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| Ceridwen by Christopher Williams |
A guest post by Laura Marjorie Miller
Have you ever dreamt that you are being
pursued, and to evade your pursuer, you leap into the air? Can you recall the
form you are in when you take flight in your dream? Do you have any form? Is it
merely your consciousness sensing what is before, around, and—most
importantly—behind you? Or have you ever checked to see if you are even still
human?
The chase is an archetype engridded in our dreams,
primordial. And shapeshifting, being one of the most ancient and original forms
of magic, has to do with the understanding of creation as well as with
survival.
‘Fith-fath’ is an ancient Celtic term for a
shapeshifting spell. Fith-fath is pronounced ‘fee-fah’ and has many different
glosses: it may mean ‘shapeshifter’ and it may mean ‘effigy’ and it may mean
‘words of magic’ and it may mean ‘poetic art’ but one thing is for sure: it is
a powerful charm. And perhaps with
charms it’s best to leave alone the exact dictionary meaning of things,
otherwise you will be in the wrong frame of mind for a charm, too fixed. Not
magic enough.
Whatever it ‘means’, the fith-fath is a shamanic
spell, plunging the magic-user into the undifferentiated field of creation so
they may come out again in a different form.
Perhaps that is why the fith-fath appears
in the story of the goddess Cerridwen, whose cauldron brews the cosmic soup
from which all forms arise, and into which they dissolve. The fith-fath see-saw
plunges you deep down into the unified field and hoists you back up again as
something else. Which is why fith-fath spells are often spoken with protections
invoked, for what if you did not come back out again as you were?
A fith-fath charm was—or is, because you can still choose to use
it—of service not only to hunters, but also to warriors, travelers, and
smugglers, rendering them unrecognizable to authorities, brigands, enemies, and
animals. One translation of fith-fath is “the deer’s aspect,” for it may
originally have been a charm for hunting tribes that follow deer, to make
hunters invisible entirely or invisible by disguising them as their prey
animal.
The Carmina
Gadelica tells the story of the youth Ossian (Oisín), who, while hunting, encounters
a beautiful deer in the woods who turns out to be his mother:
‘Do
not hurt me, Ossian,’ said the hind; ‘I am thy mother under the “fīth-fãth,” in
the form of a hind abroad and in the form of a woman at home…. Come thou home
with me, thou fawn of my heart.’
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| Oison's mother running as a hind - Arthur Rackham |
So sometimes you have to be careful. Witches
are forever becoming wounded while in their fith-fath forms: a farmer shoots a
fox’s paw off in his garden and then later a woman of the village appears
without a hand. The danger is in getting hurt while in such a state, or even,
as Granny Weatherwax senses in Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies and young Arthur in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, dissolving so
much of your human self away that you have trouble returning and maybe you
never come altogether back. You may need protection.
A famous fith-fath is the hare incantation
of Isobel Gowdie, the 17th century Scottish witch, given at her
trial confession, which includes a protection:
I shall go into a hare
With sorrow and sych and meickle care;
And I shall go in the Devil’s name,
Ay while I come home again.
Gowdie invoked the Devil on the way in and
G-d on the way out:
Hare, hare, God send thee care.
I am in a hare’s likeness now,
But I shall be in a woman’s likeness
even now.
When I was little, and found these
incantations in my grandmother’s folklore books, my heart thrilled at it. I
instinctively felt the frisson of it,
the delectable danger, the enticement like an electrical outlet to a child with
a fork, and I knew that it was real. Still to this day I know.
But what was I feeling exactly? How does a
fith-fath work, and in a story or
ballad, what is its purpose for our understanding?
One place the fith-fath shows up is in the
motif and archetype of the wizard’s duel, or transformation chase. The duel or
chase, usually a test of an apprentice differentiating himself from an
overpowering master, is a motif that arises in several European fairy tale
versions, traded from fireside to fireside by travelers until it criss-crossed
the continent, from Straparola to Grimm, surfacing as well in Norway and
Denmark.
For the purposes of this essay, I’m going
to use fith-fath and wizard’s duel somewhat interchangeably, because at the
core of the archetypal myth of the transformation chase is the key to how the
fith-fath works.
The
Archetype: Cerridwen and Gwion
Cerridwen is a goddess who lives on an
island at the bottom of a lake in Wales. She has two children, one a fair
daughter, the other a dark and disfigured son named Morfran. With concern for
her son’s fate and future, the enchantress Cerridwen determines that she will
brew a potion that will ease his life by giving him gifts of sorcery. The
potion she settles upon will take a year and a day to brew, so she enlists (or
enslaves) a youth named Gwion Bach to tend the fire and stir the brew, while
she adds medicinal herbs and appropriate incantations to her cauldron throughout
the year, at optimal astrological timings.
When the time arrives for the potion to be
delivered, three drops of the brew fly out of the cauldron and burn Gwion’s
finger. He reflexively places it in his mouth to suck it cool and in that
instant absorbs all the powers of Cerridwen’s potion. There are none left for
Morfran and the cauldron explodes, draining its contents into the dirt. In some
tellings, Gwion is a rapscallion who pushes Morfran out of the way to get the
brew for himself; in others, he is an innocent bystander. I reckon that such a
powerful potion chooses its own recipient, and the drops jump of their own conscious
will, convergent with the will of fate.
Whatever the case, Gwion knows he needed to
get out of there fast. So he takes off running, with Cerridwen in hot pursuit. Racing
through a field, he realizes that as a boy he cannot outrun her, and in that
instant of airborne stride turns into a hare and hits the ground bounding. Not
to be outdone, Cerridwen shifts into a greyhound and courses Gwion until in
desperation the boy/hare hurls himself into the nearest stream, becoming a fish
the instant he hits the water. Cerridwen dives after him as a hungry otter,
chasing him in the current. Gwion leaps out of the stream and into the air,
winging for dear life, as Cerridwen explodes through the surface of the water,
drops showering from the tips of her wings, a mighty hawk. Gwion flies into a
nearby barn, lands to catch his breath on a pile of grain and then—changes himself,
or is changed, into a seed. Alighting on the pile, Cerridwen turns herself into
a great black hen, pecks him up in her beak and swallows him.
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| Gwion - by Thierry Brasseur |
The rest of the tale is how the bard
Taliesin came to be. But I will leave it there, a tale-trace, so you can hear
the shape of the striving, the severity of the testing, the desperation and wit
of the hunt.
Does something about this sound familiar,
even if you had never heard the myth?
It may put you in mind of the Wizard’s Duel
sequence in the Disney animated version of T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1963).
The
Wizard’s Duel
The Wizard’s Duel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h90ZrKj08Fc
), storyboarded by Bill Peet and animated by Milt Kahl, is a lively setpiece
between Merlin and his rival/nemesis Madam Mim (contesting who has possession
of Arthur). The combinations of animals defy ecology and grow more outlandish
as the contest escalates, introducing tigers, rhinoceroses, rattlesnakes, and
walruses to the mix, and culminating with Mim as a dragon, finally outdone by a
germ that is Merlin, who infects her.
When I was a beginning magic-user in
Nashville, my then-mentor had an ongoing rivalry with a sorcerer who used to
frequent the local English pub. The two were always putting hexes and curses on
each other (which unfortunately affected each other’s associates). My fellow
students/best friends in magic and I used to playfully refer to this as a
wizard’s duel, although in this case a reckless and immature one. But we would
make ourselves laugh at the time, imagining them as Mim and Merlin.
Unlike Gwion and Cerridwen, the Mim/Merlin duel
is a match between peers: wizards of similar stature, and practice. As with the
archetypical chase, there actually is risk involved, physical pain being traded
around, and peril, however cartoonishly it may be portrayed.
The
Fith Fath
Another occurrence of the shapeshifting
duel in art is named outright ‘Fith-Fath Song,’ composed and performed by acclaimed
pagan musician Damh (pronounced “Dave”) the Bard.
Damh makes his version a paganized riff on Isobel
Gowdie’s incantation, reworking Gowdie’s fith-fath to be a game between the
Goddess (Our Lady) and the Horned God, a competition for life between ‘their’
creatures, with a solo party representing the Lady playing against a band of
the male god’s agents:
I shall go as a wren in spring
With sorrow and sighing on silent wing
And I shall go in our Lady’s name
Aye, ‘til I come home again
Then we shall follow as falcons grey
And hunt thee cruelly for our prey
And we shall go in our Horned God's name
Aye to fetch thee home again
Then I shall go as a
mouse in May
Through fields by
night and in cellars by day
And I shall go in
our Lady's name
Aye ‘til I come home
again
Then we shall follow as black tom cats
And hunt thee through the fields and the vats
And we shall go in our Horned God's name
Aye to fetch thee home again
Then I shall go as
an autumn hare
With sorrow and
sighing and mickle care
And I shall go in
our Lady's name
Aye till I come home
again
Then we shall follow as swift greyhounds
And dog thy steps with leaps and bounds
And we shall go in our Horned God's name
Aye to fetch thee home again
Then I shall go as a
winter trout
With sorrow and
sighing and mickle doubt
And I shall go in
our Lady's name
Aye till I come home
again
Then we shall follow as otters swift
And bind thee fast so thou can’tst shift
And we shall go in our Horned God's name
Aye to fetch thee home again.
Although done by proxy, it is a contest
still between Lord and Lady, testing one state of being that preys on another
in a chase, with a churning transfiguration from form to form. The victory is
won when the Horned God’s animals bind the solo speaker so that he can no
longer access his power to transform.
The Chase
Tori Amos is a
musical mythologist, and her song ‘The Chase’ from the album Night of Hunters is the Cerridwen and
Gwion pursuit exactly, but this time played out between two females: Tori, and
an opposing voice that belongs to her daughter Tash. The aim of this
competition is “out-creation,” and the way shapeshifting is accomplished here
is described as a change in “frequency”: a conscious alteration of the
vibratory field until it can congeal so another solid state may arise.
Quickness of wit is the test, and the transformations here have an agency that
Gwion’s don’t, or may not, have: how fast and effectively can you change? How
speedily shift?
Out there are hunters
Let’s say predators
I have weapons
That could destroy them
You must out-create
It’s the only way
I am the hunter
And the hunted
Joined together
You create duality
And neutrality….
I’ll be the hare
Then I’m the
greyhound
Chasing after you
Then I will change my frequency
To a fish that thinks
Then you will find
yourself
In the paws
Of the otter
Near her jaws
Then I’ll grow my wings
As a flying thing
Flying thing, you be
warned
I’m the falcon
Watch me change
To a grain of corn
A grain of corn
Hear the alarm
In your head
I’m the hen
Black and red
And you’re in my
barn
They would have won
Use your head or
you’ll be dead.
© Tori Amos
© Tori Amos
The mettle of Tori’s
protagonist is tested by this other entity, which could be an outer challenger
or an inner voice. Whether they are distinct organisms or as polarities of the
same consciousness, the use of female voices for both competitors emphasizes
the point that regardless of distinction, the duelists in the archetype swim in
the same magic, hunter and hunted, joined together in a matter of life or
death.
Sometimes the
contest becomes gendered, especially when the fith-fath becomes a mating song.
Two Magicians
‘The Twa Magicians’
is a Child Ballad, and I particularly favor the version of it performed by
Steeleye Span on their 1974 album Now We
Are Six.
She
looked out of the window as white as any milk
And he looked in at the window as black as any silk
And he looked in at the window as black as any silk
Hello,
hello, hello, hello, you coal black smith
You have done me no harm
You never shall have my maidenhead
That I have kept so long
You have done me no harm
You never shall have my maidenhead
That I have kept so long
I'd
rather die a maid
Ah, but then she said and be buried all in my grave
Than to have such a nasty, husky, dusky, fusky, musky
Coal-black smith—a maiden I will die
Ah, but then she said and be buried all in my grave
Than to have such a nasty, husky, dusky, fusky, musky
Coal-black smith—a maiden I will die
She
became a duck, a duck all on the stream
And he became a water dog and fetched her back again
And he became a water dog and fetched her back again
She
became a star, a star all in the night
And he became a thundercloud and muffled her out of sight
And he became a thundercloud and muffled her out of sight
She
became a rose, a rose all in the wood
And he became a bumble bee and kissed her where she stood
And he became a bumble bee and kissed her where she stood
She
became a nun, a nun all dressed in white
And he became a canting priest and prayed for her by night
And he became a canting priest and prayed for her by night
She
became a trout, a trout all in the brook
And he became a feathered fly and caught her with his hook
And he became a feathered fly and caught her with his hook
She
became a corpse, a corpse all in the ground
And he became the cold clay and smothered her all around
And he became the cold clay and smothered her all around
Blacksmiths are by
nature magic, as I have written elsewhere: ‘There is an old, old belief that
blacksmiths have magical powers…. Smiths have expertise to work with what is
inorganic, the same way a witch works with organic plants and parts. They are
powerful: the groundedness of material nature itself but they also know that
nature is not static. Metal is strong, but capable of being cajoled into forms
both beautiful and useful. Smiths are elemental transformers. They go down into
something that looks solid, fluidify it, and change it. It is a return to a
primal state, a source state, a working-back in time. In the forge… what is
solid becomes fluid through flame.’ (Imbolc in the Forge: A Threefold Meditation).
In ‘Two Magicians,’ we encounter a magic-working woman who
has met her match in a smith. There is a light-heartedness and rowdy defiance, a sense of
one-upmanship to this ballad. Perhaps that mood comes from the way Steeleye
Span performs it, but it seems that the woman derives delight from staying one step
ahead of her pursuer/suitor.
And she does prevail in the end, because she dies rather than
be with him—or maybe she only temporarily becomes a corpse, to turn back into
herself later, and that’s her secret, because according to the defiant vow she
has made, these are the terms in which they will be together. That, or he really
has outlasted her and the victory is his.
There is a reading
of this ballad that could easily see the smith as an unwanted pursuer. I am
going to choose to read it—admitting this is a choice—as the woman’s way of making sure that her lover is worthy
of her. It is a way of asserting a parity between lovers, that the one who
would court you is on a par, at least as adept of a magic-user: is he as
skillful as you? Is his craft as sound and high?
It’s more than
testing, more than even “Are you worthy to be with me?” It is: “Are you as good
as I am?”
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| The Sorcerer-Shaman, cave painting in
Les Trois-Frères, France
|
The Splitting of the Archetype
What do the
incarnations of this archetype have in common (other than a predominance of
otters)?
It is fascinating to see how an archetype
splits, because that is what makes it an archetype: it is a motif that contains
multitudes, white light split by a prism: like the Empress in the Tarot deck
who splits into all the Queens. All of these frequencies and more can live in
the original myth—or the closest we can come, anyway, to the original, which
retreats back into time and past memory.
The archetype is the key. It’s fascinating
to dissect tales in their particularity and curiously to compare them, but
there has to be a deeper why to make
the pursuit truly meaningful, beyond just mental. What’s going on if we take
the fith-fath even deeper, to the
bottom of the cauldron at the bottom of the lake? Like the unified field of the
cauldron’s cosmic psychedelic brew, the archetype of Cerridwen and Gwion ties
the tale versions together. So to understand what is happening beneath the
surface of the wizard’s duel, the fith-fath, the transformation chase, we look
to what is bubbling and combining over that central fire.
Part of the excited apprehension of the
fith-fath is the way it challenges the stability of form. It presses upon us
that being a human is incidental. And that we are more connected to the rest of
creation than we may comfortably like to acknowledge.
For that’s the shamanic secret: this core
story holds within it something of eternity, of galaxies, of souls dissolving
back into the mix and then meeting each other in new forms: predator and prey
over and over in new iterations and combinations. Such an understanding gives
depth even to the madcap whimsy of Merlin and Mim. Who are the souls we always
meet? Who are our rivals and lovers, antagonists and supporters, that we keep
encountering over eons of lives? Because we in essence are shapeshifters, our
outer forms are malleable from incarnation to incarnation. And in these
different guises, we meet one another again and again.
And how, in those incarnations, do we test
each other? Even though the chase is remorseless—How do we help make each other
better, spur each other to improve, to evolve? I asked an evolutionary
biologist once what he reckoned an impala felt, being pursued by a lioness.
‘Adrenaline,’ he replied. ‘Excitement. This is one of the most important things
they exist for and what they have evolved to do.’
Strong predators help to evolve better
prey. Faster, cleverer, more adaptable prey assists the evolution of predator
species. Just as when we refine old iterations of ourselves or leave them
behind, life according to its essence is improving, on a cosmic and macrocosmic
level, spiraling ever upward, like the arms of a galaxy swirling in the brew Cerridwen
stirs.
Laura Marjorie Miller writes about myth,
travel, natural history, ocean conservation, and other soulful subjects. Her
work has appeared in such places as Utne Reader, Parabola, Faerie,
Yankee, UMass Magazine, BeYouMediaGroup.com
Picture Credits
Ceridwen - by Christopher Williams (1873-974) Wikimedia Commons
The Sorcerer-Shaman, cave painting, Les Trois-Frères, France, Wikipedia
Oisin's mother running as a hind - by Arthur Rackham
Gwion - by kind permission of Thierry Brasseur (T.Brass) http://brass.canalblog.com/archives/2005/06/16/578359.html
Picture Credits
Ceridwen - by Christopher Williams (1873-974) Wikimedia Commons
The Sorcerer-Shaman, cave painting, Les Trois-Frères, France, Wikipedia
Oisin's mother running as a hind - by Arthur Rackham
Gwion - by kind permission of Thierry Brasseur (T.Brass) http://brass.canalblog.com/archives/2005/06/16/578359.html
