October 23, 2014
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: scavengerspirits . Comments: Leave a comment
For Sarah Lawless, in the Wolf’s Hour
mandrake
sing your dark songs to me
fill my head with visions;
drowned in ointment,
sink into the bloody soil of my flesh
send your roots deep
into the rotted heart of me
erase the pain;
send my soul tumbling
to distant worlds
as I dream the strange dreams
that are your gift;
give me your wings
shaped from shadow,
woven of loam and need
when I wail like a newborn babe,
whimper like a dog
half-dead on the road;
man, dragon,
help me to hear
let me feel anew
open my eyes
and let me see.
The ecosystem of the spirit
Lately I’ve been considering the concept of the spiritual ecosystem.
Specifically: over the last 18 months or so, I’ve collected a lot of animal relics — shells from marine organisms and land snails, deer bones and antlers, animal skulls, skins, tails, snakeskins, whiskers, shed fur from fox and wolf, horse hair, teeth, claws, and so on. Most, if not all of them, comes from animals that have passed on (the shed fur and horsehair, of course, is from still-living creatures).
If one posits that an animal’s spirit is connected to such relics, then the number of animal spirits clustered around this house, where they’re all kept, is massive, and the different types of creatures is varied (deer, raccoon, wolf, horse, buffalo, fox, coyote, snake, cat, bear, snails, water molluscs, insects [bumblebees, dragonflies, wasps, several kinds of moths and butterflies], toad, rabbit, mouse, shrew, chipmunk…)
But this “home” is pretty much not what most of them are used to — a one-story house on a very small plot of land that is a combination of garden and lawn, located in the suburbs of the American midwest. Not forest, not prairie, not marsh, not ocean.
An ecosystem is composed of numerous components — the animals, the plants, the climate, and the land itself. On a spiritual level, the animal spirits are probably — mostly — not in a place they’d recognize as “home”. So it falls to me to make it more comfortable for them…at least, as much as I can. That’ll take some thought, admittedly; the oyster and clam spirits attached to the shells I have will never find this place an acceptable substitute for an ocean, but for most of the rest of them — land and air creatures — I might be able to do better.
Trying to build a connection with them, a closeness, requires wanting them to be at peace here. On some level, I think that’s the very least I can do.
Why, hello there, Mr. Raccoon!
Today, I was supposed to get together with a group of friends to talk about an upcoming camping trip/religious gathering, but one of them started feeling under the weather, so it was called off. Since I and my husband were already out of the house, we decided to go hiking again, and headed for the forest preserve where I found the deer skull and bones.
Because this had been impromptu, I didn’t have my usual gear with me: no backpack full of trash bags and foodstuffs for offerings, no forest spirit salve, no forest spirit fetish. But there were several plastic grocery bags in the car, and when we stopped at a gas station to fill up the tank, I went inside and bought a couple of bananas and a small bag of sunflower seeds (unsalted) for offerings. Small, but still heartfelt.
The preserve was busy, and the nature center was open, and the parking lot was almost full. I gathered up my things and we headed down along the trail, heading for the area where I’d found the deer skull. I had been so excited when I found it that I didn’t really take the time to look around a little more, so there might have been other bones I’d missed.
And this, as it turned out, was the truth. Alas, another thing I didn’t have with me was my good digital camera; so the only pic I took while I was there was of something else, which I’ll post further down.
But I did find other deer bones in that area, which I believe are from the same animal. There was a single vertebra, two leg bones, the pelvis (split in two along the spinal axis, as I am told often happens with very young deer due to the fact that the sutures in the bone that meld the two pieces together are incompletely fused), and a single shoulderblade. I gathered them up quite happily, burbling especially over the scapula (the first I’d found so far), and then laid out the offering I’d brought:
Banana and sunflower seeds.
Once I had finished with that, and with a moment’s quiet prayer of thanks for the gifts I’d been given today, I began to range out a little further with the plastic grocery bag dangling from my fingers, heavy with bone. The sun was beginning to descend in the sky, and the light — which had been blocked out when directly overhead due to the branches (although there isn’t much in the way of leaf cover yet) — began to slide in sideways, flaring against lighter-color leaves, making me think I saw the white flash of bone almost everywhere.
Ironically, when I DID find something else, I almost stepped on it. But there, at my feet, was a nearly perfect skull — small, with an elongated cranium and both sharp incisors and grinding molars (in other words, probably an omnivore):
This time, I finally remembered to take a picture of it where I found it, atop the leaves. Although I couldn’t find the lower jaw anywhere, most of the teeth in the upper jaw were there, lacking only four smaller ones; also, the front of the skull was perfect. The zygomatic arches around the eyes were intact, as were the intranasal bones of the sinuses. I scooped it up with a happy little cry. It is much smaller than the coyote skull I have, and I guessed it was either from a fox or a raccoon.
Once I got home, I was able to look it up, and confirmed my first guess: it belonged to a raccoon. Raccoons, of course, are scavengers too, happy to rummage around in your garbage can if you leave the lid off, or get their dinner from the bowl of cat food you might leave out for the feral cats in your neighborhood. They eat both meat and plant foods — nuts, grains, fruits — and their dexterous little hands and black thief’s mask connect them — perhaps only in my mind — to Hermes, god of thieves. (Of course, as raccoons are New World animals found only in the Americas, there is no record of the ancient Greeks associating the raccoon with Hermes; they would have had no idea such a creature existed.)
After I finished looking the skull up, I carefully used superglue to make sure none of the other teeth would fall out (and gluing one back in that had come loose in the plastic bag on the ride home). And then I took pictures:
From below.
Close-up from below showing the sockets where the missing teeth were: two on the left, one in the front on the right, one on the right.
Then I set it up high so the glue would dry unmolested, and went to wash the deer bones. They are coyote-gnawed, which is pretty much inevitable (I think) for any remains I will find at this particular park — I see fresh coyote scat every time I visit, a lot of it — although I have seen worse.
Pelvis at top next to scapula at right top; vertebra next to that. Two leg bones at bottom.
The leg bones.
Fairly heavy crack at top of bone near knob. Perhaps the coyotes tried to break it to get the marrow out, but couldn't?
Long vertical crack down the center of the longer leg bone.
There’s some gnawing on the edge of the scapula, although not as much as I might have expected.
Given that these were found in the same area as the skull (about a 200-foot radius), I do believe these to have been part of that specific animal, and will house them in the same box as the skull once I am ready. These are pretty fleshless, and I will be whitening them with hydrogen peroxide soon.
I have to look up to find out whether the hydrogen peroxide will dissolve the superglue I used on the teeth before I whiten the raccoon skull. I am not averse to leaving the stains of nature (from rain, weathering, vegetation, etc.) on the skull if immersing it in the peroxide will remove the glue and let the teeth fall out.
When I went on this walk today, I didn’t have the salve or fetish I usually bring along as aids to seeing the things the spirits want me to see. I’ve been to this particular park at least four times in the last two weeks (and it’s a fairish drive from my house, about 45 minutes). I have to wonder if that means I am finally seeing and hearing what the spirits want me to see — pieces of themselves.
I hope so.
Ghosts Old and New
Today the predicted high was supposed to be in the upper 70s F, with no chance of rain until the evening, so I packed up my bag and rubber gloves and offerings and baggies and went back out to the forest preserve where I’d found the deer bones.
The first stop I made once I got there was at the site where I’d found the original deer bones. The last offering I’d made there, on Sunday the 11th, was completely gone:
So I smoothed over the dirt and laid out a new one:
Land under wave: steel-cut oats, sunflower seed kernels, dried apricots, dried blueberries, green grapes, chopped walnuts, and a banana.
Three dried apricots and three dried blueberries, at the end of a tail of steel-cut oats.
Chopped walnuts.
The point of the spear: sunflower seed kernels surrounded by steel-cut oats.
Banana -- and it was warm enough out that, as you can see, the local insects (in the form of Mr. Fly) have already homed in on the scent. Flies are scavengers, too.
Nine grapes. A number often associated with myth and magic.
The entire offering.
After I had laid out the offering and said a silent prayer, we resumed hiking. But this time, we didn’t just stay on the path. Nothing interesting ever happens there. Down into the hollows and gulches between the hills we went, and up over the hills and around them. We left the human path, but followed a few deer trails we went, through thorny briars and around fallen trees.
And then we began to find bones. First, a coyote-gnawed leg bone at the foot of a fallen tree:
Top one.
And then another leg bone, equally chewed (lower piece in the above pic).
And then my husband found a nearly-untouched deer leg bone matching two others I have, off to the side of the trail:
Although this one still had the ball joints at either end, it was much more gnawed than the other two of this kind I have:
And then, walking further, I chose to investigate a deep patch of briars that had grown up around a fallen oak, and found a skull.
I believe this to be a doe’s skull; there are no obvious places on it anywhere that look like areas where antlers might have grown from. It seems to have died a natural death (coyote predation, starvation or freezing in winter, disease or old age) as opposed to hunting. It also appears to have laid where I found it for at least a couple years, as it’s in fairly bad shape:
View from above.
View from front. Note the nasal prominences have all collapsed into the interior cavities.
Side view. The bone is fairly weathered, as might be expected from spending a year or more outside.
Underside view. It seems to have all the teeth still in its upper jaw. I know that figuring out how old the deer was at the time of death can be done by examining the teeth; however, I have not learned how to do so.
Rear view, showing the aperture where the spinal column and cord joined to the skull.
I think it may also be possible to estimate the animal’s age at death by the sutures joining together the plates of the deer’s skull. Alas, this is another technique I have no skill in. At best, I feel confident in saying this was an adult female, not too old (or the teeth would likely have been more worn down).
Close-up of the skull sutures.
After carefully stashing the skull in my go-bag, we continued onward.
Down by the lake, my husband spotted a huge patch of fur, spread out in a fairly large circle. Further off, smaller patches of loose fur were also visible. We had clearly found a coyote kill site; the fur was deer fur, and as nearly as I could tell, it seemed likely that the coyotes had jumped a deer when it came down to the lake to drink. At first, it appeared that there was nothing left but fur; the kill was relatively recent, as some small bits of skin were still attached to the fur — the flesh hadn’t rotted away completely yet.
But no bones. Or so we thought. After looking around for a few minutes, I spotted first one jawbone/lower mandible, and then the other — a find I was thankful for, as the skull I had found didn’t have the lower jaws with it:
Both pieces still had bone, tiny bits of flesh, and bits of fur still attached to them (the blood acted like glue in the case of the hairs, which were stuck to bare bone).
Note that the lower jaw is complete here, as the teeth at the front of the lower jaw are still attached to one of the mandibles.
Front teeth for biting off grass and greens.
I looked around a bit more, and stuck under a piece of dead log was a fairly heavily-gnawed piece of bone with teeth attached — part of the skull/upper jaw:
Upper jaw part in the bag with the deer fur.
So, as of my first visit to the park, I found pieces of one deer; with today’s trip, I found more pieces of at least three and possibly as many as five other deer (skull, fur and jaws, three separate leg bones in widely differing areas).
No wonder the woods, on the walk back to the parking lot and our car, felt like it was full of ghosts — old ones and new. Carried in my backpack were the relics of about half of the team pulling Santa’s sleigh (okay, yes, these are white-tail deer, not reindeer. Allow a moment of poetic license).
I will be cleaning these remains (very carefully, in the case of the skull, which appears very fragile) and then begin looking for a chest big enough to hold all the deer relics I own — a reliquary to house the spirit(s) of Deer, and honor their place in the world and the gift of graceful beauty they share with us every time we see one.
Addendum to “Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw”
Finally managed to make it back out to the site today. Took bags for garbage and comestibles for the offering. When we reached the area along the trail where I had left the last offering (and where I had found the deer bones), I spent a few moments in prayer, thanking the spirits there — the forest itself, the dead tree at the center of the site, the coyotes, and the deer that had died — for the gift of the bones on my last visit.
Then I went to lay out the next offering:
Somewhat uneven offering to the nature spirits. Steel-cut oats, banana, dried apricots, dried blueberries, wine, turbinado sugar, sunflower seed kernels, chopped walnuts, honey in the comb. The dark circle around the edge is where I poured out the wine.
Honey in the comb atop sunflower seed kernels; the three "arms" of the triskele made of steel-cut oats; banana pieces next to blueberries (three per "arm"); three mounds of turbinado golden sugar by the arms.
At the end of each "arm": a piece of dried apricot and a mound of chopped walnuts.
Banana and close-up of dried blueberries (three); honey in the comb atop sunflower seed kernels and steel-cut oats.
After laying out the offering, I began to search again, carefully shifting aside piles of last fall’s leaves. We’d arrived much earlier in the day (around 2 PM) and I had more time and more daylight with which to work. It also hadn’t rained again since our last visit, so things weren’t as boggy as before.
I found two more pieces from the deer, another vertebra and another leg bone.
Leg bone and vertebra.
The leg bone had rather more gnawing on it than the identical one I found on my first visit — enough to expose the honeycombed inside at one end where the marrow would be found:
There were some fairly clear teeth marks on the other end of the leg bone, as well:
The vertebra was one of the smaller “tailed” ones:
I found a fair bit of garbage while I was out there, and picked up everything I could find. It’s worth noting that this part of the world is definitely caught in an early Spring: the maple and willow trees are budding, and there are already tiny new leaves on the multiflora roses in the woods.
scavengerspirits 