Trip to Wales~Part III

The rest of this story can be found here:
Part I
Part II

Because we had missed our original flight to the UK, we lost an entire day of our trip, cooling our heels in that misery known as Newark. For our last full day in Wales we had to make a choice between going north to Aberystwyth and doing research in the Welsh National Library there, or taking our last day and heading to the coast to see St. David's Cathedral and some cairns along the way. Technically, this was a research trip, and we should have gone to Aberystwyth, but we unanimously decided that we would get more out of seeing the coast. We tucked away our last prodigious traditional Welsh breakfast, which we felt compelled to photograph for posterity, before we hit the road. Here you see my dad and the hub-man oohing and aahing over our breakfast, while our lovely hostess looks on a bit nervously. I don't know if anyone had ever photographed her cooking before!

Our hosts were delightful people, and their B&B was immaculate and quite comfortable, but I think we were maybe just a bit too much for them, being Ugly Americans, and all. However they felt about us, the breakfasts were incredible! Fried bacon, which was closer to what we would call ham, fried tomatoes, eggs over easy, and fried toast. Add to this fresh grapefruit, orange juice, toast with the most incredibly tart and delicious marmalade, and fabulous french-press coffee. We did eat breakfast at a couple of inns during our trip, but none of them could touch the home cooking at Cwmgwyn Farm.
We left Llandovery early Thursday morning, headed for St. David's and the coast. We drove through Carmarthen and some other smaller towns on our way east. We were starting to wonder just how far this drive would be, when I sniffed the air and exclaimed, "I smell the ocean!" We rounded a bend in the road and there was the coastal town of Newgale and my beloved North Atlantic. Its kind of an odd sensation, to be looking at your same old ocean from the other side of it. It was breathtakingly beautiful, but I confess; as I looked to the west my heart was thinking of home. Not long after our pit-stop at Newgale, we drove into the very picturesque town of St. David. The sun actually deigned to show itself at this westernmost point of the country and the sky was a brilliant blue. The salty delight of the air paired with a cool crispness was possibly the most perfect air I've ever breathed into my generally allergic lungs and chronically outraged sinuses.

We parked and walked through the town to St. David's Cathedral. St. David, or Devi/Dewi, is the patron saint of Wales, and his Cathedral is considered to be the most sacred site in Wales. It was one of the earliest Christian centres in Britain, dating from the 6th century, and many early missionaries travelled from here to Ireland and Brittany. But considering the Prescelli Hills were just up the coast, I'm not sure I would agree with St. David's being the most sacred site. The Prescellis are the place of origin for the bluestones in the center circle at Stonehenge and are also the site of many Iron-age and neolithic burial mounds. These are the ruins of the Bishop's Palace at St. David's Cathedral. There was scaffolding around parts of this, as a restoration project was underway. I loved the checkerboard mosaic aspect of the upper stonework. The stone used to build St. David's Cathedral is of a local origin and it's purple. It was hard to really see the purple color in the bright sunlight, but it did show up in the photos. Something else I noticed in the pictures that wasn't apparent when standing next to the immenseness of the church is how irregularly it's shaped. The tower is off-center and the back of the church is built into a hill as well, giving it an uneven aspect as well. This is the interior of the main nave of the church. The ceiling was completely panelled in intricately carved wood and the lower arches all had different patterns carved in them. The flat ceiling was put in later, because of structural issues in supporting a stone roof. In the High Gothic style, you would see barrel vaulting or rib vaulting giving the height, instead of these massive rows of arches supporting even more arches above. Don't you just love the Jesus-on-a-trapeze thingy hanging from the ceiling? Who knew he was so talented? Obviously, this church has been added to over the years. I don't know what happened to the original 6th century structure, but what we see here is called Transitional Norman, with an arches supporting arches structure. It was embellished at some point in the Gothic period with the beautiful ribbed vaulting and the intricate coat of arms painted between each rib. I meant to take pictures of the many tombs inside the church, but my camera was not liking the dark gloom of the church's interior. We bought a map of the Welsh coast in the gift shop at St. David's that showed several neolithic burial mounds quite close by. Following the map, we found ourselves on a narrow, one lane, dirt road that turned out to be someone's driveway, more or less. At one point we had to come to a complete halt in this narrow lane, for fear of running over one of the chickens and roosters who had excitedly come out to greet us and now unconcernedly blocked the way. Finally getting past the chickens, we surreptitiously parked our car on the grassy hill behind the house and began the climb up to a peninsula of land known as St. David's Head. As we crested the hill we looked off to our left and saw this:
The sunny and blue skies had disappeared, covered over by a rapidly moving front of wind and rain and lowering clouds. It was so very Bronte sisters-like, to be walking the moors, and watching the storm come in, but I was with three men, so I kept this thought to myself. We struck out across the moors towards the north, with the mist rising and swirling around us. Halfway across, we encountered a quintessentially British couple, and stopped to say hello. The wife had the horsey look commonly associated with the Royal family, and the husband, with his tidy little mustache and tweeds responded to all our remarks with a "Yes, yes, yes!" that we still love to use. They were very nice, really, and I feel a little guilty writing seeming disparities about them, but remember - I am an Ugly American, so I kind of can't help it. We walked out to the water, which was roiling and thrashing up against the rocks that made up the shoreline. There wasn't really any beach at this spot, but we didn't care; walking the moors was a novel pastime, and a plain old beach would have just been a letdown.

Those prodigious Welsh breakfasts always lasted just long enough to find us somewhere without lunch prospects, but this time I was prepared. We propped ourselves against a boulder that blocked some of the wind and ate sharp cheese and crackers we had bought back in Cheddar, washed down with garlic stuffed green olives and water. We gazed out at the rapidly disappearing Atlantic, as the fog came in quickly and completely obscured our vision. as we headed back up the hill to the cairn, I could well imagine people getting lost in an influx of this stuff.

The fog and mist were, in the words of Yukon Cornelius, "thick as peanut butter". At some points we couldn't even see each other as we walked along together, but the obscurity came and went, with helpful gusts from the wind. It did make for an eerie scene as we approached Coetan Arthur, a 5,000-year-old burial chamber, that is reputed to be King Arthur's resting place. Of course, there are a number of cairns throughout Wales that are reputed to be Arthur's tomb!

While my brother and I posed for this shot, the old man headed up and over the hill. We joked that he was looking for the old elephant/ancestral graveyard. What he actually found up at the top of the summit was a concrete pad that had been used as a lookout during WWII. If there had been more time and better weather, I would have liked to explore this area further, because we missed a number of ancient sites here, due to time restraints and fog. Back in the car, we headed north towards the coastal towns of Fishguard and Newport, where there are ferries to take you across the channel to Ireland. In a future trip to this area it might be fun to fly into Ireland and take the ferry from there to Wales - it can't be any further than driving all the way across Wales from Bristol, England, and it would be fun to see a bit of Ireland.

In Newport we made our first pub stop of the day, at the Golden Lion, a cozy little hotel and pub right on the main road. I had tried to book rooms for us here, but a band of bike riders beat us to it, booking the entire place. A shame, really, because it looked like a nice place. We had a few pints, played some tunes on the jukebox and chatted with the guys playing pool, before setting off to find our next cairn.

Carreg Coetan, also a reputed burial site of You-Know-Who, (No, not Voldemort, silly! King Arthur!) was right in Newport, down a side road. It was like a little park, nestled in a small neighborhood. My brother took this picture and he was all excited that he had caught the tiny gap between the capstone and the stone holding it up (look at this picture up close and you'll see it). My dad surprised himself by really loving these ancient tombs. He had kind of scoffed at the idea of seeing ancient sites (its what he does, we just ignore him), but after St. David's Head, he not only understood our fascination, but he was getting into it as well. See the little leprechauns hiding in the cairn? Our last cairn of the day, Pentre Ifan, was the biggest and most impressive. Looking through the cairn you can see the Prescellis and Carni Ingli; Mountain of the Angels. I don't know how we did it, but we encountered very few people at any of these sites, which greatly enhanced our ability to get a feel for the energy at these places. We took a group shot as well, which is a little dark, but I wanted to show the massive proportions of Pentre Ifan, as compared to the smaller cairns we had seen earlier. Because of its size and extreme age (built around 3500 BC) this is considered one of the most important sites to see in western Wales. Pentre Ifan was the last planned stop of the day. We got back into the car and headed a little further north to hook up with the highway that led back to Carmarthen, where we had booked rooms at the 16th century coaching inn, The Boar's Head. Along the way, we noticed signs for a historic castle, and decided to stop and check it out.

Cilgerran Castle, first built in the early 12th century and improved upon in the early 13th century, was the site of quite a bit of Welsh history, both legendary and factual. It sits on the tidal river, Teifi (Tiffy), right outside of Cardigan. Again, we missed the crowds and had the entire castle to ourselves to explore. Unlike the ruins at Carreg Cennen, Cilgerran was more intact and we were able to climb the ancient stairs inside and feel truly immersed in the history of the place. Never a believer in the theory of Ancestral Memory, my father had an immediate connection to this place, and said that he felt like he had been there before. We could hardly drag him away from the place; this from the man who said he didn't want "to see a bunch of churches and castles".
Cilgerran is built of local slate and the construction was fascinating. I loved the stack of slate discs that form the support for this staircase.
It was kind of maze-like to follow your nose around this place, and I got lost from the others more than once! As we were headed back out of Cilgerran, we met the curator, who had just realized there were visitors over at the castle. It had been a slow day, so she had nipped out for a cup of tea. We felt bad for crashing and offered to pay the admission, but she waved us along. So we headed back to Carmarthen and the inn for our last night in Wales.

I hate to even say it, but I'm afraid this is going to have to extend into a Part IV. Even I feel like this is way too many parts but I don't know any other way to do the trip justice. For my rambling and allusions to self-importance, I ask patience and forgiveness of you, dear reader. In the future, I will attempt to only tell short stories!

Part IV: Our night at the Inn and the trip back to England, and then it will be done, done, DONE, I swear!

The Making of an Existential Pagan, Part II

*WARNING* If you are SQUEAMISH or EASILY OFFENDED, it might be in your best interest to STOP NOW and go read something a little more tame. Don't say I didn't warn you...

Part I may be found here.

As a teenager in the groovy 1970s I began to explore alternate faiths. First, I dabbled in the occult, but the mumbo-jumbo aspects of it felt all wrong. That and a certain little book of spells which raised dark suffocating mists out of my closet pretty much cured me. Looking for something a little more wholesome and substantial, I became interested in pagan mythology, beliefs, and the history of earth worship. It is a field I have spent over 30 years researching and accruing texts on. I'm not comfortable using the term "Wiccan" because it has come to mean something different than it's actual definition. (It is a Saxon word, meaning "earth worshipper") I understand and respect the sects that follow a female-only faith, but for me, it needed to reflect both sides of the biological picture, as it would have for the ancient believers.

During this time I also went to church occasionally with Miss Q, who is Catholic. I remember one mass particularly where the priest spent the entire sermon time (after the Catholic aerobics) telling us how much money we should be tithing every month to the church. After this material and spiritually bankrupt sermon, he offered to bless throats, it being cold and flu season. Needless to say, I passed on that dubious protection from such a suspect source.

I have found it increasingly harder as I get older, to embrace organized religions. Bea and I went to a couple of Full Moon Women's Circles, at a local Unitarian church, and while it was interesting to see how someone else interprets goddess worship, it felt kind of silly to both of us. I think it was the flake, er guest priestess who took us on a tour of Ancient Crete (in our imaginations, don't you know?!) that pretty much did us in. I'm no expert on Ancient Crete, but wouldn't you think they had more than one damn melody for singing every single song with? I was hard pressed not to sing harmony, and Bea was just next to me, giggling uncomfortably.

A couple summers past, I attended church with my aunt's family. It was her 70th birthday and I knew it would make her happy if we at least made an effort to attend and show family solidarity. My father opted out, but my younger brother and I went. Right before we went in to sit down, I realized I had started my period. I didn't have any supplies with me, so I went into the ladies' room and made a make-shift pad out of toilet paper and paper towels (I know, this qualifies as TMI, but it does pertain to the story, so pipe down).

We sat down behind my cousins as the singing began. My brother and I went with the flow and picked up the tunes quickly. So quickly, that my cousin turned around after one song and asked if we already knew the songs, which we didn't, but we're just that good at fudging it. After the singing had ended, a man dressed all in black got up and stood before us. He began with a story that had been in the news recently, or at least that's the way he told it. A man and his wife, who were pagans, had sacrificed their child to their pagan god. A huge trio of screens behind his head, where the lyrics to the songs had been displayed, flashed a message: LISTEN TO WHAT GOD IS TELLING YOU.

He went on to tell us this was like a story out of the Old Testament, about what had happened to the Jews during the time their king Ahab married a pagan princess named Jezebel.

Now I know the story of Jezebel, intimately, and it's a horrific one. It's one of the examples Merlin Stone uses in her book, When God Was A Woman, to illustrate how early matriarchal cultures were libelled and stamped out by invading patriarchal cultures in the ancient middle east. Jezebel was the daughter of the king and queen of the Canaanite city of Sidon, who were also the High Priest and Priestess of Ashtoreth and Baal in their kingdom. When Ahab, the king of the Jews married her, he knew she would be bringing her religion to his country. He and his people appeared to be OK with this, until a rumor was started, supposedly by Jezebel, which resulted in the death of a man. Jezebel was murdered most gruesomely by the "avenging Hebrew hero Jehu", who saw in this an opportunity to get rid of both Jezebel and the king, and stamp down followers of the goddess religion at the same time. Shortly after her murder "Jehu called for a solemn assembly of the people who paid homage to Ashtoreth and Baal, tricking them in this way into gathering together at their own temple at an appointed time. The whole shrine was described as being full from one end to the other." Jehu then had his men murder "every member of the congregation and then finally made a latrine of the building itself." Nice guy, huh? If you don't believe me, go look it up in the Old Testament - II Kings. It's some blood-chilling shit. It also qualifies as genocide, to murder an entire faction of people for their beliefs.

So there's Pastor Skip (not his real name, but my brother liked it) , telling us this story, from the viewpoint of the righteous, mind you, while all the time the big screen is flashing the giant letters: LISTEN TO WHAT GOD IS TELLING YOU.

It's about this time that my cobbled-together feminine protection is beginning to fail me. I'm already miserable about having to sit through this mockery of a sermon, that is essentially telling these "lambs of God" (they got the SHEEP part right) that if God tells you to commit genocide, its OK. There are people raising their hands and uttering "Amen" around me. I realized at that moment that MY GOD was telling me to get the hell out of there, so with the blood of my femininity gushing forth as my excuse, I did.

I think that growing up in the time of the newly emerging Feminist movement made the idea of goddess worship not only more available and palatable, but gave it a legitimacy that might not have been there before the Burning of the Bras and the reclaiming of the Divine Feminine. What also cemented it for me was that my sister had arrived at a fairly similar spiritual place and helped to legitimize both my faith and hers with sisterly solidarity. Now does this mean that I concretely believe in a female deity? No. That's where the Existential part comes in. It means that I recognize the Divine aspects of both male and female in our natural world, as well as in ourselves, and while I revere them, I don't recognize either as an actual physical presence.

*Quotations are taken from When God Was A Woman, by Merlin Stone, pages 57-58, 188-189.

The Making of an Existential Pagan, Part I

As I have inferred in earlier posts, I'm not big on going to church. My parents both were raised as church-going folk; my father a Methodist, and my mother an Irish Catholic, but for different reasons, they abandoned their religions. Navy Dad

When my father was in the Navy, during the Korean War, he was onboard a ship that went to China and Hong Kong, and as the ship's doctor or medic, it was his job to check out the brothels, etc. to make sure they were "clean". He said the things he saw in China and Hong Kong made him question his faith; the faith that said God was good and would help those in need. I can only imagine the horrors, because he won't really tell us what he saw, other than to allude to children starving and (no doubt) working in places like brothels. When he came home from the Navy he had a hard time picking up where he had left off, and he stopped going to church.

My mother married her high school sweetheart, either right after high school, or near the end; its never been really clear, and if you knew my mother, you would know why I'm not asking her. (hint: see you next Tuesday, maybe.) She and her sweetie got married because she was pregnant, and she went to stay at a local convent when her condition became obvious, to keep the neighbors from talking, presumably. It was how it was done then, with teen moms - aren't you glad we' ve come a long way baby? When she gave birth to her first child, it died shortly afterwards. Her sweetie's parents had the marriage annulled and she was left to return to her parents' house, where I'm sure very little sympathy awaited her. The conversations she had with her priest after the baby's death, about the unshriven/unbaptized state of the child she had lost (it was headed to hell, according to Catholic doctrine) led her to abandon her religion. She didn't give up being a spiritual person; she tried on several different religions before settling for Ba'hai-ism, with a healthy dose of Buddhism thrown in for good measure.
Family Shot, about 1967

One summer my parents went to San Francisco and my grandparents came and stayed with us. I remember it as being a fun time, with my grandmother making customized pancake shapes for breakfast, etc. But I think she and my aunt decided that while my parents were gone, they would send us to Sunday School, in an effort to "save" us from our parents. I distinctly remember standing out in the front yard, waiting to be picked up for church. It was springtime and the lilies of the valley were blooming around the front steps. My sister was singing the Lilies of the Valley ditty that I posted here. It was a beautiful spring morning, that looking back at it, it seems as if the die was cast for me right there in that yard.

When we got to church, people inquired of my aunt who we were, and there was a general head shaking and grown ups talking to us in that artificially high voice that always puts my neck hairs up. We were sent to different classes, based on our age. I wish I could say it was a crystalline moment, something I could concretely describe to you as the moment I knew. What I remember of it is that I felt like an exotic animal, who everyone knew didn't really belong there and might just go wild at any point. There was no sense of welcome or of anyone wanting us to really be there.Dad's Graduation 1974

When I was older and we had moved down south, away from the rest of the family, there wasn't as much external pressure on my parents to send us to church. We went a couple of summers to Vacation Bible School at a Baptist church with our neighbor, mostly, I think, to get us out of the house. I can't say as I blame my mother; four kids to handle and a husband who only came home on the weekends. Oh yeah, she needed the break! It was actually less judgemental at my neighbor's church than it had been at my aunt's church, though we still had the outsider vibe from the other kids, and the adults still talked in that high little fake voice that says Condescension with a capital "C". It wasn't horrid or nightmarish, outside of the music director's extra arm skin flapping as she led us in yet another badly written hymn, but it wasn't exactly selling any of us on getting good with God. (That extra arm skin thing STILL haunts me - I never could tear my eyes away from the horror of it, all that mysteriously superfluous flesh, dangling and dancing every time she moved. I was a kid; I had no idea of the indignities of feminine aging at that time - karma is a real bite in the ass, sometimes.)

To be continued...