On Sending Mythic Medicine to Your Past Self
Karina Tynan and Achtan: A Brave Mother's Tale + a Writing Prompt Inspired by John Moriarty
When I started exploring Karina Tynan’s Instagram account as I got up the pluck to ask her to come tell a story on the KnotWork Storytelling podcast, I felt as if I were stepping through a time portal.
I was entering mythic time, of course. But it wasn’t just that. Suddenly, I was the University College Dublin graduate student seeking - and finding - solace in the mythology when the harsh realities of the world were both too close and too immense to understand.
As with the best of true myth work, Karina’s mythological retellings aren’t a denial of the present moment. They open new ways to gain perspective on what is most timeless and timely in this world.
As if to confirm this sense of kinship with Karina and this visceral connection to my younger self, there, deep down, years down into the Instagram feed, was a sacred creature I had loved and long since forgotten.
Long flowing red hair that extended to become a forest. Breasts offering torrents of blood, not milk. A large foot grounded into a skull and connected to the Underworld. Closed eyes and a serene expression, all set in a frame of crimson flowers.
Isis, it is good to see you again.
I had last seen this sculpture in the first days of the year 2000 when I was kicking around the museums of Paris alone. In the age before discreet, no flash cell phone photography, I couldn’t pull out my point and shoot to capture the image. I bought a museum catalog I couldn’t really afford in hopes that I could take this goddess home with me, but she wasn’t included.
Something in this Isis spoke to Karina and me. We didn’t have time to explore it - we had another mythic woman to discuss! - but I think that ineffable something comes through in our conversation.
Call it destiny. Call it coincidence. I call it the magic of Myth Work.
Karina came to KnotWork this week to share the story of Achtan, the druid’s daughter and mother of a future king, Cormac, son of Airt.
Maybe if you look at Achtan’s story from a certain angle, you can see echoes of Isis’s story, as she too goes on her own desperate journey to save someone she loves, and she too is the mother of a future king. So many creative knots to weave in the imaginal realm…
As I said, there was some younger part of me - my own Princess archetype - that responded in a soul-deep way to Karina’s work.
I do believe in the sort of time magic that enables us to pass the medicine back through time to the version of ourselves that needed it most. I’m reading Karina’s stories with a hope that the lonely American girl will be wrapped in their warmth and wisdom as she stumbled around Europe and Ireland in a directionless, academic fog.
It’s good to know that that moment in time was so important to Karina, too. It was another sacred synchronicity that she would call back to that same time, the early 2000s, in her introduction to SÍDH: Stories from the Women of Irish Mythology (the collection that includes her Acthan tale):
Twenty-five years ago I found myself on Clare Island waiting for the Bard Summer School to begin. The promise: Exploring Irish Mythology for its Contemporary Relevance. All these years later I am so grateful for the depth of the journeys within the Irish myths. The philosopher John Moriarty called those journeys 'a harrowing'. That is because, when a myth is occupied, it can prove to be something akin to an odyssey through the dark and light of our own psyches.
This gift of Moriarty’s mythic journey as “a harrowing” is a revelation to me.
If I am brave enough, it is going to light my way forward for some time. It’s a vital piece of this Myth Is Medicine quest and I’ll be diving into it more next week, and throughout the seasons of stories to come.
I invite you to explore “a harrowing”
We began this harrowing work in The Writers’ Knot this week. I offered the group this prompt:
Irish philosopher John Moriarty described the process of journeying with a myth “a harrowing.”
Harrow:
Noun: an implement consisting of a heavy frame set with teeth or tines which is dragged over plowed land to break up clods, remove weeds, and cover seed.
Verb: 1. draw a harrow over (land). 2. cause distress to.
Consider this idea of being plowed by, distressed by, made fertile by a myth. Describe the process and the fruits of that harrowing.
The writers agree: this isn’t an easy (or problem-free) prompt
The response and ongoing conversation amongst members of the Writers’ Knot is a fertile, challenging one.
My writers are pushing me past the poetry of the word “harrow,” and beyond the romantic notions that seem to be conjured when it’s so close to “hallow” (oh, how the mythic mind tends to seek out sacredness when we do this work).
They are wrestling with the way a “harrowing experience” is one to be expressly avoided. Sure, such an experience may be a vital growth opportunity (in retrospect) and lead to some great poetry, but traditionally, “harrowing” is associated with a journey into hell.
Wise women, they know the depression and the pain that comes with an extended trip to the Otherworld. Though they still polish the diamonds they stumbled upon during their own dark nights of the soul, they’ve got the hard won sense not to ask for such a descent with every myth they study.
And, the farmers amongst them (the Writers’ Knot tends to attract mystics, creatives, intellectuals, and also folks who live very close to the soil) are helping me understand that an agricultural harrow only works at the surface level, smoothing the soil after the hardest work is done.
My journey with Mr. Moriarty is only one book deep, so far, and I have much more to explore. I asked Karina about the source of this quote. She received it from the man himself at the Bard Summer School, so there are no characteristically Byzantine passages in Dreamtime or Invoking Ireland to parse to keep the debate going. (Unless there is? Moriarty scholars amongst you, please enlighten me!)
I so value these questions and this desire to work the real roots of metaphor so it can have real meaning in our lives. We don’t stop with easy connections in Myth Work, or in The Writers’ Knot. It’s all being tossed into the cauldron of the collective and the cauldron of my own belly.
I accept this invitation, I ask for “a harrowing”
The latest KnotWork episode, Achtan: A Brave Mother’s Tale describes the conception, birth, and dangerous early days as mother to the future king Cormac Mac Airt.
I adore Karina’s story and the conversation that followed, which took us deep into themes of sacrifice and coming of age rituals, modern parenting and how the ancient Irish concept of the geis (a curse or a taboo) emerges in contemporary life.
It seems I’m in for a harrowing with this story and how it resonates with my own personal history and my own deep longing for the collective. Both my 20 year-old princess, and the me of this moment need to immerse myself in this holy bog of a story.
Next week, I’ll be diving deeper into the details and nuances of “Wolves, Horses, and a Small King.”
In the meantime, I invite you to grab a cuppa and give yourself over to Karina’s gorgeous words and her gorgeous voice.
And, I invite you to pick up her two gorgeous books, both of which can be purchased at KarinaTynan.com (global shipping available!)