by Martin Shaw
These “terrors of the streets” often turned out to be scared of the dark, petrified by wild animals, rigid with fear at the thought of encountering a spirit. This was a new set of obstacles, different from those they were used to. As the days progressed and their defenses dropped, they started to look like children again. Suddenly we adults were the only ones with any information about the road they had elected to take. Separated from peers and intoxicants, often going through drug withdrawal symptoms, they started, slowly, to see the characters of the myths we told as being like them, standing at the edge of the unknown. They saw that, like Anga, they were stepping into a life of uncertainty, odds seemingly stacked against them.
Those first few days on the mountain, getting ready to go out, it all felt like bullshit. But when I couldn’t get a fix and we knew we were into something serious, I started to listen to the stories we were hearing at night, all bears and wastelands and stuff. The dark up there was worse than the streets, terrible man, it felt like it had been there forever. If I’d known how it would be out there alone I would have run away.
John, rite of passage participant5
THE WAILERS, THE SHAMAN, AND THE LOVE OF HOPELESS CAUSES
The tent dwellers seem to have no difficulty in isolating Vaida’s condition as supernatural in origin. We note that they initially try to scare off the spirit themselves by mimicking the external appearance of a kind of shamanic exorcism. Probably having witnessed similar scenes over the years, they wail, bash metal, make noise, blow out the lights, but to no effect. Why? Because the alchemical power of the shaman, the ability to shift consciousness dramatically, comes from an internal mastery; the exterior remnants are symbolic effigies of a transformed psyche, secondary to the hard initiatory yards already traveled by the medicine person.
Mimicry alone won’t get the job done. From a thousand different accounts we see that globally, the road to shaman-hood is isolating, rigorous, terrifying, marginal, drawing on the twin energies of discipline and intuition to get through alive. The black-eyed healer is tuned into spirit-song from other planets, galaxies even. And to gain that frequency they have been broken open by ordeal, soul rendered vibrationally open to the Otherworld. They are alive and dead.
The insistent message of the West is that you can have anything, be anything. The tribal perspective is different, and a role like the shaman’s is held by a specific individual, not dished out with a certificate at a weekend workshop.
Before long, the real shaman arrives in the story to set the whole ball rolling. Recognizing the rupture in the Mother and son’s life as opportune, as initiator, he presents the group with what I would call The Hopeless Cause: a cure so distant, hard to obtain, obscure, and frightening that only someone with nothing to lose would take it on. In a sense, the task requires both the testosterone and inexperience of the youth; if he lacks either, he will never take on a challenge that will almost certainly end his life.
Some interesting dynamic is at play; the mother’s health, her own growth, is dependent on the boy’s moving away from her domain. Maybe her energy had to come back into herself rather than outwards towards the boy. What called us away from home? In our youth we can be transfixed by an idea or aspiration: to join a rock band, get to the Himalayas, to be an entrepreneur.
Part of the requirement of youth is to hear that whatever we dream of won’t be easy, in fact may be impossible, going against likelihood of success. The “sure thing” is of no use to the soul hungry for initiation.
We need to be faced by something hard, with uncertain outcomes, that will require every fiber of our skill. This is the scene of Anga’s appointment with destiny, whose moment has come. Encouragement is vital, but real engagement comes when the task feels “bigger than us.”
The road ahead for Anga seems to indicate trouble—not an elevated route up through obvious success, but an encounter with entities that kill, in a landscape new to him. In some stories the young initiate is adopted by wandering knights who take him to the center of the kingdom for an encounter with the King. This isn’t the case here. Anga is heading out into the badlands, with only his wits for company: no college degree, references, old boy networks, or funding. In this regard he is another at-risk youth, getting educated in the severity of life early on. When we are appointed in this manner, we become familiar with a kind of constant tension in the body, looking at every opportunity from a variety of angles, feeling our way to the next morsel of food.
Some of the first exercises I show teenagers are old hunter-gatherer techniques of stalking, being still, and observing what is visible on the very edges of your vision. Most have only looked two feet ahead of them, to the Play Station or DVD, but it interests me how good they are at this, how quickly they learn. As Anga prepares to leave the tribe, he will need all the skill he has.
In “Ivan the Bear’s Son,” Ivan followed a different, more social trail. He travels as the leader of a gang, encounters a beautiful maiden, is healed by a bird, and has a huge wedding. Anga is in a solitary position. He certainly carries experience, gained in some earlier time. He displays none of Ivan’s swagger but quietly gathers his tools.
I see that life’s uphill
From here on out. My tiny art,
Circling its grief, will have to grow
Joyous the only way it knows how.
Frank Steele 6
Anga sharpened his spear, took a large pot, slung a leather thong over his shoulder, and set off. Along the way he scraped resin from the pines and put it in the pot. His journey was indeed long, tiring, and fearful, full of whole vistas and challenges he had never encountered before. By the fifth day he came to a stream, by the side of which grew a huge tree, broader and taller than all the others, blocking out both the sun and the moon with its size. All around the tree was withered and parched. “This must be the place of the serpent Simoon,” thought Anga. He set to scraping moss from the stones and when he had collected a great deal, he covered his body in the moss, tying it on with the leather thongs. He then got into the stream and allowed the moss to soak onto his body. This done, he clambered out and banged his spear against his iron pot, making a huge din. Birds flew and wild beasts scattered, so great was the din. Simoon heard the racket and slithered out of her tent.
As she approached Anga, she left a rageful trail of fire over the ground. Simoon blasted Anga with jagged flame, but the wet moss kept him safe. Everything else was burnt to a crisp but Anga was safe, a wall of steam rising from him. When Simoon paused to take in breath, Anga threw his potful of pine resin into her open jaws. The resin melted, ran into her belly, and soon she was dead.
From the shadows emerged a second serpent that said, “I am Ogloma. All my life I have been in fear of Simoon, for she has eaten all my children. I have been helpless. How can I reward you for this bravery?” Anga replied, “I only wish for one of your skins so I may cure my mother.” Ogloma willingly gave him one of her skins and Anga went on his way.
THE POT OF RESIN AND THE BODY OF MOSS
We can understand Anga sharpening his spear, but what’s going on with the resin? At this point in the story the scraping of the resin is unclear to us; we can assume the pot is for cooking and the thong for carrying, but the resin is a mystery. It serves to alert us that Anga has a plan. Whatever is up ahead, which must be unknowable to his conscious mind, Anga is gathering his tools for the road. We see that he is not a defenseless boy; if he were, this adventure would not be appropriate for him. He is not carrying a huge array of weapons and half a yurt, but has honed his preparation to the bare elements.
When the youth I work with leave base camp on the morning of their fast, they carry only a tarp, sleeping bag, and water. All street bravado, phone, drugs, designer trainers, and status have been cleared away from these three elements. It’s worth mentioning at this stage that out of a potential group of, say, ten youth, only three or four will be ready to leave the tribe (read “street gang”), and head out into the bush like Anga.
When we learn a craft, we are scraping resin; when we pull the entrails of failure into the light to gain insight, we are scraping resin; when we develop calluses from hours of practice on heavy strings, we are scraping resin. The power makes itself manifest as this part of the story progresses; not only does it provide life force to Anga, but when hurled at his adversary, it proves fatal.
AN ECOLOGY OF BONES
Simoon’s fatal reaction to resin is ironic when we consider that, traditionally, pine resin (when distilled over millennia into amber) has been associated with magical healing properties for those with intestinal disorders! The story of amber is extraordinary. When a pine tree is gashed or injured, it produces resin to coagulate and fill the wound, much as blood does. For such a reparatory role, amber is a fragile material and can be crumbled off the bark. Many have speculated over the centuries about its origins: according to Ovid, the Greeks believed that amber’s source was the tears shed by the sisters of Phaeton, a boy who died while driving his father’s chariot too close to the sun, igniting and then causing the desiccation of the Sahara. Such is the Greeks’ love of amber, they also used it as a flavoring in the wine called Retsina. Just from this one culture we start to see associations of wounds, healing, and inebriation.
We can expand our associations when we realize that many instruments of the world are layered in wood varnish/resin, including violins, cellos, and grand pianos; from the sap of trees originates a substance that calls sound into life. We know in Aboriginal culture the practice of throwing bark or leaves onto hot rocks and inhaling the vapors when ill. The lines of relationship are varied and powerful.
In the old story of Harb ben Omayya and Mirdas ben Abi’ Amir, the two set fire to a wild thicket to cultivate the spot, accidentally driving out Jinn (genie), who flew away in the shape of white serpents. Both men died soon afterwards. In this pre-Islamic Arabic story, we see a certain ambivalence in the association between tree, entity, and medicine—an awareness that they have both healing and destruction in their tendrils.
It is naive in the extreme to place too much emphasis on the natural world as exclusively benign and nurturing: it is not. It contains drowning horses, terrible poisons, and death-bringing weather. We see in the Arab story the delicacy of the balance between realms. The moment you unconsciously set out to domesticate something that is bent, complex, and wild, the spirits fly away and life ends. If we think of nature as a temple, which is an image we get from tribal peoples, to start hacking down columns and overturning the altar is obviously going to stir up a hornets’ nest. Gary Snyder observes how:Life in the wild is not just eating berries in the sunlight. I like to imagine a “depth ecology” that would go into the dark side of nature—the balls of crunched bones in a scat, the feathers in the snow, the tales of insatiable appetite. Wild systems are in one elevated sense above criticism, but they can also be seen as irrational, moldy, cruel, parasitic.7
So Anga takes his shavings from the temple walls and makes his way into the world outside the tribe. We know the way is hard for him; it always is when we enter the vulnerability of a new landscape, our old safety net of ego a hundred miles back, given to a man dressed as a wolf waiting for the midnight bus at the crossroads. I always hear blues music at this part of the story, not electric, but instead that old, terrible, haunting sound of Robert Johnson. We don’t know where he went during this period; he may have slept under motorway bridges, wandered through depressed towns, picked up jobs here and there, but he kept moving towards that place where the shaman told him to go.
I often witness in youth a certain focus in their desire to reoffend, to get sent down, to endure or deliver a beating. It’s not an entirely random path, but has its own destination, even if it is a dark one. It is an unconscious echo of the initiatory route, played out with the shadow tools youth possess. In the absence of guidance, they resonate to the strong vibrations of crisis, aggression, and adrenalin. They know they’ve been sold bullshit by the media, so why not act as bulls? As the crime increases, they move closer to the center of their story, things come to a head, they engineer rupture. Without the shavings present in their life, however, they take Simoon’s route, incinerating all life around them.
WORLD TREES, HOLY TREES, SOUL TREES
In the country it is as if every tree said to me, “Holy! Holy!”
Who can ever express the ecstasy of the woods?
Ludwig van Beethoven8
We know we have arrived at the centre of Anga’s story when we arrive at the huge tree, blocking out the sun and the moon. Whatever has been created here is obstructing the natural order of things, a deprivation of both radiance and lunar insight. This is a fearful and desolate scene. Frequently it’s a moment in the story that causes young people hearing it to either get very animated or withdraw. The inversion of vitality, the sense of dread is tangible.
In chapter two, in “Ivan the Bear’s Son,” we found the mother bear retreating from view, allowing Ivan to be taken, so as to move towards his destiny. To allow a child to be taken is another inversion of natural instinct, but we detect some beauty in it. This isn’t that. This is a place lacking comfort, love, or the sense of anything greater than its immediate surroundings. It is also the surroundings that the listening youth often say are the most familiar to them in the whole story.
In our own life, if a religious (in its original etymology, “to link back”), mythological, or philosophical perspective is lost, we lose our grip on the huge ropes handed down through history. At a retreat several years ago, one young woman claimed Simoon’s tree was her spinal column, the sum total of her experience and understanding.
I will give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall 9
A place that has lost the end of Blake’s string is dried-out, withered, and terrified. Let’s balance this with some images of World Trees. The Islamic version of paradise is a magnificent, opulent garden and at its center is a vast and beautiful tree called Tooba, which provides shade and abundant fruits that have flavor that no mortal has ever tasted. If this isn’t wonderful enough, rivers of milk, wine, and honey spring from the base of this tree. We have located a divine source that channels wisdom through these rivers into the hearts of all disciples.
We find in most cultures an image of a tree providing a center point, or axis between sacred and profane, our world and the upper world. To the old Norse this tree would have been known as Yggdrasil, the World Tree, which spans nine worlds, or spheres of perception. We find its middle layer is where humans live, but that layer is surrounded by realms of the dead, and the higher heavens of Godheimr, which contains another nine sub-worlds. In this vast, archaic system, we find that the tree has three huge roots, and from them three holy springs abide. They exist in a strange accord with one another, each existing by the others’ nourishment, and we are told they are the source of the damp and moist continent of Scandinavia. From Yggdrasil, “Comes the dew, that falls into the valleys.”10
Back in The Mabinogion we encounter Peredur, an earlier version of Perceval, who, like Anga, quests to find a cure for someone ailing, in this case “The king of Suffering.” “On the bank of the river he saw a tall tree: from roots to crown one half was aflame and the other golden with leaves.”11 We find an immediate association with Moses’ burning bush, a fire that doesn’t reduce everything around it to ashes, a soul fire, divine in nature. The fecundity of golden leaves also symbolizes the balance between spirit and flesh, their entwinement. All these trees indicate verticality, the upward vision as well as the immediate horizontal surroundings of our everyday life.<
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The detail I love in the first two illustrations though, is that nourishment for humans also comes from below, by the roots of things; when we turn our gaze down also we find wine, honey, and holy water.
In our own lives, our own quests, have we ever made it to the Tree of Life? Or do we have more experience of the withered wasteland of Simoon’s terrain? Do we have our pot of shavings with which to turn that arid terrain into the paradise of Tooba’s shade? My shavings include five a.m. walks with my father as a child—drinking tea out of a flask, watching the sun come up in the little village of Cockington, and walking the lanes home while he told me the Persian poem of “Sohrab and Rushtom.” My shavings include watching Jajouka musicians from the Sahara conjure up such fierce magic that spontaneous dog fights erupted in the crowd. My shavings include six months in that men’s hostel sitting in the pain of a marital breakup.
Not one of us is bereft of shavings, but many of us are unaware of the sheer tenacity required to collect them into a ball that can defeat the harsh, lifedenying monster that is Simoon. We have to kindle the embers attentively, as Morda did in chapter one, otherwise they scatter and lose shape. It is important not to just associate shavings with success or the prize earned. The shape of you is meant to be unusual, unique, coming from the limits of Saturn as well as your lust for external validation. The descent process is just that: a descent. We’re given a way through by the interpretative tools we have at our disposal; mythic imagination provides alchemy in crisis. Soul means keeping our head down, looking for water trails, drawing the debris out of our tiny streams that lead to the big springs of the World Tree. We may need a gang of us bucketing—the water may be stagnant, but we know its source lies somewhere vital. A hundred thousand poems, books, and songs have been written during this bucketing process.