THIS is a story about remarkable things. Firstly, in glorious defiance of the recession, courses costing at least £265 per person have begun in West Dorset on the subject of the Mythic Imagination – things like daimons, fairylore, and the otherworld (“the neglected Western tradition of soul-making… described by Plato”). The first weekend course sold out.

The second remarkable thing is that this seemingly arcane tradition in fact links West Dorset to phenomena including the sex life of Sir Walter Ralegh, the birth of the British Empire and the Vietnam War…

Let’s start in Long Street, Cerne Abbas, with this former bakery, named Raleigh House in an anecdotal village guide put together by the Cerne Abbas Historical Society.

 “In the early 1600s,” the guide states, “Sir Walter Raleigh was summoned to Saint Mary’s parish church on a minor ecclesiastical offence. It has been told that before the meeting, the family invited Sir Raleigh [sic] to rest in their home from his journey to Cerne Abbas. Thus the name remains to celebrate their famous visitor.”

A nice enough English village story, but is it true?

Sir Walter Ralegh was a lusty man, nicknamed ‘Swisser Swatter’ after the cries supposedly moaned by a woman with whom he was heard vigorously swiving. Try saying ‘Sweet Sir Walter’ in a faster and faster rhythm and see what you end up with…      

Anyway, it was the carnal desires of Swisser Swatter that brought him down to Dorset in the 1590s. Ralegh had been a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, but in 1592 he secretly married one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour, who were meant to be virgins.

Ralegh and his wife were punished by two months imprisonment in the Tower of London, and on his release Ralegh was forbidden to attend the Royal Court.

He retired to Sherborne Castle in West Dorset, where such heretical and free-thinking conversations were rumoured to be held with his entourage that in 1594 allegations of atheism were formally investigated by the authorities in hearings at Cerne Abbas. Reports of Ralegh’s conversations – particularly one at Wolfeton Castle near Dorchester – had been scandalising Dorset. And scandalising is the word.

Atheism was then punishable by death.

For witnesses to suggest that Ralegh had been arguing about subjects such as “the beinge, or immortalitye of the soule” meant there was more at stake than “a minor ecclesiastical offence.”  

Ralegh got off, for various reasons. For a start, the people investigating him were mostly personal friends; one commissioner was even related to him.

Still, the affair left Ralegh even more restlessly discontented, and even more determined, as the writer John Shirley puts it, “to regain the affection of the Queen and the respect of his neighbours.”

So, he planned an expedition to Guiana, in search of the golden world of Eldorado, and in 1595 he sailed to South America (an adventure written vaingloriously up in The Discoverie of Guiana).

Ralegh’s voyage has been described by the historian Simon Schama as “the prototype of all imperial upstream epics”. It’s passed down through time into the imaginations of such figures as Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness), John Huston (The African Queen), Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Wrath of God), and Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now).

Ralegh’s journey was a kind of alchemical, occult Neo-platonist field-trip, undertaken partly under the guidance of the magus Dr John Dee, the first person in British history known to have used the term ‘British Empire’.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to think about this: one of the reasons the British Empire began was that Walter Ralegh was fed up of living in West Dorset.

Ralegh was enthused by and infused with the magical outlook of occult Neoplatonists, whose influence in Britain peaked in the late 16th century, and whose dominant idea was (to quote the historian Keith Thomas) that “by mystical regeneration it was possible for man to regain the domination over nature which he had lost at the Fall,” ie upon the expulsion from Paradise.

All this history has now been almost entirely forgotten, but it forms the Dorset background to a series of courses being held in the 16th century panelled Oak Room at the Fox and Hounds in Cattistock. Speakers include Patrick Harpur, who lives at Frampton between Maiden Newton and Dorchester, and is the author of The Philosopher’s Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (Penguin).

You can read more about the Mythic Imagination courses by clicking on this link.

Editor’s Note: I should add that I’m not involved with the courses, and as far as I’m aware they have almost nothing to do with the West Dorset background I’ve sketched out. I’ve written about it because I felt like it (!), and because I think it’s interesting. If any readers would like more details about some of the points I’ve raised (eg fuller references), then please send an email or leave a comment.

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