On the Patterning of Nature
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On the Patterning of Nature
The Joyous Cosmology and Ella Young's animism
The impact of psychedelics on the Californian spiritual scene in the 1950s was, observed Alan Watts, a rebirth of nature. When he spoke to fellow trippers Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard he detected in them a spiritual shift that reincorporated the natural world into their ideas. Watts was pleased because as far as he was concerned this brought their thinking more in line with his own.[1]
At the dawning of the 1960s, Watts was still in the midst of his psychedelic honeymoon and all the creative energy which it so often imbues. He sent his publisher an outline sketch of a book, The Joyous Cosmology (JC), in June 1960, and ‘I don’t think I have ever felt quite so worked up about a book in advance of writing’.[2] The manuscript was finished by late February 1961.[3]
An imagined narrative that was nevertheless firmly grounded in Watts’ real life experiences with LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, JC was itself a work of art.[4] Inside, the book includes highly magnified photographs of natural objects, such as flowers, ‘all designed to give some idea of the incredible rhythm and detail of the dance of life which drugs like LSD reveal.’[5]
In my previous article, I looked at the influence of Elsa Gidlow’s gardens on Watts’ psychedelic writing. Along with the very literal impressions they made on him, through his dwelling in them, a question of ecological consciousness emerges through Elsa’s notion of garden design as a co-creative endeavour with nature. This transpired in Watts’ High Garden as a kind of ecological intelligence—what we might capitalize as Nature.
In this respect, I’d like to delve into another influential eco-minded figure in their milieu, Ella Young, drawing out her ideas in Watts’ literary portrayal of the High Garden in The Joyous Cosmology. While undoubtedly other people, notably Gary Snyder, likely informed Watts’ thinking about nature, Ella’s influence unmistakably hovers over JC—as an atavistic spirit of the natural world and its myriad, integral relationships; the patterning of nature.
Ella and Elsa
Watts thought Elsa Gidlow’s charisma was inherited from ‘a Celtic white witch and nature mystic Ella Young’ who lived beside the sand dunes, south of Pismo Beach, California. She taught Elsa that, ‘flowers and vegetables, trees and mountains, animals and birds, are people and must be treated as such.’[6] And that, therefore, Elsa’s approach to gardens as a co-creative relationship is indebted to Ella’s influence. Who then was this ‘nature mystic’?
Ella Young (1867–1956) was born into a Protestant family in County Antrim, Ireland, in the same year as the Fenian Rising. That failed rebellion against British rule by the transatlantic organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, foreshadowed Ella’s life. Not only was she an advocate for Irish Home Rule, smuggling arms for republican forces during the Easter Rising, but in the mid-1920s she herself emigrated across the pond.
According to Kevin Starr, ‘Until the Irish Society intervened, she was almost denied admission to the United States in 1926 when she suggested to her examiners at Ellis Island that she believed in fairies’.[7] At the time, the US disbarred people from entering who they deemed to have mental health issues. Yet, not only was a kind of fairy faith intrinsic to her intellectual life, it was also integral to her belief systems, and lucidly so.
The Celtic Revival literary movement of the fin de siècle was Ella’s intellectual proving ground. One of the so-called ‘Singing Birds’, or protégés, of writer Æ (George William Russell), she published her first poetry collection in 1906, a work of Irish folklore, and was friends with the likes of Maud Gonne and WB Yeats. She was steeped in theosophy, mysticism and Celtic mythology.
After emigrating, Ella spent a decade as the James D Phelan Lecturer in Irish Myth and Lore at the University of California, Berkeley. She famously wore purple, Druidic ‘reciting robes’ for her lectures, and recited poetry to her students. I imagine she was equal parts formidable and enchanting! However, she was certainly no mere academic. Like her revolutionary outlook, she breathed what she preached.
Elsa Gidlow first met Ella in the early 1930s while attending the 80th birthday of the poet CES Wood, and they became close friends. ‘It is no light gift,’ Elsa later wrote, ‘to have known in this age a Druid filled with the ancient wisdom of women.’[8] Elsa would visit the ‘exquisite garden’ Ella had created by the sand dunes near her home, and they read one another poetry. During the course of their conversations, Elsa imbibed her beliefs.
Ella’s spirituality was animistic, theosophical in temperament, and centred around an Earth Goddess. In a letter she wrote that ‘Madonna was another incarnation of the Great Mother Goddess, of the Earth Herself… the great living Being’.[9] Before eating, she gave libations to the four elements and the Great Earth Goddess—a ritual Elsa picked up too. And she spoke of orchestral fairie music emanating everywhere, should one choose to listen.[10]
The natural world teemed with agency and meaning for Ella. Her beliefs clearly fascinated her friends and companions, and, I would suggest, greatly influenced them in both their thinking and endeavours.
Love and Relationships with Nature
By most accounts, Ella was also no puritan and, while living simply, greatly enjoyed wine and the finer things, and this undoubtedly would have attracted Watts, who was quite partial to a drink himself. He was introduced to her in the early 1950s at Elsa’s house, Madrona: ‘…this frail, transparent, bewitching old lady talked to us, like a true shaman, about the personalities of mountains, and about talking to the weather and to wild animals’.[11]
It's unclear how often Watts and Ella met—enough that he should recall her fondly in his autobiography, and make special reference to her influence on Elsa. He will also have been familiar with a broadcast interview she did for KPFA radio in the early 1950s about her beliefs—the same station he worked with for many years. (If you follow the link, the interviewer is mistakenly given as Watts. It was in fact Wallace Hamilton.)[12]
Recorded around the time that Ella and Elsa met Alan Watts, this interview is a contemporary insight into the kinds of ideas that were circulating amongst the ecologically-minded Druid Heights community. In it, she extolls her animistic vision of what humanity’s relationship is—and what it should be—with the natural world. It serves as a local lens with which to read JC.
One way in which Ella frames humanity’s relationship with nature is through a dichotomy between indigenous and Anglo-American attitudes. The former, she believes, cultivates a healthy relationship with their environment. A reciprocity. For example, she notes that nature-revering Gaelic people could walk through a rainstorm without droplets of water touching them.
On the other hand, one should,
…never talk about the conquest of nature, you can never go out and drag wildflowers up by their roots, and you can never throw cigarettes about and smash up things, and as a result we’ve being doing everything of that kind, and what happens, our crops are destroyed, nature doesn’t help us when we get stranded in any kind of place…
In order to establish a ‘a fellowship with nature’ one must make a roadway of love with stones, trees, or indeed anything in the natural world: ‘If there is some tree you love particularly then get into the habit of saying a greeting to it every time you pass.’ And Ella warns not to expect an immediate response, ‘just do it with the idea that you love that tree.’ With time, signs of your relationship will blossom.
‘The trees are all living,’ she said, ‘they have spirit bodies’ along with the non-organic elements of the natural world. Hamilton asked her if spirits inhabit mountains, and she responded, ‘To begin with, the mountain is alive, and to go back further than that the earth is alive. The Earth is a great living Being. The Earth is greater than we are…’
Animism (and ecology) relies on these co-relationships in the world, yet it is the world, or Earth, which is the spiritual and aesthetic fount.
If we are landscape gardeners, just go out and look at the desert, look at any of those Californian hills we haven’t planted eucalyptus on, and you will see how nature has designed trees that follow the curves of the hills, and She has planted them exactly where, if you were a landscape gardener and a good one, you would plant them. Now when she designed those Eucalyptus trees, she did so for Australia…
Establishing loving relationships with Nature means being in harmony with its pattern. It is recognizing the inherent creativity and coherence and weaving designs in accordance with Nature’s plan. ‘You can make contact with the earth, the only magic is through love. To begin with you have to get away from the idea that we can conquer the earth… you must be taught.’
Through these ideas one begins to understand how Elsa Gidlow’s approach to gardening emerges. When she later writes, ‘Can anything repair the spirit like co-operating with the earth to make a garden?’ she is not making a flippant comment.[13] The desire to live in harmonious accordance with the earth permeates through Elsa’s notion of what a garden should be—not to mention, the way a High Garden may then intimate itself for those in its embrace.
Ella also expresses a psychospiritual worldview, describing a tripartite mind: sub-conscious, consciousness, and transcendent. The latter, she states, is when ‘the mountain touches you’, and you get a sense of oneness and divinity. The practice of making friends with a tree, or indeed co-gardening, are techniques of cultivating the transcendent—in Ella’s case a kind of Earth Goddess pantheism. Psychedelics, as we shall now see, might also prove a tool for this.
The Shock of Recognition
I’d like to put my cards on the table—The Joyous Cosmology has, since I first read it, been my absolute favourite work of psychedelic literature. Watts’ eloquence as a speaker is not always matched by his prose, yet in the case of JC, he manages to distil much of his magic into the written word. The book is richly textured in its thought, so it is with respect that I choose to pull out just a single thread; the High Garden.
We are sitting in the garden surrounded in every direction by uncultivated hills, a garden a fuchsias and hummingbirds in a valley that leads down to the westernmost ocean, and where the gulls take refuge in storms.[14]
As with many of Watts’ actual psychedelic experiences, JC is set in a homely space with a fine garden, surrounded by friends—a thinly veiled description of his community at Druid Heights. Not only is the book dedicated to them, but they’re revealed in the closely matched character pseudonyms. The architect Roger Somer, for example, is ‘Robert’, while Elsa is, aptly, ‘Ella’:
Ella, who planted the garden, is a beneficent Circe—sorceress, daughter of the moon, familiar of cats and snakes, herbalist and healer—with the youngest old face one has ever seen, exquisitely wrinkled, silver-black hair rippled like flames.[15]
Watts recognizes his companions as ‘lost friends whom I knew at the beginning of time’ and in recognizing his own ancient identity, it was ‘as if the highest form consciousness could take had somehow been present at the very beginning of things’. They looked at one another, realizing deep time together, and acknowledged ‘the marvelously hidden plot, the master illusion, whereby we appear to be different.’[16] Ella would have recognised this transcendence.
After a strange reverie of forgetting and remembering, Watts had a ‘Shock of recognition’ which stretched down from the great swathes of outer space, down to earth and through organic life, to the ‘queasy labyrinth of my own insides’. A great, joyous, cosmological pattern washed over him, and as an aesthetic it resolved in the High Garden:
I am looking at what I would ordinarily call a confusion of bushes—a tangle of plants and weeds with branches and leaves going every which way. But now that the organizing, relational mind is uppermost I see that what is confusing is not the bushes but my clumsy method of thinking. Every twig is in its proper place, and the tangle has become an arabesque more delicately ordered than the fabulous doodles in the margins of Celtic manuscripts.[17]
Watts’ mind being ‘uppermost’ and the ‘highest form of consciousness’ being present at the ‘beginning of things’ corresponds neatly with Ella’s notion of psychospirituality, especially in regard to the recognition of nature’s patterning.
‘The organism and its surrounding world’, Watts writes, ‘are a single, integrated pattern of action in which there is neither subject nor object, doer nor done to.’[18] So when he stands in ‘Ella’s’ garden, feeling a deep peace and sense of belonging, he realises that he has returned to the home behind home, ‘that I have come into the inheritance unknowingly bequeathed from all my ancestors since the beginning.’[19] He overcomes separation.
The High Garden aesthetic is a spiritual patterning that stretches across the cosmos, transcending ordinary time and space, but which is grounded and accessed through the experience of nature. ‘At the high end of the garden, above a clearing, there stands against the mountain wall a semicircle of trees, immensely tall and dense with foliage, suggesting the entrance grove to some ancient temple.’[20] Nature is a place of worship for Watts in The Joyous Cosmology.
Final Comments
I was surprised when delving into the otherwise very interesting book The Pantheism of Alan Watts by David K Clark, that there was little mention of nature, only that ego-illusion creates a separation from our environment.[21] He rightly shows Watts’ argumentation working through polarities and unions of opposites, alighting on a spiritual and metaphysical unification. However, to my mind, this higher theory approach mistakenly sidelines Watts’ groundedness.
It is clear that Watts shared with Ella an emphasis on love and relationships set within the natural world, and which in JC are appropriately centred in the garden, a place that neatly encapsulates human and non-human co-creativity. His approach, however, is divested of some of Ella’s animistic beliefs, and certainly de-gendered in favour of a less identifiable pantheism. Yet if a patterning of nature does exist, they are both within its continuum.
In Ella’s interview she was asked about evil spirits, responding, ‘The only parts of the earth that are evil are parts that humanity has desecrated and poisoned.’ This view was broadly shared by both Elsa Gidlow and Watts. Nature is ‘It’, so to speak, and only our relationships with It are corruptible. There is a political edge to this ecology worth exploring, but for now, as Watts wrote, it’s ‘Time to go in, and leave the garden to the awakening stars.’[22]
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[1] Watts, Alan (1972) In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965. New York: Pantheon Books. 342
[2] Watts J & Watts A (2017) The Collected Letters of Alan Watts. Novato: New World Library. 386
[3] Ibid. 400
[4] Watts does note in his letters that LSD was the predominant substance however. See: Watts 2017: 423
[5] Ibid. 415
[6] Watts 1972: 266–267
[7] Starr, Kevin (2009) Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 325
[8] Gidlow, Elsa (1986) Elsa I come with my Songs: The Autobiography of Elsa Gidlow. San Francisco: Booklegger Press. 309
[9] Ibid. 313
[10] Ibid. 314
[11] Watts 1972: 266–267
[12] Gidlow 1986: 315
[13] Gidlow 1986: 294
[14] Watts, Alan (2013 [1962]) The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness. Novato: New World Library. 44
[15] Watts 2013: 45
[16] Watts 2013: 47
[17] Watts 2013: 52
[18] Watts 2013: 62
[19] Watts 2013: 68–69
[20] Watts 2013: 76–77
[21] Clark, David K (1978) The Pantheism of Alan Watts. Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press
[22] Watts 2013: 77