Guidance on crossing the threshold in shamanic practice
One of the fundamental practices within shamanism is crossing the threshold between Thisworld and the Otherworld. Doing so is a transformative practice. It evokes curiosity and fear. In this article, I will provide guidance on crossing the threshold through a shamanic drum journey and address some common concerns.
What is a Threshold?
The term ‘threshold’ originates from the Middle English, thresh-wolde, ‘plank, stone, or piece of wood under a door or doorway, especially in a dwelling.’ This derives from the Old English, þrescold, þærscwold, þerxold, ‘door-sill, point of entering.’ It was used to describe the borders between countries (1).
A threshold is something that separates this from that. It’s often an entryway or a boundary. Largely, it separates places: rooms, indoors and outdoors, properties, towns, counties, countries, nations, worlds. Most significantly, in shamanism, there is a threshold between Thisworld and the Otherworld.
The threshold between the worlds is often described as a ‘veil’. You may have heard it said that there are times and places when and where ‘the veil is thin’. Liminal times and places (the term ‘liminal’ derives from the Latin limen ‘threshold’).
In British mythology and folklore, at dawn, at dusk, at midnight, at certain hills, trees and lakes, you might see the fairies or be taken to their realm. But not all of us want to be taken across the threshold involuntarily.
Practices for Crossing the Threshold
There a number of practices by which we can voluntarily cross the threshold, seeing and travelling beyond the veil. These include: drumming, dancing, fasting, meditation and using hallucinogenic drugs and plant medicines.
The safest and most effective method is journeying to a drumbeat of around 4 – 7 beats per second. This takes our brain down from the Beta state (everyday busy mind) through the Alpha state (meditative) to the Theta state (a dreamlike trance) which is just above Delta (sleep). In a shamanic drum journey, you travel in spirit from a location in Thisworld to the Otherworld by riding the drum beat like you ride a horse and following an intention.
With this method, unlike with drugs and plant medicines, you are completely in control. When the drum beat ends, you come back from the journey.
The Threshold and Transformation
Crossing the threshold is a transformative experience. When we go to another country we cannot help but come back changed. The same applies to crossing from Thisworld to the Otherworld. Even more so, because not only are the customs and people different, but space and time work differently. Things are not what they seem. Everyday logic breaks down.
The Otherworld is a land of paradox and contradiction that can only be spoken of in poetry and metaphor. In British folklore, it is said that those who sleep at liminal places and cross between the worlds and return ‘Dead, mad or a poet.’
Experiences of the Otherworld and its spirits change the way we perceive Thisworld and, by changing our perception, change us too. The rules of our society and our family values might be put into question along with the way we are treating the earth and other human and non-human beings. Yet, with a richer, deeper understanding we are equipped to handle these changes.
Concerns about Crossing
During my experience of practicing shamanism, alone and in groups, and in my client work, concerns often come up. Here, I will address the most common.
What if nothing happens?
I have never witnessed someone go on a shamanic journey where nothing happens. A common mistake is to expect a filmic journey. These can occur, but it’s far more common to have a dreamlike sense of travelling through a landscape with flashes of imagery, sounds, smells, tastes, sensings and knowings. Some people report simply feeling an emotion, others bodily sensations. Some fall asleep. These are all significant. Something happens.
What if I get stuck?
Getting stuck is really common. Everybody gets stuck. It’s a fundamental part of shamanic journeying. Stuckness is a challenge from the Otherworld and encourages us to call upon our guides and our ingenuity to unstick ourselves. For example, many people report getting stuck in darkness, particularly on their way to the Lower World. In such instances we can feel our way through, ask our guides to bring a light, or ask Darkness for safe passage.
What if I lose control?
Shamanic journeying to a drumbeat following an intention for 20 – 50 minutes is very safe. Keep your intention in mind and follow the advice of your guides and it is very unlikely you will lose control. Loss of control is only likely to happen if you’re drumming for a lot longer or if you’re combining drumming with fasting, dancing, or intoxicants.
What if I don’t come back?
On a shamanic drum journey, there is a call back beat designed to bring you back. If you start grounded in your body, follow the drumbeat and intention and return with the call back, you will be fine. In fourteen years, I’ve never seen someone not come back from this kind of journey.
What if I’m making it up?
This question stems from the flawed conception of imagination in Western culture wherein it is identified with fabrication and fantasy. In shamanic cultures, it is the channel through which we access the spiritual realms. In a shamanic journey, we begin by actively imagining our journey to begin communication with the Otherworld. Then, begins a dialogue. The Otherworld speaks to us, shows us things, takes us places beyond our wildest knowings and our deepest dreams we cannot have made up.
What if I go mad?
Generally, on a shamanic drum journey, our guides give us no more than we can handle. It’s only when we misuse drugs or plant medicines or approach the Otherworld disrespectfully we get ‘bad trips’. Yet, sometime along the way, it’s likely you will have a ‘big experience’ whether beautiful and ecstatic or horrible and terrifying (or both!). For these times, it is useful to have a shamanic practitioner and / or a psychotherapist and like-minded friends to turn to. Traversing periods of ‘madness’ and questioning is part of the territory.
The Next Step
If you are curious about crossing the threshold but unsure about how to take the next step, I would suggest seeking one-to-one guidance from a shamanic practitioner or taking a workshop or course with a reputable facilitator. I offer shamanic guidance sessions. I would also recommend The Way of the Buzzard Mystery School to anybody interested in online learning.
Stepping over the threshold can be scary, but it’s worth facing your fears for the wealth of knowledge and inspiration that lies beyond the veil, glistening far brighter than all the stolen gold that has been torn from Thisworld.
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Let me tell you a story. When I came into the world, it was too loud, too scary, too overwhelming. There were too many bright lights. Too many people. Too many faces and too many voices that I could not comprehend. I did’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be me. I didn’t want to be present.
This got worse when I was bullied. I fled to the horses. I fled into fantasy novels. When I couldn’t gallop away, I ran away. I danced until I dropped. I ran to the point of exhaustion. I stuffed myself, starved myself, drank more booze than all the bards of the medieval halls put together, took all manner of drugs. I flirted with death. Death flirted back. He saved me.
And I ran to Him in the Otherworld and He brought me back. I flew to Him in the Otherworld and He brought me back. I swam to Him across the oceans of the Deep and the starry sea of the Heavens and took Him a star. And He brought me back. And He said, “You belong here, now, in the present.”
And He gave me a monastery and made me a nun and married me. “If you can’t be present for yourself, be present for me, now I live within your heart.”
And I was present. But I still couldn’t be me. So He trampled down the monastery and He tore off my habit and left me naked with myself.
And it’s hard, so hard, being present with this body. With these senses. With this pain. With these memories. But this is the quintessence of healing.
The visions of the Otherworld have their value. The molten stars. The silver spaceships. The serpents who swallow us. The hounds who tear us apart. The gentle mothers. The tender soul parts who come back, childish, laughing and smiling, to our astonishment, to our dismay, as we fear to hold them. For what place have joy and tenderness and love in this cruel, cruel world?
The visions of the Otherworld have their value but only if we can integrate them into Thisworld and it is hard, so hard, when there is no room for dragons and goddesses with big bellies and laughing, smiling, children.
It is hard. But this is the work. The journeying is easy. This part is harder.
Presence is like a brittle star that has fallen from the sky of the Otherworld and become a seed that must grow to see and feel and experience all the pain, all the joy, all the trembling, crumpling anxiety, all the fear of this failing world.
It is a gift of the Otherworld’s King. It holds more worth than all His treasures – the trays of fruit and meat, the over-spilling mead-cups, the heaps of gold.
Help me to be present for You, for me, this day, all days, in every now, Immortal Lord.
‘I’m splendid of fame: songs are heard in the four quarters of the fort, island of the strong door. Fresh water and jet are mixed together; sparkling wine is their drink, set in front of their battalion. Three full loads of Prydwen we went by sea: save seven, none came back from Caer Rigor.’ ~ The Spoils of Annwn
It’s the middle of summer. We set sail for Caer Rigor beyond the ninth wave and further on to where all waves freeze beneath the turning of the frosty gulls.
There is no fortress in Thisworld or the Otherworld colder than Caer Rigor. It wears its icicles like the Winter King’s crown upside down when he was cast down. There are frozen birds upon the turrets with songs frozen on their tongues.
The gate of the fortress is frosted shut like the cold lips of the gatekeeper.
Down from a tower swoops a messenger on wide white wings like an albatross. He pours water over jet mixing them together. Whoosh! A rush of flames, like from a flamethrower, burning in a multitude of colours, like a flambeau.
Ice drips from the gate and hinges open like the gatekeeper’s jaw. The giant stares and unclenches his fist but halts not our passage as we enter the frozen corridors of Caer Rigor and are taken to stand before the Strong Door.
“The door to this hall has not been opened for 1500 years,” the messenger speaks solemnly, “the men inside have known not death, nor decay, nor old age.”
He holds the jet-flame to the door and the icy seal around it melts. Inside is a battalion of frozen men, not the seven survivors, no, these are dead men. Young, pitifully young hopefuls who accompanied Arthur on his fateful voyage.
There is wine, sparkling wine, in their cups, they wear the faces of happy drunks. Yet, as the door opens, as the ice begins to thaw, they set down their glasses and the pain of memory appears in their eyes with the onset of sobriety as fire and ice, jet and water mix, fiercely coloured and hallucinatory.
“Where are we?” “Thisworld or the Otherworld?” “Are we alive or are we dead?” “Are we burning or are we freezing?” “Is this reward or punishment?”
“All I remember is the flash of Llenlleog’s sword as it was thrust into the cauldron.”
“Blinding!” “The explosion.” “It blinded us.” “Yet we can see.”
“I remember the cauldron, tiny, in Lleog’s hand.”
“Nonsense – that was just an illusion – the cauldron cannot be stolen.”
“Arthur cut off His head! The head of the Head of Annwn.”
“And it sung to us for nights in this feasting hall.”
“The Head of Annwn sung of cutting off Arthur’s head and how it was deaf and dumb.”
“What will become of us now?” “How can we return to the cauldron if it is gone?”
“I told you it was all an illusion,” speaks the youngest of the men.
“You’re no longer trapped in that old myth,” the messenger tells them.
“That old myth is done,” I am inspired to speak up, “we come as new monastic devotees of the Head of Annwn to set you free from Arthur’s rule. When this castle has thawed to the cauldron you will return to be reborn.”
They raise their cups and embrace – fire and ice, jet and water mix fierce and hallucinatory as from the turrets the birds fly free and burst into song.
~
This piece is based on my experiences during our Monastery of Annwn Brythonic texts meditation group last night. Caer Rigor has been translated as ‘the Petrification Fort’ from the Latin rigor from ‘stiffness’ and also contains connotations of ‘cold’ from frigor. The citation above is from Marged Haycock but replaces her translation of ynys pybrydor as ‘stout defence of the island’ with the more popular translation ‘island of the strong door’. This allows it to be related to the Second Branch of The Mabinogion wherein the seven survivors of the battle between the Britons and the Irish feast and drink blissfully on the Island of Gwales with the head of Bran the Blessed until one of the men, Heilyn, opens the door, and all their losses and ills return.
I. The Roos Carr Figures – Voyagers to the Otherworld?
A few weeks ago, fellow awenydd Greg Hill drew my attention to the Roos Carr Figures HERE. These fascinating wooden warrior figurines, eight in total, their shields, and their serpent-headed boats were sealed in a wooden box and deposited in a boggy area (‘carr’ means ‘bog or fen covered with scrub’).
They were found in a layer of blue clay by labourers cleaning a ditch in 1836. Of the eight, only five remain (the fifth was returned after one of the labourers gave him to his daughter as an ‘ancient doll’ to play with), a couple of the shields and one of conjecturally two boats due to decay.
Radiocarbon dating to 606 – 508 BCE places them in the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age. Carved from yew they stand between 31cm and 45cm tall. Their faces are angular with prominent noses, slit-like mouths, and striking eyes made of quartzite pebbles set into eye-holes. Elongated trunks with drill-holes at the shoulders for arms taper into thin peg-like legs. Each has a central pubic hole.
The figures were found with a number of dis-attached appendages, some of which were arms, some of which were phalluses, to be placed in the empty holes. Typically, the Victorians mistook the phalluses for oars. Since then their manhoods have been returned to their correct positions.
I immediately fell in love with these little figures who might be interpreted to be living or dead warriors sailing their serpent-ship on a voyage to Annwn, ‘the Deep’, the ancient British Otherworld. Their representation reminded me of the medieval Welsh poem ‘Preiddu Annwn’ ‘The Spoils of the Otherworld’ in which Arthur takes three loads of warriors in his ship, Prydwen, to assault a series of otherworldly fortresses to steal the Brindled Ox and the Cauldron of Pen Annwn.
It suggested the existence of a pre-Arthurian tale in which warriors set out on a quest to Annwn to visit the dead and the deities of Annwn and perhaps bring back treasures to Thisworld.
II. Wooden Idols of Britain and Ireland – Threshold Guardians?
My research on the Roos Carr Figures led me to discovering that a number of wooden figurines have been found across Britain and Ireland. All were found in wet places which were seen as liminal – where crossings of bogs or waters needed to be made – suggesting they were threshold guardians. Some of these ‘idols’ have been interpreted to be gods and goddesses, others spirits of place, and others ancestors and, of course, the boundaries between these terms are intrinsically fluid.
The Ballachulish Goddess was found on Ballchulish Moss, in Inverness-shire, Scotland. Dated to 600 BC it stands at a height of 145cm, the size of a girl, and is the largest of our British figures. Carved from alder wood it has a large head with a long, thin nose, a full mouth, and small white quartzite eyes. Its chest is flat with two pairs of incised circles representing breasts and nipples. The objects it is holding have not yet been securely identified (a couple of scholars have suggested they are severed penises!). Its legs end in a solid block of wood.
It was discovered during building work, in 1880, in deep layers of peat ‘lying face down on the gravel of an old raised beach, around 120 metres from the shore of Loch Leven’ and may have stood beside a pool. ‘Under and above’ were ‘intertwined branches and twigs and ‘straighter poles which might have formed a ‘wickerwork container, or a little shrine’.
Its location, overlooking ‘the dangerous straits linking Loch Leven with the sea’ are suggestive of its worship as ‘the goddess of the straits’ to whom travellers made offerings for a safe crossing.
Another intriguing example is the Somerset God Dolly which is the oldest of Britain’s known wooden idols, dating to between 2285 and 3340 BCE. This hermaphroditic figure was carved from ash wood, was 16cm high, and had a ‘round featureless head, no neck, and a small stubby body with two asymmetrically placed breasts and a large horizontal penis’ ending ‘at the base of the trunk without legs.’
It was found on the Somerset Levels, ‘driven upside down’ ‘within a cluster of pegs’ ‘that formed part of Bell Track A’ and ‘stratigraphically below the Bell B Track’. This suggests it might have been a threshold guardian of the earlier trackway, then made redundant, and buried beneath.
Nearby, in Hillfarrance, an oak forked-branch figure dated to 1131-1410 BCE was retrieved from a pit in a ‘riverine peat wetland’ ‘beside two brooks, both tributaries of the river Tone.’ Only the lower limbs and torso, 45cm long, have survived. It was buried with shards of pottery, a burnt stone and worked wood. Again, this was a deliberate deposition, perhaps of a former guardian.
The Kingsteignton Idol was discovered on the banks of the river Teign, in south Devon, ‘lying up against the trunk of a fallen oak tree’. Carved from oak wood, 33cm tall, it has a ‘long thin body’, ‘elongated neck’, and ‘large head’ with ‘eyes, nose and chin’ ‘indicated’. There is a hole in his neck for insertable arms. Its ‘trunk is straight, square-shouldered, with carefully carved buttocks and erect penis’ and its ‘short, kneed legs end in stubby feet.’ It has been dated to 426-352 BC. It was likely associated with the oak tree, a threshold marker, and may have been its guardian spirit.
On the Dagenham marshes, on the bank of the Thames, down river from London, the Dagenham Idol was found in close proximity to the skeleton of a deer. It has been dated to 2250 BC. Carved from the wood of a Scots pine it stands at 46cm tall and has a large head, flat face, sockets for eyes (‘the right deeper than the left’), and no ears or hair. Its trunk is armless. It has a central pubic hole, potentially for the insertion of a penis and its legs are straight and footless. It might have been a guardian of the marshland and/or river and possibly had an association with deer and other animals.
In Ireland the Ralaghan Figure was found in a peat bog and the Lagore Figure on a crannog in a peat lake. A model dug-out canoe was discovered at Clowanstown 1, County Meath, and might be seen to resemble the serpent boat of the Roos Carr Figures, paddling the lake, and between worlds.
The existence of these idols provides evidence that, from the early Bronze Age into the Iron Age, the people of Britain and Ireland saw wet places as sacred and inspirited as well as potentially dangerous. The gods and spirits appeared to them in anthropomorphic forms and were carved into wooden idols, which were seen to embody them, and to which offerings were likely made for safe passage.
For unknown reasons some of these idols were deposed and buried in or near the place where they stood. Had they reached the end of their power and thus served their purpose? Had they requested to be returned to the waters of their origin? Were they seen as just as or more powerful when buried like the dead? The answers to these questions are as unknowable as the minds of our distant ancestors
III. Wooden Idols and Ritual Landscapes in Northern Europe
Numerous wooden idols serving a similar function have been recovered from across Northern Europe. The best example of a ritual complex is Opfermoor Vogtei in Germany. Situated on a bog, which includes a shallow lake, it was in use from the 5th century to beyond the Roman period.
Within circular enclosures of hazel branches were altars where wooden cult figures were worshipped. Wooden idols were also found on the edges of the lake where they overlooked the waters.
During excavations on Wittemoor timber trackway across a bog in Berne, Lower Saxony, in Germany, six wooden figurines dating to the Iron Age were found. Two of them stood on either side of the track where it crossed a stream. Both were ‘carved in silhouette out of oak planks 3 to 7cm thick’. The male was 105cm tall ‘with a rectangular body’ and the female 95cm tall ‘with breasts or shoulders indicated by a slanted cut, broad hips and vulva’. The male slotted into a plank and the female stood on a mound. The other figures are described as ‘cult poles’. Fire sites ‘at each end of the crossing’ and ‘stones and worked alder sticks’ around two of the poles suggest offerings were made.
These discoveries show that wooden idols served a significant function within ritual landscapes for the Germanic peoples. As representations of gods and goddesses and spirits of place with threshold functions they were raised on altars, fires were built in their honour, and offerings were made to them.
Similar idols, such as the Braak Bog Figures, have been found elsewhere in Germany. From Denmark we have the Broddenjberg Idol and figurines were found in Wilemstad in the Netherlands.
One of the most impressive, from Russia, is the Shigir Idol. Dated to 10500 BCE, the Mesolithic period, around the end of the Ice Age, it is ‘the oldest known wooden sculpture in the world.’
Found in a peat bog in Shigir it is carved from larch and may have originally stood at at 5.3m tall. It has a small head with narrow eyes, a triangular nose, circular mouth, and pointed chin. Its body is flat and pole-like and covered in ‘geometrical motifs’ including ‘zigzag lines’ and ‘depictions of human hands and faces’. It speaks to me of a death god filled with the spirits of the dead.
It has been proposed that the decorations tell the story of a creation myth or ‘serve as a warning not to enter a dangerous area’. Whatever the case, it would have been a formidable figure at the centre of a ritual landscape, seen for miles around, imbued with great meaning for the early hunter-gatherers.
What strikes me the most about these wooden idols is that they seem hauntingly familiar. I’m not sure if this because, as a Smithers, I have Saxon ancestry and connections to the figures from Germany or because, when I’ve been travelling wetlands, physically and in spirit, I have caught glimpses of dark figures who might be wetland spirits or echoes of their representations.
What is certain is that the presence of spirits and the urge to carve them from wood has been felt across Northern Europe since, at least, the Ice Age. In the Norse myths, the first humans were created from ash and elm by the gods and, in the Brythonic myths, soldiers were conjured from trees by a deity. I wonder whether our creation of wooden idols was seen to mirror this divine process?
SOURCES
Bryony Coles, ‘Anthropomorphic Wooden Figures From Britain and Ireland’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 56, 1990
Clive Jonathon Bond, ‘The God-Dolly Wooden Figurine from the Somerset Levels, Britain: The Context, the Place and its Meaning’, Anthropomorphic and Zoomorphic Miniature Figures in Eurasia, Africa and Meso-America, Oxford: Archaeopress/BAR International Series 2138
Jeremy Clark, ‘The Intriguing Roos Carr Model Wooden Boat Figures Found Near Withersea, East Yorkshire’, The Yorkshire Journal, Issue 1, Spring 2011
For three days she journeyed there and for three days journeyed back
to return a lost son to return a lost brother and I alone stand witness at the standing stone
that might have been placed here for this day as his golden rays shine over the marshland.
How did she win him back from Winter’s King? That is for her alone to know and the birds who sing.
This poem is a follow up of my poem ‘I light a candle for Epona‘ based on the journey of the Great Mare to the Otherworld to win back her lost son. I linked this to my brother’s period of hospitalisation. I’m glad to say he is back now and on the road to recovery so many thanks to the mare goddess and to those who sent good wishes and lit candles.
The photographs are of the sun beginning to set over the winter solstice stone at the stone circle at Brockholes Nature Reserve and over the visitor village and Meadow Lake.
‘Arthur said, “Are there any of the wonders we have still not obtained?
One of the men said, “Yes, the blood of the Very Black Witch, daughter of the Very White Witch from Pennant Gofid in the uplands of hell.
Arthur set out for the North, and came to where the hag’s cave was.’
– Culhwch ac Olwen
I. The Witch’s Cave
In the medieval Welsh story Culhwch ac Olwen (1090), Orddu ‘Very Black’, a ‘witch’ who lives in a cave in Pennant Gofid ‘the Valley of Grief’, battles against the servants of Arthur and is slaughtered by him in a gristly scene where he cuts her in twain with his knife to drain her blood.
In this tale Gwyn ap Nudd, a Brythonic god of the dead and ruler of Annwn, is dubiously made to appear beside his eternal rival, Gwythyr ap Greidol, as an advisor to Arthur. I judge this to be a move by a Christian interlocutor do demonstrate Arthur’s power not only over Orddu but her god.
It is my personal belief that Orddu was the last of a lineage of ‘witches’ of the Old North who resided in the cave at Pennant Gofid, which is identified with hell, showing Annuvian associations. They were powerful warrior-women and prophets who shared a kinship with the Witches of Caer Loyw who trained Peredur and with Scatach ‘the Shadow’ who schooled Cú Chulainn.
Their martial prowess and ability to commune with Gwyn and the spirits of Annwn to prophecy were seen as a threat to Christianity thus Orddu met her brutal end at the hands of the Christian king.
Orddu’s story has long haunted me. A few years ago it led me to trace her lineage through a series of spirit-journeys and in inspired writing from her mother, Orwen ‘Very White’, back to Snow, the first of her ancestors to arrive in Pennant Gofid (then known as the Valley of Winter) after the Ice Age.
Of all the stories I have written Snow’s has felt the realest, the deepest and the most profound. It tells how she and her people were led by Vindos/Gwyn and his wolves and ravens, following the reindeer and wild horses, to her northern cave, where it is remembered in her lore her ancestors once lived.
I have no idea whether Orddu, Orwen, or Snow are real or mythic persons or whether Pennant Gofid is an actual place in northern Britain (if it is I haven’t found it yet). However, archaeological evidence demonstrates that people lived here in caves after the last Ice Age and in the interstadials.
During recent research I found out from Barry Cunliffe’s Britain Begins and Stephen Oppenheimer’s The Origins of the British that a high percentage of the modern population can trace its ancestry back to the period after the last Ice Age when people recolonised Britain from Northern Iberia along the Atlantic seaways and from the North European Plain across Doggerland.
Up until now it had never occurred to me to question who Orddu’s people were and where they came from. To follow their footsteps back to the continent, into older times, and deeper into the cave.
II. After the Ice Age
Following the end of the last Ice Age, the Younger Dryas Stadial, (12,900 to 11,700 BP), the earliest evidence for the inhabitation of Britain comes from caves in south-west Wales. The oldest human remains from Worm’s Head include a human scapula (9920 BP), an ulna (9450 BP), a femur (9420 BP), and a cranium (9360 BP). Human bones dating from between 9000 and 7000 BP have been found at Paviland, Foxhole Cave, Ogof-yr-Ychen ‘Cave of the Oxen’, Potter’s Cave, and Daylight Rock.
One of the most famous Mesolithic burial sites is Aveline’s Hole in the Mendip Hills of Somerset. It was discovered in 1797 and investigations reported the presence of between 50 and 100 human skeletons. Unfortunately most of the finds and documentation were destroyed by bombing during World War II. Only 21 skeletons remain and they have been dated to between 9115 and 8740 BP.
Most were adults and adolescents, but they also included three children aged between 2 and 7 and an infant of 6 – 18 months. One of the skeletons was buried ceremonially in a disused hearth with ‘red ochre, abundant animal teeth some of which were perforated, and a set of fossil ammonites’.
The cave was sealed after the burial. This may have symbolised closing a connection to relatives become ancestors and to the Otherworld, or may have been a precaution to prevent their return.
In 2003 ‘an engraved panel’ consisting ‘of two rows of crosses with six in the upper row and four in the lower’ was discovered in Aveline’s Hole. Because the cave was sealed after the burial it is suspected this cave art belongs to the Mesolithic. Further art, three engravings taking the form of ‘rectilinear abstract designs’, possibly of a similar date, were found nearby, in Long Hole.
Other finds from the Mendips from this time include a mandible (9360 BP) and cranial fragments (9060 BP) from Badger Hole and the skeleton of Cheddar Man (9100 BP) from Gough’s Cave. Research into DNA has made possible a reconstruction of Cheddar Man’s appearance. His genetic make-up shows he had dark skin of a pigmentation ‘usually associated with sub-Saharan Africa’ and blue eyes.
This suggests that the earliest inhabitants of Britain, including Snow and her people, were dark-skinned. Snow received her name because she was born in a snow storm not because she had snow-white skin. Dark skin is hinted at in the way I describe Snow’s Very Great Grandmother whose face was ‘wrinkled like an old crowberry’, crowberry (empetrum nigrum), being black. Perhaps Orddu ‘Very Black’ was herself black due to a gene that linked her back to oldest ancestors.
In northern Britain a piece of human thigh bone contemporary with the burials in Aveline’s Hole was found in Kent’s Bank Cavern near the Kent estuary where it enters Morecambe Bay. Other evidence of human inhabitation of this area includes microliths and an antler point from Bart’s Shelter.
III. Creswell Crags Cave Art
Snow possessed stories about her cave, passed down by her ancestors, suggesting her people had lived in Britain in the past. Archaeological finds from a number of caves show the landmass, then attached to the continent, had indeed been occupied during the Lateglacial Interstadial (14,670 – 12,890 BP).
Creswell Crags, a limestone gorge in Derbyshire, is famous for its parietal and portable cave art and stone tools. According to Paul Petitt these have ‘very direct parallels with material from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany… the term Magdalenian… links these British industries to a much wider population dispersal into empty areas of Europe following the Last Glacial Maximum. This dispersal has its roots in the Magdalenian of south-western Europe… Magdalenian sites in Britain cluster relatively tightly between 12,600 and 12,200 radiocarbon years ago, which places the sites in the relatively mild conditions of the first half of the Lateglacial Interstadial.’
There are 25 examples of parietal art at Creswell; 23 in Church Hole, one in Robin Hood Cave, and one in Mother Grundy’s Parlour. All are engravings that often use the structures of the cave walls.
The clearest engravings are of a stag, bison, and an ibis. The latter is a bird for whom we have no faunal remains in Britain, but would have been seen on the continent by the highly mobile artists.
One of the most intriguing is a bird/woman motif, which has been interpreted as ‘long-necked birds of some kind…. cranes, herons, bitterns, and swans’ and ‘schematic human females, drawn upside down.’
Another, equally ambiguous, is described as ‘a diving bird, a serpentiform or a stylised human female?’ There is a also a ‘headless horse’, ‘small incomplete engraved animal’ and ‘abstract designs such as a ‘boomerang’, ‘engraved triangle’, ‘horn-like motif’ and ‘two small triangles’. ‘Figures of uncertainty’ include a ‘square’, a ‘bison-head profile’, a ‘horse-head’, and a ‘bear’.
In Robin Hood’s Cave was found a rib engraved with a horse coloured by red ochre. William Boyd Dawkins described it in 1867: ‘the head and fore quarters of a horse incised on a smoothed and rounded fragment of rib, cut short off at one end and broken at the other. On the flat side the head is represented with the nostrils and mouth and neck carefully drawn. A series of fine oblique lines show that the animal was hog-maned. They stop at the bend of the back which is very correctly drawn.’
The Ochre Horse shares parallels with portable Ice Age horse depictions from the caves of Perigord in France and Kesserloch in Switzerland. It is also contemporary with a decorated horse jaw from Kendrick’s Cave, Llandudno, which had five panels of chevrons cut into it creating a zig-zag effect. That people carried these representations with them may suggest horses held a special place in their traditions. Whether this was simply as a prey animal or as a spirit guide or deity remains unknown.
In Pin Hole Cave, engraved on the rib-bone of a woolly rhincoeros, was a masked figure described by Albert Leslie Armstrong as a ‘masked figure in the act of dancing a ceremonial dance.’ Again, the identity of this figure and why he was carried into and left in the cave remains a mystery.
Other British examples include an engraving of a reindeer from Gower Cave in Wales and engraved plaquettes from La Varines in New Jersey featuring abstract designs and ‘zoomorphic representations’, possibly of horses, mammoths, a bovid, and human face, dating to 14,000 years ago.
The art of Creswell Crags shares similarities with Magdalenian art from across south-western Europe. Paul Pettitt links its characteristics artworks at Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France. He suggests the Creswell Crag artists spent their summers in this area and retreated to the lowlands that now form part of the North Sea or the Netherlands and central Rhine areas and says they would have been in contact with people from Ardennes and the Dordogne, which was also accessible on foot. “The Magdalenian era was the last time that Europe was unified in a real sense and on a grand scale.”
IV. Prehistoric Chapels and Rites of Initiation
The French archaeologist and Catholic Priest, Abbé Breuil, referred to Lascaux as ‘the Sistine chapel of prehistory’. The caves of the Franco-Cantabrian area have long been seen as sacred sites that were central to the religion of the Magdalenian people and their predecessors who made earlier paintings.
According to Bruno David these caves were used for ritual performances and rites of passage. He describes Cougnac: ‘Human engagements in the deep, dark space of the cave are intriguing: here are found animals that take shape along rock walls in a combination of natural concretions and painted red or black lines. At the entrance of chambers, palms of hands were dipped in red ochre and fingers smeared with black pigment, and then pressed against rock walls to leave distinctive marks. Animals were neatly arranged along rock walls, their viewing intentionally and carefully choreographed. Depictions were made of repeatedly speared humans or human-like creatures, and rocky concretions were tapped to make a ringing sound, it appears. This is the stuff of rituals… It formed part of an inner sanctum of knowledge, of an inner life, one that needed to be performed.’
David speaks also of ‘orchestrated performance’ at Tuc d’Audoubert where, adjacent to the Gallery of the Clay Bison, in the Chamber of Heels are found ‘183 impressions of the balls of human heels and myriad shallow impressions of fingertips’ ‘which show that those who walked this space did so on the heels of their feet, carefully avoiding placing the flat of their feet on the ground… The size of the heel imprints… indicates they were not made by adults but by youths probably adolescents.’
‘What we see in the art and imprints in the clay are the products of choreographed actions involving youths walking on the balls of their feet and pressing fingertips into clay along long and sometimes narrow tunnels underground, leading to sculpted clay bison that were never meant to be seen by the broader populace of the outside world. These were rituals along passageways that were, we think, literally rites of passage for youths approaching adulthood. The art was not just to be seen, but to be performed.’
David Williams argues that Lascaux holds ‘the key to major mysteries’ as a place for ‘vision quests’ leading to shamanic initiation. He says ‘different rituals were performed in contrasting areas’. In the ‘Hall of the Bulls’ the only area that can accommodate a large number of people, ‘dancing, music, and chanting’ may have taken place. He describes this area as a ‘vestibule’. In the Axial Gallery the Roaring Bull might have evoked auditory hallucinations and the Falling Horse sensations of falling and descent.
The dense engravings in the Apse featuring ‘crowded images of horses, bison, aurochs, ibexes, deer, and a possible wolf’ etched on top of one another might have provided a glimpse of the spirit world. Having passed a pair of ‘Cerberus-like paired bison’ and crawled down a tunnel to the Diverticule of the Felines to eight formidable cave-lions, ‘a horse seen face-on’, and ‘bison with a raised tail’, ‘questers came face to face with visions of power and made personal contact with the spirit realm.’
The Shaft, and end area, which falls away into a deep well is where offerings with ‘broken signs’ were left. Here is the famous painting of a bison wounded by a spear charging down a bird-headed man with a bird-staff. Williams says here ‘we have transformation by death: the ‘death’ of the man paralleling the ‘death’ of the eviscerated bison. As both ‘die’, the man fuses with one of his spirit helpers, a bird’. He interprets this as the ‘zoomorphic transformation… becoming a shaman necessitated.’
It seems possible that Creswell Crags was also seen as a prehistoric ‘chapel’ where people communed with spirit animals and sought and then engraved visions of the spirit world. Perhaps the witch’s cave at Pennant Gofid was also used for rituals of descent presided over by Orddu and her kin that led to initiates, like them, becoming awenyddion, ‘people inspired’, the Brythonic term for ‘shamans’.
V. Gough’s Cave – Skull Caps and Cannibalism
A discussion of the cave-based rituals of the people living in Britain during the Magdalenian period would not be complete without mention of the skull caps of Gough’s Cave, Somerset, and ritual cannibalism.
There were discovered the skeletal remains of ‘a Minimum Number of six individuals: a child (aged 3.2 years), a young adolescent (approximately 12–14 years old), an older adolescent (approximately 14–16 years old), at least two adults and an older adult’ dating to 14,700 BP. Results of the research by Silvia Bello et al. ‘suggest the processing of cadavers for the consumption of body tissues (bone marrow), accompanied by meticulous shaping of cranial vaults. The distribution of cut-marks and percussion features indicates that the skulls were scrupulously ‘cleaned’ of any soft tissues, and subsequently modified by controlled removal of the facial region and breakage of the cranial base along a sub-horizontal plane. The vaults were also ‘retouched’, possibly to make the broken edges more regular. This manipulation suggests the shaping of skulls to produce skull-cups.’
These skull caps resemble those from other Magdalenian sites such as La Placard Cave and Isturitz in France, and from Herxhein, Germany, in the Neolithic period, and El Mirador, Spain, in the Bronze Age.
In Gough’s Cave was also found a human radius engraved with a zig-zag pattern of ‘87 incisions: 33 single-stroke incisions, 32 to-and-fro sawing incisions’, also bearing evidence of cannibalism. What was particularly interesting is that ‘the decorative pattern seems to have been applied in the middle of this process: the break where the bone was snapped to extract marrow cuts across the zig-zag. It seems that the arm’s flesh had been removed, but then the butchery was paused while someone engraved the bone, and only then was it broken to get at its contents.’
This shares similarities with an ulnus from Kent’s Cavern with fine cut marks and percussion marks dating to 8185 BP. The zig-zag also resembles the pattering on the Kendrick’s Cave decorated horse skull.
It is clear that complex rituals and beliefs surrounded these acts of cannibalism and the creating of skull-caps and engraving of bones. Were these acts performed to honour the ancestors? Was eating one’s kindred an act of holy communion through which their life’s essence passed from the dead to the living?
What did the marks on the bones symbolise? Days? Acts? The release of the spirit from the bones? Was the creation of skull caps linked to belief that the soul presided in the head and with its release? What did wearing or drinking from the skull caps mean? Answers to these questions can only be guessed at.
It is worth nothing that, in Culhwch ac Olwen, Gwyn is associated with ritual cannibalism. He feeds the heart of Nwython, the ruler of Strathclyde to his son, Cyledyr, who becomes wyllt ‘mad’ or ‘wild’, but later becomes a rider on the hunt for Twrch Trwyth – a veiled version of the Wild Hunt. Here the consumption of the flesh of an ancestor is initiatory, leading first to madness, then to prowess.
Orddu is associated with Gwyn and witchcraft and her abode is described as hellish. One wonders whether the practice of cannibalism lived on and was practised by her and her ancestors in the Old North.
It certainly continued into the Iron Age in other areas of Britain. In the Bone Cave of Alveston, in Gloucestershire, the remains of seven individuals were found including an individual murdered by a pole-axe. The femur of one these adults ‘had been split longitudinally and the bone marrow scraped out.’
The skeletons were deposited with dog bones, cattle bones, a possible bear vertebra, and wooden twigs.’ Mark Horton says: ‘This was a highly structured deposit that can only have got there as a result of some form of ritual activity. This region was an important centre for underworld cults during the later Iron Age, some of which survived into the Roman period; in particular the Celtic Hound God, Cunomaglus, was represented as a dog guarding the underworld in a local temple sculpture.’
VI. Further Back in Time and Back to Now
The footsteps of Snow and her ancestors might be followed back from Britain to the continent and back again through earlier glacials and interglacials. The famous ‘Paviland Red Lady’, actually a male hunter found in Goat’s Hole Cave, Paviland, on the Gower Peninsula in Wales, his bones stained with red ochre, with mammoth ivory and nerite shells, dates to 33,000 BP. This is our earliest evidence for a ritual burial and thus for beliefs linking caves and the Otherworld.
The first record of Homo sapiens in Britain comes from a maxilla fragment from Kent’s Cavern, Devon, and is dated to between 34,700 and 36,400 BP and an Aurignacian burin busqué from Ffeunon Beuno, Wales, dated to 36,000 BP may have belonged to an early ancestor.
Homo sapiens arrived in Europe in 43,000 years ago having travelled through Israel after dispersing from Africa 120,000 years ago where the earliest evidence, from Omo I, dates to 195,000 years ago.
The stories of Snow and her predecessors remind us of our shared European heritage and its origins in Africa when, as Brexit approaches, Britain is cutting itself off from the EU and limiting foreign aid.
Whilst the cave art of the Magdalenians appears to have been born of a shared culture and religion, much later on, due to Christianity, Orddu, the last carrier of these traditions, appears alone in her cave. Isolated like those of us drawn to the Brythonic tradition today and those isolating due to COVID-19.
Dare we hope, instead of fearing death by Arthur’s knife, for a happier time when we can meet safely in caves and other sacred places to celebrate our bond with the Otherworld and its gods and spirits?
was the night you were furthest away from the world like a distant asteroid – like Pluto.
From now you’re coming back – your land of ice and darkness will thaw and the mists will make it beautiful again.
From the coffin where you dream of nuclear winter you will step into a new suit of armour.
Summer is a’coming to Annwn and winter is already on its way here.
This poem is based on my gnosis that whilst it is summer in Thisworld it is winter in the Otherworld. It is addressed to Gwyn ap Nudd, a Brythonic ruler of the Otherworld and Winter’s King, who is killed by his rival, Gwythyr ap Greidol, Summer’s King, on Calan Mai, and sleeps through the Summer.
After I received this poem in a vision this morning I looked up Pluto, a planet named after the Roman King of the Underworld and saw that, in Japanese its name is Meiōsei – ‘Star of the King of the Underworld’. I thought this was very beautiful and apt for the planet that rules my birth sign, Scorpio, much as Gwyn, my patron god, is the ruling force in my life.
I then returned to an essay by Brian Taylor called ‘Photographing the Underworld? A Note of NASA’s Pluto Fly-by’ which has had a big influence on me. Here he speaks of how the photographing of Pluto ‘ruler of occultation, and protector of the integrity of mystery’ may have been saved from being an act of ‘casual intrusion’ by the plutonium powered spaceship carrying the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh ‘discoverer of Pluto’ (as a kind of offering to the underworld gods?).
Brian also speaks of how he ‘traced the exteriorisation of Pluto in the history of the nuclear era, and found the planet’s signature etched into the geography of the discovery region, most notably in an extraordinary spatial co-incidence. Pluto was discovered in 1930 at the Percevall Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona. Ten years later Plutonium was manufactured at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, and five years after that the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity Test Site north of Alamagordo in New Mexico. Curiously these three sites fall in an almost perfect straight line, about a thousand miles long, that maps the connection between the planet and the nuclear project on to the land in the most unexpectedly graphic way.’
Coincidentally I have been returning to these themes, which I touched on in The Broken Cauldron, in the later sections of the new book I am writing, which explores more deeply the influence of the gods within the modern world and Gwyn’s connections with nuclear war and nuclear winter.
At the bottom of the essay I saw an old comment I left for Brian in 2015 mentioning a dream I had about Gwyn and nuclear winter, leading me to recall it. Brian notes that the spaceship made closest contact with Pluto on a dark moon and the moon was dark last night.
‘Porth-Annwfyn. Some numinous, arcane agnomen, but which to my dream cognition was livid as moonshine and did plainly signify: Gate of Elysium.’ David Jones
Porth Annwn ‘Door of the Otherworld’. Porth so easily rolling into ‘portal’. The type of door that not only forms both a barrier and an entranceway between here-and-there but transports elsewhere.
Doors are usually boundaries between rooms in a building or its inside and outside and gates serve a similar function in walls, fences, and hedges. Doors and gates that are portals transport between worlds.
Most famously, in the Brythonic tradition, in the poem ‘The Spoils of Annwn’ we find the lines ‘A rac drws porth Vffern, llugyrn lloscit’ ‘And in front of Hell’s gate lamps were burned.’ This suggests there is a gateway through which Arthur and his warriors travelled from Thisworld to the Otherworld and that lamps were burned in the course of a vigil until he and only seven of his men returned. Annwn, ‘the Deep’, was equated with Uffern ‘Inferno’ or ‘Hell’ by Christians in medieval Wales.
Although there a number of places known as ‘Hell’s Gate’ across the world I’ve never found one in Britain. Although, at liminal times, in liminal places, I have been transported to the Otherworld. I have no control over such events.
Finally, I was guided by the Witches of Pennant Gofid, who I believe were similarly devoted to Gwyn ap Nudd, my Lord of Annwn, to create my own doorway. They guided my hand in drawing it and decorating it with the head of Gwyn as bull-of-battle, shapeshifting horses and hounds, and two new guides – a bird man and antlered woman. The teeth symbolise it being the maw of Dormach, Gwyn’s Death Hound. the Jaws of Death.
When I step out of the door it is always into a misty hinterland. Occasionally I’m standing on solid ground, but often it’s marsh, and more often I’m on my winged horse treading mist with my hounds beside me. It’s said of Gwyn and Dormach that they travel ar wybir ‘on the clouds that haunt the mountaintops’ and that wybir or nuden ‘condensed floating white cloud’ ‘serves as a garment for Gwyn’.
And so we travel ar wybir, like Gwyn, until the mist clears, or someone appears to guide us out. Setting off right or left, or North, East, South, or West never works as the directions don’t function the same in Annwn (if they exist at all). I often end up in the same places, but never by the same routes. In contrast to other followers of shamanistic paths I haven’t managed to form a stable map of Annwn.
I’ve been told by numerous teachers one should always return by the same route. Some days I manage this, but other days the routes undo themselves as if Annwn is innately resistant to memory. I search instead for the mist, wait for it to come, like my god, to sweep me up, place me back at the portal.
The door is always shrouded by mist and I have only just realised, after two years of constant use, that I have never seen the other side of the door. That I drew only my entryway, on my side, in my room, in Thisworld. That the origin and location of the exit, on Gwyn’s side, in the Otherworld, is a mystery.
All I know is that as I approach through the mist I have a feeling of increasing solidity. There is ground beneath my feet and the door is set within a wall. This creates the impression the door may once have been part of a fortress, shattered, fragmented, still able to float in the mist like Gwyn’s castle.
Could it be a cast-off door from the Fort of Pen Annwn rendered disposable by Arthur’s despoiling? A relic of Hell’s Gate? Or something older, or newer, but nonetheless no less mysterious? No burning of lanterns will shift the mist and again I must trust a gift of Gwyn’s that is incomprehensible.
‘guided by Barinthus to whom the waters and the stars of heaven were well known. With him steering the ship we arrived’ Vita Merlini
What stars will you navigate by when they have fallen from the sky? Where is North when there is no North Star? How will the swans fly?
When your boat is stuck on a turning oar in the blackest of midnights shall I tie my blindfold with a sailor’s knot? Trust your sightless eyes?
Speak the words that have never been heard this side of the sunrise? Place my payment shiny and cold in your spitless mouth that never lies?
Your cloak of stars ragged torn will you wrap around my shoulders tight as you swear by dead sea-gods we will arrive on your boat that flies
on the wings of a swan where the sea is filled with the Northern Lights? Find the frost-dark isle of my mysterious god where the sun escapes the sunrise?
Where the living are dead and the dead alive and the blind no longer blind will we find the oar, the compass, the stars, bring them back with the starlight?
*This image is the Six of Arrows – Transition – from the Wildwood Tarot.
The Book of Onei by Christopher Scott Thompson is ‘an antinomian dream grimoire, providing deceptive yet true information about the art of Oneiromancy or dream magic in the form of poetry, fantasy, and intentionally ambiguous instructions.’
It is narrated in the voice of a ‘dark seer’, a ‘night wanderer’ drawn to seek the wisdom of the ‘beautiful chaos’ and ‘primal darkness’ and its ‘chthonic and horrifying entities’ rather than the light. Unlike similar narratives involving journeys to otherworlds he does not go with a benevolent aim such as bringing back a dead lover or relative. Following in the footsteps of his father, who stole The Book of Onei from the Great Library, this Promethean anti-hero goes instead to steal a secret – the knowledge of how to understand the book. “Prometheus didn’t give the fire back,” he tells his wife before setting out through the door in the basement.
The main thread of the narrative is this unnamed dark seer’s journey. The rest is composed of lore from The Book of Onei. This includes stories which take the form of powerful parables in a similar strain to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathrustra, riddling poems, and lists of the Powers of Onei and how they might be invoked or exorcised through prayers, offerings, charms, symbols, and rituals.
The visionary scope of this book is immense and could only have been channelled from the depths of dream. One of the most striking characters is the prophet Eyes For Flowers, one of the Sons of Crow, who has huge sunflowers spilling through the eye-holes of his crow-mask. This image and the depiction of demons transformed into angels who ‘rose up from the husks of their bodies as burning wheels, as gears and eyes and wings’ put me in mind of the raw genius of Blake and Ted Hughes.
There is also a lot of animistic wonder. I was mesmerised by the song of the spider who sung to the Fool who would become Three-Times Exiled in his cage and by the words of the swaying serpent who teaches that ‘the Chaos Ocean is not a place you can walk to’ but lies ‘in the crevices between moments.’
As you might have guessed this book is packed with paradoxes. The places and powers in the Book of Onei may not exist in Onei itself and it remains unclear whether there is ‘a secret to be uncovered, or only lies within lies.’ The only way to discover the truth is ‘to go there in person.’ Deep contrary wisdom is conveyed about travelling otherworlds, drawn from fairylore, grimoires, alchemy, demonology, and, forthmost from the author’s experiences as a dreamwalker and visionary.
As a kindred spirit drawn to the beauty of the darkness I fell in love with The Book of Onei when it first started out as a series of blog posts and was delighted to hear it has been published in book form. When I read it in full I was not disappointed. It is a valuable contribution to visionary literature and dark mysticism that deserves to be preserved for longevity. Although not explicitly political it is a work that provides gnosis and guidance for facing dark truths in troubled times.
I would recommend it to anyone who has heard the call of the Veiled One who stirs her ‘cauldron made of swirling stars and galaxies’ or been haunted by the ‘eerie, dreadful dead’ of the Host. I don’t want to give away how it ends, only that it begs a follow up – more!!!
The Sanctuary of Vindos 