Shaman Pathways - The Celtic Chakras - Elen Sentier 2011

Arianrhod

Arianrhod’s name means Silver Wheel. It comes from the Welsh arian, “silver,” and rhod comes from the Indo-European root meaning wheel; her name is likely cognate with Proto-Celtic Arganto-rotā, meaning silver wheel.

It’s sometimes thought Arianrhod’s name may have also been Arianrath; in Irish, ráth means earthen ring-fort; this takes us back again to Elen’s caers.

The Sanskrit word chakra also means wheel, sometimes fiery wheel. For those who can see, chakras often look like fiery wheels.

Spinning Wheel - Spinning Tower - World Tree Pole

Arianrhod is lady of the spinning tower and of the silver wheel.

This reminded me of Light … is light particle or waves? Actually it’s both.

Light can be labelled with a wavelength, a frequency; it can reflect, refract, interfere, and diffract. In those and other respects, light behaves like a wave.

But light also has a certain amount of energy depending upon its frequency, and it also has momentum. In those respects, it acts like a particle. Some scientists talk about particle-wave duality; others even use the word wavicle. Being a particle and a wave is not mutually exclusive — the and/and principle again; quantum mechanics has reinforced this idea, based on tiny pieces of matter which act as waves.

Arianrhod in her aspect of spinning wheel appears as one thing; in her aspect as spinning tower she appears as another; she is not either/or but and/and.

Lady of the Silver Wheel

The silver wheel is so very similar to the meaning and concept of the Sanskrit word chakra. It is like the seething pool of the coire — the Gaelic word for the Cauldrons of Poesy that also means kettle, boiler, vat, dell and whirlpool. Coire is like chur in German and cirque in French, words that are about amphitheatre-like valleys. One of the very few Celtic words to be borrowed into English is corrie which, along with cwm, means just the same sort of valley as coire. In the Scottish mountains there are many places with the name coire such as Coire An t-Sneachda (Corrie of the Snows) on Cairngorm; the name defines a circular hanging valley on a mountain; like Elen’s caers, which are fortresses on hills rather than hanging valleys, they still carry the grail-cup connection.

So Arianrhod carries this grail-concept too.

The cup, grail and cauldron are all similar to the wheel- concept; they all carry the energy of the horizontal axis, the energy of the four elements, of Middleworld. These three pictures of world-tree concepts show Middleworld centred around the trunk of the world tree.

World Trees

The world turns, the four seasons turn and turn about, giving a continuity to Life although no two seasons are ever the same. The horizontal axis also holds the directions — north, east, south, west — that enable us to find our way around the Earth. We live our everyday lives on the wheel, even the day itself is made up of dawn, midday, dusk, midnight.

Arianrhod’s silver wheel carries these concepts for us, as do all spirit-wheels in shamanic traditions the world over.

Lady of the Spinning Tower

As Lady of the Spinning Tower, Arianrhod holds the vertical axis of the world tree for us.

In the Celtic tradition a tree or pole is seen as standing at the centre of all things, reaching up into the sky and down into the underworld; again the three pictures show this. Shamans use this pole to climb up to the inspiration of Upperworld or descend into the realms of the Ancestors in Lowerworld. They also use it as a jumping off point for reaching out into Middleworld and the everyday world; the Spinning Tower, Caer Sidhe, spins around to open its gate to the different points of the wheel of the year; the shaman steps out of the Tower through this gate into the space-time where they need to be for the journey and the work.

On the vertical axis, the Tower reaches up into the North Star while its caverns are in the heart of the Earth. Around its trunk circles the Middleworld where we and the rest of creation live and move and have our physical and etheric being here on Earth. We climb the world tree when we go out to journey; it is also our way home; like the fireman we can slide back down the trunk of the tree to return home when the journey is done.

The pole is also known as the broom, besom, gandreigh, riding pole, stang, staff and hobby horse — all of these are the shaman’s horse. Back in the 1950s, as a child playing hobby-hoss in my home village on the edge of Exmoor, I was told that I was riding the horse that would carry me to the lands of the Faer. Nowadays people tend to consider that only the drum is the shaman’s horse, perhaps we’ve got restricted in our ways? The riding-pole, the symbol of the world tree, is also the otherworldly beast that carries us on our journey.

The tower is a form of the world tree, a place of gateways between worlds. There are many doors that will take you to different space-times, different worlds as well as different times and places on the Earth. Lots of patience, time and practice is needed to learn how to do this and exploring the Celtic chakra system is a very good way to begin.

As we learn to work with the chakras we come to realise that each chakra is made up of both the silver wheel and the spinning tower; the vertical and horizontal axes that hold the two energies of the receptive and the creative … the queen and king again.

We can travel up and down the vertical axis of each chakra to step out onto the horizontal axis to journey. The vertical tower axis becomes our own personal riding-pole as well as the axis upon which the Earth spins.

6-armed cross

Spinning Serpent

The chakra, in the Celtic system has a basic structure or skeleton; I call it the 6-armed cross. In the Norse tradition the rune that looks like this is called Jor or Ior and is the rune of the Midguard Serpent who is called Jormungandr.

Jormungandr is about liminal spaces, being between worlds; about union, synthesis and uniting opposites, and about seeing all sides of something. Jor is also an excellent bind-rune for wards and blocks. The chakra is about all of these are things too. Each chakra, and the whole system, both is and defines a liminal space. The word liminality comes from the Latin word līmen meaning threshold; it is about being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes. Writers such as Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner have used the term in their anthropological theories of ritual and rites of passage. Liminal beings are often Tricksters; their role is to challenge you as you try to pass them, trick you off your path, generally see if you are up to it for your initiation. Dragons — as Jung knew well — and serpents are often the form such tricksters take in western tradi- tions. Jung said of the Unconscious, “here be your dragons, guarding your treasure”; he implied that they guarded it from ourselves until such time as we are able to work appropriately with it.

Jormungandr is such a serpent. S/he — for this serpent carries both genders — holds and guards the skeleton-structure of the world tree. S/he challenges us on both our going out and our coming home; when we go to find our way in to explore and learn … and then when we come to find our way out again to share our wisdom with the world.

To way of the chakras is by no means a rose-strewn path, it is follow a way full of challenges. Arianrhod’s spinning tower is hard for us to enter, then hard for us to leave; it is a liminal place, a threshold of consciousness as well as a threshold between worlds. Her silver wheel is another challenge; being silver, it mirrors us back to ourselves and flashes tricksy images into our mind’s eye that can easily confuse … what is real and what is not? And what is reality anyway? All these are questions Arianrhod asks us and she is no sweetness-and-light lady but a formidable teacher; we get no quarter in her tower.

Arianrhod’s tower is also called Caer Sidi, the Glass Castle or Spiral Tower and is traditionally the place wherein lore keepers serve their apprenticeship. The terms are strict and it is thought of as imprisonment. In the Celtic stories many folk (including Arthur) are imprisoned there, or perhaps one should say they get stuck there until they learn how to emerge. Taliesin says that he spent three periods in the prison of Arianrhod, learning his trade of seer and poet — the art of seeing clearly (clairvoyance) and the art of telling well so his audience could learn too (poetry); two basic skills for the shaman. Thomas of Erceldoune, the Scottish shaman or taibhsear (pronounced tah-shar) also spent seven years in the tower, in the land of the queen of Efland, as his story-song tells us, and came out with the silver tongue and the ability to see clear.

Taliesin’s apprenticeship actually begins with Ceridwen — I tell the story in her chapter — where he is chased through the four elements of the silver wheel, eaten and reborn. At the beginning of his story he is known as Gwion Bach, only after he is reborn again, out of the leather bag floating in the river, is he given his bardic name of Taliesin which means Shining Brow. This takes us to the idea of the brow chakra, where all the threads from the three pairs of chakras are integrated, another part of Arianrhod’s realm.

Lady of the Moon & Stars

As Lady of the Moon and Stars, Arianrhod holds the energy of the sky-starways and the earth-starways as well as the moonpaths. The stars in the sky link with the crystal stars of the Earth making energy threads which connect our planet with all the rest of the stars and planets in our solar system. Our galaxy and the whole of the cosmos are within her purview; within her range of vision and understanding and insight, her outlook and experience.

Arianrhod is a teacher and tester; she hones our spirit, helps us to keep our lens clean and bright. As George Bernard Shaw said …

Better keep yourself clean and bright. You are the window through which you must see the world.

Dag Hammarskjold also has a useful quote for this …

You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.

I love this quote; it shows us how to be unselfish and inclusive, useful to our fellow creatures. I wish more of us could see and comprehend it rather than always searching for ourselves, putting ourselves first.

Caer Arianrhod’s labyrinthine turnings offer us the wisdom, from following the spiralling path through the chakras, to find our raison d’etre, our job description for the incarnation and some hints at least of the great plan behind that.

A good mantram to use on this journey is the Affirmation of the Disciple …

I am a point of light within a greater light,

I am a strand of loving energy within the stream of love divine,

I am a point of sacrificial fire focused within the fiery heart of god,

And thus I stand.

I am a way by which men may achieve,

I am a source of strength enabling them to stand,

I am a beam of light shining upon the way,

And thus I stand.

And standing thus revolve

And tread this way the ways of men,

And know the ways of god,

And thus I stand.

The Northern Lights

Arianrhod’s caer is the constellation called the corona borealis, the Crown of the North. She also shows herself to us as the wonderful phenomenon we know as the Northern Lights. If you ever get the opportunity to go see the Lights do take it; they are quite amazing. The old traditions are still extant among the Sami folk who follow the reindeer — Elen of the Ways totem beast. There, in the north, they say you should speak to the lights, ask them to come and show themselves to you and offer a gift. You never command or try to trick the lights. Offering a gift is a fundamental shamanic concept throughout the world and very strong in the Celtic tradition — the offer of exchange; it’s respectful; it acknowledges and accepts your relationship with otherworld and with the lady of the aurora borealis, whose northern “crown of light” it is. You always offer an exchange in any work you do with Otherworld.

The chakras are places of transformation and transmutation, places of spinning, weaving energies (like the aurora borealis) that spin between the worlds.

Journey: Northern Lights

The Northern Lights …

Find yourself at the North Pole; blue whiteness all around you; stillness … is that the stars themselves you can hear singing?

You are alone, only yourself for company; this is good but, at the same time, you would like someone to share the amazing sense of joy that is welling up inside you.

At the very edge of sound you hear, behind you, the slightest crunch of the top-crust of snow.

You don’t turn round but your heart is full of hope.

Soft, warm breath strokes the back of your neck; all the hairs rise but still you don’t turn.

’Who are you?’ you whisper.

The breath caresses your neck again but no-one speaks.

’Who are you?’ you say again. Again, the breath warms you.

’Who are you?’ you ask for the third time.

A rough, soft tongue gently licks the back of your neck. Now you do turn.

There, glimmering silverly against the night-snow is a polar bear. She is huge; her great white paws hardly sink into the crust of snow, each one is as big as your head.

And yet you are not frightened; you can feel the warmth coming from the aura you just now realise you are seeing around her. Her aura shimmers and swings about her like a curtain of light. Her eyes are like dark pools of night but there, in their depths, stars shine.

You are entranced by her eyes, feeling yourself twining with her spirit. As you feel this you realise a smile is beginning on those great jaws.

’Yes,’ you hear inside your head, ’yes, it is I.’

And suddenly you know that you are in the presence of the Snow Queen herself, Arianrhod, lady of the Moon and Stars. You greet her.

’Come with me,’ she tells you.

She curls you into her great front paws; you feel like one of her cubs, with Mother, sat learning the ways of Earth.

Wrapped in her warm fur, safe in her arms, you accompany Arianrhod as she carries your spirit up into the sky. There, all around you, hang great curtains of light, all the colours of the rainbow shimmering iridescent in the velvet-black sky. They are curtains of fire, cold ice-fire flickering across the millions of miles of space.

’This is my home,’ you hear in your head, ’my temenos; the womb of darkness from which all life is born; all life and all ideas.’

It is a liminal space, a threshold, you see and sense that. Now, with Arianrhod as the great white Mother Bear, you are able to stand at this threshold. One day, you will cross it, when you are able, when you are ready. On that day you will follow Arianrhod through the curtains of light and know the greater universe … and, following Arianrhod, you will return, cross back again through the curtains of light, to bring what you know back to your own folk.

As you realise this you find yourself again sat in the arms of the Mother, the great polar bear, cradled at the top of the world, in the blue-white snow, the dark velvet sky above you spangled with diamond-stars and the rainbow-curtains of light and fire

and ice shimmering and flickering all around.

’They are my crown,’ Arianrhod tells you, ’the Aurora

Borealis. I am Queen of the North.’

You know this; suddenly you find you know all sorts of things although you don’t yet have words for many of them. Her words, queen of the north, remind you of Arthurian tales; a whole flood of memory falls around you, like the curtains of light, but you know better than to chase those rainbows now … later, there will be time later to absorb it all.

’Help me to remember,’ you ask Arianrhod.

A soft, deep growl answers you, almost like a huge purr.

’It is time for you to go, little one,’ Arianrhod tells you, motherly.

Reluctantly you realise this is so.

’Thank you, Mother,’ you tell her. ’I will come back — if I may? I would learn with you again.’

The soft-rough tongue touches your forehead, warm breath surrounds you; you shut your eyes.

When you open them again you are back in your own world, in your own space, in your everyday body. You stay still, don’t move, allowing the feelings to well up through you; there may be sadness and longing to return as well as the joy, let them all flow through you, sit quiet and allow the light and the dark to move through you, filling you with a new sense of knowing.

When you are ready, take a deep breath and sigh it out, take another and sigh that out too, and a third. Swallow, move your mouth, wiggle your fingers and toes, rub your hands together then rub your knees and legs and arms, have a good stretch and a yawn, then open your eyes. Blink a few times, move your head gently on your neck, hunch your shoulders and let go, rub your feet on the floor. When you feel that you’re safely back in your body thank your body for being there for you to return to.

Make notes and drawings to remind you of your journey then make yourself a warm drink and have something nice to snack on. You have done a lot of work so you need to replenish your body for the energy it gave you while you worked — exchange again.