A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  There were three castles in this story. One was the House of the Father, one was Valemon’s, the White Bear King, and the last was the Troll Queen, which, by the daughter’s ingenuity, became, however briefly, her own. These three energy centers she moved through admirably, until she finally came into her own. This truth is contained in the line, “They took what they could gather from the Castle.” The fact that they married there meant that the daughter became Queen of the Glass Mountain.

  THE DANCE THEN THE MARRIAGE(S)

  We realize that despite the dash from the Father’s House and the years in Valemon’s abode, the two were still not married; instead, they were in the circuitous dance of getting to know each other (and we know how long that can take). The masculine presence of Valemon had provided the clarity and drive to leave the Kingdom of Safety, but it was the feminine realm of the deep forests that allowed Valemon to break free from the grip of the Eternal Devourer.

  We recognize again in the story of the daughter that mixture from Ceridwen’s cauldron, the binding opposites of all initiation deserving of the title: rationality and luna-cy, sun and moon, masculine and feminine. This is why the marriage took so long to arrive at, instead of taking place straight after the meeting and the Wreath. As we have seen, Valemon’s energy (that awoke within the daughter) led her into the outer world, but it took the descent to give that energy depth and gifting, freeing it from the hypnotism of the part of us that just wants more. The scissors, goblet, and cloth clothed and fed the emerging consciousness of the initiated feminine.

  We would imagine the daughter had some bones sewn into her wedding dress at that second wedding, magpies for bridesmaids, and maybe a small knife in her garter in case her parents got too cloying. A woman who has become Queen of the Glass Mountain carries a certain ferocious sass back to the Old Kingdom, small purple flowers emerging wherever she walks.

  A focused, gutsy, creative (in its biggest sense) life will bear three gifting children. They may come, as Rilke says, as “a falcon, a storm, or a great song.”18 How that life looks to me or anyone else is none of our business. That’s between you and the mysteries. May they lead you from an exhilarating courtship to an abiding marriage.

  On the deep, moon-reveling, god-singing level of this story, we see how all the players were moving to divine winds. This great story of initiation requires a controlling Father, a lifting of the Candle, a falling in the Forest, growing Iron Tips, a terrifying Queen, and a deeply thrust Needle.

  Finally, the daughter returns to the kingdom from which she came, just as the old stories say, changed, regal, vibrant, and married to her soul.

  PART 2

  THE IMPOSSIBLE RETURN

  CHAPTER 7

  DEER WOMAN AND THE VELVET ANTLERED MOON

  Moon: reckless heart in heaven,

  why do you row towards the west

  in that cup filled with blue wine,

  whose hull is defeated and sad?

  Moon: it is no use flying away,

  so you go up in a flame of scattered opals:

  maybe you are my heart, who is like a gypsy,

  who loafs in the sky, shedding poems like tears!...

  Cesar Vallejo 1

  This is a story from when the world was fresh as the cheek of a newborn, wild as the talons of a hawk, and tender as the wind that shakes the barley.

  Amongst the Chukchi of Siberia, there lived a man who had only one daughter. She was a Deer Woman, who kept watch over her father’s herd. She kept a lonely vigil far from the camp with the animals and, when she needed food, would return riding a stocky red deer. She was remote, elegant, and arresting to the eye. One night as she was returning to camp, the red deer suddenly cried: “Look, look, Mistress, the Moon Man comes!”

  Sure enough, from out of the sky came the Moon Man in his sledge drawn by reindeer. She knew by his determined gaze that he meant to have her for his own, and in panic asked the Deer to help her. The Deer raked the snow until he had scooped out a large hole. The woman dived into the hole and the Deer covered her in snow until she was completely obscured. She was but a mound of crisp white snow in the freezing night.

  Moon Man went here and there, stalking the camp excitedly, even slowly circling the mound sniffing the air, but he never, for a second, suspected it was his beloved Deer Woman. Bemoaning her absence, he clambered back into his sledge and rode up the singing curtain of the inky night calling her name.

  As soon as he was gone, she sprang out of the hole, clambered on the Deer’s back and headed back to her father’s yaranga at great speed. Unfortunately, no one was at home.

  Suspecting the Moon Man’s imminent return, the red deer made suggestions. “I will turn you into a block of stone so the Moon Man won’t find you.”

  “He’ll know it’s me!”

  “A hammer?”

  “No good, no good!”

  “A tent pole?”

  “A hair on the tent flap?”

  “I’ve got it! Turn me into a lamp. He’ll never suspect that!”

  Deer Woman adopted the posture of a lamp. So the deer struck the ground with his hoof and suddenly the girl was a glowing, brightnessbringing lamp. In the time it takes a rock to hit a window, Moon Man turned up in camp. He searched between the tent poles, the pots and pans, every twig, every rough hair on a deer’s fur, every knot on the bed planks, and every grain of soil upon the floor. The Woman was nowhere to be seen.

  Although the lamp was bright, Moon Man was radiant and so he didn’t notice the lamp. “Where is that women? Where on all of this tumbling earth can she be?” As he returned defeated to his sledge, he heard the delicate peal of her laughter, like sunshine on a salmon’s back.

  “Here I am! Here I am!”

  He rushed back in and searched the wood piles, the reds and oranges of the fire, the worn felt of the walls; he even split the air itself into two halves and looked for her there. No luck, for she was still a lamp. As he left the tent in despair, again the laughter and he jumped back in, searching with a renewed vigor. So intense was his search, so focused his ambition of discovery, that he withered from his previously cherubic form into an exhausted, shriveled figure who could barely move his spindly form. Knowing she was now safe, she appeared in her much-desired human form, threw him on his back, and bound his hands and feet.

  “Ahh...” cried the sliver of the Moon Man, “I wished to carry you off, now I see I must be punished for my wickedness. I beg you, cover me with seal skins so I may be warm before I perish, for truly I am freezing.”

  “What!” she cried. “You live in the harsh blackness of the night sky, which is your nomad home, so why would you need seal skins?”

  At this moment his voice took on a sincere, exhausted and tearful tone. “Because of my nature I am doomed to roam the skies forever. Were you to free me, I would aid your noble people always. Free me and night will become day. Free me and I shall measure the months of the year for you. They shall be:Moon of the Old Buck

  The Cold Udder Moon

  Genuine Udder Moon

  The Moon of the Waters

  The Making Leaves Moon

  The Moon of Warmth

  The Velvet Antler’s Moon

  The Moon of Love Among the Wild Deer

  The Moon of the First Winter

  Muscles of the Back Moon

  And the Shrinking Day’s Moon

  “But if I free you,” Deer Woman cried, “you will regain fat, and like a Walrus of the Night come after me again!”

  “Absolutely NOT! I shall always remember the vitality and wisdom of the Chuckchi maids. I’m done. I’ll never come down from my domain again.”

  Well, she was convinced. When freed, he flew into the heavens and illuminated all around him. From that moment on he has served the Chukchi faithfully... as he does tonight.

  RIDING AN ANIMAL POWER

  Our story begins with the Deer Woman in her arresting aloneness, far from the warmth and the squabbles of the tribe. We are quickly informed th
at some magical relationship with the animals has opened up in her solitude. Indeed, the deer she rides actually speaks to her, informs and assists her in the changing of shape. In many myths, a ridden, speaking animal indicates a certain power awakened in the rider—that person rides an intuition guiding them through their life, alerting them of snares and blind allies.

  The Deer Woman appears to be deeply connected to four-leggèds, human solitude, big empty spaces. We suspect she has a tail hidden somewhere, never watches the shopping channel, and lets foxes rip up the couch. We know she can lead a large herd, but also embodies a tribal connection through the relationship to her father. When we think of Georgia O’Keefe up there in the splendid isolation of Ghost Ranch making her paintings, we get an impression of this kind of character—contained but also slightly out of view, “all to themselves,” as Tom Waits puts it. We know this is not the story of a defenseless girl.

  What leads us to such solitude is open to speculation, and the length of time spent there can make the difference between illumination and just simple hiding from humans.

  We think of Bly’s lines:What does the son do?

  He turns away,

  loses courage,

  goes outdoors to feed with the wild

  things, lives among dens

  and huts, eats distance and silence,

  he grows long wings, enters the spiral,

  ascends2

  Bly understands the magnetic attraction of the open, dark wilderness but also the element of escape that can underlie it—the chaos of family that causes us to “kiss the horse and ride off into the sunset.” That emotional distance gives the son the ability to start to flutter up above his family grief, experience ecstasy, stay remote and glowing. That’s a fragile ride, though, as any butterfly will tell you.

  As a wilderness teacher, I have encountered many sons who have “lost courage” and arrived on the mountain with a longing for huge, mystical experiences. I think I was one. It is part of the humanity of being a guide, that you help ground that man or woman in the difficult, knotty stuff of relationship that got them there in the first place.

  Only when they are anchored by emotion is it safe for them to move out into wilderness—their grief forms a cord that connects them to the village as well as to the elemental world.

  The old stories rarely name these emotions, and the characters can seem elemental because of this. You don’t get the quick, emotive confessional of the modern novel. So we can only speculate on the Deer Woman’s time out in the open places. Was she happy? Miserable? Probably both at different times. It’s worth remembering periods in our own lives of such self-sufficiency and aloneness. What we can be sure of is that in some ways her isolation has strengthened her, made her subtle. But all seasons have to move, and here comes our big lunar initiator to crack the whole scene open.

  MOON COMES GLIDING

  We’re going to explore the story in two ways now, from the perspective of relationship and of the Moon as an Initiating Deity. Some of the transitions will be swift.

  The first point of interest is that the Moon in this story is considered Masculine. In European myth we normally associate the Sun with the masculine—rationality, activity, thrust and vigor—with the Moon connected to intuition, stillness, receptivity and mystery. It feels a like a welcome change to enjoy this twist, to wrestle the moon back from the women awhile, and wrench the sun from the men. The word Moon actually derives from the German der mond, connected to the word “man.” This has a very different ring than the la luna of the Spanish, which seems much livelier, less dense. Actually we find male moon deities in many places: Tecciztecatl of the Aztecs, Mani of the Germanic tribes, Thoth of the Egyptians, Tskuyumi of the Japanese, and Rahko of the Finns are just a small selection. So this time the Moon is male, and curious. Wandering his nomadic route over the heavens, he has become fixated upon this similarly “alone” woman, not sheltered by the hearth or warm in a lover’s bed.

  Sometimes when we see someone holding solitude elegantly, when they possess the particular qualities that make our head spin, we summon our chariots, “shine” to our fullest, learn a tap dance and go charging into their splendid isolation, not realizing they may be relishing their space.

  To attract a deity is no small thing. It is a shamanic labor to head out to the ice, forest, or vision pit, seeking to entice a spirit: bride or husband. Whether she knows it or not, she has created enough elegance and space around her to beguile the Luna God himself, a Lord of Night. Many unexpected things come to us at night; many storytellers only tell in the slow time, when the fragile shell of hours breaks and the moon egg of enchantment arises.

  The Irish always say that the Otherworld is as interested in us as we are in it, and this descent of the moon is an auspicious image of just that. Indigenous artists often understand that a huge percentage of their gift comes from “somewhere else”—the mythological, religious, and cosmological realms of that Otherworld region. When we start orienting ourselves towards the community of stars, night, and moon, surpassing the human, the impact of that new relationship can be overwhelming.

  When moon energy starts to flood our life/home/deer herd, its very force and lack of “human-centeredness” can tell our instinct (the deer we ride) to start digging a hole to jump down. It can cause us to spend two days and nights without sleep working on a novel with no hope of a publisher, to forget our nephews’ names, to stop tipping waiters. It’s not about grounding, it’s about leaping. Dylan Thomas, never famed for a balanced hand, writes:In my craft or sullen art

  Exercised in the still night

  When only the moon rages

  And the lovers lie abed

  With all their griefs in their arms

  He makes a flurry of connections between his vocation as a poet, a raging moon, and the lover’s bed as a nest of grief. His bounding soul knows all about the midnight tundra where he encounters the lightning of his work. His poems are for those very grief lovers, his tribe, who:Pay no praise or wages

  Nor heed my craft or art3

  Maybe art feeds the moon as much as it does human beings.

  We suspect that Jeff Koons is unfamiliar with this intensity, whereas an abundance of its light poured from the brush of Ken Kiff or William Scott. We know that Mark Rothko laid down layers of very thin paint so that hundreds of little pricks of light illumined his work—moon light. This very old artistic pursuit requires a developed inner life, a steady psyche to ground such huge invocations. Rothko’s death by suicide raises questions about his ability to sustain the vast energies he awakened. If we just stand still and soak the energy up, we’re often dead by twentyeight, blazing and consumed by our “lunacy.”

  So we can see the Moon as a vertical connection in our lives, but also as something contacted through solitude, intensity of task, broadness of community—owls, mist, streams, bracken, and up into the cosmos.

  HIDING

  It is a genius clue that when the gift comes, the Deer Woman hides. The myth-world’s frequency is different from that of the human, and much tearing and thunder can commence when the two worlds square up to each other. Destiny is an awesome thing. James Hillman tells the story of the great Spanish bullfighter Manolete (1917-1947), who as a boy “clung so tightly to his mother’s apron strings that his sisters and other children used to tease him”4

  His clinging was an attempt to jump down the hole, to buy himself time until he had developed a container strong enough to bear the gift offered. Come adolescence, he ran towards his gifting, and towards his death. Gored by the bull Islero at age thirty, he died, his funeral the largest Spain has ever seen.

  It could be that Manolete sensed his destiny, the glory and the sobriety of it, and bought all the time he could before the pulse became too persistent to ignore. For others, the price of relationship to the moon is that they are unable to reenter the village, its light grows dim around other people. An artist’s studio can be seen to be an attempt to “catch beams.”

>   Of course, when we are overwhelmed, we attempt to return to safe ground—when the Deer Woman is confronted by the Moon, she runs back to her father’s tent. However, as in many initiatory stories, he’s not there. The father and the tent represent her grounding in her community, her childhood, and her humanity. The container remains, but this time she has to be the negotiator, the elder, the one with wit. Sometimes, when making a painting, I will occasionally slip into ground so new and unexpected to me that I panic and paint over it, calming myself with more “negotiated” gestures. Like the surface of the moon, I don’t recognize the landmarks, I can’t see any footprints. So I try to drag the Moon back into my black tent of tradition, comfort, and warmth. I too will try to familiarize the otherness of the experience into something that can gradually be integrated into a body of work. Try as I might, I’m not an astronaut yet.