Samhain 2009 - a reading (on YouTube)
Half the year we spend in darkness struggling to find the light. The night is not evil, only mysterious and unknown, unilluminated.
Unblinking eyes embrace the darkness tonight, glowing in the shadows, some friendly, some not, some merely mischievous. They look out from behind the masks of archetypes, the stories we tell each other gathered around the harvest fire to remind ourselves that danger is ever present and all around.
We tell tales of the horned god who is the hart bounding through the forest, darting into shadows to keep the wolves at bay. Like him, we fear the onset of twilight, the hunting hour for wolves and panthers. We sense them stalking us from a time when a flash of eyes provided our only warning before a scream heralded that one of us had gone missing, disappearing behind a trail of blood. The stag serves as the guardian of the forest deer, a reminder that if we are quick and willing to confront the circling pack in our fastness, our children will survive and prosper. But to him, we are just another set of eyes in the night, another predator darkly desirous of his flesh.
We speak of the great mother, the black soil beneath our feet from which life springs, as dark and mysterious as a cave. Sometimes cruel, sometimes gentle, she nurtures her better children and grinds the rest to nourish the next generation already stirring in her womb. She is the dark earth goddess we appease with blood, bone and flesh to keep the land fertile and the harvest towers full. After the sickle falls, she embraces our dead, still her children, whose eyes make our spines tingle in the night when she sends them out to play.
We whisper of the old crone, our ancestral grandmother, toothless and bent yet bold and unintimidated, reminding us with her cane when she thinks we've gone astray. She is the good witch whose identical twin lives deep among the trees luring children into her lair with sweet promises before devouring their innocence, baking them into men and women in her oven before offering them as sweetmeats to her pets, some of which have learned to walk on their hind legs among us. Their hungry eyes follow us while she hums through her preparations, devising a cunning plan to separate us from the shepherds and woodcutters so they can dine on lamb come spring.
Finally, we utter stories of the goblins, the thieves that live among us, miscreants of mischance that pilfer our good fortune. Hardship and misadventure waiting to steal our cache of luck, they are the mischievous spirits lurking near our shame. Once, they were simple village numina, kobolds and tomte easily appeased. Outcast from our homes like demons, now they gather in clans and tribes, packing up like wild dogs to hunt, setting camps deep inside the forest to brigand the unwary and unsuspecting. Their eyes shine beyond the windows tonight, casting back red or green reflections as they call for treats in small, high voices.
Half the year we spend in darkness struggling to find the light. Tonight beyond the harvest fire, eyes embrace the darkness, tracking us through the night. We must be careful not to hold their gaze or we will be spellbound by our own reflection.
© 2009 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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The stag or hart was central in Celtic mythology. There is a great deal of conjecture that the Christian devil as we picture him with horns was derived from the Celtic forest king, a symbol of fertility, as the two cultures met and clashed.
The Great Mother (Magna Mater) refers to a Roman cult they imported after consulting the Sibylline books. Most Earth Mother goddesses require blood sacrifices, not vastly different from the bone and fish meal we use to fertilize the soil. Coincidence? Or is it just that we give our dead to her embrace, and the blood is to reanimate them in the underworld?
The crone and the witch, two faces of the same archetype. The crone is an ancient adviser, though her wisdom always comes at a price to remind us that we have forgotten to pay attention to her. In many cultures, she is indistinguishable from the witch, the evil meddler. Both interact with the spirit world, one for the benefit of society's traditions, the other to tempt us to stray from them. Both are more than willing to remind us that life is hard and dark.
Kobolds are German, tomte Swedish. Both were house or farm spirits, kind of like Nordic faeries. Tomte is also a Norwegian word but to them it refers to an untranslatable ingredient in beer. I tend to wonder if they are related, but my Norwegian friend gets upset when I say that. The Norwegians have a bit of history with the Swedes (the people from whom they gained their independence).