What is AVALON?
Let me guide you to the Otherworld
I am writing this with an absolute epic view from my Retreat venue, in which I am guiding a fantastic group through the Avalonian Cycle of Healing and the Mysteries of Magic and Mythology.
I will be mainly offline for this week but couldn’t resist to steal and hour from my lunch break to take this opportunity and write about AVALON.
AVALON the holy isle
Geoffrey of Monmouth writes in his History Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) a latin pseudohistory, that Arthur´s sword Caliburn (later Excalibur) had been forged on the INSULA AVALLONIS, the isle to which Arthur would later be taken to be cured of his mortal wounds after his last battle.
Arthur himself, our renowned King, was mortally wounded and was carried off to the Isle of Avalon, so that his wounds might be attended to. He handed the crown of Britain over to his cousin Constantine, the son of Cador Duke of Cornwall; this in the year 542 after our Lord´s Incarnation.
In essence Avalon is a paradisiacal island inhibited by priestesses who heal, Faery Beings and/or goddesses of the water, who act as psychopomp to guide passing souls to their next destination.
Avalon is an island of death, transformation, transition and healing.
It is an otherworldly realm which is not to be confused with the underworld as we know if in Nordic or Greek Mythology. The Celtic otherworld is not a distant realm in another dimension but parallel to our very own world and tied within this planet and nature. Therefore it is beautiful to know that there is an actual connection to real places that existed throughout history in various places across the world that were home to wise women, known as healers or magical seeresses. Christian churches, chapels and cemetaries were built on ancient ritual sites, often marked by impressively old yew trees and druid groves. Even nunneries were situated where once priestesses in service to the goddess and the community would have resided or worshipped and honoured nature as sacred.
When I talk about the goddess I am referring to Mother Earth and her power of creation and destruction, her many faces and elements as well as the devotion to regeneration, care, reciprocity and interconnectedness of all beings and realms.
Unfortunately we don’t have many written accounts of priestesses or powerful women, but we do know of Gaulish priestesses who were highly honoured for their prophetic gifts. These women would act as influential councils during times of wars and even as messengers and peace makers.
The 9 Morgens
In the Vita Merlini, a text written by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the prophetic bard Taliesin talks about the island of Avalon and its inhabitants, the 9 sisters:
The island of apples, which is called the Fortunate Island has its name because it produces all things for itself. There is no work for the farmers in plowing the fields, all cultivation is absent except for what nature manages by herself. On its own the island produces fertile crops and grapes and native apples by means of its own trees in the cropped pastures. On its own the overflowing soil puts forth all things in addition to the grass, and in that place one lives for one hundred years or more.
There nine sisters give pleasant laws to those who come from our parts to them, and of those sisters, she who is higher becomes a doctor in the art of healing and exceeds her sisters in excellent form. Morgen is her name, and she has learned what usefulness all the herbs bear so that she may cure sick bodies. Also that art is known to her by which she can change shape and cut the air on new wings in the manner of Dedalus. When she wishes, she is in Brist, Carnot, or Papie; 1 when she wishes, she glides out of the air onto your lands. They say that this lady has taught mathematics to her sisters Moronoe, Mazoe, Gliten, Glitonea, Gliton, Tyronoe, Thiten and the most noteworthy on the cither Thiten.
To that place after the battle of Camblan we brought Arthur, hurt by wounds, with Barinthus leading us, to whom the waters and the stars of the sky were known. With this guide for our raft we came to that place with our leader, and with what was fitting Morgen did honour to us, and in her rooms she placed the king upon a golden couch and with her own honorable hand she uncovered his wound and inspected it for a long time, and at last she said that health could return to him, if he were with her for a long time and wished to undergo her treatment. Therefore rejoicing we committed the king to her and returning gave sails to the assisting winds.
The role of Morgan and her sisters as healers is important and crucial, as healing is a core theme connected to Avalon and makes it not only the otherworldly island of death and transition but also of healing and rebirth. Be it physical, emotional or mental healing, there is a transformation afoot which often requires an old identity of ours to die, to transition, to alchemise.
The connection to water is not only established through Avalon being an island (one has to cross some sort of water in order to reach its shores). The importance that water plays in healing, replenishing and fertility is central to Mythology and Mystery Traditions all over the world and particularly related to Avalonian and Arthurian Tradition: Think about the Fountain of Life, the Well Maidens, the Lady of the Lake, the Holy Grail and the Cauldron of Rebirth.
Ynys Afallon
Etymology suggest it derived from avail, which is called the British word for apples and Avalon is therefore widely known as The Island of Apples.
Writers have assumed it is because of the abundance of apple trees that grow all over the British Isles and also Europe. Which is important to note because the Myths of Avalon are not only found in England, and otherworldly islands are especially known in Irish legends, but also exist in Brittany in France and further south in Germany, where the Gaulish tribes would have lived when the Romans came and the Celts lived and passed through on their way north. It is the ancestral heritage of many of us in the Western World.
Since 1191 Glastonbury in Southwest England is officially appointed as the physical representation of Avalon, when the monks of the Abbey claimed to have found the grave of King Arthur and his queen Guinevere.
Having formerly been an island and burial place surrounded by moor lands, Glastonbury truly lends itself to encapsulate the mystical isle and everyone who comes here can feel the charge of this place, with synchronicities abound. More about my personal take on Glastonbury from having lived here 4 years can be read in this article from last years Equinox portal:
The Island of Apples
The word derives from the Proto-Indo-European ab(e)l = apple. The Proto-Celtic word was aballa, Gaulish avail, Old Irish uball, ubull, Modern Irish ubhal, úll, Scots Gaelic ubhall, Manx ooyl, Welsh afal, Cornish aval, Breton aval.
The apple is of course known to us as the forbidden fruit of the christian paradise but it is also very prominently in Irish tradition as being connected to the Otherworld. Apple branches are often carried by Otherworldly figures who function as Threshold Guardians, such as Manannán Mac Lir and the fairy woman who called Bran MacFebal to undertake a journey to the Otherworldly Island of Women. These silver branches as either hung with golden apples or crystal blossoms and are able to produce beautifully soothing music.
Gifts of apples serve as invitations to the Otherworld from fairy lovers.
These magical fruits often have the property of being able to sustain humans for a month or more and have to be consumed in order to be able to return again safely to the human world in which time has passed much faster and without the Otherworldly food the human body would have aged and depending on the length of their stay in the Fae Realm, died without the fruit that made their bodies almost immortal.
Now, what surprisingly isn’t discussed at all is that the word apple in Middle English and as late as 17c., was a generic term for ALL FRUIT other than berries (but including nuts).
With this hugely important etymological insight we conclude a slightly but significant difference in meaning:
Island of Immortal Fruit
When we consider our current definition of the apple tree, it is a wonderful tree with a worthy worldly fruit, but is it truly otherworldly?
The tree that is truly known as immortal, and therefore is considered the Tree of Life is the Yew tree. Yew is amongst the longest living trees in the world. The oldest known Yew is 5000 years old and stands in Perthshire, Scotland and I had the pleasure to visit it a couple of times as my heart home is up there.
In differentiation to the apple tree the yew is an evergreen, adding to the notion that it is an eternal tree, green all year round.
Now, the pine tree is also an incredibly old tree, also an evergreen but it bears no fruit. The yew however has bright red fruits. The fruit flesh is edible, the seed and the yew needles however are deadly poisonous. Can it get even more otherworldly than that?
The word yew is from Proto-Germanic *īwa-, possibly originally a loanword from Gaulish *ivos, compare Breton ivin, Irish ēo, Welsh ywen, French if. In German it is known as Eibe. Its Latin name is taxus beccata; baccata is Latin for bearing berries.
The Irish boy’s name “Eoghan” (pronounced Owen) has been around for many centuries – noted from pre-Christian times in the annals. It literally means “born of the Yew tree” in old Irish. This was a popular name in ancient Ireland – held by many leaders and warriors of the time. As a result, it worked its way into the names of powerful tribes as well as place names across the land.
Drooping branches of old yew trees can root and form new trunks where they touch the ground. Thus the yew came to symbolise death and resurrection in Celtic culture. The Celts will also have been familiar with the toxicity of the tree's needles in particular.
The yew’s toxicity has somewhat limited its practical uses to humans, though a homeopathic tincture is made of young shoots. The berry flesh has been used by herbalists to treat a variety of ailments including cystitis, headache and neuralgia. In more recent times scientists have discovered that extracts of yew have anti-cancer properties - can it get more healing than that?
In my teachings I work with two seasons of Avalon which not only align with the way our ancestors would have lived by but also honour the original meaning of the Apple Island. We start our inner and outer workings with a new cycle in the descent through the Samhain portal (1.-15th November this year) and the dark half of the year, where the Yew tree is our symbolic portal to Avalon. We journey to the sacred isle within us and find our guides and quest. In this season of autumn and winter we tend extensively to our inner work, our own transformation that happens in the underground to prepare the seeds we so wish to flourish for their rooting and growing in the spring and summer.
With the celebration of the light half of the year on Beltane (May Day) we step into our personal power and are guided by the apple tree and fruits through their Venusian and life giving nature. We alchemise our shadows into embodied wisdom and find the otherworldly Avalon woven through our outer world and tend to magic in our day to day life and relationships.
If you would like to join me for an enchanted year full of story, myth, meaning and ceremony, I invite you to enter my Priestess Study:
Enter THE WORLDS OF AVALON and embark on a sacred quest to your souls eternal home and the source of your personal magic and power as a devoted human in this lifetime on this holy earth!
To reciprocity, interdependence and sovereignty! AWEN.