A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  The legacy of the troubadours is a good one, but only when it carries Coyote bones with it. The primordial energy force they drew from was holistic, sexual, divine, and hugely informed, not naïve. The Albigensian crusade was an attempt to snuff out that power, later partially reawakened by the Cathars. When romance gets thinned, when too many stories promise “happily ever after,” our hunter’s bag comes up short. As readers of the Inuit tale “Skeleton Woman” know, sooner or later you will be chased across the ice of love by a woman with clacking bones and bloodied hair, snared up in your fishing net of Amor. If you haven’t been wetted by loneliness and hung up by memory, then you will keep running on the thinning waters of ideals and never face your legacy. We would do well to furnish our reading with indigenous, tribal stories of relationship in tandem with the great romances of Europe.

  We remember that Sadb had a hoof in three worlds: the Human, the Sidhe, the Animal. This is a primordial rather than angelic pattern, its tone ancient, pre-Christian. Bly writes of “the horse, the rider, and the hawk”: the horse retains patterns known for thousands perhaps millions of years . . . associated more with the physical, instinctual, muscular, hormonal body than with its alert and inventive rider . . . . the rider is flexible even whimsical, owner of rapidly changing opinions, embedded in family life . . . . and the hawk stands for the part of us which frees itself from the both the rider and the horse flies high into the clouds . . . lives in air.9

  Daniel Deardorff throws into the ring the idea that the story refers to the three brains—the arche-cortex, meso-cortex, and neo-cortex. All are squabbling universes with associative pulses we ride every second, nomadic and trined.

  So it is with Sadb, her three-fold inheritance carrying the slow, careful gait of the four-legged, the fur-bellied memories of the animal cycles, the ambitions and delights of human love, and the vast, star-touched, elemental gaze of the Faerie. As an energy heading towards Finn, it was taking no prisoners. And just in case that didn’t work, a touch of flattery: “We’ve heard of his feats even in the Otherworld” was enough to take the legs out from under him.

  The Trickster turns dark in any number of Celtic stories: when Merlin is imprisoned in a tree by Nimue, or when Arthur is cuckolded by Lancelot and Guinevere—a triumph of emotion over protocol, you could say. This crackling interference between key players is where most of the stories exist, after some initial opening of the heart. The complex message has to remain intertwined with the blossoming adventure—as with Coyote stealing fire, they grab the smoldering branch of our affections and scamper off into the darkness, sparks asunder. We would do well to heed their warning! An obscure English word for Trickster is Guizer, which also means “fool.” Fools for love, indeed, most of us.

  Over the next seven years, Finn explored every forest, beach, moor, traveler camp, and magical well. Even the foam from the Irish Sea he split asunder for word of her. He was a heavy streak of grief, buckled in on himself, riding a tear-horse. His mourning was absolute; no friend visited the orbit of his great, desperate search.

  One dusk, rather like the one that began this story, he found himself out hunting with all his Fianna, something that still could lift his spirits for a minute or two. They were on the side of Ben Bulben in Sligo when a great commotion came from a group of hounds just up ahead. The men raced forth and found a young boy, naked, with golden hair that fell to his waist. The hounds had formed a circle to protect him. The moment the boy spied Finn, he walked over and placed his young hand in Finn’s. They say that, in that moment, it was as if all the grief washed out of Finn, and an equal amount of joy washed in. In a place of deep knowing, Finn knew that this was the son Sadb had been carrying, this was his boy! Covering him in his own cloak, and raining hugs, kisses, and affection on the boy, Finn gathered him up and took him back to the Fort.

  Surrounded by food, drink, and candle light, Finn saw his beloved’s features echoed in his son’s face and felt a kind of painful healing occur. Of course, the lad couldn’t speak Irish, but as he learned, he gradually started to tell of his experiences. He had been raised in lonely places—heavy woods, rocky outcrops—and had lived on berries and spring water. His mother had been a doe, and had done all she could to nurture him. One day a dark man had come to her, speaking gently and then with anger before raising a thin hazel wand and touching her with it. From that moment onwards, she was without power to do anything but follow him about. When the boy’s mother had gone, he fainted with fear and grief, and when he awoke he wandered for a great period before the hounds caught his scent and Finn found him.

  With this, Finn named his son Ossian, which means “little deer.” Ossian grew to be a great warrior, but an even greater poet, in fact, the greatest the Fianna ever had. Ossian had many more adventures, and he even ventured back into the Otherworld. He returned finally to this one, and, as an ancient old man, regaled St. Patrick with tales of the brave Fianna. Steely-eyed Patrick of the many conversions was compelled to inquire of Finn, despite his dreadful pagan beliefs. Fully informed by Ossian, Patrick asked if he would like to be baptized.

  “Will Finn be in heaven?” asked Ossian. When he found the answer to be no, he frowned, “Ungenerous is your god,” and refused. Finn didn’t stay in hell for long though, but that’s a different story. For now, let’s leave Finn and Ossian, just met, together in the settling dusk, heading back to the feasting hall and a night of songs.

  HOLY WANDERER

  For seven years, Finn wanders. The incubation of his grief is moistened by the longing to see his beloved again. This isn’t the kind of longing for something you half-suspect you will get, but instead the awful, desperate loneliness for something that you know you won’t see again. This is a longing that carves itself into the bones of the body with a bill-hook that reveals its legacy on your face. This isn’t fueled by hope or possible manipulations to achieve it, this is a Kingdom all to itself.

  As I discussed earlier, stages of growth in myth can sometimes be symbolized by colors. In European myths, we sometimes noticed a sequence of red, black, and white. We remember in the journey to becoming an adult we can see the passage of Red—hot bloodedness, passion, flamboyance, early success, through to Black—awareness of mortality, illness, introversion, grief, and finally to White—empathy, community, the willingness to belong, the elder. Applying this progression here, we can say that Finn has been plunged into the black from the heady days of the red.

  A characteristic of the black is having no clear idea how long it will last, for the black requires a surrender, a losing sight of shore.

  In this wandering, we locate Finn, who takes his adoration of the feminine from a physical lover down into the painful, internal waters of time with the Goddess with a capital G. The sensations attached to his searching are all attached to the sensing, tacit, grief world: we are witnessing a wretched crawl into the Underworld. In other myths, both Orpheus and Theseaus failed to achieve what they sought down there, it almost killed Parzival; Dionysus was the only one to complete the journey well.

  We are reminded that the Celts regard the soul of a man as female, and that of a woman as male. So Finn’s shattering experience could be seen as a dark opportunity to do some work with his soul. In doing this, he takes an authentic step toward wholeness. The projection of Sadb hovers in the air in front of him; he courts it, weeps over it, and then takes it to a small moist cave and eats it. This handling of longing becomes a linguistic, shimmering dive towards an opening up of the Great Female Soul—she responds to this kind of language and attention. Attendants at her temple over the years have included D. H Lawrence, Hafez, Robert Creeley, and Wolfram Von Eschenbach. Sometimes for a man’s growth, the best thing a woman can do is leave. How he manages that next seven years is the great leveler.

  And then, suddenly, comes another hunt and another gift from the Otherworld, a son: a living legacy of Finn’s union with Sadb. It’s interesting to note that Finn is only presented with a son after his seven years of wandering. Th
us it’s a tempered father whom Ossian meets. Finn never regains the physical touch of what he has longed for; there is no marriage, only absence and memory. But something has been cultivated in that period, some deep internal ground remorselessly tilled, until this unexpected flowering appears.

  THE CURRENCY OF LONGING, THE MALIGNANCY OF DISAPPOINTMENT

  A steady focus on something absent, out of reach, or lost to us, acquaints us with a very particular kind of edge, acquaints us with Saturn as well as an Underworld goddess. For some of us, the loss of Sadb is the loss of youth. “And little enough you cared for her when she was yours,” says another story from the Fenian cycle. That loss leads to identification with some part of us that is grizzled, listless, wandering. It is the very fate that ensures Finn as a hero rather than just a “defender,” a culturally sanctioned holder of borders. It is an encounter with the Magpie brother of Parzival, or Gilgamesh meeting Enkidu, our precious degree swept into a snow drift.

  To broaden the psyche and become a real human being requires more than the adoration of the court; some dark arrow has to enter our flank, like William Cowper’s stricken deer:

  I was a stricken deer, that left the herd

  Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt

  My panting side was charg’d when I withdrew

  To seek a tranquil death in distant shades10

  But some energy arises that pulls us from the magnetic trance of death:There was I found by one himself

  Been hurt by th’archers...

  With gentle force soliciting the darts,

  he drew them forth, and heal’d, and made me live.

  Daniel Deardorff, commenting on the above lines, advises caution in expecting the holy rescuer, or paraclete, to arrive in physical form: “One must bring to bear a much wider imagination than accommodated within the ratio of reasonable, daylight thought.”11

  By this token, any number of experiences could have wrestled the darts from Finn—some troubled dream, another forest bereft of his beloved. But it is the role of Wanderer, Grief-Man, that tempers us into such a shape that the gift can appear. If Finn had attempted to hide his limp, his ravaged stump, surely it would have congealed and rotted many years past. The marginality of grief strikes a chord of relationship between the Trickster and the King; we sense Finn has become “real” in some way. Deardorff makes an overt connection between the two: “The King/Jester polarity is embodied in the contrary person of the Mythic Trickster.”

  It’s an extraordinary, indigenous idea that to find an authentic center, we have to wander lonely beaches and sleep under hedges, longing for something we know is lost. We make a place in us for a small, cultivated altar to the bird that flew away. The story tells us that as long as we deny the sorrow road and neglect the chamber of crow-feathers, we refuse the possibility that the God contained in the experience will speak back to us. How many of us are wearing long coats to cover our darts and clotted veins? How many of us refuse Cowper’s “leaving of the herd” and deny the encounter with the one with “gentle force?”

  We exchange the currency of longing for the malignancy of disappointment. Longing pushes the imagination outward—toward deeper inflexions of insight, peculiar creative leaps—while disappointment is a diminishment, a closing, a reduction. Remember Rilke’s “Wherever I am folded I am a lie.”12 We deny the incubation of longing by refusing to grieve, and anticipating this, we never fully invest anyway. This leads to the great sense of numbness we hear of in modern life. We touch with a gloved hand, our passions become hobbies, and we keep an eye fixed always on the door. If some feeling should come through, it carries the distortion of possession; we grab in order to be fed rather than to feed, and are startled when another relationship crumbles in our hands.

  As a twelve-year old schoolboy, Carl Jung was once lost in thought while contemplating a glorious sky, radiant sunshine glittering on a cathedral roof, and became overwhelmed with the perfection of the moment. His thoughts drifted upwards to god and:

  Here came a great hole in my thoughts and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only: “Don’t go on thinking now! Something terrible is coming . . . I gathered all my courage, as though about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on his golden throne, high above the world—and from the under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.13

  The key, of course, is that the turd still emerged from a divine rear: in the shattering of the cathedral a new shape of worship becomes possible, one that brings all our “dark shit” with it, to sort through our prima materia.

  The difference between longing and disappointment lies in having the wisdom to know where the turd/heartbreak/sacking fell from: do we erect a new, deeper church, or do we scuttle from the debris, disillusioned, an atheist to Trickster insight? Our ideal falls asunder, the image wrecked at lightning speed. We are saved depending on whether we place the experience in or outside the church. It would seem, on one level of imagination, that Trickster lives not in the incident itself, but in how we live with the incident, living, like Wolverine in the old stories, off the flakes of skin from his ass through another merciless winter. Integration and attention are central.

  We are left, of course, wondering about Sadb. Did she ever escape? Where is she? The stories are shy on the matter. Maybe some grizzled Seanchai outside Galway can tell you, but I can’t. To wander in with sugar-coated scissors to warm up the ending would require more gall than I have.

  Years can pass in our own lives between an event that caused us to both love and lose, and the slow birthing of insight that one day (seven years perhaps?) causes our shaman-fox to saunter through the groves of difficult remembering and snuffle out the seed we carry on into the rest of our lives. That seed could grow to contain any number of things . But some parenting is required; the other disciplines of the Queen or Magician have to come into play to help it grow into the bespoke shape it wants to become. Initiatory experiences often unfold this way: to find the child, we have to search the beaches, forests, and hidden caves, raking over the elusive ground of longing inside ourselves. And suddenly, when we least expect it, a child with long, tangled curls stares up at us, saying, “What took you so long?”

  Where is the wine kept?

  In the cellers of the heart.

  Friend, let’s find the key.

  Nils Peterson14

  CHAPTER 9

  THE RED KING AND THE WITCH

  When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white …

  He clawed and fluffed his rage up.

  He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s center.

  But the sun brightened–

  It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

  He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black. “Up there,” he managed,

  “Where white is black and black is white, I won.”

  Ted Hughes, Crow’s Fall1

  UP THERE IN THE MYTH-WORLD

  The Red King strode out and bought ten ducats’ worth of special victuals. He cooked them all up and put them in a chest, all for himself. He locked the chest, and kept guards to keep people away. However, come morning, the platter of food was partially eaten; some force had broken in, and the guards were none the wiser. The King offered half his kingdom to anyone who could guard effectively against the night-time thief. Well, his three sons all volunteered immediately, wanting to keep the wealth in the family. The eldest went first, and sat up alone in the chamber.

  At a certain point, he felt a warm, sleepy breeze come in, and he laid his head down. When he awoke at dawn, the food was gone. The second brother stood watch, and the same thing occurred: the breeze, the slumber, the missing food.

  Finally it was the third and youngest brother’s turn. He brought with him four needles and stuck them into the pillow. When the breeze came and his head nodded, the needles pricked him awake,
and it was then he saw a dreadful sight.

  His little sister, a baby, floated up from her cradle in a far-off chamber, entered the room and began to change shape. Her hands became whirring axes, steam poured from her ears, her skin was grey, her eyes rolled back, and she glided in another, terrible form entirely, to the chest, where the she-beast feasted on the grub. The brother hid in terror and prayed for the dawn.

  In the morning the King asked him what he had seen. “More than I could ever know—what did I not see? Give me a horse and money, for I am away to marry.” Armed with a horse and the several bags of ducats, he went to the border of the city and buried the money, putting up a stone cross to mark the site. This done, he headed out into the forests and great mountains of the kingdom, keen to get as far from his dark sister as possible.

  HOARDING THE TREASURE, STARVING THE KINGDOM

  Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after

  And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

  He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

  And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

  When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

  And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

  W. H. Auden2

  The story begins with a Red King buying food. We see that this imperial energy has found some kind of nourishment, something of value, but rather than share it with his loved ones or the wider kingdom beyond, he chooses to hoard it in a chest, hidden away. There is something of the Dragon in this man—the one that has caves of virgins and jewels, more than he could ever know what to do with.