Sometimes we need to talk ourselves into our discoveries. That’s only fair, because we’ve talked ourselves out of them until now. When we listen to others’ counsel but ignore our own, when we look for dreams anywhere but in our own hearts, when we yield up our Sovereignty, precious possession, to anyone else, then in spite of a cosmos trying at every moment to get us to claim it, we just …
Ah, what to do with beings such as ourselves?
I turn to remembered wisdom, from a praying mantis, from a post in 2017: Often the best sacrifices are ones you can keep doing. The point isn’t burnout. Make it sacred, sacri-fice it, so you can make it sacred again.
One challenge of sacred time, of holy time, is re-integrating it back into what we are pleased to call our “daily lives”. Where to stash the spiritual uplift so I can draw on it when I really need it?
Part of the reason behind a spiritual practice is to help us begin to see just how the “mundane” is also absolutely overflowing with spiritual energy. (It’s another instance of easier said than known.) We need to re-charge, yes: so we can flow again. Or to put it another way, my ability to tune in to a seemingly “ordinary” interaction in line at the supermarket, or pumping gas, or climbing the steps at work can transform the apparently mundane into a spiritual connection. The “apparently mundane” in all its flatness and dullness is our workshop, laboratory, spiritual opportunity. Empty canvas.
It’s easy (or at least easi-er) to perceive and ride the spiritual currents during retreats, workshops, seminars, gatherings. Each of us throws our offerings into the common cauldron and voila! — energy stew. We sup from it throughout the weekend, workshop, gathering. Then I get to return, to practice during “everyday life”. I am transformer, I am catalyst, I am pathway in and of myself. It can always begin again with each of us. Oh, Spirit … just show me how again, one more time?
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One of the site searches over the past several days has been in Cyrillic, for звезда шаблон из бумаги zvezda shablon iz bumagi or “star pattern made of paper” as Google-Translate clumsily renders it. Cutting a five-pointed solstice star is an excellent seasonal craft, for reasons that deserve contemplation. We’ve got the planetary conjunction (link to an informative PDF by the Astronomy Club of Asheville, NC) or “great convergence” coming up on the 21st, along with the Solstice, we have the traditional association with stars at Christmas, and we know the star or pentagram is a spiritual symbol with a world-wide spread long preceding modern Pagan associations.
So without further ado, here’s the clearest and most useful guide I’ve yet found for creating a near-perfect 5-pointed star from paper, with a series of folds, and a single snip of the scissors.
Now that I’ve got the melody of one of the fonn stuck in my head, I’m reminded yet again how we can establish new habits surprisingly easily, and can often re-program ourselves more readily than our rational “But-I-can’t-really-change” argumentative self will admit.
“… the interval created by if“, writes Robert Hass in his poem “Spring Drawing”*, “to which mind and breath attend, nervous as the grazing animals the first brushes painted, has become inhabitable space, lived in beyond wishing”.
TWO
Yesterday I spent time clearing out glossy buckthorn (frangula alnus), a fast-growing invasive in the north and northeastern U.S., along our property lines where it’s been trying to establish a foothold for the last few years. A native of much of Europe, and originally planted as a natural fence in parts of the midwestern U.S., glossy buckthorn’s invasive because it’s so vigorous. It stays in leaf longer, shading out native plants, it reproduces through both berries and runners, it has few or no natural enemies, and it tolerates wet soils and pollution. In some ways you might say it’s exactly a bush for our times, tough and adaptable, if it weren’t so successful. Bees, birds and even a specialized butterfly relish its flowers and fruit.
glossy buckthorn in leaf and fruit
The bush has value to humans, too — as charcoal it contributes to gunpowder production, and its dried bark has been used as a laxative. In older lore, the ancient philosopher and physician Galen asserted its protective qualities against against “witchcraft, demons, poisons, and headaches”. Even his name has an associated value relevant to today: Γαληνός, Galēnos means “calm”. A mini-ritual in the making — invoke Galen’s calm along with the purgative and protective qualities of buckthorn.
THREE
“Is muggle a real word?” runs one popular search on Google. Like most magical and spiritual things, the question holds the key to its own answer.
Consider proper names that have become known in the last few decades. Is Lady Gaga a “real name”? To me anyway, more interesting than the question is what a person will do with the answer. Realness often depends on aptness — on fit. Does the (new) name fit the thing it names? If it does, the name is likely to catch on. If not, it probably won’t. To put it another way, if it ignites interest and attention, it becomes real. This is a key to many insights.
We tend still, in spite of more than a century of training from many directions that should have helped us know better, to think of things magical as pure marvel, a kind of “conjuring out of thin air” — creation ex nihilo, on a par with what the monotheistic God does “in the beginning”.
But a mage, like any creative person concerned with manifestation, studies patterns, tendencies, and energy flows. J. K. Rowling builds her names out of tendencies, patterns, sound symbolism and existing English word-forms. An arbitrary word like zlimpk is much less likely to catch on in English than muggle — it violates English word formation patterns. Magic — and spirituality — follow similar laws or patterns. A quick online look at muggle lists a whole set of antecedent associations at play for Rowling to work with. And a further test? Plenty of people now know the word muggle who have never read a word of the Harry Potter series. A magical act: something there that wasn’t there before.
FOUR
I’ve written several times about Thecu and the runes of storm I received from her — “created out of thin air”, if you ignore section Three above.
Here’s the first image I have of them from my daybook where I wrote them, the entry from 19 July 2017 — nearly three years ago now.
We often surround manifestation with all sorts of coverings, labels, shrouds, mystiques, and shrines, even though in varying forms we all do it all day long. “Thus saith the Lord”, the Biblical prophets write. When the circumstances of manifestation are particularly powerful, it can certainly feel like an external source impels it. If you’re predisposed to think in terms of deity, then a god/dess is a convenient point of origin — and you’re neither “wrong” nor “right”. You made yourself available as a collaborator with the cosmos. The labels you choose to understand and account for your experience and its results may help or hinder you in dealing with manifestation and its consequences.
The next step for me is to incise the nine runes onto the metal sheet I mentioned in a post not too long ago. Eventually it will live on an altar — possibly the lichen-covered altar stone I’m in the process of shifting to my grove. I’ve been looking at the best way to inscribe a nonagon on the metal, and you’ll see my results in a subsequent post.
In part I’m writing this section to reflect on my own experience of manifestation in connection with Thecu, and to understand what it is I’m doing, as well as what it is Thecu wants me to do.
I also reflect that here I held a warning of coming changes three years in advance of their physical appearance. “Nine paths of storm” for “riding change” indeed!
FIVE
Tomorrow night, members of our OBOD Vermont seed-group will hold a virtual “moon-moot”. It’s a full moon later that evening, around 10:30 pm local time, and we’ll have the waxing moon at our shoulders during our gathering. OBOD suggests a peace meditation on full moons. I’ve held my own rites at different phases of the moon, and find the dark and new moons of equal interest to the full.
I don’t need to go any further than the daily, monthly and yearly cycles to find “transparent witnesses” for “what it all means”. One post from a couple years ago has been receiving surprising numbers of readers, I suspect because it contains the words “spiritual meaning”.
Spiritual meaning often isn’t separate from physical ones. The sun rises and sets, coming to its full strength, then diminishing, and returning again. So to does the moon. And the length of days follows the longer annual cycle. A triad of planetary and astronomical pointers toward spiritual meaning: things run in cycles, and have a natural cause or origin, a life cycle, and an end.
Of course spiritual traditions around the world also include expressions like “seeing the sun at midnight” (which isn’t necessarily the same thing as the “land of the midnight sun”). Physical events are always themselves, and may also serve as pointers to things beyond them — at least to human consciousnesses. A great deal of ink (and blood) has been spilt arguing whether these things are “real” — for one take on the matter, see muggle above.
SIX
“All I know is a door into the dark”, writes Seamus Heaney in his poem “The Forge”. Bards like to sound dramatic. Heaney’s both telling the truth and lying through his bardic hat. But if you read through the link above to the “sun at midnight” you might spy a connection.
All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
Any teacher knows the frustration of helping students move beyond thinking “Oh, it’s a poem. It can mean anything you want”. Of course: anything can mean anything. But try that out, and you quickly see such an understanding leaves you standing in mud. Rarely is it useful. It’s only when things mean something specific for us that they touch us, move us, arouse us to transformation and manifestation, those quintessential human acts.
Yes, quintessential: the five essences that underlie human activity. We know them as the four elements, and spirit — the pentagon, pentagram, pentangle or pentacle of both Pagan and Christian understandings.
Where is my real iron, to look again at the last line of Heaney’s poem? How do I do the work I need to do?
May you test and find your metal and mettle.
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Hass, Robert. Human Wishes. New York: The Echo Press, 1989.
Heaney, Seamus. Door into the Dark. Faber and Faber, 1969.
Image: Frangula alnus — creative commons image by Sten Porse.
In the previous post, in the tradition of cliff-hangers everywhere, we left Gawain in Camelot, no doubt in a daze. He’s just accepted and accomplished the first half of the challenge of the beheading game from the Green Knight.
The unseely green holiday visitor to the fabled court of Arthur has, in turn, taken Gawain’s best blow and withstood it. He both lost his head and retrieved it, apparently none the worse for wear. Clearly he’s magical, or divine (when did those two split, to our great loss?), though the poet makes no mention of this. No need, when the deed speaks for itself.
“Lud’s Church,” Staffordshire, UK — one possible candidate for the “Green Chapel”
And in a year and a day — an interval both long enough and one that will spin by all too quickly — Gawain must present himself at the Green Chapel, somewhere vaguely to the north of Camelot, to fulfill the second half of the challenge game. This time it’s his neck that goes under the axe. “Come, or be called coward forever!” The Green Knight’s words still ring in his memory.
And the devil of it all is that Gawain’s clearly asked for this. Nobody else he can blame. He rose from among the gathered court to seize both challenge and axe from the hands of his uncle the king. Clearly both men thought the challenge would end then and there, with the foolish visitor’s head bouncing across the floor. But you never know for sure when magic will intervene, nor how it will shape what comes next.
So the Medieval poet’s got the “death” part of the title already in play. We all know we’ll die, somehow, someday. As for sex, so far we can find plenty in the lively and erotic holiday atmosphere of the court, lords and ladies celebrating together in a two-week-long revel, food and drink in abundance. A Christian holiday, indeed, but not one that excludes the secular delights of feasting and dancing, flirtation and dalliance. For Gawain, there’s added pleasure in his seat of honor beside the lovely Guinevere, Queen and chivalric ideal.
But wait, as the poet might have said, there’s more and better to come.
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A brief magical interlude here. Alert to what we can learn from the “wisdome of olde bookes,” we can consider a portion of what this story may have to teach us. From one point of view, Arthur has set up magical intentions and chosen the moment. After all, the time is right for them, with all the swirl of energies around the winter solstice and new year.
The king, the male half of the royal spiritual self, will not eat until all are served, opening his heart with generosity and fellow-feeling. All parts of our own kingdoms benefit from this. And he likewise won’t eat till either a marvel manifests or — another kind of marvel — some challenge or “game” presents itself. It’s surprising what we may chance to discover and experience, when we choose to look with such preparation. And the Queen? She is a chess-piece in the larger game, but also the most powerful figure, once the pawns and knights move out of her way.
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A year and a day lasts long enough to permit some really magnificent bouts of denial and procrastination. As a period of magical testing, it can sort the committed from the undisciplined, the patient from the reckless.
At Michaelmas, late September, the poet tells us that the moon itself signals to Gawain that his appointment draws near. Yet a month later, on All Saints, the Christian Samhain, Gawain lingers still at the court, reluctant to depart. Finally, after more feasting, and loads of unsolicited advice from other knights at court, Gawain presents himself to Arthur and asks for permission to go: “Now, liege lord of my lyfe, leave I you ask.”
Here in a modern conception, the Green Knight is clearly a giant. Note Gawain’s shield adorned with pentacle/pentagram.
And the poet moves on to describe Gawain’s apparel and weaponry in splendid detail, focusing for some 30 lines on a careful exposition of the meaning of the pentangle on Gawain’s shield, though he concedes it “must tarry him in his telling.”
This passage alone, in a poem plainly dating from the 1400s, should at least temper the silly hubbub that arises every year around Halloween from certain quarters about Satanists and their evil pentagrams or pentacles. But of course, it won’t.
Here, centuries before Anton LaVey with his Church of Satan was even a twinkle in his ancestors’ eyes, the pentagram is clearly a Christian symbol. Thus, among other things, the five points of this “pure pentaungel” signify here “the fyve woundes that Cryst caught on the cross, as the Creed telles.” As a holy symbol of power, it’s been around for much longer than Christianity, of course, and will be long after Christianity is a legend and other faiths overtake it. And it will continue to acquire and shed secondary associations that may help or hinder any seeker from recognizing the pentagram as nothing less, and nothing more, than a symbol of spiritual reality beyond human opinion and (mis)perception.
Off Gawain goes on his faithful steed Gringolet, through the land of Logres — a Welsh word for England, and famous over centuries in legend and stories both old and more recent, such as C. S. Lewis’s Narnia and Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone.
After some eight weeks of winter travel north — no modern M5 and M6 motorways for him to gallop along — Gawain arrives, weary and weather-stained, by chance as it seems on Christmas Eve, at a noble castle whose inhabitants welcome him warmly.
Three persons hold his particular regard — the castle’s lord Bertilak, an obvious focus, but also two noble women, one ancient, who notably sits at the table in the seat of highest honor, and the young and lovely lady of the lord — so fair in “her face, her flesh, her complexion, her quality, her bearing, her body, more glorious than Guinevere, or so Gawain thought” (Armitage translation, pg. 85).
After Mass they “feast and dance” for three days, and on the 27th of December, St. John’s Day, other guests depart, and Gawain, explaining his purpose to Bertilak in detail, announces he must also set out on the final leg of his journey to find the mysterious Green Chapel, and fulfill his pledge with the strange knight.
But there’s no need, exclaims the lord, laughing. “Ye schal be in your bed at thyne ease” till “the first of the yere.” As for the “grene chapayle … it is not two miles hence.”
Now let’s attend to the time till then, Bertilak continues. You promised to obey my will here, and you may linger in bed till morning Mass, then pass the day with my lovely wife, while I’m off hunting away from the castle. But let’s agree to a game of exchange. Whatever I win while I’m out, I’ll give you on my return, and just so, you must give me whatever you receive.
Agreed! says Gawain, always — we’re beginning to understand — up for a game or challenge, however much he may come to regret it later.
And so they each raise a glass together to drink on it to seal their pact.
Now at his ease after weary weeks of travel, Gawain has already taken much comfort in the lovely lady, enjoying her conversation, and sitting head to head sharing confidences. It’s innocent up to this point. Courtly love shows here at its best — no “foulness,” the poem emphasizes, attaches itself either to their words or manner. Reputations and honor have held them both to clear boundaries. But they do grow increasingly intimate and relaxed under the influence of youth, proximity, holiday revels, and the easy hand with which Bertilak holds his realm.
From the original manuscript: the Lady and Gawain
Bertilak leaves with the hunt early next morning, and Gawain, still abed, hears “a lyttel din at his door.” So he “heaves up his hed out of the clothes. A corner of the curtain he caught up a lyttel, and waits warily thitherward what it be might. It was the lady, loveliest to beholde, that drew the door after her dernly [secretly] and stille.” Less innocent now … and definitely more interesting!
The story will continue in Part Three.
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Images: the Sir Gawain manuscript, formally named MS Cotton Nero A X, located at the British Museum; Lud’s Church, Gradbach, Staffordshire, UK — one of the possible sites of the poem’s “Green Chapel”; Gawain, shield and Knight; The Lady and Gawain, from MS Cotton Nero A X
*For the curious, the first line of the mauscript in the top image above reads: “Sithen [since] the s(i)ege and the assau(l)t was sesed [ceased] at Troye …” The anonymous poet opens by giving his poem a Classical backstory.
Armitage, Simon. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007.
A Druid Way 
