Celtic Shapeshifting

In the dream, I walk through a house, speaking with fervor about my plans for a new class on Celtic shapeshifting. I walk briskly between rooms, waving my arms like a swan on the water. Standing in the kitchen, I declaim the first lines of the Robert Graves version of the Song of Amergin

I am a stag: of seven tines,

I am a flood: across a plain,

I am a wind: on a deep lake,

I am a tear: the Sun lets fall. [1]

I repeat the phrase, "Celtic shapeshifting". I say it again as I leave the dream. The Song of Amergin claims affinity with all animate life, with the swan and the stars, with a tear the sun lets fall. I also feel breeze from the tale of Tuan mac Cairill, who survived the Flood as a mighty salmon, and became a hawk and many other creatures after. [2] How can I not recall his kinsman Fintan mac Bochra, who changed form when he changed his moods?

In his prose poem "Stone Boat", the poet John Moriarty gives us this grand Irish shifter of moods and forms. Once he has been paid with a story - in the Celtic way, you never come in to the good stuff without a story. sung more than spoken - Fintan reveals, "At Connla's otherworld well it was that I first realized that being human is a habit. It can be broken. Like the habit of going down to the river by this path rather than that, I broke it. And so it is that, although I always know who I am, I can never be sure that what I am going to sleep at night is what I will be when I wake up in the morning. In me the mutabilities of sleep survive into waking. What I'm saying is, my shape depends on my mood."

Then Fintan gives a lively poke: "You only need to break the habit once, the habit of being human I mean, and then you will be as you were between death and rebirth. Between death and rebirth our bodies are mind-bodies, and that means they are alterable. Alterable at will. We only have to will it and it happens, we flow from being a swan in Lough Owel into being a hind on Slieve Bloom into being a hare on Beara." [3]

Through the texts, we hear ancient bardic voices celebrating and affirming our connection with all living things in an animate, conscious world, and the shaman's ability to recruit allies in many realms and borrow their forms and their powers.

In his book Becoming Animal, David Abram tells us that "traditional tribal magicians or medicine persons seek to augment the limitations of their specifically human senses by binding their attention to the ways of another animal... The more studiously an apprentice magician watches the other creature from a stance of humility, learning to mimic its cries and to dance its various movements, the more thoroughly his nervous system is joined to another set of senses...Like anything focused upon so intently, the animal ally will begin visiting the novice shaman’s dreams, imparting understandings wholly inaccessible to her waking mind."[4]

Sometimes, of course, the forms are unwelcome, the result of a curse or of karma.

I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form. [5]

Now I am away with Aengus, following fire in the head into an enchanted apple orchard to catch a silver trout that becomes a lovely girl with apple blossom in her hair.....[6]

References

1. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1986) p.13 2. Kuno Meyer “Tuan mac Cairill’s Story to Finnen of Moville”, appendix to The Voyage of Bran to the Land of the Living. (London: David Nut 1897), pp. 285–301
3.John Moriarty, "Stone Boat" in Dreamtime (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2020) p. 21

4. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010) pp. 217-8

5. Cad Goddeu, "The Battle of the Trees". Graves version, White Goddess p. 30.
6. W.B. Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus" in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1958) pp.66-7.

Illustrations: RM+AI

Azurite Call

My favorite dead poet showed me around a magic cottage he said was on the fourth level of the astral plane. He let me handle an azurite crystal and recommended that I should use one for scrying in the spirit vision as he and his Mystery associates did. Back in the ordinary world, I could not find an azurite crystal that matched his, though I can create one in meditation and use it as a spyglass, a laser pointer, or a transporter. I was inspired to return to the primal art of divination by rock reading and to embark on new expeditions to worlds we can find inside a stone. Here is a little more of the story, playing across many years.

Twenty years ago, in the Library of the House of Time, a place in the Real World beyond consensual hallucination, a dead poet called me to climb a steep spiral staircase I had not noticed before. When I reached the top, he transported both of us to a different locale: a pleasant country cottage. Flower beds bordered the path. From the window of his study, I could look out over changing landscapes, including the Byzantium and Renaissance Italy of his poems. He showed me secret journals and held up a marvelous deep blue crystal.
   “The azurite crystal,” he specified. He urged me to use it to open the third eye fully and see what I most needed to see. I had the impression that the crystal is not only a spyglass but a transporter. It can carry the user – if he is prepared and ready – as far as the Blue Star.
    Yeats explained that his magic cottage is on the fourth level of the astral plane. That did not sound high enough, in terms of the Theosophers' atlases of astral and causal planes. But it is the poet's place and I must assume that he knows his own address.
    After this encounter, I wanted an azurite spyglass. A gemmologist friend doused some of my blue fire by telling me that it is almost impossibe to find an azurite crystal as large as the one in Yeats's fist. I settled for a chunk of azurite stone, the size of a shooter marble but rough. The stone was held precious by both Egypt and Ireland; the Egyptians crushed it to make the blue pigment with which they colored the skin of gods and kings; the scribes who made the Book of Kells used powdered azurite to paint capital letters. This is the blue of deities and of royalty.
    If I unfocus my eyes and look at it close up, my blue stone becomes a mountain range, with a glacier or cool river of lighter blue falling down its slopes and a great open-mouthed fish in its waters. There is something of the lemniscate, the infinity sign, in the general shape. As I let my imagination loose as a leopard in this world, I see intricate knotty designs, pictographs, giant faces. A great beast with open jaws, a low brow, a great sloping muzzle. It could be a bear, or a boar, but when I see it in profile, it looks most like a lion
    I am shocked to find a face within the face. This is definitely human, and it is the face of a king. Strong and stern face, long-nosed, piercing dark eyes, slightly slanting, a short beard. Above his head, crenellations that suggest a crown. Is he the master of the Beast, or does the Beast have his head?
    I turn the stone and it shows me a second face, that might be at home on Easter Island. Another turn reveals a bird-woman, with heron legs and a beak.
    I contemplate the Beast who holds the head of a king as Yama holds the Wheel of Life on the walls of Buddhist temples. My mind turns, like the wheel, to another life and another journey.
    Before Yeats called to me from the turning stair, I made an expedition to a site in the Real World we call the Cave of the Ancestors. I found the opening I needed behind the hard spray of a waterfall. I searched rock paintings for messages. I was called by the glow of light from a standing stone to brave a mess of black adders. The stone became translucent, showing me the figure of a man who was desperate for help. Bearded and crowned, torn and bleeding, he was ready to destroy himself if his appeal to another time and another world went unheard. Something gave me the courage to drop my body and track him through the electric blue light inside the stone into his broken kingdom, to do battle with a dark power.
    Now I am holding another world between my thumb and forefinger. There are endless worlds, as Vasistha taught Rama. Any number may be found inside a stone. 

Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss