Return of the Hidden Worlds

Set in a fantasized future not far away...

This is an essay I wrote for a graduate seminar in “Ecological Affect” taught by Naomi Klein. The task was to first eulogize something under imminent threat within climate crisis, and then imagine how it is saved.

Of course, I chose to write about elves…

Excerpts are now featured in the Future Ecologies Podcast

Please keep in mind that this is a work of academic fiction.

Part 1: a Eulogy for Elves

The world was once an enchanted place. Humans coexisted with various “hidden beings” - elves, trolls, fairies and more - inhabiting dimensions alongside ours. Every culture has its stories; there were the huldufólk of Icelandic lava fields; the aos sí of ancient Ireland; patupaiarehe of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s misty forests; Hawaiian menehune in hidden valleys; Cree memegwesi between rapids and rocks; shape-shifting Arabic jinn. All were liminal, humanoid mediators of our relations in the more-than-human world. In our interactions with the land and its creatures, we had to consider and respect the beings of the hidden worlds, or else suffer their punishment, or loss. Icelanders considered huldufólk inhabitants before detonating large stones to build roads; Hawaiians thought of the menehune that might seek revenge should they kill birds too fast to harvest feathers; and Irish farmers appeased the aos sí who in turn ensured the health of their crops. In the world shared with those hidden, there could be no “natural resource.”

Not long ago, these stories were often accompanied by firsthand memorates of grandparents, neighbors, and friends who really saw, heard or felt them. Now, though, such beings belong only in childhood. As Peter Pan urged, we keep fairies alive in the irrevocable Neverland of childhood by chanting “I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!” (Barrie 1911). While children may “see” or believe in them, beings like fairies “vanish instantly at the sound of an adult voice” (Magliocco 2019: 115). And who are the “adults” of modernity, arbitting existence such that fairies don’t?

In an age where “seeing is believing,” “the unseen” by definition can’t be believed, much less known. Now we have what science proves. Charles Eisenstein writes that “so deeply embedded it is in our understanding of what is real and how the world works,” that “science in our culture is more than a system of knowledge production or a method of inquiry.” Moreover, “when someone demands we be realistic, often they are referring either to money, or to scientifically verifiable fact” (Eisenstein 2018). This connection between money and science within the bounds of reality is not accidental. Actually, the world as we’ve “known” it rests on a configuration for reality, and corresponding science, that serves the interest of capital. Anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin explores how with “the first conceptualization of the market economy in the seventeenth century,” “the disentanglement of the individual from a web of community and spiritual obligations gave rise to the individual subject acting on the basis of his perceived self-interest,” producing concomitantly “the individual subject” and land as “economic resource” (Apffel-Marglin 2012: 36). In turn, this separation could only be enabled by the Cartesian split between “the thinking mind, which had a soul, from mechanistic soulless matter” (Greenwood 2020: 136). 

These separations maintain and have been maintained by the entire knowledge paradigm of modernity, wherein “to know is to objectify by distinguishing between what is intrinsic to the object and what instead belongs to the knowing subject,” such that “the subject constitutes or recognizes itself in the object it produces, and knows itself objectively when it succeeds in seeing itself ‘from the outside’” (Viveiros de Castro 2014: 60). Hidden worlds have failed objectification, and so can exist within our imaginations, or “thinking minds,” but nowhere else. Folklorists can therefore ask, smiling snidely with the authority their academic positions afford them: if these beings really exist, where is the evidence? Without evidence, they aren’t real.

In the interest of capital, the “objectivist paradigm” (Bird-David 1999: 77) for knowledge was exported around the globe colonially. Colonialism relied on the idea of “terra nullius,” “rendering empty the places it occupies and making absent the worlds that make those places” (De la Cadena and Blaser 2018: 3). Early anthropologists set off around the globe as part of the colonial project. Armed with a social “science” that could study the “primitive,” their work functioned to wrangle “others” into a system of rationalization, or social analysis, that could make them legible within our bounds for truth. Their “social science” was “science” in philosopher Isabelle Stengers’ sense when she writes, “Science, when taken in the singular and with a big S, may indeed be described as a general conquest bent on translating everything that exists into objective, rational knowledge. In the name of Science, a judgment has been passed on the heads of other peoples” (Stengers 2012). In this fashion, in the mid-nineteenth century anthropologist E.B. Tylor “posited a developmental hierarchy of world cultures from the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ to the ‘barbarian’, and finally to ‘civilisation’, the apotheosis of which resembled Victorian England” (Magliocco 2019). Animism and science occupied opposite ends of this spectrum, with animism belonging to the “primitive” and science to its matured, adult form: “civilization.” In this “developmental hierarchy,” animism and its “hidden worlds” belonged to children, primitives, and our own distant pasts.

Though later anthropologists would publicly condemn such a “hierarchy,” they would nevertheless uphold it. In other words, “animism” could still be explained away by science and “social science.” As Bruno Latour writes, with “the power of science on their side,” social scientists could “replace” such phenomena as “religion, popular culture, mythical cosmologies, markets, corporations” - and indeed, elves and fairies - with “the harder stuff of some hidden social aggregates as well as their powers, structures and inertia” (Latour 2005: 97). Nothing could escape such rationalization, least of all the fairies. If even unitary experience - the ecstatic experience of oneness reported in almost all religions - could be demysticized by brain scans, seeing elves or menehune was certainly a product of the complex neurology of imagination, or “social aggregates.” Such analysis has served the colonial and neocolonial project well, as “in order for colonialism to operationalize itself, it must attempt to make Indigenous peoples stand in disbelief of themselves”  (Watts 2013: 32). Our knowledge paradigm, and its imposition on the other, has ensured disbelief - or merely “belief”, never “knowledge” - for what doesn’t fit, like elves.

My old friend Birna asked me to pen this obituary for the hidden worlds. Regrettably, my voice doesn’t account for much. When I first met Birna, I was a young student idealistically trying to devote my career to making a difference in academia; I wanted to help make “real” the hidden worlds in service of a world into which many can fit, ecologically, culturally and otherwise. I joined with those who wished to resuscitate “animism” from the “primitive,” or else its rationalization in social and scientific analysis. However, the same attitude which allowed me to share realities with informants like Birna also made me the laughing stock of academia, so I can understand how informants like Birna have felt. I was “woowoo”; I was superstitious; I was spiritual and therefore untrustworthy in the pursuit of “knowledge”; possibly deranged by trauma, and still finding solace in unreality. To publish, I could never say what I really meant; I always had to voice myself to fit, rendering my real meanings lost. Needless to say, I haven’t made much of an impact on Western thought. I teach intro courses at a local community college, and otherwise waitress, tutor, and babysit.

Birna is 90, dying, and though she can’t speak for the subaltern or far flung corners of the earth, believes herself the last true “seer” of hidden worlds. Birna spent her childhood playing with elves, fairies, gnomes and huldufólk in a small green park beside her home in an Icelandic suburb. She’d tell me about the “many worlds of the stone,” how what to us was a boulder was also an “apartment complex” of hidden beings, each “apartment” overlapping each other in various dimensions in which various hidden beings dwelt. Many worlds could fit inside one stone. 

Birna co-authored books with elves, and acted as an intermediary between dimensions in official development projects, such as road construction. As late as the early 2000s, her psychic voice still held sway over the mapping of roads onto lava fields, so as to avoid elf inhabitations. However, Birna gradually noticed that at the same time that tourist infrastructure increasingly bent its way into the landscape, no longer asking permission from psychics or elves, the hidden worlds of Iceland were also increasingly transmuted to suit those foreigners, who exotified them as fanciful, delightful, “survivalist” in a Tylorian sense, but certainly not real. Eventually, she closed up shop on her “hidden world tours,” and retreated to the highlands, publicizing herself and the hidden no more. 

I met Birna on my first research trip to Iceland. A 20 year old student from New York, I was mystified by how a “modern,” “developed” European country could purportedly believe in elves. I came away with a few linked factors towards an answer: the “aliveness” of nature, the nearness of “the past,” the landscape cultured by stories other than capitalism, and a cosmopolitical attitude in which stories did not necessarily have to be “believed” to be real. 

As so many of my informants so patiently put it: “In Iceland we live so close to nature. And here, nature is alive. Because of this, the elves live here, and we can see and feel their energy.” Far, far away from the “objective world,” in Iceland with its howling wind, bubbling hot springs, flowing lava and northern lights, “the land was never an accumulation of inanimate matter… but a living entity by itself. Each feature of the landscape had a character of its own, revered or feared as the case might be, and such an attitude was not a far cry from the belief that it was actually alive, or, at the very least, full of life” (Hallmundsson 1987: 7). Icelanders expressed to me that this “aliveness” was the condition in which elves could live, or be believed in. 

Back then, the “ring road,” the only road circling the island and connecting the country, had just been completed in 1980. And though one third of the population lived in urban Reykjavik, most grandparents came from faraway worlds. Icelanders had lived through something of a time warp; they had all the trappings of any other wealthy Western state, but grandparents could still remember childhoods in turf houses (think hobbit homes) in the countryside, where at night, for lack of television or other forms of entertainment, storytellers would regale communities with tales of mysteries out there in the “alive” world. Just as storytellers, in these times, would traditionally bring their tales from farm to farm, grandparents brought their stories - and accompanying firsthand experiences - from the farms of the past to their descendents in the more and more urban present. On drives on Iceland’s new “ring road,” they’d point out specific stones, lava fields and mountains that they knew to be inhabited by “hidden worlds” to their grandchildren. 

But most of all, elves could exist in Iceland because they didn’t have to be believed in to be real. Informants would tell me in the same breath: “I don’t believe in elves,” and  also “but my sister sees elves, and I believe her. She’s not crazy or anything.” This was a cosmopolitical attitude before I’d ever come across the term, a world allowing for many worlds, whether “believed” or not.

When I came back from that first research trip, I landed in JFK and immediately sat in three hours of traffic. Everything was faster, cruder, and cluttered with litter. Capitalism inscribed the landscape, rather than elves. All around, I was told what to buy, how to spend, ways to use money. I viscerally felt my capacity for joy close in around me. 

I regret to report that the juxtaposition between landing in JFK and Keflavik is no longer so stark. Increasingly, Iceland is also cluttering with the architecture of capitalism. Birna tells me that what’s pivotal is the rapidly melting Snaefellsjokull glacier, once an “energy center” for the elves. It will be fully melted by 2050, and is already the build site of another luxury resort. 

Grandparents no longer grew up in turf houses; they are urbanites who’ve had their TVs, internet and smartphones to mediate their lands with stories of elsewhere. The popular TV show Game of Thrones shot scenes “north of the wall” in the Icelandic highlands, layering the landscape with new meanings, which tourists would flock to for photographs. Also layered are more highways, shopping malls, fast food chains, and the infrastructure for the new Dreki pipeline. Grandparents no longer point out the “hidden worlds” alongside the highways, now smothered with Wendy’s and Burger King. Even if they did, their grandchildren’s attention is algorithmically stripped by surveillance capitalism, sucked down into smartphones which also mediate the landscape. What interest may be left for the old stories in the passing landscape does not extend to consider anything capitalism doesn’t deem “real.” 

It’s not too different where I live now, in Kaua’i, where those who tell of the menehune are squeezed out by the billionaires who chide to “be more aloha!” Kanaka Maoli, the people of the land, find themselves squashed into affordable housing complexes as the ultra-rich have bought up most of their land, and spend most of their time working multiple jobs to accommodate this world order. In other words, time and space is hardly left for their rites of communion with the island’s spirits. And perhaps nowhere is Science’s ascent more apparent than in the recently completed 3MT telescope that sits on top of Mauna Kea - sacred mountain - despite decades of Indigenous protest. What was a feat for the “global scientific community” was a crushing blow for the sacred, the animate, the particular worldings of “the primitive.” 

I’m afraid my obituary only repeats a long-told story. As one elderly Icelander summarized back on my first research trip, “the elves leave with electricity.” Yes. The same knowledge paradigm that drills for energy to light up the earth - “Enlightenment” - is also that which has driven out the hidden worlds. Literature has tracked this since the romantic period, that first movement to lament modernity and turn to “nature” with nostalgia. In a journey curiously like my own, the fairies of Andrew Lang and May Kendall’s That Very Mab (1885):

flee to Polynesia, where they interbreed with local fairy folk. But the arrival of the missionaries forces them to relocate again, and they return to England, only to find it a very different place from the one they left. The spoils of industrial capitalism have left their mark, leading to disbelief and environmental pollution… In the end, Queen Mab leads the fae to depart once again… in hopes of finding an environment that has not been wrecked by industry, rationalism, and capitalism.

(Magliocco 2019)

Environmental pollution; industry, rationalism and capitalism. We find ourselves alone in a human world. Anthropologist Eduardo Kohn argues that “the Anthropocene” is an “actualization” of the bounded symbolic systems that separate the “human” and impose it over “nature.” As David Abram writes, “Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and our own human-made technologies” (Abram 2017); or as Gary Snyder puts it, in our separation, exiled from the “world behind the world we see that is the same world but more open, more transparent, without blocks,” we’ve learned instead “a lot of little stuff” (Snyder 2004: 176). Capitalism must cover everything, and so the elves retreat. 

Part 2: How we Saved our Hidden Worlds

For my retirement address at the Center for Cosmopolitical Collaboration and Research, I’ve been asked to dig up this old obituary from back when nobody read my work, and explain how we brought back the “hidden.” Regrettably, we learned the hard way that one worldview, one sociocultural context, one “reality,” was never meant to overtake and strangle the whole planet. Just as a monocrop perishes while biodiversity flourishes, a system and corresponding “reality” so totalizing and invasive as capitalism’s could not allow human survival. In our delusions of separation, superiority and corresponding objectivity, spread so aggressively across the planet, we very nearly went extinct. 

In looking at how the “hidden” returned from the banishment of “unreality,”