A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  This early story, probably sixth century in origin, contains great keys of metaphorical thought and, like the baby Taliesin floating out to sea, travels through the Norman Courts, the Witch Hunts, the Romantics, across the Atlantic to Turtle Island and abides with Thoreau as he longs for that “Perfect Indian Wisdom.”9 Four key images act as links to the ideas we are exploring:

  THE CONTENTS OF THE CAULDRON We are told that this mixture consists of both raw inspiration and the greatness of Science. The integrated potion contains both the ecstatic essence of the awen—the moment of druidic inspiration—and the logos principle, which is the ability to decipher, separate, and cherish both clarity and rationality. In initiation myths and practice, these two great energies are always attempting to get themselves back into a dance with one other. The repetition of Village life longs for the strange epiphanies of the Forest.

  DISCIPLINE AND WILDNESS We already see, back in the sixth century, the Welsh belief that both great strands originated from the same cauldron and were, in fact, part of the same mix, inseparable. The Bard and the Scientist and the Philosopher are caught in its froth: Descartes, Blake, and Darwin are ultimately squabbling brothers from this heated vessel.

  This hints at the multi-layered practice of the Druids, in which to denigrate one over the other was to weaken the whole. As we look at the pitched battles between theologians, poets, and scientists over the centuries, we do well to remember this earlier, mythic illustration of an integrated mixture.

  THE THREE DROPS From this whole, percolating mass, only three tiny drops are necessary for illumination. This cooking is a defined experience—prescribed—not just left to a random draught. We get a sense of a distilled intensity, but also boundaries, that, as we soon see, are there for a reason.

  THE POISON OF THE HORSES OF GWYNEDDO Once the cauldron has performed its ritual act, the accumulated power of the mixture causes the cauldron to split, and once released, its contents, on impact, becomes poison. It enters the stream of time and with this splitting we get a sense of Illumination and Science separating and both threads become warring dragons in the water of history. What befalls those who drink from this turbulent loch? Death.

  THE LEGACY OF WARRING DRAGONS

  Ceridwen’s cauldron contains the initiatory ingredients of the rational and the ecstatic. Neither cancels the other out. Initiation seeks to engender a crossroads of these energies. But as we see, without the barriers of ceremony it becomes unwieldy, deadly, containing too much great spirit. When we are adrift from the mythic these two ingredients seem to become oppositional. Left with the legacy of Ceridwen’s cauldron, we watch unfolding centuries reaping the havoc of the two warring streams, amnesiacs from a shared home. That crucial statement from Descartes, “I think therefore I am,” is a breath from the science dragon. In its era, the seventeenth century, it represents a severing from this earlier sense of relationship to the natural world. That world lacks reason; it is the job of man to tutor the native and domesticate the wild.

  Nature requires handling and enlightening, not dialogue. This idea was also politically useful; it was both pragmatic and philosophical, creating opportunity for industrial advancement, utilitarianism, and a centralized, didactic approach to religion. It said that the god energy lives only in the wine, bread, and good book. As Alexander Pope said, happily cutting himself off from the rest of the universe, “The proper study of mankind is man.”

  SAVAGE MAGICIANS AND THE THIRST FOR POTION

  Nearer to home, we can view the 1960s as the era when the struggle between the dragons took on an even greater intensity. The Dionysian tone of the latter half of that era invited an extraordinary body of information to surface to the general public, especially to the thirsty clamoring of its youth. In a minute space of time the consciousness of nations was flooded with wild, turbulent ideas contained in music, philosophy, books, drugs, and lifestyle. The god energy was most certainly out of the box and heading into trees, electric guitars, and your bloodstream at great speed.

  Where once was only the Bible, Duluth, or Margate, you now had access to Hendrix, India, the Tarot, Dylan, Joplin, Huxley. Finally accessing the intuitive Dragon, this generation ignored Taliesin’s pinpricks and kicked the entire cauldron over. The Age of Aquarius was upon us.

  The use of lysergic acid caused previously imagined psychological limits to dissolve in minutes. It seemed possible to watch a tree breathe, create lightning from your eye, see through walls. No soul work necessary, just let the tab dissolve and see you at the end. A multi-dimensional landscape was suddenly tangible. The mythic stories ceased to be flat words on paper and became huge, rusty keys to direct experience. With this wrenching of “conventional” consciousness, hundreds of thousands of people poured down the hole of initiatory experience without support of elders or much understanding of where they where going. Many returned, some didn’t.

  This kind of wildness has a child’s unsteady steps to it. As a reaction to repression and outside a ritual context it takes on a devouring form. It’s out of balance. While the pendulum swings between Dragons, the third way, of Ceridwen’s potion, is lost. The smorgasbord of cosmological refreshment was still part of a mighty reactive wave to what had been before, the strange flavors of other continents, philosophies intoxicating but ungrounded. After the experience of any kind of soulful awakening comes the task of developing a daily, unglamorous, defined practice to travel back and forth to the kind of perception you want to inhabit.

  The difficulty was harnessing the energy—to be like Dionysus, riding the leopard without being torn to pieces. For that first experience of wildness to be sustained, to mature, it has to have other elements in the potion nourishing it. Of itself, it becomes addictive, consuming and savage; in short, uninitiated. The ‘60s created a generation with the aspirations of magicians without the elders, boundaries, and community to give their apprenticeships grounding. Not much has changed.

  The temptation is to try to reclaim the cauldron, but we can’t remember the particulars of the spell; the aspiration is there, but not the framework. This early story gives us counsel, however, of an implication of specifics, of distillation, of time limits—there is waiting involved, a year and a day, while a blind man, Morda, attends the kindling.

  MORDA

  We could view Morda as someone alive to the cauldron’s interior condition. Unable to expand into the visual, the energy of his mind internalizes itself, sensitizes itself to the percolation of the cauldron. We see parallels with the practice of Dzoghen in Tibet, in which long retreats in darkness are encouraged to access an acute inner sensitivity. Ironically, the seeming limits of stimuli open up information hidden by too much choice. The process of this particular type of magic requires a reversal of what contemporary society, in the main, tells us we should have. In the Tarot this is the Hanged Man figure, with a slice of the Hermit thrown in for good measure.

  To be in touch with Morda requires knowing precisely what kind of kindling the cauldron of your own illumination requires to stay bubbling for a year and a day, or a decade, or the rest of your life. To diligently feed it sympathetic fuel. Note that the Mabinogion says Morda “kindled” the fire, gave it constant attention, not chucked on a feeder log and wandered off. Morda embodies a devotion to the life that nourishes the deepest part of yourself.

  So he crouches in his darkness and feeds the flames with the appropriate mixture of hardwoods and breath. It is unglamorous work, unwitnessed, but vital to the sustenance of any great endeavor we undertake. For something to emerge in its fullness, it has to be cultivated, sustained past the point where we would rather put it down because we could buy the potion instead of creating it. The problem is, we can’t. The mix is always slightly different; the kindling that moves my flames would extinguish my neighbors.

  It is personal work that requires discipline and an exchange of time and energy. To make something of worth is rarely a quick process. We have an image of absolutely transcendental information in the story
, but not before a period of time spent crouching near the ground, blind to the outer world, sustaining heat between the elemental (fire) and the created (the potion).

  A year and a day in a story means a long time. Also, whenever magic or the otherworld is involved, strange things happen to time. Morda is the part of us that is attentive to distant voices and is prepared to sit in dark, moist places to grow, as Yeats says, “Silver apples of the Moon.”

  THE ABILITY TO CHANGE SHAPE

  Gwion Bach, having imbibed the prescribed mixture, effortlessly transmutes from entity to entity, any previous bounds of physicality wrenched asunder. He is large and tiny, an un-static, mercurial thing. The elemental and animal kingdoms are suddenly and immediately available to him. As an example of someone having received the correct dosage from the cauldron he is suddenly vast—not caught in the rigidity of idea, he moves at speed between forms—specifically, animal forms. He could have become a giant or a tower of flame to defeat the sorceress, but he went the way of the animal powers. The story makes explicit magical relationship with them, and says that to inhabit their molecular structure requires illumination not denigration. It is a raised position.

  WORDS WERE LIKE MAGIC

  All cultures have, at one time or another, spent long periods observing the movements of animals. Early stories and poems even claim magical kinship. In the words of Nalunqiaq: “ In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived on the earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being . . . That was the time when words were like magic. The human mind had mysterious powers. A word spoken to by chance might have strange consequences. It would suddenly come alive.”10

  Shape-shifting informs us of the necessity for movement; in fact our life depends on it. A choice, relationship, or job that felt wonderful fifteen years ago can suddenly become a prison, the scales we loved are rotting and dull, the water we abide in nebulous and stagnant. Surely better to be winged, supported by invisible patterns, closer to the sun. The instinctive self, if not totally buried, understands the moves required to achieve this, if that self is obscured by static, it will create chaos till we pay attention. A healthy psyche, the story tells us, listens to its animal nature and twists in the foam when under attack, basks on a rock when the sun’s out, climbs to higher branches to protect its young. As conditions change, we are fluid.

  So, four insights from this Welsh teaching story are:1. The need for boundaries (three drops, no more)

  2. The original complementary mix of instinct and intellect (Ceridwen’s potion)

  3. The need for gestation through the interior of those ingredients (Morda, the blind man)

  4. The fluidity of forms that arise from it—the initiated form.

  Initiation is always an attempt to reunite the two Dragons, to forge a disciplined wildness. Somewhere out on the trail is a place beyond polarization: “the one true way,” the stand-off, the enemy and the savior, the Wall Street banker and the tree-hugging fringe dweller. In the next chapter we’ll delve deeper and find a story that traces this journey.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE NORTHERN WITCH AND THE LUMINOUS BRIDE

  It is people at the edge who say things at the edge:

  winter is toward knowing.

  William Stafford1

  SNOWDONIA: PREPARING TO FAST

  Often the rain has set in by now, or great banks of fog have moved up the estuary from the Irish Sea. To our small band, dug into the sides of the mountain with our threadbare tents, small rations, and great task, the weather feels like further testing. To wake up to the patter of rain on canvas is to grasp the reality that in days, if not hours from now, you will take yourself away from the group into some bleak forest or open mountainside and begin your fast, regardless of the weather. But that is then, not now; we still have preparation to undergo, stories to witness. The office, the brake pads of your car, the sound of your neighbor’s television all feel a great distance away.

  “I just need to be soaked in wilderness. Some other part of me is waiting out there. It’s hard to speak of.… I’m terrified, but need it more than I’ve ever needed anything.”

  James, rite of passage participant2

  The days leading up to the fast follow a specific schedule: Longer and longer periods alone in the natural world, first an hour, then three, then five. We examine old hunter-gatherer stalking techniques: to use the periphery of your vision to trace the movement of animals, to sit quite still and follow the unruly buffalo procession of your thoughts. Every day the surrounding land feels less unfamiliar and more like Home, its language of welcome non-verbal but no less profound. The evenings bring our voyagers back together, gathered round the campfire. There is no better time to tell stories. The myths provide instruction and context for the initiate’s road.

  This process of leaving the village is a pivotal point in the old stories, a root moment in the procession towards a particular kind of “perverse” wholeness that flies against the dictates of thin authority, the cooing affirmation of the corporate. Something moves under the skin, sticks in the throat, is ill at ease with the roles and cloaks that rush to cover your angular nakedness as you move through life. There is a unique fatigue in a regimented road that urges you to shoot the wheels off the cart, burn the masterpiece, and head off to the travelers’ camp. You must admit, as D. H Lawrence calls them, “The three strange angels.”3

  Indigenous teachers have always understood that initiation is a microcosm of the experience of living a human life; the very process of living requires leaving what is familiar, e.g. the womb, and venturing out into a world of uncertain outcomes. A life that is completely defined by society’s requirements is only partially resonant with the wider senses of our psyche. Let’s not confuse completeness with the desire to be happy and safe at all costs—no story worth hearing begins that way.

  Some adventurous, troublesome part of our nature has to be activated, the part looking for god and aloneness as well as security and the warmth of the hearth. This process lifts us from the greenhorn, the unseasoned, into psychic weight and resonance. There is no evangelical right way to do this: you could fast in an oak grove, steal a panther’s whisker, drink nothing but bulls’ blood for nine days, search for a golden fleece, or meditate in the burning grounds of a cemetery. Any of these amplifies our biology into a cosmology that is expansive, rich, and intensely mysterious. The Renaissance doctor Paracelsus saw it this way: “If the physician understands things exactly and sees and recognizes all illnesses in the macrocosm outside man . . . then he may approach the inside of man . . . this would not be possible without profound knowledge of the outer man, who is nothing other than heaven and earth.”

  Mythology often symbolizes the beginning of this process by the arrival of an extraordinary object or experience in the initiate’s life. In Russia it is a lone hunter discovering the vibrant, deep orange feather of the firebird on a desolate forest trail. It could be a princess, wandering through the forest witnessing the unusual sight of a great white bear holding a wreath. Such images cause a temporary loosening of the domestic ties, shaking, beguiling and alarming the initiate. Trouble is always part of this shuddering arrival. An event has occurred that pulls our gaze from the trance of comfort, whether crisis or opportunity, and sends us out from the village gates. The greater our investment in security and status, the more savage the underworld’s dogs can appear, the more baleful the moon. We always had a sense this place existed, but surely a pension plan and the cult of eternal youth could keep it away?

  EMPTYING THE BAG

  Ritual and myth are coded steps that can help facilitate our movement through such awakening times. These old stories remove some of the abstraction in crisis, and keep us focused on the half-concealed path, rather than complaining that we’re so far from home in the first place. Liberated experience, originality, breaking shackles can result from following this route. The element that varies from individual to individual is how c
onscious we are that we’re in it.

  We can make a rather lazy comparison of the role of the contemporary artist with these voyagers into the underworld—that by the nature of their vocation artists are predisposed to pushing the boundaries and following strange, associative trails to the unconscious. It can be an inflationary mistake to place the shaman tag on the shoulders of many working artists. The shaman has a set of handed-down psychic tools and very real connections to historic, magical information that will, for the most part, keep them alive.

  It is as if thick sheets of plastic have been placed between much contemporary art and the last fifteen hundred years of creative spiritual information. As we peer at distorted forms we can vaguely make out the hunched figure of Titian but he remains muffled. Emily Dickinson seems blurry, out of reach. As we try to wipe the plastic into clarity, someone unseen is nailing a plastic roof down too, just in case some connection has been left between us and stars, air, and mercurial conversation.

  What we are left with is a hundred thousand magazine articles, all photocopied, some scissors and paste. When all direct resonance has been bled from the images of art, we can hold up ironic commentaries on Godfrey of Strasbourg, or Dostoevsky, and wonder to ourselves, “What was all that heat about?” The constant mantra for contemporary artists is “play,” because “work” feels too heavy and macho. So play we do, cut and pasting ourselves as far as we can into a cool, white space, with no badger skulls present.