Bruny Island: A Journey Across the Waters

Cloudy Bay opens up before me like a grey and blue panorama of ghosts. The air is thick with the past and yet the purity and freshness of the place literally seems to steal my breath as old people will say a cat can do to a baby. To turn behind you, nothing but the sea grasses, and low bushes of the headlands, hissing as the wind snakes through it, before you nothing but the pounding ocean, jutting rocks and further off whistling sounds of the 'roaring forties' amid the rookeries of sea-birds. On either side mountainous headlands, not a human-soul or human dwelling in sight. This place is a sacred place for the Nuenonne people, native to Bruny Island. The majority of those people have gone beneath the surface of the land and waters now, but the veil is so very thin still. I inhale their lives and stories in the sea-mist that congregates around us. I eat them in the shell-fish of this place, where they suffered their sea-change. Nothing seems vanished, absent, I stare out to sea and the waves pound out the beating heart of the island.

A spirit of the bush, that rises some nights out of a languid water-hole, full of river-weed and stories of spirit wallaby, told me to come to the island. The people where I live used to come to Bruny, once a year to hunt mutton birds and swap girls for marriage with the tribe across the water. As I stand here I can almost see their camp-fires and hear their celebrations ring out late into the night, smell the mutton bird cooking. The story of why the water-hole man wants me to come here is all spinning into being around me. Inside a rock I picked up, out of the roaring sound inside a shell I put to my ear, whispering through the flax. Stories of a slumbering serpent that slept inside the island during part of the year and woke around mutton bird season, to uncoil it's giant being, rise up from water as shadow, as moving grasses, and snake across the land that the old people called Loetrowitter. It makes sense to me that I have to come here to bring together the story of things. I am following the story-lines back to one of their sources, asking the wind there to make the hollow noises through me it makes in the flax and in the sea shell. So that I can know where I am.

I thought I came here looking for Worreddy, the last 'clever man' of the local area and what I found instead of Worreddy was the beating heart of his land. The Land Serpent itself, hissing me into near trance as I stand quite still and a new appreciation for all the powers that have answered me since I first came here. The Grandmotherly woman with her possum skins and her basket who I met one day as she climbed to let the moon out of her basket and pack away the sun. The great Father of the Eucalyptus whose face came out of the mountain and into my life. The trixter spirit with the crow's wings who leaps up and down the sheer rock face. The Flame in the Mountain, the Lady of Obsidian through whom light passes darkly and who opens doors in rainbows. These and the water-hole man and the little girl of the cave. These spirits have made me welcome and better yet made me native to the place. Meanwhile other things are here too, something like yell-hounds, or cwn annwn, race across the land in Winter, I've heard them near their dens behind the old cemetary I used to wander in and known of their presence when I moved myself across those spirit-roads at night. So many things seethe in creative chaos now in this land, along with all the blood of the children of Europe, dogs, horses, rabbits, roots of oak tree and two hundred years of spells and charms brought here by the English and Irish alike.

Here we don't yet have in the material world any traditions of sorcery like Hoodoo, but under the surface we have a similar reality of meeting powers. And in my own practice, as I discover the roots and herbs of this land, the animal bones, the shells, the minerals and learn them, learn what they meant to the old people, or what they meant European settlers who used them in the early nineteenth century, (1) and add them to my tools of European cunning, something new is emerging. Perhaps in this way the conjury of the Mississippi has something to share with us down here on the extra-southern New World.

Van Diemen's land was "for a time a land where many dressed in kangaroo skins without linen and wore sandals made of seal skins. They smelt like foxes. They lived in 'bark huts like the natives, not cultivating anything, but living entirely on kangaroos, emus, and small porcupines'. No less an authority than John West, the first official editor of the Herald, wrote in 1856 that whites living outside of the settlement 'had a way of life somewhat resembling that of the Aborigines'." (2) It seems impossible given this history that I am the first person to begin this process. It is as Richard Flanagan (Tasmania's favourite literary son) says a 'terrible, beautiful history' which at times begins to feel like a Heart Of Darkness journey into madness, and then you take a breath and step back from the shadows for a moment, casting your eyes on the great mountain and the play of light and darkness it creates and you have to accept Her for what she is somehow.

When I got to a high spot on Bruny and could turn back to look at the main island, my home, across the water I felt I understood Her better and I thank the beautiful, untouched island across the water from us for it's visions before recrossing. Before I leave I spend a thoughtful, long time looking out in the directions of the shell-middens that are the only mark, or scarring on the earth that this land's previous occupants left to remind the future of their lives, and I wish that the evidence of my physical life could be swallowed so completely one day, vanish so utterly, so softly, into Her.

1: The Almanac of William Allison 1821, archives of Tasmania
2. Extract from a speech given by Richard Flanagan at the launch of Boyce's 'Van Diemen's Land'

Pictured: The cairns of Adventure Bay, Bruny Island.

The Teaching Spirit of Childhood

As long ago as I can remember there was someone else walking with me. When I was a very little girl my parents called him, and sometimes they, my 'imaginary friends.' I called them nothing but their names. When I got a bit older and started reading novels I called them imaginary too. I thought of him a little like Peter Pan. He reminded me of him after all. Appearing as he did as a young boy about my age with fair hair like mine, and clothing always in green and natural hues that seemed a little ragged round the edges as though he were fresh from some woodland haunt. He only ever lived in my imagination. But then I forgot him, and the other children. My parents said it was because I was an only child and was lonely.

My Mother is quite an advocate of childhood, I realise now as an adult looking back. She encouraged my 'imagination' and set places at the table for people she couldn't see. Mum has raised a number of children on the same fairytales and magic. She looked after three girls in the English countryside as a nanny before she ever raised me. And then another family, of girls again, in America. Unfortunately, like for most people for her the magic is over when childhood ends and only returns in a space where there are children. There is a wisdom in this I realise, despite it's limitations. My Mother seems to understand that children bring something with them from another world, something she has forgotten about but longs ever to recapture. And she has always surrounded herself with children.

But something different happened for me than happened for her when I started to become an adult. Rather than being buried beneath ever deeper layers of adult numbness the world of fairytales burst back in upon me like a half-forgotten memory returning as a teenager. Maybe it had something to do with moving out into the bush and being alone so much in half-wild deserted places that caused him to come back. But come back he did. This time he appeared as a young man. Or at least most of the time. When I think about it in retrospect I realise that right from the begining there was more than one way he could show himself. Sometimes when he was in a protective or guiding role he appeared a little older than me, and he appeared as a human, albeit a human man from a long time ago. But when I was seated or lying down out in nature and day-dreaming I would see him as my own age, always teasing and mercurial, his green eyes glimmering with latent amusement and mischief. But like most boys of his age he was a boy that teased me, I would not yet have thought of him as a lover.

The strange thing is that although it took me a long time, and years in the occult never brought me any closer, only further away from that initial time of innocence when I knew he was real for the first time since I was three, it was over that time I came to love him. What is he? You and I myself many times might ask. I've had numerous explanations over the years and others have suggested many others. Jungians would suggest he is my animus, other might say my holy guardian angel, witches might refer to him as my 'fetch mate' or 'familiar spirit.' Over the years he's taught me many things but I think the most important I've learned from his mercurial nature itself. He's helped me to remember something of the flexible, continuously shape-shifting world generally forgotten after early childhood. He reminds me constantly that the Otherworld doesn't have the rigid barriers that our mind wants to inflict on it. When I ask him were you once a living man? he says: 'yes'. When I ask him 'are you my familiar spirit?' he says: 'yes'. When I say are you a part of my own consciousness? he says: 'yes'. When I say are you your own independent being he, frustratingly, replies: 'certainly!'

It is only now at the age of thirty, with two children of my own where I think I am begining to become flexible enough to truly interact with him again as I did as a small child, and that moment of early puberty. Much of it is thanks to my own children who's way of being helps to remind me daily how I need to think to understand my otherworldly counterpart. And since my flexibility has returned I continue to know him in new ways. He seems to be able to appear as a man from the early middle ages with a Welsh accent who identifies himself as being like some kind of Celtic male Muse to me (should we add love-talker to his titles perhaps?) He can also be an ageless man who gives off nothing so strongly as the sense that he is 'faerie', Other. It seems he can even be a living man that I know sometimes, in some way. Perhaps this is because his essential being exists in otherness, it is constantly on the move, breaking through all possible restrictions and divisions, pointing towards wholeness and union.

These statements may sound incredible to some I realise. That I am actually stating that my familiar spirit appears to me as a living man I know in this world. People will want to ask, are you trying to say that that is objectively true or only that that other person seems to remind you of or symbolise that being at certain times? I don't know the answer to this. I can only appeal to the logic of the fairytale and myth and say that perhaps things can be more than one thing at the same time, when looked at differently. It seems to me that in the Otherworld things that we see as mere perceptions appear as objective realities. So we might experience differing moods in this world and yet our outer body appears the same. We can even exist at several levels at the same time, different levels doing different things, some of them we are not even aware of. While you are sitting reading this and your mind, and perhaps soul, is engaged with the input your body is thinking through all it's processes, keeping the rhythm of your heart and breath all without your conscious awareness. But all of these layers of being, these differing ways of being even, that we might experience from day to day, are in this world all hidden mainly from view by one little-changing exterior image.

Well it seems to me from my experiences with it that the otherworld is more transparent with this multiplicity. The ability to do and know several things at the same time, to see in all directions at once, to be in two, usually, mutually exclusive states (such as the awareness of oneness and personhood at the same time)seems to characterise this place that is not a place. When I am 'there' in trance or lucid dream there is no distinction between kissing and talking. All touching is communication, at a much more detailed level than we are accustomed to in this world. And so I have learned the most from my familiar companion through loving him than I have at the times when it appears that we 'talk.'

For these reasons I've come to believe that all of the ways I've seen him and all of the possibilities about what he might be, are true. All at the same time. And yet in the spirit of true paradox he remains the mystery that my life revolves around knowing better, the Gordian Knot my fingers fiddle to unravel, or feel the shape of whenever I touch him with my awareness. He will never be 'solved', he is a mystery who's horizon recedes continually. And yet at the same time I already know all I can ever know, because all of his answers about himself are: 'yes.' I am comfortable with that, and yet desire continues. Perhaps this is why I am a living creature, and why he has always delighted in tormenting my awareness with his riddles. He seems to always be reminding me not to try and catch him in one place. Enjoy him when I find him somewhere, he seems to tell me, but don't try and catch me there. You can see me in a living man, if you ask me if he is me I will only say: 'yes', but don't imagine I am only there. Nor here. Or any of the places, or faces, you see of mine. Did we know each other before this life? As humans? Somewhere?: Yes. But don't hold onto me like that. That's just one way I am. Let them all go so you can hold onto all of me!

And I get better at dancing his dances I think. At holding on through letting go and all the outrages to common sense he inflicts on my frail human brain. Sometimes I still get scared and want to put a net over him when I feel his presence close, behind an oak somewhere, beyond the curtain of mist, on the other side of the computer screen, above me in the darkness. But Puck-like he slips out from underneath it. He always assures me he doesn't mean to. That he really wants me to catch him, that he's actually really showing me how to hold him close always.

Thoughts on the Hope for Polytheism

I have been thinking a lot of late about 'hope' and the polytheistic resurgence. Usually, as anyone who knows me will know, I am inclined toward optimism. I am inclined to try and change the world, believing in the far reaching consequences of our actions in the here and now and the ability to change the course of history toward the good, by which I mean a path less destructive for humans, animals and all other life forms than the one we currently walk. I also have a dear friend who is an Asatru who believes we are in a 'wolf age' and that the world is in decline. Mostly, because I am not Asatru and have no theological reason to come to a certainty about such a matter, I do not agree. I don't agree to the extent that I have far reaching theories and visions about how things could be better and just spent the last year involved with an intentional community project which involved a plan for a low-impact housing, sustainable, polytheistic community. Many other things seemed less important while I was out to change the world and I wonder now if I have greatly over-estimated my own ability to do anything about the situation I see the world heading into over the next fifty years. To some extent this hubris is forgivable, I am a parent and I want my children to at least know that their Mother was one of the people trying to prevent the problems that we will bequest to them as their birth-right.

Central to my belief that 'things can change' was my view that the resurgence in polytheism and underlying animistic principles, land-based spirituality etc could be a force in that process. I am beginning to question this. I don't mean to post something which is just a massive downer, but I do wonder if I have made the fundamental mistake of involving religion and politics. The re-emergence of polytheism, serious polytheism, is still in it's infancy. Not for ourselves but for our children and our children's children might we hope for the kind of natural polytheism and lack of scholarly self-consciousness that other established religions are able to enjoy. For us is the discomfort of explaining ourselves repeatedly, of lying down the foundations. And unfortunately there are many barriers to people working together in a productive manner toward this as a common goal.

Despite all this I do still tenaciously cling to hope. One must do this if one has children, the very act of creating a child is an act of hope, an act of investment in the future, whatever one may believe. And I feel that amid the 'same old shit, different sector of the pagan community' experiences I have some times I still think I'm seeing better things than ten years ago. I'm finding other people serious about British polytheism who seem passionate about something which is a little more than ego-jostling and trying to have your interpretation of the past stamp out everyone elses. And I'm learning to take encouragement from the few rather than counting the many where people who each call themselves 'pagan' stare in incomprehension at one another and imagine that the other may as well be a Jehovah's Witness for all we have in common. So, bless everyone who's focusing on something bigger than themselves, I've seen you, you do exist, all five or six of you! Whether what we are doing will affect any of the larger problems in our civilisation that trouble me I do not know. But although I haven't necessarily yet subscribed to the Wolf Age I certainly believe in Fate, and so for me the actual purpose on the historical stage of this resurgence is something that for now only She knows.

Stories and the Tribe

Having recently passed through what might be described as a kind 'social catastrophe' which saw members of our erstwhile community going two separate ways, I have been thinking a lot about the dynamics of what makes groups of people a tribe or twyleth. This process of trying to make meaning and sense out of this occurance has yeilded me with two particular things that seem very clear about group cohesion. They are two things that I feel make a group of people able to become a tribe. If one of these things is lacking but the other is strongly present a subsistence state may be acheived.

The first of these things might be the most obvious, but in the modern world it is just as difficult to acheive as it's counterpart:

1. Mutual service and inter-dependence.

Tribes of people depend on each other and serve each other in certain ways. This service must be mutual and based on a shared understanding. If mutuality must continually be extracted from one party in any relationship then harmony in the group will suffer as a result. Mutual service at it's best relies on a willingness to reciprocate and also a willingness to allow other people to serve you in itself. I have seen a number of different personality types over my years of being in groups and communities and as such have seen a number of different tecniques via which people short-change other people. Some people will simply ask for a lot and offer up little in return, these people are the most obvious and therefore easier to manage. Others prefer to ask for very little, in fact deflect all attempts to do things for them so that they may be justified in offering up just as little in return. Whilst these people are less unpleasant to be around than the big-taker, small-giver type they end up being a complete dead-end in energy exchange in the group, a sort of culdesac that the rest of the groups energy is forced to try to pass around. These people often complain of not feeling 'involved' or even being made to feel left out. Other than the small-taker, small-giver there is also the big-giver, small taker. This person seems to aim to make you feel indebted to them. They come across quite sainted at first but will be all to ready to remind you in tense moments of how much they've done for you.
The unfortunate thing is that these 'types' are not really so simple. People respond to the perceived wishes and desires and behaviours of those around them and may manifest behaviour considered by others to be 'out of character' when trying to deal with other people with whom their way of being in a community conflicts. Another barrier to acheiving mutuality is the training given to us by our society that other people's problems are not our problems that what we have is 'ours' and should be guarded against the likelihood of all 'strangers' to take advantage. Unfortunately due to the isolationalist approach to life that most people practice nearly everyone is a stranger and under suspicion. People are afraid of being taken advantage of by others and taught to think it is smart to offer up as little as they can get away with. They get into the habit of not giving or pulling their weight unless the inequality is called out, pointed out and they are directed that they must do. I believe in this way we are almost trained by our entire experience in society to be poor community members. We are primed to be ready to see more enemies than friends and to take a very long time to feel that we 'owe someone anything.'
In many ways this is not the fault of the people involved, many people are able today to live a completely selfish life, something unavailable in the past and really you can hardly blame people for taking advantage of that possibility. I know I certainly did in my post-graduate study days when study and writing were my life and I slept till noon and regarded my own working conditions as the be all and end all of life. When you have the opportunity for a completely selfish life why should you have to worry about other people? Why should you need to worry about other people's children who are not your blood? Really we have this option now. We have grocery stores to provide us with food and as long as we have money we don't really need other people anymore. Often becoming a parent is the first moment that someone experiences the need for support of other people and of course the enormous soul-altering realisation that another being lives only through your sustainence.
In the past our life-cycle was quite homogenous. Just about everyone got married and had children and had to rely on countless others for the necessities of life from very early on. Old people would die if no one cared for them and all hands had to be on deck for the family unit to survive. Today it's all about individual choice, individual fulfillment, a common life pattern is much less in evidence and you really 'don't have to' do anything. And so when trying to form a community people come to that situation with wildly different needs and wildly different ideas of what they think suitable to offer to others.

2. Shared Stories:

Many people maintain a sense of 'online communities' and tribes at a distance who do not depend on each other for any of their material providence. This can serve certain needs for people and what I believe holds it together (whether or not it would work if suddenly converted into a physical community) is story-sharing and the ability to mutually provide emotion succour through a sense of solidarity in a lonely world. Tribes are not just held together through mutual service but a sense of identity springing from shared stories and shared culture.
When I say stories, I don't just mean favourite novels or even mythology but something a lot deeper. I see the entire life of a person as a creative act, a kind of artwork spinning out from certain story themes. A tribe invariably has a culture, which is kind of like a super-theme that draws together numerous story-threads. Those story-threads form a meta-narrative which gives shape and unity to the combined vision of the people that make up the tribe. It is difficult to describe but unmistakable when you are experiencing it. When people share the same root-stories their creative contributions become harmonious, different but harmonious. They build on each other rather than tear each other down or compete for dominance. They bring colours to a weave that appears to have pattern and order. The difference between a tartan and a few inter-tangled balls of wool.

But how does one acheive a state where they share meta-narrative with other people? A good start would seem to by the all important sharing of common myths. The difficulty today is that in modern Australia and probably in the US also, we no longer have a common unitive culture of any kind. An individual from your own age group who lived up the road may have lived in an almost unrecognisable 'Australia' to the one you called home in your childhood. A perfect example would be my own experience of a liberal humanist Australia where I was all but innocent of organised religion for most of my life and one of my closest friends experience of attending a fundamentalist Christian high-school. What this means to us, that was not a challenge our ancestors faced is that we have no common point of reference when entering a group with people. What I imagine to be 'common manners' basic ettiquette in how we treat other people can be completely unknown to someone else who grew up in the same country. Things that I would think so obvious as to never express. And from this comes an important lesson I shall take away from my experiences in community and would like to share with anyone who is trying to form a twyleth, a kindred or any kind of intentional grouping of people. Do not take any knowledge for granted, make explicit, preferably in written form the ethical basis and all agreed on aspects of manners that you consider important. We cannot rest on our laurels because if we do not state explicitely what we are to others the fall back position is 'whatever.'

Sometimes people are fortunate enough to find others that naturally share very compatible stories as they do but more often than not it will be necessary to put some thought into how we come to share such things. It becomes clearer to me as time moves on that even sharing myths and gods is not always enough to give people a harmonious sense of meta-narrative. As two people might value the stories in the Mabinogion in two entirely different ways for instance. One person may accord 'god' status to every figure mentioned in it and worship them all whereas someone else may take a more scholary approach and only allow some of the figures to be gods, or maybe none at all!

My last group, which survived for over a decade (a fair acheivement in any part of the pagan community) did so because of shared story. We shared a particular story, a secret story which was our own personal mythology, something which gave our sense of who we were meaning. We were Brythonic in orientation and so shared the same sources of information as others working in this area, but we also had something unique to us. We knew insinctually that it was something that new people needed to be inducted into with some solemnity. We didn't tell that story immediately, we kept it back until we felt that that person was ready to become one of us.

Our new group was different. It started with two couples who very clearly possessed their own personal mythologies which went unarticulated and there was never any shared meta-narrative. Small stories of ourselves began to form around the outside, but they were never a root-story, never a sharing of fundamental narrative. There was a sense right from the begining of diplomacy, of navigating the touchy territory of different narratives in the same space. It was clear that no one wanted to be re-storied into a pre-existent narrative. For that situation to work there was three options, one was to accept a discordant tangle of stories that if they were ever out-rightly narrated would probably not prove to be harmonious with each other and try and survive through denial, or for one of the two parties to become initiated into the story of the other party or for a new story to form that could encapsulate everyone. Only the first possibility ever occured and many of the 'point 1' factors on what makes a community were effected by that underlying narrative difference.

This situation, and no doubt many others in other people's groups, begs the question of how a suitable narrative is to be found in such a situation. How does a group arrive at what my original group arrived at without even realising it? How do we find these unifying stories? The process seems mysterious in the extreme and not at all something that can be solved in a commitee through voting on themes or arguing points of view. I suppose the matter is mysterious in the way every type of creative act is mysterious. We seldom get to witness or fully understand the exact moment that something new begins. And like with any other creative act we are not a master of it, it is our master. In many ways I am tired of over-thinking this sort of thing. It is enough to understand something of what is happening to us, even though one cannot control it. I have not learned how to create at will stories that bind people together. Nor have I discovered how to get people to come together to democratically produce a meta-narrative, or how hybridise pre-existing stories. But I have learned to better understand what goes wrong when the stories of our existence clash, and what it is that feels so right sometimes, those rare and precious times when something just 'clicks.' And knowing that lends a certain meaning to what may otherwise appear chaotic.

My Craft and Sullen Art Spring Clean

As you can probably see I've given MCSA a bit of a Spring clean! As it is Spring here in up-side-down land, and there are leaves bursting out on the oak and blossoms on the hawthorn hedge, it seemed a good time to revamp this site a little. I've also changed my description of what the site is about. I want to talk more about things I find very personal, like my relationship with the gods and the way polytheism is practiced at our hearth, and how my children are growing within it. I am hoping this blog will become an informative place as well as an opinionated one, which will help to draw attention to the many topics relevant to Polytheistic Resurgence/Reconstruction in the world at this time. I continue to see poetry as fundamental to an understanding of my religion, and part of the legacy of my British/Celtic forebears. I also intend to discuss any topics relevant to the animistic deeper layer of my beliefs as a sort of unitive core that links what we do to all other indigenous cultures throughout the world. I continue to want to explore such influences as modern tribalism, radical traditional living and what it would mean to promote a proud return to indigenous European spirituality, without the taint of racism that so often is attached to the term 'indigenous European.' Please contribute comments, I'd like to think of the 'comments' section of my page as a place for discussion as well as leaving a message. I will also soon be publishing a fictional occult novel, so this page will continue to be multi-disciplinarian and will involve regular forays into my creative offerings as well.

Thank you for stopping by. Bendithion.

The Lap of the Gods

Nights limpid with freshness glow
like warm fire after night-dew
and wind-caress.
Oh beloved one of mine
we lie naked in the laps of the gods
tonight
as each night
we know ourselves
blessed
in the simple recognition
of the blessing
we all share.
Who might measure such joy
or know how we partake
of a little of the bird's flight
a little of the frog's rain song
and all the miriad of twisting
turning, growing and dyings
of breath passing and coming
of waves pounding and retreating
Of joy itself passing
and making room in a space
that feels like emptiness,
for more joy.
Friend, to know you're there
is the sweetest prelude
to knowing we're all there
and all friction is a spark
at the sacred fire of life,
which sways us both
in the dance of the stars
the counter-weight of silence,
and it's twin.

Alice Kyteler 2009

Romantic Co-creation

I am excited to announce my presence at another collaborative writing project. This is the first time I have contributed to fiction online and I'm really pleased with the results so far. The theme of the blog is Romantic/Gothic and the idea is for people to post 'story seeds' and for someone else to offer to 'co-create' that story with them. The first story that is available on there is a co-creation between Robin and I. All manner of mayhem is expected. So if you like to read fiction inspired by Romanticism or the Gothic genre, of filled with all manner of arcane and salacious doings, or are just interested in the philosophical/spiritual implications of co-creation, pour yourself an absinthe and come on over to: