GETTING STARTED 5: WORKING WITH THE ALLIES OF THE MIDDLE WORLD
By Todd Covert, Chief of the Fellowship
Since ancient times, people in many places throughout the world have conceived of their cosmos as divided into three worlds, typically including a celestial realm above and a subterranean world below. Human beings were thought to reside in a middle world.
This middle realm was often seen in the mythic imagination as capped by the sky and surrounded and perhaps supported by the fathomless sea. The composition of this world may be seen as determined by the dismembered parts of a primordial being. In an instance of connection between the worlds within and without, many ancients—among them, it seems, the Irish, saw the dismembered anatomy of the sacrificed god reflected in the composition of the human being.
Proceding from the Middle World to the Other Worlds involves a journey. In some cases, this might involve descent into a cave or an ascent up a tree, hill or mound. Some tales suggest such passages as a sea voyage or a passage through the mist. Thorn trees in Ireland were regarded as doorways to the realm of the Fair Folk (and lone thorn trees were felled—it was believed—at one’s peril). All of this suggests that the Middle World is bounded, that it has borders which can only be passed under certain conditions or by beings with particular powers or tools which allow them to do so.
Midgard (an Anglicized form of Old Norse Miđgarđr), is an old Germanic name for our world, the places inhabited by humans, with the literal meaning "middle enclosure." This term clearly suggests a bounded realm—one to which we might well compare a ritual space, whether a temple or magical circle. In the ancient Irish tale of the four cities of the Gaelic gods, the names of their abodes were Findias (from finn, “bright” or “white” or “fair”—like the sky), Murias (from muir, “sea”), Gorias (from an old Indo-European root referring to the fire of incubation), and Falias. The name “Falias” would appear to refer in some sense to the Earth…and, indeed, the root word in the Gaelic languages refers to “turf” and to an enclosure. From these widely separated terms—Midgard and Falias—we can discern a broader sense of the nature of the Middle World in which we humans dwell on the part of the ancients.
If the Middle World is an enclosure, akin to sacred space, what purpose might this serve? If the Earth is indeed surrounded and underlain by the primordial Ocean, seething and seemingly limitless, then the solidity of our realm suggests discernible order, holding back chaos in which human beings cannot thrive. The ritual enactment of order echoes this, being what some have described as a recreation of the cosmogony, the birth of the cosmos.
The historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, suggested in his book, Shamanism, that many tribal peoples have enacted ritual around a central pole, post, or tree. This allows the people participating to orient themselves around the center of the world. From this point radiate the four directions—whether they are seen as “north, south, east, and west” or simply “in front of me, to my left, to my right, and behind me” (which is how the cardinal directions are, essentially, identified in the Irish culture, among others).
On a more cosmic level, this central point may extend up into the Upper Realm and down into the Lower World. Perhaps the most familiar elaboration on this conceit is in the Norse tradition, with its world-tree, Yggsdrasil, linking the nine worlds of the cosmos. As beings (as, for the Norse, a squirrel) can travel up and down this cosmic axis, visionaries—such as the shamans discussed by Eliade and the anthropologist Michael Harner, among others—may use it for their journeys to and from the Otherworlds.
Not only human beings inhabit this world. All around us, we see, hear, and otherwise sense the presence of other beings. In our homes, we may have companion animals, on whom we dote as much as on any human friend. Our world teems with animal and plant life. Some religious and philosophical traditions accord spiritual worth to so-called “inanimate” objects in the natural world as well. All these entities are more than simply “scenery” for our delight—each fills a role in an interconnected web of earthly life and we lose any from among this cohort at our ultimate peril.
Many people have encountered animal allies in realms other than that of mundane reality. Various sorts of non-ordinary experience have revealed beings who might be named by such terms as “power animal” or “totem.” Not only individuals but communities may find self-definition and guidance from these allies, even if only from their symbolic attributes—the cunning of the fox, the strength of the bear, and so on.
For others, the Middle World also teems with beings who are other-than-human. These kindreds include the Fair Folk of Celtic lore, dryads and nymphs and satyrs and others from Hellenic tradition, Norse elves and trolls, and on and on. Tradition and the experience of those who claim contact with these beings suggest that they travel to and from our domains at various times, for various reasons, and—sometimes—with certain restrictions. They may live in the wild or deep places or on other planes of existence or even within a tree. Their ultimate nature remains a subject for much discussion and debate. While some feel they are truly independent entities, others suggest they are cultural memories of lost human or para-human populations, and still others regard them as projections of our own inner, archetypal, experiences. It is worth setting aside questions of ultimate nature and merely opening oneself to the presence—or lack of presence—of these beings in one’s life. Experience is, after all, more immediate and powerful than ideas ideas about experience.
Similarly, the nature and boundaries of the very “realms” alluded to here can be endlessly examined. In the end, by their very nature, such things pertain more to the arena of spiritual belief and yearning than to that of empirical measurement and analysis. If we act as though such things are as we deem them to be, we find that the seeming divisions of belief among us begin to dissolve before our shared use of names for beings and general categories of spiritual experiences.
End of Part One —
In part two:
—Sovereignty and “dominion”
—Finding our way in the Middle World