What is the Otherworld?

Essay | The Sacred in the Mundane

“The Children of Lir", Sheila MacGill-Callahan, illustration by Gennady Spirin

In an attempt to put into words my own understanding of the Otherworld, I am drawing on Celtic and Middle Eastern cosmologies today. These ideas are not presented as dogma or absolute truths. They are simply based on my own experience and my personal relationship with these mysterious things. I hope they are received as such.

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It’s a curious thing how some memories engrave themselves into the fabric of our being… When I was about seven years old, my friend Paula told me that whenever she wished to, she would lay down, close her eyes, and travel to another world. And so one day, I tried it. And sure enough, I arrived somewhere quite other.

Not “other” in the sense of unordinary. In fact, it was rather ordinary. It appeared as a farm; replete with cows, chickens, a donkey and acres of fluorescent green fields dotted with golden hay bales.

The Otherworld I would find myself in was not psychedelic or glamorous or heavenly. It was earthen. And it was simple.

In Celtic lore, the Otherworld often appears as the landscape itself. In the Mabinogion - the earliest written compilation of Welsh myths - the Otherworld was described as a numinous version of the Welsh landscape; rugged, green and wild.

But much of the confusion on the nature of the Otherworld comes from the binary system of opposites imposed on it by the Catholic Church, notably the duality of Heaven and Hell, good and evil. These Christian interpretations of the Otherworld no doubt influence our understanding of it and can be misleading.

Though much in the Celtic cosmology is shrouded in mystery, we do have sufficient evidence from Irish and Welsh medieval sources to deduce certain conclusions. For instance, in most cases, the Otherworld was understood to be chthonic, or subterranean. In other words, it existed or was accessed through lower dwellings, beneath hills, under burial mounds, or below bodies of water like the sea, lakes, springs and wells. These elements in nature often acted as shrines or otherworldly doorways and were often surrounded by traditional lore.

One of the early Welsh names for the Otherworld can serve as a guiding torch here. According to the Russian Celtologist Victor Kalygin - who has explored linguistic evidence for the Celtic cosmos – the term annwfn derives from ande-dubno, denoting either “under, below, beneath, lower, deep and dark” and referring to a lower or underworld realm.

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This suggests that in Celtic cultures, unlike the Indo-European cosmology that venerated deities in the skies, the gods lived below. Perhaps this was a remnant of the prehistoric worldview in which the religious focus was on the lower world. And we see this belief survive all the way into the cosmology of the Iron Age Celts whose primary focus remained on the lower world and its otherworldly inhabitants.

Illustration by Edmund Dulac in The Tempest, Shakespeare. Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1908.

By unravelling the etymological threads of the Welsh word annwfn, we find that ‘an’ is an intensive (the act of intensifying something) and ‘dwfn’ means “deep” or “world.” So to experience the Otherworld of the Welsh cosmology could perhaps be understood as a deepening of this reality, an experience that was both esoteric and exoteric, accessible to all like the awen (poetic inspiration) that fills the bards.

The earthly paradise of the Celts was not like the hortus conclusus of courtly lovers or the Judeo-Christian paradisiacal Eden. Rather, it appeared as the landscape itself – rugged, awesome and wild. This explains why the Celtic worldview was animistic and nature-reverencing. And why there was little, if any, differentiation between the natural world and the sacred, or in other words, that which was deemed holy and that which was not.

The distinction between the sacred and the mundane is very much a modern construct. Earlier spiritual cosmologies did not differentiate between the spiritual and physical worlds.

My Otherworld looked like our family friends’ farm that we used to go to in Northern Spain to avoid the summer heat when I was about seven. Those visits were amongst the happiest times of my childhood. We would always arrive at night to the smell of freshly baked biscuits that Pili had prepared for us with a glass of fresh milk. Sleep was ushered in by the sweet scent of hay. And in the mornings my sister and I would run in the fields and tease their bull, leaping up onto the wall when he got too close and dangling our feet at him while we crammed handfuls of plums into our mouths and stained our skirts.

Perhaps our inner world affects the way we perceive the Otherworld, and I saw it through the eyes of a child who felt most at peace on that farm. But this doesn’t mean that the Otherworld is simply a reflection of our inner world. When I access it now, I can go to the farm if I intend to, but I can also see other landscapes, locales, structures… worlds within worlds…

And I think this is what’s really interesting about what Carlos Castaneda called non-ordinary reality (and please note here that though I don’t condone his work, I do find some of his theories and terminologies helpful in interpreting these subtle truths). Non-ordinary reality is not so different to ordinary reality. This is at the heart of the shamanic cosmology. It is a real place, accessible through the imagination and the induction of trance states via practices like breathwork, fasting, meditation, dance, exposure to monotonous sound and psychotropics. These tools allow for a direct experience of these invisible planes.

The French theosopher Henry Corbin describes it as ‘a world that is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect,’

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but is ‘only perceptible by imaginative perception’

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(please refer to my piece on the Mundus Imaginalis for a more in-depth understanding of the mystical Islamic approach to the imagination and the Imaginal Realm).

Sufi Manuscript, Image Source Unknown

Corbin describes the imagination as the organ that perceives the Imaginal. And so of course, children have direct access to these subtle spaces before the imagination becomes associated with make-believe in adult life.

It is important to distinguish between the imagination and the Imaginal. The way I understand it, the imagination is the bridge and the Imaginal is where it can lead. As Mary Oliver once wrote, ‘Imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.’

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This is the basis of shamanic flight. The practitioner imagines themselves travelling to a particular point, and then another faculty takes over. And the place of arrival is beyond the imagination. This non-physical place of arrival is recognised by cultures across the globe, all of which designate it by a different name. For the ancient Persians, it was "the country of non-where" (Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd). In Arabic it is “the world of the image” (‘Alam Al-Mithal). And in Shi’a Islam specifically it is known as “the country of the hidden Imam". The location of this non-physical place is described in Russian fairytales as being east of the sun and west of the moon. For Sufi mystics it is the place where the two seas meet.

Rather than it being a geographical place, the Christian mystic Cynthia Bourgeault describes it as ‘more like a set of governing conventions that make possible a certain kind of manifestation.’

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Tom Cheetham explains it this way:

Just as finding one’s “soul” is not the discovery of a thing but a deepening of experience, so entering the Imaginal involves a fundamental transformation in the condition of the world. It involves a kind of opening.

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The great Islamic cosmology and the lores and legends of the Celts are not ones that provide certainty or dogma. Instead, they open the heart by telling a great, unfinished story. They invite us to stop taking everything literally and instead, actively participate in the great unfolding of the mysteries. In this way, we have the possibility of re-learning what I refer to as the lost language of the imagination and becoming, as Cheetham so eloquently puts it, ‘con-spiritors in this grand, breathing Speech.’

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1. As quoted by Sharon Paice MacLeod (2018) Celtic Cosmology and the Otherworld, North Carolina, USA: McFarland & Company Inc., p. 14

2. Henri Corbin (1964) Mundus Imaginalis, from the complete text Corbin H. (1971) En Islam iranien, aspects spirituels et philosophiques, Paris: Gallimard. p. 5

3. Ibid. p. 11

4. At the River Clarion, poem by Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems, Beacon Press.

5. Cynthia Bourgeault (2020) Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, p. 14

6. Tom Cheetham (2020) Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman, p. 81

7. Corbin, H. (1964), p. 11