A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  PEBBLES DISGUISED AS APPLES

  The firebird inside the daughter is starting to flap its wings now. We sense that it has taken a long time to move through the three temple doors of the three cottages and be thus gifted. Our clearest signal that she is coming to the end of the wandering stage occurs when she arrives at the cottage of the children and the woman. From being in a state of passively receiving, she is now moving into the active stage of giving. Her suffering, seemingly random, has actually given her the capacity to provide warmth and sustenance for herself and others. We may not enter this stage till our forties or fifties in this world.

  The scene of the ragged children heating pebbles to pretend they are apples is particularly alarming. The absence of what is juicy and waterfilled means they must chew on something teeth-breaking, rough, and lacking any nourishment, with only the fantasy of sustenance to keep them going. Whole cultures chew on pebbles disguised as apples. A relationship can drag out for decades on the dim memory of that “one summer” so many years ago. The cult of the spin doctor testifies to this kind of activity. Much pebble-heating is required on a national level to persuade a people to go to war, dangling the flimsy scent of righteousness around a core of something the body naturally resists swallowing.

  That pebble-eating culture is what many of us face today. There are so many pebbles rattling around on television I’m amazed the sets don’t break. The curious, wild, and abundant third daughter is, by her very authenticity, opening the door to real food for that family. A deeper fall altogether occurs when we forgot what a real apple was ever like, forget its texture and vitality and settle for the hard nugget of fragrant nothingness.

  It was revealed to the daughter that Valemon was up at the top of the Glass Mountain (as it was called) in the thrall of the light-devouring, many-bladed, saliva-trailing Troll Queen. But luckily the husband of the woman in the cottage was a master Blacksmith who, she claimed, could make claws fitted to the feet and hands of the King’s daughter, making it possible for her to climb the mountain and then find Valemon. Well, when the blacksmith returned, he fashioned just such claws, allowing her to climb up into the sky on the side of the Glass Mountain. She traveled through the dark but kept her nerve until finally she arrived at the top.

  There at the summit she found a vast, spiraling castle and everywhere she looked workers scurried this way and that, doing work-like scurrying things. It turned out that there was to be a wedding in three days between the One of the Great Darkness and Valemon. Despondent at this, the daughter sat at the gates and played with her scissors, and, as expected, clothes tumbled forth like a dancing river of exotic fabrics. Well, the Troll Queen immediately sensed that some sweetness had entered her Kingdom and scurried to the very spot in a half-second, if that.

  Entranced by the magical scissors and frustrated at her own tailors’ bungling attempts to construct a wedding dress, the Shocking Hag Woman attempted to cajole, enchant, and bully the scissors away from the daughter. “You can have them on one condition,” she replied, “simply that you let me spend one night with Valemon.” At this the Queen cackled, “Why certainly, a small price to pay. Now give me the shiny scissors!” At bedtime, the Queen fed Valemon a sleeping draught so he slept in a trance so deep that the daughter could not wake him, no matter how hard she tried. Her tears fell like rain.

  The next day the Queen spotted the daughter’s goblet, and the daughter suggested how wonderful such a thing would be for a wedding reception—Shiraz, Merlot, brown ales from Cornwall, icy water from the Alps—imagine how impressed the guests would be! Stroking a whisker in deep thought, the Warlocked-razor-toothed one agreed, and the deal was struck for another night with Valemon. Well, she slipped him another draught and he slept right through. This time the daughter’s tears were like bullets from a gun and were accompanied by great sobs that wracked the chamber.

  After a sleepless night, the carpenters who were staying next door approached Valemon to ask him who was weeping in his room these last two nights. How on earth could he sleep through such wailing? Valemon immediately realized who the weeper must be. Meanwhile the Troll Queen had spied the daughter’s cloth and its magical foodproducing qualities, and, licking her many lips, agreed to the customary exchange of a night with Valemon for the cloth.

  That night Valemon held the sleeping draught under his tongue till the Grotesque Beloved was gone and then spat it out. The Queen returned suddenly, sniffed the air and, suspecting something, produced a large needle and stuck it right through his arm. Well, he didn’t even flinch, so she slumped off and let the king’s daughter into the chamber. The moment they were alone, Valemon opened his eyes and the two lovers were reunited at last.

  IRON TIPS AND THE GNASHING QUEEN

  The arrival of the blacksmith tells us that something has to become iron in the daughter to survive this final stage in the journey. Traditionally, a blacksmith is associated with arcane energy, and rides the same midnight horse as the shaman and the magician, the ones who inspect the underside of the universe. A blacksmith can melt what seemed immovable, and new constellations are born.

  We have discovered in earlier chapters that mountains can indicate an expansion of soul knowledge. To climb an unclimbable mountain is to gain a very specific kind of strength. It appears that to combat a divinity, you must spend a great deal of time searching, hungry, and close to the ground. The crucible of that slow walk forges us extended claws, visible sign of the shape-shifting of our psyche. A kind of visible plumage, like a warrior wears going into battle, the claws are both practical and serve as display.

  Norwegian versions of this story hold that the Witch Queen is of Troll descent; lethal, powerful, and with appetite, she is certainly a cousin of Yaga, though she is more earthbound, more caught up in the rinky-dink world. When we lose our western fixation with good/bad for a moment and move eastwards, we find a celebratory, respectful, and passionate relationship with this kind of energy, seeping under and over the polemic of opposition.

  Jung saw this arena of the “morally” nebulous as absolutely archaic, something glimpsed from before the Judeo-Christian roots of the West: “the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche—a blissful and terrible experience.”14 These forces, and the worship of them, are a long, heavy-scaled survivor of a time before the split of dualism.

  An initiating force, the Dark Queen qualifies as belonging to those Goddesses known as “Awakeners.” In India, we have both the black yoginis and the mahavidyas drinking from the same well. According to Elinor Gadon’s description of the yogini, “In her dark magical form the goddess is a female mendicant, sorcerer, and practitioner of magic.”15 When we peer over the covers at the mahavidyas we find they possess names like:

  Kali: She Who is Black; The Power of Time

  Chinnamasta: She Who Has Severed Her Head

  Dhumavati: The Widow; She Who Abides in Smoke

  Baglamukhi: The Paralyzer

  Of course, she exists in the many bubbling faces of the Triple Goddess, which means the swiftly maturing third daughter is caught in the play of a multi-layered awakening constantly on the brink of Jung’s “abyss of impassioned dissolution.” To think the Queen is somehow outside the pantheon is mistaken.

  Most of us are so hardwired by our western upbringing to view her only as evil that the shift required to view her from a whole other perspective is normally too much for us to handle. We have a hundred freeze-framed images from The Wizard of Oz and one-dimensional fairy stories making it nearly impossible for us to see the life-giving possibility of relationship with such a force. Still, many millions east of Suez do. Mythological thinking is not a simple morality tale; to always demand a level of intimacy or comfort is to lose the wider vista it offers. You can stay in the Father’s House forever, or you can go and find your own kind of trouble.

  So she is divine in some way, but in a way that makes us reach for the door lock, the childre
n, and the good book. She is a force of relentless consumption, a motorway paved in a second over a meadow of rare flowers, a wave that engulfs a coastal village that is never seen again. We hesitate at the point of making her demonic, though, for she seems more elemental than that. In some dark way she represents what Finn MacColl called “The Music of what is.” She can be present in a song, an idea, a book, a ritual, a fight, a take-over bid.

  I have cut the plantain grove

  I have taken off my clothes

  I have learnt from my mother-in-law

  How to eat my husband

  On the hill the wind blows

  I have cut the thatching grass

  I have grown weary

  Weary of eating rice

  The weapons are ready

  The axe glitters

  Over the smooth verandah

  The wasps are swarming

  O Bagru leave us

  Kill the young servants

  Kill the girls, Kill the boys

  Santal16

  We begin to understand the need for iron.

  We know that the wily, long-nailed, curious, wild third daughter has ascended the Glass Mountain, coming nearer to the Gods, and will therefore need wits and some kind of armor. Her obvious gifts halt and alert the Fierce Queen to something that interests her, something to be gained. We imagine her peering down through the foggy cloud breaths of dying men and spotting this small, unafraid, and abundant woman.

  A clue that this is an initiation story is the fact that she doesn’t just scoop the daughter up, bite off her head, and take the gifts—she negotiates . This is an auspicious meeting, not a random event.

  As exemplified by Yaga’s ritual questioning, even these elemental forces have certain turns of phrase and particular moments of cosmological obligation that they have to honor.

  Two great forces have met in the psychological and mythological worlds. We learn much from the detail that the Queen has a longing for a fine dress, a decent tipple, and a banquet. She is many-faced; to fixate only on the flashing eyes and grotesque weeping belly is to thin her out—never a wise thing. She is looking for a certain style, even as she eats whole Scottish clans in the 18th century via the English Army or wanders through a Gulag looking for bones.

  HAG POWER

  Though Freud asked “What do women really want?” in the twentieth century, we see the same question being asked in the medieval folktale The Marriage of Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnell, which first appeared in the thirteenth century. We see the similar situation of an individual under enchantment, requiring the relationship with another to break it. Ragnell is some kind of second cousin five times removed from the Black Queen and her cohorts in India; we are interested in her clarity of her communication with Arthur—her certainty. In her essay on the Ragnell story, Polly Young-Eisendrath sees an encounter with the Hag as vital for any woman trying to move into the active pronouncement of her desire.

  Today when women want to be wanted they unintentionally reinforce the misogynist belief that a demanding woman is to be dreaded and subdued . . . “Do you mind if?” or “It would be so nice if you . ..” implies something especially burdensome or difficult that cannot be stated directly. When we cloak our desires in niceties in seductions, we protect ourselves from being known directly and imply that others must always be nice to us. This kind of eggshell quality of female desire suggests that our needs must be hidden, that they are dangerous.17

  Young-Eisendrath goes on to say “recognizing our desires as human size (rather than monstrous) means that we can speak about them calmly and clearly…Rag Nell knew that her needs and desires were acceptable…she did not apologize nor did she blame. She spoke boldly from the Heart.”

  So we see that to meet the Hag is a move towards the articulating of real desire, not the consensual wants of an already designated kingdom. We see the inevitability of the daughter’s encounter with the Black Queen. In stating her desire so clearly for the wreath and leaving the Father’s Kingdom, she has already grown a tusk or two.

  We could say she is moving from the “niceness” of the princess into the clear fierceness of the Hag. To Young-Eisendrath, the role of the princess is static; she is the “Object of Desire” rather than the Mistress. “To be the Object of Desire means to have no core self, no clear autonomy and self-determination that are under your command. Rag Nell, even in her beautiful form, is no muse because she is subject to her own desires.”

  A similar move for men appears in “The Devil’s Sooty Brother” by the Grimm brothers. After seven years in the Underworld with a dark earth-man, the young man emerges with the clarity to state what he wants. He is able to spot a rip-off and do something about it. He gets his salary—to the last penny. His hair is washed, combed, and trimmed, and his eyes are clear.

  Both stories seem connected with time in hidden places, where, no longer radiant, one is able to stand in front of a king “warts and all” and keenly state their requirements. The fragility of an external display is secondary to the power of the deep heart. When we meet one of the many thousands of us who can’t state what they long for, it suggests we haven’t moved from the frozen princesses’ seat, but are caught in any number of inherited addictions.

  THE SOBBING

  Despite wanting the daughter to find Valemon, by now we are alert to the fact that everything happens in threes—three daughters, three cottages, three castles. We suspect that this new exchange may follow that same rhythm. The practical negotiation between the Dark Queen and the Daughter has a kind of charm to it. We can imagine the Holy Terror herself, swishing this way and that in front of a long mirror in her skirt. However, she has lost none of her guile; she effectively drugs Valemon not to hear the crying of his beloved, the woman who moves in the dark groves of Soul.

  We know that ability to move into grief carries great significance mythologically. In certain Lakota creation myths, the rivers and great lakes of America are the tears from the Creator’s eyes. Our weeping can be a meeting of inner and outer worlds, an external expression so clear in its message that it can arouse the same in others. Tears can be a vital tool in any significant ritual; they peel back the surface of expression to its tender center.

  Many great forces can anaesthetize us to the tears of the soul’s opening. Years sucking on heated pebbles can do that, or a sense that to attend to the soul’s weeping would bring too much grief. Best to swallow the draught of the great Swallower of Continents and stay en-tranced. For both men and women, lack of a real soulful life, or too much attention to the bone wearing minutia of the things of this world can leave us feeling as if something vast is draining us, but we don’t know what.

  It is fascinating to note that now the very force that pulled the daughter from the Kingdom of Safety is itself utterly dependent on her to rescue him from a life enthralled to the Dark Hoofed Queen. Valemon, on the level of an energy, left the daughter in the one place he couldn’t go: the still, internal, trackless, tacit forest. In doing this, he has saved his own life.

  There are many changes of the mythological stage-set occurring in this story, as one awesome force takes the lead and the others a supporting role. Now it is Valemon who finds himself in a state of enforced passivity, frozen, his only hope the abundant powers revealed through an encounter with the deep feminine.

  THE LISTENER BY THE DOOR

  In his slumber, Valemon appears to reach an impasse. The sleep is too strong to wake from, despite everything endured by the daughter—he cannot wake. This is where we encounter the curious figure of the Listener by the Door—the alerter to the hypnotized masculine. Jean Houston calls this the “observer self,” some part of us immune to the magnetic pulls of these contesting forces, standing outside the field of negotiation.

  Looking at this moment from a larger perspective, we can say this is a fragment in time that has been recurring with increasing urgency over the last eighty or so years. The fierce up-swelling of feminism could be seen as attempting just that; the me
n’s work born out of the eighties and onwards is internal work in the masculine towards a similar, but not identical end. Both break out of a poisoned sleep into awakening, free from the great devourer. It is interesting that we need some third component for this to occur, to avoid polarization. It could be that on the everyday plane, myth and psychology embody that observer, that they illuminate enough complexity to diffuse the stand-off, the viciousness of all-out gender war.

  Another larger interpretation is that the planet itself may be trying to awaken us from the thing that Eats And Consumes All. In this case the listener by the door is a tsunami, a flooded New Orleans—something that in the cold light of day says, “For Christ’s sake; don’t you hear the sobbing of your Beloved?”

  THE NEEDLE

  The piercing of Valemon’s arm is the beginning of his descent from a supernatural figure into a man. The whole story holds its breath as the ritual cut occurs, and he bears it without reaction. It is a kind of reversal of the faux-wreaths we saw at the beginning of the story. As you walk away from $100,000 a year, the boss screams, “Yeah, and we’re taking the house back too, and the company car.” In goes the needle, just as you wake up. The Queen as initiator wants to know if he’s serious; does he have sufficient courage? Physical pain is an entry point to the mortal world. We must remember that, despite the Queen’s role as a foe in this tale, on a certain level she is facilitating an initiation for the wild third daughter.

  They now had to find a way to defeat the Queen. The carpenter next door was roused, and he fell in with their planning: as builder of the bridge the bridal procession was to cross, he unscrewed a bolt or two, weakened a beam here and there, and waited. The Queen traditionally crossed first and as she stalked across, her foot hit the weak parts and WHOOSH! she fell, fell, fell down into the depths and was never seen again. None of her servants seemed overly aggrieved at the suggestion that a new wedding should occur, between Valemon and the King’s Daughter. This wedding took place and the newly married couple took what they could gather from the Queen’s castle and made their way back to the bride’s father’s castle (the King) for a second wedding. On the way they stopped at the three cottages, since it had been revealed that the three girls were none other than their daughters! At the wedding, Ragnell turned up with a mandolin and sang murder ballads with Danny Deardorff; Gioia Timpanelli blew the roof off the joint with dazzling Italian folk tales; Lorca, Eliade, and Robert Graves gate-crashed through a window held open by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who led the arm wrestling; Tom Waits ran the card games and Aretha Franklin led the Cossack dancing. We leave them, reunited at last, at the banqueting hall, as the Irish say, “in radiant contentment,” together, in love, and surrounded by friends.