Going Under

My introduction for the autumn equinox; Mythos and Mycelium section of the new Dark Mountain issue Eight Fires. With section title by Candace Jensen and mushroom artwork by Carrie LeChance.

We were meant to drop below the surface of things and to experience the depths of life in the same way that our deep-time ancestors did. Their lives were filled with story, ritual and circles of sharing. Their lives were not shamefully hidden away but known – losses, defeats, griefs, pains, joys, births, deaths, dreams, sorrows; the communal draw of life was open and acknowledged. This is what the soul expected, what it is we need today.

– From Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

There is a moment when everything dips. You leave the summer fields and seashore and plunge into the cool birch wood. The air smells different, enticing, earthy. Instead of clouds floating above you, a shining sea, a far horizon, you are looking down. Autumn is coming. Your hands are reaching out into leaves for fruit, your eyes sharpened for a form at the roots of the trees. Then you see one. A small shock on your path like a snake. A mushroom glimmering, appearing mysteriously from below.

It was a bad business our forgetting about the Underworld. We live in a civilisation that has neglected to follow the instructions of ancestral myth, insisting only on the upward thrust of the year, reaching toward endless pinnacles of growth and gain. Nevertheless the myths of places and peoples have endured, surviving on the edges, reminding us that without a culture underpinned by mythos, without honouring what lies beneath, there is no depth, no deep understanding of a human presence in a place, or a life. We become mere consumers, no longer a ‘custodial species’, the people who can sing praises, connect and dance for the living world of which we are part. 

Once all landscapes we lived in were named after the spirits who inhabited them the hills had secret names, every rock had a story, the springs were considered holy, which is to say pristine, a gift; the animals taught us how to be alive, the plants gave us their medicine in dreams. How can we revere a land where these things have been ravaged? How do we get back to a sense that it matters that we exist? Without the self-hatred that comes when we see rivers and mountains poisoned and broken by a civilisation we are entangled in, like fish in a net? 

At some point the mushroom appears and reminds us. Something ancient and rigorous and difficult is stirred within our beings: the obligation to give back to life. That sense of duty begins at this equalising point in the cycle, as the year tips into the dark. 

Somewhere we know we lack this depth as modern people; that our lives are flat and meaningless, our only value given in terms of family, or economy. As the great writer on myth Roberto Calasso once wrote: ‘A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living.’ By which he did not mean any of the world’s patriarchal religions but the gods who once spoke in oracles in caves, who became trees, who lived in the storm, who enthused human beings at key points in their lives, so they could experience the extraordinary planetary forces they were made of. 

The Eight Fires practice is dramaturgical, which is to say it demands a creative engagement with the world that faces outwards and acts. During the year we embodied the shifts of the seasons, following the tracks of several myths. Beginning with Alcyone on her winter solstice nest, we shapeshifted into spring birds with Sweeney (Suibhne) at Imbolc, crossed the equinox bridge made of alder by the giant Bran, danced with Dionysyus wreathed in the green leaves of May. Following a Welsh mountain path of flowers, we held the zenith of summer solstice with Olwen; at Lughnasadh we offered gifts to Shony (Seonaidh), guardian of the Hebridean sea. Here at the crossover of the year, we followed the passage of Persephone, whose descent into the Underworld was celebrated for thousands of years in the ancient world; whose initiates would enter the dark to be shown the solar mysteries that lie at its core. As winter approached, the flower and sun maidens of summer would become the Cailleach at Samhain. No hero ascent myth would ever be able to guide us into her rocky, raven-black realms, or bring us back come spring.  

What tracks do we need to make to reenter the world as a living place? What moves do we make at this time of year, to understand that this transformative force, this regeneration of the world we cry out for, lies not in the light but in the dark? How do we remember that Persephone is not a foolish girl raped by Hades, but the Underworld aspect of a great goddess, who gladly descends to meet her partner Dionysus – twin embodiments of the rise and fall of earthly life, in which the sun lies in the centre? 

Trapped as we are in the labyrinth of modernity, it takes effort to connect with the deeper ancestral part of our beings, the rio abajo rio of ourselves. Our culture resists the kiva, wanting all meetings to take place above ground, restricted to banter and chat, to keep us within brick walls under surveillance. To access this depth cannot be done in your head, or in front of a machine. You have to go out, leave the familiar behind, go into the forest, sit with the tree, follow the wild wind, be opened, challenged, changed, and return. That task is embedded in the fairy stories and myths of many places, and in our equinox micro journeys, we walked into our territories to remember them. We went into the place where ‘imagination can meet memory in the dark’, as the nature metaphysician Annie Dillard described the creative process of writing, to forge testimony of word and image, dance and song, for our fellow voyagers.

The mushroom was the key that opened the Underworld door. The mycelium beneath our feet, linking and nourishing the roots of the forest and plant worlds, also connected us with each other in our imaginations. Its vast communicating networks allow us to understand the forking and fusing nature of a multi-celled, ever-changing, alchemical planet; its capacity to break down forms, to understand the role of transforming the dead wood of our own lives. Without fungi to compost dead matter, there would be no soil, no sustenance, no life. We resist the life-death-life myths because our monocultural mindsets resist death, choosing to live cryonically, eternally in light, refusing to admit the consequences of our everyday actions. But we devour the world to keep this illusion going, destroying soil, water, air, our memories, our bodies, and those of millions of other creatures.

None of us wanted this. It was time to go down.

Lactarius atroviridis by Carrie LeChance

IMAGES: (TOP) Mythos and Mycelium by Candace Jensen (Eight Fires section title for autumn equinox - from set of 11)

Watercolour, hand-made floral inks and galls, mushroom spores, gouache, ink, graphite and freshly gathered charcoal on torn arches and Fabriano papers.

The design of the cover and section titles are directly inspired by letterforms and inks found in the Book of Kells and an edition of the Carmina Gadelica. Their making is rooted in the tradition of illuminated manuscripts, in which gilded, intricately-painted letters made by hand, honour the sum of their implied sounds and meanings as sacred. These are an intentionally wild calligraphy made with carefully rendered organic shapes of charred wood, stone circles, ash heaps scribed by the wind, and embedded seeds or hairs in the paper. There are languages spoken on the page between the inks, the pigments, and the paper fibres themselves.

Candace Jensen is a visual artist, writer, calligrapher and organiser. Her ‘Gaia Illuminations’ are visual essays which expand calligraphy’s traditional cultural reliquary beyond the limits of anthropocentrism. Jensen is co-founder and Programming Director of In Situ Polyculture Commons, an arts residency and regenerative culture catalyst, and lives on the unceded lands of the Elnu Abenaki in southern Vermont.

(BOTTOM) Lactarius atroviridis by Carrie LeChance

Milkcap fruiting body, painted with pigments made by fungi (Boletopsis grisea and Cortinarius marylandensis), black walnut hulls, ripe buckthorn fruit (Rhamnus cathartica), mica schist and Atlantic jingle shell.

Carrie LeChance is an artist living and working in Connecticut with colours made by the plants, fungi and lichens she knows and loves. She shares her techniques and work via Instagram: @mmmordere

You can find out more about of Dark Mountain: Issue 24 - Eight Fires in the editorial here and buy your copy here. This full colour edition is an ensemble exploration of the eight ceremonial fires of the year, celebrated in practices, stories, poetry and artwork.