My mother gave me food, my brothers gave me Father Christmas; Ferdinando Buscema taught me the secret of magic; Christina Oakley-Harrington keeps open the door on the sacred; Simon Young knows the way to Faerie; John Milbank reminds me that ‘meaning’ is a meaningful word. Kate Baylay weaved magic, both inside and outside, with her pictures. They were all with me, and to all of them I say a heartfelt thank you.
And I say thank you to my father, too, who left me with Superman so long ago.
It was a good call.
Notes
The First Key: The Mystery
1. ‘Drawing the line is not easy.’ This reconstruction is based on the one found in Jim Steinmeyer (2005), Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible, pp.47–69.
2. ‘society has been through a process of disenchantment’. Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, Daedalus, Vol. 87, No. 1, Science and the Modern World View (Winter, 1958), pp.111–134.
3. ‘The performance is on YouTube’. www.youtube.com/watch?v=405xMmDpCZs.
4. ‘a redemptive feeling, a reminder of many potential wonders’. Jim Steinmeyer, cit., p.21.
5. ‘custodians of a sacred knowledge of fire’. Georg Luck (1994), Il Magico nella Cultura Antica, p.49.
6. ‘gasps for air rather than grasps for a method.’ Ken Weber, ‘The Hierarchy of Mystery Entertainment: Essential Essays for Magicians’, in Joshua Jay, Magic in Mind: Essential Essays for Magicians, p.512.
7. ‘it is taken away from most of us at a very early age.’ Charles Reynolds, ‘On a Definition of Magic’, in Joshua Jay, cit., p.32.
8. ‘an interview with Erik Davis and Maja D’Aoust’ expandingmind.podbean.com/e/062410-magic-and-meaning.
The Second Key: The Shadow
1. ‘weird and terrible figures were often seen.’ Quoted in Richard Kaczynski (2010), Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley, p.67.
2. ‘magic had all but disappeared from British life’. Ronald Hutton (1999), The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, p.69.
3. ‘something that you did’. Karen Armstrong (2010), The Case for God, p.60.
4. ‘the first new religion home-brewed in England’. Ronald Hutton, cit., p.vii.
5. ‘the numinous in him perforce begins to stir’. Rudolf Otto (1958), The Idea of the Holy, p.7.
6. ‘We don’t have our Tertullian, our Augustine’. Tertullian (c.160–c.240) was an early Christian theologian who lived in Carthage. St Augustine (354–430) was bishop of Hippo, also in North Africa. His writings, including Confessions and The City of God, have exerted a huge influence on Christian thought.
7. ‘without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/john-keats-and-negative-capability.
8. ‘Religious fundamentalists appeal to a logos-based view of their faith’. Karen Armstrong, cit., p.7.
The Third Key: The Light
1. ‘midwives of other people’s discoveries’. F. W. Gibbs, ‘Itinerant Lecturers in Natural Philosophy’, Ambix, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1960), p.111.
2. ‘help her to remedy the weakness of her own mind’. Lisa Shapiro, ‘Princess Elizabeth and Descartes: The Union of Soul and Body and the Practice of Philosophy’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1999), p.504.
3. ‘Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine’. ‘Lamia’, in John Keats (2007), Selected Poems.
4. ‘it’s only dull and stupid folk who are not naturally disposed for wonder.’ René Descartes (2017), The Passions of the Soul, www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1649part2.pdf.
5. ‘Respectable physicists argue that parallel universes might exist’. Michio Kaku (2005), Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos.
6. ‘a prediction based on past experiences and cultural expectations’. Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017), How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.
7. ‘The article is from an urban birdwatcher’. David Lindo (2015), ‘Pecks and the City: How to Be an Urban Birdwatcher’, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/10/urban-birder-birdspotting-cities-david-lindo.
8. ‘In a novel I wrote more than ten years ago, Pan’. Francesco Dimitri (2008), Pan.
9. ‘questions about things that had until then seemed entirely obvious’. Philip Ball (2012), Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything.
10. ‘similar to those found in monasteries.’ Philip Ball, cit., p.316.
11. ‘rather than simply seeing better what they already knew.’ Philip Ball, cit., p.290.
12. ‘by giving us a glimpse of what we don’t know’. Stuart Firestein (2012), Ignorance: How It Drives Science.
13. ‘science produces ignorance, possibly at a faster rate than it produces knowledge’. Stuart Firestein, cit. p.28.
The Fourth Key: The Wild
1. ‘achieve fulfilment’. Victor E. Frankl (2004), Man’s Search for Meaning, p.49.
2. ‘a gift relationship with nature’. Lewis Hyde (1999), The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, p.27.
3. ‘nature is not a place to visit, it is home’. Gary Snyder (1999), The Practice of the Wild, p.18.
4. ‘cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity’. Annie Dillard (2011), Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.17.
5. ‘the prejudice induced by a powerful map’. Robert Macfarlane (2007), The Wild Places, p.10.
6. ‘a place as it is perceived by an individual or by a culture moving through it’. Robert Macfarlane, cit., p.141.
7. ‘All real living is meeting’. Martin Buber (2013), I and Thou, p.9.
8. ‘central to the experience of religion, politics, nature, and art’. Jonathan Haidt, Dacher Keltner (2003), ‘Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion’, Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 17, No. 2, p.297.
The Fifth Key: The Lore
1. ‘and nothing else is known of her’. This telling of the story comes from the reconstruction, from different sources, to be found in John Clark, ‘Small, Vulnerable ETs: The Green Children of Woolpit’, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2, (2006).
2. ‘He is a good man, Thomas the Rhymer’. From the reconstruction in Carolyne Larrington (2015), The Land of the Green Man: A Journey Through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles, pp.50–53.
3. ‘a brush with mortality’. Simon Young (2018), ‘Confessions of a Fairy Hunter’, world.edu/confessions-of-a-fairy-hunter.
4. ‘It contains five hundred entries’. Dr Young and I had been briefly in touch before I started writing this chapter. He wrote to me more than three weeks later, just as I was writing this paragraph. It feels like too much of a resonance not to mention it.