William Blake – The Forest Dark

What is Folk Horror?

Folk Horror is a subgenre of horror—often literary or cinematic—that draws on rural settings, archaic beliefs, rituals, and pagan traditions. It emphasizes the persistence of older, often pre-Christian ways of life that exist beneath or alongside modern civilization.

However, Folk Horror wouldn’t work if its stories didn’t feel familiar or ring true, if they were a mere invention of novelists and screenwriters. Folk horror is largely about something “ancient” that has survived: an ancient cult, an ancient force, or an ancient ritual. When movies or folk-horror-themed books were written, the writers could already rely on an existing foundation. Part of that foundation is landscape as a mysterious and living entity with magical forces.

Power Of Place

The power of place, which might not sound very credible in our rational, scientific world, is nevertheless a well-known, familiar concept. It works for the subgenre of folk horror as for its relatives, cosmic horror and forest horror. The idea that landscape is more than mere soil, more than hills and valleys, is a well-known concept.

In Folk Horror, the landscape itself is a living entity with intentions. It can change the mood of characters immediately. It can trigger fear, panic, dread, or even a deep sadness. In folk horror, the idea of psycho-geography is alive. It might be the mere shape of the landscape, but often mountains, forests, or a lake hold magical power. They are the seat of the elder gods or work as a storage where memories of battles and horrific events are stored. The power of place is responsible for mysterious disappearances or unusual crime rates.

Clues in Literature

Let’s start with the obvious. This influential book reads like a foundation for Folk Horror:

James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (first published in 1890, expanded through 1915) is a monumental work of comparative anthropology and mythology. It investigates ancient religious rituals, magic, fertility cults, and mythic archetypes—particularly focusing on the dying and reviving god.

And here is another one: The Witch-Cult in Western Europe is a 1921 anthropological book by Margaret Murray, published at the height of the success of Frazer’s Golden Bough.^[1] Certain university circles subsequently celebrated Margaret Murray as the expert on Western witchcraft, though her theories were widely discredited. Over the period 1929-1968, she wrote the “Witchcraft” article in successive editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Both books may have been outdated or, in some aspects, even refuted by modern science, but they are still an excellent reference for models and images that exist in the collective consciousness. They are part of our imagination.

Without these foundations, Folk Horror and often Forest Horror as well wouldn’t work. We accept the (weird) idea that the land is character and can even have its own intention, yes, that the forest itself can drive us into insanity because there is an existing framework. Underneath the bleak and technological surface of our modern world, magic and ancient belief systems have survived. These belief systems took on many shapes and were sometimes incorporated by modern religion, for example, Thanksgiving.

But it needs more than tradition or repeating patterns in movies and literature to do the trick – what happens in a movie like The Ritual must feel true, we must feel the ominous power of the land like in The Witch. One explanation is that our rational mind might deny the supernatural force of a landscape, but our instincts tell us another story. We don’t believe in the secret cult behind the mountains in the remote village, but we suspect it exists.

A famous case happened once on the Danish Island of Anholt when a few findings of ritualistic items led to the wildest speculations about a “satanic-cult“. Even murder was suspected. It was a professor of Folklore Studies from Regensburg, Bavaria, Christoph Daxelmueller, who shed light on an interesting phenomenon: There was never any convincing evidence for rituals or the existence of a cult on the island of Anholt. Instead, it was an existing construct in people’s minds that led to misleading conclusions. He assumes that magical thinking endured over the centuries and even the scientific revolution. As he said in his book “Aberglaube, Hexenzauber, Höllenängste”, “As a system of thought, magic draws on the idea of the sympathetic structures of the cosmos. The interweaving of macrocosm and microcosm enables a network of communication between humans and gods or demons, with magical rituals representing pictorial and symbolic acts for the mediumistic beings performing them” (translated). And this heritage played a pivotal role in the speculations about the ritualistic items found on Anhold.

Imagination Is Key

The heritage of magical thinking is essential for folk horror to be effective. But it is not just a cultural construct conveyed by books, stories, and films that matters. It is about what we feel about these stories. Even the rational mind remains skeptical; instinct often tells us a different story. And our imagination:

It is not necessary to play a true or not-true game, but folk horror stories and forest horror give us a glimpse of a deeper truth, of a hidden world behind our everyday reality where unseen forces shape destinies and form our lives in secret ways.

To create or properly understand this genre, we need to embrace the concept of imagination as William Blake did: a storehouse of images and collective memories, and a way to see the world with a deeper vision or double vision, as Blake said.

Folk horror motives feel familiar because we learned about them through cultural tradition, but also because they are part of our imagination, where archetypal images are stored like (sometimes) forgotten memories.

The Forest is a place, where the invisible world is close. It is a place for imagination. The Forest is more than the trees. It is the place for the visionary to see cosmic life.

One of the most extraordinary and influential artists and poets was William Blake. We can grasp the power of imagination through him and other writers of the beginning of romanticism. But there is more to it. Blake opposed the materialistic worldview and kept a much longer tradition alive—a tradition of seeing a deeper truth in the ordinary world.

However, there are a couple of points here, that make Blake particularly interesting:

William Blake – A Visionary in the era of enlightenment

Unlike some romanticists or modern esoterics, he is not out of touch with the ordinary world, he seeks the connection with the other world, the eternity in his words, and our oft bleak and dark everyday world.

Another remarkable thing about Blake is that he is a shamanic figure without the typical initiation as a turning point in his life. He seems to be aware of the other world from the very beginning.

Furthermore, his visions don’t seem mysterious or as hard to understand encounters with the unknown.

His Christian upbringing allowed him to shape his creative works inspired by visionary experiences in a unique cosmology that includes Christianity and elements from antiquity.

He is if we will a natural-born daimonic man, a person at home in both worlds. Unlike many people, Blake embraces the otherworld.

Blake seems, like Wordsworth, never has lost his childlike imagination. However, it is not imagination in the way we see it today, but a way of seeing. There is more than meets the eye:

Blake’s Double-Vision

“Blake distinguished between seeing with the eye and seeing through it. He insisted that his poems are not just figures of speech, but true accounts of the natural world transformed (invariably personified) by the power of the creative imagination”. (Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality, Page 90)

A famous Blake quote refers to the sun in the morning:

Do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a guinea?

Oh no, no, I see an Innumerable Company of The Heavenly Host….

(William Blake)

This is double-vision. Seeing the literal thing but this literal thing is like a symbol representing a larger reality, a deeper meaning. It might be difficult to understand for modern Westerners this idea. Blake was still with one foot in the older traditions of a more magical, spiritual worldview and with the other foot in the scientific worldview of the Enlightenment. He is famous for his criticism of the modern worldview labeled Newton’s Sleep.

Blake’s State Of Mind: Ulro, Generation, Beulah, Eternity

Therefore he developed a model, a system of different levels of vision or states of mind:

Four-fold Vision

Ulro = mostly presenting the single vision, a materialistic worldview, the world as data in modern terms

Generation = a view focused on production and reproduction without higher goals

Beulah = a more empathic worldview with the dark side of moralism

Eden or Eternity = which is also the four-fold vision. A coexistence with the divine, where the otherworld is seen too. The spiritual dimension becomes real and is seen as the normal material world.

Mark Vernon offers an excellent introduction to Blake’s system of the states of mind in The Four-Fold Imagination, What we can learn from William Blake’s visionary imagination.

Of course, this is not a view offered in everyday life, it is the goal of shamans, of meditation of a life-long quest. However, it is available for everyone who opens his eyes, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” Blake says. But we can learn to no longer see the world as the fool sees it.

It is books like Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur that offer a field guide to reconnecting with these deeper dimensions, to understand a four-fold vision.

One thing that we need to keep in mind is, that we don’t know if the higher realms are only the heavenly realm Blake envisions in some of his poetry. There are darker, dangerous realms out there, which Blake recognized too. This is the Forest Dark.

Visionary Experiences in The Forest Dark

Is it only that the daimonic world appears threatening because it is suppressed in our times? That would be the Freudian view, but if we look at the endless reports of visionary encounters a more complex image comes to light.

The Forest Dark. It’s no secret that many encounters with the unknown realms ended in a catastrophe. Fairies and aliens abduct people into their fairy realm. People go missing as the famous Referend Kirk who investigated the secret Commonwealth. People die or lose their wits. This is perhaps the most common danger of otherworldly encounters and visionary experiences They are not always a blessing. The trained mind who learned fourfold vision may be better prepared to handle mind-blowing visionary encounters. However often the Otherworld seems to choose the inexperienced wanderer in the darkest corner of the woods.

Blake and others recognized this special quality of the forest:

“Shelley, Keats, and Blake may have captured the wonders of nature but they were just as quick to recognize its destructive forces and temptations, horrors and alienation. A reaction to the Enlightenment Romantic writers went deep into the woods, as their ancestors had before them, to find, monsters and miracles.”

From: Lost in the Wildwood: Sylvan Dread In Weird Fiction

A forest is a place where certain energies appear to gather, a borderland inviting daimonic creatures and a portal to the higher dimensions. In the outstanding anthology there are more good notes about the specific quality of the forest: “A living embodiment of our dreams and nightmares, the forest has played an ancient and vital role in shaping the human imagination and literature.”

It is in the forest where our ideas of existence are tested, where initiation and metamorphosis happen. A four-fold vision can happen here, perhaps more easily, but it can be unpredictable, as we can’t know which forces reside in the deep forests from the very beginning of time.

Tag: William Blake

Why do motives in Folk Horror feel familiar?