Mythago Wood - 1 (5 page)

There is one entry in my father's notebook that seems to mark a turning point
in his research, and his life. It is longer than the other notes of that
particular time, and follows an absence of seven months from the pages. While
his entries are often detailed, he could not be described as having been a
dedicated diarist, and the style varies from clipped notes to fluent
description. (I discovered, too, that he himself had torn many pages from the
thick book, thus concealing my minor crime quite effectively. Christian had
never noticed the missing page.) On the whole, he seems to have used the
notebook, and the quiet hours of recording, as a way of conversing with himself
- a means of clarification of his own thoughts.

The entry in question is dated September 1935, and was written shortly after
our encounter with the Twigling. After reading the entry for the first time I
thought back to that year and realized I had been just eight years old.

Wynne-Jones arrived after dawn. Walked together along the south track,
checking the flux-drains for signs of mythago activity. Back to the house quite
shortly after - no-one about, which suited my mood. A crisp, dry autumn day.
Like last year, images of the Urscumug are strongest as the season changes.
Perhaps he senses autumn, the dying of the green. He comes forward, and the
oakwoods whisper to him. He must be close to genesis. Wynne-Jones thinks a
further time of isolation needed, and it must be done. Jennifer already
concerned and distraught by my absences. I feel helpless - can't speak to her.
Must do what is needed.

Until it is resolved, until the Urscumug mythago forms from the woodland,
must not let any but Wynne-Jones know of what I have discovered. The
completeness of the resurrection essential. The Urscumug is the most powerful
because he is the primary. I know for certain that the oakwoods will contain
him, but others might be frightened of the power they would certainly be able to
feel, and end it for everyone. Dread to think what would happen if these forests
were destroyed, and yet they cannot survive for ever.

The Urscumug has formed in my mind in the clearest form I have ever seen him.
Hints of the Twigling in shape, but he is much more ancient, far bigger. Decks
himself with wood and leaves, on top of animal hides. Face seems smeared with
white clay, forming a mask upon the exaggerated features below; but it is hard
to see the face clearly. A mask upon a mask? The hair a mass of stiff and spiky
points; gnarled hawthorn branches are driven up through the matted hair, giving
a most bizarre appearance. I believe he carries a spear, with a wide, stone
blade ... an angry-looking weapon, but again, hard to see, always just out of
focus. He is so old, this primary image, that he is fading from the human mind.
He is also touched with confusion. The overlaying of later cultural
interpretation of how his appearance would have been ... a hint of bronze
particularly, mostly about the arms (torques). I suspect that the legend of the
Urscumug was powerful enough to carry through all the neolithic and on into the
second millennium b.c., perhaps even later. Wynne-Jones thinks the Urscumug may
pre-date even the neolithic.

Essential, now, to spend time in the forest, to allow the vortex to interact
with me and form the mythago. I intend to leave the house within the next week.

Without commenting on the strange, confusing passages I had read, I turned
the pages of the diary and read entries here and there. I could clearly recall
that autumn in 1933, the time when my father had packed a large rucksack and
wandered into the woods, walking swiftly away from my mother's hysterical
shouting, flanked by his diminutive scientist friend (a sour-faced man who never
acknowledged anyone but my father, and who seemed embarrassed to be in the house
when he came to visit). Mother had not spoken for the rest of the day, and she
did nothing but sit in her bedroom and occasionally weep. Christian and I had
become so distraught at her behaviour that in the later afternoon we had
penetrated the oak-woods as deeply as we dared, calling for our father and
finally panicking at the gloomy silence, and the loud, sudden sounds that
disturbed it. He had returned weeks later, dishevelled and stinking like a
tramp. The entry in his notebook, a few days subsequently, is a short and bitter
account of failure. Nothing had happened. A single, rather rambling paragraph
caught my attention.

The mythogenetic process is not only complex, it is reluctant. I am too old!
The equipment helps, but a younger mind could accomplish the task unaided, I'm
sure. I dread the thought! Also, my mind is not at rest and as Wynne-Jones has
explained, it is likely that my human consideration, my worries, form an
effective barrier between the two mythopoetic energy flows in my cortex - the
form
from the right brain, the
reality
from the left. The pre-mythago zone
is not sufficiently enriched by my own life force for it to interact in the oak
vortex.

I fear too that the natural disappearance of so much life from the forest is
affecting the interface. The boars are there, I'm sure. But perhaps the life
number is critical. I estimate no more than forty, moving within the spiral
vortex bounded by the ashwood intrusions into the oak circle. There are few
deer, few wolves, although the most important animal, the hare, frequents the
woodland edge in profusion. But perhaps the absence of so much that once lived
here has thrown the balance of the formula. And yet, throughout the primary
existence of these woods, life was changing. By the thirteenth century there was
much
botanical life that was alien to the
ley matrix
in places
where the mythagos still formed. The form of the myth men changes, adapts, and
it is the later forms that generate most easily.

Hood is back - like all the Jack-in-the-Greens, is a nuisance, and several
times moved into the ridge-zone around the hogback glade. He shot at me, and
this is becoming a cause of great concern! But I cannot enrich the oak vortex
sufficiently with the pre-mythago of the Urscumug. What is the answer? To try to
enter more deeply, to find the
wildwoods?
Perhaps the memory is too far
gone, too deep in the silent zones of the brain, now, to touch the trees.

Christian saw me frown as I read through this tumble of words and images.
Hood? Robin Hood? And someone -this Hood - shooting at my father in the woods? I
glanced around the study and saw the iron-tipped arrow in its long, narrow glass
case, mounted above the display of woodland butterflies. Christian was turning
the pages of the notebook, having watched me read in silence for the better part
of an hour. He was perched on the desk; I sat in father's chair.

'What's all this about, Chris? It reads as if he were actually trying to
create copies of storybook heroes.'

'Not copies, Steve. The real thing. There. Last bit of reading for the
moment, then I'll go through it with you in layman's terms.'

It was an earlier entry, not dated by year, only by day and month, although
it was clearly from some years before the 1933 recording.

I call those particular times 'cultural interfaces'; they form zones, bounded
in space, of course, by the limits of the country, but bounded also in time, a
few years, a decade or so, when the two cultures - that of the invaded and the
invader - are in a highly anguished state. The mythagos grow from the power of
hate, and fear, and form in the natural woodlands from which they can either
emerge - such as the Arthur, or Artorius form, the bear-like man with his
charismatic leadership - or remain in the natural landscape, establishing a
hidden focus of hope - the Robin Hood form, perhaps Hereward, and of course the
hero-form I call the Twigling, harassing the Romans in so many parts of the
country. I imagine that it is the combined emotion of the two races that draws
out the mythago, but it clearly sides with that culture whose roots are longest
established in what I agree could be a sort of
ley matrix;
thus, Arthur
forms and helps the Britons against the Saxons, but later Hood is created to
help the Saxons against the Norman invader.

I drew back from the book, shaking my head. The expressions were confusing,
bemusing. Christian grinned as he took the notebook, and weighed it in his
hands. 'Years of his life, Steve, but his concern with keeping detailed records
was not everything it might have been. He records nothing for years, then writes
every day for a month.
And
he has removed and hidden several pages.' He
frowned slightly as he said this.

'I need a drink of something. And a few definitions.'

We walked from the study, Christian carrying the notebook. As we passed the
framed arrow I peered closely at it. 'Is he saying that the real Robin Hood shot
that into him? And killed Guiwenneth too?'

'It depends,' said Christian thoughtfully, 'on what you mean by real. Hood
came to that oak forest, and may still be there. I think he is. As you have
obviously noticed, he was there four months ago when he shot Guiwenneth. But
there were many Robin Hoods, and all were as real or unreal as each other,
created by the Saxon peasants during their time of repression by the Norman
invader.'

'I don't comprehend this at all, Chris - but what's a "ley matrix"?
What's an "oak vortex"? Does it mean anything?'

As we sipped scotch and water in the sitting-room, watching the dusk draw
closer, the yard beyond the window greying into a place of featureless shapes,
Christian explained how a man called Alfred Watkins had visited our father on
several occasions and shown him on a map of the country how straight lines
connected places of spiritual or ancient power - the barrows, stones and
churches of three different cultures. These lines he called leys, and believed
that they existed as a form of earth energy running below the ground, but
influencing that which stood upon it.

My father had thought about leys, and apparently tried to measure the energy
in the ground below the forest, but without success. And yet he had measured
something
in the oakwoods - an energy associated with all the life that grew there. He
had found a spiral vortex around each tree, a sort of aura, and those spirals
bounded not just trees, but whole stands of trees, and glades.

Over the years he had mapped the forest. Christian brought out that map of
the woodland area, and I looked at it again, but from a different point of view,
beginning to understand the marks made upon it by the man who had spent so much
time within the territories it depicted. Circles within circles were marked,
crossed and skirted by straight lines, some of which were associated with the
two pathways we called south and deep track. The letters HB in the middle of the
vast acreage of forest were clearly meant to refer to the 'hogback' glade that
existed there, a clearing that neither Christian nor I had ever been able to
find. There were zones marked out as 'spiral oak', 'dead ash zone' and
'oscillating traverse'.

The old man believed that all life is surrounded by an energetic aura - you
can see the human aura as a faint glow in certain light. In these ancient
woodlands,
primary woodlands,
the combined aura forms something far more
powerful, a sort of creative field that can interact with our unconscious. And
it's in the unconscious that we carry what he calls the pre-mythago - that's
unconscious that we carry what he calls the pre-mythago - that's
myth imago,
the
image of the idealized form of a myth creature. The image takes on substance in
a natural environment, solid flesh, blood, clothing, and - as you saw -
weaponry. The form of the idealized myth, the hero figure, alters .with cultural
changes, assuming the identity and technology of the time. When one culture
invades another - according to father's theory - the heroes are made manifest,
and not just in one location! Historians and legend-seekers argue about where
Arthur of the Britons, and Robin Hood
really
lived and fought, and don't
realize that they lived in
many
sites. And another important fact to
remember is that when the mind image of the mythago forms it forms in the
whole
population . . .and when it is no longer needed, it remains in our
collective unconscious, and is transmitted through the generations.'

'And the changing form of the mythago,' I said, to see if I had understood my
sketchy reading of father's notes, 'is based on an archetype, an archaic primary
image which father called the Urscumug, and from which all later forms come. And
he tried to raise the Urscumug from his own unconscious mind . . .'

'And failed to do so,' said Christian, 'although not for want of trying. The
effort killed him. It weakened him so much that his body couldn't take the pace.
But he certainly seems to have created several of the more recent adaptations of
the Urscumug.'

There were so many questions, so many areas that begged for clarification.
One above all: 'But a thousand years ago, if I understand the notes correctly,
there was a country-wide
need
of the hero, the legendary figure, acting
for the side of Right. How can one man capture such a passionate mood? How did
he
power
the interaction? Surely not from the simple family anguish he
caused among us, and in his own head. As he said, that created an unsettled mind
and he couldn't function properly.'