A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  Yaga is undefeatable in the old hero mode, the polemic of conquest by sheer force. As representative of a universal force, like Coyote, she will, if killed, surely reassemble and scamper back into life. The information given to Ivan facilitates an integration of Yaga energy; what at first appeared an adversary is actually a dark ally. Ivan has located a part of himself that is found underground, recognizes death as being in service to life, and becomes connected to a fierce, ancient, feminine intelligence. To not only navigate the dark passage of Baba’s kingdom but to make an ally of her is the goal of initiation. Every day without food on the mountain, every scar puncturing the skin of a young warrior, every hour spent burning the script that no longer serves is time in the dark garden. Experienced fully, Yaga burns the initiation cycle into you so that you carry it from that moment. That which seemed external to you, the “bad thing,” is now part of your nature, the wound from which the wild roses grow. Marion Woodman notes that, “Baba eats naïve people, people who think life should only bring them happiness. To the uninitiated, suffering is not acceptable. Their thinking is dualistic—white or black, good or evil, science or religion. Their masculinity and femininity are nowhere near the inner marriage.”14

  While Daniel Deardoff reminds us:The civilized choice is always black or white, good or bad, but never this and that—never the crossbred, chymeric, and monstrous both. In this flat, dualistic and half-hearted view, we choose between the bright victorious pose of denying the wound while projecting the defect, or the lackluster victim’s pose of shame, violence and bitter remorse for “the life that might have been.”15

  THE THREE FALSE BROTHERS

  “It was strange . . . when I returned from the mountain, even my friends seemed uncomfortable with what I’d done, even laughed at it. When I tried talking about it I felt emptier afterwards, few really understood.”

  Magnus, rite of passage participant16

  “Fall seven times, stand up eight” Japanese Proverb

  The betrayal of the brothers is an absolutely defining moment in this story. They represent the community that the initiate returns to, and the potential greed and lack of comprehension of what the individual has experienced. One presumes “evil” has been vanquished in the shape of Yaga’s death, but it is as if one final shard accompanies them back, fills the giants, and cuts the rope. These characters have stayed in their limbo state, refusing the call of growth through the Underworld journey, have witnessed the shiny jewel Ivan has returned with and are filled with desire to possess it. They want the prize but refuse the work.

  The giants see radiance and attempt to dislocate it from the origins of its birth, which is underground and under great pressure. Giant energy can never comprehend that something as horrifying as descent into the black (a journey they would not take) can bring a reward as sweet as this. So they take the painting, the script, the innovation and cut the creator out of the picture. Back they fall to the garret. They represent the antithesis of genuine elders; having lacked initiation, they are unable to do anything but grab at its prizes and leave the initiate to the dogs. As Campbell says; “The role of the community is to torture the mystic to death.”17

  The residue of the community’s blessing is affirmation; but if all you get is material gain for your work, then the definition of success is impoverished. Why can fame be a killer? Because its terms are wrong. If the one receiving attention has not built a psychological container strong enough to handle the projections of the audience, it’s like asking for water and receiving cola. That sweetness charms the eager mouth but nourishes the body not at all. The traditional response is to sink back into the community, not stay elevated in a place where you feel above it. To receive hundreds of thousands of dollars a week for one’s work is an inflated response to a lack of genuine understanding of the value of that work. If the holy wells are empty, then the returning initiate cannot speak of relationship to the invisible because that is a kind of postmodern heresy.

  If these giants also reside in us, then they are the part of us trying to second-guess how we will be received, and contort ourselves into an obligatory posture. They block the clear flow between the forest and the village, upper world and Underworld, and then wrap the meat in cellophane, remove the teeth, and inject it with sugar. The characters who have persisted in the undiluted expression of the Underworld experience—such as Cesar Vallejo, Phillip Guston, Patti Smith, William Blake—are often met with incomprehension during their lifetime. If a culture tries to block these walkways to the dark unconscious, the wyrd moon road, the reception for those who do find them will be shocking, raw, and lacking in niceties.

  DESCENT WITHOUT BOUNDARIES

  Ironically, even as we culturally forget the form and boundaries of these initiatory roads, our cities and youth—bereft of depth and sustenance—fall into even darker waters. The grief pipe becomes the crack pipe. Baba’s offering, freed from any communal perspective, grows into a devouring shadow. Without elders to help decipher the trail through, the dark passage becomes an ending in itself rather than a stage in the process.

  Baba’s community today is scavenging dustbins, sleeping by stagnant water, having wrestled loose from the domestic but without a map to guide the uncertain new terrain. Huge psychic forces can fill the gaps created by these kinds of descents. The soul recognizes it as some semblance of the initiatory opening and reaches for it. Anything rather than the consensual lethargy of the brightly lit suburb.

  But without a ritual container, the potion will spill all over again. Tramp consciousness is profoundly disturbing because it turns the wants of society upside down, appearing impervious to advertising, the promise of accommodation, a way up and out. It is a daily, rotting skeleton reminding us of the Underworld. But when you descend without context or boundaries, you can end with a burning ground rather than a maiden. The considered wisdom is that the only difference between a shaman and a schizophrenic was that one had learned to swim in the depths and one was drowning. Initiation teaches the strokes required to cross the deep lake, an ancient way of dancing with the broken wings, open sewers, and decaying flowers with which life presents us.

  The ancient perspective is that these universal energies require courting too; it’s no good projecting them all onto the Devil. If we attempt to squeeze them back under rocks in forests, they will merely intensify in nature and become more horrifying. Initiation like Ivan’s brings something of Baba back to the village and creates a dialogue with her. Whole temples in India are devoted to Kali/Yaga. Not because Indians want to murder or pillage, but because they honor her role in the greater context of the gods, in the wheeling cycle of life. Let’s rejoin Ivan now, back in the depths, bereft of his love, the rope cut.

  While Ivan lay there in agony, severed from his old state, his travelling companion, the bird, flew down and fed him morsels of food. With time this feeding caused Ivan to rise from his desperate state, to recover vigor and health. After many weeks, there came a day when the great bird lifted Ivan on his back and flew up the hole to the upper world. Recovered, he thanked the life-saving bird and made his way into the woods, looking for the beautiful woman and the three false brothers. After much wandering he found a meadow, and, tending cows there, the woman herself. She informed him that the brothers couldn’t decide which one she should marry and in the interim had sent this most precious chattel out to milk cows! Not only that, they were just over in that little shed discussing the matter! Ivan went over to the shed, put his hat over his eyes and knocked at the door, asking for a drink. The giants angrily rebuffed him. Then he threw off his disguise and flailed into them. Thrown through the shed’s walls, bruised with Ivan’s eager fists, they took to their heels and were never seen again.

  Finally, Ivan and his bride were free to marry. And what a party! Three days of boasting, troubadoring, plates of venison, vats of wine from Chile sent by Pablo Neruda, lovemaking, dancing, and a bardic gathering with Bob Dylan, Galway Kinnell, and Chuck D; it was quite the event in t
heir part of Russia. Johnny Cash was running the sweat lodge and Joe Strummer was seen with Joni Mitchell working through old Van Morrison numbers at the reception.

  If you had wandered out from the party to clear your head, you might have spotted a large female Bear in the bushes with her cubs and a good bottle of whisky. Ivan sneaked out at one point with a plate of the finest cuts of meat and generally caught up on forest gossip.

  The couple had nothing they did not need and wanted nothing they did not have, and not a harsh word was spoken between them. That is, until Ivan dropped that bottle of vintage Bordeaux .… With that shattering, the first fierce words were raised, a bat flew past the window, and that’s where the tail of this story finds its way into the mouth of its beginning . . .

  WE COME BACK CHANGED

  From a certain perspective, Ivan could not return to the upper world in the physical shape in which he’d left it: he was different, transformed. He descended as Apollo, a character of certainty, achievement, and swagger, and returned as Dionysus, one with knowledge of the dark, transformative, nebulous power of the Underworld. In his unrefined state, of course the community rejects the wild form he now inhabits.

  His dismemberment mirrors hundreds of accounts of shamanic initiation into the spirit world. A great illness or accident is followed by spirit beings literally pulling the shaman’s form into a new and altered state. An exaggeration of the normal range of the psyche emerges; the individual is receptive to information normally hidden from us. For one not yet initiated, such a fall might kill them, but we see that Ivan’s animal nature is now developed enough to throw him a lifeline. For our purposes, those feeding birds are shards of the consciousness Ivan has developed in the Underworld as he digests, bit by bit, the black. He is lifted by the wings of the flying ones and literally propelled back to his world and the last stage in his initiatory process: the white.

  The white contains all the heat of the red and the soberness of the black, though both are finally integrated into the white’s empathy. The white is the color of the return to community, the placing of oneself in the center of the village. This is a simple act, but one that requires a huge and arduous journey in order to be achieved authentically. Only in the white can Ivan marry the maiden, the gift he brought back; only then he can match her. The initiatory process finds its reason for being in the final stage of this story. Inflamed by the red, brought into the black by Yaga, Ivan can finally step into a place of genuine authority in the village and in his life. In real life this process could take two decades and in subtler forms is repeated frequently in our lives. , Of course, the wedding is an inner union between village and forest, male and female, upper and lower world, madness and clarity. In contemporary culture, how many individuals have consummated such a marriage? We still fixate on the earlier heat of the young achiever, or we abandon our heroes if they grapple too long with Baba’s skirts.

  SNOWDONIA

  The four days out on the mountain signify a day focused on each of the four directions: North, South, East, and West. Many traditions believe that the journey of a life can be traced from beginning in the East, the place of sunrise, spring, and birth, through the summer childhood of the South, to the dark passage of adolescence and autumn in the West, and finally through to the winter of the initiated Elder in the North.

  Yaga and the initiatory road abide in the West. It’s where Ivan descends to the Underworld and where our initiates on the mountain are passing through to step into the new chapter of their lives. Rather like the Giants, I have sat for those four days holding the rope as initiates ventured further into the world beneath the world. I may have felt the occasional tug, but they have effectively moved further and further into spirit time.

  On the last night of the fast, exhausted and pushed to the limit, they erect a small stone circle, enter it, and conduct an all-night vigil. That circle, in which they struggle to stay awake, cold and emotional, becomes holy ground. It bears witness to the death and the rebirth of those initiates. Like Ivan, as they venture deeper into themselves, they experience groundswells of surprise, grief, insight, and fear. Every day without food allows the bird within your chest to enter the terrain of the holy, to guide you to a marriage of the Soul.

  “That circle became a birthing canal. The valley itself was my mother, the moon the midwife. Suddenly these days of solitude and tears became a rapture. As the sun rose I saw my vision after a night of shadows and fear. It was bliss.”

  Clare, rite of passage participant18

  The vigil is the very tip of the arrow of ceremony you have been honing those four days. It is the final push between the fabric of the worlds, a prayer to the pulsing heart of the Universe. Every hour on the mountain is a re-orientating to your rightful position, to become open to the unseen and part of the rapturous hymn of wild nature. The offering you make is not pristine, it is the heavy walk of your life lifted up in all its complexities to be taken on the backs of black swans to the source of great mystery.

  As in the story, we find gardens of abundance in the dark wings of disorder. Something dies in that union, some un-truth withers, and we are left with the shape of something raw and tremendously powerful. A wedding does indeed take place, out there on a Welsh hillside in the middle of the night.

  Like Ivan, the initiates returned changed, ruptured then opened into new constellations—like something from the old stories.

  An accord has been struck, a veil lifted. Often the conscious mind is only dimly aware of what has occurred, the psychic language of the event so far beyond everyday facility that it can take years to find the voice for it. But find the voice we must. As we are seeing, the transformation of initiation is brought to bloom in the return. And it is in the return that we now find our greatest vulnerability and our greatest quest yet.

  There is a poetic thread, William Blake said, that if grasped, will guide us through these stages, through giddy achievement, the sobriety of loss, and finally into the heart—a place of service to a wider purpose than just our own predicament. There is character in exchange for safety just beyond the streetlights, scars to be boasted of. Initiation recognizes this truth, holds it in ritual and gives it shape, lest too many go down that don’t come back. What we notice again and again in contemporary life is the process without the context. If the culture has amnesia around this reality, then nothing is to be gained by risking it, because it’s too terrifying: “Your early work was your best.” “Life has dealt me a cruel hand, if it wasn’t for my bad luck . . .” Without the dimension of myth, the world can seem depleted and arbitrary. With it there is perspective, tools, and the sense of an adventure to be lived. As the Chinese say, “No one becomes a good navigator on calm waters!” Indeed, indeed.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE PASTORAL AND THE PROPHETIC

  The three parts of all understanding:

  An eye to see what is

  A heart to feel what is

  And a boldness that dares follow them.

  Irish Triad

  AFTER THE MOUNTAIN: FOUR YEARS IN THE BLACK TENT

  Once winter sets in, the wood-burning stove rarely goes out. In a climate as wet as Britain’s, mold can play havoc with damp canvas, and any tent dweller is constantly sourcing supplies of dry, seasoned wood to see them through the hard months till April. You become accustomed to continually scanning the surrounding hedgerows and copses for any kind of kindling to spark up life-giving heat. To return before dusk with a cord of wood, to light the paraffin lamps, to brew up coffee and warm yourself by the stove are immense pleasures: Wild rabbit in the pot and potatoes in the embers, and reading Cold Mountain poems by the Chinese hermit Han Shan.

  Any tent can take awhile to heat, so there’s often a bottle of Lagavulin whisky amongst the axes, billhooks, and rope to sip as the tent creaks into warmth. Weather is to be relished, sworn at, combated, and ultimately worked with. You quickly learn who has the upper hand, and you follow its directives respectfully.

  The years in
the tent were nomadic; I moved around, but the first location supplied plenty of fallen timber in the surrounding land. What came to my attention, in a field just past the stream, under the barbed wire fence, was a huge oak that had been struck by lightning. Lying on its side, perfectly seasoned by now, it would be, I knew, a very beautiful source of heat for the upcoming winter. Bow saw and rope in hand, I would make my way to the great beast, take what I needed and head back. I could never get too greedy on each trip, as the return journey required too much manoeuvring to carry more than an armful at a time. The wood itself was bleached by weather, almost like driftwood, and burned ferociously. Collecting it was like arriving at the lair of some prehistoric deity with muscled limbs in all directions, and a huge ancient trunk. My time with this tree went through heavy snows, baking summers, and endless British rain. Under a full moon it seemed to glow.

  A fire from this source always felt sweeter, more precious. When I fed wood cut to size by the billhook into the hungry mouth of the iron burner, I would sit back and close my eyes, tracing the journey I’d just been on. Words came, mad poems, ornate drawings. After grappling the wood back over the stream and under the fence, some weird excitement would emerge and prowl across the energy of the written word, looking for nests.