Feasting Michaelmas

The vigil of Rita now moves into consummation, feral whorl battening on the soft white belly of the Texas-Louisiana border with 120 mph winds and the deluge of storm surge and rains. Second maelstrom loosed into to the Gulf this season, odd how early this week I dreamt of two killer whales ravening inside the Gulf; and what of that dream’s lysis, where containment of Their feral badness seemed critical, some levee at the Straits of Florida breeched by their menace, and the two blue turbines of death leaped over and into the Atlantic, into a colder deeper vaster killing ground. In the dream’s penultimate compressions (only death assembles more in fatal coagulation), Katrina and Rita are also Columba and Oran, the two dread faces I’ve been writing at length about during the week; they are wife and anima; they are water and wind; they are fang and fin; song and story; Ariel and Caliban, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of every artistic shimmy round Ariadne’s dancing floor. But mostly they are two killer whales wild in their red joy and wanderlust, sprinting up into the heartland like loosed sperm of the Ravager, ferrying an awfulness in Their wake which totters a White House, drives gas prices up up and up, makes conversation in this house God graces at His will worried and wary, sensing sea-changes, tidal surgings of Bad News, difficult times to come.


***

Creation is always an individual achievement, for every creative work or deed is something new that was not there before, unique and not to be repeated. Thus the anima component of the personality is connected with the “voice” which expresses the creative element in the individual, contrasted with the conventionality of the father, of the collective, of conscience. The anima prophetess and priestess is the archetype of the soul which conceives the Logos, the “spermatic word” of god. She is the inspirer and the inspired, the Virgin Sophia who conceives by the Holy Ghost, and the Virgin Mother who brings forth the Logos spirit-son.

-- Erich Neumann, The Origin and History of Consciousness


***

So the backward, seaward glance is erotic, fuelled by longing to merge once again in Thalassa, though whom we greet rising in those waters is of the father-dragon, the dread Logos whose word I must somehow welcome and leash and bury and re-name. Easy, for a god. It helps to be freed of selfish cumbrance: to bind Lucifer in the chains of Michael and let that power-shadow fall, league by sad slow league, all the way down to uteral doom, where he serves best. This is Michaelmas, the Christian feast of the archangel Micheal, much revered throughout the Hebrides.; the feast of the archangel has origins is Manannan, whose origin is Lir, father-dragon whose balls are the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Fiona Macleod once traced the ancestry:

The “Iollach Mhicheil” — the triumphal song of Michael — is quite as much pagan as Christian. We have here, indeed, one of the most interesting and convincing instances of the transmutation of a personal symbol. St. Michael is on the surface a saint of extraordinary powers and the patron of the shores and the shore-folk; deeper, he is an angel, who is upon the sea what the angelical saint, St. George, is upon the land: deeper, he is a blending of the Roman Neptune and the Greek Poseidon: deeper, he is himself and ancient Celtic god: deeper, he is no other than Manannan, the god of ocean and all waters, in the Gaelic pantheon: as, once more, Manannan himself is dimly revealed to us as still more ancient, more primitive, and even as supreme in remote godhead, the Father of an immortal Clan”

-- Iona

***

To amplify --

Who is Michael?

- St. Michael’s feast day is 9/23. The Eve of St. Michael was one of the most popular festivals in the Catholic isles, with every barn turned into a dancing place or a place of merrymaking, where lovers could meet and give betrothal gifts. On this day the Michaelmas lamb is sacrificed, perhaps a survival of the earlier rites of human sacrifice.

- St. Michael is extremely old in the Catholic calendar; he is the only angel canonized before this century (approx. 7th century)

- His name means “God Heals” In the eastern church he is seen as a guardian of the sick, warding off disease and death with his sword.

- He is the leader of the heavenly host and the one who bound Satan and cast him into the deep. St. Michael is the protector of Christians in general and soldiers in particular. His sword of light cannot be defeated.

- Many churches dedicated to him built on high places (Mt. Saint-Michel in France, St. Michael’s Mount in Britain, etc). An association with heavenly heights, but also with the old fairy-mounds — a Celtic/Christian Lord of Souls who guides the dead to the otherworld. Thus the reference in the old spiritual, “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” as a prayer for passage out of this world to the sweet apple-island of immortality.

***

WHO IS MANANNAN?

- Mannann Mac Lir is Son of Lir, the Sea

- Lord of the joyous otherworld which lies across or beneath the sea.

- The sea is a flowery plain to him; the waves his steeds. “For the space of nine waves he would be submerged in the sea, but would rise on the crest of the tenth without wetting his chest or breast.”

- His boat is called Wave Sweeper, travelling equally on sea and land.

- He is the best of pilots.

- Caused favorable weather and good crops.

- Guardian of Irishmen in foreign parts.

- Ruler of the autumn equinox, now celebrated as Michaelmas (9/23)

- Able to transform himself at will, much as Curoi mac Daire the king of Caer Sidi. His magic cape makes him invisible at will.

- His wife is Fand, the most beautiful of the Sidhe (the fairy-folk, Tuatha de Danaan). Waves are also referred to as “the locks of Manannan’s wife.” When Manannan abandons her she takes up with the Irish hero Cuchulainn. Fand and the mortal Emer fight over the hero; Manannan repents and asks for Fand back. He passes a cloak between Cuchulainn and Fand so they will never meet again.

- Entertains all who come to him with an inexhaustible meal: His immortal ale preserves against disease and old age, his immortal pigs are killed and eaten one day and live the next, his cup breaks if a lie is spoken.

- Has a silver bough of golden apples that, when shaken, produce such sweet music that the wounded, sick and sorrowful forget their pains and are lulled to sweet sleep.

- The wearers of his armor and sword are invulnerable. His sword “The Retaliator” never fails to slay, and he has two other swords named “Great Fury” and “Little Fury.” His 2 spears are called Yellow Shaft and Red Javelin. On his helmet shines 2 magic jewels bright as the sun.

***

My backward glance at Michaelmas goes back through my history into the mysteries of Michael and Manannan, down their paternal coil into the heart of the sea. (Remember, an orca-rider mounts my father’s primal bardic coat of arms, the very mythologem of song--three drinking horns crested by the dolphin rider; the motto is Not by Providence but Victory, every artist’s exultant mass upon the back of the whale.) May sights harrow, fructify, sing:

***

MICHAELMAS 2005 (2)


My every sense rejoices in the dark
soak of this early hour, salt-seeming
and moon-milky: Amniotics
bathe the garden, our cat in the window,
this pen in hand. Your faintest surf
washes through what crickets chirr
this late in summer, faint, fading,
divine. Far to the west Hurricane
Rita maels round toward a coast
which will hurt us all but good.
Will we have enough gas to drive
to work come Monday? Can the
richest country on earth afford
to keep borrowing from its future
to pay for hubris? Surely He who
drenches me in this noctal womb
has alms to calm His angst, some
fitting sacrifice to bury in this chair
that bones resolve what aims dissolve.
Though the rains have stopped here
at last, it doesn’t mean that angels
aren’t still falling beyond all measure
known to heaven. It doesn’t mean that
stillness is not an arm tensed at its
rearmost degree and is one word
from Him from hurling the hammer
which shatters us for good. I would
have every tunny and wave of Your
first leagues, blue master: but You
can keep that low abysmal hall
the soak cathedrals with a roar.
Baptismal of oceans, wake me to shores
that don’t hinge on dooms, like doors.


MANANNAN AND THE
WOMAN OF THE SOUTH

Manannan comes to Iona with a mortal woman from the south of Ireland. She loves the island in the fair weather of September and October (months sacred to Manannan) but when winter sets in she nearly dies of homesickness. Manannan transforms her into a seal where she lives happily among the waves and rocks for the cold months and returns to her form as a maiden in the fair months.


SKELLIG MICHAEL

January 2005


Looking back from the great civilizations
of 12th-century France or 17th-century
Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite
a long time -- almost a hundred years --
Western Christianity survived by clinging
to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle
of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast,
rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.

-- Kenneth Clark

Here is your most desolate
shore of rock, southwest
of all we build and till
and love: What a brutal
bed it is, O Lord,
500 feet of stone perched
above a sea-blast
which choirs below
all dreams with the
blessed thunder
of salt’s destiny.
You bid me build
this oratory beyond
all ears, joining my
voice to mashing waves
and a legion of gales,
each note not so
much offered as ripped
from my lips. Here
the oldest gods are
ravenous and raw,
their bones knocking
like boulders against
first rock, fucking
and dismembering
and roaring pure blue
riot, foaling water-dragons
of the tongue I dare not
speak but must because
this hour derives its
gospel from such abyss.
O God it’s lonely here
between angel wing
and heartless tide,
my song a rock
gnawed by appetites
which have no human
end, or, at least
for which few people
I have known would
care to bend their
inner ear. So be it,
ten waves I daily row:
I will make of this
mote in the sea’s
eternal eye a chapel
for every selkie and
child of Lir to lose
their wits on their
way here, long ago
today and perhaps
tomorrow, perhaps
as long as this rock
remains at the last
shore of the heart.


MANANNAN AND ST. COLUMBA


St. Columba breaks a chalice and sends a servant to have it repaired. The servant encounter Manannan on his way and the god magically restores the chalice. The god sends the servant back to Columba with question: would he achieve Christian immortality? When the servant shows Columba the healed chalice and submits the god’s question, the ungrateful saint replies, “There is no forgiveness for a man who does such works as this!” The servant returns to Manannan with the answer, who broke out into indignant lament. “Woe is me, Manannan mac Lir! For years I’ve helped the Catholics of Ireland, but I’ll do it no more, till they’re weak as water. I’ll go to the gray waves in the Highlands of Scotland.”

Ironically, when Columba dies there is a sudden shaft of light in his cell; it is said that St. Michael (Manannan) came and spirited the soul of the saint to heaven. (Which heaven, we might ask: Celtic or Christian?)


PSALM FOR MICHAEL

Michaelmas 2004

O holy Micheal
warden of the deep
Protector of the prow
passing homeward
through my days

Exult your tide
behind me as I write;
connect the shores
of the next poem
with your vast keep

And blue its bones
with the wash
of lower heavens,

That these ribs
joist and tenon
a chapel for every

ocean traveller
who’s lost the
sound of shores.

Be thou here
the suck and draw
of that homeward tide
of lovers, sots and
sailors as we crash
and ebb our sojourns;

Write thy psalms
upon this beach
so pale and ghostly
before first light,
lamped by the
high-flung ice of stars.

Surge your salt-white
horse inside these lines
and I’ll not look back
to see if your tidal
thunder is real or no.

God of wet surrender,
slake your thirst
on these dry pages,
and I will ferry
you to distant days:

-- today, for one,
perhaps tomorrow,
til silence drowns
the page.


THE FEAST
OF ST. MICHAEL

2004

The blessed: they gathered their lives,
but He Himself gathered them up, in order to
utterly return them to the vast things of this world:
the wind, the animals and the many colored wreath
which binds all things together, Next To next to
Next To.
-- from “The Blessed,” Ranier Maria
Rilke, transl. Franz Wright

After the great storms passed
leaving lakes and rivers
to swarm the banks
with heaven’s full receipt,
it was no longer summer
but a time of dark heavier
than still-sunny days,
thicker too despite
soft afternoon breezes,
voweled and rowed by
this feast of St. Michael.
I see him spreading his
bright pale blue wings
overhead at 5 a.m.
his lucence composed
of sea-phosphor and
the milky scree of heaven.
He’s piloting the moon
surely toward the nextmost
isle of this next year,
ferrying the clench
and riot of summer past
toward home, piled now with
the leafy wrack of winds.
Amazing that it can be
so still this morning,
the moony sky almost
porcelain and the garden
outside like a black
elven lace, older than
all storms, more ripe
now than I have words
to say, unfurling in its
purple and pale white
flowers a quiet music
wider, wilder even, than
any angel’s star-brocaded
wings. They’re singing
boat songs for the
great water loosed by
hurricanes as it
harrows and dreams
down through the
limestone shelves below,
down into the vast vault
of the aquifer where
Michael tides and
shores us all.


BRAN AND MANANNAN


(from Alwyn and Brinsley Rees, Celtic Heritage)


Manannan is on his way to Ireland where he will beget Mongan upon the wife of Fiachna, and he prophesies the coming of Christ to save the world from the sin of Adam.

“Steadily then let Bran row,
It is not far to the Land of the Women,
Emne with its many hues of hospitality
You will reach before the setting of the sun!”

Bran goes his way and comes to the Island of Joy, where he sees a large crowd of people all laughing and gaping. He sends a man ashore and the man begins to gape with the others, heedless of the calls of his comrades. So they leave him there.

Before long they reach the Land of the Women. The leading woman greets him: “Come hither on land, O Bran son of Febal. Welcome is your coming.” She throws a ball of thread which cleaves to Bran’s hand, and she pulls the boat ashore by the thread. They enter a large house where there is a bed for every couple, even thrice nine beds, and the food that is put before them does not diminish. “It seemed a year to them that they were there; it was really many years.” Then one of the company becomes homesick, and Bran is persuaded to depart. The woman says they will regret it, warns them not to touch land, and directs them to pick up the man left on the Island of Joy.

They approach the land of Ireland at Srub Brain, where there is an assembly of people. Bran tells the assembly that he is Bran son of Febal, but they know no such man, though the Voyage of Bran is in their ancient stories. The homesick man jumps ashore, but as he touches the ground he becomes a heap of ashes, as though he had been dead for many hundreds of years. Bran tells the assembled people all his wanderings and he writes the verses in ogam. Then he bids them farewell. “And from that hour his wanderings are not known.”


Elegy - Seamus heaney

The God in the Sea Greets Bran
In the Land of the Waves

Seamus Heaney

(from the Eighth-Century Irish “Voyage of Bran”)

When Bran and his companions had been at sea for two days and two nights, they saw a man in a chariot coming toward them over the sea. The man sang to them and made himself known, saying he was Manannan. These are some of the verses he sang:

Bran is astonished at the beauty of the waters;
his coracle lifts on the clear wave.
I ride where he rows; my chariot plunges, I
surge through a blossoming plain.

Bran rolls with his boat, the sea lifts and
lays him, he leans to the prow.
My chariot axle threshes a surf of wildflowers,
my wheels are spattered with flower juice.

Bran sees the backs of the waves like the quick
backs of dolphins; the sea surface glitters.
I see greensward, wild roses and clover,
the pelt of the grazing.

You look and next thing salmon leap out
of the foam; mother-wet silver.
They are my calves, my calves’ licks, my
lambs, my bleating cavorters.

One chariot, one charioteer—me at full tilt—
that’s all you can see.
You are blind to what’s here. The land is a drumming
of hoofbeats, a mane-flow, a host at full gallop.

The land is immense, we swarm in its
bounty, it flourishes for us.
You are welcome; from the prow, gather up
the fruit of the branches.

Men and women, lovely, at ease among
windfalls. No sin and no forcing.
They rise off the forest floor, they pour
out the wine.

We are from the beginning, won’t grow
old or go under the earth.
We cannot imagine debility; we
are unmarked by guilt.

BRAN AND MANANNAN

2004

Our kiss to me is velvet slush,
A door to wild infinities.
To you the door is also there
But opens to your dream home, the
Order and security of days,
Bright flowers on a tabletop
I’d sweep violently away
To swive you merrily, then eat
Dinner there with great repast, and
Take you up to bed for a last
Toddy, leaving the mess for day.
Ah but the care of things is just
The point of your love, an eros of
Things laced with a cat’s even grace.
Yet our far hearts still make one race.


ST. MICHAEL AND MANANNAN

1995

Based on the drawing by William Blake
of St. Michael binding Satan

1.
St. Michael to Manannan

He was part of the darkness
that was once my own.
But you bid me rise
so many leagues
that he became
my abandoned depth.
I think of him now
like the amputee
who wakes cupping
a breast in the dream
of a trembling hand.
Once he tried
to drag me home
and we fought halfway
to the bottom of the sea.
As we wrestled
my hair grew white
and his eyes
slit to dragon coals.
The waters
boiled round us
in a terrible swirl,
chasing sea
beasts to the broken
porches of Atlantis.
When I finally
broke his hold
and fettered him
in your chains,
his face sank
the thousand
leagues of grief.
Often these days
I think of him
disappearing into
those silt shadows.
My heart at least
has never been a blade.
You've built your walls
and towers now,
demanding a new
heaven of Gothic stone.
But understand
that each time
I intercede for you
and jam my white
sword in to
the bloody hilt,
an ancient narwhal
suddenly breaks
the sea to pierce
God in the back.

2.
Manannan to St. Michael

When the last lock
snapped into
the links of doom
and he rose like
a white sword
to the sky,
I fell into deep
chill moodier
than any fairy spell.
The waters darkened
about me in a cloak
that forever hid
me from your view.
To me you portioned
hoof and horn,
the least parts of
the king's stag.
You paupered
my waves with
cunning boats.
Banished from
the cities to hide in
distant hills and islands,
I became a sleek
captain of absence,
forced to ply my
trade in dream
and sensual smoke.
My gold meadows
blazed to stubbled char.
I understand
that every time
I meet him the white
sword wins all.
Ah, but if you only
understood how those
losses make me strong!
I ripen on a vine that curls
about your sickness,
sorrow and death.
If you would only love
the gall now chilling
into winter, the gates
of my damnation
would forever close.
Perhaps then
the white prince
and I could resume
our song upon that
apple branch
where the fruit is
sweet and cold
and heavy as sleep,
where each bite
fills the mouth with moon,
and the juice runs darkly
down God's uncertain smile
the way eternal lovers
find the greatest grace
exactly where they fail.