You treat hidden beings as a way of loosening the grip of the objectivist world — not by asking anyone to “believe,” but by showing how relational worlds widen when we stop insisting that reality must be cut apart to be known.
The way you frame betweenness feels like a reminder that thresholds aren’t gaps or fantasies. They’re places where worlds meet, and where our ways of attending decide what can appear.
It’s striking how much becomes possible when we stop treating separation as the only path to understanding.
Brilliant paper. Allow me to recommend an excellent, challenging, and strangely refreshing book on Iceland's elves for those who'd like to be more immersed from afar: Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth, by Nancy Marie Brown (New York: Pegasus, 2022).
On the other hand, if you want to doubt them, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Coming of the Fairies demonstrates how even someone intelligent can take obviously faked photographic evidence seriously (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47506) -- even before AI, eyes were fooled by forgery.
Thank you, Whit! I love that Nancy has written this book; her work and journey are so aligned with mine. Another great one is the documentary "The Seer and the Unseen." I met the director, Sara Dosa, in Iceland while she was filming, and the main subject, the wonderful Ragga Jónsdóttir, was a key interlocutor for all of us.
I haven’t got to read your article yet (thank you for writing it) which may also include the following. Fairy trees and fairy forts act as portals and protectors in Ireland dating way back into the mists of time - common lore knows to to mess with those spaces, unless you want a string of ‘bad luck.’ In the documentary by the Kogis, Aluna, they also try to make us, who they call ‘younger brother’ aware of sacred spaces.
Absolutely. I address that here in cross-cultural perspective. Thank you for sharing. Recently, I read while traveling in Verzasca (Italian Switzerland) that the fairy trees there correlate to those without which the local ecosystem would be particularly damaged.
Oh my goodness that was a lot! I had a professor who was from Ghana. Gabriel Bannerman Richter told me about gnomes in Africa and gifted me a beautiful dashiki made by his wife. Ah life…
I would love to learn more about this, Patrick! And you've read my mind because just last night I was thinking about Ghana as a place where I'd like to expand this research. It looks like Gabriel Bannerman Richter's work on mmoetia is out of print; any idea where one could get their hands on a copy?
I'm very glad to be of relief! Thank you for sharing your story; I love reading and hearing about such encounters. I'd love to hear about how it continued to affect or impact your life.
Thank you for taking the time to read my story, Sadie!
As for how the encounter has affected my life, it's hard to say exactly because I don't know what I'd be like if I hadn't experienced it since I was so young at the time. I do know, though, that I feel naturally open, and in fact, certain that there are many types of largely invisible energies at play in the natural world. I feel I can feel them, if you know what I mean? It is my imagination, like you wondered about the elves you felt out on the lava field? I think not, and I guess it's because I had the experience with the 'gnome'. I need no other proof that all the world is alive and conscious. That must be how the experience impacted my life, as I think out the answer your question. Thank you for asking it!
Well, I have a new source to share quotes from for the foreseeable future. 😉 Sadie, this is absolutely brilliant. I too traveled to Iceland not long ago in search of greater connection to eco-relationality, and I got more than I bargained for. I wrote about my experience of being cracked open in a series I’m penning I call Here There Be Monsters. Your work here will surely be referenced in upcoming additions to the series. Thank you so much!!!!
Fantastic! I'm so happy to hear you cracked open there as well, on the island that is still creating itself. Please keep me updated on your work. I'd love to read it, and am grateful to be in conversation.
A refreshing alternative to rationalists and empiricists who "know" a priori what is or isn't possible. That old Aristotelian either/or true/false also part of the Enlightenment. However, quantum physics, with that wave/particle refusal of either/or and interpretations like Schrodinger's Cat and Bell's Theorem is as weird as anything in this post by Sadie Rittman. A scientific liminality.
My simple example is this: analyzed scientifically (empirically) a painting is a chunk of botanically derived fibers with splotches of chemical pigments. To rationalist, it's often illogical. It's the non-rational artistic, poetic, mystical, spiritual, and religious functions that through metaphor give it meaning. Same for human life; why we need both modes. And perhaps others that don't fit neatly anywhere. Both/and. Neither/nor. Apophatic theology.
Rationalists tend to categorize religion as assent to doctrine. They don't understand the deep experiential side that can't be reduced to precise phrases and formulas. No more than reductionism can account for Mind. They all too often assume folk beliefs and Indigenous stories are merely ways superstitious and ignorant primitives explain the environments around them. When they're taught about the real world by people trained properly, they will learn to think logically and become civilized. As if peoples who've lived in a locale for thousands of years aren't expert observers when their lives depend on it. As if they can't possibly see what they see. Or know anything western intellectuals don't. Never mind how puzzling it is these allegedly superior cultures have so many scientists employed making ever more efficiently deadly WMDs.
Thank you for this generous response, Rafi. Your example with the painting is so elegant, and I couldn't agree more about us "superior cultures" with our WMDs and ability to "know better." You're pointing towards something lost in the disentanglement of knowledge from its land or grounding there.
Funnily enough, Rupert Sheldrake just posted his own take on why people see elves when taking DMT on his Substack today.
My own growing theory on the association is that hidden beings, as I lay out here, point towards ontological interconnection just as fungi point towards biological interconnection.
I was a blue collar rank and file labor activist for 28 years, therefore deeply aware of another aspect of "superiority" and "knowing better"--class prejudice. In my 50s, I went back to school; botany major, forestry minor. So yes, a fan of R & M Sheldrake. And of all the research on plant intelligence. It was a shock to me when in my botany classes I found out people born and raised in outdoorsy Seattle couldn't even identify the area's dominant tree (Douglas-fir.) Same in the S.F. Bay area with Monterey cypress. People who live on top of the land with no roots in it. (Yes, a mycorrhizal pun.) No wonder we have ecological problems.
To my great surprise, I had a series of mystical encounters that pointed at Christianity, so I went to grad school in theology. The GTU, a consortium of various Christian denominations and other faith traditions in Berkeley, CA. I respect the scholarship and even love some of them, but for me it was a Procrustean bargain. I couldn't pare away enough of myself to fit in. Yet while there, I had several mystical experiences that pretty much fit doctrine, although not quite. Probably to do with set and setting; however there seems to be more to it. Nothing is either/or. Nothing is certain.
I sense different orders of entities, although their appearances are often quite similar. Likely due to translations by our human physical, mental, and cultural systems. Collective intelligences of plant species? The traditional forces of nature like sprites and undines? Local ones like Sasquatches? Something in their own right? Mind/deity as background, container, source. I didn't say "energy" because that's only another form of matter. Nor is It entirely benevolent, contrary to giddy New Agers and Christian dogma. Black holes and supernovas without which we wouldn't exist. Earthquakes, etc. Indigenous traditions world-wide say similar. Since I was a young adult '60s-'70s I've done several different psychedelics and entheogens. Not DMT, but I have Rick Strassman's books. He, too, included some of the darker aspects. Least acceptable of all, I'm a UFO abductee, starting very young. No, I don't take any of the associated phenomena literally. But I've upset contactees (their term) because I refuse to recant "abductee." The best writing on this and other weird experiences is by Dr. Jeff Kripal and in his /Archives of the Impossible/ at Rice University.
PS--Re: being able to see little people because of a Chinese bolete...Aldous Huxley quoting Blake; cleansing the doors of perception. Unblocking the censors. PPS-Just joined R Sheldrake. All my extra $ for this month. I'm very low income.
Your cross-section of labor activism, botany/forestry, and mysticism/theology is particularly fecund for work like this!
I certainly know what it's like to struggle with the feeling of needing to pare oneself down to fit. For a long time, I felt I needed to be "this" OR "that"; spaces and communities like Perspectiva open up invitations to the fluidity, interplay, and boundarilessness suited to our times (and... being).
I'd love to hear more about your encounters; do you write about them somewhere?
Kripal's work has been formative for me. It was key, perhaps THE key, to my undergraduate thesis on elves in Iceland, where I brought my fieldwork into conversation with his thought on how the experience of reality shifts with social framing, on the sacred in transit with science, and on relationships between religion, fiction, and the paranormal.
I'm one of Kripal's correspondents, although I haven't written to him in awhile. I've found that dealing with political and econ issues tends to dampen, if not shut out, the mystical side. It took 2 intense years to learn the basics of economics from an alt. economist, taking up most of my aged mental bandwidth. You think "The Impossible" is weird? What became the mainstream econ theory, now destroying the world, is based on a set of unwarranted assumptions and is little more than argument by assertion.
I don't have a blog for several reasons. The ones by unknown writers, with a few exceptions, are self-indulgent and poorly done. So I figure the chances of being found amidst the noise must be slim. Same for YouTube stuff, even worse for me because I can read so much faster. I've had people send me links to something (especially on Jung, the western occult tradition, mysticism, contact, etc) and I'm amazed at how bad most are, yet people think they're wonderful. That's because they know even less than who put it out. Yes, we all have to start somewhere. But the lack of discernment bothers me--who does NOT see that a claim like "all cultures had a double eagle symbol" can't possibly be true?
Kripal said recently when young, he thought someone somewhere must know. So did I. Well, I did learn from listening to elders. But the secrets of creation, possible abilities of the human mind, the nature of G-d/Mind/Consciousness? No one knows. We each get pieces of it through various experiences. When I've discovered some aspect, I haven't settled for that; I've kept going. Cost me a couple of friendships with people who accepted some occult system or religious denomination. Not saying they're wrong, there is truth there. Just not all of it. Therefore I've always felt I'm missing something and writing about it always premature.
However, I really have had some very interesting experiences. I'd be glad to share them. I don't want to put my email out publicly. Do you have a university one? Or even a mail stop or somewhere I can write to you that's safe for you to list here?
Wow, what a wonderfully thorough piece. I am thrilled to know of it! Couldn’t agree more about enlarging our perceptions beyond the objective. That narcissism callout is great- we really are too proud, and that pride prevents real seeing. We are being seen and known by the land and animals in the same way we are seeing and knowing them. That makes us friends. But if we are not friends, the error is on us, because humans are always the errant ones.
Your point that the objectivist paradigm can only know by separating, so anything that lives in betweenness can't count as real, made me think of the Balkans, where the objectivist paradigm is something we keep trying to import while staying entangled anyway. When I was writing my novel Water Bodies, I asked my grandmother, who comes from a line of oracles and healers and reads coffee cups herself, whether she believed in samovili (fairies). She immediately said no, "Каки самовиле, бегај тамо" (fairies, get out of here), which is now the standard/memorised reply to any question like this, because that view has come to look provincial, something to be avoided at all costs. She laughed, and straight after said it didn't matter anyway whether she believed or not, a kind of ritual taking-back. So you do, I said. They don't care, she said. I think her answer is interesting in relation to recovering the openness that "lets them in." It goes a step further, because in it belief is only our problem, and the samovili were never waiting at the door.
You treat hidden beings as a way of loosening the grip of the objectivist world — not by asking anyone to “believe,” but by showing how relational worlds widen when we stop insisting that reality must be cut apart to be known.
The way you frame betweenness feels like a reminder that thresholds aren’t gaps or fantasies. They’re places where worlds meet, and where our ways of attending decide what can appear.
It’s striking how much becomes possible when we stop treating separation as the only path to understanding.
Absolutely, Randy. Well said. Thank you for seeing and articulating this.
Sadie Rittman, this work is fetching. In the best way. To the between places.
To honey and milk and out to Others!
May we all be fetched, from time to time. Thank you!
Brilliant paper. Allow me to recommend an excellent, challenging, and strangely refreshing book on Iceland's elves for those who'd like to be more immersed from afar: Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth, by Nancy Marie Brown (New York: Pegasus, 2022).
On the other hand, if you want to doubt them, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Coming of the Fairies demonstrates how even someone intelligent can take obviously faked photographic evidence seriously (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47506) -- even before AI, eyes were fooled by forgery.
Thank you, Whit! I love that Nancy has written this book; her work and journey are so aligned with mine. Another great one is the documentary "The Seer and the Unseen." I met the director, Sara Dosa, in Iceland while she was filming, and the main subject, the wonderful Ragga Jónsdóttir, was a key interlocutor for all of us.
https://www.theseerandtheunseen.com/home
Amazing for the possibility.
Possibility is so important
I haven’t got to read your article yet (thank you for writing it) which may also include the following. Fairy trees and fairy forts act as portals and protectors in Ireland dating way back into the mists of time - common lore knows to to mess with those spaces, unless you want a string of ‘bad luck.’ In the documentary by the Kogis, Aluna, they also try to make us, who they call ‘younger brother’ aware of sacred spaces.
Absolutely. I address that here in cross-cultural perspective. Thank you for sharing. Recently, I read while traveling in Verzasca (Italian Switzerland) that the fairy trees there correlate to those without which the local ecosystem would be particularly damaged.
Oh my goodness that was a lot! I had a professor who was from Ghana. Gabriel Bannerman Richter told me about gnomes in Africa and gifted me a beautiful dashiki made by his wife. Ah life…
I would love to learn more about this, Patrick! And you've read my mind because just last night I was thinking about Ghana as a place where I'd like to expand this research. It looks like Gabriel Bannerman Richter's work on mmoetia is out of print; any idea where one could get their hands on a copy?
I suspect there’s a copy in the library at Sac State University (Sacramento, CA)? Perhaps you can access it online? He was a delightful professor.
What a relief to read your essay on a subject dear to my heart. Thank you!
On my blog I've written about an encounter I had with a 'gnome' as a young child. Here's the link if you'd like to read it:
https://artbybrownie.com/the-gnome-and-the-drainpipe/
Thanks again!
I'm very glad to be of relief! Thank you for sharing your story; I love reading and hearing about such encounters. I'd love to hear about how it continued to affect or impact your life.
Anne, your story is remarkable. Thank you for sharing it. I'm glad David Abram encouraged you!
Thank you for taking the time to read my story, Sadie!
As for how the encounter has affected my life, it's hard to say exactly because I don't know what I'd be like if I hadn't experienced it since I was so young at the time. I do know, though, that I feel naturally open, and in fact, certain that there are many types of largely invisible energies at play in the natural world. I feel I can feel them, if you know what I mean? It is my imagination, like you wondered about the elves you felt out on the lava field? I think not, and I guess it's because I had the experience with the 'gnome'. I need no other proof that all the world is alive and conscious. That must be how the experience impacted my life, as I think out the answer your question. Thank you for asking it!
Well, I have a new source to share quotes from for the foreseeable future. 😉 Sadie, this is absolutely brilliant. I too traveled to Iceland not long ago in search of greater connection to eco-relationality, and I got more than I bargained for. I wrote about my experience of being cracked open in a series I’m penning I call Here There Be Monsters. Your work here will surely be referenced in upcoming additions to the series. Thank you so much!!!!
Fantastic! I'm so happy to hear you cracked open there as well, on the island that is still creating itself. Please keep me updated on your work. I'd love to read it, and am grateful to be in conversation.
A refreshing alternative to rationalists and empiricists who "know" a priori what is or isn't possible. That old Aristotelian either/or true/false also part of the Enlightenment. However, quantum physics, with that wave/particle refusal of either/or and interpretations like Schrodinger's Cat and Bell's Theorem is as weird as anything in this post by Sadie Rittman. A scientific liminality.
My simple example is this: analyzed scientifically (empirically) a painting is a chunk of botanically derived fibers with splotches of chemical pigments. To rationalist, it's often illogical. It's the non-rational artistic, poetic, mystical, spiritual, and religious functions that through metaphor give it meaning. Same for human life; why we need both modes. And perhaps others that don't fit neatly anywhere. Both/and. Neither/nor. Apophatic theology.
Rationalists tend to categorize religion as assent to doctrine. They don't understand the deep experiential side that can't be reduced to precise phrases and formulas. No more than reductionism can account for Mind. They all too often assume folk beliefs and Indigenous stories are merely ways superstitious and ignorant primitives explain the environments around them. When they're taught about the real world by people trained properly, they will learn to think logically and become civilized. As if peoples who've lived in a locale for thousands of years aren't expert observers when their lives depend on it. As if they can't possibly see what they see. Or know anything western intellectuals don't. Never mind how puzzling it is these allegedly superior cultures have so many scientists employed making ever more efficiently deadly WMDs.
Here's something that could be a clue. The interviewer and researcher seem to be trying to explain away the phenomenon as hallucination, but I suspect there's more to it. A bolete mushroom that induces being able to see tiny people, yet everything else is seen normally. Interview by Ben Turner in "Live Science" June 26, 2026 of Colin Domnauer, PhD student in ethnobiology. www.livescience.com/chemistry/it-sounds-so-impossible-student-studying-fungus-that-makes-users-hallucinate-tiny-people-may-be-on-the-verge-of-a-scientific-breakthrough?
Thank you for this generous response, Rafi. Your example with the painting is so elegant, and I couldn't agree more about us "superior cultures" with our WMDs and ability to "know better." You're pointing towards something lost in the disentanglement of knowledge from its land or grounding there.
Funnily enough, Rupert Sheldrake just posted his own take on why people see elves when taking DMT on his Substack today.
My own growing theory on the association is that hidden beings, as I lay out here, point towards ontological interconnection just as fungi point towards biological interconnection.
I was a blue collar rank and file labor activist for 28 years, therefore deeply aware of another aspect of "superiority" and "knowing better"--class prejudice. In my 50s, I went back to school; botany major, forestry minor. So yes, a fan of R & M Sheldrake. And of all the research on plant intelligence. It was a shock to me when in my botany classes I found out people born and raised in outdoorsy Seattle couldn't even identify the area's dominant tree (Douglas-fir.) Same in the S.F. Bay area with Monterey cypress. People who live on top of the land with no roots in it. (Yes, a mycorrhizal pun.) No wonder we have ecological problems.
To my great surprise, I had a series of mystical encounters that pointed at Christianity, so I went to grad school in theology. The GTU, a consortium of various Christian denominations and other faith traditions in Berkeley, CA. I respect the scholarship and even love some of them, but for me it was a Procrustean bargain. I couldn't pare away enough of myself to fit in. Yet while there, I had several mystical experiences that pretty much fit doctrine, although not quite. Probably to do with set and setting; however there seems to be more to it. Nothing is either/or. Nothing is certain.
I sense different orders of entities, although their appearances are often quite similar. Likely due to translations by our human physical, mental, and cultural systems. Collective intelligences of plant species? The traditional forces of nature like sprites and undines? Local ones like Sasquatches? Something in their own right? Mind/deity as background, container, source. I didn't say "energy" because that's only another form of matter. Nor is It entirely benevolent, contrary to giddy New Agers and Christian dogma. Black holes and supernovas without which we wouldn't exist. Earthquakes, etc. Indigenous traditions world-wide say similar. Since I was a young adult '60s-'70s I've done several different psychedelics and entheogens. Not DMT, but I have Rick Strassman's books. He, too, included some of the darker aspects. Least acceptable of all, I'm a UFO abductee, starting very young. No, I don't take any of the associated phenomena literally. But I've upset contactees (their term) because I refuse to recant "abductee." The best writing on this and other weird experiences is by Dr. Jeff Kripal and in his /Archives of the Impossible/ at Rice University.
PS--Re: being able to see little people because of a Chinese bolete...Aldous Huxley quoting Blake; cleansing the doors of perception. Unblocking the censors. PPS-Just joined R Sheldrake. All my extra $ for this month. I'm very low income.
Your cross-section of labor activism, botany/forestry, and mysticism/theology is particularly fecund for work like this!
I certainly know what it's like to struggle with the feeling of needing to pare oneself down to fit. For a long time, I felt I needed to be "this" OR "that"; spaces and communities like Perspectiva open up invitations to the fluidity, interplay, and boundarilessness suited to our times (and... being).
I'd love to hear more about your encounters; do you write about them somewhere?
Kripal's work has been formative for me. It was key, perhaps THE key, to my undergraduate thesis on elves in Iceland, where I brought my fieldwork into conversation with his thought on how the experience of reality shifts with social framing, on the sacred in transit with science, and on relationships between religion, fiction, and the paranormal.
I'm one of Kripal's correspondents, although I haven't written to him in awhile. I've found that dealing with political and econ issues tends to dampen, if not shut out, the mystical side. It took 2 intense years to learn the basics of economics from an alt. economist, taking up most of my aged mental bandwidth. You think "The Impossible" is weird? What became the mainstream econ theory, now destroying the world, is based on a set of unwarranted assumptions and is little more than argument by assertion.
I don't have a blog for several reasons. The ones by unknown writers, with a few exceptions, are self-indulgent and poorly done. So I figure the chances of being found amidst the noise must be slim. Same for YouTube stuff, even worse for me because I can read so much faster. I've had people send me links to something (especially on Jung, the western occult tradition, mysticism, contact, etc) and I'm amazed at how bad most are, yet people think they're wonderful. That's because they know even less than who put it out. Yes, we all have to start somewhere. But the lack of discernment bothers me--who does NOT see that a claim like "all cultures had a double eagle symbol" can't possibly be true?
Kripal said recently when young, he thought someone somewhere must know. So did I. Well, I did learn from listening to elders. But the secrets of creation, possible abilities of the human mind, the nature of G-d/Mind/Consciousness? No one knows. We each get pieces of it through various experiences. When I've discovered some aspect, I haven't settled for that; I've kept going. Cost me a couple of friendships with people who accepted some occult system or religious denomination. Not saying they're wrong, there is truth there. Just not all of it. Therefore I've always felt I'm missing something and writing about it always premature.
However, I really have had some very interesting experiences. I'd be glad to share them. I don't want to put my email out publicly. Do you have a university one? Or even a mail stop or somewhere I can write to you that's safe for you to list here?
Wow, what a wonderfully thorough piece. I am thrilled to know of it! Couldn’t agree more about enlarging our perceptions beyond the objective. That narcissism callout is great- we really are too proud, and that pride prevents real seeing. We are being seen and known by the land and animals in the same way we are seeing and knowing them. That makes us friends. But if we are not friends, the error is on us, because humans are always the errant ones.
Thank you for your inspiring work!
Thank you, Shannon! So true. We humans do need a little help.
I cannot thank you enough for this post. I am deeply delighted. 💞 Looking forward to much more of this.
I'm delighted you're delighted! Deep delight is fundamental to this work. There is more to come.
Tusen tack!
I loved this, what a joy!
Your point that the objectivist paradigm can only know by separating, so anything that lives in betweenness can't count as real, made me think of the Balkans, where the objectivist paradigm is something we keep trying to import while staying entangled anyway. When I was writing my novel Water Bodies, I asked my grandmother, who comes from a line of oracles and healers and reads coffee cups herself, whether she believed in samovili (fairies). She immediately said no, "Каки самовиле, бегај тамо" (fairies, get out of here), which is now the standard/memorised reply to any question like this, because that view has come to look provincial, something to be avoided at all costs. She laughed, and straight after said it didn't matter anyway whether she believed or not, a kind of ritual taking-back. So you do, I said. They don't care, she said. I think her answer is interesting in relation to recovering the openness that "lets them in." It goes a step further, because in it belief is only our problem, and the samovili were never waiting at the door.