St Hugh and the Swan Wife
Commoners' Advent, day 3
Advent, Christmastide, & Epiphanytide begin with the goose of Martinmas, or Michaelmas if we include the beginning of autumn, & end with the swans of St Brigid and St Pega at Candlemas. I love this synchronicity and in my community we have come to refer to these companions of the water birds as the ‘cygnini saints ’ (from the Latin genus ‘cygnus’). 17th November brought us to the Swan of Stow & of St Hugh of Lincoln, also known as Hugh of Avalon, the patron saint of swans. I hope that my long term readers will forgive me for sharing this, now updated, piece on St Hugh as I gently move my writing from my old blog. I hope that it bears repeating.
Beautifully, Bewick's swans, one of the two species of tundra swans, return to the British Isles from Arctic Russia around this time every year. This year the first Bewick's appeared at Slimbridge WWT on 10th November, and last year they returned on St Hugh's Eve, 16th November.
I have come to love and value the saints. Although 'saint', like God, can be an emotive word, for me these are the tales of our ancestors. Like all tales they contain many tangled threads, which we can choose to untangle, or not, as we wish. I have no doubt, for example, that many of the 'Royal Saints' who proliferated as the Anglo-Saxon kings converted to Christianity, had more to do with facilitating & legitimising land grabs than grace. But, underneath all that, there is a strata of beings in deep communion with the wild places & the creatures to be found there, a continuing animism that stretches back to the beginning of human consciousness & to the place where we are all bound together no matter what our religion. For example, there are few visions of which I am more fond than of the St Cuthbert who emerged quite naturally & gently during a 'Novena for the Fallen Through'; antlered, with a cormorant on his shoulder & otters at his feet. If you'd like to you can read the St Cuthbert Novenas beginning here.
The association of God with water birds is as old as prayer, as ancient as bone. Marija Gimbutas writes often of the life-creating and protecting Bird & Snake Goddesses, appearing in ancient iconography “as separate figures and as a single divinity. Their functions are so intimately related that their separate treatment is impossible. She is one, and she is two, sometimes snake, sometimes bird. She is the goddess of waters and air, assuming the shape of a snake, a crane, a goose, a duck, a diving bird."1 She tells us too that “geese, cranes (herons), and swans are encountered painted or engraved in Upper Palaeolithic caves.”2
I remember a poll of Britain’s favourite, and least favourite, birds that was carried out some years ago. Swans were amongst our favourites, but they were also much disliked coming second to crows. The main reason given being that their necks were ‘too snake-like’.
In his book, ‘When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, & the Re-Enchantment of the World’, Mark I. Wallace speaks of both Moses and Jesus as employing a form of ‘snake shamanism', with Moses casting a bronze serpent to mediate the healing power of God (Numbers 21), and, 800 years later, Jesus aligning himself with the serpent of Moses and “animistically shape-shifting into becoming the sacred serpent for the renewal of the people.”3 "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up." (John 3:14-15).
Despite the attempts of representatives of worldly power, such as King Hezekiah (715-686 BCE), to eradicate this ancient ‘snake cult’ & to impose a more governable & useful to the powerful religion, Wallace suggests that, “the Bible articulates an unbroken line from Moses to the reign of David and the time of Jesus as a continuous exercise in shamanic healing featuring one of God’s non-human creatures ~ the snake ~ as central to restoring biological and social equilibrium.”4 It matters then to notice that goddess-saint Brigid is associated totemically with both the swan and the snake.
These ideas may be unfamiliar, and perhaps challenging, to some but there is nothing to fear. Here is an unbroken thread from the first drumbeat and praise song stretching through all of the world’s religions if we have the open-heartedness & the courage to see it. Attempts to sever this thread, and so to locate power in worldly things, are about control & the enslavement of Spirit, nothing more. Why would we want to unroot ourselves? There is something here both about our 'animal bodies', and about our solidarity and relationship with the wild, that is longing to be included in our spiritual, and religious, experience. Something lost waiting to be welcomed home. The water bird, the snake, the wolf, the bear, are waiting to be offered room at the inn.
And for us, if the waiting of Advent is about anything, then it is about the coming of mercy, grace, and justice for all beings in physical form, the embodiment of God on Earth. Although that world-shaking event has been hijacked by Empire, it remains deeply subversive and liberating & needs to be reclaimed as just that. At Advent we wait in the luminous darkness for the Child of Light to be born, and this child will turn the world upside down. That includes the Church. No wonder then that so many fear him. The Saints, often choosing to live alone on the wild edges with only other-than-human beings for company, rejecting power & status, are a rich source for reclaiming what this season truly means.
And so to St Hugh of Lincoln and his companion swan.
Hugh of Lincoln, also known as Hugh of Avalon, was born in 1135/40 as a member of French nobility. His mother died when he was just 8 years old &, later, his father withdrew from the world, entering a monastery taking his son with him.
Having chosen a life within the Church, Hugh was sent to England in 1179 in order to found the first Carthusian (or charter) house. That Henry II facilitated this was part of his penance for the murder of Thomas Becket, the then Archbishop of Canterbury.
We are told that Hugh was often in conflict with the Crown, establishing his independence from the king & standing up to him where needed. He even excommunicated the king's forester for mistreatment & extortion of the poor. This was brave when Thomas Becket had been murdered for much the same thing.
Hugh was known for his kindness & generosity, particularly towards the outcast, & attempted to protect members of the Jewish faith, who suffered great persecution at the beginning of Richard I's reign. His biographer, Adam of Eynsham, writes that Hugh would "wash and dry the lepers' feet, sit with them, teach them, console and encourage them, and embrace and kiss them one by one."5
But, at this Advent time, it's Hugh's 'deep & lasting friendship' with a swan that we might reflect upon. We are told that Hugh loved to spend time in nature, delighting in the company of wild creatures. Around the time of his ordination as a bishop, a swan appeared on the lake of Stow Park, where he often went to find peace, & drove off all the other animals.6 The swan was particularly aggressive towards humans but, on meeting Hugh, it became docile, eating out of his hand & refusing to leave his side. It even watched over him as he slept and attacked anyone who came close. Their friendship endured for more than fifteen years.
The swan is revered in many of the world's cultures. Often seen as symbols of love & fidelity, they are also representatives of light.
In Norse mythology two swans drink from the Well of Urd and are turned white by the purity of its water. Five flying swans are the emblem of the Nordic countries. In Hinduism they are connected to saints, who are both in the world and unattached to it, just as a swan's feather can be in water without getting wet. A royal swan was the vehicle of the Hindu goddess, Sarasvati.
Swans are believed to have the power to move between worlds, possibly because of their long migrations. Hence, their role as psychopomps, carrying the souls of the dead to the Otherworld. In 2016 a Mesolithic era burial of a young woman and her infant son was found in Denmark. The child had been laid on a swan's wing.
In Western Europe, swans arrive in the autumn and leave in the spring. When whooper swans and greylag geese migrated northwards from Scotland in springtime, it was said they were carrying the souls of the dead ‘north beyond the north wind’. In addition, swans often travel at night and so may have contributed to beliefs about the Wild Hunt & other processions of the dead found throughout Europe.
Although so intimately connected with the dark, swans are also deeply woven in with the light. Through their association with divine twins they have become solar symbols of the Indo-European Sun Goddess; the Sun and the Son being born in Midwinter from the deepest dark. Their star constellation; Cygnus (the Swan, also known as the Northern Cross), marks the beginning of the Great Rift, or the Dark River, a band of interstellar dust clouds that appear to divide a third of the Milky Way lengthwise in half, much like parted legs. Here, light flows from the womb of primordial darkness through the constellation of swans in flight.
A.T. Hatto, in his paper, “The Swan Maiden - A Folk-Tale of North Eurasian Origin”7, tells us that shamans of Arctic or North Central Siberian societies often wore bird costumes, with the Buryat, Tungus, and Yakut, considering the Swan to be their ancestress and/or totem. There are echoes here of the celtic bards who may have worn feathered cloaks known as tuigen, including the skin, feathers and necks of swans. Hatto suggests too that swans and geese were particularly associated with female shamans, as is also the case with female saints! (More of that soon)
But what then of St Hugh of Lincoln, patron saint of swans? There is a concept in shamanism of the 'spirit spouse', a primary helping spirit who assists the practitioner in their work, & the world's mythology is threaded through with tales of the 'animal wife'. These are shape-shifting women, often alternating between human form and their other selves as seals/selkies, foxes, cranes, and yes, swans.
This may seem to have little to do with Advent & the birth of Jesus, and I am not suggesting that St Hugh thought of his swan in this way, although many of us know how deep the love can be between us and a companion animal and how that can connect us to, and guide us in, the more-than-this. We can remind ourselves that the Holy Spirit often appears in the Bible as a dove and that Christ might also be described as a 'spirit spouse'; appearing to nuns, who are the 'Brides of Christ', in dreams. Some, including male clerics & monks, have been inspired to write the most beautiful and passionate love poetry in response. Some of it makes me positively blush! In addition, the oldest known example of a form of possible 'swan shamanism' is to be found in Israel at the 420,000 year old cave site of Qesem in Tel Aviv where evidence has been found of deliberate defeathering of a swan's wing for what is believed to be ritual purposes.
And so, here at the outset of our journey through Commoners’ Advent, we have the swan; a symbol of the sun, of light being born from star-filled darkness, and of both earthly royalty & otherworldly divinity, & so of negotiating between the two as St Hugh of Lincoln was able to do. Here too is our reminder that we will struggle with 'turning over the tables in the temple' if we have not first wedded ourselves to the wild & its Wilder God. Once, God was a bird.
I will end with Mary Oliver's powerful-as-wild-wings poem, The Swan.
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting
the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching
light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it
pertained to everything?
And have you finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
- Mary Oliver
I am determined to continue offering my work free of charge, because that too is resistance, but if you would ever like to support me with pennies you can do that at https://ko-fi.com/radicalhoneybee. Thank you so much, both for pennies and for all other forms of support, all of which are worth more than their weight in gold.
#CommonersAdvent #OldAdvent #CelticAdvent #StMartinsLent #WinterLent
References:
On St Hugh of Lincoln
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_of_Lincoln
https://catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/11/13/the-saint-who-protected-the-jews-of-lincoln/
http://thegoodheart.blogspot.com/2008/11/swan-of-stow.html?m=1
On Marija Gimbutas
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marija_Gimbutas
On swans
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan
https://www.poetseers.org/contemporary-poets/mary-oliver/mary-oliver-poems/the-swan/
http://maryarrchie.com/2019/01/21/vedbaek-burial-a-baby-buried-upon-swans-wing/
An absolutely invaluable resource on the 'Cult of the Swan'
http://www.thesoulofbones.com/blog/the-cult-of-the-swan (sadly site is no longer accessible)
On swan animism
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/swan-0012657
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/sculpture/flying_swan_pendants.php
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/birds-and-people-mingle-rare-piece-rock-art-180971690/
Neolitihic swan bone flutes https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/science/25flute.html
p. 112, Gimbutas, Marija, 'The Goddesses & Gods of Old Europe', Thames & Hudson, 1974
p. 3. Gimbutas, Marija, 'The Language of the Goddess', Thames & Hudson, 1989
p.35-36. Wallace, Mark I, 'When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World', Fordham, 2019
p.36. Wallace, Mark I, 'When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World', Fordham, 2019
http://thegoodheart.blogspot.com/2008/11/swan-of-stow.html?m=1, retrieved 18th November 2019
As 5.
Hatto, A.T. (1961). The Swan Maiden: a Folk-Tale of North Eurasian Origin? Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 24(2), pp. 326–352. doi: 10.1017/S0041977X00091461, in
http://www.thesoulofbones.com/blog/the-cult-of-the-swan (sadly site is no longer accessible)
Thank you Bee. As I start out on this journey I hope to feel connected to the web of light, love and hope, to the Saints, the wildlife and the earth. Tomorrow I will endeavour to visit our Swans and Geese at the local nature reserve down the road and spend some time in quiet contemplation 💜🙏 xx
Reading this was a beautiful and magical start to my day and I thank you for it.