Man Myth Magic Different Places

[Theodora Andy]

Suchbeautiful photos, especially that one of the stream. I think consistent walking, seeing the land in all its moods, is the best way to get to know a place. There are longer-form, seasonal patterns that only long observation reveals. I've lived in the same place for 13 years, and I feel I'm starting to understand it, but I can also see it's a lifetime's work. I'm lucky to live right by the sea, which is such an awe-inspiring, powerful, changeable force. I love the in-between, liminal, intertidal zone the most- it's so alive, never the same from one tide to the next.

The article that follows is based on the transcript of a talk I gave in 2016 at a conference called Nature Matters, organised by the very wonderful organisation New Networks for Nature, who gave much moral support to the work I was doing in founding EarthLines Magazine. Giving the talk was a strange experience, because back then (it\u2019s less the case today, and sometimes I like to think I might have had a tiny something to do with that) myth, imagination and animism were profoundly unfashionable ideas among the people I thought of as \u2018nature intellectuals\u2019 \u2013 even those who preached about reconnecting with nature. Which is curious, really, because I\u2019ve never been sure why they would want us to connect with nature, or would want to themselves, if they believed that most of what it consists of is inert, insensible, or just plain dead.

For example: the excellent British nature writer Tim Dee, in a 2011 edition of the journal Archipelago, put together a list of the characteristics which defined what he called the \u2018new topographic writing\u2019, which he was promoting. One of those characteristics was \u2018A wariness, even a testiness, with regard to anthropomorphism and animism.\u2019 And so it was with a modicum of trepidation that I accepted an invitation to speak at that conference, knowing that I\u2019d find myself in a room filled predominantly with conservationists, naturalists, and other scientific types who were doing really important work, but who would also espouse this idea that anthropomorphism and animism are not only unorthodox, but actively to be discouraged. I hoped they wouldn\u2019t also be actively \u2018testy\u2019, but it couldn\u2019t be guaranteed.

It wasn\u2019t the scientific nature of the audience which concerned me: I have a rigorous scientific background of my own, with a number of publications and prestigious research fellowships in the field of neuroscience dating back forty years. I just had a horror of facing a crowd of people who believed that nature was a resource for us to use, or for us to decide how to use. (Even though what those people were proposing, and actively doing, was work they were passionate about, and work that was critical to the health and wellbeing of so many ecosystems around the UK.) Well, that\u2019s exactly what many did seem to believe, and indeed what they spoke about (for some speakers, nature seemed to \u2018matter\u2019 primarily because it makes humans feel good) but I took a deep breath and gave this talk to them anyway. All were polite, many were perplexed, and a very few were enthusiastic. I suspect that readers of \u2018The Art of Enchantment\u2019 might find what follows a bit less challenging.

In this talk, my intent was to show how it might be possible, when turning up to live in a new place, to build a relationship with that place and with the natural world based on the exercise of the mythic imagination, as well as knowledge of the place\u2019s ecology. Based on an openness not only to the stories and histories already present in that land, but to the stories that arise when our own human imagination becomes entangled with the imagination of the other-than-human world around us. I was trying, in this conference full of sceptics and rationalists, to argue for new ways of connecting to the natural world.

\u2013 First, find somewhere or something that draws you. For me, in Donegal, it was a rock which I named \u2018the Story Stone\u2019; in my last house in Wales it was a tree which I named \u2018the Entwife\u2019. The rock, and then the tree, were my confidants. I told them all my concerns, and sang to them or told them stories.

\u2013 Next, and from your knowledge \u2013 however limited \u2013 of the folklore of the region, find places where folkloric characters might, in your mythic imagination, live. And so, at a blood-red ford, I imagined the character of the bean-nighe, the Washerwoman at the Ford who washes the blood-stained shirts of dead warriors. There was no local story about such a character, but there are stories in the wider Gaelic tradition. That was enough for me. Here in our new northern home, I imagine a giant at the top of the range of fells in front of us, because there are many giant stories scattered through the wild spaces of the north of England. I live next to a place called Pendragon Castle, and am all fired up with the Arthurian enthusiasms of my youth. So just find out what folkloric/ archetypal characters were once thought to occupy your region, and see what happens when your own mythic imagination collides with them \u2013 just as I did with Old Crane Woman in the talk below.

\u201CConnection isn\u2019t about nature in our service, a slave to our needs, a commodity for our use, a sticking-plaster for our stresses. Nature isn\u2019t there to provide us with therapy; that isn\u2019t what connection is about. Connection is about love. Enchantment. Wonder. And a necessary and appropriate sense of awe.\u201D

It\u2019s not quite dawn in this green, fertile valley; there\u2019s just the faintest glimmer of pink in the sky to the east. The moon is waxing, its light silvering the river which winds through the land, soft like the curves of a woman\u2019s body as she stretches out to dip her toes in the sea. At the crossroads, three hares are sitting quite still in the middle of the road; they scatter when they become aware of me, tails flashing white in the moonlight then fading into the dark.

Up I go, as I do every morning, along the stony, uneven track to the high bog, face to the Seven Sisters mountains, silhouetted now against a gradually lightening sky. They are the guardian spirits of this place, gathering around the fringes of the bog like a semicircle of elders, enclosing and protecting the land as it stretches across to the sea. An Earagail, or Errigal, the oratory; Mac Uchta, son of the mountain-breast; An Eachla Mh\u00F3r, the great horse; Ard Loch na mBreac Beada\u00ED, the heights of the loch of the canny trout; An Eachla Bheag, the little horse; Cnoc na Leargacha, hill of the hill-slope, and old sow-mother An Mhucais, or Muckish, the pig\u2019s back. Every name tells its own story; every mountain holds its own secret; every secret whispered down the scree slopes and sinking into the bog below.

I wind back along a tiny path to cut home across the moorland, but first I have to navigate the ford: a shallow pool in a sheltered hollow through which a deep and fast-flowing stream can be crossed. The ford froths blood-red at the edges with iron precipitates, and I creep down to it carefully, half expecting to catch a glimpse of the bean nighe, the Washerwoman at the Ford \u2013 the old woman of Gaelic legend who scrubs clean the bloody clothes of slain warriors.

Behind the ford is a single, clearly defined hill, a green breast rising from the soft contours of the land. It is crowned with heather, wiry and dormant now, spreading across its crest like a wide brown nipple. We call it a fairy hill, for these are the places which lead to the Otherworld \u2013 the beautiful, perilous dwelling-place of the Aos S\u00ED, the people of the mounds who lived in this land before us. Once upon a time, inside a hill like this on the Isle of Islay, Celtic women were transformed into the wisest creatures in the land by the Queen of the Aos S\u00ED. In the Otherworld, wisdom is largely possessed by women, since they are the ones who hold the Grail. But that is a story for another time. Here in Ireland, the Otherworld is as real as any other, and exists in parallel with \u2013 well, actually entangled with \u2013 this one. The Otherworld, in many senses, is what French philosopher Henry Corbin called the mundus imaginalis: the world of the image, a different level of reality which lies between the empirical/physical world and the world of abstract intellect, and which communicates itself in the form of myth and symbol. So it is that the Irish landscape is a landscape steeped in stories, and those stories stalk us still. They have seeped into the bones of this land, and the land offers them back to us; it breathes them into the wind and bleeds them out into streams and rivers. They will not be refused.

I moved here two and a half years ago, and this land and the creatures who inhabit it are beginning to know me as I know them. They know me because I walk every morning in the same places. They know me because sometimes when I go down to the blood-red ford, I sit for a while and I sing. Because sometimes, I sit and tell a story to the giant boulder on top of the hill which I call the Story Stone, because on every side of it I see a different face, and all the faces have their mouths open as if they are telling stories. They know me because each morning, in the same place, I stand and I say the names of the mountains. It is an incantation, a summoning. Naming is important. Be careful what you awaken with your naming; be aware of what you\u2019re calling into being.

So it is that the mountains come to know me as I know them. And I do know them. I know their voices: the different sounds they make as the wind swirls around each one\u2019s unique shape. I know them by the way the clouds gather on their crests and mist lingers in their folds. An Earagail has a penchant for small puffy clouds which perch on top of her conical head like jaunty bonnets; An Mhucais likes lenticular clouds, all the better to see her beautiful long back reflected in the mirror of the sky.

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