Dear Friends
We recently passed the longest and darkest night of the year here in Australia, and I have found myself reflecting on the midnight Winter Solstice vigil we held for our community to honour the occasion. After a traditional fire ceremony, we leaned into the dark together and called in an historical event that I would like to share here:
In 1815, a large part of the world remained in darkness after the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which sent heavy clouds of ash into the atmosphere, obscuring the sun. It remains the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history.
The following year continued to be dismal on Earth, with midday bringing a need to light candles — and the strange sight of birds settling down to roost.
In June, the great Romantic poet Lord Byron invited a small group to a hotel by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. First to arrive was poet Percy Shelley and his wife, the 18-year-old Mary Godwin, who had just begun to call herself ‘Mrs Shelley’ after the pair had previously eloped in scandal. With them was Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had recently had an affair with Byron, which left her pregnant.
Some days later, Lord Byron himself arrived, drawing up to the hotel at midnight in a Napoleonic carriage after a sightseeing trip to the battlefield of Waterloo with his young physician, Dr John Polidori.
Before long, the two poets had signed leases on separate properties: Shelley and his companions took a chalet called Montalègre while Byron and Polidori relocated to the nearby Villa Diodati, a residence once occupied by the poet John Milton.
With an eerie darkness continuing to prevail, and thunder and lightning rolling down from the mountains and across the lake with ferocious regularity, the candlelit interior of the porticoed Villa Diodati became home to late-night discussions on everything from anatomy and animism to apocalypse.
One evening, Byron read verses from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Christabel in which the shapeshifting Geraldine — who appears as a woman, but is actually a serpent — seeks to entrap the innocent Christabel. Shelley, who had already found himself slipping into an internal darkness, fled the room screaming, horrified by what he later said was the vision of a woman who had eyes instead of nipples on her breasts.
It was on another of these ashen evenings that Byron proposed the writing of ghost stories, with inspiration taken from the Fantasmagoriana, a collection of translated German horror stories.
The intensity of the environment set young Mary’s imagination on fire. That night, she had a nightmare which gave birth to her masterpiece, Frankenstein.
She included the experience in a preface to the book:
Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion …
Meanwhile, Polidori penned a short story he called The Vampyre, a tale which not only included Shelley’s ‘fit of fantasy’, but heavily influenced Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula.
Byron himself wrote the poem Darkness, which concludes:
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
Great artists and original thinkers seem instinctually drawn to the dark, both within and without. As many have noted in one way or another, it transforms them into conduits of creativity. Science backs this up, suggesting that when the lights switch off, a different part of the brain switches on, nudging our minds into an exploratory mode. It may not be a comfortable place to dwell, but I’d suggest that’s the very idea.
Winter Solstice, then, provides a point of peak creativity.
It’s of no great surprise that we are currently exploring the dark feminine in our year-long men’s program, The Way.
As we pass the midway point, applications are now open for 2024. If you are a man with a gnawing in your gut — a distant sense of grief perhaps, that there is some important and timeless thing within you that has been lost or forgotten, I encourage you to check out the program and ask yourself some bold questions.
At The Fifth Direction, July also brings a feast of offerings including special sessions with depth psychotherapist Al Jeffery and poet Tom Hirons.
Oceans of love.
Asher