehistoric religious and ritual behaviour, the exploration and importance of other ways of knowing (besides - but not instead of! - academia), and a voyage into what some researchers refer to as the world’s oldest religion: shamanism.

These entries are very much informed by where I am, here in the Australian bush. And you will no doubt hear some of its songlines and mythlines weaving through the tapestry of words.

The series will contain further resources, including curated book recommendations, video lectures by respected thinkers and relevant documentaries, as well as a comment section open to paid subscribers for your thoughts, questions, and sharing of resources with each other.

To give you a sense of the trajectory we’ll be moving through, in the upcoming pieces I’ll be delving into what precisely is meant by “prehistory”, sharing some of my visits to prehistoric sites in Europe and Australia, discussing the problematics of the archeology of religion and offering commentary on the work of thinkers who have who have opened the ways to a more holistic understanding of our origins.

As the western world falters in the intensive care unit, defeated by the consequences of its oppressive missionary, colonial and Earth-ravaging projects of the past centuries, it seems those of us who descend from its plunder find ourselves faced with two choices.

Two roads diverge in Robert Frost’s dark woods. The question is, will we choose the one less travelled?

So far, we have continued on along the well-trodden path that leads, ultimately, to total annihilation.

On the one hand, I write in the backdrop of genocide, climate change, outrageously uneven distribution of wealth, a chilling rise in totalitarianism, the mutation of new viruses since the recent pandemic that our bodies are having to learn how to fight, an absence of ritual and rites of passage that means we self-initiate through destruction, no elders to show us how to be in the world, how to relate to each other, how to be in right-relationship. I don’t know if it’s ever been harder to love. To be in relationship. To know what it means to be a woman, or a man, or non-binary, without elders who teach us how.

Somehow, we still put our children through an educational system that was originally created to train the clergy. And we wonder why the life force is drained out of them by the time they reach high school.

The post-war conventions that were put in place to ensure things like the Holocaust would never happen again have now been thrown out the window as the US shows us it has some laws for its friends, and other laws for everyone else.

Palestine has catalysed our world to wake up.

And we are now watching the collapse of our systems.

This is the context of our times.

Continuing to uphold these systems and ways of thinking will lead to the destruction of our species. And who knows how much of the wild we will take down with us…

Through the Dark Forest, by Brian Froud

But there is another road, tender and shimmering with new possibility. I’d go so far as saying it has a quality of redemption.

It is undeniable that the dogmatic, colonial, clergical and overly-literal approach of our times has failed us. And the development of a new way of being in the world is growing in urgency.

If we lower our ear to the ground, we can hear something of the old rhythms still pulsing. And an earthen, primordial hand reaches from the bony places that survived the destruction: the folk traditions, creation stories and wisdom teachings of our earlier ancestors.

In the hours I spend alone out here in the Bush, woven by the Great Dreaming of this wild place, I have sensed a clear directive to share my search for the flickering remnants of that old world.

I think they are the healing salves we need in this socio-political and climate emergency, and the antidotes to the spiritual illness that emerges from this lack of knowledge of the Self and the other-than-human worlds.

The old stories tell us that all creation comes from destruction, from Chaos.

It is from this crumbling backdrop, from deep in the ashes of our predicament, that we are given the grace of a second chance.

Madonna holding a budding Passiflora (passion flower), Joos van Cleve c. 1530-1535, Cincinatti Art Museum

In the first part of this series next Sunday, I will begin by exploring all the ways of knowing, and discussing the importance of rooting ourselves ultimately in the imagination. I think that approaching the evidence we have through the metaphoric, polyvalent perceptions of the ancient worldview will be more helpful than literalisms and logic-reliant thinking alone.

If you find value in this publication, please do share it. Recommendations really help get my work out!

I hope you enjoy this series. And that over the coming months, our imaginations are propelled forth in the courage of the road less travelled.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

— The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost, 1915