Nature Watching: The Practice of Finding the Divine in the Ordinary

Last updated on Mar 5, 2024

The world is our temple. Every spear of grass - a monument to Danu. The storm clouds menacing on the horizon - a hymn to Taranis. The zephyr dancing against the flesh - Cliodhana’s shrine. We enter these sanctuaries by fixing our attention upon creation, be it a leaf scraping along the pavement or a thrush’s trills, giving it our one-pointed attention until we become so absorbed in its presence that it devours the entire universe. Until just this remains. No self. No other. No here nor there. The vivid presence of a leaf beyond words. Within its borders, the inner precincts of the grove, a misty land where gods and spirits, the divine and mundane, the beautiful and terrifying, the eternal and the ephemeral meet. Here, creation shines. Welcome to nature watching.

This practice is the doorway to this realm before our very eyes, but before diving into the history of this practice, it’s necessary to clarify what I mean when I say nature watching. Most readers will think of David Attenborough sitting in a jungle hide looking out for a Bornean peacock-pheasant. They might recall a trip to Newfoundland, sat at a cafe overlooking the Atlantic and relishing the colors, the hypnotic spray, the humiliating power. Nature watching is that - and more.

Nature watching plunges awareness into the four facets of reality: empirical, ancestral, spiritual, and mystical. Inspired by both Ken Wilber¹ and Buddhist philosophy, these four facets are as follows:

Empirical: Existence as conveyed through the physical senses. If a pagan looks at an oak tree, the color of its leaves, the feel of its bark, and the sound of its branches aching in the air reflect this aspect. Measurements and the sciences are derivative of it.
Tribal: The socially constructed understandings and values assigned to an object. If a pagan’s group regards oaks as symbols of wealth, class, and piety, then a pagan will experience oak objects as possessing those qualities.
Spiritual: The symbols and spirits associated with an object. If myths associate an oak with Dagda, wisdom, or fierce nature spirits, a pagan will experience their presence within the tree. They experience the oak as alive and awake.
Mystical: The luminous oneness immanent in all existence. A pagan experiences an oak as infused with the divine presence that unites all of creation.

An da shealladh,² or second sight, expands one’s vision and experience to include the spiritual and mystical worlds. All four aspects are nature, for all four aspects encompass every object’s reality. A naturalist who sits beneath an oak tree and meticulously observes its structure, the shape of its leaves, and the spread of its branches is only intimate with one aspect. Make no mistake, that aspect is important. From such empirical explorers, we have learned much about the world - the different geni and species, developed life-saving drugs, and untangled the mystery that is the forest - but it is an impoverished view.

The modern parlance of the term “naturalist” betrays how disconnected Western culture has come from the ancient and proper sense of “nature,” as described above. The notion of a naturalist whose attentions and research are limited to the empirical realm is a by-product of the secularization of post-Enlightenment Europe. In the name of reason, goodness, and truth, Enlightened thinkers rejected mysticism and spirituality as superstition and tribal beliefs as irrational appeals to tradition. They stripped nature of its depth, reducing it to nerds tramping through jungles collecting bugs.

The ancient vision is different. The early Greek philosophers saw themselves as naturalists in a more expanded sense. They longed to understand the nature of the universe in all its facets, not just the beetles and fungi stuff. Parmenides was a lawmaker, astronomer (who, as Karl Popper argued, was the first to determine that the moon was round and reflected the sun's light), mystic, and ontologist. Aristotle pondered the nature of motion, the origin of the universe, ideal forms of governance, and the behavior of squids.

The ancient Druids devoted themselves to a similar range of topics. According to Strabo, they performed rituals, studied the ways of nature, served as judges, and taught on the nature of the soul. Such diverse interests and duties were confirmed by other Roman sources. Caesar describes the Druids as “concerned with religious matters, public and private sacrifices, and divination.”³ Pomponius Mela, a Roman geographer, writes that:

The Gauls do have…teachers of wisdom called Druids. These men claim to know the size and shape of the earth and universe, the motion of the stars and the sky, and the will of the gods. They teach many things secretly to the Gaulish nobles over a period of up to twenty years in caves and hidden places in the forest.⁴

These reports match extant Celtic myths, where druids acted as sages, healers, judges, prophets, and sorcerers. Druids were philosophers in the fullest sense.

When I speak of nature watching, I mean it in the druidic sense: empirical, tribal, spiritual, and mystical. And as I shall argue by comparison, this is the sense in which the Celts understood it. It is also the sense that we’ve lost in our worship of a cheap empiricism.

Another distinct but related set of concepts that we’ll cover is the division of logos and numinous in divine revelation. Logos refers to the underlying structure of the universe. For the Indo-Europeans, logos was Jove’s ordering of the universe (or that by any other creator god - Apollo, Lugh, Odin), and this subject subsumes scientific and philosophical disciplines. The course of the stars. Evolution. Geometry. How to best raise bulls. Ideal forms of polis. How to manage the human mind. Ethics. Phsyics. Logos, however, is the rational, scientific, and mechanical understanding of how the universe works, and for the Indo-Europeans, such an understanding was essentially religious. To paraphrase Einstein, it is a project to understand the mind of God.

The numinous is the universe’s divine mystery. It’s typically associated with the luminous oneness immanent in creation, but the concept covers more than that. In the numinous, the neat ordering of the universe crumbles away into a world of wonder and spontaneous, purposeless, fluid creation. An oak is luminous and alive. And it is simply there without any reason or purpose. And there is a pattern which is felt rather than known. A boxer squaring off against an opponent does not think what to do. He does not stop to analyze his opponent's moves. He flows and allows himself to spontaneously respond. These two elements, the Apolonnian logos and the Dionysian numinous, constitute the dual nature of divine revelation and being.

To understand nature watching in the Celtic pagan sense, both concepts must be held: the four-fold reality (empirical, tribal, spiritual, and mystical) and the duality of religious revelation (logos and numinous). We will never know if ancient Celts practiced nature watching. Nor will we know if the concepts explored would exist comfortably in their world, but recreating an anachronistic Iron Age religion is neither possible nor advisable. The past is an inspiration and guide for the present, not a tyrant. Reading on, we’ll examine the past in the form of four different religious traditions, each showing the power of nature watching and the workings of the four-fold reality and duality of revelation. Those traditions are:

The Thai Forest Tradition
Taoism
Greco-Roman Paganism
Early Celtic Christianity

The Thai Forest Tradition

The image of the Thai Forest Tradition to outsiders is embodied in the figure of Ajahn Mun, an austere, fiery monk who devoted his life to reviving orthodox Theravada. Ajahn Mun tolerated no corruption of the Buddhist view and practice as found in the Dhamma-Vinaya of the Pali Suttas. No magic. No worshiping nature spirits. No medicine. No astrology. Just hard-nosed practicing to extinguish suffering and show others the way out. Meditation. Analyzing experience to understand the fleeting, unsatisfying, and empty nature of all phenomena. It presents itself as empirical, rational, serious, individual, woo-free. A Protestant’s wet dream (and one reason why it exploded in popularity among goody-goody WASPs dissatisfied with Christianity).

As someone who has lived in Thailand for over 13 years, 5 of that as a monk in that tradition, it looks much different from the inside. In this “orthodox” tradition, there are fortune-telling monks who have hundreds of devoted lottery winners among their disciples. There are sorcerers whose amulets are prized throughout the country for their ability to bring in cash to a business, prevent car accidents, or shield their owners from black magic. Initially given away for free, some amulets can now sell for over a million dollars. There are also monks who specialize in black magic, using corpse oil or dead body parts to fuel their rituals. Somewhere in the mix are goody-two-shoes monks who meditate all day and follow all the rules, but even for the good boys, spirits, ghosts, demons, and magic fill the world.

I was first introduced to the practice of nature watching by my own teacher in the Thai Forest Tradition 12 years ago. At the time, I was struggling in my meditation. I had been meditating upwards of 15 hours a day for years and burnt myself out. My mind became a knot of anxiety and tension, and every time I sat down, my nervousness burst forth and shattered any attempts to settle the mind. For a full-time meditator dead-set on enlightenment, it was infuriating. The more I pushed, the worse it got.

I went to my teacher begging for help, but as usual, he was reluctant to tell me anything. He preferred to let his students struggle through and figure it out themselves. Unfortunately, I was too ox-headed, so he stepped in. He told me to stop meditating, help out more around the monastery, and, when I had free time, to pay attention to the birds, trees, and sky around my hut. “But don’t make it into a meditation,” he warned. “Just enjoy existence.” I thought it was nonsense. I was there to stride towards awakening, not enjoy the scenery. But I kept my mouth shut and, returning to my hut, did as told. It was a godsend.

Sitting on my veranda and allowing my senses to play about in the earth and sky, the tension drained from my body. All the obsessiveness that had haunted me for the past two months melted away. I had been so obsessed with meditating 24/7 that I had not looked up at the sky or trees for months. Seriously. When I finally released my eyes and ears, a new world opened. It was crisp, vivid, and alive. Everything. The dusty paths snaking through the brush. The kite circling overhead. The sun-bleached wood on my balcony.

Inspired by Basho, Li Po, and Robinson Jeffers, I had once absorbed myself in these scenes years ago before becoming a Buddhist zealot and swearing off the senses forever. Now, I had returned and wept as I witnessed poetry breathing, flying, crawling around me. “What an idiot I’ve been!”

Typical for my teacher, he didn’t tell me the depths that sitting outside my hut and enjoying the sights would take me. During the thousands of hours I racked up “just enjoying existence,” I witnessed marvelous things. At first, I met the ten-thousand insects, birds, boar, mice, spiders, scorpions, and squirrels that were my neighbors. I learned their signatures, tracks, songs, and names. I even made a few friends.

The first friend was Robert, a giant gecko who called my roof his home. He was big, shy, and loved to eat bugs. He also laid big gecko shits in my hut, which were not exactly fun to clean, but hey, that’s friendship, right?

The second was Angulimala, a pied fantail named after a famous Buddhist monk who was a former serial killer. That’s right, Buddhism has a Saint Jeffrey Dahmer, and his body count is far higher than that Milwaukee weirdo. 99 compared to Dahmer’s pathetic 17. But it’s ok, because Buddha enlightened him with a pithy teaching.

My fantailed buddy earned his name one afternoon when I was lying down watching a blue butterfly flutter around my roof. Hypnotized, I followed it for twenty minutes as it escaped into the open air and danced around the trunk of a mahogany tree. Then, Angulimala swooped down and ripped off a chunk of its wing. The butterfly tried to fly away but only managed to drag itself in circles. Angulimala played with his prey, grabbing its other wing and flinging it in the air. He stomped on it and danced proudly around. Finally, he devoured it whole and found himself a new name. Unfortunately, I couldn’t redeem him via enlightenment, but we did become friends.

And like with all good friends, the closer I got to the forest around my hut, the better I knew them, the nearer I came to logos. I learned the names of the different trees. Indian cork. The cannonball tree (yes, a real name, but unfortunately, it’s not bursting to the gills with artillery). Mahogany. Teak. The goldenshower tree (again, not making this up - and the only thing it’ll shower you with is its yellow flowers). I learned how they changed throughout the season. Why teak and bush dominated in the rocky land I called home. The medicinal qualities of their leaves, bark, and flowers. The chaos of my home changed into the comfort of understanding.

Later, things got weirder. Combined with my full-time meditation practice, the concrete world of objects began to dissolve. The teak trees outside my hut felt as ethereal as a sheet of cloth held to the sun. The earth quivered when I set foot upon its trails. It whispered advice and visited my dreams. I met the spirits that dwelled in the hills and ponds. The center of experience dissolved into an open, playful field of awareness. I met the numinous face-to-face. Everything alive yet still, vivid yet diaphanous.

Through sitting outside absorbed in mountains and rivers, my entire world had changed. The world of the empirical, tribal, spiritual, and mystical had been revealed to me, and I discovered the temple before my very eyes.

Chinese Taoism

Nature watching can also be found in Chinese Taoism. Due to Taoism’s esoteric nature, meditation manuals are in short supply. The idea of picking up a book on meditation, like this one, and trying it out at home was unthinkable. Knowledge was transmittable only from enlightened teacher to disciple. Outside of this relationship (with some rare exceptions), the path to awakening was impossible. Hence, little attention was paid to preserving the nuts and bolts of religious practice. In spite of the secretive nature of their training, they left behind clues, particularly among their artists, many of whom were monks or initiates, and nature watching certainly numbered among their contemplative tools. To get a feel for it in practice, we’ll look at two artists: Li Po and T’ao Chien.

Li Po

Li Po (701-762) was affectionately known as the Banished Immortal in his lifetime and has since been revered as one of the greatest artists and spirits in Chinese history. He was fiery, pretentious, lusty, generous, and utterly himself. He was also a student of Taoism and Zen, tossing himself into the mountains of China for long stretches to swallow its wisdom and realize the deathless. His writing ranges widely, from chiding the emperor for his wars of conquest to songs of longing to bombastic romps through celestial realms to the beauty of a plum blossom. We shall look to his more contemplative works for inspiration.

The first poem:

Reverence-Pavilion Mountain, Sitting Alone

The birds have vanished into deep skies.
A last cloud drifts away, all idleness.
Inexhaustible, this mountain and I
gaze at each other, it alone remaining.⁵

This poem can be read in multiple ways. In one reading, Li Po describes himself meditating on stillness, Reverence-Pavilion Mountain serving as a metaphor for the numinous, eternal aspect of creation to which his mind turns. The problem with this reading is that the mountain here is not just a mountain but Jing Ting Mountain in Anhui, China. Jing Ting Mountain has been famous throughout Chinese history for its beauty - clouds suspended beneath granite peaks, twisted pines reaching for the heavens, misty paths twisting among cliffs. Doubling as muse and god, thousands of paintings, poems, and songs have been composed in its presence.

With this background, the poem most likely describes one of two situations. In the first reading, Li Po is sitting down with a jar of wine, paper, and brush at his side, observing the world around him, waiting for inspiration to strike, but instead of being moved to write poetry, he forgets himself completely. Day passes into night. Birds return to their nests. The sun sets behind the peaks. Li Po sits alone with only the mountain for company until even he disappears. Then, Jing Ting Mountain. The ending of the poem suggests that perhaps even the mountain drops away. What remains: beyond words. The poem records the forgetful ecstasy of artistic creation - his and the universe’s.

The second reading is explicitly religious. Li Po sits down and intentionally absorbs himself in Jing Ting Mountain. The cries of a kingfisher. An ant crawling up his leg. The way the shadows play among the peaks. Worries and artifice melt into silence. The birds disappear. The sky empties. Day flees. The ten-thousand things dissolve. Jing Ting Mountain alone remains.

Either way, the thrust is the same: the numinous blazes forth from Jing Ting mountain. We are one with creation. And keeping with much of the Oriental tradition, little attention is paid to logos. Instead, the numinous receives almost exclusive treatment. Sinking into oneness. Flowing into life.

This first poem revels in the mystical, but other poems of Li Po take up the tribal and spiritual dimensions.

Sunflight Chant

Sun rises over its eastern harbor
as if coming from some underworld,
and crossing heaven, returns again to western seas,
nowhere its six sun-dragons could ever find rest.
It’s kept up this daily beginning and ending forever,
but we’re not made of such ancestral ch’i,
so how long can we wander with it here?

Flowers bloom in spring wind. They never refuse.
And trees never resent leaf-fall in autumn skies.
No one could whip the turning seasons along so fast:
the ten thousand things rise and fall of themselves.

Hsi Ho, O great
Sun Mother, Sun Guide— how could you drown
in those wild sea-swells of abandon?
And Lu Yang, by what power
halted evening’s setting sun?
It defies Tao, offends heaven—
all fake and never-ending sham.
I’ll toss this Mighty Mudball earth into a bag
and break free into that boundless birthchamber of it all!⁶

Before breaking this down, some background from the translator:

CH’I: universal breath or life-giving principle. / HSI-HO: Hsi Ho drove the sun-chariot, which was pulled by six dragons. / LU YANG: Lu Yang’s army was in the midst of battle as evening approached. Fearing nightfall would rob him of victory, Lu Yang shook his spear at the setting sun, and it thereupon reversed its course.⁷

Whether or not Li Po wrote this while observing the sun running through the sky, during a poetry competition, or drunk after a night of debauchery will never be known. What it does represent is a vision of the natural world that is not just National Geographic’s impoverished “wow - pretty flower!” The sun is not just a ball of light passing through the sky. The sun is a goddess pulled by six-dragons and disappearing into the waters. Ancestral myths also surface through the story of Lu Yang. Li Po ends with a threat that plunges readers into the land of mysticism. “I’ll throw all of this away and recognize what a bunch of bullshit it is,” he teases. In one poem, the empirical, ancestral, spiritual, and mystical walk hand-in-hand.

T’ao Chien

Another artist that compliments Li Po is T’ao Chien (365-427). T’ao Chien lived during the Six Dynasties Period, three centuries marred by upheaval, betrayal, and deprivation, and was born into a powerful aristocratic family whose fortunes were on the wane. As with most Chinese blue-bloods, there was intense pressure on him to serve in government to reclaim his family’s glory and fulfill his Confucian duty to the community. Initially, T’ao Chien caved to their demands and served for 10 years, enduring scandals, betrayals, and coups as a high-ranking official. One day, he had enough and walked away from it all to live a simple life on a farm.

Life on the farm was not easy. There were periods of abundance and ease, but there were also years when he would go months without a full stomach. A few times, poverty drove him to beg in nearby villages. He returned briefly to officialdom to alleviate his family’s poverty, but he found the life so unbearable that he walked away from officialdom for the final time and lived out the rest of his days on his farm, raising his five sons, farming, reading, playing music, drinking with friends, and enduring hardship. The poetic tradition that he helped establish, Gardens and Fields poetry, reflects his ability to find beauty and the divine in the midst of the rustic life before him, not, as is often the case of Li Po, in the grandeur of the wild.

AFTER KUO CHU-PU’S POEM

Trees thick and full gathering pure
midsummer shade out front, and wind

coming in its season, gentle gusts
opening my robe – I live life apart

here. Cultivating idleness, I roam
koto strings and books all day long,

our vegetable garden full of plenty,
last year’s grain holding out well.

In making a living, we gain by limits.
Wanting nothing beyond enough, nothing,

I grind millet, make up a lovely wine,
and when it’s ripe, ladle it out myself.

Our son plays beside me. Too young
to speak, he keeps trying new sounds.

All this brings back such joy I forget
glittering careers. White clouds drift

endless skies. I watch. Why all that
reverent longing for ancient times?⁸

In T’ao Chien’s gaze, everything is sacred. Not just waterfalls and Big Dippers. Not just sunrises and towering mountains. His child trying to sound out words. The mulberry trees bending with the fatness of its harvest. The tops of radishes poking through the earth. A favorite book. A cup of wine. Human life is not some scourge that we must shield from our eyes or only tolerate as minimally as possible. Farms and children are as worthy of song as white clouds drifting through endless skies. The only area which avoids his numinous gaze is the life of a bureaucrat. Somehow, pushing papers or scheming to murder an emperor didn’t make the cut.

Other poems capture him marinating his senses in the land, but the above poem attests to his scope. As Simon Weil said, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”⁹ For T’ao Chien, everywhere was his temple; his spirit, an unending hymn.

Greco-Roman Paganism

The Taoist contemplative tradition is shrouded in mystery, but that haze can be partially penetrated by a well-preserved corpus of literature spanning thousands of years and informed by living traditions today. The same cannot be said for the Greco-Roman pagan tradition. Like the Taoists, Greco-Roman spirituality was primarily esoteric, passed on from teacher to disciple through initiation. The idea of printing and making publicly available a manual on how to realize oneness with Isis or detailing the rites of Bacchus was unthinkable. Add to this the tatters that have come down to us from antiquity, thanks in no small part to Christians dead-set on “purifying” their lands of pagan influence, and what remains is but a sliver. Still, we can find clues to a nature-watching practice similar to that found in the works of Li Po. To this end, we will now turn to examine two authors: Thrice Great Hermes (yes, the god) and Virgil (I choose the Medieval misspelling because of its esoteric flavoring).

Hermes and The Hermetica

The Hermetica is a series of Egyptian-Hellenic texts that have impressed its wisdom on the West’s philosophical and spiritual traditions for thousands of years. Its contents were known and studied widely in the ancient world and translated into Arabic, Coptic, Latin, and Greek. For much of European history, that influence has been cryptic because professing love for a blasphemous text could mean death. Nevertheless, its ideas shaped the mysticism of the Sufis and impressed itself upon the minds of da Vinci, Newton, Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Jung, and many more.

The teachings present themselves as revelations from the Thrice Great Hermes (a Hellenized form of the Egyptian god Thoth) and rely more on declarative force than syllogism. This mode of discourse aligns with its esoteric origins. The truth is not a series of propositions to profess but an experience to be lived. Teachers emphasized personal contemplation and meditation over, say, the rigorous arguments of Aquinas or, as we’ll see later, the meticulous intellectual edifices of Jon Scotus Eriugena.

In this sprawling work, we find a hint of nature watching as a spiritual practice:

To know Atum's Being,
contemplate him in thought.
To see him with your eyes,
look at the exquisite order of the Cosmos;
the Necessity which governs
everything you perceive;
the Goodness of all that has been,
and that is coming to be.
Look at matter filled full with Life,
and see Atum
pulsating with all he contains.¹⁰

It’s impossible to declare that “yes, the Greeks, too, spent hours staring at Jing Ting Mountain until it alone remained!” based on this passage, but it certainly suggests it. It also picks up many themes which will be developed further in Virgil and Eriugena, and point to a sensitivity unique to the European tradition: combining logos and the numinous via a careful study of nature.

Taoism and the Thai Forest Tradition include some treatment of the logos, but as my experience and the poems cited reflect, those questions are sidelined in favor of a more immediate encounter with Oneness and an intuitive sense of creation’s patterns. This understanding is simplified into the image of rivers and mountains. Rivers - the fleeting phenomena; mountains - the eternal One. The Taoist’s task isn’t to understand hydrodynamics or the water cycle. His duty is to follow the flow based on years of traversing its waters. In The Hermetica, the numinous receives its due, but much ink is spilled on understanding the world of change in detail.

Contemplate the Cosmos as his ancient body,
which is ever prime and new.
See the planets circling in eternal time.
See the spiritual fire of the heavens
turned to light by the sun
and shed as Goodness upon the world.
See the ever-changing moon,
which governs birth, growth and decay.
See the constellation of the Bear
which never rises or sets,
but stays ever a fixed point —
an axle around which
the circle of the Zodiac revolves.
See the comets
which are called 'Prophet Stars',
for when some future fate awaits the world
they emerge for a few days,
from their invisible home
below the circle of the sun.
Who is it that maintains such exquisite order?¹¹

Compared to the poems of Li Po or the “just enjoy existence” of my teacher, Hermes displays a curiosity and knowledge of the natural world not found in the previous oriental traditions. Elsewhere, Hermes discusses seeds, horticulture, the organs of the human body, and various animals. The created world is not merely something to be attentive to as Weil exhorted, but an object to be analyzed to reveal the order within.

This attitude might be the genesis behind the intellectual discoveries that poured out of the region for thousands of years before being stifled by the Abrahamic religions. For Parmenides and other philosophers, studying the natural world was as much a religious duty as performing sacrifices.

Karl Popper argues as much for Parmenides, who might have been the first to discover the spherical shape of the moon based on his postulation that the moon’s rotation leads to its changing light as it reflects the sun’s rays. This discovery led him to hypothesize that other celestial bodies are also spherical, potentially culminating in his conclusion that the entire universe is whole, simple, and spherical. Since the true state of things is unchanging oneness, all change must be illusory. Much fuss has been made about his shocking conclusion, but The Hermetica waves off such concerns and places these ideas comfortably in the orbit of mystery traditions.

Other philosophers shared Parmenides’ enthusiasm for the natural world. Aristotle wrote on optics, argued that the sun was larger than earth, and spent two years studying aquatic life on Lesbos. Pythagoras studied astronomy and nutrition and was the first to divide the world into five climactic zones. Whether or not these philosophers actually did these things is not as important as the fact that ancient Greeks and Romans believed philosophers could and should, affirming that their role was not limited to answering questions on epistemology or metaphysics. Their role was to understand the world in its entirety, of which the numinous presence of God in a leaf or the fleetingness of human life was but a part.

We shall look at using reason to unveil the divine in later sections, but it is worth recognizing how the European tradition departs from the Oriental traditions which prized direct experience over natural philosophy. The Indian tradition, on the other hand, shared a fascination with the natural world, betraying its Aryan roots. Panini was a linguist, logician, and yogi. Mahavira was a renowned mathematician and a Jain ascetic. Understanding God entailed more than a direct encounter; it demanded a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of the world. The Hermetica attests to this ancient Indo-European attitude, and though it leans towards dialectic, it includes direct recognition of the numinous via the senses as well.

Virgil

Virgil’s claim to fame is the Aeneid, an epic adventure that would put James Cameron to shame, but he was also a devoted pastoralist. His other two great works, which we will now turn to, Eclogues and Georgics, would find better company with Li Po than Homer. Eclogues is a set of nine bucolic poems in the Greco-Roman lineage of Theocritus and focuses on themes similar to his Greek ancestor. Love. Song. Myth. Upheaval. His style seamlessly weaving land, myth, drama, and gods into an organic whole.

His other great poem, Georgics, is as elusive as it enchanting. Ostensibly, the four-part poem offers instruction on agriculture, continuing in the line of other such works like Cato the Elder and Varro, but readers encounter an entirely different world upon reading it. I can best describe it as an epic hymn to land and empire. The work covers practicals, like how to raise bulls, where to plant olive trees, and how to care for honey bees. It includes long digressions into religious practices, particularly around the rustic gods of Bacchus and Sylvanus, and bears the influence of Hesiod. Philosophical arguments hide behind sensuous observations. He laments how animals are catapulted headlong into violence and self-destruction through desire, eulogized in a conquered bull. He praises the stoic order and civicness of bees. What connects these elements is the song of a lover who can never have enough.

Virgil’s love is more than a teen’s cringe celebration of beauty. His love is mature, considered, profound, devout. Yes, he loves nature’s beauty and spends much of the poem waxing upon it, but he desires more than that. He wants to access Nature’s innermost chambers, to understand her every inch with the same surety as she does herself, to be rescued by her presence, splendor, and vision. He wants redemption, recalling the mystery cults which loom large in this text.

Virgil says as much when he writes:

And as for me, my most ardent wish is that sweet Poetry,
whose devotee I am, smitten as I’ve been with such commitment,
would open up to me the courses of the stars in heaven,
the myriad eclipses of the sun and phases of the moon,
whence come earthquakes, which are the reason deep seas surge
to burst their bounds before receding peacefully,
and are the why winter suns dash to dip themselves into the ocean
But if I am not the one to sound the ways of the world
because my heart’s lack of feeling stands in the way,
then let me be satisfied with rural beauty, streams bustling through the glens;
let me love woods and running water––though I’ll have failed.
Oh, for the open countryside
along the Spercheus, or the mountains of Taygetus, its horde of Spartan maidens
ripe for the picking! Oh, for the one who’d lay me down to rest
in cool valleys of the Haemus range and mind me in the shade of mighty branches!
That man has all the luck who can understand what makes the world tick,
who has crushed underfoot his fears about
what’s laid out in store for him and stilled the roar of Hell’s esurient river.
Indeed he’s blessed, who’s comfortable with country gods––
Pan and old Sylvanus, and the sorority of nymphs.¹²

Virgil’s first wish is for liberation. Yes, he wants to be a philosopher. He wants to uncover Nature’s truths. But this desire has a spiritual terminus: to crush all fears and bring an end to Hades. Redemption. Liberation. Salvation. The request might seem odd. After all, what does Poetry have to do with figuring out what happens when the sun sets or why there are waves? And how can Poetry offer salvation? Isn’t that the purview of proper gods - Apollo, Dionysus, Sibyll, or Zeus? But these questions reveal the world of difference between modern readers and Virgil.

As multiple scholars¹³ have pointed out, Virgil’s poem must be read through the lens of the mystery traditions of the time. To modern sensibilities, a poet is an anemic nerd who lives in a garret, tortures himself over lines of verse, and gushes over deep feelings beyond language’s reach. The poet’s life is obsessive self-introspection and expression. There’s something to this archetype, but it’s not the only one. Another archetype that’s fallen out of fashion is the poet-priest, and this is one among many that Virgil taps into.

In Book Three, Virgil leads “the Muses back from Greece, and establishing in Mantua, on a campus in long bends of the river Mincius, a marble temple with Caesar at its centre. [Virgil’s] foundation will be celebrated with games, and he imagines himself as a priest leading a procession to the altar.”¹⁴ This poetic fantasy blends nationalism, religion, poetic inspiration, nature, myth, mysticism, and science into a cohesive whole is incomprehensible to most 21st-century readers, but it would be familiar - if not a bit grandiose - for Virgil’s audience.

We need not address the nationalistic and mythic tones here other than to say that they tap into the tribal and spiritual aspects of reality. What is of import is the idea that a poet could and should understand why waves form or the planets follow their orbits through mystical revelation. The bridge between these two distinct disciplines was the gods. As in The Hermetica, god (in this case, possibly Jupiter or Apollo) fashioned and ordered the universe according to his will. It follows that he could just as easily reveal it to those who seek it.

There are two conduits that Virgil calls upon throughout Georgics for revelation: the Muses and the nymphs. Both are divine mediums that grant access to divine realms, but they differ in their orientation. The Muses are Appolonian and suggest an ascent to heaven. Buoyed by their ecstasy, Virgil and other artists can bear witness to the Bright One breathing motion and harmony into creation via his lyre. The nymphs move in the opposite direction. They are Dionysian creatures and dive down into the infernal realms. Literally. When Virgil’s Aristeus seeks out the nymphs as part of Orpheus’ mythic arc, Aristaeus meets the creatures of the deep in their underwater palace dripping with otherworldly wonder:

Then all around him waves crested like mountain peaks
and, safe in that embrace, bore him below the water.
And now, in wonder of his mother’s home, her watery realm,
pools forming part of caverns and gurgling groves,
he wanders, astounded by majestic movements of the water,
rivers rippling under earth’s great dome and reaching out
in all directions––one called Phasis, and another Lycus,
and the source from which the deep Enipeus makes its first appearance,
and from which father Tiber, and Anio, come streaming,
and rattling down through rocks, Hypanis, and Caicus of Mysia,
and that river that wears a bull’s expression, and gilded horns,
Eridanus, than which no river throws itself more forcefully
through rich farmlands into shining sea.¹⁵

The inclusion of water and earth are fitting for their role. These Dionysian spirits are fluid, unpredictable, wild. The truth which they offer is unlike the Apollonian world of order and harmony, one dominated by the dictates of logos. The nymphs offer another world, a glimpse into the numinous. Untamed beauty. Chthonic luminosity. Wordless knowledge.

As the famed classicist Brooks Otis describes it:

There can be no doubt that Virgil creates this magical watery world as a deliberate contrast to earthly reality. We go to it as Aristaeus goes to it, to find the secret that cannot be found on earth itself. Thus he must descend into the very depths of the waters, anoint himself with the unearthly ambrosia and master the daimon of matamorphoses before he can receive the pass-word, the necessary explanation.¹⁶

Virgil expands on the nymphs' role as mystical psychopomps through the metaphor of Orpheus’ journey that ends the final book. Orpheus founded the eponymous Orphic mysteries, and the lengthy dedication underscores Georgics’ religious subtext and purpose. This book is not just a long-winded poem about raising cattle and praising the beauty of nature. It’s about initiation, revelation, and liberation.

Earlier passages reinforce this reading. Virgil frequently references Demeter and Dionysus throughout the book, both related to the Orphic cults. At the beginning of the second book, he implies Augustus’ own descent into the Elysian fields (a reference to the emperor’s actual initiation in the Elysian mysteries). The image of the arista, or ear of grain, looms large throughout the book. Like with Georgics as a whole, this symbol operates on multiple levels. The plant symbolized agrarian power - and a driver of the Roman empire, the divine origins of agriculture and the human labor required to secure it, the blessings of the Roman land and people by the gods. But more than that, the arista was the central symbol in the Dionysian Mystery cults, the catalyst for rebirth and vision. The final story of Orpheus is but the icing on the cake of his mystic text.

The myth of Orpheus descending to Hades to recover his lost love can be read as a metaphor for the mystical journey. That journey is succinctly summarized in four lines by Li Po’s poem at Jing Ting Mountain. Everything - Jing Ting Mountain, an old teacup on the kitchen counter, a sparrow dozing in the eaves - glows with Oneness, yet without initiation, we fail to recognize it. That’s where the epic journey comes in, with seekers braving a journey from the familiar world of the earth into the terrifying, unknown underworld. Li Po does it in Taoist style: letting self and world melting away until it alone remains. The Greek style is more mythic in its treatment. Orpheus risks everything to recover his beloved, a metaphor for the primordial unity. After passing through a series of challenges, Orpheus does finally fetch his Eurydice, but just as he steps into the tellurian world, he looks back, and she vanishes.

While Eurydice’s disappearance has traditionally been read as a failure, the mystical interpretation is that the Beloved can never enter the terrestrial world, just as light can never exist in darkness. Oneness is ineffable, yet like the deeper crust of the earth, Oneness is also immanent, always underfoot, always present, always blazing forth from creation, always staring us right in the face. This is it, but cling to it, name it, turn it into something, turn around, and it’s lost. Orpheus learns this lesson at a heavy cost. Returning without his Beloved, grief seizes him. Sorrow suffuses his songs. But this is the Dark Night of the Soul, which every initiate must pass through after their first encounter with the One. Acceptance follows grief. Ecstasy replaces sorrow. Liberation replaces loss. And, as Virgil longs, revelation breaks through the ignorance and triumphs.

The final nymph-nature-sacral connection comes from the ancient Indo-European view of nature as a source of divine vision. In all Indo-European cultures, nature possessed oracular powers. The flight of birds unveiled the future fate of a campaign. The stars determined what days were auspicious or inauspicious, the temperament of children, the birth and death of nations, or the outbreak of plague. Bones and entrails advised priests and opened portals into the future. Nymphs, in particular, played a large role in divination due to their numinous and chthonic associations.

At the base of this belief is an understanding that the natural world doesn’t exist as some conglomerate of atoms bouncing around based on physical principles (the cheap empiricism that’s all the rage these days). Nature was spiritual and mystical. Spiritually, nature can reveal the future or offer counsel with the confidence of the gods, and they could function this way because of its mystical nature, a nature attested to in The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius:

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the co-operating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.¹⁷

Although he wrote in the 2nd century, his ideas reflect the pagan philosophy that stretches back to The Hermetica and beyond. It’s based on this view that the flight of birds can prophesy the future and that immersion in the natural world can open to the numinous beneath the surface.

Nature watching the doorway to this theophany before our very eyes and under our very feet. Studying the flight of birds is nature watching. Gazing on a pair of bulls hurling themselves at each other is nature watching. Reclining beneath a bower and savoring the fragrance of jasmine is nature watching. And all of these practices gain us, as Virgil himself hoped, into the inner precincts of nature, into her empirical, tribal, spiritual, and mystical nature.

Jon of Eriugenea and the Celtic Christian Tradition

The details of Celtic pagan philosophy and practice will remain an enigma forever. However, one oft-overlooked source hints at what the druidic world might have looked like: early Celtic Christianity. Unfortunately, many pagans dismiss this connection and see the Christianization of Celtic lands as an absolute break with the old world and gods. The historical record says otherwise.

Wherever one looks in the Medieval period, the pagan spirit lives on. The Church demanded that knights purify themselves from the polluting effects of killing after returning from campaigns, but this tradition comes directly from the Roman army (and likely other European pagan practices unattested to in the historical record). Roman soldiers performed the lustratio, a purification ritual, upon returning from a campaign ostensibly to wash away the filth of blood and soil before returning to normal society. Another purpose of this ritual was to mark the transition from war to peace and absolve soldiers of some of the trauma that hand-to-hand combat inflicted on its survivors. This practice continued until the Enlightenment period in much of Europe, with Geoffroy de Charny referencing it in his classic A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry.

Kingship bore a pagan character for centuries. Rulers derived legitimacy from the blessing of the gods, and in pagan times, they established this through rituals sited at bile, ancient trees connected to the clan’s lineage. In fact, the king of Meath punished the famed Irish king Brian Boru by cutting down and uprooting his clan’s bile, a humiliation which could rob him of his divine protection and legitimacy as a ruler - and this was still happening in the 10th century. Another pagan ritual entailed a king-to-be bathing in a pool with a dismembered horse. This Indo-European pagan ritual survived until the 8th century in Ireland (much to the dismay of the clergy) and recalls practices found as far as India. Ancestry charts continued to identify royal lines with Celtic gods, such as Nuada, arguing for a clan’s right to rule due to their superior stock.

Religion was no exception to the enduring pagan spirit. Celtic monks cut their hair in the style of druids - a tonsure that ran from ear to ear as opposed to the Roman round tonsure (which, ironically, likely came from the flamens). Monks prayed standing with arms outstretched rather than with open palms as in the Roman tradition (also based on Roman pagan forms).

Celtic pagan forms and styles continued well into the 20th century. The Carmina Gadelica, a tome of prayers, stories, spells, and songs of local Celtic people, was collected by the folklorist Alexander Carmichael in the 19th-century and attests to the pagan character of folk practices even then. Other Celtic Christian works throughout the centuries display a distinctly Celtic flavor, which can only be explained by the stubbornness of the pagan ethos.

To give you a sense of the Celtic pagan spirit alive and well in Irish culture, here are a few prayers which bear its imprint:

Hail, glorious Lord!
May church and chancel bless you!
And chancel and church!
And plain and precipice!
And the three fountains there are,
two above wind, and one above the earth.
May darkness and light bless you!
And fine silk and sweet trees!
Abraham the chief of faith did bless you.
And life eternal.
And birds and bees.
And old and young.
Aaron and Moses did bless you.
And male and female.
And the seven days and the stars.
And the air and the ether.
And books and letters.
And fish in the flowing water.
And song and deed.
And sand and field.
And such as were satisfied with good.
I will bless you, glorious Lord!
Hail, glorious Lord!

From a 12th Century manuscript, The Black Book of Carmarthen, The Four Ancient Books of Wales¹⁸

Another, prayer with a Celtic tone taken from the Carmina Gadelica:

The Likeness of the Lord
Thou art the joy of all joyous things,
Thou art the light of the beam of the sun.
Thou art the surpassing star of guidance,
Thou art the step of the deer of the hill,
Thou art the step of the steed of the plain,
Thou art the grace of the swan of swimming,
Thou art the loveliness of all lovely desires.
The lovely likeness of the Lord
is in loveliness
everywhere upon the earth.¹⁹

St. Patrick’s Breastplate, one of the most popular prayers in Irish history, has an unabashedly esoteric and druidic flavor.

I arise today
through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
through belief in the Threeness,
through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
through the strength of Christ’s birth and his baptism,
through the strength of his crucifixion and his burial,
through the strength of his resurrection and his ascension,
through the strength of his descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today
through the strength of the love of cherubim,
in the obedience of angels,
in the service of archangels,
in the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
in the prayers of patriarchs,
in the predictions of prophets,
in the preaching of apostles,
in the faith of confessors,
in the innocence of holy virgins,
in the deeds of righteous men.

I arise today, through
the strength of heaven,
the light of the sun,
the radiance of the moon,
the whiteness of snow,
the splendor of fire,
the speed of lightning,
the swiftness of wind,
the depth of the sea,
the stability of the earth,
the firmness of rock.

I arise today, through
God’s strength to pilot me,
God’s power to sustain me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s path to go before me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s host to save me
from snares of devils,
from temptation of vices,
from allurements of nature,
from everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and near,
alone or in a crowd.

I summon today
all these powers to stand between me
and every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
against incantations of false prophets,
against black laws of paganism,
against false laws of heretics,
against deceit of idolatry,
against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
against poison, against burning,
against drowning, against wounding,
so that there may come to me an abundance of reward.

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
through belief in the Threeness,
through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.
Salvation belongs to the Lord.
Salvation belongs to the Lord.
Christ is salvation.
May your salvation, O Lord, be with us always.²⁰

The pagan flavor of these poems becomes evident if we return to the four-fold reality: empirical, tribal, spiritual, and mystical. The poems display a comfort within these four modes unheard of in modern Christian prayers today. St. Patrick’s Breastplate calls upon the elemental forces of nature, their Christian ancestors, Christ, and God, all while affirming the Oneness of creation. Compare St. Patrick’s prayer to a popular Catholic devotional prayer purged of its pagan flavor:

I VENERATE and glorify You, O most Blessed Trinity, in union with that ineffable glory with which God the Father, in His omnipotence, honors the Holy Spirit forever.

I magnify and bless You, O most Blessed Trinity, in union with that most reverent glory with which God the Son, in His ineffable wisdom, glorifies the Father and the Holy Spirit forever.

I adore and extol You, O most Blessed Trinity, in union with that most adequate and befitting glory with which the Holy Spirit, in His unchangeable goodness, extols the Father and the Son forever.²¹

St. Patrick would, ironically, find more in common with Virgil or Li Po than the impoverished world of contemporary Catholics. The popularity of these other prayers shows the vitality of the Celtic spirit long after paganism as an institution collapsed.

Despite the similarities, another point sticks out from these prayers: Medieval Celtic Christianity was not Celtic paganism. Druids were priests, not monks. They owned cattle, married, served as doctors and judges, and were ensconced in the Celtic community. Save for perhaps certain training schools and cultic sites, the druids did not live apart. They served the people as priests.

As renunciate monks ascended and Christianity grew, gods and spirits were sidelined for God and His Saints. The Word competed with ancient oaks, raven bones, and the Atlantic as a source of wisdom and direction. Local myths mixed with Biblical stories, but these struggles were not to crystallize into a distinctly Christian view until centuries later. At the outset, Celtic Christianity was pagan in character, just as our own modern pagan forms will unavoidably be shaped by our own Christian heritage.

The premier Celtic philosopher to whom we’ll now turn is Jon Scotus Eriugena. He was a 9th-century Irish theologian and is one of the most significant figures in medieval intellectual history. Flourishing during the Carolingian Renaissance, Eriugena’s work bridged the gap between the classical pagan and Christian worlds (exceptional for his time, he was fluent in Greek and, thanks to the patronage of Carolingian rulers, had access to Greek texts largely unavailable to other church members). Eriugena served at the court of King Charles the Bald, where he became renowned for his acumen.

Eriugena's magnum opus, Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature), is a landmark in Christian Neoplatonism and explores the relationship between God, nature, and humanity. His philosophy presents a vision of the universe as a dynamic process of emanation from and return to the divine, at whose summit he identified not God but nature. And this nature lies beyond all comprehension and categorization yet infuses all with its presence. Sound familiar?

Eriugena wrote at a distance from his Celtic pagan ancestors, but given the dearth of evidence demonstrating the continuity of the pagan ethos, his pantheism is not merely a coincidence of having been exposed to Greek mystical thinkers, like St. Gregory of Nyssa or Pseudo-Dionysius. These Greek thinkers certainly influenced him and equipped him with some of the vocabulary, concepts, and tools that bolstered his conclusions, but the themes that dominate his work are Celtic. The cyclical nature of God’s presence. The sacredness of man and creation. The primacy of nature. The logos and numinous. The importance of studying nature alongside scripture to understand God. Yes, he is Greek-influenced, but he is also an Irish philosopher articulating a druidic vision of the world.

Eriugena was not a pagan nor a pure pantheist. He was a devout Christian and staunch supporter of the Catholic faith, and his Periphyseon records his struggle to reconcile his pantheism with Catholic theology. There is much that Celtic pagans can find inspiring and familiar in his work. The first is the intrinsic sacredness of creation. As he writes in his classic homily based on the Gospel of Saint John:

ALL THINGS, THEREFORE, that were made by the Word, live in him unchangeably and are life. In him all things exist neither by temporal intervals or places, nor as what is to come; but all are one in him, above all times and places, and subsist in him eternally.

Visible, invisible, corporeal, incorporeal, rational, irrational—heaven and earth, the abyss, and whatever is therein—in him all live and are life and subsist eternally. Even what seems to us to be without all vital movement lives in the Word.²²

For Eriugena, the Word is not only that annoying thing that preachers use to wag their fingers at heathens or shame Christians with. The Word is also logos, the intelligence which creates, orders, and vitalizes the universe. God is both logos and, as he clarifies later, the numinous kernel at the heart of all.

The next section is where things get interesting:

And if you want to know how, or by what reason, all things that are made through the Word thus subsist vitally, causally, and in the same manner in him, consider examples chosen from created nature. Learn to know the maker from those things that are made in him and by him. “For the invisible things of him,” as the Apostle says, “are clearly understood by the intelligence, being understood from the things that are made.”

See how the causes of all things which this spherical, sensible world contains subsist simultaneously and similarly in that sun which alone is called the great luminary of the world. Thence the forms of all bodies proceed; thence the beauty and diversity of colors; and whatever else may be known of sensible nature.
Consider the infinite, multiple power of the seed—how many grasses, fruits, and animals are contained in each kind of seed; and how there surges forth from each a beautiful, innumerable multiplicity of forms. Contemplate with your inner eye how in a master the many laws of an art or science are one; how they live in the spirit that disposes them. Contemplate how an infinite number of lines may subsist in a single point, and other similar examples drawn from nature.

From the contemplation of such as these, raised above all things by the wings of natural contemplation, illuminated and supported by divine grace, you will be able to penetrate by the keenness of your mind the secrets of the Word and, to the extent that it is granted to the human being who seeks signs of God, you will see how all things made by the Word live in the Word and are life: “For in him,” as the Sacred Scripture says, “We live and move and have our being.” Truly, as the great Dionysius the Areopagite says, “The being of all things is their superessential divinity.”²³

This section resonates with the writings we’ve covered thus far. Li Po’s contemplation of a mountain as a doorway to the One. The exhortations in The Hermetica’s exhortation to study the natural world to realize its divine nature. The hymn of Virgil’s Georgics. Eriugena differs here in that the means to the divine is via intellectual contemplation, a practice which we will cover in another section.

In the next section of the homily, Eriugena offers a more sensuous path:

When humanity abandoned God, the light of divine knowledge receded from the world. Since then, the eternal light reveals itself in a twofold manner through Scripture and through creature. Divine knowledge may be renewed in us in no other way, but through the letters of Scripture and the species of creature. Learn, therefore, to understand these divine modes of expression and to conceive of their meanings in your soul, for therein you will know the Word.

Observe the forms and beauties of sensible things, and comprehend the Word of God in them. If you do so, the truth will reveal to you in all such things only he who made them, outside of whom you have nothing to contemplate, for he himself is all things. For whatever truly is, in all things that are, is he. Indeed, just as no substantial good exists outside of him, so no essence or substance exists that is not he.²⁴

Immerse the mind in creation, and God shines through. Eriugena would refuse to call this a sensuous approach, however. He would call it intuition, the spirit leaping beyond the senses to directly apprehend the divine. In practice, the difference is meaningless. Whether one calls it seeing through intuition or the eye, absolute attention leads to the revelation that began this chapter: every spear of grass - a monument to Danu; the storm clouds menacing on the horizon - a hymn to Taranis.

I do not know for sure whether or not Eriugena actually practiced nature watching in the style of the Thai Forest Tradition or Li Po. What we can glean from these and other passages is that he saw observation of nature as a means to the numinous, but his scholasticism has him lean more heavily on the dialectic. Still, the path of the nymphs is there, even if in but a proto-form. Creation sings with God’s presence. All that’s necessary is that we listen with rapt attention.

The Druids and Nature Watching

Finally, we come to the druids. They are as mysterious as they come, and their status feels fitting, given their esoteric nature and love of mist, to have been scoured from the historical record by time - and naughty Christians. We will never know whether or not the druids practiced nature watching or something similar. But if I was a betting man - and I must be - the answer is yes. Nature watching is attested to in the Thai Forest Tradition, Taoism, Hellenic Egypt, ancient Rome, and Celtic Christianity. And if they did practice it, it would be more in line with Li Po or Virgil than the 21st-century trekker admiring the foliage as he marches through the Lakes of Killarney.

The practicals that follow draw on this ancient craft. Pagans who devote themselves to this practice, to the close, careful study of the natural world, shall meet these goddesses and more. They will meet the Morrigan in the maggot-infested wound of a rabbit or the carcass of a fox. They will meet Brigid in the bubbling of a stream and the dance of a campfire. They will meet Cailleach in the screams of a storm and the aloofness of the mountains. They will meet Danu in a river rolling through the land and the dew glittering on a burr. Here, in the world before their very eyes, they shall find their temple and their idols, their scriptures and their counsel.

While this might sound like some lofty feat possible only to a bearded druid in 200 AD Britain, it isn’t so. All it requires is time and attention. The magic will come of itself.

For most Celtic pagans, magic comes slowly. Sometimes achingly so. Sitting beneath a yew thrown into the misty world of gods and spirits, of ancestors and magic sounds thrilling, but it starts boring. The first few minutes are enchanting, but then ants begin to crawl into weird places. A fly hovers around your face and crawls into a nostril. A rock digs into your bum. The swaying branches lose their shine. It might seem hopeless, but nature rewards patience.

Developing the attentive powers which reveal the goddess in the branches, like any other skill, takes time. It will be a gradual process of returning, again and again, to Mother Danu, of watching her, delighting in her, trembling before her. With consistent practice, a pagan’s attention will expand and sharpen. His love for her will burn brighter and brighter until her presence overwhelms him. The world alight with her splendor, rumbling with a life hitherto overlooked, guided by divine order. At that moment, he steps into the groves of the druid and walks hand-in-hand with the sages of old.

How To

Nature watching entails closely observing an object for a prolonged period. The practice is similar to the walkabout practice, but there are some differences.

The walkabout offers breadth and physical exertion. While out surveying, you don't see just one Monterey pine, you see a hundred, and you don't see just one slice of a river, you see five kilometers of it. Walking is also more energizing and, due to the constant flow of new objects, less likely to leave a restless pagan feeling adrift in his fantasies.

Nature watching is more focused, detailed, and quiet. Instead of passing by a hundred Monterey pines, you post up beneath one and immerse yourself in its presence. You notice the long scars along its bark and how the lower branches were lopped off years back. You notice the line of black ants marching up and down its trunk. You can see the knot of twigs that is a bird’s nest high in its branches. You can smell the musty sweetness of its needles rotting beneath you. Most of these details would be lost ambling by. The downside is that stillness can lead to sleepiness and distraction for the unready.

The practice itself is simple. Find something you want to spend time with, make yourself comfortable, and watch. Let go of all extraneous thoughts. Don’t analyze. Don’t try to figure it out. Just be there with it until it’s time to move on.

You can go nature watching anywhere from five minutes between shifts at work to nine hours a day for a month in the jungles of New Guinea, as a producer of BBC's Planet Earth did to capture the bird of paradise’s mating dance.

Some other ideas for nature-watching practices (besides trekking into New Guinea):

Watch a flower as it blooms in the morning.
Watch a storm as it rolls through your neighborhood. Experience the ebb and flow of light, rain, sounds, and temperature.
Lay beneath a tree and observe its life. The birds coming and going. The ants crawling up its trunk. The leaves trembling in the sun. How the light plays amidst its canopy.
Sit beside a stream and gaze into its waters.
Feel the temperature, moisture, and wind as it plays against your skin. Notice how the heat of the day flows like a river.
Find (or make) a bird-watching hide, then wait and watch.
Watch fireflies as they dance around a field at night.
Watch the sunrise from the dawn's first hues until the sun breaks over the horizon.

The possibilities are limitless. Another lesson worth keeping in mind comes from Grandfather T’ao Chien. Man is a part of nature. Include man’s creations in your practice. A pedicured garden. A country road. A cabin. Even a skyscraper. Ultimately, nothing is unholy.

Spending an afternoon exploring and gazing upon an abandoned factory being devoured by jungle can be as illuminating as gazing upon a leaf. Rotting structures disrupt the neat categories of nature-man that dominate our thinking. All of the materials in that old factory are natural. The concrete (limestone, clay minerals, and gypsum). The rebar (steel - an alloy of iron and carbon). The roofing (tar). The plastic tiles (petroleum and bonding chemicals). Given enough time, the entirety of our species’ effort at survival will end like the leaves of autumn - ground into detritus beyond recognition and transformed into something else. Trees. Hostile alien planets. Meteors racing through space.

Some other suggestions for nature watching:

Kim's Game: Named after Rudyard Kipling's book, Kim, this exercise improves memory and observation skills. To play, briefly look at multiple objects around you and then turn away or close your eyes. Then, try to recall as many details as possible. This game can pull you out of dullness or keep you from being carried away by restlessness.
Sectioning: Break objects down into parts. If you're looking at a tree, look at its flowers, then leaves, then branches, trunk, bark, the insects on it, and the birds on it, then repeat. Or break it down into different areas, like its top, front, back, left, right, base, etc. When looking at a wide area, such as while birding, break the space into sections and methodically move from section to section. Doing so will keep your attention sharper for longer.
Broadening: Sectioning breaks things down to increase awareness, whereas broadening expands your field of vision and stretches your ability to be aware of multiple things simultaneously. Start by resting your gaze on a point without focusing in. Then, notice what's in your peripheral vision and bring that into sharper focus. Without moving your gaze, be simultaneously aware of as many details as possible. A bird springing from a branch. A dragonfly zipping by. The sound of a leaf striking the earth. The scent of dead grass. Hold all of those details in your awareness without narrowing in on one. Once well-trained, you can track multiple objects with high definition in a broad field of vision. You can also do this with other senses.
Counting: A sure way to fall asleep? Possibly, but it’s also an effective way to keep the mind busy and attention sharp. Count the leaves on a tree, the blades of grass in a field, different types of birds, or the stars in the night sky. The methodical nature forces you to observe overlooked spots, and counting requires continuity of memory and attention as the numbers grow higher and higher.
Gazing: Rest your awareness on one object or set of objects, and forget everything else. You could look at an interesting leaf on the branch of a tree, the concrete fence that edges your property, or the distant call of a robin. Allow your mind to be absorbed in it completely.
Sketching: Armed with a notepad and pen, make quick sketches of what you see. The purpose isn't to create a masterpiece to hang on your wall but to aid observation. One of its big limitations, though, is that it's a purely visual activity.
Engaging multiple senses: Vision and hearing tend to dominate awareness, but don’t neglect your other three senses. If you’re beneath a pine, take in its scent. Take a few needles, break them in your hand, and take a whiff. Run your hands along its bark. Feel the detritus beneath your toes. Taste the air - or even a few needles if you’re feeling adventurous. You can also section the senses out, spending a few minutes on vision, followed by feeling, scent, sound, and (if possible) taste. This is particularly helpful if you feel overwhelmed by thousands of sensations rushing at you.
Connecting with the spirits: For the Celts and other animistic peoples, the natural world was a living, conscious entity with layers of being contained within. The forest was a place of spirits, gods, myths, and ancestors as well as the creatures visible to our eyes, and you can experience this directly. Later practices will address this head-on, but you can also lean into it here. To do so, tune into the sense that the land, the plants, the birds, and even the electrical wires are awake and alive. Let your consciousness fill the land beneath you, the purple haze of mountains on the horizon, and the thrush hopping atop a fence. Feel the aliveness of everything and rest in that vast sense of awakeness. Note that this is an advanced practice, so if you have no clue what I’m saying or try it out and feel stymied, move on. As your attention refines, it will make more sense.

Notes

This division roughly follows Wilber’s four-quadrant model of interior-exterior / individual-collective, however, the choice of words is my own and departs from Wilber’s own theories. I do acknowledge him as the inspiration for it along with the Buddhist concept of the four-fold developments (physical, social, emotional, and intellectual).
An da shealladh traditionally refers to individuals gifted with abilities of divination and prophecy. I expand the term to include any ability to contact the otherworld, whether it be through visions of the gods or a lived-sense of the luminous oneness pulsing beneath the skin of the world.
Philip Freeman, War, Women, and Druids: Eyewitness Reports and Early Accounts of the Ancient Celts (Kindle Edition: University of Texas Press, 2002), 41.
Freeman, War, Women, and Druids, 46.
David Hinton, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (Kindle Edition: New Directions, 2002), 86.
Li Po, The Selected Poems of Li Po, trans. David Hinton (New York: New Directions, 2013), 22.
Li Po, The Selected Poems, 121.
T'ao Ch'ien, The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien, trans. David Hinton (Kindle Edition: New Directions, 2000), 248.
Simon Weil, An Anthology, ed. Sian Miles (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 155.
Hermes Trismegistus, The Hermetica: The Lost Wisdom of the Pharoahs, trans. Tim Freke and Peter Gandy (London: Tim Freke Publications, 1997), 36.
Hermes Trismegistus, The Hermetica, 36.
Virgil, Georgics, trans. Peter Fallon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 44.
For a more detailed, scholarly treatment of the topic, I suggest two essays: "The Georgics, the Mysteries, and the Muses at Rome" by Alex Hardie and "Initiation and the Role of Aristaeus in Georgics Four" by Joseph Campbell.
Alex Hardie, “The Georgics, the Mysteries and the Muses at Rome.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 48 (2002): 175–208. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068673500000882.
Virgil, Georgics, 87.
Brooks Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1964), 408.
George Long, "The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," in The Harvard Classics: Registered Edition, ed. Charles W. Eliot, LL. D. (Danbury: Grolier Enterprises Corp., 1980), 219.
Paul Stratman, trans. and ed., Prayers from the Ancient Celtic Church (Kindle Edition: Crossway, 2018), 40.
Lucie Stone, ed., Celtic Nature Prayers: Prayers from an Ancient Well (Kindle Edition: Anamchara Books, 2015), 112.
Paul Stratman, Prayers from the Ancient Celtic Church, 1.
Rev. Maurus Fitzgerald, ed., Catholic Book of Prayers (Kindle Edition: Catholic Book Publishing Corporation, 2011), 73.
John Scotus Eriugena, The Voice of the Eagle, trans. Christopher Bamford (Kindle Edition: Lindisfarne Books, 2000), 948.
John Scotus Eriugena, The Voice of the Eagle, 948.
John Scotus Eriugena, The Voice of the Eagle, 967.