The Apple of Fate

 

On a cool fall night, I lie down on my bed. As soon as I close my eyes, I see a form of the Great Earth Mother, vast and voluptuous. She rises before me, large as a mountain, and opens a fertile valley. I fly through this like a swallow, and come out in a world suffused by sourceless light.. There is a sense of being in a contained space, protected by translucent walls that are spirals of light. 
   There is a feminine presence. She lets me know she is willing to be a guide for me in this realm. She is very tall and slender, dressed in blue. Her name is of the North. Though the light is everywhere, she moves within a fine mist that makes her features hazy.
    She tells me this is a place of purification, of cleansing “down to the bone marrow.” She speaks to me of soul, and where it travels.“Where your desire goes, there you go in soul flight out of the body, and in the soul’s journey after death.”
    She shows me a ball fired high into the air, sailing up above the clouds. She tells me, “This is the Apple of Fate. When it returns to Earth, your present life will be over.” We agree I do not need to know the exact time or circumstances of its return.

 

Reading and reflecting on this report in my journal, from nearly thirty years ago, I am stirred again by the vision of the Apple of Fate. Now I am considering goddesses known to my Northern ancestors who were especially fond of apples. Idunn is a Nordic goddess who carries apples in a box crafted from ash wood. In the Prose Edda, when the gods start to feel old, they ask her to feed them her apples, which carry the magic of rejuvenation. This is why Idunn's name means Ever Young, or Rejuvenator. The Prose Edda contains the story of Idunn’s abduction and rescue, both the work of Loki) Idunn’s husband Bragi, the skaldic god of poetry, who gave his name to the cup (bragarfull) with which toasts to the mighty Viking dead were raised..
    In a story of the goddess Frigg in the Volsung Saga, an apple from the goddess can produce a new birth as well as fresh juice. When king Renr prays for a child, Frigg's messenger, a crow, drops an apple in his lap, and soon his wife is pregnant. Then there are the Apples of Hel, They are mentioned in an 11th century poem by the skald Thorbrion Brunarson, who saw the apple as food of the dead. 
     I do not find the phrase Apple of Fate in the Icelandic texts, or the excellent works of Hilda Ellis Davidson, the great English scholar of Nordic paganism. But I see that the intriguing Nehelennia is also depicted as carrying a supply of apples. With the breath of her name I feel a wind from the mythic ocean gusting through my study. Nehelennia, whose best-known temples were on the coast of the Netherlands, was a Celtic-Germanic goddess who was a special patron of voyagers, those traveling by sea or across the astral tides, and those making the crossing to the Otherworld and the afterworld. 
    Apple of Fate is a term that could fit the apple in the Garden of Eden, or the apple in the story of Paris' choice between the three goddesses, since in each of those stories a choice involving an apple determined a fate. But those stories don't resonate with me in relation to the blue lady and what she showed me. And anyway, the apple of Eve and the apple of Paris weren't apples as we know them. Apples were unknown west of Kazakhstan until some of the soldiers of Alexander the Great brought them back from his campaigns; even then, these "apples" were only small and tart, like crabapples.
    I wonder where my Apple of Fate is now, flying or falling or bumping along the ground. As the lady in blue suggested, I don't need an exact fix on that, at least, not yet….

Drawing by Robert Moss: Lady of Apples

I made the drawing after a vision in the hypnagogic zone on January 2, 2021. I heard the name "Idunn" quite distinctly. I was wafted into an enchanted apple orchard. I smelled the apple blossom in the golden hair of a lovely young woman who seems sweet and innocent.I let myself drift into a sleep dream in which I drove north, ever north, faster and faster with a young woman who seemed to be both my daughter and my research partner. The wind rushed past us as the beating of great wings. We were excited because we had found the key to a mystery.I drew Idunn by an apple tree with apple blossom in her hair, dressen in apple-green rather than blue and holding her golden apples in a basket rather than an ashwood box because that is the way I saw her this time.  

 

Soul Tree

We can’t lose our way if we go to the root of things, to the roots of a tree. By finding the right tree — a tree you know that also knows you — you can reconnect with the soul of nature. You can find grounding for soul in this world, and a shaman’s ladder to travel between the worlds.

I once moved to a place in the country because of a tree, an old white oak behind the house that had survived the lightning. I knew it for a guardian of the land and a wise ancient. Sitting with that tree, I would have impressions of all the seasons it had lived. When I walked the farm road toward it, I would sometimes feel its silent greeting. Sometimes I watched the moon rise over the hills from up in its branches. The oak became a tree of my dreaming and a portal to the ancestors. Rooted deep in American earth, the oak also joined me to the ways of oak-seers of my bloodlines in the Old World, to the druids “grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed" (as Yeats sang) to the sacred oak at Dodona where the Greeks listened for the voice of a god in the creak and rustle of the branches. After the first snows, when the cold stung my eyes, I saw that the oak still hung on to its leaves, longer than any other shedding trees on that land. Oaks hang on.

Spending good time with a tree that welcomes us is a great way to repair and renew our connection with the soul of nature. Trees have personalities, as individuals and as types, and sometimes we find they have a second personality that was not originally arboreal, a spirit from a different kinship group. In front of the farmhouse that I purchased because of the white oak was a great sugar maple. The patterns of the bark around the place where its broad trunk divided made the vivid likeness of an ancient Native shaman with a storm of gray hair and a long, twisted body. I learned later that there are legends in the Native traditions of Northeast America of shamans who have, in one of their soul bodies taken up residence in trees after physical death.

South of the farmhouse was an elderly apple tree that no longer gave fruit but still put out a few leaves in the spring time, and that let a few branches fall, which I burned in the hearth of the family room. The sweetness of apple, through pine and spruce and hickory, provided a kind of olfactory portal, and I would slip into conscious dreaming of ancestors for whom the apple branch was the passport between the worlds. North of the house was another great old tree, a shagbark hickory, that shed limbs as well as leaves profusely, as the deer sheds its antlers. I would often find antlers in the hickory hollow, dropped by bucks in the great herds of red-tailed deer that made their home in our woods, from which hunters were banned.

What trees call to you on country walks or from memory or dream? Any tree may be your soul tree, and it may also be your sole tree, the One Tree through which the three worlds of the shaman’s cosmos are joined, and which may become your ladder between them.

Text adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "World Tree" by Annick Bougerolle

Follow Your Own Merlin

Merlin has a thousand faces. He is magician, enchanter, poet, trickster, prophet, wise or scheming adviser to kings, the hero or anti-hero of countless dramas and several TV series. In the Four Ancient Books of Wales, his name is Myrddin, but in later texts an L was substituted for the Ds – it is said – because in the ears of the Anglo-Norman nobles who read Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version in the 12th century, the old form sounded too close to the French merde. In Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini (c.1150) “ He was a king and a prophet, to the proud people of the South Welsh he gave laws, and to the chieftains he prophesied the future.” He is Welsh, he is Briton, he is Scots, he is universal.

     Merlin is a dreamer, though in some of the ages in which he was remembered this was no term of praise. In Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, his enemies denounce him as “a wytche and dreme-reder”. In Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Hotspur sneers at Welsh boasts about “the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies” and “such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff.” Merlin’s company is that of the awenyddion, or “inspired ones”, of whom Gerald of Wales wrote that “their gifts are usually conferred upon them in dreams.”

      Merlin is a shaman, perhaps the very model of the Celtic shaman. I was greatly helped, back in 1985, by Nikolai Tolstoy’s book The Quest for Merlin, in which he tracks the shamanic Merlin’s phosphorescent footsteps not only through the literature but through the landscapes of the Scottish Borders, all the way to Hart Fell (“Deer Mountain”) where one of the Merlins ran wild with the deer, conversed with a tame wolf and a little pig, and shamanized by a chalybeate spring where the waters bubbled rust-red. This Dumfriesshire landscape is that of my paternal ancestors. Many  years ago – using Tosltoy as my Baedecker – I walked from the site of a ruinous battle whose expense of blood and kin drove this Merlin temporarily mad to Hart Fell, the mountain of his dreaming

     As the legends and landscapes stream together in my mind, I see the Merlin I know and love as shaman – which is to say, arch-dreamer – in the following essential ways:

- he is born different from others (some say the spawn of an incubus, some of a golden one) yet cares for and helps and counsels those in need

- his calling is renewed by a spiritual emergency (his distress over a terrible battle and then the noise of the world)

- he is at home with the trees (he finds sanctuary inside an ancient apple tree, and feeds on apples and nuts, and shamanizes among oaks and hazels and birches)

- he knows the animals and can take their forms (he rides from his wooded mountain on the back of a stag, surrounded by a herd of deer)

- he knows the gates and paths of the Otherworld and can guide others along them (in one telling, he makes a narrow bridge between this world and an island on the Other Side)

- he sees the future, and can bring accurate knowledge of what is to come that is valued by others (a primary function of true shamans, as far back as we can know or imagine)

- he is master of story, poetry and song, through which bardic arts he can redefine and so remake the world around him

- through his own wounds, he finds the power to heal the wounds of others (he loses his mind, but regains it when his shining double, Taliesin, reminds him of the courses of heaven and earth in poetic speech, and so opens a magical spring – so Merlin can then offer the same waters of healing to another, to help him bring his spirit back into the body).

We are drawn to him by his company, of warring kings and lustful queens and questing knights. Yet Merlin, for me, rises beyond Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot and the company of the Round Table, and even Morgan le Fay, though I dream of them too, and felt close to the knightly band when I stopped in Carlisle en route to the Scottish Borders.

     We dream of Merlin, and it may be he brings dreams to us. My Merlin, lover of woods and deer and poetic speech, is not confined to the  ”glass house” where a lovely female apprentice is said to have confined him after she tricked him out of his master spells.

     My Merlin travels with a magic orchard that goes with him everywhere. If you are very lucky, he may offer you an apple, either silver or gold. When you bite down, you’ll taste not only the sweet juice of the apple, but the heady power of a story – a story that will inspire you and give juice to your life – slipping into you. The dream shaman who gives us the right stories is the Merlin I follow.

Adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: Druid in Raven Cloak by Robert Moss