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Wild Child?

21/8/2013

2 Comments

 
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Shetland ponies, water horses and oracle cards.

Preface
As some of my readers know, I have been experimenting with readings on relationships with animals. In one of the first readings I did, the Beach card came up. The Beach is one of several cards which describes a "thin place" or a liminal space where two entities converge. In Celtic spirituality, such places are particularly magical or prone to "supernatural" happenings. As I considered this reading I realised that there are points in human-animal relations that have this powerful, liminal quality, and that both animals and humans may experience this. I am talking about something different than simply sharing love or affection, companionship and mutual support. I think these experiences draw their power from the essential differences between the human and the animal involved. While the opportunity for such moments may always be there, many of us don't experience them, or only rarely, although part of our attraction to animals may be that we recognise the potential for them at a deep level.

I once did a reading for someone who was constantly plagued by feelings of both anger and anxiety. This card was central to her reading. It turned out that her husband was somewhat verbally abusive, but what she found most hurtful was that he never took her seriously. No matter what she did or said, he'd consider it childish or silly. The Shetland Pony is a card of the misunderstood, of the one not taken seriously. Frequently the response is to avoid eye contact and just put up with things, or to find an outlet in rebellion.
As I see the Shetland Pony card - someone is not treated with dignity. (Enough, in itself, to create some anger....) There are some things that certain people will probably never understand or be able to take seriously. If you are the pony you will probably find a way around this, enough to get by in the situation, without giving up everything! However, you may find that you are constantly nagged or teased by friends or family because of your interests or tastes. Writing this, I have a little twinge of guilt, as I know I've been on the "dishing out" end of this,  as well as the receiving. Sometimes these things are about scoring points, other times just a failure to take others seriously. Patronising is a word that comes to mind!
shetland pony, stanley howe
photo by Stanley Howe


This failure to understand, and to think we know best, carries over into impatience when we find that the other person has dug their heels in over "something silly". But we're all afraid of something silly! I know people who would rather jump out of a plane than give a speech in public and others who would prefer to have a tooth pulled than learn to use a computer. Just as we might see someone's refusal to do something as stubborn, when they are really afraid, so we may make the same misjudgement about ourselves. Then we come up with phrases like "It's just the way I am, " or "No way am I doing that, it's stupid!" because these positions feel less threatening than simply saying, "I'm scared. You'd have to be really patient with me for me to even try that."

This is the obvious and "top layer" meaning of the card. It's the one I would probably focus on when it comes up in someone's reading. However, I knew there was more to this card, and for days, I have caught glimpses of it and wrestled with it, but there were missing pieces. I hope that I have found, if not all the missing pieces, at least enough of them to show us the way...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Water horse, liminal horse.

nokken, njuggle, jonny andvik
NĂžkken by Jonny Andvik

In the Shetland Islands, there is a creature called the njuggle (or njogle - there are lots of variations. This creature is part of folklore, and until recently part of folk belief. The njuggle (pronounces nyuggle) is essentially a supernatural Shetland pony, who is associated with bodies of water such as lochs and streams. It seems that many bodies of water in Shetland have one. One habit of njuggles is to prance and parade up and down the banks of their home water, often beautifully saddled and bridled, enticing some hapless human to mount them. As soon as this occurs, they plunge into the water with their rider and give them a good dooking, or in some sinister versions they drown and even devour their victim. Most Shetland njuggles are more the playful type, though.

Some readers will recognise the Scottish/Irish Kelpie, or "water horse", in this description. (Forget the whole 2007 movie of the same title - just forget it. We're talking about someone's traditional beliefs here, not about Hollywood.) There are certainly parallels all over Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, where such creatures are sometimes called the nĂžk, or nyk, etc. Etymologists tell us that this may well be the origin of referring to the devil as "Auld Nick" as well as possibly relating to sea gods like the Celtic god Nechtan, and even Neptune (who created the horse, in some myths). Horses and water are frequently linked in both myth and folklore.  I've also noticed that if you remove the letter N from the names Nechtan and Neptune, it is possible to see the relationship of both words to early word roots denoting the horse including the Latin equos/equus, the Greek hippos, and the Gaulish epos. These roots gave us words like Epona, pony, and the Gaelic word for horse: each.

Back in Shetland, another common prank of the njuggle was to inhabit the space under mill wheels and stop the wheel when it took their fancy. Maybe they were jealous, as the tails of some njuggles were said to be like wheels, which they used to propel themselves through the water. Or maybe they simply wanted to halt the wheels of "progress" which would eventually drive them into a kind of extinction. In these cases, they could be scared away with fire, like so many of the things we once feared.

At the liminal point between land and water there is a field of energy which at once repels and attracts - where we fear and yet desire to enter the wildness of the water, to give up control of the wildness in us to a greater wildness. The Irish mystic writer,John Moriarty, talked in an interview, about this need for wildness ~

"We shape the earth to suit ourselves. We plough it and we knock it and we shape it and we re-shape it. Dolphins were land animals once, and they went down into the sea. They said to the ocean, "Well, shape me to suit you." And now -- the Lord save us, I was in a house in Connemara sometime recently, and I saw a dolphin bone. The curve of it was as beautiful as any couple of bars of Mozart's music. It was so beautiful! I've no bone in my body that is shaped to the earth like that.

"So they said, "Shape us to suit you". We went the opposite way, We shape the earth to suit us - and that's going to fail. Unless there's wildness around you, something terrible happens to the wildness inside of you. And if the wildness inside of you dies. I think you're finished."

For some reason horses offer us a way to make this connection, but not by harnessing and forcing them into our control. Not by "knocking and shaping and re-shaping" them. It is only when we find a way to merge our wildness with theirs, or have the merger thrust upon us, that it actually does us any good. Still, this involves some danger. Swimming or putting a small boat out into wild water, riding a horse galloping out of control, both must be similar on the scale of dangerous things to do. There is always vulnerability in liminal experiences. The danger of getting stuck "in limbo", of not finding our way back...of somehow falling through the cracks of our own experience.

Modern people, I think, lack the liminal experiences which were once achieved through ritual, through feeling themselves a part of nature, through rites of passage and though belief in the supernatural. Yet these are things we long for. How and whether modern people manage to recover this part of life may just be the defining questions of our survival, and whether, if we survive, we thrive or we languish. Yet simply having a liminal experience may not be enough if we don't have points of reference for it. In "traditional" cultures, points of reference were marked by the rituals and prescriptions surrounding various life events, both the pivotal and the routine. They gave an assurance of success to the experience, if not a guarantee. Many folk beliefs, and their associated tales, offer advice as to how to avoid unwanted outcomes within liminal experiences or how to deal with them if they overtake us, and many heroic myths have grown up around dealing with such things.

Much has been written in the past twenty years about our spiritual connections with horses. Throughout human history they have been repeatedly raised as icons of something wild, free, powerful and supernatural. Perhaps only the sea, itself, shares a similar place in our deepest ideas of power and mystery. In northwest Europe, early peoples tended to gravitate to the coastline. Much of the land was boggy, steep or heavily wooded, making travel by sea much easier than by land, and the sea shore provided a bounty. The little primitive horses were probably only interesting as an occasional source of red meat. The sea was everything.

As populations grew and moved slowly inland, and farming and land travel became more important, so did the horse and its many uses. Yet most horses remained essentially wild animals, with many more being "owned" than were ever tamed, and this is still the case today with most of the mountain and moorland breeds of the British Isles, where many are still allowed to breed in semi-wild conditions and only some are tamed. As this shift was made, and men turned more toward the land and less toward the sea, perhaps the horse both replaced, and became mixed with the sea as the ultimate symbol of unknowable power and wildness. Spiritually, the horse led us back toward the water, and toward our wildness.

The small ponies of Shetland, a land hovering in its own liminal position between Scotland and Scandinavia, are the closest horses we have to the first horses to walk the earth. They are shaped to the earth, and not so much by the hand of man, as most animals we call domestic. As such, I think they are truly an ideal symbol of our longing  toward our own inner wildness and a guide into the waters of liminal experience.

Today, the njuggle is often thought of as a story for children. Which may be to say "Something thought to be childish is entirely misunderstood..."


More on the ideas in this post -
Liminality
- This article contains more than you ever wanted to know about the concept of liminaltiy, which I didn't explain very thoroughly.

The John Moriarty interview link

Radio Essay on Britain's wild ponies
_________________________________________________

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like The Beach, a series of posts exploring liminal space through myth, or Rambles with the Mari Lwyd, about horse traditions in British culture.

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A chapbook collection containing the short story The Wild Mare, plus four poems which share the theme of horses.

Size 8.5" x 5.5"

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Please see product page for more information.

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On John Moriarty's "Invoking Ireland"

4/3/2013

3 Comments

 
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I've had a growing admiration for John Moriarty's ideas over the past year or so. My first introduction to him was via a short video interview with him, during which I constantly found myself nodding in excited agreement with most everything he said. One moment I would either think "Wow! I thought I was the only one who had felt this or noticed that - but he gets it, too." Then, he would say something else and I would be floored by its originality and complete aptness, and it would be an angle on something I had never thought of.

I found some of the ideas in Invoking Ireland much easier to express with these quotes and pictures. You can click them to see larger versions.

folktale, invoking ireland
So began my occasional reading of an interview here, an obituary there (John Moriarty died in 2007), some small pieces of his writing available on line and so on. His books were a little hard to locate at first. They are more readily available from sellers like Amazon, now, or you can go direct to his fabulous publishers Lilliput Press.  So, let's talk about my favourite of his books, which is also the most accessible - Invoking Ireland.
linn feic, invoking ireland
The book has been a joy, and not such heavy going as I had feared. You would find some basic knowledge of Irish mythology useful, it's true, and maybe a smattering of Irish history, as well. However, the book also has a glossary. The first couple of chapters drew me in.  The theme of our existence in various realms of reality, how they mesh or exist in parallel - what this means for our shapeshifting nature between human soul and animal soul, is introduced with gentle enticement.
As the author leads us into the experiences of Amhairghin Glúngheal, Fintan mac Bochra, Cormac mac Airt, Conaire Mór and a host of others, he writes mostly in the first person. Knowing John Moriarty's personal story somewhat, the openings of many chapters had me thinking "Ah! Now he is telling his own story." Yes and no. I think that all Moriarty's works are autobiographical in a sense, as all gnostic writing must ultimately be, yet this book is also every Irishman's story, and every human being's story. It's not all easy going. Questions are asked as the book progresses, and the answers are not always satisfactory, it seems to me, but there is great honesty and humanity in the attempt.
Amhairghin GlĂșngheal, invoking ireland
The fact is, I did find it a heavy climb uphill through the first half of this book, once the romance of the first chapters had passed. Then, suddenly, we seemed to reach the brow of a hill, and find ourselves descending into the ease of a Kerry Puck Fair, and the story of a man forever changed by his own traditions - or perhaps I should say forever restored. This is followed by another very easily read chapter, entitled "Shaman". Again, I asked myself in the reading of it, whether the first person telling was just a convenience or more of a confession. This chapter is one of my favourites, and reads almost as a guided visualisation. A mere four pages, it is one I know I will return to again and again. It tells of a dream or vision, or perhaps a journey into another realm. The writing here is so much of one solid piece, that I struggle to find a simple quote.

Shaman tells a story of the smoke of a turf fire, of turf itself, and of an inner prehistoric landscape experienced. Speaking of the sods he'd bring from the shed each night for his fire -- "They were older, I'd remind myself, than Ireland's oldest folktale," Moriarty tells us. "What that folktale was I didn't know, but how strange it was, crossing a yard at nightfall with a prehistoric landscape in a bag on my back." He goes on to tell how one night he sat by his smoking fire, and the reek of it worked a mystical intoxication on him, and he was transported to that ancient landscape. He found an ancient pair of boots there, and putting them on, he began a strange journey. There was a lake which "didn't mirror some things it should mirror. It didn't mirror a red horse on a ridge. It didn't mirror its own islands." He continued on, experiencing a wood stinking of death, and experiencing life as a tree being felled, until finally, "The two sides of the path came together. I entered thick darkness and I didn't see the house until, seeing an old man by the fire, I realized I'd already walked into it." Here, after a riddling conversation with the old man, the adventurer undergoes a sort of agony and death, until, "it death-rattled the life I'd been living, modern life, out of me."

Another theme in the book is that of Manannán and the silver branch, which in Irish mythology was a token of a fair and pleasant otherworld. The branch played beautiful music which lulled its hearers into slumber, but at the same time often served as a sort of passport to this other realm. The author refers repeatedly to Ireland as Manannán's "lost cause" and of the audibility of the music of the silver branch across Ireland and across the world.  At the same time, he is quick to remind us that "the music of what happens" is also a manifestation of the sacred, and an ever-present token of the otherworld in our own.
john moriarty
John Moriarty

Part 2 of Invoking Ireland contains chapters on Lugh, on Manannan, and on Cú Roí. The chapter on Macha, worked as a beautifully crafted piece of storytelling, is another favourite of mine. There is quite a long chapter on Danu, as well, which is very moving, containing some startling moments of descriptive clarity -- both of nature and of the author's love for Danu. An understanding of a woman's love, bound up with the unfathomable love of a goddess, somehow comes to crystalise in the a description of a rowan tree growing there between the hills known as the paps of Danu. Storytelling and imagery rule here, as they always seem to, with Moriarty.
rowan, invoking ireland
Much of this book is a commentary on what Ireland has been, what it has become, but also the hope of what it could be again. Written at a time before the current economic woes, when Ireland was still very much the "Celtic Tiger", the author is keenly aware of what is being lost amid the success, and of what was lost in previous centuries. Moriarty used to say that he felt like he should show a passport when leaving his little rural corner of Ireland and entering the modern country. This book is mostly an otherworldly one, and yet the clues are there, encouraging not just the Irish, but all of us to look for some depth in things again, to learn to go with the grain of the land and its gods again. When this kind of commentary does arise in Invoking Ireland, it is blankly honest and incisive, but it never harangues. The point is made and we are back to the story.
unreal world, invoking ireland
science and superstition
John Moriarty self-identified as a Christian and a Catholic, but as a Pagan reader I found that this book had everything to offer and I found little to discard and nothing to offend. It is interesting that the chapter in this book entitled Christ was made up almost entirely of quotes from other writers. As to why that should be, my only guess is that the author simply engaged with the material of the story of Jesus differently than he did with that of his indigenous gods. However, I was left in no doubt that he engaged with these gods at a deep level, and the best part for me has to be that in Invoking Ireland he did us the honour of reporting his findings in so beautiful and personal a way.
pagan window, invoking ireland

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Death Shall Have No Dominion

31/1/2013

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A guided meditation inspired by poetry.

For my personal daily card draw I have my meditation and prayer cards shuffled in with my oracle deck. Today, this card came up. I thought it was interesting and appropriate, with all the thinking and writing I have been doing about the Cailleach and Bride. At the winter solstice, this card felt particularly appropriate, with the short days, and so on. However, it feels equally appropriate now, at Imbolc, with its theme of the natural cycles of death and rebirth in nature and in our lives. Looking at the cycles of nature and of the seasons we can all have certainty of rebirth to come.
guided meditation, old woman
I was not aware of Dylan Thomas' poem until I heard it quoted by the great Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty. The sound of his voice rolling the lines forth, drawing out the "o" in the word "no"  ... "They shall have stars at elbow and feet, and death shall have nooooo dominion"  was both touching and felt like a sort of wake-up call. A call to hope and faith.

John was a man who had experienced the utter demolition of his faith, but had gone on to explore what can only be described as "the meaning of life" in minute, patient detail. He did this via a process at once deeply personal and yet universal -- through immersing himself in nature to an almost hermetic degree, through exploring the mythology not only of the Irish, but of many other cultures. He emerged from this, toward the end of his life, with a spirituality of great depth and breadth -- not always easy for his readers to nail down, and yet so enriching to behold. I will write more about his work in the future.
And Death Shall Have No Dominion

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

~ Dylan Thomas
guided meditation
Meditation and Prayer cards are available in the webshop at this link

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