Spirit of Scotland Tour

with Mara Freeman and Peter Vallance June 10 22, 2007

Loch Fyne, Cairndow in Argyll Saturday, June 9, 2007 Scotland has called me to its shores over and over again. This is my fourth and longest trip; and rather than finally satisfying my urge to see Scotland, I am left longing to return again and discover even more of its mysteries. My guides for the first two weeks were Mara Freeman, British author of the seminal book on Celtic folklore and spirituality, Kindling the Celtic Spirit; and Peter Vallance, a brilliant Scottish storyteller. The last two weeks, I spent on my own, based in Edinburgh. This trip I left my harp at home (alas, airport security only allowed one carry-on), and brought my camera, art pad and colored pencils, and a collection of magical tools including a silver pendulum. My focus for this trip was to truly see on many levels into

the spirit of this sacred landscape. Scotland is a land of saints and angels; witches and fairies, ghosts and ghouls, cathedrals and standing stones, mountains and moors. Some of the oldest rock formations on earth, Lewisian Gneiss, are found in the Sutherlands, and the Isles of Lewis and Harris. It is a country surrounded by oceans the Atlantic Ocean, North Sea, and Norwegian Sea and interwoven by lochs and rivers. It is a land of sacred waters waterfalls, wells and pools - and beautiful woods and gardens. And most of all, it is a land of myth, legend, and story. These stories are recorded in Scottish folklore, music, art, and literature, and enrich every locality one visits. It is an ancient land, inhabited since Neolithic times, and every tribe has left relics, some still buried and yet to be discovered, and many incredible artifacts can be found in the numerous museums. So, join me in my extraordinary journey into the heart of this ancient land. Saturday, June 9th I arrived at the Edinburgh Airport, five miles outside of the city on the night before the tour began, and stayed at the Airport Hilton Hotel, to rest up after the long flight from San Francisco. My first sketch was of a beautiful birch tree outside the hotel, which was very appropriate because, traditionally, Birch signifies the beginning of a journey. Wandering in the small wooded area around the hotel, sketching the trees, plants, and rocks, helped me to connect with the spirits of the natural world

Oracle: I brought with me a Tarot deck (Rider-Waite) and a set of Celtic Ogham pendants, as my oracular guides for this magical journey. I brought an excerpt from Mary Greers seminal book, Tarot for Yourself to help me interpret the cards. The ogham are an ancient Celtic alphabet, represented by sacred trees found in the British Isles, that have acquired divinatory meanings over the years, much like the deck

of Tarot cards. There is much controversy as to their meanings, and I use the system taught by the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. For me, this trip is the journey of a Seer, (which is called Ovate in the Druid tradition). For this tour, I wore an ogham pendant every morning as a daily guide. On this first day, I drew Vine from the bag, which signifies ecstasy, prophecy, and inebriation! (One the many items on my agenda for this voyage is to sample and analyze a different Scotch every night!) I also drew a tarot card, the Wheel of Fortune, which can denote unpredictability and advise us to be prepared for the unexpected!
1 Ogham set by Spirit of Old

Our tour guide, Mara Freeman, usually performs an opening ritual to open her pilgrims up to the spirit of the land on many levels the physical and metaphysical. I brought my own set of magical altar tools with me, and did my initial opening ritual in the hotel room, asking the angels, fairies, spirit guides and my Scottish ancestors to bless and guide this journey. A previous class with Tarot author, Mary Greer, informed me that Tarot cards make an excellent set of easily packed altar tools representing the four elements and Deity!

Altar cloth by Loren Washburn

Background cloth by Loren Washburn, Celtic Block Print Art; ogham staves by Spirit of Old; Tarot miniature Rider Waite deck

Always on my pilgrimages, I bring my quartz crystal skull, Merlin. Later in this journal well be exploring the magic of quartz and its relationship to the massive standing stones and stone circles in the British Isles.

Merlin, in Scotland!

Before retiring for the night, I stopped at the hotel bar for a Macallan, a ten year old Speyside single malt. When analyzing scotch, you look for five details: color, nose, body, palate, and finish. One sniffs the scotch first, then drinks a sip, relishing the taste before swallowing. The first sip should be neat, without water or ice. A splash of water can be added afterwards, as the molecules mix and release more flavors. Whereas there are excellent blended scotches available, the single malts are all distinctive, and experts can tell one single malt scotch from another by their unique regional flavors. The Macallan was a perfect way to commence the journey, with its full body, dry, malty, slightly sherry and caramel tastes. (I bought a Scotch guide at the airport to help me describe what I was drinking!) Special Feature: My Interview with Mara Freeman for The Druid Network, Spring, 2007 Mara Freeman has been my teacher for many years. Ive attended her workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1990s, and signed up for her three year correspondence course in the Avalon Mystery School. Fortunately for me, she lived in Northern California until 2007, so I was able to study with her directly, as well as through her excellent correspondence course. I have also been on two other of Maras guided tours to British Isles. In 2003, she led a pilgrimage to Glastonbury, Wells, and Stonehenge; in 2005 to magical Ireland! This is my third pilgrimage with her, and it wont be my last!

Tell us something about your childhood, Mara.

2

Clan Donald tartan shawl

I grew up as an only child in southern England by the seaside. I was lucky enough to have parents who had no objection to me roaming the countryside on my own at an early age, so I spent much of my time from an early age on solitary adventures seeking ancient sites such as old stones, burial mounds, and ruined castles. When I wasnt seeking out magical landscapes I was reading magical books. It would not be an exaggeration to say that my worldview was shaped by the Narnia Chronicles of C. S. Lewis, and the fantasy novels that Lewis read when he was a child by Edith Nesbit (Five Children and It, The Psammead) and George MacDonald, (The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind.) And, of course, The Wind in the Willows, The Sword In The Stone, and later on I lost myself completely in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. But one of my most beloved books, then and now, is actually by Elizabeth Goudge a little-known book called, The Valley of Song, which is an extraordinary account of what the Qabalists call the World of Formation. What all of these books have in common, of course, is the theme of the accessibility of a realm of beauty and magic lying not far from our own physical world, and perhaps being even more real, even more a place that feels like home. When I was a teenager, I used to conduct my own untutored experiments in shifting consciousness in early attempts to reach these inner planes. They were usually unsuccessful, but by my twenties, I managed to stumble on some brambly and overgrown paths that led to these secret lands that still called to me, and so my magical explorations began. A formative experience happened at school when I was about nine. Our class was watching a crackly old geography film called The Four Corners of the British Isles. I wasn't paying much attention until they got to the north-west "corner," which was the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. It was quite unromantic: they showed a herring factory with women gutting tanks of silvery fish, but someone sang a strain of music, a Hebridean air, and it was like a key that unlocked a hidden door deep within me. I went home and told my parents they were to call me Heather from now on, dressed in tartan clothes, spoke in a Scots dialect and set about teaching myself Gaelic language. I would sit for hours with a map of Scotland behind my desk when I was supposed to be doing other things. At the public library I found the section containing old books of Scottish music and songs, folktales and legends. Thus began my entry into the magical world of the Celts, sparked what I have come to believe was a memory of a past life experience. I went to Bristol University in 1968 an exhilarating time of sit-ins, the first free concerts, and all kinds of experiments in utopian ideals and spiritual paths. I learned astrology and tarot, and spent time writing and acting in ritual dramas on seasonal festivals, the Goddess, and other subjects of the newly-burgeoning pagan field, although I dont remember calling it that back then. I also began to make a deeper connection with the Earth at this time. My friends and I took many trips out into the Somerset countryside and westwards into Wales, all crammed into whatever beat-up old van was available, to explore ley-lines and places

associated with Earth Mysteries, as this new field of study was beginning to be called. Glastonbury wasn't far away and I used to visit the town, the ruined abbey, and take trips around the landscape of the Glastonbury Zodiac. I spent quite a few hours around the Tor tuning into the palpable faery energies there. Can you tell us about your decision to move to California, what attracted you to this area, its magical links to the British Isles. Yes this wasn't planned at all! After I left the West Country, I spent the next few years teaching literature and drama in a London high school, but as I approached my Saturn return, I felt very ready for a change, which came when I visited California one summer and fell in love with the Ventana wilderness in the Santa Lucia Mountains a pristine area of mountains and oak forests. The next springtime, I moved over by myself, much to the concern of friends and family, and soon found myself living halfway up a mountain in a screen house not much bigger than a chicken-coop. There was no running water or electricity, but there was peace and simplicity, no sounds of civilisation, just the incomparable beauty of a land barely touched by human presence. I was literally living on the land my floor was of packed earth and I had no walls except in the winter, when I nailed canvas to the wooden supports. I stayed warm by feeding a small pot-bellied stove with twigs and small branches and by having a couple of huskies belonging to a friend on the bed at night. I was serenely happy and at peace among herds of deer, mountain lions, the occasional rattlesnake, and the hawks forever circling the cloudless blue skies. Long after that time, I was on the Beara Peninsula in southwest Ireland, looking down on the remnants of an old-growth oak wood, thinking: That looks so familiar what does it remind me of? Then I suddenly saw that the oakwoods of Ireland looked just like the oakwoods in those California mountains, and felt sure that the years I spent in those mountains were linked to lives I had once spent in Ireland long ago when that country was in the morning of its youth and all its forests flourished. Perhaps I had been a Druid or early Christian hermit in forest hut or stones cell, like the one on the island of Inisfallen where wild swans swim and the yew trees spread their red-berried branches over the crumbling stone walls of the ruined oratory. Whatever the case, I lived in and was deeply nourished by the forests and mountains of the West Coast for twelve years. What experiences have you had with the spirits of the land in California? Well, probably not surprisingly I felt most connected with the spirits of trees. Trees really are the most approachable of all the spirits of the Green World. Sometimes the trees would speak to me through their guardian spirit, one such being an old fellow called Oakmoss, with whom I had many enlightening conversations about his trees. I moved from that area at the beginning of the 1990s, following the Carmel River valley down to the sea, and coming to live in Carmel for a while. Here I connected with the beautiful giant Monterey cypresses, who have the most extraordinary feminine power, and who have a lot to do with why this area is renowned for its healing energies. On trips to the Sierras, I listened to the stories of the great Ponderosa pines, but perhaps felt most

impacted by the giant redwoods, whom I discovered to be the memory-keepers of this planet, at least in the Americas. Taking a journey into the portal of an enormous tree in Sequoia National Park one spring, I found myself in a library of Earth chronicles going back to the time when this part of the world was first flung up from the ocean bed. It was truly awesome! You followed the path of the Irish mystic, Ella Young, in California. Can you tell us how she influenced you, and the metaphysical culture of Northern California? Well, my interest in Ella began when I moved to Carmel and found out that this Irish poet, and storyteller had once lived close by. Around the corner from where I lived is Hawk Tower, hand-built in stone by the great nature poet, Robinson Jeffers. He actually modelled it on the one belonging to his friend, W.B. Yeats, in Galway. He and Ella and many other Carmel artists and bohemians of the 1920s would light fires on the beach at night and Ella would hold forth till the wee hours telling Irish myths and legends. Ella was a pioneer of Celtic spirituality on the West Coast. Her legendary storytelling performances earned her a seat at the University of California in Berkeley, and she gained quite a following as a keeper of the Bardic tradition. She also set about reestablishing a magical order that she had previously inaugurated in Ireland along with Yeats and other Irish visionaries as part of the Celtic Renaissance of those times. She named it the Fellowship of Shasta after the sacred mountain in Northern California, and dedicated it to the goddess Brigid, with whom she had a life-long spiritual connection. Around this time, I was developing my own storytelling repertoire, as well as writing a number of articles and recording stories on Celtic themes. In fact, I wrote my book, Kindling the Celtic Spirit, overlooking Point Lobos, the promontory where Ella spent much time communing with faeries and sea spirits. I feel with absolute certainty that the work I did during my time by the sea was clearly guided and fostered in some way by the spirit of this remarkable woman. You are moving back to Britain in 2007. Can you tell us something about your decision to return home, and about the place you are moving to? Well, I always nurtured a dream of living in the wilds of Wales from a very young age. In fact, when I first came to the U.S., I used to say that I was headed for Wales, but overshot and ended up in California! Although I have deeply loved the land of North America that Ella Young likened to a great Tawny Lion, my spirit belongs, in truth, to the old country, which she called the White Unicorn. When I first looked at the possibility of returning to Britain a few years ago, the idea was to have a small getaway cottage for summer retreats. But in 2003, a series of remarkable synchronicities occurred in which my husband David and I were led to a fairly large house in a beautiful area of West Wales. The picture that has been emerging, by way of inner guidance, is that I am to create a small centre or retreat house with a sacred garden as a place to focalise spiritual energies and teach the Mysteries. Im also planning to write more books, based on the work Ive been doing in the Western Mystery Tradition for the last few years.

Avalon Mystery School (http://www.avalonmysteryschool.net/) You are the founder of the Avalon Mystery School, which offers workshops, classes, and a correspondence course. Can you tell us something about the school, what it offers, what your vision for the school is? Yes, this whole new current of magical work started at a very specific time in 2001. I was doing a book-signing and Celtic spirituality workshop tour in the Pacific Northwest, and going on hikes in between bookings. I sometimes ponder on how my husband David and I were enjoying such a beautiful day, bathing in hot springs in the Olympia Forest, when we caught news of what had happened in New York on September 11th. Because of this, we were spared all the trauma of the media coverage that most people went through that day. Anyway, we were camping that night, and I had the first of a number of visions involving the being we call Archangel Michael. (This great being has Celtic and other pagan names and aspects, but this is his most familiar aspect to westerners today, so I prefer to use this name.) Michael has many connections with Glastonbury, not the least being the ruined tower on top of the Tor, part of a church dedicated to him, that was built to replace one that had been knocked down in an earthquake on another September 11th in 1275! These visions marked the beginning of a whole new current of magical energy entering my life. First I was guided to develop tours and seminars for people in Glastonbury, focusing on the Mysteries of Avalon, which Ive now been doing for several years. The new doorway led me to further explorations of the Arthurian mythos, the Grail cycle, the British faery tradition, and encounters with famous Avalonians, now passed on, including Dion Fortune, Wellesley Tudor Pole (who founded the Chalice Well Trust in Glastonbury), Frederick Bligh Bond (who discovered a number of secrets about Glastonbury abbey through psychic means) and others who hold pieces of this tradition. I eventually brought all this together in 2004 by founding the Avalon Mystery School, with its three-part training programme in the Arts of Sacred Magic. Since then, Ive been wholly involved in writing extensive materials for the correspondence course part of the school as well as teaching in-person classes and workshops in different parts of the U.S. and also in Glastonbury. This has really been at the source of the impulse to move back to Britain where Im planning to continue this work out of Wales and Glastonbury. . . oh yes, and write a few more books too, I hope! Can you tell us a bit about the training programme at the Avalon Mystery School? I wanted to put together a really comprehensive programme in sacred magic, which I define as magic performed for spiritual rather than personal benefits. It seems to me that there is a need to not only understand Earth-based magic, which sees the Divine as immanent, but that we should also be connected with the higher expressions of the invisible planes, in other words, the Divine as transcendent. So the Avalon Mystery School is based on the ancient Druid concept of a threefold cosmology of Land, Sea,

and Sky, expressed as a great Tree of Life with its roots in the Underworld, its trunk in the Middleworld, and its branches in the Overworld. In the First Grade, The Roots of the Tree, students learn the basics of ritual magic, and learn how to make contacts with the powers of the deep, including the Goddess, ancestors, and the High Faery race. The Second Grade, The Trunk of the Tree, is really a complete course in Nature Magic, where one works with nature spirits, elementals, and the powers of the living Earth. The Third Grade, Tree Crowned with Stars, takes us to the Overworld, where one learns about the star beings, angels and archangels. The idea is that by forming alliances with helpful forces of all three realms, priests and priestesses will become skilful mediators able to build bridges between the visible and invisible planes, and to bring through necessary spiritual and healing energies to a world that has grown so disconnected from the great Web of Being. And your new place is going to be called Chalice Centre, I see can you tell us a bit about that? Yes, I had a vision of a Grail-like chalice when I first moved to Carmel in the 90s. I was walking along Carmel Bay, when it suddenly appeared to me as a beautiful chalice filled with sparkling turquoise waters, whose spiritual energies were cascading up and over the land. From then on, Chalice Center became a virtual reality which contained all my writings, recordings, and web-sites. Later on, I learned how Tudor Pole had a powerful vision of a chalice over Carbis Bay in Cornwall which he described as the symbol that is to replace the cross for the coming spiritual age. Now the time has ripened to where there will be a physical Chalice Centre in Wales, so Im tremendously excited about that! Websites: Mara Freeman: (http://www.celticspiritjourneys.com/scotland.htm) Peter Vallance, Storyteller: http://www.peterthestoryteller.co.uk/ Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids Ogham website: http://www.druidry.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=PagEd&file=index&topic_id=0 &page_id=72 Whiskey Guide: http://www.whisky.com/ Scotlands Geology: http://www.scottishgeology.com/ Spirit of Old (Ogham pendants): http://www.spiritofold.co.uk/home.htm Mary Greer (Tarot): http://home.pacbell.net/mkgreer/ Books:

Tarot for Yourself, by Mary Greer, New Page Books, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, 2002 Accommodations: Hilton, Edinburgh: http://www1.hilton.com/en_US/hi/hotel/EDIAPHN-Hilton-EdinburghAirport-hotel/index.do