Star of Bethlehem ~ For All Who Are Lost in the Dark

Star of Bethlehem at the 1,000 year church, April 2017

It's said that the Star of Bethlehem first appeared on the night of Christ's birth to guide the Wise Men, whose journey was made complicated by their maps and charts, to the child. When its work ended it burst into thousands of brilliant fragments and fell to earth. Where it came to ground a blanket of milk-white flowers grew.

Beautifully, I first discovered the existence of this lovely flower amongst a tangle of primroses, nettles, and almost-flowering bluebells, in the churchyard of the 1,000 year church where I while away many happy moments and discover many wonders. You will know that you have found Star of Bethlehem when you see a flower with six white petals surrounding six stamens, each with a yellow anther. They bloom in the spring from early March until late May or early June. The flowers open in the early morning and are usually closed by noon revealing a beautiful green stripe on their underside, hence some of their common names; sleepydick, nap-at-noon, star-at-noon, johnny-go-to-bed-at-noon, and eleven o'clock ladies. When the flowers have died a three-celled seed capsule forms containing several black seeds.

Revealing their beautiful green stripes during a noon day nap (Image: Wiki Commons)

Her genus name, 'ornithogalum', comes from the Greek words 'ornis' for 'bird' and 'gala', meaning 'milk', and was named and described by Dioscorides (40 to 90CE) in his 'De Materia Medica' due to her abundance of white flowers that 'when opened look a lot like milk'. It is less clear why Carl Linnaeus, in his 'Species Plantarum' of 1753, names her 'dove's dung', although under this name she may be mentioned in the Bible; 

'And there was a great famine in Samaria; and behold, they besieged it until an ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a kab of dove’s dung for five pieces of silver.' (2 Kings 6:25). 

Whether the 'dove's dung' mentioned here is indeed Star of Bethlehem is unclear, but she does have the other common names of 'pigeon's dung' and 'sparrow's dung'. Alternative, perhaps more obviously lovely, names for her are starflower, summer snowflake, summer snowdrop, grass lily, and wonder flower.

As suggested by her 'grass lily' name, Star of Bethlehem is a member of the lily family, although she is often mistaken for wild garlic, especially as her bulbs resemble small onions. Her common name was once 'dog onion'. Although these bulbs are harmless in small doses they contain the toxin, colchichine, which has been used in gout medicine but can cause shortness of breath in adults if too many are ingested. Nevertheless, in the 15^th Century she became associated with the journeys of pilgrims to the Holy Land, both because they found her starry flowers growing on the hills around Bethlehem and because her bulbs were sometimes used by them as emergency rations when food was scarce. Because of her association with Christ's birth she is one of the plants often planted in 'Mary Gardens' and was taken to North America by immigrants to be planted as a reminder of home. So wild has her growth been there that she is now considered an 'invasive weed', having escaped from gardens. There really is no containing a fallen star.

Credit: E. Kolmhofer, H. Raab; Johannes Kepler-Observatory, Linz  ~ hale bopp, Wiki Commons

In herbal healing she is known as the 'comforter' and is one of the plants used in Bach's Crisis Remedy for the “after-effects of shock, such as caused by unexpected bad news or any unexpected or unwelcome event. Also for shocks received many years ago, even in childhood”; perhaps she does indeed carry a spark of the perfect Christ child. Dr Edward Bach wrote of her in his 'The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies' that she was, “for those in great distress under conditions which for a time produce great unhappiness. The shock of serious news, the loss of someone dear, the fright following and accident, and such like. For those who for a time refuse to be consoled this remedy brings comfort.” Her medicine is also said to be helpful for “the sense of emptiness and loss that occurs when a loved one dies or moves away.” One practitioner describes here as the 'Guardian of Grieving'. She has been used in the treatment of those who are suffering from suicidal depression, shock, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, offering a light to lead the afflicted out of the darkness. Indeed, she does that work for us all, blooming at the beginning of spring and reminding us of the need to come into the light after the dark winter months. She is the way-shower, a guide for the lost, just as she guided the Wise Men through the vast silence of the desert. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his essay, 'The Kingdom of the Simple' in the book of his collected sermons, 'Choose Life', notes that the Wise Men were late in coming to the Christ child, having undertaken a “laborious journey, taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds ran barefoot.” It is so easy to get lost, sometimes especially if we think ourselves 'wise'.

Harper's Magazine cover, Christmas 1898 (cropped), Wiki Commons

When I learned about the meaning of my new green companion I thought I might write about how touching I found the image of the Star of Bethlehem shattering into fragments and falling to earth as flowers. I saw her then as a symbol of it being possible for us to follow diverse spiritual paths, whilst still being part of one wild and beautiful truth. This felt so personal to my own journey as I begin to again explore my childhood faith of Christianity, having for so many years followed a Goddess-centred path. The Goddess is very much still with me I hasten to add. If anything my understanding of, connection to, and love for, Her has only deepened through following this old-new thread. 

But then the world, or the one close to me at least, did seem to shatter into thousands of pieces; the terrorist attacks in Manchester, and in London at London Bridge and the Finsbury Park Mosque, the Grenfell Tower fire; so many lost, so much needing to mend, and that is without all that is unfolding in the rest of the world; in Syria, in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia. If the world isn't shattered into a thousand sharp and ragged pieces then I have no doubt that many of us feel that our hearts are. And it feels that it is to these shattered hearts that Star of Bethlehem speaks,certainly we are badly in need of her comfort now. Much that is transpiring seems to have religion at its core, and more specifically the Abrahamic religions of the desert, together with the separation of poor from rich, the 'simple' from the 'wise' (or perhaps the 'complicated'). So much separation. We have such a drive to define ourselves by what, and who, we 'are not' and perhaps it is time for that way of being to end; not to lose our differences or our diversity; that's what makes us wonder-ful, but in understanding that differences of belief are no threat to our own; that we are all fragments of a Star of Wonder fallen to earth. In her myriad mirrored fragments, her many white petals, her brilliance of being, Star of Bethlehem reflects them all. There is no 'other', just broken parts of one great beating heart. This is perhaps why she is sometimes called the 'Reconciliation Star', the star of at-one-ment. And it does feel that there is much to reconcile, and to atone for. But we are after all literally 'made of stars'. We are more wonderful than we could ever imagine. Let's seek out the stars in ourselves, and in one another, and mend.

I will end with a poem that came as I sat down to write this. Because of recent events, and just because, I am trying to make connection with my local mosque, to offer solidarity in this difficult-to-be-different place, and tomorrow I am beginning training as a mediator for neighbours who are struggling with one another and for children who are lost in this spinning world we have created. I don't know where that will lead but I hope that Star of Bethlehem would be proud of my small offerings to the huge work of mending all that is shattered. I pray that she will be astounded by the work that we have done when she returns to open her milk-white petals next spring. 

Star of Bethlehem is tired

of dragging around the baggage

that we try to hide,

divisions that won't be reconciled,

the willful non-seeing of the so-called wise.

Wakes bright with morning,

asleep by noon,

offers guidance with maps and tea;

pours milk, leaves not bags, her best bone china

slips from her exhausted hands,

smashes into a thousand shards of stars

on her kitchen floor,

reads the auguries in their constellations.

Weeps for the weight of what she sees

swept under the carpet.

Star of Bethlehem carries diversity

as a prayer in her shopping bag,

walks with Jah, Allah, Shekinah

wearing goose feathers in her hair

in the stews of the Liberty,

Keeps a torch by the back door,

shines a light on intruders ~

Guantanamo, Yemen, Syria, the housing of the poor,

a nail bomb on Electric Avenue,

knows that she can't take much more.

No amount of bleach in her bucket

will make this pure,

No amount of soap will scrub this whole,

And her batteries are running out.

She may have to brave the dark.

Star of Bethlehem hangs her head in the churchyard

closes in on herself at shadow fall,

offers her flesh for the breaking of bread,

ties her scarf more tightly round her head.

Tuber or tumour, hate or hope.

The murder of the innocents,

child radicalised, drowned on the refugee boat,
finding belonging in the EDL,

bleeding out in the stairwell in Peckham Rye.
Herod turns his head, shuts his eyes,

she opens her petals wide.

And she is growing wild,

escaping the confines of the flower bed.

Sinking her roots into holy ground,

gathering up the pieces that she let slip,

knows it's time to get a grip.

She weeps for mercy, grieves for grace,

what we might have been, what we are.

Yet still she loves the pilgrim soul in us,

the spark that journeyed from the furthest star

and fell to earth forged in fire.

She puts the kettle on.

(Jacqueline Durban, 20th June 2017)

Star of Bethlehem at the 1,000 year church, April 2017

References:

Weed Technology ~ http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1614/WT-D-15-00065.1?journalCode=wete

http://www.plant-lore.com/3272/star-of-bethlehem/

http://www.sentinel-echo.com/opinion/plant-folklore-star-of-bethlehem-is-not-a-grass/art

Toxic, Invasive, or Lovely? http://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/1187/

On Mary Gardens ~ https://www.udayton.edu/imri/mary/h/herbs-and-flowers-of-the-virgin-mary.php

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithogalum

http://www.illinoiswildflowers.info/weeds/plants/starbeth.htm

Bach Flower Remedies ~ http://www.bachcentre.com/centre/38/starbeth.htm

http://www.celticfireandfaerie.com/star1.html

http://flowerinfo.org/star-of-bethlehem-flower

Plants for a Future ~ http://www.pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=Ornithogalum+umbellatum

http://www.healthyhomegardening.com/Plant.php?pid=2027

The Summer Deer; Wisdom of the Plant Devas ~ https://theasummerdeer.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/grief-shock-loss-ptsd-and-star-of-bethlehem/

How 40,000 Tons of Cosmic Dust Falling to Earth Affects You and Me, Simon Worral, January 2015, National Geographic ~

'Choose Life: Christmas and Esater Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral', Rowan Williams, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.

Boundaries and Blodeuwedd

Hedgerows are the living boundaries of our landscape. They create an invaluable habitat, rich in pollen, nectar, fruit, leaves, and berries, and provide essential resources for a range of bird, mammal, insect, and invertebrate species. Hazel dormice (one of our rarest small mammals), shrews, bank voles, hedgehogs, stoats, badgers, bees, butterflies, spiders, bats, and a range of birds such as tits, yellow hammers, wrens, robins, chaffinches, and whitethroats, find food and shelter in their green embrace. They also act as windbreaks, help prevent soil erosion, and form 'wildlife corridors', which species can use to move from one isolated habitat to another. The more diverse a hedgerow, the more species it can support and so our ancient native hedgerows, containing green and growing hedge plants such as blackthorn, hazel, hawthorn, dogwood, oak, ash, wych elm, wild cherry, elder, birch, crabapple, blackberry, honeysuckle, rowan, traveller's joy, and field maple, are to be treasured ~ although they have suffered a marked decline as field sizes and monoculture farms have increased. It is telling that, in a recent study, it was found that bumblebees foraging in hedgerows would rather stay on the side of a busy road than on the side of a field farmed using modern methods.

There are around 28,000 miles of hedgerow in the UK, many of which are considered to be ancient or 'species-rich'. Aside from their trees and creatures, they also support a rich diversity of wild flowers; common mallow, dog rose, red campion, hedge bedstraw. bluebells, bugle, common vetch, henbit deadnettle, common woundwort, cow parsley, cowslip, foxglove, dog violet, garlic mustard, dandelion, meadow crane's-bill, ragged robin, meadowsweet, nettle, dog daisy, self-heal, teasel, meadow buttercup, yarrow, yellow rattle ~ even their names are a meditation and a prayer.

Hedgerows hold many echoes of our far-away history. The first hedgerows were created in the Neolithic Age, 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, some still date from the Bronze and Iron Ages, and many more were created during the enclosures of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. It has been estimated that many of the hedgerows thriving in our countryside today are more than seven hundred years old, having been planted in the medieval period. Many are built on older banks, ditches and earthworks.

Not all of that history is kind and the Enclosure Acts led to the ending of many traditional rights to mow hay & graze livestock and to open fields and commons being divided up by hedgerows and fences and taken from the people to be held in ownership by the few. It is a deep grief to me that we have been divided from the land in this way and that our wild, anarchic hawthorn, so deeply connected with the otherworld and faery lore, has been one of the most common trees used in hedgelaying and therefore used against us to keep us from our beloved earth. But all of that history matters if we are to understand where we have come from and are truly to be the 'people of the land'. And I like to believe that the hedgerows, rather than taking the land away from us, have retained just a little bit of wild that we might otherwise have lost. Boundaries, whether physical or psychological, are difficult and tricksterish things and these wild edge places are never going to do what they are told or be what they were intended to be.

Hawthorn blossom

Which brings me very beautifully into my second 'B', the Welsh goddess Blodeuwedd, who certainly carries that shapeshifting trickster energy within her, and if I was asked to choose a 'Goddess of the Hedge' it would most certainly be her. When I first heard the Wild Feminine calling to me it was through her story and she has been a constant companion and deep teacher since. Like the history of the hedgerow, her story as it is presented to us is not an easy one and, just as the hedgerow has been used against the people of the commons, she has been used against women.

The story of Blodeuwedd, whose name in English means 'Flower-Face' (also an ancient Welsh name for an owl), can be found in the fourth branch of the Mabinogi, a collection of Welsh mythological tales written down by monks in the 13^th and 14^th centuries but which carry within them a much older oral tradition. In the tale she is created out of nine flowers; the oak, broom, meadowsweet, bean, burdock, nettle, chestnut and, my favourite anarchist, the hawthorn, as a wife for Llew Llaw Gyffes, who has been cursed by his mother to never marry a human woman. In order to gain kingship over the land, Llew must marry a woman as representative of the sovereignty of the land. However, like a hedgerow, Blodeuwedd, with her dual nature of flower and owl, is not so easily tamed. Although she marries Llew she falls in love with another man, Gronw Pebyr, and they plot to kill her husband leading to a train of events in which Gronw himself dies and Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl as a 'punishment'; “You will not dare to show your face ever again in the light of day, and that will be because of enmity between you and all other birds. It will be in their nature to harass you and despise you wherever they find you. And you will not lose your name - that will always be "Bloddeuwedd (Flower-face)." ('The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, Will Parker). A fuller version of her story can be read on the Welsh & Celtic Myths and Legends page here.  

It is possible to write a whole book about the layers and depths of meaning contained within Blodeuwedd's story. However, for now, I am mostly interested in her role as a 'boundary keeper' and in how we have so often made attempts to tame her. When I first mentioned my new devotion to Blodeuwedd to a Pagan friend her immediate reaction was to say, “Oh, well she is a warning to women about our unfaithful nature”! Even then I found it hard to believe that this was all that the wildly spinning vortex of petals and owl feathers that was the Blodeuwedd I had come to know was about.

In our culture we are very used to thinking in a fixed and dualistic way, with everything being either/or, good/bad, dark/light and this is how we create our boundaries of mind. A healthy and living boundary must be permeable, allowing new ideas in and allowing old ones to fade. This is the same whether we are talking about the boundaries that we use in our own lives to keep ourselves safe or a boundary in a field, which would be a poor one indeed if it didn't allow a dormouse or two through! In our dualistic way of thinking we find it very easy to label Blodeuwedd's 'flower self' gentle, sweet, non-threatening, and 'good', whilst her owl self is considered dark, murderous, frightening, and 'bad'. Like the domestic apple we have tried to tame Blodeuwedd and make her manageable but this interpretation shows little understanding of the nature of flowers or owls. If we are truly people of the hedge/edge, then we will certainly not leave it at that.

First, let's consider the nature of flowers. Of course, we humans find them very beautiful and, as they bloom throughout the year, they carry us along on an enchanting tide of smell and colour. And the enchantment that we feel is a clue to the purpose of a flower, which is to 'enchant' or to lure pollinators. Blodeuwedd is indeed 'the honey to the bee' and flowers, just like the goddess created from them, are not there just to be pretty. Flowers are the sexual organs of plants, employing any means at their disposal to ensure that the egg is united with the sperm. Indeed the blossom of the hawthorn, one of the primary beings of the hedge and also one of the flowers used to create Blodeuwedd, are said to have the smell of a sexually aroused woman and have the reputation of being an aphrodisiac in Arabic erotic literature. We have only to look at the art of Georgia O'Keefe or Judy Chicago, both of whom used flowers to represent female genitalia, to see a different aspect of what a flower might be. Perhaps, in exploring the deeper nature of flowers, we are beginning to break down the dualism that has controlled Blodeuwedd's story and see through some tiny gaps in our richly fertile hedge?

So to the owl, Blodeuwedd's second nature. In the story her transformation into an owl is explained to us as a punishment for her betrayal of her husband and certainly owls have a challenging reputation in many cultures. In some African tribes, owls are linked with death, bad luck, and evil. These same associations exist through Native American, Mesoamerican, and Arabic mythology. However, in the West, the owl is more often seen as a bird of wisdom, whilst retaining some associations with death and bad luck. Many of these 'darker' aspects are also associated with femininity and with women, as is wisdom which in Christianity is given the feminine name of 'Sophia'. Maria Gimbutas traces the veneration of the owl as a goddess to the culture of Old Europe, which refers to a time between the Mesolithic and Bronze Age periods from roughly 7,000 BCE to 1,700 BCE. My own fondness for owls was increased when it was pointed out to me how low they fly when they are hunting and I have come to think of them as our own 'hedge-riders'.

Owl Face/Flower Face

And so we see that, if we are hedge-conscious, it is impossible to pin anything down to one meaning. In the hedgerow, which was once devised to control nature and the people of the commons, there is also a song of such chaotic, joyously disordered, and wilful wildness that it, and the people who love it, can never be controlled. And in the goddess, who was conceived of by monks to give us dire warnings about the treacherous nature of women, is a being of wanton beauty shining with nectar and looking at us with the wise, deep eyes of an owl (and maybe with a sharp talon digging into our flesh). Both teach us of the edge, in ourselves and in our society, between what is domesticated and tamed and what is wild and unbound. I pray that we will all ride that hedge with our wild wisdom intact and that our thoughts will always allow through a dormouse or two.

Meadowsweet

If you would like to support, or just know more about, the people who are working to celebrate and protect our hedgerows please click on these links...

http://www.hedgerows.co.uk/

http://www.hedgelink.org.uk/