The Burning Times

The first time I heard the song The Burning Times, I was a teenager at Bromyard Folk Festival. By the end of the second verse, I was in tears. It’s a powerful song. Especially that second verse, about how the Pope declared the Inquisition, and 9 million European women died as a consequence, mostly burned to death, apart from those in the last lines of verse 2 ‘and the tale is told of those who, by the hundreds, holding hands together sought their deaths in the sea, singing in the praises of the mother goddess, a refusal of betrayal, women were dying to be free.’ It took me a long time to learn it, because singing it reduced me to tears.

In my twenties, I started reading more seriously about Paganism, and it didn’t take me long to start finding a lot of reasons to question the Burning Times myth. In the UK, we tended to hang witches, not burn them. The Inquisition was mostly about Christian heretics. There weren’t enough people in mediaeval Europe for a death toll of 9 million to make sense. The whole argument for smooth continuation of witchcraft practice coupled with witch burning doesn’t stack up properly. Whatever happened, verse 2 of the Burning Times isn’t it.

I took to doing a short history note before singing the song. But it bothered me, because this is a myth that isn’t, I think doing us any favours.

This autumn, out of the blue, a thought came to me. The Burning Times is now. And so I re-wrote the second verse.

 

If you aren’t familiar with the original, you can hear it here – https://youtu.be/RsNmJ7GKOUQ

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How the present changes the past

“History changes, I’m telling you. OK, the things that actually happened way-back-when don’t really change, but our interpretation of them sure does. It’s amazing how much our understanding of ancient Minoan culture has changed in the century or so since Sir Arthur Evans first uncovered the ruins of the temple complex at Knossos.” Laura Perry – it’s a great blog post and you can read the rest of it here. http://witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/the-minoan-path/how-history-changes-the-minoans-and-their-neighbors.html

The relationship between the present and the past is something that fascinates me. How we tend to look at timeframes that seem to resonant with where we are now, and how we read the past to make sense of the present, and read the past through the distorting lenses of currently in-vogue glasses.

Take, for example, the way we’ve made sense of the graves of the ancient dead. Weapons = warriors = men. Beads and mirrors = women. Start from that perspective and it’s not possible to think you’ve dug up a warrior woman. So the past can have no warrior women in it, which in turn validates the idea that women are passive and domestic things, and men do all the important, active stuff. Only now we can do DNA analysis its getting obvious that buried items and the gender of the body do not always match up this way.

Rare, exotic and costly grave goods buried with the ancient dead are understood as status, symbols of power and importance. As such, they ‘prove’ the existence of a ruling elite, validating the idea of a ruling elite as a timeless truth about how human societies are. It’s possible that our ancient dead had completely different ideas about the meaning of items placed in graves. Does burial have to relate to personal ownership? No. Do rare items neatly equate to kingship? No.

It’s very easy to make the past say almost anything we want it to. It’s especially easy to think we’re seeing evidence for things we already believe are true. I’m not a believer in the idea of one true way and I think truth is often complex, shifting and multi-faceted. But here’s a bit of personal dogma for you – if you can’t imagine more than one interpretation for something, you’re probably wrong, because you’re probably too busy seeing what you think is true to have thought about what’s actually in front of you.

For more of this sort of thing, Druidry and the Ancestors… http://www.moon-books.net/books/Druidry-Ancestors

Ancestors in the land

The presence and nature of ancestors in the land are going to vary a lot depending on where you live. For people of European descent living in formerly colonial countries, ancestors of land raise issues of appropriation, and of awful histories. Having never worked with this, I can only flag up the issue, I can’t really answer it.  I think relating to those who went before us as part of the land may help to make honourable relationships that take nothing, but maybe give something back in terms of respect. It wouldn’t be about visiting their places, but about recognising their continued presence, and knowing the stories of their presence in the land, and knowing what happened to them. As someone who lives in the UK, I’m not well placed to discuss these matters. Working with ancestors of place is certainly easier if there’s been no conflict between them, and your ancestors of blood.

Rather than trying to imagine all possible ancestors for all people in all places, I’m going to talk about my own experiences and hope people can use that as an effective jumping off point.

 

Ancestors in the geology

I live on Jurassic limestone. The internet is your friend when it comes to finding out about the rock where you live. Different rocks come from different eras and have different qualities, so there’s a lot to engage with here. Some of the soil here is thick clay, some is a more sandy loam, and there are areas of good topsoil for growing produce. Where it’s thin, sandy soil over rock, there’s often a history of quarrying, and a current presence of grazing livestock.

The Jurassic limestone is full of fossils – generally small sea shells, and other relics of a long departed shore. I’ve picked up fossilised crab shells, sea urchins, and all kinds of things that were probably plants. That these ancient ancestors of place can appear, so perfect and undamaged by time, is a startling thing. I cannot make any sense of the vast swathes of time between their lives and mine, and yet I can hold them in my hands. A dinosaur skull was found locally, some time ago, and I remain in hope of finding one myself. But then, having grown up on this limestone, I’ve spent much of my life finding fossils and longing for dinosaurs.

 

Ancestors in the archaeology

Prehistoric human life is only available to us as archaeology. I’m lucky – there are four barrows within viable walking distance, and more I have yet to visit. There are three Iron Age forts I can walk to from my home. I’m a short distance from a churchyard that was discovered to have a Roman villa on it, and an incredible mosaic, which is dug up at intervals – I have yet to see it. There’s a site reputed to be a Roman camp site, and stories and histories go forwards from there, becoming more certain as we go. Not so many miles away is the city of Gloucester, known to have been inhabited since people returned to these shores after the last ice age. Ancient ancestors are all around me, and visible. Much of the UK is like this.

There’s a great deal I cannot know about them, but I can walk the paths they used – some of the paths around here are 4,000 years old. I can visit their graves, and I can look at this land and try to imagine their lives in it. Currently, the Severn River is cut off from the Cotswold hills by a motorway, crossable on foot at only a few points. For much of history, there was no barrier to walking between the river and the wooded hills. It’s easy to imagine a mobile population doing just that – shifting out in times of flood, going where the hunting would be good, and coming to the hilltops above the river to bury their most significant dead.

Of course my imaginative engagement with them does not give me certainties about who they were and how they lived. However, I’ve walked from the river to the hills, I have a physical knowing of this place that must, to at least some degree, be held in common.

 

Relating to the land

There are fashions in terms of how we relate to landscape. That’s been an odd concept to wrap my head around. I’ve become a reader of landscape writing over the last few years – partly because I love landscape and want to know what other people think. Partly to learn more about what I’m seeing. Partly because I have a very low opinion of authors who write without reading in the same area of thought. It is from this reading that I’ve learned about fashions in landscape appreciation.

Of course the first thing to note is that we don’t have a complete written history of landscape appreciation. Insight into historical thinking comes from travellers and early tourists – people with money and the means and time to write letters. We have the cheerful adventurer colonialist climbing mountains no one has ever climbed before, going into unknown lands. The people who live there and knew about it all along do not count. 3^rd Englishman up the Matterhorn counts, but the native assistants don’t, by this peculiar way of seeing things. Had they climbed before it was fashionable? I don’t know.

Poor people tend not to write letters about their hobbies to distant friends who keep and/or publish said letters. They don’t tend to write poetry, or memoires, or how-to books, either. There’s a glorious exception in the form of peasant poet John Clare, whose love of landscape flows through page after page of observation. Was he a lone freak? Or were other men following the plough while meditating on the curve of the soil, or making verses to honour the skylark? Or women for that matter – because most of the writing that makes up history comes from men. Teaching women to write was not always the done thing, and illiterate women leave no notes on their opinions for historians to find. There is a silence then, surrounding how most people related to landscape most of the time.

Folk tales and folk songs, legends and place names can suggest very rich cultures of landscape. Unusual landscape features tend to attract tales – how many giant stones around the country are attributed to the Devil? Barrows attract ghost stories, half remembered fragments of history become legends. The thing about the people who work the land is that they tend to stay on the land, generation after generation. Things get passed down. One of the most interesting examples of this I’ve found is in Alan Garner’s The Voice That Thunders, where a story of a farmer from Mobberly who takes his horse to sell in Macclesfield but has a strange run in with a wizard, turns out to be an aural mapping of a route through prehistoric settlements. Map making isn’t always about marks on paper – they can be narratives of key features in the landscape, as with the old Parish boundaries.

The history of landscape appreciation, as written, tends to be about rich people delighting in charming novelties and the picturesque and other such ideas – more of that later. These are the views of people for whom landscape is an object to enjoy, or to find lacking. The view exists to please. A person living closer to the land is bound to have a different perspective – valuing what can be used, valuing places with ancestral connections and yes, I expect finding aesthetic pleasure too, but not necessarily having a language to express it in, or anyone making notes who would take that expression seriously.

New Year, New Books

I’ve had a week off, and in that time, I’ve been reading. I thought I’d set the tone for 2016 by kicking off with reviews of the books I’ve read over the last week.

The Old Magic of Christmas, Linda Raedisch. A book exploring myths, legends and folk practice from Germanic and Scandinavian countries, interspersed with ways to do some of the things described. Charming, accessible and very readable, it’s not an academic text but the author seems well read. While I’m no expert on Christmas traditions, where there were overlaps with things I know about, I saw nothing to take issue with. I very much enjoyed the author’s willingness to explore all the gruesome and creepy aspects of the season. If only regular Christmas had more trolls in it, I’d probably find the whole thing far more palatable!

https://www.llewellyn.com/product.php?ean=9780738733340

 

 

The Sandman: Overture – Neil Gaiman. A prequel to the Sandman series, I imagine it would make little sense to a reader who hadn’t already read the other titles. It’s beautifully put together, the art really shows what can be done with a graphic novel when the artist, letterer and colourist have time to lavish care and attention on every page rather than what the usual factory approach delivers. In terms of story, it is odd, clever, sometimes funny, poignant, uncomfortable – in short all I have come to expect from Neil Gaiman. If you like what he does, you will like this one too.

http://www.vertigocomics.com/graphic-novels/the-sandman-overture-deluxe-edition

 

 

The Voice that Thunders – Alan Garner. A collection of essays exploring the process of writing, the writing industry, landscape, history, family, the relationship between books and classrooms, mental health issues, language, dialect… all laced through with stories of people and places. A fascinating read and exactly what I needed at this point in time. If you’re fascinated with Alan Garner and his work, of if any of the above themes are obsessions of yours, then I heartily recommend it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1602869.The_Voice_That_Thunders

Forks in the road of history

With the benefit of hindsight, the road we took to get to this point can look straight and obvious, even if it didn’t seem that way at the time. The way in which choices, opportunities, apparently random connections and the like become the story of your life is something you can only see by looking backwards. It should be obvious that history – personal or on the grand scale – only makes sense in retrospect, but there are less obvious implications that are important.

When we look backwards, we see the path walked; the line from then until now. In hindsight, it looks like a line. All the things that didn’t contribute to it seem less important. The choices not made, the options discarded, and all the little things we did and said and had a go at that led to nothing of apparent import. When we look back to make history stories, all the asides tend to seem less relevant. What we’re looking for is that story of how we went from there to here.

There may be all kinds of consequences in terms of what we lose, but there’s a reliable one in terms of how we tell the story and how we understand it. With the path from then to now apparent to us, ‘now’ looks inevitable. It becomes harder to imagine we could have gone the other way. That we are here seems to validate all of the choices that brought us to here, or to prove that everything before was inevitable. Here we are, history has happened and because we are where we are, it is foolish to think any of it could have gone differently.

There are a lot of people in the past who still influence us, whose beliefs included the will of God and predestination. If you think everything must happen in line with God’s plan, then you look at the past and see the clear line of intent. I think that influence dominates how many of us tell stories – that we see the line of clarity. I also think that life lived, and the trajectory we follow is not inevitable. I think it’s important to look at options, for chances to rethink the whole direction and for different ways of understanding all the stories we carry.

In terms of history, I believe we have a major fork in the road before us. Are we going to become wholly corporate in a world ruled by big business? Huge international trade agreements that give companies the power to sue governments if their profits are harmed, seem to be taking us that way. The growth of giant companies, and the rising wealth and power of the 1% suggests an inevitable trajectory. But it’s not inevitable, and we can choose differently. Many of us are uniting through an array of campaigning groups around the world to fight for human rights, to resist ecocide, to challenge over climate change and to resist the direction our collective path seems to be taking us in. We could win this.

If we let go of the idea that history went the only way it could have done, we can think a lot more flexibly about the present. If we let go of progress narratives, and watch out for ideas of predestination, then we don’t have to go with the apparent flow, we don’t have to be washed away by someone else’s story. By changing how we see the stories of the past, we can imagine the future differently.

I’ve read a fair bit of radical history. I’ve read about resistance, and apparently futile fights, and things we didn’t win, and I see in there not the failures of the losing side, and not the people stood on the wrong side of history, but an ongoing thread of not accepting that we have to go where we are told to. There are options. A neo-feudal world of warring corporate entities is not necessarily our future.

Old words for old problems

I have problems with the term ‘patriarchy’ because it’s part of a dialogue that pits men against women. It’s very difficult to talk usefully about feminism, when feminism has been structured by some people as an assault on men. Yes, there’s a whole issue here around privilege, and the need to recognise that not having all the advantages any more is about fairness, not attack, but it’s hard work making that argument in face of constant hostility, and the hostile people are the ones who most need to hear something different. I’ve seen too much on social media of a certain flavour of male entitlement, and the resentment of women asking for an equal space in society, and I think we may be trying to have the wrong conversation here.

While historically women have, overall, been more vulnerable to the problems in our culture than men, most men don’t really benefit from it, and some women do – it’s never been a simple gender divide, an us versus them. The sense of being more important than the women in their lives may serve to help keep a certain kind of guy comfortable with his position in the status quo. Sure, he’s kicked from above, but he feels he’s better than someone – his wife, his mother, his daughter, and traditionally this makes his position more tolerable. That’s hideous, when you stop to think about it. A sense of privilege seems to depend on having someone to look down on, and that in turn helps us not to mind being looked down upon by others. Women do this too, and slut shaming is part of it. So much for dignity and self esteem.

The mistreatment of women is underpinned by a number of really nasty ideas. There’s hierarchy – that some people are worth more than others. The people at the top matter, the people at the bottom do not. Men matter more than women. There’s ownership issues – the idea that people can be property, in slavery, in serfdom, in poverty so abject that they must do your bidding. In obedient marriage. The idea that using people to achieve your goals is fine. This is the same system that for hundreds of years has cheerfully sent men to die for the sake of a land grab, a bigger title for the man in charge, and for the man who would be king.

It’s a system that cheerfully kills men in dangerous industries. Mining, fishing. The death and maiming rates of the industrial revolution were huge, and the canals cost about a life per yard, on average, I have been told. And when they have no use for you, they’ll leave you and your children to die by starvation.

I’ve long felt that if we want to tackle the huge international issue of the mistreatment of women, we have to tackle the culture that holds it together. Many of us officially no longer live in feudal monarchy systems, but the same logic applies. The same sense of worth attached to the few, and the disposable quality of the many. We don’t see life as equal. The life of a wealthy ‘important’ person is not considered in the same way as the life of a refugee, a sweat shop labourer, a subsistence farmer. Anyone whose position depends on looking down, must bow their head to someone else, until we get to the top of the feudal pyramid, and the few who bow to no one. The lure of moving up the food chain keeps us in the system. The feeling of being better than someone else helps us tolerate where we are. It’s a way of being in the world that turns us into users, standing on other people to get an advantage, pushing them down that we might stay above them. Anyone, regardless of gender, who engages in this does so at a cost to their humanity.

You can have gender equality and still have feudalism, you just need to find a different reason to pick on people, one that isn’t about what’s in your pants (say, money). But you have a much harder time of it maintaining sexism, or for that matter racism or any other us and them based prejudice, if you don’t have a feudalistic mindset.

Progress and Decay, Ravens and Druids

The Throng, by Tom Brown, for The Raven’s Child.

We tell all kinds of stories about the shape of human history, but without a doubt its the progress and decay narratives that dominate. Back when I was working on Druidry and the Ancestors, I included a chapter about these kinds of stories, but at that point I was still seeing the progress and decay narratives as two distinct things. (The chapter still stands, this is a development, not a rethink)

My current working theory is that they are inter-related; aspects of the same underlying experiences. The more complex our civilization (progress) the more remote we feel from nature (decay) the more liberal we are (progress) the more decadent we are (decay) etc. Which story you see depends entirely on whether you see things as getting better or worse as a consequence. For many, technology is all about progress, for others, it’s the decay of the environment.

It’s an incredibly binary way of thinking, that doesn’t reveal itself as such if you’ve signed up for one side or the other.

Tom Sneignoski’s story of The Raven’s Child is an interesting depiction of the decay/progress dynamic. The monstrous Throng are a culture of great power, able to conquer new worlds and dazzle victims with biological and technological advances. Even within that culture there are voices of resentment, who see The Throng as having fallen into decadence and lost their direction. Those who believe in the decay narrative will work from within to change or even destroy what they have a problem with. Sometimes that can be right – I think it is around the Green movement. Sometimes it has you beheading academics who know that your God wasn’t the first one on the scene.

The Raven’s Child isn’t just about monstery progress and decay issues. The humans in the story are living in the ruins of their former civilization. They are degraded. They are what we fear happens when we fall from grace, fall from progress. To overcome their situation, they need a new kind of progress, on new terms. Because we see both sides of the progress and decay narrative in this story, we also get to see its limitations, and its binary nature. Both are going on at once, in a vast web of things that improve and things that get worse, with what goes where depending on how you view it.

When we obsess about making things better, we can start to get ideas that some things are expendable in the name of progress. Some lives, some landscapes, some species can be sacrificed for the great push forward, and this willingness to pay unreasonable prices for the idea of progress is, I think, what creates the decay scenarios as a side effect. It’s not progress that’s the problem, it’s progress at any cost. It’s progress that pays no heed to who it crushes or what it destroys. This set up in turn creates the impression that only the brutal destruction of the progress-civilization (as with the humans in Raven’s Child) can set things right again. Of course it doesn’t, it just kickstarts new cycles.

Better considerations of the real costs of our often imaginary progress, might be the better outcome.

Sins of the fathers

I’m fascinated by the ways in which stories, behavioural patterns, beliefs and ways of being are passed down from one generation to the next. What we inherit can be totally invisible to us, and it can take years to spot that we’re playing out some other family dynamic in our own relationships, or perpetuating a family myth. Some people never know what it is that they are doing, or why. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to unpick the myths of my own family, and while I can now see some of them, I have no way of explaining them, I do not know where or when they started and can only guess.

When we know what the history is and who has made the story, we have a much better shot at not repeating it. This was all very much on my mind when writing Druidry and the Ancestors, but it’s a theme I’ve taken up in my fiction work as well. The current instalment of Hopeless Maine, book 3: Sinners, started life with the longer title ‘Sins of the Fathers’. Although sins of at least one mother are also very much part of the mix.

It’s interesting how often parents do not turn up in novels and fairy stories. The dead parents are such a routine feature. The absent or unknown parents crop up a lot. The young adventurer who is obliged to set out into the world and seek their fortune, somewhere else. They go somewhere they are not known, and where they can meet their destiny free from the implications of their birth. By this means, the sons of humble woodcutters may become princes and so forth. Anyone standing in for a parent, as a mentor, guide and guardian can expect the Star Wars treatment – to be suddenly cut down so that the hero must stand alone and face their destiny.

Real life does not deliver this for most of us. We will live our lives connected to our family roots, and many of us will deal with our most immediate ancestors in ongoing ways. The stories handed down to us about who we are and how we should act stay with us too. It’s one of the things I like about Hopeless Maine* as a setting – it’s really claustrophobic. Mostly the only way to leave the island is to die, and that’s not wholly reliable. Our young heroes, Sal and Owen, are living in a tiny world shaped in part by their parent’s actions, and obliged to deal with who they are, and where they come from. Granted, their troubles are not exactly akin to anyone else’s – Sal’s mother lives under the graveyard and only goes out at night. Owen’s father may be suffering from madness, or grief, or hatred, or possession, or love betrayed, or all of the above, and has means to express that, which aren’t available to most of us.

We live with the sins of our ancestors. We live after slavery, after the enclosures act that robbed the common people of Britain of their land. We live after highland clearances and colonialism, after Auschwitz. We live with a modern Israel whose conflicts have been thousands of years in the making. We live with the absence of the dodo, the carrier pigeon and the aurochs, with the poisonous legacies of industrial revolution and nuclear power. The sins of our ancestors are many. The choices they have made in fear, in greed and in ignorance shape the world as we have it now. There is nowhere else for us to go, no bold new place we can strike out to where they won’t know about our past or judge us for where we came from. We have to stay and deal with the consequences of things done in madness, in grief, in hatred and in fear. Either we change those stories, or we pass them on and see if our children are any more capable of being heroes than we were.

 

*Hopeless Maine is a webcomic, you can read it for free at http://www.hopelssmaine.com, the image accompanying this blog is the cover art for book 3.

Avebury and the Neolithic mind

I love Avebury, I’ve been there many times and the landscape as a whole, with its many ancient features, I find incredibly compelling. I’m not much of a historian, I find it hard keeping dates straight in my head and the who ruled when habits of history don’t agree with me. I’m much more interested in how regular people lived, what they thought and believed, how they organised their lives and so forth.

Nicholas Mann’s Avebury Cosmos is a fascinating book. As the title suggests, it’s very much about archaeo-astronomy, working out how the night sky would have looked at the time of building, and the different stages of development around Avebury, from its early beginnings at the Windmill Hill settlement, through to the building of Silbury, and the abandonment of the site for the overtly solar Stonehenge construction. Mann makes a compelling case for Avebury being a place of star watching.

Knowing very little about the night sky before I started reading, the star information here was hard work, but accessible to me. I learned a lot, and I can honestly say that some of what I learned staggered me, and has left me with huge questions about how we might be shaped by our environments and how, for those ancestors, the order and motion of the night sky might have influenced everything. How the making of something on the scale of Avebury would inevitably change the culture that made it, too.

Issues of geographical layout, dating of constructions and positions of stars are laid out with confidence and authority, often with reference to other authors. As a non-expert I have to take this on trust, but given that these things can be checked, and the manner of presentation, I am happy to trust.

Much of the rest of the writing is concerned with re-constructing Neolithic culture by seeing what can be inferred from the site. Some of the inferences are very logical – the scale, resources, number of hands required and duration of building tell us that there was some kind of organisation here and that Avebury was an important centre drawing workers and celebrators from across the south west. Mann considers the behaviour of other star-watching peoples who left more tangible evidence. He considers later myths and legends that might connect to the site, or to star watching ideas. Frequently he offers multiple interpretations offering an array of suggestions as to what people might have been doing here, and why. The speculation is clearly presented as such, and as there is no great case to make, no rabbit out of hat mystery to solve, it is a much more readable work for someone like me. Mann does not have any big claims or huge answers, but he opens the way to thinking about what life was like around Avebury, and how radically different cultures may have understood their existences. As someone who has a lot of issues with modern culture, these alternative views gave me hope.

Anyone looking for great goddess matriarchy won’t find any direct reference to it here. However, Mann charts the shift from the apparently gentler, less hierarchical organisation of the Neolithic to the first signs of conflict in the resource-poor Bronze age. He talks of climate change, and also the effect of the beginnings of trade in over-production and impoverishing the land. There are lessons here, too and it made me realise how hierarchy and patriarchy depend upon capitalism.

The diagrams are not easy to look at in a kindle, I couldn’t get notes and images onto the screen at the same time, which was frustrating, so I would suggest paper is probably better. If you have any interest in ancient history, stars, or Avebury itself, you want a copy of this book.

• Paperback  AMAZON US | AMAZON UK
• eBook  AMAZON US | AMAZON UK