Nostos and Chthón
Warriors! The war is over. Whether we won or lost, we lost. Go home now and make your peace with the world.
At the simplest, Nostos is an (ancient Greek) word meaning ‘homecoming’. But it is far more than this: From Nostos: An Autobiography by Irish philosopher John Moriarty:
The word nostos and the word odyssey mean roughly the same thing. In the course of his nostos, Odysseus encountered and had to overcome everything in the world that contradicts and confounds the elementary yearnings of humanity. At one stage, his nostos became a nekuia, a journey to the land of the dead. As with anodos and kathodos, I thought, so also with nostos and nekuia – they imply each other. [In the case of Odysseus, he could not return home until they implied each other]….Can there be a nostos for modern western humanity? Ever since Descartes and Newton, our God has been a deus absconditus[i] and the objective thing we naively knew[ii] has been a res absconditum[iii]. So we have no home to come home to. In a dreadful sense, our nostos is a nekuia. It is an endless, aimless wandering in an Absence. Where a personal God was, Absence. Where the naively known thing was, Absence.
We are all (whitefellas at least), exiles from the Earth. As Moriarty puts it, our Enlightenment was unenlightened, in that it led to a great blossoming of thought on the Aerios[iv] side of existence, and a concomitant focus on language, logic and the arts of human cleverness. But that part of humanity that fell under the spell of the ‘Enlightenment’ came to be divorced from half of its existence. This was is some part the triumph of masculinity over the feminine; matter over spirit; doing over being; conscious over subconscious; thinking over feeling. The ‘Enlightenment’ cast aside vast tracts of human experience (women, coloured folk everywhere, ‘backward’ rural folk – such as the Irish and the Welsh, the non-‘educated’ and non-wealthy in general, and of course, nature itself). And also, through what Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the World”, the Chthonic: the hidden, the subconscious, the mythic currents that make and un-make the World, that connect all things to all other things.
Moriarty again:
Chthón is the old Greek word for the Earth in its secret, dark, depths, and if there was any one word that could be said to distinguish ancient Greeks from modern Europeans, that word chthón, that would be it. Greeks had the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the pieties and beliefs that go with the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the wisdom that goes with the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the sense of spiritual indwelling that goes with the word, we haven’t. In the hope that they might continue in the goodwill of its dark but potentially beneficent powers, Greeks poured libations of wine, of honey, or barley-water sweetened with mint down into this realm, we don’t.
At such a distance, it is hard to be certain what Chthón looked and felt like. We might take the literal, dualist approach, and divide the Upper world from Underworld, Heaven from Hell; light from dark, but I suspect that we would be wrong. I would propose that Chthón had more in common with the Dreaming than has hitherto been understood. The Dreaming is of course, many things…and one important manifestation is the physical expression of character on landscapes and people. Mountains, rivers, trees; and also the personalities of people, and the proper relationship of each thing to all other things. This we might think of as the Aerios dimension of the Dreaming. But the there is another, Chthónic dimension, and in this, the Dreaming ancestors sit just below the visible world, as fixed points in an otherwise featureless firmament as it were. Cast a silken cloth over those points, and, voila – Aerios – we see a landscape, we see the furrows on faces. The old people engage in ceremony to ‘raise’ these points, to sharpen their resolution, to ‘sing the world afresh’. Fail to sing, and the world dulls. I have seen it.
When a witch casts a spell, she weaves an intention and casts it into astral – a generative place that is hard to distinguish from Chthón, or the Dreaming. Thus ‘created’ and energised through spell, incantation or song in this imaginal realm, the intention projects onto everyday reality as manifestation. It seems likely that art makers seek to engage in some way with this more-real-than-real, generative space: some art (not much) seems to be hooked into something deeper, a metaphysical background that we cannot apprehend with either senses or logic, but which we nevertheless understand implicitly.
Approach a tree with a pendulum. You will quickly learn that there is more to a tree than wood. You cannot see it, nor usually feel it without help, but a powerful field surrounds that tree. This is knowledge to still the axe, if only such things mattered. Beneath the ground are connections beyond count, between root, and neighbour’s root. A world of fungi expressed in synaptic connections of vast complexity that exchange sugar, minerals and information. Who can say that the collective expression of these connections is not consciousness?
The human heart expresses a field many times larger than the ‘physical’ body. The field is, or is associated with, electromagnetism and is detectable by scientific instruments at 1-3 metres from the body. Every cell of our body is bathed in, and probably regulated in some way, by this field. This Heart Field is strongly connected to our consciousness, and is an ‘organ’ of feeling and communication. In all likelihood, every living thing (and perhaps all things including rocks and atoms) carries such a field in some form and some varied strength, and these fields overlap and blend and communicate, and in so doing make the world. Who can say that the collective expression of these connections is not (greater) consciousness?
It is no longer possible to think usefully of ‘I’, or ‘you’ as individuals. We are all multi species beings. As Bug Carlson puts it: “We are all Lichen”. Multi species processes, cells in a greater biosphere body, resonating individually and collectively with, and regulated by, a greater Heart Field. Hidden from us, and yet influencing all. A Chthonic field at a planetary scale. We might call Her Gaia. We all of us can, and need to, reawaken the deeper, hidden part of ourselves and connect to the world in a great Nostos.
The War is over. We ransacked Troy for arrogance and at terrible cost, and now the way home will be long and hard, a post-modern odyssey that will take not ten years, but ten thousand. Whether we won or lost, we lost. And we are lost. The world unravels. The new God sits in Stock Exchange and Bank Account. Rapacious human ‘needs’ exterminate ecosystems with utter indifference, destroying synaptic connections at a scale and impact beyond our comprehension. Destroying the greater consciousness that makes life worth living. To our surprise, we discover that we do indeed love those places, those creatures. Lost for soul-less housing estates and industrial parks.
It is time to come home, as humbled warriors, and look to the underworld. Make peace with that part of ourselves that we have so long denied. Come home. Come home, or else career mindlessly into a hell of our own making. Come home to the Earth, to the Land, to ourselves. No longer at war, we must become small, gentle and sensitive. Poor, humble folk who strive to hear the notes that emanate from rock and tree, and seek to divine their message.
I look up to the hill behind me, and I see the old people. Those people shaded through the mists of time into the Dreaming. Their bones crumbled into the soil I farm. They watch what I do. Sometimes they shake their heads. Sometimes they smile. As I bear witness to their task – to care for this place - so they witness my actions every day.
In our cleverness, we have logic-ed spirit away. Can we feel it back?
We need two things. We need some insulation between our too-vulnerable human bodies and the world; and we need to know in our every breath that we are of nature. Inseparable. We need our story to employ our great cleverness in ways that enrich the world. Our great cleverness needs to constrain us, and in so doing, we will be, ourselves enriched.
Our destiny must be that we come home. The prodigal ape, welcomed by wrens and whales alike.
[i] Deus abconditus = a hidden or secret God rather than an AWOL God as you might infer.
[ii] The World experienced as phenomenon – The World before intellectual analysis.
[iii] Res absconditum = A thing concealed or unattainable.
[iv] What is ‘above ground’: the manifest world.