* Bum yn lliaws
rith
Kyn bum
kisgyfrith.
Bum cledyf
culurith.
Credaf pan
writh.
Bum deigyr yn
awyr.
Bum serwaw syr.
Bum geir yn
llythyr.
Bum llyfyr ym
prifder.
Bum llugyrn
lleufer
Blwydyn a
hanher.
‘Kat Godeu’,
Llyfr Taliesin VIII
From a purely shamanic perspective time and even age do not exist in any ordinary sense. The experience of many who journey is that time and space can be both compressed and conflated while in an altered state of consciousness. This can also happen in everyday life while day-dreaming and of course, in dreams. Humans, it seems, are hard-wired to be in more than one place at a time.
Traditionally, shamans have been both the Walkers Between Worlds – those aware of Essential Time – and the keepers of the community calendar, guardians of seasonal cycles and Material Time. This dual role reflects the dual nature of humanities’ relationship with time and age. Paradoxically we are both in and beyond time, part of the cycle of life and death and simultaneously outside and beyond it. Shamans have always been a bridge between material time and essential time, which we also know as non-ordinary reality time. Part of a traditional shaman's role is this merging of interior/spiritual and exterior/material histories.
Since The Fall, The Flood, the end of the Dreamtime, the stories suggest that we have lost connection to the origin of Time and now are left only with an awareness of material time. This in turn affects the ways in which age and ageing are perceived; mostly, in the West at least, as a inevitable, and even frightening, decline towards death and non-being.
Time v. Age
What is it about age or the prospect of ageing that affects us? Is it a loss of youth, a loss of physical beauty, the end of childbearing, an increase in infirmity and weakness, the onset of ill-health that will gradually drag us towards the grave? Most people will experience anxiety about one or more of these things. Shamans are as much part of this process as anyone; unlike most people however, the true shaman has always known that time and age are merely perceptions. This knowledge is a privilege, but one that is gained by making a journey that only the dead ordinarily make. By leaving this world and returning to it with knowledge and power the shaman proves that she is spirit, because she is able to transcend time and space and exist in a place where these things have no meaning.
Time, Age and Myth
Festivals around the world Eid,
Passover,
Easter,
Chinese New Year, mark human time.
Some, like Samhain, mark no-time, the time between the old
and the new year, between life and death, when anything is possible. This can be seen in the trick or treating of
Halloween – the modern Samhain - where the underlying premise remains
uncertainty or surprise.
Many creation stories from around the world refer to a golden time, an era before material time was first measured. Then, all humans could do naturally what only shaman's now do, that is, pass between worlds. After this era ended humans were left with an awareness of life and death and age and material time were born. However, there is a long history of humanity aware of its own immortality. In many cultures, poet/shamans claim to have been present throughout history, existing beyond both time and age.
Many creation stories from around the world refer to a golden time, an era before material time was first measured. Then, all humans could do naturally what only shaman's now do, that is, pass between worlds. After this era ended humans were left with an awareness of life and death and age and material time were born. However, there is a long history of humanity aware of its own immortality. In many cultures, poet/shamans claim to have been present throughout history, existing beyond both time and age.
![[Fitzpatrick-Tuan.jpg]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Yu8apSfNOUg/S2dqbLBsprI/AAAAAAAAAZU/lxK53BmBa9I/s1600/Fitzpatrick-Tuan.jpg)
Early Irish and Welsh myth and literature are filled with semi-historical/semi-mythical characters who through shapeshifting and a continuous cycle of existence, claim to have experienced all history in a variety of forms. Tir na n’Og, the mythical Irish Otherworld that lies westward with the setting sun, means ‘land of the ever-young’. Age and time are particularly powerful influences in Celtic myth and literature.
* I have been in a multitude of shapes, before I assumed a consistent form.
I have been a sword, narrow, variegated, I will believe when it
is apparent.
I have been a tear in the air,
I have been a tear in the air,
I have been the dullest of stars.
I have been a word among letters,
I have been a book in the origin.
I have been the light of lanterns, a year and a half.
I have been a continuing bridge, over three score Abers [river mouths].
I have been a course, I have been an eagle.
I have been a coracle in the seas:
I have been compliant in the banquet.
I have been a drop in a shower;
I have been a sword in the grasp of the hand.
I have been a shield in battle.
I have been a string in a harp, disguised for nine years.
The Battle of the Trees, The Book of Taliesin
VIII
In his book ‘Fire In The Head’, Tom
Cowan explores the shamanic roots of Celtic myth, including the
stories of Taliesin and Tuan mac Cairill. Welsh
poet/druid Taliesin, an historical figure thought to have lived in the 6thC,
claimed to have witnessed all history and in one poem described some of his
many forms:Irish seer, Tuan mac Cairill, who lived in the same century as
Taliesin, reputedly narrated his life as a man, a salmon, a boar, and a stag,
to the Christian holy man, St.
Finnian. Each time he aged and
prepared to die, he was transformed into another shape.
Finally as a salmon he was captured and eaten by the fisherman's wife, who then
gave birth to him as Tuan mac Cairill.
Core Shamanism seldom explores the issue of
reincarnation, in the eastern esoteric sense of literal rebirth, but the Celtic
tradition offers a very different glimpse of immortality, a shapeshifting
existence that does not have humanity as its goal, but offers experience of everything
that is, of an eternal consciousness of which we are both a part and,
paradoxically, all.
As well as tales of humans aware of
their existence outside of time, there are many Celtic-origin stories of humans
suspended in alternate reality. Grail legends and the medieval Arthurian romances are full of characters who become lost in time and space, and for whom time passes either very slowly or very quickly, and space/place become confused or irrelevant. Castles are discovered after many years of searching, only to vanish never to be found again. In the image on the right, Sir Perceval, a tiny figure dwarfed by the towering landscape, arrives at Castle Carbonek where he will be tested in a vacuum of time. Ordinary time and space, become meaningless, as Arthur’s knights search for the ineffable within the unmeasureable.
This ancient Celtic experience is still alive in the 21stC, in digital recordings of ballads like the 13thC, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ which tells the story of an historical Scottish lord taken by the Queen of the Elves to an unseen world and returned home after many years, physically unchanged but with the gift of prophecy. Even more modern tales, such as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White contain these elements of the suspension of time and youth.
Time – Keepers
Time and The Time Lord
At a seminar looking at time and age my students journeyed with the intention: ‘Show me what meaning time and age
have for me and how I can bring their positive power into my daily life".
Discussing this journey on the phone a few days later with an attendee of the seminar, we started discussing BBC TV’s ‘Dr. Who’. We decided that, though not exactly a shaman, the Time Lord is indeed a shapeshifter in the Celtic tradition, passing from one form to another, never actually dying; in fact Dr. Who has not aged but ‘youthed’ as the series has progressed.
Even today, it seems, we have our contemporary time- travellers and shapeshifters. Taliesin, Tuan mac Cairill and the old Chukchi shamans would, I think, feel perfectly comfortable in the company of Dr. Who, and vice versa. Perhaps, as you read this, they are together somewhere swapping stories.

















