S10 #04 - To the old, present, and still to appear gods and goddesses - A thought for the day

The full text of this podcast can be found in the transcript of this edition or at the following link:

https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2025/06/to-old-present-and-still-to-appear-gods.html

Please feel free to post any comments you have about this episode there.

The Cambridge Unitarian Church's Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation can be found at this link:

https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/morning-service/
 
Music, "New Heaven", written by Andrew J. Brown and played by Chris Ingham (piano), Paul Higgs (trumpet), Russ Morgan (drums) and Andrew J. Brown (double bass) 

Thanks for listening. Just to note that the texts of all these podcasts are available on my blog. You'll also find there a brief biography, info about my career as a musician, & some photography. Feel free to drop by & say hello. Email: caute.brown[at]gmail.com

Transcript

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation

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A couple of weeks ago I spoke about a poem by the twentieth-century Fenland author Edward Storey (1930–2018), “the Cart-horse Preacher,” which, in a British religious dialect, helped us better understand that a dynamic, creative, inquiring, and free-religion — known in Japanese as jiyū shūkyō and in Sanskrit as sanātana dharma — recognises that both a person’s personal spirituality and their public religion must always arise from their own life experience and context, exactly where they are and in the midst of whatever they are doing. You can, of course, read or listen to that on my blog or podcast.

Today I want to bring before you a poem by another author connected with the Fens, one that can also help us see something important about free-religion in a British religious dialect. The author is the Orcadian critic and poet Edwin Muir (1887–1959), who spent his final days in the village of Swaffham Prior.

On a lovely warm May morning, I took a spin out into the Fens to revisit the churches in the villages of Bottisham, Swaffham Bulbeck, and Swaffham Prior. (If you’d like to see a set of photographs I took that day, click here.) In doing my usual homework before the ride, I was reminded not only that Edwin Muir had lived opposite the churchyard in Swaffham Prior, in Priory Cottage, but also that he and his wife Willa (1890–1970) are buried there. Unsurprisingly, this prompted me to return to his poetry, and the one that leapt out on this occasion was “To the Old Gods,” from his 1937 collection, “Journeys and Places” (London, J. M. Dent & Sons [see also here]). 

Here it is:

To the Old Gods
by Edwin Muir

Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,

You should have fled our ever-dying song,
The mound, the well, and the green trysting tree.
They have forgotten, yet you linger still,

Goddess of caverned breast and channeled brow,
And cheeks slow hollowed by millennial tears,
Forests of autumns fading in your eyes,

Eternity marvels at your counted years
And kingdoms lost in time, and wonders how
There could be thoughts so bountiful and wise

As yours beneath the ever-breaking bough,
And vast compassion curving like the skies.

I’ll come to what I think are the poem’s free-religious implications in a moment, but first I want to share something this poem prompted me to look into before setting off on my ride. Its title encouraged me to see whether there were any ancient sites where the “old gods” might have been honoured in or around Swaffham Prior. It seemed likely, given that the Anglo-Saxon Devil’s Dyke runs along the village’s north-eastern edge. Sure enough, I soon discovered that not only was there an Anglo-Saxon cemetery on Gallow’s Hill near the dyke, but that on the same site there has also been a Romano-British temple.
Alas, the 1998 excavation did not yield enough evidence to identify which of the old gods or goddesses were honoured there — but honoured they certainly were.

This discovery led me to decide first to visit the site of the old Romano-British temple to pay homage to the old gods and goddesses themselves, before spinning back down the hill into Swaffham Prior to pay homage to Edwin Muir. In both places, I read the poem aloud as a kind of offering. Then, having done that, I retired to the Red Lion for a sandwich and a pint, where — in outline, at least — I wrote the following free-religious reflection.

The poem speaks to the basic idea that, although all human expressions of religion are temporary and passing, there is in them something at play that is eternal and enduring.

Muir begins by evoking the transience of human religion by reminding us that the “old gods and goddesses who have lived so long / Through time” have “never found eternity” because their external being — their form — was always “Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill.” He also mentions other sites — “the mound, the well, and the green trysting tree.” As you’ll know, many of the old gods and goddesses were closely tied to woods long since felled, hills and mounds quarried away or ploughed out, and wells that, over the centuries, have dried up. With the disappearance of these physical places, it’s no surprise that the gods and goddesses associated with them have faded too — and that our songs to them have been ever-dying away.

Yet faint physical traces remain. At the site near Swaffham Prior, they include a striking crop mark (see the photo at the top of this post), the ghosts of robbed-out walls and posts, some graves, silver, amber and other coloured beads, a bronze brooch, an iron knife and ring, a spearhead, an iron sickle, a silver wrist clasp, and fragments of pottery. Such remnants are enough — however ineffably and fleetingly — to remind us of the old gods and goddesses who once lived there, and to invite us, as Muir does, to address them once more in wonder: “You should have fled our ever-dying song . . . yet you linger still.”

In this moment of address, Muir does what humans have always done: he gives the gods and goddesses human form, ending the poem with a direct invocation of the “Goddess of caverned breast and channeled brow.”

On the top of Gallows Hill, for the briefest of moments, thanks, in part, to the Muir’s poem, I, too, was able to address that ancient goddess. But then, suddenly, the moment had passed and I became aware of myself standing in an almost featureless potato field underneath a towering electricity pylon, where, to any passing motorist, I would have looked simply like an eccentric, sad and lost, sixty-year old geezer muttering away to himself for no rhyme or reason.

For the briefest of moments, atop Gallows Hill and thanks in part to Muir’s poem, I too was able to address that ancient goddess. But then, suddenly, the moment passed, and I found myself simply standing under rapidly darkening skies in an almost featureless potato field besides a towering electricity pylon — where, to any passing motorist, I must have simply appeared as a eccentric, sad, and lost sixty-year-old geezer, muttering to himself for no rhyme or reason.

The key point here is that our human expressions of ultimate reality or truth — whether in the form of gods, goddesses, angels, buddhas, or otherwise — are always-already tied to particular places and times. And because the physical conditions of those places and times are always changing, so too are our depictions and expressions of ultimate truth. There is nothing permanent about them. This is as true of the old gods and goddesses as it is of any newer ones in every religion, everywhere. It was only thanks to Muir’s invocatory poem — and the fact that I could picture in my mind’s eye the crop-mark of a lost temple — that a tangible remnant of an older world could momentarily appear to me, allowing the faintest memory of the old gods and goddesses to flicker into being before disappearing once again.

Free-religion understands this dynamic deeply, for it seeks always to be like life itself — something that continually develops, evolves, and grows, and therefore must also change. With this insight, it recognises that religion, like life, must always take on some form. There is no such thing as life, or religion, without form. But this form is always provisional — always shedding its old state and undergoing metabolism or renewal. It is not fixed or immutable. Yet just because something is temporary does not mean it lacks value. As Imaoka Shin’ichirō notes — and I’ve just been silently paraphrasing him — even the most fleeting form, in its particular moment and place, is indispensable: it is the most essential form it can take.

I take it that whatever form religion assumed in that temple at Swaffham Prior, it was — in that moment, in that place — indispensable, the most essential form it could have taken. But here’s the key point: precisely because it was essential and indispensable then, some would inevitably have tried to render that dynamic form static — freezing what was meant to be temporary and relative, and mistaking it for something eternal and absolute. They failed, of course. Life always wins out; change always comes. The near-total invisibility of that Romano-British temple, and the near-complete ineffability of its gods and goddesses, bear eloquent witness to this truth. And I hope it’s equally clear that this same truth applies to every religion now or yet to come — with all their gods, goddesses, angels, and buddhas. All forms of religion are temporary and relative.

It is this realisation that leads some of us to feel the need to raise the banner of free-religion. For it is only under that banner that we can, without contradiction, acknowledge both the necessity and value of old religious forms and their gods and goddesses, and also the current ones — while still living a spiritual life that embraces the freedom to become tomorrow what we are not today. Free-religion invites us to let these forms and their deities pass naturally away, and through a process of metabolism and renewal, take on new and more fitting expressions of ultimate truth.

Free-religion can do this with gentle confidence because it is grounded not in transient forms, but in that living, dynamic creative process which makes all forms possible what Spinoza called natura naturans — “nature naturing”; the Japanese call it dai-shizen [大自然] — “Great Nature”; and Imaoka-sensei, drawing on Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, called it “the great life of free and selfless creative evolution” [自由で無得な創造的進化の大生命] — a life always-already shedding its old state and undergoing endless renewal.

In being able to honour the old gods and goddesses, the present ones, and those still to appear, we free-religionists discover we are not really honouring fixed figures and forms but, instead, the enduring dynamic, creative, free and inquiring impulse to name what is truly sacred in our changing world. Free-religion helps us express this impulse with reverence and openness, trusting that what is true will always-already continue to find form — for a time — wherever life gives it space to appear.