Correspondences and
Totems in the Circle of Eight

Tables of correspondences have always irked me. I see the attraction of wanting a symbol, a reference point, a simple emblem of a large magical construct, but to say, for example, that yellow is the color for east—well, what if your east is pink, searing white, or dusk-deepened blue, depending on the time of day? Tables advise herbs or flowers as related to a particular direction, element, or festival, but what if those aren’t native to where you live? What if they don’t even exist there, or they’re invasive weeds? The whole correspondence table reads to me like a suspect marketing plan; why would I buy a quartz crystal for the east when I could pick up a perfectly good shell actually from the east (my east) or assign a piece of obsidian to my earth direction when what I actually find in that direction is sticky, crumbly red rock?

I felt certain that the directions themselves would provide their own totems and correspondences and that recognizing and working with these correspondences would strengthen our bonds with the direction. We all had different ways of deepening our relationships with the directions, and this was one of mine.

There’s a wonderful place called Damanhur in northern Italy, a magical-socialist miniature city-state carving out a small revolution in occult magic, social and economic experiment, and visioning for a new world. The people there, its citizens, take on new names when they become Damanhurians. They each take an animal name and a plant name to align their human selves more closely with the rest of the planet. It can take several years to discover one’s names. They work with the animal name before the plant because they say we are closer to animals, so it comes more easily to identify with them. I followed this advice in working with totems or correspondences for the Circle of Eight and began by looking at the animals and birds.

Every time we go to the cape we look for dolphins because they are so often there. They like to surf in the waves breaking onto the rocks from the east, although sometimes they mix with human surfers on the northern side of the point, in the longer, rolling waves. Sometimes they’re farther out and harder to spot, but if I stay there long enough I’ve nearly always seen them.

Whales pass the cape between winter and spring, migrating north to their breeding grounds and then later returning south, and populous whale-watching parties cluster the headland with their binoculars, picnics, and cameras. As the easternmost point of the mainland it sticks out a long way, and since the whales’ water road doesn’t take this into account, they come quite close. In the past this meant it was an ideal whale-hunting station; now it’s ideal for whale watching. But that’s only twice a year; they don’t stay—we’re just one station on a long trip, and not even that; to them, we’re passing scenery. The dolphins, on the other hand, are locals, or at least very frequent visitors. So for me it’s always been dolphins for our east place in the Circle of Eight.

Just down the coast is the little curved beach with the caves. It’s scooped between cliffs that back it quite closely, and often I’ve looked up or lain on my back and seen ospreys, locally known as seahawks, fluttering or gliding there. I imagine those cliffs, that coastal scrub, and the relative peace and quiet from humans in this not-so-frequented spot give them safety, supplies, and a good launching place. They’re not as big as eagles, not as dramatic, but they have a swerve and lift and lightness I appreciate. So I thought it was seahawks who belonged to the South-East.

I went to a talk by a Bundjalung woman working for National Parks. The cape is adjacent to Arakwal National Park, co-managed by National Parks and Wildlife and the Arakwal people, who are part of Bundjalung Nation and whose land it traditionally is. This was the first agreement made in Australia to come under the Indigenous Land Use Agreement as a result of a formal Native title claim and seven years of complex negotiations. The woman spoke eloquently of her mother and aunties, their growing up and their relationship to the beaches and ti-tree lakes, the birds and animals. She talked about the different local areas, the cape being more masculine and how it had dolphin energy, whereas just a little farther south (where our South-East point lay) was feminine, and its animal was the seahawk. I felt as if my ears were leaping out of my head to catch every nuance of every word.

Dolphins. Seahawks. I knew I was doing something right, looking at what was there. I was seeing. It created great faith in me, this simple lecture aimed as much to the school holiday children as to the few adults who’d come to hear what she had to say. I approached her afterwards and asked what she thought about the issue of doing Celtic-based, imported magic on Australian land. She didn’t give too much away; she asked me questions and nodded her head. She said that, generation by generation, Aboriginal thinking was changing, and she had shared things with us her parents’ and grandparents’ generations never would have, but she and others thought it was imperative that we had to care and had to know in order to build our own relationships with the sacred and come to understand this land we lived on.

I took it as encouragement. Seahawks, dolphins; I had found the same totems not by coincidence and not by any special magic but simply the same way as others did long before me: by looking at what was there. I was drawing a different map, that was true; one designed not by Dreamings or song lines but by an eight-pointed circle based quite arbitrarily in my house in the hills and subscribing to shire boundaries marked on a map. But I can never have that heritage of being born and raised one of the Bundjalung; I cannot know this land that way. I must know it my way or not at all, and the small miracle is that there are overlaps between our ways of knowing. Dolphins; seahawks.

A few other animal totems for our directions were obvious. In the North-East there are always pelicans. Pelicans hang out in the river near the bridge. Perched on oyster racks and in the small harbor, they seem to live permanently on the tops of the poles, a strategic position next to the boats and close to the fish shop. They look like sculptures balanced there, often four or five of them apparently asleep, each on their own pole. They fly low, skimming over the waterways that twist between the mangroves, networking their way through to the sea, flapping strongly to skim down low or rise, slowly, to bank and turn and fly along the coast to other favored spots. They’re an icon here. I was happy to acknowledge them as the sacred animal for this direction.

In the South place of the waterfall and round pool I met a green, yellow-bellied grass snake, not on grass at all but on rocks, near the base of a tree. The next time I came I looked for it again and saw it—or another, similar one—twisted in the trunk of a tree near where I’d seen it the first time. When I spoke to it and reached out to touch it, it glided slowly down the slim tree trunk towards me, twisting around a bit to keep its purchase. It seemed guardianlike. Another time I came to the top of the falls and, curled up there in the sun, inconspicuous in spite of its coloring, was a green and gold tree snake, possibly the same one; unlike me, it could probably directly travel the cliff face between the top and bottom of the falls. Or maybe there’s a family of them there—a clan, a colony; I don’t know how snakes work in that regard. None I had seen were small; slender, yes, but longer than my arm. And not unfriendly. Grass snakes in the South.

In the West, many water birds browse and cruise, rest and snack on the lake. But the kings and queens of them—the boldest, grandest, and most imperious looking—are the black swans. They’re often there, two or three of them gliding or sometimes a dozen or so in a drift looking like property managers surveying their holdings as they tour around; unlike the ducks, they stand out, heads well above the water and red beaks showing off their gleaming black plumage. They are such an Australian bird, the shocking inverse to white swans; looking like someone had made a mistake when they were first seen by Europeans, I’m sure—like they came from the bottom of the world. But to me they look like the imprint, the original that somehow faded out to white in those colder climates. Black swans, then, in the West.

I did notice how many birds I had and how few mammals. I went to places and waited; I listened and looked. In the daytime I saw nothing especially noticeable, and in the night heard only scuttled rustlings and rearrangings of the undergrowth; I never came across any gorgeous possums or little native mice. Of course they’re not keen on people, even quiet, well-behaved people. They didn’t appear, and so I had to assume that although of course they were there, part of the magic and life of these places I was so attached to, they weren’t putting themselves forward to be the animal face of the place, the totems. There were bats—a great swathe of bats passed through the shire nightly on their way to feed—they just didn’t seem to belong to any of the places in the Circle of Eight. They were travelers, part of the landscape but not dedicated to any one of our directions. Mainly birds were what I was seeing. There are a lot of very beautiful, colorful, and noticeable birds in Australia.

We have kookaburras, rosellas, honey eaters, blue wrens, and hundreds, at least, of small bush and grassland birds, along with many water and sea birds. We have parrots, as well: cockatoos and corellas and galahs. I love them all with an anguished kind of affection; my most especial favorites are the sulphur-crested white cockatoos, partly because they make a quite horrible screeching cry with great glee, loudly, and pass it back and forth between themselves as if it was the best sound ever. I think of it as the sound that ripped the world open to let in the light back in the beginning times, and I think of them like the birth of the universe: white feathered coats and a sunrise headdress. Even though I was looking for them, it was their cousins I found, the more stylish black cockatoos.

I was driving the twists and turns it took to get to the mountain in the North-West. It was a bright, warm day and I had the windows open as I drove along the final road that ends at the foot of the walks to the summit and into the forest. I heard them first: they have a cry more fluting at the end than the white cockatoos; it trails off suggestively, as if something else is going to follow. It’s the kind of thing that could happen without one noticing, except this day I was noticing. Maybe I was thinking about animals in the directions anyway, maybe I was just driving cautiously on the narrow country road, maybe I was in the right mood for it, or maybe they called to me and I heard.

They flew over the road right in front of me, low and so close I didn’t actually see them—what I saw was their shadows on the road. Black, like them. Three black flying shadows on the road, in the air in front of me, as their cries sounded out. And as I drove through those bird shadows they seemed to fill the air, shadow feathers flying inside the car and into my lungs, and I felt they were inhabiting me as I swallowed, claiming space, and still I heard them calling out, that wavering end to their cry as if asking for an answer. So I called back to them that yes, I’d seen, I had them now, I knew what they wanted: to lay claim to me and this place, to stamp their shadows onto the North-West.

The yellow-tailed black cockatoos are majestic, powerful birds with a wingspan of nearly a meter, magnified in shadow-form. Like other cockatoos, they are known for their destructive capacities; originally put to the purpose of ripping dead bark off trees and rotting logs to get at the insects burrowed in there, they appear equally happy ripping off pieces of windowsill and veranda railing. In a forest setting they hurry up the decomposition cycle of dead wood. For this direction, it’s entirely appropriate: the beginning of the downward fall, the slow descent that culminates in midwinter and the South at the bottom of the cycle. Black cockatoos have another association as harbingers of rain. When they descend in threes or fours into the bowl of the valley that holds my house, circling low with their floating cries to settle momentarily in a tall tree before taking off again with another circle or two, we start looking for rain. And this mountain in the North-West is an attractor for rains; it gathers to it the mists and fine precipitation and molten downpours that are typical of this region.

Black cockatoo shadows, just as this mountain overshadows our whole area with its scarred, hooked peak. Geologically it’s the force behind the volcanic formation of this land, and energetically it’s the dynamic focus of our circle. Black cockatoos are perfect, bringing the rain of the region’s cloud catcher to the coast and farmlands; black cockatoos that hurry death along. Black cockatoos with that flash of yellow, sunrise after a black night, like the sunrise that’s sometimes seen from the top of the mountain.

I spent a lot of time in the South-West, partly because it’s a long drive, so once I got there I tended to stay a few hours, half a day, wandering around or just sitting, listening, and reading or doing ritual in my favorite place. I looked for animals other than the occasional cattle in the paddock next door. There were magpies in the young gum trees to the north of the bora ring; they weren’t always there, but often enough. They sang their warbling songs in the dry heat, and they are a beautiful bird, those liquid sounds, but they didn’t seem to call to me or to the circle particularly. They didn’t make a big show of ownership, more a pleasant background offering. I waited for snakes, possums, bats—anything that I would associate with the darker parts of the circle, the underworld and the mysteries.

Each time I came to the bora ring I brought an offering. I did that for all the directions, but for this direction it was particular. I always brought some water, either spring water from my land or rain water since it was such a dry place and I thought the land must be thirsty. I didn’t enter the bora ring to give this offering; I knelt or crouched down near the entrance and poured it onto the earth. It would pool there, puddle, or start to run in dark ribbons before the soil suddenly received it, sucking it in. And I brought honey; half a jar of honey, which I would tip onto the earth near the water. I can’t even remember why I first took honey there, perhaps it was to offer not just the necessity of water but something sweet, as well. It felt right, and I kept doing it.

One day, still face down to the ground having given my offerings, I noticed the ants. It had always been a big place for ants, the bora ring; they’re the first into any picnic you have there, and sitting on the ground you have to continually pick them off you. I suppose they like the light, dry soil of the place. There are different kinds, but especially noticeable are mid-sized, very black ants, industrious and organized; they don’t set out to bite, but they will if you’re careless. Now they were busy organizing my honey, turning it into their honey.

Ants. They are certainly the most numerous creature at that place, prominent and continual, and now I see they are the groundskeepers. They take honey when they can get it, but more obviously, they eat the dead. They clear up a carcass left lying on the ground—snake, bird, mammal; they’re not fussy. They take it all and recycle it into ant industry and ant breeding. Given that when I lift my eyes from the bora ring just slightly I see the cemetery it shares its land with, this imagery of cleaning up the dead is perfect. Ants. I feel embarrassed I didn’t really notice them before; well, I noticed them in that irritant kind of way, but not in the sacred way. Now that I look properly—and I get down to ant level to try to do that—I see they run the whole place.

Ants are travelers between worlds; between the living and the dead, between the cemetery and the bora ring. Ants aren’t glamorous; it’s hard to imagine someone claiming Ant proudly as their totem, but they carry a lot of symbolism. They’re so organized, regimented even; just like the relentless sweep of death and endings that greets us at the end of every cycle. No room for individualism; each of us ages and dies just like everyone else. They’re the absolute of the mundane; insects which are neither glamorous nor dangerous and yet here they are on the borders of reality, inhabiting the bora ring with its thousands-year-old history, cleaning up and recycling the dead.

There’s one direction left that I haven’t been able to find an animal for: the North; the lookout. There are also magpies here in the trees near the car park, but again they don’t seem iconic or especially representative of the place or its direction. There are a lot of dogs on leashes, being walked up the hill and down again, attached to their owners more than to the place. Once when I was here a pelican flew over, shockingly low because of the sudden height of this hill. I’m sure it was quite high up in the sky until it skimmed over this place; I felt if I reached my hand up I’d be touching its belly. But it was gone in a few seconds, and they so belong to the river mouth down below that I couldn’t think of asking them to hold some other place.

Damon pointed it out to me eventually, the sign that no one reads. Lions Lookout. It’s lions, he insisted, this place belongs to lions! There are no lions in Australia and there never were. They’re almost a mythical animal in this context; magnificent, but they don’t belong. He argued that a mythical animal was even better; why had I been so mundane in my choices, with birds and ants and snakes? And especially for this position, corresponding with the Summer Solstice; surely that should have a mythical animal, if any direction should. And they were golden, like the sun, and kings of their domain; they’d love a lookout! Especially one named for them… How could I refute this logic? I was never entirely comfortable with it and left it open in the back of my mind, but no other animal ever showed up to contradict it, and so it gradually and quietly became, as named, the lions’ lookout.

These were some of my own journeys and discoveries of these eight places, but we all made journeys and discoveries. We created relationship with these places, we studied them, we made offerings and visits and then, when we stood in circle together and called to our outlying Circle of Eight, we knew what we were calling to. When I stood and called to the mountain, when I invoked its spirit to hold a place in our circle and ritual, I wasn’t just calling to ancient volcanic forces, to long-ago mountain lava. I wasn’t just calling to that iconic shape that sticks up out of the landscape to hold clouds captive and call forth the rains, to that place caught in the tides between fire and water. I was calling to the tall trees, the clayed earth, and the little stream; I was calling to glimpses of black cockatoos, to their shadows and presence felt and swallowed even if not seen.

This energy flooded through me into the circle, in my words and presence, in what I spoke and how I spoke it, my voice reverent for the mountain, somber for fire and flood, filled with surprise at those sweeping black calling shadows and stilled with the hush of forest. If I called to it in summer—well, I knew it in summer, the air hot and dense. If I called to it in winter, I had been there then, too; the snap of air, the claggy soil, bright sun in the shorter day cut to cold by afternoon. At night I had been there; at dawn. I had been there sheltered on the forest floor, soft with shed leaves and bark, in tiny groves formed by close-grown trees towering above me. I had been once to the top; shrouded in a mist so severe I could not see even a few arm-lengths ahead of me. I knew what it looked like from all directions. I knew what it felt like to sleep a night on its slopes. When I stood in circle, facing North-West to invoke the mountain I took a breath and gave my voice over to it, and through me roared its exploding rock from long ago, and it called also like the black cockatoos, sounds and feathers floating on the wind.

If I called to the West, invoking that still lake, my voice was taken by the depths, by the swans swimming across it, by the cool breeze it gave on a hot day. In the South-West my voice whispered, carrying a long way out, speaking secrets to the other realms and inviting them, through my voice and vision, into our circle. My voice held the secrets of the ants, their uncounted numbers busy about the life-and-death process; my voice held dry soil and the memory of a place sacred long, long before white people thought of coming here. In the South my voice might carry downwards with the water to fall and spill into the pool awaiting it, contained in its rock walls and greenery. In the South-East my voice was breathy with discovery—cliff path, small beach, hidden caves—the winds of change coming in, beckoning to the incoming tides, releasing with a sigh the outgoing. In the East when I breathed that fresh sea air and saw dolphins playing, the direction laughed with me for the novelty of land after so much sea and played with the dangers of cliffs, smashing waves, and strong winds. Invoking the North-East, I gave myself over to the conflict—the thrust and shove of river and sea; opposites meeting, surrendering, and conquering, each in turn; a primal dance. And in the North I felt the sweep of the whole circle behind me, around me; I surveyed the land and spoke its beauty.

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