We are as dedicated as ever to continuing the golden thread, to unraveling the labyrinth, and to concluding this present cycle of four instalments - the Grail Cycle.

We have met the Grail Seeker in Issue 1.

We have grappled with the desolation of the failed quest in Issue 2.

Now there comes a time to find a path out. And it cannot be done alone.

Circumstances produce unexpected bed-fellows. Fellow victims of a rapacious government, like the dispossessed religious, become allies to be defended (often against their will), their fate taken as an augury of what was more generally in store…

— C.S.L. Davies, Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Where last the Incidental Encyclical left its winding, golden thread, the world was in waste. Holy Empires lay in ruin because of the base act of betrayal which always twists and turns first in our own heart before biting the hand that fed it - our own hand. Camelot lay shattered. Merrie England is no longer courts and pavilions, castles and cities resplendent; the Matter of Arthur lies sleeping in barrow with the grass growing wild atop it. Another Matter now stirs in the minds of the dissipated and distant-flung denizens of England. The landscape itself reflects this change, and the stories which can no longer take place in the stone keeps and amidst fluttering tournament tents now must take place in the dark and mysterious places which heroes aforehand only rode through in haste, or else fought their way out of desperately. In Nottingham, dressed in Lincoln green — through Sherwood Forest to Barnesdale Wood — upon the West Riding of Yorkshire and about the dales - the names of these towns and wild places call up Robin Hood’s exploits and most memorable legends. This was the place for the yeoman myths, the substance of the common freeman’s parish play and of the country clark’s poetic homily.

It was not just in matters of Greenwood myth that outlaws strode the wolds and fens of wild northern wastes, however; Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were the site of many dissenting movements in English history. Swathed by the cloak of the Danelaw in the 9^th century, Yorkists rebelled against their new Viking jarls after losing their king in A.D.867. During the tightening throttle of a Norman yoke over a routed England, rebel legend Hereward the Wake conspired with northern bishops and yeomen to carry on a guerrilla campaign amidst the Lincoln marshes and northern wilderness until his betrayal in A.D.1071. And on the cusp of England’s remaking as a modern nation-state (and indeed in the very same generation as the printed tales of Robin Hood began to circulate), the north once more tried to resist the creeping shadow of a king’s oppressive reach when the people revolted against Henry VIII’s infamous reform of the Church.

Though perhaps a lesser known revolt in history, this event is the best documented act of public resistance from this pivotal century in early modern England.^⁠1 There are two distinct revolts from the years 1536-7, the latter occurring within a fortnight of its predecessor. First was the Lincoln Rising, beginning on October 1 in the same year Henry VIII promulgated his Ten Articles and began the infamous dissolution of England’s monasteries for his own enrichment. Over twenty thousand responded in protest to the spoliation of their churches and communities, though it is important to make absolutely emphatic that this was not the kind of revolt seen a century later in the English Civil War: no one called for the removal of their king. Indeed, the people still referred to Henry by the honourable title bestowed on him by the pope, ‘Defender of the Faith’ — though not, it should be noted, by the title ‘Head of the Church’.^⁠2 The Lincolnshire Rising was swiftly dealt with, and its leaders - among whom a shoemaker and a monk - were summarily executed in typically grisly fashion. This did not have the effect intended. By October 13^th, only some nine days after the Lincoln mob had dissipated, a new movement had been stirred. This was a rebellion known today - and named in its time - as the Pilgrimage of Grace. This name is not a euphemism for an otherwise brutal peasant uprising; the lawyer Robert Aske who lead the rebellion against Henry VIII and named it thusly insisted that those involved kept to the highest standard of behaviour. It is clear that by and large such a standard was kept; very little by the way of looting occurred and the revolt enjoyed clerical support that kept its pilgrims armed and fed. There were no orgies of violence, nor the grandiose toppling of a smooth, monolithic Ozymandian statue in favour of the myriad biting sands of desert; no desperate acts of damned rebels.

The actions that were undertaken by these rebels - or pilgrims, as Aske insisted they were - showed that the religion claimed by the uprising was not (as some scholars have claimed) just a veil for political motives. They restored almost a quarter of the monastics and other clergy ousted from religious houses by Henry’s edicts, and peacefully occupied the city of York.^⁠3 Of course, there was politics at play on some level - but the noble element was not there at the outset or foundation of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and in many cases had to be coerced into taking the pilgrim oath and supporting it.^⁠4 Likewise, though there was much rumour that fuelled the discontent which brought the commons to stand and march alongside their parish priest and local abbess, it was rumour built from a foundation real tragedies and destruction that had already occurred: 'the people saw many abbeys pulled down in deed, they believed all the rest [of the rumours] to be true’^⁠5, as one contemporary put it. Though the people may have felt it within their honest and holy right to protest the destruction of their communities and ways of life, the King did not take the dissent with a great deal of understanding.

An exemplary response of Henry VIII can be found numerous of many letters written that week to his privy councillors, such as the following to the Duke of Suffolk, written on the 19^th of October 1536. It is in full keeping with the contemporary popular image of the forgiving and loving husband we cherish:

“You are to take the said abbot and monks forth with violence and have them hanged without delay in their monks' apparel.”^⁠6

Indeed, though the pilgrims had sworn themselves to the King and to God in their oaths (which oaths were a requisite ritual of joining the pilgrimage), Henry seems to have viewed their movement as anything but apolitical:^⁠7

"How presumptuous then are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm and of least experience, to find fault with your prince for the electing of his counsellors and prelates?" Thus you take upon yourself to rule your prince.”^⁠8

For all of Henry’s railing and ranting, the pilgrimage ended peacefully. In early December, congregated at Pontefract Castle, Aske drafted twenty-four articles in response to the king’s ten; a mix of political, economic, and religious concerns evident among them. The king’s envoy to the rebels assured them that the king would convene Parliament in the North and that he would be sympathetic to their demands; Aske then convinced them to disband. This is not to say there were not later throes and pangs of unruly commoners and clerics when the demands were inevitably trampled on and ignored by the vindictive Henry. But it is important to emphasise that Robert Aske (though eventually executed) succeeded in getting the forty thousand assembled to disband and go home after their petition had been drafted and agreed to by a royal spokesman. When they disbanded, they took none of the political or economic matters into their own hands in waiting for the King to come and ratify their wishes; they did, however, continue to enforce the restored position of the monks and nuns of their communities to their religious houses.^⁠9

Though this unique incident may not be a well-publicised historical moment today, what is well-known is the eventual result of Henry’s break with Rome. The commoners and clerics who had swelled as the grassroots and bedrock of the Pilgrimage of Grace did not succeed, and the religion of the people was soon suppressed when landowners and gentry realised the economic benefit brought about by evangelical reforms.^⁠10 But that is the general drift of history, and while general drifts can make for the broad strokes useful in painting ideological narratives, it is through scrutiny and consideration on finer detail that the symbolism and structure of history is revealed. What exactly, in 1536, were the people resisting, and what was to come about? It would be incorrect to say ‘Protestantism’. Even the term ‘heresy’ was bandied about during the pilgrimage and the rumour-mill that preceded it was mostly used in a vague sense. What exactly, in this cultural, religious, and social climate, did a pilgrimage mean, and how did it address the issue they faced?

To answer the first question, I quote again from Henry himself. In a drafted letter to the Duke of Suffolk he commands the latter to address the people concerning their discontent over Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries:

“As to the suppression of religious houses we would have you know it is granted to us by Parliament and not set forth by the mere will of any counsellor. It has not diminished the service of God, for none were suppressed but where most abominable living was used, as appears by their own confessions signed by their own hands in the time of our visitations. Yet many were allowed to stand, more than we by the act needed; and if they amend not their living we fear we have much to answer for.”^⁠11

Henry had done many things in 1536, and would go on to do many more, all of which were fundamentally the end of the world for countless communities and cities in England. Eamon Duffy’s magisterial book, The Stripping of the Altars, on the preceding century of English religious life and the effect the Henrician reform had on England is a seven-hundred page testament to each aspect of life that would have to find new support, or even entirely new foundations - or ultimately be destroyed - thanks to Henry’s actions and edicts of 1536. Already, within that year, enough had been prefigured in the Ten Articles, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the abrogation of feasts and seizure and even destruction of relics, that tens of thousands would rise against it. While summarising Duffy’s tome would be impossible, even the cursory list above displays how many parts of life were quickly stripped. The act of childbirth would change without the relics of maternal Saints like St. Anne to support pregnant women or those in the act of delivery. The economic life of towns would shift when gilds dedicated to furnishing churches to the honour of local saints found those days abrogated from the calendars, and the peasants likewise found their holidays stifled and were sent back to the fields. Entire sectors of the community would lose work and a role in parish life following the Chantry Act of 1547. And so on. The world turned over, and lain aside in a ditch, for the march of reform and progress.

But Henry’s attitude, and the attitude of Cromwell, and other of his agents in these sweeping reforms, towards those who reform would so confound was not as simple as that of an abolitionist. Indeed, many of Henry’s agents had to tread carefully in their reforming zeal around a king who had cut his teeth authoring vehement attacks on Luther in his youth. Yet even those with a more straightforward agenda of spoliation felt compelled to take a posture that has resonance with an attitude described in the previous issue of this magazine.

Why, indeed, do we consider now this historical event, the strangely un-revolutionary rebellion against a reformation? What a paradoxical thing the Pilgrimage of Grace was; perhaps even nullifying itself like a negative cancelling its like. No, it is here examined - and with some attention to its minutiae - because it is the template of the response to Wasteland. In that dangling quotation of Henry’s concerning the people’s ire at the closure of their monasteries, there is the deceitful graciousness, the poisoned charity of the very betrayal that births and later sustains the wasteland. We cannot face our own betrayals, so it is necessary to opiate ourselves with the sweet unction of a little death.

Rhetorically, Henry VIII’s reformation stands at the vanguard of tyranny in modernity. Henry and his agents make the same claim that Stalin and his cronies echo in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which the Incidental Encyclical explored in its last issue. Henry states that the service of God is not diminished when the monasteries are closed, because he has only closed those which were not serving God. Henry and his agents make the same claim that Stalin and his cronies echo in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which the Incidental Encyclical explored in its last issue. Henry states that the service of God is not diminished when the monasteries are closed, because he has only closed those which were not serving God.

This wonderful, simple pattern played out in the hands of Henry VIII’s agents just as it did in his scripted rhetoric. When Henry’s Chancellor Thomas Cromwell seized a relic or an icon from a parish, he gave assurances it would indeed be returned if it proved miraculous. Fair enough. Yet those who claimed to have seen miracles done by icons kept in Cromwell’s confiscated hoard - such as as one woman in Walsingham in 1538 - were put in the stocks, even despite the deep snow, to silence them.^⁠12 For as Cromwell was soon to demonstrate by producing a false icon with a mechanism that allowed its eyes to move, the miracles were tricks.^⁠13 This is the pantomime, village-square-demonstration forerunner of Hume’s fallacious argument against miracles devised centuries later: If a miracle were to happen ‘in real life’, it must be explicable through the laws of nature; but a miracle is something which is impossible according to the laws of nature: ergo, if a miracle were to happen, it would not be a miracle - merely something occurring as per natural law, or a lie.^⁠14

The same serpentine circle runs its way through the mechanics of tyranny all the way through to the present. Stalin’s interrogating agent claims that you - a good communist - are not being arrested for being any different to he (also, coincidentally, a good communist); you are not different to the other good communists and so because you know this (as well as he knows this, he, a good communist), you will not make a fuss at the trial, and you will readily accept the sentence and plead guilty; yes, this will prove that you are a good communist. Start with a premise that excludes any conclusion but your premise, and you have won - so long as you have force of arms to crush the honest dissenter about his day.

All miracles are deceitful until proven deceitful.

It is not enough to call a world uprooted a wasteland: the earth must also be salted, so that nothing again grows there.

All relics are false until proven false.

It is not long before the ideology reaches ad nauseam, not long at all!

All traitors are traitors until proven traitors.

And so on. It is the beautiful, tautological, innocence of the presumption and the verdict rolled into one:

GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY

So much for But what of the response? What was a pilgrimage to the people of 15^th and 16^th century England? Why was it a significant act that some forty thousand might understand its meaning well enough to not only join it, but to participate in an almost entirely non-violent uprising of commoners lasting several months - and then to have the capacity for disbanding without immediately burning down the very next thing in sight? Eamon Duffy in his essay The Dynamics of Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages summarises the attitude of many testators composing their last wills during this time, who made provision for others to undergo pilgrimage on their behalf: “The point of the pilgrimage is not the journeying, but the pardon it secures.”^⁠15 Duffy states this to contrast the prevalent, overly twee understanding of pilgrimage that might be prevalent among the readers as it is in some scholarship. Yes, there was a journey; the movement beyond the familiar into a liminal space occurred. But the point that is so clearly the focus in many lay wills that provision for, and clerical documents that prescribe pilgrimage in late medieval England, is simple. The point is not to be forever wearied, to be lost and wandering perpetually, to be wide-eyed at the world in all its unfamiliarity without relief. The point is to come home, to be re-integrated and shriven, to be whole.

True, the Pilgrimage of Grace had all manner of strangeness about it, all manner of the liminal. As Davies writes,

Naturally a movement drawn from a vast tract of country from the Lincoln- shire wolds to the Cumberland fells, and embracing all ranks of society, contained within it a number of contradictions.^⁠16

This was a movement started by the mediators - the clerics - who stood not just between men and God but between ranks of social order, too. It was first taken up by the commons, and in this was like the prior Lincolnshire Rising begun by a monk and a shoemaker. It even gained the support of the nobles, and coerced some others; it restored places that were once halls of prayer and centres of community when they had been made instruments of private ownership and title, extending the king’s direct support base and the landholding of the gentry against the middlemen and commons. It began because of real grievance and because of rumoured grievance all bundled into one. Dying men might join because they wondered who would continue to say Masses for them should the reforms not be stopped, living men might join because they had a duty to continue seeing Masses said for fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. Not merely bonds of familial piety, social order, class division, religious community, and agricultural calendar were wrapped up in this, but the most liminal margin of all in the late medieval world; that bond and barrier between living and dead.

There are many more historical details that might be brought out to highlight the liminal symbolism of the Pilgrimage of Grace, which is the liminal symbolism of pilgrimage in general. One might mention the moveable bridge the pilgrims had with them. Or that at its head was a lawman breaking the law. Or that the banner under which it marched blazed with the five wounds that marked the death of a God - a God who had raised Himself to life again. Or, perhaps most strangely, of the final oath sworn when the Pilgrimage disbanded and they tore off the badges depicting those five wounds:“We will all wear no badge nor sign but the badge of our sovereign lord.”

Some pilgrims would go home. Some pilgrims, incited by rumours, would feel unsure of the shaky agreement Aske had extracted from the king’s emissary Lord Norfolk. Some of these would seek and find an unlikely and final leader: the Protestant Sir Francis Bigod. Not only was he not marching to preserve what the commons and their clerics were fearful of losing, but he in fact had been a suppression commissioner. Bigod had joined the pilgrimage in resistance to the idea that the sovereign could be the head of the English Church; if not the pope, then at least a suitable archbishop.^⁠17 Bigod gave Henry VIII and in particular Norfolk a readily taken exit from any demands supposedly acquiesced to at Pontefract Castle. The 800 commoners still following an increasingly desperate Bigod more than a month after Aske had ratified the twenty-four articles of the Commoner’s Petition were enough to claim that the agreement of the commoners to disband had been broken. Henry was able to move against what was now a treacherous uprising, and summarily captured and executed two hundred and sixteen of those who had participated. Aske and several abbots, who had been most at risk during Bigod’s escapade and pathbreaking, were among those hanged in 1537.

Ultimately, the Henrician reform would give way to Edward’s campaign, and then to the brutal outbreak of true Catholic-Protestant violence under Mary and Elizabeth. And English history would enter modernity like many other European powers in this baptism of reformation bloodshed as the lines became drawn between formal denominations.

That is beyond the scope of the story of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and it is beyond the structural place at which the Incidental Encyclical now finds itself: in the wake of tyranny and betrayal, and of language itself being turned into a circle, what direction should one travel? What the pilgrims of 1536 did achieve, before it was subverted and subjugated, was a real challenge to the tyranny of Henry VIII. The king’s legitimacy had come to rest on his right to govern the church, having himself declared he did not accept the Pope’s authority over him (and by extension his authority under the Pope). The hierarchy of normal rule had been broken, and all over a divorce that was nothing but scandal to the commons and gentry across England. The religious reform had become Henry’s sole remaining channel of legitimacy: to reform the abuses of the church as its new head would establish him outside the old hierarchies as a new power answerable to none. But a forty-thousand strong response did, if for only a month, force an answer. The Pilgrimage went out in order to come home again, and to be whole again, and in that very act resisted the very idea of reform and Henry’s legitimacy through it. The commons wanted to come home to what was known, so they went out en masse. And if they failed as a whole because a part of them were untrue to their oath, it was only because the tyrant was too great in that moment. It was not because the pilgrimage was wrong. A pilgrimage is the only way forth from the waste.

And so as pilgrim this issue the Incidental Encyclical will go: there and back again.

For to meet all manner of

Queer Bedfellows.

¹ Davies, C. S. L. “Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace” in A. Fletcher and J. Stephenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England. Cambridge, 1985, p.60

² Ibid, p.76

³ Bridgen, S. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: the Rule of the Tudors (1485-1603). Penguin Books: London, 2000. p.129

⁴ Davies, C. S. L. “Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace” in A. Fletcher and J. Stephenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England. Cambridge, 1985, pp.75-76 and elsewhere in the chapter.

⁵ Ibid, p.75

⁶ 'Henry VIII: October 1536, 16-20', in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 11, July-December 1536. Edited by James Gairdner (London, 1888), p.304

⁷ Regarding the Pilgrims’ oath to the king: Bridgen, S. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: the Rule of the Tudors (1485-1603). Penguin Books: London, 2000. p.128

Regarding the requisite nature of the oaths: Davies, C. S. L. “Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace” in A. Fletcher and J. Stephenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England. Cambridge, 1985, pp.75-76 and elsewhere in the chapter.

⁸ 'Henry VIII: October 1536, 16-20', in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 11, July-December 1536. Edited by James Gairdner (London, 1888), pp.302-303

⁹ Knowles, David (1979). The Religious Orders in England. Cambridge University Press. p. 330

¹⁰ Davies, C. S. L. “Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace” in A. Fletcher and J. Stephenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England. Cambridge, 1985, p.87

¹¹ 'Henry VIII: October 1536, 16-20', in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 11, July-December 1536. Edited by James Gairdner (London, 1888), p.304

¹² Duffy, E. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580. Yale University Press. 1992. Chapter 11.

¹³ Ibid

¹⁴ This is not an exact representation of Hume’s logic as Hume’s actual logic on the non-existence of miracles just spends more time to get to the same evidentiary fallacy. If you don’t believe me, take a Logic class. Hume clearly didn’t, but even if he had there’s no causal proof it would have improved his philosophy.

¹⁵ Duffy, Eamon. Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Chapter 15: The Dynamics of Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages.

¹⁶ Davies, C. S. L. “Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace” in A. Fletcher and J. Stephenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England. Cambridge, 1985, p.58

¹⁷ Altazin, Keith, "The northern clergy and the Pilgrimage of Grace". LSU Doctoral Dissertations, 2011. 543. https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/543 p.242

Bibliography:

Altazin, Keith, "The northern clergy and the Pilgrimage of Grace". LSU Doctoral Dissertations, 2011. 543. https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/543

Bridgen, S. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: the Rule of the Tudors (1485-1603). Penguin Books: London, 2000. p.129

Davies, C. S. L. “Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace” in A. Fletcher and J. Stephenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England. Cambridge, 1985, pp. 58–88.

Duffy, E. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580. Yale University Press, 1992.

Duffy, Eamon. Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Chapter 15: The Dynamics of Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages.

'Henry VIII: October 1536, 16-20', in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 11, July-December 1536. Edited by James Gairdner (London, 1888), British History Online, accessed May 19, 2025, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/letters-papers-hen8/vol11/pp284-314

Knowles, David. The Religious Orders in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1979.

Stay tuned for more leviathan-themed content in the coming weeks, as well as the full release of Issue 1 for 2024, coming soon!

Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex has been one of the most celebrated example of ancient tragedy for over two thousand years - so it’s no easy task to write about, considering the amount of discussion that has taken place over it in that time. Editors Samuel and Levi tackle the task with a summary of the narrative and a discussion on how it fits in to the present theme of the magazine.

Socrates' Razor: the Grail Quest

Episode 1 of Socrates’ Razor has premiered on YouTube! This project takes the mission of the magazine project and puts it into action, taking a blend of inquiry and insight on the classics mixed with comedy and character.

Socrates’ Razor follows editors Samuel and Levi as they haplessly stumble through a quest for meaning and inspiration from the classics, helped along the way by the obscure ramblings of the Old Tar, and the on-the-scene interrogations of The Reporter.

In this very first bonus episode of 2024, Samuel inquires into one of Levi’s fields of study: the legacy and history of the Proto Indo-Europeans. Levi provides information as to how we know of this ancient group of wide-ranging horseback warriors, and Samuel considers how Levi’s insights tie into the project of the classics and the magazine as a whole. Join us in this one-of-a-kind quest to understand the offerings of a range of different disciplines - linguistics, archaeology, and genetics - and see how even modern inquiries follow ancient patterns of storytelling.

{Edit: this re-upload features improved audio thanks to regular listener Jake Welch, who offered to improve the quality and remove some of the sounds of the car - our heartfelt thanks to Jake!}

In our final podcast discussion of our first year as a project, editors Samuel, Levi, and Michael discuss the works covered in our upcoming issue: Strife Within. From the familial turmoil of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to the contradictory rhetoric of Plato’s Symposium, and through the depths of customs and games displayed in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the theme on which we conclude this year’s Journey Up is unfolded in its myriad aspects.

Join our discussion by messaging us on socials to get access to the Incidental Encyclical Discord server, where we do live readings, give updates on the progress of each issue, and talk with readers and contributors alike about the works and themes covered each quarter!

In this special episode of the podcast, editors Samuel and Levi are talking about their favourite Christmas story: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by the anonymous Pearl Poet of the 14th century. It’s an Arthurian romance that comes to us from late mediaeval England, featuring headless horsemen, knightly deeds, seduction, and witchcraft. And all of it taking place in the most wonderful time of the year - Yuletide. But what’s even more special is that this episode is our first video podcast, available to watch on YouTube as well as listen via the Substack podcast feed.

We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and hope to hear from you all through our socials, or our Discord server, to join the discussion leading up to our final issue of our first year as a publication!

Art by Bonnie Eastlake (@bonniemay_art)

(This piece continues in the series of transitions - reflections of past issues, and introductions to new issues - that has been ongoing throughout the year. The preceding instalments, ‘The Sea and the Hills’, and ‘Ode to the West Wind’, are also available on our Substack.)

Am I free? Now, here, at the age past the threshold of adulthood? I am out - of the home, I have found a barren plot and, it being granted to me, have begun to work to turn it to a garden. Perhaps, indeed, I will soon come to a promised land. Perhaps, indeed, it will be of my own making, but, even so, the plot was lent to me - not won, nor conquered, nor even sought. But slowly now: the story must keep pace with the spirit. 

My time at college is finished; I have sought, with charged enthusiasm, wisdom from dead and dusty books, and have graduated. The future looms, perhaps dark like storm clouds (yet with the same promise of rain), overhead. I am asked to return to the college and tutor. Along with this, a small place in which to live I am granted: a shed, with a tangled, dead patch of ground beside it. Thus in two ways am I charged with the task of applying myself, and what I have found in desert places. Take what you have learned and apply it, first to yourself (know it, understand it - understand what that means, likewise) - and then help others in their pursuit of that ‘likewise’. Then there is the place besides where I live. I cannot remain static in what wisdom I may have stumbled across, not even here. With the little wasteland to call my own outside my door, I now find a call of my own accord to apply myself to. 

If I have found only desolation in suburb, and even in city, it has been too large a desolation to take charge of. If I move out to the hills, stark as they are, or the coast, whittled away by the seas, I see the impact of how my people took this land. They too are become desolate, not perhaps by intention, but because there was no wisdom in how they were stormed and claimed. Australia is a nation paying deep into its soil for the loss of its indigenous peoples and their knowledge. Though I am an adult, I am young, and there is much of this I do not know. But I do my best, and turn as much of this desolation into a hospitable place as I can. It is hard work, truly. The earth of this nation had never known livestock or the kind of land clearing my own ancestors would practise on it, but their own short stay upon it has made it hard. Here I am in the plot I have accepted, by which I live. I break through the soil time and again, and bit by bit claim inches and yards. After some months, I have a yard. I have built a deck to sit on, surrounded by flowers and all other manner of growing thing. I have a place to show hospitality. 

But for all that, there is a danger in what I am doing. Perhaps I have not properly taken in the wisdom, both of this soon-to-be desolate land, and of the long-desolate lands I have travelled in study, of temperance. This is a virtue said by some to be the governor of all others. Hospitality is a good thing, but there are deficiencies, indulgences, and indiscretions possible in any virtue. As I further and further expand the garden I have built, it comes into my head to build a wall for it. As I invite further and further persons, beyond friend or acquaintance, into this home, it never comes into my head to draw a line. There may be some who have entertained angels, but I am barely twenty, and Abraham was nearly one hundred. There’s something to be said for the wisdom of patience, which I suspect is the spouse of temperance. 

Long brewing, the thunder cracks. So does my foot, which I break in a tempestuous effort to move great slabs of sandstone into a line I have dug. I have to stop. I stop, I break. Now I am static, stuck in the space clouded by my judgement. It is not always literally painful to realise a misstep. In this case, both the misstep and the resulting pain were very much so. 

At once, all the little place I had set apart for myself shrunk. Somehow, the all and sundry I had made habit of entertaining all but to a man ceased their visits. Apparently, it was a solitude I had devised, but one which I could not quite understand. There was little else to do but return to the dusty books and study. If I was to find wisdom once more and at least understand that, I found instead a body of work electric. There is a despair that does not give over to simply sinking. The book that had discharged its power straight through me was the collected poems of Walt Whitman, and in those words I - if not understanding, then recognising - became turbulent and alive. But the recognition was the step most critical, perhaps; the light shone inward like lighting rending clouds to point out where the strife had always been: not outside, but within. 

In a winter gale, when tin roofs knew the threat of west winds unchecked and trees bent like supplicants before the torrent, I stood amidst the brewing heavenly strife and read aloud from among many of Whitman’s cries of the inmost turbulence:

ONE hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!

(What is this that frees me so in storms?

What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)


O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!

O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,

I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)


O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world!

O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!

O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin'd man.


O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all untied and illumin'd!

O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!

To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and you from yours!

To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!

To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!

To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.


O something unprov'd! something in a trance!

To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!

To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!

To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!

To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!

To rise thither with my inebriate soul!

To be lost if it must be so!

To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!

With one brief hour of madness and joy.

This poem cannot be read in quiet. This poem, following the pattern known only to the intuition that tells the hearer and the crier of the word it is poetry, demands to be orated like a hurricane. This poem reels; temperance be damned. It may not be wisdom, but within it nonetheless something can be recognised. All of the things I felt charged with left me depleted. To have been removed from them is to feel flat; the spark is gone. Yet I was free to choose these things when I accepted them; why do I feel bound now that they are slipping away? What do I have, now there is only the supposedly free self left to myself?

Whitman desires to know: “Am I free?”; even to answer it himself. He demands to fulfil something, a task, and starts with the self. These are the demands of poets from Sappho to Byron, Chaucer to Ginsberg. Whitman’s desires, demands are perhaps among the most candid and simply, beautifully simply, put of all. Of course, this claim will always be something unproved - something in a trance. If out of that trance - if out of the almost necessary moment that comes in every life, of one brief hour to madness and joy - if out of it all can come recognition… perhaps, though this be not wisdom, it can be understood in light of it. Perhaps something can come of the place on which we now stand, in our final quarter of this year in our project. Something with which to continue the story, out from…

…Strife Within.

With Issue 3 of the Incidental Encyclical soon to be released, we bring you this unique instalment of the podcast. Not only is it slightly longer than normal, but it also features for the first time some in-person discussion - discussion that covers the work of Australia’s only Nobel Prize-winning author, Patrick White, and his novel, Voss. We also have special guest to the podcast Jack Summerhill to explain indigenous land management in Australia, which bridges the discussion of ‘Wisdom in Desert Places’ from the works of exile, Seneca’s “Letter to Hevlia” and the medieval hagiography of Simeon Stylites.

I am eighteen, supposedly come-of-age, and am not equipped with, nor for, much. I possess little, but for the yearning for encounters. Perhaps it is not true to say that I possess even this; perhaps it is truer to say that it possesses me. I am spirited, but still, I am only here: I want to be spirited away. So I move out - this is the year that I go to college - yet moving out is not the same as moving away. Still, it is enough to fan a kindled spirit. The college is just out from the city, but not away from it. Despite the proximity to the chaos of the urban sprawl, however, the immediate surrounds are still. To this stillness, come kindred spirits. This stillness is the first hint at the nature of what is possible, beyond the tumult of the sea that rings the great and untidy cities that line its coast.

It takes a journey along that coast for me to get to college. At the outset of the week, I depart before the dawn. The sun rises over the sea halfway along the route. When it comes time to disembark the train, the morning sun is piercing a dried and half-dead countryside. Its bright loomings hint at the threat of the desert, somewhere distant to the west. The farms around, beset by drought for some years, buy water from the city whose coast and rivers I see as the train translates me from night to daybreak at the inception of each week. The college must buy water, too. It rests upon a hill with dead grass and cracked earth around it. Beneath the hill, the train passes along the boundary of the bare back paddock. The dry dearth is both contrasted and confirmed by the trees: no native gums in sight, only brazen evergreens from the Old World which are slowly dying in a row along the hillside. Their leaves are turning lustreless bronze as they irretrievably succumb to the reminder that is a desert nation; a desert island. 

We kindred spirits have all come from coastal cities, fresh with memories of the sea which once our ancestors crossed as criminals and colonists. Their own journeys ended, they birthed our present state on the bright, sandy shores, with the shadow of dark, redder sands hanging over them where the sun sets. Like the evergreens they thought to bring with them, the spirit of the Old World had its limit: it does not take too great a journey west to find soil and sun that will slowly let it die. The spirit of the desert was not native to the Europe that banished the forerunners of our class, here, to New South Wales. The spirit of the West means something very different in this land. The leaves of the books written in a foreign spirit of the West can still enchant in this land, so long as they keep true to an evergreen identity. Yet when the poetry of Europe meets red dirt desert desolation, seldom does it survive. 

Yet and yet again, there is a call that even that spirit could not, and cannot, deny. Perhaps in the Old World, it was mixed up with and tied into a lust for a different horizon; bound to orientalism and the rising sun. At the end of the World, staring at the setting sun fans a different flame - one can only imagine the deserts beyond that still feel the heat of that dying light in the west. Out there, it waits for someone to move away from the safety brought by the cool of the sea, and encounter it.

Once, I found myself in trouble because of the still burning, everlasting want that already had possession of me: a desire to encounter, and to move away. It was not only myself, but a kindred spirit with whom I slipped away one night from the dormitory at college to camp the next hill over. Here, we read the poems from a world that might as well have been dead, it was now so old - but lived on here, in the still night. We stared into a fire in which the heat left a desert of ash by morning, and I heard from him of a place out west. It was the site of a hermitage, a century old, outside a town that bordered the beginning of the boundless red sands. Then and there we knew that we had to find it. Later, when we returned from our unannounced disappearance, any chance of getting permission to leave on an overnight trip from the college had trickled up as a result of the escapade. Then it was winter - we waited full until the summer, when the year of study ended, until we found our chance. And in that six month’s time, we embarked. 

As the moving car took us further and further away, words from a poet whom I read in boyhood danced tandem to the rolling landscape. From the lines of Shelley, whose Ozymandias my father explained to an eager and yet unequipped boy almost a decade earlier, I encountered the power of the desert as the Old World knew it. Yet in another poem of his, I find now a strange parallel to the feeling of the desert I then sought:

Ode to the West Wind

by Percey Bysse Shelley

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

The seasons spoken of, it is true, exist hardly at all in this west - less than once every decade a semblance of Spring comes to the desert. And Shelley’s poem moves in reverse to my own experience at the age of eighteen, starting in desolation before passing over the sea. Yet in this, it becomes in my land a depiction of the path of the west wind itself, blowing across the desert to the coastline. Its movement takes it from the red, yellow, and black lands whose desolation is shown in the same colours as the flag of this nation’s indigenous peoples. It is a spirit and a breeze, a ghost and a gust of air. That is the first stanza. Then, Shelley invokes the tempest, which is perhaps as terrifying in the sheer, shelterless sands as it is in seething seas to the east. By the third stanza, we have met the sea - and though the names of the seas Shelley summons are unknown to this nation’s shores, the terror and power that splits the waves is not. It is the same storm wind that can ravage and revivify a desert, even as its lightning strips the scarce barren trees bare. The poem might well have a yet-unthought of meaning in this desert island. It is verse I hope might through me take root in the red dirt of my homeland. Though I may have to read it backwards as I move from the coast inland, its verses already hold a key to an experience I have encountered; then, at the age of eighteen, driving to the ruins of the hermitage amidst the nascent desert. Now, I carry it with me in more than just abstract memory. Shelley himself took the emblems of what was an old world to his own time, right from the lyrics of the ancient Mediterranean peoples, into his poetry. The task we at the Incidental Encyclical have set for ourselves is much the same. For you, dear reader, as well as for ourselves, we hope to take the spirit of things past and find a place for it today.

As this project, The Incidental Encyclical, moves into its third issue for its first year, we take as our theme the insight that desert places are not totally barren. That there is a spirit, one that calls and guides and instructs, to be found in places where nothing else lives or breathes. From the outset of this journey up, we leave the troubled seas behind in order that we may seek:

Wisdom in Desert Places.