{"id":6256,"date":"2012-01-01T01:10:34","date_gmt":"2012-01-01T06:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paganpages.org\/content\/?p=6429"},"modified":"2012-01-01T11:33:17","modified_gmt":"2012-01-01T16:33:17","slug":"prunings-from-the-hedge-and-prunings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/2012\/01\/01\/prunings-from-the-hedge-and-prunings\/","title":{"rendered":"Prunings from the Hedge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebirth from Chaos <\/strong><\/p>\n

In the Craft traditions I’ve learned, Samhain marks the point in the year when the Lady retires to the Summerland for the winter, the Wild Hunt ranges abroad, the Holly King becomes the hoary Lord of Misrule and presides over winter celebrations, and the World, that is, the local cosmos, starts to return to its underlying chaos.\u00a0 In the Ogham Tree calendar, as reconstructed by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, most of November lies within the lunar month of the Reed, and has the tag from the Rune of Amergin that proclaims \u201cI am a threatening noise of the sea.\u201d\u00a0 Ngetal, the Reed month, is succeeded by Ruis, the Elder tree month, the tag for which is \u201cI am a wave of the sea,\u201d an alternative reading being \u201cI am a returning wave of the sea.\u201d\u00a0 Ruis ends at Yule, the winter solstice, and the day after Yule is called by Graves ‘the Nameless Day,’ for it lies outside the 364-day lunar year.\u00a0 It is the ‘day’ mentioned in the expression ‘a year and a day.’\u00a0 The following day begins Beth, the Birch moon of the new year.<\/p>\n

In this article I will present an attempt to explain most of this material so it makes sense as a collective whole.<\/p>\n

Samhain, October 31st, was the Celtic New Year.\u00a0 Its name means ‘Summer’s end,’ for the Celts recognized only two seasons, summer and winter.\u00a0 The reconstructed Craft traditions I have learned put this together with the calendar of solstitial peoples, who placed the beginning of the new year after the solstice, usually December 20th or 21st.\u00a0 Thus, while at Samhain the veil between the worlds is rent, the actual return of the World to chaos is gradual, extending from October 31st to the day after Yule.\u00a0 This return underlies the celebrations of disorder in December leading up to the night of Yule, when we bid farewell to the Holly King (as the Lord of Misrule), who will be vanquished by the reborn Oak King at midnight.\u00a0 Several confusions need to be cleared up in all of this.<\/p>\n

First, as to chaos \u2013 this is a condition, not of disorder, but of reality in its primordial state before it is organized by the mind into names and forms, and thus rendered knowable.\u00a0 It is not just something that existed before the creation of our local cosmos and will exist again after its dissolution at the end of the\u00a0 cosmic cycle.\u00a0 It is here all the time.\u00a0 It is right in front of our eyes, as it were, but most of the time we cling to the comfort of the known and find it extremely difficult to let go and face the unknown.\u00a0 Periodically letting go, at least partially, and facing the unknown that surrounds us and that we ourselves are, is a renewing experience.\u00a0 This is what witches attempt on the Nameless Day, after working up to it through the Reed and Elder moons.\u00a0 In doing so, we are imitating, on our small level, what the Gods and the World are doing at this season.\u00a0 If we participate in this renewal, we will emerge in the New Year refreshed throughout our minds and bodies.\u00a0 Thus, the parties and ritual reversals of December (as in the ancient Saturnalia) have a serious purpose as well as being for fun.<\/p>\n

The World, our local cosmos, needs some explanation next.\u00a0 The Pagan picture of the cosmos is the World Tree (in some traditions, a world pillar or mountain).\u00a0 This does not contradict modern science, for the World Tree is actually a map of consciousness.\u00a0 Many of us are familiar from yoga books with the diagram of the body and its seven chakras located along the spine, and the three subtle channels (ida, sushumna, pingala) twining through them from the base of the spine to the crown of the head.\u00a0 At each chakra one perceives a different world.\u00a0 This was also depicted in the Irminsul, the sacred tower of the Saxons, destroyed by Charlemagne.\u00a0 The World Tree represents the same reality as the picture of the yogi and his or her seven chakras, and the reality explored by modern astronomers is concerned with the view obtained through only one of the chakras.<\/p>\n

Each of us views the universe through the lens of the chakra we habitually inhabit.\u00a0 This is true of all sentient beings, all the way up to and including the Gods.\u00a0 Thus, to say that the World is renewed by returning to chaos is to really make a statement about the consciousness of beings perceiving the World, or that portion of it open to their vision.\u00a0 As the World Tree represents the possibilities for perceiving the universe from the earth, the cosmos so represented is local in character.\u00a0 Sentient beings living in the Andromeda galaxy with the same potential for exploring different levels of consciousness have their own World Tree.<\/p>\n

The lunar month falling between October 28th and November 24th is assigned by Robert Graves, somewhat tentatively, to the reed.\u00a0 The reed becomes ready for cutting in November, and was used by the Celts to thatch their houses. As it is hollow, it was regarded as providing a passage for spirits and the dead from the Underworld to our own Middle-earth (Middle-earth because it is perceived through the middle chakra of the spine, thus resting on the midmost branch of the World Tree).\u00a0 Through the piping of the reeds one could hear the approach of the spirits of winter.<\/p>\n

The Rune of Amergin tag associated with Ngetal is \u201cI am a threatening noise of the sea.\u201d\u00a0 This refers locally to western Ireland, when the crashing waves of the Atlantic filled the hearts of the Gaels of Connaught with terror at this time of year.\u00a0 These harbingers of winter assailed their sense of security and increased their fear of the unknown, of what hardships winter might bring.<\/p>\n

The Rune or Song of Amergin exists in many versions.\u00a0 It is perhaps the oldest piece of Gaelic writing, and was purportedly the challenge thrown out by Amergin, the chief Druid of the invading Milesians, to his counterpart among the indigenous people of Ireland, the Tuatha de Danaan.\u00a0 Graves arranged the different lines of the Rune to accord with the Ogham Tree calendar, which he set in the order of the trees’ blossoming in the Irish climate, an order which also fit that of the initial letters of the trees’ names in the Ogham alphabet.<\/p>\n

November was given to the first phase of the return to chaos, of the known to the unknown.\u00a0 In this phase, the unknown is approaching like ocean waves, and one feels oneself isolated on a small isle in the midst of the sea.\u00a0 Everything on the isle is known and familiar, including oneself, but the waves of the unknown are marshaling an assault that threatens to inundate what remains of land underfoot.<\/p>\n

Ngetal is succeeded by Ruis, the Elder month.\u00a0 The elder, according to Graves,<\/p>\n

\u201c…is a waterside tree associated with witches, which keeps its fruit well into December…in Ireland elder sticks, rather than ashen ones, are used by witches as magic horses. Although the flowers and inner bark of the elder have always been famous for their therapeutic qualities, the scent of an elder plantation was formerly held to cause death and disease.\u201d (Graves, p. 185)<\/p>\n

And earlier (p. 40) he remarks that the elder is a notoriously bad wood for fuel.<\/p>\n

The elder-tree thus serves as a symbol for something that has healing effects but which is very unpleasant to confront.\u00a0 The Rune of Amergin tag for Ruis is, as mentioned, \u201cI am a wave of the sea,\u201d or \u201cI am a returning wave of the sea.\u201d\u00a0 Putting this image together with the one of Ngetal, we see that the encroaching sea has now overwhelmed the little island of the known, and the observer has become one with the waters.\u00a0 From being a last remnant of the known, one has come to perceive oneself as equally unknown, part of the total mystery of this moment of existence.\u00a0 This is not an experience of the meaninglessness of life, for that still posits two entities, meaning and life, that fail to come together.\u00a0 This is rather the realization that names and forms are only relatively real, and meaning fails, in the final analysis, to explain this moment of existence.\u00a0 In the novel Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre expressed this realization negatively with the words \u201cI am the Thing.\u201d (Sartre, p. 134)\u00a0 But there was still an element of resistance in that insight.\u00a0 His hero Roquentin is drowning but has not let go of the known and returned to the sea as one of its mysterious waves. He still clings to his negative reactions as things known.\u00a0 He is still choking on the elder-smoke.<\/p>\n

Speaking from my own experience, the return to chaos, in its culminating moment, lasts only a few seconds, for it is the strongest and, in a non-negative sense, most terrifying of experiences.\u00a0 It is like waking up to find oneself at the edge of a windswept cliff. One cannot help but step back.\u00a0 But the moment at the cliff’s edge will be remembered all one’s life, with renewed vigor.<\/p>\n

Graves assigns the Rune of Amergin tag \u201cWho but I knows the secret of the unhewn dolmen?\u201d to the Nameless Day.\u00a0 Dolmens were erected on burial mounds of heroes.\u00a0 The name of the hero was hewn in the dolmen.\u00a0 This dolmen, erected above my grave, has no name, because I have lost my name and form in chaos.\u00a0 The secret I know is the secret of rebirth, for I emerge from chaos reborn, with the Gods and the World, to start life afresh in the New Year.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

GRAVES, Robert, The White Goddess; A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, New York, Farrar,<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Straus and Giroux, 27th printing, 1993.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

SARTRE, Jean-Paul, Nausea, New York, New Directions, 1964.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rebirth from Chaos In the Craft traditions I’ve learned, Samhain marks the point in the year when the Lady retires to the Summerland for the winter, the Wild Hunt ranges abroad, the Holly King becomes the hoary Lord of Misrule and presides over winter celebrations, and the World, that is, the local cosmos, starts to return to its underlying chaos.\u00a0 In the Ogham Tree calendar, as reconstructed by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, most of November lies within the lunar month of the Reed, and has the tag from the Rune of Amergin that proclaims \u201cI am a threatening noise of the sea.\u201d\u00a0 Ngetal, the Reed month, is succeeded by Ruis, the Elder tree month, the tag for which is \u201cI am a wave of the sea,\u201d an alternative reading being \u201cI am a returning wave of the sea.\u201d\u00a0 Ruis ends at Yule, the winter solstice, and the day after Yule is called by Graves ‘the Nameless Day,’ for it lies outside the 364-day lunar year.\u00a0 It is the ‘day’ mentioned in the expression ‘a year and a day.’\u00a0 The following day begins Beth, the Birch moon of the new year. In this article I will present an attempt to explain most of this material so it makes sense as a collective whole. Samhain, October 31st, was the Celtic New Year.\u00a0 Its name means ‘Summer’s end,’ for the Celts recognized only two seasons, summer and winter.\u00a0 The reconstructed Craft traditions I have learned put this together with the calendar of solstitial peoples, who placed the beginning of the new year after the solstice, usually December 20th or 21st.\u00a0 Thus, while at Samhain the veil between the worlds is rent, the actual return of the World to chaos is gradual, extending from October 31st to the day after Yule.\u00a0 This return underlies the celebrations of disorder in December leading up to the night of Yule, when we bid farewell to the Holly King (as the Lord of Misrule), who will be vanquished by the reborn Oak King at midnight.\u00a0 Several confusions need to be cleared up in all of this. First, as to chaos \u2013 this is a condition, not of disorder, but of reality in its primordial state before it is organized by the mind into names and forms, and thus rendered knowable.\u00a0 It is not just something that existed before the creation of our local cosmos and will exist again after its dissolution at the end of the\u00a0 cosmic cycle.\u00a0 It is here all the time.\u00a0 It is right in front of our eyes, as it were, but most of the time we cling to the comfort of the known and find it extremely difficult to let go and face the unknown.\u00a0 Periodically letting go, at least partially, and facing the unknown that surrounds us and that we ourselves are, is a renewing experience.\u00a0 This is what witches attempt on the Nameless Day, after working up to it through the Reed and Elder moons.\u00a0 In doing so, we are imitating, on our small level, what the Gods and the World are doing at this season.\u00a0 If we participate in this renewal, we will emerge in the New Year refreshed throughout our minds and bodies.\u00a0 Thus, the parties and ritual reversals of December (as in the ancient Saturnalia) have a serious purpose as well as being for fun. The World, our local cosmos, needs some explanation next.\u00a0 The Pagan picture of the cosmos is the World Tree (in some traditions, a world pillar or mountain).\u00a0 This does not contradict modern science, for the World Tree is actually a map of consciousness.\u00a0 Many of us are familiar from yoga books with the diagram of the body and its seven chakras located along the spine, and the three subtle channels (ida, sushumna, pingala) twining through them from the base of the spine to the crown of the head.\u00a0 At each chakra one perceives a different world.\u00a0 This was also depicted in the Irminsul, the sacred tower of the Saxons, destroyed by Charlemagne.\u00a0 The World Tree represents the same reality as the picture of the yogi and his or her seven chakras, and the reality explored by modern astronomers is concerned with the view obtained through only one of the chakras. Each of us views the universe through the lens of the chakra we habitually inhabit.\u00a0 This is true of all sentient beings, all the way up to and including the Gods.\u00a0 Thus, to say that the World is renewed by returning to chaos is to really make a statement about the consciousness of beings perceiving the World, or that portion of it open to their vision.\u00a0 As the World Tree represents the possibilities for perceiving the universe from the earth, the cosmos so represented is local in character.\u00a0 Sentient beings living in the Andromeda galaxy with the same potential for exploring different levels of consciousness have their own World Tree. The lunar month falling between October 28th and November 24th is assigned by Robert Graves, somewhat tentatively, to the reed.\u00a0 The reed becomes ready for cutting in November, and was used by the Celts to thatch their houses. As it is hollow, it was regarded as providing a passage for spirits and the dead from the Underworld to our own Middle-earth (Middle-earth because it is perceived through the middle chakra of the spine, thus resting on the midmost branch of the World Tree).\u00a0 Through the piping of the reeds one could hear the approach of the spirits of winter. The Rune of Amergin tag associated with Ngetal is \u201cI am a threatening noise of the sea.\u201d\u00a0 This refers locally to western Ireland, when the crashing waves of the Atlantic filled the hearts of the Gaels of Connaught with terror at this time of year.\u00a0 These harbingers of winter assailed their sense of security and increased their fear of the unknown, of what hardships winter might bring. The Rune or Song of Amergin exists in many versions.\u00a0 It is perhaps the oldest piece of Gaelic writing, and was purportedly the challenge thrown out by Amergin, the chief Druid of the invading Milesians, to his counterpart among the indigenous people of Ireland, the Tuatha de Danaan.\u00a0 Graves arranged the different lines of the Rune to accord with the Ogham Tree calendar, which he set in the order of the trees’ blossoming in the Irish climate, an order which also fit that of the initial letters of the trees’ names in the Ogham alphabet. November was given to the first phase of the return to chaos, of the known to the unknown.\u00a0 In this phase, the unknown is approaching like ocean waves, and one feels oneself isolated on a small isle in the midst of the sea.\u00a0 Everything on the isle is known and familiar, including oneself, but the waves of the unknown are marshaling an assault that threatens to inundate what remains of land underfoot. Ngetal is succeeded by Ruis, the Elder month.\u00a0 The elder, according to Graves, \u201c…is a waterside tree associated with witches, which keeps its fruit well into December…in Ireland elder sticks, rather than ashen ones, are used by witches as magic horses. Although the flowers and inner bark of the elder have always been famous for their therapeutic qualities, the scent of an elder plantation was formerly held to cause death and disease.\u201d (Graves, p. 185) And earlier (p. 40) he remarks that the elder is a notoriously bad wood for fuel. The elder-tree thus serves as a symbol for something that has healing effects but which is very unpleasant to confront.\u00a0 The Rune of Amergin tag for Ruis is, as mentioned, \u201cI am a wave of the sea,\u201d or \u201cI am a returning wave of the sea.\u201d\u00a0 Putting this image together with the one of Ngetal, we see that the encroaching sea has now overwhelmed the little island of the known, and the observer has become one with the waters.\u00a0 From being a last remnant of the known, one has come to perceive oneself as equally unknown, part of the total mystery of this moment of existence.\u00a0 This is not an experience of the meaninglessness of life, for that still posits two entities, meaning and life, that fail to come together.\u00a0 This is rather the realization that names and forms are only relatively real, and meaning fails, in the final analysis, to explain this moment of existence.\u00a0 In the novel Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre expressed this realization negatively with the words \u201cI am the Thing.\u201d (Sartre, p. 134)\u00a0 But there was still an element of resistance in that insight.\u00a0 His hero Roquentin is drowning but has not let go of the known and returned to the sea as one of its mysterious waves. He still clings to his negative reactions as things known.\u00a0 He is still choking on the elder-smoke. Speaking from my own experience, the return to chaos, in its culminating moment, lasts only a few seconds, for it is the strongest and, in a non-negative sense, most terrifying of experiences.\u00a0 It is like waking up to find oneself at the edge of a windswept cliff. One cannot help but step back.\u00a0 But the moment at the cliff’s edge will be remembered all one’s life, with renewed vigor. Graves assigns the Rune of Amergin tag \u201cWho but I knows the secret of the unhewn dolmen?\u201d to the Nameless Day.\u00a0 Dolmens were erected on burial mounds of heroes.\u00a0 The name of the hero was hewn in the dolmen.\u00a0 This dolmen, erected above my grave, has no name, because I have lost my name and form in chaos.\u00a0 The secret I know is the secret of rebirth, for I emerge from chaos reborn, with the Gods and the World, to start life afresh in the New Year. Bibliography GRAVES, Robert, The White Goddess; A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 27th printing, 1993. SARTRE, Jean-Paul, Nausea, New York, New Directions, 1964.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}