WAX AND WANE
Apart from the deep shafts, and the abandoned granite chimneys, the open moorland that rises above the village has hardly been touched since Iron Age times. It is a lonely place where gorse, bracken and heather grow in dense thickets. Trailbikers sometimes use the area for rough-ground practice, snarling up the silence, but otherwise it is invaded only by dog-walkers, rabbits and the occasional fox. I often walk on the narrow track that leads from the tin mine up to a clearing with a broken ring of standing stones. The ground there has that spring in it that only long-unploughed earth gives; earth that responds like a living creature to your presence, comes up to meet your feet and mould them around it; earth that is pure, peaty, fresh, alive, where water runs clear; earth whose dead are reabsorbed, so that bone and spirit infuse the soil. Visceral earth. Land with memory.
It’s a good place for thinking. The raw winds blow straight off the sea below the rocky headlands and into your brain: cold, astringent, sanitising. And the skies are so steep and unruly out there, never less than emphatic in either sun or storm. Nothing human on the small strip of land beneath them, with its little scrabbled stone-rimmed fields and scrubby trees cowering to leeward, cuffed into submission by the wind’s fist, seems more than insignificant under that vaulted arena. You can give yourself up to it all, feel elemental, naked, stripped of history. It has never seemed surprising as an ancient sacred site.
I was preoccupied that day. There were two things on my mind – or rather, two men. All week I’d dragged around my work, feeling like a husk barely containing the teeming of my thoughts. I needed to set them free, sift and winnow them in the clean air. I needed to sort my head out.
The light was growing stretched and pale in the late in afternoon when I arrived. November light: etiolated and starved. To the west, the jaws of oncoming night were closing over the sun, slowly suffocating it, leaving just its last bronze streaks on the sea, and a bloody horizon. In the east, the great inverted bowl of sky was velvet-lined, soft as a dove’s breast, slipping into mist above the uplands so land and sky seemed to blur. The grass in the near fields blazed emerald, while those beyond now lay in shadow. I took all this in as if absorbing it into my bloodstream, feeling my spirit unfurl in the silence and space. I nodded to a returning walker as his dog sprang into the back of his car, and made my way purposefully up the path towards the stone circle. My boots scrunching on the loose stones, and the rhythmic munching of hay-fed cattle were the only sounds remaining, beside the wind, once his engine died away.
I pushed through the furze to the open ground where the circle lay on the highest point of land. Some of the original twelve ring stones are crippled, lying on their sides or at a tilt, others missing now or buried under grass. From along the track a break in the gorse reveals the single stone at its centre, taller, narrower and more upright than the stones of the sacred ring, a jagged finger to the sky. As my eyes found the monolith on the horizon, the twilight seemed to slip its misty glove. Directly above it a vast full moon emerged against the still pale sky, a pregnant ghost. Translucent as pearlbed or beaten ice, an immense yet perfect ovum; it was as if the stone had pierced it.
We don't ever seem to think who shares the sun, it’s such common currency, yet we allow the moon to connect us. In night’s intimacy it becomes our proxy, our lovers’ token, a medium between worlds. But if he were looking at it too, this same bleached planet, unreliable as his affection, his moon would already have flown high in darkness, bound in an unresolvable knot of desert stars.
“We wax and we wane,” he said.
“I’m not the one doing the waning.”
“You’re so romantic.”
“Am I? And I suppose it is all physics to you. Or geometry. Even the moon. A subtle calculus, perhaps? No room for the instinctive.”
“No…. " He hesitated. "The way I have to play it, more like a game of chess.”
“Is that all it is to you, a game you play?”
“You know how things have to be.”
“I am not sure I do. Not really. I know what you’ve said. The ‘twist in the universe’.”
He fixed me with a resolute look. “What else is there to say? It only complicates things. You’ve heard of Occam’s razor…… I'm being dragged towards the pit, that's all there is to it. And anyway, you’re spoken for.”
“I don’t see what my marriage has to do with it. Not under these circumstances. Not against iftars in I-bad.”
His silences were always loaded, trigger-tight.
“Look. If my marriage falls apart – as it is doing; as every word we exchange rips out its foundations – it won’t be you riding to my emotional rescue, will it? You will sacrifice me to your aunts. You’re too afraid of the unknown. You’re just too goddamn afraid. So what am I supposed to do? It doesn’t change how I feel. He is my rock, my earth, the planet where my feet are planted: solid and enduring. I’d be a fool to jeopardise that. But you are my sky, you’re the wind and the weather: thrilling and expansive. I need both to be alive. Without the wind and the rain, the rocks are just barren stones. But without firm ground to plant a seed and nourish it, all that incredible aerial drama is …….is just atmospheric turbulence.”
“We’re zugzwanged, then,” he said.
I must have kept walking I suppose, lost in my thoughts; I hadn’t realised I’d even entered the circle but I found myself enclosed within its perimeter. I circled the ring on the inside, touching each stone in my own ritual before coming back to its heart with my hands on the central monolith, facing the full moon. Wax and wane. As I looked up, tears filled my eyes, and the bone-white disc buckled and shimmered as if reflected on water, then twisted and narrowed, curved and refilled. Wax and bloody wane. I clutched the rock, feeling dizzy, trying to clear my head, but now the stones too seemed to be moving, shifting in their earthy sockets, as if they were pushing upright, coming alive.
I couldn’t keep my balance. My head spun.
*****
We wax and we wane - the virgin moon
Ruis-beth-eadha-coll-uath-ailm
My hair is garlanded with bitter feverfew, with jasmine, honeysuckle, willowherb and daisies. Other aromatics burn on smoking torches set around the circle. They arc and flare in my eyes, my smarting eyes already filled with moon. The long moonshadows of the stones reach out to touch me, wavering and ghostly. I must cast a shadow too, but can’t move enough to tell, and my wrists chafe from the withy cords that bind me as I try to turn. My sight is tarnished like a silver buckle; all is blurred…..
Silver your halo – the tear of the sun
Elder-birch-hazel-poplar-fir-hawthorn
Blade of ice – a healing rune
Men are drumming, women chanting. The elders, the priestesses, bathe me, wash my face, my breasts, my belly. The sacred rites for my marriage night. A bed of willow waits, strewn with sweet heather and moss, for the birth of a goddess from a human life.
Ruis-beth-eadha-coll-uath-ailm
Queen of the hunt – enchantress of men
Elder-birch-hazel-poplar-fir-hawthorn
The shamens trace the circle, stone by stone, touching each with its sacred branch. Spelling out the letters of the priestess, the letters of my name. A wild cry tears into the night from every side as a white roebuck springs into the circle, spectral as moonshine, though the black light of fear is in his eyes. The circle is quickly closed by bodies pressing closer, fire in their hands. The drums grow louder; the deer cannot escape.
Now the chosen man enters the sacred ring. His five-point shape is eclipsed amongst the flames, haloed around its edges: my dark star. Swiftly the pale beast is cornered and in one bright flash of starlight the man's blade is flung free and finds its pallid throat.
The roebuck trembles, kicks and falls. My heart contracts. The blood that spills is meant for me.
Daughter of darkness – for death is your boon
Ruis-beth-eadha-coll-uath-ailm
Bird of the night – your fertile reign
Thrice white goddess – return to us soon!
The man steps toward me holding his prize. With a single rip of knife he strips the deer of its skin and wraps it milkwhite round his naked shoulders. With the flat of his blade he smears blood on my cheeks, on his chest. I feel the heat, the syrup of the blood that slides between us and within me as he lays me on the bed of willow. I whisper his name. With rough, unsteady hands he knots the leather cord around my neck and as he draws it tight I sigh, I’m filled with sweetness. Once more the drum within me pounds – my blood's a running deer, a flooding river, then the shiver of the stars. In blood my womb will carry the seed moon. My time has come. O Luna!
The great white owl of moon now lifts her wings and flies to me, my raptor; at last I hear the rush of feathered wind. Her talons slide their ice into my soul.
Her belly full, the moon flies high and free.
*****
When I awoke, I was lying on the ground within the circle. All was the same yet somehow different. Night had drifted over me and the stones were black and barred against the violet sky like jagged teeth in a broken mouth. They seemed now a set of desecrated graves with no rough magic, only lifeless rock.
There’s no way back, I know, and no way on.
The moon is laughing at some killing joke, her mouth so wide it splits her face. The moon’s a lunatic. She’s mad. She’s gone. And then she’s back, calm as before, a broad-faced nun.
The moon’s my sister. She grows old alone.
