Brief Excerpt from “Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality” by Sebastian Morello

The Magic of Christmas is Real

DURING Advent, when the Church prepares herself for Christmas, her members enter a time of mortification and penance as they await the coming of the child Jesus. Frequent invitations to drink mulled wine and eat mince pies with brandy butter in the weeks preceding Christmas Day can make this difficult. One way to observe Advent, however, is to eat less meat. Fortunately, during that very time of the year, easily hunted mushrooms—beings that belong to a kingdom between the animal and plant kingdoms—appear across much of the countryside. One Advent season, I strolled into a well-manured grassland to discover hundreds of field blewits. There they were before me, great jellyish saucers standing on purple stems in terrific fairy rings across the green pasture.

Fairies had obviously been gathering at night for their hibernal celebrations. They likely danced and laughed, played tricks on one another, and fell about amid the ribaldry that is the inevitable effect of those pixie draughts from fermented hawthorn berries. The evidence of this was all around me. Those mushrooms marked the sacred circles of the sprites with whom we share our landscape, whose rights and entitlements we disregard.

Due to the mental fog of late modernity that incrementally distorted our vision, we grew blind to the iconographic character of the world around us, and so the fairies disappeared. Slowly, we ceased to see that things are not only substances but symbols. Modern people would never call a fungal formation of spore-scattering fruits from a complex underground mycelial web a "fairy ring,” just as modern people, when carving a pathway for horseless carriages through the rustic countryside that our ancestors gifted us, do not call it "Hollybush Road" or "Brown Cow Lane" or "The Great Eastern Way" or some other such name, but the "M650" or the "Ai4.” Everything in late modernity is instrumental rather than meaningful, formulaic rather than poetic, and consequently grey rather than colourful. We reduced all insight, inspiration, understanding, comprehension, contemplation, appreciation, observation, discernment, and awareness to the one quantitative category of "information, and thereby emptied our minds of all that really matters—and the world we have made around us reflects this cognitive corruption.

* Reprinted from Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality by Sebastian Morello, Os Justi Press, 2024, pp.82-83