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Mystical Fantasy for Children: Silence and Community

To many adult Western readers, the word "mystical" suggests hermits, monks, the medieval cloister, the isolated inner experience of religious ecstasy and mystery, while the literary genre of "fantasy" implies knights, pilgrims, travel, supernatural trappings, and heroic activity. The tradition of mysticism is individual and inward; fantasy, communal and active. Mystical writing would therefore seem a contradictory concept, since the moment of mystical insight or religious ecstasy requires long silent preparation and resists linguistic description. Solitary, concentrated on the transcendent moment of spiritual fusion with the deity or the universe, the mystic also "loses" the self in wordless union with the Logos. As the anonymous author of one fourteenth-century English tract on con- templation states, "it is not permissible or possible to speak ... of what belongs solely to God. If I dared, I would not" (The Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 26, 87).' Despite the difficulties in doing so, mystics like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila do, of course, describe their expe- riences in words for others, although they continually call attention to the imperfection of those descriptions; as readers, we are forced to interpret their silences but will always feel shut out of full understanding and participation. Even in modernist works of secular mysticism, like Virginia Woolf 's or D. H. Lawrence's, the protagonists (for example, Mrs. Ram- say or Birkin) experience the tension between language and silence and do not succeed in communicating their mystical "moments" to their fellow charactersÂ—or sometimes even to us. Adult fantasy, particularly heroic fantasy, is perceived to be a much more expressive and public entity than mystical writing. Yet like the mystics in the religious tradition, its heroes customarily stand alone in the world.2 The knights of King Arthur's Round Table sit together at Pentecost and are united in their silent response to the appearance of the Sangreal, yet they set out alone on their quests. The desire for individual transcendence becomes a sign of the Round Table's dissolution as a social world; instead of drawing the knights together in a tighter bond of friend-