The Sacred Yew

YEW TO LEY LINES TO TOBERMORY TO DUN URGADUL TO KEY OF SOLOMON TO PRIEST WITH PARISH OF KILNINIAN THROWN IN FOR GOOD MEASURE

No, I am not kidding you.

I’m writing this little thingamabopper about the Sacred Yew because it’s on my mind, right?

Right.

So I go back and look it up again and see an image of it at the intersection of three ley lines (like ‘power’ lines), right?

One goes to Iona and a spot on the east coast, Aberlemno/Montrose. Fine and dandy.

One goes between Eilean Isa (w) and the Holy Island (e). Okay.

The other one connects Marywell (e) with Tobermory (w). Huh? What the heck kind of name is Tobermory?

Me being me, I had to look it up. I just HAD to.

Tobermory means the Well of Mary.

Those guys did that on purpose.

Ya think?

I think.

Now right alongside of Tobermory is this place called Dun Urgadul.

Dun says Pict and/or ancient place name (fort or protection) but what about Urgadul?

Nobody knows.

Me being me, I had to find out. I just HAD to.

Being as Dunnottar has that Swedish king Ottar making sense of the Fother (Scandinavian personal name) of Oppidum Fother, another designation of Dunnottar, I checked Swedish.

Nope.

Germanic?

Nope, no Urgadul there either.

Nothing in Gaelic (Irish or Scots) ringing any bells.

Okay, kick in the Spiral. Break it down like I did Dunnottar.

Ur.

That took me on a very interesting and educational side trip to the olden days in the Middle East, and reminded me that it was familiar because it’s in the Bible, Old Testament.

Not what I was looking for, although I was closer than I thought. Not to Ur, but to Gadul.

But I was still looking for Ur and went back to my round of languages.

Found it in German:  ur => used in words denoting the primal stage of a historical or cultural entity or phenomenon; original; earliest

My, my, what have we here?

Went digging for Gadul, and almost freaked myself out when I found it in a translation of The Key of Solomon.

And I’m going what the heck IS this?

A Hebrew word meaning ‘priest’ hooked onto a Germanic word meaning ‘earliest’, connected by a Pictish word for fort or protection, on a western Scots island, on a ley line, right by an ancient holy well that ended up dedicated to the Virgin Mary (and I bet there was a Yew tree there too or there used to be; they planted them by wells and springs and such).

Went scanning for Dun Urgadul again in general and found that it’s located in KILNINIAN parish.

O_O

And now it makes sense to me. 

I have to say I’m somewhat shocked to find a parish named after Ninian, unless it’s not Roman Catholic, because when I went looking for him in relation to Dunnottar I discovered that the Church seems to have no official records at all of him – as if he never existed – which didn’t surprise me much since Columba was their ‘golden boy’ for Scotland. If they wanted to saint him it wouldn’t look so good if Ninian had beaten him to the punch by a hundred years or more.

I have my own theories on that and don’t believe for one minute that even Ninian would have been bringing anybody any new news when it came to Christianity (although I betcha he warned them about the Roman ‘interpretation’). Yeah, I have a hunch that a little expunging went on in the Ninian-related Church records. That Culdee. *laughing* Columba too, for that matter. I betcha. They ended up kicking out his priests and caused a civil war.

I write fiction; I can say what I want. And I don’t have to expunge anything, heh heh.

Yep.

A couple of hours of research just because a place name didn’t make sense to me, that’s the way I roll.

And it’s not even a place name that has anything to do with my stories.

What the heck.

Maybe I’ll use it in a short story.

Here's my little piece that led to all of the above:

2014  01  28 

THE SACRED YEW

I put a brief conversation into Mamm of Tarnos, between TallUllin and Mamm of Iona, about the Yew. They’re seated beneath it and talking about it a little.

Mamm, after TallUllin explains how one tree can live for such a very long time, immediately draws a parallel between the Yew and the Mother. In a spiritual context there’s much to be said for the girl’s observations.

Here’s a bit I found at 

http://www.3pintsgone.com/lyrics/BeachesOfStValery/StValery/YewTree.htm

"Patriarch of Long-lasting Woods.... "

Mara Freeman, 1996

In early times, the darkly glorious yew-tree was probably the only evergreen tree in Britain. Both Druids with their belief in reincarnation, and later Christians with their teaching of the resurrection, regarded it as a natural emblem of everlasting life. Its capacity for great age: enriched its symbolic value. The early Irish regarded it as one of the most ancient beings on earth. Yew is the last on a list of oldest things in a passage from the fourteenth century Book of Lismore: "Three lifetimes of the yew for the world from its beginning to its end."

The yew's reputation for long life is due to the unique way in which the tree grows. Its branches grow down into the ground to form new stems, which then rise up around the old central growth as separate but linked trunks. After a time, they cannot be distinguished from the original tree. So the yew has always been a symbol of death and rebirth, the new that springs out of the old, and a fitting tree for us to study at the beginning of this new year. As the days now grow longer with the beginning of a new solar cycle, we move into the future on the achievements of the past, new creativity springs forth grounded in the accomplishments of " the year gone by.             . . .

Me, I’d probably have headed it Matriarch, but then I’m not the one who wrote it! 

There are thousands of web-sites about the Sacred Yew so I’ll forego redundancy here except for the above and this bit about the Fortingall Yew in particular.

The Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, Scotland is said to have grown there since long before the birth of Christ and to have been a sacred place from the beginning. Nobody can even guess at who planted it, nor when, although we can make a stab at WHY, and why THERE. Ancient religious beliefs would be the why. And the why there:  It lies at the crossing of three ley lines, for one thing. It’s said to be at or near the center of Scotland, for another. Directly north of it is a mountain of a specific shape, for another. It’s the ‘center’ in more ways than one. Iona to Aberlemno/Montrose, Eilean Isa to the Holy Island, Tobermory to Marywell . . .

So it’s fairly easy to see the logic of Mamm of Iona when she likens the Yew to the Mother in a religious sense.

From the Yew springs new growth, entirely new trees that recombine with the original tree and, when all is said and done, cannot be separated from one another. Mamm equates this with the growth of ‘new’ religions: Pagan, Druid, Culdee, Priest, Christianity . . . all growing from one Source and all serving one purpose: to protect and preserve the Mother Tree.

Despite injuries sustained over the many long years of its life, the Fortingall Yew lives on, testament to tenacity in the face of adversity – on many levels.

At any rate, researching the Yew has finally given me perhaps a little insight regarding parts of my books that I’ve had a hard time figuring out.

See, I write stuff and then maybe research it. Most of the time pertinent information pops up when I’m looking into something totally different. 

For example:  when the Mother is talking to Danann and Sidhelagh of Dunnottar in the grove and says something about how Jesus and Christianity  will be her preservation or some such – and Danann and Sidhelagh just don’t ‘get it’, not when Roman Christianity is doing everything in its power to eliminate the Mother’s place, power, and authority. Their confusion is a reflection of my own, but I left the conversation in as it came to me, even though it didn’t make much sense to me either.

Now, half a year and several books later, I find the Yew.

I was looking for a home place, inland, for Mamm’s family to be centered in and chose Perthshire; close enough to logically come to Dunnottar/Stonehaven at times, but inland.

Bits of information float about in my head all the time and from those bits came reference to archaeological finds indicating a possible Roman ‘scorched earth’ maneuver to the north of Hadrian’s Wall – and the story of Mamm of Perth begins with that story, a couple of hundred years earlier than the Dunnottar main story.

Later still, looking for a logical, centrally located, meeting point for my characters and representatives from Iona, up popped the Sacred Yew. It would have been to that general area that our Perth characters would have fled the burning plains to spend that awful Long Dark following the burning, too.

Finding out that the Sacred Yew really WOULD have been a natural ‘sanctuary’, for people in times of trouble, brought a bit of a shiver to me.

Dunnottar’s grove doesn’t have a Yew, perhaps because it doesn’t rest on a ley line. However, the family home in Perthshire does, which makes sense when I look at a map and see where (in my head) I’ve placed that family home. It would have had to have a Yew.

I also didn’t figure out the reason for adding the Yew twig to the oak leaf, earth, and small stone of the message to Danann of Perth – until long after that bit had been written. Now I’ve learned more of the connections between Iona and the Sacred Yew; it begins to make sense to me that Danann interpreted the combination to mean ‘Come home; you are Called by Iona’ – but at the time my Characters were well ahead of me (as usual – I’m forever baffled by them and I think they get a kick out of it when I finally ‘get it’).