The Cunning Farmer, Practical Geurgy
Chapter 14: The Underworld and the Fae
With the theme of the previous chapter and this one very much on my mind, I went out for a walk one night, the night of the full moon, a few days before Halloween. It was mostly overcast, with swiftly moving low stratus clouds, but very bright, warm and breezy. A deliciously spooky night. The cloud cover occasionally parted to allow the Moon to peek through and on several occasions I caught a glimpse of Jupiter, which was a few degrees ahead of the Moon. I walked down the gravel road that runs through my farm, passing by a stand of very late sunflowers which were struggling to bloom far out of their season. A Jimson weed plant was blooming,in the midst of the sunflower plants, its lavender flowers suddenly illuminated by a beam of moonlight that shot through the parting clouds. I had a sudden inspiration to pick three flowers from the plant and add them to the offerings of beer and tobacco I was carrying to the abandoned farm where I was going to talk to the spirits. I carried them in my hand for a few minutes as I walked, when I remembered that the alkaloids could be absorbed through the skin, and that I had better place them in my pocket, just to be safe.
I went up to the abandoned outbuildings, loose boards on the barn were rattling in the breeze, the milking parlor and the tobacco stripping room, where the farm family had spent much of their time tending their animals and preparing their crops for sale, were eerily quiet, darkness staring out of the shattered windows. I laid the Jimson weed flowers in the grass, poured out the beer and crumbled the tobacco, while voicing my prayer to the spirits of the place and the souls of those who had lived there. As I often do I said, “If you can hear me, knock.”, and I immediately heard a thump from a clump of trees about 50 feet away. I stated my intentions to honor the spirits and to care for the land, as I asked for their favor and assistance in doing so.
I wandered slowly, tired from the week’s farm work and the late hour, trying to decide how far I wanted to walk that late in the night. I just stood in the middle of the clearing, listening to the sound of the wind in the trees, the distant barking of dogs and howling of coyotes, the uncanny squeaking of branches in the trees sounding like voices on the wind. I just sat and thought, leaning on my forked staff, picturing in my imagination the people who had lived there, imagining myself talking to them, I drifted into a reverie. I could hear the old couple who had lived their lives there and had run the farm tell me that they liked me, that I was a hard worker, and that they were proud to see such good crops being grown on their land, and that they liked that I came to talk to them. I pictured the people who had lived there before in the 19th century, clearing the land and living in small frame houses and log cabins now gone, who lived and died on this land, the mothers, fathers, children, and elders, both enslaved and free, who passed whole generations here, now forgotten, whose bodies rotted into the land in now forgotten family grave plots. I could see the settlers who squatted on the land claimed by the Shawnee nation, who were involved in the bloody guerilla war of genocide that was fought so violently in Kentucky in the last several decades of the 18th century.
And before the Shawnee, their nameless ancestors, who had farmed the land, raising corn, beans, squash and tobacco in the creek valleys, and living in larger villages, that were wiped out by the epidemics, brought from Europe and spread by Spanish explorers who traveled through the North American back country in the 16th century. This culture was entirely erased, and I could picture that the epidemics killed so many so quickly, the dead left unburied in the abandoned villages which had fallen silent and overgrown. In my mind I went back to an earlier time, the time of the ones who built the mounds in the valleys, who the archaeologists call the Hopewell and Adena people, the stargazing culture of astronomer shamans who made massive earthworks in Ohio and Kentucky to track the solstices and equinoxes and predict eclipses, to perform unknown rituals to maintain the cosmic balance, whose farthest western outposts included our land. I could clearly see the shaman priests, dressed in wolf skin, embodying the wolf, leading the ceremonies on this ridge, in a clearing with an unobstructed view of the sky. They used the very substances I left them as offerings, the datura and rustica tobacco, to fuel their visions. The leader, the one I call the “wolf shaman” in chapter 2, turned and looked at me with an intense and intimidating lupine stare.
Back in time I went, to mammoths and mastodons, and bison, and the first humans on this land, at the end of the ice age. Back further still, the pictures became dimmer and out of focus, as I came back to myself standing in the clearing leaning on my forked staff in the moonlight. An hour had passed as if it were a moment, I thanked the spirits, and went home to bed. In the morning I woke up and the light which came into my eyes had a strange and unreal quality, and I wondered what was wrong with my vision. I looked in the mirror and my left pupil was fully dilated, and the right was normal. I panicked a bit and then I remembered the Jimson weed flowers that I held in my hand a little too long, and the vision that I had while standing in the field. I must have rubbed a bit of the juice into my eye, enough to dilate the pupil and perhaps give the vision of the previous night some of its intensity and power, allowing me to see things previously hidden.
It was given to me to know that the underworld is memory, it is the memory of the land and it is also the memory of the cultures that live on the land, the people whose lives form its stories, theses stories exist out of time and space in a place of memory, accessible, to the sensitive and intuitive, as spirits, ghosts, fae folk. This underworld of memory is held in the land, in the rocks and soil, but also in the collective soul of humanity, as a dream that we all dream together, a space at once within us and all around us, which we can make contact with in order to form a relationship across time with those who have gone before, and with those who will come after us. To form a true culture, one that honors its ancestors and makes wise decisions for generations to come, we must make peace with our past, starting as individuals, with our ancestors and the place in which we find ourselves.
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