Fiction, Invention and Hyper-reality

From popular culture to religion

Carole M. Cusack, Pavol Kosnáč, Carole M. Cusack, Pavol Kosnáč

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472463029
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317135487
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The twentieth century was a period of rapid change for religion. Secularisation resulted in a dramatic fall in church attendance in the West, and the 1950s and 1960s saw the introduction of new religions including the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), the Church of Scientology, and the Children of God. New religions were regarded with suspicion by society in general and Religious Studies scholars alike until the 1990s, when the emergence of a second generation of 'new new' religions – based on popular cultural forms including films, novels, computer games and comic books – and highly individualistic spiritualities confirmed the utter transformation of the religio-spiritual landscape. Indeed, Scientology and ISKCON appeared almost traditional and conservative when compared to the radically de-institutionalised, eclectic, parodic, fun-loving and experimental fiction-based, invented and hyper-real religions.

In this book, scholarly treatments of cutting-edge religious and spiritual trends are brought into conversation with contributions by representatives of Dudeism, the Church of All Worlds, the Temple of the Jedi Order and Tolkien spirituality groups. This book will simultaneously entertain, shock, challenge and delight scholars of religious studies, as well as those with a wider interest in new religious movements.

Part I

Tolkien’s Legendarium, the Elven lineage and the Internet

1 The Elven Path and the Silver Ship of the Valar

Two spiritual groups based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium

Markus Altena Davidsen

An unexpected email

On 7 May 2009 I received an unexpected email. I had just begun a PhD project, intending to focus on Star Wars-inspired Jediism, but now Gwineth wrote this: “I thought that maybe you might be interested to know – though maybe you already do – that there is a small number of people who are trying to build a ‘spiritual path’ on the mythical history of Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien. I am one of them”.¹ I had never heard of any such Tolkien-based spiritual groups, but eagerly replied and was soon introduced to the other members of Gwineth’s online-based group. These members approached Tolkien’s stories about Middle-earth, his so-called Legendarium, in a variety of ways, but they all agreed that the Legendarium was an effective means of transportation to the Faery Otherworld or “Imaginal Realm”. Several members were also well versed in Tolkien’s Elvish languages and had named the group Ilsaluntë Valion, which means the Silver Ship of the Valar in Qenya.² The Valar referred to in the group name are the angelic beings or lower gods of Tolkien’s cosmology; the Silver Ship is a poetic reference to the Moon.

Gwineth’s email became the start of a co-operative adventure. For the next six years, I had regular contact with Gwineth and other members of Ilsaluntë Valion, especially Nathan Elwin and Eruannlass, and I was introduced to the group’s history and ritual practices.³ I followed the forum’s discussions on topics ranging from the true nature of the Valar to the ‘re-discovery of Limpë’, the Elves’ favourite beverage which the group took to be saffronated mead. I witnessed the coming and going of dozens of peripheral members while about six individuals formed a stable and active core group.

Ilsaluntë Valion had existed for less than two years when Gwineth introduced me to the group, but some of the members had been practising Tolkien spirituality for several years. They were also in contact with likeminded individuals and other Tolkien-based spiritual groups, some of which were much older than their own. Gwineth immediately put me in touch with members of Tië eldaliéva (Quenya: The Elven Path; founded 2005), a group from which Ilsaluntë Valion had broken off in 2007, but with which it continued to cooperate very closely.⁴ Calantirniel of Tië eldaliéva, in turn, helped me uncover an entire network of Tolkien spirituality that had existed since the late 1960s.

The spiritual Tolkien milieu proved so fascinating and complex that I decided to devote my entire dissertation to the topic (Davidsen 2014; also 2012, 2013), leaving Jediism aside for a future project. In this chapter, I present a small selection of some of the most interesting material. Following a brief overview of the history of Tolkien spirituality, I zoom in on Tië eldaliéva and Ilsaluntë Valion. These groups are interesting because they have gone the furthest in creating an exclusively Tolkien-based spiritual tradition. In cooperation with other members of their groups, Michaele Alyras de Cygne and Calantirniel (Tië eldaliéva) and Gwineth (Ilsaluntë Valion) have authored two short pieces that outline the practice of their respective groups from the members’ own perspective. These two pieces are included as appendices to this chapter. We think that this combination of insider and outsider perspectives constitutes the richest and most fair way to represent of the material. In addition to the three pieces on Tolkien spirituality published in this volume, readers might be interested in studying also the Enderi ritual, an exemplary Tië eldaliéva ritual that has been published, together with a glossary and an overview of Tië eldaliéva’s ritual calendar, on the group’s homepage.⁵

Tolkien spirituality: a brief history

The Lord of the Rings (LR) had been published in three hardback volumes in 1954–55, but it was the paperback edition of 1965–66 that took the general audience by storm. In the United States, LR outsold the Bible in 1967 and 1968 (Helms 1978: 105), and it became “the absolute favorite book of every hippie” (Hinckle 1967: 25). Hippies married each other in ceremonies based on the book⁶ and read passages from LR during LSD-trips to amplify the spiritual experience (Ratliff and Flinn 1968: 144; Clifton 1987).⁷ Some readers wondered whether LR was in fact a parable about Faery and joined the emerging Neo-Pagan movement to explore the Celtic and Germanic mythologies from which Tolkien had drawn much of his inspiration. Pagan scholar, Graham Harvey, has observed that even today Pagans typically mention “Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and other Fantasy writings” rather than “how to do it” manuals when asked to name the sources that have most significantly influenced their Pagan world-view (Harvey 2007: 176).

We have evidence of one 1960s-group that read LR as ancient history and hoped to excavate Minas Tirith in the Mojave Desert (Ellwood 2002: 133), but typically hippies and Pagans considered Tolkien’s books to be inspiring fiction rather than revelation or historiography. For them, Tolkien’s narratives did not refer directly to real supernatural beings and powers, but provided, in Harvey’s words, the “metaphorical binoculars through which the realm of Faery became visible again” (2000). Following Harvey, I suggest using the designation ‘binocular mode’ to refer to the approach to a narrative corpus, such as the Neo-Pagan approach to LR, that does not ascribe metaphysical reference to the texts themselves, but stresses instead the texts’ sacred intertextuality.

Tolkien died in 1973, but in 1977 his son Christopher published an edited collection of his father’s mythological backstories entitled The Silmarillion (S). S narrates the history of the world according to the lore of the Elves and begins OT-style with the creation of the world ex nihilo by the over-god Eru (the One) or Ilúvatar (All-Father). The Ainur (Holy Ones), a group of angelic beings, reside with Eru outside Eä (the World), but some of them choose to incarnate and help shape the world and instruct Ilúvatar’s Children, the Quendi (Elves) and the humans. The 14 most powerful demiurges are referred to as the Valar (Powers); the less powerful are the Maiar (the Beautiful). We learn that the Wizard Gandalf, a major character in LR, belongs to the class of Maiar, and that Elbereth, the chief deity of the Elven religion in LR, is Queen of the Valar.

The publication of S led to the emergence of enduring groups that went beyond the binocular approach to Tolkien’s literary mythology. These groups build elements from Tolkien’s cosmology into their regular ritual practice and typically approach Tolkien’s narratives in what I call the ‘mytho-cosmological mode’. That is, they consider the storyline to be fictitious, but believe that at least some of the supernatural entities, such as the Valar, exist in the actual world and can be communicated with in ritual. A minority go even further and approach the Legendarium in the ‘mytho-historical mode’, considering some or all of the actions of the supernatural beings in Tolkien’s narratives to refer to real interventions of these beings in the actual world.

The largest of the S-based groups is the Tribunal of the Sidhe, a Neo-Pagan organisation founded in 1984 on the American West Coast. The Tribunal of the Sidhe synthesises Tolkien’s literary mythology with Celtic mythology, Wicca, and Robert Graves-inspired goddess worship – and some of the group’s rituals are directed at the Valar, including the fertility Valië Yavanna.⁸ Members of the Tribunal also claim to be Changelings, that is Elves (or similar beings) from an astral world who have been incarnated in human bodies by mistake. They say that “magickal research” has established that Tolkien was a Changeling himself and that LR and S tell the history of the Changelings in mythic form. Today, the Tribunal boasts a total of 150 members, many of whom are second generation.⁹

Already prior to the publication of S, a movement of self-identified Elves had emerged when a Ouija board spirit allegedly instructed a group of American magicians to name themselves the Elf Queen’s Daughters sometime around 1970. The original members of the Elf Queen’s Daughters told Margot Adler (1986: 319) that their identification as Elves was tongue-in-cheek, but they inspired other people to self-identify as Elves, and these people went on to speculate about possessing Elven genes or Elven souls. The publication of S in 1977 consolidated the Elven movement’s foundation on Tolkien and inspired members to experiment with Valar-directed rituals. This did not last, however, and from the 1990s onwards, most self-identified Elves have distanced themselves from Tolkien’s fiction and emphasised their dependence on sources they consider more legitimate, especially as pre-Christian mythology and folklore. They did so under the influence of the broader Otherkin movement (cf. Laycock 2012), which has itself been eager to deny its fiction-based character. Zardoa Love and Silver Flame, together known as the Silver Elves, are the Elven movement’s most important intellectuals, and their regular Magical Elven Love Letters have provided coherence and direction for a growing Elven community from the early 1980s.¹⁰

In 2001, 2002 and 2003 Peter Jackson’s successful movie adaptation of LR premiered in three instalments, and, in the years that followed, a large number of Tolkien-inspired groups emerged online, especially on Yahoo! Groups and ProBoards. Most of these groups were devoted to two new types of Tolkien spirituality: Middle-earth Paganism and Legendarium Reconstructionism. Middle-earth Pagans drew most of their inspiration from Jackson’s movies, which they considered as canonical as Tolkien’s books. Since the Valar do not play any role in the movies, Middle-earth Pagans directed their ritual communication at the characters of the movies – especially Gandalf and Galadriel, but also Arwen and Aragorn, and even Frodo and Éowyn. The aim of these groups was not to develop a fully fledged tradition, but to construct a Middle-earth ‘path’ that Pagans could use in combination with other paths.

Tië eldaliéva and Ilsaluntë Valion are examples of Legendarium Reconstructionism, a form of Tolkien spirituality which stands in stark contrast to Middle-earth Paganism. Legendarium Reconstructionists do not consider Jackson’s movies to have any spiritual significance, but draw instead on a whole range of textual sources. They prefer S to LR, and, in addition to this, they familiarise themselves with Tolkien’s letters (Tolkien 1981) and Christopher Tolkien’s 12 edited volumes of History of Middle-earth (HoMe) (Tolkien 1983–1996). HoMe includes the earliest drafts of the stories that were to become LR and S, non-narrative material about the Elves and the Valar, and two aborted ‘time-travel’ stories in which Tolkien stages Middle-earth as our world in prehistory. The firm textual foundation of Legendarium Reconstructionism has made possible a second key characteristic of this type of Tolkien spirituality: Legendarium Reconstructionists attribute a centrality to Tolkien’s texts not found in any other type of Tolkien-inspired spirituality. Whereas Middle-earth Pagans, the Tribunal of the Sidhe and all other groups discussed above integrate Tolkien material into some broader (typically Neo-Pagan) framework, Tië eldaliéva and Ilsaluntë Valion aim to base their spiritual practice exclusively on Tolkien’s Legendarium. The ambition has been to construct a fully fledged and independent tradition by systematising the scattered information on the Valar and the Quendi (the Elves) in Tolkien’s texts and by adding ‘Tolkien-true’ inventions to fill the gaps where needed. I refer to this form of Tolkien spirituality as Legendarium Reconstructionism, because it mirrors the approach of Pagan Reconstructionists.

The emergence of Legendarium Reconstructionism

Tië eldaliéva was founded in August 2005 on the initiative of two Americans, Nathan Elwin and Calantirniel (Lisa M. Allen MH). At this time, Elwin had spent almost three decades searching for likeminded people. He had often encountered people who integrated Tolkien’s mythology into a broader Neo-Pagan framework, but felt more affinity with individuals who asserted that Tolkien’s works convey esoteric knowledge or ‘gnosis’. A lecture by Stephen Hoeller, entitled “J.R.R. Tolkien’s gnosis for our day”, had made a particularly strong impression. In this lecture, the long-time leader of the Ecclesia Gnostica in Los Angeles explained that Tolkien had visited the Imaginal Realm and that his narratives reflected the gnosis which he had so received.¹¹ After listening to this lecture, Elwin decided to found a group devoted to the gnostic exploration of the Legendarium, and in February 2005 he launched the newsgroup UTolk (short for United Tolkienists) on Yahoo Groups!¹²

One of those attracted to UTolk was Calantirniel. A Neo-Pagan and an astrologer, Calantirniel had been fascinated with the Star Queen deity in various mythologies, and she had thoroughly enjoyed Jackson’s LR movies. When she finally read S in 2005, she discovered that the name of the main deity of the Elves – Elbereth in Sindarin and Varda in Quenya – means ‘Star Queen’, and she instantly knew that she wanted to join or found a tradition based on the spirituality of Tolkien’s Elves. After a few weeks of hectic online networking, she found Elwin and UTolk, and took the Elvish name, Calantirniel, meaning (Lady) Guardian of the Gift of Light in Sindarin.

In early 2005, a group of UTolk members, including Elwin and Calantirniel, decided to construct a Tolkien-based tradition and name it Tië eldaliéva (The Elven Path). The new tradition was officially launched with a ‘birthing ritual’ held via phone on 23 August 2005, and on 23 January 2006, a discussion forum was launched on the bulletin board hosting site Freebb.com. The forum remained active until Freebb.com closed its services on 30 August 2007, at which time it h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Fiction, Invention and Hyper-Reality
• Routledge Inform Series on Minority Religions and Spiritual Movements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Tolkien’s Legendarium, the Elven Lineage and the Internet
• PART II Film and Television as Sacred Texts
• PART III Online Mediation of Invented, Fiction-Based and Hyper-Real Religions
• PART IV Countercultural Personal Spiritualities and Religions
• Index