The Rites of Pan and the Garden

Earth shoots a trail of her eternal vine
To crown the head that men have ceased to honour.
Beneath the coronal of leaf and lichen
The mocking smile upon the lips derides
Pan’s lost dominion; but the pointed ears
Are keen and prick’d with old remember’d sounds.

~ Eleanor Farjeon, “Pan-Worship”

I am almost reluctant to write about the faerie realm. But only almost. The thing is, when one speaks of the denizens of the Otherworld, one invites mischief. One time, for instance, when I was in a conversation with someone (I forget who) about faeries, my keys went mysteriously missing. I found them a day later in my dog’s cage. Another time, my Regeneration Podcast partner, Mike Sauter, and I were interviewing Irish artist and writer James Tunney about The Secret Commonwealth—and they kicked me off of the internet for twenty minutes right in the middle of the conversation! James later told me that they also caused his bathtub to overflow that same day. But I’m not so reluctant as to avoid it. It’s worth the risk.

The pagan in my blood, the instinct in me
That yearns back, back to nature-worship, cries
Aloud to thee!

Despite our culture’s totalizing materialism—even the “Green Movement” is afflicted with a severe case of disenchantment to the point of being a kind of environmental washing compulsion—I run into people all the time who confess their belief in faeries. A few years ago, for example, I gave a lecture on Metaphysical Poetry and Sophiology at Hillsdale College. Afterwards I attended a kind of afterglow at the home of one of the professors. Everyone there—almost all of them were Hillsdale profs—wanted to talk about faeries. I never would have expected that. But maybe I should have. Both John Milbank and David Bentley Hart—not exactly intellectual lightweights—have been very open about their belief in faeries; so maybe the dominant narrative is just so much Ahrimanic propaganda. I mean, people see faeries all the time. Who you gonna believe? The scientific materialists or your lyin’ eyes?

Plastic Hippo on Pinsdaddy

I have a shelf full of books on faeries and reported faerie sightings. Among them there are Dermot Mac Manus’s The Middle Kingdom, first published in 1959, and Marjorie T. Johnson’s exhaustive Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society, published in German in 2000 and in English in 2014, though the reports are mostly from the mid-twentieth century. And of course there’s The Findhorn Book. The best book I have read on the subject is the classic by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911); it was his doctoral dissertation at Oxford when academia was not the boring edifice of double-speak and rhetorical posturing and bluster to which it has declined. We stand amid the ruins. And I would be remiss were I not to mention Dr. Simon Young’s ongoing The Fairy Census: a monumental and impressive undertaking.

Faerie sightings are not unknown in my family. My grandfather told me about seeing them in Ireland as a child, and my eldest daughter, Mae, saw them in our garden in suburban Detroit when she was a toddler. My wife was pushing our then infant son, Aidan, in his stroller, with Mae, who would have been four at the time, walking along beside her. Suddenly Mae said, “Mom, stop.” When my wife asked her what was wrong, Mae simply pointed in front of the stroller and said, “Those people.” My wife didn’t see them, but Mae, who is now twenty-seven, remembers them distinctly.

Then there was the time I saw the Green Man (actually Green Men) traipsing through the tops of maples near a lake one summer afternoon in my twenties. Actually, I convinced myself that I didn’t see them. It was only a decade later when my wife and our, at the time, three young children (we have since added six more) were at the Michigan Renaissance Festival and I saw someone in an ingenious Green Man costume (kind of like the ents in LOTR) that I realized what I had seen was exactly that type of creature—but they were much smaller, maybe 24-30 inches tall. 

And then there was the time in the summer of 2022 that I caught a glance of Pan (or a Pan-like figure) on my farm here in Jackson County, Michigan. We have a yurt we rent out to campers in our woods and I was walking back to the house from checking on it, thinking about the many tasks I had to complete, when I caught a glimpse of Pan out of the corner of my eye—and I kept walking. Ten steps later I had a “Hold on a second!” moment and turned around. But he was gone. He had been looking south toward my neighbor’s house and looked concerned. I think he was warning me about something.

My farm, by the way, sits on land that was once an Ojibwe mortuary site and there is a 20-ft diameter circle in our pasture that was once a ceremonial spot. We’ve found a number of spear-heads and arrow-heads in our garden and my youngest son found a silver Indian ring when I was digging a post-hole about 70 feet away from the circle (it took us a few years before we were able to identify the section—thanks to the goats we were raising browsing the brush down to nothing). The point is that the “thinness” I’ve noticed on this land has been recognized by others before I arrived here.

Nevertheless, I am not one of those people who feels himself to be an ambassador to the Secret Commonwealth (“Citizens of the Otherworld: The humans of Waterloo Township greet you!”). It’s more like having neighbors you don’t often see, though you know they’re around. I think they like that we are caring for the land in a regenerative and caring way (“biodynamics” to you and me). I get the impression that they don’t like chemicals or plastic, so they’re more inclined to hang around. I don’t think they like the lawn tractor, but I have a feeling that they’re willing, perhaps reluctantly, to put up with the electric fence that keeps the deer, rabbits, and woodchucks out of the garden. I also think they like the experiments I’ve undertaken with electro-culture (I won’t get into it, but the results have been impressive so far) and they similarly like the cloudbuster we use to neutralize chemtrails and (occasionally) to make it rain.

Cottingley fairie by Dark Shepherd

I also think they like that we celebrate the Christian Year in a way that includes the realms of nature. That is, we celebrate Michaelmas, St. John’s and May Day, fashion crosses at St. Brigid’s Day, and pay honor to Mary-Sophia at her feasts outside and on the farm (we also wassail the orchard at Twelfth Night). Since we worship in a house church here, I invite them to our liturgy. And once or twice I’ve had the intuition they were in attendance.

By now you may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned Rudolf Steiner in this essay. Of course, there is a lot to learn from the Master about the minute particulars of the workings of these beings in world evolution or the growth of plants. But, for the most part, I have to take what he says on faith. Though I have intuitions upon occasion, I am hardly a clairvoyant—and hardly worthy of being compared to Rudolf Steiner. But what I can do is speak phenomenologically about my experiences and those of people I know. And that, it seems to me, is a reasonable and practical way to begin. 

What is important, though, is that my experiences and the experiences of others provide “evidence” (which a scientific materialist would never accept) that there is more to nature than meets the eye and that we are not alone in the garden. Or at least we don’t need to be. I imagine the more industrialized a farm or garden becomes, the rarer the involvement of the Otherworldly beings. On the other hand, I imagine the more industrialized the farm, the more destructive the faerie beings can be (like the gremlins who get wet in the 1984 film). These, I think, are the legions of what R. Ogilvie Crombie, one of the founders of Findhorn, called “Anti-Pan” (actually, that’s what Pan told him they’re called). So there’s that.

In whatever way we work, spiritual beings work with us. But the work itself—and the awareness we bring to it—determines whether we work with Pan or with Anti-Pan. So choose your tools wisely.

O Pan, old Pan
Shall I not see thee stirring in the stone, 
Crack thy confinement, leap forth—be again?