To be swallowed by the monster of your art
On investigations at the British Library, Orphean dismemberment, and the erotic chaos of creativity
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A magpie woke me this morning, knocking at my window with his leathered beak.
I propped myself up grumbling some insult or other, my head heavy with not enough sleep and a glass of wine too many. When I discovered the culprit, I was of course silenced mid curse. His eyes, deep as caves, stared right at me, and I wondered how long he had been there, observing my human dreams, his head cocked like a dog listening. And in a flash of cornflower blue, he was gone.
I’m in London this week. I’ve come for some final research for my book at the British Library. This month I’ve been finalising my bibliography, and I’ve had the most phenomenal few weeks with old manuscripts and permissions to view five hundred year-old copies of some of the giants of the Western wisdom tradition.
I wrote about my time with some of these treasures in Cornwall a couple of weeks ago here:
I’ve been listening to Garth Stevenson’s album Flying this week as an accompaniment to this quest, and what a quest it has been. Getting the eleven books I was sourcing from the archives was a right mess! I was given wrong information by the British Library staff in the weeks leading up to my visit. So I thought I had everything prepared and all my t’s crossed and i’s dotted, but alas, make plans and the gods laugh, say the Hungarians!
I’d also found out a couple of days before setting off that the library would close for Easter, so the work I had planned to do over four days would have to be condensed into about a day and a half.
I set out of Penzance in the early hours of the morning on the magical six-hour train ride through the rolling hills of the West Country, and then weaved my mammoth suitcases through the murmuration that is Paddington, trudged up to North London to drop them off at my friend’s house, and rushed back across London to the British Library to register, order my books from the archives, and, as I was told, have them delivered within the hour so I could start working through them that very evening.
But alas alas alas… I hear them laughing still, those gods of ordered disorder, from their abodes in oak bark and beehives and between the folds of tulips.
The plan I’d worked out to a tee went quickly out the window.
After registering, the librarians informed me that books can’t be ordered after 4pm — something the staff I had email exchanges with weeks ago failed to mention — and I would have to wait until the following day. It was 4:03.
With three hours until closing, I decided to have a look on their computers at their online archive to see if they had any of the materials I needed in online access.
They did not.
However, look and ye shall find!
I came across an obscure article written in the seventies by an archaeologist of one of the main sites I am writing about in my book. And lo and behold, within it she mentions a temple that bridges two time periods that, up until that moment, I was presenting a surviving tradition between, but had very little evidence — only an intuitive nudge, in fact.
I couldn’t believe it.
I cried, if I’m honest. To say I’m tired is an understatement. I’m well beyond tired. Wired and electric. My life at the moment is made up of twelve hour days at the desk. Last weekend I was actually editing until the early hours of the morning.
The second draft of my manuscript is well underway, and it has turned into a dissected frog, its organs spread across my table but instead of pulling them apart, my job is to put the parts back together.
I’m finding it to be an incredibly stimulating process, as I’ve said in a note before, but God does it ask for all of you. This is my first book contract, and the first time I’ve taken on any writing of this size or magnitude. I don’t know if this is how it feels for all writers, but my experience is one of total consumption. I feel my mind has been completely hijacked and I have very little (if any!) sovereignty over this unruly beast.
There is a long suspicion, if you follow the thread back through the mythopoetic imagination of the ages, that creativity doesn’t belong to us. Friedrich Nietzsche circles it first as something violent — creation as rupture, a breaking-open of the self so that something else can come through; a necessary undoing. And Rainer Maria Rilke, softer in tone but no less absolute, asks the question that closes all exits: must you write?
And if the answer is yes, well then your life is no longer entirely your own. It arranges itself around that necessity.
By the time you reach Carl Jung, the artist is no longer even the site of struggle, but the vessel. Something moves through; images arrive from elsewhere carrying their own weight, and their own intentionality. And the work is less an act of making than of allowing.
Plato had already named this mystery long before, calling it a kind of divine madness: the poet seized, overtaken, and speaking not from himself but from the Muses who pass through him like an electric current.
Yet, in my experience, it’s not always luminous. In Franz Kafka, the tone darkens. Writing isolates, consumes, and takes more than it gives.
“I write it out in a trance,” wrote W. B. Yeats.
And H. P. Lovecraft pushes this idea to its outer edge, where imagination itself becomes dangerous: to create is to brush against something vast and uncontained; something that does not care whether you survive the encounter intact. You’re not destroyed, exactly, but altered, and cracked open.
In the act of making, you are simultaneously being unmade.
This is the erotic chaos of creativity; the same force that binds and breaks, that draws things together only to tear them open again, so that something new can be born.
It is the same pattern again and again throughout the ages: not the artist shaping the work, but the work shaping the artist; drawing them in, holding them there, asking for more than they thought they could give.
And then, a little more.
Perhaps this is not new at all. Perhaps we have always known it, only told it differently.
Mircea Eliade suggests that when the hero is swallowed—by a whale or a dragon or some other great beast—it marks a return to the primordial state, a descent into the dark, formless origin of things.
After finally cheering the completion of my bibliography later in the week with some good friends at an East London pub, we all crammed into Hoxton Hall to listen to the master storyteller Ben Haggarty tell the Dismemberment of Orpheus.
“How do stories begin?” He bellowed at the crowd, leaning towards us with his large cymbal in anticipation of our response.
“At the beginning!” A voice bellowed through me back at him.
And so it was.
For an unknowable length of time, we were catapulted back to the deep belly of the beginning, the theogony of the Greek gods; outrageously serenaded by the erotic chaos that is Greek myth, the fizzing frothing creation of the gods, the limb-tearing destruction necessary for life to go on, and all manner of offence not exactly stomachable to the rising sensitivities and sanitised constraints of our times.
“Extreme times call for extreme art!” He roared.
“The artist creates the chaos, so that we don’t have to live it, so that chaos has a place to express itself without annihilating us.”
This is my rendering of Orpheus’s story.
Orpheus was the son of Calliope, the Muse of epic song, and from her he inherited a voice that could soften stone and bend the will of death. When he played his lyre, the world itself leaned in to listen; trees stretched their roots, mountains inclined so far they cracked open the bottom of the seas; even the restless dead were stilled.
Nothing could resist him, because he revealed the delicate harmony that trembles beneath all things.
Orpheus the prophet, bard of the muses, devotee of bull-horned Dionysus, and patron of artists who take chaos into their craft to make beauty; who create in extreme times.
Orpheus loved the tree nymph Eurydice, and she him, and for a brief moment their love was bright, intact, and unbroken; the shell of an egg before it cracks.
But as the stories insist, the greater the beauty, the greater the shadow it casts.
Such is the erotic logic of things: that what draws us closest is also what undoes us. This is the domain of Aphrodite, the deeper current that moves through bodies and worlds alike, joining and undoing in the same breath.
On her wedding day, Eurydice ran through a field of long grass in joyful abandon and stepped on a serpent who, in defence, rose and buried her venom into her thigh.
Death, swift and indifferent, took her down.
Orpheus, inconsolable, did what no mortal should do—he went after her.
With his lyre in hand, he descended into the underworld, that ancient, swallowing place where all forms dissolve.
He charmed Dionysus to be his guide; lured the boat man to get him across the river Styx; his song even earned the favour of the Lord and Lady of the Underworld, Hades and Persephone. Even there, the shades gathered, torments paused, and the gods of death felt, for the first time, delight.
In return, they granted a single, impossible concession: Eurydice could follow him back to the world of light. But, as is the way with these things, there was a condition: to prove his faith in his love, he was to not turn to look at her until they had both fully crossed the threshold back into the world of the living.
To this strange condition Orpheus agreed. …How hard could it be?
And so he began to walk back the way he had come.
But as he walked, he could not hear her, could not feel her, could not even catch a trace of her scent.
With each step, he carried his faith like a fragile vessel, the sound of her absence louder than any presence behind him.
What if she hadn’t come? What if she preferred the company of the dead?
What if she didn’t love him enough?
What if… he didn’t love her enough?
Doubt is a treacherous beast. It crept into his heart like a wild cat stalking a dove and at the very edge of the living world, he couldn’t bear it any longer.
With the longing that draws the bee to the rose, he turned around.
And there she was. Full of life and blood and mystery. And for a moment, they held each other again in the unadulterated love of an unbroken egg.
But, no sooner could he hear her, feel her, catch his sweetheart’s scent, than the ground opened beneath them and, letting out a scream that cracked the delicate shell of their love, she fell back into the darkness, and was swallowed.
Orpheus pounded the ground where Euridyce had stood and howled.
Then he shut his heart away. His eyes that once contained the sun went dark as the magpie’s, and his skin hardened into bronze sheets shielding his bones.
He remained there for an eternity, plucking the same lyre string over and over and over in a trance of grief.
Seeing his most beloved devotee gripped in such pain, ivy-crowned Dionysus took pity on him, and he sent his raving Mineads to tear him apart, limb by limb.
In his dismemberment, Orpheus was consoled, because finally, death would reunite him with his beloved.
Orpheus lost his song, and regained it only after being dismembered and defeated; by giving himself over, as Rilke urges young poets, to greater and greater things.
For the rest of time, Orpheus played his lyre in the velvet darkness of the world below, his beloved at his side, and in that sweetness his song again charmed the world. Wrapped in his love and her brightness, he composed the song of the spheres; the death song of creation that, should we put our ear to the stars, or to the fleshy chest of a magnolia and listen, reminds us of death, and therefore, that we are alive.
Poetry Offering
The Thought Fox, by Ted Hughes
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
Ways to work with me
APRIL 17 | Monthly Ritual Dismemberment
I offer a monthly dismemberment ceremony on each New Moon, drawing on initiatory traditions in which spiritual death makes space for renewal and return to the essentials. Open to all genders, with the option to attend live or via recording.
Please note this month will be via recording only.
Self-Study Courses & Lectures On Demand
Three of my online courses are now available in self-paced format, along with my on-demand lectures, so you can journey through the material in your own time:
DARKNESS DREAMING | Three-week journey into a new relationship with the archetype and symbology of Darkness, not as something fearful, but as a womb-like, fertile, and illuminating ally. Through animistic methodologies, we explore how darkness can reveal the self beneath layers of conditioning and trauma, and how to weave its guidance into everyday life
THE THREE SECRET SELVES | A month-long exploration of the mythic idea of the polytheistic self—that we are made of many parts: human, animal, and angelic. Across three weeks, we uncover these hidden aspects through myth, story, dreamwork, and soul flight, learning to form a living relationship with our secret selves.
THE BEE PRIESTESSES | 7 videos exploring the tradition of the Melissae of the ancient Aegean. This self-paced course is designed for participants to move through at your own rhythm, with eight 2.5-hour video sessions, guided homework, reading materials, and dreamwork practices to explore between modules.
WHEN WOMEN WERE THE SHAMANS | Lecture series tracing the forgotten lineages of female shamans across prehistoric cultures, uncovering their roles as healers, seers, and guardians of the sacred.
Mentorship
This is for anyone who would like support and/or supervision within both creative endeavours, spiritual work, or personal support drawing on myth, stories, and animistic techniques for inner transformation.
These personalised sessions are structured to meet once a month for 3 months.
Thank you, thank you, thank you; (in threes, there is movement and structure.)
In our present times of dismemberment, better the wind and winged ones as messengers.
To bring into the world your work; your passionate weaving of words and all of the past which they seek to embrace, is itself the journey of Orpheus.
The dismembered frog of your words, is pure wisdom as the spaces are where life is free to manifest, circulate and interrelate. The un-sayable comes alive within us all in different ways. Our dismembered humanity (we readers) will find the threads and reweave our stories from (and with) yours; and together with the Gods we will smile. Ha Ha
May your book, reignite the passion of Orpheus and Eurydice in us all !
Trust is a must
Oh, my heart needed the familiar voices urging us to find and lose and find ourselves again in the creative act to emerge in this new way. Many thanks.