A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  The Deer Woman stays safe by a kind of mimicry, an invisibility that preserves us in all sorts of situations—at school we imitate the teacher and his or her “light of knowledge,” and gradually learn to hide our own peculiar, idiosyncratic opinions. If they should pop out, we would become visible and vulnerable, so better to ape what is bigger and brighter than us.

  This kind of activity, while potentially life-saving as we grow, can become a castrating and unconscious habit if carried into adulthood. Of course the Moon is looking for her, not an imitation of himself. But in this case, she bides her time and wears him out.

  Of course, there could also be a straight avoidance of intimacy in her hiding. Better to munch a lettuce leaf and practice detachment than get down into the muck of relationship and have to deal with its unwieldy shadow.

  THE GREAT THIEF

  It could be said that to know the moon is to be connected to thievery. Even the Moon’s glow is stolen sunlight, reduced 500,000 times. Not content with stealing sunlight, the moon also has a penchant for pilfering color. The gold of a cornfield or the crimson of a rose are quietly replaced by greys and blues when moonlight’s fingers fall on them. A lover of letters, the Moon steals into books read at dusk—as we read in the gloom, words become indistinct as he scoops them up and carries them off. Night is the time of break-ins, affairs, slow time-ruptures to the agitated clock of light. At the same time, we know that the Moon replaces everything the next day, just as we left it, so he appears a cheeky thief rather than a savage robber. The Moon is also a friend to lovers; his inky sky covers them as a blanket, but his light offers a slender trail to the sweetheart’s door. So to draw down the Moon brings a certain wiliness.

  All this talk of thievery could have scared the Deer Woman: would she want her own color, her essence, so consumed? We see a strong reaction to the bluster of the potential suitor. Can you remember being with someone who cast so much light that your own couldn’t be seen? Like a hip-hop star covered in bling jewelry, the moon so far offers no real relationship, only adoration. The

  Deer Woman has been alone long enough to know that she doesn’t want that. And so it begins. She refuses calls, rain-checks dates, and has always just left the party when you arrive. This just intrigues and frustrates you more, until, like the moon, you find yourself frantic and sweating, searching under animal skins and through friends’ address books trying to track her down.

  Just when you are finally turning away, you hear her voice from the top floor of a crowded restaurant, and there you go, charging in among the tables again. Her faint voice is a tiny clue that this is a courting rather than a flat refusal. Once the Moon’s grandiosity is lessened, and he is wrapped in the cords of the world, when he even faces something approaching mortality, he and the Deer Woman really start to communicate.

  How can she trust such an energy? Surely better to stay in her glorious isolation. But the Moon Man also offers an image of largeness, flamboyance. His arrival has broken the steady rhythm of the animals and the frost: he offers an outwards expression, to be seen. In the tangle of our own relationships, the rambunctious partner offers a challenge to our inwardness—we despise but are attracted to this rambunctiousness. In the myth-world, all these characters reside in us, and so we could say that the Deer Woman—solitude loving wilderness being—and the Moon Man—mighty, galaxy-shining, tide-altering—are trying to reach an accord with each other. The Road of Solitude and the Road of Voice have found a crossroads.

  All of us sense that many types of love exist. There is that first burst when we feel immortal and beloved in the eye of our sweetheart, huge and extraordinary. It is as if this sensation is propping up some fantastical posture of our own importance. The love is really about what we are experiencing—a sense of connection, support, and ardor—still centered around the self in some way. A relationship based on this pattern seems to have roughly a three-year life span. The crunch time is the possibility of a less self-centered love emerging, one rooted in compassion. Instead of trying to frantically draw your self-esteem from your partner, you instead, like the Deer Woman and the Moon Man, start to appreciate the other’s separateness, the intense beauty that is theirs alone—that they have desires, dreams, and idiosyncrasies that are not about you. This mystery can be so daunting that we allow the other to pass out of view forever. The Deer Woman never seems to be caught in the former, that instinct body is always pushing for a place of real appreciation, she’s not looking for props.

  THREE ENERGIES, A WILD BODY

  We have seen that in many of the old stories there is a common primeval pattern of leaving society, journeying into feral zones of trial, isolation, and adventure, and then returning, bringing back some talismanic knowledge that could only be found in the heavy places. We could say that the same three orbiting energies make this story one large body:The Tribal Concerns (community) The gut, shoulders, and muscled back of hunting, raising kids, burying the dead, telling the stories of the hearth fire.

  The Nomadic Scout (trial) The curious heart, the tester of boundaries, the ranging eye, the one who slips away from parties.

  She Who Calls Down the Moon (return) The Humming Soul, the Magical Body, the God-Caller, the Splitter of Blackness.

  The ingenuity of the human provokes the offer of twelve names from the moon: flowered barometers of the passage of time into the hard Siberian year. We can also enjoy them as a kind of love letter from the Moon Man shone down on his beloved. It would appear we each have our tundra, deer herd, and watching moon.

  The question is: Do we know how to dance with the Moon? Have we created a pristine tundra for him to visit? Do we ride an animal power that can negotiate his velocity and transforms it into food to feed the whole village?

  COLLAPSING IMAGINATION

  We’ve mentioned an artist’s studio as a place to catch beams, our own wilderness place where we can attract lonely deities. Forget “artist” as someone being tied to oil paint or video installations, and rather envision that part of yourself that is not snared in insurance documents and loves sitting quietly alone for an anti-social amount of time.

  When the attention in our lives is all focused on the First Body—the tribal concerns of mortgage, status, and how our peers view us—then the tundra of the Nomadic Heart gets smaller.

  That tundra literally starts to disappear before our eyes: condos appear in the woods and, one after another, the deer are stillborn.

  When the tundra is gone, the Moon Man looks down and sees nothing but television static. He sees no moving herd of art, no antlered words, no runway of strange dances and ecstatic prayer on which to land his chariot. So the mythological collapse begins and the threefold, archaic body gets thinned and stretched until only the concrete remains. With the Nomadic Heart tuned out, and the Moon-Calling Woman ignored, our psychic orbits shrink, and we give ourselves permission for the most unimaginable acts, in the name of Daniel Deardorff’s horrified “infinite progress.” We are no longer connected to hooves, tides, or night energy.

  Any hunter will tell you that much of the action occurs on the periphery of your vision; Bushmen will sit for hours stilling themselves to pick out the stealthy animals moving at the edge of what they can see. Neruda could do this with words, pulling a wriggling, startling metaphor from a bush of thought. In the understandable hysteria around climate change, a similar stilling is required. All these stories of shape-shifting are an indication of a healthy psyche, rupturing the consensual into a new constellation. Therapy can be a wonderful way to magically shrink us into our specific neurosis, dislocating our grandeur and god-juice into little childhood boxes. A useful stage perhaps, but we see Taliesin, Cuchulainn, or at least Seamus Heaney waving distress flares at this point.

  Our story points towards huge events: relationship with a deity, a mythological being, but also our having the hard cunning to draw it into manageable chunks to guide the process of living. The animal self and the lunar self find an accord, an arch of imagination that cr
eates the impossible tension called a good life. Psychology cannot contain mythic thought entirely, but provides a good meadow place between village (everyday) and forest (mythological) consciousness. Hafez says: Drink the ruby wine and look upon the moon-browed face. Contrary to the religion of those, see the beauty of these.5

  Or to remember Yeats: The power that awakens the mind of the reformer to contend against the tyrannies of the world is first seen as the star of love or beauty.6

  DEVOTIONS TO THE COURT OF LONGING

  Solitude opens the door of longing—invisible longing, which connects to the Otherworld, which calls down the Lord of the Moon. A conscious spell or wish is contained in this story for a marriage of the three energies.

  When we live in a society that is determined to sate longing instantly, a door to the myth-world closes. Some incubation is lost and our messages never arrive at the tundra and the moon because the village instantly supplies the gift.

  My father tells this story: As a child and aspiring musician, he walked the several miles from his house on weekends to stand at the window of a music shop, gazing at the drum kits he couldn’t afford. For a long stretch, his imagination had to construct a kit out of the old sofa he would pummel for hours at a time. But some hound of tenacity was born in him, a longing for something just out of reach. Years later, when I wanted to pick up the drums too, he engineered a similar process. From eleven onwards, I had sticks and much encouragement, but no kit of my own. I would walk the two miles from my house up to the creaky, damp old hall where his kit was and practice. After five years of this, I wandered downstairs on my sixteenth birthday and found a very elegant second-hand kit waiting there, ready to be set up. I’m still playing it, twenty years later.

  Something of that yearning has sustained a long and edifying relationship for both of us with the drums, and also a shared language. The long walks we both took, the financial scrapes, the adoration of the appearance and sound of the instrument, and the calloused hands are all devotions to the Court of Longing.

  I want to leave this chapter with words of Fran Quinn. It’s important to be depressed and alarmed about the things of this world, but tedious to the Gods if we stay there too long. In these lines, sense the three orbiting energies all at once, and take courage.

  Now in time-warp speed a whole new testament begins: dedications, visions, cathedral cities as death reveals himself to be a joke that lightens our way to the feast.7

  CHAPTER 8

  THE BIRTH OF OSSIAN

  Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,

  With your harmonious choir

  Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,

  That my old care may cease;

  Unfold your flaming wings and cover out of sight

  The nets of day and night

  W. B. Yeats1

  It is said that the dusk in ancient Ireland was like the beguiling musk of a great beauty, leaning in to kiss you. Fading sunlight scuttled down through the heavy oaks this particular day, so many years ago, and onto the backs of the great chief Finn Macoll and his men, the Fianna. Despite the twinkles and shimmers of their dusk lover, the men were in a sober mood. All day they had been hunting and found precious little game. As they reflected on this, a deep silence fell around them, the kind of silence any hunter recognizes as foretelling some explosion of opportunity.

  Sure enough, from the bushes burst a fawn, and a furious chase commenced. Finn, and his two hunting dogs, Bran and Sceolan, broke ahead of the pack, and all moods were lifted for the chase. The intention of Finn, the stride of the hounds, and the surprise of the fawn were all a kind of poetry. We know that when Finn was at his wildest, he was at his most thoughtful, and as he gazed lovingly at his lightning hounds, this intensified: he’d never seen them so silent, so focused. Not a twitch of the nose, not a backward look.

  At the end of a steep valley, they cornered the fawn, and Finn felt some regret at the ease of the chase. He advanced towards the hounds and the fawn, spear in fist, knife in sheath, expecting a bloodbath. What he found was extraordinary: the hounds and fawn gamboling together. When the fawn saw Finn, she approached and laid a velvet nuzzle on his hand. All the men save Finn drew back at this, as they recognized it as supernatural—that the fawn must be some magic being from the Otherworld, its opening being thinnest at dusk.

  THE LEGACY OF ABSENCE

  This story’s origins are in the Fennian cycle of Irish myth: there are also an Ulster cycle, predominantly concerning the deeds of Cuchulain, and a mythological and historical cycle. Stories of Finn have been cherished by the working people of Ireland, in much the same way the British have cherished Robin Hood. It’s worth our getting a little background information on Finn. More marginal and playful than Arthur, Finn, like many Celtic characters, was raised entirely by women.

  This is a recurring theme: Arthur himself was given up by his father Uther, Cuchulain’s male parentage had no fixed character, King Bran was the son of a sea-god, Llyr (though he never appears in the stories), Parzifal’s father was killed in battle, and so was Finn’s. Many of the really gripping characters come from a place of lack of direct male mentoring, yet often they become wonderful mentors to younger men as they age. They live in a woman’s world, often very close to nature, often in a marginal position but with the legacy of royal blood. What does this mean?

  It immediately points towards a sympathetic, associative relationship with the feminine. This relates to a juxtaposition in the Celtic psyche rather than a literal assumption that all boys should be raised completely by their mothers. It’s interesting to note, however, that as these characters reach adolescence, that is when they make contact with strong, male figures, at just the age when, in some cultures, boys have been separated from the home and taken into the wild for their initiation rites.

  In the last thirty years of study of rites of passage, a great hole has appeared in the research, and many of us have fallen into it. As we have discussed, solely same-sex initiation rites can provoke strong feelings of impotence or betrayal from the other sex, as if their contribution to a child’s upbringing has been slighted. It would seem useful for us to look at both literal initiations—scarification, fasting, separation, etc.—and the vital but more subtle initiations that go on all through life in the orbit of the family. I would say, as a rites-of-passage guide, that there comes a point when this all has to be distilled into a specific, literal, and mysterious act, carried out by an elder of the same gender, as in the wilderness retreat at adolescence. However, I regard this event as a culmination of a series of initiatory educations already experienced in childhood, often by someone of the other gender. These are connected processes. In this way I see the childhoods of these characters not as a celebration of absent fathers, but as one of a series of steps towards a coherent masculinity.

  I enjoy these associations deeply; they seem to make all the men cannier, nobler, and brighter than the kind of warrior-fodder raised in an all male universe. I see it not as a call towards matriarchy but towards balance.

  These childhoods equip the heroes for listening, wandering, and stillness, as well as startling displays of combat prowess. We could say this growing time intertwines the Goddess around the heart of the God.

  There is a lovely old saying about Finn that he was such a great warrior he could rescue an army, but such a deep poet that it took an army to rescue him from the scrapes he got himself into. Perhaps because of Finn’s time in the woods, his adventures have a propensity for the supernatural—psychic doorways frequently open for him that remain closed for others. It is a beautiful image of a leader, a warrior, and a poet, reminding us of that Gaelic saying, “Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.”

  THE OLD, WYLD HUNT

  In the old stories, hunting has to do with running toward God, adventure, and the unknown: piercing the veil, drawing down the moon. This is not trapping but trailing: pursuing some sweet and distant thing until you are deliciously lost.

/>   Earlier I wrote about the Questing Beast of Arthurian Myth—part Lion, part Serpent, part Goat—a creature sometimes glimpsed at dusk or dawn in the forests surrounding Camelot. Once glimpsed, the Beast creates such longing in the beholder he can spend years or decades in pursuit of it. The catch is this: it has no life other than to be glimpsed. That is its purpose. Something in its beguilement serves to crack open desire in us for what I called The Deal Beyond the Things of This World— something that offers no financial or secular reward, only contact with the vertical world.

  So, for the Fianna and the Knights of the Round Table, such an elevated position instigates this movement towards the Otherworld, an opening of the Soul. This movement is not just about jousting and treasure. That’s the way of the Soldier, not the Warrior.

  I take this slight detour to open up the significance of the Hunt in this story, and as we have seen, note that it is a familiar motif. It’s a lovely detail that when the men fall to brooding and silence—introspection—that is when the fawn breaks from the scrub. They say animals sense the mood of humans, and it may be that this one was waiting for the bluster and spear-shaking to die down before it made its appearance. In a very practical way, we all know what it feels like to jostle mentally for an idea or perspective on a difficult situation: We pace and bang our thoughtshields but nothing comes. Then, just as we turn away, a fawn leaps from the brush and we have an insight. I’m making a quick leap here, suggesting that the forest contains all those mercurial and unwieldy thoughts that stay far from the four/four, regular Joe of our daily lives. So on one level, to hunt is to push past the considered road and onto the spindly trails of the unexpected, to make nimble owls the navigator of your body for a while. Hunting in the old way means to show a willingness and curiosity about other possibilities than just the consensual. As soon as we take the literalness out of the statement, the image can fly.