In The Temple of Flower and Owl

Blodeuwedd and Sacred Law

Photo by Bruno van der Kraan on Unsplash

Dear Readers,

This has been a week of feathers and flowers, of comings and goings, fragrant and bittersweet as I say goodbye to someone I’ve known since my girlhood.

For weeks now the spirit of pueo has been guiding me. Silent-winged, hollow-eyed owl whose eyes are wells without bottom, in a way you have made the night friendly, flying in front of my car as I make the final turn home from work in Hilo. And though in Hawaii there are always flowers blooming, this week I was especially aware of them because I was invited by a group of women to celebrate Beltaine. All of us were asked to bring something to create an earth altar for an intimate ceremony we held on the ground embraced by a grove of mango trees.

At the center of the altar were owl wings. This owl had been found dead on the property earlier in the spring and one of the women had honored its body with burial at the base of one of the mangos and received the wings as part of her own medicine that she was willing to share with us in this ceremony.

Owls have many associations in cultures worldwide. Some consider them an ill omen and harbinger of bad fortune and death. One of my friends tried to bring an owl feather into a tipi ceremony and was excoriated by the road man and forbidden from entering with the feather. In Hawaiian culture the pueo is one of the most ancient aumakua and is viewed as a guardian and protector. In one account I read seeing an owl means you are protected, but can also mean you are in need of protection. Watch out, says the owl. I think of this each time the owl swoops in front of my headlights and slow down. In Greek mythology the owl is associated with Athena and is a symbol of wisdom. Athena, as goddess of the intellect, has never seemed as juicy to me as Artemis and Persephone.

I never really thought of it before now, but what does the owl being Athena’s totem say about the source of her wisdom?

Wisdom is born from the dark.

In darkness, we encounter the trials that can make us wise. Darkness, where we often can’t see or have difficulty seeing, is the genesis of wisdom. In this sense wisdom is mysterious and has an element of grace about it. I don’t ask for the owl to guide and protect me, but there it is flying faster than my Honda Fit along the black road above the sea.

Beltaine, a feast of fertility and flowering is normally not associated with owls, but there we were seated amongst the mangoes around the exquisite pueo wings. The details on the feathers took my breath away, tones of peach, brown egg and ecru merging into each other without bleeding, precise as the pointillist dots on the edges. Why did the dots exist if not to adorn the bird with its own unique majesty like tribal tattoos? There is probably a scientific reason, but I postulate that the mystical in this case is just as important. Looking at those dotted wings was like absorbing hieroglyphs or braille. I may not know the meaning behind the code yet, but a part of me understood it. One of the women remarked how light they were. We sat around them in shared awe, adorned them with flowers and chocolate, ferns, a tiny avocado, ripe tangerines, seed packets, words of praise and blessings on our own flowering.

I sat in the west where the sun sets and death enters. Swooping low along the ground heading east toward sunrise a hawk rose toward a low branch of a mango as we gasped and welcomed it to our circle. ‘Io is another powerful Hawaiian aumakua. This endemic hawk showed absolutely no fear as we finished our ceremony. With its back to us it turned its head and watched us gather our offerings and stand as the rain came to bless the land and didn’t move as we walked toward its perch. One by one we stopped in a crescent at its back taking in the details of this living bird with awe. We stood there so long we no longer felt a need to be silent. The bird accepted our presence as we chatted, was not scared of us, and turning its head like the minute hand of a clock in precise increments looked directly at each one of us, launching itself into the canopy when we finally moved as one towards our indoor temple.

It is quite something to come face to face with a hawk. For me, the gaze was shared but it did not feel equal-no, this hawk was not entering our world, we were entering his domain. In showing itself he let us know we had pierced the veil. Our ceremony was heard on the other side, and for a few brief minutes that seemed very long, the wild accepted us back into the hoop of life as healthy citizens of Earth. ‘Io, solar soarer also paid tribute to his dark sister pueo.

I carried a story with me to the ceremony, one I didn’t speak aloud, but that played out in the center of our circle as the offerings of owl wing and red hibiscus merged, the story of Bloddeuwedd, Welsh maiden goddess of initiation ceremonies, also known as The Ninefold Goddess of the Western Isles of Paradise.

Her name means “flower-face” because she was created out of flowers to be the wife of the hero Llew by two conniving magicians, Llew’s uncles Gwydion and Math. Llew, cursed by his mother Arianrhod never to bear the three marks of masculinity: a name, to bear arms, and to have a wife, managed to attain the first through tricks and cunning, and was wed when his uncles came to his aid creating the beautiful Bloddeuwedd to be his perfect, biddable partner, a woman without will, a woman for adornment, soft and fragrant as flowers.

Now in the Welsh society of the Mabinogion a curse is not quite the same as we consider it now. A better word for it is the Irish geis, which is more like a sacred law that cannot be broken no matter what. Interestingly, historical Hawaiian culture contained the same concept called kapu, punishable by death if broken.

A geis is not exactly a curse because it also can contain the implicit gift of revealing its bearer’s destiny. In placing a geis on her unwanted son, Arianhrod (who’s son some say was fathered by her brother Gwydion creating a parallel with the Egyptian triad Isis, Osiris and Horus), Arianhrod creates the possibility for her son to experience the ritual death of the dying god once considered essential to the health of the land and kingdom in the pre-Christian days before the time of the Mabinogion. She may seem heartless and cruel, when in fact her loyalties are actually just beyond the range of individual destiny. She has the good of the kingdom at heart.

But I’m getting ahead of myself-skipping ahead to the theorizing when I could be dwelling in some fantastic images that have more to say about what I’m getting at than my philosophizing.

We see Bloduewedd glimpsing the hunter Gronw with a stag over the back of his horse riding toward her out of the forest. Gronw, a man who chose to love her, laying with her in the flowering fields to bless the land in the old ways, but who in this story tempts her to the dark side by getting her nearly immortal husband to reveal how he could be killed:

Not by day or night

Not indoors or out

Not riding or walking

Not by any normal weapon

And then we see how they did it, luring Llew to a bath by a riverside constructed under a thatched hut and somehow persuading him to get in the bath by standing one foot on the back of a goat, one on the edge of the tub. At that point Gronw threw a sacred spear at him. When the spear pierced his side he changed into an eagle and flew away.

Blodeuwedd flees, but Gwydion is too fast. Mid-stride the magician turns her into an owl and curses her:

“You will never show your face again in daylight again and you will be the enemy of all other birds.”

Gwydion then found Llew the eagle and coaxed him back into human form. A year of healing. A year to stew and plan his revenge. Llew found Gronw and challenged him, killing his rival by throwing a spear clean threw a stone.

Who do you sympathize with in this story? I am with Blodeuwedd and Arianrhod. I feel little for Llew, but question my impulse to see them through a 21st century psychodramatic perspective. I imagine a contemporary fundamentalist Christian, or even anyone Christian, would sympathize with the cuckolded Llew, although revenge is clearly not part of the teachings of Jesus.

However, what I’m trying to get at is that this story may be in code, a pagan river running through an 11th century Christian narrative that shows that the old gods and their ways, celebrated even now at Beltaine, were not dead. Are not dead. Arianhrod’s geis allows Llew to go through the ancient initiation in a culture that would not allow it. In the story we see how the Earth is still fed even when most can’t hear her cries of hunger. We see humans feeding the holy in whatever way they can.

Despite all the neglect. The rapes and betrayals, Earth is still here beneath our feet, inviting us to converse. Seeds to flowers, to fruit, we are fed with such astonishing beauty and every now and then we are graced with the ability to see it, even if we don’t deserve it.

Writing this I’m struck again by the presence of the ‘io who joined our ceremony in the mango grove, raptor cousin of the eagle that the hero Llew inhabited for awhile.

Was he saying he’d forgiven Blodeuwedd by flying out of nowhere to join our ceremony of flower and owl?

By lingering with us, meeting each one of our eyes, was the hawk saying the geis is complete, the destiny fulfilled?

And what is that destiny? What has come to completion now that the owl has been seen in daylight?

Our particular owl was found at sunrise by a man from Israel named Yzir who goes by Eazy at sunrise. You can’t make these things up. Another friend had an encounter with it while it was still living, coming face to face with it in the dark where it stood outside the Mango Temple. I couldn’t help thinking when I heard the story that it had sacrificed itself to give us a message.

While laws do serve a purpose, the first law of the universe is really the only one we need-Do no harm. It’s the same in the Christian and Mū Hawaiian tradition.

People were executed for violating kapu. That doesn’t sound so sacred to me, and thought it may have kept order, it was a mark of sickness, a symptom of the distorted masculine that is finally ready to lay down its arms, be vulnerable in a clearing like the hawk perched in the mango, showing us its back, turning its head to look down at us.

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Jen