A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  The stories say that if we take only the Road of the Village—the ordained track—we risk perpetuating an infantile grandiosity, firmly anchored to the ego but lacking relationship to the soul, the very relationship the Road of the Forest offers. This is a dangerous situation. The ancestors also say initiation offers a direct, ritualized experience of huge, primeval forces that somehow live both in and near the psyche, what Robert Moore calls “the Great Self,”1 something numinous and vast, containing more energy than we could ever need. To be far from the Great Self is to lack clarity, to be distant from mystery, to reject discipline, and to lose humor. This self is also archetypal, which means it’s formidable. This Great Self has many names, and lives close to the mysteries.

  The business of growing up, of weathering life’s initiations, is to make connection to it rather than any claim of ownership. You could call it finding your mythic ground. It prefers flamboyant failures offered up to the Old Gods as acts of salty beauty rather than mediocre success offered merely to the literal. Its echoes abide in the dark plaits of old Tibetan women, the harsh, barking laughter of a Dagara elder, the stumpy fingers of an Orkney fisherman as he mends his nets. It breaks open in divine silence, the heavy roar of the feasting hall, the first time you protect your child. It is not passive but active, irrational sometimes, interested always. It’s not caught in the addiction for continual excitement but carries its sloshing jewels about, whispering subtle images to the old and magnificent ambitions to the young. It knows that this world belongs to the dead, and that we should hurl true words and displays of grace in their direction every once in awhile.

  So, first we need to have an experience of the Great Self, and then we need to develop a relationship with it that doesn’t devour us. I never said it wasn’t dangerous. Initiation is that container, that holding, that makes our meetings holy. This self is the energy that an elder hopes to negotiate and sometimes dance with as they age. It’s a mistake to be too explicit in its description.

  Without this regulating process, we are liable to actually avoid contact with the Great Self because we instinctively understand that it is bigger than us and could burn us up. Depression is a great protection against it. If we don’t truly understand it, we are flagellated daily by a sense that our lives could be “something more.” If we encounter it without a container, we are consumed by God-like expectations of what we should achieve with our time.

  Culturally we are seeing far more of the infantile than the Great. To meet someone in touch with the Great Self is to witness beauty. Not the beauty of Hollywood, but something leathery, troublesome, and honestly wild. We should not associate this Greatness with worldly stature or obvious charisma. This is not a term of inflation. Finn MacCool, White Buffalo Woman, Valemon the White Bear King, Vaselissa the Beautiful, and even Baba Yaga are all manifestations of the Great Self.

  Myth is the greatest cultural vehicle we have for experiencing the living poetry of these characters, and recognizing how in our own lives we move between their energies—The Wolfish Lover, The Maiden of the Flowers, Boys Who Become Swans. What is great has many sides, and the stories show us differing reflections and huge beauty.

  The breakdown of initiation and the diminishment of mythic understanding are actually defences against encountering our own beauty. On a societal level, we appear to be working day and night at that defense. But the Great Self is hard-wired in us, and though the ritual mechanisms to approach it are wiped out, it won’t disappear but instead becomes mired in shadow. Therefore a King can only be seen as a tyrant, a Hag only as a bringer of misfortune. We tiptoe away from these beings, far too informed to take them seriously, and then we wonder why we don’t have the energy to vote.

  Myth proposes the paradoxical view that we are to dwell in the tension of a “crossroads” of Village and Forest, and that this very complexity provides the grounding of an authentic human life—a strange accord with ego and soul, rationality and vision. Ego gives a shape to these energies for living in the world that benefits others, but with no inner connection they lose their divine inflections and corrupt.

  The great initiation rites enact a classic arc of experience to bring us to this crossroads, the motif we find both in ritual and story: Severance/ Threshold/Return.

  THE ADDICTION TO SEVERANCE

  This book offers a questioning: in the twenty-first century, the old mechanisms of such rites-of-passage are in great flux. As a culture we have become adept at a kind of faux Severance—we separate from family, lovers, jobs, and countries with greater speed than ever, but are adrift at the Return. The Return in any great story or initiation ritual is a place of blessing, encouragement, celebration, and integration. But it requires a grounded, rooted environment for your insights to flourish within. If we are all in movement, caught in the addiction to severance, living for the next big event, then how can this occur? Addiction only to movement is the end of loyalty to person or place or community. I am suggesting that this whole progression is under threat.

  Some huge tenderness is being lost: our terror of death allows us to sever without fully entering the grief attached, and our isolation freezes our capacity to protect and honor. This whole ancient process is being turned on its head; the gifts of the Forest are now often unwanted by the returned-to society. If the community is in denial of a Great Self, then your shining and gifts are deeply threatening. More cold Witches are waiting on your return to clip your eager wings than any encounter you could find out in the living world.

  However, I am also suggesting that the vision accessed by initiation requires the movement back into human community to bring it to fullness, and that the highest and most delicate forms of cultural expression are a natural vehicle for that vision. With this in mind, I suggest the word “wildness” rather than “wilderness” as indicative of this circuitous route.

  MYTH TELLERS

  Four great initiatory stories form the spine of this section, along with a narrative of my own work. We follow the mythic threads of a woman, a man, and a youth in the trials and ecstasies of their own journeys. None of these stories are an attempt to reawaken a tribal vision, but rather a search for deeper images, containing many reflections of how to live well on a troubled earth. In this search for vision, this book calls for the cultural reemergence of a very specific type of storyteller—the Griot, the Seanchai, the Cunning Man or Woman, Bard, Skald, Trouvere, Minnesinger, Ashik, what Sean Kane calls a “Myth Teller,” and proposes that this ancient role is one way of holding an ear to the emanations of the earth’s furry languages. It anchors the role directly with initiatory practice and calls on your indulgence to entertain the notion that you may be one yourself. This is little to do with external theatrics and everything to do with a new way of seeing.

  THE CURRENCY OF LONGING AND THE MALIGNANCY OF DISAPPOINTMENT

  The second section of this book proposes that one way to carry the Forest to the Village is through longing. Longing as opposed to the steady grunt of our wants or even the lusty gaze of our desires. Longing not as a frittering away our lives, but the impulse towards a deeper reality than just our daily chatter. This was something understood by W. B. Yeat’s, gazing towards Byzantium. Longing seems to have gone underground in much modern culture, but anything that is underground or half-seen carries Trickster energy with it. It is the Trickster that has the resilience and guile to live well in the troublesome crossroads of Forest and Village. Even Asgard has a Loki.

  This section suggests that we have replaced longing with a kind of trance state, engineered by clumsy media spells. The Irish, Siberian, and Romanian traditions supply powerful commentaries on this condition, as we shall see.

  So, longing and its beautiful loneliness is a tool for staying awake on returning to the Village. It is resistant to all sorts of contemporary trance states. Longing means staying in the hard wisdom of our life’s troubles, resisting the societal urge to just sever immediately from its tricky invitation. When a mass-society grows unconscious to
longing, after a time it will fall into disappointment. In the long term, faux Severance lacks energy, its manic tempo exhausts us.

  These are just murmurs in the wind I’m making here, but I feel glee at the possibilities—these are the steps of an ancient and radical dance that your parents didn’t expect you to go to. When we refuse this call and settle only for the steady, as a later chapter says: “We touch with gloved hands, passions become hobbies, we have an eye always fixed on the door. If feeling does come, it comes with the desire for possession, and we wonder when another relationship crumbles in our hands. Longing pushes the imagination out towards deeper inflections of insight, peculiar creative leaps, but too much disappointment is a diminishment, a closing, a reduction.” Without longing, we see the wound but not the gold.

  It is a Culture of Wildness indeed that encourages longing, handling paradox, experiencing community in rowan trees and dark pools of water, carrying images of power back to the village, and flourishing in the process. A Culture of Wildness is what initiation and myth offers.

  Our life is a house, with a roof of night-birds and muscled pillars of experience, its eaves containing a musky web of unique passions, its base holding a great fire that comes up from the very heart of the earth itself; around the house are hives of bees and orchards of apples. It is good to give some of the honey away and let in a few good-natured apple poachers. There is no shortcut to the building of such a house, but the garden is the legacy that instinctively arises through time and feeds others.

  All storytellers know that two types of time exist: one is the twenty-four hours, the school run, the bill-paying, forever catching-up time of our everyday world; but behind that looms the energies of mythic time, the great cycles that pulse from generation to generation. These great wheels infuse the everyday with nourishment, “eternity in a grain of sand.” The philosopher Plotinus suggested that while the body favors a straight line, the soul hankers for the circle. This mythic, circular time, (which is really no kind of time at all) laughs at the straight line and the alarm clock. Without it—even with all the riches of the world—we can enter the arena of the meaningless. As markets collapse and the world heats up, we would do well to see Coyote’s claws opening holes between the two. We live in an era of tremendous possibility.

  The myths can only be partly glimpsed through any words I have to say about them. They come out of the shadows for a matter of moments, and we attempt to lasso them, fail, and are grateful for the dust in our faces as they head back into that great, lively river.

  “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold,

  long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful.

  Honor and recognition in event of Success.”

  ATTRIBUTED TO ERNEST SHACKLETON FOR VOYAGE TO SOUTH POLE, THE TIMES, DECEMBER 24, 1913. HE RECEIVED 5,000 REPLIES

  PART 1

  LEAVING THE VILLAGE, FINDING THE FOREST

  CHAPTER 1

  NOMADS, PIRATES, BANDIT QUEENS

  Wild: an uncultivated or untamed state,

  disposition to rove or go unrestrained.

  Webster’s Dictionary, 1913 ed.1

  I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences,

  I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences

  Don’t fence me in.

  Cole Porter, Don’t Fence Me In2

  If you don’t want to be Crazy Horse, Boudicca, or Pablo Neruda, stop reading now. It’s probably best we nip this relationship in the bud. This is a book about teasing out the mischievous, solitude-loving, flamboyant, sorcerous, arms-extended-into-the-inky-blackness singing songs of the lost-highwayman aspect of your nature. If something in the last two sentences doesn’t ring true then head for the door; there still may be a place for you in polite society. Hurry. As for the rest of you vagabonds, draw closer, there’s strength in numbers. This is a strange book: sometimes it says simple things, sometimes it’s complicated, poetic, and obtuse. It draws on wild places, wild stories, and wild thinking as its inspiration. As the Romany gypsies like to say, “May God strike me down if I don’t finish this bottle with you, here tonight!” There is no other life.

  CAER IDRIS IS A BUSH OF GHOSTS

  By the time we arrive, dusk is usually falling. Caer Idris, “the Seat of Arthur,” the great mountain beloved of Welsh myth, watches down as we quickly construct a base camp—erect tents, dig a fire pit, gather wood, and settle into our new, mossy home before the mist comes in. As a group of us, normally five to ten, settles round the flames drinking coffee and gazing into the stark blackness, the conversation seems more impassioned and the silence more pregnant. In such an environment, talk gravitates towards stories, both of the lives of the men and women present and the older folktales they grew up with. In three days’ time these people will put themselves into a state of potential medical emergency; they will find a spot among the oak groves, small rivers, and wide exposed mountain tops, and will—alone, without a tent or fire for comfort—fast for four days and nights. As if that wasn’t arduous enough, on the fourth night they will complete an all-night vigil till the sun rises on the fifth morning.

  Now why, in the twenty-first century, when our ancestors slaved to give us dominion over nature, warmth, electrically lit houses, and a medicine cabinet for the slightest discomfort, do we find a growing number of people seeking to journey out into the natural world alone? Not to shoot a bear, claim land for property development, or name the Latin pronunciation of every plant they see. No, these people are seeking to redefine their relationship with both wilderness and themselves. Something of this spirit is found in Thorkild Bjornvig’s words: “Plant something foreign in me, a deep quiet, a mad freedom; my heart laughed when the bird raised his soft wings,”3

  INITIATION: THE THREE FOLD AWAKENING

  From one perspective, the idea of wilderness seems able to exist only as a human perception; if we’re not in it, it’s simply nature. From a purely geographical or psychological perspective this may be so, but from a romantic view it falls short. The wild has always entailed uncertainty, a place allowing imagination to flood into it. For centuries, the hinterland between forest and village has been a place of dreams, fear, and homage; by its very nature it abides at the edge of where we’re comfortable. The irony, as we pave over any last patches of available land and illuminate our cities and towns so we can’t detect stars, is that the magnetism of the living world grows ever stronger. The reason I spent years in the black tent, the reason why people even today voluntarily undergo initiatory process in wilderness, is an innate, gut-level desire to feel connected, to claim for themselves some sense of an authentic place in the world. This book talks about wilderness/wildness not just as a place to visit, like the sharp blue teeth of the ocean, or the harsh mysteries of the Mongolian steppes, but as something that can be detected and nurtured in our inner life.

  This is not a book at war with technology, modern medicine, and insurance policies (well, a little, maybe a skirmish), but rather identifies a malaise in contemporary culture, a disenchantment that originates from lack of relating to the wild—in landscape, literature, and metaphor. I believe we are damaged in this respect, our imagination reined-in on a short leash. Despite the cash flow of the West, life seems flatter.

  The specific emphasis on initiatory practice in this book is based on the tradition we have come to refer to as a “Vision Quest,” the practice of deep retreat in a wild place. We find it variously in the religious practices of the Celts, early Christians, and Native Americans, to name but three.

  This intensely mysterious experience is solitary in nature—a conscious break from society—But requires the warmth and subtlety of a return to community to help grow the seeds that can flower from such a testing. It seems that while the specific cultural textures of this process are being heart-breakingly lost, it is still possible to have a direct encounter with them.

  For the past fifteen years I have made many journeys to the ancient ground of Snowdonia in Wales
with groups from all social classes and races. In the small area where we work, we have witnessed many transformational experiences. Though not an easy experience, rarely a particularly comfortable one, year after year more men and women are agreeing to undergo it.

  This movement into wild nature can be so overwhelming it can take years to fully integrate. Indeed, I have sat with Choctaw medicine men who still rub their chins and grin in amused and grateful bafflement at the experience of their first fasts in the wild.

  In recent years I have found myself teaching rites of passage and myth across the UK, Europe, and America. Oddly, I have often found men and woman passionate about one but ignorant of the other.

  For myself, myth became a bridge between the luminous world I’d discovered and the shared challenge of simply trying to live a human life. Myth spoke of both the feasting hall of life’s abundance and the desolate tundra of challenge and despair. Amazingly, it offered both up as peak experiences.

  THE DANGER OF THE RETURN

  Much writing on initiation focuses on the journey out from society, into an unknown zone of danger, stealth, courage, and illumination. Its transformational quality is embedded in what the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep called the “Threshold” experience. This seemingly benign phrase illustrates the sometimes rapid propulsion into a set of experiences that cause a great disintegration of old, often cherished, ideas of our place in the world, and the opening to untidy new vistas of experience.