Dog as companion; apples, death & the Otherworld

‘Magna Mater’ by Stuart Littlejohn

I’ve been sitting at my desk for the best part of an hour and the virtual blank page sits still in front of me. I don’t, right now, know what I’m going to write; but as I have said many times to my many writing course participants over the years: just pick up the pen (or put your finger to the cursor).

I came here with the intention of writing about harvests, but am thinking about dogs, and staring at this picture that hangs in my study, painted and given to me by my friend Stuart Littlejohn a short while before my first beautiful deerhoundy hound, Ash, joined my family in the early 2000s.

You will see in Stuart’s painting many motifs of Celtic mythology and the Otherworld, my specialist subject/s since forever (see my first book Riding the Dragon): the Great Goddess (known by many names); hound-as-companion; the green and burning bush; the abundance and fertility of life symbolised by the apple; the ever-present inevitability of death symbolised by the skull; the intertwined light and darkness.

The trick with the darkness is to be willing to pass through it to arrive at the light. You can’t avoid it. The pagan traditions know this, as did early Christianity.

As an old hippy who has spent most of her life since teenage times steeped in so-called alternative and New Age thinking, I have several reservations about the often-superficial approach of the latter that comes from a misunderstanding of its core philosophy, but my one big reservation about it is the way that it turns away from the dark, and thinks that all can be healed by bringing everything into the light. As I write in my book A Spell in the Forest, the only way through the dark forest which we will all encounter at some stage/s in our life is indeed through, and back into the light.

Dark is not evil. That is also a misunderstanding. Dark is simply dark. We deepen by being willing to go through it; this is soulwork. We need the dark in just the same way as we need to go unconscious in sleep to counteract the busyness of day.

C.G.Jung said: ‘We do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.’

The reason I’m speaking of the dark is because we lost one of our two beloved hound-companions, young brothers, suddenly and shockingly, just after the autumn equinox, a time where light and dark are in balance, and a time associated with both huge abundance and the slide into death, metaphoric or literal. Our garden harvests are prolific, but our household is sombre after Bran’s death (named for the Alder god who in the Celtic Tree Calendar rules the month when the two hound brothers first came into our lives).

TM was firmly not a ‘dog person’ when I met him. However, I lost my old hound Ash, and told him that my living with a dog was non-negotiable. When we met the two brothers a year later, the dog we (an hour or less afterwards) named Bran immediately approached him and tried to climb up his leg – well, that was it, really.

Five minutes in to meeting Bran

Our beautiful Bran

Writing about the symbolism in the painting reminds me that it’s apple month now in the Tree Calendar, at least as I lay it out in Spell, and the land we tend here is overflowing with apples.

Apple has that dual significance: a tree representing maximum abundance, at the same time as representing the Celtic Otherworld, known also as the Fortunate Isles, or Blessed Isles, those Summerland ‘islands through the mists’ associated with Avalon, a parallel plane to which one can travel in shamanic journeying, as well as after physical death. Here’s an edited passage from my book about the mythology of apple:

I am the island of apples and eternal life

In legend and folklore, the Apple (usually a Crab Apple), like the Hazel and Hawthorn, is a tree often found at the threshold between the worlds where magical things may happen. It is a tree of the Otherworld. The shaman’s Silver Bough was hung with nine silver Apples; or sometimes it was the Golden Bough and golden Apples. W B Yeats brings the two together in ‘Song of the Wandering Aengus’, where at the very end Aengus says that he will ‘pluck till time and times are done / the silver apples of the moon, / the golden apples of the sun’, so synthesising the lunar – feminine, and solar – masculine, energies.

Apples, especially golden Apples, are significant in many cultures, and of course there was (or is) much migration of myth and legend to and from different shores. What we have now in the British culture is a rich fusion of many other cultures and their stories.

Apples are very much associated in Celtic myth with Avalon of the Otherworld, sometimes known as the Blessed, or Fortunate, Isles, or the Summerlands, with their Apple orchards, bees, birds and gentle sunshine.

The ancient Celtic Otherworld is generally seen as being on a horizontal plane (rather than vertically upwards from this plane, like the Christian heaven): outward from the land mass. It is associated strongly with the sea and islands, or sometimes as a realm below the surface of the water.

The Otherworld is a happy place of peace and harmony, a perfect mirror image of this world, but one in which where there is no pain, sickness or ageing; the Otherworld in myth generally confers immortality on its inhabitants.

Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Vita Merlini says: ‘The island of apples which men call “The Fortunate Isle” gets its name from the fact that it produces all things of itself; the fields there have no need of the ploughs of the farmers and all cultivation is lacking except what nature provides.  Of its own accord it produces grain and grapes, and apple trees grow in its woods from the close-clipped grass.  The ground of its own accord produces everything instead of merely grass, and people live there a hundred years or more.’

In the early texts, many individuals make journeys to the Fortunate Isles, this Garden of Eden in the western ocean (including Brân, or Fearn, the Alder god).

The Apple is an archetypal tree with deep connections to the Isle of Avalon, whose name means just that. As the ‘island through the mists’, Avalon was the resting-place in the Otherworld to which Morgan le Fay, healer, seer, Druid priestess, poet, shape-shifter and one-time Queen of Avalon, and a Lady of the Lake, with her eight sister priestesses ferried the dying Arthur.

Avalon has been traditionally associated with Ynys Witrin, the Glass Isle arising from the misty waters of the ancient Summer Country that once surrounded what we now know as Glastonbury Tor (a place noted for its Apple orchards, previously but also now). For the Celts, Avalon was known for its abundance of orchards of golden (solar) Apples (though silver, lunar, Apples – as in Yeats’ poem – were also associated with Avalon and/or the Otherworld).

© Roselle Angwin, A Spell in the Forest – tongues in trees, Moon Books 2021.

In druidic lore Dog (almost, if not always, a hound-type) is a guide and companion, including on journeys into the Otherworld. ‘In the Druid tradition the dog is seen as the Guardian of the Mysteries’, says Philip Carr-Gomm in the Druid Animal Oracle. ‘As such, he can be fierce, but if our intentions are good [he] will lead us over the threshold, through the darkness and the waters of the Unconscious towards the shimmering realm of the Goddess.’

Image by Bill Worthington from the Druid Animal Oracle

Like Horse, Dog has been a constant presence in my own life almost all my life. For the first 20+ years of my adulthood I lived with collies; then a deerhound entered my life and completely stole my heart. In any shamanic journeying I have made, Dog (usually a deerhound), Horse (in the form of a small grey mare), and Buzzard have been guides. In other words, this bond goes very deep.

There is much more I could say, but I find that this is enough, this time.

At this challenging time in the life of our household, deep grief, in me at least, is now also allowing in those flickers of light that are gratitude for the presence of Bran, Ash and Hound in my life.

Ash, the hound-companion who first stole my heart, on our first day together. She would grow to be hip-height on me.

You can see some of Stuart’s work here. If you visit this page, I hope you won’t mind my drawing attention to the fact that I was the model for the image named ‘Shamaness’.

Thank you for taking this journey with me.