Early Summer: Urban Druidry…

The chill left the still air.
The land was caught between breaths.
Unseen, laughing hands took mine
and led me down,
down through lonely alleyways,
past the graveyard overgrown with hawthorn and forget-me-nots,
between the narrow, tumbledown gate-posts,
and out into a sudden shock of green,
where a yellow carpet fell among the young oaks
and butterflies and dragonflies remembered distant sunny afternoons.

From the top of the world I stood above the sparkling city
while it whispered to me old, old secrets.

But I know there are no green places left in London,
no meadows not lost to departed faery feet.
So it must have been an Otherworldly hill they took me to,
another city, just out of mundane sight
that I looked down upon.

Grey Skies, Galoshes and Greed: the (Druid?) Ethics of Weather Magic

It seems to me (and this is just my interpretation) that there are two types of modern druid magic. In one, the focus is on the images of ancient druids controlling the forces of nature. In another, there’s a trend of seeking oneness and harmony with the environment, an approach where the magic is more about understanding our place within the land and the delicate balance of its forces, than attempting to impose our will onto it.

I won’t say I’ve never done the former, the kind of magic that imposes my will on the world/the land, rather than seeking union with it. But not when it comes to weather or the ecosystem.

What I do do a lot of, is calling on deities for help with weather. I assume that they, like land spirits, have a much better understanding of my ecosystem and its needs than I ever could. This tends to lead to much hilarity from SJ, who’s always saying “Ask a god to move this storm” (generally when we’re trying to drive through it) and I call on Manannan, who makes the most sense. (Or, when I’m desperate, Bhearra the goddess of the wild land and its wilder weather.) “He’s a rain god!” SJ argues with me. “Find a sun god.” And then I point out that, in the British isles, we were always guaranteed to have more in the way of thunder and storm deities than, say, gods of clear sunny days. From Taranis to Thunor to the many river goddesses, we are surrounded by water, and any gods who embody our land will probably be a bit… drippy. We do have sun deities, but, like Sulis, they also have springs and underworld associations and lots of other watery goodness.

And why not? Why wouldn’t I, like them, want to revel in the incredible beauty of the surprising, never-static weather of this land? I’m not one of these people who says “Ugh, raining again.” The weather is incredibly fickle here (raining? wait an hour – it probably won’t be). SJ has this strange, optimistic belief that every storm comes with a rainbow (no, they’re not being trite – they really think so and apparently can argue it with bad science) – so our life is full of “Quick, find the rainbow!” moments. There’s the wonderful excitement of suddenly going from a wet day to a sunny one, or of the mists that come down so fast you can wander into the Otherworld in them, and which lift again just as quickly, so that it looks you really did pass into another land. Is there anything more beautiful? Would I really want to impose my socially-constructed, limited idea of ‘a good day’ onto that?

The recent storms and months of flooding around here were very scary, specifically because they were different patterns from usual. The weather didn’t change. It just rained, for months. Towns flooded, people lost their homes and died. The rivers Soar and Avon, and my beautiful Trisantona, the Trent, are still trespassing into the fields around their boundaries. While the evidence is still being collected, the Met Office is putting recent weather down to climate change.

And that’s what happens with people mess with the weather. Build more factories and power stations? Be aware that you’re going to pump crap into the sky and the rivers. Drive more cars? Be aware that you’re contributing to the global rise in carbon dioxide that contributes to ‘global warming’. Do weather magic? Be aware that there’s a good chance you’re going to shift patterns that are really important to the local ecosystem. Or worsen patterns that are already screwed-up because of pre-existing environmental damage, like at the moment. If you can deal with that, fine. I don’t think my ethics can extend to that level – not with my very human perspective on the landscape. In tandem with deities who understand weather patterns better than I do, maybe.

But wouldn’t it be even better for me to keep trying to live in harmony with the weird, surprising beauty of the climate of my islands, that have given rise to myth and folklore and the best ghost stories? And am I not more likely to hear the land spirits that way, and be in the right mindset to form alliances with them that transcend the temporary annoyance of a little bit of rain? Yes, sometimes the weather can make me really ill – arthritis doesn’t like the damp, and I do much better in the summer than in the winter. But these are the patterns of life. What else would I miss if I gave them up?

I have a very clear memory of a school assembly – a Christian one – led by my lovely primary school teacher Mrs B (who always seemed, to 6-year-old me, to be aged about 100). She was talking to us about an upcoming school trip. She said that we could pray for good weather, but we had to leave it in the hands of God, and remember that while we’re praying for sun, the farmer down the road might be praying for rain. And that, since we and the farmer couldn’t both get what we wanted, we had to be prepared for bad weather and a cancelled trip. We can’t be greedy for the weather we want, she said. We’re not the only people who want things.

It’s still the best lesson I’ve ever had on the subject. Thanks, Mrs B, for your excellent druid weather magic ethics!

Are We There Yet? Assessing the Road Ahead

This is my first post for the Cauldron Blog Project, for which the topic is ‘Resolutions, Habits and New Beginnings.’ It’s also my first ‘A’ post for the Pagan Blog Project 2014. (Yes, I’m doing that again! I might not manage two posts per letter, especially since I’m doing two blog projects at once, but we’ll see…)
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I’m very good at saying ‘It’s about the journey, not the destination’. In reality, I’m impatient. I want to get somewhere. I sometimes forget to stop, take stock, and remember that I always am somewhere.

Whose work?

I have a compulsion to seek justice and equality.

It’s not as noble as it sounds, believe me. I hate doing it. I’m about as lazy as a cat in the sunshine on a summer afternoon. I’m a complete coward – I avoid conflict as much as I can. I’d rather not have the discussions that I have to have, to try and persuade people what equality means and why it’s important. Mostly, I’d rather pull the bedcovers over my head and ignore the world. But still, I fight.

T is for… Tombs

I love ancient tombs. Passage tombs, wedge tombs, long barrows, dolmens… I find them all fascinating.

The entrance to…

…a passage tomb, Anglesey, Wales

Wayland’s Smithy, Oxfordshire, England

It’s usually quite a challenge for me to get to ancient sites. At Wayland’s Smithy, the road ends about a mile before the site, so we dragged my wheelchair down a dirt track. (Which turned out to be rather a lot of fun!)

M is for… Mighty Monster Trees (and Massive Mountains and Moo-ing Mascots)

“Why, who are you afraid of?” said Peter. “There’s no one here but ourselves.”
“There are the trees,” said the Beaver. “They’re always listening.”

– The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

That’s me, towards the bottom left of that picture, standing beneath a California redwood. You can tell by how it’s, um, quite big.

Our second week on the road and our second day in the Redwoods, and I decide I want to take a short walk among the trees on my own. We parked the RV on the side of the not-inappropriately-named Avenue of the Giants, and I was directed towards the map. “OK,” said SJ (who is used to that thing where I get lost). “Do you see this path here?” I did. “And do you see how it leads onto this larger loop with the interpretive trail*?” I did. I could even see how to get from one to the other and back again. And just to make really sure, I took a picture of the map on my phone camera. Easy peasy.

So off I set, an intrepid explorer with two sticks and a bit of a walking distance limit. And at first, all was well. I found the trail (where the signs shared helpful facts about how old, tall and weird each redwood was). I looked at some trees. I stood inside a few others.

At which point I realised some things. One, that I’ve never stood inside a tree before. Two, that I’ve definitely never stood instead a tree that bloody huge before. And three, that these trees were monsters. And I don’t just mean in the 300-foot-tall, 2000-year-old sense. There was something incredibly primal and alien about them. Reaching out to them was like opening myself up to a vortex that I could have lost myself in forever. I stopped, but I still felt very much like they wanted to eat me. Spider-and-fly stuff – if the spider was several thousand times bigger and vastly older than the fly. Come into my parlour…

It was at that point that I realised I was horribly lost.  I had reached the place where I thought I had entered the trail from, but all I could see was thick, brambly undergrowth. There was no way of identifying the little path that led back to the van. I walked around and around the trail, much further than I’m meant to walk (I was in some serious pain afterwards!), all the while surrounded by those strange, seductive trees that wanted to swallow me whole. On getting back to the main car park for about the third time, I checked my little photo of the map and saw that I could get back to the van on the road. I started walking.

And here’s the really odd thing. All the while, I was only a couple of minutes’ walk from the van. From civilization. From the perception – the illusion – of safety.

We’re never all that far from the dangers that our ancestors lived with all the time. We’ve just shoved ourselves inside several tonnes of metal, bricked ourselves into boxes, buried ourselves in concrete. Safe as houses?

I did a lot of connecting, these past few weeks, with my goddess who stands between chaos and cosmos, between destruction and creation. In local folklore, she is said to have given the human race our powers of consciousness and thought – those egos that make us think we can separate ourselves off from the land around us, when we’re really just hiding under the covers from all the monsters under the bed. That line that Bhearra walks is liminal, shifting, illusory. We’re always just around the corner from chaos. That’s what I learned in the Redwood forest.

And now, some happy pictures of beautiful mountains, lakes and sea-shores. Which were all much less scary. (Apart from the plants that eat insects – those were also fairly terrifying.)

Crater Lake

 

Big Sur – Route 1, southern California (the cow was the honeymoon mascot)

Those weird California wetland plants that eat insects

A place that made wonderful, terrifying gnomes and fairies from local wood. (See how happy SJ was to be there. I, on the other hand, loved it. I really wanted to buy a fairy and take it home and put it on my land/sea/sky altar. Alas, this was not within my economic powers.)

Mount St Helens. Bloody huge.

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*While in America, we discovered the joy of the ‘interpretive trail’. In plainer English, this means ‘there will be signs explaining what you’re looking at’. Handy.

I is for… Icon

(So here I am, talking once again about a Christian thing that, for me, merges with Pagan things. I should really give up and call this ‘Leithin’s Interfaith Blog’.)

I adore icons. Especially Byzantine and Russian ones.

Early Byzantine icon of Mary

Icon simply means ‘image’, but the term is generally used to mean sacred imagery, particularly of Eastern churches, where icons are painted in Byzantine or Russian styles^[1]. Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches are full of icons. If you’ve only ever been in bare, late modern churches, in their dull community-centre-like buildings with no pictures or representations of the Divine, you’re missing out.

Saint Sophia and her daughters – Byzantine (picture from Wikimedia)

There’s so much to say about iconography that entire books have been written about it. Here’s just one thing: images of Mary and the child Christ, probably based on earlier images of Isis and Horus ^[2].

Statuette of Isis nursing Horus – Late Period-Ptolemaic Period, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Isis nursing Horus. Penn Museum. Photo by Jocelyn Dale, Flickr (CC)

Mary and Christ – Byzantine icon

Protestant churches don’t like icons, or images of God in general. Their rejection of them is based on the second of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not make to you any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” In short: don’t make idols. There’s a long history of Protestant resistance to Catholic/Orthodox iconography that goes along with that. Anglo-Catholic churches (the ones I used to go to) have re-embraced iconography. And there’s always this tension there – this oft-repeated mantra of it’s not an idol, it’s an icon. But I looked at the statue of Mary in my church and didn’t see ‘something that points to Mary’. I saw Mary. To all intents and purposes, it was a beautiful, glorious idol to me.

And here’s a funny thing. In Christianity, I was a huge fan of icons, especially traditional ones, like those above. But when I started honouring my Gaelic gods, in a religion/spiritual path that’s all in favour of representing deities with idols or pictures, I suddenly didn’t want to. I was no longer forbidden from making a “graven image” of my gods – in fact, it was encouraged – but now, I couldn’t do it. I had pictures of the Morrigan and Arianrhod for a while, but they became… insufficient. It was like I was trying to capture a divine essence that cannot be caged in images.

I still have this picture on my wall above my deity altar:

Relief from the temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath. Photo by Mary Harrsch, Flickr (CC)

It’s from the shrine of Sulis Minerva, in Bath, but it’s not the goddess – it’s probably either a representation of local land spirits, or worshippers. For me, it captures the essence of Sulis Minerva – not in an image of her, but in the faces of those who honoured her.

And, yes, part of it is the difference between this and this. There are hundreds of years of tradition and spirituality behind each Eastern Orthodox icon. The artwork is some of the most beautiful that you will ever see. Each one says, my god (or honoured ancestor) is worth some serious craftswork. Now, admittedly, neopagans don’t get commissions of a lot of money from a rich church allowing them to spend months, maybe more, on each image they create of their god(s). And I’m sure there are some serious craftspeople out there, making absolutely beautiful images of their deities. I just haven’t seen the ones that call to me (yet). And I think that’s mainly because – well, how can a statue of Lugh compare to this?

Photo by ghewgill – Flickr (CC)

And how can a painting of Arianrhod compare to this?

Corona Borealis – by Cristóbal Alvarado Minic – Flickr (CC)

And how could an image of Cailleach Bhearra ever compare to this?

Healy Pass, Beara Peninsula, Cork

I find the gods in the things that embody them – the trees, the sea, the wind, the mountains, and the simple little candles that stand for each deity on my altar. So when I learnt, from writers like Miranda Green, that the Celts probably didn’t have much in the way of physical representations of their gods, at least before the Romans arrived, it all made a lot more sense. Ronald Hutton says it’s not clear whether or not the Gaelic and Brythonic tribes honoured the land as a manifestation of deity or the divine. And certainly, not all the Gaelic gods are land deities. But Cailleach Bhearra is a mountain goddess and Manannan is a sea god – and while they may not quite be gods of those things, they are those things. Bhearra is as much the mountains as the stones that make them up. Manannan is as much the sea as the waves and the gulls and the shoreline.

I suppose I’m talking about a kind of polytheistic animism. I’m good with that. My icons are in the world around me.

But I’ll always love the reminder of forbidden, illicit worship of the divine embodied in *things* that Christian iconography first pointed me towards. The icon was my first way in to understanding that the divine is creation, and creation is divine.

Statue of St Gobnait. Ireland

Statue of Mary, at the side of the road in Co Cork, Ireland. You can see these on every corner in rural Ireland.

 

[1] John R. Hinnells, A New Dictionary of Religions

[2] Victor Lasareff (1938), ‘Studies in the Iconography of the Virgin’. The Art Bulletin.

G is for… Geis

I made a very specific, rather unusual vow when I married my wife.

F is for… Filidecht*

I’m posting this two days early, not just because I’m going away tomorrow, but also because this little ditty is a bit of an Equinox offering. Enjoy.

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There’s a golden flash of colour on the A52,
I saw it streaming by as my Berlingo drove past.
It might have been daffodils, or crocuses, or Spring,
But I couldn’t quite be sure – I was going too fast.
And I felt the seasons turning, and the coming May Queen –
But I’m a modern neopagan, and the lights had turned green.

There’s a golden flash of colour on the A52
Where it looks like tiny figures took a paintbrush to the land,
And they stood on ghostly ladders and took Otherworldly hues
To create a splash of brilliance with nimble fairy hands.
And it lifted up my spirit and it carried me away –
But I’m a modern neopagan, and it was a busy day.

There’s a golden flash of colour on the A52,
And I’ll need my iPhone sat-nav app to find it again,
Somewhere out between the Tesco Metro and the roundabout,
But the X that marks the treasure isn’t in the fast lane.
And I couldn’t find a parking space convenient enough.
I’m a modern neopagan, and the rush-hour is rough.

There’s a golden flash of colour on the A52,
A hoard of wealth you can’t get near at fifty miles an hour.
No salary nor lottery could buy me all that gold,
But I didn’t cash my ticket in for a moment with a flower.
My day was timed precisely for efficiency and speed.
I’m a modern neopagan with a lot of mouths to feed.

There’s a golden flash of colour on the A52,
But the diary says the Equinox is not until next week.
So I kept on driving, past the brightest glory of the season
And the turning of the Wheel was just a blurry vernal streak.
But if Spring passes me by and I forget to seek the jewel,
I’m a modern neopagan – and my next day off is Yule.

So tomorrow, you might see me crawling underneath the railings
That divide Life from the road (and see daylight dance with night),
Heading out towards the forest, where a patch of feral daisies
Waits in quiet anticipation of the symmetry of light —
Or you might see me obliviously going on my way.
I’m a modern neopagan, and it’s only one more day.

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*Filidecht is the Old Irish word for poetry – and it has concepts of seership and magic and divination and nature and community all woven in. Because words are magical.

Winter

Near Keswick, Cumbria.
It doesn’t usually look like this.

Friday evening. We’re driving through Cumbria in the north of England, on our way to a friend’s wedding. Thanks to illness, it’s the first time I’ve been out of the house in about three weeks, and I’m not too comfortable – but we’re not far away. We’re on beautiful mountain roads, sheer drop down to the lake valley on our right, rugged peak rising off to our left.

And then the snow starts falling.

As the sun sets, it gets hard to tell what’s road, what’s sky, and what’s snow. At first I think this is glorious fun. The roads are never dangerous in England. (In my head, rural England is basically the Shire. Which, of course, it is.)

And then the snow starts falling faster. A few minutes later, we’re in something closely resembling a blizzard. We don’t get really severe weather here, and we’re not used to snow. It’s a bit like when it rains in desert countries and everyone forgets how to drive. If we’d even thought of putting on winter tyres, as we later heard some of the other wedding guests did, none of the events that were about to unfold would have been a problem – but who needs snow tyres in England? The most we ever get is an inch or two, and that rarely.

Within less than an hour, there was a foot of snow on the road, and of course no sign of any snowploughs yet (because, again, snow does not come down that fast in this country). We were only about twenty miles away from our destination when we started allowing ourselves to consider that we might not make it. I was working extremely hard on staying calm – something that isn’t easy for me at the best of times – and I’m very proud to say that I only hyperventilated briefly. That was when the road dropped away beneath us into a very steep slope that I was completely sure my practical-for-cities minivan was not going to cope with. (It was only later that SJ, of the eternal calm, admitted that I wasn’t the only one who thought we were about to fall off the side of a mountain.)

A few miles on and one brief stop later (we paused to consider our options, and realised that ‘keep going’ was the only alternative to ‘stay here and freeze’), we turned a corner and met a row of blinking lights. A car had got stuck on a very steep hill and was now being pushed up. The car behind it ended up in the same situation. We stopped and waited for about half an hour.

By this point I was praying at a pitch and intensity not seen since my Christian days. In an emergency, my brain stops working, and I always end up having to quiz my wife about which god I should to talk to. (SJ is an atheist who knows my gods fairly well. At our own wedding, our vows were based on the text from the Book of Ruth: “Your people shall be my people, and your god shall be my god.” A whole new religion later, SJ faithfully honours that promise.) This time, I realised the irony of asking the “Who shall I pray to?” question while our car clung to the side of a snow-covered mountain in a blizzard. Oh, come on.

So it was that, while SJ went to help push the other cars up the hill, I called out to my mountain goddess of the wild. And got the distinct impression of being laughed at.

Just then, I looked up to see SJ talking to a man who was stepping out of the car in front of us. He was putting on a jacket, red with reflective silver patches. It had ‘MOUNTAIN RESCUE’ written across the back.

Oh, I laughed.

SJ told them we were worried about our car’s ability to make it over the hills, and that I was disabled and wouldn’t be able to help push if we got stuck. They offered to follow us the rest of the way to our destination. We did indeed, eventually, get stuck – not far from home, but far enough. It could have been a long wait for help if they hadn’t been there.

It took us an hour to drive about the last ten miles of our journey.

Later, I was oddly stoical about the other snow- and cold-related frustrations. When we got to the cottage we’d rented for the weekend and found that it was only about 10 degrees C inside, with no way to contact the owners. And the next day, when our car was snowed in, and I had to walk several hundred metres in the snow on crutches so that a taxi could get us out of there. There are worse things, really.

Stranded on the morning of the wedding. You’ll see from the tracks that we only made it half-way up the hill.

Of course, that didn’t stop us moving to a warm hotel last night. I’m not keen on inviting the forces of the wild inside too often.

SJ and I are both still somewhere between a) freaked out by events, and b) marvelling that they worked out so well. If we hadn’t filled the tank with petrol even though we didn’t desperately need it… if we had left home half an hour later than we did… if we had taken the M6 motorway (where several of our friends were stuck until 3am) instead of the A1… if we hadn’t been behind that particular car… And really, we wouldn’t have been in *that* much trouble. It would have been a case of waiting a few hours for emergency services (if we’d had phone reception to call them), maybe a bit longer if we’d been in the M6 tailback. The chances of us actually falling off the side of the mountain were low. With my condition, though, and the way it reacts to the cold, I’d have been dealing with some fairly major health problems very quickly.

And we all beat those kinds of odds every day, and even more unlikely ones. That’s the only way any of us managed to be born, the only way any of us have survived this far. But when civilization wraps its thin mantle around us, we forget that, moment by moment, we are still at the mercy of some incredible natural forces. Brick houses and central heating and reliable cars can’t hold those forces off forever.

On a forum where I post, several questions have been asked recently that are variations on ‘What are we to the gods?’ I’ve been enjoying a lot of reading on that question – not just there, but in books, in blogs like Pagan Layman’s, and in conversation. But, to me, no theological mystery-pondering can ever be as thrilling and disturbing as encountering the terrifying forces of life and the wild that are my gods – face to face, spirit to spirit, their great flood to my tiny spark. It doesn’t help me to know what the answer is to the question, but it does clarify the terms.

Was it in response to my prayer to Cailleach Bhearra that the mountain didn’t claim us? Unlikely. The mountain didn’t care whether I lived or died, whether I was rescued or spent the night in my car in sub-zero temperatures. But I will give grateful offerings anyway, and remember the natural forces by whose whims I survive, however much I pretend otherwise.

And I’ll keep open the possibility that She heard me. I’ve experienced stranger things.

There was a box at the bar of our hotel marked ‘Keswick Mountain Rescue’. I put in all the money I had on me. I’ll look into making more regular donations to them. Seems appropriate.