THE MAY QUEEN
by Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue
an excerpt from Courting the Wild Queen
Also available as a downloadable PDF
“True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank,
A ferlie he spied wi’ his ee,
And there he saw a lady bright,
Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.
Her shirt was o the grass-green silk,
Her mantle o the velvet fyne,
At ilka tett of her horse’s mane
Hang fifty silver bells and nine."– Thomas Rhymer (Child Ballad 37A)
In early May, the Hawthorn blooms as its Scorpionic scent of sex and death starts mingling with the Bealtaine air. It is here I come to bring offerings of honey and whiskey to the Queen of Elphame, praying:
A Bhanríon na Bealtaine,
A Bhanríon na coilA Bhanríon cumhra
A Bhanríon bláthúA Bhanríon dearg
A Bh anríon glasA Bhanríon ban
A Bhanríon dubhA Bhanríon ionúin
A Bhanríon fiáinIs mise do leannán fiáin
Is mise d'fhile fiáinIs mise do rí fiáin (1)
It was at the edge of this same field that a dear companion and I found most of the skeleton of an Elk, dragged into the wash by a Cougar, and picked clean by Coyotes and Ravens a little before Imbolc two years ago; a reminder that in Winter, the May Queen becomes the Bone Mother, the Cailleach. Just after Imbolc, the heady seductive perfume of the Cottonwood buds brought the reminder that spring’s sweetness would soon return, even though the snow was still deep upon the ground. Now, Spring has arrived and the Hawthorn blooms.
Sex and death, always inseparable, are marked by a biochemical cipher in the strange musky scent of the Hawthorn flower. Most flowering plants release light hydrocarbon molecules, monoterpenes, sesquiterpenes, and simple phenols that signal our bodies to move into a relaxed and open state of embodied presence and feelings of deep connection with the living things around us.
The Hawthorn flower releases an animal-like scent—a light molecule that incorporates a nitrogen atom into a carbon ring, becoming an alkaloid and an amine at that, like our own neurotransmitters. This particular amine, triethylamine, is what gives human sexual fluids part of their characteristic scent, and it is also released when flesh decays. La petite mort et la grand mort.
When we smell animal scents, our nervous systems become aroused—the valence of that arousal can move in different directions, however. Early in its blossoming, the Hawthorn releases a bouquet of more typical floral scents along with the triethylamine. The relaxation of tension brought on by the terpenes and phenols tilt the body’s response to the arousal brought on by the musky alkaloid in an erotic direction, just as our lovers’ pheromones mingle with triethylamine in their sexual fluids, giving meaning and context to our arousal.
In Ireland and Scotland alike, Bealtaine began when the Hawthorn first bloomed, a festival of ecstasy that also marked a time when the shining ones who dwelt beneath the hollow hills would walk among humans. Perhaps the lusty embodiment that the scent of Hawthorn evoked in the people made them more like their wilder kindred who had left this world at the advent of civilization. The presence of the wild and the divine being transgressive, the proximity of the Otherworld made Bealtaine, like Samhain, in some ways inherently a festival of misrule.
The Romans never conquered Ireland, and were driven back from Scotland by fearsome warriors, women and men fighting side by side. They were convinced that this was not just a battle against people but also against the ancient Gods of the land itself.
Their successors, the Christianized people of Britain who later partially colonized Ireland in the 12th century, held that their one God was all powerful but they hedged their bets. Partly to win the allegiance of the people and partly to avoid direct conflict with powerful spirits that might or might not exist, they allowed some of the old festivals to continue, transmuted at least on the surface, into the feast days of saints.
Bealtaine was a festival of unruly bodies, which Catholicism attempted to co-opt into a Marian feast, not understanding that for people steeped in an animist experience, albeit one with a syncretic Christian overlay, the Mother of God would be a profoundly sexual figure.
Mary, of course is, known among those who love her as Our Lady. She would have been understood by many as a more universal version of the sovereignty goddesses who were the living spirit of the land where she dwelled. She and sainted women received devotions at the same holy wells where people had always honored those spirits.
Lady is also the literal meaning of the name of the Norse Goddess Freyja, who came in small ways to Ireland and in more pronounced ways to Scotland and parts of England with Viking raiders and settlers. The Queen of Elphame is another name of Freyja well known in Scotland and used interchangeably with that of the bright Faerie Queen. Freyja is a warrior and a great beauty, a goddess of fertility and pleasure and victory, and the one who taught magic to her priestesses, the volva, and to Odin, the great King who sacrificed himself to himself for the sake of knowledge. Once Christianity was compulsory, it was only logical that much of her veneration would be translated into devotion to Mary.
The Protestants, whose theology and religious praxis co-arose with capitalism, understood full well the challenges that rural seasonal festivals posed to convincing people to be industrious. These festivals were inconsistent with the idea that God wanted people to transform His creation into merchandise.
In England, a new moneyed class that profited from Spain’s repaying its debts to Britain with looted gold from the Americas demanded land, and the Crown and Parliament responded with the policy of “enclosure” which divided and privatized land people had farmed in common since the emergence of agriculture in Britain. Unable to pay rent or taxes, families were uprooted and fled to the cities where they would become the workforce of the developing industrial economy or across the sea to America where they took part in the forced displacement of other people from their ancestral homes.
Men’s bodies became engines of production. Women, who had held strong positions in the family and the community when people worked the land in common, became a source of unpaid domestic labor and their bodies became engines of reproduction. Many women who refused to comply and conform were charged with witchcraft, then tortured and executed during these times. (See Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch).
It is worth noting that the armed resistance to the enclosures in England may have appealed for aid to the faerie realm with their mythical leader, whose face was never seen as General Ludd, possibly being an iteration of the Brythonic faerie King, Llud, as Rhyd Wildermuth and others have suggested. Llud was likely a Welsh and Pictish variant of the Irish Faerie King Nuada, a venerated ancestor who traveled with Irish people of the Eóghanacht tribe who ruled over parts of those regions well into the 8th century. And like an ancient King, General Ludd was indeed a defender of the land and the embodiment of the will of the people.
Derisive propaganda depicted Ned Ludd as wearing a dress with one shoe off and one shoe on. On one level, this was a reference to the raucous festivals of misrule that had once been the pressure valve keeping British society from exploding, but now were banned by the emerging Puritan order. (The original “War on Christmas” was waged by fundamentalists who wanted to put an end to bawdy merrymaking in the streets of London and keep it from the newly laid streets of Boston). He was the once Holy Fool who no longer had a place in the dour and orderly world of the dawn of capitalism.
On another level, it was a mockery of a dying rural culture. Men were seen as feminized if they listened to the women who kept alive old wisdom and old rites, the “Old Wives” who told tales filled with the echoes of ancient wisdom and practical knowledge of the land. To break people’s ties to the land, it was necessary to criminalize and marginalize those who kept those ties alive—the midwives and healers. England’s witch persecutions were an attempt to eradicate a culture. The Luddites were the men who still honored women’s wisdom and still knew there were spirits alive in the land. They fought and died to defend their families’ way of life.
Up through the 18th century, rural political resistance in England maintained a bawdy and distinctly animist character and clothed itself in symbols of the old May rites of the Celtic Pictish culture that preceded the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, the Romans, and the Normans and continued to survive in hidden ways in the countryside. British historian E.P. Thompson writes that while by the late 18th century, revolutionary politics took on forms easily recognizable to us,
“as we move backward from 1760 we enter a world of theatrical symbolism which is more difficult to interpret:...It is a language of ribbons, of bonfires, of oaths and of the refusal of oaths, of toasts, of seditious riddles and ancient prophecies, of oak leaves and of maypoles, of ballads with a political double-entendre, even of airs whistled in the streets.”
Within a generation, those Faerie Kings and Faerie Queens to whom the poor had looked for defense were reduced to quaint and dainty images of winged creatures on porcelain teacups.
Yet, at the same time, with the rural rebellions at home safely crushed, English society became willing to tolerate the eccentricity of the Romantics who sought to reconnect with the living land and with the legends of great Kings like Arthur and seductive Otherworld Queens. The spiritual descendants of the Romantics continued, launching a great occult renaissance.
Two centuries after the Luddites, in 1994 on the other side of the Atlantic in southern Mexico, another animist people resisting the enclosure of communal lands, the Mayans of Chiapas, would also take part in an armed uprising whose primary public voice was that of a masked (sub)commander Marcos, whose words broke down capitalist materialist logic with a combination of Mayan tradition, a bit of Marxist analysis, sometimes bawdy humor, and a touch of magical realism, whose words were disseminated through the internet. At one point, the Mexican government spread rumors that Sub-comandante Marcos was gay, hoping to discredit him. Marcos replied:
“Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.”
The spirit of resistance shapeshifts across time and space, acting in ways not always understood by the people whose bodies it moves through.
It may be a mere synchronicity that International Worker’s Day, commemorating the murder of eight anarchists by the state in Chicago in 1886, coincides with Bealtaine. Perhaps it is not a mistake that the forces that seek to disrupt the commodification of human bodies would end up being drawn to celebrate and assert liberation during the season when the Queen of Elphame is stirring the world into a life-affirming erotic awakening that resists all systems and modes of control. Nor is it a mistake, perhaps, that the festival of ecstasy would be overlaid with a festival to honor the revolutionary dead.
As the Hawthorn passes the peak of its bloom, the floral aspects of its scent fall away and leave us with just that musky alkaloid which, on its own, begins to smell putrid. Decaying bodies don’t produce pheromones, and dying flowers produce fewer aromatic compounds, causing us to associate the scent of triethylamine on its own with dead and dying things.
The May Queen has a dark twin, the Cailleach Béara. She is stone and earth, older than the hills. She rules the dark of the year. Some say she is the bride of Manannán, great god of the sea waiting for him to return from beyond the waves.
Cailleach is the Cailleach Béara. She is stone and earth, older than the hills. She rules the often translated into English as “hag,” a word whose modern connotations are bound up with our fear of the darkness and of the grave, which is also the darkness of the earth and the darkness of deep waters and the darkness of the womb.
When I see her, I see the color of moonlight and granite and driven snow. She smells of Hawthorn and Datura in flower and of Apples frozen halfway through fermentation. Her beauty is no less seductive that that of her twin.
In old stories, a man encounters a hag along the road who asks him to kiss her. The kiss blesses and transforms them both, and she becomes beautiful to him. With that blessing, the way opens for him to become the Sacred King who gives life to the land.
Who scorns the kiss is cursed.
The Cailleach’s bright twin. The May Queen, comes in a flurry of white blossoms, smelling of sunlight and Wild Ginger. To paraphrase Rumi, “The price of her kiss is your life.”
Whoever reads her kiss as a kiss of death does not understand the price. You will not die in that moment of bliss but like Oengus Óg, upon seeing the vision of Caer in the flames of the fire where he cooked the silver Trout, you will wander the worlds, following her scent on the wind. Or perhaps she will take you then and there.
Her kiss stirs something in your blood. Concrete and fluorescent lights become intolerable. The scent of Cottonwood, the call of the Raven, the song of the Wood Thrush, the flow of mountain streams will drive you to ecstasies you can barely conceal. You will seethe at the sight of fences that sunder the land.
You will forsake all lovers whose language is not touched by the music of her silver bells.
You will never be the same.
“Light down, light down now, True Thomas,
And lean your head upon my knee.
Abide and rest a little space,
And I will shew you ferlies three.”– Thomas Rhymer (Child Ballad 37A)
Even then, She will still offer you a choice—or at least the illusion of one. You could call it all a demonic vision, return to the church, repent, and live a life of celibacy and asceticism. Or you could throw yourself into the arms of every lover you find, chasing the echo of the pleasure of her kiss, only to find that no sweetness or debauchery can match the briefest brush of her lips on yours unless the lover be one of Her Hidden Children, come to remind you who you are.
Or you could go with her. That path is the most perilous of all—and the only one that will set you free. She offers the choice in all sincerity but there was never any possibility that you would choose to be anywhere but by Her side.
In the ballad of Thomas Rhymer, as her human lover lays his head upon her knee, the Queen shows him three roads, stating:
‘O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset with thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Tho after it but few enquires.
– Thomas Rhymer (Child Ballad 37A)
Some Christianized people accuse the People of the Mound and their Queen of using language to deceive—but it is Christian civilization which has justified cruelty in the name of love.
Righteousness presumes a single truth and a single correct response to that truth. It begins with an image of perfection against which we measure ourselves and a narrowing path toward its attainment. That path is lined with the thorns and briers of our own judgment that cut into our flesh if we stray, as inevitably we do. When we feel the first cut of thorn into flesh, we begin to dissociate, no longer trusting our bodies, and seeking instead the abstract maps in the left frontal cortices of our brains to lead us. And they lead us into the tangle of thorns again and again, because none of those maps resemble anything akin to the fluid realities of the living world.
The thorn is also the ward that protects the Otherworld from the incursion of this particular form of madness. The lone Hawthorn stands atop the Hollow Hill barring the entry of those who would bring their cruel morality. Victor Anderson described their ways as “kinder...and less civilized.” Those who dwell beneath have seen the iron chains that we place around our own hearts, the desires become the iron sword by which we impose our visions of righteousness on each other, and the iron plough with which we impose our straight-rowed monocrop vision on the body of the Earth.
It is common in our culture, when reflecting on the atrocities of the past few millennia, to ask how people could be so devoid of morality as to commit genocide and ecocide over and over again—however, the problem is not a lack of morality, but an excess of moral rigidity and moral fervor.
The violence inspired by the vision of righteousness inevitably turns outward. Whether we call them heretics or degenerates or counterrevolutionaries, those who refuse to conform to our concept of righteousness are soon defined as unworthy of living in the world that we are perfecting. The prison, the execution chamber, the guillotine, the gulag, and the concentration camp are the inevitable manifestations of ideologies of righteousness. The school, the psychiatric ward, and the mandatory rehabilitation program are the velvet gloves that liberalism threatens to slip off the iron fist of the state if people don’t show adequate commitment to their own “improvement.”
Righteousness shapes our dominant paradigm of justice, and social justice movements that fail to examine and question the nature of that paradigm quickly end up replicating it, seeking to identify and punish those whose language or concepts fail to conform to their own emergent orthodoxy. The threat of ostracism is a threat of social death that forces compliance. Corporations and the state learn that they can depend on their erstwhile opponents to distract and disable each other.
A handful of brazen individualists escape both fates and find their way onto the second road.
‘And see not ye that braid road,
That lies across that lily leaven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Though some call it the road to heaven.
– Thomas Rhymer (Child Ballad 37A)
Every dominant term generates its inverse. Unsurprisingly, for many, the rejection of righteousness begins and ends with inverting its morality, resulting in an opposite form of enslavement—enslavement not by discipline but by unchecked insatiable appetites.
The conscious embrace of wickedness, the formula of reversal that breaks taboos for the sake of unlocking the power dammed up behind them, brings at best an incomplete liberation. If the erstwhile adept or the mundane freedom fighter is unprepared to engage and focus the power liberated, the magician can become its slave and the freedom fighter the new slaver.
The fact that cultural taboos around violence and sexuality are deeply oppressive does not mean that shattering all boundaries will set you free. There is a difference between the rigid limits of repression and the fluid, negotiated boundaries that evolve in living conversation. In a culture that has rejected the wild, we miss the fact that the wild has its own etiquette of consent.
If the road of righteousness is the road of abstraction, the road of wickedness is the road of objectification. Like the road of righteousness, it begins with cutting you off from the felt sense of connection with the living world, but it plays out more viscerally. As Victor Anderson said: “Harm comes from the root of the act. Is it reinforcing the shade and shadow of some awful event or is it truly a healing?”
The embrace of wickedness need not be conscious. It can be the result of trauma that cuts off our awareness of connection. When we believe that our world is unsafe and that we have to fend for ourselves, we come under the influence of norepinephrine and adrenaline, two of the hormones and neurotransmitters that narrow our focus to the single goal of survival at all costs. We constrict our muscles, our blood vessels, and our focus.
When the threatening situations we experience remain unresolved, as most of the stressful situations in contemporary life do, we remain constricted. The perceptual changes induced by constriction make it difficult to see anything outside the threat we perceive. We come under the influence of the hormone cortisol. Released by the adrenal cortex, cortisol serves to keep us in a position to respond to danger when an immediate threat has passed but we are not entirely safe yet. It acts to elevate our blood sugar so more energy will be quickly available to our muscles, to dampen the inflammatory responses brought on by the adrenaline and norepinephrine response we had to the initial threat, to favor the storage of excess energy as fat over the construction of muscle—and to make us more afraid of and prone to perceive immediate, cataclysmic threats in the world around us while also diminishing our cognitive capacities.
It is a set of responses that evolved to protect us from immediate, passing threats.
But what if the threat is hunger or imminent homelessness or misjudging one of the capricious moods of a fiery tempered boss—something that doesn’t go away? Then the very constriction that serves to protect you by making you ready to fight or run or freeze may make it difficult for you to perceive the help and support available to you. You can become addicted to the accompanying biochemical cascade.
You might become so focused on surviving that you aren’t able to respond or even pick up on the solidarity extended to you by allies. You might miss the voices of the ancestors whispering to you in your dreams or in the wind blowing through the Firs or the omens that may come by birds on the wing or the Bear in the wood letting you know that you are not alone. Worse still, the impact of your actions (or inaction) on the Firs, the animals, and your fellow humans will become invisible or irrelevant to you. But there is a path away from the brutalities of fear and wickedness.
“And see not ye that bonny road,
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Efland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae”
– Thomas Rhymer (Child Ballad 37A)
Her kiss awakens the memory of another way of being, something you know in your bones and your blood—and your heart. Your body remembers the path that winds around the fernie brae, the road to Elfland.
The Irish call the people of that other realm the Daoine Sidhe—the people of the mound. They were the ones who found the civilization brought by Bronze Age navigators from Spain too cruel, and retreated to the Otherworld, the dark watery realm from which all rivers flow. They are identified with the animist ancestors of the Gaelige-speaking peoples of Ireland and Scotland. Victor Anderson said that their ways were kinder—and less civilized.
It was civilization that they fled in their return to the source of the wild waters. Echoing and invoking Henry David Thoreau’s observation that “Nature is a prairie for outlaws.”
Herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner writes:
“The word ”civilized” comes from the Latin “civilis,” meaning under law, orderly. ... Civilis itself comes from the older Latin word “civis,” meaning, ‘someone who lives in a city, a citizen.’ Those who go into wilderness, into Nature that has not been tamed, are no longer under (arbitrary) human law, but under the all-encompassing, inevitable law of Nature. They go out from under human law. They are no longer citizens, they are not orderly, they are not civilized—they are outlaws.”
Civilization tells us that it exists to keep us from destroying each other and it defines the wild as a place of unbridled violence, “red in tooth and claw,” to justify its own unrelenting, highly organized violence. The chaotic violence that arises from the trauma caused by structural violence is shown as proof of the need to maintain a rigid order.
We call those who inflict pain on others in unsanctioned ways “beasts” and “predators” – in a language that could only arise from a culture that has all but eradicated actual predators from most of their historic range, and so has no lived experience of the wild etiquette of consent that plays out between predator and prey. Biologists observing the interaction between Wolves and Moose on an island in Michigan observed what traditional hunters around the world already knew. There is a pause when the hunter and the hunted meet that allows for a subtle, embodied communication. Sometimes a Moose will offer itself up to the Wolf without a struggle. Sometimes a Moose will stare a Wolf down or defend itself, and the Wolf will walk away. Sometimes the Moose will turn and run, an invitation to chase. But only a sick and isolated Wolf will go on a rampage.
Wolves and Moose are not taught codes of behavior. Nor do they depend on any outside authority to enforce the terms of their unspoken agreement. Everything is communicated through their embodied experience of each other’s presence.
Buhner points out that we humans have the same capacity to directly perceive the ways in which other living beings are experiencing us. He writes of the heart as an organ of perception that picks up on subtle fluctuations in electromagnetic fields, sending information about the same changes via the vagus nerve to the amygdala and to the right frontal cortex of the brain where we interpret it as emotion. This kind of direct communication of experience allows us to base our choices on a direct emotional empathy rather than on an abstracted set of rules and guidelines. Our capacity to engage that empathy grows the more we allow our awareness to shift to focus on our own embodied presence in each moment.
The trouble with such empathy is that it refuses to honor the rules of etiquette that guide civilization’s preferred form of cognitive empathy which is marked and tested by the ability to correctly guess the internal experience and the desired response of another person by thinking about the situation and running it through the rubric of the normative experiences and responses of the majority population. More subversively, this wild type of empathy refuses to honor the rules set for whom or what we may empathize with and whose experiences should matter to us most. You are supposed to care more about the wellbeing of your family members than about the wellbeing of the man sleeping in the doorway of the bank, more about the death of an American soldier in a helicopter crash than about the deaths of twenty Yemeni civilians in a drone strike on a wedding party. And you are not supposed to empathize at all with trees or stones or rivers or stars. All those rules and categories break down when we bypass abstraction and go to a place of directly experiencing the presence of other beings.
In The Function of the Orgasm, Wilhelm Reich (2) wrote:
“Today very few people know that morality was once regarded as a phylogenetically, indeed supernaturally derived instinct. This was said in all seriousness and with great dignity.”
Reich saw civilization, and the sublimation of libido which Freud defined as its basis, as responsible for the suppression of this instinct. Alienation from our own bodies and from the experiences of other living, feeling beings is achieved through and reinforced through a body armoring, and the unconscious habit of holding tension in the muscles that create structural changes in the fascia. Reich observed that:
“The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterological armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.”
That armor is broken open through pleasure. The Queen’s kiss has the power to liberate us and to restore our innate, wild empathy, the instinct that guides us in living in our reciprocal relationship with the human and other-than-human members of our ecological communities by bringing us into a radically embodied presence.
True empathy is a function not of the socialized human talking aspect of the self but of our wild self which experiences the world through sensation and emotion.
It is significant that Thomas is instructed not to speak while in Elfland. Just before they wade across a river that contains all the blood spilled by the wicked and the righteous of the world, the Queen tells Thomas:
“But, Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,
Whatever ye may hear or see,
For, if you speak word in Elflyn land,
Ye’ll neer get back to your ain countrie.’
– Thomas Rhymer (Child Ballad 37A)
The language of civilization is worse than useless when navigating Otherworld landscapes or learning the ways of Faerie. Naming and categorizing things and attempting to place them within existing frameworks of understanding shifts us into the realm of the abstract. Being wilder, Faerie is a realm of emotion and sensation, a realm whose logic is the logic of myth and poetry and, well, faerie tale rather than the transactional language of a culture full of people separated from their own bodies and the body of the land.
Poetry is the primary instance where spoken and written language begin to reflect the experience of the wild self. Poetry is the result of the talking self-moving in rhythm with the wild self, while the wild self makes love to the part of us that knows our own infinity and divinity. Direct knowledge of our infinity and divinity would shatter the talking self. Poetry is the way we avoid madness or death when integrating the experience of the sublime or the horrific.
Poetry seeks to orient us in a universe of feeling. Perhaps this is why the Queen chose a poet to seduce. Irish philosopher John Moriarty touched on this when speaking of the nature of language in a Gaelige-speaking animist culture. He wrote:
“To learn to speak is to learn to say, 'our river has its source in an Otherworld well,' and anything we say about the hills and anything we say about the stars is a way of saying 'A Hazel grows over the Otherworld well in which our river has its source."
In lectures and workshops, Moriarty contrasted this way of engaging language from the ways in which we use language to commodify the world and to negotiate trade. This is why indigenous languages are often the first aspect of a culture that colonizers try to eradicate.
Having spent seven years in Elfland, Thomas finds that his relationship with language has shifted. The Queen makes that change permanent by giving him the taste of an Apple from her world, a gift he protests but cannot refuse:
“‘Take this for thy wages, True Thomas,
It will give the tongue that can never lie.’
‘My tongue is mine ain,’ True Thomas said;
‘A gudely gift ye wad gie to me!
I neither dought to buy nor sell,
At fair or tryst where I may be.
‘I dought neither speak to prince or peer,
Nor ask of grace from fair ladye:’
‘Now hold thy peace,’ the lady said,
‘For as I say, so must it be.’"
– Thomas Rhymer (Child Ballad 37A)
Having eaten Otherworld Fruit, Thomas experiences a permanent fall from social grace, mirroring the separation of Eve and Adam from the love of a certain desert god who demands absolute obedience and frequently proclaims His jealousy.
This would be a good time to tell you that if you have not yet caught the Queen’s scent on the wind or felt the ghost of the knowledge of the taste of her kiss, it is not quite too late to turn back. Proceed at your own peril.
Read this aloud, and you will begin to taste the wild. Buhner warns:
"If we eat the wild, it begins to work inside us, altering us, changing us. Soon, if we eat too much, we will no longer fit the suit that has been made for us. Our hair will begin to grow long and ragged. Our gait and how we hold our body will change. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes. Our words start to sound strange, nonlinear, emotional. Unpractical. Poetic."
When I first read those words, a few months after first encountering the Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, I thought they were a metaphor. Now I am a wild-eyed, wild-haired poet whose every waking and sleeping breath carry the memory of the taste of the kiss of one who smelled of sunlight and Wild Ginger beneath a tree in May. The next kiss will be the kiss of my unmaking.
Notes
(1) I am not fluent in Gaelige; I have just enough of the language for my heart’s prayers to express themselves as Gaelige now and then. I cannot vouch for the grammatical or orthographic correctness of any of the Gaelige in this strange little tome.
(2) Wilhelm Reich was a great psychologist, scientist, and cultural critic. He was Freud’s star pupil who became the bête noire of psychoanalysis when he took the position that the libido needs to be liberated in order to allow humans to be fully free and alive. He identified the libido with a form of energy present everywhere and in all things called orgone. He was one of the first to see the true nature of fascism, and spoke out against its rise, escaping Europe on the last boat out of Norway before the Nazis took over. He taught in New York for a time, and then moved to Maine where he devoted his life to learning to use orgone first for healing and then as an energy source, and a means of changing the weather. He was falsely accused of making unsubstantiated medical claims, and his books were burned by the FDA in the largest book burning in U.S. history. He refused to comply with a court order to stop his work and was arrested and died in prison. His tomb is on the hill that overlooks the cove where I kayak among the Loons.
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.