9.Conclusion: Mind as Mirror and as Lamp

It would appear that the responses to these questions as to the significance and source of these ideas can only at be tentative.

The pull that these landscapes exert upon the imagination, as demonstrated by the veneration they have inspired over the centuries, would seem to be transmuted by the distinctive creative abilities of each of these women, to emerge in terms of their own unique responses to the encounter. A complex relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity might seem to play itself out here. The primary creative impulse that motivates Wenger might be the numinous character of the Oshun forest but in becoming sensitive to this would she not have been influenced by the attitudes of the natives to that environment or did she arrive already primed to the divination of such presences in nature? Her descriptions of her responses as related to an aesthetic base and as manifested in a continuous effort to shape her perceptions into artistic form suggest that her encounter with the forest is best perceived as a dialectical process of immersion and conceptualization in which the encounter is consistently shaped by both the landscape and her own predispositions. Even if Maltwood was inspired by supposedly objective links between Arthurian narrative and the Glastonbury landscape, what inspired not only the tracing of the knights routes but the construction of astrological forms which suggest a symbolic rite of passage linked with larger than human realities, if not a mind already attuned to interpreting reality according to such forms?14

In sum, we would seem to have here an illustration of the complementary significance of what Abrams presents as antithetical metaphors of creativity in the images of the mirror and the lamp. When the mind is depicted as a mirror in relation to nature from which it derives inspiration, it is described as reflecting the natural cosmos, even if this reflection is transmuted through the shaping forms of art. In the portrayal of the creative mind as a lamp, it is represented as illuminating nature with the rays of its own internal light15. An integrative understanding of the creative process as operating in terms of a dialectical movement between both modes of response and cognition might seem closer to the actuality of creative experience as represented here by the creative activity of Susan Wenger and Karen Maltwood.

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14 Even if the numinous is perceived as impinging on consciousness at a particular location, traditional images associated with specific sites, or with spirituality in general, would seem to be crucial in reifying the impressions received at such locations.

15 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford