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# 2025-05-15 - The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood
(IMG) Illustration by Winifred Knights
I recently read Pan's Garden by the same author, and it left me
wanting to read more!
(DIR) Pan's Garden
The Centaur struck me as a book about civilization being over rated.
This book contains overt mysticism and Pagan themes. The author
writes beautifully, names the ineffable, and then belabors the point
in a vain attempt at "effing the ineffable". I noticed that all of
the named characters are men. This book has virtually no women.
Ironically, the premise of this book turns Freud's Civilization and
Its Discontents on its head. In The Centaur, civilization is the
cause of disconnection, isolation, and a stunted vision of self and
humanity in general. Humanity's more natural state is presented as
less individualistic and therefore more harmonious.
The Centaur brought to my mind Terrence McKenna's Archaic Revival
monologue. This ideology overlaps with anarcho-primitivism. Anarchy
can be divided into three camps: red, green, and black.
Anarcho-primitivism is green anarchy. See bottom of this post for
links to more anarcho-primitivism reading materials.
It's interesting that the centaur in this book had difficulty
articulating speech. So did the centaur in the story of St. Anthony.
> While traveling through the desert, Anthony first found the
> centaur, a "creature of mingled shape, half horse half-man", whom
> he asked about directions. The creature tried to speak in an
> unintelligible language, but ultimately pointed with his hand the
> way desired, and then ran away and vanished from sight.
(TXT) Anthony the Great
Below are salient quotes from the book:
"There are certain persons who, independently of sex or comeliness,
arouse an instant curiosity concerning themselves. The tribe is
small, but its members unmistakable. They may possess neither
fortune, good looks, nor that adroitness of advance-vision which the
stupid name good luck; yet there is about them this inciting quality
which proclaims that they have overtaken Fate, set a harness about
its neck of violence, and hold bit and bridle in steady hands.
"Most of us, arrested a moment by their presence to snatch the
definition their peculiarity exacts, are aware that on the heels of
curiosity follows--envy. They know the very things that we forever
seek in vain. And this diagnosis, achieved as it were en passant,
comes near to the truth, for the hallmark of such persons is that
they have found, and come into, their own. There is a sign upon the
face and in the eyes. Having somehow discovered the 'piece' that
makes them free of the whole amazing puzzle, they know where they
belong and, therefore, whither they are bound: more, they are
definitely en route. The littlenesses of existence that plague the
majority pass them by.
* * *
For him mere intellectuality, by which the modern world sets such
store, was a valley of dry bones. Its worship was a worship of the
form. It missed the essential inner truth because such inner truth
could be known only by being it, feeling it. The intellectual
attitude of mind, in a word, was critical, not creative, and to be
unimaginative seemed to him, therefore, the worst form of
unintelligence.
To make a god of [Reason and Intellect] was to make an empty and
inadequate god. Reason should be the guardian of the soul's advance,
but not the object. Its function was that of a great sandpaper which
should clear the way of excrescences, but its worship was to allow a
detail to assume a disproportionate importance.
Not that he was fool enough to despise Reason in what he called its
proper place, but that he was "wise" enough--not that he was
"intellectual" enough!--to recognize its futility in measuring the
things of the soul. For him there existed a more fundamental
understanding than Reason, and it was, apparently, an inner and
natural understanding.
Rather he looked forwards, in some way hard to understand, to a state
when Man, with the best results of Reason in his pocket, might return
to the instinctive life--to feeling with--to the sinking down of the
modern, exaggerated intellectual personality into its rightful place
as guide instead of leader. He called it a Return to Nature, but what
he meant, I always felt, was back to a sense of kinship with the
Universe which men, through worshipping the intellect alone, had
lost. Men today prided themselves upon their superiority to Nature as
beings separate and apart. O'Malley sought, on the contrary, a
development, if not a revival, of some faultless instinct, due to
kinship with her...
[An Archaic Revival?]
With women his intercourse was of the slightest; in a sense he did
not know the need of them much. For one thing, the feminine element
in his own nature was too strong, and he was not conscious, as most
men are, of the great gap of incompleteness women may so exquisitely
fill; and, for another, its obvious corollary perhaps, when they did
come into his life, they gave him more than he could comfortably deal
with. They offered him more than he needed.
The things the nations exclusively troubled themselves about all
seemed to him so obviously vain and worthless... it puzzled and
perplexed him deeply that the conquest over Nature in all its
multifarious forms today should seem to them so infinitely more
important than the conquest over self. What the world with common
consent called Reality [consensus reality], seemed ever to him the
most crude and obvious, the most transient, the most blatant
un-Reality. His love of Nature was more than the mere joy of
tumultuous pagan instincts. It was, in the kind of simple life he
craved, the first step toward the recovery of noble, dignified,
enfranchised living.
And then he poured out O'Shaughnessy's passionate ode to the Dreamers
of the world:
> We are the music-makers,
> And we are the dreamers of dreams,
> Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
> And sitting by desolate streams;
> World-losers and world-forsakers,
> On whom the pale moon gleams;
> Yet we are the movers and shakers
> Of the world forever, it seems.
>
> With wonderful deathless ditties
> We build up the world's great cities,
> And out of a fabulous story
> We fashion an empire's glory;
> One man with a dream, at pleasure,
> Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
> And three with a new song's measure
> Can trample an empire down.
>
> We, in the ages lying
> In the buried past of the earth,
> Built Nineveh with our sighing,
> And Babel itself with our mirth;
> And o'erthrew them with prophesying
> To the old of the new world's worth;
> For each age is a dream that is dying,
> Or one that is coming to birth.
The man's qualities--his quietness, peace, slowness,
silence--betrayed somehow that his inner life dwelt in a region vast
and simple, shaping even his exterior presentment with its own huge
characteristics, a region wherein the distress of the modern world's
vulgar, futile strife could not exist--more, could never have
existed.
The region where this man's spirit fed was at the center, whereas
today men were active with a scattered, superficial cleverness, at
the periphery.
"And I loathe, loathe the spirit of today with its cheap-jack
inventions, and smother of sham universal culture, its murderous
superfluities and sordid vulgarity, without enough real sense of
beauty left to see that a daisy is nearer heaven than an airship--"
"You know," he went on almost under his breath, "every man who thinks
for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own,
apart, and believes that one day he'll come across, either in a book
or in a person, the Priest who shall make it clear to him. Well--I'd
found mine, that's all. I can't prove it to you with a pair of scales
or a butcher's meat-axe, but it's true."
...Fechner, the German philosopher who held that the Universe was
everywhere consciously alive, and that the Earth was the body of a
living Entity, and that the World-Soul or Cosmic Consciousness is
something more than a picturesque dream of the ancients...
The barriers of his heart broke away. He was no longer caged and
manacled within the prison of a puny individuality. The world that so
distressed him faded. The people in it were dolls. The fur-merchant,
the Armenian priest, the tourists and the rest were mere automatic
puppets, all made to scale--petty scale, amazingly dull, all exactly
alike--tiny, unreal, half alive.
Nature had become at last aware of his presence close against her
ancient face. Henceforth would every sight of Beauty take him direct
to the place where Beauty comes from. No middleman, no Art was
necessary. The gates were opening.
He knew again the feelings of those early days when--
> A boy's will is the wind's will,
> And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,
> --when all the world smells sweet and golden as a summer's day, and
> a village street is endless as the sky...
This it was, raised to its highest power, that dropped a hint of
explanation into that queer heart of his wherein had ever burned the
strange desire for primitive existence.
The narrow space of that little cabin was charged already to the
brim, filled with some overpowering loveliness of wild and simple
things, the beauty of stars and winds and flowers, the terror of seas
and mountains; strange radiant forms of gods and heroes, nymphs,
fauns and satyrs; the fierce sunshine of some Golden Age unspoiled,
of a stainless region now long forgotten and denied--that world of
splendor his heart had ever craved in vain, and beside which the life
of Today faded to a wretched dream.
His personality held something of magic in that silent stroll
homewards, for no word fell from either one of us to break its charm.
The untidy hair escaped from beneath the broad-brimmed old hat, and
his faded coat of grey flannel seemed touched with the shadows that
the dusk brings beneath wild-olive trees. I noticed the set of his
ears, and how the upper points of them ran so sharply into the hair.
His walk was springy, light, very quiet, suggesting that he moved on
open turf where a sudden running jump would land him, not into a
motor-bus, but into a mossy covert where ferns grew. There was a
certain fling of the shoulders that had an air of rejecting streets
and houses. Some fancy, wild and sweet, caught me of a faun passing
down through underbrush of woodland glades to drink at a forest pool;
and, chance giving back to me a little verse of Alice Corbin's, I
turned and murmured it while watching him:
> What dim Arcadian pastures
> Have I known,
> That suddenly, out of nothing,
> A wind is blown,
> Lifting a veil and a darkness,
> Showing a purple sea--
> And under your hair, the faun's eyes
> Look out on me?
Again, it was the spell of my companion's personality that turned all
this paraphernalia of the busy, modern existence into the counters in
some grotesque and rather sordid game. Tomorrow, of course, it would
all turn real and earnest again, O'Malley's story a mere poetic
fancy. But for the moment I lived it with him, and found it
magnificent.
"...not alone the earth but the whole Universe in its different spans
and wave-lengths, is everywhere alive and conscious."
"'The ocean of ether, whose waves are light, has also her
denizens..."
It was like a momentary, specific proof of what he urged--a faint
pulse-beat we heard of the soul of the earth; and it was amazingly
uplifting.
"Every form of life, then, is of importance," I heard myself
thinking, or saying, for I hardly knew which. "The tiniest efforts of
value--even the unrecognized ones, and those that seem futile."
The night-life of the great glaring city poured on unceasingly--the
stream of souls all hurrying by divers routes and means toward a
state where they sought to lose themselves--to forget the pressure of
the bars that held them--to escape the fret and worry of their
harassing personalities, and touch some fringe of happiness! All so
sure they knew the way--yet hurrying really in the wrong
direction--outwards instead of inwards; afraid to be--simple...
Even in our London talks, intimate as they were, interpreted too by
gesture, facial expression, and--silence, his full meaning evaded
precise definition. ... "In me, deep down, it all lies clear and
plain and strong; but language cannot seize a mode of life that
throve before language existed.
"Rather, because you live detached," he replied, "and have never
identified your Self with the rubbish of life. The channels in you
are still open to these tides of larger existence..."
"Most men," he said, choosing his words with evident care, "are too
grossly organized to be aware that these reactions of a wider
consciousness can be possible at all. Their minute normal Self they
mistake for the whole, hence denying even the experiences of
others..."
[In other words, most men are too self-absorbed to acknowledge or
listen to the experience of other people.]
Here, it seemed, was a version of the profound mystical idea that a
man must lose his life to find it, and that the personal self must be
merged in a larger one to know peace--the incessant, burning
nostalgia that dwells in the heart of every religion known to men:
escape from the endless pain of futile personal ambitions and desires
for external things that are unquenchable because never possible of
satisfaction. It had never occurred to him before in so literal and
simple a form. It explained his sense of kinship with the earth and
nature rather than with men...
[Yet again, put in terms of nostalgia for the archaic. The Centaur
is a good candidate for a "McKenna" portal into hyperspace.]
Yet he did not walk alone. The entire Earth walked with him, and
personal danger was an impossibility. A dozen ruffians might attack
him, but none could "take" his life.
Upon his table lay by chance--the Armenian hotel-keeper had evidently
unearthed it for his benefit--a copy of a London halfpenny paper, a
paper that feeds the public with the ugliest details of all the least
important facts of life by the yard, inventing others when the supply
is poor. He read it over vaguely, with a sense of cold distress that
was half pain, half nausea. Somehow it stirred his sense of humor; he
returned slowly to his normal, littler state. But it was not the
contrast which made him smile; rather was it the chance juxtaposition
of certain of the contents; for on the page facing the accounts of
railway accidents, of people burned alive, explosions, giant strikes,
crumpled air-men and other countless horrors which modern inventions
offered upon the altar of feverish Progress, he read a complacently
boastful leader that extolled the conquest of Nature men had learned
by speed. The ability to pass from one point to another across the
skin of the globe in the least possible time was sign of the
development of the human soul.
The pompous flatulence of the language touched bathos. He thought of
the thousands who had read both columns and preened themselves upon
that leader. He thought how they would pride themselves upon the
latest contrivance for speeding their inert bodies from one point to
another "annihilating distance"; upon being able to get from suburbia
to the huge shops that created artificial wants, then filled them;
from the pokey villas with their wee sham gardens to the dingy
offices; from dark airless East End rooms to countless factories that
pour out semifraudulent, unnecessary wares upon the world, explosives
and weapons to destroy another nation, or cheapjack goods to poison
their own--all in a few minutes less than they could do it the week
before.
[As in The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson, O'Malley uses
trashy mass-media to reconnect to consensus reality. Except in
O'Malley's case this "reconnection" is of questionable value.
Rather than escaping a Neo-Nazi timeline, O'Malley "escapes" a
Gaian paradise, returning to the self-destructive glamour of
civilization.]
Common words revealed their open faces to him. He saw the ideas
behind language, saw them naked. Repetition had robbed them of so
much that now became vital, like [scriptural] phrases that too great
familiarity in childhood kills for all subsequent life as
meaningless. His eyes were opened perhaps. He took a flower into his
mind and thought about it; really thought; meditated lovingly. ... In
the mind, or consciousness of the Earth this flower first lay latent
as a dream. Perhaps, in her consciousness, it nested as that which in
us corresponds to a little thought... Was he, then, literally, a
child of the Earth...?
Here, as he wandered to and fro among these proud, immense, secluded
valleys, through remote and untamed forests, and by the banks of wild
rivers that shook their flying foam across untrodden banks, he
wandered at the same time deeper and ever deeper into himself, toward
a point where he lost touch with all that constituted him "modern,"
or held him captive in the spirit of today.
The whole world danced. The Universe was rhythmical as well as
metrical.
For this amazing splendor showed itself in a flash-like revelation to
the freed portion of his consciousness, and he knew it irresistibly
because he himself shared it. Here was an infinite joy, naked and
unashamed, born of the mighty Mother's heart and life, a joy which,
in its feebler, lesser manifestations, trickles down into human
conditions, though still spontaneously even then, so pure its primal
urgency, as--dancing.
The entire experience, the entire revelation, he thinks, can have
occupied but a fraction of a second, but it seemed to smite the whole
of his being at once with the conviction of a supreme authority. And
close behind it came, too, that other sister expression of a
spontaneous and natural expression, equally rhythmical--the impulse
to sing.
"And not of the Earth alone," he interrupted my dreaming in a voice
like singing, "but of the entire Universe..."
The account of what followed simply swept me into fairyland, yet a
Fairyland that is true because it lives in every imaginative heart
that does not dream itself shut off from the Universe in some wee
compartment all alone.
In some spiritual way I quickened to the view that all great teaching
really comes in some such curious fashion--via a temporary stretching
or extension of the "heart" to receive it. The little normal self is
pushed aside to make room, even to the point of loss, in order to
contain it. Later, the consciousness contracts again. But it has
expanded--and there has been growth.
I shared in some faint way its truth and beauty, so that when I saw
it in his written form I marveled to find the thing so thin and cold
and dwindled. The key his personal presence supplied, of guidance and
interpretation, of course was gone.
But such bothering little thoughts [of weapons and personal injury]
with their hard edges no longer touched reality; they spun away and
found no lodgment; they were--untrue; false items of some lesser
world unrealized.
For, in proportion as he fixed his thoughts successfully on outward
and physical things, the world wherein he now walked grew dim: he
missed the path, stumbled, saw trees and flowers indistinctly, failed
to hear properly the call of birds and wind, to feel the touch of
sun; and, most unwelcome of all,--was aware that his leader left him,
dwindling in size, dropping away somehow among shadows far behind or
far ahead.
[Like after i meditate, when hues are more vivid, thoughts are more
clear, and reflexes more attuned to my true values.]
The inversion was strangely complete: what men called solid, real,
and permanent he now knew as the veriest shadows of existence,
fleeting, unsatisfactory, false.
Their dreary make-believe had all his life oppressed him. He now knew
why. Men, driving their forces outwards for external possessions had
lost the way so utterly. It truly was amazing. He no longer quite
understood how such feverish strife was possible to intelligent
beings: the fur-merchant, the tourists, his London friends, the great
majority of men and women he had known, pain in their hearts and
weariness in their eyes, the sad strained faces, the furious rush to
catch a little pleasure they deemed joy. It seemed like some wild
senseless game that madness plays. He found it difficult to endow
them, one and all, with any sense of life. He saw them groping in
thick darkness, snatching with hands of shadow at things of even
thinner shadow, all moving in a wild and frantic circle of artificial
desires, while just beyond, absurdly close to many, blazed this great
living sunshine of Reality and Peace and Beauty. If only they would
turn--and look within--!
For now, as he moved closer to the Earth, deeper ever deeper into the
enfolding moods of her vast collective consciousness, he drew nearer
to the Reality that satisfies. He approached that center where
outward activity is less, yet energy and vitality far
greater--because it is at rest. Here he met things halfway, as it
were, en route for the outer physical world where they would appear
later as "events," but not yet emerged, still alive and breaking with
their undischarged and natural potencies. Modern life, he discerned,
dealt only with these forces when they had emerged, masquerading at
the outer rim of life as complete embodiments, whereas actually they
are but partial and symbolical expressions of their eternal
prototypes behind. And men today were busy at this periphery only,
touch with the center lost, madly consumed with the unimportant
details that concealed the inner glory. It was the spirit of the age
to mistake the outer shell for the inner reality.
"I am home!" it seems he cried as he ran cantering across the sunny
slopes. "At last I have found you! Home...!"
And the forms moved down slowly from their mountainous pedestals; the
woods breathed out a sigh; the running water sang; the slopes all
murmured through their grass and flowers. For a worshipper, strayed
from the outer world of the dead, stood within the precincts of their
ancient temple. He had passed the Angel with the flaming sword those
very dead had set there long ago. The Garden now enclosed him. He had
found the heart of the Earth, his mother. Self-realization in the
perfect union with Nature was fulfilled. He knew the Great At-onement.
All that he needed was now contained within himself; he was at-ease;
and, literally, that unrest which men miscall delight could touch him
not nor torture him again.
If this were death--how exquisite!
And Time was not a passing thing, for it lay, he says, somehow in an
ocean everywhere, heaped up in gulfs and spaces. It was as though he
could help himself and take it. That morning, had he so wished, could
last forever; he could go backwards and taste the shadows of the
night again, or forward and bask in the glory of hot noon. There were
no parts of things, and so no restlessness, no sense of
incompleteness, no divisions.
This quiet of the dawn lay in himself, and, since he loved it, lay
there, cool and sweet and sparkling for years; almost forever.
The bridge connecting his former "civilized" condition with this
cosmic experience was a curious one. That outer, lesser state, it
seemed, had known a foretaste sometimes of the greater.
For he began now to recall the existence of that outer world of men
and women, though by means of certain indefinite channels only. And
the things he remembered were not what the world calls important.
They were moments when he had known--beauty; beauty, however, not of
the grandiose sort that holds the crowd, but of so simple and
unadvertised a kind that most men overlook it altogether.
The thoughts of the poets went past him like thin flames; the dreams
of millions--mute, inexpressible yearnings like those he had himself
once known--streamed by in pale white light, to shoot forward with a
little nesting rush into some great Figure ... and then return in
double volume to the dreaming heart whence first they issued.
Shadows, too, he saw, by myriads--faint, feeble gropings of men and
women seeking it eagerly, yet hardly knowing what they sought; but,
above all, long, singing, beautiful tongues of colored flame that
were the instincts of divining children and of the pure in heart.
These came in rippling floods unerringly to their goal, lingered for
long periods before returning. And all, he knew, were currents of the
great Earth Life, moods, thoughts, dreams--expressions of her various
Consciousness with which she mothered, fed, and blessed all whom it
was possible to reach.
It was not the actual things the world seemed so busy about that
pained him, but rather the point of view from which the world
approached them--those that it deemed with one consent "important,"
and those, with rare exceptions, it obviously deemed worth no
consideration at all, and ignored. For himself these values stood
exactly reversed.
...men had but temporarily left her mighty sides and gone astray,
eating of trees of knowledge that brought them deceptive illusions of
a mad self-intoxication; fallen away into the pains of separateness
and death. Loss of direction and central control was the result; the
Babel of many tongues so clumsily invented, by which all turned one
against another. Insubordinate, artificial centers had assumed
disastrous command. Each struggled for himself against his neighbors.
Even religions fought to the blood. A single sect could damn the rest
of humanity, yet in the same breath sing complaisantly of its own
Heaven.
The Kingdom of Heaven is hard to enter, for Stahl had possessions not
of the wood and metal order, but possessions of the brain and reason
he was too proud to forego completely. They kept him out.
[Stahl:] "My discontent with modern life had gone as far as that. It
was the birth of the suicidal mania."
[But for O'Malley:] Return to Nature... involved no denial of human
life, nor depreciation of human interests, but only a revolutionary
shifting of values.
# Anarcho-Primitivism Reading Materials
(TXT) Anarcho-primitivism (Wikipedia)
(DIR) Archaic Revival Monologue by Terence Mckenna
(DIR) Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
(HTM) Repent To The Primitive by John Jacobi
(HTM) Twilight of the Machines by John Zerzan
* * *
author: Blackwood, Algernon, 1869-1951
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Algernon_Blackwood
LOC: PZ3.B5683 In PR6003.L3
(DIR) source: gopher://gopher.pglaf.org/1/9/9/6/9964/
tags: biophilia,ebook,fantasy,spirit
title: The Centaur
# Tags
(DIR) biophilia
(DIR) ebook
(DIR) fantasy
(DIR) spirit