The Mystical Underground

18 January 2024

The mystical underground is something I think we've all encountered from time to time. An openness in certain quarters of the helping professions to the spiritual, magical and transpersonal strata of reality.

It’s a guerrilla resistance, covert cells of healers, frequently wounded, rolling about in the materialist paradigm sowing dissent among the refugees of the Cartesian split. It hails from the underworld, a mycelial network that ties the angular and individualistic promontories of the forest together in hidden fascial union.

This is classically the province of the nurse – the sage-femme – rather than the physician. Doctors [nonbinary], instead, are typically held up as bastions of rationality in our society: heroic solar figures that banish the darkness of superstition, hypochondria and hysteria.

Of course there are practising doctors who embrace the weird, but they're typically extremely good at contextualising and concealing it – bastions of the resistance. Their assigned role does not generally permit the woo.

We don't really want shamanic surgeons anymore, and maybe that is a good thing. I would like someone performing open heart surgery on me to restrict any ascents of soul flight to a time when the demands for precision being placed on their body – and my own – are significantly lowered. But granted, we’re talking skill issues here.

It is well established that people on the front lines of the human experience, and thus often in need of help, are also disproportionately exposed to thoughts, feelings, sensations and encounters that resiliently defy material explanation. Nobody’s getting out of here alive.

In light of that, it's a pretty good thing to have someone available that doesn't immediately deny those experiences out-of-hand.

Exposure to frontline human experience works as a solvent on our certainties. At root, those actually employed to regularly plumb the depths of suffering and loss on a Tuesday must contend with some pretty hefty questions.

The problem of evil, the question of continuing existence beyond death. Earnest engagement with those sorts of questions will often find said professionals recruited into the underground before long.

This fact also clarifies why certain examples of our secular priestly class – doctors, but also physicists, engineers, psychiatrists and the like – can occasionally commit the most egregious offences against deep human truths.

Scientism and rationality, in its debased form, can act as an extraordinary bulwark against the weird fuzzy edges of life. There’s no denying it’s a potent ward against elfshot, though I would sooner know I was being targeted than rely on denial alone as defence.

Those similarly disposed and seeking conscription into their nearest cell should know where to look. Like any capable insurgency, it is to be found within the third house – integrated into village life, spreading by word of mouth.

The solar scalpel has its place, divining the cuts that rend life from death. But if we take the time to listen, we will find that it’s more often the poultice of lunar herbs that people ask for, and the mystical underground has the mugwort on lock.