Manda Scott’s Boudica novels –
from Dreaming the Bull through Dreaming the Serpent Spear – are a
magnificent act of historical imagination. We are plunged into the battles of
Britain in the time of the Roman occupation, into a maelstrom of deception and
divided loyalties, in which the heroism and sacrifice of a warrior queen shines
with a clean bright flame. The characters are indelible – the Boudica,
horsewoman, visionary, resistance leader - her tormented half-brother, her
lover who dreams with the wren, and their fierce but honorable Roman adversary,
whose soul is branded and bound by the cult of Mithras.
Manda takes
us deep into ancestral realms. The Boudica novels are a gift to dreamers
everywhere because they show us a way of dreaming – and healing and seeing –
that may have been shared by all our ancestors, a way we urgently need
to revive to restore our connection to soul and to re-vision our world. Manda
helps awaken us to the possibility that dreaming has been a secret engine of
history, far beyond what the history books have taught us. The dreamers in
the Boudica novels are druids and shamans. They are scouts and trackers for the
warriors. They mediate between the living and the ancestors. They fly with the
birds, and run with the hound or the deer. They enter each other’s psychic
space, and travel at will into other times and other dimensions. They speak to
us, across time.
I talked to Manda Scott in December 2006 about her vision
of the ancient British dreaming.
Your Boudica novels beautifully
evoke an early society in Britain in which dreamers were of central importance
- as military scouts and mediators with the ancestors, and as the conscience of
the leaders. What are your sources?
Our ancestors wrote in Greek
but chose not to keep written records of their work, thus we have nothing
from their point of view. In literary terms, then, I started
with the Roman writers and lawmakers.
We have to be
careful in that they are writing through the lens of their own experience and
for an audience which they wish to manipulate, but it is possible to begin to
read between the lines and in some cases, I assumed they were speaking without
undue spin when, for instance, in de Bello Gallico Caesar
described the 'druids' as the lawgivers and lawmakers and said that the druids
of Gaul sent their apprentices to Britain for up to twenty years'
training.
Caesar
furthermore said that the druids were above and beyond tribal boundaries and
that their word was law. He described a society in which the 'men live forever
in the eyes of their gods' and that the principal point of their doctrine
was that the soul does not die, but after death passes from one body
to another. He states that the druids were not a hereditary
order (possibly in contrast to the “nobles” who were the other “rank” in
society, although this may be purely a Roman perspective)
Later, Tiberius
passed a law in which it was a capital offence for any to practice
'soothsaying' which was clearly intended to wipe out the druids.
We can infer
further the power of the druids from Rome's actions: In almost all cases,
Roman practice was to enfold the religions of a conquered people into their own
relatively peacefully. This was often a two-way street - the Egyptian cult
of Isis became huge in Rome in the early centuries AD. Mithras was a
Persian god before he was ever Roman, the entire Greek pantheon was renamed and
subsumed. Only when the priestly class were involved in insurrection did they
try to wipe out a religions/spiritual force and this only happened twice: with
the Jews of Jerusalem and the Druids of the (later) Celtic lands of
western Europe. From this and other writing, we can infer that the
druids were instrumental in overcoming tribal friction to unite the
tribes not only within the different nations, but between them in the war
against Rome.
Apart from
writing, we have archaeological evidence. this is always prone to subjective
interpretation, but it is nonetheless interesting: An examination of the
midden remains of the Eceni in east Anglia showed that they used hides and
feathers extensively for decoration, that black feathers and white were
particularly popular but nowhere in all the middens were found the feathers of
a magpie - a carrion bird (black, of death, perhaps of Briga) with white on it
- the colors of swans and geese, the birds who fly high to the sky gods and can
then live underwater. Neither were there ever otter skins although beaver
abounded in those times - so these two, magpies and otters, were so taboo or so
sacred they were never used.
So I can begin to
build a picture of a shamanic society in which the people live forever in the
eyes of their gods. They live communally in round-houses and have a possibly
hereditary nobility but a non- hereditary (presumably skill-based) priestly
class.
I abandoned
the name “druid” because it is too laden with projection - and created
the dreamers and the singers.
It's
important to remember that the tribes were not the militaristic society they
have been painted: they were agrarian, with massive amounts of man/.woman
power needed for their cereal based diet and they were tremendous craftworkers
in iron and precious metals - they had a love of beauty and a level of skill that
was unmatched in the ancient world for at least another millennium.
These two are not going to happen if all the able-bodied men and women are busy
fighting their neighbours. A warrior-based society is not necessarily always at
war.
I read a
great deal of the Irish “Celtic” laws of the 4th and 5th centuries.
Rome never conquered Ireland and although there is some Christian spin, the
Irish laws are astonishingly egalitarian and quite at odds with the rest of
emerging “Roman” Christianity. In particular, women were able to hold
property and to request a divorce, something that we have
only recently won back. I also read the old Irish and Welsh sagas,
particularly for evidence of women as warriors. When CuChullain
wanted to learn truly to fight, he went to a warrior school taught by women.
This does not seem to have been thought of as unusual.
Finally,in the
context of the wider culture, for years I indulged in battle re-enactments
where I fought as a Dark Age spear/sword-bearer. I discovered that a) one
does not need to be a man to fight and b) what one does need is supreme self-
belief - and the skill to back it up.
Did your own dreams and visions
contribute to your understanding of
Boudica's people?
Yes, massively, continually and
through every sentence of the writing.
Will you identify and explain
some of the specific shamanic dreaming practices you describe in the novels?
There are “night” dreams, in
which a sleeping dreamer is sent specific information, regarding (For instance)
a flood which will wipe out the steading if they don't move). There are waking
dreams in which the gods visit specifically to give information - Valerius has
those regularly, even when he is fighting for Rome. There are visions sent to
non-dreamers, particularly to the Boudica in order to bring her closer to her
destiny. These often happen in or around grave mounds or passage tombs
left over from neolithic and megalithic times.
Do you personally practice any
of these techniques?
All of them. My intent
with the first book was that every part of the dreaming, from Breaca's “vision
quest” through to the end where Macha and the dreamers call down the mist
to confound the legions, was something I had either done personally, or
had seen done - mostly the former. By the second book where Breaca helps
Airmid cause the
death of a Roman governor and
where the bear-cult begins to arise, we are stepping beyond things I have done
or seen done, into the realms of what I believe may be possible, but
wouldn't choose to do. I also highlight, where I can, those
practices I believe to be dangerous. In addition, because I am a teacher, I
have made an effort to be sure that the books can be used as a learning
by those who follow, if they so choose.
How did you learn them?
I learned mostly from men and
women in this country who learned them from Native American teachers and
later branched out to learn from others who have tried to explore Britain's past. The problem we
have is that there is no direct lineage - the druids really were wiped
out and we have no true lineage. Thus, to reach again the gods of
this land, we have to listen and learn from those who have never
stepped away from their own true connections. I learned basic
journeying to a drum and progressed from there. The writing of the books
themselves grew out of a vision quest and my dreaming moved in unimaginable
ways during the six years of writing.
The books
arose when I was at the end of my crime thriller, No Good Deed.
I was contracted to write a sequel and was out with my (then) two
lurchers walking, thinking about the new book. They put up a
lactating hare and, eventually, caught and killed her. I was devastated.
Hares are sacred and she had young, which meant if I couldn't find them, they
would die. I couldn't find them, though I did spend a long time
looking. I sat down and decided that if something had to die to
show me that I was walking along with my brain in neutral going in the wrong
direction (which I was - I could have stopped the dogs if I'd noticed
what they were doing) then I had better pay attention.
I went out into
the woods alone with the specific question, “What do you want of me?” The
answer very clearly was to write Boudica - I had made a commitment to
write about her in a ceremony some years before, but had added the coda,
“when I'm a good enough writer” - which of course was always going to be
at least a decade away.
But
no, they wanted it NOW. I argued that I wasn't a historian,
an archaeologist, an anthropologist and I knew nothing about
the subject. I also had no money and had been paid to write a
different book. It wasn't negotiable. I agreed that I would spend a month
doing the research and if I still didn't think I could do it, I'd be back.
By the end of the month, I had a 23
page synopsis and the beginnings
of the first book. I also had a
new editor, and a new publisher, and enough money to continue with something
that required quite astonishing amounts of research.
Your love of animals, and your
deep affinity for them, shines through all of your writing. Do animals dream?
Do your dream with the animals who share you life, and those you have
helped?
Animals definitely dream - my
lurcher (a hunting dog which is a cross
between a greyhound and a
collie) always dreams more of hunting when she has recently put up a hare
- her feet paddle, she yelps exactly as she does when running and
she breathes in a running rhythm. My cats used to display REM and
I'm as sure as I can be there were dreaming. Inca (my lurcher) dreams
with me regularly and if I'm in trouble in a dream and am unable to wake up,
she will stand over me and put her nose on my brow until I
wake.
In
general, I think that if we live with animals as genuine members of the family,
accepting them as equals, not repositories of our projections or our
insecurities, they will dream with us. One of my most profound spiritual
experiences was when I was out with my two lurchers and a pair of working
cocker spaniel bitches, both of whom had given birth five weeks
previously. We were casting through bracken, not thinking very much and
suddenly I was aware that I was one part of a five-parted being in which I knew
where each other part was (though I could see none of them) they knew
where I was and we all worked as a unit. It was quite astonishingly
profound. I realized then that my dogs live in this state all the time
and that I could do so too if I stepped away from my 'head-mind' into my
'heart-mind'
Your ancient dreamers are
closely identified with animal guardians. Tell us about the animal guardians,
and their role in shamanic dreaming. Will you share something of your personal
experiences in this area?
The animal guardians mirror my own experience in that animals have
always
formed a more significant part of my emotional life than
(most) people and this extends tothe dreamworld where they can and do represent
and lead to aspects of reality that I
might otherwise be unable to access. In the books, I
have extended it and embraced slightly the concept of animal “totems” where a
man or a woman, on coming to puberty may (but not necessarily) find an animal
or a bird to which they form a unique bond during their “long nights'”
- their dreaming time at which they cross from childhood into
adulthood. This animal is either a specific one - as in Hail the Hound
with whom Valerius dreams, or they are generic, as in Airmid and her
frog-dreaming.
My own
experience is that I bond with specific animals, but also that many of us,
including me, bond more solidly with other things - elements (fire, water,
storm, earth) or ancestors. The animal dreaming grew out of the
story, but I think it's important that people realize they may not make an
animal connection and if they do, it may take many years to work
through their projections before they make one that is genuine.
Tell us about the relationship
between the living and the dead, as it is lived by your characters.
The boundary between the living
and the dead is as thick - or as thin - as we choose to make it.
Because my characters live in a society where the elderly and the ancestors are
held in high regard, and where the soul does not die at death, then they live
in the constant awareness of their ancestors, particularly those with whom they
have been close in life. These act as guardians and guides.
They also, for a short time, see the dead as they leave the lands of the
living and walk towards the lands of the dead.
In the start of the third book, Dreaming
the Hound, Breaca speaks for a while with the spirit of a Roman
standard bearer whose throat she has just cut. The Romans choose not to
listen to their dead (as we often do) and so are the weaker for it. Moreover,
they are the invaders in a land where their gods do not tread, so their spirits
have a longer journey when they die than do ours, who cross the river immediately
to the lands of the dead. Thus also, when it comes to personal
sacrifice, Dubornos can offer himself as a living/dying mediator between the
tribes and the gods in the time of greatest need and his offer is
perceived as entirely noble - and worthwhile - not a waste of a
life, or a loss to him.
Manda Scott is a veterinary surgeon,
writer and climber, not necessarily in that order. She was a horse vet in
Newmarket, home of English thoroughbred racing, when she first began to write
the Boudica: Dreaming series. She now lives in Caradoc's land in the
west, in the threshold place between England and Wales, a few miles south of
Caer Caradoc. She has been actively working with dreaming since she was a
student in Glasgow. Visit her website here.
© Robert Moss and Manda Scott.
All Rights Reserved.
