A Branch from the Lightning Tree

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by Martin Shaw


  Actually, the old idea of a hero is someone who suffers in full view of the community, and who is alive to a certain type of pain. Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero brought a huge shipload of information to us sixty years ago, but much work still needs to be done to apprehend this idea.

  Half a century after Campbell, we see that Robert Bly’s mythological work has, in part, involved dragging the idea of hero down from the horse of logic to the thorned road of deep feeling. For men, Bly makes this leap: “What I’m suggesting, then, is that every modern man has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet.”20

  Part of Bly’s guile lies in his ability to transmit crazy intelligence through images. That way the knowledge hits the body before the mind has a chance to filter it out to more abstract realms. “Iron John,” the Grimms’ fairy tale, informs us that a golden ball of energy resides in the magnetic field of the Wild, or Grief Man. This seems peculiar in that it doesn’t abide with Zeus or Thor, but in the strange, muddy radiance of the man found under the water.

  Temple building has to accommodate the sodden footprints of this archaic character. Iron John may scare you rigid, so that you may only be able to enter his presence for moments at a time, but he has an unexpected face. In the story’s final twist, the Wild Man is revealed as a Lord under enchantment, waiting for someone with the initiatory discipline to reach into their own psychic depths, do the work and bring him to fullness.

  There is nothing stuck about this story; the length of time required for the necessary movement can be long, but it bubbles with alchemical change. We find a sophisticated set of ideas, propelling us far beyond conventional motifs of masculinity.

  Bly’s work catches the underside of Campbell’s wave, narrows the field, and holds psychology as a kind of meadow place between Village and Forest thinking. Bly trains his vision on an earlier, arcane image of wildness containing the inner magnetism to not be swayed by the hold of money or the terror of the communities disapproval. This kind of personality typically derives from receptive listening and much sacrifice, but ultimately has tremendous activity in it. The Grief Man has walked the Road of Solitude a long time before stepping out onto the Road of Voice.

  We encounter in Bly’s Rilke translations these lines:

  When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us . . . This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.21

  We are rapidly losing any association with success, rather the right kind of failures. We understand that the ability to craft sorrow into delicate expressions of life is to draw nearer an animal self, and so to be neither transcendental nor robotic. So the hero is shapeshifting from cultural assumptions out into stranger forms. A second voice enters the fray, that of Daniel Deardorff.

  Anyone who has perused a handful of the world’s creation myths could know that the “constant,” the primordial condition, is not structured, it is, rather, undifferentiated chaos, darkness, the abysmal waters . . . Thus, the uncompromising faith in structure—as fundamental and primary to life—is revised, a revision that constitutes a radical shift from the civilised perspective: Here “structure” and the “aggregate phase” comprise the illusory and transitory states; liminality is the primary ground of creation...“The descent into hell is actually the ascent of soul”—when the heart-bird escapes, we return to our source, the original darkness, we go home.22

  To Deardorff, we came from the forest and will return to the forest. He senses a kind of psychic frailty in large, gleaming buildings and insurance documents. His work is a dark arrow out from the Grief Man’s pond towards deities in accord with this “primordial condition,” this root posture. He calls in Trickster wisdom itself, the principle of disorder, to sit in the center of any discussion of what constitutes an authentic human being.

  We know that in the form of Coyote, the Trickster has been around since the very beginning. The Chumash tell us that once upon a time he begged the Sun to accompany him on his journeys, managing to persuade the Sun to lend him his flaming torch. He let it stray onto the ground of the earth and WHOOSH! up went the brush, he almost burnt it all down till the Sun managed to put it out. This is not incompetence on Coyote’s part but a strange accord with inflammatory and unexpected universal forces.

  Coyote’s movement through the worlds is both potent and fractured; we aim meanings at him that explode in sharp colors if they even come close to his energy field. The Yurok tell us he can impregnate with merely a glance, and that things grow in dark, moist places after meeting him. He diffuses righteousness, laughs at tribalism, steals fire from the gods, and is ever-present as circumstances, cultures, and weather patterns jostle with the inevitable changes of time. We know that Coyote is a decentralized zone, that his life force exists in the tip of his nose and tail, not his broad central plain. We see he is elusive in texture; he is not located in a geographical location or specific point in history, but remains epistemic. Brian Maussmi refers to his footprints as nomadic thought:

  Nomadic thought does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity, it rides on difference. It does not represent the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds.23

  Coyote is riding a different vibration from those of us dependent on alarm clocks and year planners. He favors the rhizomic universe. The rhizome is a plant root system that grows by accretion rather than by separate or oppositional means. There is no defined center to its structure, and it doesn’t relate to any generative model. Each part remains in contact with the other by way of roots that become shoots and underground stems. We see that the rhizome is de-territorial, that it stands apart from the tree structure that fixes an order, based on radiancy and binary opposition. Trees are organized by universal principles of hierarchy and reproduction. Preordained paths whisper information from a specific point. We could say that the tree contains the classical, village-centered, solar organised model from which we derive most of our models of state, language, and society.

  The anthropological fixation on the World Tree as an immovable center by which the Shaman/Coyote ascends or descends to objectified territories is a blurred picture. This tree, seen through the eyes of an initiate, is actually a vast rhizome, pierced through with a million branches and roots—not stratified realms but alternating degrees of intensity experienced as plateaus, interconnected, riddled with gateways. So Coyote or Enkidu as strange heroes are not pulled into dogmatic gestures or pursuit of the glittering prize.

  “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or new lines,” observe Delueze and Guattari. 24 So Coyote is chopped up, devoured, shat out, obliterated . . . he dusts himself down, reassembles, and continues on his scampering path into the uncertain, ink-black depths beyond our small bay of lights.

  So here we are: the Village as Solar, Olympian; the Forest as Lunar, Rhizomic; the Crossroads of Authenticity stands in their tension. We have moved from an Olympian to a Rhizomic universe in several stages. To decide there can be only one position is to miss the point. In the tension of these seemingly opposed forces is where the hero lives. The moment we fixate, we lose.

  THE ELDER FROM THE BEREFT

  Paradox is the arrow to which the seven stories of this book are attached. Without paradox, myth is dogma, a tribal polemic. Precisely in our thin reading of the old stories originates its current meaning as a lie, or fiction. Paradox. How do we glow with the luminosity of Asgard while holding the fractured postures of Coyote? Well, it may be worth remembering that in Asgard lived a Coyote in the form of Loki. When Zeus grabbed Dionysus and incubated him, the two universes drank from each other. It is the business of living to exist in this p
aradox.

  When Trickster is ignored and a mythic context dissolved, there is the possibility, as with Yaga, that he will come to represent only a rip-off, a betrayal, nothing but falsehood. This is a thin and very sad reading of the richness Trickster offers, but when he is left out of the temple, our interpretations of him become baser and baser. The farther back we dig into his history, the more bizarre sweetness and nobility we find. Coyote is also an embodiment of wisdom, not just avarice or the desire to “get one over.” Deardorff writes:

  While this leaping wit is mercurial, it should not be confused with duplicitous deceit or indecisive weakness. The insider’s inability to endure the crisis of extremes is best characterized as “shiftless”: immovable, uninspired, obtuse and trivial, while the polyvalent Trickster, by subtle contrast, is “shifty”: multifaceted, unpredictable, irrepressible. Like the everchanging surface of water, Trickster wisdom is deceptively deep.25

  To move past the plasticity of the “champion,” we need to handle our “Divine influxes” carefully. To carry back Underworld jewels and insight from the mountain, we need to emulate both Lull’s young squire and leaping Coyote, and so holding an inner directive that is reflective, listening, and potent. It’s important that we have an animal guide snuffling through the temple, a nimble Trickster that deflates empirical onesidedness, stagnant grandeur, and too many gold chests.

  So, as we have seen, we are not abandoning the hero, but relating him back to his earliest roots and acknowledging the complexity the phrase holds. I close this chapter with a poem by William Stafford. In it, he holds in balance the two seemingly opposite experiences of abandonment and royalty. He holds as well to the Coyote idea that in our longing, false trails, and feeling far from the pulpit is hidden something luminous. He calls the elder out from the terrain of the bereft. Maybe by getting lost in the woods we can find the cell, the Hermit, and the book.

  If you were exchanged in the cradle and

  your real mother died

  without ever telling the story

  then no one knows your name,

  and somewhere in the world

  your father is lost and needs you

  but you are far away.

  He can never find

  how true you are, how ready.

  When the great wind comes

  and the robberies of the rain

  you stand in the corner shivering.

  The people who go by—

  you wonder at their calm.

  They miss the whisper that runs

  any day in your mind,

  “Who are you really, wanderer?”—

  and the answer you have to give

  no matter how dark and cold

  the world around you is:

  “Maybe I’m a king.”26

  CHAPTER 6

  WOMAN THAT MOVES IN THE DARK GROVES OF SOUL

  The Colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira’s body;

  other colors washed out…

  Approve me or disapprove me;

  I praise the Mountain Energy night and day.

  I take the path that ecstatic human beings

  have taken for centuries

  Mirabai1

  We have been fed by stories with a man at its center, a youth, and now a woman, in our third “voyaging” tale. If we are feeling particularly lethargic, men will tiptoe around a “story about women,” not realizing that tremendous energies like Yaga are in us too. And women who look to find Ivan only in an external man risk severe psychic indigestion. Again, paradox rears its head. Elements of the stories having to do with the walk of a woman’s or a man’s life are specific and exclusive, but to literalize them too avidly is to miss internal and magical perspectives.

  In the wilderness we see nature’s mirrors shift at lightning speed for whoever happens to be there. I have heard men speak of a certain valley where they received a sense of fathering from the heavy oaks and mossy rocks. Three months before, a woman in the same spot had dreamt of the great She-Bear and seen her face in those very same rocks and oaks. I am getting at, like the stories, the mistake of “ownership” in nature. This is not to propose we are the same in some flat and very unsexy manner, but is to undo, perhaps, some of the tension around the area, loosen it up, be inquisitive, find some humor.

  We are all touching inside the secret river

  Jay Leeming2

  VALEMON AND THE WILD THIRD DAUGHTER

  Once upon a time there was a King. Like many kings throughout the ages, he had three daughters, and our story is about the youngest of the three. The castle hid a sculpted inner garden, but the youngest daughter had a taste for exploration. One day, wandering the forests around the castle, she came across a most arresting sight: she beheld a white bear lying on its back, playing with a golden wreath. The strangeness of the scene and the glow of the wreath opened a longing in her heart to possess it. She offered riches of many kinds, but the Bear said there was only one possible exchange. Not gold, not land, not status—but herself.

  Well, she couldn’t stand the thought of not having the wreath, so she agreed to the price, high though it seemed. The white bear said he would return on the third day, which was a Thursday. Once the King was informed of the agreement, he stayed calm but called his greatest artisans to construct a golden wreath themselves so his daughter would not have to go through with the bargain. Whatever they constructed was never quite right—the bear’s wreath had curlier leaves, and was not so dull. The bear’s wreath was wider and twinkled with light. The daughter could not shake the vision of the first wreath from her heart. After several rejected attempts, the King and the craftsmen withdrew to come up with another plan. Something had to be done....

  The roots of this story can be found in “Eros and Psyche,” one of the great central pillars of Greek mythology, but this version comes from Norway. It carries specific images from its earlier birthing.

  The story immediately drops us into a specific scene: the wanderings of the third daughter. We are not to focus immediately on the more favored sisters, but rather on the part of ourselves that is marginal, curious, and ready to bloom. Jumping straight in, we notice the daughter was wandering in the woods, not the clipped and sculpted gardens of the castle, when she had the encounter with the white bear. This points to two ideas: The first is that her parents, the King and Queen, may not have kept such a watchful eye (or hold) on the third daughter as to limit her to the confines of the Royal court. In some way, we can see this as possible neglect, but in a positive sense, encouraging possibility. When the iron gaze of royalty (e.g., the family traditions) is on us, it can freeze us. Secondly, the daughter may already be restless or searching for something outside the “kingdom”—the consensual limits and trimmed hedges of the psyche.

  We notice several exquisite details in the appearance of the white bear. First of all, he is lying on his back playing, not snarling or protective. There is something open and delightful about this posture, that actually encourages the daughter to stay. If we view the wreath as a symbol of the bear’s status or power, he seems light with it, not bound or heavy. Growing up in the confines of a royal household, the daughter probably found that highly exciting to witness. Do you remember the first time you were entranced by something that was unlike anything you’d seen before? The bear seems to suggest a whole different way of carrying yourself.

  This isn’t a move to abdicate power, or to drop out, but to renegotiate what it means; to find your own.

  QUESTING BEASTS

  We know from myths and fairy stories around the world that it is often a white animal pulling us into some kind of otherworldly trouble. White is a spirit-color, suggesting snow, luminosity, semen, and clarity.

  In Gaelic myth, pursuing a white deer often leads to an encounter with the Sidhe, the awesome fair-folk. Something vital has been glimpsed, and we spur our horse and gallop, with or without our courtiers. We know that in Hungarian myth it was a great white stag that led the brothers Hunor and Magnor to se
ttle in Scythia. From there, they established the Huns and the Magyars. Chasing the white deer also leads both Arthur and Finn MacColl into all kinds of deep and arcane encounters.

  The association with both power and the Otherworld makes a strong crossroads of ideas. Spiritual powers are often associated with various moves towards renunciation of the flesh: the hair shirt, pouring cold water on the inflamed groin, the pilgrim’s walk. Although this story certainly has renunciation in it, it comes from the land of the Vikings, men and women with a juicier perspective on the realm of the spirits.

  In Arthurian myth we hear of something called the Questing Beast that abides in the forests around Camelot. Part Lion, part Serpent, part Goat, it exists only to be glimpsed, to be sought after, and cannot be captured. Arthur himself glimpsed the beast as a youth, as did King Pellinore, who spent a great part of his life in its pursuit. We see the Beast as an otherworldly opening of the soul. The quest itself serves to make an art of our longing for the thing that cannot be claimed. To be distracted from that desire is to fall into the wasteland. Joseph Campbell writes:

  What pulls you off from spiritual fulfillment? … In the Grail legends, the land of people doing what they think they ought to do or have to do is the wasteland. What is the wasteland to you? I know damned well what the wasteland would be for me: the academic approach to my material; or a marriage to someone who had no thoughts or feelings for me or my work.3

  THE DEAL BEYOND THE THINGS OF THIS WORLD

  This encounter between the daughter and the bear has a different slant in the sense that an exchange is offered, an accord bartered. But the price is not defined by any of the riches that the Kingdom has to offer. Jewels, crowns, any treasures of the horizontal realms are no good here. We could call this transaction The Deal Beyond the Things of This World. All considered affluence is cast aside for this one moment of deeper opening; Buddha leaves his palace to walk among the sick and lost, not knowing where that will lead him.

 

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