A Deed Without a Name

Growing up in the 70s and 80s with a curiosity about the supernatural, I was frequently disappointed.  There was, for example, one book I remember in my school library (never quite figured out what it was doing there) which took a scattergun approach to the subject.  A page or two on every aspect of the "occult", very little of which made any sense at all.

It took me many years to realise that what we call the Supernatural is, in fact, the Natural (just as the "paranormal" is actually the "normal").

What I mean by that is this: the world we inhabit is infinitely more interesting - and stranger - than we care to admit.

Do miracles happen?  Yes, all the time.  Just look around you.  Creatures are born, plants grow, wounds heal, every now and then there's a rainbow ... and while science can explain what's going on (most of the time), it still can't get to the fundamentals.  It can tells us how something happens.  It can't really tell us why it happens.

And then there are the things that science just won't go anywhere near.  These are the things which tend to get classed as "Supernatural" (or "paranormal").  But that classification is false.  It implies that the "natural" is what can be measured, dissected, categorised.  Anything else is, by definition, "supernatural" - and, as far as science is concerned, it doesn't exist.

In reality, though, the "Supernatural" is pretty much everything that our official culture wants to pretend doesn't happen.  Over time, we have gone through a situation in which certain forms of supernatural activity were tentatively accepted (by the Church) to one in which nothing of a supernatural nature is tolerated (by science).  This does not mean, however, that the supernatural has gone away.  It can't.  Because it's only natural.

Now, even I was quite taken aback when Moon Books sent me a copy of Lee Morgan's A Deed Without a Name for me to read.  Why?  Because the book ventures into what I would consider one of the most problematic areas of occultism.

The subtitle gives the game away: "Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft".  A Deed Without a Name makes no attempt to portray witchcraft (ancient or modern) as fluffy, in a New Age sort of way.  Rather, it goes straight to the heart of everything we were raised to fear and distrust about witches.

There has long been a debate about the accounts of witchcraft given in the many trials of witches which took place in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods.  To what extent did the inquisitors invent examples of scandalous behaviour and impose their own ideas of witchcraft onto their victims?  Or, if you prefer, were the infamous witchcraft trials of ages past really informed more by Christian prejudice and propaganda than by anything that genuine witches might have done?

Lee Morgan takes the position that the tales told by the inquisitors - and the witches they tortured and killed - might well have been true.  It's a startling angle.  If you've assumed that the witchcraft frenzy which swept through Europe around the time of the Reformation was a kind of wildly deluded displacement activity, a sort of massive outbreak of paranoid delusion and insanity, then it comes as a shock to be told that the witchfinders weren't really making anything up.

But Morgan's argument makes sense, for the simple reason that much of what the medieval witches were accused of falls within the scope of shamanistic practice.

Shamanism is probably the oldest form of religious activity in the world.  Every culture had its shamans.  They were the healers, the seekers, the walkers between worlds.  They interacted with their environment (both in its natural and supernatural forms), usually for the good of their communities.  However, as Lee Morgan makes clear, the spiritual realm is not all sweetness and light: it has its negative, as well as its positive, aspects (indeed, such definitions are wildly subjective - best to think of them as the dark and light sides of the same thing).  There were good witches and bad witches, the benandanti and the malandanti; those who worked for the community against the malevolent forces of the Otherworld and those who served those malevolent forces (both helping to preserve a form of balance, with the latter especially reminding the living community of its debts and responsibilities to the unseen forces and the dead).

Morgan takes us through various aspects of traditional witchcraft and makes a point of preventing the reader from retreating into the modernist "oh those poor women" approach to the witches of yesteryear.  She makes it clear that many of the witches - male and female - who were hanged and burned were not accused of things they had not done.  Rather, it was simply the fact that their (Christian) inquisitors did not understand the workings of traditional shamanism which created a rather skewed picture of what the witches were actually up to.  Did the witches have intercourse with the Devil?  In a sense, yes - because spiritual forces did enter them, passing on their fiery power and exchanging vital energies.  And who has never dreamed of having sexual intercourse with a stranger, a dream lover?  Such things are only natural - but, being beyond the vision and the tolerance of the churchmen, they were deemed supernatural, and therefore worthy of damnation.

Overall, then, Morgan reclaims the traditions of witchcraft from the bloody hands of the Christian inquisitors (and, by extension, from the disinfected hands of the laboratory scientist).  It might be difficult for the reader to confront the possibility that werewolves and vampires, the Revenant and the Leannan Sidhe, might actually exist.  We have adopted a strictly either-or position in recent years: either such entities are real (as certain religious fundamentalists might aver) or they are mere fantasies (as the materialist of today would suppose).  Lee Morgan indicates that neither position is strictly accurate.  The fundamentalists and the materialists bring their own prejudices and delusions to the argument.  But if we go back, to the universal experience of the shaman, we find that such entities are very much out there, demanding recognition and respect.  They are part of our world, and if we refuse to acknowledge and interact with them (or insist on damning them out of hand), then we are the fools.

The book offers much in the way of ritual activity designed to help the novice witch discover who or what their "fetch-beast" is (the animal soul-guide of the shaman), how to communicate with the demon lover, how to conduct an exorcism, how to produce healing.  On a psychological level, many of these exercises make sense - "Donning the Mask", for example, is really just a case of confronting and assimilating the Shadow, as C.G. Jung called it, which is an essential part of the individuation process.  There is, of course, no requirement that every reader attempt necromancy - and arguably every reason to recommend that they don't - but that is beside the point.  What Morgan has done here is to open a window on an ancient world, a window which had seemingly been slammed shut by intolerant propagandists of the past, but one which needs must be open if we are to recognise and acknowledge the role of the supernatural in our lives.

More importantly, perhaps, she has rescued the witch of old from both ideological extremes - that of the Church and that of the scientific materialist.  For ancient societies knew perfectly well that our world was at least as spiritual as it was material, and probably a great deal more of the former than the latter.  Today, we know only how to relate to the material side of existence (and we're not very good at that).  We have been taught to ignore and forget about the spiritual, and if we do allow it into our consciousness at all, it is on the basis that it's all rather lovely in an escapist sort of way.

Morgan reminds us that the Other side isn't entirely lovely, that demons do exist, and that some of us will always be called upon to interact with these unseen forces, some to help and some to harm.  In short, the witches of yesteryear have been misunderstood in two different ways - portrayed as the slaves of Satan by a bigoted Church and dismissed as fantastists or victims by modern commentators.  But they were none of these things.  They were our own homegrown shamans, the inheritors of traditions and practices that go back to the very mists of our earliest history.

They flew, as all shamans do.  They copulated with spirits in human, daimonic and animal form, as shamans often do.  They healed and they blighted, blessed and cursed, as shamans the world over have done.  They were part of the natural equilibrium that we upset about 2,000 years ago and have failed to reinstate ever since.  And they had much to teach us about our world, both in its natural and supernatural guises.

A fascinating book, then.  And a brave addition to the growing corpus of material which looks at our spiritual past in a way that is sensitive and sensible.

They were not witches in pointy hats with warts on their noses.  They were native priests and priestesses, herbalists and exorcists, who knew how to interact with our world in ways that we have forgotten.

And if we are to rescue our precious world from the ravages of science and religion, we must listen to their voices again and prepare to greet the darkness - before it overwhelms us completely.

Lost in Translation

My first paid commission as a writer was to adapt the libretto of a Danish comic opera into English.

It was an odd commission.  For a start, I don't speak Danish.  And I was at drama school at the time.  In fact, I was touring Holland and Belgium, playing in a different venue in a different town every night.  Didn't leave much time.

One thing I did insist on doing was replicating the rhyme scheme of the original Danish.  The other translations I was given hadn't even tried to do that.

Oh, and it was a comic opera.  So a gag or two seemed requisite.

Anyway, that little trip down Memory Boulevard was inspired by one of this week's niggling little problems: interpreting the old British poems which deal with Arthur.  It's not the first time I've grappled with some of these, and I doubt it'll be the last.

The image from China (above) illustrates the problem (I won't show you how a Chinese menu managed to render Crispy Fried Duck into English - suffice it to say that it was an alarming, though very amusing, image).  If you take a word from one language and spin it into another, something weird might happen.  The Book of Heroic Failures mentions the gloriously bizarre English-Portugese phrasebook produced by Pedro Carolino in 1883.  Pedro didn't speak English, so his useful phrases have a peculiar charm of their own. 

An example - his sample dialogue, "For to ride a horse", has as its opening gambit:

"Here is a horse who have bad looks.  Give me another.  I will not that.  He not sall how to march, he is pursy, he is foundered.  Don't you are ashamed to give me a jade as like? he is undshoed, he is with nails up". 

Which would surely mark you out as a tourist.  (And who could forget the wonderful English-language notes accompanying a production of Carmen, which included the dramatic chorus, "Toreador, toreador, oh for the balls of a toreador"?)

Great fun.  But a problem, too.  For even the most earnest of scholars can come a cropper when trying to translate something which belongs to another time and place.

In one of my chapters of The Grail, recently posted on the Moon Books blog, I included a few lines from the marvellous Y Gododdin poem of Aneirin (circa AD 600).  I gave the three lines in archaic Welsh, followed by Skene's 19th century translation of those lines, then a more general 20th century translation, then my own translation.

Before long, an argument had arisen.  I had done it all wrong, apparently, by departing from the text set down by my betters.  On one point, one of my interlocutors was absolutely right - I had wrongly transcribed one of the original Welsh words, which has since led to three days of obsessive research and revision to try and pin down the meaning of one word.

One word.  Three days.  About a dozen variants played with and discarded.  And this word (it's only four letters, by the way - ceni, if you must know) had already been translated in wildly different ways by acknowledged experts.

Well, I've finally come up with what I believe it meant, and that's gone into my manuscript of The Grail (but it's not online - you'll have to wait for the book).  But it was all a wonderful reminder of the great big problems of translation.

Context.  If you don't know the context in which the original words were created, you're not likely to get the meaning right when you convert them into modern English.

Mindset.  Language is not just words, it's a way of looking at, understanding and interpreting the world.  It's a means of expression, and what is expressed is how a person - and a culture - comprehends the world around them.  A different culture means a different way of perceiving and relating to the world.  They way they expressed their thoughts made sense to them: it might make no sense at all if you just alter those words to their nearest English equivalents.

You don't have to go back to Welsh poems from 6th century Britain to encounter these problems.  For the first twenty years of my research into William Shakespeare, I suffered from a major handicap: I didn't really enjoy reading or watching his plays.  No, I'll go further: I found them mind-bendingly obtuse, obscure, verbose and impenetrable.  Not much fun at all.

Reading a Shakespeare play (or going to see one) felt a bit like going to the dentist.  It would no doubt be a horrible experience, but I'd be the better for having submitted to it.

What was wrong wasn't me.  It was what I'd been taught about Shakespeare - or, rather, what I hadn't been taught.  No one had given me the vital key to understanding Shakespeare's writings (the key, by the way, is the Reformation).  Once I found that key, everything changed.  Now I can read a Shakespeare play for pleasure.  I find his work fascinating, lucid, hugely emotional, terrifying, disturbing and - most of all - relevant.  He's remarkably clear, once you get your head round the context (his world) and the mindset (how he saw it).

The poetry of Arthur's age has been persistently misinterpreted because the scholars who come to it know a fair deal about the language it's written in, but very little about the context (and, I often feel, next to nothing about the mindset).  But that's what makes working on these poems so fascinating.  Not only are you solving puzzles, but you're learning all the time about the world these people lived in and they way they saw it.

A "straight" translation tends to come across as gibberish, which is then re-interpreted through some modern idea of what people might have believed back then (for example, an excellent poem which describes Arthur's funeral has often been interpreted, somewhat crassly, as an account of a raid undertaken into the Otherworld to steal stuff).  But whether we're reading Shakespeare or trying to get our heads round what the major poets of Arthur's day were saying, the least we can do is listen to them.  Don't try to force an interpretation onto them (as so many directors do with Shakespeare, and so many critics have done).  Don't say, "This word means that.  It can only mean that.  There is no other possible meaning."  Listen to them.

It might take days.  Or weeks.  Or months.  Or years.  But the rewards can be amazing.  As if another person's world has suddenly opened up to you.  And you can see things as they saw them.

A Lover's Complaint

For reasons we don't need to go into just now, I've taken a few days out from working on the ARTHUR book.  Which just means that I've been revisiting the early parts of my first SHAKESPEARE book.

WALKING SHADOW ("Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot") is a project I've been obsessed with for more than twenty years.  It opens with a scene pretty much just like the one shown here: a sunny afternoon on Christ Church Meadow in Oxford, where Will Shakespeare lay down on the grass and watched as a 'fickle maid full pale', who was weeping and wailing down by the river's edge, was approached by a 'reverend man' who wished to know the 'grounds and motives of her woe'.

The details arre largely provided by one of Shakespeare's lesser known and least regarded poems, A Lover's Complaint.  The poem was published along with the sonnets in 1609 - that is, part of the poem was published, the second half or so apparently uncompleted or forever lost.  Which is a pity, because what the surviving fragment of the poem has to tell us is intriguing indeed.

In short, it brands Will Shakespeare as an adulterer and a traitor.

Now, if you take a look at the poem, you'll wonder what Christ Church Meadow has got to do with anything.  Shakespeare makes no mention of it in the poem.  But he does tell us exactly where the action of the poem took place - where the 'fickle maid' made her confession to the 'reverend man'.

The opening lines of A Lover's Complaint go like this:

From off a hill whose concave womb re-worded
A plaintful story from a sist'ring vale,
My spirits t'attend this double voice accorded,
And down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale ...

The hill with the 'concave womb' stood at the centre of Oxford.  Back in the misty, mythical past, a British king named Lludd was trying to figure out how to put a stop to a devastating plague.  He summoned his wise men, who told him to measure out his kingdom and find the exact centre; there, he was to dig a pit, place a cauldron filled with sweet mead inside it and cover it over with a satin sheet.

Lludd did this.  He measured the land from east to west and north to south and found that the exact centre lay at a crossroads known as Carfax, in what is now the City of Oxford.  He dug his pit there and prepared the cauldron.  Two dragons appeared in the sky - a red one, representing the Britons, and a white one, symbolising the Saxon invaders.  The dragons were wrestling and writhing (this being the cause of the dreadful plague), but when they tired they came down to land in Lludd's pit on Carfax hill.  The dragons drank the mead, fell asleep, and Lludd was able to gather them up in the satin sheet and transport them far away to Wales.

A strangely similar story belonged to the valley of the River Thames, just a mile or two away from Carfax.  King Henry II took a lover named Jane Clifford, although she was better known as the Fair Rosamund or 'Rose of the World'.  The king installed his mistress at his royal palace at Woodstock, north of Oxford, and when the affair came to an end in about 1176, Jane Clifford retired to the nunnery at Godstow, just outside Oxford, where she died and was buried.

A few years later, Hugh Bishop of Lincoln visited Godstow and was appalled to find that the nuns were still honouring the tomb of the 'harlot', Fair Rosamund, with fresh flowers and candles.  The bishop ordered the nuns to exhume her remains and rebury them outside the chapel as an example to lewd and adulterous women.  The nuns did as they were told, but as soon as the bishop had gone they dug up Jane Clifford's "sweet-smelling" bones and carried them back into the chapel in a "silken scented bag".

The heraldic crest of Jane Clifford's family featured two 'wyverns gules' or red dragons.  Like the dragons of Carfax, Jane Clifford's remains had been transported to their burial place in a satin sheet or "silken scented bag".

The opening lines of Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint therefore point to Oxford as the setting for the poem, and in particular Carfax, the hill whose 'concave womb' re-worded the sad tale of Fair Rosamund's  remains from the 'sist'ring vale' of Godstow.

But the poet had moved away from the hill of Carfax to listen to the 'double voice' of a 'sad-tuned tale'.  Just to the south of Carfax stands Christ Church College, the chapel of which is also Oxford's cathedral.  It housed a bell - "the loudest thing in Oxford" - which was known locally as Great Tom.  Previously, though, the bell had belonged to Oseney Abbey, where it was affectionately known as Mary.  At the Reformation, when Oseney Abbey was dissolved, the bell was taken to Christ Church and renamed.  It was double-voiced (the Catholic Mary and the Protestant Tom) and sad-tuned: damaged in transit, its clapper was worn out; it sounded awful.

So Shakespeare had made his way from Carfax down to Christ Church and lay down in the meadow, watching a middle-aged woman (she was actually thirty-six) weeping on the riverbank and tearing up letters and love tokens and throwing them into the river.

Her name was Jane Davenant and, at the time, she was two months pregnant with Shakespeare's child.

And pretty soon, I'll reveal the identity of the 'reverend man' who came and sat down beside her to hear her confession.