The first and second parts of this series can be found here and here, respectively.
I ended Part 2 with a call for Catholics to get Weird. In the final installment of this series, I will attempt to describe what “weird” means and why it may be important to incorporate this into our view of the cosmos. This essay is not meant to be an essay where I solve the problems of modern secularism, but hopefully it can be helpful and worthy of some contemplation.
Many Christians, including Catholics, live their lives mostly like their secular counterparts. They compartmentalize their faith to something they do only on Sundays and the rest of the week they live like everyone else. Our faith has partly been reduced to either pious platitudes or religiously flavored political rhetoric. Even most conservative and traditional Catholics, myself included, struggle to strip the blinders of materialism from ours minds.
Additionally, in America at least, everything is served to us on a silver, or plastic, platter and everything is predictable. Nothing surprises us; we are jaded. We disengage from reality through screens, porn, and other sins and distractions. We need to break through this modern paradigm by reengaging with the wyrd.
I’m no etymologist, though I am trained as an entomologist, but the usage of the word “weird” has changed in the last couple hundred years. Currently, it means something like “strange” and might imply something supernatural, uncanny or simply unexpected. However, the modern “weird” derives from the Old English “wyrd”1, which means “fate, chance, fortune; destiny; the Fates.”
The most famous example of the older “wyrd” is in Macbeth2. The Three Wyrd (Weird) Sisters were the Fates or Norns, goddesses in Classical and Germanic mythology who controlled human destiny. In all probability, Shakespeare’s inclusion of these figures in Macbeth led to the modern understanding of weird as well, due to their portrayal as odd looking and monstrous. They are both “wyrd” and “weird”. They even have beards, which emphasize their ambiguity and “otherness”.
“How far is’t call’d to Forres? What are these
So wither’d and so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,
And yet are on’t? Live you? or are you aught
That man may question? you seem to understand me,
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips: you should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.”
Macbeth Act I Scene III3
The Weird Sisters are unfortunately beardless in the above depiction, but still somewhat retain their sexual ambiguity.
How should modern Catholics embrace both “weird” and “wyrd”? I will try my best to explain what I am getting at using another group of ambiguous entities, not entirely unrelated to the Weird Sisters. However, we must expand the picture a bit.
In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis described the imaginative view the medievals had of the cosmos, which he called “The Medieval Model”4:
“This is the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organisation of their theology, science, and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental Model of the Universe. The building of this Model is conditioned by two factors I have already mentioned: the essentially bookish character of their culture, and their intense love of system.”
Lewis described the medievals as lovers of “organisation” and “there was nothing which medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up.” This emphasis on categorizing everything sounds like something modern scientists would approve of, at least on a natural level, but there is a difference. Unlike the modern tendency to flatten and impose an imperious equality on reality, the medieval’s goal was to sort everything, or nearly so, into an harmonious hierarchy, like a cathedral.
Everything has a purpose and everything has a place. However, the desire to account for everything and exclude things that don’t neatly fit may lead to tyranny. Sometimes, trying to remove the fringe from society might lead to the fringe coming back for revenge.
For example, the Orthodox icon carver, Jonathan Pageau, uses the movie Shrek5 to illustrate this point. Lord Farquaad wants to remove all of the strange, fairy-tale creatures from his kingdom to achieve the perfection he so desires; the perfection he believes he embodies. He evicts magic from his kingdom and dumps everything weird into Shrek’s swamp. To get his swamp back, Shrek, the ogre, must rescue a princess like an inverted fairy-tale knight. In the end, the creatures that Farquaad wants to get rid of come to usurp his throne. He even gets eaten by a dragon in a literal depiction of the fringe consuming the center. Farquaad is gone and the monstrous ogress becomes queen.
The Medieval Model had a way of dealing with the potential problem of tyranny on a conceptual level and Lewis calls these creatures the Longaevi:
“I have put the Longaevi or longlivers into a separate chapter because their place of residence is ambiguous between air and Earth. Whether they are important enough to justify this arrangement is another question. In a sense, if I may risk the oxymoron, their unimportance is their importance. They are marginal, fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model does not assign, as it were, an official status. Herein lies their imaginative value. They soften the classic severity of the huge design. They intrude a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into a universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory, too luminous.”
In other words, the Longaevi are fairies. Lewis did not use the word “fairies” in the chapter title because “it might encourage us to bring to the subject some-ready made, modern concept of a Fairy and to read the old texts in the light of it.” These are not the cute, delicate thumb-sized butterfly creatures we are familiar with, these creatures are dangerous and often deadly.
With fairies, the “fringe”, “weird”, and “ambiguous” is made literal and given a place in the cosmos, without having a formal way to fit them in. Now, the 13th fairy6 has a place at the table and won’t curse the princess. Yet, it is important to remember to keep the fringe distinct from the center. In America, the fairy has been been replaced by the flying saucer, but that is a discussion for another time.
I’m not saying we need to believe in these creatures in order for civilization to be saved or the Church to be renewed. However, they can help us remember that the created world is alive and not limited to the physical creatures that inhabit it. An example provided by Tim Powers in his book, Declare, depicts the djin (Arabian fairies?) as fallen angels:
“A spot of still darker red bounded rapidly across the high crest of the nearest dune, right under the empty blue sky — it was a fox, running with apparent purpose — and the dark sand was falling behind the animal like a curtain sequentially dropped, exposing the rose under layer —
— and suddenly the air throbbed with a loud roar like the harmonizing engines of a low-flying bomber. Hale flinched on his saddle at the sheer physical assault of the noise, and it was several seconds before he recognized the old rhythms — and then several seconds more before he realized that the drumming cycles were forming vast, slow words in a very archaic form of Arabic.
It was all Hale could do not to throw himself off of the high saddle and lie face-down in the sand — for the cyst of his own frail identity felt nearly negated by this ‘mountain, or one of the survivors of the tribe of A’ad’ that was shaking the foundations of the world with its speech.
His stunned consciousness recognized the words for Why come the sons of Solomon son-of-David to the Kingdom of A’ad? — and he knew that no creatures who might in some sense survive here would know the term Nazrani. Their city had been destroyed by the wrath of Yahweh, the God of Solomon, long before Jesus of Nazareth was born.” 7
Along with their ambiguity and strangeness, fairies are often connected with “fate” or doom. According to Junius Johnson in his book On Teaching Fairy Stories,
“Fey is an old Scandinavian word, probably related to the Latin word fatum, English fate. Accordingly, if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary, you get the meaning “doomed to die,” or even “at the point of death…Fey also refers to omens that presage one’s death: and so the word fairy brings in the sense of a vulnerability and a nearness to death.
But to be fey is also to have a disordered mind…Additionally, the fey is that which displays or possesses magical or unearthly qualities. Morgana, after saying that she has been fey since her birth, describes what she means in this way: ‘It is just everything that everybody else is not. ‘Fey’ people are magical people; they see what no one else sees — they hear voices that no one else hears — voices that whisper secrets and tell of wonders as yet undiscovered.’ Fey thus unites the magical, mystical, and strange with both a mentally affected state that tends toward lunacy (we might say ‘touched’) and a mortal peril.” 8
I could just end this essay now by saying read Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates to get a good understanding of both “wyrd” and “weird” — the strange providence of God, but that is a post for another time. Power may be too “out there” for most people, at least right away. Powers, and other authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Gene Wolfe have an older worldview that most modern people aren’t prepared for; a worldview impregnated with the Sacramental.
There are other weird topics I would love to include with which Catholics should become familiar. The Nephilim, monsters in mythology and Scripture, angelic choirs, and the strange passages of Scripture are all important but these are all topics for another time. Instead, I will try to close this out by coming to my point.
I do not believe that sanctity is too far removed from what it means to be fey. In the course of their earthly lives, mystics like St. Catherine of Siena and St. Thomas Aquinas had been “touched” in a way that altered theirs minds, hearts and souls. The experience changed them dramatically, dooming them with Divine Love.
St. Thomas had a divine vision that rendered him completely unwilling to finish his Summa Theologiae:
“On the feast of St. Nicholas the following year he was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished. To Brother Reginald’s expostulations he replied, ‘The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.’ 9
Many people view this as St. Thomas repudiating his own work in theology, but he was simply acknowledging that all human thought, including his own, falls infinitely short of the Glory of God. St. Thomas died shortly afterward.
St. Catherine of Siena quite literally gave her heart to Christ, and He provided her with His own in exchange. The experience changed her:
“After the miraculous exchange of hearts the virgin felt a different person, and she said to her confessor Fra Tommaso, ‘Can't you see, Father, that I am not the person I was, but am changed into someone else? … If only you could understand how I feel, Father! I don't believe that anyone who really knew how I feel inside could be obstinate enough not to be softened or be proud enough not to humble himself – for all that I reveal is nothing compared to what I feel.’10
St. Catherine even lived for seven years consuming only the Eucharist11 and died at the age of 33.
To be fey and to be holy are similar but distinct in at least one key feature. To be fey often means to lose one’s mind in the chaos of Faerie. Eating the fairy fruit is mortally perilous because we are unmoored from the natural world, but are not able to anchor ourselves anywhere else. We become homeless, listless and cursed with desires that cannot be filled with mere earthly pleasure. To eat the fairy fruit is to set loose a hunger that can never be satisfied in this world, and the fairies aren’t keen to share any more than the first mouthful.
Holiness through Divine grace similarly transforms our hearts, minds, and souls. Earthly pleasures are not enough and sometimes mortal food is rejected, like in the case of St. Catherine. Like the fey, saints are unmoored from the world and marked or “touched” by Divine Love. The saints become harmonized with the Divine symphony of God, which can often look strange or weird to those on the outside.
“For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God, for it is written: ‘He catches the wise in their own ruses.’”
1 Corinthians 3:19
There is something to all of this, but I will not try to tie this up too neatly, as I do not quite understand it all myself. I do know that the saints are both “weird” and “wyrd”, both strange and doomed, but not doomed to die. Are we not all called to the same?
The Eucharist is the true fairy fruit. When we eat of Christ, we are drawn ever deeper into Him who gives everlasting life. Unlike the fey, when we eat of Christ’s fruit our hunger is fulfilled and our desires are overwhelmed with the infinite, transformative power of God’s merciful love.
The “weird” or fringe is perilous but we need to be open to God’s strange providence.
Arthur Machen sums it up quite well:
"SORCERY and sanctity," said Ambrose, "these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life."12
Online Etymological Dictionary (n.d.). Weird. In Online Etymological Dictionary. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=weird
Shakespeare, W. (1904). Macbeth (T. M. Parrott, Ed.). American Book Co. (Original work published 1623)
Macbeth Act 1 Scene III (2010). Shakespeare Online. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/macbeth_1_3.html
Lewis, C. S. (1964). The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (2005 Canto ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Pageau, Jonathan (2017). Symbolism in Shrek: When the Margin Wins [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCFLbmAJ2Uc
Little Briar-Rose: A Sleeping Beauty Story from the Brothers Grimm. (n.d.). Pook Press. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://www.pookpress.co.uk/little-briar-rose/
Powers, T. (2001). Declare (2013 Willam Morrow Paperback ed.). HarperCollins Publishers.
Johnson, J. (2023). On Teaching Fairy Stories: A Guide to Cultivating Wonder in Students Through Great Literature. Classical Academy Press.
Butler, A. (1991). Butler’s Lives of the Saints: Concise Edition Revised & Updated (M. Walsh, ed.). HarperCollins Publishers.
Giovanni di Paolo St. Catherine of Siena Exchanges Hearts with Jesus. (n.d.). Christian Iconography. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://www.christianiconography.info/newStuffForXnCours/metropolitanEuropeanPaintings/catherineSienaExchange.html
Staudt, R. J. (2023). How the Holy Eucharist Shaped the Lives of 13 Saints. National Catholic Register. Retrieved December 12, 2023 from https://www.ncregister.com/blog/how-the-eucharist-can-save-civilization-saints#:~:text=us%20more%20powerfully!-,St.,years%20solely%20on%20the%20sacrament.
Machen, A. (1904). The White People. Wiki Source. Retrieved December 12, 2023 from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_White_People_(Machen)/Prologue