A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  In poetry, the forest comes clearer when we move from fact to metaphor. Jay Leeming says:

  Sometimes when eating an apple

  I bite too far

  and open the little room

  the lovers have prepared,

  and the seeds fall onto the kitchen floor

  and I see

  that they are tear-shaped.2

  Look at that the fact, the metaphor, the fact, the metaphor in quick succession: the village and the forest right there. Metaphor is a kind of hunting, a vine-and-leaf-covered vision that contains enough possibilities so that the idea can’t be squeezed into a straight line and sold at the market.

  So Finn has been gifted this time, probably as a reward for a hundred such hunts, by scenting the magic. That lovely description of Finn, the hounds, and the fawn as a kind of singing poetry makes us think of one, larger expanded body shapeshifting for a moment. Finn doesn’t quite know what he’s got yet, but the signs are auspicious enough to save its life, whatever it is.

  ... It was agreed that the fawn must live, in fact be a talisman of the Fianna, so they returned with her triumphantly to the fort of Almu. That night, as Finn was preparing for his bed, a knock came to his chamber door. Answering it, he beheld a woman of high beauty and gentle nobility. Finn, as they say, was struck forever in love with her.

  She spoke: “I am that very fawn you saved today, and my name is Sadb. A magician of the Tuatha De Danaan, called the Dark Man of the Sidhe, changed me into a deer because I refused his hand in marriage. Although I am from Faerie, I had my heart set on a human, one whose extraordinary feats attracted attention even in the Otherworld.”

  At this Finn felt his heart sink and tighten, but he grimaced, “Go on.”

  She replied, “Even in my deer-state, I believed that if I could find this man, he would give refuge, even dismantle the Dark Man’s power, so I could regain the deep curves and brightening eyes of my womanhood.” (It was abundantly obvious that this had occurred.) “And that man, Finn Macoll, is you.”

  The tightening of Finn’s heart was wrestled to the ground and in its place sprung a Persian garden, with small blue birds shooting around mischievous branches of long forgotten, ruby-laden trees, singing ghazals!

  Sadb received both Finn’s protection and love. From that moment, you would have needed some kind of mechanical device to pry them apart. Finn would follow her steps, trying to catch the scent where her hair had been only moments before, and he grew so giddy with her eyes that he had to carry a sheepskin with him to lie on in case he grew faint. He stopped giving orders, barely picked at his food, and stopped attending hunts. Most worryingly, the old ones say, he stopped listening to the mutterings of magicians and the fancies of strange young poets. Truly, he found all nourishment in the epic contours of her face, and the honeyed web of her body. It was an all-or-nothing love, and we are all a little envious to this day.

  THE LOVERS’ CHAMBER

  I have seen the victor Dioxippos subdue all contenders at

  Olympia and be thrown on his back by the glance of a girl.

  Diogenes

  Sadb blew the lid off Finn’s world: his heart became an aching meadow, lightning became his groin, and steam blew from his ears. A goddess stood behind the woman who stood behind the fawn, and Finn got the full voltage of all three. Who else could rattle a Chief? Sadb carried not the impersonal fire-starter of Eros or the expansive insight of Agape, but brought Amor. Guirat De Bornelh says:

  So through the eyes attains the heart:

  For the eyes are the scout of the heart….

  The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it:

  Love, which is the fruit of their very seed.3

  This is no arranged marriage between tribes, or a grope after a feast: this is love in the way we celebrate it today. A love affair, no matter how powerful, is not quite the same thing as a marriage—that requires a whole other kind of glue. C. S. Lewis said something like, “Falling in love is the spark that lights the engine of loving.” For Finn and Sadb, this wasn’t a step they would be able to take. Sadb took Finn the warrior, in his brightness and youth, and opened the door to Finn as a lover.

  But what of Sadb as Deer Woman? The power of a shapeshifter in the Old World was very real. In Old Icelandic we come across the phrase hamrammr meaning “shapestrong,” or hamhleypa, which means “shape-leaper,” both words referring to the ability to move into animal form and back. There is also an association with anger, that to be in a dangerous fury was to come “out of his shape”—hamslauss.4 Our associations with Sadb and the Deer are of sweetness, not rage, but we remember that it was a dark magician who changed her shape. Sadb inaugurates a metamorphosis of the heart, but not of the skin for Finn.

  One of the earliest purveyors of Occitan poetry, the troubadour Guilhem de Peitieu, writes:

  Per son joi pot malaus sanar,

  e per sa ira sas morir,

  e savis hom enfolezir,

  e belhs homsa beutat mudar,

  e.l plus cortes vilaneir,

  e.l totz vilas encortezir.

  (IX, 25-30)

  (For joy of her a sick man can be cured, and from her anger a healthy man can die, and a wise man go mad, and a handsome man lose his good looks, and the most courtly one become a boor, and the totally boorish one turn courtly.)5

  There is a hint of warning in Guilhem’s words, indication of a psychic journey that may or may not end well. But in this pursuit we find the aspiration of something we recognize today, a love that turns a face towards two worlds: the physical and the spiritual. In the West, the troubadours played a huge role in establishing a respectful attention to the feminine. Underneath the ornamentation of courtly love, some vital reaffirming of relationship was occurring, one not based on dominion. The older Gaelic stories, as we have seen, often locate primary relationship between the main male character and older women right from the start—a sympathetic dialogue.

  Well, Finn may have stopped, but the world did not. Danes started to pour down across the North Sea and into Dublin Bay. Finn staggered out of his chambers and took to arms. He was like an unholy dervish on the field, doubly-raged for being disturbed from his beloved’s gaze and the fact that his sweet Ireland was under attack. He employed no mercy. The battle was the Fianna’s and a feast prepared.

  As the first boar was roasting merrily, in the shadows Finn prepared his chariot to leave. The men were horrified, for what good is a feast without Finn?

  But Finn was not for persuading, and off he went. As he hurtled back toward his fort, his eyes become hawklike, scanning the walls for sign of Sadb. Nothing. As he drew closer still, his soul became an arrow and flew fifty yards ahead of his body looking for her radiance. Nothing. Finally, in a panic, he leapt from his chariot and ran the remaining mile himself. Where could she be?

  When entering the fort, people leapt behind other people to avoid his thunder-gaze and the curls of icy confusion pouring from his nostrils.

  Grabbing his manservant, the oddly named Cronan the Buzzer, he heard the awful tale: “My Lord, someone, or some thing, that resembled you, right down to the hounds and chariot, appeared on the horizon line, blowing your horn, the Dord Fianna. Sadb, elated, ran out the gates to greet you. We suspected that you couldn’t have returned from battle so quickly, but couldn’t stop her, she was travelling like a heart-wind. “I want to greet the father of my unborn child” she said.

  At this, Finn groaned, and put his head in his hands. “Go on,” he said weakly.

  “As she approached you, it was as if the air itself grew hazy and your arms extended a great blackness from under your coat, and, producing a thin hazel wand, you gently touched her on the arm. It must have been the Dark Man of the Sidhe, because suddenly a small fawn was standing there. We ran as fast as we could, but by the time we got there, the plain was empty—no magician, no Sadb, no hounds. Just us, alone, and terrified in the long grass.”

  Finn beat his chest as if trying to rip open the heart t
hat lived in it. He collided with walls, ate bricks and dust, made a ship of infinite sorrow, and sailed its black sails over the edge of despair. He staggered back to his chambers. Behind them was a secret door that led to a small room filled with crow feathers. In them he lay down.

  For a day and a night he was not seen.

  THE STRICKEN KINGDOM: LOVE AS TRICKSTER

  The image of the lover “that was only lent” is an old and tragic one belonging the Irish. It is rare to find a “happily ever after’ in their mythic cycles; as in the Russian and African, there is always an acknowledgement of the grief of life, the difficulty of being here. It would appear that loving deeply brought a price with it, a Shadow-Bride for Finn.

  That great heart expansion, so huge he “stopped listening to the mutterings of magicians and the fancies of strange young poets,” had an equally vast contraction attached to it. All that was Gold in him turns to Crow Feathers.

  The all-consuming nature of the love between Finn and Sadb causes huge structural tremors in the Kingdom. Finn no longer attends feasts, wants to fight, compose poetry or any of the things that bind him and his court in the intricacies of a shared life. In love, have we not all felt like Finn and Sadb? We stop calling our friends, neglect our study, let the garden grow wild, and focus every fiber of our attention on this new beloved. Of course the irony is that as we do this, we unconsciously start to apply so much pressure to this fragile birth that it begins to turn in our hand, until one day a Dark Man with a Hazel Wand takes it all away. The story suggests that this was Finn’s first journey to the Garden of the Lovers—he hadn’t negotiated its steps before.

  Finally, the accumulation of our neglect means that we have to rise to meet the battles of the day, put on our armor and attack our personal Danes. For a moment, space appears in the cramped confines of the lovers’ chamber—all that inward focus has to arch outward. If the Kingdom surrounding the chamber hasn’t been attended to, fed, and charmed, it’s possibility that the chamber could collapse, the spell broken by a lack of roots in the larger world. In some impossible way, the intensity of love has to be wrestled into an accord with the larger psyche/community. We know this love has origins in the Otherworld, the place of Faerie, making an accord doubly difficult. But some inexperience has left a door open to the Magician; maybe the love isn’t anchored enough in this world, so that it seems hover between the two. Maybe much first love hovers in this betwixt place. It’s both vulnerable and gorgeous, wildly tempered and sensitive to storms.

  As an initiation story, this heart-wrenching tale has an awful lot of Trickster in it, Dark Trickster at that. As long as we are attempting to fight against the current of the story, or are looking for a happy ending, we lose its hard education, its shadow-gift. Had Finn returned to Sadb and to his inebriation, who knows the consequences for the wider kingdom? If we think of all of these characters abiding in our psyche, we see that Finn is indulging the Lover, whilst ignoring the King and the Magician. The King, or Chief in his case, has weakened his boundaries, which allows invasion. His shutting down of the Magician capacity means that he has become naive to the consequences of his behavior. So he has neglected his role of provider as King, and lacks the overview a Magician would command—love has robbed him of a strategy.

  Our greatest authority on the four powers of the King/Queen, Warrior, Magician and Lover is Robert Moore. A well- functioning psyche in both male and female is seen to draw on all four main energies, often at different times.

  The five virtues of a Warrior or Knight of the medieval era were temperance, courage, love, loyalty and courtesy. A quick way to pull the whole kingdom down is to let one of these reign—in total control—over the others. Joseph Campbell loved to talk about the difference between Amor and Roma: Amor is all-consuming passion and Roma the regulations and duty of the day—loyalty to the status quo. The Troubadours would have backed Finn all the way in his headlong jump into the ocean of feeling, freeing himself from the shackles of the consensual. Moore has written brilliantly about the shadow of love, its legacy and seeming contrary relationship to the handling of a inner kingdom.

  The Lover energy is thus utterly opposed—at least at first glance—to the other energies of the mature masculine. His interests are the opposite of the Warrior’s, the Magician’s, and the King’s concern for boundaries, containment, order and discipline . . . The Lover is not, then, only the archetype of the joy of life. In his capacity to feel at one with others and with the world, he must also feel their pain. Other people may be able to avoid pain, but the man in touch with the Lover must endure it . . . Here, we have the image of Jesus weeping—for his city, Jerusalem, for his disciples, for all of humanity—and taking the sorrows of the world upon himself as the “man of sorrows, one acquainted with grief,” as the Bible says.6

  Growing is not always about balance, though. Through the warring divinities of the psyche, we learn peculiar dance steps in the seemingly random lurches that life swings us through. Lewis Hyde describes the Trickster as “the archetype that attacks all archetypes.”7 Could we be seeing the four-legged waltz of Coyote in the delicate steps of Sadb? Finn certainly does. As I mentioned in the earlier story, initiation is often about leaps, not grounding: ideally, that comes later. In the development of Finn, it would appear he has to take a step downwards, into heartbreak. The shaping of him, the authenticity of him as a leader requires it. What is admirable is that Finn stays alive to the dark aspect of the experience. He accepts the pain invoked by staying connected to Sadb, rather than drowning himself in booze and floozies. The Dark Man and Sadb cause Finn’s previous securities to be wrenched asunder, in a kind of shadowy double act: his love for Sadb pulls him way past the boundaries and role of his position, and the grief of her departure contracts or diminishes his stature as all-conquering warrior. From this perspective both the Dark Man and Sadb act as initiatory teachers for Finn.

  Many Irish stories make clear the complexities and tragedies of love, rather than reducing it to a simplistic notion. In the story of Angus mac Og, or Angus the Young, he dreams a holy dream of a beautiful woman, literally luminous. When Angus awakes, the “questing beast” in him is roused, and he casts aside all the trappings of this world to go in pursuit of this radiant woman. We are probably familiar with Yeats’s handling of his story:

  Though I am old with wandering

  Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

  I will find out where she has gone,

  And kiss her lips and take her hands;

  And walk among long dappled grass,

  And pluck till time and times are done

  The silver apples of the moon,

  The golden apples of the sun.8

  Some immense sadness appears in this stanza, and we are moved by the attention the Irish give to the absence of the Beloved, and the wisdom contained in the search—in fact, the search is the thing worth writing about: wandering through the dark groves of grief imparts a profound instruction to the heart.

  Angus’s home was the Sidhe (it actually means hill) of Newgrange, the megalithic tomb. In a short leap over to Wales, we find the hero Pwyll as he encounters a Goddess in the form of a woman, Rhiannon. Yet again, she appeared in dreams and he found himself riding wildly to catch up, night after night. At some point he gave up his frantic pursuit and used the sincere and elegant love-speech any Knight should possess, and she slowed her pace. His sword became a gamboling flower of playful metaphor, and her curiosity grew until they became husband and wife.

  In the cases of Finn, Angus, and Pwyll, the move from the Warrior into the Lover is an essential part of courting the feminine. However, chaos ensues when we act this out as a completely literal event, rather than an opening of the soul.

  If our own relationship with the divine is unclear, we will focus entirely on the lips, lashes, and eyes of our sweetheart as ends in themselves. Immediately a whole world starts to implode behind the shoulders of our lover, a congestion appears, energy that should be passing thro
ugh them to the myth world congeals and gets stuck when the lovers lack the education to be aware of this delicate thread. The Guatemalans warn us that women have the toe bone and tooth of a divine being, but that’s all!

  When this inflamed concentration fails, a kind of anti-tantric calamity of longing will curdle inevitably into disappointment. Our eyes fall downwards, and we move into the arena of disbelief. With this thin reading of love, our only hope is to start scanning the bars again, looking for a whiff of oestrous.

  When the Lover is the dominating energy, we remain enthralled but also passive. We sense Campbell’s “bliss” but lack the Warrior facility to build a container for it. We frequently and quietly attach a small grey carriage to our partner’s life force and hop on, looking bemused as their world starts to buckle under the extra weight. Pwyll leaps from his horse and attempts to snuggle under the cloak of his archaic Goddess. Not a good look.

  Finn never quite got to this point, but the signs were not encouraging. Rather than a warning against love, this story seems to be about placing it in a wide and magical context—suggesting both the spiritual and the pragmatic concerns of handling a life. Someone wiser than I will argue that they are the same thing, but the story appears to be about Integration of the Gods and Goddesses with the mundane details of the everyday. In a sense, love is always tricking us into growth, always pulling the kingdom apart, risking invasion, slaying invaders, courting devastation. We need the explosion in order to rebuild a greater psyche but not to get addicted to dynamite for its own sake.