Nimue Brown's Blog, page 61

Being Human

(David)

Humo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.

I believe the straightforward translation of this quote is, ‘I am human: I consider nothing human is alien to me’, and the general acceptance is that it expresses the fundamental unity of humankind.

It is also widely accepted that its origin is in Heauton Timorumenos, a play by Publius Terentius Afer, who was a North-African immigrant to Rome and possibly a former slave. Terentius was a cosmopolitan who was familiar with Amazigh (North-African), Carthaginian (Phoenician), Latin, and Greek cultures. A classic, and classical, multicultural background.

But I guess he was penning an already existing thought, possibly from hundreds or even thousands of years earlier. And why not? After all, can any thoughts claim to be unarguably original? Few, I think.

I came across this quote while researching the concept of an eternal goddess, in particular her historical incarnation as Astarte, for an as-yet unwritten novel. I sketched a shape of these thoughts in the mind of her priestess, in whose person Astarte meets humanity and explores the idea that people have created her to fill their need even as they are worshipping her. So, the goddess is both divine and human, existing on one level with godly creators and at the same time as a creation of humanity.

Today, old Terentius’s words got me thinking about how I consider my fellow humans.

Unsurprisingly, because I respect and admire her greatly, my preferred interpretation of the quote is from Maya Angelou: ‘I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me.’

So, this is where I am. I go further, wider than the worldview that encompassed all of humanity. My adapted version of the quote is, ‘I am part of nature: I consider nothing in nature is alien to me.’ This is where I stand.

This is an excerpt from A Hedge Druid’s Grove – find out more about the book over here – https://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/?n1=publications&id=489

At home in the world

(Nimue)

What does it take to feel at home? What kind of objects and resources do you need to feel that you are secure and comfortable? What gives you a sense of belonging?

Humans often express identity and self through objects. We surround ourselves not only with things we like, but often with things intended to express to other people something of who we are. Being able to express in this way is also a consequence of being safe. For too many people in the world, it isn’t safe to express identity – especially for queer folk.

‘Home’ has always been an important concept to me, and also often a difficult one. There are homes I have left that I did not want to leave. There have been times when I’ve gone with only some of my things and not known what I could reclaim. There were rounds of having to radically downsize and give up a lot of objects that had been companionable parts of my living space for years. As an animist I do invest consciously in the objects around me and in the sense of a home being a community.

I find it easier to feel at home when I own the place I’m living in. Renting makes me anxious. However, I’ve felt startlingly at home in holiday accommodation this year. My relationship with renting may have a lot to do with how powerful/powerless I feel in any given situation. As I work on feeling more powerful, the anxieties around where I’m living might well ease. 

Of course a home might not be one person surrounded by objects. For me, a home means plants, and people and also ideally cats. As soon as you consider living with other people, you undertake to be less secure. Where I’ve left places I was living that has on several occasions been about having to leave the people I was living with. When your security depends on your relationships, that isn’t always easy.

More than anything, I find that a home is an experience of belonging. That might have nothing to do with physical ownership. It might have nothing to do with objects in a space. It does have everything to do with relationships though – human and otherwise. The sense of belonging is a state of relationship for me. All kinds of things can give me that feeling of welcome and rootedness, but overall it’s been rarer in my life than I would have liked. 

I’m learning how to belong, how to take up space and what it is that makes me feel secure. I’m learning a lot about what a home is, and what it takes to make a good community of humans and others. 

TERMINALLY ONLINE

Poetry by JW Summerisle

TERMINALLY ONLINE

the unseeing object that makes your face

prints in plumpness

purple bodies. black hands.

the unseeing object that makes your face

places doppelgangers before you that

are not even one piece

unto you alike that

oh god it turns me blind.

dead girls who

once touched men were
once touched by men are
the girls who shape us

through the unseeing object that makes our face

through their falling spirits
slipping from the men who

shook them from their girlhoods

into ours. scythes

scroll pages. cut and numberless

seed heads hang heavy static
on us. drunk and broken black
and sleepless from
the unseeing object that makes your face.

i do not know you, amberlynn.
i am no alice either and i

cannot bear this weight of ghost that
draws my skin from the screenlight. fake light
that grows my hands to this reaping this

lonely violence that thrives upon

the unseeing object that makes your face
appear unto me just like the unholy dead.

the dark haired girls. touched.
or untouched. i can’t tell.

please —

JW Summerisle lives in the English East Midlands and often appears on TikTok @jw_summerisle . Their first poem appeared in the 2007 Foyles Young Poets pamphlet, and their first chapbook, kinfolk, came out somewhat recently with Black Sunflowers Poetry press.

Daily Rituals

(Nimue)

David’s recent post prompted me to think about my own daily rituals. Having spent a lot of years on the Druid path, my daily rituals have changed a lot over time. Usually what happens is that I get interested in a particular practice and for a while I explore that intensely and decide what to do with it. There have been times when I’ve had daily prayer practices, daily meditation practices, regular altar-oriented practices and gratitude practices. All of those have evolved over the periods I’ve spent focused on them.

I’d like a living arrangement where I could easily slip outside in the morning and have somewhere quiet and private to stand, and just be present. That’s not feasible at the moment, and I make the best use of the windows that I can. 

Currently I’m exploring a reflective relationship with the everyday details of my life. This is more about responding to my experiences rather than setting up specific actions. I’m making a point of pausing to reflect on things as I’m doing them. It mixes ideas I’ve explored before – slowing down and gratitude, conscious living and reflection. I’m currently bringing those things together in a different way. Part of the reason for this is that life has thrown a lot of new and unfamiliar experiences my way in recent months, and this deliberate slowing down has been needful.

Otherwise I’m flitting around a lot. Sometimes I do very intense and deliberate meditations. Sometimes I do body-healing meditations. I’m doing a lot of unstructured contemplation and window gazing, because I’m not so fraught all the time. I note that being calm is a great enabler of meditation and that meditating to become calm is actually a lot of work. I note that it’s a lot easier to have a spiritual life when your life is better arranged to support your spirituality. If your spiritual practice is a set of coping mechanisms to deal with stress and try to keep moving, it’s not as effective as a spiritual practice.

Working with embodiment has brought me towards relishing as part of how I do my Druidry. It’s an ongoing process of celebrating lived, embodied experience. I pause to relish the flavours of the food. I linger over my tea. I gaze out of the window at the sunlight on the trees while relishing the cool breeze and the bird song. The sun on my skin and the wind in my hair are sensory experiences I make time for. Spending enough time in hugs and snuggly situations where I can take the time to really relish that is part of this, too.

When I go through deliberate phases with things, my aim is to embed something into my life. I don’t always know what I want to have stick. For me, an important aspect of setting out to do spiritual things is to change what I do in the ostensibly more mundane parts of my life. At the moment I’m drawing on a lot of previous explorations to find ways of being more reflective as part of what I do all the time rather than as something I set aside specific time for. It’s all threaded through with experiences of gratitude and joy.

Bludzee

When we first meet Bludzee, he’s just a little kitten, abandoned in a flat and trying to make sense of his life, mostly by using the internet. He’s cute, and like farting and licking his own butt.

Lewis Trondheim’s graphic novel is a French comic that Sloth Comics have brought out in translation – this is the same publisher that has my Hopeless, Maine books so I have biases. I also don’t review things unless I like them.

This is a book that made me chuckle repeatedly. It’s not emotionally demanding and the story is engaging but doesn’t require much effort. It’s good if you want some low stakes recreational reading. The world building is really good, and unfolds around you as Bludzee tries to figure out how things work (how do you tell between an elevator and a store cupboard?). As we go along it becomes more obvious that this is an unfamiliar sort of world, and I really enjoyed how this was handled in the storytelling.

If you read the back blurb or sales pitch it’s obvious that Bludzee is supposed to be an assassin. For anyone who has ever spent time with a small, black psycho-kitty, this will make immediate sense. He has the serious murder-mittens, even by usual attack-kitten standards. However, he’s not actually keen on killing things and would far rather eat kibble than anything resembling other creatures. 

The art in this book is simple, stylish and easy to read. I struggle sometimes with images and don’t find all comics easy to tackle, so I really appreciate having an art style that makes immediate sense and page layouts that are easy to follow. I also don’t enjoy comics that shift perspective and angles a lot as that makes it harder for me to make sense of what’s going on, and Bludzee stays well away from all of that.

It’s a big comic, it took me a few sessions to read the whole thing and I very much enjoyed it. It’s not a profound or life altering sort of story, but sometimes that’s not what you want. It’s good entertainment, well delivered and entirely pleasing, clever enough to be engaging and easy enough not to be tiring. A perfect balance for a bit of escapism and amusement.

More on the Sloth Comics website – https://www.slothcomics.co.uk/project/bludzee-newly-released/#

Who are the Deities and Spirits in my shower ritual?

(David)

I’ve been thinking about the deities and spirits I conversed with in my shower and then posted about last week. I’ve been asking, who are they?

Things might fall into place for me sensibly if I look at them in chronological order, starting with the Hebrew god Yahweh. Who is he? Where did he come from? How did he achieve such all-encompassing and absolute power? Did he achieve it, or did humans achieve it for him?

I’ll start by saying that I’m not an atheist. I believe in spirits. I have met some. Communed with them. Travelled with some. There’s no reason for me to doubt their existence, in this world and the Otherworld.

I believe that some spirits are gods. I don’t worship them, although I’m open to the possibility that I might work with some in the future, but I do believe they are genuine beings with individual personalities and varying degrees of power and influence.

My departure from believing that Yahweh is the one and only god came from my personal experiences, from my realisation that other gods did and still do exist.

So, who is Yahweh?

He is presented to us as the Creator God. Therefore, it makes sense for me to start my search for his origin by looking at the cosmogony of the Abrahamic faith.

The creation myth of the Hebrews, which appears in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis in all the nearly six thousand translations of the Hebrew and Christian bibles in two hundred languages, is a collection of much earlier regional creation myths that were absorbed from other cultures.

The two most recent absorptions and strong influences at the time when Genesis was being written were from the Egyptians and the Babylonians.

For thousands of years, Egypt controlled the eastern leg of the fertile crescent, all along the Nile and up to include the land of ancient Canaan, which is a region that roughly corresponds to modern day Palestine, Israel, western Jordan, southern and coastal Syria, Lebanon, and up to the southern border of Turkey. The Hebrews lived in captivity in Egypt for 430 years, calculated by scholars to have been between 1876 and 1446 BCE.

The Babylonians controlled the western leg of the fertile crescent, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Babylonia conquered the kingdom of Judah and took the Hebrews into captivity for 59 years of exile from 597 to 538 BCE, when the Persian conqueror of Babylonia, Cyrus the Great, released them.

Modern scholars place the authorship of Genesis in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, a window that includes that period when the exiled Hebrews were absorbing Babylonian culture.

It’s the Babylonian creation myth that is rehashed in Chapter 1 of Genesis, and then the Egyptian creation myth is rehashed in Chapter 2. They’re not identical, obviously, but installed one after the other they pretty much cover all the bases the Genesis writers wanted. The main one being that in their re-telling of these stories, the many gods of Egypt’s and Babylonia’s polytheistic religions became the monotheistic god of the Hebrews.

Those creation myths from Egypt and Babylon weren’t original, either. They both derived from even more ancient sources, including mainly the Sumerian creation myth. And it’s reasonable to assume that the ultimately original source material had been around for long before even the Sumerians.

So those stories had existed for thousands of years before any Genesis writer put pen to papyrus. Everyone knew them. Everyone. The Genesis writers’ primary task was to have readers recognise the ancient oral traditions in their opening words, and from that comfortable place take them on a different journey during which recognisable events and places and even character names cropped up in often recognisable sequences, but they were heading to an entirely new literary destination where the multiple gods of the earlier creation myths were condensed into Yahweh, the single all-powerful and all-creating god of the Hebrews.

That’s how those writers positioned Yahweh, and it’s fair I think to assume that their motivation was largely political, mainly, in the first instance, to achieve control and power for themselves and their peers inside their own culture.

So that’s how it came to be taught that Yahweh was the one and only. And that, I think, is why those writers did it. But what about Yahweh?

Do we accept that he is a spirit, a being with intentions and agency? I do. I accept him as such, along with many other spirits. If that’s the case, did he go along passively with the elevation to supremacy? Or did he inspire those writers and guide them in their work in order to achieve that huge power for himself? To rule absolutely what started quite small but would one day become a world religion, in fact three world religions?

I don’t know. My instinct is that it was the latter. I’ll see if looking at his earlier identity and nature might help to clarify things.

In the earliest known mention of Yahweh, in the Bronze Age between 1550 and 1200 BCE, he was one of the many sky gods, specifically in his case a weather god and a divine warrior of lands in the south. His cult followed trade routes north, eventually into Canaan. There, he was introduced to the Hebrews, who were at that time a polytheistic people worshipping a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, El’s consort Asherah, and Baal. Yahweh was added to the list.

His nature? Storm god and divine warrior. Smiting and destroying and all-conquering. The exact nature of the god-to-come of the Old Testament.

When did he become a gentle, loving, father figure? That came hundreds of years later, and involved the creation of the Jesus Christ we are taught about, the creation of the messiah cult, which I can’t see any other way now than as a hugely successful political PR job by Israel’s religious movers and shakers.

So, Jesus. Was he an actual living person? Respected academics who have spent their lifetimes studying this subject are divided on the question. Having absorbed much of their discourse, my instinct is that he was a useful myth. An essential one. If he was actually skin and bone for a few years, then later he was mythologised because the movers and shakers needed him to be so much more.

Was he the Son of God? Well, yes, he was, wasn’t he? Because that’s what he was created to be. It’s precisely what he existed for in the political arena. If Yahweh can be said to exist as a powerful spirit and divine myth, then Jesus exists too regardless of whether he was ever a person drawing breath.

I’m an animist. For me, everything has a spirit. Including fictional characters in books read by many people. They become egregors, those characters, magical entities created from the thoughts and feelings of people. It requires no stretch of my imagination and understanding to accept Jesus as such, which means that for me he is a spirit.

How did the myth of him come to take over so much of the world? Because that’s what he was for. That’s what the human movers and shakers wanted, generations of them in the Hebrew religion followed far more successfully by many more generations of movers and shakers among the gentiles. I don’t need to examine the history of the Christian churches to see this playing out.

And that, I believe, is also what Yahweh wanted. Because he’s still the storm god, the divine warrior, the smiting destroyer and conqueror. That’s been his nature all along, from way before he was elevated to supremacy over all other gods, and it’s still his nature now. Jesus’s gentleness is a master stroke of genius to balance that stormy violence.

Which brings me, finally, in my thoughts about the deities and spirits I conversed with the other day in my shower, to Anthony.

Is he a saint? Well, yes. The Roman Catholic church sanctified him, so he is undeniably a saint. But did he exist before that? Before the person who may or may not have existed in human form but upon whom the church hung an identity and a responsibility.

My instinct is that, yes, he did. That he was a spirit loved by the people of some place, known in their local folklore, a being who helped people to find things they had lost.

That’s how the Christian church has operated through the ages, isn’t it? Co-opting pagan spirits, making them saints. People continued communing with them, working with them, regardless of their official status. I think Anthony is one of those spirits.

In my shower, today, I was comfortable asking “the spirit who protects me” to look after me getting in and out of the shower, and then to see Anthony as a different spirit who I ask to help me find my missing pebble.

I don’t know who that first spirit is. The genius loci of our valley perhaps? I don’t know. I’ve asked them to reveal themselves to me. It’s something I’ll meditate upon.

Embodied and full of chemistry

(Nimue)

Some of my Druidry this year has been about nature as it manifests in my body and exploring myself as an embodied being. I haven’t had a good relationship with my body – ongoing issues with pain, fatigue and unmet need have had me disassociating a lot in the past. It’s something I’m working to change.

We are all collaborations of tiny things. All those cells. All those bacteria. We’re electrical impulses in a meat sack. We’re chemical events triggered by environment and experience. We are random ancestral jam. There’s a lot going on in here at a scale it is hard to think about – in terms of how small those parts are and what massively huge numbers of them are involved.

About this time last year I’d started to realise how shot my body chemistry was. I didn’t feel much – mostly empty, hollow or numb. I wasn’t experiencing feelings of reward or satisfaction, I had lost the capacity to want things. It was grim and I was ill in a number of ways and not well resourced to change things.

Last week I went for a walk and, coming to the top of a long flight of steps, I had a brief experience of my body producing endorphins. I’ve never been good at endorphins, I don’t easily get the pain relief or the pleasure associated with exercise. There have been times when I’ve danced for hours, or walked twenty miles and managed to get a hit, but it’s never been reliable. To get endorphins for climbing a modest amount of steps was startling and exciting.

We’re so prone to treating our bodies and minds as separate. We don’t talk much about how soul needs might impact on body functionality. Conversations around chemical interventions have tended to focus on serotonin but this is by no means the only neurotransmitter impacting on how anyone feels. Inside this skin there is one coherent system and everything is connected. Health and illness are not brain issues alone, or body issues alone. Our emotional states are chemical states. Our mental states depend on neurotransmitters and the electrical events in our central nervous systems. Being alive is being a big, messy, complicated interaction of many things.

We talk a lot in Druidry about how everything is connected. Pagans of all kinds talk about the web of life, and we honour how that works in food systems and the interconnectedness of the natural world. All of this is also inside us. We are complicated networks of systems interacting with each other. We are delicate, fragile ecosystems that need treating with care and respect. When one part of our inner ecosystem is damaged, everything is damaged.

There’s much to celebrate here. There is so much wonder in a human body. Our inner collaborations are incredible things. We constantly take the world into us and release it again, separate and yet part of the whole. This is wild and beautiful, it is our every breath and bowel movement.

I’m starting to explore what it means to honour that rather than taking it for granted or trying to ignore it when things aren’t working.

How to be good

It’s easy to be good around things that take no effort. The point when you find out what someone’s really made of, is what they do when things are hard. How does someone act when they’ve messed up? What does a person do when doing the right thing will cost them a lot? This is when you find out if someone is genuinely honourable. 

Do we allow anger to justify us acting without integrity? I think people are always entitled to defend themselves and protect their own boundaries. In practice this often manifests as moving out of situations, stepping away from people, refusing to keep doing a thing, declining to show up, and so forth. Often boundaries are best protected by moving away from the people who violate them. 

Sometimes it can be necessary and important to seek something restorative. That might involve getting back resources that have been taken from you, or reasserting your personhood in some way. You might need witnessing, or community recognition that you have been wronged. You might need help recovering from the wrong done to you. 

However, all too often, anger becomes a justification for punishing the person who has caused hurt. Acting dishonourably in face of bad treatment doesn’t work. Not if you want to uphold any ideas of fairness, justice or honour. When we let our emotional responses to people justify causing harm to them, a line has been crossed. Anger itself does not create an entitlement to lash out, to punish or to seek revenge. It’s also worth noting that there’s nothing especially restorative about revenge. It might give some temporary satisfaction, but it doesn’t undo the harm done, and it may in turn cause others to turn against you. Revenge keeps you focused on the past and can trap you in your own misery, where seeking something restorative will help you get over things and move on.

One of the most important things to guard against is lashing out at people who have called you out on your mistakes. This comes up a lot around issues of privilege. If you get something wrong and are accidentally sexist, or racist, or ableist or anything else of that ilk and someone calls you on it, they’re expressing faith that you are someone who would want to do better. Getting things wrong can be uncomfortable, but doubling down on a mistake only makes it worse. Lashing out because you feel uncomfortable about being called out on your mistakes is an especially bad choice as a response and can only make things worse.

It takes courage to overcome humiliation and go on to improve things. It takes courage to own mistakes and square up to them. We can be compassionate with ourselves while we’re doing that, but if we are to be compassionate with others we have to be open to hearing when we’re getting things wrong.

Living History

(Nimue)

I did not expect them. Hooves thundering – a heavy horse, white and otherworldly racing across the field. A man in armour, glinting in the sunlight. I wept, and I did not know why I was weeping.

We tell good stories about knights in armour who come to the rescue. Aurthurian tales of chivalry, the wild fantasies of those early romance stories. Knights who go mad and tilt at windmills, chase questing beasts and search for the holy grail. Riders out of fairy with uncanny beauty who might lead you into all kinds of peril. Knights who will rescue you, or fight to defend your honour. The tales of knights are full of magic and wonders.

What my heart responded to when the knight rode out into the field, was those stories, and a longing for chivalry and magic.

My head went somewhere else fairly quickly. My head said this is a symbol of patriarchal oppression and feudalism. This is money, power and control, claiming might is right. What you have here is a capable killing machine able to force its intentions onto others. This is conquest and colonialism, and throwing lives away so that a small number of men can give each other titles. 

What I learned about the battle of Tewkesbury at the weekend agreed with my head response far more than with my heart feeling. A battle caused by a desire to rule, fuelled by the ambitions of others. Professor Ronald Hutton provided some enlightening context, and insightful commentary. We sat in the landscape where the battle had taken place. No one knows how many of the dead are still in that field, uncounted, unnamed, unrecovered. I was moved during the minute’s silence where we were invited to think of them. It turned what might have been just a theatrical show into something poignant. 

My heart still longs for the knights who are not driven by greed and the desire for power.

NIDDHOGGR UPON REACING A DEFINITION OF WHAT’S WRONG

I’m delighted to be sharing poetry from JW Summerisle over the coming weeks.

NIDDHOGGR UPON REACING A DEFINITION OF WHAT’S WRONG

girl. it lacks
human origin.

chaos dragons emerge from
the sea. illogically.
with no reason and no rules.

it’s sensation. sheer

bodies invisibly people
behind their buttons &

my dress doesn’t
have any left.

underpinned
by wind.

simply
ripe with

air. i
succulent
with compulsion

un-person my

body weight.
oppress this

perception
of my

flesh.

i would have been
an angel, alice.

all those years ago.

unspeaking by the
trees in hiding.
dapple light and shade.

on the concrete
where the paths

reach only
to the

trees.

lunch ladies
hunch the

branches.
and bite

off all their
nails.

baseline dopamine
in girl child lacking.

addiction paces
the human

quiet.
she would

live a
thousand

lives and
never

want to
talk.

curling tongues
fork the

hedgerows where the

weird children
walk.

JW Summerisle lives in the English East Midlands and often appears on TikTok @jw_summerisle . Their first poem appeared in the 2007 Foyles Young Poets pamphlet, and their first chapbook, kinfolk, came out somewhat recently with Black Sunflowers Poetry press.