By Anna
McKerrow
In Crow Moon, the UK is split into the Greenworld – Devon and
Cornwall, an eco-pagan community run by witches – and the Redworld, which is
everywhere else and is corrupt, polluted and controlled by criminals. The
Greenworld is still a relatively new community, and like many new nation
states, utopias and/or ideological communities, it has a set of rules – or tenets,
as it likes to call them: a manifesto based on its agrarian, goddess-loving
principles:
·
Save it, hive it, share it
·
We are
called the Greenworld as green is the colour of life, regeneration and purity.
·
Knowledge comes from the earth more than any
book. Listen to the songs of the trees, the beat of the soil, the caress of the
wind on wheat if you would be wise.
·
The moment is all we have and the one thing we
cannot keep.
·
Love the land; share its bounty; grow with love;
harvest well.
·
And it was not in our name that the Redworld
burned.
·
Community, family, covenstead. All one and none
separate.
·
War is not for the Greenworld. We leave war to
those that have not found peace.
·
Respect Nature, for She has no respect for you.
·
A quilt is a web of time, a document of the
Greenworld, stitching life to life, season to season, memory to eternity.
The Greenworld also has a set of
holy books and cultural texts that promote the values of the society, though it
is also most fond of a number of historic Celtic texts like The Mabinogion and The Tain, as well as the poetry about Irish mythology by WB Yeats.
The Greenworld texts are Tenets and Sayings of the Greenworld, Greenworld Prayers and Songs and A Guide to Reflective Greenworld Journaling
(schools edition), containing verses
to be sung at particular festivals, or readings suitable for funerals,
handfastings (weddings) and other events. For instance:
Song
for Samhain
This
is the night when the dark is thin.
Welcome,
ancestors! Enter in.
The
fire is lit, the table set.
You
have passed and we, not yet.
Brighid
bless the Samhain fire;
Flame
of creation in the funeral pyre,
Crows
dance in the dark, shadows in flight:
Goddess
bless us all on Samhain night.
I added this element of the Greenworld
for a number of reasons. First, to pay homage to the wealth of poetry that
exists in the contemporary pagan world. It commemorates the passing of the
seasons and the recognition of the wide pantheon of gods and goddesses from
different historical cultures. I also start Crow
Moon with Zia, Danny’s mother and the village witch, conducting a full moon
ritual with her village community in which she repeats a section of Doreen
Valiente and Gerald Gardner’s Drawing Down the Moon, an established
piece of traditional Wiccan ritual and a lovely piece of poetry in its own
right. Poetry is also particularly integral in druidic practice, as is song and
all creativity, and is common across all pagan practice that I have found, so
it seemed appropriate that the Greenworld would incorporate it too.
The tenets and the songs also served to
give a sense of richness to the Greenworld culture; they provided a way for me
to give readers more of a sense of how Danny and the other characters lived and
thought, without having to write the community’s concepts into the story in a
teachery kind of way. Also, it foregrounds the community as one that is heavily
ideologically driven, and starts to make us think about the pros and cons of
what that means for the people that live there. I mean, I’d live in the Greenworld
if it existed, probably, but to be honest sometimes it might be a bit… boring.
And utopias have a nasty habit of being a little bit intolerant of anything
other than their idea of perfection, sometimes.
I also enjoyed writing all the tenets
and the little chants and songs in particular, being a poet as well. It’s fun!
And lastly, the patron goddess of the Greenworld is Brighid, Celtic goddess of
poetry and fiery creative inspiration among other things, so I couldn’t really
not have any poetry in there. I don’t think She would have been happy if I
didn’t.
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