Land and the Imaginal: a conversation with Lorna Smithers
What follows is a conversation between Lorna Smithers and Rhyd Wildermuth. Lorna Smithers is an awenydd, a poet, a writer, the author of several books, and has been a part of Gods&Radicals Press from the very beginning. She lives in Lancashire, England. Rhyd Wildermuth is also an awenydd, a druid, writer, and the director of Gods&Radicals Press. He lives in the Ardennes.
Lorna and Rhyd discuss each other’s writing, their relationship to the gods and land, and especially the effects of industrialised society and Empire upon our ability to experience and communicate with each other and the world around us.
RHYD Wildermuth:
Hey Lorna,
I wanted to thank you first of all for agreeing to have this conversation with me.
About 6 years I was sitting on a bus on my way home from work and was reading your first collection of poetic works, Enchanting the Shadowlands, and I had a really bizarre experience that still haunts me and also opened up this weird path I’m still following.
What happened—and I think I have mentioned this to you before—was that I was reading one of your poems, Potato Field I think, and looked up and didn’t know where I was. Until that moment I hadn’t really been on that bus, but elsewhere, standing with a woman who had miscarried a child, staring with her at a misshapen potato in a field, mourning with her.
What was particularly unsettling about that experience was that I could not convince myself afterward that I had only been reading a poem on a bus in Seattle. That is, something had happened in my cognition where my mind remembered being with her in a different land while remembering also being on a bus simultaneously.
Now, I’ve had weird experiences reading very good fiction or watching really complex films, or listening to really adept storytellers speak. But this was quantitatively different, and I began to recognise this not just as an interaction between myself and poetry but a moment of bardic magic.
And so after this I began to explore my own experiences further to see if I could create moments for myself where I was somewhere else. I began with trying to be in places I had been before, that I knew well. And then I tried returning to places I had only seen once but had experienced a kind of otherworldly connection to the place.
All of that worked, but it’s a magic I don’t quite understand, and seems tied to a certain way of relating to the land which comes out massively in your poetry and also the essays you write. Have you experienced this? Or what is your sense of what kind of magic—if that is even the right word—comes from relating so deeply to land?
LORNA Smithers:
Hello Rhyd, thank you for opening this conversation, and for posing such a deep question. I’ve been pondering it over the last couple of days as I’ve been walking the land, and I have found it helpful to have the concrete example of my poem, Potato Field, to approach forming an answer through.
At the time I wrote Potato Field I was exploring the history of Penwortham Workhouse, on Middleforth Green, which is about a five minute walk from my home. I’ve found particular times to be deeply imprinted in the land. Here, in Lancashire, ‘the birthplace of the industrial revolution’ (it was here Richard Arkwright invented the spinning frame, which created a noise like the Devil’s Bagpipes) the memories of industrialisation and its effects on the people lie heavy. So many were torn from their homes in the countryside and forced to work in the mills. Those unable to work and support themselves ended up in workhouses.
When working with a place I visit a lot, I carry out research, then spend time in meditation, journeying there in spirit, and doing lots of free writing. I don’t know whether this is the same for you, but I often start off imagining myself somewhere (one of my favourite phrases for bardic work is Charlotte Hussey’s ‘imagine if you can’t remember’); then, if it works, I reach a point of crossing from the imaginary to the imaginal, when it is no longer me working the magic but the place.
The process of writing Potato Field is the perfect example of how the awen can lead you along a convoluted path to experiences of such magic. I had spent a long time researching and writing around Penwortham Workhouse without success. Then Preston Poet’s Society put out a competition on the theme of ‘field.’ I found out occupants of the workhouse were often put to work in a nearby potato field. I started writing then, suddenly, like you, I was transported, called to bear witness to the woman who had miscarried digging up a potato, ‘looking it in the eye, / giving it a face’. The poem won the competition.
I think at the core of bardic magic lies what storyteller Martin Shaw calls ‘getting claimed.’ That claiming being an absolute imperative to give voice to a story or poem, whether it is about a patch of land, a person living or dead, or a god.
In these times of global pandemic and climate crisis, when we can’t change the past and our influence on the future looks increasingly limited, simply bearing witness, voicing visions and experiences without knowing the effect, has become central too.
The scenes from your work that have haunted me the most are your conversation with the dead bard in the “City at the Gates of the Dead” and your vision of Brân, black-cloaked, his cloak torn from him by ravens, ‘leaving only great white pillars of bone, the foundation of a temple and a tower.’ I’ve felt like I’ve stood alongside you, called also to bear witness to these events, imprinted even deeper within the land, in Annwn, ‘the Deep’, the Otherworld.
Your experiences of land and deity, unlike mine, having lived in Penwortham most of my life, come from leading a nomadic existence. In your books and on your blog you speak of your childhood in Appalachia, living in Seattle, visiting the Welsh mountains, Breton valleys, residing in France and now Luxembourg. I’d love to hear how your gods and bardic calling have influenced your life and travels.
RHYD:
Oh, I love that you brought up the way certain times and events get “imprinted” on the land. That’s been my experience too, and I think is what made relating to land in North America so different to relating to land here in Europe.
In North America, of course, there are all the recent bloody events, especially around colonization, and that stuff lingers in the trees and streams really heavily. In Europe I noticed immediately that the feeling was different, that there were other imprints from different times, whereas from the United States the imprints are all roughly from the same time.
I noticed, for example, that in Dublin there were what felt like two imprints, one recent (the English occupation and especially the revolution) and one from near the beginning of its existence, when it was a Viking city. Where I stayed for several months was a close neighborhood that felt almost prison-like. It was situated between a well-attested grove sacred to Thor that was destroyed during the early Christianization of the island, and one of the many mass graves (Croppy Acres) where the English dumped the bodies of rebels. Both of those times were imprinted heavily on the land and it was awfully difficult to navigate.
France, especially Bretagne, was a lot softer, though of course the Nazi occupation lingered a bit. Being so wild and sparely settled though, there were many places where I’d go hiking and be very certain I was about to turn a corner in a path and arrive 3000 years before. And also (and I’ve written about this), time got really weird the closer you got to the coast and especially near the many standing stones.
Which I guess brings me to the matter of that vision. Oof. I imagine you have had the same thing happen where something so strange happens and then you think you have settled on “what it meant” until a year later you realise it was something else, and then something else again, and again. I still don’t understand that vision. It stands as this perpetual mystery that keeps leading me on new paths which double back. Not quite like a labyrinth except in that meditative way.
And I think I have stopped trying to make sense of some of those visions and just letting them exist. For a long time I tried to find ways to write them out such that they made sense to the people reading them and also to me, but now I realise that’s maybe even not really the bard’s role in society. It’s the priest or shaman’s role to make sense of visions for people, but it’s the bard’s role to remind people that visions exist, that the imaginary isn’t the opposite of reality but rather an entire realm of human experience.
You mentioned reaching the “point of crossing from the imaginary and the imaginal,” and two things immediately come to mind here. One, I think that’s what we’re supposed to do, not just to cross over but also be that crossing point (and you’re probably laughing because you know the English translation of my name) for others. That is, our role is to remind people that imaginary and the imaginal are just two different banks of a river, and there are certain places where the river is shallow enough that, if we abandon our fear of drowning, we can cross rather easily.
The other thing I think of in that phrase is the deep tragedy of how the imaginal is valued so little, and how it feels like the parts of us that interact with the imaginal are atrophying. And I really think that this is the psychic or soul cost of capitalism, or industrialism, or modernity, or however we want to name it. The cost of all this ‘progress’ or whatever is our soul and our ability to hear the land.
And I think you bring this out a lot in your works, especially this sense of loss. Which is a repeating historical loss it seems—industrialisation in Lancashire, but also earlier losses, the coming of Christianity, the Roman occupation, and also the mythic losses represented in the Arthurian legends. Can you talk about this? About what we’ve lost, and maybe what kind of parallels you see in that upheaval that Arthur seems to represent from older, more primal or earth-based spirituality?
LORNA:
Thank you for sharing a little about some of the memories you have found imprinted within the land and your thoughts around ‘that vision.’ I can certainly relate to particular visions being perpetual mysteries with a labyrinthine quality. For me, the cauldron of Pen Annwn, filled with stars, is always at the centre and keeps appearing again and again with shifting meanings. Like the meaning of constellations, the meaning of all visions and all stories shifts. This is part of the becoming of the universe, which is reflected in the cauldron.
I thought, as a fellow awenydd, you might relate to my words about the crossing from the imaginary to the imaginal. Thank you for bringing out the point about being the crossing, being the bridge, a role Brân himself literally plays in The Second Branch of The Mabinogion, and you figuratively fulfil in your own writing and in your setting up and managing of Gods & Radicals.
I see the ‘Another World’ journal to be a manifestation of that role along with the creation of the new ‘Ritona’ imprint, which will focus on mysticism and poetry. In relation to this could you tell me a little about your relationship with Ritona, a Gaulish goddess of fords and crossings, and the inspiration behind the imprint?
Moving on, I share your sense of soul loss in our losing of our relationship with the imaginal realm. I believe this is rooted in the destruction of our relationship with the land, gods, and ancestors, and of our animistic ways of being in the world.
Here, in Britain, it can be traced back to the Roman conquest and, in particular, to Christianity becoming the dominant religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine. Even when the Empire broke down the Brythonic rulers of the emergent kingdoms such as Rheged and Elmet (which may have been based on older tribal territories) retained the Roman trappings and Christian religion. Their internecine rivalry and conflict with the Anglo-Saxons paved the way for Arthur uniting Britain under, in William Blake’s words, ‘One King, One God, One Law.’
Pre-Christian sacred sites were destroyed or converted to Christian ones. The Brythonic deities, shut out, euhemerised, became remembered only as literary figures. Many were demonised. The prime example is my patron god, Gwyn ap Nudd, a ruler of Annwn. He and his spirits were equated with devils. In ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’, a medieval Welsh tale woven from older folkloric motifs, Gwyn and the giants, witches, and ancient animals of Britain were subjugated by Arthur to display the hegemony of the Christian King over the pre-Christian world. In ‘The Spoils of Annwn’ Arthur stole the cauldron of Pen Annwn (Gwyn) and slammed ‘Hell’s Gate’ (ie. the Gate of Annwn) shut. Symbolically, for me, this represents the closing of the doors to our deepest imaginal places and the replacement of the Brythonic mysteries, bound up with the cauldron, by the Christian grail.
Arthur’s raid on the Otherworld prefigured the raids on other lands by Christians during the crusades and the colonialism of the British Empire. Its rise, driven by the engines of industrialisation and capitalism, with the false deity, Britannia, made in its image, at its head, was predicated upon the loss of our relationship with the gods and spirits of the land and the Otherworld; of awe and reverence and respect and our ability to perceive and interact with the Other.
Much of your work and the work of Gods & Radicals focuses on critiquing Empire, its fall, and what we might build in its place. Can you say more about this, in particular in relation to recent developments with the global pandemic and the climate crisis and their impact on our ways being now and in the future?
RHYD:
Yeah, Empire, right? I think this point was the most poignant for me in reading both The Broken Cauldron and Gatherer of Souls, both of which have really informed my understanding of what Empire really is and what is wrought upon the world when it comes.
One thing I’ve always been a bit obsessed about is that Capitalism itself, by which I mean the system of private property relations and the industrialisation of work, arose from English soil like a strange cancer or foul spirit. From the Enclosures and those early factories—including Arkwright’s, himself born there in Preston—the entire world changed.
In my more esoteric musings I start to wonder—why there? Gods are also born from the land but do not stay there: for instance, Oshun, a goddess of a river in Africa worshiped now along other rivers and by the sea. Not that capitalism is a god, of course, but if you watch the rituals of bankers and stock brokers one could be forgiven for suspecting otherwise. And I have my own theory about what actually happened there to cause this, but it feels a bit profane to talk about it.
Regardless, some new cult, a new religion, sprung from the land where feral gods and giants with cauldrons lived and then were shut out, their beards shorn by Arthur, their heads lopped off or dug up so that, as in your citation of William Blake, there would be Only One.
“Only One” is really the definition of Empire—especially the Empire of Capital—isn’t it? Everything becomes a variation of a singular theme, the same corporate shops inhabiting every city centre across the world, while all difference, all distinction, and all resistance gets sucked into a singular void. Each land begins to look the same no matter where you go, the same sorts of autoroutes and housing blocks and commercial centres, not to mention the same mono-cropped agriculture and the same mechanistic worldview.
And this is all getting worse now that we are compelled to live our social lives online for fear of a disease made worse by the way we live. Same-day international travel, vast networks of distribution shifting food and manufactured goods across the world, and now people are dying at alarming rates with no other option but to stay home, self-isolate, and stare at screens.
This is all Empire, people without gods, alienated from their bodies and the bodies of land and forest and stream. It’s maddening, and also unsustainable. Something will happen, or many somethings, unfortunately quite destructive and deadly, that will transform all this. How it all gets tossed into the cauldron and what is reborn therefrom is unknowable, I guess. But this is all too ridiculous to last much longer.
You asked about Ritona, and I need to admit I don’t really know how to answer that. When I first came here I started following streams, finding myself particularly fascinated by the story of Melusine, the river spirit by whose power all the wealth of this land is said to have been made. Like so many other Christian stories of monstrous beings—the Tarrasque in Provence, Graoully in Metz, Dahut in Bretagne—the stories of Melusine seemed to hint at an older goddess, one of rivers. Chasing those myths I happened upon a reference to a goddess of the Treverii (the Gallo-Celts who lived here) named Ritona, and then laughed when I saw the root of her name.
So I suspect Ritona is Melusine, or Melusine is an aspect of her. All the rivers here run into the Rhine, so each stream is a Rhine-daughter, with its own nymphs (in german Meerweib—sea woman or mermaid). So along these branching streams there is another famous story about the Lorelei, a place where ships were constantly drowned by a spirit (another maiden, or possibly dwarves), and of course a Christian saint came to the rescue to subdue the spirits there.
Ritona’s name means river crossing, or ford, and the Rit- part of her name is the same as the Welsh word for ford, which is also my name. I got that name, Rhyd, in a very strange dream involving Arianrhod (who is also associated with sea women) two decades ago. Chasing streams here and the myths about them brought me to suddenly discover the goddess associated with them, and it’s really hard to look away from the coincidence of the names.
Of course I don’t know what it all means, which is how this always works. And it’s led me not just to a connection to the gods of this place but to the people who once lived here, one that keeps growing. It feels a lot like seeing ghosts sometimes, hearing echoes of what once was in certain places.
All this ancient stuff is still here, just under the surface, veiled by all the commerce and industry of Capital and Empire. And this gets kind of maddening sometimes, which leads me to my last question for you. Because I’m sure you experience this same thing, the feeling of two worlds existing simultaneously, one breathing and living and the other one vapid, mundane, and always ignoring the other.
How do negotiate those two worlds? And what kind of possibilities do you see for opening up that older and still-living world for people so entrapped by this newer one?
LORNA:
Your first question is a challenge posed me to every day for, when I made my lifelong vows to Gwyn ap Nudd, the third was to ‘reweave the ways between the worlds.’
For me this seems to take the form of a lot of inward and outward spiralling. To connect with the land and its spirits and the deeper reality beneath, where history fades into myth into absolute otherness (these being ‘layers’ of Annwn in my understanding) takes a certain amount of disconnection from the everyday world and the rules that govern both our lives and our perception. Spending time ‘alone’ and taking time to listen to what the other has to say. Meditating, journeying, conversing with the gods, free writing, drawing.
This, in itself, is a journey, and that inward or downward spiral can be a descent down a labyrinthine path to a centre that doesn’t hold – the glass fortress of a bull-horned god that distorts and fragments and a shattered cauldron. Hardest, perhaps, is the return, the coming back, the upward or outward spiral. Responding to the prerogative to translate one’s experiences into something shareable, into poetry, the only language which can express the numinous.
If I was solely a mystic I might simply sit with such encounters, whereas the task of the awenydd is reweaving them into the fabric of this world. To make the intangible tangible, the ineffable effable. Looking back, I think I was lucky when I started out, when I was gifted with the visions at the core of my first three books.
Since I finished Gatherer of Souls and made my lifelong dedication to Gwyn two years ago things have been harder. It’s not that I haven’t had inspiration, but I’ve been unable to understand or translate it. Then I’ve had the myths spilling into my personal and family life in darker ways that I have not been able to interpret.
Then, of course, there’s the pandemic. Whilst there have been positives, like the realisation we don’t all need to go out in cars every morning and cause a crazy amount of air pollution to earn a living, the costs have far outweighed the benefits. The cost in lives and the cost to both our physical and mental health.
It has, indeed, been maddening, and there have been many times I’ve come close to breaking point. I made what proved to be a huge mistake in giving up my supermarket job to volunteer in conservation as a way into paid work a few months before the first lockdown in the UK, so ended up with no money from furlough or any training opportunities when my volunteering was cancelled.
Ironically, it was actually my writing, which I’d fallen out of love with because I’d realised I was never going to make a living from it, that saved me - the small amount of money I earn from my Patreon-supported blog, book sales, and G & R articles.
My own financial situation has helped me understand why others remain trapped in this newer world – when you’re trying to keep your head above the water financially you don’t have much time or energy to think about anything else.
The basis of this problem, as you’re aware, is our entrapment in the capitalist system, which places so little value on art and even less on spirituality. To me this makes standing for them at a time when only roles that keep capitalist society running are being designated ‘essential’ even more important.
In relation to the possibilities of ‘opening up that older and still-living world’… if the situation we’re in results from the destruction of our animistic ways of being by Christianity, industrialism, capitalism, Empire, the One... if we could win them back, spiritually and materially, reverse the process we might see great change. The problem is such shifts in world view take centuries. With the climate clock ticking down I suspect we don’t have that much time. Perhaps the best we can do is plant the seeds and hope someone will be left to harvest them.
Lorna SMithers’ three books will be Re-Released in Print and Digital on 1 April, 2021. You can purchase them early at a reduced ratE by Clicking on their images below.
Lorna Smithers
Lorna Smithers is a poet, author, awenydd, Brythonic polytheist, and devotee of Gwyn ap Nudd. She has published three books: Enchanting the Shadowlands, The Broken Cauldron, and Gatherer of Souls. Based in Penwortham, Lancashire, North West England, she is a conservation intern with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust and is learning to grow small green things and listen to the land. She blogs at ‘From Peneverdant’.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, theorist, and writer. He is also the director of publishing for Gods&Radicals Press. Find most of his writing at Rhydwildermuth.com or on this site here.