Confessions of a Pagan Nun Read online

  The abbot spoke at the noonday recital of psalms, saying again that demons are among us. He told us that these demons thirst for blood and have faces so twisted that one would die of terror if one looked upon them. He also said that these demons come up through the ground and wrap their long hands around the ankles of the weak in spirit, dragging them down to hell to be transformed into servants of their ruinous ambitions. And sometimes these demons wear masks and walk about at night, pretending to be familiar persons. He addressed the nuns particularly, saying that women are the natural allies of demons. He warned us to keep no company with the women who go into the woods and gather herbs and to tell them that their actions are evil. He called these women witches and said that we should not suffer one to live, nor should we suffer astrologers to live, for astrologers are like demons who can transform themselves into bestial forms. I am thinking of my mother and her pure and wise knowledge of the deep woods. I am remembering a time when she threw back her head and howled when a pack of wolves drank from the other side of the lake. She laughed when they raised their dripping muzzles and stared at her. Would this abbot praise her death and call the worms that consumed her the agents of God’s will? I cannot consider this matter long or I will pull my hair from my head. I have, though, begged the abbot to cease telling the woman whose infant died that demons have taken her child to hell because it was not protected by Christian ritual and faith. This increases the poor woman’s mad sorrow.

  After the abbot’s sermon, the other sisters and I walked solemnly into the cold, damp air and felt oppressed. We did not consult one another on the content of the lesson and ate little at the afternoon meal. Sister Aillenn called to me to come to the high place where she stood so I could watch beside her. The two wild horses that no one has been able to catch were in the cleared valley below. They ran with arched tails, and I saw that they calmed and pleased Sister Aillenn, who said without looking at me, “I had once a horse as powerful as that.” And then she recognized me and told me that those two horses had been warriors’ beasts, used in many battles. And then their masters were killed and none other could take them as they ran from the battle and freed themselves. And so they have become wild, refusing any human master. I have heard this same story told of the horses by the people in the settlement who have tried to harness them. I did not tell Sister Aillenn that these beasts had trampled a man, whose body I had then wrapped in blankets so that his broken bones were kept still as he died.

  And now I can hear Sister Aillenn as though renewed in her private and tormented rituals. I will soon put wax in my ears, for I cannot stand to hear her moans and unearthly cries. I am afraid that we will all go mad. I can guess that the abbot as confessor asked her, as he asked me, if she had anything to say concerning the molesting of the grave. I felt cold in my stomach to think that there was any suspicion of me in this matter. The man was stern but did not press his inquiry when I rose to leave. I suggested then that he allow the unbaptized to be buried in the sanctioned cemetery. He did not reply. I am afraid that my folios will be found and read, and I will be cast out for not dedicating all my talents and materials to Christian or scholarly transcription. This abbot inspires fear. He has seeped into a position of influence like one who steals a single crumb at a time until the whole cake is gone. And we ask each other, one sister to another, how it has happened that this man has come to abide with us as a brother and now behaves like a chieftain when we did not endow him with such privilege. I have said that we should consider a gentle request that he leave our convent to build his own monastery in another place. I dared not speak this in front of Sister Luirrenn, but only to a gathering of five sisters who worked in the garden. Sister Aillenn was one of them, and after I spoke she came to me and struck me hard across my face. “You are a demon, little Gwynneve,” she said. And the other sisters looked away.

  1. Editorulgatu: common Latin version of the Bible, based on a translation by Saint Jerome.

  2. Bean sidhe: woman of the fairies.

  3. Aisling: mystical vision or dream.

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  LET IT BE KNOWN HERE that Giannon was a good man, unacquainted with demons. But he had dark moods, which caused him to be ungentle. After we had lived together for several years, he was less often summoned to the homes of chieftains, because they had come to fear his sharp satires. They wanted the powerful magic of other druids, who performed with smoke and crystals. In those times, many druids sought to hold their power with tricks that Giannon disdained. They manipulated fire and claimed to metamorphose into beasts and birds. Some druids encouraged one chieftain to attack another, thereby enlarging the influence of the dominant chieftain and his attending druid as well. No longer were druids free to roam from one allegiance to another, free of threat, for they were all threatened now by the tonsured men and needed protection from pagan chieftains. There was violence between druids and Christian priests, and between Christian and Christian. And it happened that the oblaire with the forked beard had his head held beneath the waters of a lake until he drowned. This happened in a túath in which the chieftain had been converted to the Christianity of pope and priest.

  When I had been with Giannon for seven years and had learned almost three hundred stories but borne no child, the gleemen who had been my companions visited our home. They were no longer five but four. Solemnly the woman told me that the oblaire had thought the Christians of a lake túath were his brothers, but the priest who attended the chieftain told the people of that túath that the oblaire’s beliefs were demonic heresy. The woman stood knocking her head against the herbs hanging in our dwelling to show how the oblaire had preached that Christians did not need the intervention of clergy in their communion with God. He had opened a cage and let free the ravens inside as a demonstration of the freedom of a man’s soul to soar to God’s heaven on its own wings. The trumpeter’s antics did not dilute the oblaire’s insult to the priests. During the night, when the troupe was camped outside the wall that ringed the túath, some men came to them and took the oblaire away to the lake and drowned him. The lesser juggler, who had been my husband, assaulted the men with a large branch and killed one of them. The troupe fled and came to Giannon’s home, knowing I lived there and hoping to make plans without being molested by those who wanted revenge.

  We sat in silence, except for my weeping at the news, which was a new wound for me and sore with fondness for the old gleeman. I could not see what help there was in our small clearing. Giannon brought out ale, and we considered the methods by which a man can hide himself in this land. We discussed other matters, and I hid my face with my hair when the woman began to tell of the times when I stole bread and whole cabbages from the túaths our company visited. She said, “She went in the night as a maiden, and came back the same night full grown with child.” She put out her hand to show the hill made of foodstuffs that I had carried under my clothing. I was glad they could be merry, but they brought trouble into our home. Giannon became angry when the half-wit wandered into the garden and trampled some of the herbs there. His temper silenced us, and when the lesser juggler touched my hand and looked into my eyes, I rose and said that we had little to offer but would help them fill their packs with goods for their journey. I never saw those gleemen again and think often of them disappearing down the hill, the five become four, and the half-wit slouching like a beast. Giannon stood straight as a tree with his curling tendrils dancing in a breeze like ribbons, watching the troupe disappear. And he said to me with firm wisdom, “Everything is changing.” And I felt that we two knew the secrets of these changes, the sadness and danger, and we two had a vision together of a world constantly transforming through countless births and deaths, its noises becoming deafening and cruel.

  I stayed there with Giannon, and in all those years I was hungry for his affection and wanted it far more than it was given. I think now that I was a child still yearning for her mother. But a husband’s hands on his wife can be soothing, and I admired Giannon’s hands for t
heir slow and careful attention to any task. I was more apprentice than wife. As proof of our kinship, Giannon and I erected an ogham a mile into the woods to the northwest of our clearing. I cannot say what we wrote on this stone. It cannot be spoken or written elsewhere. But it marked the time when I had spent nine years as his apprentice. In those nine years I had learned all that he knew about making and reading marks. But I did not have his child and reconciled myself to being barren. It was another sign that I was to be a druid and serve the people of this land, immortalizing their lives and their laws rather than my own lineage. It was tedious to learn the laws and their variations from túath to túath. I still know the value of a hostage according to the person’s age, birth, gender, and talents. I still know the way to list a woman’s property and separate it from her husband’s. I can still tell the configurations of the stars and have learned also the Greek names for them. I am aware, too, of the influence of seasons and the length of days. The three hundred and fifty stories are confused in my mind now, one bull in one story confused with a pig in another, many heroes seeming like one. I fear that all these stories will be lost or changed until everything will have been somehow achieved by Saint Patrick, though the deeds were first spoken of twenty lifetimes before his.

  In our lessons I achieved an intimacy with Giannon I have known with no other man or woman, and this intimacy finally overwhelmed my need for my mother. In learning the configurations of the stars in all seasons, I lay with my back on Giannon’s chest, my head next to his, resting on his shoulder, as both of us looked up at the wanderers and fixed suns revealed in the night sky. He held my hand with his and pointed them both at the stars as he gave their names and influences. We bathed together in the stream nearby, we ate together, and though Giannon despised words that had no importance, the silences we shared were full of understanding. I clung to Giannon in the night and was kept warm by him. We were twin souls, forgiven one by the other for the disappointments and terrible words of those many years when I fought too hard to extract from him the affection I wanted. In our years together, we had faced illness and fear together, as well as the concerns of all creatures for simple food and shelter. I began to accept the limitations of my life and the alteration of my aspirations, an acceptance that younger women consider weakness and surrender. But I found that the limitations I accepted, as youth and its dreams fell away, composed a narrow and secret passage leading to an expanse of space and liberation I had not realized existed. I began to prefer peaceful surrender to noble battle, for in peace is an internal freedom one never has in war, though sometimes warring is necessary for external freedom. The disappointments were not bitter, because I was with a companion who did not turn his back on truth.

  Among all the wisdom and facts I learned from Giannon, I also learned the loneliness of incarnation, in which there is inevitably a separation of souls because of the uniqueness of our faces and our experiences. And I learned also the moments when the current of my life joins the current of another life, and I can glimpse for a moment the one flowing body of water we all compose. We sat sometimes in silence and apart on clear nights, making notes on the stars and the occurrence of comets, which came more frequently in those days, as though the gods were throwing fire at each other in the heavens in a battle for our souls. We did not have to speak to know that we each wondered to what purpose we existed and to what end our efforts took us. For we both were weak in doctrine and strong in questions. But we both loved effort and knowledge, though I saw Giannon become weary in his eyes.

  I do not understand a man who does not want to know all that he can know. Why would anyone choose ignorance? If he chooses ignorance because he is lazy, then he is a fool, for the ignorant are put to hard labor digging and hauling stones for masters who tell them they need no knowledge. If a man must labor from dawn to dusk to avoid a blow on the head and to earn a cup of grain, he has no time to gain knowledge and remains a slave to masters. I think, therefore, that it is a worthy vocation to free a man enough that he can learn who he is and what he is capable of, where he came from and what philosophies steer his life. Teaching is a sacred art. This is why the noblest druid is not the one who conjures fires and smoke but the one who brings the news and passes on the histories. The teacher, the bard, the singer of tales is a freer of men’s minds and bodies, especially when he roams without allegiance to one chieftain or another. But he is also a danger to the masters if he insists upon telling the truth. The truth will inevitably cause tremors in those who cling to power without honoring justice.

  In the summer before Giannon’s disappearance, we determined to compose together a satire. It was to concern the chieftain in whose túath the oblaire had been drowned. Giannon knew that this crime agitated me, and he enjoyed his satires, for they took advantage of his sharp wit and thorny spirit. He had scrolls concerning the feats of this chieftain before his conversion, and we conspired to use them to show his fickle claims. We knew the danger of this effort and told ourselves we would bury the document beneath the stone in the woods for the earth to consume and disseminate as vapor through the land. In this way the chieftain’s demise would be slow and hard to attribute. We gave insulting names to the tonsured men and the priest who had converted the túath, and in our words we turned the people of the túath into rodents and pigs. When we were done and I prepared to take the scroll to the woods for burial, Giannon would not let me, saying he had not finished. For three days, he did not sleep or work in his garden but stayed by sunlight and rush light at the table.

  I saw what he wrote, and I did not understand its purpose. He had turned to a satire of the druids, naming particular men and women, some of whom had great powers. He made their limbs wither and ridiculed their transformations into wind and lark. He recalled prophecies they had made that had not been fulfilled. This frightened me greatly, and I begged him to burn the words and swallow the smoke. This was one of the nights that made me old. Giannon, my twin soul, said that he would tell a satire of my own life. His words were witty and cruel. He said I still suckled my mother and had the body of a girl. He said that I had weeds growing in my womb. I knew that he could kill me with his words, and I went into the woods and slept the night against the stone. We did not speak of the scroll in the following days. But he told me that he had not meant to fling painful words at me and that he was, in truth, haunted by the vision of the oblaire’s head held beneath the water, his forked beard floating like lake rushes beside him when his struggle ended. He said, “I am weary to sickness of men who do not till the soil or feed the pigs and who make those who do say certain words or die, whether they be druids’ words or priests’ words.” Giannon traveled then, and I later learned that he went to that túath and read the satire. I do not know what harm it did, but it was connected with the visitors who came to speak with us in the spring of that year.

  One winter evening in the tenth year that I was with Giannon, three druids came to see us, their forms black and foreboding against the pale evening sky. They seemed to be the darkness itself, in human form before it spread over the world and became night. We lit the rush lights and made a fire in the corner hearth. In this hut of warmth we five sat on mats and clothing , and we shared a sweet wine that the woman had brought. This woman I had seen before. She wore a large bronze circle on a tether around her neck. There were dark circles around her eyes that made them seem like empty shadows under the hood of her cloak. Her companions were a very old man composed of bones covered by a leathered skin, and a man with orange hair and beard that absorbed the energy and colors of our fire. When the woman lowered her hood, we saw that her hair had been shorn and her head rubbed with a pumice stone so that she was bald and her scalp red and cut. None of them had spoken until she showed her head and said, “I welcome your satires about the Christians, Giannon. This is what the Christians have done to me.” I lowered my head, but Giannon looked full into her eyes and said, “What of it?” I wanted to strike him because of his surliness, which always stung me e
ven when I was not its target.

  The woman then explained her complaint, having established her right as a victim to complain. These are words that even devout Christians must hear. She said, “The new priests have divided the world into good and evil, separating things of the sky from things of the earth. They teach that the things of the earth are evil and all those who do not follow their laws are evil.”

  Giannon responded with impatience, rising and thrusting a stick into the fire. He said, “All I have asked is to be left alone so that I may grow plants in my garden and not have them trampled. Anyone who comes to me saying that he knows the truth is a liar or an idiot. I am weary to my marrow with various truths.”