Musings from Gelli Fach

Vasant Panchami and the Feast Day of Brigit

2012-01-27T18:47:00.003Z

Today, January 27th, here in Wales, is the day of the puja (worship or reverence) of Sarasvati, a sister goddess to Brigit. (You can find out which day it is in your part of the world on this website.) Vasant Panchami is celebrated on the fifth day of the waxing moon period of Magh (the month of January-February) in the traditional Indian calendar. In 2017, the date will be February 1st which is also the feast day of Brigit.

Sarasvati is the goddess of thought, memory and creative intelligence. These give rise to culture and so, not surprisingly, Sarasvati has become the goddess of culture. She is the inspiration behind the arts, often invoked by poets, but also associated with music, dancing and science. She is usually depicted with a vina or lute, and a sacred book. Books, pens, musical instruments and gurus are worshipped on this day and pictures and statues of her are put up in educational establishments. Tradtionally children were taught to write their first words at Vasant Panchami and she is venerated in schools. The following song is sung to her:

O Divine Virtuous Goddess Sarasvati. We bow to your feet. O Goddess of Speech, the all-pervading with cosmic vibrations, we surrender at your Divine feet.

O Goddess, shelter to the seeker, blessed of the Three Worlds, worshipped by divine seers. Your melody is with the nine aesthetic senses and divine poetry, adorned by the varied tastes of learning.

O the one seated on the throne of swan, O the one endowed by white complexion pure as snow and moon, the one seated on the white lotus, remove from us lethargy and expand our horizon of vision.

O Goddess, you are the embodiment of artistic skills and string of knowledge. O the one holding the divine book of learning and the vina, we submit ourselves in entirety at your lotus feet. O Goddess, remove from our minds the poison of hatred.

Vasant Panchami, like the feast day of St Brigit, marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring. The colour yellow is symbolic of the festival, expressing the brightness and vibrancy of life and nature. People wear yellow clothes and give yellow flowers as offerings and gifts. A special delicacy is made which is coloured yellow by saffron and also contains nuts, cardamum, sugar and flour.

The puja tray is an important part of everyday devotions to the deities. Here is an excerpt from the website http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/carolrb/hinduism/puja.html explaining which objects are placed on the tray and what they symbolise as well as what devotions at the evening session consist of:

A pot of water for ritual cleansing.

A bell to call the family to worship. [Others say it is to let the deity know they have come to worship and invite her into their home.]

A tiny pot of the red gum gum paste to mark the forehead. This mark means that a woman's soul (her husband) is with her. [Others say they mark the forehead of the statue as a mark of respect and devotion to the gods and mark their own forehead as a sign of the blessing of the deity.]

An arti lamp for the arti ceremony where everybody passes their hands over the lighted lamp and then over their forehead to make them feel closer to God.

An incense burner or joss stick holder.

The evening session will be a much longer session and will include reading of holy books, discussions, teaching, meditation and prayer. Hindu parents spend a lot of time teaching their children about their religion.

Many Hindus meet for festivals at temples or mandirs, but most prayer is within the family at the family shrine. There is no need for regular church meetings for the congregation.

In the puja Hindus use their senses to make them feel close to God. They use music and chant the aum to make their ears aware of God. They use beautiful images to make their eyes aware of God. They burn ghee butter and incense to make the air smell sweet so that people focus on God. Specially prepared sweets and foods are part of ceremonies so that helps Hindus think about God. Finally the arti ceremony is where the sense of touch is stimulated to make people think of God.

Sarasvati has four arms, symbolising ego, intellect, alertness and mind. She is often shown as above, sitting on a white swan, a symbol of purity, or a lotus, symbol of transcendence. When her vehicle is a peacock it is said by some to mean that a strong ego can be reigned in by wisdom.

Those of you who are familiar with Brigit as goddess and saint will see that there are many similarities between these goddesses. I have explored them more fully in the article Brigit, Sarasvati and the Sacred Word, on my website, Brigit's Forge.

Today happens to be the start of my shift as a flame-keeper and well-tender for the group Nigheanan Brighde so I decided that after I'd lit the flame and recited the group prayer I'd also honour Sarasvati tonight. I put a statue of her on my shrine, and rang a bell I keep in the small cupboard that my limestone carving of Brigit rests upon. I offered rosemary and parsley as flowers, along with oats instead of rice, and rice-cakes with strawberry jam instead of the usual delicacy, lit some Indian cone incense and put water in Brigit's swan vase for ritual cleansing. Finally I used some red paint from my paintbox to dab on my forehead and recited the prayer as above. It was a beautiful small ceremony and ringing the bell and placing the red spot on my forehead felt especially potent. I hope Brigit approves and enjoys the company of her sister deity this night.

The Old Year

2012-01-02T19:16:00.000Z

The Old Year

by John Clare

The Old Year's gone away

To nothingness and night:

We cannot find him all the day

Nor hear him in the night:

He left no footstep, mark or place

In either shade or sun:

The last year he'd a neighbour's face,

In this he's known by none.

All nothing everywhere:

Mists we on mornings see

Have more of substance when they're here

And more of form than he.

He was a friend by every fire,

In every cot and hall--

A guest to every heart's desire,

And now he's nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,

Old garments cast aside,

The talk of yesterday,

Are things identified;

But time once torn away

No voices can recall:

The eve of New Year's Day

Left the Old Year lost to all.

John Clare's poem describes the old year as a neighbour and friend and suggests that we have lost something as we discard papers, garments and yesterday's conversations. It's true that there's something refreshing about a change of digit as we move firmly into 2012; an opportunity offered to wipe the slate clean and renounce old damaging habits, move forward with plans and projects and become the people we should like to become...

But time is not as linear as it appears. We move in spirals, this new year touching the last one and the one before and the one before that... Rather than completely turning our backs on the old year, the familiar, let's take a moment to think about what it brought that was good and wholesome, what lessons we learnt from it, what aspects of it we should like to bring with us as we step into this new year. And what problems it brought which have still to be solved - does a fresh perspective help?

Whatever your situation I wish you well in 2012 as you journey forward.

The Story of Brigit at Christmas

2011-12-19T13:46:00.001Z

Illustration: Parker Fitzgerald with Brittany Richardson, Brian Gage Design

Bride, Midwife to Mary, Foster-Mother of the Divine Child

It is said that Bride was the daughter of poor pious parents, and theserving-maid in the inn of Bethlehem. Great drought occurred in the land, andthe master of the hostel went away with his cart to procure water from afar,leaving with Bride 'faircil buirn agusbreacag arain,' a stoup of water and a bannock of bread to sustain her tillhis return. The man left injunctions with Bride not to give food or drink toany one, as he had left only enough for herself, and not to give shelter to anyone against his return.
As Bride was working in the house two strangers came to the door. The manwas old, with brown hair and grey beard, and the woman was young and beautiful,with oval face, straight nose, blue eyes, red lips, small ears, and goldenbrown hair, which fell below her waist. They asked the serving-maid for a placeto rest, for they were footsore and weary, for food to satisfy their hunger,and for water to quench their thirst. Bride could not give them shelter, butshe gave them of her own bannock and of her own stoup of water, of which theypartook at the door; and having thanked Bride the strangers went their way,while Bride gazed wistfully and sorrowfully after them. She saw that thesickness of life was on the young woman of the lovely face, and her heart wassore that she had not the power to give them shade from the heat of the sun,and cover from the cold of the dew.

When Bride returned into the house in the darkening of the twilight, whatwas stranger to her to see than that the bannock of bread was whole, and thestoup of water full, as they had been before! She did not know under the landof the world what she would say or what she would do. The food and the water ofwhich she herself had given them, and had seen them partake, without a bit or adrop lacking from them! When she recovered from her wonderment Bride went outto look after the two who had gone their way, but she could see no more ofthem. But she saw a brilliant golden light over the stable door, and knowingthat it was not 'dreag a bhais,' ameteor of death, she went into the stable and was in time to aid and ministerto the Virgin Mother, and to receive the Child into her arms, for the strangerswere Joseph and Mary, and the child was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, come toearth, and born in the stable of the hostel of Bethlehem.

When the Child was born Bride put three drops of water from the spring ofpure water on the tablet of His forehead, in name of God, in name of Jesus, inname of Spirit. When the master of the inn was returning home, and ascendingthe hill on which his house stood, he heard the murmuring music of a stream flowingpast his house, and he saw the light of a bright star above his stable door. Heknew from these signs that the Messiah was come and that Christ was born, forit was in the seership of the people that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, wouldbe born in Bethlehem, the town of David. And the man rejoiced with exceedingjoy at the fulfilment of the prophecy, and he went to the stable and worshippedthe new Christ, whose infant cradle was the manger of the horses.

Thus Bride is called 'ban-chuideachaidhMoire,' the aid-woman of Mary. In this connection, and in consequencethereof, she is called 'Muime Chriosda,'foster-mother of Christ; 'Bana-ghoistidhMhic De,' the god-mother of the Son of God; 'Bana-ghoistidh Iosda Criosda nam bane agus nam beannachd,'god-mother of Jesus Christ of the bindings and blessings. Christ again iscalled 'Dalta Bride,' the foster-sonof Bride; 'Dalta Bride bith nam beannachd,'the foster-son of Bride of the blessings; 'DaltanBride,' little fosterling of Bride, a term of endearment.

Carmina Gadelica, by Alexander Carmichael, Volume 1, Floris Books, [1900], pp164-166

The Gift of Power

I am the Gift, I am the Poor,
I am the man of this night.

I am the Son of God in the door,
On Monday seeking the gifts.

Noble is Bride the gentle, fair on her knee,
Noble the King of Glory on her breast.

Son of the moon, Son of the sun,
Great Son of Mary of God-like mind.

A cross on each right shoulder,
I am in the door, open thou.

I see the hills, I see the strand,
I see angels heralding on high.

I see the dove, shapely, benign,
Coming with kindness and friendship to us.

From Carmina Gadelica, Vol 1, Ortha 60.

May kindness and friendship be upon you this Season of Celebration!

Autumn Journey

2011-11-20T16:52:00.001Z

The Llanrindod Wells Oak

I wrote a while ago about wanting to embark on more right brain activities - then Cernunnos brought himself to my attention and, instead of meditating, doing ritual and writing poetry, what did I do - I set about reading, researching and writing an article about him. I do think it is true that we are often tested when we make a decision to change something quite fundamental...

Still, I gave myself quite a headache writing it - I tend not to be able to switch off at such times and even find myself half-awake in the middle of the night working out what to say. So I really decided 'no more' - or not for a while. That doesn't mean I won't write any more posts here but they won't be long, researched ones.

Since then, I am reading and writing more poetry and it is beginning to feel exciting. I am tuning into a different way of thinking and perceiving that seems to be increasing exponentially, building on itself. This is a change I've wanted to make for the last few years so it is rather wonderful if I am starting to move forward with it - like setting forth on a voyage. I hope it continues and that I don't find myself in the doldrums...

Because of this I've decided to take note of the prevailing blogging wisdom of focusing on one thing and create a blog devoted to poetry which is here now. I know there are a few of you who are interested in poetry so you're welcome to visit!

It doesn't mean there will be no poetry here at all of course...

September is gone...

2011-10-30T18:36:00.000Z

The month of September,
there is verse in the Canon,
the ripening season of corn and fruit;

Mis Medi, mydr ynGhanon,
aeddfed oed yd ac aeron;

The Verses of the Months, Welsh, c 15th century

Yes, September is certainly gone now but I needed to post the verse of the month as it is the last one in the sequence I started last October.

I've felt rather unsettled since coming back from a visit up North to visit family and have been wondering if my life is starting to flow into different channels. I haven't felt like doing much on the computer - partly because I am swapping over to a new one which I have been finding less user-friendly. However, I felt I must post the September verse before October turns into November and a new cycle begins.

For some unknown reason, after I changed a couple of things on this blog format and then changed them back, even though I checked all was as it should be, the next time I logged on the template had been changed to something I hadn't chosen. I've been unable to return it to the simple form I had before so this new layout is the best I can do!

More later...

Tending the Flame: To Brighid, Patroness of the Druids and Bards

2011-08-31T18:18:00.002+01:00

Brighid by Tattered Dreams

http://www.deviantart.net/

To Brighid, Patroness of the Druids and Bards

Beloved Brighid of the triple flame,

Daughter of the Dagda,

Guardian of the sacred springs

Whose voice is the soul of the harp

We call on Thee.

Teach our hands to heal and our hearts to sing.

We entrust our life’s progress to your care

and ask that you shape us,

bending and turning our hearts on your bright anvil of flame

till we are made perfect jewels

fit to be set in the Eye of your timeless harp

to play for the Soul of the people in times of sorrow

and times of celebration.

We thank you for your gifts to us of Poetry and Music

of laughter and tears,

and for the healing balm of your Wisdom.

May we always remember to meditate

on the gift of your sacred waters,

which surround us at our birth

and sail us to our destiny.

Our hearts are open to receive your blessings.

Midwife of our souls, rain on us,

shower your inspiration in curtains of song

from sacred waterfalls in the realm where you dwell.

Come to us as Virgin with the soft smell of flowers.

Come to us as Mother and feed us your fruits.

Come to us as the Wise Woman in the stark blasts of Winter.

Help us to see your Mystery in all creation,

that we may know gratitude and reverence.

Our hearts sing to you with love.

Teach us to change like the revolving seasons.

Teach us to grow like the green corn that feeds the people.

Teach us to fashion beauty like the stillness of the forest pool

and the roar of the ocean wave.

Teach us to heal like the soothing gem which cools the eyes and

restores the limbs.

With humility and bright expectation

We invoke Thee this hour!

by Ellen Evert Hopman
from A Druid's Herbal For the Sacred Earth Year

http://www.elleneverthopman.com/

*********

One of the ways I spend the time while tending Brigit's flame is to read and write in my 'Brigit Devotional'. It's a plain book in which I put pictures and copy poems, prayers and invocations I've written or read elsewhere. It's not as beautifully written as I'd have liked - there are blotches and crossings-out - but it has a homemade feel to it which makes it unique and quite powerful in its own way.

I like to spend time looking through it, reading the poems and prayers, remembering where I found them, being inspired by them and the pictures. It connects me with past vigils, with words and with writing on paper. It dances through time and space, strengthening, enlightening, uplifting. Between dusk and dusk, accompanying the flame, it sings to Brigit.

A Magical Day in August

2011-08-12T18:36:00.001+01:00

The month of August, the salt-marsh is [full of snail],
the bees are merry, the hive is full;
the work of the sickle is better than that of the bow;
the rick is more frequent than the playing-field;

Mis Awst, molwynoc morva,
llon gwenyn, llawn modryda;
gwell gwaith kryman no bwa;
amlach das no chwarwyva;

The Verses of the Months, Welsh, c 15th century

A journey and an unexpectedly magical day out

I’ve been feeling a bit low for the last week - a tiredness I can’t seem to shake off and consequent inability to keep on top of things, chores and paperwork, bureaucracy; mobility a little more difficult, a little more painful. On Wednesday I set off to Llandrindod Wells for a long-standing appointment with the osteopath. I wasn’t looking forward to the drive which takes about an hour and a quarter and planned to go there and come back as quickly as possible.

But… although it was a dull day with rain beating down on the slopes of Pumlumon as I set off, there were such solid swathes of rosebay willow-herb by the roadsides that they gave off a magnificent deep pink that seemed to vibrate with light in spite of the grey skies.

I arrived uncharacteristically early at Rock Park where the osteopath has her consulting-room. The car-park was full so I decided to drive on into the park to explore a little which I hadn’t done before. The track didn’t go very far and ended in a small parking area by a bowling club. From there, there was a tree-lined path disappearing round a bend, but just at the start of the path was an arresting sight – a grandfather oak, huge, with spreading and curving branches which circled the tree and gave an impression of welcome, of expansiveness, of shelter. Shaken out of my melancholy mood, I went to meet it, exhilarated.

I walked round it and gazed up into its branches, almost overwhelmed by its presence, its solidity but perhaps more than anything by the impression of an openness to the world around it, a willingness perhaps to engage with walkers on the path. After spending some time quietly beside it, I leant my hands, palms out, against its trunk, and asked for some of its strength and solidity. Then, after leaving an offering, I drove back down to keep my appointment, finding a parking-space outside the door.

After my session I decided to go into the town centre and have lunch at the Herb Garden – the place to visit if you are ever in Llandrindod Wells and enjoy good vegetarian food.

I had a bowl of mixed salads – more varied and exotic than I would ever make for myself – and a granary roll, followed by earl grey tea and an apricot slice. Outside the edges of the path were planted with herbs and rowan trees, their branches hanging low with the weight of their red berries. The excellent food and calm and green surroundings further raised my spirits and leaving I decided to call in at the Oxfam shop two doors down to look for some bedtime reading. I found 4 books but also something totally unexpected… on the bottom shelf of odds ‘n ends was a carving of a horse’s head. I picked it up – hardly able to believe my eyes - it was beautiful, unique because it had been carved into the shape of the wood - something very close-grained, beech perhaps? - a wavy cleft, maybe fungus damage, giving the impression of a mane.

I bought it of course. The person who priced it obviously didn’t see it with the same eyes as me since it was a mere 99p. For me it is one of the most beautiful things I own and since bringing it home I’ve been almost mesmerised by it. It seems to be working on me as a poem sometimes will – as I look at it, it changes angles and perspectives, there’s a tantalising trace of its maker, half-suggestions of ideas and forms and an energy greater than the sum of its part.

It’s difficult to define this energy; it has a haunting, almost wistful quality I think. The eyes of the horse don’t look at me, don’t relate to me directly, and I have a sense of a dignified acceptance perhaps resignation. Perhaps it is the look of Rhiannon as she fulfilled her punishment of carrying guests on her back to the llys.

I don’t actually have a connection with Epona or Rigantona/Rhiannon, the horse goddess, myself, but since she is important to the group Brython I’ve been open to honouring her in a sense at a remove.

For me personally, much of what relates to Rigantona may be found in Brigit/Brigantia, although not always her most important or pronounced aspects. There is some evidence that she has been seen as a sovereignty figure, a bringer of abundance, and a harbinger of the return of warmth and growth to the land - her other face the face of winter. She too has bird associates but where she differs markedly from Rigantona is that her animal is commonly the cow and she has no connection with the horse.

The cow and the horse bring up very different associations. The cow is related to nurturing, food and sustenance, and through these to wealth and prosperity; the horse bequeaths us grace, power, speed, the ability to move over the land. If the cow gives the basics needed for survival, sustenance, the horse goes a step beyond, giving the ability to command territory, to travel, to transport – perhaps, more romantically, to do so with elegance and grace.

I’ve always admired the beauty of horses and am attracted to Celtic depictions of the horse on their coins and jewellery. I have a brooch which is a copy of a bronze plate, 2^nd century, Romano-Celtic brooch, inlaid with green enamel and dappled with white spots, found at Verulamium.

But it does not have the energy of my carving and I wait to see what changes this horse energy will bring to my home.

So my trip to Llandrindod turned into a rather magical outing. The agent of the magic was, in both cases, wood. The raw, rooted and solid energy of the oak and the small, delicate horse - wood transformed by human artistry. I have a strong affiliation with wood, and appropriately - it is also my name.

Concerning Cernunnos Part 3: Cernunnos and Lugh; Nature and Culture

2011-07-27T17:35:00.350+01:00

Lugh by Joanna Powell Colbert

(Part 1 is here) (Part 2 is here)

Cernunnos and Lugus/Lúgh: What is the Relationship?

So how do these two gods relate to each other? Rather tantalisingly Alexei suspects that the answer lies in a now-vanished element of Gaulish mythology. But looking to the later insular literature, he notes that Manannán is Lúgh’s foster-father and in the Welsh Mabinogi, Gwydion is Lleu’s foster-father and says that if we observe that “both characters are older versions of the young hero in their talents and attributes, and indeed very “Mercury”-like [the Celtic Mercury which he equates with Lugus] – we may indeed come very close to understanding the nature of the relation.”

(As an aside, note that in the third branch of the Mabinogi there is another nature versus culture myth. But this time it is Manawyddan fab Llyr, who is related to the Irish Manannán, who takes on the role of the character who defeats the malign powers of the Otherworld, an army of mice who eat the crops, and he uses trickery to defeat them and restore the Land for the tribe.)

Now I am not very sure what understanding Alexei thinks we may come to by considering these older versions of the young hero. Possibly it relates to my own speculation - that, of ‘the Old Gods’, Cernunnos is a Very Old God, a kind of precurser to Lúgh from the age of the hunter.

Consider the rock carvings at Val Camonica which give us the earliest depiction of an antlered god in a Celtic context. These petroglyphs are amazing in that they span a period of about 8,000 years and show a development of ideas through the different ages. The earliest carvings, well before the rise of the Celts, are from the Mesolithic period (8th –6th millenium BC) and were made by nomadic hunters. They depict their prey - typically deer and elk.

In the Neolithic period, with the beginning of agriculture (5th – 4th millennium BC), human figures and geometric patterns, rectangles and circles among others, appear, giving perhaps the idea of fixed settlements. By the Bronze Age, roughly the 2nd millennium BC, weapons began to appear, along with the geometric shapes, and in the Iron Age (1st millennium BC), where our first depiction of ‘Cernunnos’ comes from, the Camunni people carved symbols of “heroic masculinity and superiority. Dominant themes include representations of duels and human figures…flaunting their weapons, their muscles and their genitals. There are also figures of cabins, labyrinths, footprints, hunting scenes and other symbols.” (Source: Wikipedia)

The point I want to make here is that humankind’s relationship with stags goes far, far back into the Mesolithic age when they were hugely important as prey. It's true that it wasn’t until the Iron Age at Val Camonica that a depiction of a hybrid stag/human appeared but the interaction of human and stag was a vital one going back into human prehistory and humans were hunters before we were farmers. Therefore it would not be surprising if one of the early Celtic gods, perhaps inherited from the pre-Celtic tribes, was of the stag/human form and related to food/fertility/hunter/hunted/the wild/ the human.

The authenticity of the antlers on the human/animal figure known as “The Sorcerer” from the cave of the Trois Frères in the French Pyrénées (much later to become a Celtic region) and dated to the Palaeolithic age (c. 13,000 BC) is the subject of some dispute although it now seems to be vouched for. (See here - and read right to the end for additional comments.) If indeed authentic it illustrates what I'm suggesting here. We don't know of course what it represents, if it's a god or a shaman or something else, but it does show, I would argue, the importance of the relationship between human and stag.

In the Le Tène period, starting around 500 BC, there was an expansion of the Celtic tribes, an accumulation of wealth and territory, and, according to Alexei, this period gave rise to depictions of a god, (often with mistletoe leaves around his head like horns or ears) whom Alexei identifies with Lugus. This god appears in the Roman period as a Celtic “Mercury” and Julius Caesar writes in his Gallic Wars (Book 6, 17):

“They worship as their divinity, Mercury in particular, and have many images of him, and regard him as the inventor of all arts, they consider him the guide of their journeys and marches, and believe him to have great influence over the acquisition of gain and mercantile transactions.”

However native depictions of him show certain other traits as well, namely triple forms, and a role as sovereign protector with warrior attributes. (See Lugus: The Many-Gifted Lord)

Going back to the Val Camonica carvings, we can see the development of human organisation and values and the increasing importance of weapons, male virility, and conflict. It makes sense to me that ideas about the way to obtain the fruits of the wild evolved from a hunter/hunted model - at a time when humans had less effective weapons to defend themselves and when they may have facilitated the exchange of goods and services through reciprocal gift exchange as Mauss outlines – to a model of wresting food from nature by conflict and manipulation as they moved into agriculture and a martial, warrior-centred state of organisation which used trade and the money economy as its form of exchange of goods and services.

Because of the huge importance of the Cernunnos-type god, it would not be surprising that he existed side by side with another, more recently popular god who embodied the current concerns and values of an agricultural, warrior élite; a god whom we see echoed in the warrior Lúgh in the Cath Maige Tuired.

Lugus/ Lúgh

In some ways we could say that Lugus combines in himself the attributes of the antlered god and the horned god, as a powerful fighter and protector of the food resources of the tribe. Certainly many modern illustrations show him horned by virtue of his helmet, such as this…

But he is, of course, more than simply a warrior god and the illustration at the top of this post gives a better idea of the way he combines attributes as a deity of the arts and intellectual skills, music and poetry; an associate of ravens as well as the owner of the spear, a practitioner of magic and champion of the harvest.

The Reconciliation of Opposites

I said earlier that being part Fomorian, part Tuatha Dé Danann, Lúgh is in a sense fighting against himself. Because of Cernunnos’ dual nature as stag/human, the same may be said of him. He is both hunter and hunted; the human hunting the stag and the stag being hunted. Both parts of these gods are in opposition to each other and, to avoid annihilation or perpetual conflict, must find a way of accomodating one another. They both must become a reconciler of opposites in order to keep these opposing forces in balance. How do they do this? I believe it is by negotiation and reciprocity. In the story of Lúgh and Bres, they negotiate so that in the end Lúgh does not harm Bres but exchanges his life for knowledge of how to improve the harvest and therefore the lives of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

We don’t know how Cernunnos has gained power over the ram-horned snake, who like Bres and the Fomóirí represents the powers of the Land, benign and malign. It is possible that he promises not to kill the snake in return for access to the fruits of the nature. In the end, some sort of quid pro quo, some exchange of goods or services must have been enacted – if only an exchange of mutual respect for the spiritual source of each other's honour and power. In this way, disaster is averted. Wild nature and the human world are kept in a healthy balance.

Nature v Culture in the 19th Century to our Time

However, by the nineteenth century, when Western society began to become more industrialised, I think we began to lose contact with the meaning of these gods.

Taking the folktale of Donnchadh Mór (which I wrote about in Part 2) as an example, we can see by the ending that the essential truth of Lúgh’s story has been lost. Donnchadh should have married the Cailleach’s daughter, representing the benign power of the Land, who helped him, and together they could have kept in check the malign powers of the Cailleach. Instead mother and daughter die and the hero is seen as the winner, the conquerer.

It’s easy to see why this is so. In the 19th century the success of the harvest was crucial but still uncertain. Yet humankind was beginning to develop, with a Lúgh-like ingenuity and skill, more effective means to secure it. Humans were beginning to control and tame wild nature.

But now, by the 21st century, we have moved on from there. In ancient times Tailtiu could be praised and celebrated for clearing the forests to make plains for agriculture; now we have lost too much of our forests and need to plant them again, since lack of them is having a negative effect on the suitability of the environment for humans. Nature has been tamed to the extent that now the fertility of the land is being compromised.

What we have forgotten is that, like Cernunnos and Lúgh, we too have a dual nature: like Cernunnos we are human and animal (mammal), we were once hunter and hunter, now, perhaps, in the almost complete absence of natural predators, we are preying on each other. Like Lúgh we are both beings with social organisation and culture, needing sustenance from the Land, and we are a part of nature, with its benevolence and its cruelty. We cannot harm one without harming the other, part of ourselves.

Alexei concludes his article on Lúgh with this statement:

"Even today, the spirit of Lúgh pervades the Celtic world… Trickster, psychopomp, experimenter, mover between worlds, granter of success and wealth through intelligent manipulation, and granter of continuity through change, his many gifts remain at the disposal of those who trouble to seek him out."

I can’t help thinking that this spirit pervades more than the Celtic world. Trickster, experimenter, granter of wealth through intelligent manipulation – couldn’t we apply these attributes to the practices of the world’s bankers which have led to the banking crisis?

Isn’t the desire to control and manipulate in the practice of agriculture on an industrial scale leading to an impoverishment of the Land? Unlike an organic style of agriculture which gives back to the land to ensure fertility – a sort of reciprocity – modern chemical fertilisers take from the Land and leave it depleted. We are following a model of taking in order to take rather than giving in order to be given to. Some of the practices of the huge multinational agribusinesses surely display the worst side of Lúgh’s attributes: control, conflict (aggressive litigation), genetic manipulation, the accumulation of wealth through the commercialisation of seeds.

Whereas for Lúgh, concern for and sacred duty to the well-being of the Tribe, the paramount importance of the fertility of the Land (a lack of which would undermine kings) and the value of honour would have provided a check on the negative side of his attributes - the dangers of an excess of them - we no longer have such checks.

If the gods rise and fall in prominence as human society and its values and concerns change, the value and relevance of Cernunnos and Lúgh have never been more essential. We need, I would argue, to balance conflict, skill and manipulation with the recognition that we need honour, respect and reciprocity in our dealings with Wild Nature – because it is our Other Self.

I'll end this section with the image of Cernunnos from the Gundestrup cauldron, holding in one hand the symbol of wealth and prosperity, the torque, and in the other the ram-horned snake, the power of Nature and the Land, benign and malign – and neither Cernunnos nor the snake doing harm to the other.

Concerning Cernunnos Part 2: Accessing the Fruits of the Wild

2011-07-27T17:24:00.004+01:00

(Part 1 can be found here)

So Cernunnos, as a god of the in-between, a conduit, is able to deflect the destructive power of nature away from humankind and give nature’s gifts of food and wealth. Does he do this for us out of the kindness of his heart? No, Anne Ross explains:

“The Celts did not love their deities; they made contracts with them as they did in their own society. By making offerings into pits, wells, springs, peat-bogs and all watery places, no doubt with solemn attendant ritual, the druids were in fact ‘binding’ the gods into making reciprocal gifts to mankind – including no doubt, security against their own hostility.” (Anne Ross: Ritual and the Druids, in The Celtic World edited by Miranda J Green, Routledge, London,1995, p.441)

To understand the system of reciprocal gifts, if you haven’t already I urge you to read The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss.It’s a ground-breaking book, first published in 1950, and still a classic text on reciprocity. It doesn’t give examples from the Celtic past but does look at Indo-European forms and asserts that the family of Celtic people ‘has certainly known such institutions’. After reading it I had a much deeper understanding of the system underlying early Celtic society, some later folklore and even some fairly recent Welsh customs. For me it brought into greater depth of understanding such things as fosterage; the contract between the warriors and their lord in the Gododdin; why you must not eat anything when you visit the sidhe, what lies behind the deposition of valuable items, sometimes deliberately broken, into bogs and watery places; the almost obscenely sumptuous great cattle-feasts; and possibly put Medb’s distress that Ailill had one more bull than she did in a new light….

Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia:

'In his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never "free". Rather, human history is full of examples that gifts give rise to reciprocal exchange. The famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: "What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?" (1990:3). The answer is simple: the gift is a "total prestation", imbued with "spiritual mechanisms", engaging the honour of both giver and receiver (the term "total prestation" or “ total social fact” (fait social total) was coined by his student Maurice Leenhardt after Durkheim’s social fact.). Such transactions transcend the divisions between the spiritual and the material in a way that according to Mauss is almost "magical". The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: "the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them" (1990:31).

Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient. To not reciprocate means to lose honour and status, but the spiritual implications can be even worse: in Polynesia, failure to reciprocate means to lose mana, one's spiritual source of authority and wealth.

Mauss distinguished between three obligations: giving - the necessary initial step for the creation and maintenance of social relationships; receiving, for to refuse to receive is to reject the social bond; and reciprocating in order to demonstrate one's own liberality, honour and wealth.'

In order to enter into a fruitful relationship with Cernunnos then, he would be given offerings and in exchange he would be obliged to return his gifts: to deflect the negative forces of nature, give fertility, food, and, since wild nature is ultimately the source of all material, wealth, even in the form of money. God and humankind are bound in a system in which honour and the spiritual source of authority and wealth are at stake.

As Celtic society moved beyond the gift economy - seen by Mauss as an early system of exchange in probably all human societies, eventually superceded by the market and the money economy (and of course now, by the global economy) – Cernunnos’ domain began to extend beyond the forest and the wild - the primal location for the transfer of goods from Nature to humankind - to all venues of civilisation where trade took place.

Cernunnos, Lugus and Lúgh

At this point I started to think about the god Lugus. Wasn’t also he a god of trade and exchange, didn’t he win the fruits of the wild in the form of the harvest for the Tribe and wasn’t he a hybrid figure and associated with Mercury? I found all this addressed in Alexei Kondratiev’s article Lugus: The Many-Gifted Lord. Alexei lists the attributes they share as the tendency to tricephaly (having three heads) and the association with money and with twin serpents. “Both are threshold figures, facilitating the passage from life to death and back again”. However, he points out that as they are often depicted together they are clearly not meant to be identical.

For me, another similarity between them is that Lúgh, the Irish reflex of Lugus, is a hybrid figure like Cernunnos. Not part animal/part man but, because his mother is of the Fomóirí and his father of the Tuatha Dé Danann, he is half Fomóirí, half Tuatha Dé Danann. The Fomóirí represent the powers of the Land and the Tuatha Dé Danann are the gods of the Tribe who represent human social functions and support and nurture humankind.The opposition and conflict between the two has its roots in Indo-European mythology and is clearly of pre-Christian origin.

So Lúgh is, like Cernunnos, both of the Wild - the powers of Nature and the Land, sometimes referred to as the forces of 'Chaos’ - and of humankind - of Culture and civilisation. The ram-horned snake of Cernunnos is the equivalent to the Fomóirí, (and particularly to Bres, their chief), both representing the dual aspect of the Land, benign and malign, having the power of the harvest but also the power to withhold it. But whereas Cernunnos is simply holding the snake in check, Lúgh has a different solution: he is a warrior (among his many other skills) and he does battle with the Fomóirí.

According to the Cath Maige Tuired (a 16th century text using material which may go back as far as the 11th centry and obviously draws upon IE material), Lúgh defeats them partly by magic, partly by his skill with the slingstone, and is ready to kill Bres. Bres became king of the Tuatha Dé Danann because he has a Tuatha Dé Danann mother and a father of the Fomóirí. Thus he is the mirror-image of Lúgh, a dark twin. (His succession is flawed since the Tuatha Dé Danann are a patrilinear society; the 'rightness of things' is therefore compromised.) Bres proves to be his father’s son, exhibiting the malign powers of the Land and withholding the fruits of the Land from the Tribe which leads to the conflict. However, Lúgh spares Bres who bargains for his life by revealing the secrets of successful agriculture to the Tuatha Dé Danann:

‘If I be spared’, says Bres, ‘the kine of Erin will always be in milk’. ‘I will set this forth to our wise men’, says Lúgh.
Hence Lúgh went to Maeltne Mór-brethach, and said to him: ‘Shall Bres have quarter for giving constant milk to the kine of Erin?’
‘He shall not have quarter’, saith Maeltne; ‘he has no power over their age or their (offspring) though he can milk them so long as they are alive’.
Lúgh said to Bres: ‘That does not save thee: thou hast no power over their age and their (offspring) though thou canst milk them’.
Said Bres: ‘Forbotha’, etc. [...]
‘Is there aught else that will save thee, O Bres?’ says Lúgh.
‘There is in sooth. Tell your brehon that for sparing me the men of Ireland shall reap a harvest in every quarter of the year’.
Said Lúgh to Moeltne: ‘Shall Bres be spared for giving the men of Ireland a harvest of corn every quarter?’
‘This has suited us’; saith Maeltne: ‘the spring for ploughing and sowing, and the beginning of summer for the end of the strength of corn, and the beginning of autumn for the end of the ripeness of corn and for reaping it. Winter for consuming it.’
‘That does not rescue thee’, saith Lúgh to Bres. ‘Forbotha’ etc., [...] saith he.
‘Less than that rescues thee’, saith Lúgh. ‘What?’ says Bres.
‘How shall the men of Ireland plough? How shall they sow? How shall they reap? After making known these three things thou wilt be spared’. ‘Tell them’ says Bres ‘that their ploughing be on a Tuesday, their casting seed into the field be on a Tuesday, their reaping on a Tuesday.’
So through that stratagem Bres was let go free.

(The Second Battle of Moytura, translated by Whitley Stokes, pp 106-107)

Here it is Lúgh who wins the harvest for the Tribe, conquering the malign elements of the Land. Yet we should remember that Lúgh is half Fomorian and so, in a sense, is in conflict with himself and has subdued an essential part of himself. Something we may return to later.

The Irish festival of Lúghnasadh, the assembly of Lúgh, on August 1st was said, according to one account, to have been instigated by Lúgh to commemorate his foster-mother Tailtiu, whose name, according to Alexei, means Great One of the Earth from Old Celtic talantiu. Tailtiu is renowned for having cleared the plain in the centre of Ireland for agriculture. The festival was originally a time when the people of the tribes gathered, when contracts were made, trade undertaken, artists and craftsmen displayed their wares and there were sports and competitions.

More recently the agricultural aspect of the festival was all that survived and a prime part of the proceedings was an enactment of the myth of the triumph of Culture versus Nature, where humankind, the Tribe, win the harvest from the malign powers of the Land.

The classic work on this is, of course, The Festival of Lúghnasa by Máire Mac Néill, London, Oxford University Press, 1962.

Culture versus Nature: An Irish Folktale

A later development of the theme of Nature v Culture is found in several Irish folktales which feature the Cailleach Bhearra as a corn goddess figure who teaches the people the secrets of the harvest, often being tricked into doing so by a young hero. One set of tales concerns how the Cailleach cannot be matched in the reaping of the corn and kills various reapers by sweeping their legs from under them when they fail to beat her in reaping contests. One such tale was recorded by Douglas Hyde in 1901 (D.de hÍde, Ceithre sgeulta tarraingte as an "Sgeuluidhe Gaedhealach”, Baile Átha Cliath: Gill, 1901).

In it the Cailleach Bhéarra and her daughter started farming in an area called Gleann na Madadh. None of the male reapers who worked for them were able to match the Cailleach in her reaping contests and she killed them all by cutting their legs off with her scythe. A warrior called Donnchadh Mór boasted that he could beat her and came to work for her. Although he was strong and fast he was exhausted after his first day’s work digging. However, the Cailleach’s daughter took a fancy to him and told him that if he dipped his bread in the milk of her mother’s hound he’d gain superhuman strength. He did so and won the digging contest. Before the haymaking contest, the daughter gave Donnchadh steel spikes to put in the field which made the Cailleach blunt her scythe so that he won again. Before the reaping contest the daughter told Donnchadh that her mother had a magic beetle in the handle of her sickle which gave her her powers. Donnchadh destroyed the beetle, was able to win the reaping contest and as a result the Cailleach revealed secrets to him. Her power was eclipsed and later she and her daughter and dog were killed in a storm.

Now Donnchadh is not Lúgh but he obviously owes something to him since he is strong and skilled but also gains victory and wins the secrets of the harvest for the people by trickery. In this story the fertility of the land is female, the Cailleach being the malign but powerful aspect and her daughter being the benign but less powerful aspect (and she is killed in spite of her assistance to the young hero – a poor recompense!)

Coming next: Part 3: Cernunnos and Lúgh - Relationship; Reciprocity and Conflict

Concerning Cernunnos Part One: Introduction

2011-07-23T14:41:00.002+01:00

Cernunnos by Valerie Herron at Mystic Media

Personal Experiences

Having a connection with stags it was inevitable that I would be attracted to the antlered god, Cernunnos, when I first heard about him. In my old house he had a separate shrine to Brigit in a different room, but in my present house, as I described in a previous post, he shares what I think of as the household shrine with her.
Having the two deities side by side made me realise how much, for me personally, they complement each other. Brigit’s domain is in the human realm: a culture goddess, presiding over the arts, a guardian of the hearth, a protector of flocks. Even as a sovereignty figure and tribal protector her concern is with the human world. Cernunnos on the other hand is part stag, part human and therefore his domain is the human in the wild - or the wild in the human.

There again, Brigit is strongly female; Cernunnos is strongly male. I had some encounters with him several years ago when I was having a difficult relationship with someone. It was very good and satisfying in some ways but totally lacking in verbal communication – and then there were the other women! I met with Cernunnos a few times in deep meditation… Now I have to say that I’m not sure where the images of the gods come from in this type of state. I encountered Brigit in deep meditation over a long period of time and the image of her certainly didn’t come from my conscious mind; she wasn’t how I consciously imagined her. For one thing she was young, younger than me, which was a surprise and felt rather strange to begin with. But another Brigit came to me one night, unbidden, a huge and powerful entity with a somewhat different character and in a non-human form (although thinking about her later my mind began to give a human shape and face to the experience). So I tend to think that the gods I encounter in meditation have something more to do with archetypes perhaps on a subconscious level than the gods that appear as Visitations. But I don’t know – I’m still collecting, or awaiting, experiences with which to test hypotheses.

The antlered god I encountered was very much like the picture at the top of this post – in his prime, agile, virile, at one with the forest and the wild. To me, as a woman, he was very much Other in his maleness. Unlike the man I was having the affair with, however, he was an excellent communicator and was able to tell me things about myself and the way I appeared that I couldn’t have seen for myself: through his eyes I was able to view myself from the outside as it were. The affair ended as messily as it had begun, but re-reading my journal of the time recently, I thought again how insightful and useful what he told me was and actually still is.

Lately I’ve been thinking about him more and more. What do we know about him? Who is he? Why am I feeling his presence again? What is his relevance today? I’m going to outline some of his iconography and the current thinking about him and then follow on to my own speculations about him – taking in how the fruits of the wild are mediated into culture, comparing him with Lugh, and finally considering how we - or I - might honour him and engage with him now, in the 21st century.

Some Facts and Scholarly Opinions

First, a quick recap of some of what we know about the antlered god. The earliest representation in a Celtic context comes from Cisalpine Gaul, Val Camonica, in present day Italy. It dates to the middle of the fourth century BC and shows a tall figure with antlers, having a torque on each arm and a (possible) serpent underneath his left elbow. To his left is a smaller ithyphallic figure also with upraised arms ( in the ‘orans’, praying position).

The name, or possibly title, Cernunnos, actually only appears once, carved on the so-called Pillar of the Boatmen – a monument set up in the early first century AD by Gaulish sailors and found under the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. It depicts several deities, Roman and Gaulish. In fact the inscription is now obscured and only reads ‘ernunnos’ but has been reconstructed to Cernunnos which probably means ‘the god with horns’. It shows a figure with small antlers having a torque hanging on each one.

The most famous image thought to be that of Cernunnos though is, of course, the one on the Gundestrup Cauldron, found in Denmark, dated to the 1^st century BC and probably of Thracian design but depicting mainly Celtic images. Here he is seen wearing a torque, carrying one in his right hand and holding a ram-horned serpent in his left. He is sitting in something similar to the lotus position and other images of an antlered god found in other contexts are also sitting. Surrounding him are various animals.

He is often seen elsewhere in association with animals, especially the stag. At Reims he is shown with antlers; he is balding, bearded and cross-legged, wearing a torque. Above him is a rat and on his left arm is a bag containing corn or coins which are streaming down between a bull and a stag. He is flanked by Apollo on his right and Mercury on his left.

The Bull or Ram-Horned Gods

A distinction must be made between the antlered god and the horned god. The bull-horned or ram-horned gods share some attributes with Cernunnos and they are both sometimes associated with the Roman Mercury or with the Celtic Silvanus. However the bull or ram-horned god is a war god, often depicted as a phallic warrior with sword and shield. Ross describes him as “a god of ceaselessly warring pastoral tribes… a fitting expression of their fundamental attitudes and desires – a powerful fighter, a protector of flocks and herds, a bestower of virility and fertility on man and beast”. (Anne Ross: The Pagan Celts, Ruthin, North Wales, 1998, p 163-4).

Horned God, Maryport, Cumbria

Attributes of the Antlered God

What then are the attributes of the antlered god, Cernunnos? Ross says “he is always portrayed in a pacific role, and his whole cult is suggestive of fertility and agricultural and commercial prosperity.” (Ibid, p. 163) Miranda Green observes that “the overall symbolism is distinctively that of prosperity and well-being: "Cernunnos is lord of nature, of beasts, fruit, corn and even plenty as symbolised by money. The underworld aspect to the snake and perhaps the Cernunnos-cult is suggested by the rat – a burrowing, carrion-feeding and therefore chthonic [of or relating to the underworld] beast – on the Reims relief. The main feature of the iconography is the close link between man/god and beast. The stag-symbolism is very potent in that often stag and stag-god are present together; it is tempting to see here an example of Celtic shape-shifting, Cernunnos changing at will from beast to man-form.” (Miranda Green The Gods of the Celts, Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, Stroud, 1997, p. 197).

David Fickett-Wilbar gave a very interesting paper at the Celtic Harvard Colloquium in 2003. You can read a version of it here: Cernunnos: Looking a Different Way.

His conclusion is that “The consensus opinion of the Gaulish Cernunnos as 'Lord of the Animals' is based almost solely on his antlers and the depiction of such a horned figure on a panel of the Gundestrup cauldron. A close inspection of the panel, and comparison of it with the other panels and the Lyons cup, shows, however, that it cannot support this interpretation. Other representations present a number of paired opposites, leading to the conclusion that he is, rather, a god of bidirectionality, and cognate with Mercury. This connects Cernunnos with prosperity (as a god of merchants) and explains the antlers as a display of one more set of opposites, that of man and beast…
In summary, then, although… Cernunnos was considered a god of material prosperity, he was so by means of his nature as a god of the in-between, of bi-directionality, of the reconciliation of opposites. He was both wild and tame, god of healing and god of death, of the hunter and the hunted, of nature and of culture, and in his very person human and animal. Under this interpretation, his iconography seems ambiguous because it was meant to be. He is an ambiguous god, and always was. Ambiguity does not conceal his nature; it reveals it.”

Finally, Alexei Kondratiev has contributed further insights into Cernunnos and his manifestations. Since what he has to say is particularly relevant to my future speculations, I'll quote at length. This is from the article known as Basic Celtic Deity Types :

The Celtic 'Silvanus' or God With Antlers (Karnonos/Cernunnos).
"He is the god who crosses boundaries, and the god of change. He is the interface between Tribe and Land and between our world and the Otherworld. Through him goods can be passed from one realm to another (hence his association with money), and valuable things can be gotten from raw Nature. He also manifests change as adaptability, as expressed by his antlers that drop off and grow back according to the season. Because some of his functions overlap with those of Celtic "Mercury" they are often shown together, although neither replaces the other, since their basic characters are quite different.“

He expanded further on the Imbas list between February 15th and 27nd, 2008, topic: Ram-headed Snake:

"A lot of scholarship in recent years (notably David Fickett-Wilbar's paper on Cernunnos at the Harvard Celtic Colloquium a few years ago) has made the origin and nature of this image [the ram-horned serpent]pretty clear. [It]... is first found in Bronze Age China -- in pretty much the same form it would later have in Celtic art. The image then evidently was carried westward by the equestrian cultures of Central Asia and entered the Celtic world in the middle Iron Age, presumably by way of the Celts' Scytho-Sarmatian neighbours. The serpent represents the powers of the Land (a widespread and deeply entrenched Indo-European motif, also widespread outside the IE world), and the ram's horns indicate its dangerous aggressive and destructive aspect. Holding the serpent, Cernunnos indicates that he has power over it: he can deflect the destructive potential of wild Nature. The torc he holds in his other hand indicates that he gives gifts: he promotes wealth and material well-being. These are themes that are developed in all the other representations we have of the antlered god…"

“Connecting Cernunnos with the Dagda [as an article 'Cerre - An Archaic Epithet of the Dagda/Cernunnos' does in the Journal of Indo-European Studies - Fall/Winter 1988 by William Sayers] brings out the attributes they share as "Lords of Riches" and as beings who can bridge opposite realms in a way that is beneficial to humans. The vast majority of the "Celtic Mars" figures (like Uellaunos) are closely associated with the imagery of Fiannai/ocht, which is also about the interface between nature and culture. David's paper provides additional information on the origins of the symbolic motifs associated with the figure while continuing to see how it all relates to the nature/culture interface and the ability to cross boundaries (which naturally includes a patronage of trade). Taking all these insights together leads to an overall insight into how centrally important this boundary-crossing attribute was to the Celtic theological imagination, so that Graeco-Roman observers could come to the conclusion that "Mercury" was the main god of the Celts…”

”One should also remember that there was no single, normative pantheon throughout the Celtic world, or even throughout what we would consider a single Celtic country (like Ireland) -- although the druids seem to have been working towards that goal at the height of the Iron Age. Each Celtic community inherited a basic mythological and theological vocabulary from their Indo-European past, but freely assembled the pieces on their own terms, leading to very individual expressions. The Dagda is one example we know of from Irish literature of how a certain group of basic Celtic mythological motifs were put together in Ireland (or at least in the Boyne Valley and adjacent parts of the North); Sucellos is a similar expression from the peoples who lived along the Saone and the Rhone; Cernunnos yet another one from the Belgic peoples. They're all related, without being identical: what they have in common helps us understand what the pre-Christian Celts considered important in their deities and how they related to them.”

"I don't see that there's any direct and explicit link [between Cernunnos and the Otherworld]. However, as a figure who always stands on the boundary between opposing realms or concepts, he would be on the boundary between this world and the Otherworld, or the Upper World and the Lower World, and be able to pass from one to the other. " "He isn't the embodiment of the spirit of wilderness the way [Finnish] Tapiola is. Since hunting and gathering is the most primal way humans take resources from nature into culture, Cernunnos is certainly the patron of such activities (whence the many Cernunnos-like motifs found in Fiannai/ocht); but his role extends far beyond hunting…”

"This is the view of Cernunnos [as Lord of the Forest] that prevailed in older writing but... it's been largely superseded by more modern scholarship, which offers a more all-inclusive and convincing explanation of all the features of the figure. In a way, one could still say that Cernunnos is "Lord of the Forest", but he's more precisely the guardian of the forest's edge, regulating what passes across the border between nature and culture."

An Aside concerning Snakes, Brigit and Conall Cernach

As somewhat of an aside, regarding the significance of the serpent, Alexei also pointed out that those deities, especially healing deities, who grasp poisonous snakes with impunity, mediate the power of the Land to people so that the potentially harmful influences are neutralised or become positive. He puts Brigit in this category as well as Cernunnos, based on the charm in the Carmina Gadelica about the snake coming out of the hole on Brigit’s Day:

Early on Bride's morn
The serpent shall come from the hole,
I will not molest the serpent,
Nor will the serpent molest me

and observes that the same formula is used of Conall Cernach in the Táin Bó Fraích:

"We will go truly," says Conall. They attack the Liss; the serpent darts into the girdle of Conall Cernach, and they plunder the dun at once. They save then the woman and the three sons, and they carry away whatever was the best of the gems of the dun, and Conall lets the serpent out of his girdle, and neither of them did harm to the other.”

There has been some speculation that the epithet Cernach in the name Conall Cernach, the foster-brother of Cuchulainn, is related to Cernunnos however it seems more likely that it means ‘the victorious’. Alexei suggests that the storyteller used some motifs connected with Cernunnos because he had noticed the similarity of the name.

Next: Part 2: Accessing the Fruits of the Wild

July

2011-07-05T16:48:00.002+01:00

The month of July, the hay is under cover,

the sunshine is hot, the hailstones melt;

Mis Gorffennaf, hyglyd gwair,

taer tes, toddedig kessair;

Verses of the Months, Welsh c 15th century

I had an unexpectedly nice morning on July 1st repotting some sunflowers for a friend as well as some fennel which had seeded itself - just as well because the parent plant didn't survive the harsh winter. I also dug up my purple sage and put it in a pot for the time being. It has been nibbled by something again this year and isn't thriving - the same with a lungwort. I'll let them get to a good size in the pots and then find a congenial place for them. They are already perking up and taking more of an interest in life.

I've also repotted one of the small hazel sapling which seeded itself in a friend's vegetable patch. There were two and I've put the other,bigger one at the top of the garden next to the plum tree where it's doing well. I'm still not sure where to put this one and it was complaining about its confinement. So now it is in an old split bucket giving me a chance to decide.

Lest you think all in my garden is lovely, here is a rather ugly,untidy, dirty corner. But of course if it were not for this, the growth and healing and blossoming could not take place.

There are less than pleasant areas of my life too... and I often think that in spite of them, something lovely grows and blossoms. Perhaps it is not in spite of, but because of?

Oh, the dwarf beans have perked up too and seem to be thinking about fulfilling their potential.

Metaphors...

Midsummer Garden

2011-06-27T17:02:00.003+01:00

I thought I'd show you some of the lovely things that are happening in my garden at the moment... (Click to enlarge.)

The peerless beauty of the rose - this one is the New Dawn. I planted it by the trellis I put up on the east side of the garden last year and it has grown wonderfully. I've planted honeysuckle and clematis as well as by the trellises but the roses are the only plants that have taken off - I think they like the chicken poo...

There were no apples on the Bramley last year and I thought I might have to get another pollinator - it needs two and I only have one, a Fiesta (child of a Cox's Orange Pippin but more disease resistant). However this year there are several apples so something in a neighbour's garden must have done the trick. Both types of apple are good for storing - important when you have more than you can eat.

The Victoria Plum has fruit on it for the first time too!

This is a particularly lovely part of the garden. It begins in the spring with solomen's seal and continues with monkshood, hypericum, peony, cornflowers as well as the ubiquitous lady's mantle which is on a mission to take over my whole garden... Orange lillies are slowly ripening now.

Here's a pink peony I caught before the rain demolished the petals.

Last year I threw down some wild flower seeds from an old packet on a bare patch at the top of the garden. They grew and corn cockles were a joy to see. I hoped they might seed themselves and come again this year but unfortunately not. However, there are masses of white campion as a consolation.

The strawberries are rich red jewels hidden among the green leaves. Picking them is like a treasure hunt! Last year's plants extended themselves into a big plot so I've got a good crop.They taste like strawberries used to taste when I was a child. I wish I'd noted what type they are.

I only grow a few token vegetables on a small area I can easily manage myself. It's on top of a wall that runs along the patio at the bottom of a slope. Last year the leeks and swiss chard were very successful - this year, for some strange reason, the slugs have eaten 13 of my 17 leeks... and the perpetual spinach is spindly with small leaves.
One cauliflower grew huge and then fell over and subsequently died in the strong winds we had a few weeks ago. The other has been largely eaten - although the white flower in the centre is growing; it won't come to much but I've never grown cauliflower before so I'm interested in seeing it. I've a few dwarf beans in a container but they're not doing much - so, not a good year for vegetables. There is one courgette plant which has two forming nicely and the purple-sprouting broccoli above is looking promising... but I think the slugs have found it. (Yes,those are rosebay willow herb and yes, it was a mistake to leave them - but they are so beautiful!)

The most exciting thing is the new pond! More of that - and its guardians - another time.

Tending Brigit's Flame

2011-06-21T13:24:00.000+01:00

I've recently rejoined Ord Brighideach, becoming a flame-keeper in Cill na Craoibhe Olóige, the Olive Branch, a group within the Order that I inititated about 12 years ago. I lapsed from it when my life went a bit haywire but last month I finally decided the time was right to make the commitment to tend the flame again.

It's coincided with wanting to suspend writing any more articles - including the one about the Cauldron of Poesy - because I think I've had enough of such left brain activity (researching, ordering, codifying, making a coherent argument) and want to concentrate more on poetry, inner work and practice for a while. I'm sure I'll come back to the Cauldron at some point (maybe in the winter when I'm not in the garden so much) but it feels right to put it aside for now and move into something more free-flowing.

My first shift was a wonderful experience. I have two shrines in my house now; one by the fire in the living-room and one in the hall. The latter came together in a totally unplanned way; the hall is very large and when I moved in 3 years ago it felt bare. The bottom part of a pine dresser needed somewhere to go so I put it there and it seemed to belong. Then I wanted a place to put a mirror that had belonged to my parents; the one thing I wanted most out of their house. It's antique, of dark wood with curly edges and a golden phoenix (or probably an eagle) on the top and it became for me a symbol of renewal. (I was reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix while I was staying in my parents' house, clearing and sorting out their things with my siblings. Harry's grief at the death of Sirius seemed to mirror my own.) The Phoenix mirror hangs comfortably above the dresser cupboard - in spite of being in a totally different style - and since it had been above the hall table in my parents' house that seemed fitting.

Next came a Buddha... My son and daughter-in-law had given it to me for a house-warming present (they bought it in Sainsbury's!) It was for the garden but after being there the first winter the paint started to crack so I brought it indoors, repaired it and put it on the dresser cupboard. It's rather beautiful. I'm not a Buddhist but I think of him as the Spirit of Contemplation and seeing him calm and at peace as day changes into night, summer into winter and sun into rain helps to remind me to keep a philosophical outlook as I go through the changes life brings.

Finally, the little head of Brigit I made in pottery class needed somewhere to go and I put her to the right of the Buddha and she was happy there. I spent 8 weeks making that statue. I used as a model the statue of a goddess or priestess wearing a torque found at a healing spring in Chamalieres, France and dated to the first century AD.

I thought of it constantly in between the weekly classes and couldn't wait to work on it. Sadly it came to pieces in the kiln but all was not lost: the head was intact and the body was in quite large pieces so it was possible to glue it together and in way, as it was a copy of an old statue, I thought it would add something to it. The pottery teacher said he would glue it and I decided he might make a better job of it than me so I left it to him. But horror of horrors - he didn't do it right away and someone from another class saw it lying on one of the shelves and threw it out! Thankfully, they left the head. I was devastated, as you can probably imagine! I do have a photograph of it though:

A patient of mine, a carpenter, made me a plinth out of reclaimed cedar, for the head to rest on and all was not lost. I was left with a gap on the left side of the Buddha and so it was natural to put the little statue I had made of Cernunnos based on the Gundestrup Cauldron there.

After this I realised that the hall was the perfect place for the shrine. It's in the centre of the house and I pass it several times a day.

A week or so before I started tending the flame again I bought a candle holder I'd had my eye on last year. It came from a sea-side shop selling useful items for caravanners and campers and what my mother would have called 'tat' - which I actually quite like! Shells and little ornaments and mobiles and windmills... But I had resisted buying this particular 'thing' because clearing out my parents' house and moving a couple of years later has made me very wary of 'things' - I've got too many of them and I'm not good at dusting... But one day, in a weak moment, when I was in the shop buying some windmills (to put beside the baby leeks to keep the cats off) I bought it. And I'm so pleased I did - it's perfect. Not only is there space for two tea lights but there is a hidden pump (not too loud) which makes water cascade down the wall of the holder. The flame of the tea lights is reflected in the water giving the effect of fire in water, which I associate with the mystery of Brigit, and the sound is gentle, evocative, musical.

It's called a Cordless Tealight Tranquility Fountain and cost £6.99. I thought it would also be a very nice thing to have if you had to go into hospital or somewhere rather sterile. (You could use some LED tealights.) They have them at Redsave if you're in the UK, or at Amazon.com.

I don't know how it will be in the winter sitting in the hall by the shrine when I'm tending the flame, (not for the whole 24 hours of course!) but for now it is fine. How lovely it was to go into deep meditation, to say poems and prayers, to talk to Brigit, to connect. Willow, one of my cats, came out of the kitchen into the dark hall, lit only by the candles, and sat, unmoving, beside me for 20 minutes - both of us honouring the space.

One thing I noticed is that there are gaps in the 19 day cycle of tending the flame in Cill Olive (Brigit herself tends it on the 20th day) - shifts 8, 12, 15 and 17 need to be filled. This saddens me because it means the flame is not being kept alight on a permanent basis. If you would like to join me and the other flame-keepers at Cill na Craoibhe Olóige, the Olive Branch to tend Brigit's perpetual flame, that would be wonderful!

Here is some information from the site: "Each Flamekeeper is assigned a shift to tend Brighid's flame on a 20 day cycle - 19 shifts, plus one day upon which Brighid tends the flame herself. Since the Celtic day runs from sundown to sundown, we tend from sundown to sundown. The expectation is that you will tend the flame for as much of the day as possible, taking safety into consideration. If you can only manage a few minutes, that is acceptable, although tending the flame the entire day is optimal. The longer you are able to tend, the more energy we will be able to generate: an offering to this world and the otherworld, as well as to Brighid."

As I envisaged it originally, the Cill had the particular purpose of praying for peace - as it appears the Abbesses of Kildare once did. When I lapsed, the Order took over the Cill and its origins seem to have been lost and it is not now a requirement. However, if you're interested and you'd like to, you could say a prayer or a poem or think about peace - in the world or in your own life.

Here's a peace prayer I wrote:

Brigit,

We ask for the light of your flame

To enable us to see clearly,

To illuminate the darkness,

To show us the shadows

Cast by our own light.

May the flame of your inspiration

Help us to express and comfort,

To understand and explain -

Encourage us and guide our actions.

We ask for the gift of your healing

To soften our pain,

And mend the wounds

We have inflicted on one another -

Bless us and make us whole.

May the fire of your forge

Enable us to shape our future

With courage and determination,

Using the flame of justice,

Tempered by compassion.

Brigit,

We ask for your protection

Against all that would harm us.

May the beacon of your flame

Show us a path to peace

That all may follow.

Rob fír/May it be true.

Calling All Dragons - Heart of the Dragon Festival

2011-06-05T17:59:00.003+01:00

Come and join the gathering of the dragons on 2nd July 2011 at Newcastle Emlyn, Castell Newydd Emlyn, in the Heart of the Teifi Valley in west Wales.

From the Heart of the Dragon Festival organisers

This amazing festival that hatched a new baby dragon in July 2007 at Newcastle Emlyn on the banks of the Teifi River in West Wales is sending this call to all dragons and dragon keepers around the world to come and join them in celebration of the return of the Dragon and the fulfilment of Merlin's prophecy on 2nd July 2011. In a combination of myths, new stories, ceremonies, a parade of dragons, a green fayre, and many other magical and exciting events for all.

A beautiful Golden Dragon Gate was installed at the entrance to the castle, thanks to the Town Council.
Also a giant carved oak chair now sits at the back of the Castle overlooking the grounds and the River Teifi, surounded by a mosaic telling the story of our dragon.
(Thanks to Pamela Gaunt, the Small Awards Lottery Fund and Sculptor Ian Johnston)

ON THE DAY

Merlin, the Dragon Queen, Tiamat, and the baby dragon will be there to bless the ground to fulfil the prophecy:

'When dragon oak is truly found, Merlin and Dragon will bless the ground.
With oak within the castle wall, the town will prosper for one and all.'

We Need HELPERS!

Both before and on the day to help us organise our dragons and their keepers. Also to help with the running of the Green Fayre and events of the day.

An amazing chance to work behind the scenes of a festival.

Contact Annette or Marc

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES

If you have a product or service that would fit into the philosophy of the festival and fayre and would like to have a stall or space at the event; or advertise in the programme; or even become a sponsor of the festival then please Contact Annette or Marc

Please forward this - That way we can possibly reach every corner of the world and encourage all to come and join the gathering of the dragons at Newcastle Emlyn, Castell Newydd Emlyn, in the Heart of the Teifi Valley in west Wales. Also come yourself of course!

A Call to all Dragons, Dragon Keepers & Dragon Lovers everywhere

from the Heart of the Dragon Festival

Join us, on 2nd July, in bringing together the largest collection of dragons ever, to celebrate the return of the dragon - both our baby hatched in 2007 and now the Golden Dragon in 2011.

So come along and bring a dragon.

Your dragon can be large, small, drawn or worn; in groups or on its own; on a flag or a T shirt; in your hat or on a ring; sculptured, knitted, sewn; carried, pushed, floating - we have a river! or even flying; as a drink, food, or something growing; you can even read, sing, dance or play us your dragon's tale.

Whatever, you and your dragon will be very welcome to join us in this exciting challenge of gathering the dragons.

Obviously real dragons will be especially welcome

The Green Fayre

The FREE ENTRY Heart of the Dragon Festival has always had demonstrations of crafts and workshops around sustainability and a positive future, so this year it has been decided to give over the lower field of Newcastle Emlyn Castle Grounds to a Green Fayre so that we can have more stalls, events and workshops showing sustainable ways of caring for the lands of the dragon. So come along, join in, have fun and share the spirit of the dragon.

If you do not have a dragon - do not despair, as there will be workshops to make dragons and dragony things at the fayre. so you can then join us in the celebratory Parade of Dragons through town and around the castle in the afternoon.

The Story behind the Festival

The Old Story
The Last Dragon in Wales was killed in Newcastle Emlyn… Centuries ago on a hot summer’s day, the townsfolk were gathered for the annual fair. Suddenly above the noise of tradesmen, cattle, music and song was heard the most extraordinary sound. Grown men quaked in their boots and the onlookers were paralyzed with fear. There, in the sky above them, was hovering an enormous winged serpent. After circling for some time it came to alight upon one of the turrets of the castle and appeared to fall asleep.

The people were desperate to be rid of this fearsome beast. At last a tall young man strode to the front of the crowd, a red shawl under his arm, and a musket over his shoulder. He went into the river until he was waist deep and spread the shawl over his shoulders and took steady aim. The serpent rose into the clear sky. A shot rang out. The Dragon swooped towards the floating shawl and clutched it in its talons .Writhing in a whirlpool of blood, shawl and venom the serpent sank beneath the water never to be seen again.

As for the brave man, as soon as the shot had left his gun he had dived beneath the water and swum to the farther bank of the river and climbed out, none the worse for his ordeal. It was said that the fishing on the Teifi was not good that year, but whether it was due to the contaminated water or fear of the beast nobody knew.

The Facts
Stories are passed down orally over hundreds of years by many tellers and later written generally from one point of view for political propaganda, as well as entertainment!
The version above is the well known and recorded legend of Newcastle Emlyn - where heroes are good and dragons are bad.

But are they?

All around the world, for thousands of years, the dragon was a creature representing the power of nature, and still is beloved and revered in many cultures. In Wales we still see the magnificent creature on our flag, a symbol of national pride.

The castle in Newcastle Emlyn is one of the few built by the Welsh, and tracing the various versions of the story back over the different dates given, is, in itself, a fascinating exploration of Welsh history, of invasions, occupations and resistance.

Research reveals that the story could have originated as a record of a battle in 1403 when chieftain Owain Glyndwr, whose standard was a red winged Gwiber/serpent, seized the castle briefly from the occupiers, but the falling of his flag and the accompanying bloodshed ended this resistance… so is it a tragedy or a heroic feat, This killing of the Dragon?

The New Story
However, all good stories have a new beginning and this one is called Heart of The Dragon.

In midsummer 2006, a story was found in Newcastle Emlyn's shop windows telling of people’s love for the dragon. The Scouts made a nest and Protectors of the Dragon’s Nest and Guardians of the Dragon’s Story were appointed when over a hundred people called to the dragon from the hill top of the castle ruins. They were rewarded with finding a floating coracle on the serpent shaped river, which contained a dragon's egg! The dragon returned to where it was last seen: Newcastle Emlyn.

This egg was carefully tended by the protectors and guardian. During the year between the finding and the hatching of the egg it travelled across to other Dragon festivals around Europe: Ireland, Portugal and Poland.

The Festival… HEART OF THE DRAGON

Newcastle Emlyn hosted a two day Heart of the Dragon Festival in July 2007 that literally stepped into the story at the castle, with a medieval fayre and re-enactment of

the Last Dragon of Wales story and saw over 3000 people pass through its gates! There were prop making and historical costumes tents, birds of prey, music, storytelling, puppets, and much, much more for everyone to enjoy and participate in. There was an exhibition of the history of the castle and Owain Glyndwr for people to visit.

Then to bring the present into the stories of bloodshed and the wars of history, local schools, community and youth groups made processional dragons for a parade through the town accompanied by marching bands, stilt walkers and jugglers in the celebration of the return of the dragon. For the giant egg hatched and the birth of a new Baby Dragon was seen and given a welcoming ceremony.

In 2009 the baby was named amid further ceremonies, with Tiamat the Dragon Queen and Owain Glyndwr, and Merlin returned from the crystal cave who gave the prophecy that

‘When dragon oak is truly found, Merlin and Dragon will bless the ground
With oak within the castle wall, the town will prosper for one and all.’

Now on 2nd July 2011 this prophecy will be fulfilled with the oak tree found and carved into a Dragon Chair sitting in the castle grounds overlooking the River Teifi, and now to be blessed by Merlin. With this festival there is to be a call to all dragons and dragon keepers across the world to come and join the celebrations of this auspicious event at the Heart of the Dragon Festival and Green Fayre in the presence of Tiamat and especially the Golden Dragon.

The Philosophy

HEART OF THE DRAGON began as a community arts project in 2005 and around five thousand people have been involved in one way or another over that time in the festivals, events, workshops, writing, drama etc.

Heart of the Dragon has looked at this mythologically where locally, in our town, which has the legend of the Last Dragon being killed… we have reborn the dragon as a symbol of unity, hope for the future and care for our land of the dragon. We have attempted to honour the dragon as a national symbol (whilst not supporting nationalism) and bring the dragon off its perch on flags and castle turrets right down to the land, in fact as the Spirit of the Land. We have a creation story where the whole world is a living and breathing Dragon.

In our medieval fayres we have had demonstrations of scything, coppicing, natural dyeing and weaving etc. As we are primarily an arts project, people of all ages and backgrounds come to our events, because ceremony, procession, fun, magic, myths and storytelling, costume, music, dance and more appeal to all. Therefore we can be a platform for the so called ‘alternative’ to get seen by many in the so called ‘mainstream’ These are of course just words, basically we have been aiming to create a story which heals divisions in our community, created historically and politically, that reconnects people with their community and environment.

Like most movements that are pioneering new ways of being, especially environmental and sustainable, Heart of the Dragon looks back to the wisdom of the ancient and from that looking at how we can now begin to repair the damage we have done and are doing to our planet. So we work on the local, then national and then global levels, as do all projects endeavouring to bring in sustainability and global responsibility.

Links to Festival Sites
http://www.newcastle-emlyn.com/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Heart-of-the-Dragon-Festival-Newcastle-Emlyn/101937233208403

follow facebook links to see baby dragon being born

http://www.heartofthedragonwales.org/

Email Addresses

Pamela Gaunt Artistic Director

Annette Ecuyere FestivalOrganiser

Marc Gordon Co-Ordinator

June

2011-06-01T13:04:00.000+01:00

Verses of the Months

The month of June, beautiful are the lands,

the sea is smooth, the strands are gay,

long and fair is the day, women are lively,

the flock is abundant, the bogs are passable;

Mis Mehevin, hardd tiredd,

llyfn mor, llawen marianedd,

hirgain dydd, heinif gwargedd,

hylawn praidd, hyffordd mignedd;

Welsh c. 15th century

The Way of Brigit, Goddess and Saint: Towards a Post-Christian Paganism

2011-05-11T18:45:00.008+01:00

Sulamith Wülfing: The Way

Goddess as saint: my dilemma

Some time ago I wrote about how a visit to Brigit’s church by Llanon had unsettled me and made me wonder about my relationship to her as goddess and saint. I had first read about Brigit in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess where the connection between goddess and saint was stated and so from the first I didn’t question it but incorporated material from St Brigit’s story into her lore. But walking into a church, seeing the prayer books, the cross on the altar and the east window with its depiction of the risen Christ suddenly brought it home to me that Christianity also claimed Brigit and that she had her own relationship with the Christian god. The church was not my church and I was unsure how to relate to the figure of Jesus behind the altar. I felt I needed to make some sort of response and so gave a short nod and muttered something about ‘just having come in to have a word with Brigit’ as I went to the pew beside her own window…

When I first started researching Brigit and other Celtic material, I wanted to dismiss the references to Christianity, to God and Jesus and the other saints beside Brigit. I was trying to sift Christianity out of the narrative and reach further back to a pagan past which I believed was still discernable in such accounts as Giraldus Cambrensis’ description of the keeping of the flame at Kildare. Like many pagans I rewrote some of the charms and prayers in Scottish, Irish and Welsh sources for my own use, missing out the Christian references.

But then as time went on I found myself less sensitive to these and in a subtle and almost imperceptible way began tuning in to the manner in which the Irish, Scottish and Welsh folk and poets related to and interacted with their God and saints. So, for instance, I noted how there were folk traditions concerning Jesus, his mother and the saints, such as this one from the Western Isles where it was told that Christ asked Peter to row 707 strokes from the shore when he was going to fish for tribute money. According to Alexander Carmichael, because of this, the old men of Uist required the young men to row out 707 strokes before casting their nets on Christmas Day and whatever fish they caught were given to the poor as a tribute in the name of Christ, King of the sea, and of Peter, king of fishermen.(1) Again, certain woods were seen as evil or poisonous, such as aspen, because they were said to have been the wood the cross was made out of.

I saw the way that Christian prayers were used as invocations or charms for healing and protection – for instance the Credo, the Pater Noster and the Prayer of Mary Mother had to be recited by a person needing protection when she had a caim, or circle of protection set around her – and how the actions of Christ and the saints were recounted in healing charms for toothache and other ailments. The attitude to God, Christ, Mary, Brigit and other saints was in general positive and trusting. They were petitioned for protection and healing, their powers seen very often as benevolent and magical – there is a sense that deities and saints are part of the family. A prayer in the Carmina Gadelica for the kindling of the fire says:

Who are they on the bare floor?
John and Peter and Paul,
Who are they by my bed?
The lovely Bride and her Fosterling.
Who are those watching over my sleep?
The fair loving Mary and her Lamb.
Who is that anear me?
The King of the sun, He himself it is.
Who is that the back of my head?
The Son of Life without beginning, without time.

Eventually I began to mentally translate ‘God’ as ‘Godness’ or ‘divinity’ and after a while I stopped having to translate but saw the word ‘God’ as signifying this.

The hagiography, the texts about the saints, were usually written with a specific purpose in mind. Often this was political such as Cogitosus’ life of Brigit which was probably aiming to promote the See of Kildare against the spread of Patrick’s centre at Armagh, or 12th and 13th century Welsh hagiography which was used to further the cause of an independent Welsh Church against Anglo-Norman culture and traditions. The authors of these stories used folklore narratives and motifs as part of their armoury and as a result they drew on concepts and beliefs from traditional patterns. This is especially true in Wales where the values of the native culture were emphasised over traditional church concepts and values.(2) In the Welsh lives of the saints, secular or pagan characters – even the tylwyth teg, the fair people or fairies – figure alongside the Christian saints.

So I began to blur the boundaries between pagan and Christian and exposure to this way of being Christian – essentially a folk tradition – led me to tune not so much into the name of the religion and its divine beings but the way in which the people of the three Celtic-speaking countries of Ireland, Scotland and Wales related to them and worshipped them. And the way they were worshipped seemed to me to emphasise intimacy and immanence (God’s presence in the material universe).

One of the ways folk Christianity differs from orthodox Christianity or the Christianity of the established Church is that it is often conveyed through story-telling which weaves a narrative around the particular culture and landscape of a people. It is more concerned with what Edward Conze has called the ‘initial tradition’ of Christianity – which I think of as that of Gospels and Acts – than the ‘continuing tradition’ that consists of the Fathers and doctors of the church, the decisions of councils and synods and the pronouncements of various hierarchies’.(3) So unlike much of theology which seeks to apply logic and reasoning to religion in an attempt to make it into an ordered system, story-telling is multivalent, fluid, adaptable, forgiving of inconsistency and paradox. It has its roots in the people and their landscape and is therefore less susceptible to the control of a central agency, unlike a top-down theology, the product of an élite which may have political considerations as well as spiritual ones.

I am personally much more influenced and inspired by story than by theology which is often an intellectual exercise designed to apply logic to things which are beyond reason. The word for ‘supernatural’ used by the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso means ‘that which knowledge cannot eat’. So story, art and symbol become valid means of approaching an interaction with the supernatural and the divine; Jesus understood this and often used parables to convey spiritual lessons, or esoteric speech, ‘secret sayings’. The truth of a story does not depend on its factuality or historical accuracy, the story is a container or vessel for truth. As a poem attributed to St Columba says:

If every poem is a lie,

then clothing and food are lies too,

as are the whole world and even clayey man..

Masa brec gach dan suad,

Is brec brat’s as brec biadh.

‘s as brec an domhan uli,

‘s as brec fos an duinecriadh. (4)

The story of Brigit and Jesus

Returning to my crisis about Brigit as saint, over the weeks following my visit to Llansantffraed, I began to think again about her story as it appears in folklore and poetry. The Carmina Gadelica recounts that Brigit was Mary’s aid-woman or midwife and that she was present in the stable in Bethlehem and helped to bring Jesus into the world. After he was born, she became his foster-mother. She was known as ban-chuideachaidh Moire (the aid-woman of Mary), Muime Chriosda (foster-mother of Christ); Bana-ghoistidh Mhic De (the god-mother of the son of God) and Bana-ghoistidh Iosda Criosda nam bann agus nam beannachd (godmother of Jesus Christ of the bindings and blessings). And Jesus is called Dalta Bride (the foster-son of Bride); Dalta Bride bith nam beannachd (the foster-son of Bride of the blessings) and Daltan Bride (little fosterling of Bride). Foster parenting was very important in Celtic society, sometimes more tender and close than blood ties and it commanded obligations and duties.

In Ireland two poems or hymns refer to her – rather surprisingly - as the actual mother of Jesus:

“she, the branch with blossoms,

the mother of Jesus!”

in chróieb co m-blathaib

in mathair Ísu

(Ultan’s Hymn: Brigit Be Bithmaith)

and

Brigit, mother of my high King,

Of the kingdom of heaven best she was born

Brigit mathair mo rurech

nime flatha ferr cinis

(the 7th c St Broccan’s Hymn to Brigit)

(This may be referring to a concept based on a reference to Matthew xii, 50: 'Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother.')

There is a story that in order to divert Herod’s men away from Jesus so that he could make his escape to Egypt with his mother, Mary, Brigit put a crown of candles on her head and dancing away, led them in another direction. Another story from Ireland told that Brigit walked in front of Mary with a lighted candle in each hand when she went up to the temple for Purification. In spite of strong winds the candles did not flicker or go out.

So Brigit helped at the birth of Jesus and protected him and Mary afterwards. She was Jesus’ foster-mother, his god-mother (or perhaps his goddess-mother) and his protector.

Now there are multiple interpretations of how this story might have come about. If you believe in the reality of Brigit as goddess, she may have chosen to express herself through the new religion. Or perhaps you prefer to think that the people had known a goddess Brigit (perhaps particularly associated with Leinster where Ptolemy’s map shows a tribe called the Brigantes) and did not wish to abandon her when they took on Christianity. There again there could have been a nun called Brigit whom the folk simply equated with the goddess of the same name or perhaps the fathers of the new religion in Ireland wanted to make it more palatable to the people by making this link with the much-loved goddess of the older religion. But whatever interpretation you put on its genesis, the cult of Brigit chose to accept and nurture Christianity and the implicit meaning of this narrative, the truth that is being expressed through it, is that Brigit existed before the birth of Christianity and assisted in bringing it into the world.

Why would Brigit take Jesus as her foster-son?

Thinking of Jesus as the foster-son of Brigit made me consider him differently and I began to look at what is positive about the story of Jesus and why Brigit or her people would have wanted to embrace it. What did Christianity bring that was an improvement on what had gone before?

Meditating on what I like about the Christian story was an interesting exercise. As a child I liked the story of Jesus, responding to its underlying mythic patterns: the magical child whose birth is foretold and who shows wisdom at an early age; the dying and rising god, the sacrificed god: Jesus himself describes himself as a grain of wheat which by dying bears fruit (John 12: 24):

'Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit'.

I found very attractive the idea of the child born in the humblest of surroundings who went on to champion the poor and sick and offer the promise of healing and forgiveness to all and I also particularly liked the facility Jesus had with words, the clarity and acuity of his thought. So that when, for instance, he was put in a tight spot when he was asked whether the Jews should pay taxes to the Romans he said ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what belongs to God’. This prevented him being arrested by the Romans for advocating that the people should not pay tribute while the Jews would have understood the deeper message, implicit rather than explicit, that everything belongs to God. He was saying something but not saying it - which is potent speech.

Again, with the woman taken in adultery, his challengers tell him that according to the Law of Moses she should be stoned. If he agrees with this, he would become responsible for the act of execution but if he does not he will be seen not to uphold Mosaic Law. The way he deals with this test is skilful. He says: 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone'. This takes the responsibility for any murderous act away from himself as well as commanding the crowd to look at themselves and their sins and take responsibility for them. When the people leave he tells the woman he does not condemn her and enjoins her to go away and ‘sin no more’. Presumably he thinks that she is guilty of adultery but he effectively forgives her and offers her a second chance; he is merciful. And he is clearly not anti-women in this encounter.

This story appears only in John, whose gospel is later than the other three and differs from them since it puts forward a theology of Christ which was based on Greek philosophy, especially Stoicism. John refers to Jesus as the ‘logos’, which is usually translated as ‘the Word’ but is a Stoic idea which has a wider meaning, denoting also ‘meaning’ or ‘pattern’ – the divine animating principle pervading the Universe. So Jesus is the incarnation of this principle – of the way of heaven on earth.

Rightly or wrongly I can’t help but associate this idea with the Vedic idea of the rita, which, similarly is a vital force which underlies the Universe and human and divine behaviour; the ‘cosmic order or law’ - and also with the Irish concept of fir flathemon, the principle of the truth of the ruler which, means that when the king rules in accord with the rightness of things, being just and righteous, he ensures peace and prosperity for the land and the people. When he forsakes this principle however chaos ensues –the weather is erratic, crops fail and so on.

John also records that Jesus brought grace and truth and that he said that he was ’the way, the truth and the life’ and that no-one could come to God except through him. Rather than meaning that Christianity is the only religion which promises reconciliation with the divine, to me this means that only by following the way of truth, embodied by Jesus, can one achieve the kingdom of heaven – not necessarily in the after-life but in this one – the kingdom of heaven is inside us, not outside us, and therefore accessible to everyone so that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” as the Lord's prayer puts it. And what God wills, as Jesus sees it, is a kingdom in which compassion, truth, justice and non-violence reign and which give everlasting life to the spirit.

In their book The Last Week, Borg and Crossan point out that it was the passion of Jesus for this kind of kingdom that led to his death since it came into conflict with the domination system of the Roman Empire – a system which is, in fact, pretty much the norm even in the world today. So it was the injustice of the domination systems that killed him because he was upholding an antithetical system of peace and compassion. He was killed not so much for the sins of the world but by the sins of the world.(5)

This Jesus is then the embodiment of the way of truth, the divine order that upholds the universe; a speaker of truth to power; an advocate of non-violent opposition to domination systems by believing in and acting in accordance with a system which depends on compassion, mercy, justice, love. In many ways then, he is the ideal of the king in the Irish sense – he upholds fir flathemon, he may even be to some extent the ideal that the concept is built on since the Irish texts which refer to it were written down in the Christian period.

How easy was it for the Irish people to accept Christianity?

One particular problem was that the honour price (the system of payment for injuries suffered depending on one’s wealth and position in the clan) was antithetical to the Christian teaching of merit based on spiritual achievement not material possessions or status.(6) Another, significantly, seems to have been the Christian doctrine of Mercy.

In the Pseudohistorical Prologue to the Senchas Már, dating from the early eighth century, there is a story in which the men of Ireland, after the arrival of Patrick and Christianity, met up with their king, Lóegaire, who asked them what would be the most difficult thing about converting to the new religion. They replied that the Christian doctrine of Mercy would mean that they wouldn’t be able to put murderers to death as was their usual practice and so the social fabric would be destroyed. A compromise was reached and the men of Ireland converted to Christianity. Lóegaire then ordered that the whole of the oral native tradition of law and poetry was to be examined, reviewed and edited so that it conformed to Christian standards.(7) (It is implied that there is much to keep and that in some way the native, oral lore of Ireland prefigures the Christian law.)

The reason why this story seems significant to me is that in the Life of Brigit in the Lebar Brecc, when she is consecrated Brigit chooses, out of the eight beatitudes, the beatitude of Mercy. By doing so, if the Pseudohistorical Prologue is to be believed, she is putting herself at the heart of a fundamental early opposition between Christianity and Paganism and choosing to espouse a way of Mercy rather than one of retribution.

Certainly, by the end of the 7th century/ beginning of the 8th Mercy had become a desirable quality. The Audacht Morainn (Testament of Morann) is an Old Irish text which belongs to the medieval genre of Speculum Principis or Mirror for Princes. These texts were instructions to kings or princes on aspects of rule and behaviour. The text mentions fifteen virtues proper to a ruler appearing in this order: Mercy, Justice, Impartiality, Conscience, Firmness, Generosity, Hospitality, Honour, Stability, Beneficence, Capability, Honesty, Eloquence, Steadiness and Truth in Judging. ‘Let him exalt mercy/ it will exalt him’ (Ocbath trócairi, cotnocéba) announces the judge Morann Mac Moín and so it has exalted St Brigit, herself the exalted one.(8)

Portia’s speech on Mercy from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (late 16th century) is relevant here and a good description of the workings and blessings of mercy:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless'd,

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown:

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptred sway,

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God's,

When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy.

Brigit's foster-son

So, to recap, my research and meditation on Jesus as the foster-son of Brigit led me to consider him in this way: as an example of the deep mythic patterns of the divine child, the dying and rising god, (wheat and fruit), the sacrificed god; as a prophet who spoke truth to power, who had a facility with language and sharpness of thought, who advocated non-violence but challenged the power structures of his day, who was seen as the way of truth, like the ideal of Irish kingship, the embodiment of the logos, the divine power pervading the Universe, and who preached that this logos, this way, is a way of compassion, love, justice and mercy. What is unique and radical about his story of course, is that he advocated loving one’s enemies as well as oneself and one’s neighbour and that he himself suffered the worst of torments and still retained his ability to love and forgive.

This figure seems to be a fitting foster-son of Brigit – both of the culture goddess, with his facility for thought, language and the Word, and of the saint with his advocacy of mercy and compassion. His actions as a conveyer of abundance e.g. (the loaves and fishes) and of celebration (turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana, his first miracle) makes him a figure consistent with Brigit as goddess of fruitfulness and abundance as she appears in many of the stories of the saint and in folklore. In her Life in the Book of Lismore she refers to him as Mary’s son, her friend, and asks him to bless her kitchen with abundance:

May Mary’s son, my Friend, come

to bless my kitchen!

The Prince of the world to the border,

May we have abundance by Him!

Ti Mac Mare mo chara

do benna chad mo chule!

fiaith in domain co immel

ro[n] be immed la sude.

Perhaps during the missing years of Jesus’ life he was being taught by Brigit, as would be consistent with her role as his foster-mother! That might account for the more enlightened view he had of women. Not only did he effectively defend the woman taken in adultery, Mary of Magdala was one of his close circle and in Thomas’s Gospel (114) Simon Peter said to Jesus, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." I take this to mean that Jesus taught her as men were taught so that she became enlightened – an unusual perspective and action for his time.

Christianity and interpretation

This Jesus I have outlined feels like a person I can connect with Brigit and can relate to when I visit the church of Llansantffraed. Of course I have ‘cherry-picked’ the parts of the Christian story which appeal to me, make sense to me and are consistent with my values and aspirations. But there is a long and honoured tradition of such cherry-picking or spinning. Paul and the writers of the gospels had their own way of seeing and shaping the story and its meaning. Before 200 ce early Christian groups held different beliefs but in the 3rd century Christianity became an institution with a hierarchy and fixed set of beliefs, other forms becoming heresy but still existing.
Christianity also took on attributes of other religions apart from the Jewish from the outset: the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, the Roman (and maybe originally Persian) religion of Mithraism and Greek Stoicism. The story was further interpreted by the Church Fathers such as Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo and other leaders, theologians and bishops who formulated the dogma and doctrine and seemed to have added to it the obsession with sex and the vileness of the body and made sure it was a patriarchal religion. Of course the biggest distortion of the Christian message in the West occurred when the Roman emperor Constantine became a Christian and then made it the official religion of the Empire, effectively turning the religion from one whose followers were brutally persecuted to one which itself became an instrument of imperial oppression; a practice continued by some of the popes down the ages as they sought to use it for temporal power and wealth, turning on its head Jesus’ message.

To an extent as well Christianity took on some of the practices and beliefs of the people who inhabited the lands which became Christian (known as contextualisation or inculturation). Famously, Pope Gregory the Great decreed in a letter to Abbot Mellitus in 601 AD that pagan sites in England should be built upon so that they would still be used by the people who worshipped there:

"To his most beloved son, the Abbot Mellitus; Gregory, the servant of the servants of God. We have been much concerned, since the departure of our people that are with you, because we have received no account of the success of your journey. Howbeit, when Almighty God has led, you to the most reverend Bishop Augustine, our brother, tell him what I have long been considering in my own mind concerning the matter of the English people; to wit, that the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed there. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed. And because they are used to slaughter many oxen in sacrifice to devils, some solemnity must be given them in exchange for this, as that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of the holy martyrs, whose relics are there deposited, they should build themselves huts of the boughs of trees about those churches which have been turned to that use from being temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, and no more offer animals to the Devil, but kill cattle and glorify God in their feast, and return thanks to the Giver of all things for their abundance; to the end that, whilst some outward gratifications are retained, they may the more easily consent to the inward joys. For there is no doubt that it is impossible to cut off every thing at once from their rude natures; because he who endeavours to ascend to the highest place rises by degrees or steps, and not by leaps. Thus the Lord made Himself known to the people of Israel in Egypt; and yet He allowed them the use, in His own worship, of the sacrifices which they were wont to offer to the Devil, commanding them in His sacrifice to kill animals, to the end that, with changed hearts, they might lay aside one part of the sacrifice, whilst they retained another; and although the animals were the same as those which they were wont to offer, they should offer them to the true God, and not to idols; and thus they would no longer be the same sacrifices. This then, dearly beloved, it behoves you to communicate to our aforesaid brother, that he, being placed where he is at present, may consider how he is to order all things. God preserve you in safety, most beloved son.
"Given the 17th of June, in the nineteenth year of the reign of our most religious lord, Mauritius Tiberius Augustus, the eighteenth year after the consulship of our said lord, and the fourth indiction."
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, 731 CE, (book 1, chapter 30)

So I have no qualms then in spinning the story of Jesus and weaving my own interpretation of it; after all, it is a function of story-telling as opposed to dogma, that one finds oneself and one’s truth within it.

A post-Christian paganism

This process of reading and researching and meditating on these things has been a fruitful one for me. I moved to a Welsh-speaking area of Wales in 1977 when it was very strongly a Christian country, church and chapel, though it is less so now as secularisation creeps in. Anyone living in a Celtic country and wishing to engage in some way with the tradition, cannot do so without encountering Christianity. It is, on the whole, the medium through which the folk as well as many writers, poets and artists have expressed their understanding of a deeper spiritual reality for nearly 1500 years.

The Celtic lands are covered not only with dolmens and standing stones and stone circles but with churches which, as we have seen were often built on the sites of earlier pagan sites, and holy wells dedicated to the saints who took on some of the functions of earlier deities. So it is difficult to separate out the ingredients in the landscape as well as those in the early Welsh and Irish literature (which the scholar Kim McCone described as ‘a textual omelette’) in order to apportion with a hundred percent accuracy what is pagan and what is Christian.

It is also difficult to determine to what extent our world-view and ethics in the West have been determined by Christianity. It may be that the concept of a benign deity, rather than a capricious deity who has to be propitiated, which many modern pagans - though not all - ascribe to, is itself Christian in origin. And virtues, such as those in the Audacht Morainn which Alexei Kondratiev, a leading participant in the Celtic Reconstructionist movement, put forward for the basis of a Celtic moral philosophy for the movement, are very probably an amalgamation of pagan and Christian virtues devised after the oral native lore was synchronised with Christian law. While I agree enthusiastically with seeking to research and recover as much as possible about early pagan Celtic religion, I understand the limitations of doing so and, as I started by saying, I recognise that the spirituality of various communities in Celtic-speaking countries, has been expressed through Christianity as well as through paganism and to ignore that and marginalize it seems a grave oversight if one is at all interested in honouring the Celtic inheritance.

The Celtic Reconstructionist FAQ states that CR seeks to try ‘to envision what different Celtic Paganisms might look like today if they had been uninterrupted by Christianity, much as Hinduism has changed over the centuries, remaining the same religion but changing in form with the changing times’. I think my perspective is more pragmatic, taking Christianity in the Celtic lands as not so much a break in the Celtic religious or spiritual tradition but as a part of its development and evolution.Therefore a re-emergent pagan or polytheist approach may, to my mind, be inevitably coloured by Christianity just as Christianity was, to some extent, coloured by Celtic paganism.

Resolution

In conclusion, my exploration of the story of Brigit as goddess and saint and the meaning of the relationship between the two has led me to a path which may possibly be described as syncretic. I have not become a Christian, nor like the pagan Romans have I hedged my bets by including an altar to the Christian god in my shrine, but I have developed a way of honouring Jesus as the foster-son of Brigit so that when I visit her church by Llanon, I shall walk into it and be able to greet him more whole-heartedly as I make my way to my special place, the pew beside the window depicting Sant Ffraid.

Of course, while I have entitled this post The Way of Brigit, it is naturally, my particular path and each of us will find our own.

The east window at Llansantffraed, Llanon

References

1. Carmichael, Alexander, FlorisBooks, Edinburgh, 1992 p. 119, pp. 601-2, p. 154

This is part of the Fishing Blessing:

Thou King of deeds and powers above,
Thy fishing blessing pour down on us.
I will sit me down with an oar in my grasp,
I will row me seven hundred and seven strokes.
I will cast down my hook,
The first fish which I bring up
In the name of Christ, King of the elements,
The poor shall have it at his wish.

2. See Henken, Elissa, The Welsh Saints: A Study in Patterned Lives, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1991 and also Henken, Elissa, Traditions of the Welsh Saints, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1987

3. Conze, Edward, Buddhist Scriptures, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1959, p. 11

4. Nagy, Joseph Falaky, Conversing with Angels and Ancients, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1997, p.165

5. Borg, Marcus and Dominic Crossan, The Last Week, SPK, London, 2008, pp.162-3

6. Patterson, Cattle Lords and Clansmen, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame and London, 1994

7. Nagy, Joseph Falaky, Conversing with Angels and Ancients, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1997, p.201-202

8. Mary Condren, author of The Serpent and The Goddess, has been inspired by Brigit and by the benefits of Mercy rather than Sacrifice as a basis for modern society.

May and Canu Haf/Summer Carols

2011-05-02T11:47:00.000+01:00

Verses of the Months

The month of May, the ploughman is extravagant;

every dyke is shelter to the destitute;

joyful is the lightly clad old man;

the wood is leafy, the wanton is glad;

reconciliation is easy where there is love;

tuneful are the cuckoo and the hound;

Mis Mai, difrodus geilwad,

klyd pob klawdd i ddigarad;

llawen hen diarchenad;

hyddail koed, hyfryd anllad;

hawdd kymod lle bo kariad;

llafar koc a bytheiad;

Welsh, c. 15th century

Canu Haf/Summer Carols

The Middle English word 'carol ' comes from Old French 'carole', meaning 'a dance in a ring' or a 'joyous song' and it wasn't until 1502 that it was first noted to mean a Christmas hymn. Summer carols seem to have been more popular in Wales than in England and were sung in houses as well as churches and chapels; some of the old carols call on friends and neighbours to sing together a song of thanksgiving for summer days.

Here's a summer carol called Mwynder Mai/the Sweetness of May. The tune was first published in The Welsh Harper in1848. T. Gwynn Jones wrote a song to go with it:

(I've just realised that the second note should be a C and not a D! Unfortunately I don't have the software to change it any more. Click to enlarge.)

The Sweetness of May

The wizard of May is out riding unseen,
He captures the land with a network of green;
Soft waves of bright sunlight sweep over the leas,
And summer-time songbirds make merry the trees.

Though summer must languish and winter be long,
Though brief be the season of sunshine and song,
Though sorrow still tarries when happiness dies,
Sweet May is the promise of God's Paradise.

Mwynder Mai

Daw dewin y Mai heb ei weled, fin nos,
Gan wasgar ei liwiau ar weirglodd a rhos;
Bydd heulwen y bore yn dawsnio ar dwyn,
A daw ar adenydd lawenydd i lwyn.

Er oered fo'r eira, er garwed fo'r gwynt,
Er byrred ei rwysg fydd yr haf ar ei hynt,
Mewn byd sy mor gymysg o fethiant neu fai,
Rhyw awr o Baradwys yw mwynder Mai.

Written and translated by T. Gwynn Jones

April, Hares and St Melangell

2011-04-07T15:58:00.031+01:00

Leaping Hare: original limited edition print © Jenny Fell
prints and cards available from the artist

from The Verses of the Months

The month of April, the upland is misty,

the oxen are weary, the earth is bare,

feeble is the stag, playful the long-eared (hare);

Mis Ebrill, wybraidd gorthir,

lluddedig ychen, llwm tir,

gwael hydd, gwareus clusthir...

Verses of the Months, Welsh c.15th century

North Wales Wildlife Trust

St Melangell's Church

excerpt from Pilgrimage to Melangell's Healing Centre by Noragh Jones

Third day - arriving at Melangell's shrine and Cancer Help Centre, nestling at the head of a green valley. The church stands in a pre-christian circular enclosure. There was a healing well nearby, but now it's been fenced off and privatised by a new owner.

This is the end of my solitary pilgrimage. I meet friends and talk too much the way you do when you've been alone. Then we catch ourselves out and sit quietly in the church for an hour - praying or not praying according to our lights.

On the oak rood screen Melangell is saving a hare from the Prince of Powys's hunting party. All around the church are carvings of happy hares finding sanctuary under the saint's cloak. (The locals call hares wyn bach Melangell - Melangell's lambs).

I read in the visitor's book a moving record of hundreds of pilgrims who have come here and found the help they needed - to go on living or to face dying. I am lost for words. I go and sit in silence at Melangell's shrine.

ar ei allor (on her shrine

hen gath yn eisted an ancient cat sits

ac yn canu grwndi purring)

Later we go out into the churchyard. The yew trees they say are two thousand years old. Their broken trunks bleed red sap. But they go on offering shelter to whoever comes - faith or no faith.

rym ni'n cymry ein tro (we take it in turns

profi tragwyddoldeb trying on eternity

yn yrywen gau in the hollow yew)

From Stone Circles: Haiku and Haiku Prose by Noragh Jones;

also included in Another Country: Haiku and Haiku Prose from Wales

True Poetry and Ecology: The White Goddess Revisited

2011-03-27T20:12:00.007+01:00

The first time I came across mention of Brigit, goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft, was in Robert Graves’ book, The White Goddess, which I happened upon in the library of the six-form college I went to. This book was to have a huge influence in shaping my subsequent life and my spine still tingles reading the sentence “My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry – ‘true’ in the nostalgic modern sense of ‘the uninprovable original, not a synthetic substitute’.”

Graves’ thesis was that ‘true poetry’ is that which is loyal to the Theme, namely the story of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year. This God fights with his rival, his twin or other self, for the love of the Three-fold Goddess, “their mother, bride and layer-out”. The God of the Waxing Year becomes the God of the Waning Year, is beaten by his rival/twin and dies but is reborn as his other self. This theme was borrowed from The Golden Bough by the Scottish anthropologist, James Frazer, and adapted by Graves to express his own personal mythology in which the Goddess is the Muse and the poet is the God of the Waxing Year. All true poetry expresses some part of this story (which Graves believed was a fundamental part of our psychic inheritance) or evokes the presence of the Goddess when “owls hoot, the moon rides like a ship through scudding cloud, trees sway slowly together above a rushing waterfall, and a distant barking of dogs is heard; or when a peal of bells in frosty weather suddenly announces the birth of the New Year”.

In the Golden Bough this cycle represented the religious beliefs of fertility cults, in which the god mated with the earth goddess, died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Graves lived on the north-west coast of the island of Mallorca where life was still ruled by the old agricultural cycle and he commented that what he wrote would read “very perversely and irrelevantly” to people who were attuned to a more industrial way of life. He had an instinctive mistrust for the growth of industry in the West and its associated values:

“…we have come to be governed, in practice, by the unholy triumdivate of Pluto, god of wealth, Apollo, god of science, and Mercury, god of thieves. To make matters worse, dissension and jealousy rage openly between these three, with Mercury and Pluto black-guarding each other, while Apollo wields the atomic bomb as if it were a thunderbolt…”

According to Graves, the function of true poetry is the religious invocation of the Muse; its use is “the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites”. He saw this as having been once a warning to man that he must “keep in harmony with the living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house” but in his day (he was writing in 1960), the warning had been ignored so that the “prime emblems” of poetry were being dishonoured. Nowadays, he said, “serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill… the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman is reckoned as ‘auxiliary state personnel’. Money “will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-obsessed poet.”

In the last chapter of the book he talks about the suppressed desire of Western people for the return of the goddess and foretells ecological disaster if it is postponed, for the longer it is:

"… and therefore the more exhausted by man’s irreligious improvidence the natural resources of the soil and sea become, the less merciful will her five-fold mask be, and the narrower the scope of action that she grants to whichever demi-god she chooses to take as her temporary consort in godhead."

True poet that he is, he placates her with a poem, the last stanza of which warns:

At dawn you shall appear,
A gaunt, red-wattled crane,
She whom they know too well for fear,
Lunging your beak down like a spear
To fetch them home again.

***

To me the White Goddess is an extraordinary book, filled with power and inspiration. A lot of the scholarship has been shown to be flawed and Robert Graves’ intuitions and theories have given rise to some popular misconceptions which have become part of neo-pagan lore – such as the ogham tree calendar and the image of a triple moon-goddess, maiden, mother and crone, as a basic goddess underlying all European – and therefore Celtic - goddesses. It is not taken seriously by scholars and has become discredited now among many Celtic pagans, particularly Reconstructionists. To be fair to Graves, he himself said that he didn’t trust his historical intuitions any further than they could be accurately checked. (He appealed for feedback from Celtic scholars but was disappointed not to receive any.)

Robert Graves burial place in the churchyard in Deià (Click to see detail)

However it has been a hugely influential book, perhaps, as a single source, the most important for encouraging the return of the goddess and bringing the treasures of Welsh and Irish mythological and poetic sources to a generation hungry for their sacred insights and practices. The book was double-edged in propagating misconceptions about Celtic texts but at the same time encouraging many to learn more, promoting Celtic studies, and I would argue that its legacy is positive rather than negative in this respect. Alexei Kondratiev, rather to my surprise, agreed with me and I notice that in his book The Apple Branch, he concurs with Graves’ intuition that the thirteen lines of Irish Song of Amergin relates to the thirteen moons of the lunar year and the imagery of each line describes some attribute of the different moons.

So as well as giving credence and form to my perception of nature and the land as sacred, The White Goddess was the first book to introduce me to an ecological awareness as well as to Irish and Welsh mythology in general and Brigit in particular. The book also enhanced my perception of poetry as a magical language.

After six-form college I went on to university to read English and, having taken the poetry module, wrote a dissertation on ‘The White Goddess in the Poetry of Robert Graves'. I decided to hitch-hike to the island of Mallorca where he lived to visit him in the summer break before my final year and talk to him about it. He was away in London when I arrived but I eventually came across him at the post office and we went back to his study, talked about the dissertation and he showed me his latest poems – a wonderful encounter. I visited many times subsequently but that first meeting as the proverbial snotty-nosed undergraduate was, of course, the most precious.

I fell in love with the village of Deià where he lived: its turquoise-blue sea, mountains rosy in the evening light, the tinkling of bells as the sheep wandered among the olive groves on the hillside going down to the cove, the church perched on the hill at the top of the village which Robert believed was originally the site of a temple to Diana… it seemed like paradise to a girl raised on the flat lands of East Yorkshire, knowing only the great North Sea which was completely different in character to the Mediterranean, being cold and grey and inhospitable.

The hilltop church at Deià

I wasn’t the only person to be attracted to the village by Robert and The White Goddess – I remember in particular an American girl arriving on the rickety bus from Palma one afternoon. As she came down the steps of the rickety old bus, her small brown suitcase fell open and the contents spilled out onto the road – there among her jumbled clothes was the small Everyman copy of the Mabinogion, identical to the one I had at home. I returned to the village after finishing at university and lived there for a few years before going back to England to join my partner in London and have a child. I visited rarely and haven’t been back for over 20 years although I still sometimes dream about it. After a few years in London - not being a city girl - I moved to Wales, inspired again by The White Goddess, and have been here ever since.

Women and poetry

Graves’ Theme is, as I have said, a personal theme which is suited to a hetero-sexual male and leaves rather open to question the role of the woman poet. Woman is not a poet, he declared at one point, “she is either a Muse or she is nothing”! But then he seemed to relent and said that this didn’t mean a woman shouldn’t write poems but that she should write as a woman, “not as if she were an honorary man”. Although good advice this still meant, for him, writing as he thought a woman should be: “A woman who concerns herself with poetry should…either be a silent Muse… or she should be the Muse in a complete sense: she should be in turn Arianrhod, Blodeuedd and the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd who eats her farrow…She should be the visible moon: impartial, loving, severe, wise”. He thought that domesticity was anathema to the poet and the Muse and that the White Goddess was always ‘the other woman’. As for motherhood: "...if a woman-poet can get a healthy child in exchange for the gift of poetry, why not?" So his view of the Goddess and the woman poet might be said to be rather prescriptive!

Naturally, for all his vision and insight, he couldn’t totally escape being a product of his time, his upbringing and his experiences. He was gracious enough to recognise that one’s relationship with the Goddess was none of his business and for me, what is important is his recognition that the marginalisation and exclusion of the feminine was a cause of great harm and danger to us and the ecosystem of which we are a part, his weaving together of mythology and poetry and his understanding of the magical nature of poetry:

“True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coincidences, into a living entity – a poem that goes about on its own (for centuries after the author’s death, perhaps) affecting readers with its stored magic…the source of poetry’s creative power is not scientific intelligence, but inspiration…”

So I celebrate The White Goddess and think it deserves more credit than it gets these days. It is perhaps not the best book to read if you want an introduction to Celtic Studies or Celtic Reconstructionism but if you want to explore mythology, poetry and many ancient Irish and Welsh texts in the company of someone with an extensive knowledge of them, a formidable intelligence, poetic vision and iconoclastic ideas, then I recommend it thoroughly.

March and Dewi Sant

2011-03-09T17:33:00.002Z

Ploughed Field by Mark Fisher

from The Verses of the Months

The month of March, great is the pride of birds,

bitter is the cold wind over the end of the ploughed field;

Mis Mawrth, mawr rhyfic adar,

chwerw oerwynt ar ben talar;

Welsh, c 15th century

Dewi Sant

Mosaic in Westminster Abbey

March 1st, the day of his death, is the feast day of St David or Dewi Sant - the patron saint of Wales. Tradition states that his birth was foretold to his father, Sant, by an angel while he was out hunting one day. The angel prophesied that he would find a stag, a salmon and a hive of bees by the river Teifi. He was told to take these to Maucannus’ monastery where they would be kept for David. In the Latin lives, the interpretation of this is that they signify David’s power over ancient serpents, his wisdom and his abstinence. Linked with this is the story that Patrick wanted to settle in Glyn Rhosyn but was told by an angel that he must, in the words of a cywydd by Ieuan ap Rhydderch, “leave the land which was kept by holy God for blessed Dewi” (gadu’r tir a gadwyd/ O Dduw lân I Ddewi lwyd). Patrick departed in tears but was given the care of Ireland instead.

No-one is sure how David came to be patron saint of Wales but it is recorded in his Lives that he was chosen as the chief saint at the Synod of Brefi. This Synod was attended by the great and good, religious and secular, and it was decided that each of the clergy would preach in turn and the one who could be heard by everybody would become the chief and would be made archbishop. David didn’t attend at first, but after repeated messages and the threat of fasting, he went. None of the others had been able to be heard by the crowd, in spite of standing on a pile of garments. David merely stood upon a handkerchief (or perhaps a shroud) belonging to a young boy he had raised from the dead and the land rose under him, forming the hill in Llanddewi Brefi where the church now stands. He was renowned as a preacher and being raised up, everyone could hear him. A dove sat on his shoulder while he preached at the Synod and doves had taught him his books. Not surprisingly, the Dove is one of his symbols.

In the Armes Prydein or the Prophecy of Britain, an early 10th century Welsh poem from the Book of Taliesin, David is the only saint to be named. The poem relates how the Brythonic people allied themselves with the Scots, Irish and Dublin Vikings and, under the Welsh leaders Cadwallon and Cadwaladr, vanquished the Anglo-Saxons from Britain. The author is thought to have been a member of one of St David’s monasteries so this may be why David is given such prominence. Possibly this poem helped to place him in a leading position in Wales.

Leeks are another symbol of St David and have been associated with Wales since at least the time of Henry VIII. There is a tradition that David told the Welsh soldiers to wear a leek in their hats when they fought a battle against the Saxons and were victorious. Another tradition says that the Black Prince gave them to the Welsh soldiers to wear at the battle of Crécy. (I am sure that I have read an account, possibly in a herbal or medical text, that leeks worn in battle would make the warrior invisible or impervious to injury. As yet I’ve been unable to locate it but if I have remembered correctly, it might explain this use of them. I’ll keep searching.)

When he decides where to settle in Wales, David has an encounter with a prince called Boya which is somewhat reminiscent of Patrick’s confrontation with the druids at Tara in Ireland. It is said that David lit a fire and the smoke encircled the whole of the island, extending even to Ireland. Lighting a fire in this way was a recognised way of staking a claim to land. The Welsh laws call the right to dwell on inherited land dadannudd, the uncovering of the fire, and into comparatively recent times, someone who could build a house overnight, a tŷ unos, and light a fire in it making smoke rise out of the chimney by dawn, would have the right to the land. In Ireland too, the lighting of a fire on the land was a prerequisite to claiming ownership of it.

A new mosaic of St David, by Welsh artist Ifor Davies, at Westminster Cathedral was blessed by Pope Benedict XVI when he visited the UK in September. The stone at the bottom of the mosaic is from Llanddewi Brefi, the spot where the miracle of the rising of the land is supposed to have happened.

The Pope, who had been unable to visit Wales, blessed the mosaic with water from the holy well of St Non, David’s mother, and had this to say about St David:

Saint David was one of the greatest saints of the 6th century, that golden age of saints and missionaries in these isles, and he was thus a founder of the Christian culture which lies at the root of modern Europe. David's preaching was simple yet profound: his dying words to his monks were, 'Be joyful, keep the faith and do the little things'. It is the little things that reveal our love for the one who loved us first and that bind people into a community of faith, love and service. May Saint David's message, in all its simplicity and richness, continue to resound in Wales today, drawing the hearts of its people to renewed love for Christ and his Church.

He ended with a few words of Welsh: Bendith Duw ar bobol Cymru! God bless the people of Wales!

Germaine Greer, writing about the mosaic in the Guardian, was not happy. She lamented that church art is now “feeble, derivative and kitsch” and thought that people “who are capable of the heroic acts of faith required of today's Catholics should not be mocked by being fed such meretricious pap.” I won’t comment on the art (except to say that I’m a sucker for things that sparkle!) but it’s nice to see a young St David with a contemporary face.

There’s a rather lovely Green Man carving in St David’s Cathedral in Pembrokeshire, under one of the choir seats.

And to end, as I've mentioned before, there's a picture of Dewi as a boy with St Non, his mother, in the double window in the church of Llansantffraed in Llanon, alongside Ffraed. (Click on any of these pictures to enlarge them.)

February and an Irish Imbolc poem

2011-02-01T18:56:00.000Z

St Bride by Margaret Tarrant

The month of February, a feast is rare,

the spade and the wheel are hard at work...

Mis Chwefrol, anaml ankwyn,

llafurus pal ac olwyn...

The Verses of the Months, Welsh, circa 15th century

Imbolc

Tasting every food in order

This is what behoves at Imbolc

Washing of hand and feet and head

It is thus I say.

Fromad cach bíd iar n-urd,

issed dlegair i n-Imbulc,

díunnach laime is coissi is cinn,

is amlaid sin atberim.

(From an Irish calendar poem in Hibernica Minora, edited by Kuno Meyer,translation by Kenneth Jackson.)

Urthona: the arts and the sacred

2011-01-25T14:30:00.000Z

I came across Urthona [if you get diverted repeatedly, as I did, to a Dharma Link website, scroll down to the Urthona link] when the editors were doing an issue on Celtic Connections and asked if they could use an article of mine on Brigit. Urthona describes itself as a journal of Buddhism and the arts but has much to offer those who aren't Buddhist but are interested in the arts and the sacred; I think it deserves to be better known than it is.

The name is taken from Blakes's spirit of the Imagination, Urthona, one of the four Zoas. Information in the front of the journal tells us that "In his temporal form Los, Urthona is the archetypal blacksmith who labours in his forge to beat out forms which will awaken mankind from spiritual slumber and remind us that this world is 'all one continued vision of Fancy or Imagination'.

"The journal seeks to present the work of artists and thinkers who:

Express the sacred dimension of the arts in ways which are relevant now.

Embody in their work the unlimited possibilities of human consciousness; its potential for insightful, sympathetic appreciation of nature, humanity and all forms of life.

Illuminate or embody the Buddhist notion of cultural disciplines as a Way, a means towards finding our true nature, that which is boundless and unconditioned.

Critical of the pervasive nihilism of our age, but aware equally of the dangers of falling into fixed systems of metaphysical views, the writers here explore (in the words of poet Peter Abbs) the 'suspended, open, precarious nature of spirituality'."

The current issue on Art, Ecology and Insight I found particularly uplifting and thought-provoking - it filled the day it arrived with beauty and inspiration. I especially enjoyed articles by:

Ratnagarbha on Buddhism, Blake and Deep Ecology

"The ancient view that the entire universe is alive, and that the worlds of mind and matter are not ultimately separate, is at the heart of the new discipline of Deep Ecology. Ratnagarbha discovers that both the cosmology of the Romantic poet William Blake and the world view of Buddhism have much to offer the ecology movement."

Vishvapani on Buddha in the Forest

"Vishvapani, author of a new book on the life of the Buddha, explores the neglected topic of the Buddha's relationship with nature" concluding that "The monks of the Theragatha... express a deep intimacy with the natural world that is born of long years spent outdoors, living beneath the stars and amid the animals and spirits. They don't sentimentalise nature and are all too aware of its perils, discomforts and snares, but neither do they reject it.

This intimacy is also the key to Gautama's changing relationship with the non-human world. he saw through his culture's terror of the wilderness by becoming intimate with his mind and finding within it the roots of terror. Then he was able to become intimate with nature itself.

His lesson to us is this: to heal our relationship with the natural world, we must heal ourselves."

Dhivan on Conscious Surrender to the Beautiful, an introduction to Sangharakshita's The Religion of Art

"In The Religion of Art, Sangharakshita explores the possibility of a unifying vision that embraces both passions [those of the Arts and of Buddhism with its teaching of a path to liberation and truth] to find the truth in beauty and the beauty in truth." The article quotes Lama Govinda who wrote: Therefore wherever religion is a living force there it finds its natural expression in art, in fact, it becomes art itself - just as art in its highest attainments becomes religon. Art is the measure of the living quality of a religion." [my italics]

Vajradarshini on Ordinary Beauty which explores the Japanese idea of Wabi Sabi

"... this isn't a beauty which lifts us above our everyday experience but the beauty which is within our experience. This is the beauty showing us reality, showing us impermanence, imperfection and insubstantiality."

Eco-artist Ratnadevi on Living on the Edge of Uncertainty

"The explicit intention of many eco-artists is to elicit in the viewer an affinity with nature. It can be argued that this reason for art-making is as old as civilisation itself, with depiction of nature taking the place of the lost immersion in it. Contemporary eco-artists not only want to restore this sense of participation in the natural world, but also attempt to mobilise the desire to preserve and protect it, engendering the spirit of deep ecology. In that they are the brothers and sisters of many indigenous art-makers and ritualists through the ages. Deep ecology seeks a radical change of perception that views nature not from a separate standpoint, but from an embeddedness within it."

Beautifully produced, there are, as always, poems, photos, artwork and reviews as well as articles A feast for the intellect, the senses and the spirit. Well worth a look!

January and the Festival of Pongal

2011-01-01T17:46:00.001Z

Photo: chic.biker

The month of January, the valley is smoky,

the cupbearer is weary, the wandering bard is in distress,

the raven is thin, the hum of bees is rare,

the byre is empty, the kiln is cold…

Mis Jonawr, myglyd dyffryn,

blin trulliad, trallawd klerddyn,

kul bran, anaml llais gwenyn,

gwac buches, diwres odyn…

Verses of the Months, Welsh c.15th century

***

To everyone experiencing winter – and especially those who cannot at present find summer inside themselves – here’s a beautiful and rather uplifting video to give you a vision of a warmer land on another part of our beautiful Earth- as well as some food for thought. In it Carl Sagan speculates about the nature of the universe and the gods, accompanied by images of the festival of Pongal.

The festival of Pongal comes from the South of India, especially Tamil Nadu. It is linked to the agricultural cycle and celebrates the first harvest at the time when the days are becoming longer. It is an auspicious time and a time of new beginnings. People offer a special thanksgiving to Surya, the sun god; rain; the earth and cattle – all of which play a part in enabling the harvest. Pongal comes from the word ponga which means ‘to boil’ and pongal means ‘spillover’ or 'that which is overflowing’. It is also the name of the sweet rice which is the special food of the festival. So as we experience our time of scarcity, another part of our planet experiences a time of abundance.

During the Pongal festival, people wear new clothes and throw discarded articles on the fire. In a few short months the earth will have turned again in its cycle and the sun will bless us once more. What would you like to discard with the old year and what seeds would you like to nurture until the earth turns and spring returns to the north?

May the sun radiate peace, happiness and prosperity into your life in 2011.

Christmas, the Light of Winter-Time

2010-12-23T18:10:00.002Z

Picture by Margaret Tarrant: Medici Cards

Although not a Christian, I always celebrate the festival of Christmas as the light of winter time. The birth of a child who brings light to the world is as good a metaphor as any for the rebirth of the life-giving sun.

The festival of Christmas was a part of my life from the beginning, being embedded in the culture I grew up in (although my parents weren't religious), and I fell under its spell, entranced by the candlelit carol services and the poetry of the King James bible. I still recite Isiah 9:2 as I light the Christmas candle:

"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined" .

When I go to bed on Christmas eve I always have a sense of something wondrous about to happen. Perhaps it is simply conditioning because of the childhood magic of waiting for the coming of Santa Claus and, growing older, this becoming merged with the carol 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' with its opening picture of the dark streets, sleeping but dreamless, and then:

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given

So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven

These days I'll think of the return of the sun as being the wondrous gift but the concept of the sun shining on all and giving its blessing to everyone is a good one and in this spirit we may think perhaps of our own hearts not only receiving a blessing but also radiating it out to others.

Although I abhor the way Christmas has become commercialised and degraded it seems to me that it still retains a memory of ancient times - a midwinter feast in defiance and celebration just as we slowly begin to move forward from the deep heart of darkness to face the hardest days before the light gains enough strength to nurture life again - a delicate and precarious time rather like convalescence.

Christmas is a time when the promise of love and fellowship, family, peace and joy is never quite or even wholly realised but nevertheless a time which stands as a testament to our human desire and hope for these things. So although often more honoured in the breach than in the observance, we still value them and they serve as a point of orientation which this festival remembers.

I celebrate the Solstice too so my festivities start on the 21st with the lighting of one of Peter Neuman's Solstice and New Year candles and - for the last few years - a Solstice tart. Morrisons supermarkets sell these in December and although they call them 'fruit flans', to me they are sunwheels with their radiating pattern of fruit, gleaming like treasure, culminating in mandarin oranges arranged around the outer rim.

The days from the 21st to the 25th are special days and one day I'll be organised enough to be restful as the sun rests until the 24th, but because I usually get caught up in the general rush and expend more energy than I have, I'm grateful for the 'time-out' that occurs during those few days of the Christmas holiday - a time of stillness echoing the sun's stillness of the previous few days; a time when everyone can catch their breath and step off the relentless merry-go-round for a while.

So often out of step with the contemporary world, I actually welcome Christmas as a festival where I can share the Spirit of the Time with my fellows on this little island in the north of the world...

December and an Irish Poem about Winter

2010-12-01T00:01:00.027Z

The month of December, of short days and long nights,

there are ravens among the young plants, rushes on the moor,

the bee and the nightingale are silent…

Mis Rhagfyr, byrddydd, hirnos,

brain yn egin, brwyn yn rhos,

tawel gwenyn ac eos..

Welsh, Verses of the Months, c.15th century

Photo: Angela

Irish Poem about Winter from The Guesting of Athirne

In the black season of deep winter
a storm of waves is roused
along the expanse of the world.
Sad are the birds of every meadow-plain
(except the ravens that feed on crimson blood)
at the clamour of fierce winter;
it is rough, black, dark, misty.
Dogs are vicious in cracking bones;
the iron pot is put on the fire
after the dark black day.

Dubaib rathib rogemrid
robarta tond tūargabar
īar tóib betha blāi.
Brōnaig eōin cach īathmaige
acht fīaich fola forderge
fri fūaim gemrid gairg,
Garb dub dorcha dethaite.
Dīumusaig coin cnāmchomaig,
Curt[h]ir ar æd īarnlestar
īar lō dorcha dub.

(Original early Middle Irish edited by Kuno Meyer, English translation by Kenneth Jackson)

Poetry and Performance

2010-11-14T18:15:00.013Z

Poets of The Word Distillery after the 'Out of Our Heads' performance

(I'm the one holding the poster)

I’ve been meeting up with a group of local poets to workshop poems for just over a year now. They’ve given a couple of performances at the local Arts Centre during this time and I decided to be brave and join them for this November’s event.

Although I’ve done quite a bit of teaching, given talks, performed the odd poem at book launches or celebrations and conducted two or three ceremonies, I’m always – not to put too fine a point on it – terrified. The last time I recited a poem (not one of mine) was at my son’s wedding a few years ago. I didn’t make a very good job of it, so I was aware that my performance could be a total disaster. But – as those who follow this blog may know – poetry is becoming part of my spiritual path at this stage of my life, and because I draw inspiration from ancient Celtic poetry which was only or mainly oral, I felt it was important to explore and promote this aspect of the craft.

To prepare I read up on the performance of poetry in medieval Wales. Of course there are major differences between Welsh medieval poetry and the poetry of the present day. For one thing it was formal, often in strict metre, whereas today it is mainly free verse, mine included. Another major difference is that it in the early period it seems to have been performed not by the poet but by a professional reciter, to the accompaniment of a string instrument played by the reciter or a musician. (One fourteenth century poet asked: what good would a poem be without a harp to accompany it?) Only later, it would seem, during the period of the 14th to the 16th century, did the poet recite and accompany himself.

I was rather interested in the word used for ‘to recite’ , ‘datganu’, literally ‘to sing back’. I don’t know what the underlying concept of this word was – it could be something fairly prosaic perhaps, such as the idea of the poem being sung back to the poet – but it sparked off various mystical overtones for me. If poetry is inspired, i.e. breathed in from the Muse or the Awen, then to recite it is to breathe it out – to give it life and offer it back to the source - and out to the external world.

Uttering something is also creative and may be an act – or enactment - of truth. The performance of the law in early Ireland not only served as an aid to memory for recording judgements but also created and transformed law. So, I mused, performing poetry is also creative in itself and an enactment of truth, however humble, homely or personal.

I didn’t really expect to find any useful information about how to successfully perform one’s poetry, but surprisingly the Gramadegau’r Penceirddiaid (the Welsh Bardic Grammars), and the Statute of Gruffudd ap Cynan, offered me some, courtesy of Patrick Ford.

Firstly: ‘Tri pheth a beir kanmawl kerdawr, nyt amgen: dychymycvawr ystyr, ac odidawc kerdwyryaeth, ac eglur datkanyat’. ‘Three things that bring praise to a poet: imaginative meaning, formal excellence, and clarity of recitation.’ (GP)

Secondly: ‘Tri pheth a gytbreinant ymadrawd (ac a’e) teilygant: ehudrwyd parabyl, a (chywreindeb) synwyr, ac annyan(a)wl dyall y datk(einyat)’. Three things that bring honour to (poetic) expression and make it worthy: fluency of expression, elegant sense, and full understanding of the reciter’. (On the other hand, ‘pŵl datkeinyat’ , ‘dullness of the reciter’ results in a loss of dignity.) (SGC)

Thirdly: ‘Tri phetha vrddassant gerd: ehudrwyd ac ehofynder parabyl ac ethrylith y datkeinad’. Three things that ennoble poetry: the liveliness, confidence, and natural ability of the reciter. (GP)

It would suit me, I thought, to have a datgeiniad to recite the poems for me while I stood ‘proudly by’ as one Irish commentator put it. Although, as the Bardic Grammars pointed out, it is rare that a reciter is able to recite a poem exactly as the poet composed it. But in the absence of such a person I had another entity to fall back on: the persona. And as confidence was an important component of the performance of poetry, I felt that I needed to call upon a confident persona that the unconfident self could hide behind…

So, I concluded, what I needed was fluency of expression, elegance, a sensitive reading of the poems which brought out their meaning, liveliness – and a confident persona – simples! as the meerkat says…

As well as this useful advice, I was greatly helped by Ami Mattison’s wonderful website/blog poetryNprogress which I happened to find. Her 11 Tips for Spoken Word Beginners were invaluable. The most useful I found were these:

1. Develop a unique performance style. Always express your poetry in your own style.

2. Rehearsal is fundamental to consistent and successful performances.

3. Never apologize or make excuses and don’t explain.

4. Love your audience. Ami says this is the most important and I couldn’t agree more. She says that when you perform it’s not about you, it’s about the audience. Respect and love them by giving them everything you’ve got to give in your performances. It’s a privilege to share your poetry with an audience of strangers…

This last one really helped me. Most of my fear of performing is fear of the audience: I think that they are there to criticize me - perhaps it’s to do with the household I grew up in! But no, they have paid good money to enjoy themselves, to be entertained and perhaps learn something. And so, I reasoned, it was my job to entertain them, to give them everything I’ve got. They might not like it but that’s up to them: all I had to do was fulfill my part of the bargain.

So, having rehearsed and borne in mind the advice of the medieval bards and Ami, I stopped on my way out of the house to ask for the blessing of the ‘household gods’: Brigit for eloquence and fluency, Cernunnos for a touch of wild wisdom to energise the art - and the Buddha to remind me to retain equanimity and a philosophical outlook if the whole thing was a disaster.

I didn’t drive my usual way into town, instead going by way of the coastal village of Borth to pick up some throat lozenges from the chemist (as I had rather unfortunately caught a cough and cold from my family at the weekend). The chemist was closed so I didn’t stop but set off up the road which rises above the sea, towards Aberystwyth. There was a slender waxing moon, high above the bay. Rather than a heavenly body, it looked like a crescent cut out of the black material of the sky, giving a glimpse of a silver realm beyond. Threading my way along the dark and winding country road, I suddenly had a strange feeling - as though I were going, not to a poetry performance but to an initiation ceremony. Although still scary, it was a rather heady and exhilarating feeling and so instead of shrugging it off I let it settle around me as I drove, until, coming to the murky orange lights on the main road at the edge of the town, it dissipated and I forgot about it.

* * *

Well, my voice wasn’t as good as it could have been – I wasn't able to use it to its full capacity and had to break off to cough once or twice – but I did my best, trying to speak clearly and enliven the poetry, to embrace my confident persona and remember that performing my poems was an act of truth, a sacred thing. And I loved my audience rather than being afraid of it (well, perhaps a little afraid).

Today I got an email sent from a member of the group, commenting on each of us. He said, “Hilaire was a natural performer, she was totally at ease with the audience-- a real pro.” So, I think the preparation must have worked and I should like to recommend the advice of the ancestors, the medieval bards, as well as the poetryNprogress website.

I’ve realised, too, that to step into new territory, even if it is a small step to the other side of the footlights, or a larger step outside one’s comfort zone, is to be initiated into a new perception and a new knowledge…

_______________________________

1. In fact, our word ‘recite’ meaning ‘to repeat or utter aloud something previously composed, heard or learned by heart’ comes via French from Latin: ‘Re’ plus ‘citare’, ‘ to cite’. And ‘citare’, interestingly, means ‘to set in motion, to call’. So perhaps our familiar word recalls an underlying Indo-European idea of the creative power of words to bring things into existence?

2. See Patrick K Ford, ‘Aspects of the Performance of Poetry in Medieval Wales’, Bangor University Foundation Lecture, March 2003.

November and a Poem for the Ancestors

2010-11-02T18:03:00.008Z

The Verses of the Months

The month of November, the fool grumbles,

The wethers are fat, the woods are half-bare…

Mis Tachwedd, tuchan merydd,

bras llydnod, llednoeth koydydd…

Welsh, circa 15th c

For the Ancestors at Nos Galan Gaeaf

Photo: Janet Fikar

As life’s hours tick beyond autumn

and winter shadows the far hill,

bats gather where once swallows played
and the birch lets fall her golden leaves.

I sit with you, silent ones, to share this meal,
however harsh our words once were,

however discrete our lives,

our worlds leach now one into the other – a gentle confluence -

and like blood the dark ale carries your spirit

to rest, in this small circle of light

where united we gather strength to nurture

whatever future may be born.

Outside the marigolds glare down the approaching dark

While beyond the river, the crane is flying with my wings.

St Ffraid: Brigit in Wales

2010-10-28T18:57:00.004+01:00

Interior of church, St Bride's Major
photo: Paul Williment

I’ve finally finished writing about Brigit in Wales, St Ffraid, and uploaded it to my website. It’s several weeks after I’d planned to have finished it but various things have intervened to delay me and I also realised that I’d lost the insight I gained after being ill in the New Year: that by moving forward a small footstep each day –“ the footstep of a cock on a gentle evening when his crop is full” – things get done in an almost miraculous way. I’d become too caught up in wanting to have done something instead of enjoying the doing. So I relaxed about it and thought ‘It’ll be finished when it’s finished’!

I’d been meaning to write something about St Ffraid because there isn’t much about her on the web – as often happens, Wales is rather neglected. So it was a work of service to Brigit and to Wales – that sounds rather pompous – what I mean is that it felt like something I ought to do rather than something I was desirous of doing. But, as with all work of willing service, I have been enriched by it. I have felt much more connected to the story of Brigit in Wales: to the custom of St Brigit’s Ale which I plan to revive in some small way; to the places and rivers associated with her – especially the church at Llanon which I am inspired and uplifted by and the Braint on Anglesey which is another area I’d love to visit one day; I was pleased to find the Welsh form ‘Gwas Sant Ffraid’ in the tradition, meaning ‘servant, follower or devotee of St Ffraid', since, finding it more and more difficult to assign a label to my spiritual path (more of than another time) the one firm designation I give myself is ‘devotee or follower of Brigit’.

I was also conscious while I was researching and writing, of how slender a thread the Welsh story of Brigit is and how grateful I am to the tradition bearers who have contributed to spinning this yarn so that we can learn something about it today. In particular, of course, we are lucky that Iorwerth Fynglwyd’s cywydd has survived. He was one of the Beirdd yr Uchelwyr or Poets of the Nobility who were composing after the fall of the last prince Llywelyn in 1282. More specifically, he was one of the Cywyddwyr (c. 1350-1650) - the poets who developed a new form of poetry, the cywydd, which, although still linked to the tradition, was often more personal and emotional. Instead of a formulaic approach to mention of the saints, the Cywyddwyr displayed what seems to have been a genuine devotion to them. Iorwerth Fynglwyd was known particularly for poems which encapsulated some truth or proverbial wisdom and some of his cywyddau were the most popular in 16th century Wales. He lived at St Bride’s Major, Glamorgan, and therefore would have been especially familiar with the story of St Brigit.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Sabine Baring-Gould and John Fisher carried out amazingly extensive research into the British saints – there would have been much less for me to say if they hadn’t written about Brigit – and in our own time Elissa Henken, professor of Folklore and Celtic studies, has written two interesting books about the Welsh saints, including material about Sant Ffraid and female saints in general.

And there are many more poets and scholars besides, providing links with the tradition so that we able to discover and be inspired by it.

Statue of Brigit, St Bride's Major,
with pen in her left hand and book under her right arm
photo: Paul Williment

October and an Irish autumnal poem

2010-10-01T16:58:00.029+01:00

The month of October, the axle is hard worn,

the stag is wanton, the wind is swift…

Mis Hydref, hydraul echel
chwareous hydd, chwyrn awel…

The Verses of the Months, Welsh, circa 15th c

Irish poem about Autumn from The Guesting of Athirne

A good tranquil season is autumn,

there is occupation then for everyone

throughout the very short days.

Dappled fawns from the sides of the hinds,

the red stalks of the bracken shelter them;

stags run from the mounds

at the belling of the deer herd.

Sweet acorns in the high woods,

corn-stalks about cornfields

over the expanse of the brown earth.

Prickly thorn bushes of the bramble

by the midst of the ruined court;

the hard ground is covered with heavy fruit.

Hazelnuts of good crop fall

from the huge old trees of mounds.

R[aithe] fō foiss fogomur
feidm and [for cech] ōenduine
la tóeb na llā lāngarit.
Lóig brecca [a broin]d osseilt
Dītnit rūadgaiss raithnigi.
Ret[h]it daim a dumachaib
[f]ri dorddān na damgaire.
Derccain suba a ssithchailtib
Slatta etha imm ithgurtu
Ós īath domuin duind.
Draigin drissi delgnacha
fri tóeb in lāir leithlessi,
lān do mess trom tairnith[ ].
Tuittit cnōi cuill cāinmessa
do robilib rāth.

(Original early Middle Irish edited by Kuno Meyer, English translation by Kenneth Jackson)

Shadows and Shimmers: Conversing with the Otherworld

2010-09-25T18:24:00.005+01:00

I said in my last post that I’d write something about my relationship with Brigit as goddess and saint. My plan to visit Brigit’s church at Llanon more often had made me start to think about this, mainly because I was a little uneasy about using the church in this way; it seemed rather like accepting hospitality from people some of whose views I profoundly disagreed with. And since my main connection with Brigit is as a goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft, just where does St Brigit fit in?

The trouble was that once I started to muse about all this I found I had pulled at a thread which led to a very long tangle! What did I believe about gods and goddesses and God. What was my relationship with Christianity and with neo-paganism? I decided to try and put into words my thoughts and intuitions - not easy to do, to formulate something coherent and communuicable. I found it interesting as an exercise though and was curious to see what would emerge.

So I’m going to start at the beginning, and I don’t expect to finish it in one post but will divide it up into perhaps three parts.

How I understand the spirit world and deity.

I find it difficult to believe that an all-powerful God made the universe and I don't tend to believe it has a purpose. It seems to me to simply exist in a dynamic state with its own natural laws. The way Lao Tsu describes the Dao - "That which can be expressed is not the eternal Dao" etc - gives an idea of its mysterious unknowability. I think in this instance I have what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’ which he defined as when a person “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Maybe scientists will be able to penetrate its mysteries at some point in the future – or maybe not. The quantum physicist Niels Bohr said that the world is not only stranger than we thought, it is stranger than we could think - almost echoing Hamlet's words to Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy".

I wonder if we have evolved on this planet with intelligence and senses that might not have the capacity to see, or perceive or understand the spiritual world – much as we cannot hear sounds that dogs can hear but which undoubtedly exist. Certain drugs which alter people’s chemistry and physiology cause them to be able to see things another way – different colours, shapes, movement. So our physical make-up determines how we see/perceive/understand the world and what we think of as reality.

I always remember watching the scientist Carl Sagan describing how a three-dimensional object would appear to a two-dimensional being who would be unable to conceive of it. (The aim of this was actually to help us to understand the fourth dimension, since we are trapped in three dimensions). Amazingly, I found the very clip on YouTube so here it is:

While this doesn't give an exact analogy, it is suggestive of the way that some people experience supernatural or mystical phonemona. It seems to me entirely possible that there are dimensions we cannot conceive of but which we occasionally glimpse in shadows and shimmers and whispers.
I have only my limited powers of reason, my intuition and my own experiences to draw upon to make this unseen realm, this Other world, intelligible to my own satisfaction. What follows is simply a working hypothesis - I don't know what the truth actually is.

***

It seems to me that because the spiritual world or the Otherworld is invisible to us - because we are only dimly aware of it through shimmers and whispers - we can only describe it and relate to it by drawing on the imagination. We make up stories about it - creation myths, the activities of the gods and goddesses and so on - we people it with beings somewhat like ourselves but with supernatural abilities or with bizarre creatures and mysterious beings. Imagination, then, becomes the tool through which we try to understand, describe and relate to this other unseen dimension; imagination becomes the tool through which we try to understand and relate to a greater reality.

To me, this model makes sense of the different religions there are in the world, the different gods and goddesses and supernatural beings - and why people with different beliefs have visions, hear voices, experience presences consistent with their own particular religion, in near-death experiences for example. These deities and other spiritual visitors may seem to be mutually incompatible unless you conceive of them as diverse tools that various people and groups have developed to enable them to access the Otherworld, through prayer, meditation, visualisation and art. In this view, the gods and goddesses become sacred instruments enabling us to access a larger reality.

Do these deities actually exist? Yes and no. "No" in that I don't think that such beings exist in the forms we imagine in that dimension, "yes" in that they exist as mediums or proxies, as an interface between this world and the Other. An imperfect interface that works erratically and/or selectively and sometimes not at all - rather like the remote control on my new mini digibox which sometimes responds immediately to my wishes and sometimes refuses to allow me to switch channels or access the menu or makes strange messages appear which are incomprehensible. (Most annoying, I have to say!) Or to put it another way, I am not my name "Hilaire" - but if I am in range or not unable or unwilling to respond, then when my name is called or I am addressed, I will answer to it.

I am assuming here that an 'other' dimension exists 'out there' as it were. But it is also possible that this Otherworld is not outside but inside us. The psychologist Carl Jung thought of the gods and goddesses as archetypal forces within our collective psyche. Modern science has begun to investigate the workings of the brain by neuro-imaging and seems to be coming to the conclusion that supernatural experiences are merely the result of physiological processes. For instance, apparently 80% of people experience being aware of an unseen presence when areas of their brain are stimulated by artificial means. Job done, the conclusion seems to be, it's all just the brain causing illusory sensations. But this seems to me just to lead to more questions. What is stimulating those areas of the brain when there is no human intervention? What effect does increasing blood supply to that area of the brain have? Might it enhance certain functions and abilities, the perception of unseen presences for instance?

Neuro-imaging has discovered that people in meditation are able to diminish the flow of blood to the parietal lobes - the area of the brain that is associated with orientating ourselves and awareness of stimuli among other things. Again, this seems to lead scientists to the same conclusion - that the feeling of loss of ego and merging with the timeless is only a sensation caused by physiology. But what might we be able to tune into when some of the parts of the brain that help us to be aware of our surroundings are switched off? Relieved of the distraction, perhaps the area of our brain that allows us to experience another way of being is enhanced, rather like when you are trying to hear someone speaking against loud music from a radio; when it is switched off, what the other person is saying can be heard more easily.

It does seem possible that when we are relating to something that seems to be outside of ourselves we are actually simply relating to an area of ourselves that is out of our conscious access. In my consideration of the mysterious way that poetry sometimes appears I am aware of the huge role that the unconscious part of the mind plays. Yet consciousness itself is still a mystery and it's possible that the unconscious mind is in some way connected to another dimension.

I tend to think that the brain and the conscious and unconscious mind are not a closed system. My reasons for this are rather "fluffy" and purely the result of intuition. For one thing, the awareness of other beings or presences or energies are often activated by certain places or natural phemonena in the natural world, and for another, I expect some people reading this will have had the experience, as I have, when in a certain heightened state or simply a state of well-being and good functioning, of coincidences, opportunities and luck coming into one's life and moving us forward in tune with our path in life. At those times the outside world seems to be participating in our reality to give us a helping hand. Well, as I said, this is "fluffy" but that is the experience!

All this may seem "wondrous strange", as Horatio said of the ghost of Hamlet's father. It is strange. So is quantum physics - so strange in fact that even quantum theorists don't really understand what is going on, they can only explain the phenomena. Quantum reality defies common-sense, is at odds with Newtonian science and even logic - one of the mainstays of science - has to be modified: quantum logic is known as 3-valued logic because as well as 'true' and 'false' it has to also posit 'maybe'.

The "many worlds" interpretation of reality states that at every act of measurement of quantum phenomena by a human being, the physical universe divides into separate universes. Apparently a majority of quantum physicists believe this is true...

I'm not saying that I think quantum reality is the unseen realm - I'm just saying it's very strange, only recently discovered and beyond the ability of the best scientific minds to totally understand. So I don't really have a problem with imagining and relating to another reality which isn't yet, or ever will be perhaps, compatible with scientific thinking.

William James, 1842-1910, the American psychologist and philosopher, had some interesting things to say in his lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience. For instance: "Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal." His approach was ultimately pragmatic, as is mine, and I agree entirely with the personal statement he makes at the end of the lectures:

"The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have meaning for our life also, and that, in the main although their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to keep myself more sane and true..."

***

Next time I'll write about the particular story I embrace as my sacred instrument for relating to the Otherworld - the story of Brigit.

Some images of St Brigit in Wales

2010-08-29T18:31:00.005+01:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I visited the church of Llansantffraid ym Mechain on my way to Sheffield a couple of weeks ago. The church has been much enlarged and altered since its 12th century beginnings, and walking into it, with the mellow light seeping in from the yellow glass window behind the altar, I had the impression of a large and welcoming cave. The picture in the east window is divided into three, with St Bride on the right hand of the king of heaven. She is shown as a nun with a bible and crozier, traditionally carried by bishops and abbots.

Here she is in more detail, courtesy of Paul Williment's excellent site dedicated to Brigit.

On the south wall there is a window with the heading 'Charity', given by Isabel Cumberland in 1928. On my last visit, the then vicar's wife told me that it shows St Brigit. She appears here dressed in rich robes, holding an apple. The story about Brigit and the apples illustrating her charity appears in the 9th century Bethu Brigte, translated by Donnchadh Ó hAodha, and is as follows:

32
Once she was hurrying on the bank of the Inny. There were many apples and sweet sloes in that church. A certain nun gave her a small gift in a basket of bark. When she brought [it] into the house, lepers came at once into the middle of the house to beg of her. ‘Take’, said she, ‘yonder apples’, Then she who had presented the apples [said]: ‘I did not give the gift to lepers.’ Brigit was displeased and said: ‘You act wrongly in prohibiting gifts to the servants of God; therefore your trees shall never bear any fruit.’ And the donor, on going out, sees that all at once her garden bore no fruit, while shortly before it had abundant fruits. And it remains barren for ever, except for foliage.
33
Another virgin brought her apples and sweet sloes in large quantities. She gave [them] immediately to some lepers who were begging. ‘She who brought it will be sound’, said Brigit. ‘O nun, bless me and my garden.’ ‘May God indeed bless’, said Brigit, ‘that big tree yonder which I see in your garden; may there be sweet apples on it, and sweet sloes as to one third; and that twofold fruit shall not be lacking from it and its offshoots.’ And thus it was done. As the nun went into her garden she saw the alder tree with its fruit, and sweet sloes on it as to one third.

I sat in the pew beside this window and looked towards the window behind the altar. There is a partial screen separating the nave from the chancel where the choir stalls, the altar and the window are and it effectively separates the congregation or audience from the participants in the service. It made me think about religion as performance and I wondered what it would be like to be present in that church on a sunny morning with light streaming through the window and the choir singing.

Apparently the first decorative windows appeared in Christian churches around 348 - 410 AD and are mentioned by Prudentius. Stained glass was brought into Britain via Gaulish churches and the earliest evidence goes back to 675 AD. The Gothic period saw the construction of the great cathedrals of Europe and stained-glass windows really came into their own then. Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis rebuilt his church in one of the first examples of the Gothic style. He brought in craftsmen to make the glass, believing that beautiful objects would lift people's souls closer to God. I considered how wonderful it would be to build a shrine to Brigit, Goddess of Poetry, Healing and Smithcraft, and commission a beautifully-coloured stained-glass window, aligned to the south...

After the 16th-century Reformation in Britain many stained-glass windows were destroyed because of the condemnation of idolatry but they were re-introduced during the 19th century Gothic revival.

***

My visit to Llansantffraid ym Mechain was rather hurried as I was on my way to Sheffield and wanted to get to the motorway before the rush hour. But a week later I went down the coast about 10 miles to the village of Llanon for a more leisurely visit to another church dedicated to Brigit, with the alternative spelling of Llansantffraed.

The day I went had started in a very mundane way with a trip to the Co-op to do the weekly shopping. When I'd finished the sky was beginning to brighten and on the spur of the moment I decided that it would be a good time to go and take a picture of the window in Llanon. What ensued was a lovely and rather magical experience, the sort you can never plan for but which sometimes appear like a visitation of grace. By the time I arrived at the church the sun had come out and the sky was blue. I'd bought a sandwich and went into the churchyard where there was a convenient bench leaning against the wall; there I ate my lunch while butterflies chased each other over the grave stones and a young buzzard flew overhead. Tucked away at the back of the village next to the sea, the feeling of peace was tangible and soothing.

After sitting for a while, I went into the church and took several pictures of the double window which depicts St Brigit and St Non with her son, David, the patron saint of Wales. St Ffraed is shown as 'St Ffraed, Leian', St Brigit the nun, and appears with a cow and a bowl of milk. Above her is a swan to match the dove, the emblem of St David, which is above St Non in her window. St Ffraed's robe is blue, the wimple lilac and the effect is of simplicity, unlike the robe she is wearing in the Llansantffraid ym Mechain window - the difference perhaps in iconography between 1928 and 1971 when this window was dedicated. Certainly the feeling I was given by the Llansantffraid ym Mechain windows was of Christ and the saints as formal, remote and distinctly aristocratic while these presented a much more accessible and approachable image!

The Llansantffraed double window commemorates the rare phenomenon of two female saints in one parish. According to a leaflet in the church, the remains of an old chapel dedicated to Non are thought to be in the village. The ruins are claimed to be that of the Chapel-of-Ease. Like Llansantffraed church this would have originally been a monastically-based Celtic worshipping cell. It ceased to flourish after medieval times but was affiliated to Llansantffraed church as late as the beginning of the 18th century. According to The Lives of the British Saints, a conventual foundation of St Ffraid's was said to have existed about a mile north of Llanrhystyd, on the coast, a little to the north of Llanon.

The St Non's Chapel near St David's in Pembrokeshire which I visited a few years ago, has windows representing not only St Non but also St Ffraid and St Winifred, as well as a statue of Mary with her baby son, so it has a strong feminine presence. I'll post some photos of it another time.

The stone font in the Llansantffraed church is rather lovely; it is described as 'peculiarly decorated' in the church leaflet and is probably the oldest object in the church.

The little church inside has the feel of a chapel, white-washed and simple, although the windows are colourful and rich. The east window shows the risen Christ (as, in fact, does the Llansantffraid ym Mechain church); in the Llanon window he is standing in front of a cross holding out his arms, palms upwards. Apparently this is unusual as most east windows show scenes from the Crucifixion. As the leaflet available in the church highlights, it focuses on the wonder of the Easter message and I prefer this, to the emphasis on suffering and death of the Crucifixion.

After spending some time looking around and reading the notice-board I went and sat outside on the wall, to read the leaflet. Suddenly there was a resounding tap, tap, tap. I looked up, expecting to find that someone was on the other side of the hedge hammering, but to my surprise saw a song thrush only a few feet away beating a snail against a stone on top of the wall to get at the fleshy part inside, something I've never witnessed before. The thrush seemed to have a little hideaway in the hedge with an opening out beside her anvil stone and I guessed she'd used it before to prepare her lunch. This bird with its lovely song and connection with anvils seemed an appropriate one to come across in relation to Brigit.

The Ceredigion coastal path runs alongside the church and I hope to go back with a picnic and explore a little way along it before the summer is over. In fact I decided that I'd return to the church again - using it as a place to go and talk to Brigit at special times, perhaps when I feel the need to connect with the qualities attributed to her as saint. I find that making a special journey, however short, makes the occasion more potent.

Partly what was special about this visit was that it reminded me of several rather similar visits on sun-filled days to sacred places in Ireland. The west coast of Wales is reminiscent of the west of Ireland - and there were many links between the two countries along the seaways in times past. Llanon was once the home to a ship-building works and there are many grave stones in the churchyard bearing witness to this.

I was reluctant to leave but eventually set off back up the coast. On the way I saw a sign advertising strawberry cream teas and drove a few mile up into the hills to sit outside in the sun (and wind) looking out over the green fields and hills while I drank tea and ate scones with jam and cream. They weren't as good as Uncle Leo's but the presentation and setting made up for it!

While gazing out over the Welsh landscape I pondered the nature of my relationship with Brigit as both goddess and saint... but more of that next time.

Three more good things: scones, the beauty of the landscape and one's own company.

Sunny days in cafés

2010-08-17T14:58:00.008+01:00

Well, I haven’t got on very well with my piece about St Ffraid… I changed a sentence and went to the university library to get a copy of The Holy Wells of Wales but that was it for last week. Ah well, I still like to have a plan, even if I don't stick to them.

However I did have an enjoyable time socialising. I’ve been to my favourite café – Uncle Leo’s Ice-cream Emporium – with friends a few times. They serve tea there in old-fashioned teapots with china cups and saucers and plates that don’t match. I tend to like things that don’t match; I seem to have an overall bias towards diversity.

Their tiny scones with cream and home-made jam are delicious and they also have Victoria sponge which is currently my favourite cake (it used to be carrot cake).

Because there were some sunny afternoons I took a book outside to read - Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland by Robin Chapman Stacey. You can’t separate the law from poets and poetry in early Ireland so every chapter is packed with information and insights that I found quite thrilling (sad but true). There is a lot about rosc – the archaic non-syllabic verse which is interspersed with the prose in the Cauldron of Poesy text – so that will help me to sharpen up and bring into a better focus what I have said about it in the first part of my article - which I thought I had finished!

I also went to see the film Wild Target which I enjoyed – it was a British action comedy, rather like the old Ealing comedies. In fact it was a bit like The Ladykillers which is one of my favourite films.

Wild Target
Uploaded by moviestune. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

I also went up to Sheffield for an unexpected visit to my son and his family. As the journey takes me through Llansantffraid ym Mechain I was able to call in at the church – which I last visited about 12 years ago. I wanted to take a picture of the windows showing St Ffraid to add to my web article. I plan to go down the coast a few miles this week if it isn't raining and take another photo of the window at Llansantffraid church, Llanon. I’ll post them next time.

Meanwhile, back to the café – I have a plan to meet up with a friend and go there for a quiche one evening. Then it’s less than a stone’s throw over the road to the Victoria Inn where we can have some Guinness and sit on the beach. How wonderful it is to live so near the seaside! I hope to get on with the writing again this week though…

Three of my favourite things: tea, cake and discussion.

At the time of first fruits

2010-08-03T13:00:00.000+01:00

At this time of first fruits I thought I'd write about various projects I've been working on lately. I've been feeling frustrated that none of them have ripened into fruition but perhaps it is better to look at it another way - as the work so far being the first tender fruits.

The Cauldron of Poetry is is the most important; I’ve been working on it for nearly a year on and off and have been intrigued by this Irish text about cauldrons and poetry for well over a decade. It's going to be in three parts and I have actually finished the first draft of the first part - the most challenging for me. It is an exposition of the text. The second part will look at the symbol of the Celtic cauldron and the meanings that have accrued to it. I have this in note form.

The third part is not yet started – it will look at how some of the ideas of the first two parts – as well as some other ideas and practices of early poetry – may be used today. I expect this part to be the easiest and most exciting as it will flow from what has come before and won’t involve checking facts and referring to other texts all the time.

There were times when I really questioned why I was working on this, what on earth was the purpose of it. But at one point, reading around the subject, I had a moment of epiphany when I felt that my spiritual life and my poetic life were beginning to converge and this writing about the Cauldron was part of the journey to that union. Whether this will turn out to be the case or not, I’m not sure. Sometimes these intense moments of inspiration are not realised – but obviously I still have to follow it to its conclusion and see what happens.

St Brigit in Wales: Sant Ffraid - I decided to write about Sant Ffraid because I was looking on-line to give a link to some information about her on my web site and found very little. In theory this piece of work shouldn’t take very long as I have most of the information I need. In theory!

Poetry and the Otherworld: this is a working title and is almost written but exists only in my head – nothing on paper yet except some quotes from modern poets which I’ve collected. It’s about where poetry comes from and why early societies connected it with seership and the Otherworld. Sometimes today poets report that they hear poems which appear mysteriously. I’ve had this experience myself many times and part of the piece will describe a personal experience of working with Malidoma Somé, an initiated elder of the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, Africa. I wanted to attend some of his workshops after reading his books and thinking that the Dagara were a people actually living a lot of the practices of the early Celts (and their more recent folklore traditions). I had my most complete experience of a ‘received’ poem during this time, as well as gaining other insights into a possible connection between poetry and seership in early societies.

There are more articles I've planned or researched or started to write but these are the three I want to concentrate on and then I intend to have a break from prose and non-fiction and spend more time on poetry.

I've a busy week this week, mostly socialising! But I hope to finish the piece on Sant Ffraid - I'll update my progress next week. It would be lovely to say I'd finished it and then I could move on... What I should like to do then is finish Poetry and the Otherworld and the second part of the Cauldron by Calan Gaeaf/Samhain. There's a plan... I always like to have a plan...

Collected Poems by Frances Horovitz

2010-07-24T16:24:00.003+01:00

"Celtic Gods Celtic Goddesses" by R.J.Stewart, artwork Miranda Gray. Copyright worldwide

An Old Man Remembers

‘…and Gwydion and Math made for Lleu Llaw Gyffes a wife out of the flowers of the oak, the broom and the meadowsweet and her name was Blodeuedd. And when she betrayed her husband with Gronw Bebyr, Lord of Penllyn, for punishment she was turned into an owl…’
from THE MABINOGION

in this valley she walked
I remember
a woman with the smell of wind in her hands
walking at nightfall in the floating dusk
veiled in the petals of an early spring

they say she was made of flowers
flowers yellow and white
of spring and summer
and drifted away on wind and water
when the shape spell dissolved

certain she was a flower in our valley
her breasts were flowers red and white
and her eyes and the scent of her
and certain there was never a warm child in her arms

but she lay in her lord's bed and was loved
she bore him his cup and his meat
gold was given her, white linen
and many songs by the firelight
of longing and pride

the valley contained us
a flower for a queen
lust swelled our harp strings
we grew fat on our dream

now I remember
her shadow swims clear
there was blood in the valley
a stranger
blood in the bowl and the spring
red sullied white
two lives destroyed
and white petals scattered
in a cold racing wind

some say of that frail woman of flowers
her love turned her to owl's wings
and lonely now in the valley
with foxes and ravens she rules

and certain at nightfall
when the owls cry out
I think I see her clear
a white shape on the hill
-but this is an old man's longing
a shadow, a dream
a memory of harp-song and flowers
and a fair woman walking in the spring

from Frances Horovitz, Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1985)

* * *

This rather haunting poem brings us to a new relationship with the Blodeuedd story, giving an eye-witness account which brings the events a little closer while looking at them from a new perspective.

The poems in the collection could be said in general to show us a connected world whether they portray human relationships – a lover, a husband, a son; the natural world of leaf and bird, of bone and stream; the dead; the ancient sacred places such as West Kennet Long Barrow and the Uffington White Horse or the myths that are part of human culture. All are evoked with an imaginative intensity which dissolves time and distance and is never sentimental or trite.

I first came across Frances Horovitz in an anthology of love poems from the sixties. Her poems stood out as being more subtle and sometimes thought-provoking than many of the others which often had a certain exuberance and crudity perhaps typical of the subject at that time. In Loving You, reprinted in this collection, the poet moves “as soft as old silk” in the room where her lover is, but an elongated line almost mid-way through the poem, standing out starkly in contrast to the rest, startles us when the poet declares: ‘I could mark you through to the bone’ before retreating and deciding to walk gently “soft as silk/loving you”.

I like the edginess, the feeling of danger that pervades many of the poems. Humans have the power to hurt each other, even if they will do none. Nature too is as cruel and as kind as humans are. There is an honesty here which doesn’t avoid these realities but offers us a richness of experience and an elemental beauty as compensation.

More often than not the landscape holds some kind of threat; in Crow the bird is ‘a dark spy in the land’, in Journey ‘the leaves are black/ and grab at my face’ while in Winter Woods “our warm blood stills/ the sun is livid in exile/ we have encroached -/ this is not yet our land”. But sometimes too the natural world offers solace as when soapwort and figwort act ‘as torch and talisman against the coming dark’ in Flowers or when ‘Bird-song and water bear away grief’ in Old Song. And among the last poems Frances wrote before her early death at 45, is the beautiful Evening where, as she waits for the ‘lessons of grief and light’ she sees the luminous hills and knows there will be the holly tree, the hawthorn, mistletoe and the thronging foxgloves, where the bluebells ‘heaped in a pot/ still hold their blue against the dark’.

One of my favourites in the Collection is the Poem Found at Chesters Museum, Hadrian’s Wall. I have visited this museum with my son and particularly noted the inscriptions which the poet has so skilfully heard and made into a poem here: the invocation of the gods and goddesses, the catalogues of tools, like incantations, identifying the roles of men and women and finally the faltering of the inscriptions as the past fades and moves beyond our reach. You can hear Frances Horovitz read it herself here on the Bloodaxe web site, along with four other of her poems, including Flowers, mentioned above. She was renowned for her reading of poetry, possessing, as her publisher Bloodaxe says, “a rare ability to hear a poem and become its voice”. In her reading of this poem, its true power is beautifully revealed.

The other thing I think special about this collection is the voice of the mother and her young son glimpsed through several of the poems – a relationship not often sustained in poetry collections. The Letter to My Son written not long before her death, is heart-breakingly poignant and the final resolve is wise advice to any parent on letting go of their child:

“- and this, your early body, soul and mind,
hold me to myself
when all else falls apart.
These memories are mine:
The rest of you I let go free,
my child who will be a man.

So many of the things I find most important in life are here, the intricacies of our relationship with landscape and the natural world, other human beings, the past and present, our own myths. And more than that – it is a rare collection because it lets us follow the poet to a place where few poetry collections go – almost to the last moments of life. Her husband, the poet Roger Garfitt, has bravely and judiciously included her last poems in a section entitled Unfinished Poems and Fragments. Wilson Ward sparsely describes a fellow inmate of the hospital, the aptly named Mrs Rivers, who floats out of the world, leaving everything behind as we all must do; the final poem, Orcop Haiku, leaves us with a brief glimpse of the view from her September window as she lay, confined to bed, but still engaging with the landscape beyond.

The images are spare but rich, sometimes haiku-like, evoking the beauty and precariousness of life, and there is wisdom here too. As James Wood commented in The Times, “One is reminded, gratefully, of John Updike’s appreciation of Wallace Stevens: “What a good use of life, to leave behind one beautiful book."

Callanish Haibun

2010-07-06T14:46:00.013+01:00

Photo: Mr Tattie Heid

The Callanish Stones: a haibun by Noragh Jones

On the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides an old woman tells me tales of the Callanish Stones dancing on Midsummer Eve. In the white nights of the far north the great circle of stone beings awakes and honours the ancestors entombed in these red moss bogs. As midnight nears, the giant stones shift and stir for one short night of celebration. Before dawn they are back in their ancient places, for on Midsummer Day they guide the rising sun down their stone road to light up the innermost heart of the stone circle.

watched by mild-eyed cows
the lurching stones
do their highland fling

* * *

A fine drizzle is falling. In the midsummer glow that is neither sunlight nor moonlight I enter the stone circle and walk around aimlessly, wondering where to take my place and wait for the witching hour. I watch myself keeping to the edge and avoiding the tall centre stone. Tribal memories of human sacrifice? In the end I prop myself against what I hope is an unassuming stone outside the main circle. I drink coffee from my Thermos flask. I take deep breaths and try to meditate, but the pull of the awakening stones is too strong. I look skywards. A lively south westerly has risen and is chasing the clouds across the darkened moon.

shifting shadows
stone beings hunkered
on the black bog

Five minutes to midnight. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling. Soon I’m shivering all over. The stone ones don’t want me here on this night of all nights. And I don’t want to be here either. If I will myself to stay I’ll be a madwoman by dawn? Well, maybe only the hair turning white overnight? Who knows?

Fingers numb, I pack my rucksack and make for the road. My feet sink in the gripping bog. The wind tears at me, forcing me back with every step forward. The light that is neither day nor night deceives me. Are the stones really dancing there across the red moss? And what if I joined them? Teeth chattering, I drag my puny self away from the power of the circle, till I am more or less an ordinary human being again.

Such loss, such gain…

When I look back from the safety of the tarmac the familiar moor has already gone. And in its place?

reeling planets

the dancing stones
are juggling sun and moon

From Stone Circles: Haiku and Haiku Prose by Noragh Jones

Gŵyl Ifan: A Welsh midsummer festival

2010-06-24T16:08:00.020+01:00

Free nature photos

Gŵyl Ifan, the Festival of St. John the Baptist on June 24th, was the midsummer festival traditionally celebrated in Wales. It was one of the three ysprydnos or spirit nights when the world of the supernatural was closest to ours (the others being Nos Galan Gaeaf on 31st October and Nos Galan Mai, or Nos Galan Haf, on 30th April).

Three key elements of this calendar festival were: y fedwen haf, (the summer birch), the bonfire and the herb St John’s Wort.

Y fedwen haf

Reports of this custom come principally from Glamorgan although there are others from as far apart as Anglesey and Carmarthenshire. The birch was raised on the eve of St John’s Day and, according to one account by the blind poet, William Roberts, from the eighteenth century, the pole was adorned with colourful pictures and the young women decorated it with golden wreaths covered with ribbons. On the top was a weather-cock with gold feathers and ribbons on its tail and underneath that was a floating banner. Much dancing and merriment took place around the birch.

Y fedwen haf from the summer dance festival, Cardiff
see the Gŵyl Ifan website

There was a tradition of ‘the theft of the birch’, by which villagers from a neighbouring parish would try to steal the pole, so that the presence of strong youths was required to guard it. The theft of the birch had serious consequences because it was seen as a huge disgrace and no birch could be raised again until another had been stolen to replace it.

The bonfire

A bonfire was as central to the celebrations as it was at the festival of Calan Mai. Marie Trevelyan describes it vividly:

"Three or nine different kinds of wood and the charred faggots carefully preserved from the previous midsummer were necessary to build this fire, which was generally done on rising ground. Into this fire various herbs were thrown, and girls with bunches of three or nine different kinds of flowers would take the offered hands of boys who wore flowers in their buttonholes and hats, and jump together over the midsummer fire. Wild merrymakings these were, and the young people threw the flowers from their posies, hats, hair, and buttonholes into the heart of the flame. Roses and wreaths of various flowers were hung over the doors and windows on St John’s Eve and Day."

If anyone – human or animal – were to jump over the fire on St John’s Day, they were thought to be given immunity against fever and disease for a year.

Trefor M. Owen relates that the origin of these bonfires was in fires of actual bones (hence bone-fire) where the position of the bones after burning was used for divination purposes.

St John’s Wort

The plant known as St John’s Wort was widely revered in Celtic countries. In the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, it was spoken of in terms normally used for noble lords and chieftains as allail, 'of great renown', or loinneil, 'splendid', 'elegant'. The plant was thus honoured and while picking it the person would also recite the purpose it was required for and the intent in taking it, according to the Carmina Gadelica. In Wales it is known as dail y fendigaid or 'the blessed one’s leaf', and llys Ieuan, 'John’s herb'. As you can see from the picture above it is five-petalled, golden yellow with prominent stamens reminiscent of rays of the sun. The stamen, it should be noted, is the flower’s male reproductive organ which produces pollen.

St John’s Wort was put over the doors of houses to keep evil spirits away (mugwort was an alternative if it could not be found) and if gathered at noon on St John’s Day was considered to be effective against many illnesses.

Divination was practised as at the time of the other ysprydnos, since messages and influences could leak through from the Otherworld. Commonly, these divinations concerned the length of life and the likelihood of marriage. One way of divining the length of life using St John’s Wort, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, is given again by Marie Trevelyan:

"Take as many St John’s worts as there are people in the house. Clean these free of dust and fly, and hang them on the rafters of the room. Each wort was named after an individual. Those whose plants wither first, die first."

She also tells us that to forecast marriage, spinsters used to make a wreath or garland with nine different kinds of flowers. Then, while walking backwards, they would try to throw the garlands onto a tree. The number of times it fell to the ground represented the number of years they would remain unmarried.

Alexei Kondratiev states that in Brittany the place of the St John’s Wort was taken by the aour-yeotenn or ‘golden herb’ which shines like the sun in the dark on St John’s Eve and at no other time. Mysteriously, it could only be seen by those with the gift of seership. It is possible that this magical herb was actually the St John’s Wort seen in a symbolic or mystical way.

Bibliography

Trefor M. Owen, The Customs and Traditions of Wales. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1991.
Trefor M. Owen, Welsh Folk Customs. Gomer Press, Llandysul, 1987
Marie Trevelyan, Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales, EP Publishing Limited, Wakefield, 1973
Alexei Kondratiev, The Apple Branch. The Collins Press, Cork, 1998

Monoecious silence and other nonsense

2010-06-17T18:08:00.024+01:00

Arrowhead (Sagittaria Sagittifolia): a monoecious plant
from the book "Wayside And Woodland Blossoms", by Edward Step

I recently did an exercise by Karen Swenson from the book The Practice of Poetry. It consisted of choosing unfamiliar words from a dictionary, assigning different parts of speech to them and using them in a poem. The object of the exercise was to concentrate more on sound than on meaning. Here is my attempt:

In dargion safety the sparrow lings softly,
as the orphrey, shallooning his wings,
ginks and clacks to the Trisagion west.
Coffling wanly the niblick sinks
into the monoecious silence.

I found it interesting that ‘orphrey’ (actually an ornamental border on ecclesiastical vestments) must have subconsciously reminded me of osprey and led me to turn it into a bird - showing how we may be influenced by similar sounds to infer meaning, often without realising it.

I liked the phrase 'into the monoecious silence' and wondered if I could recycle it to use in another poem. The dictionary told me it meant, as a biological term, 'with unisex male and female organs' and as a zoological term, 'hermaphrodite'. "Ah", I said to myself, "that won't work then!" But no sooner had I thought that than my mind did a little hop, skip and jump (the way it does) and informed me: "A monoecious silence is one which is sufficient unto itself". And, yes, in a poem you could say that, since poetry isn't wholly subordinate to the structures of meaning that would pin words down… It's one of the reasons I like poetry so much - the alchemy of sound, meaning and association; the mental gymnastics.

This set me thinking about Noam Chomsky's sentences:
1. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
2. Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

Chomsky said “It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) (nor indeed any part of these sentences) has ever occurred in an English discourse. Hence, in any statistical model for grammaticalness, these sentences will be ruled out on identical grounds as equally "remote" from English. Yet (1), though nonsensical, is grammatical, while (2) is not grammatical.”

People have tried, successfully, to incorporate the first sentence into a prose piece, drawing on the several meanings of the words. There is this, for instance, by C.M. Street:

"It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously."

The second sentence is not so easy to use in prose, being ungrammatical, but it doesn’t present too much difficulty for poetry. For example, off the top of my head:

Across the pale defeated hills
furiously sleep ideas,
green colourless.

Poetry does not depend upon grammar to quite the extent that prose does. It incorporates other ways of understanding than by logical processes. The evocation of emotions and intuitions from the varied meanings of words and their sounds, from their echoes and resonances, means that poems may even incorporate contradiction –“green colourless” - and paradox and still convey something meaningful. T. S. Eliot said that “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” and this partly explains how. The right brain is engaged as well as the logical left brain.

Jung has talked about the rush of psychic energy that symbols may give us, caused by the conjunction of different images; their union releases an insight, making us go “Aha!” I think the same psychic charge occurs when the mind does that little hop, skip and jump in order to go outside the usual structures of meaning and expand its understanding when confronted by words used in uncommon and uncharacteristic ways. Which is why I think poetry is often more exciting than prose...

Night at Rhosybeddau

2010-05-29T18:08:00.026+01:00

I was afraid of the night
as of an enemy,
but first was the moon
shining on his dark face
and as he drew near
I saw the birds of dawn
lay sleeping in his wild black hair.

“Do not be afraid”, he said,
"for the golden flame of the sun
has touched your heart,
and there I may not enter.”

I wonder now,
if that glow should ever fail,
would the birds of dawn
sleep in my hair?
Would the moon
illuminate my face?

Hags, cranes and hammers

2010-05-18T17:41:00.011+01:00

Photo by John Eagle

Writing about the sour-apple hag reminded me that I’d meant to tidy up and put on my web site an account of a journey I made in 1997 to visit the Hag of Beara in Ireland. It describes visiting some special places on the Beara Peninsula as well as musing about my own mid-life journey through the rather uncomfortable hinterland between the ages of mother and the hag. So here it is at: Pilgrimage to the Hag of Beara

I used Noragh Jones’ Meditations for Hag Sacred Sites on the Beara Peninsula as a template for the journey and posted that as well. If you are not able to go to the Beara Peninsula it can still work as a guided meditation for the mid-life journey: Meditations for a Hag Pilgrimge

I also ruminated a bit more about the old woman as spinner and winder of yarn, remembering the three hags in the Irish tale of Finn in The Enchanted Cave of Keshcorran. In the story Finn and his band were hunting in Northern Connacht and so incurred the wrath of Conaran, a Danaan lord, who sent his three daughters to capture them:

"Finn, it is said, and Conan the Bald, with Finn's two favourite hounds… came upon the mouth of a great cavern, before which sat three hags of evil and revolting aspect. On three crooked sticks of holly they had twisted left-handwise hanks of yarn, and were spinning with these when Finn and his followers arrived. To view them more closely the warriors drew near, when they found themselves suddenly entangled in strands of the yarn which the hags had spun about the place like the web of a spider, and deadly faintness and trembling came over them, so that they were easily bound fast by the hags and carried into the dark recesses of the cave. Others of the party then arrived, looking for Finn. All suffered the same experience - they lost all their pith and valour at the touch of the bewitched yarn, and were bound and carried into the cave, until the whole party were laid in bonds, with the dogs baying and howling outside." (Silva Gadelica, Standish Hayes O'Grady)

Like the Greek Fates, these three old women are connected with spinning yarn. In this case it is enchanted yarn, having been spun left-handwise, against the course of the sun and hung on holly sticks. The association of hags and spinning yarn, as I surmised in my last hag post, does seem a natural one. Spinning and winding the yarn could be an occupation suited to elderly women since it doesn't require too much exertion or mobility – and it was a skill which was essential to the well-being of the community since it provided the means to make cloth for clothing, blankets, hammocks, bags, rugs, baby-carriers and so on. As an Irish triad says: "Three slender things that best support the world - the slender stream of milk from the cow’s dug into the pail, the slender blade of green corn upon the ground, the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman." These crafts are believed to be among the earliest and most primitive invented: there is evidence of woven articles from Turkey and Mesopotamia 7000 to 8000 BC.

It was a way in which the grandmothers could have been ‘economically viable’ and earned their keep. I can imagine it being quite pleasant – women perhaps getting together and working while chatting, gossiping and… spinning a few yarns. Some of the matters of the community were no doubt chewed over and some things set in train that might well have affected the fate of some of its members – marriages decided upon, a word here and there in the ear of a son or son-in-law about the suitability of someone for this task or that.

The Grandmother Hypothesis suggests that there is some evolutionary advantage for women having such a long post-fertile period; that there is some 'genetic intention' for postmenopausal women. Some anthropologists believe that the human species took a leap forward when people started living long enough for grandmothers to survive and be able to look after the children – thus freeing their sons and daughters to do other work: hunting, gathering, building shelters, fetching water and so on. Others dispute the hypothesis, arguing that the grandmother herself would use up resources that could be used for new young. But perhaps spinning, winding yarn and weaving were also their contribution?

There is evidence from all over the world of old people being dispatched or abandoned when they became a burden by consuming resources without contributing anything in return. David Rorie gives some interesting examples from Scotland, England and Brittany which suggest that once violent acts may have given way to ritual and incantation. Also interesting is the association with cranes. In Easter Alves, in Morayshire, there is an account of ‘ringing the Millen Bridle’ – a method by which the death of a sick old woman was hastened. It seems likely from the account that the Bridle – whatever it was, for the word in Scottish may refer to a particular piece of wood used in carpentry or the piece of iron fastened on the end of a beam of a plough as well as the more familiar meaning – was kept by a guardian and during the ‘ringing’ of it, a magical formula was recited:

Cran’s flesh or wran’s flesh
Come oot thy way.

Campbell, in The Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands recounts that if someone is thought to have lived too long and it is desirable to get rid of them, their death may be brought about by shouting three times through the key-hole of his room:

Will you come, or will you go?
Or will you eat the flesh of cranes?

Anne Ross states that according to Julius Caesar in the first century BC the ancient Britons refused to eat the flesh of cranes in case it had been human in an earlier life and Giraldus Cambrensis (12th cent.) observed the same taboo in Ireland.

In Brittany there is a report of an elaborate ceremony to hasten the end of an old person by use of er mel béniguet, the holy hammer. The beadle of the chapel was the guardian of the hammer which was kept in the recess of the church wall. When it was brought to the sick person’s house, the oldest person, a woman, held the stone to her chest, bent by the weight of it, and made the sign of the cross with her right hand three times and then raised the stone above her head: “waving it and saying: ‘Mathô-Talen, for the last time commit they soul to God, for here is what will relieve thee from the agonies of death, and lift from thee the burdens of life’. The ends of his fingers having been wet with holy water, he slowly made the sign of the Cross with the right arm. Lowering the stone little by little with both hands, she at last placed it gently on his forehead, steadying it with her left. Then again raising her right, she cried in a shrill voice: ‘By the Holy Trinity, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, thanks to the holy hammer of Saint Meltro, the deliverer of the aged, rest in peace, Mathô-Talon, for thou hast lived well!’ Hardly had she finished when the old man drew his last breath: his limbs stiffened and he gave up the ghost while saying, ‘God be thanked!’” There were known, apparently, several such ‘holy hammers’.

Aubrey gives a similar account from seventeenth century England where a ‘holy mawle’ was hung behind the church door and when a father was seventy and of no more use, the son could fetch the hammer and knock the father on the head with it.

Rorie notes, “the word for hammer or maul (mell) is the same in both Scots and Breton, and it brings us in touch with the ‘millen’ of the ‘bridle’; for ‘to mill’ in the Scottish vernacular, is ‘to give one a beating, to drub’. *

On a rather more heart-warming note, here is an Irish example of a wide-spread folk motif of grandchildren coming to their grandparents’ aid:

'A man had a father who had grown too old to do anything but eat and smoke, so the man decided to send him away with nothing but a blanket. "Just give him half a blanket," said the man's son from his cradle, "then I'll have half to give you when you grow old and I send you away." Upon hearing this, the man quickly reconsidered and allowed his old father to remain after all.' (Irish Folktales, Henry Glassie)

* All accounts above from David Rorie, Folk Tradition and Folk Medicine in Scotland unless specified otherwise.

A Little Bloggin' Song

2010-05-11T12:53:00.014+01:00

Whenever I say the word 'blogging', I hear it overlaid with the music of Bob Marley's song Jammin'. Looking up the lyrics, I found they were quite applicable to bloggin'. So here (with a few minor changes and an omission) is a little bloggin' song:

Bloggin'

Ooh, yeah! all right!
We’re bloggin’, we're bloggin'
I wanna blog it wid you.
We’re bloggin’, we're bloggin’,
And I hope you like bloggin’, too.

Ain’t no rules, ain’t no vow, we can do it anyhow;
I am gonna see you through,
’Cos everyday we pay the price with a little sacrifice,
Bloggin’ till the blog is through.

We’re bloggin’ -
Bloggin’s not a thing of the past;
We’re bloggin’,
And I hope this blog is gonna last.

No bullet can stop us now, we neither beg nor we won’t bow;
Neither can be bought nor sold.
We all defend the right; jah - jah children must unite:
Your life is worth much more than gold.

We’re bloggin’,
And we’re bloggin’ in the name of the lord;
We’re bloggin’
We’re bloggin’ right straight from jah.

Yeah, we’re bloggin’
We’re bloggin’,
See, I wanna blog it wid you
We’re bloggin’
I’m blogged: I hope you’re bloggin’, too.

Blogs about my pride and truth I cannot hide
To keep you satisfied.
True love that now exist is the love I can’t resist,
So blog by my side.

We’re bloggin’, yeah-eah-eah!
See I wanna blog it wid you.
We’re bloggin’, we’re bloggin’,
Hope you like bloggin’, too.
We’re bloggin’, we’re bloggin’, we’re bloggin’, we’re bloggin’,
We’re bloggin’, we’re bloggin’, we’re bloggin’, we’re bloggin’;
I wanna blog it wid you!

Thanks to Bob Marley, wherever you may be…

Some words about poems and poets

2010-05-03T19:05:00.039+01:00

Beryl Cook: Poetry Reading

This, I think, is my favourite definition of poetry:

"... a poem is made in language and lives in its readers' multiple interpretations. Even in the most apparently lucid poetry, light doesn't shine directly on a single meaning but is refracted by metaphor and splintered by patterns of sound or relationship to other texts - or, to shift to another metaphor, the poem is always out of the office, and even at its most compliant it's rarely wholly subordinate to the structures of meaning that would pin it down".
Zoë Skoulding (Poetry Wales, Vol 44, no 3)

I also like this which says something more about the poem's relationship with the reader:

"But a poem is reciprocal, it insists
on adult relations, to exist
it pre-exists in you or not at all.

Severed from me you hold its future, make
it open up between us. You must take
a poem like a lover.

God give you guts to see it: When it works
poetry is an orgasm. The O.K. word
is resonance."

It’s an excerpt from a poem written by a one-time tutor and mentor of mine, Peter Fison, who first really brought the wonders of literature alive for me.

T.S.Eliot, of course, had a lot of interesting things to say about poetry. Such as:

“…the poet is occupied with the frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meaning still exists.”

***

Finally, to go back a few centuries here is a triad from the Llyfr Coch Hergest, the Red Book of Hergest,

"Tri pheth a beir y gerdawr uot yn amyl: kyfarwydyt ystoryaeu, a bardoniaeth, a hengerd. "
‘Three things that give amplitude to a poet: knowledge of histories, the poetic art, and old verse.’

Although it comes from a very different society to ours, it still has relevance. The 'knowledge of histories' refers to the inherited native tradition. The triad appears in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess as:

"Three things that enrich a poet: myths, poetic power, a store of ancient verse."

Poets are still enriched by knowing history and myth, possessing poetic skill and being familiar with the poetic canon.

Sour-apple hag, a winder of string

2010-04-19T16:54:00.045+01:00

Illustration by P J Lynch

Gwrach gallawdyr groenllawdyr gravellin – horawc
gwrach lechawc gwrach lychwin
gwrach abrec ynychegin
gwrach afylsur llywyadur llin.

Stalk of an old hag, trouser-skinned, gravelly, swine-lousy,
rickety old hag, soiled old hag,
old hag with a blot on her kitchen,
sour-apple hag, a winder of string.

Translated by Gwyn Williams

Yesterday, the blot on my kitchen being too large to be ignored, I spent some time cleaning and idly thinking of this excerpt from a poem about an unnamed hag by Madawg Dwygraig, a 14th century Welsh poet. There is something almost attractive about her foulness – in the way things or people which are perfectly themselves have a kind of beauty. The language of the poem with its harsh ‘ll’, ‘ch’ and ‘c’ sounds almost mimics a kind of hissing and spitting though and I don’t think Madawg Dwygraig’s intention was to portray her in a favourable light! (He also wrote an extremely nasty poem about Mallt, the Irish mother of the poet, Gryffudd Gryg, a contemporary of his.)

The englyn made me think about Jenny Joseph’s poem Warning which describes an old woman, rather genteel in comparison with our gwrach, who merely does such things as wearing purple with a red hat that doesn’t go, spending her pension on brandy and summer gloves and running her stick along public railings “to make up for the sobriety” of her youth (although she does want to learn to spit). Joseph wrote it when she was still a young woman and the poem is a reminder or warning to have some fun while you’re young, to do what you’d like to do sometimes, dare to be unconventional or - God forbid! – a teeny bit rebellious, doing things like running your stick along railings .

Our 14th century hag would not have had the luxury of a pension and reading about hags of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries I wonder if some old women who didn’t have husbands or families fostered the image of the witch with magical powers to protect themselves. People would give them food and clothing when asked, out of fear that they would blight the crops or curdle the milk. Sometimes though this would backfire and they would be attacked or killed.

Jane Pugh, telling the story of an old woman cornered in Llanidloes, writes: ‘It was the year 1839 and witches were a favourite topic in Wales, as well as all over Britain and many poor old women came under suspicion, harmless though they might be. They only had to be old, wrinkled and ugly with a prominent nose and life became very hard for them as if in those days it was not hard enough for the poor. Few old women ventured very far from their homes and most avoided town at all costs, just in case someone started up a cry of “witch”.’ 1 Apparently in Wales only three witches (four were convicted but one escaped) were hanged during the time of the Penal Witchcraft Act of 1563 – 1736; this was a very small number compared to those hanged or burned in England and Scotland. There is, however, no record of how many were killed without trial.

Hags do, of course, appear in mythology and folk-tales where they are often powerful figures, sometimes conferring sovereignty on the young hero. The hag is, in fact, a symbolic figure, drawing her power ultimately from the archetype of the Terrible Mother. The hag is the female figure, no longer fertile with life-giving qualities, but associated with death and destruction. However she is still one aspect of the Great Mother who is allied to the Land and the king rules only with her approval. There is perhaps an echo of this concept in the Mabinogi story ‘Peredur, Son of Evrawg’ where nine hags are ravaging the land and Peredur gets the better of one of them in a fight. She teaches him to ride and bear arms and then gives him a horse, weapons and armour. There are stories from Ireland in which the hag appears to a young man and when he kisses her, transforms into a beautiful maiden and confers the kingship upon him.

The hag seems a fitting figure to associate with sovereignty. The maiden is attractive to the young hero and therefore he wants to possess her. She in turn would have been driven by social imperatives as well as by biological ones to appeal to young men, and therefore her actions and behaviour were intrinsically linked with his. There were not many jobs open to a young girl in ancient Ireland; even though women could become poets, lawyers, healers etc they were rare and special circumstances probably prevailed. Before Christianity, which at least offered the alternative of becoming a nun, the role of wife and mother was probably the main or only pathway open to a woman, which made her dependant on being chosen by a man. The hag, however, was another matter. Not being attractive to the young hero she was not bound to please him and had greater freedom to please herself. She was sovereign, in the sense of independent, and he had less power over her. Perhaps because of this she seemed more threatening.

Our ‘stalk of an old hag’, being unnamed and therefore having no identity, takes on mythic proportions. She is a ‘winder of string’, reminiscent of the old women known as the Moirae or Fates of Greek mythology who controlled the destinies of each person: Clotho would spin the string that represented the life of the person, Lachesis would decide the length of it and Atropos would cut the string at the appointed time, signifying the end of the person’s life. The three Fates were, inevitably, very powerful and instilled fear even in some deities. Maybe the winding of string and wool was a job particularly suited to old women and that is why they became associated with it.

Whoever she was, this sour-apple hag had enough power to get under the poet’s skin to the point where he thought it worthwhile to spend his time and skill on composing a very accomplished poem of seven englynion to her, each line beginning with the word gwrach and the end-rhyme remaining the same throughout. Perhaps she was his mother-in-law?

1. Welsh Witches and Warlocks by Jane Pugh, Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, Capel Garmon, 1987