In her Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters, Mary-Jane Rubenstein notes that “‘pantheism’ is primarily a polemical term, used most often to dismiss or even ridicule a position one determines to be distasteful” (Columbia University Press, 2018). Pan, the goat-God of nature, morphs into various targets for philosophical and theological projects. As such, ‘pantheism’, while frequently referring to a collapsing or identification of God and World, is a protean term, with various heresies, enemies, and monstrosities imagined.
While theologians deployed this nebulous concept as a bogeyman to haunt their theological projects in service of a kind of masculine transcendence, 19th and early 20th century horror writers actively played with the fear of pantheism in various ways to bring about new perspectives on life and meaning. Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951), English broadcaster and author, is being rediscovered as one of the great “weird fiction” and ecogothic horror story writers of the time. In his 1912 collection, Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories, Blackwood explicitly invokes the fear of pantheism as a driver for his collection of stories, with many of them. His writing is complicated for its depictions of human beings, colonial histories, ghosts, plants, ecological mysticism and morality.
One of the most important short stories of Pan’s Garden is indisputably “The Man Whom the Trees Loved.” There, a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bittacy, fall under the sway of a forest. Mr. Bittacy, falls under the influence of a painter who paints trees, who “had of making a tree look almost like a being—alive. It approached the uncanny.” Mr. Bittacy begins to practice what only can be described as a kind of attentive, vegetal or arboreal mysticism, paying greater and greater attention to the diversity of trees in the near forest that then call to him. They long for him to join them. He doesn’t simply fall in love with the idea of the trees, the trees call and love him, instead, making the ecological world’s agency one of seduction. He slowly disappears into their mystical groves, and Mrs. Bittacy breaks down hearing the remnants of his voice with the sounds of the trees in the wind.
Gendered and colonial dimensions in the story need deconstruction, but they themselves play into an interrogation of anthropocentric Christianity. In a striking early discussion, the painter and the Bittacy couple talk about how little one knows about the world. The painter notes, provoking a critique of anthropocentrism and the organic/inorganic nature of life, “’It's rather a comforting thought,’ he said, throwing the match out of the window, ‘that life is about us everywhere, and that there is really no dividing line between what we call organic and inorganic.’” They go on to, remarkably, note how no one has proven plants unconscious beings. Mrs. Bittacy, in piety, reacts to this negatively, reasserting the doctrine of the Christian Imago Dei, “It's only man that was made after His image, not shrubberies and things…." Mr. Bittacy tries to reassure Mrs. Bittacy at this point, “We are not pantheists for all that!”, even as it is he who will enter into a kind of disappearing communion with the forest.
Plant Studies and Folk Horror scholar Dawn Keetley has identified in Blackwood’s story what she calls “tentacular ecohorror,” where “the terrifying encounter with a nonhuman nature that reaches out to entangle the human.” The forest’s radical otherness to human life serves as a kind of strange threat, where nonhuman agencies and entanglements challenge forms of anthropocentrism taken too easily for granted. As she notes, “The narrative moment of tentacular enwrapping dramatizes an existentially terrifying destruction not only of the protagonists themselves but also, more generally, of human ways of being and knowing.” (Fear and Nature, Penn State Press, 2021).
This paper, then, seeks to critically weave three discourses together: Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s interrogation of deployments of pantheistic monsters, critical plant studies through Dawn Keetley’s “tentacular ecohorror” alongside recent discussions of plant consciousness (Zoe Schlanger), and the weird fiction of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” to think through how plant horror might also reveal some contours of a vegetal mysticism needed to take plants seriosuly the present. And it will ask if such an immanent plant mysticism might help to reclaim a more complicated view of pantheism (e.g., Roland Faber’s ‘transpantheism’), panpsychism (e.g., David Skrbina), or new materialism (e.g., Jane Bennett) in turn.
Rubenstein argues that, “The most threatening, and therefore most promising, pantheism would therefore not be the ‘all is one’ variety, but rather the mixed-up, chimeric kind, whose theos is neither self-identical nor absolute, but a mobile and multiply-located concatenation of pan-species intracarnation” (190). In his depiction of the trees, the tentacular horror of their agency, and their ability to invite assemblage, then, this paper sees theopoetical promise in the indeterminacy of Algernon Blackwood’s forest.
This paper seeks to critically weave three discourses together: Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s interrogation of deployments of pantheistic monsters, critical plant studies through Dawn Keetley’s “tentacular ecohorror” alongside recent discussions of plant consciousness (Zoe Schlanger), and the weird fiction of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” to think through how plant horror might also reveal some contours of a vegetal mysticism needed to take plants seriosuly the present. And it will ask if such an immanent plant mysticism might help to reclaim a more complicated view of pantheism (e.g., Roland Faber’s ‘transpantheism’), panpsychism (e.g., David Skrbina), or new materialism (e.g., Jane Bennett) in turn.