My Craft and Sullen Art

Closely - some poetry

2011-12-05T02:55:00.000-08:00

'I have changed since you knew me,
a thousand glass images
shattered heat compressed, and
my wings injured me.
Take my hand
this never comes undone
well. The slithering out
of last year's skin
feels tight and dry.
The touch of the holy
should make us weep
and howl.
-So
I don't mind being comet-borne
and criss-crossed with burning,
yet hold me true
to my course
a little longer
so that I may leave
a fire trail.
Everything is better
once the knowledge of
death touches it

closely.'

-Lee Morgan, 2011

2011-12-05T02:52:00.001-08:00

"And so, while his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh in the taverns and brothels of London, the soul that inhabited him was Caesar, who disregards the augur's admonition, and Juliet. who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the plain with the witches who are also Fates. No one has ever been so many men as this man who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words 'I am not what I am'...

History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: 'I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.' The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: 'Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.'"

From Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths (Penguin, 2000) Trans. J. E. Irby.

Free-Fall

2010-03-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

My bone-deep bruise

the blood takes a long time
to come to the surface
when the wound is deep.
Injure again my air-light bones
fracture my illusions,
so I can see you better
with my eyes closed.

Grounded with broken pinion
I'll call freedom
if my mad flight but plummets
in ill-reckoned stoop
into the thorns
of the hedge outside your home.

-Alice Kyteler 2010

Fate and the Movement of History

2010-03-01T01:01:00.001-08:00

Recently I had some of my words on a previous article misunderstood and it occured to me that some explanation of what I mean when I use the word 'Fate' might be called for. I tend to use the word in the way it's used within the particular mystical stream I work in and forget that it's everyday meaning is a little different.

When I say something that happened historically was 'Fate' this is, within my understanding of Fate, something indisputable, if something happened then it was 'Fate'; something that manifested in the great weave of things. This is not a moralistic concept, it does not condone or condemn a historical occurance. It just says that this thing happened. This dynamic system that is made up of all things, including us, expresses itself in numerous ways, some of those ways through human wills or collective human wills. If there is a way to put one's human will toward bringing about a more 'positive' (from our human perspective) result then I believe by all means we should do so. But in the case of history where something has already occured and cannot be undone I am inclined to try and above all understand the meaning of those occurances. Often we will see things that we disagree with or consider to be evils, sometimes knowing those things about history can allow us to understand things about the current weave of things around us that may help us to become positive forces for change.

When I observed in a post (a very long way back) that the children of Europe were fatefully connected with Australia I meant in no way to condone moralistically the colonisation of another sovereign people. What I meant was: this occured let us try to understand it, and if it proves beyond human comprehension, at least let us try to be positive, fateful forces ourselves in shaping the future of Australia. I don't think that this will be easy, in fact it is hard to even inch a foot forward in any direction without offending someone else in some way. But I would rather risk offence and misunderstanding than not try to come to grips with these big picture issues. I can know history, I can feel all my human feelings of outrage, pity, empathy, anger, frustration and even sometimes despair but it doesn't free me from the need to try with my own life to create a more positive future, even if there are some people who basically think that me and people like me don't have a right to one. I don't know why Fate span out as it did, nor do I expect to, as the supra-system I give this name to is not a personal 'God' as in the Christian worldview who is meant to operate within some idea of human justice. Nor does the concept of an intelligent supra system playing itself out through it's part exempt us from personal responsiblity for our actions. But I haven't done any harm to anyone, I've just been born in a particular place (yes I was born here, despite being in England for a while as a youngster) which I now have to find some sort of spiritual peace in.

It does not seem to me that despite all the atrocities and injustices that man perpetrates against man that the land here holds me in prejudice. People who are alive who have perpetrated or continue to perpetrate injustices should answer for them, the rest of us need to find ways to call the same place 'home' in a meaningful and non-destructive way.

Global Visions, Ecology and Modernity

2010-02-26T19:19:00.000-08:00

I have been silent for a long time on here. At first it was because of the disastrous falling apart of our initial community and some feelings of disillusionment. Lately it has been anything but, as our now smaller community is blossoming in unexpected and wonderful ways. Instead my silence has been the result of trying to solve certain philosophical conundrums.

In our previous community model we were getting back closer and closer to traditional lifestyles, growing a lot of our own food, planning to try and go off-grid with our wood oven heating our water and an eventual solar-powered electrical system. Our community was meant to be held together by Indo-European polytheistic adherence, with a few different cultures represented and my sorcery and craft workings for healing or otherwise were sort of a private thing. In fact it seemed to be a source of problems.

When everything fell apart we started from the ground up, and increasingly I noticed that the things uniting us were the spiritual currents in the land here and the mystically transformative aspects of traditional witchcraft. There was something more organic going on and it led me to think about a lot of things. I’ve always been a bit more political than a lot of people in my religious and spiritual circles and I am constantly trying to find how what I do and believe is to be integrated into the way that I live. To my mind this is necessary. As long as you are not on the very edge of being unable to eat and live, it seems to me the next thing is you have a responsibility to consider, how shall we live? How should we live so as to embody what we believe?

My answer last year was a return to a simpler more organic way of living. I still think this, I still think that there is much beauty and poetry there, but I don’t think it contains the seeds of us finding the way forward as a civilization anymore. As much as it seemed to me a sane thing, given the way our current life-style is poisoning and destroying the land all around us that us people from earth-based spiritualities claim to venerate, it seems to me as I look deeper that it cannot be. The way forward will have to involve us finding a way to be technologically advanced in harmony with the rest of the supra-system.

Previously it seemed madness to me that people would rather face ecological collapse than change their life-styles. Now I realize that there are greater Fateful factors playing out here that require consideration. The internet, for instance, is, as a dear friend of mine says ‘the synaptic system of a new world.’ Something is happening to humanity, some kind of change or realization of ourselves. Globalization is something we all must intellectually and spiritually grapple with and the possibility of instant communication around the world makes it impossible for us to ignore. I deeply and personally care about what happens in New Orleans for instance even though I've never been there. Tribalism is going to have to be redefined, we all belong to tribes of the mind and spirit that span countries and continents. But I don’t believe we can just simply rely on technology and science to save us, nor can we try to go backward. It is a balancing act we are asked to walk, and a living through the emergence of something new. Being aware of what is happening is the best way to become what we have the potential of being, the super-conscious aspects of the great being that is made up of all Life.

I am someone who lives out in the bush and drinks sky water and takes away my own garbage composting the rest, who spends a lot of time out of doors. I am not unfit nor unhealthy and ‘Nature’ is a very direct reality for me, not something I talk about only from my seat in front of the computer as it is for so many. However, I do also spend a fair amount of time at screen, both as a writer and someone who connects with their broader spiritual community online. It is undeniable and no where as tawdry as so many paint it. I still support the importance of flesh and blood community and yet at the same time I know that amid all the trashy internet speak and people writing 'r u?' and numerous vacuous ‘twitters’ there are people like myself and my few precious comrades using this wonderful technology for all it is worth. It is after all like a reclaimed library of Alexandria, back and forth flicker instant access to the classics, to political activism, to high-end correspondence between thinkers of all different types, contemporary poetry, love-letters and the society of other polytheists, mystics and witches. Part of what we are, our generation, some of the one above it, and all of the one below it, is this shared mental life of various qualities for different people. It’s making our world smaller and manifesting the web of interactions in this world in a new way.

As a female I owe my ability to participate in this world of thought and mysticism to things like birth-control, labor saving devices and most particularly the way the capitalist system provides my family with most of the food we drink and clothes we wear. Previously I have raged against this, trying to only buy hand-made goods, move toward growing all my own food. For a while I managed a large amount of this, but had little time to participate in the above mentioned community or to write the books that burn inside me to be written. I still believe that my mystical experiences were aided by this style of living and I continue to seek a lot of solitude in the wilderness and to live on local produce and favor either the second hand or hand-made purchase. However, it is not simply a question of whether I wish or whether I would be willing to give up a lot of if not all of these comforts to bring our collective lifestyle back into harmony with the greater system. Personally if this was what it clearly took then I certainly would. But the question is more complicated.

As someone who believes in Fate, I have to ask myself questions about the meaning of the way we have developed. Even agriculture has some times seemed to me a controlling of the land and nature that caused us to fall further away from our original state of integration with nature, a state we find other hunter gatherer people in. But the fact is, our civilization moved in this direction and has continued to refine the process for a long time now. Most parts of the world no longer have the kind of eco system where hunter gathering is a viable option. We are forced to practice agriculture, but we have options about how we practice it. And now we have technology it appears that we cannot live without it. There must be some reason for all of this. Some aspect of the collective consciousness that seeks to know itself in some new way through this great ‘experiment’ like behavior humans are exhibiting. I cannot seem to believe that what we are witnessing is merely our own self destruction playing out. Perhaps it is, but it seems that there is more to it than that.

We need to be ready to explore what the future holds, without being futurist enthusiasts who claim that all problems will be solved by science without the requirement of any action on our behalf, or on the other hand, deciding that the future is evil and a return to the past is needed. We will need a fusion of ancient wisdom with modern technology if we are to survive and prosper as a global community. And in many ways we are yet to imaginatively catch up, let alone mythically and spiritually, with the way that life has changed just over the time we’ve been alive. Out of the five people most important to me on the planet one of them lives in another country from where we speak instantly every day. We have to ability to see images of each other, to hear each other’s voices and to share a large number of words and yet nothing of our daily physical life. This sort of thing has the ability to radically change the way we view the world. Globalization and the concept of the global village is going to have to become a reality. Copenhagen, where the world demonstrated it’s as yet significant inability to work together to decrease it’s CO2 showed us a world imaginatively a long way behind where it needs to be to catch up with the reality of it’s situation. We simply cannot deny the same life-style that we enjoy to the developing world unless we intend to give it up also. And I don’t think we do. We no longer live in a world where we can afford to live off 'raiding' other people, our destinies are too bound up in each other's.

Daily I find myself pondering these things, while I stand in the aisles of supermarkets making my consumer choices. Do I spend two dollars on the Fair Trade chocolate or choose to ignore what I know about the human implications of the free-trade chocolate? Do I buy those extra things that I really enjoy but don’t really need or do I spend that money on the more expensive milk where the cows are treated humanely? These questions to most people who as part of our largely unconscious civilization make a habit of never considering the reality of how anything came to be where it is being bought by them, will make me sound like an extremist. But I have my own questions. I still believe all these things are important, we are conscious beings capable of making conscious decisions if people did in front of most people the inhumanity that brings to them many of the products they enjoy they would throw up!

However, if I go too far down this path I find myself forced to condemn people I love dearly as unfeeling, selfish and blind. I don’t want to see things like that, I don’t want to see myself like that on the day that I can’t afford to buy the Fair Trade chocolate but buy some anyway or feel like a different type. Sometimes it seems like so much avoiding the truth of the fact that we are all guilty, all complicit. Perhaps there is no other way to be. Perfectly good people in the past lived on the proceeds of slavery or moved into land where the previous occupants were pushed out. Some of those people, the dependents of those people, weren’t bad people they just needed something that someone else had and benefited from someone else’s misfortune without even thinking about it. But today do we have the luxury of saying we didn’t know? When all this information is at our finger tips? What explanation will our age tender for itself? Basically, that we preferred not to look because we liked to have certain things and it might make them taste bad?

Today we are not talking about need in many cases we are talking about want. We are talking about chocolate and coffee and cheap shoes. And yet chocolate and coffee are simply pleasures people enjoy, things that the less well off members of our society couldn’t afford to use if only Fair Trade chocolate and coffee were available and I struggle to see guilt in the innocent enjoyment of these kind of pleasures. What difference would it make to not have it amid the plethora of other exploitations and cruelties I see reflected back from the shelves of the supermarket every day? Can we be free of it even if we become vegan and never touch a free-trade item that exploits workers in third world countries? Even then our governments pollute on our behalf, make war on our behalf and obtain access to oils in ways that might make us feel queasy at the gas-pump, no matter what choices you the consumer make you can never not participate. We have not been given any other choice but to partake in this society we were born into. Unlike Brave New World who offered the protagonist a choice between insanity and lunacy, we have only been offered a choice between insanity and insanity.

So how does a highly conscious compassionate being live in such a world? Despair and pessimism seem worse than useless. Perhaps one must simply hold out some hope that there is something going to develop out of these birth-pains. That we will find a way gradually towards a system not so based on exploitation of poor nations, animals and the environment. Find it before we destroy our own future, and worse yet, before we deserve to have our future destroyed. But we in the West are Fate’s instruments as much as anything else and I like to think that this transformation of ‘development’ that we have started and is spreading across the world is not a cancer but hopefully a bumpy stage in the evolution of a new way of being for mankind.

There are a few things that give me hope. The place of women in the West, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Whether we want to pretend it’s not true or not the fact is that outside the modern world there has never been a world where a female enjoyed the independence and options that we enjoy today. The pagan world may have offered many great examples, but nothing like today. In those days our role was still tied to reproduction, and as we could not altogether control it it was not a choice but something that made us less free than males, less our own person. We needed to be controlled in certain ways so that society could control reproduction. This is not an 'evil' in those societies, just a fact of what happens when society and nature meet up and have to form compromises. This is found the whole world over to some extent, no matter how ‘equal’ the sexes may appear in a traditional society.

It may seem like only one example, but this is the self-realization and potential of over fifty percent of the species we are talking about and that is quite something. I know I have great potential to contribute to society, to have my voice heard, to have things worth saying, to love whom I love, to go where I wish to go, to help people, to travel, to influence things, so much of it would have been impossible for me in another time. I can’t imagine that only on the eve of our self destruction would Fate make such opportunities available to Her daughters. This gives me hope that something else, a different way of life which might eventually alchemically wed the best of sustainability with the best of technological progress could be about to be born. Mainly because that’s the only way I can see us going forward and I just can’t imagine that all of this, this gradual emancipation of women, other minority groups, this increasing consciousness of the needs of others in remote places, the internet and all the potential for knowledge on a world scale that it offers, is all for nothing but our destruction.

Bruny Island: A Journey Across the Waters

2010-01-23T04:06:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-06T15:23:00.000-08:00

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.

Stories and the Tribe

2009-11-01T14:45:00.000-08:00

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

2009-09-28T20:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-27T05:11:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-25T00:44:00.000-07:00

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:

In the Wild Wood

2009-08-29T20:46:00.001-07:00

The past few weeks has been difficult. A combination of illness and distress over certain elements of my private life. Today when my husband took our two wonderful children out for the day and I was left at home it was just what I needed. I could feel the anticipation of slipping out alone into the wilderness buzzing in me all the way to my finger-tips. Seldom in my life has the desire to enter the world were no other human life is been so strong.

It's not that I dislike people. I am lucky to have some wonderful humans in my life. But the need comes upon me every now and again, to move faster than the children can travel, into denser more dangerous terrain than they can follow, to be among things with whom I can communicate without the need of words.

I knew I didn't just want a country-lane stroll, I wanted to go off-road, off-track even. So when I crossed the small Winter-borne stream in my trusty gum-boots and heard the waterfall through the trees, hidden from view, secret and enticing, I had to try to go there. There was no way through initially but I followed the winding paths that the wallabies make through the undergrowth, thinking if I follwed the wedge shaped marks of their feet in the mud, staying beside the stream the stream would end in river.

Within a short time of going off track I was among giant trees I hadn't even known hidden there. I put my back against one of them and closed my eyes, quietly introducing myself to the place and seeking a feeling of permission to penetrate deeper. The soft lift in the wind and the sight of a puffed up bush-robin, flitting from plant to plant confirmed my belief I should go deep. I found wonderful places there. Giant trees uprooted by their immense age and size, laying on their sides, their roots entwined with white clay. There was wonderful grottos and mosses and finally I found the river side.

The treck had been worth it for the sight of the river in full flood, bursting it's banks, and across it a tree bridge made of one of the great-grandfather's of the wood, covered in moss. The tree was by far strong enough to take my weight and I crossed and for a time sat down, neither on one side of the river nor the other, to meditate. When I had finished I climbed down the other side and realised I had not idea how I had got there. There had been no real visible track, the wall of green was smothering close all about me. But despite the closeness and denseness the place gave off no atmosphere of hostility and I felt unconcerned.

Wishing I hadn't brought my heavy duffle-coat and scarf because I was now sweating, I looked around me and wondered if the path up-hill would take me to the path I had taken to get into the wood in the first place. It was so dense even my dog couldn't get through properly, I decided to try walking on the river stones because the river was the only path that didn't present as a wall of greenery. But within a very short while of negotiating the mossy river stones I fell into the river. Icy Winter flood water flooded into my boots and soaked into my clothing. The shock heightened my awareness and I flailed a little to stand up, amid the running water and slipperiness of the river-weed. Pulling myself out of the water using some friendly plants I stood on the river bank and considered my options. I had found a wonderful place, a wonderful place I doubt anyone but me would probably want to try getting into or out of! And now I had to get out of it.

I emptied out my gum-boots and decided that if wombats could get through here so could I. I was cold and wet and it looked like rain so I figured rather than doubling back and trying to get out that way I'd try the all-fours approach. The first thing I needed to do I found was leave behind anything I'd tried to take with me from this place. Dutifully the lumps of clay and flat bark in awesome long scroll like strips was left where it had come from and I got down to the task of crawling my way out of the wood. All above me was a dense roof of tangled vines and bramble but when I scrunch up tiny I'm not too my bigger than a wombat. I crawled through dirt, and probably some quantity of animal manure, scratching and clawing my way out of the tunnel. As the tunnel of green ended in light and I spilled out onto the grass I experience the sensation of having been given birth to by the wood.

I rolled over on my back, sopping wet, covering in mud and grinning from ear to ear. I lay there for some time before sitting up to wringe out my socks and do the obligatory 'leech check' on myself. As I was sitting there very close to me my power animal circled in the sky over head of me. The falcon circled three times and then disapeared into the trees. I was left feeling an intense sense of holiness and awe, a sense of having touched the wild heart of this land I love. In some way even though it was not that far out I'd found a secret water-fall, crossed the perilous bridge to the Underworld and then returned to the land of the living through a long difficult tunnel, guided by my spirit bird. I think I am refreshed.

Words and Silence

2009-08-13T17:11:00.001-07:00

It is something I've always believe that words use up our store of silence. That the quiet within us, the quiet that is nurtured, allowed to fill us with the blue-grey lull of reverie is what allows for the creative flame to flash out with it's pleasing heat. We want that fire, we want it all the time, in our addiction-driven society we tend to want all pleasures all the time, as much as we can get them. We forget about how hunger is the seat of all our enjoyment of nourishment, how pain was the parent of love and pitiless fate the mother of mercy. And as such we forget how the silence gave birth to words.

We are comfortable with words in our world, we bandy them around ceaselessly, endless reproducing them and we wonder that their beauty and potency begins to dry up. We burn ourselves out wanting to make them constantly and we soon become bored when their flow ceases. But when I was away from this screen and away from human society, either in the trackless wood or the far more trackless outreaches of my mind I have seen a lady. She only passed me on the road but her eyes were pools of silence to drown in, in which coalesce all the things we call loneliness, and shadow, and potential. She is always passing me, known but for shorts spaces between breaths before the noise and chaos of my pulse-pounding humanity wakes me and stirs me from her society. Though She never truly goes anywhere. She has brought me two great gifts, one looked like a piece of worthless black coal, the blackened product of the long dead past, the other like a dagger sure to rend my heart. The first was what I might have called loss, and the knowledge of things passing, the presence of yesterday that cannot be cancelled from human reckonings of things. The second was love, as sharp and swift as the talons of a bird of prey. And at times when I hold her gifts close to me and try not to mind their cold sharpness I find that for a moment I can speak from silence. Just for a second, on the road of life, passing Her, an atom among the spectacle of creation glows for an instant and then appears to go out.

Dreamkeepers, by Harvey Arden: A Review

2009-07-02T15:46:00.000-07:00

"Years ago I began to recognise my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one whit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prision I am not free." -Eugene V. Debs

Dreamkeepers, A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia is well worth reading though not for the reasons I might have hoped. It doesn't really measure up as a 'spirit-journey' at all, at least not through the author whose experience is shot through with Modernist-seeming, academic meloncholy. Speaking to about half a dozen Aboriginal people in the Kimbleys only does not seem to me to paint a broad enough picture of 'Aboriginal Australia.' That being said the authors (sometimes painful) sincerity carries the day and makes this worth reading. It is worth reading because most of the time he manages to put asside the fact that he is obviously there seeking something, some kind of vision of their spirituality to wet his poor parched Western soul; long enough to let the people speak for themselves.

It was of course the moments where older Aboriginal Australians spoke for themselves about what they remembered that were most worthwhile to hear. I would go as far as to say that every Australian should have to read it, or something very like it, just for the fact that most of us don't really know or understand how things came to be the way they are today. I am probably more educated on the topic than most, but the Aboriginal people I have myself had contact with are all from the New South Wales region and my knowledge of things tends to be centred there. Some shocking facts that I feel should be shared with people regardless of where in the world they are will follow.

"When I was a boy," tells one man, "in the 1950's the coppers (Police)around Wyndham here used to shoot black-fellas for ten bob a head." p.7

In the 1950's! Don't get me wrong I knew appalling things were going on up until very recently but open season on Aboriginal people within my parents life-time? This shocked me. And I have to admit, that it was not the only thing, despite having lived in this country for nearly all of my life.

Previously I understood that Aboriginal people were sent to missions and force-fed Christianity, I had no idea how violent the 'force' had been. I had no idea that people were hunted and chained up to be dragged there by force and shot if they refused to comply. And that when they couldn't catch them they forced other Aboriginal trackers to hunt down their own people. And among those that the author spoke with there was more than one that still believed either that the 'whiteman's god' (and might I add how this equation makes me shudder)is better than their old ways or is 'one and the same thing.' Then our would-be Romantic author goes into town on pension day and witnesses the following scene:

"We parked our car and walked into a scene that mighth have been the stage set for an expressionistic ballet - a tableu of despair with dozens of Aboriginal men and women lurching, staggering, some sprawling, some prone, some slumped in doorways, some on their knees or haunches with arms outstretched in perpetual supplication to the few passersby. Small children played lethargically among them, eyes crawling with flies, noses crusted with snot. Literally thousands of empty beer cans lay strewn about the street and sidewalks. The stink of alcohol, vomit and piss was unmistakable and utterly sickening. It seemed hard to believe such a place could exist." p.47

Alas to me, and I imagine to many Australians, this is not an image that comes as a shock. This is the image many of our elders have bequeathed to us, along with a good heap of judgementalism. It is actually like they were given a script to read. It goes something like this: 'if you went out there you'd feel differently, it's disgusting. They hang around waiting for their 'sit down money' so they can get drunk again and sniff petrol. And the government pours all this money (!) into helping them and all they do is get a nice new house and tear it up to make firewood.' Yes, our grandparents and sometimes parents generation have been well trained to not see us as implicated in this image of human degradation. It is, of course their own inherent inferiority as a race that makes them behave like that. But what else could be expected of a people raised like our people have been raised? Orphaned so long ago of our gods we can't even empathise anymore with the pain of a people dispossessed of their dreaming sites, and therefore their identity?

And inherent in this fact is what makes this book worthwhile. It illustrates, though maybe quite unconsciously how the poison spread. 'White people' are no more inherently evil and greedy than Aboriginals are inherently lazy alcoholics; we are simply two people in different stages of ruination. Our ruin, so ancient and so pervading it became the causal element in theres; an enduring tragedy. Reading through this story it is easy for me to see the root of the despair of many of these people. And one must make the most enormous effort of imagination to do so. We have to imagine that our people were untouched in our primordial ways and practices for somewhere between 40 000 and 70 000 years. Yes, that's right, the Aboriginal peoples of the Kimbleys are the 'owners' of the oldest continual religious symbol. There are cave paintings of the Rainbow Serpent that are tens of thousands of years old and many can still point to those paintings and tell those stories. Stories passed to them that connected them with their dreaming sites. When dispossessed of those sites they are only 'half men' as the place itself is part of the ritual that gives them full manhood initiation. We must imagine that our name, and therefore our identity linked us to a place like that for that depth of time and then imagine that place after open-cut mining. We would know then that in that site of desolated, torn up ground we were gazing at our own inner-world.

It is a universal truth that old scars become more numb than fresh skin, and that if one lives with a lingering pain or disease for long enough it bothers us less than one who is new to such suffering. Such it is for our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, our dispossession, our loss and the descration of our sacred land is an old scar for us, but a fresh wound for them. Few of us even realise anything is wrong. We assume all societies had depression, alcoholism,boredom, suicide and the general existential uneasiness we are heir to in the West. It must be so, we are, after all, the very evolutionary pinnacle of human existence. No one has ever been smarter and lived better than we do, right? Because easy is good, right? Accumulating stuff is happiness, right?

For those who think in this manner it is education to witness the hunger of this author, as he sniffs desperately around the damaged edifice of Aboriginal spirituality, hoping to glean some fragment to put him back in touch with the 'Aboriginal in all of us.' I was constantly struck in the reading how locked out, how utterly foriegn and spiritually void he imagined himself and perhaps all Westerners to be. An amazing, unspoken racism, a belief that white people are fundamentally 'different' somehow. It was not that I didn't want to learn more myself, out of respect, for the first peoples of Terra Australis, but when one of the Aboriginal chaps he interviewed told him 'get your own dreamtime!', I felt he spoke quite wisely.

In one sense, in the deepest spiritual sense, I don't think there is more than one 'dreamtime'; the dreaming is an eternally present spiritual reality, and call it what you will it has existed for all people's. But in another sense this man is right, white people can't take away, buy, or steal Aboriginal culture, we can only look to them for some idea of the things we've lost contact with to our detriment.

As well intentioned as Mr Arden appears to have been it is inevitable and sad that this spiritual hunger that he approaches Aboriginals and Native American people with will inevitably lead to an ongoing cycle of stealing. And guilt alone is not enough to remove this pernicious element, because the author has guilt in plenty for someone who isn't even Australian. Many will say 'but we should feel guilty!' and this is true. But moving from guilt to understanding and recognising the wound in us that caused all those tides of history that swept up indigenous cultures around the world in a tide of destruction, is the next productive stage after guilt. The very fact that we use this differential 'indigenous', brandishes our wound for all to see. 'Indigenous', 'from somewhere, of a land, the first people there', is something that other people are. Not us. Our dispossession from our indigenousness was so ancient we have forgotten and dispossessed others of theirs in turn.

The great virtue of reading this book is that one is able to consider both these points. Able to see the great and ancient things that contributed to human happiness in the old way of doing things for Aboriginals, so conspicuous when the elements of it have been partially removed. When one element is disturbed everything is disturbed. The 'Law Men'roam the streets ready to beat up errant women who cross their paths and spear young men who contravene the old laws, whether the person follows the ways or not. They come across more like old ways vigilantes than shamans and law-keepers, as depicted in the classic 'Aboriginal Men of High Degree'; and who can be surprised? They are an institution on the defensive, wanting to force things back to how they were and show that a spearing is better than time in the white-man's prison. It makes one wonder if the difference between law and abuse is not simply the element of shared story. When the two people involved don't share the same laws, the same foundation stories anymore, then people are want to ask the white man to arrest them rather than go to the Law Men! And one imagines that being so deeply part of a tradition as they once were that the idea of breaking a taboo would have been all but unthinkable, literally, and spearings much more rare.

All in all, I think it's thought provoking and sad, worth a read, if only to expose the two way tragedy that Westerners are locked in with the indigenous people we've occupied.

Ask Sodra to support the protection of Tasmanian native forests - The Wilderness Society

2009-06-17T17:06:00.001-07:00

Ask Sodra to support the protection of Tasmanian native forests - The Wilderness Society

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Witchcraft and Shamanism

2009-06-10T20:03:00.000-07:00

"The idea of shamanic spirit-flight, universal as it is, has come to be encapsulated in European folklore in the image of the broom-riding witch. In other folklore, as well as the witch-trials and records of clergymen from centuries past, we also hear of Witches taking to the air on the backs of horses, goats, stalks of ragwort or other plants, pitchforks, and brooms. We hear stories from as far back as ancient Rome of witches using special ointments to turn into screech-owls and fly through the air."

Robin Artisson - 'The Horn of Evenwood'

After my previous article on shamanism and the comments below it I began thinking about a number of things relating to the practice of traditional witchcraft and shamanism. I mentioned in the 'comments' section that I was just as happy to be called 'witch' or 'sorcerer' as I was 'shaman' but that what I lamented was the debarring (or just general disrespect) of any one from a universal spiritual reality on the basis of race.

I thought back to the training workshop run by Harner's shamanic institute that I attended and I remember as we went around the circle, doing that obligatory getting to know you speech, how many people were drawn to 'Celtic' or 'Germanic' myth and wished to know how to do 'Celtic Shamanism' or the like. It is interesting, given (as mentioned in the above quote) the existence of a much more recent strain of shamanic behaviour that they could be tapping into that no one said 'witchcraft.' Or is it?

The most obvious reason why people may hesitate to say they are, or to in fact be, interested in witchcraft is that the term still carries some kind of stigma. I must admit that when it was my turn to share I didn't identify myself as an old school witch. When asked I said that I had a long history of shamanic practice, primarily within cultures that were ancestral to me, such as the British Isles and Eastern Europe. Awesome politician talk in that one. It is, of course, all true.

Why did I want to say I was a shaman but not a 'witch', given that a great deal of contemporary work exists to identify witchcraft practices as European shamanism surviving into post-Christian times? In my case it had little to do with concerns that other people would think I meant diabolism and baby-eating, if only that were the case! At least people take you seriously when they imagine you feasting on infants. No, I was concerned at losing credibility based on being associated with fluffy, new-agey 'witches.' It just seemed there was more chance of establishing something that could be taken seriously if you vetoed the word altogether. And as I have said on a previous post on Traditional Witchcraft, I toyed for a while with refusing to use a word at all. However, Traditional Witchcraft today isn't just a term; no different than saying 'British shaman' or 'Celtic shaman' it implies the acceptance or non acceptance of certain things. And although part of my irredeemably savage soul will always connect with the most primal and ancient currents I can see much of value in some of the things that are accepted by the traditional witching way.

The first and most important thing about witchcraft is that it has persisted, to at least a limited extent into modern times. Most of the evidence for this is a little difficult to document but I can cite personal experience of at least the persistence of witchcraft belief and certain associated motifs in British country people of the older generations and there are discoveries such as this on in Cornwall, where the later end of the archaeological finds go up to the 1950's. Not only is it easier both intuitively and intellectually to make 'contact' with a practice that has persisted in this manner, (at least as an initial 'entry point' to to awakening otherworldy experience) witchcraft is also a way of operating that has been forced to adapt to the modern world. And when I say 'modern world' I should add I mean the post-Renaissance world. It is the way that our ancestral pagan practices adapted and changed over time and as their inheritors we stand on strong ground in reclaiming them, in some ways stronger ground than when we try to associate ourselves with the ancients.

Now before I continue I should probably add that I consider ancestral religion a huge part of my life. I keep a hearth and home that functions around principles all inspired by the gods of our British heritage and in my daily doings I make frequent recourse to an ancient pantheon. But mixed with that ancient understanding is less ancient material, folklore, saint-prayers adapted for pagan use. So really when you start to look closely the difference between these two aspects the 'religious' and the 'sorcerous' is less than it first appears. Both are strongly influenced by folklore from the past two hundred years and many of the 'prayers' I do as I light fire and bake bread possess a very fine difference between themselves and what one may call a 'charm.' So let it be nice and clear that I mean no disrespect to modern polytheism when I say this. But the purpose of 'religious' life, at one important level, is to bind together communities and sacralise daily activities, so it is important that their is a binding aesthetic a sort of singularity of purpose and vision. An agreement between people to worship together in the same poetic manner. The sorcerer however is more pragmatic. His history throughout the world, particularly the New World, shows us that he or she relentlessly cannibalises practices or skills that may add power to their work. And in this way the witch, part of a traditional practice which was always both immensely conservative (in that it's folk memory was extremely long) and immensely integrative (in that it took in new influences, such as heretical Christian practices, Hermetic and Ceremonial elements introduced into Britain at various points over the past thousand years, and in the New World native and African practices as in Hoodoo.)

In this way Traditional Witchcraft is well adapted to the modern day, it is already ready for a world that has got a lot smaller and is clearly ready for those cross-pollination's. It also provides the person of European extract who is called to behave shamanically with continuously worn and well-trodden tracks that they can follow. The very imagery of the witch is ground into the western psyche in the way that an imagined return to some kind of 'Celtic Shamanism' (I would argue) can not provide.

There may not be a lot we can do about the reputation of witches, and we would not be the only type of cultural shaman or witch-doctor anywhere in the world to have a bad reputation. The more recent bad-press we've received due to well meaning sweetness and light pagans and wiccans, trying to tell everyone that we all believe in the three-fold law and are cuddly crystal-huggers has trivialised the idea of witchcraft for so many that it is not surprising that often people of European extract look for a spiritual transformation and power in things like Core Shamanism to the exclusion of it. Alas it seems we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. If say 'shaman' we are white people trying to co-opt someone elses culture, if we say 'witch' we are either a new-agey reiki-fancier or a diabolical kitten-killer. Luckily for us witches we've spent hundreds of years surviving in the shadows and upon the edges of society, living with one foot outside the hedge and the comfortable 'in space' of the current day. And by embracing our history, not just the part that happened before the Christian-Misfortune, we benefit from those tropes and stories that teach us how to live in liminal spaces and on peripheries in as a society that still isn't ready for us.

Song of the Death-Bed Bride

2009-05-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

For my beloved R-, because words must needs be tortured in the half saying. And I'm so proud to know you.

The darkness wells up

I give him promises
like dew-fall.
My brow burns;
to ash,
I tell him:
'Touch me.'

Touch of fire
that burns my words out
put them to paper,
it curls,
crumbles syntax,
cataclysms the edges of form
creaks and groans
beneath it.

Silence where all else is fled.

A thousand tongued whispers,
more than the sum of all poems,
his touch,
lover of my spirit.
Love. Teacher to me of the meanings
words dance over
their eruption.

And I tell him:
'Touch me.'
In the ways that lie buried
in the dust of the forgetfulness,
in the places hands can't reach.
Leave not the faerie
adamantine core of me
wanting her mate, but give me
his immortal eyes on fire
refracted eternally,
in the pools of mine.

A perpetual embrace
our memories dance about
like a celestial watch-fire,
never lost sight of.
Unspeakable embrace,
of knowing, that life's love-making
stretches out it's fingers toward in want.
My fingers trembled, with such want.
Now they reach surely,
without ever reaching.
Always touching his,
at the centre,
and finding there the All.

A- 2009

Shamanism: some thoughts on tribal shamanism and revival

2009-05-20T21:04:00.000-07:00

It is no secret to anyone who takes any interest in shamanism that many people hold some pretty potent prejudices about the idea of Western shamans. I think this is an interesting topic because there are some pretty good reasons for these prejudices, but also some good reasons for reconsidering them.

One of the first reasons that many people note when studying extant shamanic societies is how the seriousness of the shamanic vocation in those societies does not match up with the part-time, often rather light, playing around with the idea of being a shaman that occurs in some neo-shamanism. It is pointed out that a shaman is a shaman specifically in relation to who they shamanise for, they must, in short, serve a community. Shamanism for tribal and clan-based societies world-wide was not originally an exercise in navel-gazing and admiring the intricacies of one's inner self in the vast amounts of free time allowed to us by modern living. In fact in some societies, most notably in Siberian shamanism, the shaman would try desperately to evade their vocation because of the vast hardships and dangerous life of service that they knew they would face.

Personally I love Michael Harner's Shamanic Institute, but any organisation that goes out to run workshops is going to, by necessity, have to stress the comfortable, safe side of the practice. And by doing so one has to essentially deny vast amounts of otherworldly experience as known to shamans worldwide. But you just don't get too many people interested in learning or supporting your organisation by saying 'hey do you want to come along and experience visions of dismemberment, be starved of food for a while, stuffed full of peyote, turned out into the desert, dance for hours till you hallocinate etc. And if you don't get destroyed by the evil spirits that consume your flesh during your initiation, hey, you'll be a great healer one day. Well, at least you will if you survive a serious of psychic traumas, each of them potentially more dangerous than the last. But if you're still alive and not mad you'll be stronger than ever, heres the bill for the workshop I think you'll find the price reasonable.'

No, such an approach would not help when dealing with the Western approach to things. We expect things to be pretty easy and comfortable and to enrich us personally. And in my opinion Harner's work has been invaluable in spreading awareness of this valuable and ancient core of human spirituality. But when anything becomes more popular you always get people who embarrass you as a Westerner who sees their experiences in terms of a world-wide shamanic format. And I think this needs to be tackled and discussed. It is natural to be dubious that any Westerner could ever be part of that tradition, to the extent that I have seen a book by Sarangerel, a very well respected shaman who practiced in the Siberian/Mongolian tradition whilst alive, put down because she was born in America. To some it does not matter if you've gone over there an immersed yourself, worked for it, who you learned with, all they can see is the colour of your skin and the fact that you're American. As a knee-jerk response it is understandable, but as a deeper position makes little sense at all.

If one considers the shamanic experience, as outlined in a book such as Mircea Eliade's famous 'Shamanism' there are many aspects of the shaman's calling that go across cultures. If we consider the 'core shamanic' concept, that these similarities point to a core, shared, spiritual root-system of humanity it only makes sense that the visions, sicknesses or ordeals that alert young shamans to their calling might be universal rather than purely cultural. If such a thing is the case this pecularity that has marked out some people in cultures all over the world for a deeper than average interaction with the otherworld, whether we see it in a spiritual or psycological framework, there is no more or less validity to a call received by someone in any society or time.

What distinguishes between shamans, I feel, is not their call but what comes after. In traditional societies the young shaman showing signs of their calling was spotted, watched, nurtured. When the time came they might be taken under the wing of an older shaman, or they might be tutored by a deceased shaman from generations earlier who still wanted to pass their power and their position. And if that occured they would be believed, they would have no reason to lie, because they would be expected to perform as a shaman after all! And if they were ineffectual people would know they had lied. Whereas in the West today many are called, but it appears in terms of managing to not become mentally ill, fall into delusions of grandeur or narcissism, or simply repress what you are experiencing; few are chosen.

Being a spiritual being is a universal phenomena, as is being a spiritual specialist. But what one does when one is a spiritual speciflist is not universal. However, we should not become too despondant in the West, thinking there is no role for those of us who have been so called. Many places from Mongolia to Korea use shamanism in semi-urban settings, call one in like one calls in a doctor, has them deal with things like finding a job and exam results. It is not only in the West that the shamanic practitioner functions in a modernised world. If we are serious about what we do we need to lose our own inferiority complex in relation to tribal peoples. Sure we've lost a lot of knowledge that they may have retained, but many other peoples are rebuilding partially damaged traditions. All we need to do to start deserving to take ourselves seriously is to recognise the shamanic calling in relation to community as it has always been and begin our journey of service, and realising the harsh, dangerous or unsettling powers of the otherworld that don't sit well with the 'white light brigade.'

Being a real shaman isn't 'fun' or diverting, not in the general sense. And I think most of the people interested in it are interested in being shamanists, that is, animistic people who participate in a shamanically experienced universe and make recourse at times to the guidance of shamans. The vast majority of people do not want their whole life consumed by something like this, they don't want a job where you never knock off. And that's okay, that is really, in fact, how it usually is. But for those who are so called to an intense interaction with the otherworld, there is a long road in re-dignifying the image of the 'white shaman', but it will only be through us 'being the change we want to see in the world' that our descendents may one day inherit a little more respect. And unless we walk this road with courage and conviction the soul of our people and ancestor-wise-people will be neglected and many calls peter out into triviality and delusion. The more of us who are shamans or wise-people in such a way as deserve to be taken seriously, and we henceforth take ourselves seriously, the more others will do the same in time.

Mythic Living

2009-05-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

Whenever I read other people's writing where they naturally and effortlessly reference the myths of their ancestors, I smile. Watching every little sign and signal of the resurgence of the gods and ancestral belief in the modern world is like witnessing the first shy budding of Spring. But many forces of habit and social pressure stand between us and experiencing the world of myth in the way our ancestors did. I have spoken of many of these forces in different articles on this blog, but today I'd like to draw attention to a particular one.

When one reads any surviving literature from ancestral pagan times it is clear that there was little discontinuity between the lives of gods, the world of myth and the life of mankind. Numerous times in a day our ancestors would have identified themselves with particular deities as they performed certain actions associated with them. This may have been through certain prayers and observances to that god, or simply an unconscious and natural flow of association. In this way the world was illuminated, mundane tasks came to life with mythic resonances. The life of average people was far from 'average' in the way we experience it today. In this way what we call 'work' disapears and joins the realm of the imagination in one continuity of daily wholeness. And I know from being a Hearth Keeper today that such a state is still obtainable.

Many people who are part of the resurgence of the old gods will have acheived a measure of this life-poetry once more. But we still struggle with the forces of postmodern irony and self-consciousness. Those who know what 'postmodern' means could probably express to you exactly how naive and unsophisticated it is to associate one's loves, one's loss and one's daily doing with the grandeur of myth. Those who can't react anyway, instinctually embarrassed by such behaviour. They might call it 'grandiose' or 'taking one's self too seriously' or maybe just in Australian slang: 'up yourself.'

Such concepts are distinctly modern. Our lives themselves are unfoldings of the myths. The myths have not stopped. Modern pagan and polytheist people who fall into the 'extreme-scholar' basket may become a little rigid about what can be classed as part of the myths. And this is natural enough. We are left with myth in calcified, written down form. It seems to have ceased it's evolution, it's weaving outward, seems to have solidified once and for all. But nothing living solidifies. And the moment the myths become part of the mind and heart of living people, for reasons as simple as that we 'know them by heart', they begin to change, to grow, to morph. The living of the people of the gods is once again an outgrowth of a folk-soul populated by gods and always engaged in sacred unfolding.

What does this mean for the lives of 'ordinary' men and women? Well, to begin with, that we are not ordinary. That what we do is still 'echoing in eternity' along with the deeds of the ancestors and that we can stop and pay attention to the myths as something we participate in. It might sound strange to some, too basic to others. But I believe it's deeply pertinent. Have you ever hesitated for fear of sounding foolish and naively Romantic when you wanted to compare your love to the love of two famous lovers in history? Or an episode between heroes and demi-gods? Did you feel that you should somehow be more humble?

I would argue that we cannot be humble without humbling our origins also. If such things are acceptable in our eyes when done by the ancestors they should be aceeptable by us also, we are, after all their seed and in some way them, themselves reborn. I would also argue that we do not need to believe that leading a modern life, driving a car rather than riding a war-horse, necessarily puts us outside the scope of myth and poetry. Myth and poetry are as durable as our imaginations are flexible. They never fail us, it is we that fail them. We fail them when we put strange restrictions on where we agree to see them. When we refuse to see beauty outside of certain perameters, when we denigrate our lives by calling them 'mundane' or 'ordinary.'

If we are to once again seize the full imaginative power and robust colour of our ancestors conception of life we cannot fall easy victims to modern irony. As compelling as it is to show how smart, how savvy we are, too cool for such things, the price for this feeling of superiority is far too high. It denies us our chance to live in the grandeur of our humanity and to remember how it interacts and inter-penetrates with the world of myth.

Deep Ecology and the Image War

2009-04-21T15:59:00.000-07:00

The docking of the 'Steve Irwin' in our harbours got me thinking. Generally anything associated with Steve Irwin would be likely to have the exact opposite effect on me. But in this case, for those who don't already know, this is the name of a ship engaged off our shores in a desperate bid to protect whales and other marine life from the predations of Japanese whaling ships. To a lot of people here in Tasmania these guys are heroes, they have after all been shot at, been under grenade fire and in one case Captain Watson has tried to board one of the whaling ships and been repeatedly dipped into freezing water on the end of a blood soaked rope whilst still refusing to let go. As a deep ecologist and someone who cares about animal rights, I say that probably warrants the term 'hero.'

Now to give you my standpoint on things I think of myself as a deep ecologist , in this context it will suffice to say about this that I do not see the only motivator for trying to be a non destructive part of my eco-system as saving our own skin, or safe-guarding our own resources. I see all living things as part of a dynamic web of life that is sacred in it's entirety. I therefore don't see any other alternative than to act on this belief by trying to establish reciprocal and positive relationships with the land around me and working towards having an ever smaller and smaller ecological footprint. These ideas and actions are deeply tied in with my spirituality.

What disturbs me is the way that all of the logic and the pure and good emotive and spiritual reasons to not wantonly destroy our environment and other life-forms for selfish gain can be immediately countered and dispensed with in idle mockery. The work of these fine ladies and gentlemen on the above protest ship, for instance, can be immediately written off as 'hippy stuff' with a quick quip about 'save the whales man, hug a tree.' And whilst this might be seen as simply irritating and ignorant by the average environmentalist, for me, someone deeply interested in the power of words and other forms of texts; this is devastating. It is devastating in it's power.

To try and unlock some of the power that this mindless counter-argument holds we need to look at what underpins it. We must remember first and foremost that much of our thinking is driven by a capitalist consumerism. Even if we don't want it to be we are still to some degree affected by it. This might seem unrelated but it is not. What advertising sells to us is not so much objects these days, but images, lifestyles. We are sold, at least if you are to believe the visual texts involved in advertising, not just a thing but a whole way of being. We are taught to worship the thing, revere the thing that will give you passage to this way of being. You know the drill, we all know it so well it's almost impossible to notice at times. Drinking Coke will make you cooler, certain brands of tampons will allow you to frolic more happily with your girlfriends than others. Brands of perfume will allow you to be like the female celebrity that markets it, etc. But what we realise less often is that our society has become so used to trading in images that it has become a powerful method of defense or attack.

We all know that environmentalism has an image. It is of course the image of the 'hippie', usually with dread-locked hair, somewhat unwashed, and often accused of 'granola munching' or 'mung bean eating' and other such crimes against humanity. Now in a lot of ways I don't fit too well with the 'hippy' image. I dye my hair, eat meat, wash, am not exactly what you'd class as a full pacifist, etc. And in Tasmania I'm far from being the only one. The environmental movement is much closer to being 'mainstream' down here, it attracts old ladies and fellows in business suits as well as the usual by way of 'hippies.' I think this is one of the reasons it is so strong. But still the sorcery of image is stacked against us on a word-wide scale. People who care about things like trees and whales can immediately be trivialised by this image, no matter how smart, savvy or profound their reasons for participating. We are so affected by image in this postmodern world that we struggle subconsciously on a regular basis with how the things that matter to us will affect how we are perceived, whether we will be taken seriously or whether our actions and beliefs will cause us to be pigeon-holed as having walked the well worn and for some reason, humorous, path of the environmentalist.

Now to me it isn't really a question of whether mankind needs to change it's way of living drastically. I think it goes without saying, and not just to avert our own demise. People still argue about the causes and extent of global warming while ice sheets break away and polar bears are swimming for an iceberg that will never come. Numerous species are going extinct every day, we do not have to wait for the next scientific report to know whether we are heading for massive ecological disaster, massive ecological disaster is already upon us. As yet it has not killed too many people in too many parts of the world that we think are particularly important, so we aren't generally too concerned. We get concerned when Al Gore starts throwing up the graphs that show Manhattan going under water, but biodiversity and the loss of things that simply provide sheer beauty and majesty in the world, even if no humans are there to look at them; these don't seem to get us quite so worried.

I think we need to rethink a lot of things, what we think it means to protect 'ourselves' and 'ours'. We can no longer simply be satisfied that ourself and our family are doing well, because we cannot consider ourselves as separate from the greater systems that we are a part of. If we cannot acheive positive intergration with a particular environment which we strive to protect all members of, pay back what we take and otherwise tread lightly we cannot expect long term happiness and prosperity in any place. If we realise ourselves as aspects of a greater unfolding reality, which is life itself, we will come to see this impossibility very clearly. And that our behaviour towards what we call 'our environment' constitutes a warfare with the world perceived as 'outside' of us, which is at some level really a war with the self.

Joanna Macy, working as an anti-nuclear activist in USA, found that one of the major impediments confronting the activists' cause was the presence of unresolved emotions of despair, grief, sorrow, anger and rage. The denial of these emotions led to apathy and disempowerment. In other words we are acting out these unresolved feelings and our spiritual wellbeing, or lack of it, is directly pertinent to the development of a deep ecological way of living. We need to look at these deep causes and sources of dis-ease as a shaman might confront Smallpox as a spirit that stalks among his people and must be fought and overcome. And as either healers, walkers of the spirit realms or activists this is a fight that we must fight.

Human despair, alienation and apathy are one part of the problem. But I contend that our existential anxieties that we are our images further inflicts a homeostasis upon us, a resistance to change based on fear of loss or misappropriate of selfhood. It is easy to see how these maladies feed into one another. Alienated in our own mind from the greater system and therefore powerless in our own mind to affect it we feel fragile. Feeling fragile and impotent we feel angry and we require props to support our sense of self. Consumerism provides us with these props, it provides us with things that masquerade for ways of being. We believe without these objects we could not have these ways of being, and without those ways of being we would not be who we are. The vicious cycle continues. Fundamentally we are opposed to the perceived sacrifice of object gratification that would be involved in living more simply. And we are subconsciously put off associating ourselves with a movement that has an image that we and the dominant social systems around us do not subscribe to. And so mockery of a stereotype takes the place of real social discourse.

What can we do? Well there are numerous ways to frustrate such a system. Providing examples of behaviour that refuses to fit neatly into the stereotype, that shows that ecologically minded people come in all forms and dress codes, clearly does something (as evidenced in Tasmania). Effort has been made to make green life styles 'cool', which amounts to fighting fire with fire, which might have it's place. But while we are still concerned about such surface considerations as image we will never reach a deeper understandings of how recognition of wholeness and honouring that wholeness is integral to human happiness.

Double-Drumming

2009-04-17T03:21:00.000-07:00

The Sun sets behind the dying hill
that I may make something
of these earth-furrow impressions
that the breeze kissed into place.
Beautiful stories
that smell of wild mountain thyme,
and coal-fire.
Ancestor ghosts in marrow
and synapse,
mind-lightning, heart-rivers
I cannot but in love drop you
like acorns into this sadness rich loam
In a dance across the sky
at day's death,
we dance,
this world-torn paradise
into new shapes.
Of joy cries and harsh lament
glacial pure with the sharpness
of beginnings.

Swan-maidens of ebony wing
sun behind the obsidian
light in darkened glass palace
Mountain haunt of rainbows.
River of long tear flow
Ancient Source Mother of wisdom,
land of shellfish bone midden
and fallow star fields
that swallow up the heart
in their expanse.
I conjure your ancient heart
and offer mine
in double drum
for a new dance
along this eternal path
of the west-setting sun.

Alice Kyteler 2009

Frost in the Spider's Web

2009-04-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

It is of course impossible to try and explain the poetic drive. The American poet Ruth Stone said in conversation that she remembered growing up in rural Virginia, working in the fields, when she would feel and hear a poem coming at her. It was coming at her like a thunderous train of air, barrelling down at her. When she felt it it would shake the earth. And she knew that the only thing to do was to run like Hell, to try and get to a peice of paper before it thundered through her body so she could catch it up and capture it. Sometimes she would get there too late and it would go through her before she reached a pencil, and at such times she would see it continue on over the landscape, looking for another poet. I feel that this is one of the best and most powerful modern descriptions of the descent of inspiration that I've heard. It inspired me to try and describe my own idiosyncratic way of experiencing this subtle fire.

Stone felt inspiration like a thunder, something that could shake the earth and came barrelling along. For me the sensation is softer, but no less devastating in it's power for this. It comes on the wind, makes me drawn my breath in sharp when it touches me. Sometimes it makes the hairs on the back of my arms stand on end. I find myself opening my mouth slightly to try and taste what is travelling on that wind a little better. Where I am at that time I am forced to stop, and to close my eyes. The wind seems to carry a memory of something that stirs a hidden force in me. This force coils through my body making my insides quiver, making me feel weak in it's hands. My body goes soft and yeilding as though in the hands of a skilled lover. I am ready to receive it, the soft quivering becomes a rush, as though hot blood or fire were rushing to my forehead. Stunning hyper-awareness is mine. The grass is greener than green suddenly, the sky an intenser blue than can be described. Everything about me is a mystery and a wonder never seen before. I must make words! And these words must convey this sudden newness. They must cut through the stale bonds of habit, burn out all the pedestrian qualities of every word I lay down with this sacred fire, and invite all who read them into this sanctum I've entered!

But I do not rush to paper. The poem is still incubating inside me, forming in the forge of memory. I do not begin until the first refrain enters my head, fully formed, perfect. If it is time it should need little revision or effort, it should be born into the world whole. At such times it is love that is uppermost in my mind. It is always to the beloved that I speak. For the utterance itself is always an act of love. It wants to shatter the distance between our perceptions, melt our beings together in one new poetry of being, one new harmony. Even if it's only for a moment.

Oneness is always it's aim. And so fragile it is, these moments, these moments you must hold your breath through. When, for a moment, you feel that something has been communicated, shared, that you've stood in the space of that sanctum with someone. It is like the painful delicacy of frost in a spider's web. It is so beautiful when it catches the light, your heart could break with thinking that it cannot always be, you would love to touch the frozen crystals, but you know they will melt with the warmth of your fingertips. The pain of having brought forth something from this tender place into the light of day, brought it forth in love, for it to not be understood; this could be immeasurable. But it is a risk that must be ennacted again and again. For without this risk taken for love there can be no creation. And that strange half pleasurable, half discomforting sensation that we call 'inspiration', is the place I source my life from.

The Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer: A Review

2009-04-12T18:17:00.000-07:00

Everyone who knows me will know I've been hankering after getting my hands on this book for a long time, and have finally done so. As I read it became increasingly clear to me that I wanted to see more talk about the implications of population genetics in British pagan reconstruction and polytheistic circles.

Now before I read this book I've heard a number of different misleading news reports about the findings in this area and I think reading this book really shows how complex the picture is and difficult to break down in a simple way that can be consumed by the public. I remember hearing a news report of something along the lines of 'Not Celts but Basque' and then shortly after this had been reported hearing that England had indeed been 'swamped by Saxons.' One story was saying that a great population conservatism and continuity had existed in BOTH the areas we now think of as 'Celtic' and 'Saxon' and the other was saying that it was clear that most English people matched well with Friesians on the Y chromosome.

Now personally, I'd just like to start by saying that I think this sort of thing matters. It matters passionately to people who are trying to reconstruct their cultural and religious lives off the fragments of history left to us. If part of our history has been a late myth, conjured by one historian with a chip on his shoulder and a lot of later assumptions built on other assumptions, then I want to know about it! Any new light that genetics, archeology or any other source can shed on the life of our ancestors is vitally important to us. And not just for people working as I work but for all of us who trace our origins back to the islands of Britain. A people's imaginative sense of their origins is something I hold to be vitally important.

When I picked up this book, therefore, there were two main things I wanted to know about it. Firstly, what his methodology was for his conclusions and secondly, who had negative things to say about it. On the first point I found the book difficult to fault, his methods are explained in the back clearly for anyone with even a high school awareness of biology to grasp. And the numerous bits of evidence he draws together to form a coherent picture is both intellectually convincing and often struck me with an intuitive 'feels right' sensation.

On the topic of who has critiques to offer of Oppenheimer's work I entered a Google search and the main example I found was this, which to be honest only strengthened Oppenheimer thesis in my eyes. I'm a big believer that you can tell a lot about a thinker by what quality of other thinkers are his supporters and his detractors. And in this case this linguist admits to having no understanding of the genetic evidence and seems incapable of understanding how the 'Founder Effect' might influence a gene density map. My partner Algernon wrote a critique of him and other such specialists who attack one aspect of a thesis in which they are a specialist and ignore the rest, so I wont address it further here. Suffice to say that I felt convinced that though the book I was holding in my hands was indeed 'popular science' that it was based around a solid interpretation of numerous available databases. Let us now go on to talk about some of the thesis' and their implications.

Although I will be forced to greatly simplify a much more complex picture I will here summarise the basic points of 'The Origins of the British'. I will start with the 'Celtic' side of the picture because this is of greatest interest to me.

# Although the word 'Celt' came historically to be associated with a central European home-land, and a Iron Age, Aryan origin, the remaining people considered 'Celtic' today (the Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Manx, Cornish and Breton people) do not owe their genetic heritage to such an origin.

# The genetic trails show that overwhelmingly these peoples, whom Oppenheimer names the Atlantic Coastal peoples, entered their current land when landbridges connected all these places to a 'beach-combing' Atlantic trail, during the late Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods.

# The next largest genetic contribution to these areas was during the Neolithic period, but essentially these contributions were largely from the same location, being the Basque Ice Age Refuge (one European location where a genetic bottleneck occured during the last ice age as people 'hid out' in non glacial locations.)

# During all three of these periods there is archeological evidence of cultural interchange between these areas, even after there was an ocean dividing them. There seems to be a deep time divide, both genetically and culturally, which reflects a very real 'Celtic Border' (though not exact) with a culture with a slightly different origin being at least represented in some parts of what we now call England since early times.

# In England this Iberian or 'Basque' component also contributed a large amount of genetics over this period. But, particularly in the Neolithic period some parts of England and Scotland in particular received a significant influx of people originally from the Ukrainian Ice Age Hideout, a similar genetic bottleneck population. These people entered via what is now the North Sea from what is now Scandinavia and Norway, leaving a genetic trail behind them. This entering occurs early enough that there are specific 'British only' mutations that came into being far too early to have been the result of an enormous Saxon blitzkrieg during the dark ages.

# Oppenheimer further suggests that as the Neolithic period was the latest date for any large genetic contribution to the Atlantic Coastal (Celtic) Peoples that perhaps the Indo European language they now speak entered at this time, possibly on the back of farming. Though these people now speak an Indo European language there isn't much 'Indo European' about their genetic makeup.

# This being said there is no clean picture of Basque/Celt on one side of the islands and Saxon/Ukranian Origin on the other. Many parts of England have genetic markers with a Basque orgin as their dominant type. And most parts of the modern Celtic world have received an early contribution (neolithic or earlier) from the Ukranian refuge people that went on to become the Saxons, Jutes, Angles etc.

What does this mean to us?

Well I think it is potentially very important. If the modern Celtic speaking nations actually separated off and settled into their locations a lot earlier than the Iron Age, the admittedly noticeable similarities between their cultures and beliefs become evidence of a much greater cultural conservatism than we had previously imagined. It gives us the possiblity that the similarities in our myths are of much greater antiquity than we would have dared to consider. It also means we need to rethink what it means to be a 'Celt.' Many people have simply decided to ditch the word in favour of 'Brythonic' if they are Welsh or 'Gaelic' or Irish or Scottish particularly. However, both gentically and culturally there is long evidence of early cultural interchange between these nations. Could there after all be some greater meaning in this much abused word? Not the meaning that we had previously ascribed to it, but a much older more indigenous meaning? One that does not neatly end at the bounders of those nations but extends to form part of the ancestral identity of the majority of British people?

I believe this information should revolutionise how we look at ourselves. It should change the way we look at the Basque region and have us looking for answers and origins to puzzles there. And it should even change the way many Celtic Reconstructionists tends to look upon Asatru and the Norse and Saxon people in general soley in terms of invaders or oppressors. Certainly there is much ugly modern history behind this. But the English people are not soley 'Saxon' by a long shot. And the majority of the blood shared in common with those previously called 'Saxon' entered long before any invasion and have as much claim to indigenous status as we.

It is all very thought provoking. I don't believe things come to light for no reason, even science is to me a manifestation of the unfolding of Fate, and so this was something we were meant to know about ourselves at this time in history. Perhaps it will be important for us to know that people of all kinds of British origin have such an ancient claim to think of themselves as 'indigenous' to somewhere. Rather than as the product of invading people who continuously commited genocide on the people who came before. I will be interested to see discussion, debate, research and other engagement within the British Reconstruction and Polytheist community.

Worth reading!

Image by Thomas Dodd 'Mnemosyne: Goddess of Memory.'

In Which All is Linked

2009-04-07T15:48:00.000-07:00

Drawing things together into a cohesive whole is on my mind at the moment due to the post of a fellow blogger Algernon Misanthrope and I am inspired towards my own act of synthesis.
Though it seems perfectly obvious to me what the topics I write about have in common I am going to attempt here to elucidate the common thread that runs through this blog and bring it into sharp focus.

I write a lot about Romanticism and what I call 'Post-Romanticism' here as well as paganism, animism and polytheistic resurgence. Now, to many, Romanticism may seem like a dusty academic topic that has no link to such contemporary movements. On this I would disagree. It would take a longer work than this to fully chart the numerous historical connections that link the original Romantic Movement to present day Romantic tendencies such as these. It will be sufficent here to point out the indebtedness of modern Celtic Polytheists to the Celtic Twilight movement (a direct out-growth of Romantic tendencies) and the Romantic nature of antiquarian and folklorist behaviour to which we owe so much of our ability to reconstruct earlier culture.

However, it is my belief that the reliationship between modern polytheistic resurgence and paganism and the earlier advent of Romanticism go far deeper. If you cut the original Romanticism right back to it's fundamentals, not just as a literary tendency but a life-style and 'way of being' movement, you find that it is the begining of a process we are still very much involved in. The Romantics were the first Radical Traditionalists
they began a process of cultural self-reflectivity that continues today. Many people may find the term 'radical traditional' to sound like an oxymoron, but I assure you it is anything but. The Romantics, in many ways, were living at a revolutionary time in history where they could contend for the honour of being considered the original radicals, and yet in many ways they were arguing for the continuity of folk tradition over the rapid change of industrialisation, and for the beauty and mystery of older cultures in the face of the advent of cold rationalism.

This is not to say that the Romantics were purely about retrospection and anachronism, they were not, and this is what I believe makes them so modern. Or should I perhaps say what makes Pagan Reconstruction and polytheistic resurgence so Romantic! When the Romantics engaged the medieval period for instance, they didn't strive to recreate the Medieval period as it really was, they took inspiration from it. They self-reflectively looked at one emergent culture, or cultural discourse, and chose against it, selecting another. Or at least selecting a hybrid-other combined from the things that excited them about their era and the things that were more beautiful and meaningful that they could glean from meditation upon a previous cultural discourse. This, if you consider it's implications, is the ultimate radicalism, and also the ultimate possibility of modernity. This is why I consider us to live in a Post-Romantic era rather than a Post-Modern one.

As modern people we live increasingly in a world where we can survey the cultural discourses of the past with access to a great deal of information. We have access to a great deal more than the Romantics did, but the process of cultural disintegration and discontinuity that brought us here had already begun for them. They stood on a threshold historically that we have crossed. And they saw ahead and made a decision, in the fact of the old model that had fallen apart, to weave together the old and the new and make something more beautiful. The destruction we live amongst, our fallen age, paradoxically bequeaths us this freedom; and this is what I believe we have to learn from the Romantics. The broken heart of their era is the broken heart of ours, and we are heir to all of their meloncholy, but we are heir to the freedom that opens up in the space of desolation also.

We live in a world where we have been largely brainwashed by the ideal of progress. The Romantics questioned progress, whilst at the same time embracing some aspects of it. I believe we need to do the same. The word 'anacronism' has been giving a judgemental, trivialised aura by a world obsessed with progress. 'Oh that's such an anacronism', is rather similar to saying 'what a pile of steaming, out-of-date crap.' But if we can break free for a moment from this progress based idea that things are getting better and better as we go along and consider all the information we have access to, something amazing happens. New possibilities for counter-cultures open up in that post-apocalyptic, post-modern void world.

Take for instance the inherently sexy movement of Steampunk. Not just a literary movement but ideally undertaken as a lifestyle, Steampunk draws it's inspiration from the Victorian Age. But in a typically Post-Romantic kind of way, the Victorian Age in question is self-consciously not the 'real' Victorian Age, but an imagination-hybrid between elements of Victorian style and edgy hyper-modernity. Similarly the neo-tribal, Radical Traditional and associated Pagan and Polytheistic resurgence movements are not about recreating in their entirity the world that was before. There are, typically, aspects of the way the world was in ancestral times that modern practitioners will reject: such as animal sacrifice, slavery, and some aspects of the previous relationship between the sexes.

So what I believe all these movements, or counter-cultures have in common is that they are manifestations of Post-Romanticism. We could list here: Steampunk, Radical Traditionalism, Neo-Tribalism, Gothicism, Pagan Reconstruction, The Rewilding Movement, the Waldorf (Steiner) Schooling Movement, New Polytheism, Core-Shamanism, the Traditional Artisans movement (modern Luddites), Environmentalism, and Eco-Spirituality; as just a few ways that Romanticism is alive and well in the twenty-first century.

Now I believe that knowing this is more than a point of historical interest, it helps to position us, helps us to see who else is striving for similiar ideals and to acquire strength in numbers. Also it can help us to wake up to the trend of trivialising something as an 'anacronism' just because that movement is trying to select a different, potentially more effective cultural stream. Just because something may have been over come for a long time by another oppressive discourse that had might on it's side it doesn't follow that what was previously lost was without value. To believe that would be to fall for the worst kind of social Darwinism; which I would like to think that we were above as a culture.

In conclusion:

To be a modern day Romantic is to be a Post-Romantic. That is, we are able to be self-conscious of our own Romanticism and of our history, to select one discourse over another, and to blend historical modes. We are able to self generate our own counter-cultures. We belong, in this, to a two hundred year heritage of doing just that. This is not a 'stick your head in the sand' unrealistic, backward looking tendency, but a dynamic, radical, questioning, action-taking tendency. As modern pagans, polytheists, neo-tribalists, steampunks or eco-spiritualists, I contend that we are all part of that tendency and should assert the dignity and worth of such imagination-pioneering in a troubled and alienated world.

Guerilla Acts of Sanctity

2009-04-02T16:59:00.001-07:00

One of the things I've always missed about the British landscape is the sites of continuous ritual importance. Natural places that because they have been reclaimed by pagans, taken over by saints or even just popular 'superstitions' have continued to be honoured. Because of the near extinction of the indigenous population here there isn't much known about what sites were venerated and in what way. However, tantalising snippets remain. I have heard that stone cairns existed here in the Cradle Mountain district, that and a recent trip to Mt Wellington, or Kunanyi, got me thinking.

My husband and I take relatively frequent trips up the mountain. Kunanyi towers over the Hobart region and the weather here is at her mercy. It is like travelling to a different nation at times because there may be snow on the ground up there when the temperature down here is quite moderate. And it only takes about twenty minutes to experience that change! Last time I was up there I noticed that people had begun to build cairns. This clearly isn't an official building project, but simply something some of the Tasmanian public felt driven to do by the sense of sanctity that the place holds. I of course contributed a rock with the boys and started an additional one in another location that I felt was more powerful. My husband told me that he knew of another out of the way place nearer the cost where there is a long-standing cairn making tradition that he and his class added too on their excursion. Once such a thing begins, it appears, people love it. They don't know why but they feel driven to make a place 'special.' Or maybe sometimes, hopefully, they do know why.

It is for such a reason that I have decided to begin performing guerilla acts of sanctity. Tasmania doesn't currently have any rag or ribbon trees to make it's sacred springs or wells or other sites of natural power. But I think, why not? A new European tradition in a new land acknowledges old powers in a way that is part of the background of the people that now live here. It seems to me to bring these things together in a harmonious way. That is of course after one has made contact with the land powers there and offered to honour them in such a way and received a positive response. I knew exactly where to begin.

Up on the common-land above our house there is a row of established hawthorn trees, one of which forms a beautiful bower beneath which is a tangled root system at the bottom of which I sometimes pour offerings. It also sits beside a fork in the way at the exact place you view the mountain for the first time. The place has that feeling of being a place of transition and threshold, a power place that our ancestors and predecessors would have honoured and recognised in some way. So every time I have something to thank the local powers for, of a problem that I wish to dissipate with the peice of material, or any such purpose I take something and tie it to the underside of the tree. Over time I am hoping my small spiritual community here will participate also, and maybe other people will see it and not understanding it necessarily will feel compelled to add to it, even after we are gone.

I write this to encourage such guerilla acts of sanctity elsewhere. I will be writing updates as my project continues and I would love to hear from anyone else who begins performing them, or already performs them. Let's resacralise our experience of place today! If you live in a place where such traditions already exist, please remember to take a pin votive, rag or other offering to one. If not, consider what places were sacred to the people that came before. Is there a way that they honoured such places? Or a way (such as cairns) that was used by many peoples? One needs to use their intuition and sense. Is there a pre existing care-taking people who already honour certain sites in certain ways? If so you should respect this. But if, like me, you live in a place where such veneration has largely lapsed, along with the loss or displacement of traditional care-takers, I urge you to consider making public space acknowledgements in whatever form is traditional or important for you. There is actually already a history for such revivals going back to antiquarian research in the Romantic age where more than one such custom was revived in Britain.

Pagan and earth-honour peoples largely don't have a voice or a public presence when it comes to monuments or buildings. When it comes to the buildings perhaps as it should be, as people who's worship involves the natural world their is something counter-intuitive about convening in halls. However, if nature is our temple it is our responsibility to see that the spirits of rivers nearby, ancient trees, mountains and groves are offered to and respected, not just in our own backyard. And personally, being of a radical inclination, I see nothing wrong with these offerings being in people's faces in the way a rag or ribbon tree is. Not only pagans would benefit from an increased acknowledgement of the sacred in public spaces.

Earth Hour

2009-03-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

I see Earth Hour roll around each year with a mixture of excitement and frustration. I too wonder, if we are able to turn off all those street and office lights for one hour a year, why can't we turn them off for one hour a night? Or, gods forbid, all night? And I feel the pain of serious environmentalists who throw up there hands in despair at everyone patting themselves on the back for something like this. HOWEVER everything has to start somewhere, and little snow-balls can gather a lot of momentum as they travel down hill. I was in Sydney in 2007 when we switched off all our lights and looked out over the cities and towns to see everything turned dark. We quietly heckled those whose lights were still on, taking note from our balcony. I remember thinking 'if only the whole world would start doing it. What good will it do while it's just Sydney?'
Perhaps humanity needs to take baby steps in taking some weight off their technological props. Either way when I see all the lights go down on the clip I get a feeling that people can do something. And when people feel they can do something, people do do something. There is the barest gap between belief and motivation and motivation and result. Please join me in switching off your electricity tonight at 8.30 your time. And consider perhaps our own private Earth Hours, on our own time? Once a week? Whatever time we can spend wasting less, and also learning how to be quiet with ourselves again, learning how to entertain ourselves when all the light and flashing movements calm and still for a moment; it can only be good.

Sacred Landscapes, Lands of Origin and the Myth of Place

2009-03-26T18:07:00.000-07:00

Recently I read the following letter that was sent by an Irish American to the Irish Government regarding the arrest and subsequent imposition of conditional bail agreement on seven protesters against the construction of the M-3.

Dear Sir or Madam,
I continue to be alarmed by the activities of the Irish government as regards the M-3 and other roadways being built in Ireland, and which are causing irreparable damage to the honor and memory of our ancestors. This morning I was acquainted with the fact that seven valued and highly respected protesters who were arrested last week at the Hill of Tara were granted bail under the condition that they refrain from protecting the history of this ancient and holy land by preventing the forward movement of bulldozers and other machinery being used to rend and tear the earth, under which lies the bones and remains of warriors, kings and queens, all our ancestors. Who is it that has sold out our old Mother? Who is it that is guilty of complicity with money hungry monsters bent on the destruction of all that is holy in the land of the Irish? Who is it that has sold our old Mother for the sake of greed? Sirs and Madams, how is it that you can rest at night with the voices of those you have disinterred ringing in your ears? Have you no shame? Out of the past resounds an echo of desperation and sorrow, a grouping of words that are relevant and timely for these acts of terror you are allowing to be perpetrated upon the land.

Mise Eire (I Am Ireland)
by Padraic Pearse
1912
“I am Ireland
I am older than the Old Woman of Bearra,
Great is my glory,
I who gave birth to
Cuchulain the brave,
Great is my shame,
My own family
Have sold their mother.
I am Ireland,
I am lonelier than the
Old Woman of Bearra.”

My questions to the powers that be are, do my husband and I ever return to Ireland? Do we encourage our children and grandchildren to seek out their heritage in a land that is no longer recognizable as the beloved land of their ancestors? Or, do we rather tell the story to them of how beautiful it was, once upon a time, and warn them not to venture to a place that is no longer the Ireland of the Welcomes? Sirs and Madams, shame upon you and all that you have not done to protect our precious heritage and history! Shame upon you for compromising yourselves and the rest of us who claim Irish descendency, only for the sake of satisfying your own avarice! Shame upon you and your atrocities! Shame upon each of you for selling your old Mother!

An Irish-American

Probably needless to say I read this with a sense of sympathetic, empathetic, understanding. The cradle of my own people, my cultural identity and my 'holy homeland', is Wales and the West-Country of England. This was where my Mother was born, where I learned to speak, and where my Mother's Mother's lived for generations before us. Though I am an Australian Brit I never hear about destruction, or even so much as change, to the ancient landscape there without a feeling of deep hollow pain and impotent sorrow and frustration. Sometimes people who live on their ancestral ground are as passionate about their heritage as myself and this 'Irish-American'; but often I notice that distance does something to increase passion. I often wonder if this is a 'distance lends enchantment' factor, allowing the place to become a far off island in the water, an otherworld of sorts. Or if it is simply that those who have been transplanted are made more keenly aware of the value of origins and continuity through what they have lost.
I found myself thinking about my own situation here in Tasmania. Tasmania is my magical isle, my sanctuary from the turbulent world, my southern apple isle; and I love her. I never thought I could love another place like this. To actually think that I could perhaps call it 'home.' And yet I have come to. Part of it is the sounds and smells that so often overwhelm me with familiarity, apple wood smoke on a chill air, or being hit in the face by a mountain wind full of sleet! These things place me back in Britain in an instant. But it is also more than that, why I love this place. It is also it's wildness and loneliness, it's sense of newness, of a land only two hundred years ago in it's stone-age, still half dreaming. There is a sense of possibility here that I haven't felt anywhere else. As though anything could still happen. I have fallen in love it her eagle haunted mountains and her eerie Turner-esque water-colour Winter skies.
And yet every now and again the old longing raises it's head, for a moment and I wonder if there is not yet a conflict unresolved. When I hear that 'Irish American' speak about the land that holds all of her dead ancestors, warriors, kings and queens and I remember a landscape covered in the ritual-scarification of sanctity. Mounds, stones, chambers, where the myths of my people are dreamed into the landscape. Everywhere marks of meaning that story a people into their environment. And here a certain silence, blankness, but for the few sparse memories of places that were Dreaming sites for the People Who Came Before. The land itself tells me stories, and I remember them and associate that place with that story, but it is only me that knows it. And they are different stories to the one's I tell my children about the doings of their ancestor's and their gods.
This is not necessarily a problem but I find myself asking: what now? The ancient people of this island were all but destroyed. Their descendants, the Palawa and Lia Poota peoples, work as we work to reconstruct the threads of their ancestral identity and religion. And whatever fruit their work bears it will not become our fruit. We have our own stories, and the land has it's own stories. Somehow I imagine some sort of sacred marriage must occur here. I feel my ancestors would have understood better how to handle such a situation. At some point they too came into the lands that became the ancestral lands. At some point in time their story became part of that land, was 'dreamed into' it. Mythologically these things happen in a dreaming time, a misty mythic past. But what of us now? Whether 'rightly' or not our dead are in the soil here now, generations of them, and with them beneath our feet we become, in a sense, 'native' to this place.
The ancestor's stories didn't 'happen' in Britain, they happened in a timeless space and through story became knitted to the land. The stories knitted a people to their land. And I find myself wondering how we European people story ourselves into this Southern Island. I want to respect the people who came before, and yet European presence here is a fact and the work of sanctifying that fact is still before us. I look with optimism and hope upon it's unfolding. Great wrongnesses happened here in the past at a human level, terrible things, and yet still for all the sadness and horror there was a collision between this land and the children of Britain, that was fated to be. I wonder what it's outcome will look like. And I hope that there is a story waiting to be told, possible to tell, that involves a synergy between a little island to the north and a little island to the south that after much tragedy and grief were finally harmoniously married.
And I hope that like that 'Irish-American' I can continue to still honour the homeland, as one honours to womb they sprang from, even whilst having moved and become independent. I hope that we are able to let our vision relax a little, become fuzzy, misty, the dreaming vision, and see how two places can be one place.

Thoughts on Polyamory

2009-03-17T15:56:00.001-07:00

I've been wanting to write an article on polyamory for a while, but it was a recent post in a forum I belong to that finally made me decide to get it done. To give you a bit of background I am myself in a polyamorous relationship that has lasted over ten years, and the more I spend time in forums and talking to others, the more I realise that I am by far and away not the only one to be so successful.

Recently in said forum a fellow, who of course will be called 'Bob'wrote in with a problem. He is part of a thus far successful 'quad' situation. He and his wife both respectively have a girlfriend and boyfriend who they are also in love with. So all three of the relationships that make up their situation are stable, serious, love-matches. Everything has been going fine until 'Betty' as we shall call his wife, comes home one day and explains to Bob that her night with her boyfriend had taken her to a place, sexually and emotionally, that she had never gone to before. She then, (at his urging, as they treat each other as best friends and share things) explained to him that she had had some near transcendental sort of experience that resulted in an unusually protracted orgasm; among other startling emotional effects. This was an important moment for her, but difficult for Bob. Bob wrote into the forum for advice about what to do. He had never felt jealous before, but now found himself feeling afraid that this meant that Betty didn't love him as much as her other man, and that he must have sexually failed her in some significant way. All natural feelings of course.

What inspired me to write this post was the huge quantity and quality of replies that Bob received, from dozens and dozens of people in sucessful polyamorous relationships. I had to smile to myself to see that there were so many others, just like my husband in I in their attitudes, in their mutual decency and caring for each other, and in their long-term success. And also at the quality of the replies themselves.

I won't of course repeat anyone's words here, suffice to say that the general tone of the advice was as follows: Be happy for your wife, no two people can offer someone exactly the same kind of love, or pleasure. The very fact that you are her husband may mean that she fell into patterns with you that she has overcome elsewhere, some of this is probably NRE (New Relationship Energy); it doesn't reflect on you. Other husbands actually wrote to him encouraging him to see that he had hit the jackpot, because her other love had helped her to unleash new aspects of her own sexuality and that in their experience he would probably benefit from this release in their own sex life. It was really inspiring stuff to see how these other people, men and women, had confronted their own jealousies and insecurities and come out with strong relationships and strong willingness to embrace their partner's freedom and joy in life.

It also led to me coming across this wonderful word that I had not heard before 'compersion'; meaning to 'take pleasure in your partner's pleasure, even if the source of the pleasure is not yourself.' I realised then that there was actually a word for what my husband and I experience. Like Betty I also have another love who has brought out a type of love in me, a type of intimacy, that I have never felt before. And my wonderful husband has not only been happy for me, but I think experienced 'compersion' for me. The best interests of my 'other significant other' have become important to him also, because they are important to me, and my joy and enrichment is a source of his joy. I know for a fact that many people wouldn't be able to understand this, but it is heartening to know that many do. As some of these supportive people on the forum told Bob 'there are equally things that you give your wife that he can't.' And this is very true of my husband too, with whom I share a special long-term, solid bond; and two beautiful children. Every healthy love is unique and takes nothing from the pre-existing one, as love is not a finite commodity. But of course in our commodity driven world, it might be difficult for us to recognise this.

This is not to say that I believe in some sort of fluffy Utopia where no body ever feels jealousy. Jealousy is as natural as love itself. But it is passing through the fire of jealousy and seeing it for what it is that ultimately makes us stronger in our relationship. As investigative reporter and sex education Eric Francis said:
"Right inside the jealous episode is a fiery core of erotic passion. It may surprise you how good it feels, and if you get there, you can be sure you're stepping right into compersion." Embracing jealousy as a sign of the passion you feel for that person, but not being a slave to it, seeing it clearly for what it is and moving on in compassion seems to be the key to coming to 'compersion.' Jealousy shows us (reminds us?) that we really, really still want that person. But it also shows us that at some level we fear losing them. We fear that that something that someone else can give them that we can't means they will leave us, that we have proven ourselves inadequate, and they will 'choose' against us.

The beauty of polyamory is that one can potentially move beyond the need for comparison, choosing, and any thought of inadequacy. One is no longer forced to try and satisfy the entirety of another person all in one's self. And as the old saying goes, you can't compare apples to oranges. And who would stop eating apples because they tried an orange and it gave them a flavour buzz they'd never had before? No one. Unless of course some repressive religion and social system came along and stood over them waving a finger declaring 'YOU MUST CHOOSE EITHER THE APPLE OR THE ORANGE! IT IS NOT MORALLY CORRECT TO SELECT BOTH FRUITS.'

Now I know Christianity isn't the only religion, or culture for that matter, to advocate monogamy. In societies that were functioning without proper contraception monogamy was often a matter of property law. Once there is property one must know who the father of a child is and so the woman must be 'owned' by the husband so that all will know who the child 'belongs' to. For this reason there have been many societies to have more than one wife but few where the women were permitted to have more than one husband. But basically we can see the reason, women reproduce, and therefore property acquisition leads to the need to make women another form of property. There have of course been some exceptions to this rule where laws were drafted meticulously to work out who got what in relation to polygamous situations.

So we can see that there were property reasons even before Christianity that made it simpler to live monogamously. But what of today? Where we have contraception? What is the excuse now for the state daring to interfere in the matter of love to the extent to actually write into the marriage contract 'to the exclusion of all others?' Is it not bad enough that a second love must be a cause for public interest, scrutiny and criticism, unable to be sanctified socially by any recognition of the seriousness of that second bond (ie: in marriage); but they must also force us to say something that over-writes that dominant, Christian-hangover/property fetish of the mainstream into our very emotional lives?

When you really look at it fairly it's pretty gross. We hold love up to mean something, or most of us do. And yet if it comes in a form that makes other people uncomfortable because it messes with their idea of love = ownership, well it becomes pretty unsanctified in their eyes pretty damn quick. I think it's hilarious considering how comparitively recently we still weren't able to accept that gay people, being 'different' to us, were also capable of love. Is is really such a stretch for people to strain their imagination further into imagining that a man or woman may love more than one man or woman? Personally I see anyone opposing gay marriage as the worst kind of conservative, red-neck, ass-hole; but I wonder, why do we not also condemn the fact that the state has a say in how many mates we should have?

A Review:

2009-03-11T20:57:00.000-07:00

Veratyr’s Precious Gift: Perspectives on Modern Heathenry:
Neo-paganism Considered in Relation to Reconstructionist Paganism; Asatru as an Ethnic Religious Tradition;
And a Discussion of Man’s Formation, Life, and Destiny as Recorded in the Eddas. By Robin Artisson

I decided to review this essay partially because I think it runs on naturally from some of the questions and considerations that I have raised in my past two articles. Especially in the ‘comments’ section of ‘Traditional Witchcraft Reconsidered’ there was much talk about the importance or otherwise of tradition and personal philosophy and how they relate the quality and depth or spiritual experience. This recent article by Mr Artisson seems to make certain aspects of why to bother with ancestral traditions at all, very clear. It certainly raises some interesting questions for consideration.

The general outline of this essay seems to be an attempt to outline the underlying philosophies of neo-paganism, to expose its faults and then show how reconstructed paganism can offer an alternative. The author uses his own framework of Asatru to illustrate this. The claims made against neo-paganism’s ability to give long-term satisfaction or guidance to the questing human spirit certainly seem to be backed up by my empirical observation. Though I think it would strengthen the argument to see some figures, if any such research exists on the life-span of neo-pagan adherence and incidence of reconversion back to Christianity or other religions; or at least something beyond the author's personal experience. Not that I haven't personally seen evidence of the same thing myself.

Anyone who has been reading here will know that I am one of those people that doesn't find the depth of answers, wisdom or guidance that I require in my life in the typical neo-pagan practices and beliefs. However, I also have my questions about adherence to one particular ‘ethnic tradition’ in the modern world. So I was very interested to see how the author would handle this one.

Neo-paganism and Wicca are represented here by Mr Artisson almost solely in relation to their ethical framework, which I would imagine would have to be considered by most people to not be one of the strong-points of their ideology. 'Do what thou wilt, if it harms none' has always sounded like a contradiction to me right from the word go. I don't blame the author for narrowing in on it because I think it clearly displays the internal schizophrenia of neo-paganism. On one side you've got 'an it harm none' where Wiccans try very hard to shed the bad reputation of the word 'witch.' Mixed with Crowley's 'do what thou wilt', which though, as the author pointed out, was meant to mean the 'true will', is still associated with a much less morally sensitive philosophy.

Whether or not Wicca and Neo-paganism have been unfairly represented here as 'calling the quarters and burning incense' I will leave for their adherents to argue, but to me the point of what an ancient ancestral tradition has to offer that they do not is well made and obvious. I think a particularly persuasive part of the essay is when Mr Artisson explains why the consensus of one's ancestors is a powerful thing:

"Do I need my beliefs “bolstered” in such a way? Does anyone? Perhaps not, but I wouldn’t trade the fact that historical groups of people- both my people and others- have lived in line with these ideas. I feel connected to the larger web of human religious impulses, and with that feeling, I find a certain peace. I find a certainty that goes beyond just my own personal feelings on the matter. I feel situated within a larger context of human spiritual experience- the very feeling of “situation” and stability that people seek today in many ways.

This is not a matter of “seeking validation” or justification; it is a matter of taking one’s place within the searching, moral spirit of mankind, in whatever place one feels called to take it."

It's not necessarily a 'logical' argument, many could certainly claim that that feeling of being 'situated' is a simple 'strength in numbers' kind of thinking which keeps us all in a kind of herd mentality. I have heard such things from people who adhere to the more radically individualistic streams of modern occultism. But to me personally there is something suggestive of a kind of humility, rare in this modern, all too self-confident age, in turning to the bulk of the fruit of human searching for answers and taking your position among it in some way.

Personally I have had little to do with Asatru until recent years, though I certainly admire it's level of organisation. And the fact that it is recognised in Iceland as the indigenous religion I believe to be a great thing for modern paganism. After reading this essay I feel I understand that little bit more how much it has to offer the world. The segments quoted by Rydberg in it are facsinating and will lead me to further reading. One such quote that points to an important point is this one:

“This Heathen Teutonic conception of human nature, and of the factors comprising it, is most like the Aryan-Asiatic as we find preserved in the traditions of Buddhism, which assume more than three factors in a human being, and deny the existence of a soul, if this is to mean that all that is not corporeal in man consists of a single, simple and therefore indissoluble element: the soul.”

This I think is linked to one of the most pervasive of the problems with the dearth of actual philosophical or cosmological information in the standard neo-pagan world-view; the gaps tend to be filled in by subconscious returns, or gap-fillers derived from fall-back Christian thinking. For instance, in the Western world, and quite clearly in New Age thinking, we just assume we know that there is a body and a soul. Where that thinking came from is seldom considered.

Personally, especially as I am still learning about Asatru, I found the sections entitled 'Lodur's Gift', 'Honur's Gift' and 'Odin's Gift' provided me with an ample knowledge with which to understand the nature of man in an older pagan context. It is a vision of a cyclic universe, replete with a mystical path leading to attainment of a timeless state, and with a story of the creation of man. The fact that the first man and woman Ask and Embla were created from trees rather than clay, and the philosophical implications of this are well explored here.

Perhaps my favourite part of the essay was the section that begins in this way: "Like the leaves of any tree, we bear within us a full miniature image of our origin: each leaf has a tiny tree etched on it, in the form of the veins of the leaf, with each leaf’s central, thick vein (like a tree trunk) and then many other veins that look like branches. The human being does contain a reflection of the many powers of the world-tree within their mind and body. Our bodies were even (as the myths state) shaped from trees.

We are each (metaphorically speaking) like a leaf (or a fruit) from the branches of the world-tree, each containing all the marks of our great parent which is the combination of all forces in reality- deep in the human body is the generative root, like the lower realms, and heart, fire, and wind, and the brain at the “top” of our bodies- like the luminous realm of the conscious Gods at the tops of the tree, in their Godly worlds."

It sounds like a simple, micro-cosm, macrocosm type of thing but I think if read in context it yeilds some profound thoughts and also draws attention to the poetic power of the myths themselves.

I consider myself to be of an ancestral tradition. In my own thinking and on my own time I just don't draw the hard lines around it, or allow it to limit my visionary experiences of how reality make it's appearance to me in that way of being we term 'the other world.' In this way I might be considered heretical to some reconstructionists, but I certainly never doubt the beauty and power of the myths, or their ability to communicate truths that could never be accumulated or matched in the searching of one human life-time. But one of the best things I can say for this essay is that it reaffirmed that feeling, clarified it, brought reasons for that feeling to the fore-front of my mind.

I found the vision of a 'middle way' presented here very appealing. I myself have often thought that there must be a mid-way to be represented beyond fanatical adherence and radical 'do what you feel-ism'. I have to agree that there would be something very arrogant about believing that we alone in modern times have been able to make valid spiritual observations and that our personal ego projections know better than millenium of accumulated human knowledge.

However, I also find myself getting a little twitchy sometimes when I hear people (yes even other pagan recon people)talking as though they know certain things to be certain facts because the Edda says so. My mind begins to wonder about the historical situation in which it was written, other possible influences, this sort of thing. I don't seem to do well with people who are too sure they have a final answer for all time to all human questions. Sometimes, like anyone who carries around one of those things we are want to refer to as 'a religion' Mr Artisson can sound 'too sure.' And I for one have found myself uncertain about things like the 'Wolf Age' that we are currently believed to be living in and how certain many Asatru people sound when they discuss this supposedly self-evident fact.

But the Wolf Age doesn't feature in this essay, and I have to say my general overall feeling of this essay is that the author is merely certain of the value of these wisdoms to people. And on this I whole-heartedly agree with him. Many people have a negative knee-jerk reaction to anything classed as a religion or faith, and I think this does our ancestral religions a great diservice; as I have heard many otherwise rational people take out their problems with Christian dogma on pagan reconstructions.
And if we dare to really 'imagine into' them the thinking of our ancestors can stretch us imaginatively in numerous ways. There is one particular thing, that relates to my own particular favourite soap-boxes: the importance of non-dualist, non-linear, non-either/or, interaction based, thinking.

"The human mystery has something to do with the constant two-way interaction and interplay of the mortal and the immortal, the time-bound and the timeless. Humans have sought for so long for the answer to their own impasse by looking for some static or imperishable “thing” in themselves that was key, but the real answer is and always was in the interaction between what is seen and unseen, the interaction between the many levels and forces of reality."

This is a mystery that I appreciate, and appreciate the willingness to allow it to remain mysterious rather than reaching for imperishable 'things in themselves' to try and collapse the natural and creative tensions that arise in the universe's dynamic system. And as far as I'm concerned if the remaining lore of the North European ancestors has allowed a situation and positioning for this level of mystical thinking to arise, then it's value is certainly re-doubled in my mind.

What I Believe

2009-02-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

I decided to do this after my last post, and partly inspired by two fabulous examples of a similar thing from these two fellow bloggers: Hinhan and EB. Basically, in the place of somewhat short and perhaps even misleading single words, I'm going to write down what the fundamentals of my belief system are:

1. All That Is, The Great Mystery, One Thing or Universe is one great and infinitely complex Being. Our perspectives as we experience them are an aspect of that Wholeness, as eternal and reforming/shape-changing as the massive multi-form entity that they are part of.

2. We cannot know absolute certainty, as we are always aware from within consciousness and can never examine the examiner. Embracing uncertainty is therefore tantamount to embracing life.

3. What we can know is what feels right, what works well, what yeilds long term Positive Results for what we experience as 'our selves' and the other selves who come under our influence.

4. What brings pleasure and what yeilds pain are the only real guides we have in a world where Final Truth cannot be ultimately known in the way that we have come to expect. Any religion or system that teaches us to trust pain for it's own sake over pleasure, and misery and shame over joy and peace with ourselves is the ultimate in pernicious influences for humans; because it turns upside down the one internal marker within us that allows us to discern a truth.

5. All people and animals have a fundamental right to use the things of the earth about them to nourish themselves to the extent that their body has need of, no more and no less. No one has a right to claim to own something or someone in a way that flies in the face of this. No body or institution should prevent or try to prevent another from this natural right to work for our own survivial. What is taken must be fairly reciprocated in all areas, or negative results will follow.

6.The source and sacred core of all human religious and mystical understandings and systems is the altered state of consciousness, or trance. Humans have within them the ability to know the universe that they are part of beyond the senses and intellect, even though it is impossible to fully reduce such knowing to either word or image.

7. There are some places on the earth where such a state is more easily accessible. These places were considered power places to our ancestors.

8. All living things are ensouled, even things not generally deemed 'living' like stones and rivers possess a mysterious sentience. The sentience of humans is at all levels deeply related and connected to the sentience of these beings, especially those upon whose physical expression (ie: water) we rely most for survivial. This fruitful interaction and sense of relation of forces is why we experience sensations of peace and wholeness in pure wilderness settings and find our minds stirred toward meditation or creativity.

9. Story, art, music, and poetry, in the form especially of myth, are the most powerful tools humans have at our disposal with which to understand ourselves and to to some extent convey experiences beyond the senses and intellect. Although we can never reproduce anything that would belong in that catagory it is possible to so affect another as to make them themselves more susceptible to such an experience of their own.

10. There is a mysterious ancestral awareness, a blood-knowing that connects us to our lands of origin, the symbols of our ancestor's past worship, and eventually to all of mankind via our world-origins in African foreparents.

11. Love is the recognition via revelation of the oneness of things, experienced through the Beloved individual. To the human heart the irreplaceable singularlity of this connection is equally sacred as the oneness to which it points. It is one of the few things that allows us to see infinity in something finite and at the same time to celebrate the miracle of the seeminly finite and unique details of life. Love is therefore the worthiest way to spend a life, the best thing to say you lived for and the noblest to say you died for.

12. Just as energy never disapears only changes form consciousness itself is never destroyed but undergoes possibly inexpressible or unpredictable transformations. It may be as impossible for us in waking consciousness to express or invisage the post death state as it would be for a Flatlander square from 2D land to invisage what it might be like to become a cube in the 3rd dimension.

13. There is no such thing as an 'unseen world' or an 'otherworld'. Things may seem 'unseen' or 'other' to us in some states of consciousness, but if you imagine how a 2D square cannot see 'up'it certainly doesn't mean that the three dimensional being looking down on him is somehow insubstantial or less real than the square. Perhaps the beings we know as gods exist in such a state. What is important is what we experience, and I experience their presence as a vast consciousness, similar to our own but on a grander scale. To some extent our own consciousnesses seem to reside 'within' them, or in some other sense of relatedness that is difficult to articulate. Just as our interaction with the awareness of a river brings peace, our interaction with these Grand Beings seems to bless humans with a great sense of wholeness as they acknowledge and celebrate the ways their consciousness intertwines with other consciousnesses.

14. We subconsciously remember a time when we were 'other' than we are now. The universal belief in another world and yearning for the ineffable is proof of this. Nothing comes from nothing, for a desire to be present there must be something upon which humans come by this desire. There is nothing else that we desire that we have never tasted.

15. The state that is sometimes termed 'enlightenment' does not negate normal human emotion but instead augments it; being, as I believe it to be, a state of unexcluding wholeness. The experience usually termed 'suffering' is still felt along with other normal human sensations, but it is felt in conjunction with a greater awareness of the enormity of the many layers of reality. I do not believe in an enlightenment that involves any form of escapism or exclusion either of feeling or experience.

16. The forces we understand as 'Fate' provide a constant stream of what appear as obstacles and possibilities, as the relative wills of other beings come into conflict with our own. A state of 'free will'is therefore impossible, as it is impossible to say from where our experience of individual will orginates in the plethora of influences. However, no obstacle is ultimate, while there is life there is hope for all possible outcomes. As the Key Maker in the Matrix says there's 'always another way.' We cannot know what will be possible until we have 'tried everything' and it is impossible to exhaust all possibilities. So lean into life hard. Do not accept the limiting stories of yourself or your life that may be sold to you by people who favour fear!

Traditional Witchraft Reconsidered

2009-02-17T14:43:00.000-08:00

Somewhere a little over ten years ago I began to think of myself as a Traditional Witch. By this I don't mean hereditary craft exactly, simply that I began to exclusively draw my learning and practice from traditional European witchcraft folklore and what other intelligent people had written about it. Although I was always very aware of and proud of both the Welsh and the English component of my ancestry, I didn't really involve myself in what might be termed 'pagan reconstructionism' until after I had children.

There is something about the reconsideration of things that occurs when you bring fresh lives into the world that forces you to consider things like the large amount of supporting customs and practices that come with being part of a pagan culture. So I found myself a 'Celtic Reconstructionist'. The mystical and sorcerous practices of witchcraft were still my lone occupation, but with my family I was, and am, worshipping the gods of my forebears, enacting their practices and keeping their festival dates. I continue to be, to some extent involved with both communities on a small and wider scale.

It is certainly satisfying to enact and reclaim these traditions but I find myself struggling with certain schisms and questions that they raise, and also considering patterns I notice in my community. The most obvious schism that comes of pagan recon is the sense of artificiality that comes of adopting our vision of a culture that to a very large extent no longer exists. This is not to say that 'Welsh culture' or 'Irish culture' don't exist, simply that (rather obviously) their pagan identity is somewhat out of reach for us modern people. I think it is wonderful if people feel that there is no schism for them in relating to that world, but for me there has always been the sense that if pagan reconstructed religions are to move forward, they will have to somehow not be completely retrospective, closed-minded or dryly academic in focus, but reinvent themselves in dynamic and daring ways.

Quite understandably a lot of traditional pagans, both those who consider themselves 'witches' and those who don't, define what makes them 'traditional' as 'not eclectic' or not influenced by 'The New Age'. This is certainly both understandable and laudable. Whilst it might seem like pointless exclusivity from the eclectic perspective there are many people who work under the 'traditional' banner trying to promote or re-develop a serious and deep form of spirituality that can stand proudly beside the other great mystical traditions of the world. One that gets spiritual results for people, not just provides for diverting social occasions.

So if there are people doing this (which I believe they are) and this is already occurring (which I believe it is) what is the problem? Why does Traditionalism require any reconsideration at all? Well one of them is a highly subjective reason of mine that I will come to later. The other is something I've noticed. It appears from my observations that 'Traditional Witchcraft', or even 'Witchcraft' in a general is basically sexier to the public than reconstructed pagan religion on it's own.

I think there is several reasons for this. It could be that people raised in monotheistic religions have a knee-jerk response that's not all good to the word 'religion' and to the idea of of holding a shared creed with other people. Now we may argue that this is misguided, something merely to be got over before under-taking to re-dedicate oneself to the religion of our ancestors. Well I am not all sure. I think that there might be something in the mixed origins of what we now think of as 'Traditional Witchcraft' (the folk origins of a witchcraft still occurring in any place in the last few hundred years will undoubtedly owe it's origin to more than one 'pure' cultural source, including the input of Christianity)and the inherent core individualism of the practicing sorcerer that is simply more easily assimilated into modern life.

If you're anything like me you've probably been disgusted on more than one occasion by what I like to call 'special and unique snowflake' syndrome, you know, those people who can't take advice or wisdom from anyone because THEIR spiritual nature somehow functions completely differently to everyone else's on the planet, and the gods are something different for them than they have been for anyone, ever. And this probably has something to do with the fact that they are really a lost faerie being moving among mortals, or possibly some sort of were-creature. You take my point...

This being said, and I hate to admit this, difference is the reality that we must deal with. You and I were not raised in the same clan, worshipping the same gods and sharing the same ideals from the day one. Any two people, in fact, who try to construct some sort of intentional community, clan or kindred in which they hope to re-enact and reinvigorate the religious and cultural practices of one particular branch of their forebears, will quickly find this out. The different people who come are not all looking for the same things, they do not necessarily interpret the core values and ethics in the lore the same, and some will be more dedicated than others. We have certainly lost something by way of the sense of belonging, group-mind and general cohesion that we can imagine our ancestors enjoyed. But like all the double edged gifts of our increasingly culturally complex society, there are blessings as well as curses.

Now as never before we are different from those we find and think of as 'like minds' in ways inconceivable in the past. The sheer potential for difference is far too enormous now for this not to be the case. Everyday we interact with people from different nations, upbringings, religions and social classes. In many ways the place of cultural disintegration and rampant difference that the nuclear family, with it's own micro-culture can engender manifests in a great deal of disharmony and in-fighting in Traditional Witchcraft and paganism. We see a great deal of strong personalities coming together finding as many 'unlike minds' as they do 'like' ones among there so-called brethren. And maybe this is as it should be. Well for those of us who believe in Fate, we must assume that we are witnessing some fascinating new weave which is part of Her great artistry. For whatever difficulties we face we live in exciting times, who knows what will evolve from our efforts today?

This is where we are brought to my subjective point. It occurred to me recently, and I discussed this with a very dear friend of mine Hinhan, that for some reason I was bored with the Traditional Witchcraft and pagan community. He pointed out to me, quite astutely, that the problem probably lay in him and me rather than in that community. That we simply required new space, new horizons, fresh-air. I realised that I was having more fun, meeting more interesting and friendly people, getting more stimulus and inspiration for new work and ideas, being part of the emergent Steampunk community, thinking about things like what an even more emergent 'stonepunk' or 'bronzepunk' might look like, exploring the misty boarders between the poetic and the magical with educated people of all kinds, and even interacting with some of the fine and articulate people in the 'adult blog' community.

And so I thought I'd write this article, and in fact this whole blog in general to share some of the fruits of this line of thinking. I don't suggest that we all yield to the pressure of modernity and go out and incorporate an Egyptian god from here and some Native American practices, mix them all together with a little Kali worship and go around giving everyone 'bright blessings'; but I do wonder if it wouldn't do any harm to get a bit more accepting of the cross-fertilisations that are happening all around us. We all know it happened with Hoodoo, (the sorcery that the African slaves brought with them mixed with some native practices and some European ones) and I don't think there is many people that would call Hoodoo un-traditional. But for that sort of thing to happen in an environment people need to feel confident enough in what they do to just let be, to go with flows, to allow cultural evolution to work through them without thinking about it too much.

I mean, as a 'British Traditional' living in Tasmania what is going to happen now that we are here? What will evolve out of this fusion? We are not Aboriginal, but then we are no longer wholly British as we experience greater and greater synergy with this land also. I don't know what happens. I don't have the answers, I just know that for myself I don't want to calcify. And I don't want to be a 'Traditional Witch' if it means I must spend more time on politicking, acquiring traditional street-cred and managing allegiances than actually performing sorcery or developing myself spiritually. I don't want to stagnate in some brain-fantasy where I'm a bronze-age celt in a torc. I want to bring through my ancestor's wisdom, but I still want to embrace the possibilities of this world. It's possibilities and it's realities.

A friend of mine is in the habit of telling people to 'lose their words'. That is, to imagine that one has no language, to go into the world of nature and not name things with our minds, just be with what we see and hear in that pre-verbal state. And something tells me that this is what we need. To spend more time losing our words. It is ironic that I must use words to share this thought. And words are a trap we are bound in at times, as words are generally the only way that we interact with other witches and pagans on the other side of the world. But I think if we could lose a little of our anxiety about them, just take a big deep breath out. And stop worrying about what we are, what words define our practice, will I sound like an eclectic if I refuse to give a word for what I am? Just let it all go. Followed to it's conclusions it will lead us somewhere crazy, where every person we meet we might have to evaluate on each actual belief they hold one at a time, to slow right down and exchange a true knowing of each other in the place of tags. In one sense we would not meet so many people, but in another we would meet many more people.

I met an old woman once in Britain, she told me that if she lived a few hundred years ago people would have called her a witch. I asked her what she called herself, she said 'Mary'. I'm with her, except my names not Mary.

Madame Alice!

2009-02-15T16:49:00.000-08:00

Your humble hostess has recently had the pleasure of appearing in the erotic fiction of another blogger. My concupiscent compatriot 'Rogue' is responsible for the following, rather classy, offering. You will of course have to navigate to the 'adult' realm of the blogger universe, but I'm sure you people can handle it.

http://theurbanrogue.blogspot.com/2009/02/le-salon-de-punition-avec-alise-et.html

As well as being a lot of fun I was also drawn into the following considerations. Is something simply more aesthetically pleasing because it's older, 'out-of-date' in style? Is this the shadow of the sublime, discussed in earlier posts, that falls across us again? Or something to do with the culture of restraint, so prevalent in previous centuries, that allowed that shadow to be felt that bit more keenly? Is it simply the lure of the far off, the exotic that pleases the eye and ear when something assumes the style of an earlier time period? Or is there really something of elegance and style missing in the way we take our modern pleasures?

Appreciating the Simple

2009-02-13T21:07:00.001-08:00

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

By William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

Lately I wrote about the sublime and so I think to bring balance to our Romantic musings I will make a comment on the appreciation of simple pleasure. There is a contradiction, or a seeming contradiction at the heart of the Romantic aesthetic. I've often heard it explained in terms of there being 'two types of Romanticism'; one that concentrates on the mystery of the far off, the exotic, the dark, turbulant and intense, the other which urges us see the Romantic in everything around us. Most people have their favourite, but I will suggest here that both are necessary to what I like to call The Romantic Quest. The first 'type' would be where I would place the sublime upon which I lately gave example.

Wordsworth, whose famous 'daffodils' poem I've quoted above was one of the better known exponents of the 'beauty of the simple' school of thought. He seemed to encourage us to stop, look and listen, to appreciate the dialects of the common people and the rustic rhythms of their time-less lifestyle. His is the kind of Romanticism that we have to thank for much of the folklore that was tirelessly compiled during that century, just as those traditions were starting to give way before a tide of change.

Many of the pleasures of life that I personally enjoy on a regular basis are actually a part of the legacy of this species of Romanticism also. The conscious enjoyment I take in being a 'solitary walker', in the appreciating the natural capacity for wonder and the innocence of my beautiful children, in objects of antiquarian interest and natural history, in returning to simpler more natural ways of living, in the story of place and the myths of it's people. All of these things may be said to owe something to the 'Wordsworthian' strain of Romanticism, to associate it with his daffodils that so well typify the experience. I think a wonderful example of this ability to see something more in an everyday occurance than what other's see, and therefore experience a 'bliss of solitude' when others are only noticing some yellow flowers, is this extract about William Blake:

When he was about nine, he told his parents he had seen “a tree filled with angels” on one of his walks; he later reported a similar vision of “angelic figures walking” in a field among workers as they gathered in the hay (Gilchrist 1: 7). Unlike the child in Wordsworth’s poem, however, Blake never outgrew these visions. He was past fifty when he described seeing the rising sun as “an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty”

And it is when these experiences are at their most intense that the so called 'two types' of Romanticism can be shown to indeed be part of one whole. Sometimes the imposing beauty that a sudden realisation experienced in a common situation, but with extraordinary vividness can be almost awful and approach the condition of the sublime. The experience is reached in two different ways, one through extremes, deprivation followed by excess, mystery, horror. And the other through an equally intense heightened awareness of the inherent mystery in the simplest object. As Blake so well described it:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

One of these methods, and they are we should make no mistake, transcendental methods, relies very much on external rare stimuli and the other on the perception; on being awake to the potentials of common external stimuli. Most Romantics use in their poetry (and you would assume appreciate and know in their lives) both kinds of transportation, at one time or another.

And I think there is great wisdom in this for us today. Because this brand of secular transcendental thinking is very appealing and accessible for many today, who may also be disenchanted with organised religion and looking for an unregulated experience of the divine. It shows us that the Romantic Quest, which is a life consciously and therefore artistically lived, where we remain enchanted with life, requires us to seek those peak experiences in diverse ways. We cannot spend an entire life seeking to be worked up into a frenzy of holy-dread. As Lord Byron very succinctly pointed out, if one were forever in such a state how would anyone shave? And if one seeks too often extreme sensation at the expense of the simpler joys one runs the risk of becoming too quickly jaded. The Romantic quest should ideally be for sustainable magic in our lives, not a fast burn that leaves us saying 'yes, well there was more daffodils last Spring and really this is nothing by comparison to the Swiss Alps.'

When we become practiced at enjoying the simple and wholesome delights that can be found in things like children, home cooked food, fresh air, brisk walks in the cool air and the site of Spring flowers; we will find ourselves all the more sensitised for a dose of the sublime when it errupts into our lives. Some of the ways that the sublime may emerge into daily life I would suggest would be through the bliss/terror and total helplessness of true love, through moments of extreme weather where we are reminded of our smallness, through the fear/thrill of being upon a precipice, sudden unexpected moments of crisis where everything goes quiet,we seem to move slowly and are suddenly more conscious of everything, confronting mortality in some situations and being in the presence of a truly wild animal. Really these two things are just two different ways of being conscious of being conscious, and therefore extracting more delicious and subtle pleasures from the great art of life.

The Sublime: Romanticism and the frontiers of sensuality

2009-02-05T19:30:00.000-08:00

Like many words today 'sublime' has lost it's power. Like it's twin-sister 'awful', except in the opposite direction, the original complexity of the term has resolved into a simplistic word for something very pleasant. And it is interesting when a word falls into disuse, or its meaning simplifies, especially if no word arises to replace it. Because often it means we aren't using it because we aren't feeling it. Allow me to explain.

The sublime existed on certain frontiers of sensation, where sensual experience of unusual intensity intersected with the divine or mysterious. This wasn't always a pleasant thing, one can speak of a sublime love but also a sublime of terror, awe, sorrow, or many mixtures of these things that we classify as positive and negative feelings. But by and large these things were strong, extreme, awe-inspiring. A field of daffodils is beautiful and inspiring, but a yawning precipice that plunges away into 'chasms measureless to man' is sublime. It is related to the sensations of holy-dread that our ancestors understood as a godly force, from which we derive the word 'pan-ic'.

The Romantic movement was at the heart of itself a rebellion. It was a movement explicitely in the teeth of early 19th.C industrialism, rigid class structure and institutionalised religion. As such 'the sublime' was almost their way of describing a secular religious or mystical experience in terms that were taken as literary and therefore acceptable. One of the most obvious examples of this is Shelley's 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty', even the title is a perfect example of how the mystical nature of this experience was being coated in intellectual terms. ('Thou' is intellectual beauty)

"Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!...

With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love’s delight
Outwatched with me the envious night—
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou—O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express."

Here you can see the nature of the Romantic conception of the sublime as 'awful loveliness', but also the intensity of this experience which we see causes Shelley to shriek, his heart to hammer wildly and his eyes to stream with tears! This should serve to remind us if nothing else, among the platitudes dished up in the place of mystical experience, what a strong mystical experience actually looks like.

In a lot of ways you could say that the Romantics tended to insert the word 'sublime' instead of 'divine', but in doing so they brought a whole dimension back to mystical experience that had been lacking since the days of pre-Christian Europe. And so, for the first time in a long time, beauty as a full bodied sensual experience was back, along with fear, darkness, and sexuality. The work of the Romantics celebrates a form of mystical experience that I believe is deeply needed and nourishing to us today. Because the world we live in today is just their world, taken to all the extremes of industrialisation, mechanisation and environmental destruction that they feared.

I am about to hit you with examples. If you think you don't like poetry stay with me for a little while and give these words a chance. I want you to do something different with them than what you normally do when you read. Before you start take a couple of deep breathes, close your eyes and try and really 'be' in your body, notice your breath and your heart-beats. When you have done that I want you to read these little snippets outloud to yourself, even if you are well familiar with them. As you do notice the sensual quality of how the words sound as well as their meaning, and how this adds to the full-bodied thrill they were designed to evoke in us:

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold :
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

Now if you didn't feel that, if your own blood didn't thick a little with cold and you didn't at the same time get a strange shudder of delight, go into the next room and throw some cold water in your own face. Return and try this one.

"I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing."

If you didn't feel it at the 'and no birds sing' refrain, read over again and linger like a lover's hand over the beautiful assonance in the phrase 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci hath thee in thrall'. Its like syphillus, even if you didn't know what it means it sounds beautiful. Did you shudder? If not slap yourself twice across the face hard to wake yourself up a bit and try this one.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river."

Okay, if said the words: "And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
as if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing," outloud and lingered over them as I suggested, without some degree of sexual arousal there is simply no hope for you.
But if these passages did give you a little shudder, a catch of breath or a warm rush of blood to the face or groin, then congratulations, you are still alive and have just experienced the Romantic Sublime.

Vintage Erotica

2009-01-30T16:26:00.000-08:00

How beautiful is some of this stuff! Literally a lost art. If anyone can actually get past the pictures there is a philosophical discussion on here about the aesthetics of vintage eroticism versus modern porn and some invitations to consider the questions for yourself.

Vintage Erotica: http://www.spaceandmotion.com/erotica-vintage.htm

Personally I tend to disagree that it has anything to do with expliciteness. But this is of course a highly subjective area, whether one considers an explicit shot 'beautiful' depends on what sort of conditioning one has received about what beauty is and what parts of the body are beautiful. Certainly the element of mystery and beauty in some of these pictures is enhanced by the drapery and the poses, I'm all for pretty ornaments. But really I've seen some older style pictures that are just as explicite as modern pornography but in a totally different universe of style. The black and whites are just more artistic because of their reliance on light and shadow, but its also the fact that the women in them are real women with normal curves, natural breasts and individual idiosyncracies. Not a labioplasty among them. There are examples here.

http://vintagelovelies.com/cabinet/eroticphoto/93

http://www.vintageclassicporn.com/g/1920/index.html

When you've meandered through here for a while other than stopping to admire the beauty of the human form and the beauty and joy of sexuality, consider this: what can be known about a society by it's turn-ons? A great deal I would suggest. And what do we know about our era from how modern pornography compares to the older stuff?
Once you've done that you'll probably feel pretty depressed, so I suggest you finish on this thought: the contemporary facination with the vintage and anarchronistic and the capacity for self awareness that information technology like the web gives us puts us in an unparalleled position to choose aspects of our culture. We can choose to select past aesthetics over our own, to 'colonise the past' as Steampunk Magazine calls it, we can refuse the cheap and mundane and select the beautiful, mysterious and the natural.

Introductory Blog

2009-01-18T03:16:00.000-08:00

This blog is going to be a bit of an adventure, a work of alchemy or perhaps a big pot of steaming gumbo. I'm not a hundred percent sure. It is primarily a Romantic project, and a move toward begining to talk about what a new Romanticism, or a post-Romanticism might mean. But its my take on it you might say, along with the 'post' aspect of in 'post-modernism' that points to pulling apart, re-configuring and reimagining, the Romanticism in this blog is a Frankenstein's monster dreamed up from all the aspects sub-cultures that have affected me most. The Romantics were moving toward primitivism, I take this to full blown animism, the Romantics liked to play around with opium and the use of highly aroused states of horror and awe to alter consciousness, I'm taking the exploration of trance and consciousness altering to a specialist level. Our Romantic forebears were pantheists I'm talking about a grittier, earthier eco-spirituality that suits our times, replete with the possiblity and colour of pagan gods rampaging back into the halls of the imagination and unabashed fetishist splendour.
My experiments with post-Romanticism take place against the backdrop of Van Diemen's Land and are therefore influenced by Tasmanian Gothic, though I do hope that the content here will be of interest to others outside the apple isle. But any movement interested in animism and the history of place as part of the imaginative heritage of a post-Romantic sensibility cannot ignore location, and thus it shall be part of my posts. I do hope over time we will see some interesting things developing as the articles, thoughts, poems, stories and fragements of post-Romantic philosophy and sorcerous musings on this site begin to expand.

yours in enthusiasmos

Alice Kyteler

A Defence of Poetry

2008-09-15T20:01:00.000-07:00

Meditations on the Poetic Art - ‘A Defence’

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

-Shelley ‘Adonais’

I am going to make an attempt in this essay to define the act of poetry from a mystical point of view. And in so doing I hope to approach an understanding of the poetic impulse itself.

Poetry is an art concerned with the production of what, in the most banal terms, are experienced as ‘beautiful words’. However, at the heart of the impulse governing poetry is a desire to go beyond words, a continuous and fatal attempt to exceed their normal capacity for expression.

But given that words are not discarded altogether in favour of some pre-verbal form of performance art, we must see an attempt at fusion here, a walking of a line, between the sayable and the unsayable. This very concept presupposes a mystical framework, because for humans to wish to word the unsayable, we must assume that humans possess within them the ability to feel and experience things that are beyond the nexus of words that most of our conscious communication with others is governed by. This flies in the face of extreme postmodern theories of language, which sometimes suggest that all human experience is totally conditioned by language.

There is a problem here. For something to be thinkable language is indeed a predicate. For something of any complexity to be conveyed to another, language is also a predicate. But the realm of mystical experience and even the realm of feeling, do seem to provide us (in their purest forms) with such pre-verbal experiences that might explain the impulse to poetry.

People feel the need to express and be understood, this seems to be a universal thing. However the range of things that we feel, and feel the need to have understood by others, goes far beyond what stark Darwinian biological models of language and social development can account for. People feel things that touch on infinity, and they feel emotions outside of the ‘either/or’ parameters of language. Even when we attempt to describe an emotion as ‘bitter/sweet’ we have already lost it’s essence. We are forced to place one term before the other and give it the cognitive advantage of primacy, we are forced to write these things as two separate words which gives the illusion that two feelings are being experienced at once, rather than one integral one, which just happens to be an outrage to language. So we create words like ‘poignant’, and yet still a lean exists in one direction or another as to whether the word is interpreted closer to the ‘happy’ side of the scale, or the ‘sad’ side. And yet truly alive emotions do not work like this, they are a tumble of sensation which seems to resist being lined up in this manner. And yet once we line it up, something happens. Our responses to what we are feeling are affected, depending on which side of the either/or spectrum we choose to word them with.

What this results in is a deadening of language and of our own ability to experience things in wholeness and primacy, without layers of interpretive language piling up on top of them. Poetry eternally fights these forces of calcification, it heats, beats, bends, melts, moves and shakes up words, until they are better able to word emotions that are still alive and haven’t been done to death by rigid, unimaginative wordings. It is poetry that defends us against these mundanity breeding forces. Without it the range of things sayable would get narrower and narrower and as we wouldn’t have poetry to point to the space unsayable behind words, we might forget that there ever was anything unsayable, our emotions resolving into prosaic homogeneity as we fall into the trap of the literal, the comfortable, the labelled. In fact I think our world is beginning to lose poetry already…

Poetry is therefore about the ‘torture’ of language. There is something acting upon the structures of language, which in themselves represent the way the human organic intellectual faculties work (by which I mean the sense for grammar which is universal among mankind) something acting to disorder those structures in ways that express creative fusion and hybridity. Something which liberates language through its own torture, dismembering, and initiatory resurrection.

What then does it mean from a mystical point of view? This desire to take this medium which speaks of earthly division into either/or and contort it till it points to something behind it that can never really be said? I would suggest a very high place of importance for poetry. I would suggest that it embodies man’s own affirmation of the worth of his experience and his longing for immortality. The very fact that we try to dress our personal experience in language, try to marry the unseen reality of each human life to the seen reality of words, is a metaphor for the ‘supreme obtainment’ or philosopher’s stone of tradition.

Each time we enact this sacred marriage we attempt to give voice to the spirit’s eternal reality as witness, through the lens of the colours of the soul and finally imprinted down in the material manifestation of words. The poetic act contains an unspoken statement. It says: ‘I have glimpsed what Shelley called ‘the white radiance of eternity’, I see with its eye, I know that death will trample all these colours of my life to fragments. But in this act where I shine light through them, somehow I draw away with me into that whiteness a history of these colours, a trace, a memory. By the very fact that I both sink and soar in this act of composition I have brought together that which appeared apart, I have solved the riddle, I have sacrificed myself to myself, I have known the wedding chamber, I have gone, I am forever reappearing.’

By the time you read these words the moment that gave birth to them will have passed, the fire that was in my head will have long seeped out through the well of colours that swirls like abstract-expressionism inside me, and finally into the solid arms of ink and page. And yet you can read them now, again and again, a reproduction of the instant, hinting at it, losing it and saving it at the same time. Doing both at the same time, unable to make a word for this and yet able to make us aware of the lack of one. This art is, after all, nothing less than a ritual re-enactment of our own completion, in which we are forever lost and found.

A Vision

2008-07-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

Here in poetry form is the record of a vision which came to me on the wings of the Green Faerie, after a long wander in the vaporous woods of Lady Mari. In a state of protracted erotic excitement and heightened sensory awareness I penned the following record of my visions. Given my state of undress it is fortunate that no 'person from Porlock' came calling.

I began on the backward
womb passage
blood line of the cord-bridge
crossed the placenta
of my Mother's, Mother's
Mothers.
Like fording a river
like a disease
like the old cunning
that moves in darkness.

I am them
and they in me
I am the cunny of the world
the pleasure of its women
the back-arched savage joy
that shatters out
all the hard edges
the
sink of memory
that gurgles up
from our beginings
in Her great thighs.

I am the womb-burden
the birth blossom
bruising
of the noble womanhood
of this proud island.
I am million legged
and armed
She whom we were all within
as potential,
Russian doll like,
as she moved unaware
the wind
from the future
only shivering her
with its voices
on the backs of her arms.

She would Mother a nation.

Hush-
In the air
of her breathing
holy quiet,
as she sleeps.
Post-coital
never dreaming
of the march of her conception.
Have a care,
we her children,
not to wake her
with the eyes of thousands.
Mother
say it with tenderness,
Mother of my Mother's Mother's
daughter of Don
sprouted from the soil
like a golden corn ear
sealed and perfect,
suckled at the tit
of the Void,
on milk made from starlight
and all the old land chalk
is in your beautiful bones
that I would lift to my lips
and kiss
with all their grave dirt on.
Ancestress.
You are a giantess
I move as
in this land
that I am
and am of.
And I welcome
and know the manhood
of Britain, through your knowing,
As it comes forth from me
draws its life from me
in a long, slow ache of joy
too strong to say its hurt.
As it plunges in me also
hard
a deep-searching root
that draws its power
from the oak's knotted wood sinews,
and the hot-blood-rut
in the balls of the bulls.

I am the warrior
some woman's son
every woman's son
my son
myself
bleeding out
the last pulse-given
flood of his redness
into the corpse-coddling green
and
the bone-seeded loamy black
of this thrice beloved land.

Then I, at the leaving of the breath
at its yeilding
am only
the fingernail scrape screech
of the sea bird's voice
that calls the
dying
birthing-song
of Rhiannon.

I am the sadness depth
of a ruin by the sea
crumbled
burial cairn
of Branwen's broken heart.
Looking westward,
the faraway eyes of my people
filled up to overflow
with the horizon.
The view that the eagle only
sees of the ice fortress
of Eryri-
land of poets-
And the deep, thumping,
stamping, irrepressible
song of the ocean
that sluices through the halls
of our heart.

Visions from the Land

2008-03-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

Recently Australia saw a historic occurance between its indigenous and non-indigenous population; something that has been dubbed 'sorry day.' For many Aboriginal and Koori people who were taken from their family and culture and forcibly Christianised at missions, this was a belated but important apology for their suffering.
What was in fact missed by many non-indigenous viewers was the fact that something historic and important happened for us on that day also. And no, I am not referring to the possibility that this may lead to compensation claims, but something a little more profound. For the first time that I am aware of, an elder that the Aboriginal and Koori people's chose to represent them, formally welcomed us to this land.
For those of us who consider ourselves pagan or who follow any form of animistic spirituality, this is an important moment; one that should provoke a reevaluation of our relationship with the land and it's first people's. There is of course also a great deal more to experiencing the land-soul of this country than obtaining the welcome of other humans. Pagans of European descent typically do not understand or work with the land powers of this land well, which can do nothing to enhance the quality of pagan reconstruction occuring on Australian soil. I hope my experiences can go somewhere towards remedying this problem.
Generally speaking I find that there are two types of non-indigenous pagan in this country; those who ignore the fact that they are in the southern hemisphere altogether and stoically push on with their festivals in the wrong order because it is more 'traditional', and those who make the necessary basic adjustments. The broad umbrella group of 'those who make concessions' is wide indeed. The most common adaptation is simply the reversal of festivals to aline with the seasons here. This is simply common sense for any earth-honouring tradition, failure to do so indicates a greater respect for calenders than for the land itself, and little more need be said about this.
Some of the groups making concessions acknowledge that many places on this vast and diverse continent do not possess four distinct seasons and may include terms like 'the wet' in their rituals. But here we begin to encounter terrain fraught with deep complications that highlight a vexed relationship with the land and its original inhabitants. A vexation that I believe manifests in surprising ways.
There is a complex relationship of guilt and alienation that the Westerner is heir to in Australia. In most people this complex lies buried, expressing itself only in huge environmental insensitivity and hostility, and the mental health issues and suicides that are statistically high in the bush and outback areas. It is only among the pagan community that these contradictions and conflicts are encountered face to face and either deal with or not dealt with as the case may be.
In my case I am of part English part Welsh ethnicity, born in Australia to an English ex-pat, and myself a British citizen. As a child I lived in England for a time and have been back on six occasions. So when I awakened to my 'inner pagan' I did so, whilst being in nine square kilometres (three miles) of bush, in a distinctly British sort of way. It wasn't that I disrespected the land around me, it was simply that I didn't know how to approach it. I imagined that the land itself was somehow 'Aboriginal' and that Aboriginal people only really felt part of it.
Although as a conscious belief this would be riddiculous for any animist, (as how can anyone not be part of the land-soul of their environment?) as a subconscious feeling I believe this view point to be very pervasive. It took a recent experience of the local land-powers to really make me look again at this issue.
Out alone in the bush and near some beautiful large bodies of water, after having made offerings to the land spirits and entered a light meditative state, I quickly began to receive strong impressions from the intelligences that were all around me. I made a conscious effort to abandon what I thought I knew about the Australian bush. Before I tell you of the actual experience I would like to talk about what they were. Because in a sense it was moving beyond this assumptions that made the experience possible at all.
One of the curious things I've noticed is that the Australian bush has a strange affect on the Western mind. There is the most obvious example of the Australian term 'bush-wacked' to describe those who have spent too much time in the isolation of the Australian bush and begun to mentally unravel. The less obvious can be observed by a glance at our imaginative life. Anyone who encounters the novel 'Voss' or 'Tree of Man' by one of our more important novelists Patrick White, will be struck by the sense of whiteness, blankness, void, with which the outback is depicted. And to the Western gaze, it is not surprising. To someone British what we call the 'tyranny of distance' assaults the spirit first, the sense of a vast and changeless environment with an ever receeding sky-line. Australia possesses summer skies that fit Elizabeth Barrett Browning's description of 'the vertical eye-glare of the absolute heavens', dry colourless grass, and an absense of old human monuments. When we settlers strive to conceive of an imaginative vision of the land, we do so in half-hearted, tacky, commercially exploited splashes of Aboriginal art. Something that we seldom bother to really understand first. We have not yet imagined ourselves into this landscape. We remain in our own imaginations; interlopers, thieves, and worse murderers. Or even worse we tell ourselves racsist fantasies to obscure this awareness.
I remember vividly being taken as a child to see a cliff where numerous Aboriginal people had been thrown to their deaths on the rocks below, by white settlers. I remember even as an eight year old, the cold feeling of dread that creeped over me in that place, the sense of corruption of the soil, this was a sad and angry place and I fancied I could still smell death. At school the face and name of Truganini (the last full blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal to the survive the extermination of her people) was enough to fill my soul (clearly more sensitive than many of my contempories) with a looming sense of racial blood-guilt. The environment around me, imaginatively, was scarred and full of angry ghosts. All of this had to be overcome before I was properly able to interact with the spirit of the place.
I discovered through historical sources that the site of my meditation had not directly been home to any Aboriginal tribes. It was an idea so foriegn to my British sensibilities, but this place had in fact been almost empty of humans for the many aeons that it had existed. For most of that time it had been a location difficult to access, before the invention of modern roads, cut through rock and mountain to dam the great river.
What I sensed when I slid deeper into an earth listening state was an amazing sense of pristiness, of purity, of imaginal richness also, that belied the apparent 'grey and brown' of the environment. The mountain to my right became to my inner sight a hollow golden orb. To say it was hollow was in fact a mistake, as it was full of this golden light and tall willowy figures seemed to dance and move harmoniously within. As my awareness expanded to take in the entirety of the place I discovered a dusky primeval quality around the water, with points of light arising from it, usually golden in colour, a dreaming haze, sometimes sharpening in intensity to reveal beings that seemed made of liquid light.
Out of the navy blue of the nearby waterhole, emerged an awesome coiling power. It too was dusky in hue, but caught up in its body were colours seen darkly, like oil in water. The dominant impression was of the darkness of deep water. This force oozed up out of the waterhole, sinuous and spiralling. Whilst it seemed to be encompassing the mountain I had a lulling, rhythmic sensation of already being held within the liquid matrix of it's power, as though my body were literally being moved slightly in water. Finally the serpentine form twisted in my direction and I perceived that it bore a woman's head.
What struck me about the face was that it was not the face of an Aboriginal woman, as I had been conditioned to expect. This is not to say that the face was explicitely European either. It was a woman's face made up of night-sky and deep water, it had no nationality. At this moment I sense a moving closer of one of the tall golden beings within the mountain. He, for such it seemed to be, came close to me. I got the impression that he was perhaps a spirit of a Eucalypt, or some other nature spirit, as none of these entites felt as though they had been human, though of this I am not certain. He communicated strongly, locking my awareness into his so that he had my full attention.I will not try to word exactly what he told me. Suffice to say that he made the curiousity and friendliness of his kind known to me. He pointed out to me that the mythology and culture of Aboriginal people was a product of the relationship between a land and a people. And that if we were going to experience this land we would have to do so by allowing this interaction to occur between who we are and the character of the land.
I came away from this experience with the realisation that the effective experience of animism in this country cannot be experienced either by rejection of the land around us in favour of what we bring with us, or of abandoning who we are and trying to become 'white Aboriginals'; but by a marriage of the two. As simple and common sense as this may sound there will be many who will object to any 'imprinting' of Celtic or Norse mythology or religion onto a land they see as 'belonging' to indigenous people. I believe this to be wrong for two reasons. One is that the dreaming of this country is not a static entity, if you look at the implications of 'The Dreaming' in Aboriginal religion, the dreaming of this land now dreams the white man too. The dreaming dreams us, and by implication It does not reject the imaginative life of those within It. Secondly, indigenous people have famously always maintained that they did not own this land but that they instead belonged to it. If we are to establish a healthier relationship with the ground beneath our feet I believe this is a notion that we could all do to meditate upon. Because no land is limited, defined or owned by the perceptions or the mythology of its human inhabitants. The land and each individual within it are continually re-dreamed at every instant. I believe if we are able to all accept this we will be one step closer to a state of harmony with this place.

The Magic Time and the Celtic Soul

2007-12-17T20:54:00.000-08:00

As we look around us today we are surrounded by the relics of the Celtic past. It seems that every second shop now sells things decorated with Celtic knotwork, Celtic jewellery, Celtic music or dance. It may be this heightened exposure that has led to an increasing amount of awareness that the word 'Celtic' does not refer to any kind of material reality. Some people even recognise the word as an outgrowth of the Celtic Twilight movement of the late nineteenth century.
Although this is to some extent true the roots of Celtic revivalism can be traced firmly back to the Romantic age, and in some cases even before. In the late eighteenth century William Stukeley began his investigation into Britain's megalithic stone circles and tombs. This sudden interest in the stones, which had previously mainly served the local people as convenient building materials, was part of a groundswell of interest in anthropology and folklore, a tendency that we refer to as 'Romantic.'
If it is fair to say that many of the qualities that we have come to associate with Celticism hark from the Celtic Twilight period, then it would also be fair to say that the Celtic Twilight owed itself to the Romantic age proper before it. Peter Tregear describes the relationship between Celticism and the literary movement in the following way:

For artists not directly connected to Ireland or associated political causes, the imagined fringe-dwelling Celt could therefore serve as an attractive cipher for the anxiety they felt towards the `mainstream,' however that was defined. So it was that Celticism became characterised at the beginning of the twentieth century as essentially an anti-modernist fantasy about loss, and--by extension--an allegory of the artist him-or-herself who now felt similarly to be on the periphery of the modern world.

As much as there is something snipey and decidedly anti-Romantic about this quote, I think it manages to point out something important. I think we can indeed talk about a Romantic impulse (symbiosis with the land, interest in ancient traditions and folklore, love of mystery for its own sake, the remote, the sublime) marginalized by the continuous march of modernism. But I do not see this marginalisation as a reflection only of Romantic egotism, but a deep rooted pagan urge coming to the surface in a society no longer under the grip of the church to the same extent as before.
The Romantic age was about more than just an aesthetic interest in the qualities of nature, it was a strongly mystical movement. One needs only look at Thomas Gray's poem 'The Descent of Odin' to see an example of a radical new thinking. Many early Romantics like Gray were attempting to replace the 'stage-peice' Greek gods of Classicism, with the Celtic and Norse mythologies of their homeland. By the end of the nineteenth century these interests had crystallised into an even more determined urge to save what was left of Britain's Celtic and pagan heritage.
If one looks at the movement called by some 'Celticism', in relation to the political social situation that Ireland, Wales and Scotland were facing at the time, it is easy to understand the name 'Celtic Twilight.' Folklorists and poets attempting to save the relics of the past were facing prejudice against the Gaelic and Brythonic languages and customs, and a mass literacy movement that was doing its best to stamp out the differences between England and its fringes. This era also saw the continuing increase of factories and enclosures and the begining of technologies that were to make the world feel smaller. In this context we need to understand phenomena like the sense of meloncholy which has become so intrinsic to the way we view being 'Celtic.'
The Welsh word 'hiraeth' almost embodies this sense of longing to sicken and die for, homesickness of the soul. And although a similar word is found in Gaelic and this concept no doubt predates the Romantic period, there was certainly a strong emphasis placed upon this nostalgic aspect of the Celtic consciousness. Fiona Macleod, in his preface to The Washer at the Ford speaks of 'the Gael in his sorrows' and the deep existential meloncholy to be found in the term 'I have the gloom.' This longing, this homesickness is not for the physical locale of Wales, Scotland or Ireland, but for a imagined world, one imagined as lost.
In fact, so much of what we have come to think of as 'Celtic' has to do with this sense of twilight, this sense of loss of a greater past, that it is easier to see being 'Celtic' as a Romantic and post-Romantic phenomena rather than an ancient one.
As J.R.R Tolkien put it:

"Celtic"... is a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come... Anything is possible in this fabulous Celtic Twilight.

I chose this quote because it says something very important. It allows breathing space for the creative beauty of what was occuring, for embracing a Celtic Renaissance, a rebirth of something that may never have existed, but does, because it is the product of the group soul and its imaginative life. The very longing for a more 'pure' British past that leads people to reject the fuzzy (I prefer misty) term 'Celtic' is itself a manifestation of the Celtic Twilight. The longing that leads us to try to preserve but also to recreate, and create, out of the fertility of our love for the land and its people.
We are fortunate to be heirs to the writers of the Celtic Twilight, in all its meloncholic beauty. Fiona Macleod who brought us words full of the brooding mists of the imagination, words with the capacity to haunt the soul. Words like these:

I saw the Weaver of Dreams, an immortalshape of star-eyed Silence; and the Weaver of Death, a lovely Dusk with a heart of hiddenflame; and each wove with the shuttles of beauty and Wonder and Mystery...Come unto me, O lovely Dusk, thou that has the heart of hidden flame.

Yeats, with a voice as wistful as the dying strains of the song of the sidhe, who told us:

‘I am of Ireland,
The Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’

By Welsh voices like Waldo Williams, that flame into being full of feirce pride in their language, and are still beautiful in English:

Dyma'r mynyddoedd. Ni fedr ond un iaith eu codiA'u rhoi yn eu rhyddid yn erbyn wybren cân.Ni threiddiodd ond un i oludoedd eu tlodi,Trwy freuddwyd oesoedd, gweledigaethau munudau mân .

Here are the mountains. Only one language can raise them.
And, in their freedom, place them against a sky of song.
Only one could penetrate to the wealth of their poverty,
Through the dream of ages, visions come and gone.

Our imaginative and our spiritual debt to these writers is enormous. As Yeats poem says:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread carefully because you tread on my dreams.

When we traverse the landscape of modern Celticism we do so over the dreams of these poets and writers that tried to reimagine the land and people. Fiona Macleod even left us an inspiring vision of the Celtic Twilight, that though it may feel offensive to some of pure 'Celtic' background, as someone of Anglo-Celtic extraction it made a kind of sad sense:

A doomed and passing race. Yes, but not wholly so. The Celt has at last reached his horizon. There is no shore beyond. He knows it. This has been the burden of his song since Malvina led the blind Oisìn to his grave by the sea. “Even the Children of Light must go down into darkness.” But this apparition of a passing race is no more than the fulfilment of a glorious resurrection before our very eyes. For the genius of the Celtic race stands out now with averted torch, and the light of it is a glory before the eyes, and the flame of it is blown into the hearts of the mightier conquering people. The Celt falls, but his spirit rises in the heart and the brain of the Anglo-Celtic peoples, with whom are the destinies of the generations to come.

As unpleasant as the words 'a mightier conquering people' might be to the ears of any Celt, there is a real wisdom and hope in this vision of a continuity that lives within the heart and brain. England might have conquered the land, but the in the land of the imagination the day has been won by the Celt, whether we truly know who he is or not. As the Scots say: 'the English can trample down the heather, but they'll never trample down the wind.' And perhaps with new technologies that seem like magic, that can tell use the origin of our ancestors from a tiny cell of us, all the old national lines we drew ourselves will become less meaningful. Because where the 'heart and brain' feel the pulls of the land and receive the poetry of being Celtic, even writing in English needs be no block to contributing to that great tradition. Voices like that of Dylan Thomas, who was not a political Welshman, are nonetheless full of the verbal ingenuity and richness of his native land, his poetry embodies the deep burr of ancient brooding lakes and the uncompromising flint edges of the mountains. As he said of his own work his poems are not so much crafted as 'hewn.'

Thomas had a message that I feel is very appropriate for us as lovers of Celtic Twilight. Something that can spur the heart to reimagine twilight and the coming dark, as right, and yet something that our spirit's fires will burn bright hot in resistance to and so manifest a great beauty.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.