I chanted songs before the enchanter chanted this world into being from fire, air, earth, water, wind, mist, dew, from fruits, from an unknown frightful thing.
I know the chants that make corpses rot and bring the dead to life from the cold earth’s bones. I know the sleeping songs of stones.
My chants of transformation rival the formulae of mathematicians. I sing not numbers, sine, cosine, dark equations
but still I can launch an aeroplane or nuclear bomb. I can bring warplanes down from the skies and I can call a seedling to grow.
I make a mockery of all who claim to conquer the divinities of mountaintops and gyres with what you call my neanderthal tongue.
I am no songbird and I am certainly no homo sapiens. I know nothing of your guilt and depression, only the chants of Chanting Crow.
Mither voices through the mizzle, through the mist, mist-numb mutters. He fails to muster them at first with His voice. Hoofbeats louder, huge round hoofbeats of His Horse.
“COME!”
Mistlings mither through the mizzle, seep, sink, sit, slither in the godless grey drizzle of forgetting until the voice of a God loud as the cracking of glass beneath the hooves of His horse calls.
“COME! COME!”
Awake the mistlings remembering, their misting reassembling into a mither of forms. They look like something viewed through cracked glass. They teeter, totter, diused limbs pale, severed, crunch of footfalls.
“COME! COME! COME!”
Oh the baying of the hounds rounding, bounding, barks, bristling hackles, woofs reign! He rounds them up, gentle guidance, touch of red nose, hand on arm, “Don’t dither,” “remember, remember, remember.”
“COME! COME! COME TO MY FORT!”
Oh these feet know the path, the way when the mind does not, misty heel, misty toe. One foot before another soul-forms remembering forest, foray up river, up hill, up mountain, to the in-the-air turning fort.
“COME! COME! COME TO MY HALL!”
Misted ones mix and dance no longer mizzle-like but blue and red as blood and water, the only drizzle sweat upon their brows before they sit and partake in the feast of holy leaf-meat and ever-flowing mead.
“COME! COME! COME TO MY CAULDRON!”
This drink is not one of forgetting – they know themselves now and the pain as He sings their soul-names voice resounding like the sound of shattered glass is outweighed by beauty.
“COME! COME! COME TO BE REBORN!”
The waters in the cauldron are blue as the infinite seas of the Deep and filled with blood and there are stars shining and each beholds a star and reaches out and becomes like glass.
A poem and artwork that came to me as I was revisiting the traditional lore in recent articles based on my experiences of witnessing Gwyn guiding the passage and rebirth of souls.
Where did you come from appearing as if from the night in this bright hour of daylight
to serve in the temple of the unmentionable?
What called you to this disaster? What does it taste like?
What dark armoured God shaped you at midnight knowing when you disappear again the stars will cease to shine?
In you the smell of a promise is fulfilled for to feed on death is beautiful.
When did we lose our armour? Our taste for roadkill?
So naked, so hungry, so lost, so Godless in the face in the face of this catastrophe
we can only pray you will help us to bury the corpses and lead us back to the dark sublime.
The work of carrion beetles in devouring dead bodies is usually unseen and unappreciated. In the UK we have 28 species – 17 Silphinae and 11 Nicrophorinae (known as sexton or burying beetles). These little death-eaters play an essential role in ridding the world of decaying organic matter.
They are 12 – 20mm long and black, often with red-orange bands on their wing cases. Pictured above are Nicrophorus investigator and nicrophorus humator.
With their Annuvian colours and death-eating role I see them as associated with our Brythonic God of the dead, Gwyn ap Nudd.
we live, we live, we live, we die, we die, for love.
Our daughter corms are many, many, many,
we live, we live, we live, we die, we die, for love.
Our fertile flowers are many, many, many,
we live, we live, we live, we die, we die, for love.
More, more, more, so many, many, many,
we live, we live, we live, we die, we die, for love.
~
Every year an increasing number of early crocus (Crocus tommasinianus) in Creiddylad’s garden. Visible first their striking basal leaves with their pale median strips (caused by cells that lack chloroplasts) then their lilac flowers in two whorls with three sepals and three petals and orange styles and stamens. They spread profusely both by seed and from daughter corms.
Crocuses (Crocus sativa) were first imported to Britain by the Romans for saffron and were reintroduced during the Crusades then in the 16th century from Turkey. The name crocus derives from the Greek krokos for saffron. In Greek mythology Krokos was a deity who was turned into a crocus after he pined away and died from unrequited love for the shepherdess Smilax.
The Cell of Sister Patience 