If you’ve been reading here a good long while, you remember my review of The Mist Filled Path, a book by Frank MacEowen that struck my life with great force a year and a half ago. Frank’s message came to me at just the right time, and I found that it resolved a lot of issues with the direction of my spiritual path, as well as laying down rich soil for growth. Perhaps the most profound gift the book gave me was a deepening of my sense of comfort and rightness in the label ‘druid’, which I had adopted as my own just a few months before, and the path circumscribed by that term.

But people are not labels, as Frank makes very clear by his own example. His path has wound among Zen Buddhism, shamanic studies, Celtic spirituality, and Jungian psychology, with a dash of poetry thrown in. He has undergone the ’shaman sickness’, participated in the Lakota Sun Dance, and slept alone in burial mounds in Scotland, listening to the song of the world.

Frank’s latest book, The Celtic Way of Seeing: Meditations on the Irish Spirit Wheel, is vastly different from The Mist Filled Path. The latter is a journeyman’s chronicle, a spiritual travelogue; but The Celtic Way of Seeing is a great map of the soul. Frank looks at the ancient divisions of Ireland, and the connections between that sacred physical space and the sacred spiritual space within us. It’s a book that packs a lot of punch, especially for those of us inclined to think in terms of maps and landscapes. I’ll be writing a full review soon.

In the meantime, I’m absolutely ecstatic to present this interview with Frank, in which he very graciously opens himself up with characteristic insight and honesty on all kinds of topics. I asked Frank five questions, and I’m going to present four of them here; the fifth I’ll save for the review of The Celtic Way of Seeing, since it will make more sense in that context. And now I’m going to scurry out of the way and let you jump right into the interview! Read the rest of this entry »

What does fiction have to do with divination?

The common thread is the story structure, the plot. A work of fiction is an illustration of prototypical event structures, plotlines that are moving or meaningful. A divination system also provides plotlines, as well as general elements to flesh out the events of the story. A divination system shows you a possible plot line for your own personal story; it allows you to construct a tale to make sense of your life.

A Tarot spread can be thought of as a narrative structure upon which you can hang the life events surrounding the theme of your reading. The classic three-card reading — past, present, future — is just about as basic a narrative structure as one can imagine. The Celtic Cross is an elaboration of that basic narrative, showing obstacles, influences from ‘above’ and ‘below’, etc. Diane Sylvan has a marvelous spread (the Storyteller) that echoes Campbell’s journey of the hero. The Tetractys spread, which I learned of while researching this article, is a fascinating one that I’d love to try sometime, and seems to combine four plot patterns into one.

The Tolkien spread uses Tolkien’s favorite six-part plot pattern, which I explain in detail in the previous post; it underlies most of the action of The Lord of the Rings, as well as the overall arc of the novel itself. It illustrates Tolkien’s primary theme, eucatastrophe — the sudden twist, unexpected and yet intimately bound up with the framework of the tale, that brings the story to a positive conclusion. Read the rest of this entry »

Click here for the previous post in this series: The Function of Fiction.

Patterns of Plot, Patterns of Life

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.
The old that is strong does not wither;
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

–Tolkien

One way in which fiction influences our subconscious thinking is in its very structure, its plot. Different authors and different works have different plot styles and devices, sometimes woven carefully and consciously (The Quincunx), other times written on the fly with almost no forethought (Louis L’Amour). These patterns of plot can influence the way we, as readers, try to organize our own experiences — the way we make sense of our own stories. We come to expect our lives to unfold in the same way that our favorite fiction does. Read the rest of this entry »