The Good and Bad Seeds
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned …
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
William Butler Yeats,
“The Second Coming”
How do we know sin? How do we avoid it? From whom do we take our inspirations in this world, where all things are available and we are taught only to value ourselves?
Imagine that you have a garden in which you have planted the seeds of various fruits and vegetables, without ever looking to see what they are. Eventually all of them will grow if they are fed and watered sufficiently, but still, you do not know what your harvest will be.
Some produce plants that are nourishing when we eat them. They give us strength and enable us to live richer and happier lives. Others yield fruits we do not like or that make us ill and may even be poisonous. The first thing, then, is to pay attention to what you are planting!
But even if you are a careless gardener, all is not lost, because we can also recognize good and bad seeds by the effects of their fruits on us if we at least observe what we receive by eating them. And, once we know this, we have choice. We can continue to plant the bad as well as the good and to eat all the fruits we produce even though we are sickened by some of them. Or we can plant only good seeds from now on and give more of our soil and our souls to them so they grow stronger and yield more fruit.
And so it is with sin. If we approach our lives with purpose and pay attention to our actions and the results they produce, sooner or later we will learn what is useful and what impoverishes our souls.
In short: to know sin, we must watch ourselves and be guided by what our actions achieve. We do not need to be told by others what sin is or how to avoid it because the good gardener is a citizen of nature. Through his experience, he learns to plant only good seeds and tend to them wisely so they grow strong in the sunlight and add beauty to the world.
As a species, human beings have not been especially adept at knowing the difference between good and bad seeds or taking care of our garden, Earth. We know that now.
However, in the 1980s, when my pilgrimage took place, the oracle’s messages were difficult to understand because they seemed so pessimistic and at odds with the times. Western civilization was riding a wave of good fortune then, with new wealth and opportunities and such an obsession with the self and immediate gratification, and so little thought for the future, that the media would later come to call this age Generation Me. It was the era of yuppies and Wall Street, with its mantra of greed is good. Anything—by any means and without conscience or consequences—seemed possible.
As bizarre as it sounds now, the world had not heard of the environment, or else we cared little about it. For another twenty years, America, the world’s greatest polluter, would be concerned more about profits than its impact on the earth.[1] Now the phrases “credit crunch,” “recession,” and “global (by which we really mean Western) economic crisis” are familiar to everyone, and global warming has become the theme of our age. Awareness comes late, however, and we cannot immediately go back to the world we once knew.
Those who are making apocalyptic predictions now are not oracles but scientists. One of them is James Lovelock, who, more than thirty years ago, made the discovery that our planet has an intelligence by which it controls our environment to keep it fit for life. He called his discovery the Gaia Hypothesis, and it is now widely accepted. Lovelock believes that through our actions, the Gaia system is failing, and climate change cannot be reversed.
“The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change … civilization as we know it is now unlikely to survive,” he says. “Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic, where the climate remains tolerable.”
The best scenario for the rest of us, he says, unless we form sustainable small communities and learn the survival skills of our ancestors, is that we will become “a broken rabble led by brutal war lords.”[2]
His predictions are gloomy, but it is just as well that we know them, because then we have the power to make choices and can prepare for our new futures.
The rising tides, wild weather, and intemperate climates that global warming brings means that the cycles of nature will be disrupted, and we are already seeing evidence of “the new plagues of Egypt” that Adam spoke of. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes and biting insects are finding new habitats, for example, as the earth warms up and conditions become more humid. Professor Roger Wotton, a biologist at University College London, suggests how things may progress. “The dramatic series of events that included the Nile turning to blood and a plague of frogs are explicable as natural phenomena,” he says, as a result of weather conditions not unlike our own now.[3]
All of this was predicted by the oracle, and as odd as it may seem, some of her stranger predictions have also been borne out by events. One of them was that within thirty years (that is, by about 2014), people will be more machine than human and “what we knew as information will be noise.” In fact, by 2007 governments in many countries were already launching health initiatives because people were spending so little time in nature or even in the “real world” but were instead plugged in to the Internet, television, video games, mobile phones, and virtual reality, leading to what they saw as an epidemic of obesity and ill health. These inventions were unheard of in the 1980s, and all of them are based on information that has become so overwhelming that it has, indeed, become noise.
Finally, there is the oracle’s curious prediction that the conditions we are now experiencing have arisen because the moon—“the first sin eater”—has withdrawn from the earth in distaste at the changing nature of the world. For years, I have taken this as a metaphor: that our governments will lose sight of their morals and lead us into wars and more frenzied profit-seeking to the detriment of our planet—as, indeed, the history of recent years suggests. But that may not be all there is to it.
There is also an idea, now current among scientists, that the moon may have a more practical role to play in our understanding of the changes on Earth. According to a NASA-funded study, for example, “insights into Earth’s climate may come from an unlikely place: the moon …
“Scientists looked at the ghostly glow of light reflected from Earth onto the moon’s dark side. During the 1980s and 1990s, Earth bounced less sunlight out to space. The trend reversed during the past three years, as the Earth appears to reflect more light toward space.” [4]
The light of Earth—in effect, the energy given off by we who live here—is increasing, but seemingly no longer to the taste of the moon, which is more or less what the oracle said.
The predictions made all those years ago, then, have in many ways come to pass, some more quickly than even the oracle imagined. Our future now lies in forming the communities that Adam spoke of, learning the ways of our ancestors, and taking a greater, more loving, and more respectful interest in the world.
Some of this may already be happening, as good seeds are planted to counteract the bad. One recent development, for example, small in itself but encouraging nonetheless, is the resurgence of the tradition of sin eating.
Though previously considered defunct in its original form, traces of the sin-eating custom have continued, and if you attend any funeral you will encounter them, notably in the wake customs of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, where food and drink are laid out in the presence of the corpse to symbolize the purity of the soul within the deceased body.
Other than these remnants, however, little is known about the true custom or the original sin eaters: who they were or what they believed, or about sin eating as it was first conceived and practiced. There are even some who question the very existence of these guardians of the soul.
The historian Wirt Sikes is one. He wrote about a meeting of the Cambrian Archaeological Association at Ludlow in August 1852, for example, where Matthew Moggridge of Swansea spoke about the custom.
“When a person died,” said Moggridge, “his friends sent for the sin eater of the district, who on his arrival placed a plate of salt on the breast of the defunct, and upon the salt a piece of bread. He then muttered an incantation over the bread, which he finally ate, thereby eating up all the sins of the deceased. This done, he received his fee of 6d (sixpence) and vanished as quickly as possible from the general gaze; for, as it was believed that he really appropriated to his own use and behoof the sins of all those over whom he performed the above ceremony, he was utterly detested in the neighbourhood; regarded as a mere Pariah, as one irredeemably lost.”
“Such is the testimony,” says Sikes. “I venture no opinion upon it further than may be conveyed in the remark that I cannot find any direct corroboration of it as regards the Sin-eater, and I have searched diligently for it. The subject has engaged my attention from the first moment I set foot on Cambrian soil, and I have not only seen no reference to it in Welsh writings, but I have never met any unlettered Welshman who had ever heard of it. All this proves nothing, perhaps; but it weighs something.”[5]
In 2008, during research for a television documentary based on my book The Sin Eater’s Last Confessions, I contacted St. Fagans National History Museum in Cardiff, Wales, to see if they could shed any further light on the practice. The curator, Emma Lile, was almost as dismissive as Sikes. “The practice has long disappeared in Wales,” she said. Her response did, at least, suggest that it was a custom that once existed, in contrast to Sikes’ conclusions, but the general consensus was that sin eating had vanished from the cultural landscape somewhere in the mid-1800s.
Chance intervened to change that, however, when, quite by accident, I came across a contemporary sin eater as part of the same documentary research. “I provide spiritual comfort to the recently bereaved,” he told me, “following teachings from my grandparents, who did the same. I’m not any sort of village wise man; I simply carry out a small ritual over a recently departed brother or sister. My [Welsh] grandmother was the person from whom I learned this. She taught me no strict ritual, more a set of actions, very simple, and a few words to say. I think I may be just a faint shadow and relic of something much bigger; a bit like an old gravestone with the writing gone, or a burial mound: a lump in a field or a tumulus on an OS map.”
Although SW, as he asked me to call him, felt that sin eating was mostly lost to the modern world, the fact that he is here at all is comforting: someone, at least, is taking care of the soul by planting good seeds for the future of our world and its regeneration from small shoots and new beginnings.
For me, two mysteries remain from the pilgrimage I embarked upon all those years ago. The first is the identity of the stranger who had so inspired Cad and Adam and who, in some way, contributed to the adventure I shared with them. I have carried out research over the years and considered many ideas about who he may have been. There is one that I return to.
There was a man—a wisdom teacher from Europe—now long dead, who fits the description Cad gave of him. In 1921 and 1922, when Cad and Adam would have been at an appropriate age, this teacher made a pilgrimage of his own to western Europe to give demonstrations of his work in cities, including London.
London to Wales is a distance of less than two hundred miles, and it is therefore conceivable that he may also have traveled there and, by chance, met two young men eager to know more of his philosophy, which was so in keeping with their own.
This teacher believed, as Adam did, that the body, mind, and spirit were one and must be kept in balance for us to know spiritual health and equilibrium. Both he and Adam also referred, in their unique ways, to Bible passages to demonstrate their conclusions about the soul and the possibility of its redemption.
Both also taught ways to increase our spiritual energy and focus it to find purpose, avoid wasted efforts, and wake up to a better world. The stranger’s methods included practices and movements that were like Adam’s in many ways, and he introduced an exercise he called the Stop, where the student, as Cad more or less described it, would stop what he was doing on a certain command and then calmly observe his mental, emotional, and physical states so he could better understand and “re-member” himself.
“You must realize,” this teacher said, “that each man has a definite repertoire of roles which he plays in ordinary circumstances … but put him into even slightly different circumstances and he is unable to find a suitable role, and for a short time he becomes himself.”
One of his ideas was that we are “food for the moon,” just as Cad related it. The moon feeds on our energies, sins, and souls. An aware and awake man, however, has a shot at freedom and can know his truth and purpose while he is alive so that he does not become one of the sorrowful dead, “ill-met by moonlight.”
According to the stranger, however, the number of people who would actually arrive at this awareness was just “five of twenty of twenty.”
Only twenty percent of us will break out from our habits and conditioning, that is, and consider the possibility of a greater freedom, and of these, only twenty percent will do anything about it. Just five percent of those who remain will find their freedoms.
The mathematics of this equation are not hopeful. It means that 0.2 percent of people—or two in a thousand—stand any real chance of enlightenment. For the most part, then, the world is led by people who are undeveloped and unevolved: bad seeds giving rise to the conditions we experience today.
There is a great deal of correspondence between this teacher’s philosophy and Cad’s descriptions of the work that he and Adam did with him, but I still hesitate to reveal his name. There is some piece of evidence missing—or perhaps it is a lack of conviction on my part—that means I am not certain enough to announce it. He is, however, well-known, and research of your own will reveal him to you from the clues I have given.
For me, however, the greatest mystery of all still remains: what really became of Adam. It is one that I imagine time has now solved, for he was an old man when I knew him, and a quarter of a century or more has passed since the events of this book. No one can live forever, at least in this physical world.
Although I made further visits to Wales and met with Cad again, I returned only briefly to Hereford, the place of my childhood adventures with Adam. Shortly after my return from Glastonbury, in fact, my family moved away from the town, and my association with it was mostly lost.
Nobody can say with certainty, then, where Adam has gone, but I have an answer that satisfies me—at least until another is found. It was given to me in an oaken dream one Glastonbury day, of a man who had found a community of spirit where he was needed and belonged in a way that he may never have experienced as a sin eater on the edges of our society.
Somewhere outside of time, Adam has found his home and taken his place among the Merlins and immortals of a new Camelot, young and strong and at one with the world he loved.
May you continue to inspire us:
To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again.[6]
[1] BBC News, June 2, 2002: “The world’s largest polluter, America, has recently not backed pollution treaties to reduce car emissions or petrol consumption. The US alone accounted for 36.1% of worldwide greenhouse emissions in 1990” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2024265.stm; accessed June 11, 2008). BBC News, February 14, 2002: “The US contains 4% of the world’s population but produces about 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions. By comparison, Britain emits 3%—about the same as India, which has 15 times as many people” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1820523.stm; accessed June 11, 2008).
[2]The Independent, January 16, 2006: “Environment in crisis: We are past the point of no return” at http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/environment-in-crisis-we-are-past-the-point-of-no-return-523192.html (accessed June 11, 2008) and The Independent, January 16, 2006: “James Lovelock: The Earth is About to Catch a Morbid Fever That May Last as Long as 100,000 Years” at http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/james-lovelock-the-earth-is-about-to-catch-a-morbid-fever-that-may-last-as-long-as-100000-years-523161.html (accessed June 11, 2008). Lovelock’s new book, The Revenge of Gaia, was published by Penguin in 2006.
[3]The Times, December 15, 2007: “Plagues of Egypt ‘caused by nature, not God’ ” at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3053571.ece (accessed September 22, 2009).
[4] See “Scientists Look at Moon to Shed Light on Earth’s Climate” at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0528earthshine.html (accessed June 5, 2007).
[5] Wirt Sikes, British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions (London, 1880).
[6] John O’Donohue, “On the Death of the Beloved,” from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (Doubleday, 2008).