The Theurgy of Deer Stalking

I have never been deer stalking but I've felt the same way when I've been tramping the fields and woods to shoot upland game birds and small game.

From The European Conservative

By Sebastian Morello, PhD

Hunting near Hartenfels Castle (1540), a dazzlingly colorful 133 x 185.5 cm oil on woodwork (later transferred to masonite) created by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553). Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

In the thrill of a deer stalk, the world is revealed to be what it truly is, a divine communication.

The first time I shot a deer, it was a large fallow buck which I took down at 170 metres with a fine Finnish rifle on the fringes of a woodland in East Sussex. It was an easy shot. With my friend—a very accomplished deer stalker—I had built a hide in which we waited. As a sizeable herd emerged from the twilight shadows of the wood to graze in the meadow, my companion indicated to me which buck I ought to take. We couldn’t get a clear shot with a safe backstop, so we crawled into the middle of the pasture where we lay for a few moments to control our breathing, and then, bang! I had intended to take a neck shot but at the last moment I lost confidence in my abilities and took a ‘boiler room’ shot instead, hitting it in the heart. The buck leaped into the air, took two steps, and collapsed dead. On inspecting that magnificent creature, I saw that I had hit it precisely where I had aimed, and thus could have taken my initially intended shot to the neck and spared the animal that second and a half of suffering.

Almost immediately after shooting that buck, I became aware of myself. My body had petrified with adrenaline, and my finger now stuck out straight over the trigger guard, wobbling like a twig. My muscles and bones seemed to be more aware of the gravity of the situation than any rational deliberation would have brought home. A veritable king of the woods, crowned with the champion antlers of a rut veteran, who had for many seasons stood with his court of hinds and ascending fawns amid the hallowed glades of Wessex—that glorious region where England was invented—now lay motionless upon a muddy bed.

Unlike in continental Europe, we have no longstanding tradition of deer stalking in England. Here, red and fallow deer herds were historically managed with great success by staghound and buckhound packs, and roe deer—now called the ‘prince’ of British deer—were considered a mere pest and shot on sight with shotguns until they were almost extinct south of the border. The only great tradition of British deer stalking belonged to the Scottish Highlands, where gillies—servants who on account of their rural knowledge have always been respected as leaders—took wealthy sportsmen out to stalk red stags in the hills, often combining the use of deerhound and rifle. English deer stalking as a fieldsport and as a means of responsible wildlife management has a pedigree going back only to the 1960s, and it has few if any traditions attached to it. In Central Europe, following a driven hunt, it is common for the killed animals to be arranged on a bed of fir branches between flaming torches, and honoured with songs and the sounding of hunting horns. The Plains Indians of the American Midwest danced after hunting, to honour the spirits of the creatures that had fallen to give them sustenance, and I am told that even in the U.S. of today, many hunters kneel and praise God on making a kill. In spiritually frozen England, however, our sporting pursuits are almost wholly without religiosity, with some sportsmen even hunting on Sundays. Having shot that buck, I could think of nothing to draw upon from my own culture to respond appropriately to the situation. A pat on the shoulder from my fellow stalker with a “Good shot, pal!” did not correspond to the seriousness of the occasion. In truth, I was pleased both with the cleanness of the kill and the beauty of the prize, and I was looking forward to casseroling its venison, but in my wonder, I also wanted to reverence my quarry and worship its Maker.

Reverence and wonder belong to a special kind of meeting with reality. Such sentiments are similar to, but qualitatively different from, those that go by the same name but are experienced by the observer. The observer, whether a viewer in an art gallery or a hiker on the fells, gawps with amazement at something of which he is not a part, which he sees from the outside, so to speak, with which he has not become one thing. Those who know me know that I love both art galleries and hillwalking, but I feel sorry for people who do not know the awe that arises from real participation. There are many ways to experience the participatory awe of which I speak (dancing being among the most important), but hunting—whether with hounds or with rifle—is a way special to me, wherein I have experienced this awe with such intensity that it has become an addiction.

During a deer stalk, one becomes part of the landscape itself. In pursuit of prey, one crouches among the predators of the world. Even someone sympathetic to the activity may be forgiven for thinking that the use of a sophisticated technology like a rifle, with its scope and astonishing long-range accuracy, might remove one from the inner drama of the hunt. In a way, this is true. A deer stalk will never be as ‘natural’ as houndwork, but on the other hand, in the case of the latter, one is not hunting at all; the hounds are hunting, and the hunter is ‘hunting the hounds,’ and consequently he remains more an observer of the hunt than the actual predator. During a stalk, however, the deer stalker is the hunter—he is the predator. The difference between a deer stalker with his rifle and a hunter-gatherer with his bow and arrows is a mere difference of degree. And deer stalkers know that deer stalking is a deeply primal activity.

This year, I shot my first muntjac. These hardy little creatures—not much larger than my whippet—with their short antlers (more like horns) and tusks, belong to an invasive species from Asia. For their presence in England, we can thank the Bedfords—that most whiggish of families that gave us the philosopher Bertrand Russell (who thankfully was humbled by the inestimable Wittgenstein)—from whose Woburn Abbey muntjacs escaped sometime in the early 19th century. I lay prone upon a hill and the animal wandered out into the open below. I put my crosshairs on it and the kill was instant. Later that week, I cooked the haunches in red wine, beef stock, thyme, and juniper berries, and with roast potatoes and Yorkshire puddings I ate them with my children, while my vegetarian wife looked on quizzically.

Muntjac have no close season, and so they can be stalked alongside roe bucks in midsummer. There is nothing like a summer stalk. To move along the skirt of a wood, silently prowling as the sun sets and blushes the heavens in an apricot marvel, to peer past a line of swaying silver birches—those arboreal ghosts—to the maze of ancient beeches and oaks, catching a random glimpse of movement and freezing in anticipation, alert to every snort and rustle, is an experience that cannot be compared to anything else. The union of moral gravity, aesthetic spectacle, and embeddedness in the most real level of reality, leaves one feeling more alive than I can convey, and all in the face of death.

Not discounting my defence of the primal realism of hunting with a firearm, the presence of such a sophisticated piece of technology as a modern rifle ought to give us pause for thought. Each technological step we have taken as a civilisation has no doubt made our lives more bearable, but so too each step has removed us from reality and moved us towards virtual substitutes. The moment man ceased to break his nails by tilling the earth with his fingers and opted for a stick, he took a step away from starvation as a constant danger over his life. But so too, at that moment the earth below his feet became ‘soil,’ a mass of dark matter rather than the medley of fermenting dirts, stones, grits, twigs, bugs, seeds, slimes, and everything else that makes up the fundamental prerequisite on which our agronomy depends. The technology was introduced, the reality was distanced, and with that the living earth became ‘stuff.’

With each new technology, the particular becomes less particularised and more abstract, and at each technological step the abstractionist, mechanistic metaphor steps further to the fore as the dominant prism through which we see everything. Thus, with each step, our survival indeed becomes more of a given, but so too our survival is enjoyed in a greyer, more abstract world that increasingly exists in our minds alone. With each step, we increasingly retreat from anything to do with the actual complexus with which we’re surrounded and of which we’re a part, and we enter a world of our own making—which is really a fantasy. Our civilisation, as it became more civilised, in contending with this problem of losing grip on reality in our pursuit of safety, placed hunting at the heart of its shared culture. Our civilisation did this so that it had a lifeline.

There are, of course, pragmatic justifications for deer stalking. At present, there are more deer in the UK than at any time since the end of the Ice Age. 1.5 million deer roam these isles in six species, only two of which are indigenous; and with no natural predator besides humans, they are doing untold damage to our woodlands and our agriculture. Just recently, out on a hike, my son and I observed that half a barley field had been flattened by the Chinese Water Deer that have come to dominate the Home Counties and East Anglia since they escaped from Whipsnade Zoo in the early 20th century.

Romantic rewilders, wanting to leave nature to flourish unmanaged, have recurrently run up against the cervine problem, and found themselves—contrary to their principles—calling on professional stalkers to prevent the consumption of every newly planted sapling. Deer devastate woodland beds, eating the wildflowers, many of which are already in decline. In Scotland, the country’s red deer population has doubled in the last 50 years, stripping the Highlands of its already thin vegetation, sometimes in herds of a thousand strong. And the British Deer Society claims that deer may be responsible for a recorded 50% reduction in our woodland bird species, including the blackcap, nightingale, and willow tit.

The obvious tension between a growing deer population and certain objectives of environmentalists has meant that individual deer stalkers as well as the estates that offer stalking packages to sporting tourists are not targeted in the same way as the traditional hunts and—more recently—the commercial shoots. In fact, the environmentalist lobby routinely calls for a 50-60% reduction in the country’s deer population. Stalkers, on the other hand, have in general asked for a more moderate approach to deer management, encouraging greater interest in their sport and promoting venison as a healthy, sustainable, and organic source of protein. But given that do-gooders from the growing towns attack both the hunts and the shoots with clear ignorance of the powerful animal welfare and wildlife management arguments in their favour, it likely won’t be long before deer stalkers face the same forces of ‘progress’ as well. 

Notwithstanding the problems deer cause, only some of which I have noted, it would be a mistake to point the finger at deer for all our conservation problems—that would be both untrue and unjust. The roads and motorways, the heavy traffic, the UK’s human population boom, the ongoing urban sprawl, the use of pesticides and herbicides, and many other factors are contributing to the erasure of the wild world of which we are meant to be responsible stewards. Nonetheless, if we’re going to take our stewardship seriously, part of that will be managing our deer properly. In any case, besides having an adverse effect on biodiversity, overpopulation can lead to food shortages for the deer themselves, and consequently malnourishment and disease among them.

The many pragmatic reasons for deer stalking, however, do not sufficiently explain our need not only to continue the sport but to encourage others to take it up recreationally. The deeper reason we must stalk deer is to maintain our humanity, as the forces of modernity seek to undermine it.

The foxhunter, the beagler, the rough shooter, the fly fisher, the deer stalker: each throws himself back into reality to a depth that is perhaps impossible otherwise. A chicken wrapped in plastic, taken off the shelf from a long line of identical objects isn’t a chicken at all, but it is merely chicken. That is to say, the particularity of this animal which lived in misery and died so that half of it could be binned and the rest consumed in front of a TV, is lost on everyone involved in its life and death. But the muntjac I shot earlier this year, the moment I put my crosshairs on it, ceased to be a mere instance of its species-kind and became this particular wild animal, now enjoying its habitat in peace and soon to be offered in a disposition of admixed ecstasy and sorrow, as a solemn sacrifice to the cosmic cycle of death and regeneration.

Turning against hunting, perhaps our last cultural lifeline to reality, and condemning it in a frenzy of sentimental hatred, has coincided with our final retreat into a virtual world. We increasingly live second lives as computerised avatars in an unreal realm of mechanised mirages, glued to devices through dopamine dependencies. This trajectory marks a last Manichean effort to liberate ourselves from our bodies as we are re-created in a new bodiless Metaverse. 

There is a manic hatred of the body that runs through all modernity’s new pathologies: skin pigment as the source of all social ills, bodily sexuality as that from which we must be liberated, masculinity as the foundation of cultural toxicity. This hatred of the incarnational belongs to a species of misanthropy that is alien to the field sportsman. For him, reality must be honoured and not repudiated, and death must be both redeemed and judged a means of redemption. The alternative is to seethe before reality and one’s place in it, hating the absence of the eternal in a finite universe and hysterically endeavouring to create eternity ex nihilo in a simulated world.

Having undergone a dramatic departure from the real to the abstract through technological transformation, we are deeply disturbed by the concrete and the actual. The obvious indication of this discomfort with reality is displayed by the confused and fiery emotions that fieldsports provoke in much of the public. But having personally sought deep encounters with the real for years by way of therapeutic outings with hound and gun, I am still struck dumb in the face of reality.

Not long ago, while walking in a vale with my dog, I met a man sitting at a small wooden table, on which were about a hundred jars of honey, divided up into dark and light honeys. “Are you the beekeeper?” I asked. “I am,” replied the man. “And where do you keep the bees?” “In the next field,” he responded as he pointed to a collection of hives beyond a nearby fence. “Why are some jars dark,” I enquired, “and some light in colour?” “Some of the colonies favour those bushes over there, and some those over there,” he said, waving his hand around, “they are different plants and so with them the bees produce different honey.”

I stared at that man in amazement. Everything involved in the production of this honey was before me: the beekeeper, the bees and their hives, the bushes that the bees had harvested, even the small wooden table that the beekeeper had carried from his kitchen and converted into a shop. It was all before me in a single vision and the luminous concreteness of it was dazzling. I bought eight jars of honey from that man and carried them back in my rucksack.

As it happens, the UK is the world’s biggest importer of Chinese honey. Enter any supermarket in the UK and look at their own-brand honey, a jar of which can be bought for 70 pence, and you will see that it says “100% pure,” with nothing to indicate the country of origin. It is, of course, from China; and routine laboratory testing reveals that much of the global supply is diluted with corn syrup. We cannot be shocked by this, because the fact is, we’re all implicated in this nonsense. We all know that a jar of 100% pure honey cannot be exported around the world and sold for 70 pence—profit would be impossible. So, we silence the pangs of our consciences: we require the jar’s label to say ‘organic’—whatever that means in this context—and have on it a stylised picture of a beehive in a field. We don’t mind being lied to, for by so being, we can claim to be the innocent party and never fess up to the fact that we’re all willingly peddling the lie together.

Our honey consumption is just one of a million possible examples that illustrate modern man’s preference for illusion over reality, and the way this habituated preference conditions his whole life. We are all incriminated in the self-destructive flight from reality. Over time, we discovered that unreality was easier than reality, and we agreed to be part of the lie if the dividends were desirable enough. And as we plunged ourselves into the web of deceptions that became our technologized modernity, we grew evermore troubled by our intermittent encounters with the concrete and the actual. This is why, as modernity continues to escalate, the field sportsman—who is largely defined by his having made peace with reality—will be looked upon with increasing horror. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this better than the progressive who expresses his disdain for hunting whilst enjoying a deep-fried battery chicken.

There is currently so much talk of ‘re-enchanting’ our world because people intuit that the world is actually enchanted, but due to our flight from reality we just cannot see that it is enchanted anymore. A magical world is not a creation of folk-imagination, but folk-imagination is generated by encounters with the magical world—which is the way the world is when known at the deepest depths of reality. One catches a glimpse of it when one is fully absorbed in a task that quietens the mind and allows one to focus on the actual. In that state of near total self-forgetfulness, the world ceases to be ‘stuff’ and becomes both a living being and a being animated by incalculable life. This intense immersion in the real is not dissimilar to what the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called the “flow state.” And as the brilliant philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has pointed out, accumulating data suggests that depression is profoundly linked to the deficit of ‘flow’ in modern life.

Unfortunately, as Vervaeke has also noted, we have created counterfeit flow states through video games, which stimulate in the participant all the hyperfocus without any of the embodiment, effecting not reverence and wonder but the ‘gamer rage’ phenomenon on which there is mounting commentary among psychologists. Rather than feeling cleansed and awoken by the concentrated attentiveness provoked by genuine ‘flow,’ gamers routinely feel jaded and irritated after playing, with many feeling that they’ve wasted valuable time. As a friend of mine said about his son, “Every time he finished playing his video games, he was pissed off with everyone, and neither we nor he knew why.” This describes a completely different effect to that experienced by the martial artist, the rock-climber, or the field sportsman—that is, by someone who has experienced real ‘flow.’

In antiquity, among the Platonic schools of the Mediterranean, ecstatic immersion in the flow state was sought through theurgical practices. In theurgy, supplicatory rituals were executed to uncover the hidden presence of the gods, ultimately for the practitioners to achieve henosis—that is, union with the spirits. Through rites, dancing, chanting, the burning of incense, and the igniting of fires, all in a great sacral theatre deep underground in the belly of the earth, philosophers of old would peer through the veil of epistemic illusion and gaze upon uncovered realities. Together, they would pursue a full encounter with the magical realm that exists at the heart of all being.

Following their secret theurgy in hallowed caves, those mystic philosophers would practise incubation, entering a deep sleep so as to awaken the next morning changed. Incubation was also practised by Christians at their shrines and altars during the early centuries of the Church. This should not surprise us, but perhaps it does, for what most of us do not realise is that theurgy baptised is what Christian liturgy is. Christian liturgy is meant to cast the baptised community into ultimate reality, as God is called down into the inner chamber for the exoteric transformation of the world and the esoteric transformation of the soul. We, however, have grown blind to the true vitality of liturgy, and our current liturgical practices exemplify our spiritual sightlessness.

I wonder whether this spiritual blindness stems from our losing the sense of the immanence of the sacred. Part of the problem no doubt derives from the widespread insistence that Christianity is a purely monotheistic religion. Of course, in a univocal sense this is correct. But the notion that we cannot speak of Christianity as polytheistic in an analogical, but nonetheless true, sense is due to the mistaken belief that the difference between monotheism and polytheism is that of believing in one God or many. In fact, the difference between monotheism and polytheism is that of whether the divine is utterly transcendent or immanent.

The Norse gods, for example, were not gods in the sense of creators whose essence was their existence (of which there could not logically be more than one in any case). These gods were themselves created, according to Snorri Sturluson’s 13th century Poetic Edda, which explains that from the original abyss came forth a fire that melted an ice sheet, with the drops forming themselves into giants as well as a huge cow, the latter of which licked into being the first tribe of gods from a salty rock.

The origin story of the Norse gods isn’t dissimilar to that of the Greek gods. In Greek mythology, in the beginning there was Chaos. Out of the chaotic void emerged the Earth and the underworld. From the sky came the Titans. Cronus, one of the titans, castrated his father and threw the testicles into the sea, an act which produced the first of the gods, Aphrodite. Because Cronus had betrayed his father, he feared that his offspring would do the same to him. Each time his sister-wife Rhea gave birth, Cronus ate the child (famously depicted by Goya in the 1820s). But Rhea hid one child, Zeus, wrapping a stone in the baby’s blanket so that Cronus ate the stone instead. When Zeus was grown up, he drugged his father, causing him to vomit up Rhea’s other children (and the stone), after which Zeus fought Cronus for the kingship of the gods. Zeus and his siblings—the Olympians—were victorious, and all the Titans were hurled down into the Abyss. 

The gods of old, then, were not creators but were themselves created. They were bound up with the world, their destiny being inseparable from that of the world, and they were constantly involved in the drama of the world. Anyone who has lost himself in the epics of Homer will know how entangled in that drama the gods really were. In the Christian account, the Creator is not a being, but is Being. The Creator is utterly transcendent, He who is that is, the infinite divine Substance of Love united in a consubstantial Triune Godhead. And yet, He is emanated in the world not only in the creation we see about us but in the saints and angels who participate in His divine attributes, especially His omnipresence and omnipotence, to which He grants them a share. These spiritual persons are intimately involved in the world’s events, and they are as different from one another as water is from fire, down to every angel possessing his own distinct nature.

Thus, whilst Christians believe in the God who is Being itself and who is the Absolute Source of all contingent beings, without whom nothing can be explained—that is, an utterly transcendent God—Christians also believe in the gods: divinised, deified beings whose lives are bound up with our lives here below. Foreshadowing this belief, the 2nd century Platonist, Maximus of Tyre, wrote the following:

There is one God, the king and father of all things, and many gods, sons of God, ruling together with Him. This the Greek says, and the Barbarian says, the inhabitant of the continent, and he who dwells near the sea, the wise and the unwise. And if you proceed as far as to the utmost shores of the ocean, there also there are gods, rising very near to some, and setting very near to others.

According to Maximus of Tyre, all peoples know that there is one God and that this world is full of His gods, who in His service govern the cosmos with Him. And given that the Christian religion redeems this basic understanding common to all peoples, thereby illumining the universal, primitive theology—the “prisca theologia” as Marsilio Ficino termed it—with the story of salvation, there follows an imperative for the baptised to meet these gods and know them by name. It is as “the God of gods,” as the Book of Deuteronomy puts it (Deut. 10:17), that the baptised must encounter the Creator; only then can they “give thanks to the God of gods, for His steadfast love endures for ever” (Ps. 136:2). 

Moreover, among the gods there is one to whom Christians should give themselves in devotion before all others. Every ancient religion has an ‘Earth Mother’ or ‘Great Mother,’ who is the virginal embodiment of the whole created order, which is itself feminine as the Creator is masculine. With the discipling of the nations, the Earth Mother was revealed to be Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. In the Christian account, she is that part of creation which is redeemed before the redemption. She is the one from whom the Eternal Son draws His sacred humanity, uniting Deity and creation in one person. Thus, she is the perfect emanation of divinity within the created order. She contains the whole of creation in her acceptance of the Incarnation, as the portal through which the Divine Logos bursts into the world that He has made. She is, therefore, intimately bound up with the earth and its story. That is why her cult utilises so many symbols of nature—roses, lilies, daffodils, irises, marigolds, cornflowers, wheat, almonds, strawberries, pomegranates, pears—and she is honoured with titles like ‘Our Lady of the Fields.’

Those who hold to apostolic Christianity do not like to admit that Mary is ‘worshipped’ because they are on their guard against the charges of idolatry that will be hurled by protestants, but by this evasion they dishonour her. ‘Hyperdulia’ is the worship offered alone to Mary—whom all Christians were content to call the ‘Divine Mother’ until the 16th century—for while she certainly cannot receive the ‘Latria’ of the Holy Trinity, she is incalculably above the ‘Dulia’ of the lesser gods. And when Christians worship the Magna Mater, they routinely do so at grottos, where she is met enfolded in the earth: it is with the earth’s story that she is forever bound up as ‘Queen of the Universe,’ with the moon as her footstall and a constellation for a crown (Apoc. 12:1).

Christianity, then, ultimately reconciles monotheism and polytheism by affirming the utter unicity and transcendence of God whilst simultaneously seeing the world as pregnant with divinised beings whose everlasting lives are interwoven with the cosmic drama into which we’ve been thrown. Truly, the Christian God is “the God of gods.” And God threw Himself into that cosmic drama so that He, as Aquinas put it, “might make men gods.” (Once we see this, we can grasp how far a modern Christian liturgy—commonly a trite mutual-affirmation session—has departed from the theurgic immersion in the spiritual realities that it is supposed to be.)

The woodland gods—Hubert, Eustace, Cóemgen, Neot, Hildegard, Francis—all accompany me into the wild. The great hunter-kings of old, who continue their reign at Europe’s high altars—Edward of England, Louis of France, Stephen of Hungary—ride out before me, flushing the game from hidden sanctuaries. I venture forth, begging permission of the innumerable, potent spirits who guard the paths, the groves, and the glades, whom we can no longer see and thus whose entitlements we disregard. The trees breathe, and I breathe their breath; the earth pulses with the movement of the gods; a thousand animal voices declare that the Lord is present, and I am in Him.

In the thrill of a deer stalk, the world around ceases to be ‘stuff out there’ and is revealed to be what it really is, a divine communication that truly conveys the Creator as my speech truly conveys me. The magical language of God, spoken in billions of beings both visible and invisible, is whispered into my ears. His purposes are orchestrated all around via His gods. The Earth Mother, Our Lady of the Fields, blesses me and blesses my rifle. She also blesses the deer on which my offspring and I will feed, having offered its flesh in our thanksgiving to the one Lord and Creator in whom “we live and move and have our being,” as the Apostle said in Athens, when he quoted a theurgic master.

In stalking deer, I peer through the web of technological layers by which we’ve covered up the cosmic commotion and all its grit. I become a predator who is contiguous with the whole drama of creation, pursuing prey and seeking to honour it in the kill. I find myself once more in the soul-shaking cycle of death and regeneration which never in fact disappeared, but which we hid in battery-cages and sanitarily repackaged in cellophane. Late modernity’s grey oppression is seen for what it is, a thin and fragile sheet of ephemeral mist. The colourfulness of God’s created language, His animating spirit unfolding in all the marvellous bits and pieces that make up our earthly home, comes bounding into my purview and strikes me dumb. And in stalking a hart and wondering at its majesty amid my act of violence, I find that I must give up nothing of my humanity but rather I must become fully human.

Anyone who has squeezed a trigger and watched the most noble of creatures collapse into a lump of lifeless matter, well knows that peculiar admixture of joy and compunction that only makes sense when accompanied by wonder. After I shot my first fallow buck, my stalking companion shot two more deer in its herd. We exhausted ourselves dragging them up the hill. Then the gralloching began at our shelter while the third member of our party, who had stayed back at the camp, threw together a welcome meal of beefsteaks and rice on a portable gas stove. We sat to satiate our appetites. There was fresh blood on our boots, on our trousers, on our hands. Under a silvery blanket of stars, accompanied only by the melody of hooting owls and rustling leaves, and beside our motionless quarry, we opened a bottle of good red wine. Enwrapped by the becharmed aroma of fried beef, the claret’s bouquet, and the lingering tang of cervine bile, perennial meaning revealed itself in the concreteness of the actual, and it was glorious.

In the modern world, there are so few ways by which we can face deep reality through participatory wonder, and there are so many ways by which we’re offered counterfeit versions that only exacerbate our frustration. Fieldsports offer an escape route out. The deer stalker moves in the magical atmosphere that is found in the most profound encounter with the real, in an enchanted territory which all our ancestors knew before we undertook our retreat from reality. The moral character of the deer stalker—his longing for a clean kill and his admiration for his victim—is inseparably bound up, whether he knows it or not, with this deep encounter with reality. Such a moral relation with a chased animal belongs to an ethical realm that is unknown to someone who only meets dead animals on supermarket shelves.

Fieldsports are under attack, in the UK and in many other countries. We are told by the engineers of our brave new world that soon we will all reside in 15-minute cities, ‘net-zero’ urban cages from which we will never stray beyond a street or two. We will all be vegan, and we will visit our loved ones via Zoom. Our parting with reality will be complete, and we will have become what we previously ate: we will be battery chickens. This process of unwinding reality—or seeking to do so through a mounting promethean pathology—we are told is necessary to save the planet from a ‘climate-apocalypse,’ when in fact we don’t even know what the planet is anymore. 

I suspect that the reasons we’re offered by transnational elites and their acolytes for this forced global transition to a ‘net-zero’ world are not the real reasons. Obviously, we must slam the brakes on the technologically driven corruption of our world and its fragile climates and complex ecosystems, but the people to lead the charge are not the rapacious globalists in their private jets. And, since each time one of those elites starts talking about ‘environmentalism,’ our inbuilt bullshit-detectors start beeping, there is likely something else altogether at play.

The fact is, we declared that God is dead, and now we cannot bear it when He speaks. He speaks in His creation; and so, we are making a creation of our own where He isn’t permitted to reside and where we will not be tormented by His voice. Of course, like the Tower of Babel, the whole thing will collapse. In the meantime, however, we must resist. We must resist by leaving the Tower and going deep underground, into the secret caves and sacred glades where reality is protected by the Great Mother’s command, and there we must keep the theurgy of the woodlands going.