by Martin Shaw
As we touched on in the introduction, I believe that the ground of real peril in a contemporary initiation is not the Threshold, but the Return Journey. In fact, without the return, the alchemy is half undone, the spell of making unuttered. To retreat permanently to the woods is to create a marginal life out of a marginal experience. Initiation is a threefold process, and the transformational can only be fully experienced in the integrating of all aspects of that journey.
The assumption in ancient society was that you had a supportive environment to return to; that many hands would ruffle your head, warm tears would splash your cloak as you danced into the next stage of your life. This assumption has lost all ground in western culture. With this loss we find the potential initiate in a stage of unparalleled vulnerability. How does one share a vision with a culture that has forgotten that the process ever existed? Where is myths place in all of this?
MYTH: A COLLISION OF RUPTURES
The word “myth” carries a variety of association too wide to explore fully in this book. The stories we will explore may be described as initiatory myths: they follow the archaic progression that rites-of-passage also offer; they are indeed two strands from the same rope. I use the word myth to describe a story that instigates an intense, personal reaction and at the same time a wider range of relational awareness.These are visions of what we call eternity, or outside daily time, and have little regard for catagories of folktale, fairy tale, or myth. From this perspective these categories are secondary functions.As I have written, myth is promiscious. Just as we start picking out wedding rings and carving its meaning onto tablets of stone, we find it in the bed of another tribe, society, or civilization, enjoying a quite different set of associations. What we can say is that initiation myths often deal with rupture. How secular society accomodates rupture is an interesting question—the word indicates a break or fissure in the surface of appearances. In the myth world, it is not the steady road of societal affirmation that defines us but rather that we orientate ourselves through hierophany—a sacred rupture. Myth could be said to be a collision of ruptures. From this perspective, our rupture, our ruin, is our axis mundi, our place of orientiation, our holy hills, our cathedral.
Myth has also had its critics, Roland Barthes describing it as “an abnormal regression from meaning to form, from the linguistic sign to the mythical signifier”4. I would argue with Barthes that a sign is something that has literal significance laced upon it, whereas a symbol has a far wider web of connection. Within the realm of story a sign denotes, a symbol connotes. When images from the unconscious or myth are seen only as signs, they are robbed of their transformative power; their use as psychic guides is erased. It can only point towards a breakdown of the imagination when we interpret a symbol as a sign.
Mythic understanding is subterranean; it lives underneath. A woman who is really a seal, a Dragon obese with conquest, a bridge that is a razored sword—it is rash to suggest these doorways are falsehoods; they provide a poetic space for the imagination to flood into. Rather than frozen, they are vast-collapsing and refiguring with every consciousness that encounters them. Barthes’s position arises when we are deprived of the real thing—when the myth stiffens into religion or certain ritual techniques are used to subvert the consciousness of large groups—this seems to me his real bone of contention.
Initiatory myths are clear that real story is not designed for societal crowd control, but that they are forged in the great smelting ore of earth consciousness—not just the human. Are myths literally issuing from rocks, lightning storms, and snowflakes? Is it possible that what we call myth is an arc of imagination that rises from the awakened mind and at some invisible but tangible moment collides with the arrival of plant, mineral, or star conciousness? What also is the sound comunicating from concrete, fumes, and electricity? Do they engender a kind of twisted mythic arch, or does the vital, truly mythic synthesis require contact with an unmanipulated natural force?
WHAT IS WILD?
To be in touch with wildness is to have stepped past the proud cattle of the field and wandered far from the twinkles of the Inn’s fire. To have sensed something sublime in the life/death/life movement of the seasons, to know that contained in you is the knowledge to pull the sword from the stone and to live well in deep woods in fierce winter.
Wildness is a form of sophistication, because it carries within it true knowledge of our place in the world. It doesn’t exclude civilization but prowls through it, knowing when to attend to the needs of the committee and when to drink from a moonlit lake. It will wear a suit when it has to, but refuses to trim its talons or whiskers. Its sensing-nature is not afraid of emotion: the old stories are full of grief forests and triumphant returns, banquets and bridges of thorns. Myth tells us that the full gamut of feeling is to be experienced. Wildness is the capacity to go into joy, sorrow, and anger fully and stay there for as long as needed, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Sometimes, as Lorca says, it means “get down on all fours for twenty centuries and eat the grasses of the cemeteries.”5 Wildness carries sobriety as well as exuberance, and has allowed loss to mark its face.
SITTING WITH THE DEEP EARTH
We understand that some sort of nuzzling, inquiring, devotional life has existed between man and animals for millennia. From an indigenous perspective, neglect of ritual forms creates a kind of chaotic sickness or malaise that invokes a very real sense of dislocation from the wider community. These ritual forms are the secret history of the world: they are medicine. To face the world without them is to walk naked into a blizzard, to enter a desert without water.
There was a time, the myths tell us, when the link between animals, humans, and the land was fluid, magical. The perception of community would extend out, both into the landscape and through the stories seeping up from the burial grounds of your ancestors. The swift raven, the sharpened axe, the soft hairs on a mouse’s belly, all were interconnected if you looked long enough. The anchors of story, ceremony, and hard living kept you held in this awareness.
At a certain point in your development, normally around fourteen, this perception would take on an even deeper reality as you were removed from your domestic concerns, village ties, and family and taken out into the lonely open spaces or deep forests. Just at a time when the youth thinks they have seen all the adults have to offer they are catapulted out of what is familiar and into “the world turned upside down,” the initiatory zone.
As a young man, the only conscious initiations I or any of my friends experienced involved proving ourselves in playground fights, boasting outrageously, and pretending we’d had sex when we hadn’t. We would make dens out in the woods behind the estate, occasionally visited by girls, and we would all take pride in our ramshackle shelter. It felt vital to have a place built by hand, away from the concrete. Rain would sluice through the ceiling of branches and twigs and we’d sit there with blunt pen knives whittling spears in anticipation of the elders who never came. Some instinctive soulfulness was at play, and in our own way we cultivated it.
The stories were invented rather than handed down, but came through time in that small area, getting scarred knees, covered in soil and listening to the ghostly sound of wind in the trees. Girls were intensely mysterious to us, and made our throats hurt and our faces hot if we met one we liked. We knew they had their own hideouts in the woods, but we were rarely invited. Something was hidden in their camps that had to do with the moon, long grass, and their contrary nature of which we could only speculate. We were wild pagan kings, green wood bandits, mad for life and drunk on adventure.
As we move from childhood we experience a kind of leap. We know that at adolescence, the average male has up to thirty times the normal amount of testosterone coursing through a body struggling to catch up. He glimpses somewhere up ahead the capacity to bear greater responsibility, have children, to contribute to a wider community, but rarely achieves this gracefully. This second jump has always been complex, and its innate vulnerabili
ty has required the birthing canal of initiation to anchor the individual into their new, wider role.
In my own life it was a time of intense questioning and profound difficulty. Flailing about, my friends and I took risks, climbed drunk up the sides of tall buildings, fell in love with unobtainable girls, got beaten up, all the good stuff. We were expanding, stretching our wingspan in rooms that now felt too small. Furniture was always going to break. We were moving through a gateway, but the doorkeepers and the world they represented seemed grey, repressed, and bloated. Where is the mystery in going straight from school to college to job to mortgage? What wider perspective, what beauty cuts through that ghastly procession and makes you howl with the joy of being alive?
WAVES NOT CAUGHT
So we see a great momentum entering at this stage, but a complexity in how to handle this great surge. If nothing is presented to the individual at that crucial stage, if no Arthur, no White Buffalo Women, no Elder appears, then the energy loses focus, eats disappointment and becomes self-centered, because the world it’s heading towards seems dulled or greedy. Mythology, as we will see, helps us into adulthood by showing us a picture wider than our own self-absorption. It’s as if adolescence is a moment when a wave is higher than usual, when some power makes it crest, peak at a point where far off views are seen, other vistas, not just the churning sea. Dreams are more vivid, possibilities endless. A healthy community catches that moment, and allows a container both for its power and impact as the wave crashes down again. Initiation matches the upsurge of energy by offering something of equal magnitude, a sense of appointment in life.
The sobriety of this mishandling means that the wild parts of us become segregated, marginalized, or only appear when we’re drunk. Wild consciousness gets limited to an AC/DC record, a survival skills workshop, a one-night stand. Rock’n’Roll holds that wildness for many of us: I love it myself, but its obsession with youth points towards boys and girls who remain uninitiated, whose perception of wildness cannot grow with time. It becomes a frozen moment, fondly enjoyed, but as unacceptable in your “grown up” life as a wolf in kindergarten.
The job of the elder is to be nuttier, more curious, occasionally fierce and more connected to the eccentricities of wildness than the youth ever dreamed. More than anything, the elder has seen some rough pattern to their life and knows how to express it through a story. This carries tremendous hope with it.
WRESTLING DEATH
There is a fear of death in continually idolizing youth, but it quietly and continually moves through our community regardless. Part of that heroic teenage expansion lies in drawing close to the winged stranger, seeing that one day, possibly soon, there will be an end to all this. Every ram-raider, every teenage life-threatening prank is an unconscious, archaic desire to come close to that dark wind. By the third or fourth day without food on the mountain, you start to hear death shuffling around through the trees. Initiation creates a boundaried opportunity to step nearer the kingdom of death and be called back to the living by the singing voices of the elders.
Traditional wisdom holds that death requires a kind of courting in much the same way you’d court a new love. You send her gifts, whittle a cord of ornate words to hopefully, possibly, land in a gleaming bouquet at her feet. This is a form of archaic gambling, to construct strange little dances to honor her, never to ignore her.
Youths are meant to wrestle death in constant, boundaried endeavors that help the sun rise one more day. That great wrestling is the one of several secretive reasons our world keeps turning. Death finds it charming. The Great Raven Woman appreciates panache. She is a constant companion, and sends you little vibrations every day in the form of miniscule endings. She is entwined with and in love with life. She adds poignancy to endless summer days, also tapping her cane when you think this grief/joy will last forever. They say she has the kindest eyes and is always immaculately dressed.
All she asks in return is a little acknowledgement, a little style and affection in how you address her. The initiation of wilderness is a clear wave in her direction, a leaving of golden apples at her feet, of sewing her claw marks into the hem of your dress. It opens a dialogue that should inform the rest of our lives, rather than meeting her all at once, rather abruptly, at the end.
Cesar Vallejo claims that as humans we carry a slight suspicion that we may be immortal, and this makes us miserable.Ruben Dario has said that the grief of the gods is never to attain death. Regarding men, if they were, from the moment they are conscious, certain of attaining death, they would be joyous forever. Unfortunately, men are never certain of their death: they feel the dark anxiety and the yearning of dying, but always doubt their death. The grief of men, we can say, is never to be certain of death.6
A MYTHOGRAPHY OF THE CROSSROADS
Death in the center of life is a major component of what we call shamanism—a rather exhausted term that nonetheless suggests that everything in the world is animate, alive in the way that it is. The rotting grass in the belly of an Elk, the underside of a decaying leaf, the ashes of a lightning strike all informed the localized community of their own nature, and they perceived themselves as another kind of animal in the ever-shifting landscape.
Playing a wilder and more experiential role than a priest, a shaman—the bright feathered, double-tongued wolf singer—occupies the darker areas around the center of the village, a kind of psychic sentry whose task is to maintain some kind of equilibrium between the wants of the people and the geographical and specific demands of the local deities. Terrible pay and a high-risk venture.
Gary Snyder observes:The practice of shamanism has at its very center a teaching from the non-human, not from an Indian medicine man or a Buddhist master. The question of culture does not enter into it. It’s a naked experience that some people have out there in the woods.7
Semyon Semyonov has put it this way:My ancestors made me into a shaman . . . they cut the flesh off me. They separated my bones and counted them. My flesh they ate raw.8
The fierce-eyed healer would carry two tongues after such an experience—one speaking of the hearth fire, the times to gather and plant, the ambitions of the tribe, and the other carried the grief of the lonely moor and the vast intelligence of the wolf right into the center of the human community. They became a crossroads of psychic information, a crossroads that was vital to ensuring that an ongoing accord was met between the earth and its inhabitants. In many ways this book is a mythography of that crossroads.
In Europe, at first glance it can be hard to find such a defined practice still in existence, but it is a mistake to assume that the fundamental tenets of shamanism have been extinguished. Anthropologists may argue specifics, but in general, we can detect strong echoes of it in the western tradition. What is lost is the community understanding, as the idea of wilderness changes with political or religious agendas, the ceremonies turn to dust and those original longings become the domain of certain intellectuals, poets and a heretical few.
Back before the Enlightenment we find in Welsh myth a story that contains the notion of an expanded self, a propulsion into the scales of a trout, the swiftness of the cheetah, the bellow of a stag. It involves a wrenching from the familiar, to engage with witch-seeing. It contains a wonderful hint at the energies that seek tense alignment in initiation practice.
THE BIRTH OF TALIESIN: DISCIPLINE AS THE DANCE PARTNER OF WILDNESS
Back when the world was young and full of charming wolverines, a sorceress, Ceridwen, once composed a draught of raw magic in a vast cauldron. This concoction was said to contain the distillation of both Inspiration and Science, and whoever should taste three drops of it would receive illumination into the mysteries of the cosmos. Ceridwen’s reason for brewing such a mixture was that her son Avagddu was said to be the most ill-favored man in the world, of quite arresting ugliness. Quite a sight.
Turning this around in her agile mind, Ceridwen surmised that to compensate for the violence of his startling appearance, Avagdd
u had to employ this magical wisdom when making his entry into noble society —in this case the court of King Arthur and the Round Table. A spell of such potency required brewing for a year and a day, so she put to work a man, Gwion Bach, to stir the cauldron and a blind man, Morda, to kindle the flame beneath it. She wrapped words of allure and threat around the two so they would not cease from their task till the year and a day was up.
Towards the end of this period three drops splashed on the finger of Gwion Bach and without thinking he drew it to his mouth to quell the heat. At that very second, a great, holy seeing ruptured his mind—the future displayed itself and he saw that he must be alert to the witching skill of Ceridwen; she was connected to unearthly power. With this insight, he gathered himself and headed for his homeland. With the three drops delivered, the great cauldron split in two, for the unbridled hugeness of its power undiluted became a poison. That poison poured from the cauldron into a stream, that, when horses drank from it, killed them, and so that confluence of streams was called the Poison of the Horses of Gwyneddo from that day forward.
Pursued by Ceridwen, Gwion shifted into a hare, then a fish, then a bird, until finally he became a grain of wheat that Ceridwen, now incarnated as a high crested black hen, ate. Ceridwen then became pregnant and bore this growing magic child for nine months till his birth. Touched by his beauty, she spared his life and sent him out onto the darkening waves, wrapped in a leather bag, to the mercy of gods on the 29th of April. He was discovered by Elphin, another luckless son, whose assistant, gazing at the child, proclaimed, “Behold a radiant brow!” and the name Taliesin, meaning “radiant brow,” was born.
