Honey to the Flower ~ Mead Making as Medicine

Mead Making, 'Writing with Bees' with Charlotte du Cann, May 2018

Mead is an ancient bee medicine made by our ancestors since the earliest times. It was created throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, with Chinese pottery vessels dating from 7,000 BCE showing traces of honey fermentation such as takes place in mead making. In Europe similar traces have been found in ceramics belonging to the Bell Beaker Culture (2,800-1,800 BCE). Fermentation has a long history and can be seen as a way to reclaim food from fast food and supermarket culture. I find it deeply heartening ans hopeful to have fermenting food in the hedgehermitage kitchen; a substance in a constant state of transformation, just as I like to think I am. With the simple recipe that follows we might also use mead making to connect to the land and the plants around us in our everyday lives; this too is a radical act in a culture so threaded through with disconnection from nature.

The Hispanic-Roman naturalist, Columella, gave a recipe for mead in his ‘De re rustica’, in about 60 CE;

“Take rainwater kept for several years, and mix a sextarius of this water with a (Roman) pound of honey. For a weaker mead, mix a sextarius of water with nine ounces of honey. The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days, and then left on a shelf near the fire. If you have no rain water, then boil spring water.”

Many recipes will also include yeast but an older way is to make it without as adding raw honey to spring water will cause it to ferment. I was given the following mead-making recipe by Charlotte du Cann at a ‘Writing with Bees’ workshop held by the Natural Beekeeping Trust in May 2018 and I am only just now trying it out. The thought of it obviously needed to ferment first!

Blackthorn blossom, nettle, and strawberry mead, April 2019

All that’s needed for the recipe is a jar; a Kilner jar is perfect as it needs to be shaken vigorously at the beginning, spring water (not tap), raw honey (runny is best as less shaking is needed!), together with soft fruit, flowers, berries, and leaves. By changing the recipe it’s possible to follow the seasons in the most simple and beautiful of ways. I can think of few things nicer than going out with my foraging basket in search of ingredients for mead making. We might try elderflower, rose petal and strawberry, or wild cherry and meadowsweet in the summer, blackcurrant and fennel, blackberry and mint, as the seasons change. Other possible ingredients are things like herb robert leaves, lemon balm, lavender (both leaves and flowers), violets, forget-me-nots, rowan or hawthorn berries, sloes, rose hips, mallow flowers, borage, and heather, among countless others. It is important to be sure of our identification of course, and to be mindful of where we are collecting our ingredients from, but there is so much for us to experiment with. And we are taking part of the land into ourselves; offering the honey made by the bees back to the flowers.

Foraged primroses, nettles, and blackthorn flowers

To make the mead, take around 1 litre of spring water (the less water, the stronger the mead) and half a 227g jar of honey (although I had a much larger jar and probably put more in!), put them in a jar and shake energetically. This will activate the honey and it will begin to froth. You can then add your sliced fruit, together with any leaves or berries you like. Swirl it around again and leave, making sure to stir once a day. After a few days it should begin to froth; continue to stir once a day, and when the frothing begins to calm down, you can strain it and drink it. The process should take around ten days. It can become too fermented. If this happens, just strain out the flowers, fruit, and leaves, and put it into the fridge.

I put my flowers in first, but I'm sure that it will be ok!

Adding the honey

Filling them up with spring water

After energetic shaking ~ the blackthorn mead was especially excited!

I am currently trying two different recipes. My first thought was to make nettle mead from the nettles in the hedgehermitage garden. I am doing that, with the addition of some primrose flowers from the churchyard of the church I go to and which has stood on that spot for over 1,200 years; ancient ground. My other jar contains blackthorn blossom and some nettle tops from the companion plants growing under the blackthorn just down the road from here. I have added strawberries to both, although I think that I would rather have just used the nettles and flowers. I am not yet confident enough to do that though, as I wonder whether the soft fruit aids the fermentation process. I was mindful of keeping the nettles from the two different locations separate. I would like to use one to weave connection between my home with my church and the other to connect more deeply with the blackthorn being and her edge-place plant allies. I will perhaps sip a little each day and see what comes. I think of this more as a sacred ‘medicine’ than an alcoholic drink and will treat it in that way. I will perhaps write about that another day.

In the meantime, do let me know if you make this simple mead and what recipes you decided on. I wish you many blessing of honey and land if you do choose to make this mead prayer.

The Blackthorn Being

Bewitched by the Blackthorn Being, part II ~ sacrifice & service

"Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, the holy tree is blooming there..." W.B. Yeats

I absolutely adore this stunning blackthorn pattern by William Morris, which was first sold by Morris & Co. in 1892. It is mostly the work of John Henry Dearle, as Morris was reaching the end of his life during its design, but it contains many of Morris's signature themes, such as daisies and entwined leaves.

I can see so many aspects of the Blackthorn Being here; owls, with shades of Blodeuwedd, foxes, stags, the presence of serpents in the snake's head fritillary which form the eyes of the Mother of the Woods; she is serpent-eyed indeed. In the Irish legend, 'The Pursuit of Diarmaid & Grainne', the deer goddess, Sadhbh, becomes pregnant as a result of eating sloe berries, the dark fruit of the blackthorn. Her son is born with a lump on his head, which contains a snake. Later, the snake is killed in sacrifice to save another man, underlining blackthorn's sacrificial service in mythology.

Since I wrote about blackthorn the other day, I have been reflecting on this sacrificial aspect which feels to be part of her purifying medicine. She is a great stabiliser of emotion & a bringer of hope & joy, a healer of depression. She does this by taking in negative, stagnant energies which are not her own; scapegoating herself, just as the, primarily Welsh, 'sin eaters' once did for the newly dead. How appropriate then that she was believed to be one of the trees woven into Christ's crown of thorns; the crucifixion as the ultimate scapegoating, sin eating for the world. Sacrifice and service. 

Blackthorn too seeks to transform despair into hope, death into life, just as winter transforms into spring. Indeed, the Buddhist practice of 'tonglen', or taking and sending, does much the same thing; breathing in the negative as a thick dark smoke and allowing it to settle in the heart chakra before breathing it out as transformed light. At its most powerful we are not working with only our own suffering but the suffering of others, whether of body, mind, or spirit, seeking to transform it as a gift, and a relief, to them. With our breath we can offer others a breathing space, an opportunity to also, at last, 'breathe out'. This turns on its head our usual human urge to avoid discomfort and seek out only what makes us feel good. Sacrifice and service. In this way we awaken compassion in ourselves for the suffering of others, whether human or non-human. Might we do this for humans with whom we vehemently disagree, as well as for those we love? Might we offer our heart breath to the victims of the badger cull, to trees cut down? 

But, of course, what we do for others we also do for ourselves, and vice versa. Pema Chödrön describes this as "breathing in for all of us, breathing out for all of us". It may be that we are too deeply entwined in our own emotional, spiritual, or physical, journey to feel that we have anything to offer to others. I have written about this before; the sense I have that some of us who feel a great deal are also feeling for those among us who are too overwhelmed, numbed, or disconnected to feel. This is the path of the serenydd, which I hope to write about more this year when I can find the words. Here is the path of the wounded healer, offering healing from our own pain & turning what seems like poison into medicine. Sacrifice and service. 

"You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal
of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, 

and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on."


Mary Oliver, ‘Wild Geese’


And this is the gift that the blackthorn also offers us; physiologically, as all trees do in breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen, but also spiritually in the power of her deeper prayer. She is so often regarded with suspicion and fear, as all beings associated with death are. That is because we have cut death off from life. Still, she keeps breathing for us and offering us her medicine.

And of her association with death, blackthorn is a tree of the 'warrior's journey' helping us to face our own dying, perhaps the bravest journey of all. But she also teaches us how to be fully alive. She is a wise, wild teacher to anyone who has an enduringly negative or pessimistic attitude, interpreting their life story through the bad, rather than the good. Blackthorn reminds us that the stories we tell ourselves about our lives matter, that we can re-frame them & change everything. I dislike intensely the 'New Age' view that we are somehow to blame for the terrible things that happen to us, just as we would not blame a blackthorn if she were mindlessly cut down. There are many with power in this world who do not use it well but it is good to be reminded that we have some power. On a day when we are feeling particularly compassionate we might choose to breathe in their suffering. Again, blackthorn teaches us that we don't need to rid ourselves of our 'thorns', or let go of our protection against what wounds us, in order to offer healing to that which wounds.

As for our own power to interpret our stories, I once read, I think in 'New Scientist' magazine, an article which talked about the disturbing trend for aid workers seeped in our cultural way of thinking to go to other parts of the world where natural, and other, 'disasters' had occurred and think that they were being kind by persuading the victims to take anti-depressants, of course encouraged by pharmaceutical companies who were keen to increase the market for their wares. But the issue was the assumption that the people who had experienced the death of loved ones, the destruction of homes and livelihoods, would be depressed. But often this wasn't so. They may have been in shock, desperately grief-stricken, angry, horribly sad and distressed, all entirely appropriate in those circumstances, but they had ways of framing their experiences within a worldview that we can scarcely even imagine. Anti-depressants just weren't the sort of medicine that were needed.  Indeed, our propensity to medicate perfectly valid human reactions to experience is to be questioned in our deepest core. It might be also be suggested that, increasingly, natural disasters due to climate change are caused by the rich Western world disproportionately effecting the poor elsewhere, and that, rather than seeking to truly offer healing, we wish to numb victims in order to avoid seeing, or engaging with, the pain that we ourselves have caused. Even medicine becomes the tool of oppression in the wrong hands; a colonisation of the heart. Unfortunately I have been unable to trace the article but there is an equally interesting, and more recent, article here on similar themes.

In our culture happiness has become a tyranny, but in so many ways victimhood is becoming equally attractive. The inauthenticity of emotion is a disease; the denial of grief, when there is so much to grieve, the burying of anger, when there is so much to rage against, and the refusal to see beauty in spite of, and because of, our grief & anger when there is so much that remains beautiful. Grief AND gratitude is increasinly the wild edge that we must walk upon. As in so many fairy stories, we perhaps need a jab from the sharp thorn to wake us up to reality and then the medicine of her petals to help us forgive it. There is so much that needs to be re-written and re-framed.

Tony Benn comes to mind. He said;

"There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up." 

A true warrior of the blackthorn speaking truth to power! No one said that it was meant to be easy. That's why we need to befriend the dark and the beings who understand its medicine, lest we should slip into a fairytale of denial or depression.

Interestingly all of this is a conversation that often arises here in the hedgehermitage, most recently today even before I had fully thought about blackthorn in this way. There is always a reason why our attention is drawn to a sister or brother being at a particular time and blackthorn is so rich with medicine and meaning. There is a lot to share, but of course it is personal too.

Returning to this lovely pattern, Morris & Co. tell us that, "the face of the Mother of the Woods in the wine red version gives life to the tree & the forest ~ a sort of a Morris 'green man'". They also note that, "sometimes children are afraid of the Mother of the Woods, kindly though she is, & so it's possible to place the daisies in the centre to 'ofset the crone'. I'm not at all sure that that's but I wish them much luck!

References:

Previous piece on Blackthorn ~ https://radicalhoneybee.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-blackthorn-being-and-vashtis-great.html

William Morris Blackthorn pattern images, Wiki Commons.

William Morris Blackthorn tiles information ~ http://williammorristile.com/textiles/blackthorn.html

Blackthorn folklore ~ https://www.druidry.org/library/trees/tree-lore-blackthorn

Sin Eaters ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin-eater

Mary Oliver, 'Wild Geese' ~ http://rjgeib.com/thoughts/geese/geese.html

Buddhist practice of tonglen ~ http://awesomemindsecrets.com/healing-meditation-tonglen/

Pema Chödrön, 'How to Practice Tonglen' in 'Lion's Roar' ~ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lionsroar.com/how-to-practice-tonglen/amp/

'The modern epidemic of sadness destroying heart and soul cannot be solved with anti-depressants', Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, International Business Times,  23rd February 2018 ~ https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/modern-epidemic-sadness-destroying-heart-soul-cannot-solved-anti-depressants-1663346

The Blackthorn Being and Vashti's 'Great No'

It was lovely to see a froth of blackthorn blossom at the edge of our church field on Sunday. A member of the rose family, she is one of the first trees to blossom in the hedgerows after the dark of winter and so she is a powerful symbol of the determination to return to life from the frozen places. I love that her blossom appears before her leaves, which reminds me of the blackbird singing before the dawn. They both know that what they long for is coming, so why not just start singing now? “Why wait?”, they say, “open your petals, sing your song, the light is coming!”

Blackthorn, whose magic is deeply woven into the folklore of winter, is sometimes known as 'The Mother’, or ‘Dark Crone’, of the Woods and grows prolifically in the British Isles. She is often planted in boundary hedgerows as a protection due to her sharp thorns. Her folklore is equally thorny, and it was that that I sat down to write about this afternoon but, as so often happens, in the writing of it I somehow connected to a deeper ‘river beneath the river’ of what the Blackthorn Being* might want to say. As well as their stunning blossom, blackthorn also has striking deep blue/black fruits called sloes at the beginning of winter. It was when I read that the expression ‘sloe-eyed’, which refers to someone with beautiful, dark eyes, was first written of in Augusta Jane Wilson’s 1867 novel, ‘Vashti’, that the lightning struck.

Vashti is one of the little known women of the Bible, who appears only in the first chapter of the Book of Esther. I’m not sure that Augusta Evans’ novel has anything to do with the Biblical Vashti, but I was reminded just by seeing her name how compelling she is. In Esther we are told that Vashti is the Queen of Persia and the first wife of Persian King Ahasuerus. In the third year of his reign, Ahasuerus held a celebration for visiting nobles, together with his officials and servants, to ‘show the riches of his royal glory and the splendour & pomp of his greatness’. This lasted for one hundred & eighty days, at the end of which he held a further seven day feast in the garden of his Royal palace, to which everyone was invited. There, drinks were served in golden vessels and ‘the royal wine was lavished’. However, the king made sure to declare that no one was under any compulsion to drink as, ‘the king had given orders to all the staff of his palace to do as each man desired’. At the same time Vashti, his queen, was giving her own feast for the women in the palace. But she was not to be offered the same respect as the men.

On the final day of the feast, the king, who was ‘merry with wine’, told his servants to summon Vashti, ‘in order to show the peoples and the princes her beauty, for she was lovely to look at’. But Vashti said no. Her defiance infuriated the king, who then consulted his officials on what should be done. Afraid that Vashti’s 'great no' would encourage other women to also say no to their husbands, and considering her refusal to comply a wrong against not only the king but all the men of the king’s provinces, an order was issued that Vashti was never again to come before the king, that she should be ‘replaced by someone better than she’, and that ‘all women must give honour to their husbands, high and low alike’. When the king’s anger had cooled he 'remembered Vashti and what had been decreed against her' but his reaction was not to mend what had been broken but to send out his officers to ‘gather all the beautiful young virgins in his kingdom’ and bring them back to his harem. This is when Esther appears and the story continues. But Vashti is gone, disappeared. And most people, even those who read the Bible regularly, are unfamiliar with her name.

I have been in a Bible study group studying the Book of Esther and Vashti was almost glossed over entirely, with perhaps a disapproving mutter. It seems that the church prefers Mary’s “Yes!”, which is so often painted as passive submission rather than the radical act that it was, to Vashti’s “No!” Where Vashti is remembered she is an ambivalent figure. Occasionally she is written of as a feminist icon; Harriet Beecher Stowe called Vashti's disobedience the "first stand for women’s rights’. And, author of ‘The Women’s Bible’, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wrote that Vashti "added new glory to [her] day and generation...by her disobedience; for 'Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.'" The African American poet Frances E.W. Harper, who considered the queen’s refusal to come from self-respect, wrote of her 1895 poem ‘Vashti’ that she was, "a woman who could bend to grief, but would not bow to shame." In contrast, the ancient Judaic interpretation of her story in the Midrash considers her to be wicked and vain, rejecting the possibility that her refusal was made for her own dignity and instead speculating that she must have been afflicted by a disfiguring illness, such as leprosy. Another interpretation suggests that the angel Gabriel had visited her and given her a tail!

But what of her connection to the Blackthorn, other than the suggestion that she may have been ‘sloe-eyed’? In many ways, Vashti reminds me of our own ‘hawthorn Christa’, the Welsh Blodeuwedd, who is described as the most beautiful woman on earth, having been created by enchantment out of flowers as a wife for Lleu Llaw Gyffes, without of course ever asking her what she wants. When she falls in love with another man, Gronw Pebr, whilst Llew is away she plots with him to kill her husband in order to free herself from this enforced spell and is punished by being turned into an owl who is ‘shunned by other birds’. Again, there are many interpretations of her story. To be ‘turned into an owl’ might not be seen as a punishment at all, but instead as Blodeuwedd’s decision to reclaim her claws after years of submission. This is Blodeuwedd’s ‘great no’. As Alan Garner writes of her in ‘The Owl Service’, “She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.”

Nevertheless, again I was once in a group, comprising only women, which was discussing the Blodeuwedd story and it was suggested to me that her meaning in myth was as, “a warning to women not to give in to our fickle and unfaithful natures!” I wrote more about Blodeuwedd, and her connection to hedgerows in my article, ‘Boundaries and Blodeuwedd’. Then, I had only thought of her in relation to hawthorn, which is one of the flowers purportedly used in her creation, but perhaps there was a petal or two of hawthorn’s hedgerow sister, blackthorn, included too. They are both after all so wonderfully willful and wild.

Blackthorn is often associated with witches and with spells used to 'bind or blast’. In South Devon witches were said to carry blackthorn walking sticks for use in mischief making and, in Irish folklore, Blackthorn is the home of the Lunantisidhe, or moon fairies, who are unfriendly towards humans; and with good reason when one considers the devastation we have brought to hedgerows. In medieval times the Devil was said to prick his devotees' fingers with a blackthorn & heretics & witches were burned on blackthorn pyres. She is also one of the trees said to have been included in the crown of thorns at Christ's crucifixion. What a heavy burden to bear.

In older Celtic lore blackthorn is said to symbolise a warrior's death in service to a higher cause & to provide aid to heroes who, if they threw a blackthorn twig, would find an impenetrable hedge between themselves & their enemies. In Scotland too she is associated with warfare, & with the 'Old Hag of Winter', the Cailleach, who calls in winter by striking the ground with her blackthorn staff; a long & difficult winter being named a 'Blackthorn Winter' in her honour.

But, of course, Blackthorn is also a healer. She is not only a protector but a purifier. Medicinally, like hawthorn, sometimes known as whitethorn, she is wonderful for the circulation, for stimulating the metabolism, & for 'cleaning the blood'. Her dark sloes, ripen & sweeten after the first frost, which puts a rather different slant on the Cailleach's cold prayer; just as we are warned after the first frosts not to eat the remaining blackberries because the Devil has spoiled them, the sloes sweeten & help us to settle into the dark. As we emerge into the very early spring, her flowers help to purify the blood, soothe the stomach, and lessen the apathy that we can sink into in the winter. Drinking water infused with blackthorn bark is said to relieve fatigue and increase vitality and the fresh juice of her sloes when gargled can relieve a sore throat. The pulp of her berries, when combined with other ingredients, has also been used to make face masks to maintain skin elasticity and so ‘enhance beauty’. I’m sure that both Vashti and Blodeuwedd might have been said to have skin that was ‘blackthorn blessed’. And, of course, her sloes make the most delicious sloe gin.

And so, here is Blackthorn, a most wonderful healer, a provider of protection and much needed boundaries, and a bringer of joyful intoxication, yet there is such ambivalence towards her. Despite being acknowledged to have her uses, she is associated with the Devil and with witches’ curses, and linked inextricably with, the often terrifying Old Woman, the Cailleach, and so with winter, that most ambivalent of seasons. Perhaps with her stunning froth of flowers, which belie the ‘savage thorns’ beneath the prettiness, she just isn’t ‘friendly’ enough?

Which brings me back to Vashti, Blodeuwedd, and another Biblical woman who refused to say a submissive “Yes”, Adam’s first wife, Lilith. Lilith was said to have been ‘created from the same clay as Adam’ and at the same time, or even sometimes before him. This is in contrast to Eve, who was created from Adam’s rib later. In Jewish mythology, Lilith is often described as a sexually voracious demon who is banished to the desert but returns in the night to steal babies. Shades of Vashti’s ‘tail’ here perhaps? And what of Lilith’s crime? That was to refuse to be subservient to Adam, or in some versions of her story, to refuse to have sex in the missionary position! Here then is her ‘great no’. We might then find meaning in the knowledge that her name translates from the Hebrew as ‘night hag’, or ‘screech owl’. Indeed, Lilith is sometimes depicted with the feet of an owl. Sometimes she is also described as ‘the serpent in the tree’, but that is another story and another thread to follow. Isaiah 34 tells us that, “Her castles shall be overgrown with thorns, her fortresses with thistles and briers. She shall become an abode for jackals and a haunt for ostriches. Wildcats shall meet with desert beasts, satyrs shall call to one another; There shall the Lilith repose...” Again, she is often described as beautiful, but, like Vashti, like Blodeuwedd, like the Blackthorn she just isn’t nice enough. She has claws.

All of these stories provide inspiration for women not living the lives that they themselves have chosen, and to all living without liberty. Vashti, Blodweuwedd, and Lilith, all had status, at least in relation to their men, and all were valued for their beauty. And they all said “No” to living a life without power over their own bodies and destinies. But it isn’t really about being able to say no. Rather, it is about being counter-cultural, taking back our power to choose, just as Mary took her power by saying her ‘great Yes’. The Blackthorn Being, both blessed and burdened by the meaning that she has been given, can teach us about the strong boundaries that we need in order to make these clear decisions over our own lives and, if we are met with resistance, how to use our claws.

In response, we too might be regarded with, at best, ambivalence; thought of as unbeautiful; too willful, too wild, too fat, too thin, too waspish, too sharp, too unruly, just not friendly enough, but the world is changing, slowly, and Vashti, Blodeuwedd, and Lilith, queens of the Blackthorn Being with their ‘great nos’ are flowing through our veins to make sure that it does. They know that what we long for is coming, so why not just start singing now? 

“Why wait?”, they say, “open your petals, sing your song, the light is coming!”

References:

* I borrowed the phrase 'Blackthorn Being', slightly adapted and with much respect, from Sharon Blackie's wonderful article, 'The Blackthorn Beeing' at https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/the-blackthorn-beeing/

Blackthorn, and other plant lore ~

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

http://www.speedyremedies.com/7-health-benefits-of-prunus-spinosa.html

https://ireland-calling.com/celtic-mythology-blackthorn-tree/

http://www.plant-lore.com/blackthorn/

https://www.druidry.org/library/trees/tree-lore-blackthorn

https://speakingofwitchwands.net/2018/10/23/folklore-of-the-blackthorn-dark-crone-of-the-woods/

http://www.cottagesmallholder.com/the-old-english-legend-of-the-devil-and-the-blackberries-466/

Vashti ~

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/esther-full-text

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

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/vashti-esther-a-feminist-perspective/

https://rachelheldevans.com/blog/esther-and-vashti

https://rachelheldevans.com/blog/esther-actlly-vashti

http://day1.org/1066-the_woman_who_just_said_no

https://www.thoughtco.com/who-was-vashti-2076497

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

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

Blodeuwedd ~

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

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

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

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

http://radicalhoneybee.blogspot.com/2015/04/boundaries-and-blodeuwedd.html

https://broomcloset.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/blodeuwedd-flower-faced-goddess-of-wales/

https://www.druidry.org/library/gods-goddesses/blodeuwedd

Lilith ~

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

http://witcombe.sbc.edu/eve-women/7evelilith.html

https://www.thoughtco.com/legend-of-lilith-origins-2076660

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/neeqgw/praise-lilith-a-chill-demon-cast-from-eden-for-refusing-missionary-position

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/

Hedgerow/Hedgetemple - Blogging from A to Z

(Yns Mon/Anglesey, Spring 2011)

Some may have noticed that I haven't written anything on my blog for some time; it has been a deep journey through the dark months and, once I have tasted winter on my tongue part of me goes to a place that doesn't have the words for much. But now it is spring and the empty pages of what~could~be~written are calling, sometimes even shouting. And so, to get the words flowing again, I have signed up for the 'Bloggingfrom A to Z Challenge'. The challenge is now in its sixth year and the idea is to write something every day, except Sundays, for the whole of April. This means twenty-six posts, one for each letter of the alphabet.

Most participants on the challenge also choose a theme and, this year, I have chosen as my theme 'Hedgerow/Hedgetemple'; two words that make me vibrate with a sort of nameless pleasure so I thought that this would be a good excuse to explore what those words mean to me. Without sharing too much now, I will say that I have always had a fascination for the 'edge places', those places that can't be defined as one thing or another; the marshes, the fens, the shoreline, the riverbank, and always the hedgerow. Certainly hedgerows are planted by humankind as markers but they become places of such rich biodiversity and mystery that it is hard to define them at all, standing as they do on the boundary of the tamed and the wild. Maybe too they allow something of the untamed that was enclosed when we began farming in the Neolithic 4,000 to 6,000 years ago to thrive again, even in a small way.

The hedgetemple, is similarly hard to define and is more a sense of 'beingness' than a defined thing or place, an attempt to allow a sense of belonging between people on diverse spiritual paths but who share a love and reverence for all that is wild and green and who reject the constraints of more organised groups and religions. I can only say that, for me, the word itself, and my exploration of what it means to me, has been a deep healing.

I have no intention of attempting to define or pin down what the words hedgerow and hedgetemple mean in the days to come and, at this moment, I have little idea of what will be written but I hope and expect that there will be wonders; that a leaf might be lifted, a little hollow peered into, or an edge revealed, to allow just a little bit of magic to shine through. To the hedge!

Tomorrow, I will begin with A is for Activism, Apples, and Afallon...