Myth and Magic: An Urgent Contemporary Relevance
LY DE ANGELES
Author since 1987, stolen child/natal alienation activist, teacher, seer, skeptic, mystic
5 AUDIOBOOKS . Release Date: 1st NOVEMBER 2024
LEGENDS OF THE SÍDHE
WHAT? Celtic mysticism & ancestral story in the current era
WHERE? In the shadowed doorway of the alley. On a ship in the raging sea. Under the bed. Just outside the window on a storm-wracked night. Behind eyes that have seen too much. Within the tomb of the murdered. Behind the locked door of solitary confinement. Within the drugged confusion of an insane asylum. Within textbooks too thick to really read. From a pulpit dedicated to scaring children for the remainder of their lives, and unto (unprecedented catastrophe notwithstanding) the seventh generation. Who is it that perpetuates the greater curse?
WHEN? Now.
WHAT DON’T WE REMEMBER? Everything.
CROW MAGIC
SEEKING RELEVANCE
WHAT’S WEST?
Arya Stark: What’s west of Westeros?
Jon Snow: I don’t know.
Arya Stark: No one knows. It’s where all the maps stop. That’s where I’m going.
(Game of Thrones)
Except there’s also Tir na n’Óg, Tech Duinn, Emain Ablach, Annwfn, even Camelot. Drowned Lands that may or may not, like dragons, have been very present before a comet, or an extinction possibility from, perhaps, Little Boy (the bomb that consumed Hiroshima, blew security away), another Hitler, an Ice Age. Reshaping the world we thought we knew, but didn’t.
LORE
Once upon a time familiarity with faerie evoked foreboding, even terror. Fäerie (the halls, realms, or wisdom of) are intergenerational knowledge of place and event. A way of understanding ancestry, weather, messages from birds, rings around the moon, what the pollinators teach, who and what is a future antagonist.
It is postulated, through the work of Dr Lynne Kelly, author of over twenty books, including the 2024 release of The Knowledge Gene, that anthropomorphic stories—the humanising of wildness—are the childhoods of indigenous memory-keepers. That as we age we learn, through initiation and mnemonics, of the warnings and wisdom of elders preceding us; of what is known to be necessary for the survival of family, stability, clan and territory.
With subsequent invasions have come the demands, threats and violation, by agreement with an agenda, to either wipe out opposition, imprison, tame, or breed out all objection. When, or if, that is impossible, the belittlement and humiliation of cultural practice and story becomes the go-to destructive rear-guard; the use of media and politics, its agencies.
WILDNESS
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (Santayana)
The Legends of the Sídhe series began decades ago with one unexpected story. Heralded by a tickle of words, upon waking from the vividity of dream, the first story became several, became first one book then more. From publication with Llewellyn USA, to Ireland, my family’s unrealised ancestral land, for pre-release to independent publishing. They are stories of now. They hint at who, or what, we might also be. Who or what we might pass in the street and condescend towards because they are not what society considers acceptable. Normal. But who, hidden in the shadows, defines normalcy? I remember a young man on Degraves Street, Melbourne, who watched me in passing, nodded slightly, and raised up every hair on my body. Because I understood. Not who he might be but what. I experience this hair-raising even as I write of him.
As Neil Gaiman suggests, in American Gods, we bring the spirits of place (genius loci, anam cara) with us when we travel to new lands. They are not delusion, they are us and our ancestral DNA as human, or beyond that simplicity to rock, kelp, ice, salmon in the pond beneath an enchanted hazel tree. Blanketed, intentionally, by a banality that suffocates the life out of culture and individuality by its own pompous, sadistic and irrational logic. Shaming intentionally.
So comes arguing, ridicule, exile and sanctioned killing and maiming. War. Humiliation. Each other, government, our children, bludgeoning into submission and silence our innate awareness of what is just and right. The stories today are of invasion, and of refugees trying to protect a family, exonerated and excluded simultaneously. As historically written. As always having been so. And most often chronicled by acquiescence with the captors; the potential destroyers of everything we cherish. It is, in the consciousness of those who would debase and entrap freedom in rhetoric, a stockholm syndrome-esque agreement.
We kill. Or we are killed. Too many species to list (and I am a keeper of lists). We mock, instead. Scared shitless of derision.
In Australia, declared invasive species are slaughtered or confined. And yet, we do not consider ourselves as such. Should we? We are. It is not a matter of speculation. If we, for a moment, look in the mirror of animism and declare honestly, we also slaughter, supplant and suffocate First Nation people with a narrative of a dead god, self-righteous platitudes, violation and murder. With reservations called Utopia. Previous coloniser bureaucracies made it law that every tree on a property of agricultural size be removed This fact is terrible, yet few know because the facts are obfuscated. Hidden in embarrassment. Written with the arrogance of a preening conqueror, marginalising the generations of dispossessed since invasion; erasure of the dignity of a human people of an approximate 60,000 years by the belittlement of the ‘boong truck’ (police paddy wagon) and the spit hood.
SPIRIT WORLD OR SPECULATION?
Am I making more of the faerie stories I wrote? That I have narrated? No.
Artists of all genres (and I count myself as one of them) are the horses that carry legends across consciousness and, perhaps, generations. We do this for ourselves, but when and if we approach a human audience we ask the observer to please consider without bias what we do, as it is inadvertently also for you.
FӒERIE
Fäerie is everywhere. I’m simply a Celtic manifestation of place. The people of myth come through me but are not the premise of just another story. For the first several books I didn’t use the word faerie. I was afraid of scorn. Of marginalisation. That the tag line would exhibit trivia. Untrue on all counts. The Legends of the Sídhe cross enforced territorial divisions, from Ireland to Scotland, to Wales. From there into other landscapes and cultures. Kissing. Surprised, because they know and call these mysteries by many other names. Could be any country. Could be your city. Your village. Your graveyard. Travelers, Tuatha Dé Danann, sídhe, fáidh, the Good Folk, the Fair Folk; all relevant. Fact is, I hid from the f word, goaded by Willie-the-Red, the fiddler in almost every tale, who annoys the others of his clan by raising the word up like a middle finger flag to the cautious and those who would demean. Their deniers. Something quite profane.
WRITTEN ON THE SUBWAY WALLS
I don’t want to screw with the stories by projecting a notion of deep and meaningful. They are to be enjoyed by anyone who finds enchantment in mythic realism and folktale. Goodness no. We have—society as I glean it—been fed a religious fantasy for a couple of thousand years give or take. That’s okay. If people choose an ideology, and harm no one and nothing with its interpretation, who is anyone to deny their right? But when all other points of view are extinguished by the adherents of those ideologies, we should ask, how is that not violent?
Callous and deliberately hateful, wracked with spite at how close they almost came to agreeing? What is destroyed in the name of righteousness? Whose home is razed, concreted over with platitudes and coded smarminess after the dust has settled?
Politicians use this trick. Institutions uphold the trick. Courts of commonwealth law, mostly, require a hand on a book that is dubious in its integrity and its presumed pacifism, to say the least. There are many, and we are legion, who know another way. As far into history as the Grimm lads, Hans Christian Anderson; as contemporary as Charles de Lint, Terri Windling, Froud, Sherri S Tepper, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ursula Le Guin, George Miller, the Wachowskis, Kim Scott, not to mention the authors of the big stories like Lord of the Rings and Matrix, Once Were Warriors and Walkabout, with whom I could never and would never want to compete.
MEMORY
Just behind the glamour of orthodox religion exist the memories of why the dolmen stones were placed where, what landmark show the way to the gathering of clans, that lighthouses explain submersion and danger without the need for texts, why certain hills are hollow and why the amanita muscaria (fly agaric, a powerful forest medicine) persists in the illustrations of faerie rings on the covers of children’s books. Our reaction—our recognition of something unprecedented; a message—when the 1,400 oaks, upholding the arrogance of men, that for just short of a thousand years was the tower of Notre Dame, burned out of control, reflecting the terror of the Tower card in tarot, and the disaster and/or crisis it portends.
Mythic stories call us to remember that the green-faced, warty old woman costumes, worn by children at samuin, might just be the remnant of the Washer at the Ford, or Ceridwen chasing Gwion Bach through a succession of shapeshifting animist transformations (initiations) until he emerges into manifestation as the poet Taliesin: the stag of seven tines.
Oh, I will mention, just once, that myth is not fallacy. The word’s etymology is that of a story with no known author. I do not write myth, but of myth.
DIGNITY
Plunge your hands into that whale heart, lean into it and squeeze and let your voice join the whale’s roar. Sing that song your father taught you… (Kim Scott, Deadman)
I have written copious texts on the problem of the attempted genocide of cultures, lands and languages. That this is killing us perpetually. It is why our ancient mothers were murdered and our current mothers fear. Why and our fathers become so desperate they drink themselves to death, anaesthetised to who they take down with them. Bash and mutilate those they profess to love and who love them but cannot condone when the behaviour incites destruction.
The differences in culture are profoundly interesting. Story-sharing and the deeper stratum of exploration, both respectfully and permissively, are to my mind liberation. Through respect our differences become treasure. Honesty equalling courage: a love story, really.
We must feed children wisdom, not delusions to grow out of so they can become good office workers or toilers in factories making eventual landfill that smothers dignity, divided and silenced.
That’s why I do this. No fear of claiming heritage.
PERSONAL NOTE BY THE AUTHOR/NARRATOR
No fear of claiming heritage is implicit in these stories. Yes, they are allegory. That’s how we get it. A mirror to self. Whether that’s an Olympic swimmer winning gold in the name of “our country”, Led Zeppelin’s The Battle of Evermore or Yeats suggesting Come Away O Human Child.
I had no knowledge of who I am or from whom I am born, until more than fifty years of being alive. I was taken, as an infant, just like the changeling in one of my stories, and never permitted to disagree with the people who bought me. Sometimes we have to wait. To pace ourselves against seemingly insurmountable odds to bring to the light of day an honest history, delegated to shame for reasons of militarily-organised expediency; condoned by church and state.
As such I can’t pretend. I don’t write these stories to merely entertain. That would be alien to my nature. Punishment for rebellion against an imposed standard of supposed normalcy is serious. Yes. But oh, freedom is nectar, despite threats of revocation, once gained.
I have worked with faeries to acquire the guts.
May I present what you might feel but have no words for?
Do I ask anything? Yes and no. Yes, it’d be a relief to be informed by strangers that I write well and that someone sees what I see. That anyone understands this is more than a small thing. No, because I have learned that many have been indoctrinated into the erroneous idea these stories are merely the figment of a delusional mind. That imagination is both personal and irrelevant. These stories are us. They are also themselves. We need to honour the differences without seeking to be better than the different, or we and our children will never be safe. I must, before I finish writing this, also acknowledge the privilege of representing and providing service to them. To be this voice, to have been brought into this vision and to be trusted by the Good Folk, enough, to not to fuck this up.
PRODUCTION
AUTHOR/NARRATOR/AUDIO EDITOR: Ly de Angeles
FINAL PRODUCTION EDITING TO UNIVERSAL STANDARD: Peter Robinson, Motiv Music
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