“I did know once, only I’ve sort of forgotten.”
~ A.A.Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Alan Alexander Milne (January 18, 1882 – January 31, 1956) was an English writer best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, as well as children’s poetry. Milne was primarily a playwright before the huge success of Winnie-the-Pooh overshadowed his previous work. Wikipedia
by Kittredge Cherry |
Last Updated on May 23, 2025 (qspirit.net)
Joseph, a popular figure in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, can be seen as a gender-nonconformist who inspires LGBTQ people today.
Queer Bible scholars focus on how Joseph wore a robe that is usually known in English as a “coat of many colors,” but could be translated as a rainbow-colored “princess dress.”
The story of Joseph and his princess dress (Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28) is part of the three-year cycle of lectionary readings. It will be read again at many churches worldwide on Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026.
Even before birth, there was something queer about Joseph. According to ancient commentaries known as midrash, Joseph and his half-sister Dinah were miraculously switched in the womb, meaning that they changed gender even before they were born. The Bible describes Joseph as well-built and attractive. He is known as Joseph the All-Comely in Orthodox tradition and ranked as “the most handsome man in the Bible” in at least one poll.
Joseph’s father, Jacob, loved him more than any of this other children, so he had a special robe made for him. In Hebrew the robe is called “ketonet passim.” Its meaning is considered unclear by many traditional Bible scholars. Various translations use terms such as “a robe with long sleeves,” “an elaborately embroidered coat” or “a varicolored tunic.”
Joseph dreams of grain in an illustration by Owen Jones from “The History of Joseph and His Brethren,” 1869 (Wikipedia)
The only other use of the term is in II Samuel 13, where princess Tamar wears a “ketonet passim” and the author helpfully explains that this is “how the virgin daughters of the king were clothed in earlier times.”
Traditional Bible scholars found it confusing that Joseph would wear an article of female clothing, the meaning is clear enough to today’s queer people of faith. Joseph was able to interpret dreams, and his rainbow robe also suggests the multi-colored garments that are sometimes worn by shamans and magicians.
Joseph wears his princess dress as he tells his brothers about his dreams in an illustration of Genesis Chapter 37 by Sweet Publishing (Wikipedia)
From a queer perspective, it’s sadly not surprising that when Joseph’s 11 brothers saw “that dreamer” in his princess dress, they got so upset that they attacked him and sold him into slavery. There is even an ancient tradition that the Egyptian officer Potiphar bought Joseph as a sex slave. The Bible story goes on to tell how Joseph triumphed in the end, rising to become Egypt’s second most powerful man and rescuing his family from starvation during a famine.
The icon of Joseph at the top of this post was created by Matthew, a practicing Roman Catholic whose artwork appears at Queer Catholic Icons on Instagram as @queer.catholic.icons. “Joseph’s gender non-conformity and othered-ness is clear throughout Joseph’s story, attributes that make Joseph beloved by LGBTQ people of faith. I depicted Joseph standing in the desert, the place where we meet with God, and wearing a multicolored garment,” Matthew wrote.
There are many books, artworks, articles and videos that provide more queer insights into Joseph.
A scholarly paper titled “A Queer Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Renaissance Painting ‘Jacob and Joseph’ in the Sistine Chapel” was presented at two Biblical studies conferences in Europe in July 2024 by Karin Hügel of the University of Amsterdam. The abstract begins, “In the context of Michelangelo’s fresco ‘Jacob and Joseph’ in the Sistine Chapel, the beautiful effeminate Joseph, Jacob’s son, can be understood as a quasi-queer ancestor of Jesus Christ….”
Joseph by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, Papal Palace in the Vatican, 1511-1512 (Wikipedia)
“Josephine: A Trans Story of Biblical Proportions” by author J Mase III, a black/trans/queer poet, and illustrator Wriply Bennet was published in 2023. Inspired by the work of Peterson Toscano, it provides counter narratives to dismantle anti-trans Biblical rhetoric.
Raised in a Christian and Muslim home, Mase won a Lambda Literary Award for transgender nonfiction in 2020 for “The Black Trans Prayer Book.” It also appears on Q Spirit’s list of the top LGBTQ Christian books of 2020. Stories, prayers, poems, spells, incantations, theological narrative and visual offerings by black trans, non-binary and intersex people are collected in this interfaith, multi-dimensional theological and artistic work. The aim is to celebrate their valuable role in faith
Mase speaks on the video “Josephine (What the Bible Says About Transfolk).”
Other LGBTQ resources about Joseph include:
Joseph wears a rainbow dress in a photo by queer artist Laura Sommer of Heidelberg, Germany. She describes herself as “disabled, Autistic, queer, non-binary, aro/ace (aromantic/asexual), Christian and a neeeeeeerd.” On her website Wibbley Wobbley Minds, she uses Playmobil toy figurines to recreate the life of Joseph and other stories from the Bible and literature.
Joseph by Laura Sommer (Wibbley Wobbley Minds)
“Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel” by the late Chicago Theological Seminary professor Theodore Jennings has a chapter titled “Joseph as Sissy Boy.”
“OtherWise Christian: A Guidebook for Transgender Liberation” by Chris Paige has a chapter on “Joseph(ine).” A more devotional reflection on Joseph(ine) appears as a chapter in “Christian Faith and Gender Identity: An OtherWise Reflection Guide” by Chris Paige.
The story of Joseph is re-imagined through a queer lens in the 1990s Midwest with “Queering My Religion: Biblical Stories of Queer Love in the ‘90s” by Jeff Crim. It was independently published in 2024. Based in Tennessee, the author is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
(Gender)queering Joseph: Midrashic Possibilities for the Torah’s Most Extra Child by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (Life is a Sacred Text)
“Sexual Orientation in the Presentation of Joseph’s Character in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature” by Robert Harris in the April 2019 issue of the Association for Jewish Studies Review.
Bible scholar/actor Peterson Toscano does a video presentation of “Joseph and the Amazing Gender Non-Conforming Bible Story.” It’s an excerpt from his solo performance “Transfigurations: Transgressing Gender in the Bible.”
Jade (Jude) Sylvan won the Billings Preaching Prize at Harvard Divinity School in 2019 with a video sermon on Joseph and the princess dress. Sylvan wrote “Beloved King,” a musical about David and Jonathan, as one of the requirements for a master of divinity degree at Harvard.
There’s even a Joseph of Genesis patch that can be ordered in the colors of the rainbow flag, the trans pride flag, bi pride flag, asexual pride flag, nonbinary pride flag and more from the NeuroqueerCrafting (formerly Sapphic Stiches) Etsy shop.
Joseph of Genesis by NeuroqueerCrafting
A popular mainstream retelling of the story is “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” a musical with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Q Spirit’s Litany of Queer Saints includes this line:
“Joseph of Genesis, gender-defiant dreamer in a rainbow coat, pray for us.”
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Note on pronouns: This article follows Biblical tradition by using he/him/his pronouns for Joseph.
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To read this article in Spanish, go to:
Un José queer y su vestido de princesa en la Biblia (Santxs Queer)
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Related link:
תפילת משיח קשת בענן (Rainbow Christ Prayer in Hebrew)
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Top image credit:
Joseph by Matthew of Queer Catholic Icons
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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published on Q Spirit in August 2020, was expanded with new material over time, and was most recently updated on May 22, 2025.
Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.
Founder at Q Spirit
Kittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.
by Kittredge Cherry |
Last Updated on July 12, 2025 (qspirit.net)
Kuan Yin, the genderfluid spirit of compassion in Buddhism, is sometimes thought of as a queer Christ figure or LGBTQ role model. Buddhists celebrate the enlightenment of Kuan Yin every year in July or August. This year the date is July 13, 2025.
Transcending gender identity, Kuan Yin appears in whatever form is necessary to help people in need: sometimes female, sometimes male, sometimes androgynous.
Christians honor Christ as savior, and Kuan Yin is a type of Buddhist savior figure called a bodhisattva — an enlightened person who is able to reach nirvana (heaven) but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save others from suffering.
Artists often show Kuan Yin with eyes in the hands and feet. They are like the wounds of Christ, but Kuan Yin can see with them. Kuan Yin is also associated with the mother of Christ. When Christianity was persecuted in Edo-era Japan, the “hidden Christians” created states of Mary disguised as Kuan Yin. Comparisons to Mary are more common than comparisons to Christ. For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York published the 2021 article, “Compassion, Mercy, and Love: Guanyin and the Virgin Mary: How two independent cultures—feudal Europe and imperial China—depicted divine figures with incredible visual similarities.”
Also known as the goddess of mercy, Kuan Yin goes by different names in different places, including Avalokiteshvara in India, Tara (female) or Chenrezig (male) in Tibet, and Kannon in Japan.
Writers and scholars who have explored the queer side of Kuan Yin include Patrick S. Cheng, an Episcopal priest who teaches at Chicago Theological Seminary; Hsiao-Lan Hu, religious studies professor at the University of Detroit Mercy; and Toby Johnson, a former Catholic monk turned author and comparative religion scholar.
A different kind of queer Asian Christ figure is portrayed in “Jesus Prays Alone” by Jason Antiquera, a Catholic missionary priest from the Philippines who works on mission in South Korea. He relocates the gospel story of Jesus praying alone in agony before his arrest. Instead of the garden of Gethsemane, the contemporary Asian Christ prays in Itaewon, an LGBTQ neighborhood in Seoul, South Korea.
“Jesus Prays Alone” by Jason Antiquera
Antiquera explained the connections when he introduced the digital artwork in a Facebook post in June 2024:
“This is a modern Gethsemane, not a garden, but street of clubs and bars where a lone man wrestles with an intrinsic problem: betray his identity or die. At the background are writings on the wall expressing hate and violence towards queer people with which Jesus is also grappling…. This scene symbolizes the struggles of LGBT people to reconcile their sexuality with their spirituality, to live as whole human beings even when church and society label them sinful or sick. In a world that often denies the value of queer lives, many LGBT people have felt utterly alone, trapped between denying themselves and confronting the “social death” of persecution and exclusion. Crouching in a back alley, the Jesus of today could be praying for a world where all God’s children are honored.”
His approach resembles “Jesus Prays Alone” from “The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision” by New York artist Douglas Blanchard. Antiquera was also inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s “Café Terrace at Night.”
In the introduction to his 2003 essay “Kuan Yin: Mirror of the Queer Asian Christ,” Cheng explains:
“Kuan Yin, the Asian goddess of compassion, can serve as a mirror of the queer experience. Specifically, Kuan Yin affirms three aspects in the life of queer people that are often missing from traditional images of the divine: (1) queer compassion; (2) queer sexuality; and (3) gender fluidity. In other words, Kuan Yin can be an important means by which gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people can see ourselves as being made in the image of God.”
Cheng writes clearly about the connection between Kuan Yin and Christ in the section where he describes his personal search for queer Asian Christ figures:
“I have been intrigued by the possibility of Kuan Yin serving as a christological figure for queer Asian people. For me, it has been difficult to envision the Jesus Christ of the gospels and the Western Christian tradition as being both queer and Asian (although I do recognize that queer theologians and Asian theologians have tried to do so in their respective areas). It is my thesis that Kuan Yin might serve as a symbol of salvation and wholeness for queer Asian people of faith….”
Click for the whole essay “Kuan Yin: Mirror of the Queer Asian Christ” in English or in Spanish.
Cheng’s latest book Rainbow Theology: Bridging Race, Sexuality, and Spirit was published in 2013. He is also the author of “From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ”, “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology.” His series on “Rethinking Sin and Grace for LGBT People Today” was one of the most popular stories of 2010 at the Jesus in Love Blog.
“Kwan Yin is Coming” by Stephen Mead
Hsiao-Lan Hu presented a paper on “Queering Avalokiteśvara” at the 2012 American Academy of Religion annual meeting. She noted that the Lotus Sutra says that Avalokitesvara will appear to teach different beings in different forms, based on what they can accept.
In the summary of her paper, Hu writes, “Of the 33 forms listed in the Lotus Sutra, 7 are explicitly female, indicating that the Bodhisattva of Compassion transcends gender identity…. What is the theoretical ground in the Buddhadharma (Buddha’s teaching) that justify or even propel such conceptualization? How does that theoretical ground compare to modern-day queer theory?”
She summed up her paper in the 2013 Women’s and Gender Studies Newsletter from the University of Detroit Mercy:
“Avalokiteśvara’s multi-morphic manifestation affirms different beings in their specific identities, while his/her transformability points to the possibility of moving beyond the confinement of any particular identity. For people of minority identities, the Bodhisattva thus can be both a source of comfort and a model for coping with reality in which they often need to perform different roles.”
Hu is the author of This-Worldly Nibbana: A Buddhist-Feminist Social Ethic for Peacemaking in the Global Community.
Another LGBTQ perspective on Kuan Yin is provided by Toby Johnson in the preface to the revised edition of his book “Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe.” Johnson writes about Kuan Yin as the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara:
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“It is said there are Three Wonders of the Bodhisattva. The first is that he is androgynous, simultaneously both male and female, transcending the polarity of gender. That’s why he is such a sweet and lovable fellow: he blends the best of masculinity and the best of femininity.
The second wonder is that he sees there is no difference between nirvana and the life of suffering and rebirth in time, no difference between eternity and temporality, no difference between heaven and earth. This is why he could renounce his own nirvana and embrace all human experience. This life is nirvana; this is heaven on earth.
And the third wonder is that the first two wonders are the same!
That’s why this is such a nice myth for gay people to entertain. It says we’re really all One, all reflections of one another, that the distinction between male and female is illusory and needs to be transcended and that transcending gender is part and parcel with experiencing heaven now.
Avalokiteshvara is portrayed as the androgynous young being, beloved by everybody who knows him. That is very much like the ideal so many gay people find themselves looking for as a lover (and as a sense of themselves). And in the way that we gay people find the world a reflection of ourselves, so this myth says it really is. When we love another man or another woman, seeing their beauty and consciousness as like ours in homosexual attraction, that being we’re loving is the being that is ourself. No duality, no polarization.”
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A student of Joseph Campbell, Johnson has written 10 books, including the classic Gay Spirituality and Two Spirits. He is former production manager of Lethe Press and former editor of White Crane Journal. Johnson discusses Kuan Yin as an androgynous figure who embodies compassion in his articles “Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara” and “Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.”
Queer theologian Robert Shore-Goss applies the bodhisattva concept to queer Christian life in “Bodhisattva Christianity: A Case of Multiple Religious Belonging” in the 2013 book “Queering Christianity: Finding a Place at the Table for LGBTQI Christians.” Goss pastored Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley (North Hollywood, CA) after serving as chair of the religious studies department at Webster University in St. Louis.
One of the few artists to explore queer Asian Christ figures is Jason Tseng, a Chinese American non-binary illustrator based in New York City. Tseng’s Queer Saints Project creates icons of queer ancestors.
Queer drag queen Christ by Jason Tseng, 2022
Contemporary icons that blend Asian and Christian iconography include “Korean Christ” by Robert Lentz, “Christ Sophia” by Br. Michael Reyes, OFM (Christ with Chinese characters and lotus blossom), and “Vincent Van Gogh: Peasant” by Lewis Williams (Van Gogh with Japanese characters and lotus blossom).
The queer Asian Christ also resonates in translations of the Rainbow Christ Prayer into various Asian languages. The prayer matches the colors of the rainbow flag with the seven models of the queer Christ from Patrick Cheng’s book “From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ.” Versions in Asian languages include:
Chinese: 彩虹基督禱文
Japanese: 虹色のキリストへの祈り
Korean: 무지개 그리스도 기도
Malay: Doa Kristus Sang Pelangi
Tagalog: Panalangin ng Bahagharing Kristo
A large Ming-Dynasty bronze sculpture of Kuan Yin was included in the art collection of Bayard Rustin, a civil-rights activist who was kept in the shadows because he was openly gay.
Images of Kuan Yin posted here were created by Tony O’Connell, Stephen Mead, and William Hart McNichols. Mead is a gay artist and poet based in New York whose work has appeared internationally in cyberspace, books, and galleries. His Chroma Museum website features more than 500 montage images from his series on historical LGBTI figures and allies.
“Olga’s Kuan Yin” by William Hart McNichols ©
McNichols is a New Mexico artist and Catholic priest who has been criticized by church leaders for making LGBTQ-friendly icons of saints not approved by the church. His icons have been commissioned by churches, celebrities and national publications.
| “Avalokitishvara” by Tony O’Connell |
O’Connell is a gay artist based in Liverpool. Raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, he has been a practicing Buddhist since 1995. He creates an artwork celebrating Avalokitishvara / Kuan Yin every year on his/her birthday. Viewers who look closely at his painting here will see an eye in the palm of the Compassionate One’s hand.
“There is an amazing statue of Avalokiteshvara in a Liverpool museum with a text that explains how the mustache was painted over to alter his gender as the people who met the monks on the spice routes from India struggled with the idea of a manifestation of compassion being male and wanted to see him as female. It occurs to me that there are subtle ranges of the same personality between Avalokitishvara, Kuan Yin and Tara as one gender ambiguous enlightened mind,” O’Connell said.
He explains that Tara came into being in compassionate response to samsara, the cycle of birth and death: “There is a beautiful scripture that talks about how even with all his enlightened abilities to benefit living beings, Avalokiteshvara saw the suffering of samsara was almost beyond measure. His heart broke for living beings and he wept tears of compassion. When the first tear hit the ground a lotus flower grew up and blossomed to reveal Tara. Her first words as a Buddha were, ‘Do not weep- I will help you.’”
O’Connell also perceives Kuan Yin reflected in the life of Francis of Assisi, a Christian saint known for loving animals, hugging lepers, embracing poverty and praying for peace. “I see him not just as a saint but as wider and more inclusive than that, as an echo of the Bodhisattva Avalokitishvara – the Buddha of Compassion and also as a gender non compliant queer spiritual archetype who can be reclaimed and celebrated by marginalised minorities,” O’Connell explained when he created an image of Francis on a lotus throne with a rainbow and four arms representing the qualities of Avalokitishvara. It appears in Q Spirit’s profile of Francis of Assisi.
For more about Tony O’Connell and his art, see previous posts Reclaiming sainthood: Gay artist Tony O’Connell finds holiness in LGBT people and places and Olympics: Spiritual art supports Russia’s LGBT rights struggle.
O’Connell affirmed LGBTQ people in 2021 by creating a linocut image of Tara and printing it on an actual rainbow flag made of fabric. The artwork appears at the top of this post. Tara is shown in a forest, inseparable from nature, with such authentic compassion that even the wild animals gather to listen.
The artist was drawn to Tara as a being who could choose any gender, but vowed to be reborn as female until the end of the world. O’Connell explains in depth:
The scripture that first attracted me to this remarkable deity describes her life before Her Enlightenment when She was still called Wisdom Moon. She was meditating when some monks passed by Her and were impressed by the level of spiritual energy She was emanating. Possibly without meaning to sound arrogant but defaulting stupidly to their learned cultural expectations they said that they hoped she would attain male rebirth in Her next Life so She could become a Buddha. She was very far advanced of their understanding of reality and recognising that gender is a conditioned illusion. She answered them quite forcefully, saying-
“In this world there is no man, There is no woman. There is no person, self or consciousness. Man and woman are merely imputed and have no essence; thus the minds of worldly beings are mistaken!”
She then vowed to always choose female rebirth until she attained full Buddhahood. It is for this reason that she stands not only as a powerful feminist symbol but also as a protector against homophobia and transphobia.
The full text of Tara’s vow is:
“There are many who wish to gain enlightenment
in a man’s form,
and there are but few who wish to work
for the welfare of living beings
in a female form.
Therefore may I, in a female body,
work for the welfare of beings
right until Samsara has been emptied.”
The Rainbow Tara print is available with various options at his Hallowed Prints shop on Etsy.
Kuan Yin is honored in the Lotus Sutra, one of the most popular and influential Buddhist sutras (scriptures). It inspired Q Spirit supporter Ernesto Borges Torres to write a meditation that begins with these lines about Kuan Yin:
The Awakened affirm:
If living beings are in need of experiencing salvation
from a Buddha or other spiritual leader,
from a goddess or a god, king or queen,
wealthy person, householder or politician,
from a lay woman or lay man, nun or monk,
woman or man or girl or boy,
from a dragon, demon, human or non-human being;
the Great Bodhisattva Responder to the Cries of the World
will appear in our bodies to liberate such living beings from suffering.
When living beings suffer adversity, sorrow and pain,
the Bodhisattva Responder to the Cries of the World,
by means of the power of Her manifest Wisdom,
is able to liberate them from the miseries of this world….
Multiple in-depth discussions of this post can be seen on Facebook here with various people adding valuable background info on Kuan Yin and his/her/their many incarnations:
https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fkittredge.cherry%2Fposts%2F10154912152418575&width=500
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Top image credit:
“Rainbow Tara” by Tony O’Connell
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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBTQ martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published in August 2017, was expanded with new material over time, and was most recently updated on July 12, 2025.
Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.
Founder at Q Spirit
Kittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.
AUG 05, 2025 (newsletter.freewillastrology.com)
IS ASTROLOGY REAL?
Is astrology real? Of course! Yes! Astrology is very real—although not in the same sense that the orange vermillion steel towers of the Golden Gate Bridge are real, or the lavender soap you used for your last shower, or the great horned owl you saw roosting in a juniper tree.
Astrology is real in the way that an Emily Dickinson poem is real, and psychology’s theory of the unconscious mind, and the dream of your dead ancestor you had last night, and the myths of Gilgamesh and Inanna, and the story Toni Morrison told in her novel Beloved.
Is astrology true? Of course! Though it’s not true in the same sense that the binomial theorem is true. Not true like the speed of light is 186,282.39 miles per second or like every molecule of water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Astrology is not true in the same way as the fact that 55 big American corporations pay no federal taxes.
But astrology is intensely and intimately true in a trillion other ways. It’s as true as the epiphany you had when you realized you wanted to move to a new location or get married to a person you loved.
Astrology is true like the mix of delight and melancholy that seeps into you as summer turns to autumn. True in the same way that you feel cheerful and frisky when the first spring leaves appear on oak and maple trees. As true as the fact that you are sleepier in the depths of winter than at other times of the year.
Astrology is very much true, deeply and gloriously true, in the sense that Patti Smith is true as she sings her song “Radio Ethiopia.” True like the inspiration Georgia O’Keeffe tapped into as she painted Flowers of Fire. True like the wrathful hope that motivated Martin Luther King Jr. to write his “I Have a Dream” speech. True like the Indigenous Anishinaabe trickster spirit Nanabozho, an unruly, gender-changing hero whose job it is to learn the names of all creatures.
Astrology is as real and as true as your imagination. As real and as true as the story you tell yourself about your life. As real and as true as your never-ending cavalcade of yearnings.
ASTROLOGY IS A MYTHOPOETIC LANGUAGE
Should I engage in conversations with people who long ago decided that astrology is nonsense? It’s not a good use of my time. Their minds are as irrevocably and self-satisfyingly closed as an evangelical Christian Republican who already knows forever there’s no such thing as human-caused climate change.
But if an open-minded person agrees to consider my rational discourse, I begin with the thoughts below.
The majority of those who deride astrology with kneejerk derision don’t know that four of history’s greatest astronomers were practicing astrologers: Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, and Pierre Gassendi.
Most of the deriders haven’t read smart astrological philosophers like Dane Rudhyar, Alice O. Howell, Clare Martin, Steven Arroyo, Richard Tarnas, Antero Alli, Keiron Le Grice, and Liz Greene. They aren’t aware that pioneering psychologist Carl Jung cast horoscopes for all his patients and believed that “astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.”
The deriders don’t know about astronomer Martha Maiden. She was a program executive at NASA for years and achieved such prominence that she now has an award named after her (https://www.esipfed.org/awards/martha-maiden-award/). Martha is also an excellent astrologer. I know because she and I were friends who attended Duke University at the same time. We lived next door to each other in Durham and carried on an astrology study group with two other friends.
The closest approach that fraudulent “skeptics” often make to studying the ancient art of astrology is to glance at a tabloid or internet horoscope column. To match their carelessness, I might make a drive-by of a strip mall and declare that the profession of architecture is shallow and debased.
That’s one reason why the ill-informed “skeptics” spread ignorant lies about the subject. For example, every few years, there’s an uproar in the press when an astronomer falsely declares that there is a 13th astrological sign, not just 12, and that therefore all our personal horoscopes are different from what we think they are.
Those astronomers haven’t bothered to do the most basic research about how astrology works. Their “rationality” is profoundly irrational. I’ve compiled more information about this subject here: https://tinyurl.com/IgnoreTheHoax.
Here’s another gross misunderstanding by “skeptics” who have eschewed basic research. They say that all astrologers think the stars and planets emit invisible beams of energy that shape people’s lives. The truth is, some Western astrologers believe that, but many don’t.
Science popularizer Carl Sagan provided an egregious example of this ignorance. In his TV series Cosmos, he portentously dismissed the straw-man notion that planets might impact a newborn baby.
He said, “How could the rising of Mars at the moment of my birth affect me, then or now? I was born in a closed room. Light from Mars couldn’t get in. The only influence of Mars which could affect me was its gravity. The gravitational pull of the obstetrician was much larger than the gravitational influence of Mars. Mars is a lot more massive, but the obstetrician was much closer.”
I’m still aghast that a scientist of Sagan’s caliber could have been so poorly informed.
Every single one of the many astrologers I respect agrees with what expert astrologer Richard Tarnas says in his book Cosmos and Psyche: The planets don’t emit invisible forces that shape our destinies as if we were puppets. Rather, they are symbols of the unfolding evolutionary pattern. Just as clocks tell time but don’t create time, the heavenly bodies show us the big picture but don’t cause it.
I don’t want to provide space for every spurious argument made by unscientific scientists. But here’s one more howler. Several self-described rational skeptics have assured me that astrology is nonsense because it believes “our behavior depends on the positions of the stars.”
I laugh out loud when I hear such comically ignorant drivel. The fact is that Western astrology has nothing to do with any stars except our own: the sun. It’s all about planets.
The “rational skeptics” make another fundamental error. The truth is that smart astrologers are not determinists, not dogmatists, not superstitious manipulators. They don’t believe that our behavior is dependent on or controlled by heavenly bodies.
+
Many scientists deride astrology as being a “pseudoscience.” In making such a fallacious claim, they reveal they have shunned the most basic principle of science, which is to actually investigate the subject they aspire to understand.
If these incompetents took the trouble to do research, they would have discovered that Western astrology’s best practitioners don’t claim that astrology is a science—which means that it can’t be a pseudoscience!
The lyrical and practical truth is that astrology is a blend of psychology, storytelling, and mythology. As Carl Jung said, it’s an aid in understanding and articulating how the psyche works. Like any language, it’s both logical and messy; it’s useful in making sense of the world, yet full of crazy-making ambiguities.
Astrology is a symbol system that, when used with integrity, engenders soulful approaches for deepening our connection to life’s great mysteries—not predictions of literal events. It liberates and fertilizes our imaginations and encourages us to think less literally. It teaches us to visualize our destinies as mythic quests and deepens our connection to life’s gorgeous mysteries.
Psychologist James Hillman spoke of the joyous work of learning our soul’s code—the blueprint of our destiny. That’s what astrology does best. To imagine that this can be done in a scientific way is irrelevant and delusional.
ASTROLOGY IS NOT A SCIENCE! Nor is storytelling, depth psychology, mythology, dream interpretation, or poetry.
It makes as much sense to criticize astrology for not being scientific as it does to deride Joseph Campbell treatises on the world’s mythic traditions or Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novels because they don’t explicate and illustrate the quantum field theory of physics.
The scientific method is a wonderful method for achieving some understanding of the world. But we can’t use it to analyze the Indigenous Bororo people’s myth, “The Bird-Nester’s Aria.” It’s not a reliable strategy for uncovering deep truths about how a Beethoven symphony might alter the way we think about a problem we’re having at work.
We profoundly need the scientific method and logical deduction and objective perceptions. They are crucial to being human. But we also need mythopoetic storytelling and art that moves us emotionally in mysterious ways and playful fun that frees us from our fixations.
Does it make sense to say that analyzing and working on dreams is “pseudoscience”? Of course not. You can’t design a repeatable experiment to test your hypothesis about those slippery marvels. And yet, working with one’s dreams, analyzing them to find subconscious patterns that affect our behavior, can be intensely practical.
Astrology is not designed to compete with scientists’ logical analyses of why things are the way they are. Rather, it’s meant to open our minds to the mythic elements that underlie the surface-level interpretations of what we’re all about.
I can’t imagine any intelligent person who would believe that the scientific way of knowing is better and more important than the mythopoetic—or vice versa.
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New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Aug 4, 2025 The late Joyce Whiteley Hawkes, PhD, was a biophysicist and author of Cell-Level Healing: A Bridge From Soul to Cell as well as Resonance: Nine Practices for Harmonious Health and Vitality. In this video, rebooted from 2019, she shares many details regarding the capabilities of the individual cells in our bodies. A 6-foot human has about 100 trillion individual cells. There are 200 different types of cells that all emerge from a single fertilized egg. These cells are in communication with each other and, without any conscious intervention on our part, coordinate smoothly. As a healer, Joyce is able to apply clairvoyant insight into the operation of cells. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He currently serves as Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on October 14, 2019)
By G. Allen Johnson,Staff Writer
Aug 2, 2025 (SFChroncile.com)
Film director Francis Ford Coppola talks during an appearance after a screening of “Megalopolis” at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco on Friday, Aug. 1.G. Allen Johnson/S.F. Chronicle
Before he broke through with “American Graffiti,” before he became an instant legend with “Star Wars,” George Lucas became the unsung hero of another American classic that changed cinema history: “The Godfather.”
Or so claims Francis Ford Coppola, the director of that 1972 masterpiece.
“Everyone turned ‘The Godfather’ down, all the wonderful directors of the time,” the 86-year-old filmmaker told an enthusiastic crowd at the Palace of Fine Arts. “So they tried to hire me. Here was the logic: ‘One, he’s Italian American, so if it gets a lot of flack, they’ll blame him. Two, there’s a script that wasn’t very good, and he’s become a successful screenwriter, so he’ll rewrite the script. And three, he’s young and has two kids and a pregnant wife, so we can just push him around and order him to do everything we want.’”
Indeed, part of the lore of the “The Godfather” is that A-list Hollywood directors such as Otto Preminger, Sergio Leone, Arthur Penn and Peter Bogdanovich turned down the project, and producer Robert Evans then insisted that an Italian American direct. He offered it to Coppola, an independent filmmaker who had just won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay to the 1970 best picture winner “Patton,” directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, who won the Oscar for best director — and who also turned down “The Godfather.”
“Well, I turned it down,” Coppola recalled. “I had a young apprentice, and we had come together to start a company (San Francisco-based American Zoetrope). His name was George Lucas. He said, ‘We can’t turn it down, we have no money, the sheriff is going to chain our door because we haven’t made the taxes on the thing. You have to do it, we have no other alternatives.’ I said, ‘You’re right George.’”
Coppola and American Zoetrope went on to produce “American Graffiti,” filmed in Petaluma and San Rafael, sending Lucas on his way to his own groundbreaking career.
Billed as “An Evening with Francis Ford Coppola and ‘Megalopolis’ Screening,” the event in Coppola’s adopted hometown on Friday, Aug. 1, finished off a six-city tour designed to create more awareness and discussion of his 2024 $120 million self-financed dream project that tanked at the box office.
Coppola was certainly generous with his time. The event lasted nearly four hours, with a screening of the two-hour, 18-minute film followed by a 90-minute discussion with the filmmaker simply sitting in a chair pontificating on a wide range of issues while occasionally taking questions from the audience.
Topics included anthropology, history, societal evolution, and the philosophy of human innovation and creativity. “Megalopolis,” which likens the fall of Rome to the current state of American politics and culture, is informed by the development of human civilization over 300,000 years, noting that patriarchal societies began with the domestication of horses.
So, not your typical film discussion.
Still, the audience who paid prices ranging from $61-$205 and mostly filled the 1,000-seat venue were enthusiastic and attentive, giving the auteur standing ovations as he took the stage and as he left it. However, there was a small but steady stream of people who began leaving about 45 minutes in.
One topic that hits close to home for Coppola is homelessness in San Francisco. The director noted that he founded a nonprofit, North Beach Citizens, in 2001 to help the unhoused find housing, food and services because he felt the city wasn’t doing enough.
“I used to walk to work and see these homeless people sleeping, and people would call them human garbage. What, are we crazy?” said Coppola, who added that the solution to most of society’s problems has to be addressed first at the community level, inverting the top-down aspect of federal government.
Coppola gave insights about his films, from the two “Godfathers” to the San Francisco-shot, Watergate-era thriller “The Conversation” (1974); the troubled production of the Vietnam War movie “Apocalypse Now” (1979); and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), his biggest non-”Godfather” box office hit.
And, of course, “Megalopolis.” Although he did not address various controversies about its production, including on-set inappropriate behavior (and no one asked about it, either), he believes it serves a warning about America and yet provides hope for the future.
America “will get out of this mess,” Coppola said, as today’s generation of children matures.
“Look at the world around us right now, wars all over the place, and the most horrible thing of all, children being killed,” Coppola said. “The kids being killed in Sudan or in the Middle East, someone was gonna find a cure for cancer or write the most gorgeous music ever been written or make a great film. So to me the children are precious. They are our future.”
For now, Coppola refuses to release “Megalopolis” digitally, content to tour with the movie for special one-off screenings. The film only made $14 million globally after its release in September. He did acknowledge there eventually will be a Blu-ray, and the man known for re-editing his past films teased the audience with an alternate cut of the film.
“Right now I’m working on ‘Megalopolis Unbound,’” he said to laughter, and ended the night.
Aug 2, 2025
STAFF WRITER
G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness.
It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be that voice. It is our evolutionary inheritance — we are the story of survival of the tenderest, the living proof that tenderness may be the ultimate fitness for being alive.
I know no better homily on this fundament of our humanity than Ellen Bass’s poem “Kiss” from her altogether soul-salving collection Indigo (public library).
KISS
by Ellen BassWhen Lynne saw the lizard floating
in her mother-in-law’s swimming pool,
she jumped in. And when it wasn’t
breathing, its body limp as a baby
drunk on milk, she laid it on her palm
and pressed one fingertip to its silky breast
with just about the force you need
to test the ripeness of a peach, only quicker,
a brisk little push with a bit of spring in it.
Then she knelt, dripping wet in her Doc Martens
and camo T-shirt with the neck ripped out,
and bent her face to the lizard’s face,
her big plush lips to the small stiff jaw
that she’d pried apart with her opposable thumb,
and she blew a tiny puff into the lizard’s lungs.
The sun glared against the turquoise water.
What did it matter if she saved one lizard?
One lizard more or less in the world?
But she bestowed the kiss of life,
again and again, until
the lizard’s wrinkled lids peeled back,
its muscles roused its own first breath
and she set it on the hot cement
where it rested a moment
before darting off.
Couple with Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk on storytelling and the art of tenderness, then revisit Ellen’s magnificent poems “Any Common Desolation” and “How to Apologize.”
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only for children. They are more than fantasy, more than fiction, shimmering with a surreality so saturated that it becomes a mirror for what is realest in us, what we are often yet to see. They enchant us with their strangeness because we are largely strangers to ourselves, ambivalent in our yearning for transformation, for redemption, for homecoming, restless in our longing to unmask the face of love and unglove the hand of mercy. They ask us to believe in magic and reward our trust with truth.
Art by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales
Fairy tales are above all in service of life’s most difficult, most unfinishable task — knowing who we are and what we want. Their most revelatory function is to remind us that, because we know ourselves only incompletely, we don’t always know what we are looking for until we find it, often by way of getting lost, or until it finds us, often in a guise we don’t immediately recognize as the very thing we long for.
That is what Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) explores in her excellent posthumous essay collection The Unforgivable: And Other Writings (public library).
Observing that many fairy tales “end like a ring right where they began,” she writes:
One of Kay Nielsen’s stunning 1914 illustrations for Scandinavian fairy tales. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Through these routeless convolutions, we map the terra incognita of your own interior world. In a passage evocative of the Chinese notion of wu-wei — “trying not to try” — Campo considers the paradox of self-discovery:
[…]
No one arrives at the enlightenment he sets out to seek. It will come to him in its own sweet time. Thus the destination walks side by side with the traveler… Or it hovers behind him… In truth, the traveler has always had it within him and is only moving toward the motionless center of his life: the antrum near the spring, the cave — where childhood and death, in one another’s arms, confide the secret they share. The idea of travel, effort, and patience is paradoxical, yes, but it is also exact. For in this paradox, we stumble on the intersection of eternity and time.
It is hardly surprising that, in their central project of loosening the clutch of certainties we call a self, fairy tales blur the ordinary experience of time — time, after all, is the substance we are made of.
Another of One of Kay Nielsen’s Scandinavian fairy tales illustrations. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
In a passage brimming with the musicality Maurice Sendak considered the key to great storytelling, Campo — the daughter of a musician and a composer — writes:
I am thinking now of Hannah Arendt’s magnificent meditation on love: “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” she wrote. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.” Perhaps this is why love is the central axis of most fairy tales, why love in real life has a certain dreamlike quality, why both love and dreams are ways of getting to know the stranger in us. “In each of us there is another whom we do not know,” Carl Jung wrote, “[who] speaks to us in dreams.”
One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s 1929 illustrations for French fairy tales. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)
There is the same dreamlike quality and the same capacity for revelation in the state we enter once a fairy tale ejects us from time and thrusts into nowness. Campo paints the dreamscape we enter:
In being both a portal between the known and the unknown and a still point between past and future, fairy tales help us discern our own nature by guiding us toward the deepest truths of who we are and helping us apply them to the mystery of being alive — a nonlinear process the fruits of which we call maturity. Campo writes:
Complement with Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear and Anaïs Nin on the meaning of maturity, then revisit the greatest illustrations from 200 years of Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
By Peter Conrad
By February 1844, Dickens could smilingly assume that his was a cue for universal joy. Earlier, the world seemed more inclined to demean or discard him. In 1823, not yet twelve and “such a little fellow” as he plaintively put it, he was removed from school and sent out to work to help defray the debts of his improvident father.
His parents, interned in the Marshalsea prison until they settled with John Dickens’s creditors, deposited Charles with a crabby crone who rented rooms to children; from Monday morning to Saturday night he pasted labels onto bottles of shoe polish in a warehouse just off the Strand, storing a small loaf and a piece of cheese in the old woman’s cupboard for his suppers. His Sunday treat was to visit his parents in the prison. After a year, a legacy enabled his father to pay off what he owed. Let out of the Marshalsea, he extricated Charles from the blacking factory, though his mother favored leaving him there.Dickens, however, thought of childhood as a hell that was always liable to return from the old time to ensnare him.
Shamed and lastingly wounded by his ordeal, Dickens kept it a secret and only disclosed the details in a memoir that he entrusted to John Forster in 1847. His tone in this fragment of autobiography is cheerlessly ironic. “It is wonderful to me,” he wrote, “how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age”: wonderment here means numb disbelief. He was also a castaway of a peculiar kind, not the victim of a shipwreck far from home like Robinson Crusoe or Walter Gay in Dombey and Son, since he had been cast out by those who should have taken care of him.
With the same sharp-edged resentment, he described his drudgery as a professional initiation, the start of his “business life.” His task was to cover the pots with layers of paper, tidy up the edges and then, once they had attained a “pitch of perfection,” apply the printed labels. “Perfection” was his sour joke about an aesthetic standard; “pitch” made it sound as if he was already dabbling in black ink. Summing up, he declared that during this period he had “no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from any one that I can call to mind, so help me God.” His abiding grievance punctuates this enumeration of parental failures, and the concluding oath gives the accusation a legal force.
Fifteen years later he referred in a letter to “the never-to-be-forgotten misery of that old time” and tried to forget the misery by transferring it to “a certain ill-clad, ill-fed child”—an indigent, anonymous waif he might have seen in the street, his undersized Doppelgänger. Reversing biological precedence, Wordsworth maintained that “The child is father of the man” and hoped never to lose the boyhood spirit of “natural piety” on which his poetry depended. Dickens paraphrased that declaration but dented its glad hope in a Household Words account of a childhood outing, when he described an unkempt boy whom he then identified as the “exceedingly uncomfortable and disreputable father of my present self.”
Dickens retained the fresh and vibrant vision that Charles Baudelaire envied in children, who “see everything as a novelty” and seem “always intoxicated,” yet his exhilaration was always edged with dread. In one of Wordsworth’s poems about his own early years, a boy cups his hands at his mouth and blows “mimic hootings to the silent owls / That they might answer him”; the hallooing develops into screams of delight which Wordsworth soberly summarizes as “concourse wild / Of jocund din!”
Dickens’s boys are more likely to be begging or picking pockets than romping through the landscape duetting with birds, and his closest equivalent to those poetic hootings comes in David Copperfield when a filthy dealer in used clothes—a “drunken madman” who is said to have sold himself to the devil—peppers his every utterance to David with the ejaculation “Goroo” and extends this rasping outburst into “a sort of tune…like a gust of wind.”
For Wordsworth, childhood was a paradise that was lost in time but could be regained in space, and he recovered it on his perambulations through the landscapes in which he grew up in Cumberland. Dickens, however, thought of childhood as a hell that was always liable to return from the old time to ensnare him, even though in space he made conscientious efforts to avoid it: in middle age he still looked the other way when walking past Charing Cross, so as not to see the street running down to the river where the blacking factory was located.
Two exchanges in Dombey and Son convey his conviction that his childhood, rather than being mislaid, had been stolen from him. Doctor Blimber, headmaster at the school in which the disconsolate Paul has been enrolled, asks a rhetorical question about his ailing pupil: “Shall we make a man of him?” Paul replies, “I had rather be a child,” but that is not an option. Nor is it for Edith, who cynically marries Paul’s father after his first wife dies. “When was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me?” she asks her mother, the raddled coquette Mrs. Skewton, who raised her with the sole purpose of beguiling and entrapping a rich man. Her mother “gave birth,” Edith says, “to a woman.”
A blithe childhood like Wordsworth’s was a luxury, as Dickens recognized when he wrote a pair of sentences that he eventually deleted from the manuscript of Little Dorrit because the truth they told was too caustic: “The poor have no childhood. It must be bought and paid for.” In the absence of anyone to pay, his Christmas story The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain shows us the unaccommodated child. A tutelary phantom points to a sleeping boy and calls him “the last, completest illustration of a human creature,” “abandoned to a worse condition than the beasts,” unalleviated by any “humanising touch.” The child is the phantom when young, and in looking back he echoes Dickens’s lament in his memoir. “No mother’s self-denying love, no father’s counsel, aided me,” he says; he compares himself, as Dickens might have done, to a bird expelled from the nest to scavenge for itself.
Dickens endows the infants in his novels with a desolate foreknowledge of what awaits them. Mr. Chillip, the physician who delivers David Copperfield, later has a child of his own, “a weazen little baby, with a heavy head that it couldn’t hold up, and two weak staring eyes, with which it seemed to be always wondering why it had ever been born,” and in Bleak House Caddy Jellyby’s baby is a “tiny old-faced mite,” sadly pensive in its crib. One of the Spirits who visits Scrooge temporizes between the first and last ages of man. He is “a strange figure—like a child; yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions.”
Dickens has been reproached for not allowing his characters to grow and change; he could hardly do so, because he saw life as circular rather than developmental. Beginning and end conjoin to squeeze the middle. Mrs. Skewton, for instance, wears a traveling robe “embroidered and braided like an old baby’s,” and Little Nell’s grandfather naively falls prey to gamblers because he is a “grey-haired child.” The emotionally unawakened Sally Brass in The Old Curiosity Shop has “passed her life in a kind of legal childhood”; along the way she manages to produce an illegitimate daughter, who is equally stunted—”an old-fashioned child,” she has apparently been “at work from her cradle.” A second childhood may perhaps be happier than the first, since at least it will have a definitive terminus.
In A Tale of Two Cities Sydney Carton asks the elderly banker Lorry if in old age childhood seems remote. Lorry touchingly replies that the closer he gets to the end, the nearer he feels to the beginning: it is “one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way.” The sentiment recurs in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where fond recollections of “nursery time” in Cloisterham have a second coming when those who grew up there reach their “dying hours.”Dickens has been reproached for not allowing his characters to grow and change; he could hardly do so, because he saw life as circular rather than developmental.
In an essay on his frequent visits to the Paris morgue, Dickens speaks of childhood as an “impressible time”: his word imagines an imprint, an indentation that leaves a mark like that of inky type on a blank page, rather than a vivid unfocused sensuous impression. “An intelligent child’s observation,” he says, is remarkable for its “intensity and accuracy,” and—surely unnecessarily—he warns “some who have the care of children” against taking their young charges on outings to see the bloated corpses fished from the Seine. It is bad enough, he adds, to send children into the dark or to coop them up in a bedroom alone as prey to “the great fear”; if you treat a child in that way, “you had better murder it.”
When Wordsworth said in The Prelude that he “grew up / Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear,” he was thinking of an “impressive discipline of fear” much milder than the disabling horror experienced by Pip in the graveyard in Great Expectation when the convict Magwitch rears up behind the tombstones or by Oliver Twist when he is taken to visit Fagin in the condemned cell. Wordsworthian discipline does not extend to the flogging administered to David Copperfield by his stepfather Murdstone; at worst, Wordsworthian fear is his awed sense that nature silently reproves him when he ravages a tree to feast on its crop of hazelnuts.
Wordsworth’s account of his “seed-time” pays grateful tribute to the green earth as “the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being.” At the age of six, Dickens had an amoral indoor equivalent in his nurse Mary Weller, who was only thirteen when she was engaged to look after him. He honored her as a “female bard” and thought that she must have been descended from “those terrible old Scalds,” the Skalds who recited poems about Norse heroes; despite his later warnings about frightening children, her bardic gift to him was an enjoyable terror.
At night, as he claims in The Uncommercial Traveller, she told him stories that were “utterly impossible…but none the less alarmingly real”—sagas about a swash-buckling serial killer, or a shipwright who enters into a diabolical pact and as a result is forced to sail in a vessel infested with rats, which nibble their way through the boards and sink it, drowning all hands. Nature nursed Wordsworth “with something of a Mother’s mind,” but rather than maternally soothing Dickens, Mary sent him into “the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills.” He meant the inkier corners of his mind: what may sound like a punishment was also a literary initiation.
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Excerpted from Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller by Peter Conrad. Run with permission of the author, courtesy of Bloomsbury Continuum, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Copyright © Peter Conrad, 2025.
19th centuryBloomsbury ContinuumBloomsbury PublishingBritish literatureCharles DickenschildhoodDickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great StorytellerEnglandEnglish literaturePeter Conrad
Peter Conrad is a literary critic and cultural historian. His books include The Everyman History of English Literature; Creation: Artists, Gods & Origins; and Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century.
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