A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  CHAPTER 4

  GAMBLING WITH THE KNUCKLE-BONES OF WOLVES

  Rooster, you monster with a blood-red crest, a jagged

  spongy comb cocked to one side: even in your looks,

  your undeniably feral, ancient face, an angered current runs, as if

  your eyes might give off sparks.

  Aleksandr Kushner1

  If they are awake, young men and women remember they need to gamble for their lives with the knuckle-bones of wolves, fling a glamour of language at star formations, forge a thin red knife of ingenuity from love of a hopeless cause, pad lunatic miles across fresh tundra snow to steal one whisker from the Arctic Tiger, and in doing so, charm the Gods and Goddesses of earthy panache so sweetly that they blow the winds of excitement and long term purpose into their lives. They sense that an appointment with trouble is part of their deal with this world. But where to find that ragged door of trouble that reveals but does not end life?

  To talk about elders we have to make space for the youth, who are, after all, tugging on the other end of that rope. In the last three chapters we have looked at the explosive rupture of Taliesin’s birth, the tensions between the warring dragons of intellect and lunacy, and the role of initiation as a kind of glue that binds them together. Having then explored the problematic reentry into society, we now turn our attention to adolescence, the traditional age at which to step out from the domestic. I first came across this next story in a translation from the Siberian by James Riordan. The story may be masculine in tone, but has proved to be a great favorite with young women as well.

  THE SERPENT AND THE BEAR

  This story hails from the land of the great white, Siberia, and was first sung into life many, many centuries ago. Handed from mouth to mouth in the oral tradition, it contains great medicine. Back when the world was a fresh young pony riding through the universe on the back of a whale with a jaw full of wildflowers, there lived a Nanai tribeswoman named Vaida and her young son, Anga. A tiger had eaten Anga’s father when he was a baby, so no man dwelt in his tent. One day Vaida fell sick and, bedridden, was unable to work. The neighbors proclaimed, “It is the work of the bosiyoo; she has a bad spirit in her. We must drive it out before it finishes her.” The clan gathered in the threadbare tent, blew out the lights and raised their voices to alarm the bosiyoo. In the dark they banged on iron pots, and rattled and wailed like little shamans, but nothing worked.

  At last they summoned a real shaman. They watched him, resplendent in horned hat and dress, weave slowly over the ice towards the tent, so smoothly it seemed he was floating. He warmed his drum over the embers, then began to play, a rhythm that grew in volume as he started to swirl like a dervish around the fire. After a time his lips flecked with foam, his eyes rolled back, and his soul flew on the rhythm of the drum to the mountaintop in the western heavens where there is no day but only continual night, where the moon is but a sliver and heavy mist is always present. There he broke bread with the spirits. Some time later, his soul returned and the shaman gave his information.

  “She will certainly die unless someone can bring her the skin of the serpent Ogloma and the fur of the Great Bear. To find Ogloma, they must cross terrible tundras; and near Ogloma dwells an even more fearsome serpent, Simoon. She kills without mercy anyone who approaches her. Her breath of fire would incinerate a man’s arm in a second.” Sobering news, but young Anga quietly took it in. The shaman continued, “There is no one who would dare approach the land of the Great Bear. He lives in a cavern deep in the heart of a terrible mountain that is too steep to climb. Where would we find such a bold warrior to go in search of these terrible monsters?” The old women stepped back, muttered sadly and left the tent. Vaida moaned, tears hot on her cheeks, “So I shall die on this bed . . . how will you live then, my son?”

  “Dry your eyes,” said Anga, “I shall go fetch the serpent’s skin and the bear’s fur, worry not!”

  “You are too small for such a task, you will never make it, little Anga.” But Anga insisted, and made ready for his journey.

  THE FATHERLESS TENT

  The story begins with a scene of crisis. We are confronted with the situation of the ailing mother, the worried young son, and the deceased father, “eaten by a tiger.” This last is a hard blow to the rhythm of the two of them, leaving them to scratch a life in the most challenging of conditions. The absent father suggests a boy raised primarily in the company of his mother who, judging by the boy’s later actions, has done an extremely accomplished job. Although the specter of the father, an older masculine presence, hangs over this story, we detect him most in his absence. In many ways this is a story of absence. What makes it particularly pertinent is the very contemporary sense of the boy’s striking out on a journey without clear guidance.

  When we delve into the Irish stories of Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, we find that he received his instruction in warfare from a woman, Scathach, who revealed both the roads of skilled weaponry and lovemaking to him. Another great female warrior, Aife, bore his child. We immediately detect that women are a source of developed, formidable fierceness that the male would do well to learn from. The intelligence and courage that Anga displays is testament to some clear instruction from the mother. As she ails, there is a debt to be repaid.

  As the raw materials of what constitutes an initiation slowly filter into the western mindset, we may be tempted to draw quick, dogmatic definitions of the experience. Although we can say that in many cultures men and women are segregated while they undergo an initiatory process, that occurs partially so that they may perceive the other in a more magical, cosmological, and tender light on their return. The intent is not to be deliberately divisive but to drink deeply from the well of your own nature, so as to inhabit the dance of relationship with greater vigor on your return.

  Women instruct men and men advise woman all through our lives. While a distilled aspect of initiation is to be taught by a same-sex elder, the whole experience loses its humor if we then assume that there is no dialogue worth hearing from the other camp. The respect for each other is designed to grow organically, not stiffen into the hard ice of resentment. This separation is meant to loosen you up, not turn you into a hard-mouthed, dictatorial little soldier.

  I would say that the initiatory sequence opened up for Anga a long time before the shaman appeared and that his mother was the initiator of that period. He lived in her energy, witnessed her survival in extremis, and was equipped by her instructional legacy with the tools for survival. However, the relationship eventually requires a strong shift.

  LEAVING THE MOTHER TO SAVE THE MOTHER

  Somewhere above the machinations of the story, it’s evident that the time was right for Anga to be given such a task. If the task had come too early, he would undoubtedly have been unequipped to attempt it. If it had come later, the sweetness we sense between the two could have congealed into the kind of resentments we see between mothers and teenage sons all over the world.

  Anga leaves at just the right time; Vaida hasn’t required of him to become a surrogate husband, and he isn’t desperate to be rid of her. This is the perfect moment for a traditional initiatory break, in which ritual elders call the boy from the tent in the guise of the serpent and the bear. Instead of receiving, as Anga has done for so long, the emphasis is now on giving. It feels time for Anga to either receive instruction from another source or become a more active participant in their story together. The wine is ready to leap from the bottle; keep it corked and it will sour. Something in the ingredients of the “cure” reveals something about the nature of the illness in the first place.

  First of all, a dialogue with the animal powers is required. Serpent skin and fur contain healing properties for the dying feminine.

  When our animal nature has been sufficiently thinned out and no wildness edifies us, then the old crone in us—the one with dark eyes and weathered skin—falls into illness. When a culture is moving at such velocity that it can no longer hear its
tires speeding over small native villages, some sickness will pull us down.

  Our terror of an overgrown lawn or a desolate stretch of road at midnight means we are far from the animal body. But for the Dark-Eyed Woman, this all pours from the same deep river that brings us to health. She is an unpredictable current under our skin; the part of us that laughs when soaked by a rainstorm, that would happily never see a clock face again, that crawls out of your skin at night and walks deserted beaches on the coast of Ireland.

  When her energy is absent in the tent/tribe/culture then some young energy is required to break the seal of vacuity and bring home the real honey. In modern life it is often young people who ride great waves of creativity for a few brief years, bringing in new ideas, images, and vitality. When this is literalized in physical youth rather than an inner resource, its resonance tends to be fleeting, a great cresting that lacks the depth to bring the Mother back to life.

  Our clue is that the youth is charged with making contact with two extraordinary forces from the wild, so that he himself will be changed and broadened. Youth in itself can’t sustain change indefinitely, but as an energy open to feral tuition, it has huge possibilities. By the information we receive of the tiger and the Bosiyoo, we are aware that this story is concerned with great unwieldy powers, with the Otherworld pulling on the fabric of tribal life from the very start. It is a story with a divine center, so we move out in that direction, carrying our talismans and hidden steel close. If we do not chance it all, the Mother will die.

  Give me the dangerous violin, risking every note

  Like dynamite on a china plate;

  Give me the story that burns up as it finishes,

  The melody leaping out

  Onto its wire

  The crowd gasps.

  Now roses will pour out of words

  Or we will ruin everything.

  Jay Leeming2

  Anga’s father didn’t slip on the ice, fall down a well, or perish in a brawl; he was devoured by some kind of primeval force. This detail is important, alerting us to something mysterious happening. This creature is only half in this world; around his shoulders are the danger colors of orange and black, the fears but also prayers of the worshipful villagers, and the ability to flourish in hard conditions.

  Something in that dangerous energy field has taken his father from him. The two great animals of the Nanai, the tiger and the bear, stand like bookends in this story.

  In my own work with at-risk teenagers, I have met many adolescents who grew up with no father in the tent. Sometimes, due to their brutality, it was just as well they were out of the picture. Either way, many don’t grow up so able as Anga, so ready for the adventure. Part of my job was to scour housing estates, older brother’s crack dens, arcades, and bars to locate them when they failed to turn up for an appointment and convince them to get in the car without any kind of physical altercation.

  On two occasions I saw one of them climb out of a second floor bedroom and jump rather than engage with me. Another time, one pulled the end of the car gear stick at sixty miles an hour in an attempt to off-road the vehicle (it almost worked). Another climbed out on a ledge over a raging river and threatened to leap if I asked about his father again. Most of these young ones seemed to fill the space of absence with two very different feelings about the father.

  To some, the father became heroic, above the squalor they endured, clever to have escaped, even if that was to prison. With every personal misery they were suffering, the dream myth of life with the father was amplified. Once in awhile, the father, usually so as to apply for more government benefits, would offer them a weekend in Birmingham or wherever he happened to be. A temporary glow would come over the youth, only to be frozen into contempt upon returning to the overworked mother, livid boyfriend, turbulent home, alcoholic uncle. It’s a different context, but I think of Fran Quinn’s words:I love you so much I will

  hold onto anything, even

  your dark and angry face3

  The other road taken was denial of the father, loss or fear articulated as rage, perceiving him only as a monster. Either of these roads is thin and lacks balance, but that can be hard to grasp in the suffering trance they’re caught in. That thin road—he/she’s like THIS, and only THIS—can enable emotional movement but lacks soul. In an environment that refuses the necessary reflection, we scurry for ways to transcend the absence. We can ride that animosity or fantasy for decades, and let it infiltrate our lives in a hundred different ways.

  THE RITUAL CUT OR A PERILOUS WOUND

  Adolescents already possess a defined sense of mythology, although they don’t verbalize it as such. As with Baba’s children, whom I discussed in chapter two, in the absence of ritualized forms, adolescents’ initiatory route takes a kind of shadow form. The trauma they experience instigates change but not necessarily growth. It’s not that these young people lack identity; they have defined, handed-down archetypes from their life experience, environment, and family. They are often more established in their sense of themselves than some of the more affluent teenagers I sometimes work with.

  Jake, a fourteen-year old, had an unshakable sense of his own identity as hell-raiser, sex offender, and bully. Caught in an almost hypnotic desire for his underworld experience, e.g., Prison, he would often be found stealing cars the same afternoon he had been in court after yet another warning. For Jake, prison was the river he had to cross to become a man like his father, to bear the same tribal scars. The street mythology was more authoritative than anything society could throw into the situation to calm it. If you’ve been raised by wolves, why would you listen to an old English sheepdog? Despite everything attempted to stop him, Jake escalated his misdemeanors until he was sent down.

  Street perception of people and situations involves tremendous subtlety. You have to bring a kind of “edge-seeing” into every situation, read body language, act instantly, know how to bluff and spot weakness, and get what you want. Forcing youth to the periphery of society, it creates the necessity of the intuitive. Opportunity lies in grasping it. I’ve always been interested how at- risk youth can often grasp the underbelly of a story quickly, the hidden motivations behind the characters’ actions. The edginess of their position means that they are often looking into situations while simultaneously watching their own back, learning to look both ways.

  They are Baba’s children, accelerated into experiences they are too young for and lack the blessing and support of elders to make sense/soul from. But even in the shadowy world they inhabit, we see Yaga’s intelligence at play, the survival drive, the canniness, the desire for initiatory experience.

  They get it, but in ways that take them too far into the burning grounds, so that a ritual cut becomes a perilous wound for which they lack the salve that would clean it from infection. That ritual cut is meant to be flooded with the mythic imagination. As the skin heals underneath, a hundred bright images from the myth–world scurry into their blood stream. Without it, the wound congeals and we fall into disappointment.

  I discussed this situation with a Crow Elder, who suddenly turned to me and said, “That (the at-risk teenagers) is where we find our leaders!” He recognized what was crying out underneath the masks and made it his work to find it, honor it, and inspire its bearer towards leadership in the community. Such youths see the shit of the world because they have had it rubbed in their eyes from the moment they could crawl.

  Much has been written about the need for reintroduced rites of passage for such individuals. In my own experience, hours or afternoons in their company weren’t enough. A walk or a story wasn’t enough. What was needed (and rarely happened with so much health and safety red tape) was a complete removal of everything that was familiar to them, in order to walk the real initiatory road. Estate, gone.Drugs, cars, and status, gone. Family, gone. They needed the Uncles with the Clay masks, ropes, and blindfolds. The Aunts that lead them into the red center of the Women’s Hut.

  Some strong, serious rit
ual act needs to come in, to alert the soul that something real is happening. The poet Timothy Young, experienced in this area, says that if you teach boys to hunt with skill and respect, some energy enters them that hones their natural ferocity into something grander and more useful.

  Geoffrey Canada describes running a martial arts evening in Harlem. Does he go in as lamb, or as a therapist? No, he goes in as a lion. Pacing up and down, he draws the attention towards himself and the work, towards activity, and for a moment the lure of the streets is dimmer.

  I’m trying to bring magic into the lives of these kids. To bring a sense of wonder and amazement. I can feel the students losing themselves and focusing on me. I have crowded all the bad things out of their minds: The test they failed, the father who won’t come by to see them, the dinner that won’t be on the stove when they get home. I’ve pushed it all away by force of will and magic.4

  So we follow the archaic clues: severance from the estate, district, gang connections, sexual partners, and drugs, and follow the thin trail towards possibility and challenge. This is a true Rebel move. The marks of street life are still consensual, preordained in their way, but the way of the Mountain is unique and uncertain.

  The initial response to that kind of uncertainty is anger, and many attempts to escape from the program. Over the years we have found youths trying to hitch their way out of Snowdonia, ducking in the amusement arcades when they were meant to be fasting, with much smuggling of Class A drugs in their rucksack. When the dust had settled, however, and no way home was apparent, slowly they began to gather round the nightly campfires. When they began to realize the intensity of the rite-of-passage they were undertaking, and the fact that it didn’t seem completely “safe,” they began to see it as a challenge, one they’d have to raise their game to get through.