Flamekeeping Shift: Intense Dreams

My flamekeeping shift started at sunset last night.

I've been having intense dreams for the past several nights, though most of them have been of a mundane nature. Last night I had two intense dreams.

The first, there was fire and a presence in the heavens, a great god whose laughter mingled with the long rumbling of thunder. Everyone was terrified. The sky was bright, too bright — the white, rolling clouds parted here and there to reveal impossible liquid-fire light beyond them, golden tongues licking the mist-curled sides of each billow of cloud. Lightning dropped like rain, jagged liquid fire, thick and slow, not the usual quick and thin streak of electricity but something else. Some people said it was Jesus. The mighty presence laughed. I recognized some Pagans among the panicked crowds, making offerings and kneeling in supplication to Zeus or Thor. The god laughed again, turning his attention to fall on them like liquid lightning. Squealing, they dodged out of the way as the fire fell, impacting the earth with a huge roar and a blaze springing up where they had stood. Terror ran through me, a fear welling almost to an ecstasy. The god drew spiraling lines in the earth, trailing fingers of lightning along the ground until the rocks trembled and buckled, scorched scars raised in long lines almost as though some burrowing animal were tunneling just beneath the topsoil, pushing up its trail. The liquid-fire lightning dragged along, raising spiraling welts on the earth as people dodged out of the path. The lightning turned and danced, and I found myself caught between converging lines with nowhere to go. I stood rooted in place, willing every part of me — from bone, blood and breath to soul itself — into complete stillness, waiting for the moment of convergence. Then there in front of me was a man, wild grin shining and a noise like thunder. It was — gods forgive me — the Tenth Doctor. (Not actually him, in the dream, but his look — my mind probably seeking for some visual representation of the mingled terror and adoration I was feeling.) I trembled, saying, "But... I know you." And the implication of recognizing this god with a kind of terrifying intimacy bordering on triumph. Somehow, I communicated to him, "You're scaring people, you have to go." He offered me the body of a serpent, bloody and skinned, its scaled hide sparkling with a myriad diamond jewels in the impossible light and the length of its body cut into chunks of wet, red flesh with the white, round center of its spine peeking through the mess. I breathed, and said, "No, I don't eat meat," to the horror of those around me, who were bowed down to the ground and weeping in fear, unable to imagine refusing the god anything. The god laughed again, uproariously, and then he was gone just as suddenly, the whole scene settling like dust into a quiet stillness. And I looked down to see that I was holding a plastic bag full of wet, juicy honeydew melon chunks (one carved in the shape of the serpent's head).

I woke up at this point in a lot of pain, with my legs twitching terribly, and it took a long while to fall back asleep again. Once I did, I had a second dream.

Not as detailed as the first. I was in a cart, somewhat like a cross between a roller coaster car and an open-topped railway train car, with rows of bench seats across it with seat belts. There were carts in front and behind mine, too, in a long chain and the train seemed to be underground in a long, dark tunnel with rough, earthy or rocky sides. The dream is only vague impressions for a while — there were many people in all these carts, loading and unloading as the train went back and forth along the line making stops, and many of the people seemed somewhat young, though not exactly children. I remained on the train the whole time, never getting off, and almost always sitting alone on the bench seat as people shuffled around me. Then, at one point, a man sat down next to me — I could best describe him as a stereotypical redneck hick — his hair was blond and short, cropped in a kind of bowl cut with bangs hanging down across his forehead, and he had large teeth and an overbite, barely a chin to speak of, and when he spoke he had an obnoxious stereotypically southern accent that seemed at once idiotic and overly cheerful. But his eyes seemed sharp and intelligent. He sat down next to me, and again there was a sense among everyone around me that this was somehow an honor bestowed on me. Everyone around treated him with a great deal of respect, almost reverence, and deferred to him as a kind of leader. I found, mingling with my distaste for him, a vague sense of familiarity, as though this were some kind of disguise that he was wearing. Again, the dream was only vague for a time, with the sense that we were about the embark on a much longer journey, not the same shuffling back and forth between the same few stops, and that this man next to me was somehow in charge of the journey or leading it. I noticed he wore a blue coat with a few metal pins and sewn-on patches and stripes here and then, almost like a military uniform though I didn't recognize it at all. It seemed too big for him, sticking out at the shoulders, so that he seemed like a child wearing his father's clothes, but there was still that intelligent look in his eye and a sense of authority that he carried about him. We were moving along on the journey now, people settled into their seats, and the tunnel beneath the earth seemed to stretch on in front of us forever with no light in sight except for the torch lights mounted every once in a while that passed us as we moved. The man acted towards me as though we knew each other and were good friends, and I had that vague sense of familiarity (though I was out of the dream enough that I couldn't place why I felt I recognized him). As we moved, the train sped up, faster and faster, and suddenly there was a great lurch as though we'd been struck from behind. The man next to me stood up in his seat, gazing back into the darkness past all the other carts, and his face changed briefly, the expression of soft, cheerful idiocy replaced by a hard, intelligent, penetrating look as though the disguise for an instant had fallen away and the full power of his presence came through. I felt, then, that we were good friends, that I did know him (though I still couldn't say how or from where) and that I trusted him completely. He dropped back down into his seat next to me and whispered that a great serpent was following us, quickly catching up to the train. If people realized what was happening, they would start to panic. He was able to call up or get in touch with the person at the very front of the train and instruct them to veer off the track as we passed an opening in the tunnel — because of his inexplicable authority, nobody argued with him. We veered and suddenly the train was plunged into an icy underground river, the carts now floating like boats or rafts all chained together in a long line. The wheels churning the water beneath the carts sped us onwards, faster and faster, taking twisting turns and bends in the rocky tunnel, now without any light but a kind of eerie very dim blue light that seemed to infuse the air and come from everywhere and nowhere. Behind us, the huge serpent was gaining on us and people were beginning to panic. Its eyes glinted like sharp blades in the darkness, its forked tongue flicking, its massive body writhing in the waters behind us.

I feel as though something happened then in the dream, just before I woke up, but it's gone now, I can't remember it. I don't remember waking up frightened at all, though there was a lot of energy coursing through me. I wish I knew who the man was, or what happened at the end of that second dream. It's no coincidence, I think, that both dreams involved a serpent, as well as other people who were in danger and frightened. But I'm not sure I know what either of the dreams mean.

Diary - Brighid, Lady of the Stars

Sun: leo (fixed fire), 6:35 AM - 8:11 PM
Moon: waning gibbous, taurus (fixed earth)
Earth: cool and bright this morning, though the air is thick with mist lying low in the grassy valleys of the park

A reader of my website asked me to elaborate on my relationship with Brighid as a stellar goddess. This is what I wrote in response:

S--,

That is a great question - in both senses of the word! It's a really good one, and it's also a really BIG one! :) I'll do my best to answer it briefly here, and I also have an "about the gods" post coming up in my 30 Days of Druidry meme where I'll probably touch on it a bit more.

My relationship with Brighid is very mutable and seems to always be in flux, but one thing that has remained consistent is my connection with her "darker" aspect. Lady Gregory described the goddess as having a face that was one half fair and beautiful, and one half dark and ugly. Up until then, I'd only ever read about her "light" aspect, her connection with fertility and inspiration and the sacred fire in all its various manifestations. When I read that line by Lady Gregory, though, suddenly something "clicked" for me, and Brighid as a goddess became suddenly much more complex and compelling to me. This relationship between light and dark mingling and rubbing up against one another creates that liminal space that is so much associated with Brighid - especially the saint, who was born at dawn on the threshold of the doorway, a daughter of a Druid chief and a Christian slave who grew up to become the most powerful saint in Ireland, even more than St. Patrick, as well as the first and only female bishop (so the legends go).

The goddess, too, has these liminal light-and-dark aspects in her lore. As one of the Tuatha dé Danann, she was a goddess of light, order and civilization. Yet in the wake of the war between the Tuatha dé and the Fomorians, she marries Bres, King of the Fomorians (and half-Tuatha dé himself) in an attempt to make peace and forge an alliance between the warring sides. Together, they have a son, who is later killed in battle as a result of a betrayal, and Brighid wails for him in grief - the first keening that was ever heard in Ireland. So here you have these deep connections between light and dark, joy and sorrow, peace and war, in the mythology surrounding her, and over and over she occupies a liminal position or place between the two. I think this is what Lady Gregory meant by saying her face was half light and half dark. As for the saint, it was said that St. Brighid was amazingly beautiful, but she was committed to becoming a nun with the church and did not want to marry, so to avoid a suitor she gouged out one of her eyes in order to make herself ugly, so that her face became literally half beautiful and half grotesque (afterwards, she restored her own eye in an act of miraculous healing). I think this story from the saint, as well as some of the lore surrounding Brighid as a goddess, shows her willingness to "go dark" when a higher purpose calls for it. It reminds me of a poem by Wendell Berry:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

So all of that is the basis of my view of Brighid in the lore, which you probably already mostly knew already! My personal relationship with her, beginning with that realization of her darker aspect, has consistently included an understanding of her as sometimes swinging between these light and dark sides. My first most powerful direct experience of her presence was during a time when I was traveling, feeling ungrounded and lonely and cut off - I was sitting in a hotel room alone at night watching the rain fall steadily in an unfamiliar city, and I saw the lights of the city reflected in the water and had an overwhelming sense of her presence as this vast, deep awareness that was so.... big that she passed over me like I was a speck of dust caught up on the hem of her mantle. She wasn't just "represented" by the light in the water, she was the light in the water, and so in that way she was absolutely everywhere, she was a natural force that was utterly enduring and changeable, no matter what came and went she would be there in some form or another.

For a while, then, my relationship with her involved the more common light-focused aspects of sacred fire and solar energies. I began keeping her flame with a Brighidine Cill and working with her creative energies as poet. But I was rarely able to connect with her other two traditional roles - the healer, and the smith. Then late last fall, I was in conversation with some others in the Cill about her various aspects, and someone brought up the work of smithcraft and the forge as a place of creation and transformation. I forget exactly how it happened, but through the conversation and the "lobbing of lightbulbs" back and forth, we began to collectively come to an understanding of Brighid as a kind of primordial creatrix figure.

I guess one way to think about it is that her aspect as a solar deity kind of "withdrew" into a far distance and her darker aspect once again asserted itself. "To know the dark, go dark" - associations with the dark heat of the forge, with its noise and steam and sweat and dull ember glow, out of which springs suddenly the spark of light as the hammer strikes the metal on the anvil.... all these were images we came to understand were an aspect of her connection with the stars, those far distant suns that were only pinpricks of light, but that stemmed from a "big bang" in the primordial past, the same that gave birth to our own sun. The metaphor of "fire in the water" has some deep connections in the Celtic worldview with the basic stuff of creation and creativity - and this was not only reflected in the creative process of poetry (the spark of inspiration in the "watery" realm of emotions), but also the hot springs of healing and the blacksmith's process of tempering metal using both fire and water to achieve the sharpest edge. The stars themselves are like sparks of light in the vast ocean of night. They are inconceivably far away, and yet their light reaches us steadily, so reliably that they have shaped our understanding of the very structure of the universe (through both astrology and modern astronomy) and have been used for centuries as guides for sailors navigating on the sea with no stable landmark to follow. In this way, stars are themselves in a kind of liminal space and they draw us into that space as well when we gaze on them. Unlike the moon (which can sometimes seem so big that it's almost right on top of you!), the stars on a moonless night seem to exert their own kind of gravity. I've spent nights star-gazing on top of Mount Cadillac, the tallest mountain on the eastern seaboard, and more than once have felt that giddy vertigo of suddenly feeling the earth as a tiny speck of dust in the vastness of space, a speck too small to hold me down. Because the stars are so far away, and yet so present to us through their endless, self-giving light, they seem to pull us into this place suspended between intimacy and mystery.

So when I talk about Brighid's "stellar" aspect, this is a little bit of what I mean. I see Brighid primarily as a celestial deity - a Shining One, a being of the heavens, of sky and space. As a celestial deity, her "light" aspect is expressed through her role as a solar goddess, a goddess of the sun and the fires here on earth that we have the most connection and relationship with. But she is also a stellar goddess in her "dark" aspect, in which the light itself retreats into the surrounding darkness and becomes hardly more than the pinpricks of the stars, yet still with all the same power and mystery about it. In both senses, she has this liminal quality to her, and there is often overlap. (As a goddess of the dawn, she strides between night and day, with not only the rising sun but also the "morning star" of Venus as companions!)

So I hope that answers your question at least a little bit. :) This is still a relationship that I'm exploring, and like I said, it swings between light and dark for me quite a bit. Over the winter, her stellar aspect was especially strong for me, whereas in spring and early summer her solar/fire aspect was much more powerful and present to me. Now I seem to be in a place of balance in my relationship with her (and this is partly due, I think, to my evolving relationship with Manannan, Son of the Sea).... So, we'll see. :)

--Ali

Lady of Star Fire, Son of the Sea

A post to the Lady of the Stars SIG on TC, that I thought would be relevant to my "seakeeping" shift today.

So this is something I've been mulling over for quite a while, since a ways back when I had that intense dream about a "sea god" and began to explore and expand my relationship with Manannan. My work with Brigid seemed to be put "on hold" for a period, and she's only recently started to reassert herself. Now I'm working to try to integrate and understand how these two deities might somehow work together or relate to one another in a shared practice.

I think there are several of you in the LotS SIG who also work with Manannan as well as Brigid. A lot of our responses in the "Who is the Lady?" thread evoke some pretty significant connections between fire and water, and I'm feeling a similar push/pull from Manannan, though from a bit of a different perspective.

The Lady of Star Fire seems to me very much like a spark in the darkness. Sometimes, her "spark" is what feels emphasized, her fire and light, her warmth and activity and creativity and passion (and these feel very much like Brigid's more traditional "solar" aspect to me). Other times, it is her "dark" aspect that seems to come to the fore, the primal, primordial nature, the black seas of the universe stretching between the stars.

Manannan feels equally paradoxical in nature. If the Lady is the fire-in-the-water, Manannan sometimes feels to me like the water-in-the-fire… The overwhelming energy of intense emotion, the inspiration of the past, the palpable tingling of mist against skin, the lightning in the storm...

[snipped for relevance]

"Lady of the Star Fire" Chant

I just loved Ellen's chant, so much that I wanted it to be longer! Here's an expanded version I've been playing with. I tried to incorporate some more of the themes we've been experiencing and exploring in the "Lady of the Stars" TNC group, tying them back to the poet/healer/smith triplicity more traditional to Brigid. For me, this triplicity expresses itself more abstractly as "inspiration, integration, transformation" as a kind of process of both creativity and love (i.e. the "forging" of relationships). So in the first three stanzas, I tried to capture those themes... With the "exploratory" ritual in mind, I wanted to incorporate a kind of "appeal" to her for guidance in the final stanza. Here's what I ended up with (to Ellen's tune):



Lady of the Star Fire, speak to me, speak to me!
Spark of inspiration, Goddess of light!
Shaper of the Darkness, shine on me, shine on me!
Ember of creation, burning in the night!

Lady of the Star Fire, speak to me, speak to me!
Healer at the hot springs rising from the heart!
Fire in the Water, flow in me, flow in me!
Sweet the restoration deep within your art!

Lady of the Star Fire, speak to me, speak to me!
Queen of transformation, Forger of Worlds!
Hammer on the Anvil, sing to me, sing to me!
Ancient spiral turning, galaxies unfurled!

Lady of the Star Fire, speak to me, speak to me!
I am your apprentice, Worker of the Fire!
I have heard your starlight calling me, calling me!
Show me how to answer, guide my hope's desire!

Brigid of Amber, Brigid of the Stars

I frequent a forum called The Cauldron, where I belong to a flamekeeping Cill dedicated to the goddess Brigid. I began flamekeeping with them just before Imbolc of last year. (Mine is the third day in the rotation of twenty, and my shift has fallen more than once on days of special personal significance to me — which others have told me often happens during the first year of flamekeeping for a new Cill member.)

Recently, some wonderful and fascinating discussions have been going on in the Celtic Polytheism SIG, "Hazel and Oak," focusing on Brigid of the Forge as a creatrix/star goddess. The conversation has sparked (no pun intended) the suggestion of designing a group ritual. I want to plunge in and get involved in this work, journaling some of my thoughts and potential liturgical ideas on this blog, so I thought I would just mention this as an introduction for future reference.

I'll add to this later, but for now, here is a response I posted to the forum tonight, regarding the possibility brought up by others (and echoed in my own personal ritual experiences over the summer) of amber being a "stone" sacred to Brigid.

Part of the reason I did the three gifts meditation was to prepare for my trip to Northern Ireland (for a spiritual retreat focused on peace activism and social justice), and I was hoping for some images/icons to "carry with me" to meditate on during my time there. When the shadowy, robed figure outlined against the flames of the sacred fire reached into the heart of the fire and handed to me a droplet of amber, I think I actually laughed out loud in the middle of the ritual.

It suddenly seemed so obvious to me: first and foremost, amber as a "stone" of living fire or fire-in-water, the life-blood of the tree borne of the intermingling of the underground waters drawn up from the roots and the sunlight cascading down from the sky, cupped and drunk by the leaves. The prayer I use during my flamekeeping shifts begins: "Fire and water in the earth of my body, I keep your sacred flame." Amber as the sap or resin of ancient trees seemed like the perfect symbol of this idea.

And then, of course, is the fact that amber is especially well-known for containing the preserved remains of ancient insects, some of which contain the blood/DNA of ancient animals. So in another way, amber represented the "preservation and protection of life" and the continuation of ancient traditions and primordial energies or spirits. The fact that I was going to a retreat in the land of my ancestors that was focused on peace activism seemed to align perfectly with this idea.

I have wondered if anyone else made this connection to amber. While I was on the retreat, just after I'd found the amber sun amulet at the farmer's market, I had a discussion with someone at the retreat who was a former Pagan — he pointed out that amber and jet was a common combination for jewelry (especially among Wiccans, I think, if I'm remembering correctly what he said). But he said that amber was mostly associated with the God rather than the Goddess, being more "active/yang" and masculine. This deflated me a bit and so I kept my musings about any possible Brigid-amber connection to myself. So it's been wonderful for me to see others validating that connection and sharing some of their own thoughts!

And in keeping with the themes of fire-on-water and creation, I suddenly see amazing connections to the very first of the Rosary Poems I wrote back in college (of which, at the time, my advisor said, "Some poems just show up whole and perfect the way they are, like a gift"):

Annunciation

The light shines in the darkness,
and the
darkness has not overcome it. JOHN 1:5

Her yes becomes flesh
in flesh, white-winged fire swept
along sweat as if over the agitation
of waves, sharp spine of sunlight
in a slow serpentine across
the waters of her body —
there is no rushing it, no cascade
into the long cry of rising — only
a breath, a word, and the pouring
in of everything, even God.

More thoughts on all of this when I'm a bit more "together" and coherent.