THE SCATTERED
We are the Scattered.
People sent away.
People driven out.
People with culture and language and art.
Poets and seers.
Seanchaith. And those who grip hope with taloned minds.
Those of us who refuse your schools.
And we are the scattered.
We are all tellers of stories, and stories are what make the human-animal world. But stories are not only mouth-spoken.
Stories are ink in skin, and carvings of bone. Stories are in flutes and drums and chants. Song. Stamping feet, boat, harpoon and fur-kin. Feather and fin kin. Stories are walking places and standing stones. Glaciers. Woven baskets. Stories are strong in weather-lore and old growth forest soughing language. And stories are also told in the bombed out basements and the raggedy person who is begging on the street. Stories are what they have been through. Stories are in the eyes of the condemned and the terror of a rejected newborn’s howl as the nuns take them from unmarried (therefore unsanctioned) girls and them learning to ask only with dreaming and unfertilized eggs.
Stories are in the warnings of weather and the knowledge of Navigators.
And
All storytellers are wayshowers. We are not, however, the way you will travel. That is up to each and every individual interpretation of lore. The story below is one by the master storyteller, Robin Williamson. I suggest you seek out others. This looks at the legends of the Tuatha De Dannan but there is much to discuss (the “leather bags” of the Firbolg, for example, were known to be crane skin). These stories are anthropomorphic stories of events that we can never truly know, like that of Balor, the will to survive. What event of such magnitude could enchant with such terror? Before the Younger Dryas? A meteor? Events of cataclysm redefined as “battles”?
Even though we are picking at the remnants of knowledge hidden in ancestral stories the search to liberate ourselves from the violent root of christian interference continues.
We are, after all, still here.
THE LANGUAGE OF ANIMACY
Rewilding the magical narrative.
DRÚ WIT
All drú and bardic holders of deeper stories are alchemists of what is currently and erroniously vandalised, in language and mind, as witch. Do many of us claim that word? Of course, an anarchy of self-ownership, and yet still parents allow their children to green their faces, preostheticise their noses, add warts and pointy black hats in dishonour and parody of the countless millions murdered throughout the current era, for difference. For defiance of a rapacious and arrogant invader.
Witch people are edge-dwellers. Often living oddly, through necessity, on the clifftops and in the caves of mythworld. Many have fallen or jumped because they cannot pretend to be what others want them to be. Sometimes because they haven’t a language that does not sound like a made up version their mothers or sisters have heard in a trashy movie. Being witch is a way of living that requires paying attention to earth, to patterns and weather conversations, to communicate, create ceremony, art story, to learn through the experience of living indigenous knowledge, memory and practice, in language that defies justification.
Many terminology need euthanizing. Much that is demanding and thoughtless. Words that ring of the Abrahamic religions: sacredness, worship, holy, divine, adore. Evoke, summon, banish. Alien to the language of crop circle and bog. Neither is it the language of a seven-tined stag, the iron muscle when you bite into salmon flesh, the scent of vernix, the howler winds across the Cairngorms, the reek of goat in musk or the shock of a ribbon-fleshed, barnacle-encrusted once-woman’s body caught on the line instead of brother mackerel.
CLAN
So what is clan? You can’t make it up. In this era termed as suffering, what George Monbiot, in his book Feral describes as, “shifting baseline syndrome“, or some disturbing, perhaps unique period in history (who truly knows?) of forgetting who we are. Whose ancesors, however, sill sing their sounds and stories in our synapses and bone and ligament and blood, be that human people, plant people, wolf people, otter people, pheasant or owl people, ant and arachnid and shark people; rock and shingle-on-a-shore people, condemning hem to voicelessness. We have been taught blindness and silence in a factory of discord. What he Hopi call koyaanisqatsi. We have been bludgeoned, imprisoned, tortured, murdered and shamed into beliefs that are ridiculous. And glaringly pointless and subservient to its masters in frocks and gold. We believe we can steal the identities and the tracks, the migratory stories and those of other oral critters, call ourselves healers or teachers or makers, and not be, because many of our species contrive and thrive (although impoverished of meaning), in slivers of lies. Continue to take from cultures what is thought to be not within ourselves. This is cultural suicide and there can be no clan either. Again. Ever. Until we listen. When we remember respect.
Who knows, now, as palefaces, as anglo/europeans, calling ourselves english, australian or american, when these lands have been wrenched, through he blood of confusion by those who said no, from the mothers of forever, and ignoring honesty? Who knows the imramma of eire or albion? What lore and weaving and hunting kept us alive over 250,000 seasons around the sun? I don’t. You don’t. We have to break ourselves, turn our bodies into reindeer and swallows, drink from some salmon-and-hazel meandering pool of vision before we can even begin to know ourselves under the surface of such an intentional erasure, enacted by a series of regimes called religion, that have conned us into believing the word ‘mundane’ is trivial, when we are earth; the word humiliated, seeped in the disappearance of entire species, from its latinized seeming source?
C’mon. I write too much. I talk this better. But.
- Get your DNA traced
- Find a serious genealogist and follow the sap towards the roots
- Speak without religious expletives or any words from that bastard tongue
- Skill up, and be ready to admit you were not taught to make dreamcatchers by the Ojibwe elders and given permission to work that draoicht, that you do not know sanskrit so the word ‘chakras’ no longer falls from your mouth as though you have learned it in the towers of a vanquished Tibet. That you speak the words that do not stem from latin, the language of conquerage
- Hunt
- Think
- Ask questions of those whose stories are unbroken, who have survived the plague of missionaries who have atempted to replace magic with dogma, questions with ansers.