Dark Skies

by Tiffany Francis-Baker

  Samhain has almost disappeared for many of us, and with it the act of celebrating the dead. We see other cultures around the world taking part in festivities that we might call morbid, but these are simply different ways of processing death. Today, especially in the name of mental wellbeing, we are encouraged to grieve over the death of a loved one, to take our time to accept somebody has disappeared from our lives, to cry and talk about the loss until we at least get through the initial shock. But essentially, we are encouraged to move on – to visit a cemetery once in a while and keep photos around the house, but to carry on with our lives and focus on the living world. Does this make us better or worse at coping with death? Other cultures celebrating the dead and remembering them with such vitality, seem to focus not on their absence but on the happy memories they created. The art of celebration seems to blur the line between this world and the next, to reduce the concept of death down to just another part of life, an experience to be shared between generations.

  At the darkest point of the year comes the last in the cycle of seasonal festivals celebrated by the people of ancient Britain. Imbolc, also known as St Brigid’s Day, marks the very beginning of spring and is held at the start of February, around halfway between the winter solstice and spring equinox. It was a time to let go of the past and look to the future, clearing out old possessions, thoughts and habits, making space for new beginnings in the home and in the mind. It’s easy to see where the modern tradition of New Year’s resolutions comes from, combining the energy of a new seasonal year with ideas of regrowth and regeneration to make us better versions of ourselves. Traditionally associated with the start of lambing season and when the blackthorn tree blossoms, it was a slightly more reserved festival promoting the hearth and home, often involving special fires, feasting, divination and the burning of candles for purification, evoking the power of the returning sun. Saint Brigid was worshipped in both Celtic and early Christian communities, and was thought to visit virtuous homes on the night of Imbolc. Although the mythology surrounding the festival remains unclear, it is believed that people would lay rushes or hay on the floor of their homes as a bed for Brigid to make her feel welcome, along with food, ale, candles, and a white birch wand she could use to kick-start the growth of new life.

  For the people of ancient Britain, Imbolc must have seemed like a light in the darkness. True, early February is hardly the optimum time to celebrate warmth and new growth, and in reality February is possibly the most depressing month to experience in Britain. Short, bleak days and nights are drenched in mist and drizzle, endless and drab, like the world has been painted over with a grey wash. It is relentless. No wonder so many people choose the beginning of the year to escape abroad, abandoning our shores for a burst of winter heat. For our ancestors, however, living without twin-engine jets and all-inclusive hotels, there was no escape. To celebrate Imbolc was to focus on the beauty of the season: the rotund joy of new buds emerging on leafless branches; a change in the air as the decaying aroma of autumn slowly shifts into the freshness of spring; the warmth of pregnant ewes carrying new life in their bellies. In fact, it is thought the origin of the name Imbolc came from the Old Irish i mbolc, meaning ‘in the belly’, referencing the symbiotic relationship between the ancient people and their livestock. Is it better to spend as much of our year as possible in warmth and sunlight? Or should we stay in our natural environments, absorb the rhythm of the seasons and find the joy in every breath of winter wind, every broken leaf and frozen raindrop?

  Each year there is a day between February and April when spring reaches out from the cold depths of winter and taps you on the shoulder. It is an awakening. Perhaps the weather reporter has called it ‘the warmest day of the year so far’, or perhaps it is just cloudless, windless, the scent of new life on the air. You feel warmth on your face after so many insulated months of half-light, half-living, tucked away inside to escape the claws of winter. An inch of skin exposed to the air is brushed by spring; the sky seems more blue, more alive, more merciful. And deep within your stomach something stirs, a longing for the outdoors that has been hibernating like a great bear, otherwise content to be wrapped up inside with tea and telly. The bear in you wakes, restless, stretches out his thunderous paws, shakes away the cobwebs of January, looks up to the sun and remembers long, hot days filled with wild roses, river swimming, cider in pub gardens, fresh raspberries, sunburn, bare feet, salty chips. Summer is on its way.

  Once the burn had finished, most of the congregation started slowly moving towards the gates, back to their cars and the comforts of modern life. I left the space in which I’d been sitting and moved away from the crowd, back towards the roundhouses and Roman villa, where a few exhibitors were packing away their things and it was emptier, more peaceful. Under the light of the stars I walked along the border of the farm where everything had been left to grow wild. The flowers had closed their petals until morning when the first light of spring would warm them from root to tip and open up their colours to the dawn. And while most of the birds had now presumably gone to sleep, one blackbird was still singing beyond the trees, its rich, velvety song serenading the crowds, calling farewell to the singed wickerman and welcoming in the warm summer months ahead.

  In the darkness everything smells different – more damp, more fragrant, more earthy – and as I stood alone in the corner of the farm, the air was now swelling with new life and woodsmoke, my favourite combination. In the ditch around the Iron Age enclosure, I could see new shoots of rosebay willowherb arriving from the depths of the soil, and by summer I knew the entire bank would be thriving with hot-pink flowers. It’s a pioneering plant, the first to colonise barren lands with very little vegetation; in Britain it is also known as ‘bombweed’ as it was one of the first plants to recolonise bomb craters after the Blitz in the Second World War. In winter it shrivels right back to nothing, but by July it would be a shimmering cascade of colour swaying in the wind, full of bees and butterflies, a perfect pink enclosure for our beautiful Iron Age village.

  I wandered over to the Roman villa, pale in the twilight with a grape vine growing up the wall and neat pots of herbs along the front edge. In the garden the walnut tree was full of new leaves, rich and shining, and if you looked closely you could see the humble beginnings of new buds coming through, tiny green pods that would later develop into crunchy walnuts, ripe on the tree. We only ever had a few nuts growing each year but it was always a treat; we would share out the spoils between the office staff, one small section of walnut brain in each eager hand.

  Inside the kitchen of the Roman villa – or at least, what was presumed to be the kitchen, as the only archaeological evidence from the original site was a hearth – a statue of the Roman goddess Ceres had been placed in an alcove in the wall. She was the goddess of agriculture and fertility, and a Roman household might have left food by the statue as an offering, encouraging Ceres to bless them with a fruitful harvest. No full-time Roman family lived in our villa, so instead she was surrounded by dried flowers and paintings, our own salute to the Roman gods and their mystical powers. I walked into the villa, which was now empty of visitors who had filtered down to the wickerman paddock, and found Ceres sitting there in the dark, a fresh cobweb woven over her head.

  Now and then, I wish I could believe in a god, so as to feel like someone out there has the power and benevolence to give my life a little boost or protect me from harm. The Romans had hundreds of gods – one for every purpose and every problem. Need to win a battle? Call on Mars, the god of war. Hoping for a successful marriage? Make an offering to Juno, the goddess of matrimony. Need to revive a withered apple tree? Get hold of Pomona, the goddess of orchards. Worried about that volcano erupting? Vulcan’s your man – the god of fire. Many of the Roman gods came with a Greek equivalent, such as Venus and Aphrodite, because when the Romans ruled Greece they adopted the Greek belief system, gave them new Roman names and changed some of their mythologies to better suit their own belief systems. In Greek my
thology, for example, Zeus frequently visited earth in disguise and got up to all kinds of mischief, starting fights and impregnating mortals, whereas the Roman god Jupiter ruled from the heavens, never debasing himself by coming down to earth and mingling with the plebs.

  The Greeks worshipped several deities associated with the darkness, starting with Nyx, the goddess of night. Held in great esteem by the ancient people, she was believed to be one of the oldest primordial gods born from the void of Chaos, together with Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (the Underworld), Eros (Love) and Erebus (Darkness). Nyx became the mother of many other figures in the Greek pantheon, but she was usually depicted as a woman holding two children in her arms: Thanatos, the god of death, and Hypnos, the god of sleep. She also gave birth to the Oneiroi, a group of gods and demigods that ruled over dreams and nightmares, fathered by the god of darkness, Erebus. The most famous of these were Morpheus, who took the form of men, Phobetor, who took the form of beasts, and Phantasos, who appeared as inanimate objects. The next time you suffer a nightmare, remember that it’s probably just Morpheus, Phobetor and Phantasos on a lads’ night out.

  The Greek and Roman gods are surrounded by so many stories and symbols, they still capture our imaginations today. One of my favourite computer games growing up was Disney’s Hercules, which was based on the Greek legend of Heracles and took my stepsister Christie and I months to complete. A Trojan Horse is the name now given to a virus that is allowed into a computer by disguising itself as something benign, based on the Greek tale of the Trojan War. Sigmund Freud took inspiration from Oedipus to name one of his most famous psychoanalytic complexes, and even the multinational sportswear corporation Nike is named after the Greek goddess of victory. The names of constellations are also well known for their Greek and Roman origins, and the US Apollo Space Programme, carrying astronauts to the moon, was named after the god of the sun and knowledge who was known for his skill as an archer to always hit his target. One of the most fascinating ecological theories of the twentieth century – the Gaia Hypothesis – was named after the mother of the Greek gods by its creator James Lovelock, who argued that all organisms on earth interact with their surroundings to form a self-regulating system, which maintains the conditions for living things to survive on the planet. The Greeks and Romans, and most of the ancient civilisations, were intelligent and culturally creative, so it makes sense that we have held onto their ideas for thousands of years.

  There in the darkness of the kitchen, I took a closer look at the statue of the fertility goddess Ceres, faintly illuminated by the moonlight shining in through the windows, then cleared away the cobweb and rearranged the flowers. By the time I returned to the beer tent, where I had spent most of the evening volunteering with friends and family, providing pints to happy festival goers and pouring pale ale over myself in the process, most of the crowd had started filtering out through the exit. As the farm only has one small car park, each year the farmers allowed us to use one of their fields to accommodate everyone’s cars, which meant that at the end of the festival guests had to take a short walk up the hill to find their vehicles and start the journey home. To help guide them, we gave out small flaming torches (safer than they sound), so that to watch the visitors walking up the hill was like watching a line of explorers off on an adventure into the night, the silhouettes of families black against an empty twilight sky, perfectly blue and clear. It somehow reminded me of the school nativity play – perhaps the wise men following the star over the hill with their torches ablaze.

  I thought of our ancestors celebrating this festival in the past, and all the festivals that marked a change in season, a shortening or lengthening of the days, the time to sow or harvest, to be happy with the warm weather or to prepare for the long, cold winter. How much did these ancient rituals mean to them? If they did celebrate Beltain in this way, did they genuinely believe that by burning the wickerman the gods would bring them a successful harvest? Or was it, just like today, a simple excuse for merriment, for happiness shared in the warmth of a late-spring evening? Aside from the visitors who had come to the farm this evening, how far had we distanced ourselves from these seasonal celebrations, and did we have any rituals left at all?

  Perhaps not in the official sense, but in Britain we are still obsessed with the changing seasons and weather. For me, summer is not so much associated with farming or preparing for harvest, but with spending long, warm evenings in the Queen’s Head pub garden. It’s not the only way I spend my time, but in the depths of winter when I am cold and miserable, sick of the greyness that cloaks the countryside and the stagnation of the landscape, I imagine the pub garden as my happy place in summer: skin exposed to the sun, cold cider in pint glasses, hot pizza, and grass between my toes, surrounded by all the friends that have grown up in our hometown, who may have all gone on to different careers and lifestyles but who understand the beauty of being there together, the unique joy of sitting in that garden under the evening sun.

  One night we had been lounging around in the pub garden for hours, drinking and laughing and bathing in the heat of the evening. There was me, Dave, his brother Andy and the family Schnauzer, Tinks, and we had been sitting outside so long that we were all baked. We decided to leave the pub and head down to the river on the other side of the town, a quiet stretch of the River Rother that weaves from Empshott in East Hampshire, all the way through our town and over to Stopham in West Sussex, after which it joins the River Arun and flows out towards the sea. The upper half of the river was used for centuries to power watermills, first recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086, but today it has less industrial associations and has been officially recognised as a Site of Nature Conservation Importance for its valuable wildlife habitats. In 2001, a camera trap picked up a sighting of an otter – the first confirmed evidence of otters returning to the Upper Rother in 14 years. The presence of otters is a natural sign that a river is healthy and, since their reappearance, conservationists have worked to improve the water quality and to reduce pollution running off the surrounding land, in the hope of keeping the otters there and increasing their population.

  We arrived at the river and started walking down to the water’s edge. By now the sun had almost set, and a golden light filtered across the sky between blushing waves of blue and pink. It was the height of summer and everything was wild with growth; this place marked the start of a walking trail called the Serpentine Way, but it was so out of the way that it was free from the usual restrictions of highways and byways, and the hedgerows had been left to grow long and straggling rather than being forced into shape by a hired man and his hedge trimmers. The grass was tall and bristling, full of birds and mice and the insects I tend to avoid unless wearing long trousers.

  We wandered down to the river, Tinks lolloping about with her ears bouncing, her tousled face full of joy at being free to explore after being well behaved at the pub for so long. We walked through a tunnel of trees, over a fallen log, rotten and smothered in lichen, and into the welcome shade of the forest in the evening heat. There the river opened up beneath the tree canopy, a perfect stretch for entering the water and swimming across the riverbed. The bank rolled down into the water and we could walk across the soft earth with bare feet.

  Always prioritising efficiency, I had been wearing my swimming costume under my clothes and so I quickly undressed before edging closer to the water, reluctant to submit my baking skin to the cold river. I tiptoed in, the riverbed full of shingle that was not painful to touch but still worth taking a bit of time over each step. One, two, three. Into the water I went, up to my thighs, water surging around my waist and bringing bumps of shock to the surface of my skin. The water was so shallow that I spent a while only waist-deep, enjoying the heat of the sun on my shoulders and the water around my legs. I looked back and saw Dave and Andy still making their way in, and I could read the same dilemma on their faces: the eternal debate between being boiling hot and succumbing to the raw chill of the river water. Eventually they waded in,
so that the only one of us left on the bank was Tinks, looking beautiful and shining in the rays of the dying sun.

  It became clear that Tinks was even more wary of the water than the rest of her pack, and I forgot how different dogs were suited to different habitats. Our old golden retriever Murphy loved the water, flumping into the local lake to chase the swans and float through the blue with his eyes shining. Afterwards he would emerge onto the shore like a swamp monster, his fur shrunken into soggy strands until he shook his whole body, freeing and fluffing himself while drenching us all in wild water. As a golden retriever, with his oily coat and webbed paws, he was bred to love swimming. But Tinks was smaller and more dainty than Murphy, and it took her a while longer to get used to the idea of coming in. In fact, if we hadn’t started swimming up river and away from where she stood stranded on the shore, she probably would have stayed on the bank the entire time. As it was, she became more anxious as we moved further and further away, so in the end we waded back over and helped coax her in. It turned out she wasn’t a fantastic swimmer and, although she was able to float, she was so small that it took all her energy not to sink, so instead we took it in turns to pass her between us in the water like teaching a child how to walk. One of us would release her gently into the river, and the other would call her over with cheers and smiles, until she was safely back in our arms. Not the most efficient way of moving through the water but after a few goes she enjoyed herself, and in our strange triangular position we spent the next hour or so paddling about in the water, our skin cooled off from the heat of the sun, the trees trailing their leaves through the surface of the river and softly over our shoulders. All the time the sun was setting, the light failing, the landscape cast into peace and shadow.