by Martin Shaw
On one level, we could say that she is having an encounter with a profoundly masculine force, one not tied up with the consciousness of her own father, the King. Indeed, she is given no time to ponder or intuit; this is a moment of vajra clarity, requiring a masculine response. If you want this wreath you have to give yourself. Well? Yes or No.
Something is opening up in her that requires a decision. No friend to ring or group debate, she has to make a clear move or this wonder will be gone. She has glimpsed the world beyond the world, and she has to be active to follow it. Maybe she has led a sheltered life, or has been so stuck in the archetype of the princess she felt frozen. We feel that the wreath is something specifically for her away from the familial gifting of the castle. I have met many women compelled to venture into wilderness because of a glimpse of the wreath. They sought to clear a space where they could allow water to start to clean the thick layers of mud, accumulated projections, and splintered bones of past lovers off their hide and into the scrying bowl of the living world. If they glimpsed the wreath many years back and denied the call, then it is sometimes Yaga’s broom of descent that sweeps them in.
I spent forty years as a math teacher in Birmingham, trying to forget my longing to travel—to be somewhere entirely different, different food, language, religion. The job never paid enough for that, and it took four days on a mountain for that memory to surface and not go away. I’d walked into a situation where I couldn’t deny my longing any more, even if it felt too late. No one in my family ever did anything like that, so I relegated it to a “wish” pile that I knew would stay unanswered.
Dorothy, rites of passage participant4
To make the Deal Beyond the Things of This World is to be mad in the eyes of the buttoned-up-tight world. Somehow Blake achieved this while keeping an elegantly shod foot on the streets of nineteenth-century London. How long is it since you were “Mad as the Mist and Snow?” asks Yeats.5
Mirabai, the great Bhakti poet of North India, made the deal when she committed her life utterly to devotion to the dark one, Krishna. When her husband died, she pulled further and further into temple life, and her immediate family did everything they could to stop her, even sending her poison as a suggestion she take her own life. She uttered the words: Sati na hosyan girdhar gansyan mhera manmoho ghanamai (I will not commit sati: I will sing the songs of Girdhar Krishna) A life force as great as hers was always going to stir up strong feeling in the Kingdom of Safety. She is a humming one, a defiant, exquisite breaker of chains.
THE CURLY LEAVES OF MEMORY
When the King hears of this bargain, he initiates the frantic creating of new wreaths, but of course they don’t quite fit. The daughter remembers something greater.
When we project an encounter with the masculine out onto an external man, rather than cultivate it in ourselves, we may find ourselves in relationships where the grip is just too tight, the leaves not as bright as we remember, and the whole affair just not as thrilling as the possibilities we glimpsed out there in the forest. We are attempting to obtain in the rinky-dink world what we glimpse from the otherworld. That’s not to say magical blurring points can’t happen, but no man or woman can be a substitute for your own wreath long-term: that ship will hit the rocks.
A man can have a hand on the tail of the wolverine, or a heart that exotic birds feed from, but ultimately they are also linked to the external, human form. We cannot humanly sustain the projection of something divine. If the projection remains unconscious in us, we will, simply by human disposition, carry a longing for whole other layers of experience that cannot be offered by another person, no matter how well meaning. A literalized perspective will always lead us to a bar, a party, or a nightclub, rather than the inner awakening that this story suggests.
When a serious attempt to hear a soul voice is underway, many promises will manifest from the established kingdom to hamper that process. Do you remember that moment when you finally screwed up the courage to leave your post at the production plant and travel for a year? A promotion is offered out of the blue. Suddenly a false wreath appears. With it comes all the justifications why it isn’t faux at all—maybe if I have more money I can stay in bigger hotels when I finally travel. I could take out more insurance, be safer. Maybe this is spirit talking to me at last. But it’s not spirit; it’s a false wreath.
When I glimpsed the wreath and the bear out on the mountain, I was offered any number of false wreaths to stay in the music business. More money, work with world musicians and “heal the world with sound”—any number of ghastly but convincing reasons not to accept The Deal Beyond the Things of this World. Of course, as in the beginning of any decent adventure, we have no idea where this is going. The faux wreath isn’t a full denial of the real one, but instead an imitation, a compromise, or, in the arena of relationship, it’s simply looking in the wrong place.
This first stage of the daughter’s life, in the safety of the royal court, should not be construed as a mistake. The fact that she is healthy, sane, and free to wander points to a certain success rate in her upbringing. It is the safety of a court that stabilizes, establishes boundaries, gives an occasional curfew, and gifts you a solid base from which to gaze over treetops at a sunset and dream: good ego work. We learn quickly how to present ourselves elegantly and opportunely, but the strength of emerging emotion at adolescence can make us more porous, so receptive to that sunset that it compels us to squint and lean forward into the last of its rays, each one pulling us away from thou shalt.
As we have discovered, initiation, in both ritual and myth, is a container for these openings. When they are absent in our lives, the ability to discern between a real and a false wreath becomes ever more vague. The culture of falsity is now so dazzling that a terrifying amnesia exists about the glade where the wild roses grow; many have simply never caught their scent. One hit of DMT will blow the castle doors open in seconds and precipitate a chemically engineered free-fall into a Persian garden. As we congratulate ourselves on having plunged straight into Ceridwen’s cauldron, we would do well to remember our fathers turning to the whisky cabinet and gazing at sunsets through the castle gates.
Time passed and sure enough, on Thursday the white bear appeared to claim his princess. The King’s plan was simply to kill the bear, and he sent in his bodyguards to dispatch the beast. Well, the bear hardly looked left or right, but batted them away like bothersome flies and headed towards the throne. The tradition of Norway at that time was that the eldest daughter must marry first, so the King allowed her to be taken. Whisking her onto his back, the bear flew from the safety of the stone castle and out into the lush forests surrounding it. “Tell me,” said the bear, “have you ever sat softer or seen more clearly than you do now?”“Yes, on my father’s lap I sat more softly and from the turrets of my father’s castle I saw more clearly,” she replied. “Argh! You are not her!” exclaimed the bear, turning in his tracks and leaving her by the castle gates.
The next Thursday he returned again, and this time a small army had assembled. Even more nonchalantly than before, the bear swatted them aside. He scooped up the second daughter and whisked her off as before. He asked the question again: “Tell me, have you ever sat more softly or seen more clearly than you do now?”“Yes, on my father’s lap and from the turrets of my father’s castle.” “Gadzooks! betrayal!” exclaimed the bear before dropping her off at the gates.
One final time he came to collect, and by now a huge army of mercenaries, bear-catchers, priests, and hair cutters waited for the bear. The hum of arrows sang like banshee wails at the bear, but he ducked underneath their flurry and made merry amongst the throng. Like a hot knife through butter, he sliced through his adversaries and made off with the third daughter. Soon they were out in the deep woods. Again he asked the same ritual questions: “Tell me, have you ever sat more softly or seen more clearly than you do now?”
“Never in my life,” came her reply, and the bear knew he finally was with the right woman.<
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THE FALSE BRIDES AND THE RITUAL QUESTION
The firmness of the third daughter’s refusal of the father’s wreaths is impressive. The family’s tactics, however, are not exhausted. When the illusions fail to hold, a kind of blocking and shaming enters, carrying the eternal message: “We do not follow our longing! And if anyone was going to, it certainly would not be you!”
In some way, the shamed imagination is at stake, the possibility of something wonderful beyond the village gates being deeply threatening to a fundamentalist mindset. What happens when you lose the fundamentals? The cage shakes for the whole family. Gripping the sides of the falling elevator, the father pulls tradition to his breast and invokes this rule of the first daughter marrying first. There appears to be a touch of real malice here, a twisted arrow: “I’ll give one of my daughters up to the Bear, but not the one he wants.” It appears that everyone loses in such a scenario.
The shaming of the imagination is a terrifying violence. It is interesting to notice the changes in a child’s drawings between the ages six and nine. Although the pictures can gain in accuracy of literal image, we see again and again some freewheeling, loose limbed and curious spirit fall from the page.
Possibilities get narrowed quickly, and the failure of the adult to appreciate the odder layers of the child’s thinking finds express as an attempt to get every child viewing the same rose, house, or shoe as quickly as possible. Howard Gardner observes:
Children are seen as sinking into the doldrums of literalism: a pedantic preoccupation with the photogenic aspects of drawing undermines the child’s involvement in the expressive genius of the graphic medium . . . while technical competence is found to improve steadily with age, flavorfulness—the extent to which drawings incorporate individualizing features—reaches its apogee in first grade and then steadily recedes thereafter.6
We recall Picasso’s famous quote: “Once I drew like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like children.” There is wisdom in the idea of learning the rules to then break them, but if that possibility is never considered, then we are caught in the trance of the consensual, and may use chemicals rather than the arts to push beyond its rigidity. Every bar full of office workers at the end of a long day comprises an attempt to blur the edges of the Father’s Castle—even for an hour. If the creative muscle of the imagination is not used regularly, then we become dependent on external forces to shift our consciousness.
When we amplify “the rules” this vigorously, we create permission for many things. The tracks to the forest get concretized, and streetlights, permanently on, block out that troublesome dusk.
All that forest was wasted on air and owls until we got here. Those Iroquois were savages who didn’t know what to do with the land. Any mile of earth is wasted unless it’s ours, unless it’s lit by the steady lamp of our knowledge. Haul the universe into that light, all the whales and crickets and mountains. We will sell the water and make money out of the trees
Jay Leeming7
We are encouraged that the spell of shame seems not to enter the daughter’s heart, but falls at some unspecified spot between her and her father. Some of us get caught in that unspecified spot, neither leaving completely nor committing to stay. This is why in initiation rites it must be unrelated elders who physically pull you from the grip of the family’s house; it would be seen as unboundaried and foolish to attempt the break all by yourself—there is too much psychic stickiness between you and your family.
What the king fails to anticipate is the encounter with the Ritual Question, a thing bespoke. The vision in the woods is unique to each individual, a specific rapture that cannot be dished out like a panacea and have the same effect universally. Therefore, when the sisters respond truthfully to the questions, “Have you ever sat more comfortably than you do now? Have you ever seen more clearly?” it’s to their credit. To lie would be to end up like the three false giants in “Ivan the Bear’s Son”—unable to handle the jewel from the Underworld. It is not their journey. In three or five years, maybe their answers will be different.
BEAR CATCHERS AND HAIR CUTTERS
The final lines of defense are the swathes of soldiers, bear catchers, and hair cutters, desperate to prune both the daughter’s and the bear’s extravagance. We appreciate the fact that for several thousand years we have existed in a culture with a sharp blade and some scissors aimed at a woman’s neck and hair. We’ll do anything to stop the white bear getting through. To step into activity, to be in contact with a deeper masculinity than a bungled patriarchy, has caused this scene a thousand times over in the last hundred and fifty years. We must not fall into literalism here, but understand that to break from the Father (big F) involves an internal movement towards an internal masculine. When a culture polarizes this profoundly, we know it is deeply unwell.
BLOCKING THE SPIRIT BEAR
The pushes and pulls of initiatory openings are always a dance between the tacit and explicit. One of the weaknesses in contemporary spirituality is exposed when, in attempting to recreate this process consciously, ritual is created without inviting in the unexpected, playful dimension of wilderness and the wild. Then we stay firmly in the realm of “ideas,” keeping our entire focus on the human and psychological dimension. It is the integrity of the soul that is at stake here. Why do you think the ritual life of indigenous cultures has always put emphasis on exertion, eloquence, and a certain amount of suffering? To alert he soul that something real is going on, something serious. We can have a lovely and edifying time at a workshop or talk, but how far has the soul moved?
Not one inch.
In these encounters, and god knows we’ve all had them, we block the white bear from getting through, by imagining that he has. It reminds me of that old quote about “religion being the last defense against a religious experience.” Superficial, cozy, thinned out, controlled spirituality can be a way of staying in the Kingdom of Safety. We can wear all the feathers we want, attend all the prayer groups we can, turn up at a hundred ecological rallies, and in our secret hearts we are Bear-Catchers and Hair-Cutters. I’m not saying the wreath and the bear represent God, but they do represent genuine spiritual movement.
In Goethe’s The Invisible King we hear a father imploring a child not to pick up the wreath, that all that is fantasy:
“My boy, why is it you hide your face?”
“Dad, over there do you see the King?
The invisible King with ermine and staff?”
“Dear boy, what you see is a rolling mist.”
This denial of the soul continues, growing more frantic through several stanzas until:
The terrified father rides wilder and wilder;
the boy now groaning as he sits slumped over;
In grief and fear at last the father got home.
The boy lay dead in the father’s arms.8
We understand that the wild third daughter is undergoing a major severance from rank, family, and comfort. We doubt she knows consciously what the compulsion is towards the wreath, only that the divine moment has arrived and she must break through. The severance is the movement of a sword-swoosh through the air. In “Ivan the Bear’s Son,” the severance occurred through untamed wildness, in “TheSerpent and the Bear,” the break came through a desire to save the mother, and in this story the severance occurs because of Longing.
THE ANSWER FREELY GIVEN
Because of this, when the third daughter answers the Ritual Question, she answers freely and without pressure because it IS the clearest view she has ever seen and the most comfortable seat because she is riding the fierce energy of her own destiny.
The answer the soul longs for has no coercion in it: the cleanness of the answer creates a container for great movement. The Bear isn’t growling, threatening divorce or a hefty lawsuit: he’s simply listening. When we fall in love, we have the capacity to speak with that clarity for a while, before the machinations of relationship wade in with agendas and obstacles to
sustaining that opening.
The bliss the wild daughter has followed cannot remain in the shape in which she found it, but its clarity allows the break from “the Father’s House” she needs.9 This is not so much the negotiation of a Yaga answer—that is different stage—but the spark that strikes the kindling that starts the burning of the life you were born to have, not the one others attempt to create for you.
When it seemed to the young woman they had ridden three times around the world, they finally arrived at a castle that was breathtaking to behold. She saw turrets so high they were hidden with clouds and a great drawbridge of solid oak. At the castle, she lived in comfort, with only one essential task: to see that the fire never went out. The bear was away in the woods during the day, but at night, under darkness, in the bedroom, he became a man—though she felt rather than saw his form. For three years running, she bore children from these amorous meetings, and each time the bear would steal away with the child, who was not seen again.
Time passed, and, caught in a growing homesickness, she asked the bear if she could visit her family. He had no objections but responded rather cryptically that she should listen to what her father said, but not what her mother wanted her to do. So she returned home, was met well, and soon started to fill her family in on life over in the realm of the bear. When she rather lustily informed them of the bear’s nocturnal activities, her mother leaned near and said, “Surely it would be a great pity not to see this fine man! Take this candle so when he is resting you can see what kind of catch you’ve got!” At this her father looked up and said, “Leave it alone! It will only do harm.”
