The Elven Spiritual Path

Unusual Beliefs
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Since people have been posting various religio-spiritual topics, I thought of this one. I do believe in a lot of this as from my studies it harmonizes Christianity, the Bible, and elements of the Celtic Faerie beliefs perfectly…

Thank you so much for visiting the home of Elven Spirituality! This is Tië eldaliéva, meaning the Elven Path, or the Path of the Star-people.
The co-founders came together online for the purpose of creating a spiritual path that is based on the Elven viewpoint put forth in Professor JRR Tolkien‘s Middle-Earth stories, collectively known as the “Legendarium” and include The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. However, most of the materials used for the creation and practice of the Elven Path are the posthumous publications, which would be considered the origins or the historical back-stories. These especially include The Silmarillion, the Lost Tales I and II, Unfinished Tales, and Morgoth’s Ring (Vol. X of the History of Middle-Earth, or HoME, series).
The reasons for doing so are varying due to the individual, but overall, there is a prevalent understanding that Tolkien’s stories, which he began writing in 1917, are a valid mytho-history and after applying this deep and touching material to our current spiritual understandings, it has been discovered the materials do indeed relay all one needs – and if there are outside ideas present already that help fill it in, so much the better.
This is not a Role-Playing Game (RPG), but a genuine spiritual practice that although best practiced as a standalone, it can enhance certain understandings of any and all spiritual backgrounds that is based on love, balance and the flow of nature.

How many here knew this spiritual path existed? I’ve known about it for about 12 years… I have spoken with Elves but have also found the Elves, Faeries, and the tall humanoid angelic aliens are all one in the same.

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I don’t mean for this to sound bad, but do you believe in “all possibilities” or should I say, everything you read? I mean basing a belief system off something from a fantasy series…

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fantasy can be a way for some to cope with lifes hardships

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I would be curious to know if a belief in things Faerie predates other more ingrained beliefs? But then again I believe unicorns once existed… :wink:

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Yes, actually, things faerie are very ancient beliefs, especially in Europe and Scandinavia

No, I do not believe everything I read. This is not just something I read, it was something I was deeply into at one time. I did some of my college essays and finals on Tolkien, Elves, faerie, the connection between the myth and reality…
I know people sometimes view Tolkien as just fantasy as in made up stories, but they are not if you study what he was doing.
First he was creating a mythology for the Celtic lands and specifically Britain.
Second, he was a philologist, studying ancient languages and finding the true historical meanings to those languages.
He was a visionary and kept having a recurring dream about Atlantis which he wrote into his books as the sinking of Numenor
He had other inspired portions of this writings, and much of the Silmarillion parallels the Bible,
So no, it is not just some fantasy series

Here is something that might help…

http://forum.westofwest.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=792

What is it about the Legendarium that causes you to view it as a valid mytho-history?

This we may answer, but first we must clarify what ‘myth’ means, as many people have misconceptions about it:

The term “myth” is often used colloquially to refer to a false story; however, in academic use the term generally does not refer to truth or falsity. In the field of folkloristics, a myth is conventionally defined as a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form (see the Introduction to Alan Dundes’ Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth). This is the definition that we use ourselves.

Given the academic definition, the Legendarium fulfills the “explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form” requirement very well. (For those not familiar with the source materials, one can read a brief summary of the legends here.) Some will object that the Legendarium is not a ‘sacred’ narrative, but the determination of sacredness is very much open to personal interpretation: to the atheist, all sanctity is delusion; to a Christian, the Holy Scriptures are sacred (but not the Qur’an); for us, the narratives comprising the Legendarium embody sacredness—as they did for Tolkien himself:

Quote:
You speak of ‘a sanity and sanctity’ in the Lord of the Rings. ‘which is a power in itself’. I was deeply moved. Nothing of the kind had been said to me before. But by a strange chance, just as I was beginning this letter, I had one from a man, who classified himself as ‘an unbeliever, or at best a man of belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling … but you’, he said, ‘create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp’. I can only answer: ‘Of his own sanity no man can securely judge. If sanctity inhabits his work or as a pervading light illumines it then it does not come from him but through him. And neither of you would perceive it in these terms unless it was with you also. Otherwise you would see and feel nothing, or (if some other spirit was present) you would be filled with contempt, nausea, hatred. “Leaves out of the elf-country, gah!” “Lembas – dust and ashes, we don’t eat that.”’

— From Letters, #328

OK, so I get the “mytho” and “sacred” parts of your worldview. But what do you mean by the “historic” part of “mytho-historic”? What is there in the Legendarium that relates to primary world history?

The tales include mythological descriptions of major Earth events, such as the emergence of lichens, fungi, mosses, and invertebrates; the appearance and spreading of conifers. The eternal reshaping of continental landmasses is expressed as the battle between the waters of Ulmo and the vulcanism of Melkor (all events described can be found in Lost Tales I, “The Chaining of Melko”, pgs 98-100). And even the very coastline of the First Age Middle-Earth continent Beleriand closely matches new information being discovered about the ancient shape of an inundated part of Europe called “Doggerland”. As one can see, there are indeed primary world historical parallels to the mythological events depicted, and I have listed just a few of many. Our worldview is no more “far-out” than other spiritualities and world religions, and deserves the same respect.

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Here is some more explanation…you really have to KNOW what the writer was doing rather than just reading the books or watching the movies and just thinking it’s a fantasy story…and this is something I studied extensively, especially when I was in college 10 years ago.

http://www.hatrack.com/svu/tolkien_lewis/Morgan_Rebecca.html

"Interrupted Music
The making of Tolkien’s Mythology
Motives: Why did Tolkien decide to write the Silmarillion in the first place?

Tolkien thought that England didn’t have a myth of its own. Beowulf, one of the myths associated with Briton, was a Danish myth, not native to English soil. Another mythology associated with England was the mater of Arthur. But although that had originated in England, the French had taken it and changed it almost beyond recognition. It also had Christian themes lacing through it, which he thought disqualified it as a mythology.

The Finnish had published the Kalevala by this time, which gave their land an identity. He wanted to give England a mythic culture equal to Greece or Scandinavia. But because of the way that England had settled, it was impossible for one to have grown naturally. So he decided to write one to dedicate to England.

Models: What did he model it after?

Tolkien had read the Kalevala, Beowulf, and the mater of Arthur. He wanted to create something that felt like it could have existed, such as these stories did.

Points of View: Who was telling the tales? What was their perspective?

Tolkien himself couldn’t really decide who was telling the tales. In 1956 Tolkien wrote to a reader:

I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real center of my story. It provides the theme of a War…but that is mainly a “setting” for characters to show themselves. The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race “doomed” not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete. (Interrupted 45)

But later around 1958 he wrote:

The mythology must actually be a “Mannish” affair…. What we have in the Silmarillion ect. are traditions…handed on by Men in Numenor and later in Middle-earth (Arnor and Gondor); but already far back-from the first association of the Dunedain and Elf-friends with the Eldar in Beleriand-blended and confused with their own Mannish myths and cosmic ideas. (Interrupted 47)

He even wrote a story that deals with the problem of whose perspective it really is. Athrabeth is a story in which an Elf and a Human discuss life and why humans die and Elves don’t. And what we learn from this tale is that the perspective that the myth is in depends on who is telling the tale. If an Elf is telling the tale, then the perspective is from the elfish perspective. If a human, it is from a human perspective

The tradition: What was the traditional form that myths came in?

Myths are oral tales that were written down. And therein lies a problem for Tolkien. He wanted to create a mythos that felt real, but because he was writing it down for the first time, he had a disadvantage that the creators of the mythos he was copying didn’t have. He needed to create stories about the oral traditions and about the older manuscripts that scribes had copied the stories down on to give it the same feel as the ones that he had read.

The artifice: How was he going to get it published, and get people to care about it?

The first idea he worked with was ‘Eriol the Mariner,’ who would journey to Numenor (or england) and write down the stories of an ancient race before they died. But Eriol turned into Aelfwine and Tolkien couldn’t think of a way to sell his framed mythos. So when C. S. Lewis proposed his sci-fi challenge, Tolkien was willing to take him up on it. C. S. Lewis was to write a space travel story, and Tolkien a time travel one.

Tolkien decided that the way to go was to have his time travel happen between Avatars, and he still was going to use the ‘Eriol the Mariner’ idea, but instead of having Numenor in England, he was going to move it to Atlantis, and have the drowning of Atlantis be the reason for the race dying. And to get the stories to the England of today, he decided to have the memories of the earlier race locked in the racial memories of Englishmen. The way he was going to unlock the memories was with cataclysmic events that occurred at the same time to both of the ‘avatars’ etc. (And the way he was going to get from a flat earth to a round one was the disappearance of Atlantis would cause the world to bend, except for one road that stayed straight.)

While in the midst of writing this story, his publisher requested a sequel to the Hobbit, and he never truly picked up where he had left off."

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Fairy magick? Or that? Really? You had to bring up someone’s dream world?

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The dream world part was only his dreams about Atlantis, which he believed came from ancestral memory, or racial memory as he called them.
He seriously wanted to give England a mythology, a lost mythology if you will, since he felt England had lost much of its mythology which is true if you look into history and see the suppression by the Church against the ancient legends and those who followed them.
So while the material he wrote is in the genre of fantasy it is not exactly fantasy, it is mythology. This basically means the stories symbolize historical events from creation, to the Gods and angels, demons and the dark lord, to the various peoples of earth. Each race depicted is representative of a real race or type of people on earth.
the Elves for instance are comparable to the faerie race, the Tuatha D’Anu of Ireland and Scotland, the people of the stars, magical, related to the firstborn of the Creator, and the Watchers He sent to earth, and that in time they would fade away, their influence would wane and the race of man (human) would dominate, but not entirely. While no full blood elves remained, there were people with Elven blood that carried on the elven line through men, such as Arwen and Aragorns son… On earth this is historically accurate as far as the bloodline & ancestry.

That people would follow a spiritual path based on the mythology written by Tolkien (mainly from the Silmarillion, not from LOTR or the Hobbit) is not unusual at all, considering that Tolkien drew from many real established spiritual and religious teachings to compile his works.