Selkies and Humans - balancing our nature
Holidays will soon beckon, and we will be singing to the seals from a cliff we know; and if you haven’t yet tried this, please do – they do respond! That idle thought led me to a programme, ‘Mythical creatures’ with Rihanna (yes, Terry’s daughter) Pratchett. There were black dogs, dragons, red caps, mermaids, hobs et al, but it was the Selkie that lodged in my mind. This magical seal-woman is referenced in The Druid Animal Oracle and I’ve noticed its rise in popularity amongst OBOD members. Its particular nature, of shapeshifting between sea and land feels very much of the zeitgeist, and a gender-neutral member said particularly how comfortable they felt with this mythic creature.
Faroese stamp: The Seal Woman
Aside from the ill-fated Great Selkie of Sule Skerrie, Selkies are usually female, and their stories are not happy. Briefly, a lonely fisherman spies a group of seals shedding their skins as they emerge from the sea to dance on the shore as women. As they transform back he captures the last by stealing her skin, and so ties her to the Earth realm. She becomes his wife and bears children, but always yearns for home; and when inevitably her hidden skin is found, she immediately leaves her family to return to the sea.
My friend, happily celibate and non-binary, said they strongly identify and that got my brain buzzing: for how appealing is a hero/ine who carrys the implication of a wild freedom of expression that cannot be pigeonholed by society. The story affirms the reality of being in a permanently liminal state that’s useful to us all. It’s a fellow-feeling acknowledging that we are none of us, whilst incarnated, actually in our chosen element.
That feeling is surely part of the deeper nature of all humankind. It is the origin of the first Bible story in Genesis. Maybe life is about coming to an accommodation with feeling like fish (or Selkies) out of water? Religious philosophers cite this universal feeling as evidence that our true nature is to swim in eternity; we will never feel quite comfortable in the world of time and space (‘Time’s run away with me! Where’s the time gone?’), or be truly ‘at home’ in the world of here and now. Instead we will – and most of us do - yearn, like the Selkie wife, for another state. That’s why many of our most potent stories hark back to a mythic ‘Golden Age’. The Garden of Eden, Camelot or Atlantis, whether ejected from the garden, city or drowned island, the message is the same.
We are ‘Other’ our place is not here. ‘We are stardust, we are golden; and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.’ Or maybe to the sea… So, back to the Selkie.
This story’s dark nature is worthy of the Grimm brothers. It is about coercive control. The fisherman’s love may be genuine, but his actions are reprehensible and the wife is his prisoner. Its origins come from a patriarchal, tribal time in the Highlands and Islands when a man had to work for many years before he could afford to marry. The result? Many young brides taken by much older men to strange and isolated lives far from their families. No wonder this tale was widespread.
We recognise more easily today control disguised as love and its consequences: that’s the surface story. But what might the underlying wisdom be? From a spiritual point of view we might consider how we all have to give up half of our nature to fulfil an imposed role, as the wife did. We are all ‘the wife’, complying with – or perhaps feeling tricked into - the contracts that rob us whilst promising ‘what we want’. Unless we are very aware.
Most of us think we are. We’ve come a long way, but we are still living in a world with crazy rules coming from head-ology, and certainly not from the heart or body: so can we trust our own judgement? What will help us gain the wider perspective, to decide what is right for us?
Being in nature will. Simple. A half-hour walk by the shore, in the woods, on the downs, gives us mental and emotional space, and we feel more sane, balanced, able to act with clarity. It gives us the space to acknowledge that other part of our nature, our wild souls. It is a duty of respect to that inner spirit to gaze beyond cultural expectations; to consider how much of ourselves we might still be giving away.
The good news is that Druidry is a practical, er, practice. As well as stimulating our love of nature it encourages a fascination with traditional wisdom tales which help explain relationships in a sentient world. Suggest how we may come into harmony with all parts of our being to fulfil our potential. Example: young Jack goes out into the world and is friendly and kind to human and non-human persons - a creaking gate, a horse, a river... Result? The whole sentient world responds when he needs help, whilst his selfish brothers get their comeuppance.
Some fairy stories are simple. Innocence and goodness are supported and protected – as in The Babes in the Wood. Curses and ill luck are transformed by the magic of love, as in Beauty and the Beast. And there is a bright tale that mirrors that of the Selkie. It is the story of Aengus Og, the Irish God of love, who might have died of love, but came to an accommodation with his Swan Maiden and voluntarily shapeshifted so they could live together alternately as Human and Swan at different seasons – for what more expansive and fluid instinct can there be than love?
The Selkie wife is a dark, adult tale, grown from a real time, real experience, that makes finding its message a little harder. Does it have a happy ending? The husband is left lonely: whether the child/ren are is not so certain. What the Selkie’s regrets might be we can only speculate. But these uncertainties aside, one message is clear. This is that no matter how many years we spend in compromise, the potential of our true life is always there. Like the Selkie’s skin, it is in a hidden place, but safe; we just have to find it. What a fantastic thought! And lovingly and wonderfully, in many versions of the story the child finds the skin for her mother. It is the seal-mother who returns at intervals to reconnect with her child. No coercion, just a pure flowing instinct of love.
Today, unlike the story’s original audience, we have the amazing privilege of choice. We can not only absorb its moral lessons, but can craft it and modify it as it might appear in our lives. We can resolve to cut short the time of separation and longing in our own lives – a real feeling of separation anxiety for many members. We can stop focussing on those feelings of lack and turn our attention deeper within, to our hidden places. We can put our energy into joining ourselves to that wilder part of our nature that makes us truly alive. And we can do it whilst teaching, delivering pizzas, cleaning offices or hiring a private jet – whatever might be our circumstance and contract with the world.
We start by realising that we have the freedom to discover and unlock our potential. By focussing on that, we are already changing ourselves from a deep place. We are connecting up new synapses between the magical and the mundane, to create moments that will fill us with life in abundance. We are, like the Selkie to whom some of us might soon be singing on our holidays, creatures of Earth and Salt Water: of Bones and of Blood.
We do after all originate from the sea: and somewhere within us all there is a dim resonance of that time 375 million years ago, when our lobe-finned ancestor, Tiktaalik, first crawled from it. For what other reason does the baby, fully formed, spend the last three months in utero, unless to plump up ready to float buoyantly into the world? and why else are water births are so popular? The salt water of the womb is our first home.
As adult humans we carry this legacy, and as Druids we are aware of it. From moment to moment we can honour it by being fluid and fresh to new experiences, by being open to change, to swimming with the currents and by being magical: we should never stop exploring our mysterious world and our place in it.
The fresh energy and potential of Spring has arrived! Let’s get out there and let our fascination with the fluid world change us.