The following is my introduction to a new edition of Phantastes: A Faery Romance, by George MacDonald. This book, more than any other I’ve read, was absolutely the most influential — and transformative — work I’ve ever encountered. That’s because it functions not just as a fairy tale, but also as an esoteric ritual.
This edition is annotated by yours truly and will be released 13 January, 2026. It can be ordered here.
I need to tell you about Summer.
No, not those glorious, long, languid, and gold-tinged days of the year, but rather the strange woman — I’m sure she was a woman and not a faerie — who, singing, wandered into my fifth-floor apartment almost three decades ago.
I heard her song before I saw her. I don’t remember what she was singing, nor could I try to recount it. It didn’t really seem to have words, or, if there were words, they weren’t the kind of words that can be written out.
I was cooking something with curry — lentils, I believe — and she’d said the smell had drawn her. She wasn’t hungry, though, “just curious,” she’d said. She’d been looking for a friend, a specific friend, but it was not the correct apartment building. While others, upon discovering such a mistake, might have then left in search of the correct building, Summer followed the scent of Indian spices up five flights of stairs to a door (opened to allow for a cross current breeze) to see who was cooking.
Perhaps others might have been a bit disturbed by an unplanned and seemingly random visit, but I, not long into my twenty-first year of life, was still young enough to welcome chance meetings. Thus, I offered her food that she declined and tea that she did not.
Summer arrived again at my apartment a few days later, this time bearing a gift of a book. I looked at it curiously, noting that its title was one I’d added to a long list, taped to a wall, bearing the names of books — derived from references in other books — that I thought I should read one day.
“I saw your list,” she said by way of explanation. “I don’t know the others, but you should definitely read this one.”
I’m not sure precisely why nor when I’d added George MacDonald’s Phantastes to that list, nor do I remember any of the other titles I’d included. Likely, I — as many others — first heard about it by way of the medievalist C. S. Lewis, best known for his Christian allegorical children’s series that I, and I suspect many reading this, had devoured as a child.
Lewis, an atheist most of his life, credited his early reading of this book as the slow catalyst for his later conversion to Christianity. Of the process, he wrote, “It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new.” I could certainly say the same, though the country into which I’d been unconsciously smuggled by Summer’s strange gift was much older than the Christian lands in which Lewis found himself later in life.
That is, the same book made one man a Christian while making another a Pagan, and thus is its strange power: capable, through subtle magics, of waking you like its protagonist into a wholly different cosmos.
You’ll probably want to know a bit about its author; unfortunately, in seeking out this knowledge, you will mostly find only facts. He was a Scottish minister and a writer of sermons. Delve deeper, and some of the facts finally hint at something more: he resigned as a minister because his theology wasn’t Christian enough for his congregation. Read the sermons, then, and you quickly see the problem for them: MacDonald didn’t really believe in damnation or hell, and his ideas about sin and redemption wouldn’t pass any kind of doctrinal test.
Read Phantastes, and you’ll get an even better understanding of what he actually believed. For instance, from chapter twelve:
They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men, are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law. … No shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and green glory in a self-encircling twin-star, but has a relation with the hidden things of a man’s soul, and, it may be, with the secret history of his body as well. They are portions of the living house wherein he abides.
If this sounds a bit — well — occult to you, then you’ll likely be more forgiving of the next thing I’ll write than others might be: I consider this book one of the most important esoteric texts in the English language. To understand this, or at least to have a chance of not concluding I’m given too much to exaggeration, you’ll need to let me explain something about the Romantics. And anyway, no doubt some of you reading this are wondering what’s up with the book’s subtitle, “A Faerie Romance.”
In school, at best, we learn that the Romantics were part of a “movement” they founded, Romanticism. And we hear that they really liked emotions. Maybe if your school was a little better than mine, you might have learned also that they really liked Nature and didn’t like industrialization or capitalism. And if your school was extremely good (mine definitely wasn’t), you might have gotten to hear that it was a movement occurring in several places at once, especially in Germany and Great Britain.
What you almost definitely didn’t hear in school — and maybe never heard until now — was that the Romantics were all variously creating a framework for spirituality and magic outside of the Christian order. Sure, many of them were nominally Christians, and some were even theologians, but what was really guiding their work was an intuition that Nature was full of spirits trying to communicate with them.
This isn’t really a strange idea, and it’s most definitely not a new one. It’s how the ancient Greeks saw the world, and also the Romans, and all the pagan cultures of Europe before Christian conversion. And, actually, even most Christians through the middle part of the last millennium believed this, too, no matter how hard Catholic bishops and, later, Protestant ministers tried to get them to think otherwise. In other words, the Romantics weren’t coming up with some new religion, but rather clinging to the “old faith” in reaction — and resistance — to the disenchantment of the world.
This would have been obvious to many at the time because of the subtitle alone: Phantastes is a Romantic work. And even without that hint, the Romantic character of the book would have become quite obvious the moment a reader saw the names of the authors MacDonald quotes at the beginning of each chapter (the epigraphs). Poets and writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Goethe, and especially Novalis are all immediate signals of who MacDonald has read and wants you to keep in mind as you read.
Oh, hey. Let me stop here and tell you something. Don’t worry if you haven’t read those people, and don’t worry if you don’t even know who some of them are. I didn’t when I first read Phantastes. However, I’ve done some work to make this easier for you by putting more than a hundred footnotes throughout the text for context. Also, because the English language has changed a lot since George MacDonald wrote this book, some of those footnotes are there to help you with archaic words you may have never seen before.
Back to the matter of Romanticism, and also the occult or esoteric or mystical nature of this book: Phantastes can and should be read like a dream. What I mean is that there’s this part of your consciousness, or rather a place between consciousness and unconsciousness (call that the “soul” if helps), where everything you need to understand this book and to let its magic work is found. It’s kind of like imagination, but imagination you feel and sense, rather than just envision. Mystics call this the “imaginal,” and it’s where the door to the Otherworld, and Faerie, and all the other names its residents call it, is located.
I probably shouldn’t tell you more than this, but here’s some advice: read it before a nap on a day where the light is streaming golden through your windows, or before bed when you’re really comfortable and not going to be interrupted by thoughts of work. And don’t skip the poems and songs scattered throughout: we “moderns” aren’t so comfortable with rhymed poetry anymore (except rap, which is pretty much all we’ve got left of this ancient magic), but just try it anyway.
And a final word. Obviously, I have no say in how this book gets into your hands, but I hope especially that the way it arrives into yours is as strange and as magical as it was for me. In other words, I hope there’s a Summer for you, whether a person (I’m pretty sure she was a person …) or a strange circumstance that leads you to this gate. I guess, in a way, I’m trying to be your Summer, as Summer was mine. Regardless, oh, rising pathless one: a great good is coming to you. And so, fare well.
—Rhyd Wildermuth
I think I read it years ago; I feel a thrill of anticipation toward rediscovering a long-lost friend.
So glad you are doing this. I read the book just a couple of years back, checked out of the library, and am thrilled to be getting a copy from Sul with your intro and annotation.