“In order to connect to what was before,” says Christopher Juul,” you have to disconnect from what is now.”
THE GREAT INVISIBLE
The invasions and decimation of the landscapes of others has created an invisibility, an obfuscation, of the heritage of vast cultures of species. Not just human. We are one single branch of an unprecedented network of primordial depths. Death and decay, our family. Absorbed back into mother earth. It is that simple and that profound. Unless the forest is destroyed.
Colonization has, for 2,000 of the estimated 4.2 billion years of life as earth, decimated us all in what is called, by scholars, the era of the 6th mass extinction.
So we, who can, wake up. We cannot fear anymore. We had to hide. We have had to play along. We were not told. We were taught we are complicit in the destruction. We are not. We refuse this. We reclaim and rewild. While we can.
Image: kernunnos. Yannick Germain
“The earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximately 780,000 years ago. The oldest proto-human bones discovered in England date from 500,000 years ago…”
I am a twig upon a vast tree within that forest. A medicine woman in this body, I re-skin your bones in my one way. Ancestral way. My family’s ancient lineage is a forest of thick, gnarled tap-roots, unbroken through the ages, beyond bus drivers, and women institutionalized for speaking their spells, from workers dying of the lung disease from the linen factories, or the coal mines, to smiths, horse whisperers. Down the roots of the blood in our veins, like the spiders in the caves beneath the World Tree, to warriors defending a way of life doomed because people matter: my ancient father, of whom I am both proud and shadowed, C’radoc ap Cunobellinus, at the time of the 2nd invasion of the landscape now titled the British Isles (erroneously named Caratacus by the Romans). I am also Brittany and Paris and my living relatives of my father’s lineage, who found me through ancestry.com, are both Irish and English ‘gypsies’, Romanichal.
I am Ireland, Albion and France. I am also fungus within the old growth conifer forests of the Víkingur landscapes, and along the shoreline of Faxaflói. Nothing of anyone else has been uncovered. So I sit with these stories. The colour of the skin of my genetic mothers, nscrutable as the fog misting in from the sea, dyed silver and blue with woad and bear fat, inked with the soot of the bone fire. Drabarni, I can tell you the future.
Initiation that only happens with a lived trauma. It is not easy. But it will change you.
Our culture. Confused by abandonment and disrespect.
TATOUAGE FOR A WOMAN TO BE ON THE JOURNEY OF SPIRIT
Every line on the skin, every mark, tells who we are. The body speaks before words do.
Her beauty is our strength, it is our courage, it is something everyone must see.
When this is done, from the very first piercing, the woman will wear talismans and jewellery and her life is changed forever. Every gesture on the day the skin takes the marks, has meaning. Everything must be done as it has always been done. The elder’s hands grip the needles. Others stretch the skin. If the culture has been severely depleted the elder will do both. The skin must be stretched. The rite is painful but is to be faced with courage. The elder must not see fear or they will not mark the woman.
When a woman is mature the ceremony must be performed until her pattern is exposed to the world who made her.
