Lost Islands talk

Introduction to Kevan Manwaring’s Lost Islands

Speech by Anthony Nanson at the book launch, Inventions Arts Centre, Bath,

18 May 2008

Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, Thule, Hy-Brazil, the Fortunate Isles, Tir na nOg, Lyonesse, Ys … Avalon. The very names of these mythic islands that never were mesmerise us. They’re an irresistible magnet to all manner of wildly speculative thinking that tries to demonstrate these lands’ concrete existence sometime in the mists of the past. Some of this is unashamedly cranky, presented with complete disregard for scientific standards of validation. On the other hand, books by the likes of Graham Hancock, Charles Berlitz, and Erich von Däniken have tapped a lucrative se am of ‘mysteries’ journalism that dresses up imaginative speculation in a pseudoscientific guise that can seem persuasive to the gullible. Why does this sort of thing have such an appeal? It seems to me to be a symptom of the dominance in our present culture of the assumption that only that whose material reality can be scientifically demonstrated has any claim to truth or value. The pseudoscience attempts to download myths such as those of Atlantis and Avalon from the realm of the imagination into the material world that the ruling voices of our culture tell us is the only reality that exists.

Lost Islands is not that kind of book.[1] Kevan Manwaring is at pains to distance his work from the flawed reasoning of pseudoscience. He embraces Keats’s ‘negative capability’;[2] in other words he accepts, and indeed finds inspiration in, the impossibility of sure knowledge about some aspects of the world; something that goes against the grain of our materialistic society’s impulse to know certainly in order to control absolutely. He discriminates between mythology – the realm of the imagination – and geology and archaeology, the realm of the actual. Note that this is not the same as a distinction between falsehood and truth. The contents of the imagination may well be ‘true’, whether materially or psychologically or in some metaphysical way; only we can’t know their truth with the same kind of certainty with which we can try to pin down scientific data. They may also be just as valuable.

But I do not mean to define too rigid a dualism. The frontiers between the actual and the imagined are themselves uncertain, like the boundary between sea and land in the intertidal zone around an island. And the implication of Kevan’s book is that to face up to the world’s deepening ecological crisis we must transcend this dualism. In my view, there’s a divergence even within the green counterculture between an otherworldly naivety – the attitude that dodges political responsibility by declaring that, at some spiritual level, each one of us chooses everything that happens to us – and the earnest mobilisation of science and politics to try to save the planet from the destructive effects of the ever-growing human population. The weakness in the latter stance, laudable and necessary though that stance is, is that it often fails to take seriously the existential challenges arising from the fact of human mortality. Effective response to the crisis requires us, as individuals and collectively, to constrain our lifestyles and our procreation for the sake of people, places, creatures we may never see, for the sake of children who won’t be born till after we’re dead, for the sake of processes of ecological recovery that may not bear fruit within our lifetimes. The ingredient often missing from the discourse of environmentalism is ‘faith’ – some kind of myth or metaphysics that can sustain our commitment to the struggle and can keep our lives joyful in the face of challenges so awesomely long-term and so dispiriting.

Kevan’s attempt to tackle this dialectic between myth (in the strong sense of that word) and science is explicit in the threefold structure of his book. In the first part, ‘The Allure of the Imaginary’, he approaches the mythology of lost islands by way of the ancient Irish notion of ‘immrama’, wonder voyages that are as much spiritual as physical journeys and may be interpreted as a kind of shamanic reconnaissance of the metaphysical pathways between our mortal existence and whatever lies beyond the veil of death.[3] The island paradises encountered by the voyagers – with their ecological perfection, their peacefulness, and their beautiful and unageing inhabitants (the emphasis is usually on the women) – represent an idealised world that we seek seemingly in vain in our mortal lives and traditionally have hoped to find beyond the grave.

In the second part, ‘The Cold Light of Day’, Kevan examines the geological and ecological history of actual islands, emphasising in particular those which really have disappeared, for example during the rise in sea level at the end of the last ice age (though some of his examples are really flooded coastal regions rather than flooded islands); and those, such as Easter Island, which though still above the waves have suffered an ecological meltdown; and those, like many Pacific atolls, which are expected to be lost to the impending sea-level rise caused by global warming in our own time. In both ecology and myth the island is such a potent symbol because it is in microcosm a whole world, its resources visibly finite within the bounds of its coastline. As Kevan points out, the photographs of the earth’s globe taken by the Apollo astronauts clarify for us that the earth is itself an island, of finite resources, isolated within a barren sea of space.

In the final part, ‘When Worlds Collide’, the actual and the imagined are brought together and Kevan makes an object lesson of the European impact on America, that vast and bounteous continent discovered to actually occupy the geographical space, across the western sea, where Celtic and Greek myth imagined the islands of paradise to lie. He makes us confront the perennial and distressing futility of seeking paradise on earth: it seems that everywhere human beings go, and however impressed we are by the beauty of what we find, and however good our intentions, we end up causing ecological destruction – and are now doing so on a scale that threatens the future of our civilisation.

This grim diagnosis begs two questions relating to the two sides of the dialectic. Firstly, having had our consciousness raised – about global warming, habitat destruction, species extinctions, the human suffering that results when resources are exhausted – what are we, individually and collectively, going to actually do about these things? Because we have to do something. Because the ecological crisis is actually happening. Because we’d be less than fully human if we said we didn’t care. That is the hands-muddying task of politics and science which I’ve already alluded to. Secondly, how can the mythology help us to keep going, to find consolation (in the strong sense of that word, emphasised by Tolkien[4]) in the face of despair, without us evading the duty thrust upon us by the first question? Kevan’s answer to that second question, I suggest, lies in the frame story within which he’s parcelled the whole book: the Irish legend of Oisin and Niamh. For Oisin comes back from the paradise of Tir na nOg and dialogues with St Patrick. There is a synthesis between pagan celebration of the earthly here and now and Christian concern for our spiritual destiny in eternity, between an earthly paradise that can be found beyond the sea and an eternal paradise hoped for beyond death. As in so many of these metaphysical oppositions, it won’t do to simply argue the case for one side of the dialectic. You need to do the political work and have spiritual faith. You have to accept both sides, embrace the paradox, in faith that out of doing that will spring hope and wholeness and possibilities you might never even have imagined.

[1] Kevan Manwaring, Lost Islands: Inventing Avalon, Destroying Eden, Heart of Albion Press, Loughborough, 2008.

[2] Letter from John Keats to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27(?) December 1817, in John Keats, The Complete Poems, Penguin, London, 1973.

[3] Caitlín Matthews, ‘The Circuits of the Soul in Celtic Tradition’ and ‘The Quest as Shaman Journey in Celtic Tradition’, in The Encyclopedia of Celtic Wisdom: A Celtic Shaman’s Sourcebook, Caitlín & John Matthews, Element, Shaftesbury, 1994.

[4] J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’, in idem, Tree and Leaf, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1964.

Lost Islands: inventing Avalon, destroying Eden, by Kevan Manwaring, available from Heart of Albion Press here


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