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Friends,
Depending on where you live, you might be well acquainted with the otherworld. Here in Ireland – especially rural Ireland – it’s known as the place where the fairies, Sidhe, the elemental beings live. But rather than being distinct from our world, it is a layer we live with. It is always among us, but not present in the way we understand the world of everyday life.

The beings there, the substance, is the constitutive forces that make up the world we live in. And our proximity to this world and its forces and powers and its substance – which is always present, always near – gives us strength. 

Here’s how novelist Arundhati Roy talks about an otherworld, but in a political sense –  “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”

But the otherworld is already here. Its always here. We don’t need to wait, we just need to follow that breathing, that hearing.

That said, most of only going looking for it out of urgent necessity. When we find ourselves in a world that has ground up our hopes and actions, that has undone or covered over the good works we’ve committed ourselves to, that has seized our conceptions of the world and darkened them…

Does that world sound all too familiar?

Well, perhaps it’s heartening, then, to read that most of us only encounter the Otherworld when this one becomes unbearable. When we have been defeated.

Take heart – in the defeat, the Otherworld comes closed. And in that closeness, new strength appears.

I’m so excited to welcome philosopher and author Federico Campagna back to the show! Together, we find the magic in defeat and the strength that it offers, using his new book, Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History as a springboard for our wide-ranging and empowering discussion.

Federico gives many potent examples of the hidden strength in defeat and the contact with that otherworld. Whether it’s through Egyptian gods or the writer Joseph Roth, esotericists or people who felt the mythic effects of being defeated by Alexander the Great. We witness again and again options that become available for seeing and creating new worlds only when – as Federico writes of the people in the book:

“Instead of clinging to the values of a vanishing world, or embracing the new rising power, they dared to migrate to the grand zero of the imagination where ideas and values can be extracted anew from the infinite virtuality of the possible.”

May this episode bring you strength and magic, even in the most unexpected of places and conditions!

MORE ON FEDERICO

Federico was on the show a few years ago – a conversation I loved so much that I reposted it as AEWCH 292. On that episode, we approach his other excellent works Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Realityand Prophetic Culture: Recreation For Adolescents.