Other-worldly

Phillip Pullman (in His Dark Materials) has his protagonists Lyra and Will descend into the Land of the Dead. In the context of the novels, Pullman portrays this as neither a paradise nor a place of torment in the conventional sense, but a dull, emotionless, unmotivated existence of perpetual, joyless twilight, inhabited by the unquiet ghosts of the dead

Among other characters, they encounter the ghost of a monk, a devotee of the evil, religio-fascist 'Authority' that dominates the ecclesiastical and political life of the word that Lyra inhabits. Blinded to the reality of his situation by his dogmatism, the monk insists that the Land is the one of milk and honey that the Authority promised to its faithful acolytes. The story is a powerful parable against the danger of blind acquiescence - possibly the unforgivable sin, as far as Pullman is concerned

Some people would shoe-horn in a bitter reference to Brexit at this point. Of course I wouldn't stoop so low - but if you think Rees-Mogg could do a turn in the Christmas panto as the ghost of a dead monk, who am I to argue?

We have had a day of warm, foggy, humidity-drenched, perpetual gloom such as I cannot remember. I patrolled the garden like Pullman's monk, determined to find light in the darkness - or at least enough photons to register on a camera sensor 

Some people get hot under the collar about the symbol of temptation in the Garden of Eden being described as an 'apple', when the Christian bible refers only to the 'fruit of the tree of knowledge'. How many of them are aware that, in the past, 'apple' was a generic word meaning the fruit of any tree? Dogmatism has many forms