‘Sarabande’ – Vital Statistics of a Fantasy Novel

So far, this blog has discussed a lot of the symbolism and location settings in my contemporary fantasy novel Sarabande (Vanilla Heart Publishing, August, 2011). Now, as a change of pace, here are a few “vital” statistics that represent the kind of, well, trivia, that doesn’t lend itself to a post for each weird item.

1. I began writing Sarabande during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) on November 1, 2010. No, I didn’t write 50,000 of the novel’s 80,503 words in 30 days. But, NaNoWriMo got me started.
2. The character Sarabande was first introduced in The Sun Singer (2004).  Her demeanor is loosely based on that of an old friend from many years ago.
3. While I don’t mention the make and model of the box-like van driven in the novel by Billy, it’s a 1964 Ford Thames, based on the van I drove in Glacier National Park in 1964 delivering spring water to Many Glacier Hotel after the water pipes were knocked out by the June flood that year.
4. The “Garden of Heaven” location mentioned in Sarabande is a place name suggested for a valley in Glacier Park, Montana, in 1924. However, the name never gained a following, so you won’t find it on any map. I have hiked through there many times, enjoying the wildflowers, surrounding mountains and the name’s symbolism.
5. If I were an all-powerful Hollywood mogul (do they have moguls any more?) producing Sarabande, I would select Clint Eastwood as the director and also cast him in the role of Billy. Anjelica Huston would play Gem, Mila Kunis would play Sarabande, Fergie would play Dryad, and Noah Wylie (though he’s a bit old for the part) would play Robert Adams.
6. The character Gem was introduced in The Sun Singer. I always visualized Gem as looking like the cover picture on Anna Lee Waldo’s 1978 novel Sacajawea.
7. The names of the chapters are based on (and named after) the lunar illumination phases of the moon.
8. Sarabande’s experiences mirror those from the myth of the Sumerian goddess Inanna’s descent to the underworld.
9. While writing the dream/vision sequence in which Sarabande floats down the Missouri River, I used Google Earth and flew along the river’s course as though I were in a low-flying plane. I had Map Quest open as well to help me keep the cities and towns straight. (Just after Sarabande was released, my wife and I saw the river from the air on a Delta flight between Nevada and Minnesota; I was happy to see that the real river looked like the Google Earth river.)
10. I used an online flight plan site for general aviation pilots to plot some portions of Sikimí’s flight. I had to be a bit creative in entering the kind of “aircraft” I had since aircraft fuel and speed specifications are used to compute times, distances and available airfields along a proposed route.
11. The red rose Sarabande sees when she steps into the cabin between worlds is a Cramoisi Superieur, an old variety of China Rose.  The rose, as a symbol of the soul, represents the main character’s potential and actual transformation.
12. The encounter between Sarabande and Robert Adams in Fairview Park in Decatur, Illinois was written based not only of memories of the park but on maps showing the exact location of roads, lakes and specific trees. The same is true for the neighborhood where Robert Adams lived. (I am a fanatic when it comes to precise detail.)
13. Othello, the Friesian who played Goliath in the 1985 film Ladyhawke was a role model for Sikimí. For Friesian horse lovers, Ladyhawke is a wonderful quest movie featuring (sadly) horrid music and (happily) a lot of footage of Captain Navarre (Rutger Hauer ) on his high-stepping horse.
14. I listened to Mary Youngblood’s wonderful native flute music in “Beneath the Raven Moon” while writing both Sarabande and Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey. (My muse liked the music, too.)
15. Since I can’t even keep up with today’s slang, I had little hope of remembering teenager slang from 1983 for some of Robert Adam’s dialogue. So, for a bit of inspiration, I went to a handy web site called “Fads & Trends in 1983″  If you were a teenager in 1983, perhaps you said bogus when you meant “not good” or don’t have a cow when you meant chill out.  Since Sarabande came from the universe next door, her wardrobe did not include tight stonewashed jeans, China flats or the “Cyndi Lauper Look.”

–Malcolm

Writing a Novel or Short Story? Sweep Your Readers Away!

What are your three favorite novels?

Literary agent Donald Maas asks prospective writers this question in Writing the Breakout Novel. Maas says that “a great novel is like a great love affair” because it’s so vivid and intense, and leaves you with a lifetime of memories. Your three favorite novels will be like this. One way or another, they will sweep you off your feet with larger than life themes, characters or settings.

If you’ve read The Lord of the Rings or, more recently, seen the feature films, then you know what Maas is talking about when he says: “Probably all of your favorites are novels that swept you away, whisked you into their worlds, transported you to other times or places, and held you captive there.”

The world must be convincing, writes Maas. When I read such movels as The Lord of the Rings, The Night Circus, The Tiger’s Wife, The Shadow of the Wind, and The Prince of Tides, I feel that I am in a real place—even if it flowed completely out of the writer’s imagination like Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Whether it’s the remarkable scenery in Peter Jackson’s films or the descriptions of the Shire and Mordor in the original books, The Lord of the Rings definitely transports readers to a place that’s very different from their own neighborhoods and their morning commutes to work.

More Than Name Dropping

When languages are taught through immersion techniques, students are plunged right into them rather than trying to learn by making lists of handy phrases and frequently used nouns and verbs. Likewise, place settings in novels work best when the author imagines a fictional place (or remembers an actual location) and figuratively stands in the middle of it while telling his or her story.

Sadly, I have seen a fair number of stories set in exotic locations fall a part because the author gave me no sense of being there, opting instead to resort to name dropping. That is, s/he either picked up a guidebook to, say, Paris or Rome or London, and started listing the names of famous streets, restaurants, and tourist attractions.

Or, perhaps s/he looked at the travel itinerary from a recent trip to that place. This is the easy way out and it doesn’t really work because it’s really just a laundry list of words that will give readers a lightweight impression of an exotic locale without taking them there.

When I traveled to Europe many years ago, I used an earlier version of a Frommer’s travel guide. It kept me from getting lost and reminded me of some great places to visit that I may have otherwise forgotten. For a writer, such a guide is beginning. By itself, it’s not the kind of source book you need to transport either your characters or your readers into the place where your novel or short story is set.

In his comments about Jan Morris’ book Destinations in a feature article that appeared in The Telegraph last fall, Pico Iyer wrote: “Suddenly you’re not just seeing but hearing, feeling, sensing Washington,  Panama, South Africa, as they look today but also as they may seem a hundred years from now. How many writers have been able to take a place and weave a thousand details and feelings and moments into a single near-definitive portrait, which almost seems to stand outside of time?”

This close-up love of a place that reaches all the senses is what the novelist needs if s/he hopes to sweep readers away. When the story is told from the perspective of a believable place, then perhaps the reader feels a bit of culture shock or jet lag when s/he stops reading and puts down the book for the night. S/he appeared to be sitting in his favorite chair or propped up in bed. In reality, s/he was in a faraway place and for a short while that place was more real than the reader’s real life location.

Getting Back to Your Favorite Novels

When you look at the characters, plots, themes and places in your favorite novels, it’s not for the purpose of mimicking them. As you consider what story you want to tell and just how and where you will tell it, your reasons for being attracted to certain novels are a clue to where your passions are. What inspires you? What stays on your mind long after a story has been told? When you know this, then you’ll be able to internalize your characters and settings in such a way that they will flow out onto the page with the power to sweep readers away.

–Malcolm

Post Script – Several Examples of Places That Come Alive

The Prince of Tides: “Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold….The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, the depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks.”

The Shadow of the Wind: “As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness.  I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever.  I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”

The Night Circus: “The ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.”

The Fellowship of the Ring: “The chasm was long and dark, and filled with the noise of wind and rushing water and echoing stone. It bent somewhat towards the west so that at first all was dark ahead; but soon Frodo saw a tall gap of light before him, ever growing. Swiftly it drew near, and suddenly the boats shot through, out into a wide clear light.”

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Learning how to see

“Then, I think there is a looking with your whole body as if there were tentacles that sense and touch the totality of the thing you’re looking at so that the tree stops being leaves, branches, roots. It starts becoming a clustering, a gathering, a drooping, a lifting, a turning.” – artist Jane Rosen in Parabola Magazine

“When you ‘see’ there are no longer familiar features in the world.  Everything is new.  Everything has never happened before.  The world is incredible.” – Carlos Castaneda

“Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth – our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. – David Abram

The protagonists in my novels are all learning to see the world as it is rather than as they think it is. Robert Adams (The Sun Singer,) David Ward (Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey) and Sarabande (Sarabande) face many challenges in their novels. Those challenges are called the plot. The plots of novels are often distilled to their essential focus in the publisher’s or author’s description found on Amazon and Barnes & Noble:

Robert: Now he must resurrect his dangerous gift to fulfill his promise, uncover the true secret of Julianne’s death, undo the deeds of his grandfather’s foul betrayer, subdue brutal enemy soldiers in battle, and survive the trip home. The journey is a physical one: mountain trails, a resistance group fighting a tyrannical king, a vision quest on a mountain peak.

David: After he lands a teaching job at a small college in central Illinois, he suspects he was conjured there by a woman standing in the moonlight on Moon Hill. Siobhan, the wise woman in his life tells he will never understand what has happened to him until he can answer the question: “who tried to kill me and why?” As a “light-dancer,” he remembers well the alchemists’ guiding principle: “By fire is nature renewed whole.” He suspects all paths lead to that point.

Sarabande: She leaves the mountains of Montana for the cornfields of Illinois on a black horse to seek help from Robert Adams, the once powerful Sun Singer, in spite of Gem’s prophecy of shame. One man tries to kill her alongside a deserted prairie road…one tries to save her with ancient wisdom… and Robert tries to send her away. Even if she persuades Robert to bring the remnants of his magic to Dryad’s shallow grave, the desperate man who follows them desires the Rowan staff for ill intent… and the malicious sister who awaits their arrival desires much more than a mere return to life.

In order to survive the plots they find themselves within, each of these characters must learn a great deal about himself or herself. The world as it is is their greatest teacher. Survival—in fiction as in life—depends upon our  learning that as long as we are looking at the world, we are blind to it. Looking is a one-sided, often-arrogant approach to everything and everyone who is not us. Seeing only occurs when we stop looking, when we participate with all that is not us in the creation of the world around us.

As you read The Sun Singer, Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey, and Sarabande, I invite you to see what my characters are learning to see: the vast wonder that often hides in front of our eyes.

–Malcolm

If You’re A Muggle, Snap Out Of It

“Why is it, for some of us, we are blind to Harry’s world of dragons, magical folk and interesting creatures symbolizing some of life’s mysteries? It is because our Muggle society has created so many walls separating people, places, cultures, religions etc., that we cannot see the mysteries for what they truly are. Love, respect, wisdom, truth, courage and hope are some of the magical elements needed to form the foundation of a more healthy society.” –  Susanne Iles in “Mythology, Magic and Muggles”

Myth and fantasy remind us that there’s more to the world than Muggles.

Down through the ages, Muggles have been almost all powerful, convincing us (among other things) that seeing is believing, nothing lasts forever, and that things that go up must come down.

Through our stories, we have (down through the ages) managed to keep the Muggles from going from almost all powerful to all powerful. We continue to believe in magic even though (most of the time) we’re not quite sure how to prove  that it’s real. Of course, what’s the use in that anyway? We don’t need to prove it to ourselves and Muggles refuse to believe even the evidence they can see:

1. Little baby ducks
2. Kodak moments
3. Rain drops on roses
4. Your lover’s eyes
5. Old pickup trucks
6. The morning and the evening star
7. Whiskers on kittens
8. Sex, drugs and rock and roll
9. Slow moving trains
10. Twilight shadows
11. Bright copper kettles
12. Poems, prayers and promises
13. Rain
14. Bird songs
15. Cream colored ponies
16. Little country streams
17. Sunrise and sunset
18. Woods on snowy evenings
19. Hugs and kisses
20. Crisp apple strudels
21. Memories, dreams and reflections
22. Babies’ smiles
23. Wind on a summer night
24. Candles
25. Light in the forest

If you’re not a Muggle, I know you can add to this list. If you are a Muggle, snap out of it…or as Susanne says much more eloquently, “It’s time to overcome the Muggle mindset and reclaim the magic in our lives.”

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You may also like: Shhh, I write hero’s journey and heroine’s journey novels

- Malcolm

Book Note: ‘The Alchemy of Dance’ by Leslie Zehr

“Sacred dance is as ancient as creation itself,” writes Leslie Zehr in The Alchemy of Dance: Sacred Dance as a Path to the Universal Dancer. “Dance is intrinsic to women as a form of expression.”

According to Zehr, the intention behind the dance separates sacred dance from other forms. The energies are different through our chakras, connecting us to heaven and earth and raising our vibrations.

Complete with drawings showing dance positions, The Alchemy of Dance associates the movements and intentions of dance with alchemy, archetypes and the Tarot. The last card in the Tarot’s Major Arcana, called Universe or World, can also be thought of as the Universal Dancer.

World - Wikipedia

According to Zehr, “In alchemy our goal is to become the Universal Dancer, to reach that point of fusion, complete integration, the gold often called enlightenment. In the Alchemy of Dance we reach that point through sacred dance, we become one one with the music and everything around us. We are in a complete state of no mind.”

Origins of the  Book

Leslie Zehr’s personal journey includes the study and teaching of esoteric wisdom, sacred dance, herbal healing and Reiki. At first, she was reticent about discussing the “very primordial, very experiential” concepts and movements of dance in a book: what she taught in classes seemed to be “beyond words.”  However, when her students sought background information and reminders about the movements and their associations, the book was born.

Zehr’s information about movements and positions follows the Major Arcana cards in a Tarot deck, beginning with the Fool (intiate). Dancers on the path learn, for example, that the Magician knows universal laws and how they work, and that the High Priestess, as the gods’ messenger, “connects us to the feminine aspects of the Divine.”

This slim volume presents a fair number of concepts, all of which should be helpful to readers who take the time to experiment with the positions and movements and follow their own knowledge and intuition toward the emptiness and empowerment of dance.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of magical realism and contemporary fantasy, including “Sarabande.”

contemporary fantasy for your Nook

‘Sarabande’ listed in Preditors & Editors™ Poll

The annual Preditors & Editors™ Readers’ Poll  is now in progress through January 10th. Sarabande is currently tied for 16th in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels category. If you enjoyed the novel, click here to cast a vote for it. My name is spelled incorrectly in the listing, but that doesn’t matter. In fact, the novel is listed twice: this kind of thing can happen when one tries to correct a listing. (The listing in the running seems to be the one which has my name spelled wrong.)

While you’re on the Preditors & Editlors site, make sure to vote for novels, stories and sites in other categories. You will be asked to confirm each vote by e-mail. This follow-up keeps people from filling up the ballot boxes with multiple votes.

Thanks for your support,

Malcolm

You may also like: A River Runs Through It - My love of rivers flows through the novel.

“From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.” – Jacques Cousteau

A River Runs Through It

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” – Norman Maclean

Lake, Angel Wing and Glacier where the story begins and ends

Water is the earth’s blood, carried through veins called rivers into the ocean which is the Earth’s heart. Some philosophers claim that the human mind is not held within the brain, but within the blood. So, too, perhaps the mind of the Earth can be found within water. We are, I think, in large part defined by how we view water, how we treat it, respect it, drink it, conserve it, and find beauty in all it reflects.

“Don’t you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it’s in the sea, and it’s homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.” -  Zora Neale Hurston

Sarabande is carried, nourished and purified by water because rivers run through this novel in reality and in symbol. The word “river” appears in Sarabande 428 times because water is feminine element and symbolic of journeys and the unconscious and the movement of everything, including earth itself, from place to place.

While Billy spoke softly about the ancient ice, builder of the Prairie Pothole Region of the Great Plains that encompassed the Sandhills where the Great Mystery flew with pelicans and cormorants, water, the menstrual blood of the Goddess, carried Sarabande away, and she dreamt of a river.

When you stand at the summit of Triple Divide Mountain in Montana’s Glacier National Point, you can pour a cup of water there that will flow in part toward the Pacific Ocean, Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. As I wrote Sarabande, I found myself very conscious of water, where it came from, and where it went. Some of the water begins its journey in the glacier that lies along the continental divide beneath a spur of rock called the Angel Wing, and that is where the novel begins.

Missouri

When Sarabande is assaulted near a creek—an actual creek that flows beneath U. S. Highway 2 in Montana—the water flowing past her damaged self begins its journey in the high country and much of it ends up in the Mni Sose (the Lakota name for the Missouri).  Sarabande follows that water in both reality and imagination.

There was sadness in Mni Sose’s song, but not resignation, as she felt the waters coming closer and merging nearby with the water that poured out of the glacier beneath the Angel Wing and flowed eastward across the plains on a winding course.

Later, when Sarabande and Robert Adams leave central Illinois, their great black horse carries them over the Sangamon River where I waded as a child and where Robert floated on a raft. Robert tells her that the name Sangamon comes from those called the “Keepers of the Fire” and means Good Earth.

Sikimí aimed for the water, splattering clouds and water upward into a towering spray when his back legs struck the Sangamon of the good earth and created a rolling wake. As the wake engulfed the boat, Dohver yelled at them, demanding, imploring, and warning. He shouted, “Return to Fairview Park or you will die in the Garden of Heaven.” Then the boat tipped over in Sikimí’s wake. When Dohver fell, Sikimí leapt into the low clouds, changed course, and the river fell away into a quilt of corn, oats, and narrow roads.

Sangamon

In ther later chapters of the novel, important scenes are set next to a Glacier Park river whose name I have fictionalized into The River of Sky. This river was the scene of an important battle in The Sun Singer. During that battle, Sarabande killed her sister Dryad in self defence and that is what led to the ghost that haunted my protagonist at the beginning of Sarbande.

Apí’si shouted at her telepathically and with a voice while she was saying the words “Arch of Time” and feeling the pull of the wind. Apí’si’s high-pitched barking tore into her heart as a warning and a goodbye, followed quickly by a wet tongue in her face. Instinctively, she hugged her Coyote sister just as time and winds wrenched her free of the river’s soft arms.

Sarabande’s story is a circle, and she is carried by blood and water from start to finish because a river runs through it.  Listen, you can hear the voice of the Earth from the sound of rain and surf and splashing fish and waterfalls.

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” – Loren Eiseley

–Malcolm

Review: ‘Cinder’ by Marissa Meyer

“Cinderella is one of the most recognized stories around the world. The themes from the story appear in the folklore of many cultures. Sources disagree about how many versions of the tale exist, with numbers ranging from 340 to over 1,500 if all of the picture book and musical interpretations are included.” — History of Cinderella

In her debut young adult novel Cinder (Feiwel & Friends, January 3, 2012) Marissa Meyer has taken an eleven-hundred-year-old story and wrapped it in the tattered fabric of a future society called New Beijing. Cinder has a suitable resume: persecuted heroine, deceased parents, ungrateful and nasty stepfamily, dirty clothes, and–since she is a cyborg–a very important electromechanical foot.

The sixteen-year-old Cinder is legally bound by law to her stepmother Adri who, like many humans, views cyborgs as second-class citizens. As a talented mechanic, Cinder plies her trade out of a booth in the city market when she is not stuck at home maintaining the family’s equipment from cantankerous netscreens to a constantly broken-down hovercraft.

While Cinder works, Adri and her two human daughers Peony and Pearl are busy creating wondrous gowns for the upcoming ball. They hope to dance with Prince Kai, and would be shocked to discover that their ragamuffin servant actually met the handsome prince when he stopped by her booth with a broken android in need of repair.

Cinder is too practical to admit that she might be smitten with the prince even if the prince might be smitten with her. Such things are forbidden. Why would the prince risk his reputation being seen with a cyborg, much less dancing with her? Her practicality reminds her that even if she dressed herself up in fancy clothes and came to a ball it would be obvious to everyone she was out of place.

Meyer adds danger and intrigue to her story with a deadly plague and an invasion threat from the independent empire on the moon, both of which hit Cinder very close to home. Billed as Book One of “The Lunar Chronicles,” this appealing mix of fairytale and science fiction reads well. Cinder is an appealing, if a bit grease-stained, protagonist who uses intelligence and skill to navigate through the undertain tides of princes, plagues and stepmothers.

Truth be told, I wanted a fairytale ending and wondered as I read the final line if the novel ended with a very muted happily ever after because of an impending sequel. Nonetheless, Marissa Meyer spins a fine tale that will probably make you forget the last version of the Cinderella story you read.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of contemporary fantasy and magical realism novels, including Sarabande.

Winter’s Waiting Wonder Child

“At first I was little Gwion, and obtained my inspiration from the cauldron of the hag Ceridwen. Then for nine months almost I was in  Ceridwen’s belly. At length I became Taliesin. ‘Johannes’ I was called and Merlin the Diviner, and Elias, but at length every King shall call me Taliesin.” – Hanes Taliesin

Traditionally, people have feared Winter’s cold darkness, turning to bonfires and hearths for the comfort of light and warmth. In spite of the excitement of winter sports and the family oriented celebrations between Thanksgiving and Twelfth Night, most people just don’t like the cold weather, wintertime driving conditions and high heating bills. So, we are in a hurry for spring. Science and technology—as I wrote in my novel Sarabande—draw us away from magic and the long-felt meanings of the phases of the moon and the changing seasons.

While I do not plan to exchange my house for a dark, winter wood nor return to my Celtic ancestors’ way of life back in the days of Merlin and Arthur, the old ways and the old stories still impact the way I see the world in a modern age. The Winter Solstice marks the first day of winter as well as the moment in the great wheel of the year when the waxing sun overcomes the waning sun. Some symbolize this as a struggle between the Holly King (the Creator’s “death aspect”) and the Oak King (the aspect of the Divine Child’s rebirth.) Others tell the story with the mythic characters of their own choosing, culture and religion.

While our spiritual practices are quite varied, they often contain an overlay from the natural pagan focus of an earlier day, bringing holly, Yule logs, and pine boughs into houses filled with candles and twinkling lights.  Our pragmatic modern age has drawn us away from the forest and farm, so it often takes some effort to recall what the old symbols mean and then to explore them separately from their original environment.

If we still lived on the land, the cycles of the year from germination to leafing to flowering to fruiting would more apparent. We would know from our own experience of the land and its crops that Winter is a time of potential and sleep leading to rebirth.

The Wonder Child

My favorite symbols of the changing seasons come out of the medieval Welsh poem Hanes Taliesin that was included by Lady Charlotte Guest in her English translation of the Mabinogion. (This pre-Christian mythic “Tale of Taliesin” shouldn’t be confused with work of the historical British poet of the same name.) In The White Goddess, Robert Graves refers to Hanes Taliesin as a riddle poem because its highly cryptic and symbolic lines have been transcribed out of order to conceal its presentation of the Wisdom teachings of the mystery schools.

The schools’ Wisdom teachings were, of course, an initiatory reenactment of what was viewed as the soul’s journey in a lifetime, figuratively speaking from seed to fruit. In the story, the Great Mother Ceridwen had knowledge and inspiration for her son Avagddhu that she prepared in a cauldron out of a mixture of twenty two herbs and other ingredients in boiling water. The process was lengthy, requiring each ingredient to be added at the height of its potency.

While stirring the mixture, her servant Gwion Bach accidentally tasted three drops that spluttered out of the cauldron and landed on his tongue. When he swallowed, he suddenly became infused with the knowledge and inspiration intended for Ceridwen’s son. When he ran away, Gwion Bach went through many metamorphoses including a hare and a hawk. Whenever he changed his form, Ceridwen changed her form and stayed close behind him. Finally, when he changed himself into wheat on a threshing floor she became a hen and ate him.

She became pregnant, ultimately giving birth to a beautiful child named Taliesin whom she sent away in a skin bag (coracle). He was found and adopted and ultimately taken to the high king’s castle where he was reared in a world of bards and royalty. Foundlings who are taken to the houses of kings appear in many stories, notably the tale of Moses. In this riddle poem, Taliesin progresses through levels of education and service to King Arthur until evolves as a druid.

The Story of Taliesin is Everyone’s Story

Like a seed in the earth, Avagddhu is born in darkness, where the Light is as yet unmanifest, as the Son of the Creator and the Great Mother, and becomes through the stages if life the radiant wonder child, Taliesin. Many belief systems carry echoes of this universal story. The Tale of Taliesin begins in Winter (primordial darkness) where all possibilities originate and demonstrates for us throughout its many versions a route or a way for us to follow toward enlightenment.

The symbols of this way are around us everywhere in the cycles of the sun and moon and the great myths. With the Winter Solstice, when we cry out for warmth and light in the seemingly inhospitable snowy winter wood, the story begins. We know where it leads. Our holiday celebrations and symbols remind us of our journey and give us renewed hope.

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You may also like a similar post by my friend Smoky Zeidel called Some Thoughts on Bees and the Holiday Season. As I read Smoky’s post, I couldn’t help but remember that one of Ceridwen’s twenty two ingredients was the “suavity of bees,” referring to their sweetness and life-preserving honey.

–Malcolm

Fantasy authors’ memorable words

Those yarn spinners who dabble in fantasy and folktales and other legerdemain have brought us magical and inspiring stories since the world was young and, if we are lucky, they will continue to do so until the world is young again.

In  these tales, we experience worlds faraway and worlds within along with characters that practice every known form of the good, the bad and the ugly. Perhaps the ultimate beauty out of the universe of fantasy literature can be found within the fantasy authors’ most memorable words. Here are a few of my favorites:

• “Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality — for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it wisely.” – Terri Windling
• “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” ― Madeleine L’Engle, Many Waters
• “You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.” – Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
• “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
• “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” – Isaac Asimov, Foundation
• Having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character. – Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark
• “A rite of passage that doesn’t involve some danger is too much a gift to create confidence.” – Marge Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time
• “It is our choices, Harry, that show us what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” – Orson Scott Card
• “One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.” – Neil Gaiman, American Gods
• “Stone and sea are deep in life / Two unalterable symbols of the world / Permanence at rest / And permanence in motion / Participants in the power that remains” – Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
• “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” –  Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
• “Well,’ the Goddess said, ‘your heart didn’t heal straight the last time it broke. So we’ll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.” – Jane Yolen, The Books of Great Alta
• “There’s stories and then there’s stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you’ve heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page.” – Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot
• “There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you.” – Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
• “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” – Frank Herbert, Dune
• “And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new. ”  - Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
• “Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.” – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
• “Maybes never are.” – Anne McCaffrey, Dragonsong
• “Not all meanings are meant to be clear at once. Some ideas take time. Some words are designed to lead us on inner journeys, with truth hidden deep inside them.” – Brian Froud
• “Let us proceed under the assumption that the fairy folk do exist, and that I am not a gibbering moron.” – Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl