WHAT THE TREES TOLD ME: PART TWO

Middle World journeys are common and often unbidden. Daydreams and peak experiences can have a journeying element. They can be surprising, and even a risky because the spirits we meet in the Middle World don't know us and aren't necessarily our friends. And why should they be? We often aren't all that friendly and respectful to them. We often don't give back. 

A very simple method of Speaking to the spirits of nature is to walk in nature, come across a being like a tree or rock and ask respectfully for a message. Then open yourself up, and wait. 

You can also enter a Shamanic state of consciousness by rattling or drumming or whatever it is you use, and then walk out and come across a being and Speak with them. 

Here is a poem I wrote directly after doing this. It is a slight attempt at older poetic forms, where in this case the last sound of the first line rhymes with the first line of the second. Old Norse poetry is remarkable like this; they do a lot with a few words. English is a huge language and has a lot of words. This is because it is the confluence of many languages. When we write creatively we have many words to choose from. We can say field, meadow, pasture for example. In most other languages, the vocabulary is smaller and they do more with the words they have. Norse poetry uses many different alliterations and rhymes and stresses on words to express and change meaning. It also uses kennings, which are shorthand poetic descriptions. For example, the sea might be the whales' road. If you want to write real Norse poetry here is a good place to start:

http://viking.archeurope.info/index.php?page=old-norse-poetic-metre

Here is the poem, and as I said it is a direct insight, from the trees themselves. It is good to write directly after an experience. We are explorers after all, and explorers take good notes. 

 Five trees grow from one who died
Abide in loving unity
Family dig deep
Sleep not for knowledge gained
Pain for love of Yggdrasil

Yggdrasil is the Axis Mundi or World Tree in the Norse spiritual view. Nine worlds come off it, and beings abound in it. There is a squirrel called Ratatoskr who runs up and down it, carrying trash talk between the eagle at the top and the dragon at the bottom, as well as general gossip. I think I am like Ratatoskr as I move up and down my own Axis Mundi.

 

WHAT THE TREES TOLD ME: PART ONE

I have been sitting out in the forest at night. There is a place where I can see the Milky Way from the edge of the trees, and the rocky faces of the hills as the light fades, and I think it can't get any darker, and then it does. 

An ecotone is the term for a place that is on the edge of two ecosystems. An example might be where taiga meets steppe. At the ecotone, there are features of both taiga and steppe, and also new features. There might be a marshland, for example. There can be a mixing of climates, like an alpine climate where a cold wind drops into the plains, and warms with the land. Ecotones are dynamic places humanwise as well. Taiga people meet steppe people, and there is an exchange of culture and economy and language and genes. Anthropologists like ecotones as much as biologists do. 

Where I go to sit out, I have my own miniature ecotone, which is why I can see the stars from the edge of the trees.These trees are not native; they are mostly pine trees, flanked by ferns and blackberry. I have come to terms with pine trees, as long as it is not monoculture. They give me pine cones, and I remember Cernunnos, that boreal being, stag shaman, shapeshifter, animal charmer. All these forests are his, even at the other end of the world. I use an old Chaos magic banishing ritual and hallow the space, and Speak to the land spirits. I make offerings to the great helping spirits who I work with. I sit down and wait to be astounded. I am lucky that so far it has been a place of rich insight. 

On the way back there are always further wonders and marvels. The trip to and from a place like this is always important. We are best to develop a working attitude as we approach such a place. As we leave, we are best to travel lightly and slowly as we reflect. One of the wonders is a group of ti kouka, or cabbage trees. I have always liked them. They, like me, are creatures of the margins, of river bank and forest edge, of ecotone. They are common and often overlooked. Their leaves make great fire starters, but the trunks are so impervious to fire they were once used as chimneys. In a light wind, they rustle their long dry leaves, clever and sardonic. I can imagine a behind-the-hand commentary. The picture here is of ti kouka by a river; these are not the ones in question, but trees are the most joined-up creatures around.

We know now that trees recognize kin, that they nurture each other and they send and receive resources according to need. When the ti kouka Speak to me, on a night in the forest, others affirm what they say days later. 

This silvery and fantastic night, they seemed like important people, courtiers or grandees, nodding to me in acknowledgement and and rustling drily. There were seven of them, each as wise as the others. I asked them if they had something to tell me. They were deeply aggrieved. They were very clear that nice rituals and 'thoughts and prayers' are meaningless now. No, they don't want offerings or consciousness raising. They want action. There is sickness all around them and things that look fine are actually in trouble. Humans need to be on the streets and in the halls of legislature. It all needs to stop, now. 

So I felt pretty chastened and since then the grief and confusion of the times we live in have become more acute for me. The trees are right of course. The shit is getting way too real.

 

DREADFUL VISITATIONS: ANCIENT WOMEN WHO SEARCHED THE DEAD

Combining my interests in death, and walking in the worlds of the dead, I bring you some Dreadful Visitations. 

Below is the rather gorgeous front page of the Bills of Mortality from 1664-1665 in London, during the plague. Plagues are a bit topical nowadays and we can learn from how they have been handled in the past. We forget that the plagues of Europe killed a large proportion of the population and changed the demographic and economic landscapes for ever. And they went for centuries. 

In London, they tried to count the dead and work out what they had died from. This was a first attempt at statistics keeping, demographics, and epidemiology. We know about it from contemporary accounts by wealthy and literate men such as diarist Samuel Pepys, and the person in charge of it, John Graunt who is considered to be the 'father' of statistics. Daniel Defoe, in his excellent book Journal of the Plague Year, critiques the statistics keeping of the time; he wrote a generation later and his book is a fictionalized account, but illuminating nevertheless. 

So much for the wealthy and literate men. I am much more interested in the people who did the work on the ground. They were called Searchers of the Dead, or just Searchers, and they were women and they were poor. In once place they are described as 'ancient sober woemen' (sic). They were often ex midwives or carers for the sick, who were driven to change their employment as the circumstances changed around them. They were paid per body, which meant their incomes varied a lot. They had no training. They were subject to strict rules: they were not allowed to take up other employment, they had to live away from other people (usually they lived together), and they had to carry a white wand to indicate the nature of their work. A form of social distancing. Their lives were often short, due to their older age and the fact that they often died of the diseases they found.

We know the names of some of them. Mary Oswell and Elizabeth Scott of the Stepney parish took up the roles in 1625. Within two years both were dead. Goodwife Pattison worked for St. Antholin, Budge Row, from 1590-91 to 1597-98, alongside others like Mother Bamford, Goodwife Tailor, Goodwife Atkinson, and Goodwife Hubble. Goodwife, or Goody, was a title of respect used for working class women at the time. I am glad we know their names. 

Recording was done by sextons and parish clerks and were then collected into Bills of Mortality. During this period they were published privately, by Ellen Cotes, who was very aware of their value to posterity. They were sold weekly for a penny. Thus the residents of London knew where the plague had spread. The causes of death intrigue us today. 'Rising of the lights' is any lung disease. I quite like 'suddenly' as a cause of death, being dead of suddenness seems almost merciful.

Not everybody was happy. John Graunt and others were very critical of the searchers of the dead. He claimed that they were open to bribery and that their searches were too cursory. Families could also be aggrieved if the findings embarrassed them or linked them to communicable diseases. Nevertheless this is the best look we have at death of that time, and of this peculiar social service that survived into the nineteenth century.

I wondered what it would be like being a searcher, taking to the gig economy later in life, figuring that your job would literally kill you, leaving ordinary society behind and having to carry a white wand  wherever you went. I wondered if the women formed a sort of sisterhood, if they shared ideas and kept each other safe and maybe worked a kind of magic around death. Being set apart from society changes people. I thought the searchers might have that combination of marginality and special power that Shamans often have. They might be feared and respected both. They might have their own rituals for keeping safe and avoiding social opprobrium. They might have that form of immediate, in-house, lowbrow authority that comes from being the only person able to do a shitty, difficult thing.

With Shamanic journeying, you can go anywhere. I have written previously of a piece of necromancy where I journeyed to the Shaman of Bad Durrenberg, a historical person. I felt for the searchers of the dead because I too am a 'sober ancient woeman' in the precariat, and I have done some down and dirty jobs in my time. So I thought I would pay them a visit. My experience is entirely my own, and not to be seen as any piece of research. It has no empirical value. However, it is an example of how we can journey to ordinary people, our ancestors, or those who we feel an old kinship with.

What I got was not what I expected. It was a trip back in time, by firelight and lamplight. I met three women, who lived together. And no it was not a sisterhood, there was no hint of witchcraft or the mysterious about it. This was business. They explained about the ethics of what they did, and they did not see themselves as professionals in the way that we would today, or perhaps that John Graunt and those in authority expected of them. For them, the cause of death of an individual was a matter of observation and negotiation. The searchers worked within a social matrix of extended family and neighbourhood and parish. There was what happened that made a person die, and then there was what really happened, within this matrix. So of course they were bribed, in small ways, which helped their precarious finances immensely. Of course family members of the dead person had a say in how the cause of death was recorded; they knew best after all. This was not about diagnosis, but about negotiated truths. The skills the women had were all about sharp eyes and ears - and tact and sometimes keeping the mouth shut. 

They said, if you ever come back, bring booze. Londoners, bless 'em.