Magic Theater of the Soul

Magic Theater of the Soul

Golf as a conscious exercise can reveal the sublime — and the demonic.

by Michael Murphy

The soul isn’t what it used to be. Instead of that immeasurable, mysterious presence Indians and Greeks have celebrated in their Upanishads and Platonic dialogues, into which the physical universe has been “cast like a net in the sea,” a “soul” is now commonly thought to be either a superstitious projection or an entity we believe in but hardly know.  The numinous powers and majestic vistas of soul described by the mystics of antiquity have faded from public view. 

And yet, for many of us, there are moments in which something immense, disturbing, and yet strangely familiar, something that fits ancient descriptions of the soul, breaks into our consciousness. All of us have been touched in this way, in dreams and reveries perhaps, in sadness or exaltation, or by omens and synchronicities that call us away from our deadening certainties.  This can happen when we least expect it, in any activity it seems, whether trivial or consequential--and yes, even in golf.

If this connection between golf and the human soul seems implausible, it is doubtful that you’ve played the game in the spirit of its greatest connoisseurs, through which you would comprehend this saying of its Scottish inventors: “The game was invented a billion years—don’t you remember?”

I invoke that Celtic rune to suggest the soul-making power golf offers us, some of which I discovered by accident after writing a book about a golf professional named Shivas Irons. Although the book, Golf in the Kingdom, was based upon my own sense of the game’s further mysteries, I had no idea when I wrote it that so many others had seen a phantom, felt a presence, or experienced raptures on a golf course. After it was published, in 1972, more and more people wrote to say that golf had made the world a stranger and more beautiful place.  As one of them put it, “...in the late afternoon light, the greens and fairways were suspended, and I seemed to be walking on air. Was this the eighteenth hole we had played these many years? Was matter a secret form of spirit?” Statements like that from people completely unschooled in mysticism have convinced me that golf often stretches the senses in uncanny ways, opens the heart, and enlarges the mind.  Today, 37 years after my book’s appearance, such accounts have persuaded me that golf sometimes becomes a magic theater of the soul.  “Golf is of games the least earthbound,” said John Updike, “the one wherein the walls between us and the supernatural are rubbed thinnest.