This Ancient Heart: Landscape, Ancestor, Self
207
This Ancient Heart: Landscape, Ancestor, Self
207eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782799689 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hunt, John Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/30/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 207 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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This Ancient Heart
The Threefold Relationship Between Landscape, Ancestor and Self
By Paul Davies, Caitlín Matthews
John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2014 Paul Davies and Caitlín MatthewsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78279-968-9
CHAPTER 1
Time and the Grave
By Emma Restall Orr
The fellow lifts himself heavily from the bench, and turns to me with a smile bruised and battered with grief. We hold hands for a while, our breath misty in the cold air, no more words needed. As he trudges away I watch, his feet scuffing the stones of the track. He stops by his car and I wait, alert with concern, but slowly he lifts a hand, and with an extraordinary tenderness he touches the hazel catkins that hang, honey-yellow, in the frosty grey of the leafless hedge. I see him breathe in, nod to himself, before getting into the car and quietly driving away.
What happens to us when we die?
It's a question that lingers. At the natural burial ground where I work it is a question that is posed every day. Those who are facing their own demise, who are searching for what it will take to let go in peace, with grace, will often stare into the darkness of the not-knowing. Those who are floundering after the physical loss of a loved one, who feel the emptiness in their arms, yet the bursting fullness in their hearts, will cry out to me, knowing it is a question that can't really be answered. Those finding a way of living when their worlds have been reshaped by death, stand at the graveside and stare.
Detailed assertions have for aeons been put forward by the religious, the spiritual, the philosophical, the scientific, offering answers, both comforting and dreadful. That these are so diverse only fuels the agnostics' dilemma, provoking many simply to shrug, resigned to the enormity of their ignorance, while others stride towards denial, refusing to think of the inevitable, that death comes to us all. Yet the question persists. Our mortality, and how we carry it, plays a significant role in what makes us who we are.
When someone tells me they have no fear of death, I hear words that clatter with what seems to me a graceless irreverence. Death is not a force about which we should risk any expression of hubris. We may feel comfortable with the idea of our own personal journey, confident that we will be peaceful in our courage should we know when death approaches. We may even feel assured that our affairs are sufficiently in order so that, were we to die today, we would leave little that would burden others, tidying up the debris of our lives. But for most of us, this is not the case. Death frequently brings with it terrible pain and disorder. Not only do many die having crawled through long hours of suffering, but seldom do we die before someone dies whom we love dearly. Death then reaches deep inside us, merciless, hollowing out a vast, empty cavity of grief. How we spend our finite years, with death behind us, death beside us, death before us, how we carry the certainty of death, helps to shape us.
As thinking beings, aware of ourselves as thinking beings, it is the mind that many are primarily concerned with: when we die, does the 'I' head off upon its next adventure, or is it extinguished? These two alternative beliefs are the most common within our culture, the first a substance dualism, where the soul or spirit leaves the physical body, the second a materialist monism, where there is nothing but matter, the mind being no more than a chemical phenomenon.
Then there's the other side of the question, which is not so ethereal. When we die, what will happen to the fleshy parcel that is our physical body? What we would want for ourselves, and for those we care for, is informed by our understanding of the I. If the body, after death, has no spirit, no soul, no mind, then it is effectively just detritus, the organic remains or leavings after a life of conscious living. We shouldn't care what happens to it. For without a subject, a perceiving I, it is an object, a thing, no more than inert matter.
Of course, although some quip that their family should not bother with the fuss of a funeral, that their body should be thrown out with the rubbish sacks, there are forces that don't allow this. Religious strictures, and legal requirements, ensure that what happens to the dead is socially responsible. But there is more: in a healthy human being there is an emotional desire to ensure that the body of one who has died is properly cared for. Even the committed dualist who believes the soul to have flown, even the ardent materialist who believes the person no longer exists, can feel some degree of continuing concern, an impulse to care.
At what point does that fall away?
Let me now change the tone and direction of this brief essay, and offer here two words, words that, like many with equally ancient Germanic roots, have a deftly effective impact: wet and dry. There is a significant difference between the newly deceased, still fleshed, soft, cold and heavy, perhaps seeping with potentially dangerous fluids, with whom we still have some relationship, the wet dead; and the dry dead, the stale old bones of the long dead, discarnate, faceless, and now relatively safe.
Consider this within our modern culture. In our heavily populated country, we are encouraged to hand over those who are dying into the care of hospitals, nursing homes and hospices, to hand over the dead to funeral directors, keeping death at arms' length: death is no longer a natural and inexorable part of everyday life in every home. Most now have no idea how to deal with the wet dead, physically or emotionally, the driving instinct being to step away. In Britain more than 70 per cent have their loved ones cremated, the long process of natural release and transformation now exchanged for 90 minutes at 1,000°C. A few days later the ashes are returned to the funeral director. No longer a person, the wet is now dry. Instead of daily or weekly visits to the cemetery, the urn stays with the funeral director, or in the back of a cupboard, or perhaps one day the ashes are scattered somewhere that feels right, usually at a significant distance from home. Grief is a bore: we feel the pressure not to tire others with the burden of our loss, but to accept and move on: he's dead, dry, gone.
How our culture deals with the ancient dead is a reflection of this. Bones disinterred through the process of land development are bagged up as 'human remains': the dry dead. Faceless, nameless, they may be packed into boxes, and taken to some archaeological store, perhaps accessioned into a museum's collection. The intention may be to study or rebury, according to the requirements of the exhumation licence, but many will disappear with the hundreds of thousands of other ancestral bones, down some crevice created by an ever-increasing lack of resources, abandoned on shelves for decades to come.
At the same time, archaeologists dig up graves as entertainment for popular television shows, making wild speculations, telling stories, as if the act of ransacking a grave were entirely acceptable, good clean fun: it is the dry dead they are finding, not the wet. Furthermore, despite new 3D replication technology, museums still believe it acceptable to create displays using the bones of individual people, mocking up the opened grave, manipulating a skeleton into a pose, provoking visitors with a little shock and horror in brightly-lit cases. Or, where they have only disarticulated bones, a femur is placed as another object in a museum gallery. A cranium lies on a glass shelf in a display cabinet, alongside shards of pottery, an old knife, a small card with a few abstruse words, all historical artefacts, dull and dry. The person is not a person: the bone is just another item of interest.
What happens to us when we die?
The question is then extended to this: when we choose to bury a loved one, when we lay someone to rest, with the prayers and grace of whatever ritual we need, in the presence of our family, our friends, our God(s), do we expect that person to be left to rest in peace? If so, for how long? The Human Tissues Act (2004) was written into UK legislation in response to a scandal about children's organs that had been retained and studied without consent: wet flesh. Its remit covers one hundred years. Those who have died more than a century ago were felt to have slipped out of memory, no longer to be in relationship with the living. Even organs preserved in jars, if old enough, were somehow now considered to be of the dry dead.
Yet, a hundred years after the start of the Great War, its anniversaries are bringing back to us not just pertinent imagery, but stories, memories, the names of grandfathers, great uncles, great grandfathers, great grandmothers, together with photographs that reveal faces. Poppies floating in the Thames wet the edges of the dry dead, changing their status, calling these individuals back into our hearts, giving them space within the communities and families of the living. We can again hear their laughter, acknowledge their love and pain. They have become persons again. Jack Cooper, a young lad of 18, a farm labourer until he stepped up to volunteer, who as a soldier died slowly, terribly, in the dreadful stench of no-man's land somewhere in northern France, his right leg blown off just above the knee: were his bones to be found by the plough, and exhumed by archaeologists, would it be acceptable to put them on display? Whose consent would it be necessary to achieve, or could it be done without consent?
Let's consider another lad, this one 14 years old, his muscles strong from working on the land, his form short and slight from being always hungry. His bones are found when a field-edge ditch is dug more deeply after flooding. After initial concern about murder, the bones indicating multiple stab wounds, the police pathologists acknowledge their age, and pass them over to archaeologists. Everything points to a battle of the Civil War, from which perhaps the young lad crawled away, hiding himself in a gulley where he later died, to be lost for 370 years. We don't know his name, but still we can picture his life, amidst a landscape before the enclosures, pulling oxen along the ridge and furrow of the great Warwickshire Feldon, laughing with his brothers, looking forward to lifting the flagon of sun-warmed, sharp, home-brewed cider that will quench his thirst. Would it be acceptable to put his dry, cracked bones on display in a museum? If, instead of being left in the ditch, when the fighting was over one of the local women picking over the battlefield had found him, if he'd been returned to his home and buried, his mother weeping at the grave, would it be acceptable to exhume him, for the sake of scientific curiosity or a television show?
What change would be required for it to be defensible to do so?
Perhaps there is something poignant about having an entire skeleton. If all that had been found by that French plough were a femur or a cranium, the dead soldier remaining without identification, or if the English boy who had died in that Warwickshire ditch had been scattered by time and wildlife, leaving just a few bones, would that make a difference?
What if we were able to identify the person whose cranium sits on the shelf on display in the museum? A woman in her mid 20s, with three living children, three having died, we can imagine her, a lass with long fair hair, sitting in the meadow by the river, the baby at her breast, breaking hunks of bread and cheese for the older two boys, laughing as they chase butterflies in the sunshine. Her name is Hancara: she was wife of the tanner Catacus, whose beautiful voice following her death would sing nothing but laments. Putting flesh on her dry bones, she becomes an individual once more, a warm and tender human being, loving mother, daughter, wife. Can you feel the softness of her cheek as she embraces you, still laughing? Of course, such a story can be discarded as pure fiction. Yet, only the little details are gathered from thin air: the individual whose cranium is on that museum shelf was no less a real, living, breathing, laughing human being.
Is it time that makes the difference? The Human Tissues Act speaks of 'deceased persons', while museums and archaeologists working with older ancestors refer merely to 'human remains'. King Richard III, whose bones were exhumed from a car park in 2012, died in 1485; however, his social status sets him apart, allowing him to be laid to rest in Leicester Cathedral, with dignity and grace, and in a manner that ensures he will not be disturbed again. Is it the lack of a name then, or the absence of memories, that diminishes a person's individuality, a person's humanity, sufficiently to make it acceptable to pull them from the grave, to keep in boxes or exhibit their bones as curiosities?
For some, such as myself, it is never acceptable. For some, the exhibiting of ancestors is in every case deemed indecorous, the retention of the dead in museum and archaeological storerooms is felt to be wholly disrespectful. To dig up a grave is always an unjustifiable act of desecration. There never comes a point where the dead lose their personhood. It makes no difference at all whether they died five years ago or five thousand years. But why?
Returning to that original question is a place to start: what happens to us when we die? I spoke of the two most common beliefs, the dualist and materialist, both of which consider the physical body as inert matter at death. To an animist such as myself, there is quite a different standpoint, based on an integrationist metaphysical perspective of a universe that is undivided. What is generally perceived as the distinction between mind and matter is understood by the animist as an illusion created by the veil of perception. In other words, the limitations of the human mind mean that we can never perceive nature as it actually is, but only as we perceive it to be through the rough filters of our senses, the way in which we process that data having evolved purely to support the simple needs of survival. Our basic awareness is of mind being something separate from matter, but nature, as it is in itself, is whole: the experience of the individual mind emerges because the essence of nature is minded.
Animism is considered by the ill-informed to be no more than a primitive and superstitious nonsense, a childlike view of trees that talk. It is nothing of the kind. With a strong heritage worldwide, including in Western philosophy, it has an entirely rational foundation, overcoming the unavoidable problems found in both materialist and dualist metaphysics. Where the basis of the universe is an essential consciousness, all that comes into form within nature is conscious, from the layers that exist within what we term subatomic particles, out to galaxies and the dark matter that many believe may constitute the greater part of the universe. Wherever that mindedness coheres, becoming moments of being, there are patterns of perpetual interaction, of perceiving and responding. Human consciousness is just one specific and unimaginably narrow version of the countless perspectives within the wholeness of nature. It is the only type of consciousness we have, the only one we know, and indeed perhaps the only one that we can even begin to imagine.
This animism does not explain beyond doubt the mystery of death. In some ways it adds to the enigma, for in recognising the limits of human consciousness, it emphasises all that we cannot know. However, what it offers is an idea of how we are as we are, through the journey of living. For during our lives, from our first years, we slowly build and determine our sense of self, the I that perceives, the I that allows us the experience of our own existence. Yet the coherence of being that makes up the self isn't contained solely within a physical body: it extends, reaching out through communication, building with each action and reaction, each relationship, each act of creativity and participation, as connections and memories develop and spread. We grow, becoming more fully a part of the woven fabric of the worlds in which we live, until the centre of that self begins to soften in focus. Slowly, with age or disease that softening accelerates, leaving the I less and less substantial, this dissolving continuing through our journey of dying, and on through the days and years after we have died. Slowly, softly, the I lets go, releasing itself from the coherence of individuality, and returning to the wholeness of nature in itself.
The purpose of this essay, however, is not to present an exposition of animist metaphysics, nor to justify it as a philosophical position, but to explain why such a perspective may lead to such strong attitudes about the dead. This sense of nature's wholeness is key. From an animist perspective, the world is not empty space and inert matter, through which a select number of sentient beings move. There are no things, there are no objects. Every part of the universe, from the subatomic to the cosmic, is in a state of perpetual experience, wakefully engaging in relationship within each ecosystem, with each momentary interaction a note in the song of the whole. It is this ongoing sensation of mindful wholeness that so comprehensively informs the fundamental beliefs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from This Ancient Heart by Paul Davies, Caitlín Matthews. Copyright © 2014 Paul Davies and Caitlín Matthews. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Graham Harvey,Introduction by Paul Davies,
Time and the Grave by Emma Restall Orr,
Tribes of Spirit: Animals as Ancestors by Greywolf,
Ancestors and Place: Seidr and Other Ways of Knowing by Jenny Blain,
Wights, Ancestors, Hawks and Other Significant Others: A Heathen-Archaeologist-Falconer in Place by Robert J Wallis,
Healing the Ancestral Communion: Pilgrimage Beyond Time and Space by Caitlín Matthews,
Memory at Sites of Non-Place: A Eulogy by Camelia Elias,
Tuning into the Landscape by Sarah Hollingham,
How Genetics Unravels the Role of the Landscape in the Relationship Between Ancestors and Present by Luzie U Wingen,
Ancestors (Anck-est-ors) by David Loxley,
The Heart of the Land: The Druidic Connection by Penny Billington,
Afterword by Ronald Hutton,
Biographies,
Endnotes,