Confessions of a Pagan Nun Read online

  Then my mother began to disdain Giannon the Druid, as though seeing in my heart his image as I walked beside her. She said, “He is no help to his fellow aes dána. He denounces their magic and does not praise their rituals. He effaces his own and his religion’s strength by claiming that druids have powers that any human could gain and claiming that others pretend to have powers that they do not have.” I said, “But he makes marks and deciphers them.” She answered, “He is dangerous because he does not hold up the old powers against the new. He denounces both.” I did not want to speak more to her. But she sweetly said, “Your love for him will perhaps soften his leather heart,” and she took my hand and added the words, “as you keep my heart soft, though this life can so easily turn one’s heart to stone.” Now I know that some of my mother’s sweet words described dreams and not the life I have known. For I have learned that my love cannot heal all wounds and cannot stop death.

  My mother continued her warnings in Tarbfhlaith, telling my older sister, who continually denounced all people as greedy, that this land’s men were being seduced by improvements in agriculture and gold coins. She warned that any famine or drought or other disaster would be a door through which many more tonsured men would come into the túaths and houses of chieftains to whom they already offered riches in exchange for conversion. She said, “They will bring their stronger wheats and better horses. And what is a more powerful influence to a hungry man than a table full of bread? What is more powerful to the dying than a god who can die and live afterward, displaying his wounds as though they were stains? And what is more powerful to the wailing mother than the promise that if her dead child is prayed for to the new god, he will go to a place with no pain, waiting for her to hold him again?” I record these words so a scholar may examine their accuracy.

  I tear at my own breast even now when I think that at this time I did not go with my mother often to the deep woods. I saw that she was getting weak, and I was afraid of the changes in her body. I wanted to wait every minute for Giannon. Seasons passed until the time of light green leaves came and Giannon strolled into the túath beneath a pack of scrolls and pottery that made a jeweled noise as he walked. Many came to see him regarding news and laws, which he knew well. When he dropped a scroll, I retrieved it. When he admired the smell of some bairgen,1 I bargained for it and fed it to him, letting his lips touch the tips of my fingers. He journeyed on to other túaths, and I wanted to be more than servant to him.

  In this time, Thayll, one of the boys who came to use my father’s boat, asked me to be his wife. He was a good man, a cousin of the chieftain, and my father was pleased with him because already this boy was a young warrior and had fathered a son. I was his wife for a fortnight and loved well his warmth. He had sweet names for me and tickled my face with blades of grass. He praised my small body, which hid a strong spirit and could endure and match his desires. But I told him soon that I thought constantly of Giannon and the powers I wanted to learn from him. I promised Thayll that I would be his wife from time to time and would use any druidic powers I acquired to help him as a warrior. He taught me how a man and woman can give each other pleasure and tangle their limbs together. But my soul and his never recognized each other. I did these things many years ago, before I knew Christian laws.

  Though I was still small and doomed to seem frail, my body was full of womanhood, and I knew its strengths. I began again to accompany my mother to the deep woods, for now she needed help in carrying her sacks. In her devotion to the rich and fertile forests, I recognized the nature of my own emotion concerning Giannon the Druid. The fertility of the woods seemed related to my own body’s texture. I had the notion that if Giannon and I had our bodies opened by a warrior’s blade, sweet black earth and deep red petals would fall out instead of blood and organs.

  When Giannon returned, almost a half year since I had last seen him, he had become known well for a satire he told about a chieftain in a neighboring túath. This satire revealed the chieftain’s weaknesses, including a rash on his groin, and so destroyed his authority. Giannon was now greatly praised by our chieftain. The people of Tarbfhlaith presumed that Giannon’s powers were great and had expanded beyond the telling of news and recording of laws. He was therefore set upon to cure the sick.

  Two young children were dying, and their parents asked Giannon for a cure, as did a man with a rancid swelling on his leg. Giannon told them that he knew no more than the cures they knew, including the plants and ritual appeals to the spirits of certain trees and pools. The people persisted, asking for spells. Giannon insisted angrily that he had none and knew of none. He said, “Perhaps the druid Cuillard, who knows of worms and poisons, can help.” He said that he was sorry for their pain and that there was nowhere that he went where there was no pain. Our oldest grandmother said, “I have heard of a place where there is no pain.” She said that the tonsured men had told her about such a place. Giannon’s eyes and mouth drew down in weary sadness. He told me when we were alone and touching each other’s fingers that people will go anywhere and to anyone who promises them a place of no pain, and that they will even forsake their own wisdom and destroy their own homes and fields for such a promise. He asked me, “What power do you want?” And I answered, “The power of words.” And he told me two stories concerning the displacement of the Formorians, that ancient tribe of immortal and greedy beings.

  Soon after, Giannon and I bathed in the lake, and though I hung my arms around his neck and pressed against him so that my skin touched his, he did not ask me to be his wife. But he looked long into my eyes until I thought his eyes were my own. We laughed without speaking, and I slept in the sun with my head on his chest. Time then was made of moments of thorough peace and deep agitation. His body was young and as pleasing as Thayll’s to look at.

  At this time Giannon gave me my first lesson in deciphering marks. He entrusted me with one of his scrolls and said, “Study this.” I asked how I would begin, and he said, “I will tell you what the first line says and then you will study the marks and how they correlate with the sounds.” The line he told me was Criost ferr, fisi dia cech druí.2 I asked him if he believed this, and he said it did not matter if one believed words or not, but only if one understood them and their power. That first scroll seemed to me a treasure that I was hardly able to touch without losing my breath. And now I am surrounded by scrolls, tablets, codices, and parchment that mice rummage through as though they were only dried leaves.

  With my scroll in my hand I felt larger than any other mortal except Giannon. The apprenticeship with him had begun, and I knew that it was to be of an intimacy rarely known and never fully described. I told my mother about the scroll and watched her pass her trembling hand over it, tracing the marks with her fingers and holding on to me to steady herself. For she had begun to lie down for long times during the day. And when she spoke, it was often about the end of the world. I did not know where her wild joy had gone. I confess now that I was angry with her for her weakness. I chided her with her own stories of Mebd and Marach and other women whose strengths made them immortal heroes. But she grew thinner and quieter, and soon I found her always on her bedding.

  I made it known throughout the túath that I owned a scroll and was learning the arts of the aes dána. My father ridiculed the work that I did with the scroll, and my mother was too weak to praise it in his presence. My older sister, who was the mother of two sons then, chastised me for not doing practical work and for therefore putting more burden on our infected mother. But my mother held my hand and asked that I tell her what the scroll said. She placed her polished pebbles over the marks, arranging them in triangles and spirals on the parchment. I studied the scroll on my own in the evening after brushing the floor and securing the pigs. When it was not damp or cold I took a rush light outside and worked over the puzzle of the marks. I muttered the sounds to myself, and when I identified one sound with one mark, I found that mark throughout the text and applied the sound where it occurred. In a few
weeks I had deciphered many names and could see where they were repeated in the text. Many of these marks referred to the stars, which I also studied, for the text detailed the astrologer’s art and identified Christ as a master astrologer. I have not since heard this theory spoken and well understand its blasphemous nature. May God forgive those who misunderstand Our Lord Jesus Christ. I wanted to see Giannon, but he did not come to our túath, and some said that he had transformed himself into a salmon so as to avoid his enemies. One man said he caught a salmon that looked at him with such disgust that he returned it to the water and determined it to be a druid.

  When the worms’ corruption of my mother’s body became rampant, the druid Cuillard was sent for because of his healing reputation. Cuillard was a strange man to me because his skin was orange and his beard as thick as gorse. I watched him place stones upon my mother’s chest and abdomen and make noxious teas for her to consume. He chewed meat and spit it into the fire, saying words that I do not remember and dare not say in this place. I asked Cuillard boldly about Giannon, and he told me sharply, “He has secluded himself.” Giannon to me was more holy and superior because of his reclusive nature. I wanted to stop looking on my mother’s wasted body and thin face and go into hermitage with Giannon as close as my own clothing to warm me. I would hide my eyes in his shoulder and smell the wax, honey, and smoke on his skin.

  When Cuillard left, my mother tried to get up and do her work as though the worms were dispelled. She leaned on me as we slowly walked to the deep woods, and I began to weep heavily at having such a diminished and unhealthy being to compare with my mother, who had strolled in front of me like a sister goddess not so long before. She said, “Listen to the voices that speak only to someone who can be very quiet. The wind has a voice. The leaves have voices. The stones have voices.” I said bitterly that the stones did not speak to me. My mother held me close to her, and I could feel how every physical effort made her tremble when once she had lifted me and held me. I felt then that the world was a worthless and cruel place.

  Closing her eyes, my mother listened to the small ringing of water coming up from below the earth into the pool. I looked well at her face, the cheekbones grown sharp and her hair streaked with wild white hairs. Without opening her eyes she said, “You are looking at death, my little Gwynn,” and I put my head down into my hands. We walked back through the woods slowly. She stopped to listen to the calls of birds and the rattle of leaves that still clung to winter branches. She said, “I still cling to the branch, but I am ready to fall. I am ready to rest.” And I felt anger at her weakness again. When we were home, my mother lay on her bedding, which my sister had fattened with more reeds. My father raged about Cuillard’s failure to rid my mother of the worms.

  Soon my mother began to shed blood from her body through her mouth. Death was surely just outside our home, drawn by the smell of her blood. I fell on my knees and begged the earth beneath our bodies to comfort and cure her. She retched terribly and woke my little sister, who called out to her. But my mother’s will, which normally drove her to her needful children, was no longer master. Something else had her body, and it was no longer hers to control. I saw in her eyes the unspeakable torment of a mother who cannot go to her child who calls out to her, and I knew it was finished. I knew, too, that she had been the only one who believed from the beginning that I was strong, and now she would be gone and no one would understand as she had. No one would remember how we had laughed at the raven who hopped on one leg and then the other, a raven we named Hopper and never failed to search for on our walks.

  I sat by my mother, making my first true decision to endure and not be a coward. I wanted not to see her end, for it was ugly and not heroic. I wanted to press my eyes shut until she was the woman walking before me in the woods with her black hair and dark cloak. But I knew that I would have to live forever with what I did on that night of dying, and that if I chose to be a coward, I would have to repeat such cowardice over and over again in order to justify that it had ever occurred. And so I stayed there and held her hand, which was wet with the watery blood she had wiped from her mouth. I touched her forehead with my fingers, and I said to her that I thought she was a great woman whom many would remember. I said that I would make marks that would tell about her and would live forever. I told her that I would wait my whole life to see her again in a place that had none of this pain. The pigs snuffled nearby, and fairies as tiny as insects flew about her mouth; I waved them away with my hand. I told her, “I will stay with you.” My father grabbed his hair in both fists and left the dwelling. We heard him moaning outside, and we heard also the squeal of a pig that he kicked. He left and did not return until dawn, after my mother’s body had lain lifeless for a long time and I knew that she was no longer in her cold and rigid flesh.

  Soon began my father’s obsession with the burial of my mother. He commanded that she be buried in an unusual fashion, without any druid in attendance. He commanded that a tonsured man be fetched or created among some member of the túath and that a Christian burial, of which he had no particular knowledge, be performed. There was no pacifying him. Though I fed and coddled him like a child, he refused to relent in the business of her funeral. It became clear that my mother’s body would either decay or be buried according to my father’s intense whim. The household itself was diseased, as though the worms that had stricken my mother were in the air around us. There was a black fog there. My older sister could be consoled by nothing, getting no comfort from the idea of any burial. She screamed, “We will see her no more. We will see her no more.”

  My older sister and my father began to battle each other in thundering voices, and I looked on, bloated with grief. I held my little sister, who sucked her fingers and wept without sound. And finally I made a pack out of pigskin and put in it some cakes, a cup, a dagger, and Giannon’s scroll. That night I secretly lay down next to my mother’s body, which was covered in a shroud so delicate that my words made it flutter around her head. I whispered in her ear, “You are gone, Mother. I will see you no more as I have seen you since I was born.” I wept against her hard shoulder until spittle came down my chin. Then I rose and walked straight and heedless into a night thick with mournful spells and blackened spirits. My motion then, though vague, was to take a pilgrimage to Giannon or to solitude and return to Tarbfhlaith before the next moon. I had a belief in nothing but sorrow.

  Qui crediderit salvus erit, qui vero non crediderit condemnabitur.3

  And now moans Sister Aillenn, walking on the rocks outside my clochan and repeating in breathless whispers the Kyrie Eleison as though expressing the inconsolable sorrow that lives in my memories, though the birds continue to fly through the sky with the joy of wings.

  FOURTH INTERRUPTION

  SISTER AILLENN HAUNTS ME. She is the old land of beauty and chieftains, whispering the Latin prayers as though to transform her soul from its sinful pagan nature. I want to take her hand at times and run with her far, far to the deep woods, so that branches whip our faces and briars tear our skirts, and we run so far and so swiftly as to be transformed into deer, leaping free of any doctrine but the doctrine of pools and grass. But these are dreams, perhaps put into our minds by demons. For Sister Aillenn has told me that, as she was asleep, Satan attacked her violently. She said, “He fell upon me like the stump of an ancient oak, embracing me with the dead roots, and I was completely paralyzed.”

  I have recently transcribed the image of Satan as a crushing boulder in the writings of Saint Patrick.

  The grave of the infant has been repaired, but I have since noted frantic claw marks in the dirt, as though some beast has still been trying to dig up its buried obsession. Now the grave is well covered with stones and there is no cross above it, so that it looks like a pagan cairn. And in this I find some comfort.

  Brigit, whose kindness relieves pain,

  Brigit, who feeds the hungry,

  Brigit, whose poetry soothes mortal sorrow,

  Be with me now
like a mother.

  There has been a sickness passing through the convent, causing pains in the stomach. We have had a Christian man who knows medicine come to manipulate our limbs and give us cultivated herbs. These are times when Saint Brigit’s kindness is sorely needed. I lie down upon my bed close to the little fire and pray for some comfort, since the cold causes the pains to grow sharper. I cannot write this day any more and cannot go even to the chapel to sing the psalms. May God forgive me.

  1. Bairgen: cake speckled with currants.

  2. “Christ is more knowledgeable than any druid.”

  3. “He who believes will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned.”

  [ 5 ]

  THE VOICE OF MY MOTHER was silent, though I listened for it always. Only when I stopped begging and waiting for it, much later than the time I am telling of here, did I hear it in breezes and owl calls. I wanted no other magic but her human presence. I would have traded all gods and spirits for the lowly carnality of one beloved woman. But I did not know with whom to make such a bargain. The universe was as silent as my mother.

  I was afraid, too, of my own mortality. Death had come into my life and now knew me. I could not hide from it any longer. One day I would die, afflicted with worms or drowned or the victim of blows or blade. I received comfort then by looking at the stars, whose infinite depth the night I left Tarbfhlaith hinted at a large magic in which the birth and death of humans were small things. Some stars were round like distant suns, and others were made of shining white mist and wound like a road between the constellations. But I could read no message in the stars and wondered what could be deciphered there by a druid who could translate the night sky.

  And what message would I have wanted from the stars that night when I wandered motherless for the first time in my life? What message would I want the sky to tell me on any night? That I am loved? That I am protected? That something understands my efforts though they fail? That the sky is a curtain behind which all that we long for waits, all the dreams we mourn that are held in the arms of the dead, who wait and whisper like children in a game of hiding? That if I have faith I will be embraced by an understanding that is complete and blissful? Perhaps if one stops looking up at the stars and looks instead at this world, the messages we need would be there and the gods could tend to larger matters than one tiny person’s sorrow.