The Power of Myth and Storytelling: Part 3 – Myth and the Otherworld
Tuesday 2nd June, 2009
Myths bring us close to the mystical, to the Otherworld. I wonder if you know what its thresholds look like.
Thin Places
The Irish know them as the thin places. Once you experience them you realise that they are all around you, though there are many you may never see. Repetition, pattern and contrast in the landscape are essential elements in fairy stories and are reliable guides to these thin and sacred places. Traditionally these liminal places are at the edges, the boundaries, the extremities: where two streams meet, where water meets land, where the moon or the setting sun cast their mystical pathway on the ocean. And don’t forget the joy of gathering the dew – or even better, rolling in the grass under the moonlight when the dew is thick on the ground – the experience of heaven and earth in union, or the sense of opening and clarity when you step into a grove deep in the forest.
The wise woman, Biddy Early, from Co Clare, was remembered in many stories that were recorded by Lady Gregory and published early last century. Biddy Early worked a lot with the healing power of water and often used the potent curing power of dew. Lady Gregory was told by north Clare native Daniel Shea that : “Biddy Early told me to go out before sunrise to where there’d be a boundary wall between two or three estates, and to bring a bottle, and lay it in the grass and gather the dew into it.” (1) These doorways can be anywhere where we closely connect with communal, ancestral landscapes. In Ireland many such places are known as sacred sites – burial places of the ancestors, where significant times in the cycles of the year are celebrated, where ceremonies of joy and sorrow are held, rites of passage experienced, and where the ancestors are honoured. These are places where we can experience the mythic in the living landscape. Places where myths are told and myths are created.
The acts of sacred intention and celebration held there also provide the entrance to the Otherworld and are themselves closely connected to myth. In such places time can feel suspended and in these moments we are perhaps as close as we will ever be in this physical world to the Dreamtime world of the ancestors.