AVALON Blog Post 7: GLASTONBURY TOR

Some places are holy places.

On Wednesday—it might have been Wednesday--we drove west from Stonehenge, following the sun. Mystics say there are ley lines--spiritual energetic paths marked by sacred sites—that run through Stonehenge and Glastonbury. One of these is called St. Michael’s Line, which runs through Skellig Michael in Ireland, Mont St-Michel in France, all the way to Mount Carmel in Israel. Glastonbury Tor is on this line, which follows the path of the sunrise on May 8^th—close to Beltane, the ancient festival day that many cultures still celebrate as May Day.

We arrived in Glastonbury and pulled into a car park on Silver Lane. The sun was on its way to setting as we walked towards the Tor. Past the Chalice Well, where they say Joseph of Arimathea dipped the Holy Grail into a stream, past the holy thorn, where they say Joseph of Arimathea struck his staff into the ground, and it grew into the Holy Thorn, a blessed bush that flowers twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. We went through an old wooden gate and stepped onto the Tor.

Some places are holy places.

Glastonbury Tor was once called Ynis Witryn, the Isle of Glass, in an older tongue. Today the tower of the ancient church of Saint Michael stands at the top of the Tor. That church was built in 1323, but was quarried for stone in the 1500s, leaving only the tower. Before that, another Christian church was built atop the Tor in the 10^th or 11^th century—but that one was destroyed in an earthquake in 1275. Excavations in the past suggest there was a Celtic monastery on the Tor sometime in the 600s or 700s.

And before that? Archaeological exploration in the 1960s found artifacts suggesting a pre-monastery Roman temple, and prehistoric flint artifacts from the Mesolithic era (9600-6000 BCE) suggesting something even earlier. The human-built earthwork terraces that shape the Tor date to the Neolithic, around 5000 BCE, the same time that Stonehenge was built.

What was here, before the Roman armies brought Christianity to Britain? What might it have been? Who first stood in that place and felt it to be sacred? 

Some places are holy places.

According to earth scientists, in the 500s the floodplain around the tor was a lake, and the tor at its center an island. It is certain that this place has been deemed holy for a millennium and more. Some speculate that when it was an island, it was the Isle of Avalon.

My Mom and I stepped onto Glastonbury Tor at twilight. Fairy time, the time that the Scots call the gloaming. In a world that often insists we see things as this or that, good or evil, black or white, friend or foe—it is good to be reminded that Nature plays by other rules. In the gloaming, light and dark mingle in the air--the mingling is its defining quality. At twilight everything has a quality of in-between-ness. We climbed the Tor at twilight.

It’s a climb! It is a steep, aerobic hike of 521 feet above the surrounding plain. My Mom stopped two thirds of the way up, to sit on an old stone bench and look out over the wee glittering town below. I kept going all the way to the top.

It is a very powerful place, is Glastonbury Tor. Is it Avalon? I don’t know. Maybe! Does it matter? Maybe! Is it holy? Yes.

Why would a new religion build its churches on top of someone else’s holy places? There are many reasons, but one is surely: it's effective. If you and everyone you know and all of their fathers and grandmothers and great great aunties as far back as anyone can remember have known a place to be holy…and now there’s a new building there, with new guardians, and they say, this was how it always was, you just misunderstood it before…well, if it is a holy place, and it is your holy place, chances are you’ll keep going there, even after the building changes. And if the new guardians make new rules, over time, you might just accept them. And you might even forget that there were ever other rules.

This is how it is:

And this:

There is a scene in my play AVALON that repeats three times, at beginning, middle, and end. It's the first thing I wrote, before I knew much about what the play would be, and it fell into my head almost fully formed. Because the scene is repeated, it becomes something more than just the words the characters are saying. It becomes something, maybe, like a prayer. Sitting at the top of Glastonbury Tor, that scene came into my mind.

[SCENE: A young woman with a bowl of peaches. Warm from the sun, she peels and slices them and puts the pieces in her mouth. The juice runs down her hands, arms, down her neck so she is sweet and sticky in the sun.  A man watches from the edge of the clearing, behind a giant tree, just so. He is strange and powerful, full of thoughts, comely and distant.

 He comes closer. He is a wizard.

She sees him.]

YOUNG WOMAN

Would you like a peach?

WIZARD

I know what it will cost me.

YOUNG WOMAN

Only the energy to take it from my hand and put it in your mouth

WIZARD

Only the energy to slip the moon from the night sky and put it in your pocket

YOUNG WOMAN

I don’t know what that means. This is only a peach.

WIZARD

Ah, no.

YOUNG WOMAN

It is.

WIZARD

Nothing is ever only a peach.

YOUNG WOMAN : [laughs. Eats a slice of peach.]

WIZARD:  [watches her do this]

YOUNG WOMAN

Well, if it seems to you too costly, I will do it for you.

[She stands, a slice of peach dripping in her delicate fingers. She crosses to him, extends the peach towards his lips. His lips part, so slightly. She pulls the peach back, struck by a new thought]

YOUNG WOMAN

What will it cost me, if I feed you?

The peaches are in the scene because of a typo. The day I started writing AVALON, I wrote myself a first-day poem, a kind of pep talk about what the play would be. As I was writing, I glanced back and saw that in a line where I meant to type “peace” I had typed “peach.” I changed it to peace, but kept going:

The Bard plucks music from the air

The lovers twine and seek and struggle, and find those fair rare moments—here, in, Ca-mel-lot—in which all the world is suspended in a summer dazzle of sunshine, peace, fairness, kindness, happiness

Peaches and apples,

The glamor of the moon

The dazzle of the sun

The moment I saw the word peach, I had a vision of the scene that starts the play. Avalon means Isle of Apples, but there can be peaches too.

[Images: Glastonbury Tor, sun side and night side]

In the Tower and on the Tor, I took photos. A young woman and her mother offered to take some for me. The few folks there shared an interior smile, a feeling of good will, of communion and solitude at once. It's a witchy place, in the best way. I sat in the tower, walked around it, stood in the wind. The horizon glowed in colors that would have seemed impossible, had I not been seeing them with my own eyes.

 [Witchy vibes inside the Tower, and Twilight through the doorway]

I stayed at the top of the Tor while the last stragglers and their dogs wandered gently down. It is a place of power, as my Dad would have called it. I sat in the doorway, quietly opening my own doors to the open doors of the place. The first stars diamonded into the deepening blue of the sky, stark and joyful. I was still sitting there when I saw a man come over the last rise of the hill below me. As I saw him I had an immediate sense that it was time to go. Mom was waiting down the hill and it was dark, almost.

I pulled on my coat and walked out of the tower, heading for the steps. As I started down them, the man I had seen was just getting to the top. With an Irish lilt he asked, “Are you from Portland?”

“I am!” I said, running through my head why a stranger at the top of Glastonbury Tor might guess such a thing…and coming up with an answer. “Did you see my Mom down the hill?”

“I did,” he said. “She’s a wonderful lady.”

“I know!” I said. He paused, debating something with himself, then said, “I like…your energy. I don’t, usually talk to folks like this.”

“I don't either," I said, then continued. "I’m Melody. It’s good to meet you.”

“I’m Ricochet” he said. “Ricochet?” I repeated, not sure I’d gotten it right, but also thinking, that’s quite a name! “Rick O’Shea,” he said again, and I heard it properly that time. Later, when my Mom and I compared notes, we realized we had both had the exact same train of thought about his name. She had talked to him for some time, and learned that he has traveled to sacred places across the globe—Mount Shasta, Taos, many more. A traveler, a pilgrim, a seer.

Back on the Tor, Rick O’Shea asked me, “So, what brings you here?”

I debated with myself—it’s a lot, the writing of this play, the quest of it, the pilgrimage of this trip, the holy sense of going into the roots of our human tree, in search of a true story there…what is the level of explanation this new friend will want to hear?

“I’m writing a play called Avalon,” I said. “It rises out of the stories of Arthur, Morgan LeFay, Merlin, and their companions...My Mom and I are making a sort of pilgrimage to places connected with the legends.”

He nodded. We were silent for a moment, a couple of kindred spirits having a chance meeting at twilight in a holy place, if you believe in chance.

“Do you, do email?” he asked, and since I do we exchanged emails, there on the Tor—it’s the 21^st century, and the gods surely smile on the kind of tech that connects people who’d otherwise go their separate ways—I think the gods must like that.

I said I should be heading back down to my mother, adding, “I think you have the Tor to yourself.” Rick O’Shea smiled and said, “She’s a wonderful woman. She was sitting there on the stone and we had a good chat.” I laughed and said it had been such a treat to meet him, and that I’d write to him. “Come see the play!” I said.

“Maybe!” he said. Another pause.

“Well. Good night. Enjoy…this wonderful place,” I said.

“I will,” he said. After another pause, he added,
“Good luck with your…prayer.”

In the stillness, I thought, that’s what this play is. A prayer.

“Thank you,” I said, and went down the hill.

Some places are holy places.

[Images: There and back again]

NEXT POST in Seeking Avalon:  FOR OUR MOTHERS

AVALON will have its world premiere in August 2019, produced by Opera House Arts and staged in a site specific production at Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies on Deer Isle. All text and photos ©2019 Melody Bates. Learn more and support her work here.

AVALON Blog Post 6: Driving the Snakes out of Ireland

All the Snakes of Ireland

A Song for Saint Patrick’s Day

I always loved St. Patrick’s Day. Growing up, I felt a strong bond with the Irish part of my heritage. I loved the poetry, the music, the dancing, the fairy lore, the family stories, the bright life force that ran through my idea of what it was to be Irish. I wore green, ate soda bread, played jigs on my fiddle and danced a fair seven steps. Erin go bragh! It’s a bit funny though—it was St. Patrick’s day, but I didn't know much about him.

 

[Images: St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, The horned fertility god Cernunnos with snake on the Gundestrup Cauldron-1^st Century BCE, and Minoan Snake Goddess-1700-1450 c. BCE]

They tell a story about Saint Patrick: while fasting on a mountaintop in Ireland, he was attacked by snakes. He rang his bell, Finn Foya, whose name means “sweet voice,” and all the snakes in Ireland fled into the sea, leaving the island forever. Thus St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, and to this day, Ireland has no snakes.

Scientists tell another story, which is that Ireland never had snakes. Ice Age and surrounding seas kept them from reaching fair Erin. So whence the legend of Patrick and the snakes and the bell?

Cultural anthropologists suggest a third version of the story: that the “snakes” of Ireland could be a symbolic reference to pagan Druids, and the indigenous spiritual traditions that Christianity branded as heathen and idolatrous. That these were “driven out” as Patrick and other missionaries sounded the bell of Christianity, and the new religion took hold.

 

 

[Images: the Pictish Aberlemno Serpent Stone- 

c. 600 CE, and the modern flag of Wales]

So are the snakes in St. Patrick’s story a symbolic stand-in for Druids? Let’s consult some professional smart folk.

Historian Natalia Klemczak tells us that the Druids were the “ancient religious leaders, scientists and researchers of the Celtic society…poets, astronomers, magicians, and astrologers…They organized intellectual life, judicial processes, had skills to heal people, and were involved in developing strategies for war. They were an oasis of wisdom and highly respected in their society.” The snake was a Druid symbol, one they legendarily tattooed on their bodies.

Both snake and dragon are ancient symbols of the divine, particularly associated with fertility and mother goddesses, their shedding of skin connected to rebirth and the cycle of life. Cultural historian and systems scientist Riane Eisler writes: “In archaeological excavations all through the Neolithic, the serpent is one of the most frequent motifs. ‘The snake and its abstract derivative, the spiral, are the dominant motifs of the art of Old Europe,’ writes archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. She also points out that the association of the serpent with the Goddess survived well into historic times…Clearly the serpent was too important, too sacred, and too ubiquitous a symbol of the power of the Goddess to be ignored. If the old mind was to be refashioned to fit the new system’s requirements, the serpent would either have to be appropriated as one of the emblems of the new ruling classes or, alternately, defeated, distorted, and discredited.”

Or erased, yeah? That works too, I guess.

We go into deep waters here, where it starts to feel personal. Modern-day Christianity comes into view when we consider religion from this long historical angle, which means that people’s personal relationship with their faith comes into view too. How do we have this conversation? I was raised Catholic, with devout lefty Catholic-worker style progressives on my Mom’s side, and Irish mystics on my Dad’s. I treasure the memory of my paternal Grandpa announcing on one full moon evening in August that it was “time for church,” and taking us out in the old tin boat to sit in the moonlit cove of Oregon's Odell Lake, while the last twilight faded and the bats thrummed softly through the luminous air. Also vivid, the debates I had with the young priests who taught my confirmation classes when I was 13, about why women can’t be priests. An intractable argument, in the end.

In writing AVALON, I am still wondering about both of those things: the luminous church of the lake and the moonlight, and whether we all have equal access to the divine. I am also writing about a historical moment in which one way of structuring the world was overtaken and replaced by another. Since we are, historically and figuratively, the heirs of that moment, and still living with its structures and consequences, I don’t think it’s possible for it not to feel personal. For good or ill—maybe for both at once. Let’s keep going.

[Image: statue of Saint and Dragon in the Orkadian Cathedral of Saint Magnus]

Midway through our Avalon pilgrimage, my Mom and I went far north to the Orkney Islands, an hour’s ferry ride from the northernmost tip of the Scottish mainland. In Kirkwall we visited the Cathedral of Saint Magnus, built out of local pink sandstone in the 1100's. Inside, I came across a statue of a man vanquishing a dragon with a human face.

At first I thought it was Saint George, the ne plus ultra of dragon-slaying saints. But he looked so spare and Nordic--perhaps it was St. Magnus himself. I googled St. Magnus + dragon, and sure enough, there are stories of St. Magnus vanquishing not only a dragon, but--on a different occasion--a large group of snakes. A prolific vanquisher of reptiles! But then I realized the statue wasn’t Magnus either. It was Saint Olaf. So I googled Olaf, and he too had gone toe-to-tail with a dragon—in his case a terrible sea serpent. I started to wonder just how many saint v. dragon (or snake) stories there are out there. It turns out, there are a lot. Theodore, Michael, Margaret, Philip, Keyne, Cado, Paul Aurelian, Romain, Florent, Clement, Martha, Maudet, to name a few…and of course, Patrick and his snakes.

I suppose it is possible that all of these saints came upon actual dragons and/ or hordes of snakes, and smote them, etc. But let me just take Occam’s razor out of its case…it seems rawther more likely to me, dear readers, that the Saint-vanquishes-dragon visual was a very apt metaphor for out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new. A potent reminder that snakes and dragons are the Devil, and so are your old gods, and we know what happens to devils and their worshippers.

Should we automatically side with the saints? Should we have any sympathy for the snakes? 

There were men and women who were Druids in the land of the Once and Future King. Even the Romans said so. They were mystics, healers, bards, knowledge-keepers, and leaders of their people. And then, some few centuries after Saint Patrick’s time, they were gone. The story of Saint Patrick and the snakes may be made up, but the story of the Druids who somehow ceased to be is a true one.

I think it’s the story of two different ways of structuring the world, and how one structure overcame the other. I think it is a story worth telling.

The Lorica of St. Patrick is an old prayer that may have arisen from a tradition more ancient than the man himself. I love this part of it:

I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun
Brilliance of moon
Splendor of fire
Speed of lightning
Swiftness of wind
Depth of sea
Stability of earth
Firmness of rock.

It does sound rather pagan.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, and Happy Snakes’ Day too. May the road rise to meet us all.

Melody Bates

St. Patrick's Day

NEXT POST in Seeking Avalon: GLASTONBURY TOR

AVALON will have its world premiere in August 2019, produced by Opera House Arts and staged in a site specific production at Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies on Deer Isle. All text and photo of St. Olaf © 2019 Melody Bates. Learn more and support her work here.