In Search Of The Psammead
The question came up in conversation with a group of my occult-inclined friends, recently – what actually influenced us to become involved with neo-paganism and the magical arts? I've had to think quite hard about my own answer. It might have started with the influence of a socialist comrade, in the early days of my political activism, who I strongly suspect was quietly a member of some magical order or other, and who introduced me to the Tarot. It might have started earlier, when one of my aunts emigrated from Britain to Canada, and left my father with a complete collection of a "partwork" magazine titled Man, Myth and Magic. Which I, as a curious teenager with raging hormones, read voraciously; taking particular and inevitable notice of the naked witches!
But on deeper reflection since that initial conversation, I think I can take it back even further and to a somewhat unexpected source.
I've always been an enthusiastic reader. This might be due to growing up in a house where books were part of the furniture, so to speak. My parents were both keen readers themselves, though their tastes in reading material were perhaps already old-fashioned even by the time of my 1960s childhood. My father was an enthusiast for Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Richmal Crompton, the latter's Just William stories reflecting Dad's memories of his own wartime childhood in a small rural town on the Norfolk/Suffolk border. My mother was more inclined towards the likes of Johanna Spyri's Heidi, but she did introduce me to one book that's had a lasting influence on me – her copy of Alice in Wonderland, given to her as a Christmas gift in 1946 and still treasured among my possessions.
I'm arguably digressing a little, but I think it helps to give some idea of this background. In modern parlance, I might be considered "hyperlexic". By the time I was eight, I had read every book in the house. Next, I started on the books my uncle had left stored with my grandparents, discovering WE Johns, Biggles, and a lasting fascination with the aircraft of World War One. At about the same time, I began to systematically work my way through the local children's library.
Further digression is necessary at this point. In the1960s and 70s, public libraries in Britain were very different places to the local council "hubs" they have subsequently been turned into. I've recently moved back to my hometown after a forty-year absence. A trip to the local library a few weeks ago was quite disheartening – relatively few books on the shelves, and those mostly appear to be so-called "cosy crime", generic thrillers, celebrity memoirs and the like. The adult library there, when I was allowed to join in 1973 (aged 13, I'd completely exhausted the contents of the junior library by then) was a veritable treasure house. On the shelves, not only the populist pageturners of the day (Dennis Wheatley and Alastair Maclean, for example) but classic literature, including translations from some of the great European and American writers. It was there that I first encountered Giovannino Guareschi's stories about Don Camillo and Peppone, Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk, Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, Angela Carter's feminist reinventions of fairy tales, the Black Panthers, Tariq Ali's over-optimistically titled The Coming British Revolution (complete with a frontispiece showing how to make a Molotov cocktail!), the diaries of Che Guevara, the writings of Karl Marx, Donald Featherstone's pioneering books on wargaming, a broad selection of rock and jazz LPs...even a gallery of paintings and prints to borrow and hang on the wall at home.
Anyway, to return to the junior library... It was a peculiar time in some ways for children's literature. Alongside contemporary children's fiction, there were still many older works. The Water Babies still lingered on the shelves, for instance, as did Heidi. From a slightly more recent period, there were the Edwardians. And prominent among those was Edith Nesbit.
Nesbit is best remembered nowadays for one book, The Railway Children, which has been adapted for television and the movie screen a few times – the best of which, in my opinion, still being the 1970 version, though of course that may just be my nostalgia. Although she only started writing for children in order to escape financial problems, and really wanted to be remembered for her poetry, the stories were groundbreaking in her day and to the ten-year-old me they were, quite literally, a magical revelation. In Five Children and It, the protagonists meet a magical creature, the psammead or sand fairy, in chalk quarries just a few miles from my childhood home; their subsequent adventures take place in locations I visited (and still visit) quite regularly. The central character of The Magic City, coincidentally named Philip and so particularly relatable for me as a child, built "cities" from household objects and ornaments that sprang to a life populated by his toys. After reading that novel, I spent hours creating similar cities of my own. Sadly, they never came to life!
But crucially, what the Nesbit stories did was to suggest that magic wasn't something that only happened in the faraway worlds of fairy tales. It could happen right in the here and now, breaking open the mundane world like an egg to reveal wonders. And looking back, I think it's fair to say that this planted a seed, a seed that has since grown into active engagement with occultism and with Surrealism too, the quest for the Marvellous that may be hidden within the everyday.
Edith Nesbit died in poverty and obscurity, and was buried in a lonely churchyard on the Romney Marshes, in the far southern reaches of Kent. A few years ago, I laid plans to visit her resting place, but the covid pandemic and lockdowns put paid to that idea. I'm thinking it's about time to revive plans for the journey, as a pilgrimage of sorts.
This line of thinking also takes me towards the concept of a deeper project, one for which that pilgrimage might serve as an overture. I've mentioned the psammead. Its habitat in the chalk pits is on Bluebell Hill, a place I've written about previously and that has multiple associations with "old magic"i. But I am thinking now on its associations with new magics, too; particularly their creation, or perhaps their re-creation from the depths of memory and the imagination.
In his book The Magical World of the Inklings, the late Gareth Knight emphasised the mythopoeic foundations underlying the work of an informal group of Oxford fiction writers, the titular Inklings – JRR Tolkein, CS Lewis, Owen Barfield et al. He proceeded from there to suggest meditation and ritual work based on those foundations. This is not the place to précis Knight's book, with all its flaws as well as positives (though I can recommend reading it, to anyone interested enough), but I will dare to suggest that there was a similar if less explicitly high-minded process at the root of Nesbit's magical children's stories. The psammead does not exist in our physical world, but might do so in another, mythic sort of reality that exists in the realms of creative imagination.
So, I have questions. Can it be that fictional creations, in at least some cases, function as "avatars" of some deeper, older Innerworld forces? Is the imagination able to give form to some idea or memory from the depths of our collective consciousness? Can a work of fiction or of poetry play a role in manifesting a creation of the imagination? Perhaps helping to anchor it to some level of existence in the world of our everyday reality? If the answer to any of those questions is a positive – what implications might this have for the fictional creations of, say, Kafka or Angela Carter, or of Edith Nesbit?
I can't give a definite answer to any of those questions, at this point, but must leave them hanging while I seek evidence one way or the other. Because, as the psammead said, “Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof.”
I'll try to report on any findings in due course. In the meantime, maybe consider where your own occult inspiration came from. You never know what, or who, you might find.
i The poem sequence Bluebell Hill is included in my collection The Decipherment of Nature, published by Sul Books and available online here.
Philip Kane
Philip Kane (by Grace Sanchez)
Philip Kane is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).