Overture
There are stories that grip you, images that haunt, arrest or liberate the imagination. This one, The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh, is among them. It is a tale haunted by grief ensorcelled into fury. A tale where the flowing waters of heart-break transform into the stone of black fire. It pulls up the shades of all of the ungrieved loss, heartbreak, and disappointment of a life.
If I track it I can see the trail of the dragon slithering, the flashes of anger and the cindered landscape left behind. A world in crisis asks us to see how these moments of grief and rage are tied to the great patterns playing out across the Earth. In these times of trouble, I go to the Old Stories. I see how spring might return to the cindered landscape of the heart. How the world might be healed by a beautiful question, a song of great power, or a “great grief cry.”
This one is for those of us remembering how to grieve:
The Story: Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh ~ Spells of Grief and Becoming Dragon
We find ourselves in a kingdom in balance. The hearth glowing, the King and Queen and their family shining forth from the golden halls at its center. It's something I could almost long for, as I look out at a world filled with such trouble. As Ursula K. Le Guin says:
“The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”
If the flight into the imaginal, is indeed a move towards freedom then why not escape taking the whole world with us?
Despite the dream of childhood fancy, the places that we fly to are never simple, but filled with a riot of blessed and broken beings. Even the golden halls of pure joy are destined to tarnish. The young Queen is struck ill and confined to her bed, she enters into a harrowing illness becoming a thin shade as her family bears witness. The sting of this grief catalyzes the blackening. There is nothing that can be done, and the joyous atmosphere of the kingdom hears its death-knell. The black clothes of grief wave like a flag of praise and wailing.
Time passes, and the King is called forward from the grief spell back to duty. The councilors demand that he mount his throne and return to dispensing judgment. Inevitably he is told he must marry again. Dutifully he acquiesces to the weight of the crown, and follows the council. The shuttered blinds are opened, the funerary incense snuffed, the black veils traded in for white garments, flowers of solar yellow are brought into chambers once again.
All except for the daughter spring back to life. She is a tower of strong tears who refuses to be struck down.
Things begin to move with stunning speed around the girl who refuses to leave her bed chamber. The proceedings of court give way to the love-songs of courtship and something is different: no more child’s laughter punctuates the functions of the state, only the faint echoes of her great grief cry. Her hard grieving, at first, endears her to the new Queen. How beautiful for a young woman to love her mother so much.
But as time passes the new Queen’s heart starts to harden.
She complains that the daughter won’t accept her and this story begins the process of hardening her heart. She stews, “why wont she love me?” and the new queens heart begins to smolder with a black-fire of resentment. She confronts the girl, “Why can’t you be happy for your father, our life here is beautiful and you are the only one still stuck in the past…move on!”
“My love of my mother, and the grief I feel have not reached their bottom yet.” Said the girl.
That night the new Queen complains to the King. He knows not what to say, a father holding his daughter and his duty, and his new wife and the memory of his first in a straining tension.
I was told he wrote this poem that night, in secret, by candle light:
On days like today,
when I’m tired and the blur of last night’s wine still hovers on my eyes
I watch you weep, and I am lost
I cannot see you, only the things
I could do, should do, can’t do, won’t do
to make it all stop.
All I can hear is the groaning of the buckets,
littering this bone-house,
catching every last drop of the grief-water.
They groan as they are full to bursting,
and I frantically check them
refusing to know that the great breaking in of waters has come.
The garden is dry, last years wildflower seeds
lay in the cracked soil and refuse to burst,
the paths are lined only with memories of fiddlenecks and calendula blossoms.
because the buckets catch the tears
interrupting gravitations work,
interrupting water’s longing,
and won’t let them hit the earth.
But in my dreams,
you are a tower of strong tears.
A tower cutting into the blue sky,
all soft edged stone and green, green moss.
A tower of weeping,
where the spiral stair to your lovers chamber runs in a torrent,
and the green moss drinks in the water
squishing like sponges under my feet.
The tower of strong tears,
your secret name,
You watch again and again
as things break, as dreams fall,
dark fates are met.
You watched at cross, at empty tomb,
and heard him call your name.
And in your weeping you knew.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been afraid to swim,
and so I stand at the foot of your tower
in repellent yellow rain gear,
with my rusted, groaning bucket
catching your tears.
When the writing trance ends he slumps back into bed. The Queen arises from her bed and begins to grind a mandrake root to powder, she gathers her own blood, mixing them in a paste, she speaks incantations:
“I weird ye to be a Laidly Worm,
And borrowed shall ye never be,
Until Childe Wynd, the King's own son
Come to the Heugh and thrice kiss thee;
Until the world comes to an end,
Borrowed shall ye never be.”
The next morning, she devises to get the girl out of her bed chamber and to get her to walk the grounds. “The breeze and the birds, and the smell of the flowers will be good for you,” she said. When they finally get her out of the room, the Queen slips in and rubs the paste of mandrake and blood into the sheets of the grief-bed. Every inch of linen is soaked through.
That night the girl is struck by hot and terrible dreams. Great obsidian scales writhing and scraping against themselves in the dark. When she awakes she sees black scales, the twin of the dream-dwelling scales of her nightmares. She follows the foot down to a strong tail and a broad body with muscled legs and leathery wings. She feels in her heart's root, not the great waters, but a roaring fire that can leap with the smallest coaxing.
She has become Dragon.
Grief
A kingdom, in myth, is an image of a whole cosmos. In the cosmos of the Laidley Worm grief, at least initially, is welcomed. Everything stops: the choreography, smells, and signs of grief are taken up and made central. A family is taken down to the ground and halted from the schemes of daily life. Their grief is a public thing and the public lamentation of the family has power, it calls all to revere and love life. Then duty comes in, with its scolding finger wagging, demanding the return to normal. When the machinery of the day world gets running again the girl's great pain is occulted, hidden from sight.
When grief is confined to the private sphere it’s power turns inward intensified by the gravity of invisibility. Private comes from privare, which means “to bereave, deprive, rob, strip.” But also from privus which means “one’s own.” When grief is made one’s own and secluded in the secret chamber we are deprived of these qualities of reverence and love for life. When the waters of grief stagnate they become a mire.
Dragon as Atavistic Resurgence
The exiling of the griever makes way for the emergence of the serpent of obsidian darkness. This being of dark-fire is far too vast to be confined to a child’s bed chamber and must slither out of the window searching for a safe place to brood. It is said in this story, that the sheer heat of the dragon’s fury cindered the land in a mile wide radius around the cave that she took residence in. In the heat of fury she burrowed beyond the green world, beyond the dark soil and into the blackness of flint-like stone.
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
-Rainer Maria Rilke
In the work of maverick London magician Austin Osman Spare we find a magical theory of this kind of shape-shifting dubbed Atavistic Resurgence. In Spare’s praxis this is a process “by which means he claimed it possible to experience the mnemonic echoes of all creation” (Robert Ansell). As our body is made of the same flesh of all creation, from a sorcerous viewpoint these echoes live within the body, and at any moment may erupt and shift our shape.
We must keep in mind that this is categorically different from the sorts of animal play one might engage in while learning to track animals. The conscious and well studied mimetics of the tracker, galloping like a coyote, or belly sliding like the otter is a kind of method-acting. Relying on the intention to mimic the shapes of our animal neighbors, using the will to get into their mind and move like them.
Atavistic Resurgence sources from a different place, instead of becoming animal through the will, the atavistic resurgence erupts at the edge of human dominion over self. These shape-shifts are beyond the scope of intention. Riding on the wave of powerful feeling one finds themselves slipping into the shape of the bear.
The ancient form of the dragon exists beyond time nestled at the very core of this floating gem in space, but also in the hall of every cell. From a magical perspective the dragon can be seen as the source of the tectonic, tellurian tides of all of life. As such when the girl’s shape erupts into the dragon's form, she is resonating with an image secreted deep within from a time before time. This image calls her towards her to borrow towards its twin deep within the earth.
As described by Gast Bouschet in Through the Dragons Eye the black dragon “ writhes in the spaces between life and death, It whose sacred poison initiates the fusion of opposites, It whose black flame ignites and fuels our sorcerous heart” (Bouschet). In the story we see a flesh-shifting atavism beyond the realms of the Midgardian (Earthly) creation and into the chthonic. The woman becomes an echo of the great power fueling the heart of Earth.
Pushed by the spellcraft of the Sorceress Queen the King’s daughter rides the mnemonic echoes and becomes the black dragon. The stagnation, and stone stuckness of her grief allows a pathway for the atavistic resurgence to swell up and take hold. The black-blacker-than-black of the heart of grief gives way to the red of the dragon's fire.
Dragon Sings to the Wind
From the rocks emanate a ring of a cindered landscape. The fire at the center of the dragon sent into exile is strong and it burns and poisons the earth around. All of that pressurized grief, being consumed by the dragon fire, has become poison. Medicine, at different doses or proximity may heal or destroy the body that consumes it.
From the blasted land and the burning wound in the forest’s heart comes also the entrancing song of the dragon. It is said that years went by, and the King forgot (by negligence or spellcraft) that he even had a daughter, until one day word of the waste growing in the heart of the nearby wood came to the court. Whispers of a dragon, living in the cracks of the great stone enlivened all corners of the sovereign's court. When the din of whispers became loud enough the King mustered the best knights in the realm to go and dispatch the beast. Dressed in their finest array, brocaded silk and white steeds, these knights thundered off into the woods to meet the terror wyrm. As they approached the den, the ashes kicked up from the earth dusting their clothes and the hooves of their horses. At first they heard the roaring, the great fury-blast of the dragon trembling from earth and rending the sky. The knight’s training prevailed and they continued their approach. That is when they noticed that the roar was accompanied by song.
“I weird ye to be a Laidly Worm,
And borrowed shall ye never be,
Until Childe Wynd, the King's own son
Come to the Heugh and thrice kiss thee;
Until the world comes to an end,
Borrowed shall ye never be.”
The curse that was once used by the Sorceress-Queen has become the dragon’s own song of lamentation cast upon the wind. The knights thunder forward, just faintly hearing the song, but not yet achieving its meaning. At the foot of the rock, as the song and the roar reached their fever pitch, the Knights were struck still by the pure force. The song found its mark, and a voice spoke to each “go back, there is nothing you can do here.” To their credit, one by one, these ash marked Knights turned their steeds.
The dragon weaves a song of tension, between the chthonic roar and the celestial overtone, and in the writhing center it calls out the curse that made it so. The poison becomes the longing call for healing.
Back in the days of the ailing mother, the princesses brother, Child Wynde, had gone off across the sea to make a story of his own. The glory-seeking brother heard nothing from home, and never wondered about it as he saw sights beyond his own youthful imagination. One day the road took him to the shores of the sea, where he heard his name sung from across the water, faintly over the lapping of the waves on stone the song sang:
“I weird ye to be a Laidly Worm,
And borrowed shall ye never be,
Until Childe Wynd, the King's own son
Come to the Heugh and thrice kiss thee;
Until the world comes to an end,
Borrowed shall ye never be.”
Upon that spot he set to work, traveling into the great woods that spread to the shore to find a single burl of wood to carve into a ship. Along with chivalry, Child Wynde was well versed in magic. On the shores of that sea he works the burl, the celestial song of the dragon in his ears, for days. Child Wynde continues to carve until before him stands a ship made of a single tree that will sail across the sea on a mage-wind.
Aboard the magical ship he approaches the rising spire of the dragon’s craigie lair. The song intensifies revealing the chthonic rumble roaring beneath the celestial melodies. He circles the lair finding the gaping entrance. When the dragon pours forth in black majesty from the hole, he raises his spear. All of that knightly training had become an instinct in him and for a moment it seems he will play out the same old story, knight of white slays the earth-beast. Then he begins to sing a song of his own that harmonizes with the dragon’s. Her great head begins to spiral toward the spear until winding she reaches the bottom. The obsidian scales, seething with fire, are just inches from Child Wynde’s face as leans in for fateful kisses three. The dragon-woman’s song intensifies, her body begins to quiver and quake.
First her wings that beat the air they fall to the ground,
then her legs that stomped the earth,
followed by her fire that burned so hot,
and lastly the tears return falling from her human eyes.
All around the body of the dragon lay strewn on the forest floor and from its fertile decay a forest of immeasurable beauty sprung up like a garland around the cave of the dragon. The ritual of healing feeds the life of the land.
dancing its black-flames of dark
in the hollow halls of my heart
I feel the foundations tremble and the fierce fury rise
the pestilent poison seeks its mark
In the scaly seething I get lost
The sorcerous seduction of pure serpent
I sting, I’ve stung Ive stung
In other times Gawain's presence graces me
and I gaze down at mary’s shield
In Hawthorn’s hall tears fall
Mary stands to shed the tears I fear
Mary, may I learn to weep my own.
Coda
“ My friends it is wise to nourish the soul or else you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.” C.G. Jung
When we approach the anguish of un-moving grief, which reaches its apex in the daemon of suicidality, with the dry language of medicine, self-help, coping and chemical imbalances alone the soul goes hungry. There is no nourishment without images of deep resonance and in the hunger of the denizens of the imaginal, the small god’s who have taken residence “within” us are starved, and a starved god is quick to become a monster. We can imagine the scene in the story, where the young girl is told by the actions of the world around her that her grief is simply “too much,” that in order to be good she must chin up and shoulder her burden giving into the push of the world. How many of us walk through our days shouldering unimaginable weight, for the loss playing out in this middle world. Our personal losses, when we have to return to work 4 days after the loss of a beloved, or the planetary pain of watching the atrocities of war, genocide, famine, and the thrashing of the empire-beast.
With so little etiquette in grief it is no wonder that the untended sorrow may become dragon, lurking like the beast at the center of a labyrinth seething, waiting for any excuse to send forth jets of great fire. So we have a feedback loop, a monster making machine, the grief is exiled because it jams the wheels of production and in its exile it mutates into the scaly nightmare beast. Culturally, we of the West, know how to do only one thing with dragons: slay them. In the thrall of a myopic love affair with the hero's journey grief has become a monster to slay, a dragon to rescue our beloved from, a villain to outfox. This dragon slaying tendency is intimately tied to our disconnection from the earth, each other, and the elemental nutrients of the full spectrum of human emotion. We can remember that the symbol of St. George and the Dragon has been used as the emblem of the conquering of the pagan cultures on this earth by the vision of the Church and the empires of reason. So effective has this campaign been that a friend recently pointed out that encounter with the dragon is nearly synonymous with their slaying, we have very few images left of another way of being when we encounter these great primordial beings. Even C.G. Jung, the great psychonaut of the age, falls into this trap when he tells us in the minor key that a soul untended breeds “demons and dragons in the heart.”
The sword for beast slaying shiftshape but remains sharp and stinging. In a culture that pathologized emotions, sets parameters of a normal grief process and dubs everything aberrant the sword becomes Science’s scalpel of diagnosis. Diagnosis from the Greek origin diagignōskein, one meaning “to know apart,” when we diagnose and fix a story upon someone we literally state out from the complexity of the web of creation. This can be viewed as an act of exiling the other. We see it clearly in the story, when the girl is told she grieves too long and too hard for her mother. First she disappears into her private chambers, cut off from the fellow feeling of family. When this doesn’t work, when isolation doesn’t bring her back on track then she is sent away for good, lost in her dragon shape to the wilds of the world.
This story is a calling to a new-ancient protocol of being with grief, and rage. Knowing that these eruptions of primordial feeling are intimately tied to our aliveness. The atavistic resurgences make the space for trouble our shape as human, and demand that we step into other shapes. To say yes holding grief at the center of things, until grief has well and truly had its way with us is a radical act. If we trust the story, we can see that this is where the healing lies. A grief witnessed, and sung back too becomes the healing water that enlivens the earth. The earth as in the teeming web of relatedness we find ourselves inextricably woven into, but also the earthen as in our bodies that dry out, and become ill in the heat of the fires of the ungrieved sorrows.
References and Further Reading:
Through the Dragon’s Eye - Frater Acher, Gast Bouschet, and Harper Feist
Goetic Atavisms - Frater Acher
Tower of Strong Tears - by Chaise Levy
Galdr to Mary the Griever- by Chaise Levy
Pushing Through- by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Robert Bly
No time to spare: Thinking about what matters - by Ursula K. Le Guin
Borough Satyr: The Life and Art of Austin Osman Spare - edited by Robert Ansell
For me, this tale is about the role women have played for millennia as grief tenders, keeners, and deaths doulas.
A king and queen have a son and a daughter. The son can't bear to witness his mother's death (and transformation..something I've seen so many times, the male turning away from death and their own grief) so his goes on his quest. The queen dies, the son leaving the king, his daughter, and the court to grieve. Over time, their sorrow for the queen subsides, except for the daughter, who remains deeply mired in grief. The king remarries, but the daughter’s grief only intensifies, leading her to cry daily and suffer from what we would now call grief depression.
The new queen, concerned about the impact of the daughter’s relentless mourning on the king and the kingdom, decides to take action. Understanding that the grief needs to be transformed, she makes a mandrake salve and spreads it on the daughter's bed. Overnight, the daughter turns into a black-scaled dragon.
Unable to stay at the court, the daughter-turned-dragon retreats to a cave. Her brother, while on his quest, hears her dragon song and ultimately slays her. From her carcass, new life springs forth, symbolizing renewal and rebirth.
This story highlights the transformation of grief and the dangers of becoming stuck in it. The new queen is wise, not the evil stereotyped stepmother, recognizing that the daughter’s grief must be addressed and transformed. Traditionally, women have been the ones to perform the emotional labour of mourning—serving as keeners, death doulas, and tenders of the dead. Here, the masculine roles provide the necessary energy for change, but the transformation of grief is predominantly managed by the feminine.
The daughter's prolonged mourning and eventual transformation into a dragon symbolize how unprocessed grief can alter a person profoundly, turning their sorrow into an overwhelming and isolating force. Death is transformational for everyone, both the living and the dead. Her brother’s act of slaying her wild dragon self, though violent, represents the necessity of confronting and eventually healing deep-seated grief to allow for new beginnings..He performs a kind of acupuncture to get her grief energy flowing again so that it transforms. The new life that springs from her carcass highlights the potential for growth and renewal following the resolution of grief.
The king’s passive role in this process contrasts with the active interventions by the new queen and the son, reflecting traditional gender dynamics in the context of mourning. Women, historically, have often been the primary mourners and emotional caretakers, while men were expected to maintain composure and strength.
The use of the mandrake salve, with its associations with magical transformation, signifies the application of ancient feminine wisdom to address and resolve deep emotional issues. The daughter’s transformation into a dragon and her subsequent death, leading to new life, echoes the life-death-rebirth cycle, suggesting that profound sorrow, when confronted and resolved, can lead to renewal and new beginnings.
This tale provides a rich narrative exploring the complexities of grief and its transformation. It underscores the vital role of active intervention and the wisdom of those who understand the necessity of such transformation. The story also offers a poignant commentary on the emotional labour often borne by women in the process of mourning and healing.
This is deep! Thank for sharing this!