Entrance to Oweynagat cave, Roscommon, Ireland
Entrance to Oweynagat cave, Roscommon, Ireland
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated from the German by Robert Bly1
Battling through an unexpectedly fierce February snowstorm, I tracked down the portal to the Otherworld. At the base of a small mound in a farmer’s field in Roscommon in the west of Ireland, partially obscured by a hedge of overhanging, snow-clad trees, was a sunken black maw. It would have been intimidating enough even without the stark contrast it presented to the white world around it. It was unmarked and inconspicuous, with only the presence of a stone lintel to alert the passer-by to the fact that this isn’t just any old hole in the ground. It is the entrance to Oweynagat, Cave of Cats. The cave referred to in the early ninth-century tale ‘Cath Maige Mucrama’ (‘The Battle of Mag Mucrama’) as Ireland’s ‘gate to Hell’.
The hell-mouth of Ireland. Would you pass through its jaws?
Given that the opening is less than three feet high, you might approach your journey to the Otherworld with a little trepidation. You’d want to have a head-torch, for you’ll need both hands and feet to scrabble down into the cave. It’s muddy; a pair of waterproof trousers wouldn’t go amiss. Get on your hands and knees, bend your head low, and ease yourself down into the dark. You are passing through a hole in what once was the roof of a partially collapsed man-made souterrain: a particular type of underground passageway associated with the European Atlantic Iron Age. You’ll want to go slowly; it’s wet and slippery. Crawl down for two or three metres, and you’ll find yourself in a small opening, a kind of entrance porch to the cave. Look behind you; shine your torch up at the back of the old stone lintel, and on its bottom edge you’ll see an inscription in Ogham, the ancient Irish alphabet. When translated, it reads ‘Fraoch, son of Medb’. Once, a passageway would have led out of this ‘porch’ to the right of the entrance, but now it is blocked with collapsed debris, damage likely to be due to the construction of a small lane which comes to a stop directly overhead. The last capstone which is visible amidst the rubble also bears Ogham letters, but it is incomplete, and no translation has been made.
Turn left, then, into a small opening through which nothing but black can be seen. The faint beam of your torch will be inadequate to penetrate this shadow; trust that there is a place to go. Wiggle on your backside down a low, narrow, slippery passageway which descends steeply for about ten metres over crumbling, uneven stone. As the passageway opens up above you, stand now and look up at the rock. Your torch will pick out myriad tiny crystals shining on the wet, muddy yellow-brown walls. Taste them: they’re salty. Taste the food of the Otherworld. Taste the sweat of the deep Earth. Or are they the Earth’s tears? Look behind you (never look back); the path slopes upwards and only the very faintest hint of light can be made out, and only because you know it is there. Look up; the roof above you is ribbed. You are in a tunnel, a birth canal, and you are slipping down it into the silent dark womb of the Earth. Take a deep breath; walk on. All you can hear is the occasional drip of water falling from the walls into pitch-black puddles on the floor. The topography changes again: duck, and slither on downwards as the floor level drops sharply one final time.
You’re there. Oweynagat, Cave of Cats. A long, narrow natural limestone fissure, just 2.85 metres at its widest point and about 37 metres long. Watch your step: at the centre of the cavern is a hollow filled with mud; it has been known to swallow boots. It looks like a pool of clotted, black blood. In the feeble light from your head-torch (you wonder vaguely about battery life), edge your way around the walls to the end of the fissure, where the cave ascends, narrows again, and terminates in a crack. Is this the door to the Otherworld?
You’re in a womb. Yes, really a womb: you’re in the birthplace of Medb. Medb, Maeve: spell it as you will. The goddess-queen of Connaught was born in this cave. Medb: ‘she who intoxicates’. Is it the dark which intoxicates you now, and if not, why are you laughing? Whisper the story of Medb; Oweynagat remembers. How Étain, reborn as a mortal, was fleeing from her human husband with her Otherworldly lover Midir. How they stopped to rest at Oweynagat with all of Étain’s companions, including her maidservant Crochan Crogderg, whose name means ‘blood-red cup’. At the end of their stay, Crochan so loved the cave that she begged to stay. Étain and Midir agreed, and so it was here that Crochan’s daughter Medb was born.
Inside Oweynagat cave
The birthplace of Medb; the womb of the Earth. Oweynagat remembers. Turn off your torch. Turn it off; you know your way out. Turn it off, and succumb to the deepest dark you’re ever likely to know. Unaccountably, incongruously, words will spill into your mind: words which purport to describe the dark. Tenebrous, stygian . . . stay still, calm your breath, try them all on for size. But there is no word for this dark, a darkness so complete, so thick, that it is tangible. You’ll realise then, if you have not learned it before, that darkness is not simply a lack of light. Darkness is alive, and its life is obscured by light. Darkness puts out its tentacles and touches your face; darkness licks at your eyes and grants you a different kind of sight. Darkness is the voice of the shadow, a voice which words can only fail. Listen. Is it the drumming of your own heart that you hear, or the long, slow heartbeat of the Earth? Reach out, and there is nothing there. There is only you, whatever you might be, face-to-face with the long dark.
Do you fear this? You should not. You should not, even when you remember that this was also the dwelling place of the Morrigan, the Great Queen, the crow-goddess of death, war and rebirth. From here she emerged each Samhain, and from here she once came in her chariot, crimson-cloaked, leading a heifer to mate with the famous brown Bull of Cuailnge. Can you feel it now, the soft brush of a black crow’s wing?
Stay with the dark, even though you are thinking now of the other stories that are told about Oweynagat. A band of magical wild pigs which emerged from the cave and wreaked havoc and destruction on the surrounding land before they were banished by Medb. The Ellen Trechen, a triple-headed monster which rampaged across the country before it was killed by Amergin. A flock of small red birds who withered every plant they breathed on, before they were hunted down by the brave Red Branch warriors of Ulster.
Chaos comes from this cave, and you fear chaos. Do not fear it. Stay with the dark.
Oweynagat: Cave of Cats. Three magical wildcats came out of this cave and attacked three great warriors of Ulster, before being tamed by Cú Chulainn.
Chaos. Chaos comes out of the Otherworld, and you have always feared it. Stay in the cave. Stay, and remember that the Otherworld was also a place of protection and refuge. Think of Fraoch, son of Medb, whose name is inscribed in Ogham on the lintel of this cave. Remember that old Irish tale, the ‘Táin Bó Fraich’? Whisper the story; Oweynagat remembers. Fraoch seduced Findabair, the daughter of Medb. When he refused to pay an exorbitant bride-price for her, Medb sent him on an errand near to the dwelling-place of a water monster. He slew the monster with the help of Findabair, but was severely wounded. A hundred and fifty maidens of the sidhe, all dressed in green, carried him off into Oweynagat and bore him out again the following morning, fully healed. Think of Fraoch, son of Medb, and stay with the healing dark.
The Otherworld grants visions; remember that, too. Remember Nera, the servant of Medb, who saved Cruachan from an attack by Otherworldly forces with the assistance of a fairy woman whom he met in this cave and married. She warned him that Medb’s beautiful palace would be burned to the ground the following Samhain, and that warning enabled Medb to eliminate the danger. But as for Nera . . . he was left there ‘together with his people, and has not come out yet, and he will not come out until the end of the world.’ Will you come out of Oweynagat? Will you find your way back out of the dark?
Remember the gifts of the dark; Oweynagat remembers. The great cauldron of abundance which once was kept at Tara, but later came through this cave to the Otherworld. Remember the gifts of the dark. Turn around, grope for the wall and lay your forehead on its wet, muddy surface. Smell the fluids of the Earth; inhale their spicy brown richness. Can you hear the Earth breathing, or is the rasping breath your own? It is warm in here, warmer than the distant snowbound world outside. It feels safe, and it feels terrifying. More than anything, it feels alive, and you are alive in it. You are alive of it. Remember that; Oweynagat remembers. Remember the gifts of the dark.
That is enough for this visit; you have introduced yourself to the cave. You know you’ll be back; the Otherworld doesn’t give up its secrets easily, and certainly not all at once. Turn on your torch, and make the slippery climb back up to the surface. When you emerge from the birth canal which leads from the womb of the Earth, you’ll be smiling. You’ll be smiling for most of the day. But you’d better wipe that mud off your face before you make your way back to town, to find a bowl of soup and a comforting pot of tea.
Caves: portals to an entire unfathomable world which is hidden from our view. No wonder they are both feared and revered. Mythologies from around the world offer up stories of the magical, uncanny energy which can be found inside caves, and once they were important locations for ritual, ceremony and rites of initiation all across Europe.2 According to archaeologists,3 Oweynagat cave may well have been a focus for similar cult practices in pre-Christian Ireland, practices which included sensory deprivation and the powerfully altered states of consciousness that are associated with divination and prophecy.
Caves are the black, chasmal mouths of the Otherworld; the gateways to transformation – the deep and enduring transformations which are delivered from exposure to the darkest of places. The night-filled, fecund womb-places of the Earth – out of them we are reborn. This rebirth is at the heart of the Heroine’s Journey; it catapults us into new ways of seeing, new ways of being in and of the world. The journey begins at the threshold of the Otherworld. You could cross over in the dark entrance chambers of the hollow hills; you could reach it through a burrow or cave.
In Welsh mythology the way to Annwn4 could often be found at the bottom of deep lakes, and one old myth5 recounts the story of Ceridwen, an enchantress who lived at the bottom of Llyn Tegid – known in English as Lake Bala – in Snowdonia. The lake was named after her husband, Tegid Foel, and it is told that it formed when a well overflowed because the cover was left off it. And so the well flooded the original town of Bala, which is said to lie now under the four-mile-long lake, the largest body of water in Wales. The River Dee runs through it – though according to legend, its waters never mix with the waters of the lake – and Llyn Tegid once was famous for its deep and clear water.
But as with so many of our rivers and lakes, pollution has seriously impacted its water quality, and in the 1990s a severe outbreak of blue-green algal blooms led to concern about the excessive inflow into the lake of phosphates from domestic detergents, agricultural fertilisers and public sewage. Llyn Tegid has always been famous not just for its abundance of pike, perch, brown trout and eel, but because it is also the only known home of the gwyniad, thought to be a kind of herring, a curious relic of the last Ice Age. Sadly, this unique freshwater whitefish is now under threat both from the deteriorating water quality and from the introduction to the lake in the 1980s of another fish, the ruffe, which attacks spawning gwyniad and feeds on their eggs and fry.
If you visit Bala and Llyn Tegid today, you will find a neat and tidy lake whose levels and outflows are carefully managed. Its edges are busy with pleasure boats – kayaks, yachts and all kinds of other water-craft for rent, and the narrow-gauge Bala Lake Railway runs for several kilometres along its southern shore. It is hard to imagine that this was once one of the most magical and powerful places in Wales, home to Ceridwen and her magical cauldron, the source of transformation, wisdom and inspiration.
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Ceridwen was a powerful sorceress who lived at the bottom of Llyn Tegid with her husband, Tegid Foel. She became pregnant, and in time gave birth to twins. Her daughter, Crearwy (‘Light’), was beautiful, but her son, Afagddu (‘Darkness’), was ill-formed and grotesque. Ceridwen loved her son just as she loved her bright, shining daughter, and wanted to offer him a gift which would compensate for his ugliness. So she decided that she would give him the gift of wisdom. Ceridwen happened to possess a huge cauldron, and into it she carefully poured the herbs and ingredients for a potion of her own creation which she planned to offer to Afagddu. Once it was ready, only the first three drops of this potion would bestow the magical gift of wisdom; the rest would be a fatal poison to anyone who happened to drink it.
The ingredients for the potion were precious and rare, and Ceridwen gathered them carefully from all the secret places of the land – places which only she knew. Once the constituents had all been brought together in the great metal cauldron in Ceridwen’s house under the lake, she lit a great fire under it. The mixture needed to be cooked for a year and a day, and must be stirred steadily throughout this time, day and night. And so Ceridwen set Morda, a blind man, to tend the fire beneath the cauldron, and a young boy, Gwion Bach, to the task of stirring the liquid. With promises of dire consequences and fatal retributions if it should happen, she made Gwion swear that he would never taste the liquid.
On the final day of the allotted timespan, just as the concoction was about to be finished, Gwion Bach in his excitement to be free of his burden stirred a little too vigorously. Three drops of the liquid spilled onto his thumb, burning him. Instinctively, without thinking, he put his thumb into his mouth and sucked it to ease the pain, and this is how it came to be that the first three drops of the potion which had been intended for Afagddu were drunk by Gwion Bach. So it was that, in a single moment which lasted for no time at all and for all of eternity, he gained the knowledge and wisdom which Ceridwen had meant to pass to her son. Realising that Ceridwen would know at once what had happened, and would be furious, Gwion fled.
He fled from the cauldron and from Ceridwen’s house, but Ceridwen gave chase. Using the powers that the potion had given him, he shape-shifted into a hare, and he ran through the great long grass in the fields, as fast as he could. But Ceridwen became a greyhound, and began to gain on him, her mouth wide open in a vicious snarl. Gwion found himself up against a river, and in a sudden flash of silver, he changed into a fish and leapt into it. She transformed herself into an otter. As she caught up with him and opened her mouth to swallow him, he burst up through the bright water and turned himself into a bird.
Away he flew, up, up as far into the sky as he could reach – but Ceridwen became a hawk, and hurtled through the air in his wake. Down, down she forced him, until finally, exhausted, he took refuge in a barn. But she followed him in, swift and all-seeing, and in one final burst of power, summoning up the last of his strength, Gwion metamorphosed into a single grain of corn and fell to the ground amidst a scattering of wheat and other grains on the floor. Ceridwen wasn’t going to let him go. She turned herself into a black, glossy, red-crested hen, and she bent her head down to the ground and she scratched at it until she found him, and finally she ate him. Triumphant, she took her human form again and smiled.
But Gwion could not be destroyed; he had drunk the potion from Ceridwen’s cauldron of transformation: the cauldron of life and rebirth. The grain that once had been Gwion lodged itself firmly inside Ceridwen, and she became pregnant. She knew who it was, this child that she was carrying, and in her fury she resolved to kill him after she had given birth. But when he was born, he was so very beautiful, and Ceridwen found herself unable to end his life. Instead, she decided to give him a chance; she sewed him inside a bag made of skin, and cast him adrift on the great ocean. The child did not die, but was washed up in his bag in a salmon weir near Aberdyfi; there he was found by a prince named Elffin ap Gwyddno. The reborn infant was raised by Elfinn, and he grew to become the legendary bard and prophet, Taliesin.
~
The story of Ceridwen shows us the cauldron – like the cave – as a symbolic womb, the source not only of rebirth and transformation, but of knowledge, wisdom and awen,6 or inspiration. Celtic mythology abounds with tales of magical cauldrons – tales which are believed by many folklorists to be the forerunners of the later body of medieval Grail mythology – and old cauldrons have been found at the bottom of lakes and deep well shafts throughout the Celtic countries, left there as offerings to the goddess of the land.
Ceridwen is the keeper of the cauldron of wisdom and rebirth, and her story reflects the role of women, in these native mythologies, as the source of all life and creative power. In some retellings of this story, Ceridwen is often described simply as an enchantress or sorceress – but once she would have been seen as very much more than a mere witch. Ceridwen’s cauldron transforms Gwion Bach, and her long pursuit of him after he drinks the three magical drops makes it possible for him to discover and draw on the new knowledge that he’s acquired in order to shape-shift, to try to escape her. But the dark goddess in the Otherworld cannot be eluded; finally, after submitting him to these tests of his newly acquired prowess, Ceridwen swallows him up and rebirths him as Taliesin, who became the greatest of all prophets and bards.
The story of Ceridwen and Taliesin, then, is the story of an initiation, a rite of passage, and of the transformations which inevitably must follow. And so, in this Heroine’s Journey of ours, after the stage of Separation – in which we listen to the Call, and sever ourselves from the old world we inhabited – then the second stage, the stage of Initiation begins. But when we heed that Call and step off the edge, thinking to firmly set foot on the path which lies ahead of us, to strike out confidently on our new pilgrimage – we may instead find ourselves losing our footing, plummeting down into the dark.
Scream if you will, but let yourself fall. We have to let ourselves fall. If we want to become Voices of the Wells, we need to plumb their depths. And in order to kick-start the process of transformation to which we’ve now committed ourselves, we have to destroy old ways of thinking, remove old limits. So grope your way blindly into the darkest cave, let yourself sink to the bottom of the deepest lake. Jump into the black, bottomless well. It is this Descent, in which we go down and face the dark goddess in the Otherworld, which destroys outmoded forms of being and prepares us to develop the wisdom we need to give birth to our most authentic self – the self that knows its place in the world, that has its feet firmly planted in the rich loam of the Earth. The self that can begin finally to act from that place of solid, grounded rootedness.
The journey demands that we make this Descent, because a sacrifice is required before we may continue on our path: the sacrifice of our old upper-world self; the sacrifice of that part of us which once was sustained by our attachment to the Wasteland. There at the bottom of the lake, in the impenetrable darkness of the cave, in the roiling depths of the black, scalding cauldron, the ego begins to be dismantled. We must be taken apart, broken into pieces, so that we can begin the long, hard work of putting the fragments back together again, rebirthing ourselves into a new pattern.
Here, in the long dark, we must also meet what Jung called the Shadow: all that is irrational, instinctive and hidden in our own psyche. We are forced to go deep into ourselves, so that we might first discover what it is that we must accept, know, and above all lose before we can find out what it is that we might become. Our Descent starts with disillusion and ends with dissolution. There is no escaping the process, and it can be hard. The Descent is a time of helpless wandering, of grief, rage and alienation. There is no quick way through. But the destruction which takes hold of us is required to initiate us into the mysteries, to set in motion the long, difficult game of transformation. In staying with the dark, we gather the strength which we will need to find the way back to our path and to face the rest of the journey ahead of us. In that place of destruction, gestation and rebirth, we begin to learn the answer to the biggest question of all: if we strip away everything we are told we must be in the Wasteland, what is left? When everything we once valued is taken from us, what then do we become?
Storyteller and yoga instructor Tracy Chipman7 lives in a small town in north-west Wisconsin. I’ve known her for a few years now; we first came into contact because of a mutual love of stories, and a shared connection with the stories and landscape of the Outer Hebrides. During a long, dark time in Tracy’s life she connected very strongly with Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world. Superior is dark, and deep: at its deepest point, it runs to 406 metres.
‘I was pretty settled in my life in south-east Iowa when my father was diagnosed with cancer. Eventually I moved in with him to care for him,’ she tells me. ‘I came to Lake Superior on a whim, for a little break from the fray, and I was unprepared to feel such a strong connection with it. From miles away I could actually “feel” its presence. From then onwards I became utterly besotted with it. When I thought of the lake, that enormous body of water, so incredibly deep, I pictured it as a feminine entity, a woman. I saw her gathering herself together deep under the surface, filling the dark cave-space of basalt and sandstone, waiting there for aeons, beginning to know herself, somehow finally coming to light. The lake, and this image of it, seemed to promise something that I needed. After that first visit I posted a note on Craigslist, an online classified site, looking for someone I could write to who knew Lake Superior well. And so, through this interest in the lake, I met a man called Mike, and the course of my life forever changed.’
Tracy doesn’t have any obvious Celtic ancestry; her ancestors came to America in the 1600s, and what little she knows of them suggests a Dorset connection – though she thinks there may also be a Scottish link. But she always felt a strong tie to Britain, she says, even as a small child. And so in her mid-twenties she bought herself a one-way plane ticket to London, and from there set off for Scotland, where she felt a sudden and unexpected sense of belonging. Tracy ended up staying for six months, living near Edinburgh and travelling around Scotland. ‘I had to return to the US, but in 1995 I came back to Scotland. I was invited up to the Outer Hebrides with an ornithologist friend who was heading to the island of South Uist to do research, and words can’t really convey the impact the islands had on me. I was touched, inspired and moved, and I left knowing somehow I’d be back.’ She went home to Oregon, where she was living at the time, and started up a non-profit organisation called The Hebridean Folklore Project, with a mission to help keep the islands’ folklore alive and accessible, and in the summer of 1996 she went back to Uist for the first of many extended journeys to the Hebrides. By day she hitched, walked, ferried and bused up and down the islands in search of stories, ‘listening to the old people, listening to the sea and the curlew’s call.’ By night she pulled pints and poured whisky at The Dark Island Hotel in Benbecula. The islands drew her back, over and over again.
‘The islands and how I engaged with the land and culture offered me a solid connection to place that I hadn’t experienced before, as well as an unequalled soul education – instructions for living a wild and authentic life, if you will. I spent so much time doing fieldwork, walking and exposing myself to the wind, to the sluicing horizontal rains. At the same time, I was tipping headlong into the ancient cooking pot of oral tradition shared by the old people of the islands.
‘It was a time of unprecedented heady and hearty feasting. I was waking up to a strong affinity for Celtic culture, which meant above all awakening to the culture of place. Insights spilled out to me from those old myths and stories. Life’s highest truths seemed to blaze out of them, from South Uist folklore to the great epic Celtic myths – they all drew me further through the doorway of Celticity. The spinning tales of ceremony, the sacral ebb and the flow, the feral land, dreaming, speaking, and the trove of deep magic firing from the Gaelic language . . . all this began informing the tread of my day-to-day life. Of how I live this precious life of mine; the breath-by-breath choices I make about how I spend my time; where I find and create beauty; the direction I steer my livelihood and soul work as a storyteller, writer and folklorist; how and with what I feed or soothe myself; the way in which I listen to the elements and all living and non-living beings. The way I live now is directly derived from my experience of Celtic lands and culture. The islands taught me not only how to be in relationship with place, but also how to simply be.’
During Tracy’s extended visits to South Uist, she struck up a deep friendship with Seumas, an elderly local man. He was her guide to the land and its stories, and when she returned to America they kept in touch. But Seumas passed away in 2002, and his death led to an experience of profound grief and loss. ‘There was a strong heart connection between us,’ Tracy says. ‘He embodied the land and the Celtic culture of the islands for me in so many ways. His death also signalled the beginning of a long cycle of loss in my life.’ And indeed, it was a time of many changes, upheaval and isolation. Her father’s long struggle with cancer led eventually to his death. Her marriage had begun to fall apart and eventually she and her husband split up. Her beloved cat was hit by a car and died. Then came the sudden death of a close friend and mentor. To cap it all, Mike, the correspondent with whom she had unexpectedly fallen in love, had a massive heart attack on Samhain eve, just as they were falling asleep, and died in her arms.
Tracy looks younger than her fifty years; she has a wide, open smile that lightens the intensity with which she talks about these darkest of times in her life. ‘Quite simply, I retreated,’ she says. ‘I went to live in a primitive cabin in the woods at Four Mile Creek near Washburn, in Wisconsin. It was near Lake Superior, the beloved lake that had first connected Mike and me. It was winter, and I was deep, deep into my grief. I was living in an altered state, because that’s what grief does: it changes you. I was surrounded by this all-white world, listening to wolves and coyotes, following tracks worn by deer and bobcat, feeling so close and connected to the land. I felt as if I was shape-shifting, actually becoming the land and the wildlife all around me. There were times where I felt non-human. Not surprisingly, that made it hard to relate to other people socially. I spoke about death often as well, which didn’t help. I had such a strong sense of isolation and alienation from society, and in some ways, that’s still with me; I’m still recovering from it. But during this remarkably transformative time there was a strong sense of merging with that creative intelligence, the energetics underlying nature.’
Pushed to explain what it felt like, this sense of shape-shifting into the land, Tracy shakes her head and laughs. ‘It’s hard to explain. It felt like belonging to something safe, like I could trust the cycles and the beauty of the land, of nature and the elements, not to just disappear. Everything else that mattered to me seemed to have disappeared; the land was all that was left. Nature was this relatively benign yet hugely powerful energy to shift into when my own experience felt so crushingly grief-stricken and traumatic at times.’ She hesitates, runs fingers through her hair, gropes for words. ‘All I can say is that I felt a part of the rhythms of the land and nature: there was no separation. It was so much more than the purely human experience I had known before. In the Hebrides I had experienced a strong connection to the land, to those islands, and that experience was a type of education, showing me how it – this shifting into land or place – might be done, giving me something to take home with me. But years later, carrying all this grief and loss, I was completely raw. My human life had been stripped away, and I was living in the woods in a way that was uncluttered by all the crap we usually surround ourselves with. It was a very mindful experience in the sense that the past was a complete bombshell for me, and the future utterly unimaginable, so I was forced to live in the present – that was all I could endure. And the present for me in that place was nothing more than the land, the elements of fire and ice, the trees, the animals, the seasons. It was a tremendously transformational period in my life, and there were such gifts that came from it.’
So great were those gifts, and so transformative her time in the woods, that Tracy recently purchased fifteen acres of boreal woodland a mile from the shores of Lake Superior, and close to the cabin she once lived in. She is clear that those gifts – involving above all a deeply embodied sense of belonging to the land – have utterly transformed the way she lives now. ‘It’s a sort of internal spaciousness, a simplicity, which isn’t dominated by the agendas and concerns of society. In my work as a yoga instructor and a storyteller, some qualities of that knowing, that being present, are brought in and shared with others. More and more in all of my work I find the rhythm and flow which came out of that time with the land and its creatures, which is now part of me. I’ve learned how to show up and pay attention in a new more authentic way which informs my daily life.’
For Tracy, the two sets of experiences, first in the islands and then at home in America, are deeply connected. ‘It’s as if the islands gave me the gift of understanding what it might be to belong, to be in relationship with the land, which came with me back to America. To me, Celtic culture is a calling to belong to something greater, something luminous stitched throughout the horizontal and vertical realms of life. Celticity is an initiation, a coupling of my soul-self with the land and the elements and with the web that meshes, coils and weaves it and us all together. It’s both a reverence and a sense of responsibility. My way of being in the world now has been birthed, cultured and tempered by that sense of Celticity, and deepened by that long stint in the dark.’
The necessary disintegration of our former selves forces us to clutch, in the depths of our extremity, at whatever it is that we believe to be the source of life. When we have given ourselves over to the dark, allowed it to work on us; when we can no longer think, reason or manage our way out of the crisis we find ourselves in – then what we are left with is instinct, the soft animal nature of our physical bodies, the songs our senses sing. The transformation that follows is for sure, as Tracy discovered, in some ways about shape-shifting: about taking on new forms, remembering that we are two-legged animals, learning a new way of being in the world, a new tuning-in to the rhythms and seasons of this planet. Only then can we truly become creatures of this Earth; only then can we begin to feel a sense of belonging to it.
But sometimes that disintegration of the old social self, that falling back into more physical, instinctual, animal ways of knowing, can turn into a process we can’t control; sometimes it feels like the onset of madness. In this most ‘civilised’ of all cultures, madness is never something to be embraced – but in our old Celtic myths it occurs often enough, and it’s a perfectly natural response to the unendurable. More than that: it’s an initiation, a precursor to transformation.
Inside us, those old stories whisper, there might well reside a sleeping madwoman: a woman who cannot and will not tolerate the brutalities of the world around her. They suggest to us that one day, in the extremity of some great grief, or following the brutal rending of some protective veil, this madwoman within us might break out. More importantly – they tell us that at some point in our lives it might be okay to let ourselves break, to run to the comforting dark of the cave, to flee to the simple white wildness of winter woods, to withdraw from the deodorised, civilised world around us. To express our rage and lick our wounds; to allow the wilderness to work on us. And so it is that Irish mythology offers us a great gift: the story of the madness of Mis.8
~
Dáire Dóidgheal, the most powerful ruler in Europe, set out one day to invade Ireland. It wasn’t just that he wanted to conquer that beautiful, fertile country: it was that he had a particular hatred for the greatest of all Irish warriors, Fionn mac Cumaill. Fionn had eloped with both the wife and the daughter of Bolcán, King of France, when he spent some time in his service; Dáire was utterly furious about this, and determined to seek retribution for this disrespect to his friend. And it had to be said, the fact that Dáire’s sense of pride was dented by all the stories which were circulating Europe about Fionn’s prowess and successes might just have had something to do with it.
So Dáire mustered a large body of troops from all across Europe, and they sailed over to the south-west of Ireland in a mighty fleet of ships. Fionn came to hear that the invading forces were on their way, and so he gathered both his own people and allies from all around the country, and they were waiting for Dáire when eventually he landed at Ventry, near the settlement of Dingle in County Kerry. A great and bloody battle ensued, which lasted a year and a day. Fionn’s son Oisín faced Bolcán of France in combat, and defeated him. But Dáire’s forces fought so fiercely that eventually Fionn had to call the Tuatha Dé Danann to come to his aid before the battle could be won. But then Dáire’s son Conmhaol was killed, and in spite of his great skill as a warrior, Dáire Dóidgheal himself was finally slain by the mighty Fionn.
Dáire had brought to Ireland with him his beloved daughter Mis, for he could never bear to be parted from her. Mis was as beautiful as the night, with her long black hair and large black eyes and her pale, perfect skin. After the battle was finally over and the remaining warriors had dispersed, Mis came down to the beach with the band of men who guarded her, to look for her father – but after a frantic search among all the dead and dying bodies lying on the beach, all she found was his decapitated corpse stretched out on the sand. She ran to him, but when she saw what had become of her beloved father her grief overwhelmed her, and she flung herself across his body and licked and sucked at his bloody wounds to try to heal them, just as an animal might.
But nothing could restore him to life, and when finally she understood this Mis staggered to her feet and wailed and clawed at her ravaged, wet face and her blood-stained clothing. Finally, in the utter, unstoppable agony of her despair, she cracked. Taken by the extremity of her madness, she rose up into the air like a bird, and with a long high-pitched howl which shook those who heard it to the very core, she flew away into the heart of the Sliabh Mis mountains.
There it was that Mis came to rest, and she lived in the mountains for many years. She was a crazed creature in those days, was Mis; she grew long trailing fur and layers of feathers to cover her naked skin; she grew great sharp claws with which she attacked and tore to pieces any creature or person she met. She could run like the wind, and no living thing was safe from her. They called her the wild woman, and so dangerous they thought her that the people of Kerry created a great barrier around the mountains, a desert stripped of people and cattle, just for the fear of her.
Feidlimid Mac Crimthainn was the King of Munster in those days, and he offered a great reward to anyone who could capture her alive. He promised half his kingdom if Mis could be restored to sanity and society, as well as the gift of her hand in marriage. But so fearful were the stories about her that none of the warriors in the land dared to accept the challenge.
And so the people continued to live in fear of Mis, until one day, a gentle young harpist named Dubh Ruis9 came to the court of Feidlimid Mac Crimthainn. He approached the king, harp in hand, and announced that he would take up the challenge – for he had devised a subterfuge which he believed might restore Mis, and bring her back into the world again. Mac Crimthainn’s warriors laughed and jeered at the idea that this tall, handsome but gentle young man might succeed where they had not even dared to go, but for lack of any alternative plan the king agreed, and gave him the purse full of gold and silver which he requested, and which formed part of his plan to beguile Mis. And so Dubh Ruis set off with his harp, and he travelled deep into the place in the mountains of Sliabh Mis where she was thought to have her lair.
Dubh Ruis found a good dry spot in a clearing at the heart of a small oak wood, in the foothills at the base of the narrow mountain range. He took off his clothes, and set out his cloak on the ground; he surrounded it with a circle of gold and silver coins. And then he laid himself down on the cloak and began to quietly strum at his harp. After a while he heard a rustle behind him, but he didn’t turn around, he just kept on playing. Then the rustling sound grew closer, and slowly, carefully, he looked up.
There she was, in all her fearsome glory: part-hag, part-wolf, wild-eyed, hardly recognisable as human. She looked dangerous enough to strike horror into the heart of the most ferocious warrior – but Dubh Ruis ignored her; he lowered his eyes and turned back to his harp and his music. After a few more minutes, Mis spoke, her voice rusty and cracked. ‘Once at my father’s court there were things like that.’ And she pointed with one long-clawed hand at his harp.
‘Were there, now,’ said Dubh Ruis. ‘Well, won’t you sit down and listen for a bit, while I play?’ But Mis shook her head, and took a long step back. Dubh Ruis said nothing, but turned back to his harp and his music. He seemed to take no further notice of Mis – except that he watched her, out of the corner of his eye. And then she suddenly noticed the gold and silver coins, and she stared long and hard at them, and then she took a step closer to him.
‘Once my father had things such as that,’ Mis said. And she pointed with a sharp-clawed hand at the coins.
And Dubh Ruis said, ‘Did he, now. Well, won’t you sit down and look at them for a bit, while I play?’ But Mis shook her head, and took a step back again. It was then that Dubh Ruis shifted around a little on his cloak so that his fine set of genitals were on display to her, but all he did was continue to focus on his harp, and his music. He seemed to take no further notice of Mis – except that he watched her, out of the corner of his eye. And then she suddenly noticed his genitals, and she stared long and hard at them, and then she took a step closer to him. She stood quite still, and didn’t speak. But Dubh Ruis saw a flush rise in the grubby, bare skin of her face and brow.
And Dubh Ruis said, ‘Won’t you come and lie here with me for a while?’ And this time Mis did not step away, but instead took another step closer, and then another, and so Dubh Ruis slowly reached out his hand to her – and still she didn’t back away. He took her long-clawed hand and pulled her down beside him, onto the soft, fine-woven woollen cloak. Quietly he said to her, ‘You wouldn’t be hurting me now, would you?’ Blindly, seemingly entranced, Mis shook her head.
And so it was that Dubh Ruis the harpist made love to her, crazy Mis, wild woman of the Sliabh Mis Mountains. And once it was over, she asked for more, and more loving she received; and then she asked for more music, and more music she received; and she sat calmly with Dubh Ruis while he played, and she fingered the silver and gold coins. ‘I remember . . .’ she started to say, but then she shook her head and would not continue. But Dubh Ruis saw that a tear leaked from the corner of her eye.
Dubh Ruis grew hungry, and he took up his leather bag and brought out a piece of bread from it. He offered half of it to Mis. She took it from him carefully, lifting it to her nose, sniffing at it, and she said, ‘I remember this!’ And Dubh Ruis said to her, ‘Yes, you do. It is called bread.’ Mis nodded – but there wasn’t enough of it to satisfy their hunger, and so she ran off into the woods to hunt for a deer. When she brought it back to him, though, slung over her strong, bony shoulders, Dubh Ruis would not allow her to eat it raw, or to tear at it with her long sharp teeth as was her custom. Instead, he built a fire and he roasted the deer over it, and he served her cooked meat.
Then Dubh Ruis took Mis to a pool at the edge of the wood which had been warmed by the sun, and he coaxed her into the pool with soft words and kisses, and there he bathed her gently, and he washed away the dirt of the forest. And then he took branches from the forest floor and built a shelter for Mis, and he made a bed of moss inside the shelter, and he covered her with his cloak, and he stayed with her.
Each day, gently, Dubh Ruis scrubbed at Mis’s skin, so that over time the fur and the feathers fell away from her. He combed out her long black hair, and cut back her rending claws. Each day he spoke to her of the world she had left behind. And each day he made love to her, on their bed of moss in the forest. Each day, she changed a little more; day by day she slowly transformed back into some semblance of the young and beautiful woman she had been before her father was killed. And finally, after two months had passed, Mis asked of her own accord if they could leave the mountains and go back down into the world.
So Mis returned to court with Dubh Ruis, and they were rewarded handsomely by the King of Munster, and Dubh Ruis was given her hand in marriage. They lived together happily for a number of years, and Mis bore four sons.
But the warriors who had been made to look small by Dubh Ruis’ success plotted against him, and planned their revenge; and one day, while he was out walking in the woods, they killed him. This time, when faced with the dead, maimed body of a loved one, Mis did not lose her reason to her pain and despair. Instead, she poured her grief into a poem: a lament for her gentle harper, Dubh Ruis.
~
Sometimes, madness seems like the only possible response to the insanity of the civilised world; sometimes, holding ourselves together is not an option, and the only way forward is to allow ourselves to fall apart. As the story of Mis shows, that madness can represent an extreme form of initiation, a trigger for profound transformation. Mis is portrayed as a typical geilt – an Old Irish word which means a mad person, or a lunatic. But the word geilt has a particular connotation in Celtic myth and literature: it is conferred upon people who go mad from terror, often as a result of their exposure to the extremities of battle. There are several such old stories, but the best-known, of course, are about men. A great deal of literary attention has been paid to the episode of Merlin’s madness in Arthurian legend, which comes upon him after the Battle of Arfderydd, and to the old Irish tale of Suibhne Geilt (Mad Sweeney) who similarly goes mad in battle – but the story of Mis is seldom told, even though it is believed to be older than all of these others.
Mis is the original wild woman, that archetypal madwoman who lives deep within each of us. She speaks for us all: for the rage which we cannot express, for the grief which eats our heart out, for the voices we have suppressed out of fear. This old story shows us a brutal descent into darkness during which all illusions are stripped away and old belief systems evaporate, and in doing so it suggests that the extremities of madness or mental breakdown, with their prolonged, out-of-control descent into the unknown, might offer us a path through which we can come to terms with the truth. Like other legendary geilta,10 Mis is driven to extremity in her grief, shape-shifting into bird form, flying away into the hills and woods, growing fur and feathers, eating wild and raw food, leaving the intolerable world behind her. But a geilt cannot emerge from her madness and come back to the world until she has achieved some kind of personal transformation. Through her ordeal – her removal from society and her time spent in the wilderness – she must find a way to reclaim a more authentic sense of identity and belonging. She finds it with the help of a man; she finds it in the union of the masculine and feminine.
In all the old stories, the geilt is hypersensitive to the sights and sounds of the civilised world, finding them unendurable. She finds other people unendurable too; only alone in the wild, in nature, can safety and freedom be found. In the same way, it is our sudden awareness of the horrors of the civilised world, the Wasteland, which not only leads to our Descent, but which accompanies us into the dark. That awareness, that inability to endure the unendurable, forces us to challenge our old values, and in particular, the materialism on which our culture is founded. We are highly likely to be left feeling isolated and bereft; we may sometimes be left falling apart.
Sophie McKeand11 was born in north Wales, and still lives in the town of Wrecsam, close to the English border, with her partner Andy and her eighteen-year-old daughter Rhiannon. She feels a fierce attachment to her land, and its people. ‘Even when I wasn’t conscious of it, I realise now that I’ve always struggled with the idea of ever leaving here. The Cymraeg (Welsh) word hiraeth is the only way I can explain it. It doesn’t translate well into English, but it refers to a kind of deep longing for home.’
She comes across now as funny, practical and supremely down-to-earth, but ten years ago, when she was twenty-nine, Sophie thought she was going mad. ‘I was trying to be a Good Citizen, whatever that was, and a “good single parent”. I was working as a field sales executive in media, I had just bought a house, I thought I’d done everything everyone had told me I ought to do to be a good and productive member of society. But conforming to all those expectations, living in that way, was killing me. I hated my life. My escape was a headlong leap into the all-encompassing weekend fog of drinking and taking drugs for release before crawling into the sick, empty heart of Monday morning. I remember one Monday morning in particular, a distinct defining moment, after a long weekend of partying while my daughter was away. I was standing in the shower, feeling like shit, and this internal voice which I’d never heard before said very loudly and clearly, This is not who I am. It was a side of me which had never spoken before. It was like thunder, or a lightning strike. I heard it, and then all at once everything started to unravel. I kept thinking about all that I’d bought into – the house, the smart car, the laptop. All the stuff. If those things weren’t what life was about after all, then who was I, really? What was it for?’
What happened next was a series of experiences that at the time made Sophie worry about her sanity. ‘But I didn’t seek out medical help, because I never felt that was the answer. Somehow I knew that I needed to work it through rather than medicate it, to understand the new way I was beginning to look at the world. I thought, who is anyone else to tell me that I’m thinking in the right way or the wrong way? I’d been doing that all my life, and look where it had got me.’
Her experiences during this time were both shattering and transformative. ‘It was all about connecting directly with the land, right here in north-east Wales. I had what I can only describe as a huge spiritual awakening. I remember, after that moment in the shower, thinking that we’re broken people, all of us. Our roots are torn from the earth, fed into the Machine, chipped and moulded into sheets of MDF which are used to build things we don’t need.’ Sophie found herself developing an aversion to pavements, to tarmac and concrete, and so she began to spend more and more time walking in the hills, forests and lakes with her dog. ‘I’d walk for miles up into the hills, literally for hours. That was my therapy, I didn’t want anything else. Then . . . well, I started to connect and converse with the land. It was as if the world exploded into life. I started to hear the trees’ voices, the mountains’ thoughts. At the time it was quite scary. One night I dreamed of a fire dragon and when I awoke he was still with me and he stayed with me for days. What was that all about? A psychotic episode? A hallucination? What with that and the voices, I was convinced I was completely nuts. But the truth is, I knew that it was really the rest of the so-called civilised world which was nuts! And that was hard to deal with. This is what I wrote about how I felt at the time:
Fear of all that we are, of all that I am, becomes a soul-silencing black rat chewing the tongue from the paralysed Self. It is nails screeching down blackboards. It is waking in the night infested with demons that burrow beneath skin as old ghosts tramp through the bedroom vomiting appalling truths. It is the blackened grief of the illumined mind. I do not fear death. I fear life, and what we do with it. I am suffocated with horror. We are one? It hurts to look anybody in the eye. Being around people becomes a terrifying ordeal. I am afraid for all children.
‘I kept it all to myself, of course,’ she laughs. ‘Whilst it was happening, there was complete psychological compartmentalisation. The bigger side of me was denying it all, saying, This isn’t me, I don’t think like this, the natural world doesn’t communicate! I can shut it off, just let it run like a film in the other room whilst I get on with my normal life. I was striving for “normality”. I would watch TV, read the newspapers, go shopping. I would tell myself, No, this is the real world, this one you’ve always lived in. Then at the same time, the other half of me was embracing all of these voices and visions, and I couldn’t stop them any more than I could stop breathing. They were like waking dreams, only tangible, material, and they were effecting visible changes in the real world!’
Sophie is very clear that the experience changed her and, given the extent of her distress at the time, remarkably positive about the nature of transformation she underwent. ‘It changed me; of course it changed me. That moment in the shower, the moment I call the epiphany – that was the start of it, the dark time. Since then it’s been a long, long journey. It didn’t all happen at once. It’s been a tough process to get to where I am now. Eventually something began to come out of the fog, the things I thought I must do. Write, walk in nature, wild-swim, learn Welsh, work in my community. Big things, too: I quit my job, sold my house, signed up for university, stopped smoking. I began to look into what it was to be Welsh. I began to write poetry, and then to perform it. What was interesting is that throughout this whole process, painful as it was, I felt as if I were becoming a better person. As if I were being transformed into a better mother, partner, friend, writer. More involved with my place, with the local community. I wanted to drink less, write more. I thought, if this is madness, I’ll take it.’
The transformation clearly was a powerful one. On Sophie’s website, acclaimed nature writer Jay Griffiths, author of the bestselling books Wild and Kith, says that her poetry offers ‘an allusive, restless sensibility turned outwards to the world; her words have heft, they grasp their way out of poetry into landscape.’ Talking to Sophie, I am looking into the dancing eyes of a seemingly average woman, approaching forty, with a brown chin-length bob, clutching a simple black cardigan around her. She’s sitting at a desk in a pleasant, ordinary-looking room in their perfectly conventional house which she shares as a working space with Andy. But on her website you’ll find photographs of Sophie on stage with paint on her face and feathers in her hair, with heavily tattooed forearms, wearing tight short dresses of black or shocking pink. She has performed her poetry, usually backed by musicians, extensively across the UK: at the Green Man, Wilderness, Dinefwr and Uncivilisation Festivals, as well as at venues like the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho. She insists that the spoken word has power.
‘Performance poetry exists as a primeval reminder of our oral traditions, of who we are. Spoken as part of the landscape, it becomes landscape. Spoken as part of the community, it becomes community. Community really matters to me. Now, more and more of my work is in my local community. I work full-time in the arts, and especially with groups of young children in schools around the county, focusing on poetry, and on language.’
Celtic mythology is the foundation stone of much of Sophie’s work; she is particularly passionate about connecting people to the stories which spring directly out of the places where they live, out of their own cultural traditions. ‘Recently I’ve been working with the Ceridwen myth, because it allows and builds on the possibility of transformation and inspiration, and I think that’s so important for kids to understand. So I get the kids in my poetry workshops to make a cauldron of inspiration, and then I ask them what we’re going to put into the cauldron. They go outside and come back with found objects as metaphors – bark, standing in for dragon’s tongue, for example: something which represents wisdom. Or they use objects that I bring – marbles, and so on – and they’re the ones who decide what those objects represent. Then they stir it all up and pretend to taste it, and I tell them they’ve been transformed by the potion. And also, like Gwion Bach, we shape-shift! I bring fur or feathers and they transform themselves into some animal or other. And then I ask them what they are going to say now that they’re transformed, and they write. They write very freely, about how they have been changed, about how it feels to be that animal.
‘Watching the kids devise their own symbols and metaphors from these items is amazing. It encourages them to engage not only with their own Welsh myths and stories, but with the land and its animals. Connecting with the land is an integral part of my work. And learning Cymraeg, because the Cymraeg language grew directly out of this land; it is the voice the land gave us, the one it resonates with most beautifully, and this is why I’m working so hard to learn it. I’m still the out-of-tune violin in the orchestra, but I’m working on it.’
Sophie’s experiences of what might be thought to be madness, and the strong sense of connection to the land which both began it and emerged out of it, have influenced the way she views her place in the world, her sense of responsibility to her land, and her community. ‘It’s definitely about protecting,’ she says, emphatically. ‘And I feel that part of that protecting is in encouraging the next generation to think about myths and their connection – and our connection through them – with the land. Planting a seed so that sometime, when they need it, they’ll remember these things. Because it’s time for us to rise up and take back our role as caretakers and stewards not just of the land but of the children, too. I think a lot of women are doing this now, with more homeschooling, with community projects, with educational projects that operate a little bit outside the norms of our patriarchal education system. This is how we ensure the land has good future caretakers.
‘I also feel that the land needs something from us, yes. We always think of what we need, but the land needs us now too. The trees need help spreading their seeds. There’s a need for people to speak poems and songs to the land. To collect litter. This is one of the ways I connect and respond in an authentic way. It’s interesting because I never see people picking up rubbish. We always feel it’s someone else’s job, that we’re too important, that we don’t have the time or a suitable bag to put the rubbish in. But it’s not always the grand gestures that will change the world.’
The descent into darkness can take many different forms. It might be a mental or emotional breakdown, but it might also be a physical illness or disability. In her remarkable book The Alchemy of Illness,12 Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferer Kat Duff has this to say:
The well venture forth to accomplish great deeds in the world, while the sick turn back into themselves and commune with the dead . . . Space and time lose their customary definitions and distinctions. We drift in a daze and wake with a start to wonder: Where am I? On a train to San Francisco or at Grandmother’s house? Maybe both, for opposites coexist in the underworld of illness . . . Defying the rules of ordinary reality, illness shares in the hidden logic of dreams, fairy tales, and the spirit realms mystics and shamans describe. There is often the feeling of exile, wandering, searching, facing dangers, finding treasures. Familiar faces take on the appearance of archetypal allies and enemies, ‘some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed into the squatness of toads,’ as Virginia Woolf noted. Dreams assume a momentous authority, while small ordinary things, like aspirin, sunshine, or a glass of water, become charged with potency, the magical ability . . . We drop out of the game when we get sick, leave the field, and desert the cause. I often feel like a ghost, the slight shade of a person, floating through the world, but not of it. The rules and parameters of my world are different altogether.
When we descend into the dark, we find ourselves literally losing the plot. We find ourselves between stories. All of the stories we have told ourselves about who we are have begun to disintegrate. Chances are, we are losing much that we once held dear, all that we once thought defined us, all the old dreams. It’s hard to let go of dreams, no matter how dysfunctional. But once the process of disintegration has begun it must be properly worked through. The old stories are clear about this: we must die to ourselves, and to the world, before we can be reborn.
Sometimes, that dying takes a long time; sometimes, we can’t imagine we’ll ever be free of the pain of it. Stay with the long dark: it takes as long as it takes. We cannot shortcut our time in the dark – but so often we try to, because we are born into a culture which has prepared us poorly for waiting. Instant downloads via the internet save us from having to wait for books to arrive in the post; videos can be streamed online with a few brief clicks of a mouse. Fast food, fast service. We want everything now, including transformation and wisdom. In this culture, if something seems to be broken or defective, off we go at once, looking for a quick fix. We want to medicate our way out of the dark, to drink or drug our way out; we want to treat our way out with solution-focused therapies, how-to spiritualties. We go looking for a product, a practice, a technique. We want to know now what it is we might become, and we want to become it now.
But we won’t find our way by running hell-for-leather towards the light; we will find it rather by embracing the dark. By exploring the fecund, loamy ground of our being – our own being, and that of the rich, wide world around us. For some of us, this might mean adopting a meditation or movement practice which forces us to be quiet, and listen to what our bodies are telling us; for others, insight might come in the real dark, sitting in the woods alone at midnight, merging into the trees, listening to the night sounds. Some women will explore their past and present feelings by keeping a notebook. Whatever form it takes, whether it comes easily to us or not, we have to be still, and trust; we have to resist the urge to view what is happening to us as a problem to be solved. We have to let ourselves hurt, release the old needs, let go of the old urges to become what we are not, what we were not meant to be. This is how we pave the way for rebirth.
There are dangers to be found in the dark; of course there are dangers. One of the greatest dangers lies in the fact that it is all too easy to get stuck there. We may focus in too tightly on the intensity of our grief, sinking into it, drowning in it. We may talk of little else, we may become self-absorbed, self-pitying, navel-gazing. This is another of the ways in which our society tricks us, for we have become a culture of narcissists, excessively focused on the perfection of our own pain. But this is a time to resist the urge to protracted self-pity, because it is all too easy to lose ourselves in tending our own emotional wounds; it is all too easy never to move on. It is true that we have to do a good deal of inner work before we have anything meaningful to offer to the outer world; it is true too that we must recognise our wounds and incorporate them into the ground of our becoming. But we need also to stop licking them. We are more than the sum of our wounds. We need to focus on coming back to our bodies, beginning to repossess our instincts, beginning to reclaim our deep connection to the land and its non-human inhabitants. This is how we heal.
Slowly, then, in its own good time, the darkness begins to fade. We can begin to move again, to grope for the way ahead; we can find it, finally, the path which leads us on through the Otherworld. We can go forward on our pilgrimage, walking, working our way to understanding what it is that we might offer to the world. This journey of ours, like all pilgrimages, is in some senses a journey out of time – a journey which takes us far beyond the ‘normal’ everyday world. It is a journey through the Otherworld, where the rules are incomprehensible, the tasks seem impossible, and the stakes are perilously high.
And yet, as Sophie discovered, the Otherworld is also a fertile place. In stark contrast to many other mythological and religious traditions, although the Celtic Otherworld is dangerous, with ample traps for the proud or unwary, it is usually envisaged as a land of abundance. It is a place of beauty and harmony, not of darkness and terror. Old age and death do not exist there, and no hell-fires burn. It is a country which exists outside the laws of time and space; home to deities, other spirits and supernatural beings, and our ancestors. It is a world which runs parallel to our own, and which might sometimes seep into it. It is elusive, accessible only at certain times of the year, at certain ‘thin’ or threshold places, or by invitation. However you think of it, for the Celts, the Otherworld was just as real as our own; today, some would say it still is. The Otherworld and our world are simply two manifestations of the same phenomenon.
I have travelled several times to the dark entrance to the Otherworld, because whatever the monomythic plot structures might like to suggest, a Heroine’s Journey is rarely, if ever, linear. My own journey has been more like a series of spirals – spirals which go both ways, leading me inwards and then back out again. Sometimes it has seemed more maze than spiral, as I’ve lost my sense of direction completely, and found myself slammed up against a dead end. If journeys are fractal, perhaps mine has been more fractal than most. And the truth is, I’ve made most of the mistakes I warn of in the pages above.
My first flirtation with the dark came when I was thirty, when the veil which had shaded my sight and protected me from full knowledge of the Wasteland was shredded piece by piece, and finally ripped away. Everything changed. That veil could never be worn again, no matter how fiercely I might have wanted to sew it up with trembling fingers and too coarse a thread. I saw my life for what it was, and I couldn’t un-see it. I had failed to become the person I had wanted to be. I had taken the wrong path, the safe path, the path without heart. I had made my choices out of fear, for the choices we make are the products of old wounds, and of baggage from the past which we might carry around with us still. I hadn’t even begun to address the baggage from my own past, though I was awfully good at advising other people about theirs. The lives we eventually live are a function of the choices we think we have, or the choices we believe we do not have. Suffering always from an excess of caution, I had a habit of imagining fewer choices than I actually had.
But no matter how coherently you might be able to express and explain the factors which brought you to this point, when you come to the mirror and see yourself clearly for the first time, and do not like what you see, all excuses flee. Only grief is left – the great grief which comes from knowing that you have failed yourself. Some people fall apart then; others simply cannot contemplate the possibility of falling apart. So it was for me when, at thirty, I tried to manage my way through the Call which I first heard at that time. No deep plunge into the darkness for me; no signs of weakness allowed. I bit down on my grief and set about controlling the situation I found myself in. That is what I had always done; that is what I would do now.
‘Out of control’ was not an option. It had never been an option. I clung to control because that was how I had survived as a child. After my mother found the courage to divorce my father when I was four years old, she dealt with her own pain by sinking into a years-long struggle with binge drinking. During the drinking days I learned to fend for myself, and I learned to cover the tracks – for what I learned above all was that no one must ever know. We must keep the secret, we must cement over the cracks. And more than anything – more important than anything else in the world – I learned that I must take charge of my own young life. I needed to keep control, because the people closest to me seemed to have lost it.
There is no ‘off’ switch for such deeply ingrained habits; they become a part of who we are. And at thirty years old I was still so very good at papering over the cracks, and keeping everything tightly under control. So I planned the journey which I imagined was ahead very carefully, and timing was the essence of it. I knew that I needed to leave my job; I knew where I wanted to go – but everything must be tied up neatly, for above all else I feared chaos. I had seen chaos in my beautiful, sad mother; I had seen what happened when you went down into the dark and couldn’t find your way back out again. It was not going to be my path. And so it took me two tightly controlled years to extract myself from the situation I was living in, because I left nothing at all to chance.
I might not have allowed myself the full experience of Descent, but those two years weren’t pretty. Perhaps that’s precisely why they weren’t pretty. Every day, I longed to be somewhere other than the place I was. I longed very specifically to be in a tiny tumbledown cottage in the Maumturk Mountains of north Connemara which we were in the process of purchasing for a song, and which Len was going to move into and work on while I remained in the UK, earning the funds to renovate it.
Staying in the UK for a while was a necessity. We had a large mortgage, and I had no way of paying it if I didn’t have my salary, and the housing market was in a slump. We couldn’t take any chances; the house had to be sold before we could do anything. As soon as we decided to move to Ireland, we put it on the market, but it took a year to sell. Once the house was off our hands, I could safely hand in my notice – but I was contractually obliged to work out a notice period of a full year before I could leave my job, and I worked it out from a small rented, furnished flat so that I could squirrel away every spare penny to tide us over for a while when I finally escaped. And so, for two years, what I thought of as my ‘real life’ – my life-to-be in Ireland – was on hold. I hated every second of every minute of every day that I spent in that ugly office building in the small Surrey town. Every day was a roller-coaster, over and over again climbing the crest of anger and then plummeting down into despair.
Those two years that I spent hanging around at the threshold of the entrance to the Otherworld weren’t good years, and I don’t think I was a good person during them. I certainly made some foolish choices, did some things that later I wasn’t proud of. Looking back at myself with the wisdom and experience of another couple of decades, I see a curious mixture of brittleness and savageness. Disliking both the company I worked for and the people I worked with, at the mercy of two unpleasantly sexist bosses, surrounded by back-biting and politicking and by people who it seemed would do or say anything to ‘get ahead’, I became hypercritical of others, maybe even misanthropic. I held myself in too much esteem and others in too little. I see fractures too that I wasn’t aware of at the time, as the chaos which I had planned so carefully to avoid began to break out in other, more subtle ways. I see someone desperately hanging on to the cliff-edge of control with bleeding, shredded fingernails and gritted teeth, wanting all the while to just let go and scream her tired heart out as she fell.
But as always, on the surface, to everyone around me, everything in my life seemed to be perfectly – and characteristically – managed. I did everything properly and (mostly) politely and did not rock any boats. I did not smash the gates of the citadel as I left; I simply slipped away, smiling slightly. Never burn your bridges: that was my motto. That was my motto, and because of it, it was all too easy to find my way back over those bridges when my carefully planned escape didn’t work out and I found myself in retreat, just a couple of years later. So it was that I found myself repeating the process, making the same journey all over again.
And so now I have a different motto: always burn your bridges.
In the autumn of 1994 I packed up a few meagre possessions into a crumbling black Fiat Uno (the smart, large and comfortable company car handed back without an ounce of regret) and I headed west. I knew precisely what I was driving towards, and it was all that had held me together for the last two years, since I first had stood on a Connemara shore looking west. I was heading for grey mountains, brown bog and the salty scent of a not-too-distant sea. I was heading for a small shallow river along the lane and a holy well over the hill. I was heading for the clean, crisp silence of a Connemara morning and visible stars in the sky at night. I could hardly believe my luck; I could hardly believe that I’d done it. And finally, after several hours of driving, a ferry trip across the Irish Sea, and a few more hours of driving on quieter, slower, kinder roads, I passed through the unrendered new concrete block gateposts of a cottage that still wasn’t fully finished (though it did at least, thanks to the random, peripatetic comings and goings of a couple of local builders, have a new roof and windows and damp-proofing and plumbing). I stepped out of the car, fell into my husband’s arms, and I wept. I felt as if I had escaped from Death Row.
For the first time in my life I began to feel as if I was at home. It was an odd feeling. Though I didn’t actually set foot on Irish soil till I was thirty, I had always loved Ireland with an intensity that I could never explain. I had grown up immersed in and loving Irish culture. My great-grandfather, Jimmy Dunne, was an Irishman who had come to England for work. Jimmy, who died in 1937 at the age of eighty-three, was a family legend. He had, we were told, fathered thirteen children with his first wife in Ireland, who died giving birth to her final set of twins. He then had another thirteen children with his second wife, my great-grandmother, who made clothes for the local gypsy population in Hartlepool, the English town in which he eventually chose to settle. The youngest of that second set of thirteen children was my maternal grandmother.
But the intense attraction towards Irish culture that permeated my childhood wasn’t just genetic: after my mother had divorced my Scottish father, she fell in love with a golden-haired, blue-eyed Irishman from County Tipperary. Sean moved in when I was four years old, and brought with him into our world a small but perfectly formed collection of Irish folk music LPs: a vivid miscellany of comic and cautionary tales, tragic ballads and fiery rebel songs. Those songs infused me with a strong sense of the landscape, history and culture of this vibrant, passionate country which seemed so different from the dour north-eastern industrial town where we then lived. And as an antidote to a drab and difficult world, I spent much of the rest of my childhood and teenage years engrossed in Irish folk and fairy tales, myths and legends, literature and poetry.
That music and those poems and stories began to come to life again in Connemara, in the land from which they’d originated. And, little by little, so did I. I crashed for three months, exhausted, nursing myself slowly back into the world. The simplicity of my daily routine was transformative – the ability to take my tea outside in the morning and sit on the giant stone by the doorstep looking out at the mountains; to wander down by the river when I felt the need or the call, rather than when someone else said I could have a break; to empty my head of rage and despair and to focus on how alive my body felt, squelching through the bog. Removed from the Wasteland, managing for a while to hold the world at bay, my symptoms of anxiety began slowly to disappear.
My healing began in the land, and this land was what I had left the Wasteland for – the only solid refuge I’d imagined and held onto when everything else was falling apart. I turned away from the safe but confining refuge of my own head; I spent more and more time outside. In the peaceful, empty spaciousness of the bogs and mountains I found not only the silence which I always seemed to have needed, but a curious and very freeing sense of humility. I was a mere speck in this landscape; I didn’t matter. Paralysed by self-consciousness from my early childhood, more than anything now I seemed to have a need for invisibility as I slowly began to prepare for the long hard work of trying to uncover what it was that I might become, now all the trappings of the Wasteland had dissolved. The bright shining veneer of worldly success was all gone; what was left that was ‘me’? What did I want? More importantly, what did I have to give? The gift of this place was that no one knew me here; no one was looking at me, no one was judging me. The land certainly had no expectations of me. For the first time in my life I didn’t have to perform; I didn’t have to excel. I simply sat among the other living things I shared the place with, paying attention, and began instead to catch a glimmer of what it might possibly be like to just sink seamlessly into the world around you – to really live as if you were a part of it.
So it was that I found the smallest beginnings of a way of being in the land which forever afterwards was to become my touchstone for all that was healthy, and which never left me. Whatever else I did over the next few years, I was always trying to work my way back to that deep sense of silence and spaciousness, to that more tuned-in way of living in the world, to that sense of my feet being in the right place. I knew they were there somewhere, the answers I was seeking but for which I hadn’t quite, yet, formed the right questions. I was to stay for only two years in that little stone cottage in Connemara, but while I was there I felt as if it might just be possible to find a sense of belonging to this saner, wilder world. I was learning to listen – though I wasn’t entirely sure yet just what it was that I was listening to. I was learning, painfully slowly, to understand the importance of place.