film · 2021 · 4 min read

In the Earth

Name: In the Earth
Director: Ben Wheatley
Genre: Shamanism, Alchemy
Released: 2021

In the Earth Is About the Old God Under the Trees That Uses Science and Ritual As the Same Mouth

What does In the Earth really mean?

Ben Wheatley shot a folk-horror film during lockdown, in a real forest, with a small crew. What he caught in the trees is older than the pandemic frame around it.

Depth ScoreTeaching · 7/10The film itself is transmissionMore films at this depth →

How deep did this go for you?

In the Earth arrives disguised as a virus movie. A scientist, Martin, walks into the Arboreal Forest with a park scout, Alma, to reach a research station and a colleague, Olivia, who is studying the way trees communicate underground. The film seems to be about a plague and a hike. It is not. Deep in the wood there is a presence the locals call Parnag Fegg, an old spirit of the forest, and everyone who enters the trees is being drawn toward it by two methods that turn out to be one method. Olivia tries to reach it with equipment, frequencies, chemistry, lenses. A hermit named Zach tries to reach it with symbols, blood, a stone marked in ancient script. The film's revelation is that the scientist and the sorcerer are the same man wearing different tools, and the thing in the ground does not care which language you use to knock.

Shamanic Reading: The Forest Chooses Its Vessels and Cuts Them Open

Shamanic power is not chosen, it is inflicted. The spirit selects, and the selection is a wounding. In the Earth stages this literally. Zach captures Martin and Alma and photographs them in strange poses, and later mutilates Martin, hacking off his toes, because he believes the forest has told him this is required to make contact. This is the shamanic sickness rendered as horror: the initiate does not consent, the body is broken as part of the calling, and the one performing the mutilation believes he is a servant, not a butcher.

The film's most precise image is Zach's ritual photography. He is not documenting. He is trying to make the forest look back through the lens. When Olivia later uses her light rig and speaker stacks to trigger the same strobing, seizure-inducing communion in the final act, the two methods collapse into one overwhelming sensory storm. The forest answers both. That is the shamanic teaching stripped of comfort: the spirit world is real, it can be reached, and reaching it dissolves the reacher. Martin walks out of the trees at the end changed, unable to say what happened, carrying something he cannot name. He has been to the spirit and it kept part of him.

Alchemical Reading: The Great Work Performed by a Fungus

Alchemy insists that transformation happens through the union of opposites inside a sealed vessel, catalyzed by an agent that is itself part-mineral, part-living. In the Earth places that agent in the soil, in the mycelial network that Olivia is studying, the underground fungal web that binds the trees into one communicating body. The film proposes that this network is the philosopher's stone as an actual organism, a substance that thinks, connects, and transmutes the humans who enter its range.

Watch how the film uses spores and psychoactive contact. Martin steps on a growth and is poisoned, and from that infection his visions begin. This is calcinatio and the encounter with the mercurial spirit at once: the body broken down, the substance introduced, the consciousness altered by an agent that is neither pure matter nor pure mind. Zach's stone, the megalith carved with symbols, is the vessel marker, the point where the work is meant to occur. The forest is the athanor, the slow furnace. The strobing climax is the moment the opposites, science and ritual, human and fungus, fuse. Nobody controls the reaction. The vessel was never theirs.

Questions this film answers

What is the deeper meaning of In the Earth?

In the Earth arrives disguised as a virus movie. A scientist, Martin, walks into the Arboreal Forest with a park scout, Alma, to reach a research station and a colleague, Olivia, who is studying the way trees communicate underground. The film seems to be about a plague and a hike. It is not. Deep in the wood there is a presence the locals call Parnag Fegg, an old spirit of the forest, and everyone who enters the trees is being drawn toward it by two methods that turn out to be one method. Olivia tries to reach it with equipment, frequencies, chemistry, lenses. A hermit named Zach tries to reach it with symbols, blood, a stone marked in ancient script. The film's revelation is that the scientist and the sorcerer are the same man wearing different tools, and the thing in the ground does not care which language you use to knock.

What is the hidden symbolism in In the Earth?

What esoteric traditions appear in In the Earth?

In the Earth draws from Shamanism, Alchemy traditions. Ben Wheatley shot a folk-horror film during lockdown, in a real forest, with a small crew. What he caught in the trees is older than the pandemic frame around it.

Is In the Earth worth watching for spiritual seekers?

In the Earth (2021) directed by Ben Wheatley is essential viewing for those interested in Shamanism, Alchemy. In the Earth Is About the Old God Under the Trees That Uses Science and Ritual As the Same Mouth. It rewards multiple viewings and contemplation.

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