“If our place is imperilled, so are our myths. If we heal the one, we heal the other … So said priestesses who long ago spoke in the voice of doves. So said the prophetic oaks they tended, who murmured to their suppliants through wind blown leaves.”(1)
Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash: Sacred Landscapes in Ancient Nature Myth is an inspirational collection of interwoven contemplations on landscape and myth; on enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment. I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in these themes.
Author Dianna Rhyan says of her own approach to writing: “assembled, these pages refused to assemble, and so altogether, they form a series of sketches, fallen like samaras*, whose order is ultimately undetermined. The priestess of Apollo wrote her prophecies on leaves. When strong winds came, they scattered all over her cave. Did she mind? Amidst the leaves, voices of winds and voices of trees, lost and found, thread their way.” This review shares something of the book’s flavour, rather than attempting a linear account of what is covers.
Rhyan draws strength from wild and marginal spaces, especially the Cuyahoga River in north eastern Ohio. She describes her close relationship with the land but is all too aware of a sadness in its silence. The genocidal displacement of the people who once lived there has erased their stories about this land and their relationship with it. As a mythologist, she looks further afield for inspiration, especially ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and the early Greek speaking world. Even four thousand years ago, in the early Sumerian world, people had doubts about ‘civilisation’. We find the contrasting influences of the laurel, which blooms, and the ash, “a battle-earned artifact”.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh (2) the hero destroys a forest and its guardian at an early stage of his “futile immortality quest” and then goes out of his way to offend the Mother Goddess Inanna. In The Descent of Inanna, she herself must experience death, losing her identity and powers as she descends through seven gates to the Underworld controlled by her sister Ereshkigal. Asking, at each gate, ‘Gatekeeper, why is this done?’, she receives the reply ‘Silence, Inanna. Do not open your mouth against custom. The rules of the Great Below are flawless. You may not question what is perfect.’ Rhyan’s reading of this ritualised and repeated reply finds a new order in which free nature, and the Goddess perceived as its embodiment, need to be rigorously controlled. She comments on the way in which perfection “deadens” and rules “disarm”. For three days Inanna hangs dead, a carcass on a hook. But the upper world needs Inanna in order to reproduce itself and flourish. The Wisdom God Enki sends emissaries to Ershkigal to secure Inanna’s release. She does not stay dead.
Rhyan also draws on Greek sources from different periods. One of them, from Sophocles’ last play, Oedipus at Colonus, is about the final days of Oedipus, after he has blinded himself and been been exiled from his erstwhile kingdom of Thebes. These misfortunes follow the discovery that he has (unwittingly) killed his father, married his mother and thereby, as a source of pollution, caused a plague in the city. He is told: “seek no more to master anything”.
Oedipus is now a pauper, wandering in a wasteland. Letting go of his civic and social identities and surrendering to this fate, he survives. He is reborn as a child of nature on the goddess haunted mountain Cithaeron. For his awakened inner vision has guided him to the place where he was once, as an infant, left out to die. The compassionate nymphs who nursed him then are perhaps looking out for him once more. He has journeyed from palace to periphery, freed from all power and self-determination. At that point, he is given a new role, as guardian of the sacred grove at Colonus. It is a place beloved by immortals, a place of lush growth, where the nightingale sings, and with “cool waters” that never fail. Here, as this new version of himself, he will live out his days.
Late on in her book, Dianna Rhyan says: “if we look over our shoulder, not only what we threw away as detritus is following us. What we had despaired we had lost forever, long ago in the depths of ancient ages, is following us too. We require myth, intensely alive myth, to see it. It is very good at not being seen.” I see her as making a great contribution to making ‘intensely alive myth’ visible once more.
(1) Dianna Rhyan Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash: Sacred Landscapes in Ancient Nature Myth Winchester, UK & Washington, USA: Moon Books, 2023
(2) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2023/05/30/
*Samaras: here, the winged maple seeds found in the author’s local woodlands.
Contemplative Inquiry 