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Imbolc 2008
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Greetings!
This is Dr. Geo Athena Trevarthen's newsletter. You're receiving it because you or someone at that email address signed up at my website, www.celticshamanism.com. Please let us know if you wish to unsubscribe and notify us of any change to your address. Please also make sure that your email server and spam filter will accept email from tuath@btopenworld.com as that's where this mailing will normally come from.
Below you'll find some seasonal information about Imbolc / Brigantia, a Gaelic fire-lighting prayer, the main article "Using All that's in Us." You'll also find further information about my forthcoming book, The Seeker's Guide to Harry Potter, and a book I was interviewed for, Soul Companions. Upcoming events I'll be speaking at include the Pagan Federation Scotland Conference in May, the Accio Conference at Magdalen College, Oxford, in July and a Soul Companions event in Wales in September.
Please feel free to forward it on to any who you think might be interested!
Le Beannachdan,
With Blessings,
Dr. Geo Athena Trevarthen, Imbolc 2008
Happy Imbolc!
As many of you probably know, Imbolc or Brigantia, traditionally celebrated on February 1st, is the feast of the Celtic Goddess whose worship continued under the worship of the Irish Saint Brigit. Imbolc may mean 'lamb's milk,' and it's when we get that first hint of spring. We were out a few days ago and you could smell the change in the air and see the tips of the snowdrops peeping up.
Brigit is often called "The Mary of the Gael." Her feast is followed on the 2nd by the feast of the purification of the Blessed Mother, and Gaelic tradition made her Mary's midwife! It was important to the Gaels to synchronize their Native Deities and traditions with the cosmology of the new religion that many adopted. The conversion process was additive, not subtractive. I think they probably took Christ's statement that he came not to change the law but to fulfill it to apply to all ancient sacred tradition, not just the Jewish.
Her festival comes at a key point in the post-Yule/Solstice/Christmas doldrums, when we need a bit of cheering up. I just got some sprouting hyacinth bulbs in a bowl at the greengrocers to bring that spring scent and color into the house. Observing the yearly festivals helps us observe each year and each day, with more awareness. It helps slow time a bit and makes us notice the seasonal gifts we're always being offered.
We live on a farm, so we'll soon see the lambs born and running around in big 'lamb gangs' up and down the hills. You don't need to make such efforts to symbolize and ritualize in country life. We have solid fuel heating, so the power of fire isn't just a symbolic candle in rituals, or something in a metal box in the basement, it's the force raised "as Brigit raised it" each morning. All the old prayers speak of daily activities as continuations of what the Deities, Saints and ancestors did in ancient times. It wasn't so much that people sanctified daily life by thinking of it as repeating earlier sacred events. They didn't see daily life as separate from these events. Everything was and is part of the flow of being coming from the Creator through everything in the universe.
One Gaelic prayer fire lighting from Alexander Carmichael's book, Carmina Gadelica, for lighting a fire invokes Bride (Brigit) and the Blessed Mother Mary. I give it here in English, then Gaelic, then rough phonetic.
I will raise the hearth fire
Togaidh mis an tula
Tog'-ih mish an too'-lah
From: Carmichael, Alexander, 1900-1971, coll., ed., and trans., Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations Collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the Last Century, 6 volumes, vols 1-2, 1900, (Edinburgh: T&A Constable) This is from volume 1, pp. 232-3.
We can all see life as sacred and magical, or see it as drudgery. On a British TV commercial for a station's 'self-improvement' season, someone said, (in an American accented voice, because Brits associate self-help with America) "The day is a gift — that's why they call it the present! Funny but true. Appreciating the gift is the most important thing any of us can do for our own happiness. It may seem trivial to begin and end the day with thanks, to whatever or whomever you think of as your 'Higher Power,' but nothing transforms our consciousness so much. Over time, it really works like magic to change how we feel about life. Magic begins with our perspective on life. Of course, everything begins with how we see things, how we choose to look at them. Imbolc is a time of rebirth and reappraisal, where we can reevaluate how we've looked at life up until this point, and how we'll choose to look at it from here on.
Using All that's in Us
This year the lead up to Imbolc has certainly been such a time for me. In my last newsletter at Lugnasad, I told you about how I had taught a class and was writing a book on the Harry Potter novels, The Seeker's Guide to Harry Potter. (There's a newsletter archive on my site if you missed it.) The book will come out towards the end of March in America and April in the UK. If you'd like to pre-order it, request it from your local bookstore. That helps to get the word out and supports local bookstores.
The publisher is O-Books and the ISBN # is 978-1-84694-093-4.
This newsletter and my next one, which will be out close to the book's release date, will have a bit to do with Harry. The last one was a kind of nutshell description. This one says a bit about my experience in the land of the publishers and writing over the last decade. In short how I came to write the book and the 'head space' in which I found myself drawn to the novels. The next one will tell you a bit more about some Celtic themes in Harry Potter. Don't worry — I have not changed my entire spiritual focus to the Harry Potter universe! It's just that getting out this first book is a huge deal for me. What many of you don't know about is my exciting prior history with the world of publishing.
I won't go into exhaustive detail, but way back in 1997 was the crest of what big publishers considered to be the 'Celtic wave.' That was annoying for a start — fashions of faith. Never mind history, a bigger Celtic wave was probably when we had communities from the Balkans to the British Isles. What about when we invaded Rome and Greece? Or maybe now, when the Celtic diaspora has spread vast numbers of Celts round the world who still feel that their 'hearts are Highland' or Welsh or Cornish? Anyway — you can see where the problems began! :-)
I sold a book to a major New York publisher for a reasonable sum. In 1998, it began to become obvious to me that it hadn't been as good a deal as it had seemed at the time. There was a bizarre mix of attitudes at the publisher. On the one hand they wanted to change everything I was doing and saying into mush with a shamrock or tartan flag in it. (To go with the Kabbalah book they'd made into mush with a menorah and the Native American book they'd made into mush with an eagle feather!)
On the other hand, they seemed to feel that all that mattered was that I look good for the chat shows — so why couldn't they leave my book alone? As time went on, they questioned everything. At the head of the book I had a little passage about how we need aspects of the Celtic tradition today. For example, I wrote, "Because it was a warrior tradition, it worked under any circumstances. Like the ancient Celts we need a tradition that won't fail us in our darkest hour."
Editorial note: "Explain why."
Response: "Oh — maybe so we don't kill ourselves!?"
At one point they even told me that the Celtic Deities' names were too hard to read, so I should change the spelling to make them more accessible. Change the names of my Deities, eh? At that point I had to say that I answered to a Higher Authority. I wonder if they've done the same with Kabbalists? I mean, the unpronounceable name of God that the high priest only said in the temple once a year. That's not really very accessible is it? People should be able to say it all the time!
I went up to the top of Arthur's Seat, a beautiful high volcanic hill in Edinburgh, to have a talk with the Dagda, the Celtic Father God, about it. He said "It's time for you and I to take back this book." I took lots of spirit journeys about it, prayed wrote, edited and put my foot down at various points.
As the years (yes, years) went by, one editor and one 'ghost writer' were fired for incompetence, another editor left the company and those of you waiting for a book from me continued to wait. A later editor told me she'd read my book and it was awful and I should make it just like certain pages on my website. I confronted her with those very pages in my manuscript in the introduction where they were covered with the last editor's red ink. She was quite embarrassed because it proved she'd reviled my book without reading it, relying on the prior (fired for incompetence) editor's opinion. The company got taken over by a vast conglomerate and tons of books were cancelled, including mine. The 'Celtic wave' passed and Kabbalah became the next big thing. (Kabbalah for health, Kabbalah for wealth, Kabbalah quite openly, Kabbalah in stealth!)
The publisher threatened to sue. I responded with a thirty point legal letter. (I'm not the daughter of the first woman to graduate in Roman Law from Cambridge for nothing.) I described the editorial incompetence I'd experienced and the damage they'd done to my health and my work. I threatened to sue them back into the Stone Age. I never heard from them again and the statute of limitations expired last year.
I felt a bit like I'd been cursed. This brilliant thing that seemed to assure that my ancestors' teachings would go out in the broadest and best possible way had been torpedoed.
On a personal level, I'd gone from being able to send myself on a non-work related holiday for the first time in my life in 1998 to being on public assistance in 2000. Though I was born in London, my teens were spent in 1980's Washington DC, a place of Darwinian capitalism if ever there was one. Some part of me truly believed that the fittest would survive and thrive, and that if I worked hard enough success was assured. Up to that point in my life I'd had a pretty steady progression so this fall from the heights was a big shock that derailed me for some time.
I worked on various different things. I completed my PhD on Celtic shamanism in 2003. It's probably going to be published by the Hungarian Academy as part of their shamanism series. (I'll let you know about this, obviously.) I did drafts for a couple of other books. As I worked, I kept realizing I was making assumptions about what people knew, and that there were basics I wasn't covering. Basically I realized that the first book I'd started on should actually be the third or fourth book in print!
Of course, I had my first daughter in 2004 and my second in 2006, and they've delightfully occupied my time! Nonetheless, I kept writing. (Between 5 and 8 am, always my best writing time, so no hardship, with the laptop on a plant stand by the bed as Téa, then later Aurora, nursed on a bolster in front of me.)
In 2000, the year I went 'on the dole,' I'd also come across the work of another writer who'd famously been on the dole in Edinburgh, JK Rowling. I felt a kind of connection, and not just with her subject-matter. We'd both sold our first books around the same time in the US for large amounts. From there our fates diverged dramatically, but I found hope in her tale. Her charitable works also made me feel that she's the sort of person who knows what to do with vast sums of money, distribute it! This mitigated envy. I was standing in front of the Harry Potter books at Thin's bookshop in Edinburgh and thought "Why not?" She wrote the first book in part for her own escapist comfort and they've provided the same to others, including myself. Yet something I love about them is that they also encourage action.
In a 2007 article, Chicago Tribune critic Judith Keller said that the last novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was less about clever plotting than about engaging the reader in a contemplation of life's big questions. Books live in the time and place they're written in as well as in their readers' minds. She asks us to consider "the touchstones of the beginning and ending of the series, and all that lies between."
The first book came out in the year of Princess Diana's death in 1997. The decade between the first and last books saw major terrorist attacks in America, London and Madrid and divisiveness caused by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The negative implications of globalization and global warming became much clearer. In short, "the books' life-span corresponds with an ominous and unsettling swath of world history, a time of confusion and unrest and instability." Paradoxically, the books gave us escapist relief from the darkness of the times even while enabling us to face their challenges.
The books also draw parallels between supernatural and 'ordinary' evils that don't make for easy reading once we see them. The books comfort us, but never make us comfortable with the status quo.
I ended up reading and re-reading them in a cycle. David was bemused. I've never felt so compelled to reread any novel. I think Lord of the Rings and a couple of Anne Rice's books have had a few go-throughs, but nothing like Harry Potter. In part to justify my fixation, I proposed a class on the books to the Office of Lifelong Learning at the University of Edinburgh, where I'm a Post-Doctoral Fellow. They went for it and I found myself reading lots of books about Harry Potter. There's all sorts, ranging from highly academic to religious (pro and anti) to literary.
Then there are the websites, zillions. I had fun. As I was reading and teaching, I realized that there was a book here. I couldn't find any book on Harry Potter that took a broadly spiritual, mythic approach. All the spiritually focussed books, for and against, were Christian. I felt that there was a lot to say about Harry Potter that related to the perennial wisdom, those truths, symbols and archetypes that pop up in all traditions.
I decided to email John Hunt at O-Books and propose it. John had come across my website some time before and had wanted me to write something for them. The early Irish topic he was most keen on would have required either hours in the Edinburgh library which I couldn't do with my girls or expensive research books I couldn't afford just now at home, which I'd told him. But he'd given me a really good impression, and after my last debacle, I liked the idea of dealing with the head of a publishing house, rather than someone who could be countermanded or pass the buck at every turn.
It's significant to me that I signed my contract at 42, the number Douglas Adams gave as the answer to "life, the universe and everything" in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Of course, then they needed to find out what the question was!) The process has been intense, but good, this time round. I had an excellent editor this time, who really helped crystallize the book and make it a manageable length and good input from John, as well as others who've read it. I had to counter my own knee-jerk reactions at times to fight for my own way rather than find the best way for the book. My first draft ended up being cut by half, but it's a much better (and still quite substantial) book for the editing.
I think the most rewarding thing has been to finally have the sense I'm getting out what's been put into me. In a recent interview, JK Rowling has said that she'd most like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with what she'd been given.
Many of us go through the standard early mid-life 'moment' in our forties, when we think "What did I do all this for?" I have four degrees relating to everything from arts, film and communications to Celtic Studies and anthropology. Yet I didn't feel that there was enough out there in a tangible form that people could use.
The Harry Potter books have a lot to do with motherhood and specifically, with the sacrifices mothers willingly make for their children. I felt guilty that after all my mother had done for me, all the money she'd spent helping me qualify for ten different professions, I wasn't succeeding well enough at any of them to fully support my own children. Britain is a humane and wonderful place (despite what some Britons say) so we have health care and a home and all we need to get by. But I wanted to be able to do more for my girls and for the less fortunate.
What comes will come, and I've been hugely blessed whatever it is. The book itself has been a real gift in that I've used everything I am and everything I've learnt doing it. My family tradition gave me a take on reality akin to the 'wizarding world' of the novels. My academic training and writing training meant I'd accumulated vast comparative resources to draw from. I didn't need to hunt for things about the hero's journey or shamanism or sacrifice. I knew the comparative sources. My film background came into looking at the films and the ways they compared to the books at a few points. Even my endless 'time-wasting' re-reading meant that I knew the books back to front and remembered lots of snippets verbatim that proved crucial when I sat down to write. It's even woven together aspects of my academic, personal and spiritual life. I'll be leading a round table discussion on Pagan and Christian themes at the Accio Harry Potter conference at Oxford, my dad's alma mater, this summer! It will be my first visit to Oxford and I'm really looking forward to it.
Most enjoyably, my idea to do a few illustrations ended up with my having a big influence on the overall design. I contributed an image for the cover (a winged disk I'd made at art school) and did 23 pieces of art and design for the books, incorporating photos I'd taken in Edinburgh and elsewhere, new drawings and illuminated first letters for the chapters. The book has ended up being a nice 'book design and illustration' portfolio piece as well as a book I've written. I love doing art, and embellishing books is a big part of Irish and Scottish tradition (think Book of Kells) so I'd welcome a sideline designing and illustrating books I like. Nowadays I can do it from my wee home in the Borders. The designer who laid out my book lives in France. Other than his Internet being down at one point and a wild boar destroying his garden, all went smoothly!
It's very healing. I feel I've finally broken a decade long curse. The book is actually at the printer's right now.
Brigit's festival is all about rebirth, and I feel I've had one. An old ritual comes to mind. The lady of the house would take a long burning peat from the fire and put it on the doorstep. Then she'd say, "On the day of Brigit, the serpent shall come from the mound, and I shall not hurt the serpent, and he shall not hurt me." Then she'd beat the hell out of the peat with the fire tongs.
I can't say that I've plumbed all this ritual's layers of meaning, but something about it resonates with me this Imbolc. There's an element in it of both exorcism and acceptance. Celtic tradition accepts the 'tough stuff' as part of life, it says yes to the process, even while it encourages us to be heroic and take a stand against the parts of the process we can do without. The ritual also has humor. "I'll make darn sure that the serpent doesn't harm me!" The magical way is vigorously pro-active. It's not about submitting to outside will or fate. However, it is ideally about aligning our will with something bigger or higher, so we don't operate from ego alone.
The serpent is the ever-renewing power of life that also carries death. As an ambivalent yet potent figure it's slithered around numerous Indigenous traditions, Sumer, Eden and Egypt, where twin serpent Goddesses appear on either side of the winged disk that stood for Horus. It obviously also takes a prominent role in the Harry Potter books. On the surface, it's the symbol of evil Lord Voldemort, the main villain of the piece. Yet on another level, Harry's ability to talk to snakes, and his other ambivalent qualities, are a big part of what enables him to triumph in the books. By the end, Harry uses everything within him, good and bad, to good effect.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Christ says something like, "If you manifest what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not manifest what is in you, then what is within you will destroy you."
As Paracelsus said, "Everything is poison. Nothing is poison." Looking back on the last decade, I can see that the poisonous things can be transmuted into something useful. I started out okay with the publishers in 1997, but if they'd made me some sort of star of the 'witch-doctor racket' then, it would have been very hard to say no to their money and their demands. I would never have changed the spellings of Divine names, but I'm not sure what else I might have done.
I've got a better perspective on money now. (Largely David's influence here. He used to live in a converted Bedford van with a wood stove in it, going around megalithic sites. That's economical!) I was never a spendthrift, but there were 'normal' things. I'd get a weekly carry out rather than getting the makings of ten Chinese meals from the Chinese grocers for the same price as one carry out. Everyone says babies cost a lot, but so far, with the aid of Ebay, charity shops and buying food from local farmers and marked down, we're fine. When I told a friend how much David and I live on her jaw dropped, yet we're far from deprived. It's all what you expect. We don't expect to be able to afford holidays away or a mortgage or big nights out or new cars. I figure that the girls need my presence much more now than they'll need to inherit a house at some later time in their lives. If we get more cash in the future we'll be able to make it go infinitely further spending it only on what really matters.
Time is the same. I used to worry that having children would mean I didn't get so much work done in my life. I really wanted to help others and write and teach. Still do! After I had children I realized that their effect can be the opposite. I accomplish more in my three early morning hours of focussed writing than I used to in a day or more before I had children. As they start going to school I'll likely be able to accomplish a ridiculous amount. I know I'll end up doing ten times the work that I would have done had I not had them.
Of course, that's not the most important thing about having them. But that's another newsletter...
For now,
EVENTS and ANNOUNCEMENTS
At the end of March a book by Karen Sawyer entitled Soul Companions, Conversations with Contemporary Wisdom Keepers — A Collection of Encounters with Spirit, is coming out. I've been interviewed for it, along with many others spiritual teachers I know and like and I recommend it to you.
Part of the description is: "As our world rapidly moves towards ever greater spiritual, environmental and political challenges there is an urgent need for us to listen to the voices of respected healers, seers, visionaries and shamans whose wisdom, insights and leadership will inspire and guide us to make our planet a healthier, more peaceful and equitable place to live. For over two years, the author met and entered into profound dialogue with such remarkable people. This unique and important work brings together over 40 of the conversations that took place, revealing that there are many dimensions of existence overlapping and permeating the world as we know it. Every one of us has spirit helpers that can guide, heal and inspire us on our journey through life." For more go to:
http://www.o-books.com/product_info.php?products_id=439
Also her website at: http://www.soulcompanions.org/
I'm also set to be part of a teaching event with some other participants in September. (See below.)
24th May, 2008, Edinburgh
25th to 27th July, Magdalen College, Oxford
20-21st September 2008, Pembrokeshire, Wales
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