Loup-Garou

 

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Disappointed in love, weary of war, Goran von Hagen retreats to his idyllic alpine estate. He does not know the ancient secret of the looming mountain--or that it will change his life forever.

I first met this Being a very long time ago, back in my ninth or tenth year when our family was visiting Bermuda.  I was already in awe of this tropical place, because it was much warmer than our home during early April, which was, at that time, in upstate New York.

 Back in the 1950's  in NY, there was still plenty of snow on the ground, and it was still darn cold.  Bermuda was warm enough that you could swim, although the Atlantic was still cold, the sunlit coves and that crumbly brown and pink coral sand of the beaches was absolutely beautiful. I had that day just learned about the Moray eels who hung out in the coral outcrops in our swimming place and had been suitably alarmed. You could even see them in the clear water if you swam too close, peeking out of their lairs with gaping mouths filled with pointy teeth.

  So my nerves were already jangled when later a young Bermudian employed by the hotel, in the course of showing us where we were allowed to play, began telling a gang of us stories about Loup-Garou. As luck would have it, this was the night of the full moon. Soon, the worldly kids from NYC began to recount the plots of old horror movies, to show that although this Loup-Garou was a new monster to them, they already knew about lots of other creepy stuff. My imagination, never under control, went wild. 

In my little single room at the hotel that night, I had a lovely view of the ocean and the full moon shining on the water. As you can imagine, I didn't sleep much.

Then, a few years later, staying in Grenada for two months in a friendly little local hotel, I became good friends with the children of the owner. The owner's wife basically ran the place, cooking and riding herd on her staff and shopping, while her husband swanned about in the evenings, preparing drinks and playing host to the guests. He also kept the books and wrote letters to potential customers to confirm reservations. I remember peeking into his sanctum and seeing stacks of those blue Airmail letter forms atop his big desk. 

The kids were close to my age. The oldest was 15, and working hard to prepare for O Level exams. I played mostly with the second boy, Richard, and his younger sister, Lynette, who had been born just a year after me. They tried to scare me with Loup- Garou, but I scored points when I told them I had already been initiated into The Lore. They had a lot more to say on scary subjects, however, and started to explain zombies, of whom I hadn't yet heard. To their great satisfaction, zombies got under my white skin pretty thoroughly.  :)

The center of all things terrifying, these young West Indians told me, was Haiti. (Poor Haitians! Some things never change, only it's more terrible on that tragic island now than we "First World" people can begin to imagine, not just fantasy.)

This leads me to a book I just finished, which, sadly, has no zombies or werewolves, but is historical, about the early French colonists of Quebec. I was amused to discover, researching here and there, that the French of that province had brought their Loup-Garou with them, and so his "range" was not just limited to France and the West Indies. He also lived in the snowy North Country!

The French, apparently, had had "an epidemic" of werewolves since the 1400's. Of course, people suspected of having the affliction were regularly burned, hanged and so on. In Quebec, there were reports of such beasts from the earliest settlers. 

In 1767, the Gazette de Quebec reported just such a pernicious beast. After setting dogs on it, and much gunfire, the beast retreated. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief, but, like any good monster, one major attempt at extinguishing it wasn't sufficient. The second round of massed gunfire and ferocious dogs seems to have finally done for it, because, after that, although many have searched the remaining documents, we hear no more about it. No bullet-riddled human corpse left behind, not even a humongous dead wolf--nothing! 

Imagine that.   ;) 

~Juliet Waldron

Season's Greetings!

 

Journey to the Queen of the Fairies

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A long-time Canadian friend is a shamanic practitioner. She lives with her husband in a tiny house way up the valley of the Ottawa and therefore uses zoom to expand her reach to interested folks. She is learned in the Irish Celtic traditions. The mythology of Ancient Ireland is foreign to me, but she is deep into the stories and characters, which are, about as far away from the European schoolroom- familiar Classical tradition as you can be. 

The Irish origin story was long thought to be little but another product of the famed Irish imagination. That is, until recently. DNA studies have suggested that the traditional tale of an epic journey to a far off island by a tribe of cattle herders is a true one. 

These cattle loving, builders of stone monuments arrived during the Neolithic. Later, the Romans were unable to colonize Ireland--they had enough on their hands with the British, Scots and Welsh!  After the Romans, the earliest Christian monks were sufficiently open-minded to commit some of this ancient oral tradition to manuscript, which is why we have some of these stories today. 

These tell of gods, goddesses, heroes and queens plus a truly outstanding array of monsters and supernatural beings. They have come down to us in a way that the gods of the various ancient Britannic people have not. Much of the Irish story is certainly lost and much is probably garbled by the monkish recorders, but it is fascinating to me how long what is basically a tribal history can be remembered, if it is not intentionally erased by some colonizing power.  

 

My friend is an expert hand drummer. She also teaches yoga and conducts trance journey sessions, one of which I attended on the night of the Summer Solstice. This is a liminal time, like the other moments of transition from one season to another. 

Long ago, these seasonal changes were marked by observations of the "circling sky," --the rising of certain stars, the moon's path and that of the sun--were of crucial importance, first to hunter/gatherers who followed animal, fish, and bird migrations. When agriculturalists came on the scene, they used the same observations for planting and harvests.

It was wonderful to feel that I was about to be part of a timeless ceremony. Although this one happened to be conducted via the internet, it felt authentic. Needs must! And the only thing that has really changed is human technology, for the human emotional brain remains the same. I was simply grateful to be able to join in.

Effective drumming, (like chanting or ritual dance), puts the listener into a non-ordinary state of mind. You enter a space where imagination leads the way. Learning and expectations naturally play a part, for everyone present had their own unique image of "fairies" and how the Queen of this Wild Court might show herself that night. 

We shared afterward, although this was not required. (Nothing is "required" of participants except participation--focus on the drum, and be present.)  When the drum went quiet, we shared. Everyone, it seemed, had gone by a different path to a very different place. Some of us saw "our" Queen of the Fairies; others got lost on the path. 

When we closed our spritual doors and went our separate ways, I walked outside, to watch the sun's setting. This meant, however, that I was facing east. There to greet me, through a hole in the neighbor's prosaic, overgrown arborvitae hedge, was the full moon, magnified because she was still very low on the horizon. 

I live in a tourist town and there is always noise, lots of traffic, street racers, trucks, lawn mowing and general two stroke engine racket. On this night, there was only a miraculous silence, a kind of ambient hum behind. Only the birds were speaking, twittering, as they settled down in twilight. Bumblebees still dangled from milkweed in my garden. To the west, the sun showed a final full disc of molten gold. Under the old apple tree, four bunnies played, jumping over one another surrounded by clouds of fireflies, sparkling as they floated up on every side.

~~Juliet Waldron 

   

Those Were the Days--maybe...

 

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More memory lane writing for February, a month I get used to skipping, because the obligation only comes around every four years. Recently, I completed my 79th trip around Our Local Star. So it happens that many of my elder friends spend a lot of time wishing they were 50-60 years younger. 

Sorry to say, but contrary to a lot of what my same-age friends seem to remember, youth wasn't all Golden Days. 

Here's a case in point, a memory I have of a now mostly forgotten blizzard which happened in Massachusetts in February in 1969. This was a year in which my husband had graduated from college but instead of entering the work world, we'd fallen for siren song of those days and dropped out. He was working in a leather shop for a pittance and I was working a few days a week as a nurse's aide in a small hospital about an hour's commute away. We lived in a cabin in the woods near the Quabbin reservoir, which, in those days, was pretty empty of people, although there were a lot of deer, rabbits and raccoons. We had 1930's indoor plumbling, a woodstove and a kerosene heater, which made the house a lot more "modern" than others in the area.  

Other college friends had migrated to the big city of Boston (and vicinity) and were working 9-5 jobs. Sometimes we went in to visit them over weekends. On this particular Sunday, we left late, around 12, I think. It was snowing--but in those days that was not unusual or even a subject of much concern. A big storm was said to be coming in, but we knew the drive back to western Massachusetts well. It was two and half hours, give or take, to dirt road that led to our little house. 

We piled into the car. Our son, then 3 years old, was crying at leaving his same age friend and heading back to the no-kids world of the country. My husband took the wheel, I sat beside him, and we all headed out. First, we'd have to travel north on the 128 beltway before intersecting the secondary road which would take us much of the way across the state to our cabin in the woods. At once the wind picked up, blowing mightily. 

Snow blasted down. It was crystaline, and began drifting across the road, making it hard to see. If you remember old Beetle windshield wipers, you understand they were having a hard time keeping up, so now and then it was hard to see. The traffic, always heavy on the beltway, began to slow. The big cars nearby began to skid and wobble, struggling to maintain their lanes, lanes which were rapidly becoming little but the tracks of vehicle ahead of you. 

It was quickly becoming apparent that we weren't going to escape Boston. On every side, people were heading for the exits. Trucks fishtailed and then jack-knifed, but, intrepid Beetle drivers that we were, we manuevered around them. Still, anxiety increased every moment because there we were in the middle of it--Daddy, Mommy and little boy, all within this German eggshell. And, oh, yes, I haven't mentioned it yet, but I was eight months pregnant. We were beginning to get cold too. It was the old VW tale about the single heating vent burning up the driver's left foot, while icicles formed on the passengers. 

The wind was howling, pushing the trucks. The wipers were no longer keeping up. Nothing to see but blowing snow and red tail lights as ahead, people braked for obstacles we couldn't see. Finally, my husband saw a familiar exit, the way to his parent's house in Lexington. This was problematic, as we currently weren't on good terms. Still, it seemed the only choice. We dove into the exit.

Now there was another problem--drifts were clogging the ramp. The plows, always diligent in these populated areas, couldn't keep up. Cars ahead were getting stuckwhile trying to exit the exit! The heavy cars of those days wallowed and skidded. People were getting out of their cars in that whipping wind, hoping to push themselves free. The little V-Dub became bogged down too. 

"Get out and push!" my husband yelled. So there I was, in my full-length dress, high boots and big belly, scarf tightly wrapped around my head, pushing the car. When he found traction and surged ahead, I fell flat on my face into the snow. He managed to manuever around the stalled cars higher on the ramp, until he encountered the penultimate drift. His forward progress came to a halt.

I trudged back to the car amid wind and blinding white, shivering from the snow still stuck to my bare legs. When I arrived, he jumped out, cried, "You drive  now!" There had been only one car ahead of us, but they were making slow forward progress toward the main road. No waiting there! You just had to merge and pray the crawling cars saw you coming. 

So through that final, high drift, with me on and off the clutch, rocking the car, and with him pushing, we broke free and reached the road. He wore his prized, very cool hat, an old fedora--but this blew off, and was last seen sailing above 128 into a wall of white. 

Now at the top, we paused, changed drivers, and went the final few miles to safety, starting and stopping and negotiating our way through intersections where the lights were not working, and past many, many disabled, abandoned vehicles.

No cell phones in those days, so there were, on the steps of the Lexington house, where. blessedly, the door opened to us. Once inside, I had one of those false labor episodes, which are rather painful. I remember my mother-in-law calling a pediatrician who lived close by, who said he would make his way over if this didn't resolve, but, of course, once I was warm and had changed my clothes, it eventually went away.    

We were in that house for three days, because that's how long it took for all the abandoned vehicles to be cleared from the exit/entrances. Our son was happy to be at his grandparents because there were two teen Aunts to play with him, although, naturally, the elders were definitely ready for us to leave by the time we did. Driving around on the second day, hoping to find an opening, we'd passed by " our" exit, and seen the grill of the car that had been behind us, almost buried under a monster drift that completely had encased it. 

When we reached home, we were delighted that our dirt road had been cleared. My husband forced the car into the drift at our driveway, and then we half-swam half-crawled our way over chest-high snow to the house, towing our little boy and a suitcase. The cats were glad to see us, as their kibble had long since run out and the house was darn cold. The old kerosene "furnace," by itself, kept the place in the vicinity of 45 degrees, so the plumbing hadn't frozen. With a fire started in the wood stove in time we were warm again.

~Juliet Waldron

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