We’re delighted to welcome Charles Stang as Scholar-in-Residence at Esalen for the first two weeks of June.
A professor at Harvard Divinity School and member of the Esalen Board of Trustees, Charlie explores the intersections of mysticism, philosophy, ecology, and religious imagination. During his residency, he’ll open the month with a very special Wednesday Evening Program on June 3.
Drawing from his recent essay “Thoreau’s Gods,” the evening will explore Henry David Thoreau’s vivid relationship with the animate world — the woods, waters, and unseen presences of New England that he experienced as living intelligences and guiding powers. Charlie invites us to reconsider Thoreau not simply as a naturalist, but as a kind of pagan polytheist attuned to the spirits of place.
The talk, Skywater: An Elemental Meditation on Walden Pond, unfolds as part contemplative inquiry, part sensory invocation — exploring water as mirror, teacher, threshold, and philosophical companion. Moving between ancient philosophy, Walden Pond, and the question of what immersion — bodily, perceptual, spiritual — reveals about the soul, the evening invites us into a deeper encounter with the living world.
If you’d like to spend more time in conversation with Charlie during the magical in between moments, there are just a few spaces available in our early June workshops...
The telegraph came to Concord in the 1840s. You might expect Henry David Thoreau to detest this technological intrusion, much as he did the railroad that skirted the western shore of his beloved Walden Pond, whose line the telegraph followed. But on a September afternoon in 1851, he reports in his Journal that he heard “the telegraph-wire vibrating like an aeolian harp.” It sung to him:
It told me by the faintest imaginable strain that a human ear can hear, yet conclusively and past all refutation, that there were higher, infinitely higher, planes of life which it behooved me never to forget. As I was entering the Deep Cut, the wind, which was conveying a message to me from heaven, dropped it on the wire of the telegraph which it vibrated as it passed. I instantly sat down on a stone at the foot of the telegraph-pole, and attended to that communication. It merely said: “Bear in mind, Child, and never for an instant forget, that there are higher planes, infinitely higher planes, of life than this thou are now traveling on. Know that the goal is distant, and is upward, and is worthy of all your life’s efforts to attain to.” And then it ceased, and though I sat some minutes longer I heard nothing more.1
What a remarkable testimony. Not a voice, but a vibration or strum that still somehow instantly translates into words, a message from heaven meant for him: this plane on which you travel is but one of an infinite number, ever higher.2 We imagine these infinite planes are not stacked one atop the other, separated like layers of phyllo dough. They crisscross and communicate: the higher sings to the lower, parent to child, who can just make out its faint tone and its irrefutable meaning. Although there was no office in town, Thoreau judges the telegraph “no small gain” for Concord, because he can make his own use of it as a means of divination, of receiving communications from higher planes. He insists that the human soul “is played on even as this wire,” that we are each a string to be so strummed.3
This episode, and many others like it, are masterfully marshalled by Richard Higgins in Thoreau’s God, the aim of which is to show “the palpable, undeniable presence of divine mystery in Thoreau’s writing.” Higgins argues that Thoreau “disavowed discursive theology, but he spoke of and sought communion with a mystery at the heart of the universe that was at once immanent, or present, in nature and yet transcendent. He called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God.”4 Higgins is principally interested in Thoreau’s theism, his faith in a God who both suffuses and exceeds nature.
This is why the telegraph message is so important. Thoreau never quite confesses a single God over against a single nature. To start, Thoreau understood that nature itself is layered: many, perhaps all, of the higher planes through which we can and must ascend are not “supernatural,” Higgins argues, but rather “super or intensely natural.”5 And, as Thoreau says, they are as likely to communicate their “celestial wisdom” to us through “the hootings of owls, the croaking of frogs,” as through wind moving a telegraph wire.6 In other words, between our familiar plane and that divine mystery Thoreau often called God, there are infinite higher planes of nature, of super nature, and in those planes the one divine mystery filters through and becomes different divine principles and persons—what Thoreau would very often call “gods” or sometimes “powers.” “I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers,” he writes in his Journal, “This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived.”7
Thoreau was no strict monotheist, then, nor was he anything remotely like an atheist. If we must apply a label to him, “henotheist” will do as well as any: faith in one ultimate, divine source or “God” which expresses itself in many “gods,” like white light refracted into a colored spectrum.8 If monotheism is a belief in only one (monos) God (theos), henotheism is a belief in one (hen) God (theos) among but above many others. In other words, henotheism accounts for polytheism, for the reality of many gods below the one God who is their ultimate source. Thoreau’s henotheism was fed by many streams, by an ever-evolving Christian monotheism, including, as Higgins puts it, “his Puritan heritage, Protestant reformational zeal, and Harvard’s rational Unitarianism.”9 But the implicit polytheism of Thoreau’s henotheism was also fed by Indian thought, especially the Bhagavad Gita, and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, whose writings began to circulate in Concord in the 1840s. In these two very long and broad traditions, there is generally no conflict between a confession of one God, understood as the ultimate divine source, and the reality of many gods—large and small, near and far—who issue from it and whom we are called to know and acknowledge.
Thoreau often keeps his distance from God and is unsure of his words. “Let God alone if need be,” he writes to his friend Harrison Blake, “Methinks, if I loved him more, I should keep him—I should keep myself rather—at a more respectful distance. It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover that God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know whom I mean.”10 God is disclosed just as Thoreau is turning away, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye or over his shoulder. But even when glimpsed, God is not confidently named. At the end of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau seems to call God by another name, “Silence.” Much as God gives birth to gods, so Silence gives birth to sounds, the articulated expression of the divine source. Silence is like water, a deep river or “under-current”: from her silent depths emerge bubbles, her “faint utterance.” As in Greek (sigē), Thoreau’s Silence is a “she,” the oracle behind all oracles: “Who has not hearkened to Her infinite din? She is Truth’s speaking-trumpet, the sole oracle, the true Delphi and Dodona.”11 Is Truth (alētheia) another name for God? We are not told, but there is no mistaking Silence’s primordial priority: “Silence was, say we, before ever the world was, as if creation had displaced her, and were not her visible framework and foil.”12 As Higgins puts it so beautifully, echoing Genesis 1:1, Silence “existed before the first wind swept over the waters.”13
Later in life, Thoreau will ask, and answer: “What is religion? That which is never spoken.”14 But of course, he does speak of religion: he bears witness to God and, even more often, to the gods. And it is not always peaceable between them. In A Week, Thoreau contrasts “my country’s God,” Jehovah, with “the liberal divinities of Greece.” Jehovah is “more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.” He calls this God of his Concord countrymen “the almighty mortal,” essentially a human tyrant “apotheosized,” a “wholly masculine” deity, with no room for a divine mother, wife, sister, or daughter. He contrasts Jehovah with the “youthful and erring and fallen gods” of Greece, “the divine race.”15 Of them he famously singles out one:
In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.16
However, this early enthusiasm for Pan is not the best place to look for Thoreau’s mature polytheism. Higgins reminds us that Thoreau mentions Pan only one other time, in a Journal entry on Christmas Day, 1841, where he remarks that “Pan himself lives in the wood”; “after that,” Higgins writes, “Pan mysteriously disappeared from Thoreau’s pantheon.”17 As much as he loved classical mythology and drew freely from it, I suspect that Thoreau outgrew the worship of this god with a name given on the authority of others, and from another land. After all, Pan is a god of ancient Greece. In his Journal, Thoreau writes, “I, a descendent of Northmen who worshipped Thor, spend my time worshipping neither Thor nor Christ.”18 As he matures, Thoreau shows more and more interest in the gods of his own land, “the gods of New England.”
Thoreau’s polytheism, his paganism, consists in this: he does not worship the gods of others or even the gods of his European ancestors—in the end, neither Pan, nor Thor, nor Christ. In his Journal he complains that “it is a defect in our Bible that it is not truly ours. . . . The most pertinent illustrations for us are to be drawn, not from Egypt or Babylonia, but from New England.” He is frustrated that Americans have not yet learned how to name things, including gods. Why do we say that a river is “meandering,” after the winding Meander River of Asia Minor? Why not say instead that it is “musketaquidding,” after the Musketaquid or “Grass-ground River,” which again English settlers have unimaginatively christened the “Concord”? The point here is that Thoreau recognizes that the native name for the river emerges from the river itself. Americans, by contrast, rely on “imported symbols.” “Have we not the genius to coin our own?” he asks. “What if there were a tariff on words, on language, for the encouragement of home manufactures?”19
Thoreau does not appropriate the names of the gods of those peoples who lived on the land his ancestors took from them. Rather, he tries to meet the gods who reveal themselves in and through that land—to himself, his neighbors, and to the land’s displaced and dispossessed peoples, then and now. Thoreau strains to hear how these gods wish to introduce themselves. Often, they do not tell him their proper names. If we must give them names, Thoreau suggests, we should not rely on imports, but on homemade goods. We must rely on our own genius and the genius loci or “spirit of place” when we presume to name a river, or a god—if indeed there is any difference between the two.20
Who, then, are these gods of New England? Ironically, he speaks of his meeting two of them in a chapter of Walden called “Solitude.” But first, he tells us that, “sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded.”21 Favored, guided, and guarded—that is a good summary of Thoreau’s experience of the gods of New England. On long winter evenings, he tells us, he was occasionally visited by someone he calls,
an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider,—a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried.22
Here I must disagree with Higgins, and many others, who have equated this figure with God. To my mind, this figure is quite obviously not God, not “God the Father” of the Christians, nor some singular divine source, but rather some sort of god or “godling”—to borrow a term from Francis Young.23
This is not a creator god, but a settler god, a proprietor. A settler does not create the land: he moves onto it from elsewhere and shapes it for his own needs, or the needs of others. Today, the word “settler” is hardly a term of approbation, and Thoreau’s critique of, and place in, what has come to be called “settler colonialism” has been examined closely.24 But at its root, to “settle” means simply to make a “seat”: to build and so to dwell, however long or lightly. Perhaps it is this god’s error to think that he owns this land, that it is his own—Latin proprius, hence “property” and “proprietor.” But even if he fancies himself its owner, he welcomes not only Thoreau and his neighbors, but also the peoples who lived here long before them. I would submit that this god not only welcomes, but favors, guides, and guards those who live on the land he calls his. Who knows just how old this god is, or how long he has lived here. Though rumored dead, he lives on, in secret, and enjoys the occasional company of others; he’s a storyteller god, full of wisdom and humor; a god who is a friend; a god to be loved.
In another chapter, “Ponds,” Thoreau again mentions this same “ancient settler . . . who remembers so well when he came here with his divining rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here.” Thoreau does not accept that this pond was named “Walden” by English settlers after Saffron Walden in England. Rather, he muses that in some time immemorial (in illo tempore) this primordial settler god dug a well here, and carefully walled it with stones: “one might suppose,” Thoreau writes, “that it was called, originally, Walled-in Pond.”25
Notice that this god followed the lead of the land: he read the vapor, sward, and hazel, in order to know where to dig. And by walling water in as a well, and giving it a name, the settler gave rise to another god, the Pond itself. Gods can make other gods, as we know from every ancient theogony. Walden Pond is said to be not only a well, but also a mouth. Does it speak? What does Walden say, and to whom? And what else does a mouth do? Eat, drink, breathe, kiss, smile, frown—does Walden do all of these? It is also said to be an eye. Does Walden see? What does Walden see? What else does an eye do? Weep, wink, close its lids at night or at death—does Walden do these things too? As a mouth and an eye, Walden quickly becomes a face of sorts. Thoreau says that the ancient settler, the well-digger, “rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?”26 Walden has not only a face we can see, but also a name by which we can address it. Walden is also said to be a mirror. Whose reflection do we see on its surface? Walden’s own face? Its “Maker,” the ancient settler? The face of the sun, moon, stars, and clouds? Our own face? The face of The Deep, the source and center of infinite higher planes?27 All of them, I imagine: Walden is a surface on which we can glimpse the faces of the gods, perhaps even God’s own face, perhaps even our own: “It is earth’s eye,” he writes, “looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”28
The ancient settler is not the only god of New England Thoreau knows:
An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact each one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet.29
Like the settler god, she too is old, older than mythology, and very much alive: ruddy and lusty. She too is a storyteller, a memory-keeper of fables and facts. He is the settler, the well-digger, and she the gardener. We do not know who is older, but it seems that she has been here longer than he. She invisibly tended her garden before he built his well. If so, she is, like him, much older than the Pond. Just as scholars are tempted to think of the settler as God, or perhaps as Pan, so too they muse whether this elderly dame is meant to be Mother Nature or Demeter, again relying on imported names.30 If Thoreau, who met these gods, refrains from naming them, why do we presume to do so? Perhaps it is not first and foremost their names we should seek to know.31 Perhaps the most important point to acknowledge is that Thoreau believed these gods were real, that while occupying a realm “unseen and unheard,” they nevertheless permitted themselves to be seen and heard, to be sensed and even thought.
I fully agree with Higgins that “one of the stumbling blocks to seeing Thoreau as religious is a tendency to think he cannot possibly mean what he says . . . I would argue that Thoreau means what he says.”32 To accept that Thoreau means what he says forces us to acknowledge that he has a much more capacious understanding of reality than is common in our contemporary flatland culture. And it challenges us to question our culture’s, or own individual, commitment to that very flatland.33
Higgins says of the telegraph communication, the ancient settler, and the old dame, “It is hard to know how seriously to take Thoreau’s intimate portrayals of God.”37 Putting aside for the moment that I don’t think these are portrayals of God, but of gods, I take them, not literally, but very seriously. Of course, Higgins is right that Thoreau is often being “droll,” having fun with these descriptions. But I understand Thoreau’s playful prose to show us just how seriously the gods challenge our fragile certainties about what is real. Horace once famously asked, ridentem dicere verum quid vetat? “What presents someone from speaking the truth while laughing?”38 The most serious of topics can only be treated playfully.
“Remembering to be as self compassionate as I can and praying to the divine that we're all a part of.”
–Aaron
“Prayer, reading, meditation, walking.”
–Karen
“Erratically — which is an ongoing stream of practice to find peace.”
–Charles
“Try on a daily basis to be kind to myself and to realize that making mistakes is a part of the human condition. Learning from our mistakes is a journey. But it starts with compassion and caring. First for oneself.”
–Steve
“Physically: aerobic exercise, volleyball, ice hockey, cycling, sailing. Emotionally: unfortunately I have to work to ‘not care’ about people or situations which may end painfully. Along the lines of ‘attachment is the source of suffering’, so best to avoid it or limit its scope. Sad though because it could also be the source of great joy. Is it worth the risk?“
–Rainer
“It's time for my heart to be nurtured on one level yet contained on another. To go easy on me and to allow my feelings to be validated, not judged harshly. On the other hand, to let the heart rule with equanimity and not lead the mind and body around like a master.”
–Suzanne
“I spend time thinking of everything I am grateful for, and I try to develop my ability to express compassion for myself and others without reservation. I take time to do the things I need to do to keep myself healthy and happy. This includes taking experiential workshops, fostering relationships, and participating within groups which have a similar interest to become a more compassionate and fulfilled being.“
–Peter
“Self-forgiveness for my own judgments. And oh yeah, coming to Esalen.”
–David B.
“Hmm, this is a tough one! I guess I take care of my heart through fostering relationships with people I feel connected to. Spending quality time with them (whether we're on the phone, through messages/letters, on Zoom, or in-person). Being there for them, listening to them, sharing what's going on with me, my struggles and my successes... like we do in the Esalen weekly Friends of Esalen Zoom sessions!”
–Lori
“I remind myself in many ways of the fact that " Love is all there is!" LOVE is the prize and this one precious life is the stage we get to learn our lessons. I get out into nature, hike, camp, river kayak, fly fish, garden, I create, I dance (not enough!), and I remain grateful for each day, each breath, each moment. Being in the moment, awake, and remembering the gift of life and my feeling of gratitude for all of creation.”
–Steven
“My physical heart by limiting stress and eating a heart-healthy diet. My emotional heart by staying in love with the world and by knowing that all disappointment and loss will pass.“
–David Z.
Today, September 29, is World Heart Day. Strike up a conversation with your own heart and as you feel comfortable, encourage others to do the same. As part of our own transformations and self-care, we sometimes ask for others to illuminate and enliven our hearts or speak our love language.
What if we could do this for ourselves too, even if just for today… or to start a heart practice, forever?
Illustration by Jacqueline Tam
Charles M. Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He also sits on Esalen's Board of Trustees.
We’re delighted to welcome Charles Stang as Scholar-in-Residence at Esalen for the first two weeks of June.
A professor at Harvard Divinity School and member of the Esalen Board of Trustees, Charlie explores the intersections of mysticism, philosophy, ecology, and religious imagination. During his residency, he’ll open the month with a very special Wednesday Evening Program on June 3.
Drawing from his recent essay “Thoreau’s Gods,” the evening will explore Henry David Thoreau’s vivid relationship with the animate world — the woods, waters, and unseen presences of New England that he experienced as living intelligences and guiding powers. Charlie invites us to reconsider Thoreau not simply as a naturalist, but as a kind of pagan polytheist attuned to the spirits of place.
The talk, Skywater: An Elemental Meditation on Walden Pond, unfolds as part contemplative inquiry, part sensory invocation — exploring water as mirror, teacher, threshold, and philosophical companion. Moving between ancient philosophy, Walden Pond, and the question of what immersion — bodily, perceptual, spiritual — reveals about the soul, the evening invites us into a deeper encounter with the living world.
If you’d like to spend more time in conversation with Charlie during the magical in between moments, there are just a few spaces available in our early June workshops...
The telegraph came to Concord in the 1840s. You might expect Henry David Thoreau to detest this technological intrusion, much as he did the railroad that skirted the western shore of his beloved Walden Pond, whose line the telegraph followed. But on a September afternoon in 1851, he reports in his Journal that he heard “the telegraph-wire vibrating like an aeolian harp.” It sung to him:
It told me by the faintest imaginable strain that a human ear can hear, yet conclusively and past all refutation, that there were higher, infinitely higher, planes of life which it behooved me never to forget. As I was entering the Deep Cut, the wind, which was conveying a message to me from heaven, dropped it on the wire of the telegraph which it vibrated as it passed. I instantly sat down on a stone at the foot of the telegraph-pole, and attended to that communication. It merely said: “Bear in mind, Child, and never for an instant forget, that there are higher planes, infinitely higher planes, of life than this thou are now traveling on. Know that the goal is distant, and is upward, and is worthy of all your life’s efforts to attain to.” And then it ceased, and though I sat some minutes longer I heard nothing more.1
What a remarkable testimony. Not a voice, but a vibration or strum that still somehow instantly translates into words, a message from heaven meant for him: this plane on which you travel is but one of an infinite number, ever higher.2 We imagine these infinite planes are not stacked one atop the other, separated like layers of phyllo dough. They crisscross and communicate: the higher sings to the lower, parent to child, who can just make out its faint tone and its irrefutable meaning. Although there was no office in town, Thoreau judges the telegraph “no small gain” for Concord, because he can make his own use of it as a means of divination, of receiving communications from higher planes. He insists that the human soul “is played on even as this wire,” that we are each a string to be so strummed.3
This episode, and many others like it, are masterfully marshalled by Richard Higgins in Thoreau’s God, the aim of which is to show “the palpable, undeniable presence of divine mystery in Thoreau’s writing.” Higgins argues that Thoreau “disavowed discursive theology, but he spoke of and sought communion with a mystery at the heart of the universe that was at once immanent, or present, in nature and yet transcendent. He called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God.”4 Higgins is principally interested in Thoreau’s theism, his faith in a God who both suffuses and exceeds nature.
This is why the telegraph message is so important. Thoreau never quite confesses a single God over against a single nature. To start, Thoreau understood that nature itself is layered: many, perhaps all, of the higher planes through which we can and must ascend are not “supernatural,” Higgins argues, but rather “super or intensely natural.”5 And, as Thoreau says, they are as likely to communicate their “celestial wisdom” to us through “the hootings of owls, the croaking of frogs,” as through wind moving a telegraph wire.6 In other words, between our familiar plane and that divine mystery Thoreau often called God, there are infinite higher planes of nature, of super nature, and in those planes the one divine mystery filters through and becomes different divine principles and persons—what Thoreau would very often call “gods” or sometimes “powers.” “I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers,” he writes in his Journal, “This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived.”7
Thoreau was no strict monotheist, then, nor was he anything remotely like an atheist. If we must apply a label to him, “henotheist” will do as well as any: faith in one ultimate, divine source or “God” which expresses itself in many “gods,” like white light refracted into a colored spectrum.8 If monotheism is a belief in only one (monos) God (theos), henotheism is a belief in one (hen) God (theos) among but above many others. In other words, henotheism accounts for polytheism, for the reality of many gods below the one God who is their ultimate source. Thoreau’s henotheism was fed by many streams, by an ever-evolving Christian monotheism, including, as Higgins puts it, “his Puritan heritage, Protestant reformational zeal, and Harvard’s rational Unitarianism.”9 But the implicit polytheism of Thoreau’s henotheism was also fed by Indian thought, especially the Bhagavad Gita, and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, whose writings began to circulate in Concord in the 1840s. In these two very long and broad traditions, there is generally no conflict between a confession of one God, understood as the ultimate divine source, and the reality of many gods—large and small, near and far—who issue from it and whom we are called to know and acknowledge.
Thoreau often keeps his distance from God and is unsure of his words. “Let God alone if need be,” he writes to his friend Harrison Blake, “Methinks, if I loved him more, I should keep him—I should keep myself rather—at a more respectful distance. It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover that God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know whom I mean.”10 God is disclosed just as Thoreau is turning away, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye or over his shoulder. But even when glimpsed, God is not confidently named. At the end of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau seems to call God by another name, “Silence.” Much as God gives birth to gods, so Silence gives birth to sounds, the articulated expression of the divine source. Silence is like water, a deep river or “under-current”: from her silent depths emerge bubbles, her “faint utterance.” As in Greek (sigē), Thoreau’s Silence is a “she,” the oracle behind all oracles: “Who has not hearkened to Her infinite din? She is Truth’s speaking-trumpet, the sole oracle, the true Delphi and Dodona.”11 Is Truth (alētheia) another name for God? We are not told, but there is no mistaking Silence’s primordial priority: “Silence was, say we, before ever the world was, as if creation had displaced her, and were not her visible framework and foil.”12 As Higgins puts it so beautifully, echoing Genesis 1:1, Silence “existed before the first wind swept over the waters.”13
Later in life, Thoreau will ask, and answer: “What is religion? That which is never spoken.”14 But of course, he does speak of religion: he bears witness to God and, even more often, to the gods. And it is not always peaceable between them. In A Week, Thoreau contrasts “my country’s God,” Jehovah, with “the liberal divinities of Greece.” Jehovah is “more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.” He calls this God of his Concord countrymen “the almighty mortal,” essentially a human tyrant “apotheosized,” a “wholly masculine” deity, with no room for a divine mother, wife, sister, or daughter. He contrasts Jehovah with the “youthful and erring and fallen gods” of Greece, “the divine race.”15 Of them he famously singles out one:
In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.16
However, this early enthusiasm for Pan is not the best place to look for Thoreau’s mature polytheism. Higgins reminds us that Thoreau mentions Pan only one other time, in a Journal entry on Christmas Day, 1841, where he remarks that “Pan himself lives in the wood”; “after that,” Higgins writes, “Pan mysteriously disappeared from Thoreau’s pantheon.”17 As much as he loved classical mythology and drew freely from it, I suspect that Thoreau outgrew the worship of this god with a name given on the authority of others, and from another land. After all, Pan is a god of ancient Greece. In his Journal, Thoreau writes, “I, a descendent of Northmen who worshipped Thor, spend my time worshipping neither Thor nor Christ.”18 As he matures, Thoreau shows more and more interest in the gods of his own land, “the gods of New England.”
Thoreau’s polytheism, his paganism, consists in this: he does not worship the gods of others or even the gods of his European ancestors—in the end, neither Pan, nor Thor, nor Christ. In his Journal he complains that “it is a defect in our Bible that it is not truly ours. . . . The most pertinent illustrations for us are to be drawn, not from Egypt or Babylonia, but from New England.” He is frustrated that Americans have not yet learned how to name things, including gods. Why do we say that a river is “meandering,” after the winding Meander River of Asia Minor? Why not say instead that it is “musketaquidding,” after the Musketaquid or “Grass-ground River,” which again English settlers have unimaginatively christened the “Concord”? The point here is that Thoreau recognizes that the native name for the river emerges from the river itself. Americans, by contrast, rely on “imported symbols.” “Have we not the genius to coin our own?” he asks. “What if there were a tariff on words, on language, for the encouragement of home manufactures?”19
Thoreau does not appropriate the names of the gods of those peoples who lived on the land his ancestors took from them. Rather, he tries to meet the gods who reveal themselves in and through that land—to himself, his neighbors, and to the land’s displaced and dispossessed peoples, then and now. Thoreau strains to hear how these gods wish to introduce themselves. Often, they do not tell him their proper names. If we must give them names, Thoreau suggests, we should not rely on imports, but on homemade goods. We must rely on our own genius and the genius loci or “spirit of place” when we presume to name a river, or a god—if indeed there is any difference between the two.20
Who, then, are these gods of New England? Ironically, he speaks of his meeting two of them in a chapter of Walden called “Solitude.” But first, he tells us that, “sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded.”21 Favored, guided, and guarded—that is a good summary of Thoreau’s experience of the gods of New England. On long winter evenings, he tells us, he was occasionally visited by someone he calls,
an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider,—a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried.22
Here I must disagree with Higgins, and many others, who have equated this figure with God. To my mind, this figure is quite obviously not God, not “God the Father” of the Christians, nor some singular divine source, but rather some sort of god or “godling”—to borrow a term from Francis Young.23
This is not a creator god, but a settler god, a proprietor. A settler does not create the land: he moves onto it from elsewhere and shapes it for his own needs, or the needs of others. Today, the word “settler” is hardly a term of approbation, and Thoreau’s critique of, and place in, what has come to be called “settler colonialism” has been examined closely.24 But at its root, to “settle” means simply to make a “seat”: to build and so to dwell, however long or lightly. Perhaps it is this god’s error to think that he owns this land, that it is his own—Latin proprius, hence “property” and “proprietor.” But even if he fancies himself its owner, he welcomes not only Thoreau and his neighbors, but also the peoples who lived here long before them. I would submit that this god not only welcomes, but favors, guides, and guards those who live on the land he calls his. Who knows just how old this god is, or how long he has lived here. Though rumored dead, he lives on, in secret, and enjoys the occasional company of others; he’s a storyteller god, full of wisdom and humor; a god who is a friend; a god to be loved.
In another chapter, “Ponds,” Thoreau again mentions this same “ancient settler . . . who remembers so well when he came here with his divining rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here.” Thoreau does not accept that this pond was named “Walden” by English settlers after Saffron Walden in England. Rather, he muses that in some time immemorial (in illo tempore) this primordial settler god dug a well here, and carefully walled it with stones: “one might suppose,” Thoreau writes, “that it was called, originally, Walled-in Pond.”25
Notice that this god followed the lead of the land: he read the vapor, sward, and hazel, in order to know where to dig. And by walling water in as a well, and giving it a name, the settler gave rise to another god, the Pond itself. Gods can make other gods, as we know from every ancient theogony. Walden Pond is said to be not only a well, but also a mouth. Does it speak? What does Walden say, and to whom? And what else does a mouth do? Eat, drink, breathe, kiss, smile, frown—does Walden do all of these? It is also said to be an eye. Does Walden see? What does Walden see? What else does an eye do? Weep, wink, close its lids at night or at death—does Walden do these things too? As a mouth and an eye, Walden quickly becomes a face of sorts. Thoreau says that the ancient settler, the well-digger, “rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?”26 Walden has not only a face we can see, but also a name by which we can address it. Walden is also said to be a mirror. Whose reflection do we see on its surface? Walden’s own face? Its “Maker,” the ancient settler? The face of the sun, moon, stars, and clouds? Our own face? The face of The Deep, the source and center of infinite higher planes?27 All of them, I imagine: Walden is a surface on which we can glimpse the faces of the gods, perhaps even God’s own face, perhaps even our own: “It is earth’s eye,” he writes, “looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”28
The ancient settler is not the only god of New England Thoreau knows:
An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact each one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet.29
Like the settler god, she too is old, older than mythology, and very much alive: ruddy and lusty. She too is a storyteller, a memory-keeper of fables and facts. He is the settler, the well-digger, and she the gardener. We do not know who is older, but it seems that she has been here longer than he. She invisibly tended her garden before he built his well. If so, she is, like him, much older than the Pond. Just as scholars are tempted to think of the settler as God, or perhaps as Pan, so too they muse whether this elderly dame is meant to be Mother Nature or Demeter, again relying on imported names.30 If Thoreau, who met these gods, refrains from naming them, why do we presume to do so? Perhaps it is not first and foremost their names we should seek to know.31 Perhaps the most important point to acknowledge is that Thoreau believed these gods were real, that while occupying a realm “unseen and unheard,” they nevertheless permitted themselves to be seen and heard, to be sensed and even thought.
I fully agree with Higgins that “one of the stumbling blocks to seeing Thoreau as religious is a tendency to think he cannot possibly mean what he says . . . I would argue that Thoreau means what he says.”32 To accept that Thoreau means what he says forces us to acknowledge that he has a much more capacious understanding of reality than is common in our contemporary flatland culture. And it challenges us to question our culture’s, or own individual, commitment to that very flatland.33
Higgins says of the telegraph communication, the ancient settler, and the old dame, “It is hard to know how seriously to take Thoreau’s intimate portrayals of God.”37 Putting aside for the moment that I don’t think these are portrayals of God, but of gods, I take them, not literally, but very seriously. Of course, Higgins is right that Thoreau is often being “droll,” having fun with these descriptions. But I understand Thoreau’s playful prose to show us just how seriously the gods challenge our fragile certainties about what is real. Horace once famously asked, ridentem dicere verum quid vetat? “What presents someone from speaking the truth while laughing?”38 The most serious of topics can only be treated playfully.
Illustration by Jacqueline Tam
“Remembering to be as self compassionate as I can and praying to the divine that we're all a part of.”
–Aaron
“Prayer, reading, meditation, walking.”
–Karen
“Erratically — which is an ongoing stream of practice to find peace.”
–Charles
“Try on a daily basis to be kind to myself and to realize that making mistakes is a part of the human condition. Learning from our mistakes is a journey. But it starts with compassion and caring. First for oneself.”
–Steve
“Physically: aerobic exercise, volleyball, ice hockey, cycling, sailing. Emotionally: unfortunately I have to work to ‘not care’ about people or situations which may end painfully. Along the lines of ‘attachment is the source of suffering’, so best to avoid it or limit its scope. Sad though because it could also be the source of great joy. Is it worth the risk?“
–Rainer
“It's time for my heart to be nurtured on one level yet contained on another. To go easy on me and to allow my feelings to be validated, not judged harshly. On the other hand, to let the heart rule with equanimity and not lead the mind and body around like a master.”
–Suzanne
“I spend time thinking of everything I am grateful for, and I try to develop my ability to express compassion for myself and others without reservation. I take time to do the things I need to do to keep myself healthy and happy. This includes taking experiential workshops, fostering relationships, and participating within groups which have a similar interest to become a more compassionate and fulfilled being.“
–Peter
“Self-forgiveness for my own judgments. And oh yeah, coming to Esalen.”
–David B.
“Hmm, this is a tough one! I guess I take care of my heart through fostering relationships with people I feel connected to. Spending quality time with them (whether we're on the phone, through messages/letters, on Zoom, or in-person). Being there for them, listening to them, sharing what's going on with me, my struggles and my successes... like we do in the Esalen weekly Friends of Esalen Zoom sessions!”
–Lori
“I remind myself in many ways of the fact that " Love is all there is!" LOVE is the prize and this one precious life is the stage we get to learn our lessons. I get out into nature, hike, camp, river kayak, fly fish, garden, I create, I dance (not enough!), and I remain grateful for each day, each breath, each moment. Being in the moment, awake, and remembering the gift of life and my feeling of gratitude for all of creation.”
–Steven
“My physical heart by limiting stress and eating a heart-healthy diet. My emotional heart by staying in love with the world and by knowing that all disappointment and loss will pass.“
–David Z.
Today, September 29, is World Heart Day. Strike up a conversation with your own heart and as you feel comfortable, encourage others to do the same. As part of our own transformations and self-care, we sometimes ask for others to illuminate and enliven our hearts or speak our love language.
What if we could do this for ourselves too, even if just for today… or to start a heart practice, forever?
Charles M. Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He also sits on Esalen's Board of Trustees.
We’re delighted to welcome Charles Stang as Scholar-in-Residence at Esalen for the first two weeks of June.
A professor at Harvard Divinity School and member of the Esalen Board of Trustees, Charlie explores the intersections of mysticism, philosophy, ecology, and religious imagination. During his residency, he’ll open the month with a very special Wednesday Evening Program on June 3.
Drawing from his recent essay “Thoreau’s Gods,” the evening will explore Henry David Thoreau’s vivid relationship with the animate world — the woods, waters, and unseen presences of New England that he experienced as living intelligences and guiding powers. Charlie invites us to reconsider Thoreau not simply as a naturalist, but as a kind of pagan polytheist attuned to the spirits of place.
The talk, Skywater: An Elemental Meditation on Walden Pond, unfolds as part contemplative inquiry, part sensory invocation — exploring water as mirror, teacher, threshold, and philosophical companion. Moving between ancient philosophy, Walden Pond, and the question of what immersion — bodily, perceptual, spiritual — reveals about the soul, the evening invites us into a deeper encounter with the living world.
If you’d like to spend more time in conversation with Charlie during the magical in between moments, there are just a few spaces available in our early June workshops...
The telegraph came to Concord in the 1840s. You might expect Henry David Thoreau to detest this technological intrusion, much as he did the railroad that skirted the western shore of his beloved Walden Pond, whose line the telegraph followed. But on a September afternoon in 1851, he reports in his Journal that he heard “the telegraph-wire vibrating like an aeolian harp.” It sung to him:
It told me by the faintest imaginable strain that a human ear can hear, yet conclusively and past all refutation, that there were higher, infinitely higher, planes of life which it behooved me never to forget. As I was entering the Deep Cut, the wind, which was conveying a message to me from heaven, dropped it on the wire of the telegraph which it vibrated as it passed. I instantly sat down on a stone at the foot of the telegraph-pole, and attended to that communication. It merely said: “Bear in mind, Child, and never for an instant forget, that there are higher planes, infinitely higher planes, of life than this thou are now traveling on. Know that the goal is distant, and is upward, and is worthy of all your life’s efforts to attain to.” And then it ceased, and though I sat some minutes longer I heard nothing more.1
What a remarkable testimony. Not a voice, but a vibration or strum that still somehow instantly translates into words, a message from heaven meant for him: this plane on which you travel is but one of an infinite number, ever higher.2 We imagine these infinite planes are not stacked one atop the other, separated like layers of phyllo dough. They crisscross and communicate: the higher sings to the lower, parent to child, who can just make out its faint tone and its irrefutable meaning. Although there was no office in town, Thoreau judges the telegraph “no small gain” for Concord, because he can make his own use of it as a means of divination, of receiving communications from higher planes. He insists that the human soul “is played on even as this wire,” that we are each a string to be so strummed.3
This episode, and many others like it, are masterfully marshalled by Richard Higgins in Thoreau’s God, the aim of which is to show “the palpable, undeniable presence of divine mystery in Thoreau’s writing.” Higgins argues that Thoreau “disavowed discursive theology, but he spoke of and sought communion with a mystery at the heart of the universe that was at once immanent, or present, in nature and yet transcendent. He called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God.”4 Higgins is principally interested in Thoreau’s theism, his faith in a God who both suffuses and exceeds nature.
This is why the telegraph message is so important. Thoreau never quite confesses a single God over against a single nature. To start, Thoreau understood that nature itself is layered: many, perhaps all, of the higher planes through which we can and must ascend are not “supernatural,” Higgins argues, but rather “super or intensely natural.”5 And, as Thoreau says, they are as likely to communicate their “celestial wisdom” to us through “the hootings of owls, the croaking of frogs,” as through wind moving a telegraph wire.6 In other words, between our familiar plane and that divine mystery Thoreau often called God, there are infinite higher planes of nature, of super nature, and in those planes the one divine mystery filters through and becomes different divine principles and persons—what Thoreau would very often call “gods” or sometimes “powers.” “I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers,” he writes in his Journal, “This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived.”7
Thoreau was no strict monotheist, then, nor was he anything remotely like an atheist. If we must apply a label to him, “henotheist” will do as well as any: faith in one ultimate, divine source or “God” which expresses itself in many “gods,” like white light refracted into a colored spectrum.8 If monotheism is a belief in only one (monos) God (theos), henotheism is a belief in one (hen) God (theos) among but above many others. In other words, henotheism accounts for polytheism, for the reality of many gods below the one God who is their ultimate source. Thoreau’s henotheism was fed by many streams, by an ever-evolving Christian monotheism, including, as Higgins puts it, “his Puritan heritage, Protestant reformational zeal, and Harvard’s rational Unitarianism.”9 But the implicit polytheism of Thoreau’s henotheism was also fed by Indian thought, especially the Bhagavad Gita, and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, whose writings began to circulate in Concord in the 1840s. In these two very long and broad traditions, there is generally no conflict between a confession of one God, understood as the ultimate divine source, and the reality of many gods—large and small, near and far—who issue from it and whom we are called to know and acknowledge.
Thoreau often keeps his distance from God and is unsure of his words. “Let God alone if need be,” he writes to his friend Harrison Blake, “Methinks, if I loved him more, I should keep him—I should keep myself rather—at a more respectful distance. It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover that God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know whom I mean.”10 God is disclosed just as Thoreau is turning away, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye or over his shoulder. But even when glimpsed, God is not confidently named. At the end of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau seems to call God by another name, “Silence.” Much as God gives birth to gods, so Silence gives birth to sounds, the articulated expression of the divine source. Silence is like water, a deep river or “under-current”: from her silent depths emerge bubbles, her “faint utterance.” As in Greek (sigē), Thoreau’s Silence is a “she,” the oracle behind all oracles: “Who has not hearkened to Her infinite din? She is Truth’s speaking-trumpet, the sole oracle, the true Delphi and Dodona.”11 Is Truth (alētheia) another name for God? We are not told, but there is no mistaking Silence’s primordial priority: “Silence was, say we, before ever the world was, as if creation had displaced her, and were not her visible framework and foil.”12 As Higgins puts it so beautifully, echoing Genesis 1:1, Silence “existed before the first wind swept over the waters.”13
Later in life, Thoreau will ask, and answer: “What is religion? That which is never spoken.”14 But of course, he does speak of religion: he bears witness to God and, even more often, to the gods. And it is not always peaceable between them. In A Week, Thoreau contrasts “my country’s God,” Jehovah, with “the liberal divinities of Greece.” Jehovah is “more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.” He calls this God of his Concord countrymen “the almighty mortal,” essentially a human tyrant “apotheosized,” a “wholly masculine” deity, with no room for a divine mother, wife, sister, or daughter. He contrasts Jehovah with the “youthful and erring and fallen gods” of Greece, “the divine race.”15 Of them he famously singles out one:
In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.16
However, this early enthusiasm for Pan is not the best place to look for Thoreau’s mature polytheism. Higgins reminds us that Thoreau mentions Pan only one other time, in a Journal entry on Christmas Day, 1841, where he remarks that “Pan himself lives in the wood”; “after that,” Higgins writes, “Pan mysteriously disappeared from Thoreau’s pantheon.”17 As much as he loved classical mythology and drew freely from it, I suspect that Thoreau outgrew the worship of this god with a name given on the authority of others, and from another land. After all, Pan is a god of ancient Greece. In his Journal, Thoreau writes, “I, a descendent of Northmen who worshipped Thor, spend my time worshipping neither Thor nor Christ.”18 As he matures, Thoreau shows more and more interest in the gods of his own land, “the gods of New England.”
Thoreau’s polytheism, his paganism, consists in this: he does not worship the gods of others or even the gods of his European ancestors—in the end, neither Pan, nor Thor, nor Christ. In his Journal he complains that “it is a defect in our Bible that it is not truly ours. . . . The most pertinent illustrations for us are to be drawn, not from Egypt or Babylonia, but from New England.” He is frustrated that Americans have not yet learned how to name things, including gods. Why do we say that a river is “meandering,” after the winding Meander River of Asia Minor? Why not say instead that it is “musketaquidding,” after the Musketaquid or “Grass-ground River,” which again English settlers have unimaginatively christened the “Concord”? The point here is that Thoreau recognizes that the native name for the river emerges from the river itself. Americans, by contrast, rely on “imported symbols.” “Have we not the genius to coin our own?” he asks. “What if there were a tariff on words, on language, for the encouragement of home manufactures?”19
Thoreau does not appropriate the names of the gods of those peoples who lived on the land his ancestors took from them. Rather, he tries to meet the gods who reveal themselves in and through that land—to himself, his neighbors, and to the land’s displaced and dispossessed peoples, then and now. Thoreau strains to hear how these gods wish to introduce themselves. Often, they do not tell him their proper names. If we must give them names, Thoreau suggests, we should not rely on imports, but on homemade goods. We must rely on our own genius and the genius loci or “spirit of place” when we presume to name a river, or a god—if indeed there is any difference between the two.20
Who, then, are these gods of New England? Ironically, he speaks of his meeting two of them in a chapter of Walden called “Solitude.” But first, he tells us that, “sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded.”21 Favored, guided, and guarded—that is a good summary of Thoreau’s experience of the gods of New England. On long winter evenings, he tells us, he was occasionally visited by someone he calls,
an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider,—a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried.22
Here I must disagree with Higgins, and many others, who have equated this figure with God. To my mind, this figure is quite obviously not God, not “God the Father” of the Christians, nor some singular divine source, but rather some sort of god or “godling”—to borrow a term from Francis Young.23
This is not a creator god, but a settler god, a proprietor. A settler does not create the land: he moves onto it from elsewhere and shapes it for his own needs, or the needs of others. Today, the word “settler” is hardly a term of approbation, and Thoreau’s critique of, and place in, what has come to be called “settler colonialism” has been examined closely.24 But at its root, to “settle” means simply to make a “seat”: to build and so to dwell, however long or lightly. Perhaps it is this god’s error to think that he owns this land, that it is his own—Latin proprius, hence “property” and “proprietor.” But even if he fancies himself its owner, he welcomes not only Thoreau and his neighbors, but also the peoples who lived here long before them. I would submit that this god not only welcomes, but favors, guides, and guards those who live on the land he calls his. Who knows just how old this god is, or how long he has lived here. Though rumored dead, he lives on, in secret, and enjoys the occasional company of others; he’s a storyteller god, full of wisdom and humor; a god who is a friend; a god to be loved.
In another chapter, “Ponds,” Thoreau again mentions this same “ancient settler . . . who remembers so well when he came here with his divining rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here.” Thoreau does not accept that this pond was named “Walden” by English settlers after Saffron Walden in England. Rather, he muses that in some time immemorial (in illo tempore) this primordial settler god dug a well here, and carefully walled it with stones: “one might suppose,” Thoreau writes, “that it was called, originally, Walled-in Pond.”25
Notice that this god followed the lead of the land: he read the vapor, sward, and hazel, in order to know where to dig. And by walling water in as a well, and giving it a name, the settler gave rise to another god, the Pond itself. Gods can make other gods, as we know from every ancient theogony. Walden Pond is said to be not only a well, but also a mouth. Does it speak? What does Walden say, and to whom? And what else does a mouth do? Eat, drink, breathe, kiss, smile, frown—does Walden do all of these? It is also said to be an eye. Does Walden see? What does Walden see? What else does an eye do? Weep, wink, close its lids at night or at death—does Walden do these things too? As a mouth and an eye, Walden quickly becomes a face of sorts. Thoreau says that the ancient settler, the well-digger, “rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?”26 Walden has not only a face we can see, but also a name by which we can address it. Walden is also said to be a mirror. Whose reflection do we see on its surface? Walden’s own face? Its “Maker,” the ancient settler? The face of the sun, moon, stars, and clouds? Our own face? The face of The Deep, the source and center of infinite higher planes?27 All of them, I imagine: Walden is a surface on which we can glimpse the faces of the gods, perhaps even God’s own face, perhaps even our own: “It is earth’s eye,” he writes, “looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”28
The ancient settler is not the only god of New England Thoreau knows:
An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact each one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet.29
Like the settler god, she too is old, older than mythology, and very much alive: ruddy and lusty. She too is a storyteller, a memory-keeper of fables and facts. He is the settler, the well-digger, and she the gardener. We do not know who is older, but it seems that she has been here longer than he. She invisibly tended her garden before he built his well. If so, she is, like him, much older than the Pond. Just as scholars are tempted to think of the settler as God, or perhaps as Pan, so too they muse whether this elderly dame is meant to be Mother Nature or Demeter, again relying on imported names.30 If Thoreau, who met these gods, refrains from naming them, why do we presume to do so? Perhaps it is not first and foremost their names we should seek to know.31 Perhaps the most important point to acknowledge is that Thoreau believed these gods were real, that while occupying a realm “unseen and unheard,” they nevertheless permitted themselves to be seen and heard, to be sensed and even thought.
I fully agree with Higgins that “one of the stumbling blocks to seeing Thoreau as religious is a tendency to think he cannot possibly mean what he says . . . I would argue that Thoreau means what he says.”32 To accept that Thoreau means what he says forces us to acknowledge that he has a much more capacious understanding of reality than is common in our contemporary flatland culture. And it challenges us to question our culture’s, or own individual, commitment to that very flatland.33
Higgins says of the telegraph communication, the ancient settler, and the old dame, “It is hard to know how seriously to take Thoreau’s intimate portrayals of God.”37 Putting aside for the moment that I don’t think these are portrayals of God, but of gods, I take them, not literally, but very seriously. Of course, Higgins is right that Thoreau is often being “droll,” having fun with these descriptions. But I understand Thoreau’s playful prose to show us just how seriously the gods challenge our fragile certainties about what is real. Horace once famously asked, ridentem dicere verum quid vetat? “What presents someone from speaking the truth while laughing?”38 The most serious of topics can only be treated playfully.
“Remembering to be as self compassionate as I can and praying to the divine that we're all a part of.”
–Aaron
“Prayer, reading, meditation, walking.”
–Karen
“Erratically — which is an ongoing stream of practice to find peace.”
–Charles
“Try on a daily basis to be kind to myself and to realize that making mistakes is a part of the human condition. Learning from our mistakes is a journey. But it starts with compassion and caring. First for oneself.”
–Steve
“Physically: aerobic exercise, volleyball, ice hockey, cycling, sailing. Emotionally: unfortunately I have to work to ‘not care’ about people or situations which may end painfully. Along the lines of ‘attachment is the source of suffering’, so best to avoid it or limit its scope. Sad though because it could also be the source of great joy. Is it worth the risk?“
–Rainer
“It's time for my heart to be nurtured on one level yet contained on another. To go easy on me and to allow my feelings to be validated, not judged harshly. On the other hand, to let the heart rule with equanimity and not lead the mind and body around like a master.”
–Suzanne
“I spend time thinking of everything I am grateful for, and I try to develop my ability to express compassion for myself and others without reservation. I take time to do the things I need to do to keep myself healthy and happy. This includes taking experiential workshops, fostering relationships, and participating within groups which have a similar interest to become a more compassionate and fulfilled being.“
–Peter
“Self-forgiveness for my own judgments. And oh yeah, coming to Esalen.”
–David B.
“Hmm, this is a tough one! I guess I take care of my heart through fostering relationships with people I feel connected to. Spending quality time with them (whether we're on the phone, through messages/letters, on Zoom, or in-person). Being there for them, listening to them, sharing what's going on with me, my struggles and my successes... like we do in the Esalen weekly Friends of Esalen Zoom sessions!”
–Lori
“I remind myself in many ways of the fact that " Love is all there is!" LOVE is the prize and this one precious life is the stage we get to learn our lessons. I get out into nature, hike, camp, river kayak, fly fish, garden, I create, I dance (not enough!), and I remain grateful for each day, each breath, each moment. Being in the moment, awake, and remembering the gift of life and my feeling of gratitude for all of creation.”
–Steven
“My physical heart by limiting stress and eating a heart-healthy diet. My emotional heart by staying in love with the world and by knowing that all disappointment and loss will pass.“
–David Z.
Today, September 29, is World Heart Day. Strike up a conversation with your own heart and as you feel comfortable, encourage others to do the same. As part of our own transformations and self-care, we sometimes ask for others to illuminate and enliven our hearts or speak our love language.
What if we could do this for ourselves too, even if just for today… or to start a heart practice, forever?
Charles M. Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He also sits on Esalen's Board of Trustees.
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