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Barks and Shaw: Rumi and the Old Road of Story - Feb 15th 2013
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Year Course 2013: Just 3 places left
Early morning in California. Frost on the ground, but spring just over the hill. The heating in this old red-wood apartment has given up the ghost, so the woodburner has taken its rightful position of main heat source. As a brit i am astonished at the dryness of the logs - so different to the ingrained moisture that hangs willfully around in a good Devon log. So i sip French roast coffee and feed in the big fellas to the iron mouth of the burner.
We have but 3 places left till the School of Myth UK course is full - to the brim - no room for more. So here is probably the last shout out about it. Please send on to anyone you think is ready for such high adventure.
THE STUDY PROGRAMME
The Rattle-House of Sound, The Stag-Boned Hut that is a Poacher's Chapel, The Den of Smoky Language…
The weekends revolve around the telling and exploration of several myths. Implicit in these vivid expeditions is attention to the age old relationship with civilisation and the wild, animal-lore, philosophy, poetry and ritual practice. For 2013 onwards, Shaw is re-visioning much of the programme, with accompanying work on radical, wild-infused ideas through British history – from the Bardic schools, to medieval dream-poetry, to the Cunning Man and Woman to the ideas of the radical Leveller, Gerard Winstanley. These will be given as optional lectures late on the Saturday afternoon.
Writes Martin;
“ Myth in the way that I am thinking about it is
an echo location emanating from the earth itself ”
In the animal world, when a wild call collides with another being, it sends a subtle echo back to the caller, giving even an almost blind creature a sense of what is in their surrounding field. I think the earth has always done something similar.
It transmits certain pulses, coded information, arresting images, and then sits back, like the toothed whale, or the shrew, or the megachiroptera bat, to see what echo's return from its messaging. Occasionally a child, or a wandering tramp, or a woman sitting alone in garden at dusk will experience one of these sonorous emerging's. These pulses tell us something about how to live. Tribal cultures have been far more advanced at honouring this messaging, and gradually crafting art around it till it becomes a two-ways-looking form of mytho-natural beauty that creates deep relationship between wolf and caribou, granite and moss, gaudy rowan and demure willow. This mystical Morse code is the true underlying pattern of any myth deserving of the name. It is the sound of the earth and its inhabitants thinking about itself.
The school attracts a diverse set of students: from storytellers to surgeons to racing car drivers to artists. No one is too experienced or too new to myth to not find their way into this groundbreaking programme. All are assured a very warm welcome by Martin and the team. The success rate of the programme can be noted by the wonderfully diverse and idiosyncratic way that students of the school have taking their own way of relating and expressing the mythic imagination out into the wider world.
Most weekends are held in cosy residential centres on the moors-hot water, bed, wood burning stove, great company, wild story.
Although it is possible to join the course at any point, there is an understood commitment to attending the remaining weekends.
DATES £200 per weekend, £250 non refundable deposit for entire course.
April 26th to 28th 2013
June 28th to 30th 2013
August 2nd to 4th 2013
October 4th to 6th 2013
December 6th to 8th 2013
Leaving the Village Finding the Forest
April 26th - 28th
Initiation myths – how do they relate to bustling modernity? ‘The Return to Greece’ – Greek mythology and its relationship to European fairy tales. Over the weekend we will study and hear told epics from the Greek and Fairy worlds – ‘Psyche and Eros’, ‘The Gnome’ 'Tatterhood' and more. We will explore how certain splits have occurred in the Western psyche, and how myth, especially initiatory myths, speak to possible ways of re-aligning these two dragons – logos and mythos. There will also be solo time in the startling beauty of Dartmoor, “walking the stories” – reflecting, engaging and creating directly from the myths. This weekend is primarily about finding your mythic ground.
Coyote Man and the Fox Woman
June 28th - 30th
Trickster stories – How does myth engage with paradox? From tribal stories to Gypsy and Eastern European wonder tales, we enjoy tricky, shifty, snuffle-heavy, abrasive, oddly tender, hilarious stories that tell us much about the survival of soul in a world seemingly fragmented and lurching into ever deeper trouble. The psychologists say this is a ‘Proteus (shape-shifting) era, the artists say we have entered the ‘altermodern’– a time of rapid change, cultural diversity becoming globalisation, no clear centre. We suggest it is not a Zeus time, not a Goddess time, but a Trickster moment. But for Trickster to thrive, it needs boundaries and a strong sovereign centre to bump up against. Trickster needs relationship with other deities. So we ally ourselves with stories that are far from the Hollywood ending this weekend.
Tasting the Milk of Eagles
August 2nd - 4th
Stories that migrate. A weekend on stories from the dark Caucasus mountains: The Nart Sagas. These little known but brilliantly vibrant stories may hold all kinds of keys to the roots of the Arthurian canon. Over a weekends telling we explore how stories, like herds of animals, travel from place to place – making cultural claims of these no-author stories complicated to a modern mind. Many are nomads. We will hear of Lady Setenaya and her magical apples, or brave Wazermeg entranced by a black witch into a starving dog. These stories will seem both strange and oddly familiar, as if something is stirred, just underneath the conscious imagination. Most will never have been told in the United Kingdom before. Sometimes, but not always, the Seneca story 'The Listener' rides alongside.
Parzival
October 4th - 6th
The centre of Western mythology: the Grail Quest. We will tell this far-ranging epic over a full two and half days, paying particular attention to the role of Parzival’s Magpie Brother and Cundrie, the fierce-tusked Crone of the Woods, as crucial elements to him getting to the Grail castle after many years wandering in the wasteland. Accompanying the story is associative information: of the world of the Twelfth century Troubadour (and their little known female counterparts, the Troubaritz), the significance of Persian poetry on the story, it's Gnostic mysteries and the rise of a kind of divine feminine in the medieval era.
Myth as Migration, a Wild Land Dreaming
December 6th - 8th
After the migratory, the local. What would it be like to absorb and even tell stories from a radius of twenty five miles from your door? In the time of the bio-regional, of attention to local produce and business, we pay the same attention to the notion of local myth and folklore. Over this final weekend, we trace seven idiosyncratic Devon stories – from the arrival of Brutus of Troy, to a Wassailing story from the hamlet of Scoriton in the early twentieth century. These stories form a kind of myth-line across the mossy landscape of Dartmoor. On this weekend, we will walk the moors individually - stepping into both out own myth and the story of the wider place. The next day we will find ways to see the deeper significance in our solo time – the river underneath the river – and work into a personal myth line that can continue with deeper study.
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Santa Rosa March 9th -
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Coleman and Martin, Feb 15th, Stanford Memorial Chapel
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The Golden Ticket: GREAT MOTHER CONFERENCE 2013
Spring is springing in Northern California, as the family and i begin to turn our attention to an imminent return to Devon (early next week in fact). It's been an amazingly rich trip: whale watching, early morning animal tracking across beaches, an endless array of great tasting and amazingly nourishing
This weekend is the last gathering of the MYTHTELLER INTENSIVE in Point Reyes - we are groaning above and beyond capacity and will be exploring PSYCHE AND EROS (which will shortly lead me to this blogs main point). Also- the night before we leave there will be one, final evening - a house concert no less - with just a few seats left, in Berkeley - organized by the writer and storyteller Leah Lamb. Every idea i haven't explored or story told will be in the mix for this final U.S. evening. If you are in the Bay Area next Tuesday why not try and score a ticket? Details at:
http://www.facebook.com/events/149387431891101/
Tomorrow morning, the film director Haydn Reiss makes his way with crew through the bay area fog up to Inverness (not the Scottish one), for my interview in his upcoming Robert Bly documentary - Details at:
http://www.facebook.com/RobertBlyFilm?fref=ts
Thinking about Bly always brings me back to the conference he founded way back in the seventies, and one i find myself deeply involved in now........
So, here is the main event, the golden fleece, the tremulous journey into a wild-flower underworld of story, poetry, body, singing and the wild, genius music and deep fellowship. The Great Mother Conference.
I don't always ask this, but please share this, forward it on as a link, bang a drum - this wine is too rich not to share. This extraordinary conference in Maine in the first week in June is almost 40 years young, but still deepening, still vibrant, still the only place to go. I've never been anywhere quite like this.
IF THERE'S ONE THING YOU DO THIS YEAR, DO THIS:
THE WOMAN WITH THE GOLD
BETWEEN HER TEETH
The Four Tasks of Desire
The Great Mother Conference June 1st-9th 2013
“Between my breasts there are quails, they must think I’m a tree. The swans think I’m a fountain, they all come down and drink when I talk”
Gloria Fuertes
Teachers: Coleman Barks, Alicia Ostriker, Michael Stoker, Gioia Timpanelli, Fran Quinn, Lisa Starr, Tony Hoagland, Martin Lowenthal, Marcus Wise and David Whetstone, Susan Littlefield, Jay Leeming, Doug Von Koss. Miguel Rivera, Tim Frantzich and more....also about a 100 others in the shape of beloved participants.
We live in an era frantic with news of scarcity – economic and emotional. That there is never enough of anything. This year we drive our horses in quite another direction – that we are in fact a cosmos. In many ancient cultures, a woman was clear that she was connected to the intelligence of a hawk or the bend in a river, a man just knew that he walked with bears. In Greece, legend persists that there is a series of tasks to experience before you encounter this level of awareness – what some call the inner-marriage. They require acute discipline. They are not easy. They are as diligent and quiet as they are ecstatic. But from these four tasks true culture is awoken – we experience ourselves as connected, and therefore of service.
The story? Eros and Psyche. A story of woman’s difficult awakening, a man’s deepening into love, and the four tasks required of Psyche to enter a deeper relationship to Eros.
We ask: like Psyche, what great tasks do we undergo that are clarifying our own desire, our own relationship to Eros? We could see that desire as what in us reaches out to the world, feels vital and awake.
What also of a damaged-eros? when a mythology of love falls, what is its replacement? Lack of eros is far more than erotic: it indicates lack of connection to the living world, the dis-location of pornography, decline of intimacy in the family.
A host of artists, poets, musicians and thinkers are gathering to explore the deepest implications of this story. Through our mutual art we will participate in a celebration of desire, and learn something of the labors that have led to its flowering. We will ask each participant to bring four tasks gathered from their own life – What labors have tested and confirmed and continue to provide an eros renewed?
Dare to see yourself as a kind of cultural historian of your
own life.
On arrival at the conference we will all find a partner to exchange these wisdom seeds with – at certain points over the wider week. Small groups will also be a vehicle for this. So this is a call out to all the boat builders, poets, gardeners, storytellers, mechanics, philosophers, dancers, hedgerow dreamers, quilt makers, secret nomads, introverted musicians, wise children, foolish grown ups,
and all we have momentarily forgotten to join us.
We leave at dusk. Bring your dancing shoes.
Over nine days we will gather by a lake in Maine and through poetry, discussion, storytelling, astrology, time outdoors, music, movement and private reflection we continue the work of nourishing the soul and lifting the spirit. For almost forty years this conference has seen some of the most agile minds of poetry, mythology and the wider arts pass through its doors, creating a robust container for a thriving community of artists, thinkers, ecologists, children, and passing animals.
Through its rich history the Conference has been honored to welcome such teachers as: Joseph Campbell, Marion Woodman, William Stafford, Jane Hirshfield, Galway Kinnell, Naomi Shihab Nye, Li Young Lee, James Hillman, Coleman Barks and many others.
It has long been speculated that the gathering is secretly a longship of gypsy-souled troublemakers dreaming of Persia pretending to be a conference. We can neither confirm nor deny. What we do say is:
Bring your dancing shoes, a revolution of the heart is afoot!
“We knew that gypsies were properly another race. They inhabited the land of Eros – as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something may get in or out”. Seamus Heaney
Reading List:
Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine. Erich Neumann
Alchemy of the Soul: The Eros and Psyche Myth as a Guide to Transformation. Martin Lowenthal
The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man. Marie-Louise Von Franz
The Myth of Analysis. James Hillman
The Moon and the Virgin. Nor Hall
Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic. Alicia Ostriker
Writing Like a Woman Alicia Ostriker
Talking into the Ear of a Donkey. Robert Bly
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The Old Stories - Why Would We Need Them?
Well, we have set foot back in old Devon, which is still playing out the last dance steps of what i gather was a fairly serious winter. We are all jetlagged, wandering the corridors at 4 a.m., looking for hot tubs and margaritas and the yip of the Coyotes that stalked the woods behind our apartment up on California's Inverness Ridge. A long and beautiful trip - thank you to Jonah and the Storytelling Project at Stanford, the Sufi i met on a street corner, the hundreds of new friends, all that attended the Mythteller three month intensive up in Point Reyes, the nimble trackers that took us out early one morning to trail pawprints in much the same way i trail stories - with curiosity and wonder, and most of all to the generous, lion-hearted, poetry souled Lisa Doron. We are grateful, and we remember.
I turn my head also to some upcoming collaborations: With Satish Kumar on the 'Earth Pilgrim' week at Schumacher College, June 17th-22nd, and then with David Abram for 'Wild Land Dreaming: Living Language and the Erotics of Place' - a full week - 1-7th July, also at Schumacher in Devon. Can't wait. Both David and i will be leaning into some very new ground for this collaboration - there have been some great conversations and companionship down the phone lines between here and New Mexico.
Todays missive is a response to several enquiries i had last year from ecological friends asking why i felt this connection to myths and fairytales - and couldn't i just articulate my own emerging stories from time in the wild as the 'new myths', and be done with the grubby, complicated, book heavy world of (especially) European folk tales? To the enquirers, those stories felt too 'contaminated' to still be of use - they longed for something pristine and unencumbered by human history, just an authored expression of delight with the living world. That has its place, but if myth has no author, this also has its setbacks.
I write a little about my preparation for approaching Snowy Tower - my telling of Parzival - and begin with where i first starting feeling my way through these image-based ideas, up in Snowdonia, Wales.
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It is hard for us to imagine the time when human language was primarily just a sound in a wider polyphony of earthy expression – the splashing brook, the patterning of bird song. Hard for us to hear human sound without drawing on the resource of visualizing letters if needed. The inside of our heads has changed dramatically in this regard. This apparent sophistication has crafted a speech that can seem to sit uneasily in the panorama of the wild, with its burbles, chirrups and thunder. Human language can seem like the voice of a guardian or overlord, rather than the confirming murmurs of a being placed absolutely within this textured web.
Some distance away the leisurely bellow of long horn cattle gently re-orientates a calf back to their emerging story of the trip to the watering hole. Watching it all, the mountain Caer Idris holds the shadow of scudding clouds gracefully in its lap. Caer is also a good thief, capturing differing colors as the day progresses, sometimes golden crested, sometimes muddy red and green - the mountain is telling a story of the value of shape-shifting for anyone ready to behold it. These stories are the legacy of time bent open to the archaic hymns of the land. But this non-usual language, this fragrant cluster of apple-blossom words, how can it be spoken of to the rinky-dink world, the world we can see glittering below in nearby Barmouth?
Certain myths, certain stories, are a bridge to the muscled thoughts of the living world. These thoughts we could call ‘wild mythologies’.
Some stories these days do not offer that avenue of perception. Like genetically modified crop, their intrinsic design is so shaken up, so bent only to allegory, that this root-connection is lost. Their taste is briefly sweet but lacks texture and weight. Nuance is ironed out. If the hand of the human community is too impacted, then story becomes only pastoral, an affirmation of what we already know. We don’t need stories like these. Many of us long for the prophetic, the unruly, the associatively spacious, the ones that awake our animal soul to pad lonesome tracks in blue green forests at the edges of our imagination.
At the same time, stories gathered from the wild places, if authored and spoken by just one individual, will lack the psychic weight and difficult edges that many myths and fairy tales hold - even ones gathered between the pages of a book. Receptivity to natures humors is the great opening, the essential vehicle, but the passing of the story through time and community also enables it heft, maturation, authority, the hard yards of living between the horizontal and divine worlds. Having sat round hundreds of campfires for twenty years hearing powerful, truly animate stories pour from the mouth of returning vision questers - stories ablaze - i have wept at their mythic truth, but have not quite heard a myth. A subtle distinction, but important. They carry the ‘I’ elegantly, but not always the ‘We’ that the great stories reveal. The storied images have not passed through enough lives, communities and culture. They are intensely beautiful rivers, but they are not the ocean.
It was the waiting tribe, many years ago, that would help the initiate dig the tributary that took their river to the bigger tribal soul-story. The ancient stories, rather like our vast, majestic seas, may have occasional temporary pollutants, but are not to be abandoned, but cherished, worked with, carried, honored. They carry silvery shoals of insight, slow moving crab wisdoms that survive at great depth and under intense pressure, many limbed aquatic revelations that give themselves up for our nets, time and time again.
On one level myth is not really about ‘a long time ago’, but a kind of vitalized, ritual present, but at the same moment, the opening up to that heightened liminality through many centuries and communities both deepens and broadens the power of the images. Repetition has enormous weight. So, although the myths usually refers to eternal concerns, the repeated practice of invoking that very ‘timelessness’ is one of the elements that, on the human side at least, gathers resonance and psychic vigor to the telling, like moss around a stone. It’s very mysterious.
Although many would rather be done with myths and folktale and produce, almost overnight, new stories of harmonious and stress-free relatedness to the living world, it is like trying to out run your own shadow. Naive. All those power games and paradoxes that myths and fairy tales engage with - they keep revealing to us difficult inner-material, material that comes with the labour of being a human - a human with a history of betrayal, urbanity and a tricky lower intestine- and not always the pristine mind of the elk or indigo bunting. That’s useful as we turn our head towards wild intelligence. Its rather domestic grit reminds us of the village we come from as well as the forest we long for. Human initiation always calls forth dwelling in the crossroads of both. The great stories, the ones that challenge, mystify and wake us up, if they have origination points at all, will come from these earthy eruptions, and to this very day contain vast windows to the Otherworld and the Animal Powers. But, like us, some contain the sooty loam of city streets and contemporary allegories garlanded around their feathered neck. I don’t think they would be so hard to loosen up, to get their wingspan free of the oiled and inked page. The stooping hawk catches the dawning and is gone.
So do we just tip toe away from this complex inheritance, and rattle off endless cut and paste ’new’ myths after an afternoons brisk walking on the Brecon Beacons? I think this would prove to have little sustenance. It would lack authenticity. We need the experiential, the great un-shackling, a loosening, but bardic thinking would entail that encounter then challenging and deepening the existing mythos, not abandoning it completely. This is where study arrives. We won’t get into heaven without it.
My own policy is that of a pirate - steal the stories back. It’s why i was lead to Parzival - to form an associative link between my experiential practice in the wild and the great treasury of myth, and then only to realise that that very link was in fact a circle, that the stories very core came from the ground.
To tell Parzival in a good way, i first took it back to the fireside for several years - to woodsmoke, and low bellied badgers, rustling beds of nettles and a hundred thousand stars overhead. Up on the dreaming flank of Dartmoor i once told the story for three days straight, eyes weeping from the wet kindling, great draperies of mist settling around our small gang, iron rain paddling our thin canvas shelter hanging from the oaks, the drops fierce thrumming, the roe-buck shaking dew from its flank in the thicket. Toothwort, meadowsweet,skullcap, coltsfoot, black horehound, silverweed, eyebright - the murmurings of the herb world scuttled through those long grasses of its telling. This time gave the story a chance to stretch its old and powerful paws, examine its frosty whiskers in the cool, green reflection of a moorland lake. The wet feathered rooks, adders, and loping hares of that place reclaimed the tale - the embers splutter and brooding clouds got all snarled up in the syntax of the telling, and dropped their amiable flurries into these very pages. We could do the same with other stories - reconsecrate them in the living world. That’s a radical act, and will certainly produce results. How that turning of the story towards wildness actually appears is almost a chthonic element, more a sensation in the beholder than anything else, a kind of curiosity, or freshness in its expression. Try not to over think its external manifestation.
Parzival is, however, not a story about a localized geography. It’s a myth that has absorbed a confluence of wisdom’s whilst retaining a tangible essence. It has had what we could call a nomadic agency over the centuries. As a myth teller, it is appropriate to have experience of both nomadic stories like this one and tales of what i call ‘the slow ground’. Slow ground stories have retained a geographical blueprint, that designate a rough line that you could actually travel the route of. In the final book of the Mythteller trilogy i will focus specifically on such stories, but Parzival, like many races and cultures, has wandered far from its origination point - gaining a different kind of style in the process.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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On the way to the airport: one last foray in Berkeley - (with thanks to Leah Lamb)
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Cundrie: Tough Love in the Myth World
Ok, final mutterings from Parzival this week - then i will leave it alone. Five years on a book does this to a man. I am really excited to issue the first illustration for the book - by the brilliant Cara Roxanne. Check out her music too at: http://cararoxanne.wix.com/crowpuppets
These are some sections cut-and-pasted together, that have loose connections only - and i am aware they don't answer every question raised.
So it's not always coherent, but there are other places to go for that kind of thing.
The writing is on the role of Cundrie - the Great Tusked Woman of the Woods - in the development of the Grail story. In short - she rides into Camelot, interrupts praise from Arthur himself, and tears into Parzival- accusing him of abandoning his grail quest. In short she shames him. But long term, she saves him. She issues some hard swipes to his ego, but preserves his soul.
This piece begins with a wider appreciation of why i find her so compelling to the story, then invokes some of her toothy attributes, and then just descends into a joyous romp through the kind of images she seems to invoke when you have been prepared to stay in the burning ground of her instruction.
THE ANIMAL FEMININE AT ITS CENTER
Picture the scene – the end of the story. Parzival finally arrives at the Grail castle gates - the very centre of divine power on earth. Is he with King Arthur, resplendent with hawk, hound, and horse? No.
After five years wandering bewildered in the wastelands, his companions are a hag with the snout of a dog, claws of a lion, and tusks of a boar, and a pagan brother mottled black and white like a magpie. This startling image is central to the tale, and yet this trinity of energies seem somehow sidelined. To my eyes, it is the great trickster story of Medieval Europe – without trickster in the form of Cundrie, Parzival would have never made it to the gates.
It matters to me that women occupy such immense roles of both activity and mysticism in this story, to have it pegged as a simple, male hero myth is a hugely missed opportunity for all of us. No one wins. This is my young daughters favorite tale, the vitality of her imagination floods effortlessly into all the characters - she is amok. I love to hear her tell it.
Sibyl Language: Dark Speech
Nothing wakes us up like menace - menace refreshes.
Tony Hoagland
Cundrie is about standards, the upwards gaze, the pilgrim's walk, the tiger’s wrath, slipping through the eye of the needle. She doesn’t want us fat at table scoffing the calorific delights of a neighbor's praise. That could lead to a heart attack. She wants us out amongst the wet trees of longing, following the shaggy trails of a god.
Let us consider for a minute. This is not the “far distant lady” of the troubadours, no lances are bring splintered for her love, no eyes scouting for the heart. She is the cynocephalic hag of the forest. She is the crossroads apparition, the midnight collision on the lonely road with a white-faced Banshee. She is not a delicate vision peering down from a medieval tower. The image of the feminine as gateway to the divine has just morphed into a murder of ravens, the bent prophecies of the lonely willow, the sow protecting her muddy nest.
It is also a story that leads from the 'idealized' picture of the feminine, distant and holy, to an eye watering, tongue flailing hag of the woods, up close and holy. We sometimes expect the former and then get the latter. We detect from the early poems of the Countess of Dia and others (one of the Trobaritz - the tiny, dis-connected group of women poets of the era) , an irritation at being used as a seemingly passive image within the troubadour framework. This story is not about deifying women in far off towers. All the women in the story are are opinionated, up close, active, occasionally brilliant, sometimes maddening, always engaging.
We salute Cundrie and her capacity for a certain bracing word-power. Let's widen our appreciation of this. In the old Irish poem, ‘The Dialogue of the Two Sages’, two men battle verbally for the chair of chief Bard – Ollav – of Ulster. Whilst refraining from direct insult, they hurl muscled language across the feasting hall until the poetical battle is complete. The elder describes himself as “inquiry of the curious, weft of deftness, creel of verse am I and abundance of the sea”, before enquiring of the younger what art does he practice? “I make naked the word, I have foregathered the cattle of cognizance, the stream of science, the totality of teaching, the captivation of kings and the legacy of legend.” 4 It’s an old western stand off, pistols drawn, both guns blazing. Much of the tension comes from the fact that it is witnessed; one will have to lose, the stakes and reputation of both are all to play for.
In the Senchus Mor, the presiding king over the showdown is the legendary Conchobar Mac Nessa who claims they speak in a “dark tongue”, and of whom his advisors insist “keep their judgements and their knowledge to themselves”. It is truly initiated language - obtuse, elevated, aggressive. Some claim it is an archaic form of Gaelic that had been held tight under the secretive cloak of the bards whilst becoming widely extinct. There is no addiction to harmony here, but an understanding that sophisticated language, ritual measure and space for the opponent's lunge (which is actually invited) is the way to resolve disputes. Many Taoist scripts, and, of course, the I Ching have a thread of dark speech all the way through them.
One of the many fascinations with hearing Robert Bly speak in the eighties and nineties was the possible flare-ups that could occur, that were even encouraged. He seemed able to both dish out and endure any number of attacks. Cundrie was never dismissed from the table, but found full voice in his commentaries on contemporary America and the state of the arts. There was also room for a volley of attacks from the floor. Those attacks could also cause him to change opinion mid-stream, which was admirable to witness. Yes it was messy, rather unresolved, but most importantly, invigorating. It was Bly that turned many of us onto feminism.
She brings tough stuff
Cundrie is a critic. A hard-eyed, lethally accurate, thousand-year-old critic. You can’t buy her. She is to do with the truth that bursts unbidded - the coffee morning abandoned – the guests outraged, the wild snake that gobbles the naïve. It means stepping into opinion – not seeing the hundred different possibilities but the tough centre of the argument. You are out on the lawn, bellowing at the neighbor over a boundary line issue. You are no longer involved in a popularity contest, you fashion small black loaves of language that are as heavy as iron.
The Cundrie in you hates to see you searching for the remote, settling for porn over the erotic, neglecting to show your kids badger's dens, books you love, asking them nutty questions. She drags women from the dishes to catch a thunderstorm then changes the locks. If you fail to read the messages she sends then she shows up in our outer life and really lays it out.
Cundrie is a sybil - “one who offers divine council”. The very first sybil, Sibylla of the seventh century BC, had a harsh tongue in her head; her prophetic utterances would cut deeply into the complacency of the enquirer. She would speak flatly of famine, disease, war and would chastise heavily whoever came forward with a question. Heraclitus observed that the prophecies were delivered from unsmiling lips – it seemed a heavy role to carry. Still, it was claimed she lived for 1,000 years, so maybe she was just conserving energy.
A detail is that the prophecies did not indicate a possession state – she retains her lucidity even while a spirit wind sweeps through her. In Sibylla, we locate two great forces conjoining, the cosmos and the woman. But even in this conjoining, the crucible of soul is wide enough to hold both in a tapestry without annihilating the personal or shutting down the cosmic. In our exploration of how to hold and express wild mythologies, this is a crucial detail. Remember Parzival tranced by the blood on snow? They lack Sibylla’s expansive container that holds the arduous tensions of the two. It is only in later centuries that this mediation seems to be compromised by a later Sibyl’s working in Apollo’s temple; there we find descriptions by the poet Lucan of “a rabid jabber poured from her foaming lips...the groans and loud babblings as she gasps to draw breath; doleful howls and wailing fills the cavern”. This image does not suit the eloquence of Cundrie.
Sibylla herself was part of no organized establishment, she rode independence like a snorting horse, scattering freely her troublesome images. Another detail is that she didn’t speak them – she sang them.
Cundrie is emphatically showing Parzival the route downwards. Like most of us, he encounters grief and trouble with the sense of ‘It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!’ Even as we head down into the muck we can see dawn breaking beyond the next set of hills. Hallelujah. The stone has been rolled away. This is James Hillman’s territory of irritation, even claiming that we are entirely christianized as a society if we operate with that sense of relentless optimism. The textual qualities of the descent – the scents, colors, the terrible insights – get lost if we are always paddling away from the flood. Drown, says Hillman. Drowning pulls us into the barnacled insights of Neptune; we are finally in a murky, half-lit world where we have to move very slowly. Soul is as interested in our retreats as our frantic jerks forwards, but this is a very hard notion to embody.
But where is it leading?....
The Great Remembering
Cundrie and the magpie brother take Parzival, and us, with all our worldly sophistication, back somewhere ancient. To the mysteries of Chauvet Cave, laden with 150 bear skulls and the vulva of a goddess, emblazoned with a black ochre on phallic limestone. The walls are filled with paintings of charging images – the clear jut of the lion, the owl, the rhino, the hyena. Lacerating these very walls are the claw marks of the bears that live there, lusting to drag down this proud gallop of meat.
This was a time of magical as well as fleshy rupture – you could walk right out of your body if the chanting made the air quiver at just the right moment, the scattering of bones wished you on, if your trembling form was striped in ochre like the back of the great auroch itself. These uttering’s spun you right out and into myth time. It was in this way that the spirit-lights came, and we travelled far to see who we already were.
It was in this emerging that we scraped our feathery head on the limy rock as we leapt into the shape of rook, or burst through altogether riding wolf-mind. We negotiated which beasts would step forward and lay their head for their brother the hunter, and when our time came, which of us would wander into the snow, lie down and bend our head for our sister the bear. This went on for hundreds of thousands of years.
Cundrie and the magpie brother hold Parzival, and us, shoulder by shoulder, as we, by flickering light, see the dances being danced that hold our unsteady cosmos together, the secretive little steps that charm the lillies, those bold sweeps of arm that rouse the fresh wind, those flurried curves of charismatic language that call the secret names of all things. Suddenly a woman sweeps by, breasts bare, with the mane of a horse, a fine boned old man lurches, just for a second, into the shape of a dog-fox, children become butterflies and ancients become the great trees we always knew they were. We see this through a haze of heat and distance, but we see it. None of this entirely denies human culture, its innovations, printing press and great blessings, but it certainly deepens it. It re-routes all this magician energy back to a healthier, earthier position. The divide between court and forest grows porous, and a culture of wildness arrives.
The Grail serves this dance. In some far distant place old visionaries and young dreamers keep shuffling back and forward with bear skulls and antelope hides. Standing at the centre of the Grail story is not empire but this primordial dance floor that is truly the breath of god.
and what happens when we join the dance?...
"In the green rivers of the west, pike moved again over the shale, in the east, Merlin chicks bustled to get beak to their mothers food, in the north, young wolves yipped and nipped and felt the sun on their back for the first time, and in the south, the sows udder spurted thick with a golden milk. Old Albion itself started to swell, to rise, to remember itself. The dragon tracks of its dew-glittered glens curled out into the minds of its people - old women remembered stories of their childhood and started to tell, friends long estranged reached for each other with no words at all and started to weep, the sparrow sang love songs to the worm, the long barren fen burst with wild flower, parties erupted in every hamlet, village, travelers inn and lasted for years.
Bellies became fertile, and the White Stag was seen in the forests of Camelot again, glimpsed at dusk. A sword shot forth from a green Welsh lake, held by a woman’s hand. The salt fields of the North sea churned their foamy theatre as the whale spouted their courting joys. The greening harvest of the land dragged honeycombed stars down into its curvy secrets. All was awake! The roaring champions of hawk and roe-deer carried the news to every wet flanked copse, every tangled byre, every darkening stream, all was a kind of singing."
Amen to that. That's what i call hope. Even Jim Hillman would have agreed on that.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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The Ship Is About to Sail - friends, grab an oar!
Just three days till the beginning of the 2013 School of Myth year programme! Contact us today - not tomorrow - if you feel the call to high adventure - tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com is the one. Ok, onwards.....
As i hear the news bleat distantly about England's lack of quick financial revival after the economic crash, i find myself pondering the notion of the word poor. Growing up in a house without phone, television or car, and having produced a little yellow meal ticket for school dinners back in the far distant 1980's, it's a word that has been hurled in my direction once or twice, despite not really feeling so.
The word poor leads us to thoughts of deprived diet, housing and work opportunities. But poor has other, more insidious connotations. To be in poor in spirit, to be far from soul. It is odd that in the growing Western preoccupation with organic food, yoga and un-feisty thoughts, that we often neglect myth as another kind of food – a literal soul food. Maybe we sense that its full fat, often barbecued and calorific content may create too much disturbance in suburbia or the ashram. But it could be a crafty way of getting some protein without risking heart disease.
It was awareness of this kind of soul-poverty, a cultural deprivation in all of the material abundance that lead to the forming of a hedge- school down here in Devon. The idea with a hedge school is quite literal – an Irish notion that you assemble some kind of rough structure against the side of a hedge and begin to teach underneath it from whatever skills you have. It’s all very simple, and comes from a time of tremendous hardship.
Many friends suggested this wasn’t a good idea, or to wait for some kind of government funding, or possibly an arts council grant. I do not compute this kind of thinking. No pirate could stomach its cautious implications, its lily-livered, half-wish of an idea. Even in a county positively overflowing with spiritual sorts – and packed programs on bodywork, psychology and vegetarian cookery - there seemed little hope for a wayward, no qualification at the end, headlong immersion into the nature of myth, wilderness and rites-of-passage. And the lure? The sweet lure to get folks to sign up?
At its centre was four days with an empty belly, headache and nightmares, glued to the side of a ghostly Welsh mountain in the pouring rain. An advertising dream, surely.
Well, it appeared my friends may be right. For the first year the school had three students. I was partially catering as well as teaching, running back and forth with plates of food. Cara was the real engine room of the kitchen, eyes weeping from chopped onions (well, that’s what she tells me). The next year was a big step upward – we now had four students. Big time. Any profit amounted to a six pack of cold beer and a packet of fish’n’chips after everyone had left on the Sunday night. I clearly remember the first time I had enough money left over to buy a book on the Monday morning. I still keep it close by.
The early years were intense. We’d rise at dawn, grab towels and walk in silence through a mile of forest down from our raggedy tent till we got to a small river. We always began the course in the depths of winter, just to increase its edge. We would go down backwards into the water, float to the very bottom, get a good soak of icy rapture, before back to fire making, cups of hot tea, and the day's unfolding curriculum. There was absolutely no time off: myth, ritual, poetry and a little food, hard at it between 6am and 11pm. Much of the time was spent traversing gnotted forest, jumping into the ocean with wild flowers, chocolate and poetry for Mannanan MacLir, or deep in the clutches of some esoteric old story. It seemed quite wonderful to all of us. We were a strange Fianna, frisky hares drunk on moonlight.
Next time round we had 30 folks and a waiting list. Were I to tell you of what was required to move it so dramatically in numbers it would require another book. The truth is that we were never size-ist. Were that hedge school still three in number, no doubt I would still be there, sheltering from the rain, telling indecent jokes, drinking tea and teaching as best I could.
We have been blessed beyond measure by the folks who became immediate family – like something from the old stories. Remember Jonny Bloor? Not only was he the school's very first student, he went on to become a right hand man: leader of music, general encourager and apprentice poet. In fact all three of the first years – Scott, David and Jonny, went on to play vital roles within the emerging school. Chris Salisbury, the outdoorsman and storyteller, brought a wealth of practical forest knowledge, experience of the performative side of storytelling and a calm eye. The women started to roll in too – Sue, Sam, Tina, Rebeh and beyond. We are adrift with cooks who play the banjo, mechanics who tell the epic of Gilgamesh, surgeons who have remembered they are really bandit queens, grief counsellors who have not stopped laughing, life coaches who have not stopped weeping. We have been buffeted by weather, death, illness, financial scrapes, wayward leadership, but, for anyone dreaming of a more complicated life, we are right there.
And what of Dartmoor, the seat of the school? Dartmoor has been submerged in ocean, a tropical island, a red wood forest, and over time, an interlaced consortium of wild and domestic interaction. Its surface is highly ridged with human impressions. Go down to Merrivale just before dawn in May and you’ll see a double row of stones near the road side. As it gets lighter you will see that the stones point devotionally to the star cluster of the Pleiades rising up from the east. These jagged eruptions guided the seeding and the harvesting of precious crops, five thousand years past.
It’s not hard to detect the remnants of corn-drying barns, longhouses, the banked up reaves which marked the fields, the cromlech tomb of Spinster’s Moor, the stone circles of Scorhill and Grey Wethers, the standing stone of Drizzlecombe, then down through the dreaming into the hillfort at Hembury, then Lydford and its Anglo-Saxon patterning that still lives under its street design today, the clapper bridges and stannery routes, or old Brentor church - wrenched and groaned into life atop a volcanic outcrop in the 12th century, caught on a ley line that stretches from Cornwall to East Anglia.
Most of the tors were originally people: Bowerman out hunting with his dogs, interrupted a coven of witches who promptly turned him and the hounds into stone. Vixiana the Witch was hurled into a swamp and the grandmothers say that the grassy bristles sticking out are from her hairy chin, just feet beneath the surface.
There is barely a copse, stretch of lane, or fecund outcrop that lacks a name and a story. Three hundred and sixty five square miles of intrigue and layered myth. But even Dartmoor, seemingly so permanent, is a shape-shifter, just like the stories are. The red-ochre soils we enjoy here today are the remnants of what was once a kind of desert sand, carried by flash floods down from the highest points of the moor.
It has been cultivated, abandoned, mined, regenerated, feared, shorn bald of its tree crest. From a human eye it has been both cramped and lonely, fertile and barren. It carries a word-hoard of story, is a vascular intermingling of animal intelligence. It is its own wild consciousness, its own fluid mythology, whatever shape a particular millennium places upon it. These are just temporary bumps along the way, little snippets
of clock time pecking at its great, eternal tumps.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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The Storied Tongue
(Friends-under 10 places left till we reach capacity at this years Great Mother Conference - nine soul-stirring days on Psyche and Eros with myself, Coleman Barks, Alicia Ostriker, Tony Hoagland, Gioia Timpanelli, Fran Quinn and many more. Final sign up at: www.greatmotherconference.org)
Something fairly brief, but very close to my heart this week:
“ No one had told me that the language that was the real glory of English literature was still being used in the field by unlettered men like these.”
The novelist Adrian Bell on the farm workers of the Suffolk countryside.
As a young man, Bell was taken on for a farm apprenticeship. Although having received a public school education, in the eyes of the farm workers he lacked real knowledge, barely able to handle a hoe. What he did possess was an ear for poetry and an open attitude. One day he had to lead a horse between the rows of young plants, still tender. When asking for advice, the horseman looked him in the eye and said: “You lead that mare as slowly as ever foot can fall.” In the literalness of the image – a direct observation from the horseman’s world - Bell also immediately sensed an earthy poetry; in its taught rhythm and true substance. That was the beginning of a lifetime's admiration and learning for the young man from such men. Indeed he says: “I didn’t begin my true education until I had the privilege of listening to the powers of expression of Suffolk farm-men who had left school when they were twelve years of age”.
The great collector of oral accounts of England’s old rural communities, George Ewart Evans (1970), agreed with Bell. He claims that the sweet observation, but also poetry, of the horseman’s advice was very typical of many men he met in the field. They rarely spoke in abstract language, but let the image lead the talking. He describes how rare it would be to hear a phrase like ‘early summer’, far more likely ‘beet-singling time’ or autumn would be ‘sowing the winter corn’. He recalls showing some healthy apples to an old woman who replied ‘those apples will keep till apples come again’. The rhythm is pronounced, the thinking keeps close to apple itself, but also lends a kind of wistfulness to the wider thought – ‘till apples come again’. The increasing lack of visual image in much language and a growing montage of abstraction (this is several generations on) saw Evans declaring that English has lost much of its ‘tactile nature’, it was simply less enjoyable to listen to. He made a clear distinction of the generation born between 1880 and 1890 as the last to generally speak with this deep, descriptive cadence. What I would call a ‘storied tongue’.
A place where some clarity was lost was when very direct questions were asked. Then the questioned individual used all skill in their formidable arsenal to avoid coming down strongly on either side of an argument. This was largely due to a generational build up of caution around sticking your neck out in a small community. It simply meant vulnerability, and when you are living on the breadline that is something you could ill afford. This reached amusing proportions when, after a day in the fields, a worker nursing a pint, rather than giving an opinion directly, would give it as if describing a previous conversation where the same subject arose. So you would say “I said” in the past tense, rather than “I think” in the present. This defuses the intensity of the opinion somewhat, despite everyone knowing this other ‘conversation’ is fictitious, because everyone used the same mechanism. So if it caused too much of an adverse reaction, you could always say you had re-considered since.
These escape-clauses were also to do with a certain kind of manners. You didn’t want to apply pressure on a neighbour or leave them without the possibility of a graceful retreat. Evans describes the borrowing of a scythe between old friends; this had been going on for decades but the borrower never asked straight, he always offered a verbal ‘out’ for the other by asking: “I suppose you ain’t got an old carborundrum, Charlie?”
(Carborundrum is a kind of rub for the blade).
A flat out error would be met by a gentle: “I fare (incline) to think to think you’ve made a mistake, Bor.” If under intense questioning, the farm hand could resort to two standards: “I don’t fare to recollect anything about thet” or “thet were afore ma time”. This is very similar etiquette to tribal groups I have enjoyed meeting across the United States. Direct questions are simply seen as a little unsophisticated, a little gauche; everything gets answered, but in a longer, round-about and certainly more elegant way.
When the farming system truly changed around hundred years ago, the hub of families working in close proximity started to change. And when that changes, language changes, aspirations change. My daughter goes to a tiny rural school, only half a dozen lanes away from the geography of this story (please note: this refers to another part of essay not shown), a school full of farmers' children. So far I have not heard one Devonian accent, and these are Devon children! Not only is the phrasing identical to children all over the English speaking world, the actual accent itself seems to be leaving the mouths of her generation. You’ll catch it in a local pub, or between two old boys at the greengrocer’s, but all now speak a language of American and Australian soap operas. The accent is a kind of generic south English, the north holding onto more regional flavours for now. As is always the case, it has taken only years to dissolve something that took hundreds of years to build. It’s not happening, it’s happened.
The elegance of old culture farming language is another example of cadence slipping under the net of official changes within English diction. The unlettered tongue retained all sorts of delicious, concrete, descriptive, ingenious phrases and descriptions – true wealth. As Evans rightly claims:
And a sympathetic, although not sentimental listener, has the feeling that some of the speech of Chaucer, of Spenser, of Shakespeare, or Tussar and of Claire kept wonderfully alive into the Twentieth Century.
In the continuing questions that arise around the revival of storytelling, I cannot stress highly enough my belief of a return to the storied tongue of these earth folk. Of the apples that returned, and the winter-corn, of the dusk as wine-red as the beloved’s cheek. This is soul language, rooted in things.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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praise to the hut and the sun
Hey compadres -
i find myself back wandering the green lanes of mighty Devon after a wonderful nine days having a visceral encounter with 'Psyche and Eros' at the Great Mother Conference in Maine. Alongside the poets Alicia Ostriker, Tony Hoagland and many other valid, brilliant contributions. We went through the story a few scenes a day, and in my telling we had moments amplified into a kind of ritual theatre, with a group of inventive players that deepened the visual experience in ways i could never have contemplated! Thank you to their directors too - Anna, Erin and Jonah. It is a colorful and vibrant conference - celebrating year number 40 next June.
I arrive home to many happenings - most immediate is a collaboration with Satish Kumar next week on the 'Earth Pilgrim' program at Schumacher College. As well as a conversation around soul, philosophy and myth, i will be leading a group of us up onto the wind-rattling moors to tell the local story of 'The Grey Wether Stones'. I include part of my working commentary on the story below - due out sometime in my 'The Bird-Spirit King: Myth as Migration, a Wild Land Dreaming' book.
We still have a couple of places on the Coyote Man and the Fox Woman weekend (last weekend in June, Dartmoor) with myself and visiting teacher David Abram. If you couldn't get into our week long retreat, then this is your only chance to grab a place - Email Tina today! when they are gone, they are gone.
So, The Grey Wethers. The below refers to the story of a Dartmoor man, Zorac, who grows lazy in his worship of the sun god Belus and pays a hard price. His great herd of sheep are turned to stone (hence the stone circles up there). Years later, a visiting turf digger to the moor, Lynhur, hears Zoracs story and the possibility of great wealth if he digs up his bones. What could possibly go wrong?.....
Hut Poetics
O Light im schlafenden Haus!
O Light in the sleeping House!
Richard von Schaukal
It is worth taking a moment to examine the place where Lynhur hears the story. He is not at home, but in a new landscape, something unfamiliar.
He is already lifted out of his normal frame of reference – there will be the sharp edges of newness for his imagination to push against. It is this sense of openness that is part of the initiatory process, of being deliberately exposed to a frame of reference beyond the pressured traditions of the immediate social memory. From one way of looking at it, Lynhur is a young aboriginal, sitting in the brujo hut with the elders, hearing of what lies out in the un-trodden bush: the spirits, the tangled dangers.
(This witnessing in a wild place has become a Dartmoor tradition – Crockern Tor has served as a gathering point for representatives of the four moorland towns. Strange opinions would pop out that maybe would be too obscure, too clawed, for the waxed floors and grand paintings of Ashburton Town Hall.)
In my tent years, I would enjoy tufts of grass sticking out from between the faded canvas and the trellis. Robins would fly round the tent roof ribs then out again. There were always drafts; no feather could ever fall straight.
In summer months, you could sleep with the tent ajar to the night's dreaming, the roe buck trail nearby, the badger discovering last night’s dishes in the grass, old seasonal spirits shuffling about. Winter required muscle: canvas frozen on the inside, endless scouring for kindling, sleeping under a leathered mass of skin and blanket, throat creeky with sudden temperature drop, only mouth revealed from the dark pile, gasping wintered air. The place, the circled hut, was a conjunction, a polyphonic murmuring, a den of natured languages. It was psychoactive. All this made visitors, sometimes even other yurt dwellers, uneasy. “Why not do away with that tent entirely and have done with this?” muttered one. But I needed the tent. The tent was the ritual marking out; the frontier inn that invited all the chattering denizens in for a drink and a gossip.
Gaston Bachelard knew well that all of us have such a hut; that a house, flat or apartment contains a kind of Russian doll set of other containments. The further down we go into ourselves we finally get to our own hut. All it takes is a lit candle, or a snowflake at the window, or rain a blissful-clatter on the roof, and the hermit wakes, with its immense ‘in’-ness, from behind our daily face.
Bachelard reminds us that the hut is not social in the normal sense of the word, it offers solitude. He also poses the challenge of interiorisation, that the spaciousness of the imagination rather than a literal change of location is key. We all know what it is like to end up on a foreign beach and to your horror, you realise that you have brought yourself with you.
So, you can put this book down, light a candle, lie under a blanket and find the hut anytime you want. What a relief. The hut is an image of poetic reverie, it seems utterly alive - the spluttering peat fire, the coming storms, the story as axis-mundi in volatile weather. Bachelard rightly loves the image of the lamp in the window of the hermit’s hut as a symbol of the vigil and the diligent mystic, that someone is keeping watch, studying hard, a friend to the night, while we sleep on.
Our image in the story is even shaggier; it is the gasp of relief when a stranded walker sees a distant light in the mist and knows their life is saved. The madness of the fog increases ten fold the warmth of the fire.
Rilke describes the experience of seeing a lit hut at night from a distance with three friends, as so powerful it could not but separate and isolate the experience for the friends, as their individual interior worlds all leapt up and went “see, see!”. The inner-life, so long brooding in the embers of such an image, could not share it around like a common item.
The Favoured Grow Lazy
What does it mean to worship the sun? Svarog (Slavic), Helios (Greek), Shamash (Mesopotamian), Ra (Egypt), Awondo (Africa), Tonatiuh (Aztec), Amaterasu (Japan) are just a tiny fraction of the many sun deities across the world, some male in character, some female. Belus himself drags Babylonian, Greek, Egyptian and Roman culture with him – all having slight variants on his name.
The sun, with many mythologies, can broadly indicate will, success, radiance, the outer world, strength, the fullness of midday. In a time when nuanced religious consciousness is at a low, it is the sun deities' temple, more than any other, that brings in the worshippers, because it appears to hold what we all want – wealth, warmth, strength, clarity of vision. We flood the temple and direct our lives to its attributes.
Some say that those who work in the great banks and wall streets of this world are sun worshippers. Addicted to its golden rays, its vastness, its beaming and favoured heat. None of the moon's murky ambiguities, the sun is good news for the hard worker, the ambitious young buck, the power-shouldered business woman.
But the story tells us that lusting alone does not cut it with the sun. That these great banks, these lazy vats of hoarded gains, irritate the Yellow One as it gazes down on Manhattan and the fat cats toasting the common people from high balconies with champagne. As the Occupy movements indicate, cavalier and profane attitude to other people’s money will bring consequences.
Consequences because the Sun is not a profane altar, a refuge for the greasy handed. The sun bring warmth to the sick and skinny boned, a sophisticated hand to the turning of the seasons and every animal, plant and ocean that responds to it. Without its generous distribution of light, we have no Shakespeare, no Dickinson, no Goya. It is a gift almost above all others for us air-gulping wanderers. Old Belus and his other dimensions were not about making Zorac, or the bankers, or us, fat cats.
Belus is a death bringer and life provider, delicately balanced, and aggravated when his favours are exploited. When the mythological layer to life collapses, when the ceremonies become toxic (end of year bonuses at the tax players' expense) then does something inside the lost worshippers not turn to stone? When we see the flat gaze of the corporate wealth-monger staring at us on the evening news, it is probable that something inside them – their sheep, their animal nature, have turned hard and unfeeling.
Then the solar man is arrogant and proud…domineering; a mere vapour, expensive, foolish, endued with no gravity of words, or soberness in actions, a spendthrift…(Lilly 1647 65:68)
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
i find myself back wandering the green lanes of mighty Devon after a wonderful nine days having a visceral encounter with 'Psyche and Eros' at the Great Mother Conference in Maine. Alongside the poets Alicia Ostriker, Tony Hoagland and many other valid, brilliant contributions. We went through the story a few scenes a day, and in my telling we had moments amplified into a kind of ritual theatre, with a group of inventive players that deepened the visual experience in ways i could never have contemplated! Thank you to their directors too - Anna, Erin and Jonah. It is a colorful and vibrant conference - celebrating year number 40 next June.
I arrive home to many happenings - most immediate is a collaboration with Satish Kumar next week on the 'Earth Pilgrim' program at Schumacher College. As well as a conversation around soul, philosophy and myth, i will be leading a group of us up onto the wind-rattling moors to tell the local story of 'The Grey Wether Stones'. I include part of my working commentary on the story below - due out sometime in my 'The Bird-Spirit King: Myth as Migration, a Wild Land Dreaming' book.
We still have a couple of places on the Coyote Man and the Fox Woman weekend (last weekend in June, Dartmoor) with myself and visiting teacher David Abram. If you couldn't get into our week long retreat, then this is your only chance to grab a place - Email Tina today! when they are gone, they are gone.
So, The Grey Wethers. The below refers to the story of a Dartmoor man, Zorac, who grows lazy in his worship of the sun god Belus and pays a hard price. His great herd of sheep are turned to stone (hence the stone circles up there). Years later, a visiting turf digger to the moor, Lynhur, hears Zoracs story and the possibility of great wealth if he digs up his bones. What could possibly go wrong?.....
Hut Poetics
O Light im schlafenden Haus!
O Light in the sleeping House!
Richard von Schaukal
It is worth taking a moment to examine the place where Lynhur hears the story. He is not at home, but in a new landscape, something unfamiliar.
He is already lifted out of his normal frame of reference – there will be the sharp edges of newness for his imagination to push against. It is this sense of openness that is part of the initiatory process, of being deliberately exposed to a frame of reference beyond the pressured traditions of the immediate social memory. From one way of looking at it, Lynhur is a young aboriginal, sitting in the brujo hut with the elders, hearing of what lies out in the un-trodden bush: the spirits, the tangled dangers.
(This witnessing in a wild place has become a Dartmoor tradition – Crockern Tor has served as a gathering point for representatives of the four moorland towns. Strange opinions would pop out that maybe would be too obscure, too clawed, for the waxed floors and grand paintings of Ashburton Town Hall.)
In my tent years, I would enjoy tufts of grass sticking out from between the faded canvas and the trellis. Robins would fly round the tent roof ribs then out again. There were always drafts; no feather could ever fall straight.
In summer months, you could sleep with the tent ajar to the night's dreaming, the roe buck trail nearby, the badger discovering last night’s dishes in the grass, old seasonal spirits shuffling about. Winter required muscle: canvas frozen on the inside, endless scouring for kindling, sleeping under a leathered mass of skin and blanket, throat creeky with sudden temperature drop, only mouth revealed from the dark pile, gasping wintered air. The place, the circled hut, was a conjunction, a polyphonic murmuring, a den of natured languages. It was psychoactive. All this made visitors, sometimes even other yurt dwellers, uneasy. “Why not do away with that tent entirely and have done with this?” muttered one. But I needed the tent. The tent was the ritual marking out; the frontier inn that invited all the chattering denizens in for a drink and a gossip.
Gaston Bachelard knew well that all of us have such a hut; that a house, flat or apartment contains a kind of Russian doll set of other containments. The further down we go into ourselves we finally get to our own hut. All it takes is a lit candle, or a snowflake at the window, or rain a blissful-clatter on the roof, and the hermit wakes, with its immense ‘in’-ness, from behind our daily face.
Bachelard reminds us that the hut is not social in the normal sense of the word, it offers solitude. He also poses the challenge of interiorisation, that the spaciousness of the imagination rather than a literal change of location is key. We all know what it is like to end up on a foreign beach and to your horror, you realise that you have brought yourself with you.
So, you can put this book down, light a candle, lie under a blanket and find the hut anytime you want. What a relief. The hut is an image of poetic reverie, it seems utterly alive - the spluttering peat fire, the coming storms, the story as axis-mundi in volatile weather. Bachelard rightly loves the image of the lamp in the window of the hermit’s hut as a symbol of the vigil and the diligent mystic, that someone is keeping watch, studying hard, a friend to the night, while we sleep on.
Our image in the story is even shaggier; it is the gasp of relief when a stranded walker sees a distant light in the mist and knows their life is saved. The madness of the fog increases ten fold the warmth of the fire.
Rilke describes the experience of seeing a lit hut at night from a distance with three friends, as so powerful it could not but separate and isolate the experience for the friends, as their individual interior worlds all leapt up and went “see, see!”. The inner-life, so long brooding in the embers of such an image, could not share it around like a common item.
The Favoured Grow Lazy
What does it mean to worship the sun? Svarog (Slavic), Helios (Greek), Shamash (Mesopotamian), Ra (Egypt), Awondo (Africa), Tonatiuh (Aztec), Amaterasu (Japan) are just a tiny fraction of the many sun deities across the world, some male in character, some female. Belus himself drags Babylonian, Greek, Egyptian and Roman culture with him – all having slight variants on his name.
The sun, with many mythologies, can broadly indicate will, success, radiance, the outer world, strength, the fullness of midday. In a time when nuanced religious consciousness is at a low, it is the sun deities' temple, more than any other, that brings in the worshippers, because it appears to hold what we all want – wealth, warmth, strength, clarity of vision. We flood the temple and direct our lives to its attributes.
Some say that those who work in the great banks and wall streets of this world are sun worshippers. Addicted to its golden rays, its vastness, its beaming and favoured heat. None of the moon's murky ambiguities, the sun is good news for the hard worker, the ambitious young buck, the power-shouldered business woman.
But the story tells us that lusting alone does not cut it with the sun. That these great banks, these lazy vats of hoarded gains, irritate the Yellow One as it gazes down on Manhattan and the fat cats toasting the common people from high balconies with champagne. As the Occupy movements indicate, cavalier and profane attitude to other people’s money will bring consequences.
Consequences because the Sun is not a profane altar, a refuge for the greasy handed. The sun bring warmth to the sick and skinny boned, a sophisticated hand to the turning of the seasons and every animal, plant and ocean that responds to it. Without its generous distribution of light, we have no Shakespeare, no Dickinson, no Goya. It is a gift almost above all others for us air-gulping wanderers. Old Belus and his other dimensions were not about making Zorac, or the bankers, or us, fat cats.
Belus is a death bringer and life provider, delicately balanced, and aggravated when his favours are exploited. When the mythological layer to life collapses, when the ceremonies become toxic (end of year bonuses at the tax players' expense) then does something inside the lost worshippers not turn to stone? When we see the flat gaze of the corporate wealth-monger staring at us on the evening news, it is probable that something inside them – their sheep, their animal nature, have turned hard and unfeeling.
Then the solar man is arrogant and proud…domineering; a mere vapour, expensive, foolish, endued with no gravity of words, or soberness in actions, a spendthrift…(Lilly 1647 65:68)
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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Article 4
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The Grey Wethers
The sun is out - Devon is in shock, but lively with happiness. I'm just about to spend a day teaching on Satish Kumars 'Earth Pilgrim' Program. After discussion, we will be heading up to the Grey Wether's Stones - up near Sittaford tor- where i will tell the story of that place and it's mythic underbelly as best i can.
About 18 months ago i posted the below on the blog - the commentary of walking some of the geography of the story - and it seems fitting to lay it out again today. The old Dartmoor folktale is about a peat worker, Lynhur, many centuries ago, hearing of an old ritual where he could shear the wool from a sheeps back (for the rest of the year a Grey Wether Stone), and, under a variety of ritual conditions, assist it turning to gold. Hearing the story from a perspective of financial gain and not initiation the experience does 'not go well for him'. It's a wise story - partially about right relationship to Belus, God of the Sun. I'll put it up on the blog soon.
Hawk
Without a map I descend into the spillage of muddied lanes and dirt tracks between the Postbridge road and the descent into Chagford. There is hay bound in black lining like huge sticks of liquorice on the fields' sluiced edges. Somewhere en route I am looking for signs for Fernworthy reservoir, and the pine woods that surround it. It is through them that I will eventually get to the open moor and the circles. Today, all signs seem to suddenly stop, and I am almost on the descent into Chagford before I realise that something must be up. This can’t be right.
I’m hot and irritated. Why is it so hot? I have been up and down this steep road more than once, assuming I would get spoon fed by signs for the route to the forest. As this sits angrily with me, a large hawk bursts from the low cover, to my left, and sweeps across my path, only several feet ahead, initially at shoulder height. Epic wing span, mottled with dashes of exposed white, fierce mouth; that’s about all I can take in. I could have reached out and touched it. And lost a finger. It is a great thrumming blast of feather and clarity; cutting utterly through my pouty mood. Wing span clears five foot, easy. It’s not a buzzard – I know the colourings of the common and rarely seen rough legged buzzard, even have a fair idea of the further more obscure honey buzzard. This is something else again. (The buzzards have grown more visible on the moors since a lessening of game keeping aggression, large ‘wakes’ of them being reported).
Hawk hefts itself upwards, catches a current, and forces my head far right. In the distance I can see the formal shape and ‘cut out’ pattern of a conifer forest, past more lanes, dips and old growth copses. Thank you.
Hawk, friend to Hera, Isis, Circe, clawed instructor of patience but companion to lovers – king lover Gawain means ‘Gwalchmei’ – Hawk of May. Its vigour makes me done with whines.
The Anxious Forest
I get into some focused walking, almost a slow jog, to cut through the time spent on tarmac. All Devon lanes are crooked and seem to lead you round on yourself before you get anywhere near your destination. Rather like a Devon conversation. When I finally enter the forest at its sweetest spot, I see that the dry stone walling at its entrance is almost entirely covered – the old stones appear like mossy loaves of bread, or the curls of a green sea. There is an ocean scent, up from the coast, that only leaves when I move further into the shadowed forest, and the unmistakable aroma of pine drifts fragrantly towards me . At the centre of the dirt track is a wide ice ridge, although most of the ground is without snow. I can’t help but enjoy jumping from puddle to puddle, breaking the iced top. There seems to be no one about.
Tracking the ice ridge I slip, scamper, and steady myself on this white arrow of intention leading, some miles ahead, to the Grey Wethers stones. Was Lynhur so enthused on his walk to the stones – was it a glory swagger he carried with him? Had his winter starvations burnt all caution from his whip-thin frame? Today my companions are invisible, but they stomp alongside – the peat diggers, the solar worshippers, the transgressor of the sacred. I am many.
These pine trees, planted out of necessity for wood in the first war, carry war-paint – dashes of white horizontal against the steep trunks and endless shades of black. They seem poised for the chainsaw, to suffer without complaint. Occasionally, in the soldiering lines of timber, a strong gold light warms small areas of earth. It is strange to think that these non-native forests were planted out of a sense of anxiety. Maybe it can be sensed, I see no animal tracks but the occasional horse and sheep scat as I get nearer the moor.
These trees are voracious wanderers. Read the statistics: from the Canary Islands to the far East of Russia they are found, from Africa to Scotland, from New Zealand to Chile. They have become a tree of empire, of building, they have a knack of wiping out the local. Like most invaders they are tall. Tall and long living – some going for as long as a thousand years. A god stands behind them, the immortal Prometheus, the stealer of fire from Zeus. Well, like their inspirational deity they too have spread like a wild fire. A pine found in California was a true ancient, and aged at almost five thousand years old, and was named after the god whose liver is eaten daily by an eagle and regenerated every divine night. The woods feel efficient certainly, but lonely. They absolutely do not hold the panache of an old growth stretch of oak and ash.
I come to an earlier stone circle. 27 small stones, roughly 20 metres or 30 strides in diameter, probably four thousand years old. When first discovered, the inside face of the stones were black with charcoal – from ritual: funeral or feasting. Hair, teeth, flickering flame, lurching figures, raised incantation, tears, offering. As I make my way towards them I can see sunlight glittering; taking my attention to something placed by one of the entry stones to the circle. There is a bundle - letter, photograph, map – curled now through weather, but clearly a message to a lost and young friend. The photo is taken at what seems to be a rock festival, a group of young men, handsome wide open faces, lean together in camaraderie. It’s clear one hasn’t made it.
There are water logged and now ice stiffened pieces of cloth here and there, purple and red. And then more - witching gear, fifth fath. A bound rough figure in lightning struck wood, placed on the top of a stone. I leave the wood, the letters, the map, all of it, well alone. The very public-ness of the offerings seems a little clumsy. This strange charcoaled circle is clearly in use. Maybe not with the elegance and precision of original design, but there is something here that drags the bereft, the mystically ambitious, the straight out curious, to its humours.
The Bone Pile
The track rises, passes a crossroads, more air, more blue sky. Like all these walks I relish the sheer aloneness. I can see for miles and there really isn’t anyone around. Some part of me uncurls into that space as I start thinking about having turned forty some months ago, of my father’s illness, or my life now. As these unwieldy thoughts crash about, I re-focus my attention to the present. I gaze around.
Stacked up, probably a dozen on either side of me, maybe fifteen foot high, are stacks of bones. Bone Hills. I blink, and look again. It’s not bone, but erratically assembled piles of bleached wood. They look like Mongolian shrines; I await the yip of the swift ponied Asian rider. Where is the dark Altai cry? Each skulled hump looks like it deserves flowering orchids, bowls of frothing beer, silks tied to branch, rough slabs of jungled chocolate, quiet attention, goat meat for the circling hawk. Each one looks like a little death, some small ending that has occurred during my life. All the grieved and un-grieved moments I have dragged my still limping frame through. It’s a kind of review of all sorts of passages I simply have not allowed myself time to feel. Really, it’s a very strange moment.
And oddly, it’s OK. In this sudden graveyard I can map my own travels, places I have lived, erratic betrayals, crooked loves, emphatic healings, street brawls, lonely Sundays counting the hard cards of grief. In the smaller piles, I see many little routes I have not taken; friendships cut short, choked at the hilt, strangled, mashed and bruised with bill hook flails. There are kindling piles of hubris and simple stubborness. We can’t follow every trail. We are not meant to hear every voice that speaks to us. So it is. Things pass back into the composting earth. I feel a strange pleasure that there is something to show for these few decades. There is a story. The brightness makes it all visible, concealment no kind of option.
I have preferred moonlit nuance on the piles before now. The wind is up, and freezing, I keep going. Apart from that insistent wind, it is deeply quiet.
I linger awhile on the edge of the forest, and note a reluctance to come out from its shades into open moor. My lunar nature is developed, instinctive, but this appointment in the palace of the sun god is making me nervous. I’ve avoided it many, many times.
The Courtly Stones
I finally cut out from the forest entirely and head across open moorland, keeping in the tree-line's shade, although cold, the sun is fiercely beating, too much for my pale wintered face. The grasses are stumpy bolts, blown into extreme clusters, meaning a constant meandering, no straight line kind of way across broken down walls, more moorland, over small, semi-frozen streams until finally the stones.
They are two circles. I count twenty stones in the northern circle, the southern has twenty nine. This second circle seems far more substantial, large, strangely shaped chunks of rock. Someone has placed a black stone, glittering with crystal, in a worn spot where a stone must have once been. Somewhere in Birmingham, an occultist feels pleased with themselves. Between the two courts of stone is a gap, a grassy runway, heading way off into open moor. The sky is criss-crossed with plane fumes. Again, my attention is drawn to the unusual late winter heat. Then it hits me. Belus! This is his place. No wonder the rocks bake on a February day in a sub-zero wind.
And how did I get here? Not ordinance survey map, not compass or grinning local, but by the sweeping grandeur of a hawk. A hawk- messenger of the sun gods. Friend to bright Apollo, head of Ra, feathered loyalty to Armenti, the Great Mother. Friend to Belus. The Celts said truly that a hawk's feathers carries sunlight with them. The hawk is more than a familiar of choice for Merlin, but actually the shape he would skin-crawl into. Dear hawk, bold pathmaker where there is no clear path, what the Seanchai storytellers fiercely name as the oldest animal of the Celts. Fly above me, fly above me, always.
Here, like the other circle, are signs of ritual use. This though, rather more charged. There are the remains of a flesh offering, just a scrap left, and some bloodied icicles, hanging off a particularly distinguished stone.
This place was here during the battle of Hastings, the witch hunts, the Tudors, the Great War. It sat steady through the reformation, Cromwell, 9/11.
Businesses go bust, empires go haywire, proud people make love, have families, dream, fight, and die. Endless thousands of dramas played out. And still the circle, the wind, the great empty hold their eternal council. It is a constant scene. There is no stagnation here, only permanence. I’ve never been in such a place that seemed so entirely to itself, almost its own ecosystem, its own consciousness.
These stones seem vast and elemental, the current ceremonial detritus I have witnessed scratchy and without consequence. But they bring some ghost memory from our guts, the real excavation is not of them but something inside of us. It is like arriving at any extraordinary theatre set without a description of the play, the actors gone for lunch, but a fierce longing to see it. It is as if older eyes watch from the tree-line, seeing us puzzle over the jigsaw. It is not a strange thing that we bring our brokenness here, our fragmented imaginations; we have to have something to lean on.
On this day, I am not confronted with the drama of the Lynhur story but something of my own. The times I have shied from light, averse to clarity. My own scepticism of bright things, of success. The bone-piles I carry with me. That it is alright to follow a bird's grand flight rather than a badger’s earthy snuffle sometimes. The blessings I have squandered.
Hours later, I emerge from where I began this walk, my face is salty, scorched by the sun.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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