Lineage, Attention, and What Remains

Saturday, January 24, 2026. For My son, Daniel Gordon Hamilton (12/17/1973-3/16/2025) and Dr. Elizabeth Petroff, and her enormous influence on my early curiosities.

I was trained by a woman who took the divine seriously—and sentimentality not at all.

My first mentor, Dr. Elizabeth Petroff, was my Comparative Literature professor at UMass in 1972.

Among other things, she taught me how to speak with my personal angel.

She also taught me the history and use of tarot cards—not as fortune-telling, not as belief, but as a symbolic language meant to steady attention.

This is not an essay about belief.
It is about how attention is trained.

That distinction mattered to her.

Petroff was not interested in spiritual atmosphere. She cared about method—about whether a practice clarified perception or merely amplified feeling.

Tarot, in her hands, was not an authority. It was a tool.

One way—among many—of learning how the mind organizes meaning under pressure.

A grammar for pattern, tension, and choice. Something to think with, not something to submit to.

She taught me to begin with lineage.
With context.
With restraint.

Attention

Over time, I became a thoroughly science-based curmudgeon with a persistent curiosity about the divine.

This was not a rebellion against rationality.
It followed from it.

When attention is taken seriously—when it is given, not performed—it eventually brings you to questions that measurement alone cannot resolve, but cannot dismiss either.

That is usually where mysticism enters.

Not as transcendence.
More often as residue.

Language

Julian of Norwich understood this.

She began her writings with an apology—not for speaking, but for the limits of speech itself. What she received, she said, came in several forms at once: through the body, through understanding, and through something she could only call spiritual sight.

She warned her reader that she would not translate it cleanly.

Not because it was unclear.
But because some kinds of knowing resist transcription.

That caution feels less like humility than care.

When Mysticism Appears

Mysticism is not a personality trait or a lifestyle orientation.

It tends to surface when inherited frameworks—religious, cultural, psychological—no longer hold experience comfortably. When belief remains intact, but meaning slips. When life functions, but recognition thins.

That is why mystical language clusters around periods of disruption.

The High Middle Ages were not calm. Social orders were shifting. Economies were reorganizing. Cities expanded faster than moral categories could adjust. Mysticism was not a retreat from that instability. It was one way people learned to think inside it.

Why Women Spoke

Women became some of mysticism’s most visible voices.

Not because medieval society privileged them—it did not—but because fewer sanctioned paths were available to them. Mystical speech became one of the only forms of public authority that did not require permission.

They did not speak as innovators.
They spoke as witnesses.

Hildegard. Hadewijch. Mechthild. Angela. Julian.

They were not withdrawn from responsibility. They were embedded in it—advising, healing, administering communities. Many did not come into visibility until midlife, after long periods of domestic and interior labor.

Mysticism did not remove them from obligation.
It intensified it.

What Remains

This distinction still matters.

Mysticism is not about elevation.
It is about answerability.

Tarot, angels, astrology, visions—these are not destinations. They are interfaces. What matters is whether an encounter sharpens discernment or softens it; whether it enlarges responsibility or deflects it.

The medieval women understood this. Petroff insisted on it. Much contemporary spiritual language quietly avoids it.

Love, in these accounts, is not ornamental. It reorganizes perception. It moves outward. It circulates—not because someone seeks authority, but because the experience itself will not stay contained.

Inheritance

We are again living through rapid change.

Economic uncertainty.
Cultural fragmentation.
Nervous systems stretched by constant interpretation.

It is not surprising that interest in mysticism returns at such moments—not as superstition, but as another way of knowing.

The mystics do not promise escape.
They offer orientation.

My son often urged me to consider this in all my hard-nosed musings. He suggested that meaning is received, not manufactured. That guidance is often quiet. And that a human mind, trained with patience, can still remain intact while attending to something larger than itself.

He was relentlessly drawn to this idea. He reminded me of it more than once.

That, finally, may be my inheritance.

Not visions.
Not language.
But the capacity to listen—without inflation, and without betrayal.

And if that still works, it just might be good enough.

Be Well. Stay Kind. And Godspeed.