Datura

White blossoms open in the moonlight, releasing their seductive, narcotic perfume into the evening air. If the strange music that drifts from the Otherworld had a scent, it would smell like this.

Simply coming into the presence of Datura, you cross an invisible threshold. The air shimmers around her and time moves differently.

To take her flower, her leaf, her seedpods into your own body is a treacherous prospect. A little bit may relieve profound pain or help to open the airways — but even the smallest dose also brings a person into a liminal state that can just as easily open into sublime beauty, abject terror, or a madness from which some never return. The medicinal dose, the visionary dose, and the toxic dose are very, very close to each other.

My exploration into "Elder Voices" — the plants and fungi who have transformed experience and perception since long before the emergence of our species — continues this Sunday with a visit with Datura. I hope that you will join me.

Ahead of the class, I wanted to share a bit about my experience of Datura that I included in Courting the Wild Queen (with minor edits for flow outside the context of the book.

______________

The May Queen has a dark twin, the Cailleach Béara. She is stone and earth, older than the hills. She rules the dark of the year. Some say she is the bride of Manannán, great god of the sea waiting for him to return from beyond the waves.

Cailleach is the Cailleach Béara. She is stone and earth, older than the hills. The word “cailleach” is often translated into English as “hag,” a word whose modern connotations are bound up with our fear of the darkness and of the grave, which is also the darkness of the earth and the darkness of deep waters and the darkness of the womb. The older meaning of the word is “veiled woman.” In the middle ages the word referred to nuns. The word carries much older meanings though, lost to modern scholarship, given that we know little of the Irish language before the tenth century or so.

When I see her, I see the color of moonlight and granite and driven snow. She smells of Hawthorn and Datura in flower and of Apples frozen halfway through fermentation. Her beauty is no less seductive that that of her twin.

In old stories, a man encounters a hag along the road who asks him to kiss her. The kiss blesses and transforms them both, and she becomes beautiful to him. With that blessing, the way opens for him to become the Sacred King who gives life to the land.

Who scorns the kiss is cursed.

At Samhain, my Wild Queen comes dressed in white.

The Hunter rises in the night sky and rides across the Milky Way and the Bears sleep beneath the earth, listening to the dream songs of the trees.

All October, Coyote bones and Datura blossoms bedecked her altar.   Now she beckons me out beneath the stars and bids me set the dry blooms petals aflame.

Their scent is seductive like the Hawthorn but carries none of its warmth.   Its shimmer is not the shimmer of sunlight on water, but the shimmer of moonlight on snow.   Narcotic in the crisp night air.

Forgetting the intoxication the smoke will bring, and the dangers of poisoning from inhaling too much, I bend over the burning flowers and breathe deeply.

I feel the Wild Queen at once as close as my breath and spread out across the whole night sky.

Her lips are as smooth as flower petals and as cold as the space between stars. Time slows. Frost spreads in fractal patterns across the ground. I feel a strange, frozen bliss moving through my body in the same way.   I am sinking into darkness, into the silence between my heartbeats, the stillness between my breaths.

Then there is something at my root so cold that it burns, and the sensation rises up my spine. She whispers in my ear, “Not yet, my darling, not yet, but still, you will pass through the house of the dead, though you are not among them.”

Through vespertine

tunnels at the center

of the flower

you follow the scent

into a dark hovel

where a wild haired woman

stirs fresh petals

into a cauldron

filled with your bones.

Drink it,

and you will know

what the Apple tree knows

when she drifts into winter slumber,

drunk on the fermentation

of her own rotting fruit

whose decay will feed

the seeds in springtime

and become the perfume

of the blossom before summer:

The lines are thin

between birth and death,

between kill and cure,

between ecstasy and terror.

What shimmers

in the twilight

and stirs desire

takes its life from the darkness,

where all knowing,

all healing

begins

and ends.

image from Wikimedia Commons