OF FIRE AND WATER: TAKING THE SPIRIT SERIOUSLY

I've been struggling with a knotty problem for some time. Any parent knows that a child is born with its own independent spirit that has nothing to do with you. We cannot be reduced to our DNA and environment. Studies of identical twins prove this, where they may have very different characters despite identical DNA and early environment. And yet when addressing the soul we often behave as though all we are is a product of DNA and environment. Some psychotherapists get very worked up with me when I point out the obvious corollary, which is that childhood conditions are not as formative as we are led to believe: such a belief is the product of a reductive materialist outlook that is often at odds with the psychotherapist's metaphysical beliefs.

Moving into the shamanic sphere, another corollary is that ancestral patterns are not as formative either. We make too big a deal of them because of the cultural belief that conditions - whether DNA or environment - are all, with the spirit almost an optional extra. If you are doing ancestral work, you need to root out this belief, or you will over-emphasise and so misunderstand its influence.

We do not take the spirit seriously enough, even though it is the strongest conditioning factor of all. We are not effects, or victims, of DNA and circumstance. Sure, trauma, that overused word, shapes us. But at bottom, it doesn't. I am wary of the 'trauma' peddlers and their message of victimhood. At bottom there is something pure and powerful that is beyond it, that is able to stand up to anything and make something of it, even though it may take decades. At bottom we are cause, not effect, and this is a real experience.

The soul and its origins are inherently mysterious. This does not suit a materialist scientific culture which wants explanations for everything. So we say yes of course we have a spirit, and then carry on as if we don't. We want scientific respectability, and we want words and reasons for everything, and the spirit doesn't work that way. 500 years ago it was heretical to deny the existence of the spirit. Nowadays it can be heretical to insist too strongly on its existence. You wouldn't find it asserted in a standard psychology book, yet it is the main part of who we are.

So what I've been struggling with is how to describe the relationship between the spirit and the influences it meets, whether DNA, family, culture or ancestry. I needed a metaphor, for there is no scientific explanation.

The metaphor came to me while driving in Scotland a few days ago: it is fire meeting water. The spirit is fire, and the conditions it meets are water. Our lives are the synergy between them, the hot steam that arises and transforms. This metaphor has a deeply traditional resonance, for what else is the steam within the Sweat Lodge?

Fire is cause, it is the living and moving element that will burn you if you come too close. "Trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God who is our home," sang the poet Wordsworth. The fire is sacred, it is an emanation of the Great Spirit, 'the holiest of everything', and our lives are for the same reason a sacred task.

Water is the containing element. It is the mother, and the conditions of our life, everything we are born into. Water too is sacred. It is the feminine to the fire's masculine.

Fire meeting water may be a gentle simmering over a long period, or it may be fiercely boiling, as at times of initiation. In any case, it is the most helpful way I know of thinking of who I am. It is metaphor not concept, so it speaks to the whole of me. And it has its roots in ancient conceptions of the elements, both European and American, and carries the power of that.

I view the fire as primary in any consideration of my life. In that way I am no longer tempted to reduce myself to my childhood or my ancestry. And because both the fire and the water are sacred, I trust the callings within me (fire) and the conditions I meet (water), testing as that they often are. My life is an ongoing synergy between fire and water.

I make a point of not looking for childhood or cultural or indeed any explanations of who I am. Childhood could just as easily have been a mirror for the propensities I arrived with, as it could have been the cause of them. At the same time, I hold my childhood closely, I feel it deeply. It has given me certain struggles that have forged me as an adult. I used to view it as a list of things that went wrong that I needed to correct. I don't view it like that any more, for who am I to judge the purposes of the sacred? My childhood was what it was, much of it is lost to memory, and that is as it needs to be, for we are not creatures of the past.

The fire burns in the present, while the water contains, but is not limited to, the past. Their synergy creates the future.

This elemental way of looking at who we are is to be found in the Medicine Wheel. We come from the East, Fire. It goes round the Wheel and interacts with the Water of ancestors and family, and in this way a personality is formed that inhabits a body and this world – the Earth of the West. The Air of the North gives the ability to stand back and have perspective on the crucible of Fire and Water: in that way we can co-operate with and hold the transformation process.

The Dragon-Dreaming

I haven't posted recently, because I have been writing a fantasy novel featuring Merlin. The idea came to me while travelling in Arizona at the end of March.  Here is a chapter I recently wrote: 

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN The Dragon-Dreaming

Winterfire rolled through the deep blue vault, a carpet of white cloud far below him, the sun huge and red on the horizon. His favourite game: chasing the sunset. Small hands were touching his scales, caressing them. That was nice. He did a back-flip for the sheer pleasure of it, and swooped up to find the sun had won the game.

Now the sun was directly above, and Winterfire stared directly at his old friend, as only dragons can, while he continued to roll high in the sky. Breakfast. Chasing the midday sun, his second favourite game. The sun that stoked his fires, built the reserves of cold truth-seeking flame.

There were the little hands again, stroking. And tickling. Now there were claps of thunder and bursts of coloured lights.

The hill at Fenny Castle shook slightly. It was night-time, and the surrounding levels were silent. The lights of Glastonbury shone in the distance. Earth. A distant memory stirred. A sense of urgency to visit something forgotten. The little caring hands became more insistent. The hill shook again.

Winterfire awoke for the first time in 1600 years. A full-sized dragon reared up from the depths of the hill and paraded itself atop Fenny Castle. At least, for those with eyes to see. And he was angry. This had been no natural sleep. He could feel the enchantment falling away in wisps about him. Morgaine. With a mighty thrust of his back legs, and a single beat of his wings, he was airborne. He soared upward and circled the skies above, breathing fire indiscriminately, roaring his rage. He was the power in the land, and he had been neutered by that woman.

The fairies were in his mind, speaking. It was a close-run thing, they were saying. We kept you here. Winterfire collected himself. The other Dragons of Avalon, what about them? Why wouldn’t she have glamoured and obliviated them also?

“We’re coming too,” he heard the fairies say. Winterfire swept down to the hill, and a multitude of fairy beings glimmered onto his back. He shot up at speed, and then glided the few miles to Glastonbury Tor. It was in a spirit of play, serious as the mission was. The fairies, who came in all sizes, from a few inches to ten feet high, could have simply wished themselves at the Tor. Winterfire’s trajectory too was driven as much by his intention as by his wings. They all lived close to the dreaming, they flashed in and out of the human world, and as such the normal rules of the possible were softened.

He landed on the summit of the Tor, and was startled to see the ruins of a church, only its tower remaining. He realised at that moment that he must have been gone a long, long time. And that the Dragons within the hill might be too far gone into the dreaming to return.

“The church and the people drove us away too,” said the fairies, who spoke as with one mind. “We kept a low profile after the church was built. It was the modern tourists who finally did for us. We’ve been worried about the Dragons for some time.”

Winterfire felt himself into the mound. Their sleep was very deep. It could go either way. They hadn’t been tended by the fairies in the way that he had. Three of them, each in their own cavern deep under the earth. There was a point in the sleep of Dragons beyond which they did not return to this world. Humans had always been prone to deny the dreaming, to see this world and nothing else. There were always those amongst the fairies who said why bother, why struggle to remain, because the humans did not even pay lip service any more?

The breathing of the Dragons was deep and expansive in the Otherworld, but barely perceptible in this world. They would not wake quickly, as he had, if they awoke at all.

Rosewing, who trailed beauty wherever she flew. Earthtreader, the most readily visible to humans, who would be easiest to bring back. And Phoenix, whose fire both destroyed and laid the seeds of renewal.

A lively breeze blew across the top of the Tor, funnelled by the church tower. The fairies leaped in the air, letting it carry them. Winterfire meanwhile was moving deep within the hill, calling the fairies down as he did so.

Many hands were soon tending to the sleeping dragons, as Winterfire entered their dreamings, which coalesced and fell away from each other, in rhythm with their shallow breathings.

Earthtreader was deep within a live volcano, flowing lazily with the lava, joyfully anticipating the next eruption, which would project him high into the sky above. Winterfire joined him, floating alongside in the cauldron of molten rock. Their minds touched, as he felt the fairy hands all about, urging the sleeping Dragon back to this world. Winterfire dreamed himself deep within the earth below, down to its molten core, stoking and goading it. Already there was a stirring within Earth-treader’s mind as he felt the touch of Winterfire’s. The liquid earth boiled and roiled from its very depths, while Winterfire continued to stoke it. The pressure grew and grew until it could no longer contain itself, and a massive wave surged upwards. The explosion was massive, a super-volcano. Winterfire reminded himself that this was the dreaming, where all things were possible, and to keep the connection with Earthtreader.

The sheer size of the explosion, far greater than he had anticipated, shocked Earthtreader out of his deep forever dream, towards the mind of Winterfire and into wakefulness.

“It was Morgaine,” said Winterfire. “Welcome back. You’ve been gone for 1600 years. We need to wake Phoenix and Rosewing. If it’s not too late.”

Earthtreader was slow to anger, unlike Winterfire. That would come later. He had a job to do. As the most present to this world, he would be most effective at drawing the other two dragons out of their much deeper dreamings.

Phoenix would be the easier case, albeit still very tricky. Earthtreader dived into her mind and her dreaming, where she spent her days and nights guarding a vast pile of dragon-gold. The fairies were already there, skipping over the hoard, picking up nuggets of it and pretending to run off with them. This was beginning to irk Phoenix, who had been sleeping the peaceful sleep of ages, gradually merging with the gold. There was already a golden sheen to her scales. Once the merging was complete, she would be lost to this world.

“It’s not yours,” whispered Earthtreader, mind to mind. “It can’t be yours. These are the riches you reveal with your fire. Remember the people, the people you destroy and renew. The world needs you.”

He felt his words land in Phoenix’s mind, but she continued to dream, to relish her hoard. Her sleep was, however, disturbed at the edges. She fretted at the thieving fairies, while staring blankly at the mind of Earthtreader, unable to entirely ignore it.

“You’ve been enchanted,” said Earthtreader more forcibly, “there is another world you have forgotten. Come with me.”

Phoenix had always been partial to Earthtreader, and her mind began to reach towards him, despite herself. She loved the dream she was in, she didn’t want it to end, not ever. Earthtreader felt the link was now strong enough for something more drastic. He joined her fully in the dream, and disappeared the gold. Phoenix brought it back, and Earthtreader disappeared it again. A tussle ensued, in which their minds drew closer together, while flashes of wakefulness glanced across Phoenix’s dragon mind. Earthtreader was gaining the upper hand, and pressed home his advantage. He was not up against the true dreaming, which would have been a more equal struggle, but the enchantment wrought by Morgaine, which he had himself already broken.

The dream gold was now gone. Earthtreader was holding it, as it were, behind his back, refusing to return it. Phoenix stared at him, shocked and confused, but realisation was slowly dawning. When it happened, it was very quick. She reared up and blasted flame over the remaining presence of the dream gold, that had been conjured up by Morgaine to entrap her. And with it her renewed life in this world began.

There was just Rosewing left in the enchantment. The fairies were busy caressing her, but none save Phoenix could detect her breathing. They were all able to enter her Otherworld, a canvas of spectacular yet subtle colours that were unknown in this world, where they drank in the beauty that surrounded and infused her. Rosewing seemed to entirely belong in this world. Phoenix, as another female, was able to move closest to her essence. She knew it would be touch and go. It was certainly not going to be a quick awakening, as it had been for herself and the other dragons.

Phoenix breathed the full force of her fire, stoked by the beauty of Rosewing’s world, over the sleeping dragon. This was not the brutal act it seemed, for dragons feed on each other’s fire. Within that fire fell a carpet of flower seeds, which as they unfurled would attract Rosewing’s gaze, drawing her into the beauty of this world. But it would take time, if indeed this was any longer possible. It was a sad, sobering moment. Dragon and fairy tears fell on Rosewing’s scales. There was love as well as beauty for her here, if any remembrance was to stir, if the memory itself of this world had not entirely vanished.

It was time to go. There was work to be done. The three Dragons rose as one into the night air, Earthtreader giving a mighty departing lash of his tail at the ruined church tower atop the Tor. The earth shook as it had not done for centuries, and the tower collapsed in a heap of rubble.