Tolkien as Mystic: Not Inventing But Reporting

[@shawnfield6033]

It is a download of inspiration. I am wide-read on poetry, and I have composed many poems. And there are quite a few of those poems that seem to have come from somewhere else. Yes, I was so inspired, but I can also see there are large portions of the longer, more epic poems that seem to have come from elsewhere, as if my hand was guided in the process and I didn't anymore know their outcomes until written.

[@pjulian777]

Thanks for your comment! That sounds exactly like the kind of work Tolkien is speaking about. If you would like to share some of your poems I would be most interested to take a look... is there anywhere I can find you online?

[@R.P-e2z]

"A splintered fragment of the true light may be exactly what we human beings are." Was not expecting such profundity, but I think your parting words not only confirm that Tolkien was indeed getting his mythology from somewhere outside himself, but hint at how he was able to do it. He was a man who sought Truth. Not just "the truth," but Truth with a capital T, the law and order that undergirds our existence and leaves its footprints in cultures as different from one another as the ancient Greeks were from the precolonial Nez Perce. Those two cultures tell two eerily similar stories, that of Orpheus visiting the Underworld and Coyote's journey to the Land of the Dead. Two cultures, separated by time, distance, and very different societies, each told a story of a brokenhearted man who seeks to undo death itself to bring back his beloved, fails, and reminds us that death is inevitable. I think the similarity of those stories proves that the storytellers in each of those cultures were seekers of Truth, and that they shared what they found with their people, filtered through the lenses of their respective worlds and values. Tolkien did something similar with LotR. By seeking Truth, he found the story of a world beyond our own, with themes and warnings that will always be of value in our world.

[@Sidionian]

Tolkien had a deep, almost unprecedented knowledge of the occult, collected both in his life as the author of LOTR as well as in previous lives which were rouses into consciousness from the subconscious. Here are some examples: Numenor represents the last remnant of Atlantis, Poseidonis, and went down in similar circumstances as Poseidonis did (black magic, inner corruption of a great civilization, etc.) His depiction of the great music and creation of Arda in Silmarillion along with the Gods, elves and men etc. demonstrate a deep knowledge and understanding of Gnosticism, Esoteric Christianity, Neoplatonism, and other occult traditions. Anyone who claims that he just leaned on his Catholic faith is simply an ignoramus.

[@pjulian777]

@@Sidionian Thanks for your comment. It is interesting to see Tolkien refer again and again in his letters to his recurring dream of the Great Wave rising out of the West to drown the world, which he specifically relates back to the Atlantean tradition. Do you have any specific sources that show Tolkien grappling with Neoplatonism, Gnosticism etc? I’d love to hunt them down if you could point me in their direction. I have always had this idea that Tolkien intuited a lot of these things rather than learned them, perhaps from his (Jungian) collective unconscious or something similar… thanks again for the comment!