A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  On her return she did indeed wait till he was slumbering, and, ignoring her father’s advice, lit the candle. The legs were toned and lean, the wrists strong, the chest broad, and as she leant in to see his face, a drop of wax landed on his breast bone. With a great roar he awoke, “One more month! If you could have held on one more month, I could have become a man all the time! I am held in the glamour of the Skull-Gnashing Great Dark Queen; she made me a bear, and now that this has happened, I have to go and marry her! One more month!” With that he fled the bedchamber, out into the dark.

  ANOTHER KIND OF ROYALTY

  After the severity of his departure, we discover the first surprise of the journey: that this strange Bear is actually a King himself, a noble. The castle the wild daughter is led to dwarfs her father’s, makes it appear scant and lacking. We know that none of this was indicated when the daughter made her choice. As in an encounter with Faerie, certain things seem dreamlike, obscure. We find that Valemon the White Bear King becomes a man at night, that some shape shifting is at hand. Also, there is the extraordinary detail that she passes through the three pregnancies, immediately to lose the babies as Valemon makes off with them. We are in the realm of deep symbols now, a place far more archaic than the daughter’s original home.

  Like Ivan arriving in Yaga’s kingdom, we see a tantric moment occurring. In obedience to the call of the wreath, we find in the revelation a shock: no cave of bones and damp, but rather abundance on a huge scale. Of course, the channel that has been opened between the heart and soul of the daughter will amplify the radiance of the castle tenfold. Do you remember the tiny flat you lived in when you first left home? How much you loved it? As the first place you lived in that was yours, even that was a place of huge psychic wealth, the possibility of changing shape right there, far from the pacing parents.

  We wonder at her luck; great forces have flown into the opening she made by leaving. We are reminded of the phenomenon of new converts to a religion being gifted with words of prophecy and healing while aged practitioners look glumly on. An openness to the unseen rather than any great scholarly learning is what creates the doorway. This is a kind of luck the Gods sometimes give the first timer. The difficulty arises in trying to build a strong enough container to maintain that practice without becoming so dogmatized that the Gods can no longer get through.

  With all this freshness and magic abounding, we are given a clue that this is early days in the story, that maybe she is still following or dancing with this energy rather than fully integrating it. Dancing can lead to high adventure though, and whatever Valemon’s castle holds must be potent, as she has three children, one after another. Still, during such an infatuation, strange things can be discounted, and the children are spirited away.

  Something in the daughter has freed itself in the three years since leaving her family. She has drunk deeply from the well of the Otherworld, lived close to the shimmering gaze of dawn, and escaped her shackles. Maybe she painted in her studio for three years, listened to Billie Holiday, drank wine, and paid no attention to selling work. Maybe she toured the length of South America in a traveling theater company and never wrote home. Maybe she lived in a small Welsh fishing village and fashioned effigies to the sea waves themselves. Whatever has been going on with her is swathed in a sense of being near the magical places. The inebriation of this hazy world means that years can pass at lightning speed in our world and just one night in the other. This hints at accelerated experience, something rarefied, not tangled in shopping lists and the school run.

  One aspect of the wild daughter’s strength is being drawn from the animal realm, but we see in the night-time transformations some counterforce wanting to break through, to integrate, and to take human form. What the story calls the bear is attempting to pull itself from the unconscious to the conscious, to be wedded, but if it remains in this betwixt and between state, it lacks the grind/rub of tension to be fully born. The current situation, although once necessary, is becoming languid, stuck.

  THE RAISING OF THE CANDLE

  The daughter’s return to the horizontal world, the family, provides both crisis and deepening of the situation. Goodbye sweet moments with the oil paints, hello trouble, the great awakener. The advice of the mother causes us all to pull back in dismay—yet we know the applecart has to be overturned. From interpretations of “Eros and Psyche” (and its survival into current times due to its insertion into Apuleius’s The Golden Ass), the Raising of the Candle can be seen as a moment when we decide to drop down into darker depths: “What really is the face of my family? How is my marriage after thirty years?” It means peeling back the bandages and peering at the wound. If, in a relationship, only one of you is ready to make that journey, then the other can react like Valemon, and flee the chamber of the lovers altogether.

  That’s the psychological layer of the story; on a mythological level, everything is behaving just so, the advice of the mother being in service to the more elemental swings of initiation that are hidden from us for now. Valemon may protest, but only on the level of a man, not in his Magician aspect.

  Raising the Candle means bringing things to account. Governments, when wading through yet another political scandal, or television companies, getting caught rigging phone-ins, love the rhetoric of

  ‘Raising the Candle’ but refuse to lift the light to the face. As we mentioned, the tempo of this activity is rarely harmonious in a relationship, in which one of us normally wants to stay on the upper deck whilst the other descends into the barnacles, seaweed, and anchorless depths.

  With that, and ignoring the wild daughter’s pleading, the Bear set off at speed for his appointment. She jumped on to his back and held on as he swept through the deep forests of his land. She held on through itchy thickets, through the iciest of rivers, till her fingers were blue and her clothes rags, until at one savage turn of the road she was finally flung off, landing hard on the cold ground. In seconds the Bear was gone and she was completely alone.

  She wandered this way and that for a long time until she came to a cottage in which she found an old woman and a young girl. The King’s daughter asked if they had seen the White Bear King Valemon. “We did, but he was passing so fast you can’t catch him. He’s a month away.” Well, she took the news as best she could and engaged in conversation with the young girl. They sat together and talked about the flowers that grew by the window, and what birds would sing early in the morning. The young girl started to play with a pair of golden scissors, and whenever she clipped the air an abundance of silk, lace, cotton, and wools appeared before her. Clothes were born in an instant, offering both warmth and style.

  Looking up at the old woman, the young girl said, “This poor woman’s clothes are in rags. She needs the scissors more than us. Could we give them to her?” It was agreed, and the third daughter made her way further into the forest, clutching the scissors. We know she spent more nights alone before she came to another cottage. Again, she met a crone and a young girl; again she asked them if they’d seen Valemon. Again, he had passed by so quickly she could never catch him. He was at least a week away. Well, she fell into talking with the young daughter about the music she most loved, the strangeness of dreams, and her favorite animals. The girl was playing with a goblet as they talked, a very magical goblet, because every drink she desired would instantly fill it. Hot toddies, fresh water, and rich berry juices could all be available in an instant. Seeing their visitor’s distress, the young girl enquired whether they could give the goblet to her, so at least she had some liquid to help nourish her. The crone agreed that the third daughter needed something for her thirst and handed the goblet over.

  Well, more time passed in the woods for the third daughter. She finally came to yet another cottage, also with a crone and girl inside. She asked the question about Valemon and this time the response was, “Yes, we’ve seen him, just yesterday, but he whisked past at such speed you could never catch him.” Now used to this answer, she sat on the flo
or with the young girl and discussed all the different ways you could plait hair and what it was like to see lightning strike an old tree. The girl produced a cloth, and when she uttered the words, “Cloth, spread thyself, and deck thyself with every good dish!” it produced legs of lamb, freshly baked bread, figs, crunchy salads, exotic chocolates, and a dozen mouth watering nibbles. The young girl was touched by the tiredness of the third daughter’s eyes, and asked that she might give the cloth of abundant food to the stranger. Without hesitation the crone agreed, and the third daughter went on her way, still looking, still hoping.

  It seemed that forest stretched and shifted before her, so that she’d never come to the end of it. She wandered far off any regular paths, through bushes and long grass, by poison oaks, and slept under an uncertain night sky. After a great long time, she came to a vast mountain with sheer sides, like a wall. It was very forbidding, but next to its base the third daughter found another cottage. This cottage was inhabited by numerous little children all circling around their mother, desperate for food, like chicks in a nest. They were so hungry they were sucking on warm pebbles, pretending they were apples. Dressed in rags and dehydrated, the children were a sorry sight. In no time, the third daughter had produced the scissors, goblet, and cloth. Soon, the children were clothed, warm, and eating real apples, chicken, cucumber, and cheese, and drinking hot chocolate.

  THE GIFTING OF THE WYRD ROAD

  The curious third daughter has now been discharged from the back of the energy that got her out of her father’s house. Those immediate, strong decisive promptings that led to following the thing that sang of the fluttering birds have abandoned her. One of the esoteric meanings of being lost in the forest is to go inward, to travel down in lowering spirals to a bed of autumn leaves and be still. We start to glimpse the moon in a place like this. Whatever energy we were riding has bucked us off. Half-way through the court case, the bright young lawyer collapses and finds herself in a hospital bed.

  Inquisitive moves toward soul knowledge are never a one-time deal, and the required responses change like light on water. What was active in the daughter now has to retreat; in order to deepen, she has to be still. The tacit can rarely be detected at speed charging through a forest, a career, or relationship. The initiatory field has opened again, this time requiring we walk through another door. Fire gives way to water. We understand that the third daughter’s wandering could be months without a cooked meal, a hand on the shoulder, a reason to raise her head from the sodden earth. Just when she may be thinking of lying down and becoming a willow tree, she encounters the first cottage, with its crone, child, and gift. This alerts us that some work must have been done internally, that the outside world is finally starting to respond to her movement downwards.

  We cannot help but notice the constellation of the crone, the mother, and the maiden—the three-fold, absolutely, positively, incredibly ancient face of the Goddess. She is both in the presence of and part of this archaic force. Maybe owls adorn the doorframe and a scythe of the silvered moon leans by the fire. Maybe if we sink deep enough into ourselves, it will be possible to have an audience with the bone-white, spider-spined, child/universe/elder dream-maker of all the known and unknown worlds. The cottage doorways are temple doorways for the daughter, where there are no ritual questions but everything to be won. Just don’t dare suggest she is contained entirely by you, or you’ll be toast.

  This is the daughter’s encounter with the Red, Black, and White—the sequence we find in “Ivan the Bear’s Son.” Only this time the Red is represented by the menstruating fullness of herself, the Black by the presence of the old woman, and the White by the youth and sexual innocence of the young girl. Robert Graves sweeps by us now with his perspective on the Trinity. Tip your hats and hide your wives: here he comes.

  I write of her as the White Goddess because white is her principle color, the color of the first member of her moon trinity ... the New Moon is the white goddess of birth and growth; the Full Moon, the red goddess of love and battle; the Old Moon, the black goddess of death and divination.10

  It seems that somewhere on the wyrd road of our own wanderings, if we are sufficiently lost, if our hands are stained with berry juice and frost, then we will arrive at this most ancient, solitary realm. We know that in Greece this triple power was represented by Persephone as the Maiden, Demeter as the Mother, and Hecate as the Crone. In the magical papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt we find the poem of “Three faced Selene,” where we encounter “Hekate, many named, Mene, cleaving air just like dart-shooter Artemis, Persephone, Shooter of Deer, Night Shining, triple sounding, triple-headed, triple voiced Selene.”11

  In an era in which even to have the language to comprehend a visit to the three doorways is rare, we understand why thousands of men and woman over the last thirty-five years have attempted to raise our awareness of the Triple Goddess. Even so, to attempt to hijack her for a particular cause in the horizontal world can be naïve. In a review of Is the Goddess a Feminist? by Alt Hitebeitel and Kathleen Erndl, Pradip Bhattacharya makes this point.

  The Oriya tradition of Bhubanseswar goes against any feminist interpretation: Without Shiva, Shakti cannot create, on her own she destroys society and nature. While in terms of physiology man is superior, in terms of culture women surpass men. The Goddess’ power is significant only when reined in from within . . . Hence while Kali may be a symbol for feminism for western women, to Oriya women she is neither a symbol of equality or social transformation . . . the male and female deities are not just side by side but even within each other . . . the west appropriates the Hindu Goddess for the purpose of marketing feminism, because the system of gender hierarchy is inherent in the Goddess. In the world of the Goddess separation is illusory and founded in a profound unity at its core.12

  I include this not as an attack on feminism but to re-emphasize the point that the male and female deities are not just side by side but even within each other.

  On all three of the third daughter’s visits, the news on Valemon is not good, but slowly shifts in time-scale. “I saw him a month ago, a week ago, three days ago, but you’ll never catch him!” Each encounter is a move further along the road, but she meets continual encouragement to work harder, to sleep under hedges, to become a lover of solitude, to keep stumbling deeper into the forest of herself. Of course, something is progressing, otherwise she would never have got nearer Valemon. What are the gifts? The Scissors, The Goblet, and The Cloth. We could say this means she is learning how to clothe, nourish, and feed the Soul while lost in the woods.

  The Scissors are active but linked to the invisible; they “drink down the moon” into this world. Iron, we know, is talismanic, associated with defense against evil. So the clothes that flow from this lunar connection would have powerful, life-giving properties tied into their hemlines, straps, gilded unicorn designs, heavy silver brooches, warm wools, delicate silks, and ornate leather jerkins.

  We can have fun imagining the clothes a tailor of the Otherworld would create for us. I have it on good authority that beige is banned, as are stonewashed jeans and trainers. The current paralysis of imagination holds no sway here. We can refer back to other chapters in this book that elaborate the visual manifestation of inner vision—the cloak of bird feathers. Something is emerging that is ready to beheld by the outside world, but speaks of the other.

  The Goblet has associations with the Holy Grail, of course, especially in one of its earlier forms, Ceridwen’s cauldron. We know the one Knight who found the Grail is Parzival. Parzival actually means “One who Pierces the Valley.” A valley is a place between two opposite mountains. So we see that to attain the grail is to be that one who can move through the center of the extremes of duality and not get caught in the play of the diametric poles of aversion or longing. Duality defines the temporal, noetic realm, but the aspiration of a Grail-seeker is to abide in the non-dual ground of beingness—Rumi’s “field beyond right or wrong doing.”

  To be gifted wi
th the Goblet raises our wandering in the forest from abstract misfortune to timely and vital. Like Parzival in the wastelands, the third daughter has had much stripped away. But this is soul-water she now drinks, directly from the roots of the World Tree. She is puncturing the clashing wants of the horizontal and arriving at the well “where the spirit horses drink.”13 Certain Indian Saints and Hildegard Von Bingen are holding her upright as she receives this auspicious gift.

  The Cloth evokes Christ’s feeding of the five thousand, the moment when Jesus multiplies the soul nourishment this world needs over and over. For Jesus, that was an overt show of divinity, of Christhood. In a community of the starving, he manifested both physical sustenance and relationship with his biblical ancestors.

  In the African story of the Genie and the Tree, we come across a gifting of another cloth, one end of which causes all it touches to become silver, and the other end of which heals all wounds. The recipient of the cloth becomes a kind of wandering alchemist and healer, fulfilling both roles in a wasteland world.

  At a conference on the Iranian poet Hafez I attended recently, one of the older Persian speakers suddenly leaned forward to the audience and said, “Make your work The Face of the Beloved, and let what you create be her lashes, her mole, her lips.” To do that would mean carrying all these gifts, letting the radiance of the World beyond the world shine into each cottage door you come to. Doing so requires both huge strength and the capacity for a kind of visible luminosity, an active principle that can be only be born from a great stillness. We see also that it is the third daughter’s child aspect, the part of her born since leaving her father’s house, that convinces the old women, the wisdom keepers, to release the gift because she’s done the work.