The Magician's Apprentices

Animate Earth, in Memory of Stephan Harding

Stephan Harding was my friend and mentor. Before he passed away last year he paid me a great compliment, one I will cherish always.

I met him on a three-week course in ‘Holistic Science’, twenty years ago. I had, on the Friday of that week, just finished a five-year stint at the Environment Agency, given up my company car and salary, and on Sunday night arrived at this magical house on the Dartington Estate, the Old Postern of Schumacher College. I remember the thrill of staying in that monastic bedroom with only a bed, sink and desk for a full three weeks, and I remember well the two lead teachers, Stephan Harding and Brian Goodwin.

This was the start of my long love affair with Schumacher College. As a scientist who had just been firmly told by a senior manager that ‘there is no room for creativity in science’ (pah … who would want to be a scientist then?), it was soul medicine to be with these people who were gathering teachers from all over the world, others who wondered whether we have our scientific method slightly wrong, too reductive, too dismissive of intuition, and feeling, and sensing, that a different type of science, a more holistic approach, could be of better use.

Rupert Sheldrake was one of the visiting teachers in that time, alongside people like Starhawk, the wiccan-witch permaculturalist and author of ‘The Fifth Sacred Thing’. (I remember the rumpus that ensued on a Tuesday open night when throngs of young women six deep at the window were unable to get into her talk). But it was Stephan himself who really impressed me. Here was an ecologist, like myself, who was not afraid to bring his more magical experience of the natural world into the public realm and to call for its inclusion into the contemporary way we understand reality.

My own magical experiences until then had been covert, and certainly not something I would mention in a professional context. I remember lying on the grass outside the Old Postern, whilst Stephan led us in a guided imagination of the sky as being something we could step into and swim, as though we were looking down at it rather than up. His way of bringing everything back to the Gaia Theory, something he had worked on with James Lovelock (the theory that the whole world is alive, intelligent and actively regulating all things within it to support life), was the bridge between two very different, scientific and magical, ways of seeing the world.

After my first visit to the College, Stephan came to give a series of talks to the senior science managers of the Environment Agency, discussing with them how to use this expanded sense of holistic science in their decision making. It was obvious to me that we needed to do it. It was obvious to them too and they loved hearing him speak. Stephan however, who was always nervous and self-deprecating about his pioneering ideas in front of the traditional scientific establishment, was much less comfortable. I am sure that just by meeting him, there will have been ripples into the way things are done now.

Years later I went back to work at Schumacher College as I promised I would on my first visit, pledging myself to the rising sun in the cow fields behind North Woods. I wanted to make sure that this work, the bringing together of science and magical thinking, was available to as many people as possible. Working with Stephan, we brought poets and practitioners, magicians and scientists from all over the world. We ran postgraduate programmes on ecology, spirituality and mythology, and we expanded our possibilities into a second magical venue at the very heart of the medieval Dartington Hall.

Stephan has passed away now. And Schumacher College has moved on from its iconic home at Dartington - although its seeds have blown, germinated and grown around the world and a wilder nomadic version will live on. Before he left he asked me to keep talking about ‘animism’, this notion of the earth as intelligent, in the way he wrote about it in his book ‘Animate Earth’. He said he wished he’d been able to bring more people to the lived experience of animism in his lifetime, in the same way we do in our organisation named for his work: The Animate Earth Collective.

But he was the one who built the bridge that so many people have been able to cross. So many people from all backgrounds are able to experience magical thinking about the natural world, and feel the delight when nature responds to them, by using his expanded science. He was a rare thing, a scientist magician, and everyone around him knew it. The last thing he said to me, the last time I met his eye, and I hope I managed to convey my gratitude at the enormity of the compliment he gave me, was that I was ‘the local magician’. (I live in the same small village as him).

I would say exactly the same back to him: that he was the original, and that I and many others he knew and taught, are his apprentices. If we together can manage to fill even a fraction of his shoes with the work we take forward, perhaps we will have earned our animal stripes.