A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  Back to Anga: We find him at the center of the story (Actually, there are two centers, but who says stories should entirely follow logic?), facing a devastated scene, recognizing he’s approaching Simoon’s hot spot. We see him scraping moss off the rocks, the one bit of green left in the area, tying it to his body with thongs and soaking in the stream. With our immediate focus on moisture, we see him working in opposition to his surroundings, which are dry and arid. As a medicinal plant, moss has associations with good luck, so we see him gathering all the good luck he can find. The moss is obviously related to the pine shavings, but we still can’t see to what end.

  With the moss twined to his body, so that he resembles nothing less than a Green Man, he allows the water to soak the moss to his skin. That water must be freezing but he endures it. Mythology and psychology are laden with water association. A common outlook is that water is a container of emotion, of deep feeling, of memory; that it moves from one place to another, is fluid and runs from the beginning to the end of time. It is in amniotic fluid, a watery container in which we form limbs, eyes, and a beating heart. It is the stuff of life. An old belief is that water is inherently feminine, but in it we find gods swimming around quite happily too. Mannanan Mac Lir, the Irish god of the sea, is just one example. Where we detected an ailing feminine in the tent, we find a strong, flowing force literally gluing the protective moss onto Anga.

  What is gripping in this story is the intelligence Anga brings to it. Courage alone won’t decide the victor in a fight like this. Courage got Anga out the tent, out of the estate and the family grip but, just like Ivan, he needs canniness to defeat Simoon. Waving a spear about just won’t cut it. Like those youth learning hunter-gatherer exercises, Anga has learned to extend his vision past what is directly in front of him. His connections to the resin of trees and the deep waters of soul turn Simoon’s fire into steam, hot air. As this knowledge flies through the air from his pot, its velocity defeats the crippling bully, in fact kills the serpent right there.

  Moments of alchemy exist all through this encounter; moss into armor, fire into steam, healing resin into poison. We see that in transformational points in our lives things can transmute very quickly. If, like Anga, we have followed ritual steps and gathered our weapons carefully, it is possible to disarm, or re-see any number of difficult encounters. By attending to nature, Anga executed the very steps required to defeat this great foe. Attending to nature, as we are realizing, is a double-pronged process involving both the external and internal domains.

  ARCHAIC BEINGS

  In this story we come across two serpents, one dominant, aggressive, and highly visible, and another hidden, far from view. It is worth looking for a moment at different ideas about the serpent through history. Back in the Sumerian era, we find myths of a serpent guarding another Tree of Life, the Axis Mundi, and hence seen as a protector of holy knowledge. We immediately see connections to the Garden of Eden and think of that quote in Matthew 10:16, “Be ye therefore wise as serpents.” Serpents, mythologically, serve dual roles: they are holders of wisdom but at the same time devouring, ambivalent, and far from the flock. This is more than just a Christian smear campaign, since versions of these two perspectives crop up all over the world. The Gnostics identified parts of our inner workings with the snake: the human medulla and the spinal cord.

  In Australia, medicine men when undergoing initiation are supposed to endure a swallowing by a huge snake deity that ruptures their perceptions, pushes them into new, strange terrain. Eliade explains:The ritual swallowing by the snake is to be interpreted as a return to the womb—on the one hand because the snake is often described as female, on the other because entering the belly of the divine also carries a symbolism of return to the embryonic state . . . It represents not so much a ritual death followed by a resurrection as a complete regeneration of the initiate through his gestation and birth by the Great Mother.12

  So a snake encounter in a ritual or mythological setting is more than a just a symbolic experience; it is literally to be born anew. Snakes can make us uneasy because they appear so archaic, with armor-like scales and an impossible ability to shed scars, ticks, and skin. They are an ancient throwback to some other time. We’ve all seen footage of snakes calmly swallowing some cute creature and the reptile’s neck bulging as the furry little fellow heads to his end. “Goodbye sweetness, hello dinner.” Snakes are not creatures we happily make connections with, as we do with primates. In India, serpent energy is understood to abide at the base of the spine, and certain intense yogic practices create what is known as Kundalini, an ascending of that base sensation, that libidinous power, up to the top of the head, creating an ecstatic experience. To hoard that libidity is seen as undeveloped, greedy, whereas to take the other route of tantra with it is to distil it into a spiritual potency, capable of linking heaven and earth. That practice, like Ogloma, is far from our view; in order to find her, first of all you have to defeat the land-scorching, devouring nature of Simoon.

  Holding the thought that all the characters exist within us, we can start to look at the role of the two serpents. Simoon appears on a superficial level to be dark and Ogloma light. To interpret the story on this level only is a gross injustice to the odd swamps and many layers of its meaning. Simoon is dark in the sense of an energy unharnessed, lacking boundaries; every time she opens her mouth something gets damaged. Something in her behavior has caused an inversion of the traditional World Tree, creating a desolate realm where very little grows.

  THE ALCHEMY OF SERPENTS

  When I tell this story, teenagers, the middle-aged, and the elderly all have something to say about Simoon. Typical questions are: When did you scorch the earth around you? Is Simoon still steering your ship or has you’re Anga helped you shed that skin? What were the conditions that brought her into life in the first place? Initiatory process offers the transmuting of that hostile power into something with discernment and clarity.

  In the stories of Finn Mac Cool, we notice he had a spear hidden in a ritual cloth that, once brandished, always found its deadly mark. It was not an indiscriminate, fire-breathing blaze, but a focused, specific tool, rarely used.

  When we throw our resin into the mouth of violence, rage, and destruction, it can cause collapse. Suddenly a hundred elders crawl down our esophagus into our lower intestine, pressing poultices to wounds, singing incantations to inflamed areas, taking that raw energy and turning it into something with form. I don’t think this happens only once; I think Simoon rises up many times in our lives, and we need to be ready with our shavings to transmute it. I say transmute, not annihilate completely. Simoon is raw material, not to be ignored, made nice or pretended she was never around.

  The complexity arises in how to handle Simoon in our lives. The scaly one can go quiet for years, or only reveal herself in our most intimate relationships. My own association with her, due to the heat and the killing, involves an absolutely savage rage. For others, it may mean a whole other set of skeletons clanking out of the closet. What is vital to understand is that this transformation is taking place on sacred ground, in the center of an initiatory process, not in some random incident. The story informs us that we are entering the terrain of a heated and blackened psyche in a ritualized, alert manner. That terrain could be in a therapist’s room or beside a still lake, but it requires some kind of container, some kind of support, in order to bear.

  To let Simoon course through our veins is far easier than sitting in the complex emotions which awoke the serpent in the first place. Rage is a leap out of the apparent unsteadiness of vulnerability, shame, or imagined ridicule. In our lives, Simoon’s legacy can start to be counted by our late thirties when we begin to long for some fresh part of ourselves to come with the poultice and the moss. If we don’t get conscious about this, our wound becomes our character, and we wake up in our own unique prison.

  For me, a profoundly useful shaving in Simoon’s mouth was having drumsticks thrust in my hand at eleven years
old. For some ex-offenders I’ve worked with, learning the craft of making a beautiful oak bow and arrow, with intricate carvings and coated in varnish, has been a way of throwing a shaving into the mouth of those old patterns. In my life, the most important step was the simple acknowledgement that Simoon exists. To vocalize without aggression this fire-breathing character is to open the vocal chords wide enough for the poultice to descend. Zip it up, deny it, and the kettle just boils on and on.

  Ogloma can then emerge, that wisdom-point that has been hard to locate for so long. Without the transformative harnessing of Anga’s throw, Ogloma would still be hidden under a rock in the nether regions of our consciousness somewhere. For the youth fasting on the mountain, Ogloma can start to appear somewhere on the third or fourth day, though without the resin, moss thong and a mythic framework for the experience, we may never meet her. Staying too long in Simoon’s country leads to a kind of cynical trance state, in which power is all, and nothing exists that isn’t burnt, hurt, or needing to be devoured. In a psychic climate like that, inevitably you will aspire to be the biggest critter in the valley.

  The story alerts us to the fact that you have to have grounding, or shavings, to transmute savagery into the grace of wildness. If we grew up in Simoon’s Kingdom, then where do we find it? The moment in the stream also symbolizes emotional literacy: it is the combination of knowledge of one’s own depths (water) and the relationship to what is moist and nourishing (moss), bound together with the rope of village knowledge.

  To know water is to know grief, and grief can temper rage. Grief gives us the capacity to become human again, to acknowledge remorse, to feel the sadness of the world. To know water is to go deeper than the decimation of Simoon’s Kingdom. The first step towards finding shavings is to enter the water—to stop flailing and start feeling.

  Islam has the tradition of the nafs, the greedy part of us that gobbles up success, smoothes over failure, delights in others misfortune; Sufi teachings tell us that to lead a soulful life, we must walk another road, pay attention to things that are hard to find, work quietly and diligently, without incinerating everything in our path. In our story we also take a different route. When Ogloma is freed, she willingly gives the skin to Anga, and we feel the beginnings of hope for his mother. Some new energy is at work.

  After more treacherous journeying, Anga came to a towering mountain, so high your eyes would strain and go blind if you tried to see the top of it. Still, holding the image of his mother in his mind, he started climbing. Soon his hands were bleeding from the ragged outcrops, the wind lashed his thin shoulders and icy snow fell on his upturned face. All was dark. He came to a rough ledge that was the entrance to a deep, deep cavern. Slowly walking down the tunnel, he came across a bear of huge size—the king of all bears—the Great Bear. Asleep in a corner, paws wrapped around his head, the bear moaned fretfully. Anga noticed a sharp splinter buried deep in one of the paws. Compassion overriding his fear, Anga tied his rope around the splinter, strained and tugged, and finally extracted the splinter from the bear’s swollen paw. With a roar of pain, the bear awoke, but when he saw Anga with the splinter, he was overcome with gratitude. “For three agonizing years I have been in pain, never being able to remove the splinter. You have saved me from my torment, how can I thank you?” “Give me your fur,” said Anga, “so I can cure my mother.”

  The Great Bear took off his fur and handed it to Anga, who set off at once back to his settlement. This journeying time was like a flying arrow, and Anga hurtled like a young deer through forest and tundra to get to his people. He reached the tent and gave the skin of Ogloma and the fur of the Great Bear to his mother. Pressing them to her skin, she was instantly and forever cured, all the pain drained into the ground. From that day on, Anga was celebrated by the Nanai clan for his boldness, cleverness, and compassion. He had found his place in the world.

  CLEAN STEPS AND MUDDY CLAWS

  With this hope, this snake-skin, comes a change of geography, and an ascension. All mountains are nearer the gods than we are. At Mount Kailash in the Himalayas, Buddhists pay respect by walking its base clockwise, and followers of the older religion, Bon, counter-clockwise. They say of Caer Idris, the very mountain that overlooks our base camp, that to spend a night alone up there is to come back “mad, dead, or a poet.” Mountains puncture sky, ideas, and endurance. Hidden in their mist is the breath of the other. We know that much time had passed for Anga, carrying that snakeskin. We know trouble has been and gone during this period, maybe twenty years. Anga could have carried Ogloma’s spiritual skin through any number of situations; it probably gave him the ability to be very still, to cherish silence, to see people’s unconscious motivations, to feel clean. Meeting and carrying Ogloma’s skin gives us a sense of control, of discernment. We have, after all, transmuted all those ashes and roarings into something distilled, more refined.

  The profundity of a spiritual experience can often leave us reluctant to return to the dusty, anarchic streets of the rinky-dink world. In our fully glowing and intensely vulnerable state, contemplating a return from the safety of the hermitage, mountaintop, or ashram can seem distinctly unappealing. How can I hold onto this wonderful feeling?

  INFLATED ANGELS

  Mythologies from around the world hold to the truth that tension, squabbles, betrayals, and cunning are part of the experience of our journey, the “joyful participation in the sorrow of life.” The spiritual seeker within you, if identified as the sum total of your being, leads you into a place of inappropriate openness in the complexity of a world with a hundred different agendas. The world can become a place that you have ascended from, and you look pityingly down at all these other unenlightened ones, people who lack the clarity of your vision. Another pitfall is that of walking unarmored into secular situations in which you share your revelations clumsily to strangers. Either mistake leads to an even greater distance from that first opening.

  The spiritual athlete often changes the color of his clothes

  and his mind remains grey and loveless

  He sits in the shrine room all day,

  So that the Guest has to go outdoors and praise the rocks.

  Kabir13

  Spirituality is often associated with serenity, self-effacement, and gentleness. How does this equate with encountering a being as primordial sounding as the Bear High King, with his associations of hierarchy, royalty, claws, power, fur, raw meat, magic? It doesn’t sound remotely politically correct; it sounds highly dangerous, morally dubious, and laced with uncertainty. When we encounter temples in Asia, we often find explicit scenes of copulating groups, mythic animals, and bizarre cosmologies carved into the antechamber walls. This is to let us know that we are approaching holy ground, Waken or Taboo. Holy isn’t always a church or open meadow. It can be a zone of profound change, where sexuality, the mythic realms, dreams, and the opening of soul can all occur. Those sculptural images on the temple walls are telling us this, warning us of major potencies at play. If you want to keep everything just so, nice and white, go no further.

  Staring up at the mountain, Anga is looking at those Asian temple gates. For many of us, just tackling Simoon is a life’s work. To move through the base material of rejection, blind rage, and conquest is a massive undertaking. Surely to rest with Ogloma’s skin is the final end of the spiritual quester? Well, if you view spirit as having no connection to soul then maybe. But if these realms (while not the same) are connected, then a further step needs to be taken. The soul is dragging us back into the initiatory sequence, to encounter another ruler or power.

  THE INNER KINGDOM

  A High King is a charged figure; he requires subjects, a court, and a kingdom. Surely that fact is grotesque in an era of equal opportunities? Not to the soul it isn’t. A King or Queen is a centralized point inside the psyche which has the power to radiate outwards, make decisions, hold boundaries, enjoy three-day feasts, and draw up the gates when necessary. There exists an interdependence between them and their s
ervants and kingdom. This is a built-in posture of the self, not an argument for external monarchies or dictatorships.

  In the outer world our experience of too many Herods, Sergeant Majors, and crooked politicians can make us long to negate any kind of authority whatsoever. But who will snatch up that latent crown when we make a big show of our abdication? That’s right, another child-killing, imagination-crushing Herod.

  The savage and distorted King is a force that anyone living today has experienced in abundance. We are far more familiar with this than a King image that is strong, decisive, cultured, and fair. When that image is denigrated or entirely lost, then the psyche is adrift from ancestral anchor-points that could root it in a fertile sea bed with the bones of captains and great ships. Without these anchor-points, we avidly hold onto our posture of abdication, using irony and wit to mask the uninitiated child, one hundred arrows in their chest and back. Robert Bly says:

  The diminishment of the father and the collapse of the outer King makes the longing for the inner King intense, almost unbearable. I would say that, after the attention of tiny desires, the next step begins not with resolutions, but with a long grieving over the dead inner King, surrounded by his dead warriors.14

  Contemporary spirituality has taken steps towards the capacity to listen, cherish, and question considered wisdom. But to polarize utterly from a position of activity and authority is a mistake.

  This Kingdom is the place that nourishes and protects the spiritual opening Anga experienced, and integrates it into the whole. A court would include holy women, jesters, knights, scullery maids, and dogs eating the scraps from under the table. An encounter with the King or Queen moves an experience in from the margins of your psyche and strengthens it, prepares it for the arrows and boiling oil of an incendiary world. This is a controversial idea, as it indicates the spiritual quester alone is not the most elevated position in the psyche, but one of a whole wheel of impulses required to live well. Their epiphanies need grounding. The final advantage of this movement is that an individual with a strong King or Queen can wield the discernment to articulate such openings in way useful to others—cleanly and with great strength. We could say that even the Soul has a Village and a Forest, and that to fully nurture such openings require the ‘return to the community’ to bless it.