Don’t take the pictures lightly Listen to their sound For from their coloured feeling Experience is found So listen, So learn, So read on You gotta turn the page, read the Book of Taliesyn “All the sciences of the world are collected in my breast For I know what has been, What is now And what hereafter will occur…”
Deep Purple, “Listen, Learn, Read On”
Mysterious magical potions, transformation and divine posession: Here er two stories from two different mythical spheres, both describing how the divine nature is the source of poetic inspiration.
There are certain challenges involved when studying in the Druid tradition when living outside of the British Isles. So much of the mythology and the spirituality inspired by it is grounded in the land, in the nature particular to that area, and in particular places. How do you engage with all of that when you are living somewhere else? One thing that comes naturally is to look for similar stories and concepts grounded in your own home area.
The story of Ceridwen and Taliesin is well-known among Druids. It is a complex story with many possible interpretations, which Druids seem to never tire of discussing among themselves. It is often seen as a fable about initiation into the deeper mysteries and the change following from them. The mysteries in question are about awen, the Welsh word for inspiration.
At the OBOD summer gathering this year there was a fascinating discussion between Kristoffer Hughes and Eimear Burke, comparing the Welsh story of Gwion and the Irish story of Fionn, who both gains divine inspiration by way of three drops of magical liquid. From my native Scandinavia there is the story of Odin and Suttung’s Mead.
War among the gods
The story of Suttung’s Mead is told by Snorre Sturlason in the Skáldskaparmål (The Language of Poetry, part of the Prose Edda), and in Håvamål. The Mead is a powerful magical elixir, bestowing the gift of poetry upon anyone who drinks it.
It all started with the war, the first known war, between the two families of gods known as the Æsir and the Vanir. The war eventually ended with a peace treaty between the two clans, and as a sign of peace they all spit in a vat. They then decided to make a man out of the spit. He was called Kvasir. As he was made from the stuff of all the gods he was very wise, and travelled far and wide and spread his knowledge among the people.
Kvasir eventually encountered two dwarf-brothers, Galar and Fjalar, who killed him. They drained his body of blood, mixed it with honey, and kept it in three vats, known by the names of Odrøre, Bod, and Són. This was mead, and anyone who drank from it would become either a bard or a sage.
Unfortunately for the dwarves, they had also at some point killed the jotun Gilling. When Gilling’s son, Suttung, wanted to avenge his father, the dwarves offered him the mead in exchange for their lives.
Suttung kept the mead in the center of the mountain Hnitbjorg. His daughter Gunnlöð was given the task to guard it. Her name means “invitation to battle”, so you can assume she knew a thing or two about fighting.
Odin’s heist
Odin eventually decided to obtain the mead for himself.
He worked for Baugi, Suttung’s brother, a farmer, for an entire summer. He then asked for a small sip of the mead, which Suttung refused. Baugi drilled into the mountain and Odin changed into a snake and slithered inside.
Inside he met Gunnlöð, and persuaded her to let him spend three nights with her. For each night, she allowed him to drink from one of the three vessels.
When Suttung was about to return, Odin fled, taking the form of an eagle. The jotun was of course furious when he discovered that someone had drunk his precious mead, and gave chase, also in eagle-form, but Odin eventually managed to escape.
Odin, perhaps queasy from having to flee after drinking, then vomited up all the mead he had been drinking into yet another vessel. Nearly all, anyway. Some passed out the other way, and this was not kept by the gods, but was available for all. This part of the Poet’s Mead is what has been drunk by the bad poets.
It is sometimes said that Gunnlöð gave birth to a son after her encounter with Odin, and that he was Brage, the god of poetry, but the sources are not clear on that point.
Poetry and nature
Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
These stories are different in many ways, but they have certain important elements in common. First among them is the divine potion, which is a source of inspiration or awen, and turns whoever drinks it into a great poet. The hunt or the chase is a motif found in both stories. They are also both full of shape-shifting and transformation. Kvasir is turned from spit to man to mead to inspiration, Gwion goes from boy to hare to fish to bird to corn, and is then born again not only once, but twice, eventually becoming the bard Taliesin. There are also different cases of theft, or of the magic drink ending up with someone for whom it was not intended.
In both stories nature can be seen as the source of poetic inspiration. But the stories also teach us that inspiration alone is not enough, there is also the need to master the craft.
Ceridwen brews her potion from herbs growing around Lake Bala, and boils them in water from the lake. But first must in some versions of the story seek the knowledge of the Pheryllt (which is interpreted as Druid mystics, also as the Roman poet Vergil).
Suttung’s mead is made from divine essence but is brewed by dwarves, who are usually depicted as better craftsmen than the gods themselves. It ends up with a jotun, a representative of the forces of nature. Odin also has to put in work to obtain it, first through a year of farm labour, and then the perhaps more pleasant task of three nights of love-making.
Odin might argue that he is just stealing the mead back, as it originally is made from the spit of the gods. But the liquid he steals has undergone a significant transformation along the way. And transformation, and the acquisition of wisdom, are central themes for both stories.
To sum it up in a triad, as druids are wont do to. Three pieces of advice for creative souls: learn the craft, seek inspiration in nature, and keep a drink handy.
I try to write a post for each of the neo-pagan festivals, but for Beltane inspiration has been lacking this year. Not too surprising, when you look out the window.
Beltane this year, the wand and the chalice, felt less like a celebration of the union of the Goddess and God, or the fertility of nature, and more like a rather desperate plea to nature to get on with it.
After the hottest March on record and an April with 95 less precipitation than normal, two months with literally no rain, the land was dry and barren. For a long time nothing was blooming except a tiny handful of pioneer flowers, a defiant little coltsfoot here and there. The trees withheld their leaves. The few vegetables I foolhardily planted withered and died. We have gone one feeding the birds even in May, as there was nothing to eat, and watering young trees.
Our drought at home, dramatic as it is, is a mild discomfort compared to this, of course. But it is serious enough. For decades we have based our food system on external inputs of feed concentrate (the production of which is destroying the Amazon rainforest), chemical fertilizer (which is now in shortage) and international markets (who are in turmoil because of shortages, war, and climate change). The barrenness in the garden and the forest outside our windows appears less as an isolated freak incident and more as a herald of a systemic and global instability, like the Goddess has a fever. Watering my struggling plants I am reminded of the interconnectedness of live on the planet, as microorganisms in a bigger body.
Luckily we have our own well and has not been affected by the water shortages in the cities. But the river running in the valley below our home has shrunk to the size of a small stream, and a moon landscape has appeared where there used to be lakes. A Beltane fire was out of the question, of course; over most of the country there are orange-level fire hazard alerts.
And then, yesterday, the rain appeared.
Never before have I seen such an instant reaction from the Earth. As the water was absorbed by the thirsty soil, buds and leaves started appearing on trees and patches of green burst forth from the earth. Literally in a matter of hours, the landscape changed in colour and appearance. The sun suddenly seemed friendlier, less harsh.
I am used to thinking of the union of the Goddess and God as a metaphor. Seeing the immediate effect of the rain hitting the ground, and the fertility springing from it, I have gained a new appreciation of it as a more literal truth.
Equinox, equal nights, is a time of balance: day and night are equal, light and darkness is for a brief moment in equilibrium, before the momentum of the turning wheel carries it towards the turning point of the solstice. Which is as it should be, of course, just as a moving bike will fall over if it stops.
Keeping with the maxim as above, so below, the equinox is also seen as a good time to seek balance in one’s life as well. At the vernal equinox, when entering a time of growth, you can plant not only physical seeds, but also metaphorical ones, making space and concentrating effort to grow whatever needs growing.
But this year, it is worth turning the attention outwards as well, to consider issues of growth and balance in the world surrounding us. We are seriously fucking it up.
At the time of writing, a food crisis is mounting in the world. Prices have reached an all-time high, after a year of devastating extreme weather events across the globe. With a global shortage of chemical fertilizer, an industrial agricultural system dependent on external inputs is in trouble. This is exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, but not caused by it. Of course, for many people the food crisis is nothing new, it is just the way life is lived. About one tenth of the world’s human population is undernourished. Just from 2019 to 2020, the number of undernourished people grew by as many as 161 million, a crisis driven largely by conflict, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic, reversing a decade of declining hunger in the world.
The second of the four IPCC climate reports was drowned out by the clamor of war, but pointed towards how not only the war, but our entire way of organizing our societies, is undermining the ability of both people and other creatures to keep on living as before.
All of this throws into sharp relief imbalances both in the natural world and the economic system, not to mention between the two.
Is it even possible to have balance in one’s life when things are so out of sync? It is certainly a challenge if you also want to stay connected to the rest of the world, to nature, to other living beings. Perhaps that is why so many of us seem to be retreating into our own bubbles?
I have struggled with depression (or dysthymia, if you want to get technical) for most of my life, and the ecological crisis has been one of the factors that been feeding that. When talking with psychologists about the issues I have been struggling with, in my experience that this has been challenge for the methods or perspectives they are used to. I have talked to well-meaning people offering me a program designed to get me back to being a productive worker as quick as possible – to get me in sync with society. That poses a challenge if you are depressed precisely because you are part of a system of overproduction and -exploitation.
For me this equinox became a period of reflection about what I could do to better align myself with the needs of the ecosystem, of the Goddess, at this time. What needs to grow in the world, and what needs to grow in me in order to contribute to that growth? What needs to be cleared away to make room for that which needs to grow?
I answered the questions in form of a commitment to the Order of the Oak, and to the work I do in Friends of the Earth Norway and Extinction Rebellion. These are the words of the oath of the order, which was spoken by a number of Druids in many countries on the equinox:
I swear, as a Druid of of The Order of the Oak by [that which we deem to most sacred or most appropriate as a preceptor] to advocate, advise, and take real world sacred action to conserve, restore, and protect our divine planet and its peoples in the face of unprecedented ecological devastation caused by human domination.
I vow to myself and to each of you: To commit myself daily to the healing of our world and the welfare of all beings. To live on Earth more lightly and less violently in the food, products, and energy I consume. To draw strength and guidance from the living Earth, the ancestors, the future beings, and my brothers and sisters of all species. To support others in their work for the world and to ask for help when I feel the need. To pursue a daily spiritual practice that clarifies my mind, strengthens my heart, and supports me in observing these vows.
Little seedling, sleep until winter-season goes Birch and heather slumber still hyacinth and rose
Zacharias Topelius
We have developed such an estranged relationship with nature around us that we as a matter of course can enjoy air-transported fresh mangoes in the middle of winter and gorge ourselves all year round on whatever we desire. Most people living in the richer part of the world have never felt hunger, even if we might have been hungry from time to time.
In earlier times, and for most non-human creatures, I imagine this time, at the edge of winter, must be the lean season. In autumn, plants and animals prepare for the coming winter in various ways: by storing food, by cozying up in their dens and burrows, by reducing their activity or eating and growing as fat as possible. Throughout winter, they feed from this storage. But by now they might be starting to feel the strain. The cold has been biting for a long time, stores have dwindled, all that lovely fat has been burnt away. Spring is coming. You can feel it in the air, a certain mild current bringing promise of warmer times. You are starting to wake up from your slumber, perhaps taking walks outside your den, or poking some buds towards the sun. But it is not here yet. Decievingly mild peroids are replaced by sudden cold spells. Nothing is yet growing, not here in Scandinavia, anyway. There is still some time to wait before you can eat, but in the promise of the lean period soon being over, the waiting only gets harder.
Humans, too, must have felt this time; the cold having settled in the body for so long, a long period of darkness (even in our time of pilled vitamins and supplements, around half the population in Norway, where i live, suffers from vitamin D deficiency in winter), no fresh fruit or vegetables.
This is very much what Imbolc feels like, at least in a Scandinavian setting: the promise of something yet to come. The faint quickening of the Earth, the seed stirring in the soil.
Death by cream bun
The full moons in January and February is sometimes known by evocative names such as Wolf Moon, Snow Moon or Hunger Moon (depending on who you ask, Hunger Moon can be either of them). All these names evoke the scarcity and hunger of wintertime.
A bit later will the time of Lent, which for Catholics is a time fasting. For a period of 40 days, you give up eating meat. In the secularized Lutheran country where I live, we abandoned the fast long ago. We have kept Fastelavn, the pre-fast holiday where you gorge yourself on cream buns (Swedish king Adolf Fredrik famously died after eating fourteen of them, swimming in cream, to finish off a meal of smoked herring, caviar, lobster, sauerkraut, and meat stew, washed down with generous amounts of champagne), but we have conveniently forgotten that the whole point of the day is to prepare yourself for forty days of meagre living.
For the last couple of years I have bee inspired by this practice myelf. When I say inspired I mean just that: I have no pretense of either fully understanding nor copying Catholic practices. But I have been inspired to abstain from animal products, alcohol, candy and refined sugar during this period. I have considered other abstinentions as well, such as coffee or social media, but a half-hearted ambition gets you nowhere in this game. You either do it or you do not.
Body and spirit
Bur even if my actions are inspired by Catholic practice, my approach is probably a little different. The Norwegian Catholic Church says on its home page that “traditionally, the fast is observed in order to limit bodily needs in favour of spiritual undertakings, and thus free up spiritual powers”. I understand this as presenting the bodily and the spiritual as opposites – the bodily wants and needs perhaps being seen if not ass sinful, then at least as a temptation to lead your attention away from God.
I do not feel the need to downgrade the body. I enjoy having a body. And, yes, I sometimes curse the limitations of my body or complain about pain or think life would be better if I was a little slimmer. But all in all I am quite happy with it, I celebrate the physical and enjoy the sensual. These are not distractions from God, it is here the God(dess) and the sacred reside.
A Pagan understanding of body and soul will probably seek a balance between body and spirit, to recognize that the body actually exists, and that the lives we live are not just a preparation or application processs for the next life.
A Druidic approach to this conundrum could be to attempt to dissolve the contradiction. Rather than turning away from the body to focus on the spirit, I approach the fast as a means of being more consciously present in my body, and thus in the world. This active and conscious presence also help me facilitate a stronger attention to spirit. The sixths sense is approached through the five!
Reasons for fasting
One of my primary motivations for doing this is a wish to tread softly upon the Earth. We are strangling the world through our excessive production and consumption. Restraining yourself is a good thing. By fasting I cut out some of the food with the heaviest impact on the ecosystem.
By peeling off luxuries I can be more conscious of my real needs. What do I need, and what can I do without? It does not necessarily follow that enjoying things you do not need is sinful. We are not machines. We can and should do things because we enjoy them. But knowing your needs is a good thing. (It follows that this sort of fast is not about starving yourself or eating less than you actually need.)
This period of abstinence can be seen as a way of aligning yourself to the cycles of nature, as described above. Perhaps this is why so many promises of dieting are made at the beginning of the new year, and why so many of them are broken after such a short time. After all, as nature begins to awaken, it’s time to eat.
It is not about torturing yourself. On the contrary, in the medium to long run it makes you enjoystuffmore. No, really.
Self discipline is good for you, particularly of you have ambitions of practicing magic. Self discipline can also be hard, particularly when you live in a culture where the difference between wants and needs are erased, where wishes are expected to be realized instantly, and where the possibility of doing just that is often there, if you have the cash (or willingness to put yourself in debt). Fasting is a way of exercising your self discipline muscle.
Fasting tends to promote an increased awareness of sensory perceptions and awareness of your own prescence in your body and in the world, perhaps also opening you to different impressions.
However, Lent is a poor fit for the Pagan wheel of the year. It goes on straight through the spring equinox. But with a slight adjustment the lean season fast can be held during the Hunger Moon, for a period from one new moon to the next. It could even begin on Imbolc and continue until Alban Eilir, if you want to extend the period a little. Then you get to start and finish with a feast. The only problem is that you lose out on those Fastelavn cream buns… but they probably taste just as good if you eat them for Imbolc.
«The Mole had long wanted to make the acquaintance of the Badger. He seemed, by all accounts, to be such an important personage and, though rarely visible, to make his unseen influence felt by everybody about the place.»
Kenneth Grahame
There is, for some reason, a conspicuous lack of mythological stories about the badger. There are some, of course, but not many. Despite its iconic appearance and the fact that the badger is a rather common animal, it seems mostly to be lurking in the background.
When researching this article, I leafed through a number of books with titles like «Animals in Mythology and Folklore». They have chapters on the wolf, the fox, the lynx, the hare, the beaver, and so on, but not on the badger. Badgers are also noticeably absent in collections of fairy tales from Asbjørnsen and Moe or the Brothers Grimm. There are badgers in literature, but most of them have appeared rather recently.
Thebadgers’ home ground
The British isles should be the badgers’ home ground. A fourth of the world population of the eurasian badger live there, and they have been there for approximately 250 000 years.
The relations between humans and badgers go far back as well. In Ireland badgers were eaten in ancient times. Badger bacon was seen as a delicacy fit for kings. Although badgers were probably not kept as household animals, there were laws in pre-Christian times stating the penalty for your badger digging in your neighbours’ field.
But there are only a few surviving stories about badgers from that time. This seems to have carried over into neo-pagan spirituality. The articles about various animals on the OBOD website do not mention the badger, neither does the Druid Animal Oracle. The guardians of the elements are, as we know, the hawk, the stag, the salmon, and the bear.
Perhaps the badger likes it that way, this somewhat reclusive being who lives underground and prefers to come out under the cover of night. Nevertheless, we will pull a few mythological badgers out into the limelight for a little while.
Gwawl fab Clud, the badger in the bag
Gwawl is probably the most well-known mythological badger, and he isn’t even a badger. Not quite. He is a man, but he can be seen as having a connection to badgers. Perhaps because he is a noble of Annfwn, the Welsh underworld, a connection shared with the badger due to its nocturnal and underground activity.
Gwawl appears in the first branch of the Mabinogi. He is the promised of Rhiannon, but she prefers Pwyll pen Annfwn. (Despite the name, Pwyll does not hail from Annfwn himself, but he subbed as a king there for å year, while the real king got himself some well-deserved time off.)
When Pwyll and Rhiannon hold a wedding feast, the spurned Gwawl appears in disguise and asks for a boon. Pwyll carelessly promises anything that is within his power to give. Gwawl then asks to have Rhiannon for himself. Pwyll is bound to grant his wish, but with Rhiannon’s help he manages so stall it for a year.
The next year a feast is held for Gwawl and Rhiannon, and now it’s Pwyll’s turn to appear in disguise and ask for a boon. Gwawl is suspicious, but agrees when all he asks for is enough food to fill his bag. The bag, however, turns out to bottomless. No matter how much is put in it, there is still room for more. As they keep stuffing the bag, Gwawl is told that if will be filled when a man rich in hosts and lands steps in it.
When he does, he is caught in the bag, of course. ‘What is in the bag?’, ‘A badger’, Pwyll and his men tell each other as he is punched and kicked around. Gwawl asks for mercy, saying that there is no honour in killing a man unable to defend himself. Pwyll agrees to let him go, on the condition that he will not seek retribution for what happened.
This is said to be the origin of the game known as «the badger in the bag», which does not sound like fun for all the participants. Pwyll’s actions is also shown to have consequences in later branches of the story.
Tadhg mac Céin’s failed party
Moving on to Ireland, the story of Taghd was first told in the Sanas Cormaic, a glossary ascribed to the bishop-king Cormac mac Cuilennáin, but multiple versions of the story exists.
As the story goes, king Taghd’s son wanted to hold a feast for his father, with meat from all kinds of animals. He tricked a number of badgers out of their sett (either five or a hundred, depending on which version of the story you are reading). He did this by swearing on his fathers honour they would come to no harm. Despite his word, he killed the badgers and served them to his father. When Taghd saw what kind of meat he was served, he was furious and refused to eat.
The son should probably have done his homework better — according to the story, Tadhg actually means badger.
People with a geis (a magical prohibition) against eating the flesh of an animal with whom they share a special bond is a recurrent motif in Irish mythology. The most well-known of them is probably Cú Chulainn.“The hound of Culann” had of course a geis against eating dog, and when he went ahead and did it anyway, things went sideways from there. With a name meaning badger, it should come as no surprise that Tadhg has a geis against eating badgers.
In one version of the story, the badgers are also his own, shape-changed relatives.
Monsters and good helpers
In both of these stories, the badgers are not really seen as endowed with mystical attributes. They appear primarily as victims. You might argue that Gwawl is more of an antagonist than a victim, but his badger-aspect is only mentioned when he is helplessly trapped in the bag. Perhaps badgers were most often encountered when people were hunting for them?
We encounter a more proactive badger in a slightly more recent Irish story involving St. MacCreahy of Clare. The badger in this story is a broc sidh or bruckee, a demonic creature terrorizing the countryside, capable of devouring an entire flock of cattle for one meal. The bruckee is said have resisted the prayers of six local saints before St. MacCreahy eventually succeeded in getting rid of it.
Another saint who encountered a badger is St. Ciarán, one of the twelve apostles of Ireland, who was said to have a way with animals. According to one story, a fox, a badger, and a wolf helped St. Ciarán with chopping wood and building huts for his cloister-brothers. One day the fox stole the saint’s shoes, but the badger chased him and forced him to give them back and repent like a proper monk.
The badgers’ golden age
The story of St. Ciaráns helpful badger can perhaps be seen as a foreshadowing of the many badgers appearing in literature in the modern age.
There are numerous literary badgers from this period, and now they are presented in a very different light. These badgers are for the most part friendly creatures, if slightly gruff, offering help and wisdom to the protagonists.
Consider, for example, the badger in The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (here the protagonist himself is also turned into a badger for a while), in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, in Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl, Watership Down by Richard Adams or the Narnia stories by C. S. Lewis. This list alone is enough to declare the 20th century as the literary golden age of the badgers.
This change of attitude is probably no coincidence. The old mythical tales hail from an age where most people lived in the countryside, and probably saw the badger either as a pest ruining their fields, as game to be hunted, or both. The 19th century romantics and 20th century fantasy writers, on the other hand, tended to see nature through a lens of nostalgia.
We can understand this as a counter-cultural reaction to a society in rapid and often violent transformation. These writers lived in a society where former commons had been privatized and people had been driven into the rapidly growing cities to serve as industry workers. Through a process described as entzauberung (dis-enchantment) by the sociologist Max Weber, the mystery and tradition of old times was replaced by rational modernity. The bond with nature was being broken. In this age of urbanization and modernity, the badger became an ambassador of the old society that was on the verge of disappearing. The friendly badgers we encounter in these books are often guardians of knowledge, traditions, and order.
We can forgive them, then, for being a little gruff.
Twopoetic badgers
The 19th century poet John Clare also presents a nostalgic view of the badger. While his poem Badger describes a hunt, he grants the badger a great deal of respect for its stubbornness and strength. This badger can fight and win against an entire pack of dogs.
When badgers fight, then every one’s a foe. The dogs are clapt and urged to join the fray; The badger turns and drives them all away. Though scarcely half as big, demure and small, He fights with dogs for bones and beats them all.
The badger also appears in a poetic story by J. R. R. Tolkien, in the woods of Middle-Earth’s very own Jar Jar Binks — Tom Bombadil.
In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Tom is captured by “Badger-brock with his snowy forehead / and his dark blinking eyes” and his relatives. They grab Tom by his coat, pulling him down into their subterranean home. But when Tom gruffly (and possibly by means of a spell) asks to be released, they apologize and show him the way out.
Later, when Tom ‘captures’ hos wife-to-be, Goldberry, the badgers appears as guests at the wedding, dancing “in the bright honey-moon”.
…and a villain
We also meet a couple of dastardly badgers. The most memorable of them is probably Tommy Brock, from Beatrix Potters’ The Tale of Mr. Tod. Interestingly enough, Potter herself led a largely rural lifestyle.
This badger is described as “a short bristly fat waddling person with a grin; he grinned all over his face. He was not nice in his habits. He ate wasp nests and frogs and worms; and he waddled about by moonlight, digging things up”. He would occasionally eat rabbit-pie,“ but it was only very little young ones occasionally, when other food was really scarce”.
In the beginning of the story, Tommy Brock is on good terms with the rabbits, and is invited in for seed-cake and cowslip wind and cabbage leaf cigars. But when the old rabbit grandfather falls asleep, Tommy is tempted to run off with the bunnies to eat them. Before he comes that far he gets into a quarrel with Mr. Tod, the fox, and the bunnies manage to run off.
Folklore
A collection of folklore and beliefs about badgers have also been preserved, and some of them are still living folklore.
In Britain and Ireland, badgers were sometimes seen as descendants of pigs brought by the Vikings. They were able to travel quickly downhill by rolling up into a ball, and they had longer legs on one side of the body, allowing them to walk upright in steep slopes. There are also stories about lost children being raised by badgers.
In my own Scandinavian homeland, there is a persistent belief that when a badger bites, it will not let go until it hears the crunching of bone. One way to protect yourself against this is to wear eggshells or lumps of coal in your boots to trick the badger. Several people I know have expressed this belief, usually followed by a slightly uncertain «but that’s not really true, is it?».
The badger is connected to earth and thus also to the underworld. In a few verses from the 19th century it is therefore seen as a harbinger of death:
Should one hear a badger call, And then an ullot cry, Make thy peace with God, good soul, For thou shall shortly die.
A badger crossing the road could bring good or bad fortune, much like a black cat:
Should a badger cross the path Which thou hast taken, then Good luck is thine, so it be said Beyond the luck of men.
But if it cross in front of thee, Beyond where thou shalt tread, And if by chance doth turn the mould, Thou art numbered with the dead.
We can imagine that a great number of stories like these could have existed without being written down. And, as we mentioned, perhaps this is exactly how this nocturnal shadow-walker likes it.
Nevertheless, if you know where to look, the paw-prints of the badger can be found in stories and mythology from ancient times to the present age. To find a really rich tradition of badger stories, however, we need to look overseas — to Japan, and to America.
Sources
Casal, U. A. «The Goblin Fox and Badger and Other Witch Animals of Japan.» Folklore Studies 18 (1959): 1-93. doi:10.2307/1177429.
Frøstrup, Johan Christian: Dyr i tro og overtro (Grøndahl, 1989)
Mac an Bhaird, Alan. «Varia II. Tadhg Mac Céin and the Badgers.» Ériu 31 (1980): 150-55. www.jstor.org/stable/30008220.
Mac Coitir, Niall: Ireland’s Animals (The Collins Press, 2010)
Sullivan, Charles William: The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays (Psychology Press, 1996)
Thos. J. Westropp. «A Folklore Survey of County Clare (Continued).» Folklore 21, no. 4 (1910): 476-87. www.jstor.org/stable/1255388
The holiday commonly known as Samhuinn among Neo-Pagans is by some accounts the beginning of the year. (In Wales a similar holiday is known as Nos Galan Gaeaf). It is a time connected with death, the dead, and the ancestors, which is fitting for a new year, as death is also the beginning of a new turn of the cycle.
Dedicating a holiday to the dead is probably healthy in a time where our relationship to death is often lacking substance. We tend to think of death as unpleasant, to the point of not really talking about it, and rarely acknowledging the role death plays in our lives. When death does appear, as it inevitably will, we are often left feeling awkward, fumbling for words, not really knowing what to make of it, because most of us have so little experience in dealing with it.
In the context of an unfolding ecological crisis, death takes on a different meaning than just individuals passing on. The phrase “turn of the cycle” may not be sufficient to express what is happening in the current situation. A huge number of individuals from different species are passing on without new individuals replacing them. They die, and then they are gone. The circle is broken.
How can a nature-based spirituality relate to events such as these?
To the otherworld and back again
One of the fascinating aspects about many of the Celtic myths is the close and reciprocal interaction between the Otherworld and the prosaic world.
The Welsh medieval poem Preiddeu Annwn (The Spoils of Annwn) tells of King Arthur’s expedition to the otherworld in the ship Prydwen. He brings back treasures, most importantly a cauldron with mystical properties, which “does not boil the food of a coward”, with “a dark ridge around its border and pearls”. Two lines of the poem can be interpreted to mean that the narrator, the bard Taliesin, got the gift of poetry from the cauldron:
My poetry, from the cauldron it was uttered. From the breath of nine maidens it was kindled.
The mystical cauldron with connection to the otherworld appears in many Welsh mythological stories. The story of Culhwch and Olwen also tells of Arthur going on a journey in Prydwen to claim Diwrnach’s cauldron. In this story he goes to Ireland rather than to Annwn (but perhaps the difference was not that great to the original audience).
The giant Bran is involved in events concerning a magical cauldron in Ireland. This cauldron can bring the dead back to life. As in Arthur’s journey to Annwn, only seven people return from this expedition, Taliesin being one of them.
In the fourth branch of the Mabinogi Arawn, king of Annwn, sends a flock of magical pigs as a gift to Pryderi, king of Dyfed. These fine pigs inspired envy among others, eventually leading to a war with the neighbouring kingdom of Gwynedd. A similar motif can be found in the mystical poem Cad Goddeu (Battle of the Trees), which also describes a battle between Gwynedd and Annwn. The cause of the conflict was a dog, a lapwing, and a roebuck which had been stolen from Annwn.
A common thread for all of these related stories is that the Otherworld is the source of exceptional things: poetic inspiration! Fantastical beasts! Life after death! We see the contours of an Otherworld quite different from the Christian Hell or Heaven; a place where life does not end with death and where the Otherworld is not the final stop, but the source of new life and wealth for the living.
Annwn can be interpreted as the land of the gods or faeries, the land of the dead, as both or something in between. Without making any claims about what the stories “really” mean or what the ancient Celts themselves believed, modern readers can be inspired by this to see death as just another stage of life; that life and death are not opposites, but rather two aspects of the same phenomenon.
We can understand the cycle of life and death, decay and rebirth, not just as the “grand” narrative concerning what we perceive as the beginning and end of our own lives, but also as something that unfolds every day in between. We kill things – plants, animals, or fungi – and eat them so that we may live. Through the process of apoptosis, parts of ourselves die continuously so that we might live. When this does not happen, we call it cancer (I stole this point from Hughes 2019).
We also give back to support life around us by returning waste, sometimes even our own bodies, back to the cycle. For everything that dies, there is something else being nourished. Perhaps the spoils of Annwn manifest here, the transformative cauldron bridging the gap between the living and the dead.
Bodily and spiritual death
Death is not only the inevitable end of our current incarnations, but also an ubiquitous force present in our lives as we live them. We kill other beings so that we may live, as everything in nature does, but most of us only see the sanitized end-result of a visceral and often grisly process.
Kristoffer Hughes (2019) mentions how we have created a layer of “visceral insulators”, professionals who serve to insulate the population from the grisly business of death. Hospitals and mortuaries impose a clean break between the living humans and the dead; washing and caring for and disposing of the dead for us so we do not have to. Butchers (and garbage collectors) serve the same purpose for animals. I would add professional soldiers to that list, insulating us from the very real violence upon which our society rests. In a quote often attributed to George Orwell, “we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm”.
Often in our culture, death is seen as the enemy. We struggle against death to the point of keeping people artificially alive far beyond the point where life has any enjoyment left to offer. Many people oppose euthanasia on ‘humane’ grounds. Interestingly enough, for animals it’s the other way around: The ‘humane’ approach to a suffering animal is to kill it to end further suffering. There is a striking dissonance between the way we approach death for ourselves and for other species.
Pagan and Druid spirituality do not seek to deny or antagonize death. Still, perhaps partly as a result of this detachment from the visceral side of death, we often seem to be mostly concerned with the spiritual aspect. In ritual we seek to honour, or talk to, the spirits of the dead. Dying itself is sometimes described as passing into spirit. Sometimes the soul or spirit is seen as eternal, unchanging, as opposed to the temporary body. Sometimes death and rebirth is even seen as a process with the ultimate goal of escaping the confines of the physical body..
There is a certain ambiguity here. If parts of us are considered unchanging, then perhaps it becomes easy to see our bodies as not really ourselves, not the real ourselves, but “a machine that contains the spirit” (Hughes), something we wear, for the time being, not something we are. On the other hand, one of the most attractive features of pagan or earth-based spirituality is how the physical and spiritual aspects of existence are acknowledged as equally important. The flesh is not evil, nor a distraction from the more elevated or worthy spirit. It is the realm in which we live our lives, and thus every bit as important as the spirit.
Death is not just passing into spirit, it is also our physical bodies moving on to other forms of life. I have no way of knowing what happens to our spirits when we die. But the way to new life also goes through our bodies being consumed, nourishing other bodies and becoming part of them. Perhaps this is what reincarnation truly is; parts of our being moving through the spiral of life, ever-changing.
Starhawk expresses it beautifully in The Spiral Dance:
All things are swirls of energy, vortexes of moving forces, currents in an everchanging sea. Underlying the appearance of separateness, of fixed objects within a linear stream of time, reality is a field of energies that congeal, temporarily, into forms. In time, all ‘fixed’ things dissolve, only to coalesce again into new forms, new vehicles.
It can be a scary thought, challenging our sense of individuality. Even as we talk of connecting with the world, the Great Spirit, the Goddess, it’s like we insist that parts of us, the core parts of us, are disconnected after all. But if we hold on to this thought, we can appreciate our ancestors being with us on Samhuinn, as they always are: in the trees, in the soil, in birds and plants and animals and in our own bodies, in the living land.
No matter what you think of these questions, I think what happens to our physical remains is worth our attention.
Care for the land, soon you will be part of it again
This is one of those things that are better experienced than just explained. You can, if you wish, follow this meditative visualization (inspired by one found in Starhawk 2004).
Imagine that you are lying on the ground, rotting. Perhaps you are in a forest, with autumn leaves falling around you, or in another place evoking tranquility and peace, death unfolding around you as you yourself pass to the next stage of life. If you wish you can imagine yourself as a leaf, falling from a tree, or simply as yourself.
Feel animals taking bites of you, insects and microorganisms breaking down the fibres of your body. Feel yourself becoming one with the soil, feel how pieces of you are nourishing animals, birds, insects, fungus, becoming part of their bodies. Even here, at this place and time of death, life abounds.
Let your consciousness follow one of these parts, perhaps an insect or a bird. Who will eat it? Who will you become next? What does it feel like to be an earthworm, a beetle, a plant? Let your consciousness follow your journey from one being to the next. Perhaps an awareness will arise; that we are all part of a greater whole, and that our individual incarnations are merely a particular and temporary constellation of energy, of life-matter, continually moving from one shape to another. Allow yourself plenty of time to follow the flow of life-force.
Perhaps you will end up in the forest again, as a leaf over the ground where your body was lying, and as you look down upon the ground you let go, whirling through the air, moving ever forward in the spiral.
Cursed by the golden bowl
But what happens when this process is halted, when decay and rebirth is not allowed to happen, but matter is frozen in a fixed form?
In the third branch of the Mabinogi a magical mist descends on the land of Dyfed, leaving it empty of domesticated animals and humans. This is the situation when Manawydan and Pryderi come across a white boar (cue for Otherworldly business) and follow it to a huge, towering fort. Pryderi enters the fort and is drawn towards a beautiful golden bowl. Upon touching the bowl, “his hands stuck to the bowl, and his two feet to the slab on which he was standing. The power of speech was taken from him so he could not utter a single word. And thus he stood“. When his mother Rhiannon later comes looking for her son, she too enters the fort and suffers the same fate. In a blanket of mist, Pryderi, Rhiannon, and the fort vanish. They are effectively trapped in their current form.
Consider plastic pollution, one of our biggest environmental concerns today. Cheap and practical, plastic was not too long ago imbued with a certain futuristic glamour, the harbinger of a bright sci-fi age where everything would be glitzier and more convenient.
It took a while for us to realize that, as we kept producing more of it, plastic did not really break down, nor did it have anywhere to go. It just stayed in its form, perhaps broken into smaller pieces, but not becoming anything else. Today plastic is found on the most remote mountaintops and the deepest ocean floors. Human babies are full of the stuff, and many animals are not able to properly nourish themselves because of all the plastic in their stomachs. In the North Pacific Ocean, the pile of waste known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated to be covering an area three times the size of France.
By converting organic matter into plastic and other synthetic materials, we are effectively removing matter from the circle of life, death, decay and rebirth. Rather than the ever-shifting dance of life and death, we are fixing it in a kind of perpetual unlife. This is what being undead looks like.
The curse affecting both Pryderi and Rhiannon as well as Dyfed turns out to be the work of an enchanter seeking revenge for the humiliation of Gwawl ap Clud, in an earlier branch of the tale. The curse is eventually broken, and they can return to life. The curse trapping plastic in its current form can turn out to be longer lasting, as various plastic articles can take between 200 and 1000 years to decompose.
The question of our own deaths is also important here. Where I live, the possibilities for an ecological funeral are almost non-existent; while a normal funeral, with its caskets and chemicals and everything, can be very polluting. Even in death, there is a choice of feeding the earth and rejoining the circle, or fighting tooth and nail against it.
Stoke the fire
For Samhuinn, I invite you to consider the flows of energy in your household or your everyday life. What comes in, what moves on, and in what form? Will it move on to find new life in the cauldron of transformation, or will it remain frozen in the otherworldly fort? Is there anything that can be done to stoke the fires of the cauldron?
Literature
Kristoffer Hughes, Journey Into Spirit: A Pagan’s Perspective on Death, Dying & Bereavement (Llwellyn, 2019)
Starhawk, The Earth Path. Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature (HarperCollins, 2004)
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess: 20th Anniversary Edition (HarperOne, 1999)
Å feire jordens fruktbarhet i en tid med økologisk sammenbrudd.
Det nærmer seg Lughnasadh, som er navnet nypaganister ofte bruker på festivalen mellom juli og august.
Lughnasadh befinner seg i overgangen fra sommer til høst. Sporene til denne overgangen begynte man å se allerede ved midtsommer; ikke bare at dagene, som fram til da har blitt lengre og lysere, nå ble kortere igjen, men også i luktene. Mens våren er vekst og friskhet, er sommeren modenhet og med et vagt anstrøk av råttenskap i lufta, etter hvert som den frenetiske veksten og forplantningen løser seg ut i et klimaks.
I denne overgangen er sammenhengen mellom liv og død kanskje tydeligere enn noen gang ellers. Den fruktbare naturen viser seg overalt, i frukt og bær og blomster og sopp. Om morgenen vekkes jeg av fugler på jakt etter modne rips. I grønnsakhagen strutter potetplanter og brokkoli. Men overgangen mellom modenhet og overmodenhet og råttenskap er hårfin. Samtidig er også dette tiden da noen skapninger dør for at andre skal få leve.
For menneskesamfunn kan en god eller dårlig kornhøst utgjøre forskjellen på liv og død – også i dag, selv om de som vil lese dette antakelig er rike nok til å kjøpe seg ut av det enn så lenge. For kornet selv er utfallet stort sett gitt, enten høsten er god eller dårlig.
I mytologi og folkesanger knyttet til planting og innhøsting kommer sammenhengen mellom død og liv iblant fram, som i balladen om John Barleycorn, som viser hvordan kornhøsten også er ganske brutale greier:
There were three men come out of the west, their fortunes for to try And these three men made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn would die They’ve ploughed, they’ve sown, they’ve harrowed, thrown clods upon his head Till these three men were satisfied John Barleycorn was dead (…) They’ve hired men with the sharp-edged scythes to cut him off at the knee They’ve rolled him and tied him around the waist, treated him most barbarously They’ve hired men with the sharp-edged forks to prick him to the heart And the loader has served him worse than that for he’s bound him to the cart So they’ve wheeled him around and around the field till they’ve come unto a barn And here they’ve kept their solemn word concerning Barleycorn They’ve hired men with the crab tree sticks to split him skin from bone And the miller has served him worse than that for he’s ground him between two stones
Lughnasadh har navnet sitt fra den irske guden Lugh, og er en festival med en lang historie før den ble adoptert av moderne nypaganister, og med mange lokale variasjoner og myter tilknyttet seg. Den kalles iblant med navnet også kirken bruker, Lammas eller brødmesse. I Norge foregår den på dagen for Per vinkel, noen dager etter den mer kjente Olsok.
Lugh stammer delvis fra fomorene, som i likhet med jotnene representerer naturkreftene. Selv tilhørte han likevel guderasen Tuatha Dé Danann, som senere utviklet seg til å bli alver og underjordiske, men som vis-a-vis fomorene kan sies å representere sivilisasjonen; et invaderende folk som tok Irland i sin besittelse og fordrev de som tidligere hadde bodd der.
Lugh er kjent for å være flink til alle slags ‘kunster’ og håndverk som var verdsatt i det gamle jordbrukssamfunnet, et slags guddommelig søskenbarn på Gjøvik. Derfor har han også kommet til å overskygge Tailtiu, sin fostermor, som er den som egentlig skulle hylles på denne festivalen.
Tailtiu sies å ha vært den som ryddet Irland for jordbruk. Dette arbeidet var så anstrengende at hun døde av det, og Lugh opprettet derfor høstfestivalen i hennes ære.
Motivet med gudinnen som dør for jordbrukets skyld dukker opp flere steder, og gjenspeiles i at jordbruk i sitt vesen er en ganske voldelig praksis. For å gi plass til potetene mine har jeg rykket opp planter og gravd opp røtter. For å stimulere veksten og fruktbarheten til de plantene jeg har bestemt meg for at jeg vil ha, rydder jeg vekk mangfoldet av de andre.
Dette er ofte mer dramatisk enn bare å luke litt ugress i potetlandet; størstedelen av Europa var dekket av skog før de ble ryddet vekk av jordbrukere de siste 3-4000 årene. Ofte ble det gjort ved å sette fyr på skogen og dyrke i asken som var igjen; litt som det gjøres i Amazonas i dag, kanskje, der utrolig komplekse økosystemer brennes for å frigjøre plass til beiteland og monokulturell soyadyrking. Dermed er det ikke bare en og annen plante, men ofte hele habitater, som går med. I dag er tap av habitater den viktigste grunnen til at FNs naturpanel advarer om masseutryddelse.
Når plantene har blitt store nok, blir de plukket og spist. Ikke bare planter, men også dyr blir påvirket av dette; i det moderne landbruket blir dyr kvestet av slåmaskiner, og store landområder gjøres om fra habitater til monokulturelle åkre der ofte ikke engang insekter kan leve. For ikke å glemme alle dyrene som vokser opp i fangenskap for så å bli til mat.
Mye moderne jordbruk bygger på de samme prinsippene som industri, der man baserer seg på eksterne inputs i stedet for et sirkulært kretsløp: kraftfor, kunstgjødsel, sprøytemidler. Intens monokulturell dyrking utarmer jorda. For å kunne dyrke likevel, tilsetter man kunstgjødsel. Gjødselen inneholder fosfor, som for det meste utvinnes av fosfatstein gjennom gruvedrift, før det skilles ut gjennom en industriell prosess. Dette krever energi og ødelegger naturen. Avrenning fra landbruket i sjø og vassdrag kan skape store miljøproblemer, blant annet gjennom oppblomstring av alger som kveler annet liv i vannet, og gjør det uegnet til å drikke eller bade i. I Oslofjorden er dette en viktig grunn til at økosystemet er i ferd med å kollapse. Historien om gudinnen som dør for at jorda skal kunne dyrkes har ikke blitt mindre relevant med årene.
Nå står jordbruket overfor stor usikkerhet rundt den fremtidige forsyningen av fosfor. Nesten alt fosforet som brukes i landbruket i dag kommer fra USA, Kina og Marokko (inkludert det okkuperte Vest-Sahara), der reservene kan være brukt opp om 50 til 100 år. Samtidig har man i jordbruket avlet fram planter som er tilpasset et miljø med rik tilgang på gjødsel, uten den samme evnen til å ta til seg næring fra skrinne omgivelser som viltvoksende planter har.
Det var spådd at fomorenes leder Balor skulle bli drept av sitt eget barnebarn. Han forsøkte derfor så godt han kunne å hindre dette, blant annet ved å sperre sin datter inne i et tårn. Men barnet ble selvfølgelig født likevel. I det andre slaget ved Mag Tuired kjempet Tuatha Dé Danann mot fomorene, og Balor falt for hånden til sin dattersønn, Lugh.
Både Lugh og Balor har blitt knyttet til solen. Historien om Balors død har derfor blitt tolket som en fortelling den nye solen som tar over for den gamle, i overgangen fra et år til et annet. En annen tolkning gjør Balor, med sitt ene dødelige øye, til en personifisering av solens destruktive krefter, og Lugh til de kreftene som for oss er fordelaktige.
Men dersom man ser Lugh og Balor som representanter for henholdsvis sivilisasjon og natur, skjuler det seg en hel liten fabel om jordbruket her også. Uavhengig av hva folk tenkte i gamle dager kan kanskje denne tolkningen gi mening for moderne lesere: At Lugh, som representant for den bearbeidede naturen, ender med å ta livet av de urgamle, utemmede naturkreftene som er hans opphav.
For paganister som verdsetter livets sirkel, det økologiske kretsløpet mellom liv og død, forråtnelse og gjenfødelse, er dagens landbruk åpenbart dypt problematisk. Hvordan kan man forholde seg til Lughnasadh i dag, med sine dype røtter i jordbrukssamfunnet?
Man kan tenke på hva som bør styrkes og svekkes i dag, og knytte sin markering til årstidene og naturlige sykluser snarere enn til industriell jordbruksproduksjon; til fruktene og bærene som blir modne, til den nye generasjonen dyr som har vokst opp, og til døden som lurer bak geitramsen. Man kan markere sin plass i livsspiralen, der man høster det man trenger, men helst ikke mer, i visshet om at man selv en dag skal innta en annen rolle i næringskjeden.
Man kan tenke over hvordan man kan redusere sin avhengighet av den industrielle jordbruksmaskinen: kanskje se hva som finnes av lokale produsenter omkring seg som drives etter mer regenerative prinsipper. Hvis man er en del av jordbruket selv, kan man vurdere hvordan dette kan drives på en måte som står minst mulig i motsetning til økosystemene rundt. Men på et vis er vi jo så godt som alle knyttet til det industrielle jordbruksmaskineriet. Å komme seg unna det er nok mer krevende enn å velge riktige barer i butikken, men kanskje man likevel kan vurdere om det er noe i ens eget forbruk som kan fjernes eller legges om i en mindre ressurskrevende retning. Hjemme kan man planlegge å sette av en flekk i hagen eller noen kasser på balkongen til å dyrke mer av egen mat, basert på organisk gjødsel og uten torvbasert jord. Bygge en kompostbinge. Sette av en del av hagen som verken skal dyrkes eller klippes. Sette opp et fuglebrett eller på annet vis planlegge å gi noe av jordbrukets overskudd tilbake til den ville naturen. I en tid der høsten ofte står i fokus kan man også tenke over ens egen rolle i den store sammenhengen; vi høster, men hva kan høstes av oss? Det er ikke tilfeldig at mannen med ljåen, utstyrt med et redskap som forbindes med slåttonna og med kornhøsten, også har blitt et symbol på vår egen død.
Vår rolle i kretsløpet innebærer selvfølgelig at vi selv pent må dø når vår tid er inne; helst uten å holde oss kunstig i live med all verdens forurensende hjelpemidler, eller forgifte likene våre med kjemikalier før vi legges i jorda, men rett og slett la oss bli spist og vende tilbake til sirkelen, slik vi har spist selv.
Jula varer helt til påske, men det er ikke sant, for derimellom kommer fasten, synger vi. Men det er ikke sant, for hvem faster vel i våre dager, når påskemarsipanen kommer i butikkhyllene i februar?
Fastelavn betyr egentlig kvelden før fasten. Den har vi holdt fast på, med fleskesøndag og feitetirsdag, men de kremfylte bollene var der altså engang for å forberede oss på 40 dager med gudfryktighet og sveltihjel.
De siste tre årene har jeg, inspirert av katolikkene, fastet fra askeonsdag til påskeaften. Når jeg sier inspirert av mener jeg nettopp det; jeg har ingen pretensjoner om verken å forstå eller å kopiere den katolske fasten, som er en stor greie med en betydning som sikkert strekker seg dypere enn hva en tilfeldig observatør fra utsida får med seg.
Å, sjelen
For min del innebærer fasten å avstå fra kjøtt og animalsk mat (altså spise vegansk), droppe alkohol, godteri og tilsatt sukker, og generelt spise mindre. For å hjelpe til med det siste har jeg brukt en av disse slankeappene. Jeg hadde også noen halvhjertede ambisjoner om å kutte ut kaffe og sosiale medier, men i dette gamet nytter det ikke med halvhjertede ambisjoner. Enten gjør man det, eller så gjør man det ikke, og jeg gjorde ikke dette denne gangen.
Utgangspunktet mitt for å faste er litt annerledes enn det jeg oppfatter som den tradisjonelle kristne begrunnelsen. På Den katolske kirkens nettsider kan man for eksempel lese at “[tradisjonelt er faste noen man gjør for å begrense legemlige behov til fordel for åndelige beskjeftigelser, og slik frigjøre åndelige krefter”. Det forstår jeg som et syn der det legemlige og det åndelige står i motsetning til hverandre. Der kjødelige lyster kanskje er syndige, eller kanskje bare en distraksjon fra Gud*.
(*Så skal det sies at jeg kanskje karikerer det kristne synet litt også; en alternativ måte å oppfatte den katolske fasten på er at “troen ikke leves i en eller annen adskilt, åndelig sfære, men at den angår våre liv som hele mennesker av kjøtt og blod – at viljen til å søke Gud skal gjennomsyre alle sider av livet”, som en annen person uttaler i samme artikkel.)
Mmm, kroppen
Denne nedgraderingen av det kroppslige er ikke noe paganister driver med. Paganister er glade i det kroppslige og fysiske og sanselige; det er slett ikke noen distraksjon fra Gud, tvert imot er det der gud(innen) eller det hellige finnes. Et paganistisk syn på kropp og sjel vil være mer preget av jevnbyrdighet mellom det kroppslige og det sjelelige, av at kroppen finnes i virkeligheten, og av at dette livet ikke bare er en forberedelse eller opptaksprøve til det neste.
En druidisk tilnærming til dette kan være å forsøke å oppheve motsetningen: Man kan si at det med fasten ganske naturlig følger en økt oppmerksomhet om det sanselige, en følelse av en sterkere tilstedeværelse i verden, og gjennom det også en sterkere oppmerksomhet om det man kan kalle det åndelige. Veien til den sjette sansen går gjennom de fem!
Men nå gjør jeg ting veldig vanskelig her. I stedet kan jeg jo ramse opp årsakene til at jeg synes faste er verdt å drive med:
Først og fremst dreier det seg om et ønske om å trå varsomt på jorda. Vi er i ferd med å kvele verden gjennom overforbruk. Det er bra å begrense seg. Faste innebærer å kutte ut noen av den mest forurensende maten.
Ved å skrelle bort en del luksus kan jeg bli mer oppmerksom på hva som er mine egentlige behov. Hva trenger jeg, og hva trenger jeg egentlig ikke? Så trenger man ikke av den grunn å mene at det er syndig å nyte ting man egentlig ikke trenger. Vi er ikke maskiner. Men det er fint å vite hvilke behov man har.
Selvdisiplin er viktig, ikke minst hvis man har ambisjoner om å utøve magi. Selvdisiplin er også vanskelig, ikke minst i en kultur der forskjellen mellom ønsker og behov er visket ut, der opplevde ønsker helst skal tilfredsstilles umiddelbart, og der muligheten for å gjøre dette ofte er sterkt til stede så lenge man har penger til det. Faste hjelper deg med å trene selvdisiplin-muskelen.
Med fasten følger det som nevnt en slags skjerpet oppmerksomhet om det sanselige, der man blir mer bevisst sin tilstedeværelse i verden, og kanskje mer mottakelig for inntrykk.
Mmm, kake
Nå gleder jeg meg til å spise kake og drikke sprit. Men jeg er glad for mine fasteperioder, og vil anbefale andre å prøve. Til neste år skal jeg likevel gjøre noen endringer.
Den katolske fasten varer i 40 dager, pluss søndager, fra askeonsdag til påskeaften. Det vil si at den krysser en viktig paganistisk høytidsdag, nemlig vårjevndøgnet. Da kan man jo ha lyst på en fest. Med noen små justeringer kan små justeringer kan man få denne kabalen til å gå opp likevel.
Fullmånen i februar/mars kalles gjerne for hungersmåne. Dette er tida da vinterforrådene er brukt opp, juleflesket er forbrent, beltene strammes, dyrene våkner fra vintersøvn, men nå i starten er det lite mat å finne i skog og mark.
Det sammenfaller ganske godt med tida fra Imbolg til vårjevndøgn. Hvis man gjør dette til begynnelsen og slutten på fasten kan man både åpne og lukke denne perioden med en fest. Den eneste ulempen da er at det rammer fastelavn – men man kan jo spise kremboller til Imbolg i stedet.
Don’t take the pictures lightly Listen to their sound For from their coloured feeling Experience is found So listen, So learn, So read on You gotta turn the page, read the Book of Taliesyn “All the sciences of the world are collected in my breast For I know what has been, What is now And what hereafter will occur…”
Fra Deep Purple, “Listen, Learn, Read On”
Mystiske trolldomsbrygg, forvandling og guddommelig besettelse: Her er to historier fra hver sin mytekrets, som begge handler om hvordan den guderørte naturen er opphavet til dikterisk inspirasjon.
Historien om Ceridwen og Taliesin er velkjent blant druider. Det er en kompleks historie med mange mulige betydninger, og ulike tolkninger av historien er noe druider aldri blir ferdige med å diskutere. Den oppfattes imidlertid gjerne som en fabel om innvielse i dypere mysterier og forandringene som følger av dette. Det dypere mysteriet vi her snakker om er awen, som er det walisiske ordet for inspirasjon.
En liten dråpe er nok
Historien om Ceridwens brygg er bevart i litt ulike versjoner i flere walisiske manuskripter fra middelalderen. Hovedpersonen, Taliesin selv, levde på 500-tallet og eksisterer både i den mytiske og historiske verden. Man vet lite om hvem den historiske Taliesin var, men en rekke dikt er bevart som er tilskrevet ham.
Den mytiske historien om Taliesins tilblivelse er bedre kjent. Myten forteller at Ceridwen har to barn, den vakre Creirwy og den heslige Morfran. I et forsøk på å hjelpe Morfran brygger Ceridwen en drikk som vil gi visdom og poetisk inspirasjon til den som drikker den. Slik håper hun å gi sønnen en gave som vil kompsenere for hans frastøtende ytre.
Slik går det ikke. Drikken blir i stedet stjålet, eller drukket ved et uhell, av Gwion, gutten som var satt til å passe bålet. Han blir jaget av Ceridwen gjennom jord, sjø og himmel. Begge tar form av stadig nye dyr gjennom jakten. Gwion forvandler seg til hare, laks, gjerdesmett og til slutt til et hvetekorn, men klarer likevel ikke å unnslippe Ceridwen, som forfølger ham som mynde, sel, hauk, og til slutt som en høne som spiser hvetekornet.
Men hevnen blir ikke helt slik Ceridwen hadde sett for seg, for etter å ha slukt Gwion, blir hun gravid med ham, og ni måneder senere føder hun ham på nytt inn i verden. Ceridwen putter den nyfødte gutten i en sekk og kaster ham på havet. Senere driver han i land, i nærheten av det som i dag er Aberdyfi i Wales, og blir funnet av prins Elffin ap Gwyddno. Han gir barnet navnet Taliesin, som blir den største skalden som noen gang har levd.
Det finnes likhetstrekk mellom denne og andre historier. En historie fra den keltiske mytosfæren, fra Irland, forteller om Fionn Mac Cumhaill og visdommens laks. Fra den norrøne mytologien har vi historien om Suttungs mjød.
Et islandsk manuskript fra 1800-tallet viser Odin i fugleham som spyr og skiter ut diktermjøden.
Gudespytt og gudespy
Historie om Suttungs mjød fortelles av Snorre Sturlason i Den yngre edda. Etter krigen mellom æser og vaner spyttet alle gudene i et kar som et tegn på fred. Av spyttet laget de en mann, Kvase, som var meget vis. Han reiste omkring i verden og delte av sin visdom, men ble til slutt drept av dvergene Fjalar og Galar. De samlet opp blodet i tre kar, Odrøre, Bod og Són. Blodet ble blandet med honning, og av dette oppsto en mjød som ville gjøre alle som drakk av den til skald eller vismann.
Senere tapte dvergene denne drikken til jotnen Suttung. Enda senere ble mjøden stjålet av Odin. Han forførte Suttungs datter Gunnlod, som voktet drikken, og sov hos henne i tre netter. Dermed fikk han lov til å ta tre slurker av mjøden, som var nok for ham til å tømme alle de tre karene.
Odin flyktet i ørneham med all mjøden i seg, men ble forfulgt av Suttung som også hadde iført seg ørneham. Framme i Åsgard spydde Odin ut mjøden i kar som æsene hadde satt fram. Men noe av mjøden kom ut den andre veien også. Den tok æsene ikke vare på, så den var tilgjengelig for dem som ville. Denne delen av er diktermjøden er forbeholdt de dårlige dikterne.
Inspirasjon og forvandling
Disse historiene har hver sin unike karakter, men har samtidig viktige likhetstrekk: først og fremst den guddommelige drikken, som er en kilde til inspirasjon (awen) og gjør den som drikker den til en stor dikter. Samtidig er jakten, forfølgelsen, et motiv som går igjen i begge.
Begge historiene inneholder også stadige forvandlinger; Kvase som går fra spytt til mann til mjød til inspirasjon, Gwion fra gutt til hare til fisk til fugl til korn, før han blir født på ny ikke bare en, men to ganger, og gjenskapes som skalden Taliesin.
I tillegg kan man spore en forbindelse til naturen som opphav til den dikteriske inspirasjonen i begge historiene. Samtidig kan man lese ut av historiene hvordan inspirasjon alene ikke er nok til å lage kunsten, man trenger også å beherske håndverket.
Heksegudinnen Cerridwen brygger sin trylledrikk av urter som vokser rundt Lake Bala, og koker dem i innsjøens vann. Før hun kan gjøre dette må hun i noen versjoner av historien søke kunnskap hos de druidiske mystikerne kjent som Pheryllt (Pheryllt er den walisiske stavemåten for Vergil, den romerske dikteren som også ble tilskrevet magiske egenskaper).
Suttings mjød brygges på sin side av dverger, som har mektigere skapende evner enn gudene. Senere havner den hos jotnene, som er representanter for naturkreftene. Sett fra Odins ståsted stjeler han drikken tilbake, den er jo opprinnelig laget av gudenes spytt. Men samtidig har den gjennomgått en betydelig forvandling på veien. Og nettopp forvandling, og tilegnelse av visdom, er gjennomgangstemaet i begge mytene.
La oss oppsummere dette i en triade, som neo-druider er glade i: Tre råd til kreative sjeler: lær håndverket; søk inspirasjon i naturen; ha noe å drikke.
Paa Blomst og Løv i Eng og Skove, paa Vildt og Tamt i hver en Egn, paa Fjeld paa Sky, paa vilden Vove stod hemmelige Runetegn.
Men Odin løste dog dem alle fra Luft, fra Jord, fra Havets Skjød, og signed dem, og lod dem falde som Perledug i Suttungs Mjød.
Derfor maae alle Skjalde tømme et Bæger af den rige Drik, og hvad der før var svøbt i Drømme, staaer da i Glands for deres Blik.
Druideværen tiltrekker seg i dag folk fra hele verden, langt utenfor områdene der de historiske kelterne levde. Samtidig står en rekke ideer og begreper hentet fra keltisk mytologi og kultur sentralt i den druidiske læra.
For meg knytter den keltiske mytologien an til litteratur og mytologi jeg leste da jeg var liten, til kong Arthur og til Susan Cooper og Lloyd Alexanders fantasybøker, of til ferier på familiens sommerhus i Bretagne. Likevel er det ikke så rart om man på et eller annet tidspunkt skulle føle seg rammet av bedragersyndromet. En del folk med bakgrunn fra keltiske land kan uttrykke berettiget oppgitthet over hvordan begreper og ideer fra deres kultur blir brukt på slumsete vis av folk som ikke egentlig forstår sammenhengen de inngår i. Kulturell appropriering diskuteres som oftest i forbindelse med urfolk eller fattige land, men kan også være relevant for europeiske kulturer som har vært og til dels fremdeles er kolonisert av England.
Guden i haugen
Mange av mytene, gudene og skikkelsene man støter på i den keltiske mytologien er forankret i konkrete steder, som man kan lese av på kartet og besøke. Gwyn ap Nudd, underverdenens konge, forbindes ofte med Glastonbury Tor, der inngangen til underverdenen han er konge av sies å være. Heksegudinna Cerridwen, hvis myte de fleste druider kjenner godt til, utøver sin magi ved Lake Bala i Nord-Wales. Brigit, Lugh og andre skikkelser knyttet til det åtteeikede årshjulet hører hjemme i alvehaugene i Irland. Men hva når man bor et helt annet sted?
Samtidig handler en sentral del av druideværen om å knytte konkrete forbindelser til landet og naturen der man er. Druidisk praksis er å tilegne seg kunnskap om naturen, gå turer og dyrke planter i den, lytte til den meditere, ofre og utøve ritualer for å knytte kontakt med den.
Druider rundt om i verden har tilpasset det keltiske rammeverket til sine lokale forhold. Se f.eks. Julie Bretts Australian Druidry for et eksempel på hvordan dette gjøres i en helt annet naturlig og mytologisk landskap enn det opprinnelig keltiske.
Et sted i dette spenningsfeltet befinner skandinavisk druideværen seg også.
Århundrenes tåke
Her er noen ting det har vært nyttig for meg å vite når jeg har arbeidet med keltisk mytologi:
Keltere som betegnelse på en folkegruppe i jernalderen og keltisk som betegnelse på noe som helst i dag er to helt forskjellige ting, akkurat som en viking og en nordmann anno 2020 er to helt forskjellige ting. Historisk er det riktigere å forstå keltere som et kulturelt fellesskap enn en ensartet etnisk gruppe, og et svært mangfoldig og sprikende sådant.
Kelterne kom opprinnelig fra nordsiden av Alpene. Jernalderens keltere var spredd over et område fra de britiske øyer, via dagens Frankrike og deler av Tyskland til den iberiske halvøy i vest og området rundt Svartehavet det som i dag er kjent som Tyrkia.
Over dette vidstrakte området fantes et stort mangfold av kulturelle og åndelige praksiser. Ifølge religionshistorikeren Marie-Louise Sjoestedt kjenner man i dag til cirka 300 keltiske guder. De fleste vet man ingenting annet om enn navnet, men det dekker antakelig over både regionalt utbredte guddommer som opptrer i litt ulike navn og skikkelser, helt lokale guddommer, og et utall ulike kulter og måter å forholde seg til disse på.
Det vi har bevart av informasjon om de keltiske druidenes praksis har kommet til oss gjennom århundrenes tåke og flere filtre. Selv skrev de ikke ned noen ting. De få samtidige beskrivelser vi kjenner til er gjort av de ikke helt nøytrale romerne, og de tidligste mytologiske historiene vi kjenner er skrevet ned av kristne munker i middelalderen.
Det som i dag kalles keltisk omfatter land og landområder med svært ulik historie, språk, mytologi og kultur.
De ‘offisielle’ pantheonene eller bevarte mytologiske samlingene vi kjenner i dag viser altså bare en liten flik av noe veldig stort, mangslungent, omskiftelig og uhåndgripelig. Vi kan bruke disse som portaler til å søke bakover i den mytologiske tåka, der terrenget likevel er villere og mer ukjent enn de stivnede skriftlige framstillingene vil ha det til. Vi kan gjøre det med en visshet om at utveksling, blanding, eksport og import av guder, mytologi, verdensanskuelser, sed og skikk og tradisjon er ingen ny oppfinnelse, og ikke noe man skal være redd for.
Det er ikke det samme som å si tut og kjør. Man skal behandle myter med respekt og vite hva man gjør. Men det finnes et rom til å søke gudene bak gudene og knytte sine egne forbindelser med landet — slik de gamle kelterne antakeligvis også har gjort.
The badger's trail 