The Bear King
an excerpt from Courting the Wild Queen by Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue
Available as a .pdf at this link
There are moments when the world cracks open. Sometimes through those cracks you see the reflection of who you really are in the curved mirror of the original darkness that came before time and space, the darkness that had fallen in love and in lust with Herself, giving birth to all things. In a holy orgasmic birth cry that contained all the sounds that would ever echo through Her infinite body, She called forth our names, setting in motion the events that would arrange matter and energy into the form that writes these words and the forms that receive them.
As that sound condensed into matter, it became the hydrogen contained in the water of our bodies as well as the bodies of stars in whose furnace was forged the iron in our blood. Looking at the night sky, we see our starry kindred. But we forget that we are as ancient and as powerful as they are.
In the glaring electric light of the world into which we were born, it is hard to see and recognize such kin, let alone remember them.
When our lives break open, sometimes we fall down a well so deep that when we look up, we see stars at noon, and make out the constellations that remind us of our inner landscape, of all that we contain—and the world as we previously knew it is completely and utterly transformed.
I write from the bottom of one of those wells, following the stars that make the body of the Great Bear as they point toward Polaris, the bright star of the north that guides us through the dark vault of heaven. There we gather what was exiled and cast into the outer darkness by the coming of civilization and reintegrate it to ourselves, thus ultimately emerging back into the world in the fullness of who we are, aligned along the pole that the star marks.
I now write as a ritual of summoning myself, of calling myself in through the cracks in the world. And I write for all who also seek to emerge into this time and place in the fullness of who they are.
Like earthquakes, the events that shake and crack open our worlds tend to come in rhythmic pulsations, with tremors before the big quake and aftershocks that follow. They are kin to the orgasmic pulsations that gave birth to the universe. When they are tearing life apart, they require a particular focus and orientation to ride the waves to the point where pain transforms into ecstasy.
With Bealtaine approaching in 2016, I walked away from a beautiful life that no longer fit me. I left a job, a community, an island, and a country that had been home to me for four years during which I’d grown and shifted as much as I could in that time and space, just as I had in so many other places and times before.
My earliest memories are of feeling “a stranger in a strange land,” afraid I would never find somewhere I belonged. I did not yet know that I was autistic—that my brain formed synapses in wild fractal patterns different from those of the people around me and experienced sensation and emotion without the filters most people have. All I knew was that everything about me felt out of place: my big Celtic body in a world that valued the slim and the swift, my strange manner of speaking and thinking, my fascination and fixation on ancient times and distant places and strange other worlds, my challenges in performing tasks according to the linear logic most people follow, my struggles with understanding and relating to how people around me were experiencing the world. Their confusion and frustration with my inability to accept the world around me “as it was" created a sense of alienation that metastasized into shame. I locked pain deep down inside me and turned the anger that rose from it against myself, not understanding that violence inwardly directed is still violent. I felt worthless and hopeless, and recklessly damaged and dishonored connections with people I loved.
Time and time again I had followed threads of synchronicity and possibility to places I had believed could become my true home, only to discover that they were, at best, temporary refuges. That pattern had repeated itself once more.
As I became once again uprooted, the shame and terror that had stalked me since childhood rose in me like a pair of wounded beasts, shaking me to the core, and I felt as though the ground was crumbling beneath me and the stars were falling from the sky.
As my world crashed around me, I turned to my gods and my ancestors. Every day, I went to the Hawthorn up the road, bringing offerings and calling to the tree, to my Irish ancestors, and to the Queen of Elphame in rudimentary broken Gaelige. I began to awaken to the genetic memory and the echo in my pulse created by life before the centuries of violence that cut us off from connection to our lands, our community, and the living world.
I took part in a sweat lodge and sat in the hottest seat, where I wept, shook, and prayed, and then washed myself with clear water from a cold stream when I emerged.
I felt free—for a little while. That night the shame and fear returned. I excoriated myself for going through catharsis after catharsis without ever experiencing lasting change.
The next morning, as I drove back to the land where the sweat lodge had been held, the radio belted out “She Moves in Mysterious Ways.” The song ended and I switched off the radio, just as I turned onto a gravel road where I was met by a Black Bear.
The Bear and I watched each other for several minutes before the Bear ambled away and I continued up the road. When I arrived at the house, Meg, who had led the ceremony the day before, handed me a red cloth. I unwrapped it and found a Black Bear claw (...just in case I was about to attempt explaining away the Mystery that was unfolding.)
In the forests of North America’s Pacific Northwest, where I lived at the time, Bear and Salmon are bringers of life—as they were in the lost Irish forests of my Paleolithic ancestors. The oldest human artifact in Ireland is the carved jawbone of a Bear, but by the time the Celts arrived in Ireland, Bears had been gone for hundreds of years. And the Irish rainforest itself is now the trace of an echo of a memory.
On returning from the ocean to spawn and die, Salmon draw Bears to rivers and streams. Bears and Eagles drag fish carcasses into the forest where they enrich the topsoil. In the Irish tradition, the Salmon is the oldest creature, and holds the wisdom of three worlds—the watery underworld it swims through, the airy heavens it leaps through, and the earth its body returns to. Whoever eats the body of the Salmon gains that wisdom.
Bears gorge on Salmon in autumn, and then retreat into their own dark underworld where their dreams are shaped by the mycorrhizal songs of the sleeping forest. When they stir in spring, they dig their medicine roots—plants like Osha and Angelica and Skunk Cabbage, which the herbalist Matthew Wood notes are “brown, furry, pungent, and oily” like Bears themselves, roots whose medicine stirs their blood and awakens their breath as they emerge from their winter slumber.
Wherever people and bears live in proximity, humans have traditionally followed the Bears’ example: digging and decocting those same roots. And they have told stories of people who married those strange dark giants who rear up on two legs.
Bears are wild kin who walk between worlds, helping us remember who we are.
A bright spirit arrived in my life right about then, calling me forth and away from madness. Solar in her warmth and light, she called to me just as the scent of deep forest and dark waters about me called to her. By day, I was keeping it all together, teaching classes and tending patients. I spent April evenings that year wandering through the forest, singing fragments of The Ballad of Tam Lin and April nights listening to recordings of the ballad over and over again. I saw us both in the story but thought only of the woman pulling forbidden Roses who fell in love with a wild shade. I forgot the process by which she brought him into the human world.
Then he appeared in her arms
Like the Bear that never would tame.
She held him fast, not letting him go,
In case they would never meet again.
Then he appeared in her arms
Like the fire burning bald.
She held him fast, let him not go.
He was as iron could.
And he appeared in her arms
Like the adder and the snake.
She held him fast, let him not go,
He was her world’s make.
And he appeared in her arms
Like to the Deer sae wild.
She held him fast. Let him not go
He's father o’ her child.
And he appeared in her arms
Like to a silken string.
She held him fast, having him not depart,
Till she saw fair morning,
And he appeared in her arms
Like to a naked man
She held him fast, let him not go,
And with her he's gone home.
Nevertheless from Samhain until Midsummer, we lived that part of the tale.
Lenore Kandel wrote, “the divine is not separate from the beast.” As a priest of the old gods I know that to be true. It is through the ecstasy of our animal self that we are able to experience our own infinity and divinity in ways that thought, and language can never fully describe. But those judgments which our minds place on our animal selves imbue them with the shame, fear, and guilt which are fed life force every time we repeat those judgments, cursing our own bodies and the body of the world. We lock away the wild, and in doing so, separate ourselves from the divine.
When the wild again awakens within us, at first it is like a caged beast breaking free that remembers its pain and its terror before it remembers its magnificence.
As my shame and fear of confusion overwhelmed me, I raged against myself, not knowing who I was, believing myself to be a monster that needed to be restrained or destroyed. I saw myself change from one terrifying form to another, rending the fabric of my own life.
She held me tight and feared me not, never forgetting who I was. But I could not remember, and I would not look at the starry mirror for fear it would reveal the grotesquerie I believed myself to be.
I feared that if I permitted myself knowledge of the fullness of my desire, I would be predatory in the sense which a culture which does not know the ways Wolf and Orca imagines predators—not understanding the language and dance of consent and interdependence between hunter and hunted in the wild. I forgot Her holy lust was the reason matter and energy born of the darkness arranged itself to become my personality. I conflated masculinity with violence and oppression, ceding its definition to the culture whose transfiguration I pray for.
In the tradition I embrace, we speak of the Peacock Lord who could send thunder and earthquakes through all the worlds with a single shake of his tail but is held still by the hand of his beloved Star Goddess, the Mother of All Things. I feared that if I allowed myself to embody power, I would tear my world apart, not trusting Her hand to hold me still when stillness was required, and release me when the time came to shake the foundations of a civilization that threatened the survival of the world.
And so, I engaged in the ultimate blasphemy that constitutes rejection of the body that is Hers, the sex that is Her sacrament, the power that is the movement of Her love across space and time.
Gwydion (the late adopted spiritual son and initiate of Victor and Cora Anderson in the Feri tradition) started showing up at Samhain. I started leaving Cannabis offerings for him every Friday night, and soon he was a regular visitor. A herd of Deer would show up, and I would know it was time for a spirit walk with Gwydion.
Gwydion Pendderwen was trained in the Craft beginning with his teenage years when Elon, the Andersons’ son, brought Gwydion home with him. Victor and Cora had both grown up steeped in folk magic in the early part of the twentieth century. They stirred what they learned from their forebears together with their own insights, encounters with gods and spirits, and past life memories to bring forward a magical tradition that was at once both ancient and new. Gwydion and Victor shared a birthday, many past lives, and a gift for poetry. Gwydion brought more Irish and Welsh elements into the cauldron of magic that Victor and Cora cooked.
Gwydion also brought some of his generation’s irreverence and countercultural values concerning consciousness expanding plants, fungi and chemicals and sex and relationships. This sometimes-generated friction with Victor and Cora, whose minds were usually quite open but who also valued the decorum of an earlier time. Gwydion was brilliant and sometimes rash, which worried Victor.
Gwydion was the great bard of his generation and his poetry, liturgy, and music often circled around the mythology of the Sacred King, who was sacrificed for the good of the land and the people. Some believe that his deep identification with that mythos played a role in his early death. This was part of what he came to warn me about. But there was another dimension as well.
Gwydion died in a car accident just after Samhain in 1982. He was 36 years old. One story I have heard is that Gwydion swerved to spare the life of a Deer in the road. He had a powerful relationship with the Stag as the embodiment of the sacred King, the kind of relationship that usually gives rise to a prohibition on killing the animal.
Not long before he died, he had shot a Deer in the garden. Gwydion was carrying a lot of regrets and spent his last day on earth visiting people he had once been close with, trying to make amends for ways he felt he had done them wrong.
What Gwydion then wanted me to understand was the mortal danger that guilt and shame create for a priest. Shame at its ultimate root is a belief that we don’t have the right to continue to exist. Everything we feel becomes a prayer we make, a spell we cast. Those working with intense magic are running an especially strong current of power through our bodies, amplifying our prayers. When guilt and shame are sufficiently deep, they can become our own unconscious death prayers, especially if we also inhabit a myth that tells us that when we cease to bless the world we must be sacrificed (a word that at its root means “made sacred.”)
If we do not believe in our own sacredness, we court suffering and death in an effort to purge ourselves of what we believe makes us unworthy of the grace of divine love and passion.
There are particular dangers for priests socialized as men in a patriarchal culture who come into intimate connection with the source of all life. Holding onto identification with our culture’s model of masculinity lends to either side of the coin of false pride: hubristic self-aggrandizement or abject self-annihilation. This warps the mirror of time and space in which we behold ourselves, just as God Herself did in the beginning, and from which we conjure forth worlds, just as God Herself does now. That misperception can cause us to experience the infinite love of the Mother of All Things as rage or rejection and live our lives accordingly. The failure to address this kind of complex is a breach of the vow of love we have made to that Beloved Mother, and the sharp edges of a broken vow are a weapon we turn on ourselves. We can come to believe that only death can set things right.
Gwydion wanted to show me another way of taking up the path of the sacred King, of making my life an offering to the land and the people. Being an anarchist, I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to engage kingly myths, and at least part of me just didn’t want to die. Yet, something told me these objections were diversions from courting my own power and my own sovereignty and stepping into my real work.
The tradition and the culture were not my own, but I was welcomed into the medicine ceremony with open arms, and there was a strange familiarity to the rhythms of the songs and the bitterness of the medicine. It was right around Imbolc, and I could feel the land beginning to generate life beneath the snow.
My ancestors had their own version of this ceremony, performed in caves and stone chambers with mushrooms and a goat skin drum, but only the slightest echoes of that tradition survive. After midnight, we were invited to go outside to drink water and greet any ancestors who desired an audience with us.
Gwydion showed up, of course, and asked me to pay deep attention to what was about to happen. When I returned to the tipi and drank the medicine, I had visions of a similar fire and a similar drum in a stone chamber, and a sacramental mushroom tea. The medicine was showing me the ways of my own ancestors a continent and an ocean away.
I heard a song, its rhythm and its intonation resonant with echoes of Indigenous North American music but its words a Gaelige and proto-Celtic creole:
“Se do beatha bhaille, Art- rí Dubh”
“Welcome home, Black Bear King”
It was the song for recalling the fullness of my being into this world.
When the sun rose and shone through the opening in the tipi, I had an image of the sun coming through an opening in the stone chamber, just as the light flowed from the darkness when, as Victor said, “darkness lay with death and love was born. Love lay with darkness and death and light were born."
Another vision, another understanding of kingship thus began revealing itself to me that night. In the old stories, the King is wedded to the land, and his sovereignty is a gift the land bestows and withdraws at will. This suggests a very different notion of sovereignty than that which tends to be bandied about in the dominant culture today.
People now tend to speak of sovereignty as being individual and personal—our right to control our own bodies and lives. But the individual rational actor is an invention of capitalism, a concept that severs our connections to land and community. In reality, our bodies and our minds are ecologies—communities of myriad beings coming together and giving rise to a more or less shared consciousness—and are completely interdependent with the humans and other-than-humans who share our landscape. Just as a god might be the mind that arises from a forest, a river, a planet or a cluster of galaxies, so too each person’s consciousness is a collective consciousness born of the matter and energy that make up our beings.
To be sovereign is to be in alignment, to be self-possessed—which inherently means to be conscious of the ecological selves we are members of in the same way that our individual neurons are members of a brain, a nervous system, a neuro-endocrine emergent self-regulating feedback loop, a human body, a family, a community, a species, an ecology, a landscape, a planet, a solar system, a galaxy, a universe, the body of God Herself.
To live in the knowledge of all these levels of consciousness and being can be overwhelming and may make it difficult to do the work of an ordinary human life. Communities evolve in ways that allow some to focus on embodying and anchoring these truths.
During the embryonic development of a human, some stem cells evolve to specialize in signaling processes and become neurons. Some evolve to specialize in detoxification, thus become liver cells. Some become the cells of muscle fibers to move the body through the world.
In the organic emergence of culture from community and ecology and landscape, two figures emerged who are integral to the life of the community but separate from it. The Witch in the hut at the edge of the village holds its circumference, the boundary, like the membrane of a cell—the site of communication with the outside world which also defines what is within and what is without. This is the very act of mediating between them. The King holds the center, like the nucleus of the cell, the repository of the genetic information about the world from which it arose rewritten by the experience of the cellular body.
The Witch and the King both know that the center and the circumference are one.
Ecologies are webs of sex and death. The sacred King is the tree to which people tie their colored ribbons and weave them in the dance. But if the tree is not rooted in the land, then it will topple—so also, if disconnected from the land, the King falls.
The King’s relationship with the land is sexual in its nature. The King feeds pleasure, devotion and adoration to the land, and the land feeds the King and the people with blossoms, fruit, seeds and the bodies of Deer and Salmon. As long as the King feeds the land with love and the lust for life with dedication, the King may live. When the King ceases to feed the land life force, the King’s body must be buried beneath an ancient mound or thrown in the bog.
The King who has lived a good life is buried with his ancestors beneath the Hollow Hills, held in the arms of his Wild Lover as his body dissolves into Hers and he prepares to be born again among his people. The King who has betrayed the land and the people is thrown into the bog where his body is preserved by the tannins from the peat so he will not be born again soon. This was not a punishment, but a balancing. This is the real meaning of the idea that the King’s life is given to the land as a sacrifice— when a King’s life is lived in a way that is a gift of love freely given to the land and the people, then that life is a joyous and sacred gift. When the King’s life ceases to be a gift of love freely given, then his death is the one remaining gift he can offer.
This form of Sacred Kingship stayed alive in Ireland well into the medieval era. At the feis, a great festival at Samhain, the time of honoring the dead of the tuath (tribe,) the King would make love to a woman who, as priestess, as Sacred Queen, embodied the spirit of the land. The king, historian Michael Richter tells us, was regarded as the embodiment of the people and was responsible for the well-being of the túath. He was without physical defects and his beauty was praised by the poets “
The physical beauty and spiritual radiance of the King inspired a river of vitality to flow from the people into the body of the King, which the beauty and power of the Sacred Queen inspired him to feed back to the land through her body.
The great King Nuada of the Tuath Dé, the Tribe of the Gods, the Shining Ones who went North to learn the secrets of the world and rode a black wind home, famously lost his arm in battle, which cost him his kingship for a time. One skilled healer forged him an arm of silver that allowed him to become a great warrior again. But the people remembered his kingship fondly and longed for him to be whole again. A healer of even greater skill channeled their will and their desire into Nuada’s body which allowed him to grow back his own arm to again become their King. 1
John Moriarty said that a king is a dream of a people. But what happens when the people themselves no longer honor the life of the land and the sacredness of beauty and true power? They dream the king into a nightmare.
Through its confusion about power and its loss of connection to the living world, our civilization turned sex and even love into a crime, making it the original shame. We could no longer see the truth of our erotic lives: we are part of God Herself, formed to make love to Herself in myriad forms. Our bodies are the land itself come into human form to raise energy in ecstasy to feed it. Sex is a part of our ecological function, and it is diminished when we see it is only an interaction between individuals, rather than as a flow within an ecology and diminished further when we objectify ourselves and each other.
Just as with the castrated Fisher King whose land became a wasteland when he refused to either heal or die, we curse the world in the process. The destruction we visit on Her body, which stirs the wrath of Her consort, is the expression of the loss of our erotic relationship with the body of the world. It is exacerbated by our feeding sexual energy to our own and each other’s egos rather than to our god-selves, the land, and to our people. The consequences of that failure are heaviest for those who have made vows to the land or to God Herself in courting their own power. Their self-cursing in turn curses the world and they are cursed in return, a recirculating spiritual infection that becomes fatal if allowed to run its full course without interruption.
I was shown that the King and his embodied human lover formed a smaller erotic ecology which, when fed with love and trust, could become a self-regulating and self-healing system, in turn ensuring the health of the land and of its people. Those lovers were like stars in a constellation—coming together they revealed something of each other’s nature and something of a shared pattern of being that made the figure of a Bear or a drinking gourd or a starry plough. Each of which was the center of its own constellation.
The first kings were priests, not hereditary rulers. They were oracular figures who spoke the law they heard in the movement of water over stone and the sound of wind in the trees, from the depths of the cave and sacred well bringing the law up from the land, not authority figures who handed down their own fiats, imposing them on the land.
This remained true to a large extent in Ireland until England broke apart the Irish tribes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Medieval Irish kings, if not necessarily formally filling a priestly role, continued to serve largely as the ceremonial figure who embodied the will of the people and united them in purpose and focus rather than as a political ruler in the modern sense, Richter tells us:
“According to the legal texts, he did not have any legislative power, as the law was complete, comprehensive and independent. He was not even responsible for the maintenance of law, as this was the responsibility of the people. Offences were settled through the pronouncement of the legal scholars and were avenged by the victim’s clan by way of the blood feud or the imposition of compensation. The king instead defended the túath against enemies from outside. Within the kingdom, he presided over the people’s assembly ( oenach ) [ . . ]”
Our longing for meaning and connection in an age of alienation has spawned a global industry based on hiring strangers to dig in our DNA to discover the secrets of our ancestry. Yet, we ignore or dismiss our oldest oral traditions and folklore. We do not remember that the Great White Sow was one of the oldest symbols of the Goddess and by her milk she feeds both Poets and Heroes. We forget the Goddess of ten thousand breasts.
Traditionally, when the King no longer truly fed the people, his nipples were cut off and the royal body was thrown into the bog. In other parts of the world when the King could no longer sexually function with the representative of the Goddess, he was retired by sacrifice or stepped aside for another to ascend. Failure to perform one ecological function results in shifting into the performance of another. Sex and death are the currencies of wild sovereignty.
Art- rí Dubh , “Black Bear King.” Some scholars believe that the name of King Arthur may be derived from the proto-Celtic word art- which is related to the Greek word arctos and means “Bear” (which in modern Irish is béar) and the Irish word rí, which we translate as “King” today, and is related to the Sanskrit rig which means “shining.”
Art-rí is so close to the Irish Ard-rí, “high King,” that the latter could have easily evolved from the former. If so, this would put the origin of sacred kingship in Ireland within either the late Paleolithic or early Neolithic era, when Bears still roamed the island and long before the Gentry went beneath the hollow hills to become the Daoine Sidhe, the People of the Mound. (Perhaps the mounds themselves were inspired by the caverns and hollows where Bears hibernated.)
Dubh means “black” in Irish, as does the related suffix du in Welsh, showing up in the name of the Clogwyn Du'r Arddu, the stone beneath which a sleeper will become “mad, dead, or a poet,” and also in the name of the god who opens the gates of death.
Black is the color of the north in old Irish traditions, the place where the Shining Ones had learned the secrets and magics of nature. It is the color of the womb and of the grave. It is the place of beginnings and the darkness beneath the Hollow Hills where the Old Ones sleep. Ancient Irish cosmology saw all things as having their origin in darkness from which light then flowed.
But why a Bear King?
Victor said that anything that is true is observable in nature. The Salmon mirrors one understanding of sacred kingship—expending all of its energy to swim upstream to and for sex and death to give life to a generation of Salmon as it spawns and gives life to the forest when it rots and dies.
The Stag reflects another dimension—shedding its antlered crown each year and growing one anew. Think of Robert Cochrane’s cipher of “the Roebuck in the Thicket”—one of the Stag’s mysteries is that in the battles of the rutting season he is at once the hunter, the hunted, and the hunt.
The Bear King is something else, something older. The Bear goes into the underworld for a season and then returns. The Bear King pays the debt of death to the land not by forfeiting body or life, but by spending the dark months of the year dreaming deeply with the roots, the Bears, the land, and the stars turning in the cold winter sky. Three months out of the year, the Bear King returns to the womb of the land, which is also his grave as well as his cavern of initiation and the cauldron of rebirth, deeply listening in ritual and trance to what the land would have the people know.
As the light returns and life stirs in the land at Imbolc, he rises to walk in the world again, digging pungent roots whose scent stirs the waters and the blood within his lovers’ bodies. While the sun burns longer than the night, he serves the land by walking among the people. In the dark months, he serves the people by lying with the land.
The Bear King is a psychopomp at the gate of death, ecstasy, and birth. He returns in these times to give death to a culture severed from the living world and already rotting on its uprooted vine, and to sing enchantment back into the world and sing the world back into enchantment.
And so, as the wheel of the year turns toward Samhain, I come around to understanding my ecological role in this time and place. As the darkness descends, I spend long nights by a fire that warms my bones and stirs their memory. Sometimes in the flames, I see a vision of a Wild Queen. In the wake of the Owl’s call, I hear the tinkling of silver bells. When the Queen’s Seven Sisters rise just before the morning sun, I will meet her beneath the Hawthorn.
NOTES
1 One of his descendants, Mug Nuadat, known also as Eóghan Mór, would become the founder of the Eóghanact tribe from which my own Ó Donnchadha sept would emerge.)
Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue
Seán is an herbalist, writer, and teacher, and an initiated Priest in two traditions. He lives in the mountains of western Maine. Seán’s approach to healing weaves together the insights of traditional western herbalism and contemporary science. He regards physical, spiritual, and emotional healing as deeply intertwined.
Prior to becoming an herbalist, Seán was a political organizer in movements for peace, human rights, and global economic justice, and a freelance journalist documenting the human and ecological impacts of U.S. policies in Latin America.
He grew up near Boston, a short distance from where his great-grandparents first landed when they arrived from Ireland. Since childhood, he has been an avid student of Irish history and folklore. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1996 with a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing.
He is also the author of The Forest Reminds Us Who We Are published by North Atlantic Books in 2021.