The Wood Spirit

[stephanie]

There is an old Scandinavian belief that when Lucifer and his angels fell from Heaven, they landed in the woods and forests and were doomed to remain there forever as wood spirits and trolls. One may suppose the ‘forest-spirit’ idea does not ever die out, such things are older than even the most ancient memory. The name for this particular remembrance is Yggdrasil… once there was a strange tree which was the home of ancient gods and spirits, the mighty Yggdrasil. It's powerful magic held Heaven, Earth and the Underworld together.

At any one time you and I may always suppose we are under a confluence of imagery in pretending. How is one to do their best to respond to such things in this day and age?

Many now believe there is a poetic basis to mind and those who respond best do so by suspending belief, neither trying at first to name or discern, but …imagine! I could say imaginal movement is little, just a little movement between then and now, and here and there but not exactly here. (ever) That’s because I am only ever really pretending, no matter how ever so real it seems.

The archetypal and poetic pattern, Yggdrasil, shows the shape of the imaginal landscape we are in when we are into it, when we have suspended belief and go into it the way you do when you go into the movie theatre to watch Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings or Batman Returns or Terminator or anything else. Symmetry is the order of the day. This is called the mythological worldview. You are in it. It is not in you. And that invisible world is what the word ‘soul’ means. Soul is a third world, not given. The Latin phrase is ‘tertium non datur’. This invisible third you could say is an unmanifest, hidden world shining in the here and now. But, you can’t see it. And the task is to see it. The task is to make this inside, hidden, unmanifest world manifest in the here and now. The Greek word for making is poiein. The word, Heidegger says, means “to cause something to be brought forth.” Poiein is where the Greek word, poieses stems from which our word, ‘poetry’ comes.

Even though you will suspend belief to experience this poetic and mythological worldview you cannot really be caught by this consciously since this is the very worldview we now call a lie. We say it is a myth and we mean it is a lie. The world is not really orderly and three-tiered but erupts in chaos at every turn and this because spirit and nature are both dead matters these days. So you and I and everybody else experiences uncertainty all the way around when it comes to anything being a ‘truth’ anymore. The world itself seems more than ever gnarled and twisted like a tree...like Yggdrasil. What is it like, this likeness of the like Yggdrasil imitates in you?

For some the world is more ‘real’ like the movie “Signs” than like the worldview which inspires it! For some others it is like "Terminator" and for others it is like a “Mysterious Case of Benjamin Buttons.” These movies would each be inspirations grounded in the one source inspiring us all just now but the one source remember is really non datur. It will take some time to ‘make its self manifest’. But perhaps for this very reason you and I might retain a kind of sympathy in a third not given, a third lost—a fantasy world. And now, it seems, this we are to do.

As you are exploring this ‘making life’ try to hang onto the little picture of the mythological worldview. Symmetry is the order of the day. Too much fantasy in play is just as not good as too little. You’ve got to allow for a third not given. You’ve got to ‘feel for it’. The felt-sense isn’t a reference to emotions but to subtle, invisible essential ‘essences in motion’, e-motions. E-motions make metaphors of everything.

Now imagine, if you can, the enormous ash tree which overshadows the whole world that is Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil's leaves are the clouds, while its fruit and flowers are the stars. On the highest branch sits an eagle with a falcon perched on his head between his eyes. These birds are, respectively, the atmosphere and the universe beyond. Together they observe the state of the world and must report to the pantheon of gods who sit in judgement below. A silver-haired goat grazes at a nearby branch. The goat provides the mead which the gods drink. You've got to have that. It is the animal soul of the materializing imagination and it cannot be devalued here. Do not be unfriendly to life processes that are chewing and eating away at the tree that is your tree.

Yggdrasil has three thick roots which reach into the past, the present and the future. These are fed by three fountains, which serve Heaven, Earth and the Underworld. The fountain which serves Heaven is filled with holy water, and is guarded by three Fates. These strange creatures, who rule the past, the present and the future, decide the course of our lives. Two swans float in this heavenly fountain. One is the sun, and the other is the moon. The earthly fountain sends forth the waters of the world, gives birth to all living things, and is the source of all knowledge. It is inhabited by a giant whose extraordinary wisdom has come from drinking those waters. And the boiling, bottomless fountain at Yggdrasil's roots sustains the underworld, supporting a monstrous dragon and a host of swarming snakes who generate the Earth's internal fires.

Besides supporting the sun and the moon, Yggdrasil hosts four reindeer, who nibble on the upper branches, dropping dew from their antlers onto the earth. Then, scurrying between the eagle, the falcon and the dreadful dragon there is a squirrel, who is both the rain and the snow. The four winds frame this picture in the form of four rabbits flying among all of the branches. In a particular sense, Yggdrasil is the weather.

But beyond even this, Yggdrasil is indestructible life like the green shoot sprouting through snow in March. Like the spirit of nature returned to the soul of the world in a green man working silently and hidden within the very crux of life, Yggdrasil is.

So, too, you are.

So Be. Come no thing.


Epilogue


It is told that should the god's era ever end, then men and women who are chosen to repopulate the earth will emerge from the ever green, Yggdrasil. For this is the source of all life. Of course, I am only a poor poet. And, this… a story for the telling.


This essay is also published to mythopoetry blogspot

[stephanie]

Just Beautiful, Danny!

I would go to Campbell here. No symbol system contains everything. Something always gets left out. (That's what gets the squirrel squirreling to and fro. It's what is actually going to shape the story and get something else going...something pictured beautifully like your picturing now) The order of the day throws the day (the mythical day) into dis or Hades and you are going past the image-order (in this case symmetry) into that. That is the (ad)venture.

Here I go to what Plato says soul's venture is. And for this I am using an excerpt from my essay on "The Heroine Low In Soul's High Adventure."

The soul’s venture according to Platonic and Christic imagination is into world. Its journey is away from an inhuman status in transcendent mystery downward. By divine necessity a psychic life puts itself down literally. Soul becomes imaginal light.

I can re-picture it this way. Soul enters the world slipping into spaces where the world between spirit and nature cracks apart. This is an imaginal space called līmen. Into liminal space and along the horizon where sunset leapt away and light vanished, having followed, soul-life is thrown back upon its self reflection darkly. No one awaits in nothing where someone is to meet within her own absence-space herself again. Psychic life will go on from here and try repeatedly to picture through what it is compelled to imitate yet finds nowhere. In all its trying lives an innate resemblance that it does not yet know it is. The logical but unconscious gesture mediates its own impulse responsive to divine life.


The idea that is 'an order of the day' (any day and any idea in any worldview) throws 'day' over into Dis or Hades every time. Images are not things to be clung to. They are images to be thrown down to thread upon the spindle of imaginal light.

It isn't symmetry vs asymmetry nor heaven vs hell nor thinking vs feeling that is the problem of the third not given. It is the inability between the two (any two) to revise the shared symbol against itself. It is in forgetting the importance and relevance of daydreaming and reflection, meditation, contemplation and reverie. It is a refusal to accept as of equal value in naming the real what is the imaginal dimension that soul-making is. (I think 'faculty' was a way of seeing imagination during Bachelard's day that has been revised against itself in the days since B)

Lovely, lovely comment and I will take it with me into the next room in the story next time there is a story for the telling. -sp

[Daniel Deardorff]

Stephanie, I have been pondering this blog post ever since you posted it. I have been in love with the image of Yggdrasil for as long as I can remember. I often use it to describe the way that sacrality works via verticallity. Also the squirrel (who's name is Ratatoskr which means Drill-tooth). The squirrel embodies the third thing which leaps and carries messages between the solar bird above and the lunar serpent below. They say the messages Ratatoskr delivers are insults, which indicates a Trickster aspect to the ludic/limbic mammal. I love when you say "This is called the mythological worldview. You are in it. It is not in you." which recall Blake: "To be in a Passion you Good may Do / But no Good if a Passion is in you."

One point I question is the statement "Symmetry is the order of the day." I am an advocate of asymmetry. The Genius of Deformity as I present in my book is aligned with Gaston Bachelard assertion that:

Imagination is always considered to be the faculty of forming images. But it is rather the faculty of deforming the images offered by perception, of freeing ourselves from the immediate images; it is especially the faculty of changing images.


and adding a dash of Hillman:

archetypal therapy attempts… an epistrophé of the entire civilization to its root sources, its archai. This reversion begins where the Gods are fallen, where depth psychology has always worked with its eye attentive to the ugly.

This brings me back to my questioning "symmetry" and "order," I don't really think you mean to leave out deformity and disorder in the mythic worldview, but it's a big part of my work to speak up whenever i feel them being left out, even by omission.
Thank you for bringing all this poetic richness into the mix.

[stephanie]

Hi Andreas-

Your comment regarding the opening image in the blog post is very valuable to me and I thank you so very much for sharing your thought and its associations. Your comments are helping me to examine some of the anxieties around the terms "indigenous" and "autochthony." And so, I am very grateful because what your reflection took me back toward was introceptivity and exceptivity regarding perception and the primacy given perception in shaping the body one feels to be 'real.' One says 'real' but in the judgement one makes here one really means 'ideal'. But, all images tend present themselves in space. Images as appearances, says Merleau-Ponty, count for nothing. And so, there is a mode of the spatial in all images in which images 'speak' for themselves and not 'us'.

This also brought me back to Veronica Conboy's intelligent interrogation in "The Bridge of Breath Strand" regarding images, which are first and foremost images of psyche and psyche's shaping and making power. And to this, you also offered something quite remarkable that strikes me applicable here. Perhaps images also paint mountains and skies and rice cakes, too to satisfy their own margins going in/to the blue absence- shades at work in the hungry belly of stories right where ego-soul cannot be, but something else can...Be...and...Come no thing.

[Andreas Kornevall]

Thanks for sharing in the story of the great tree. Of course the idea of falling and becoming trolls is a roman interpretation that Scandinavians inherited. They had trade sanctions against the Heathen lands, so Sweden (where I come from) fell into the hands of Roman powers. Well economically this was very important as the Vikings were traders primarily.

If there was a dualism in the Norse worldview it is rather Chaos and Order - there is a constant battle between these two. Chaos symbolised as Frost Giants, and Trolls. Spirits of the land were the first you respected, and you had to especially treat the Gnome with outmost respects as he was the Head of your patch. So plenty of porridge was given to him. In ancient world, all the Homesteads would have a "Caring Tree" which stood there representing Yggdrasil. Today garden in Swedish is translated as "Tree-Yard". The domestic home, which is the symbol of homestead and plenty is symbolised by Frey and Freya.

[stephanie]

I love this poem! Thank you for sharing it! -sp

[Patricia Ann Doneson]

STORY:

One day while wondering in the wood of my forest I came upon a still point. Perhaps a place where heaven greets earth and in this still point all trees disappeared from the forest and I stood unmoving in this invisible place. Here in the wood of my own being a poem found birth. I share with you the gift of that silent encounter.

STILL POINT

In this still point
I reach out
with eyes
that feel
touching the
sadness of the tree.

One
golden
tear of sap
works its way
into my presence.

I stand unmoving
in this invisible
space
watching
the wound,
this amber flow,
this life force
pushing forward

realizing this is
my wound,
my tear,
my life
and this great
tree and I are one.

Patricia Ann Doneson

From my book, Songs of Silence, copyright 1998