Article Eight

The Spirit

of Yew

The Yew Tree sits well with the passage between Life and Death. Like a primordial ancient grandmother that holds the balance between the two. The stories she holds beneath her bark and bleeding keen out to the wild land lost, loved and grief stricken and powerfully held in serpent roots that split the rock upon which, has held her for so long.

Yew spirit reaches into a void that is the womb of nurturing and the cave of souls were we are laid bear, to be witnessed, exposed and rewoven into the fabric of time and place; A place that is nothing and everything all at the same time. Her cauldron carrying the toxic brew of inspiration of death, the beauty in decay yet the power to renew through total surrender, a journey you never return from quite the same way as when you first spied the green, red berried, sweeping branches touching bear ground.

The Yew Tree has had a long association as a tree of the ancestors, the dead and the dying. Sources always point to the fact than many majestic, ancient Yews are to be found in church yards, holding their regal role as guardians of the dead. This is true, but somewhere I feel we miss something, and this association in itself is becoming dogma in our Paganism. The Yew has many tales to tell, it will offer healing, and it will act as a guardian to the dead, assisting the flow of the journey of spirit and physical bone songs.  

My blood and tears has flowed beneath many of the Yews of my home, a bitter sweet sacrifice to the stories they have spun upon my battered and emotionally scared soul. Leading me through tunnels of deep rich truth that seems to be so ancient, it resonates as sound, no words, and it’s these sounds of wild land stories and soul journeys that have allowed me to find the power of Yew in its bark, leaves, roots and its bleeding.  

The Yew puts us in direct contact with our past, the past of our blood line. It can act as the gate keeper to those shadow lands within our psyche, as well as that of our ancestral memories. We can face our own mortality within the presence of Yew in our journeys and its here the sweet toxicity of its presence can touch our soul, and help us to play the important role as guardians of the dead and dieing, here the Yew teaches us to be the Bone Singers.

The Bone Singers are the edge folk, living in both this and the next world. Chanting over the last breaths of life at the side of a tribal member’s death bed. Preparing the body for the mortuary platforms for the crows and ravens to peck the bones clean and finally with ritual, placing and arranging the bones in the chambered womb-tombs. They cared for the dead and sang the stories of the bones of the ancestors, their chants echoing in deep bellied womb-tombs. They were both feared and respected, and so lived on the edge of their society and this physical existence. Today the Bone Singers bring the inspiration of aloneness, of being different from the 'norm', of facing our mortality and how we may work with the dead and the dieing. Here we find our true vocation and dedication, for the Bone Singer spends many hours with the bones of the dead to ensure that their song lives on and echo from deep within this sacred land, deep within the belly of mother earth. We also sing those ancestor stories with those who are dieing, helping them to surrender to the death that comes, to find their ancestors waiting for them to journey along the yew line paths of another world, a new, yet old journey in their dying.  

The Yew also honours the life blood that flows through our veins, the stories that we too are weaving upon this wild land, woven through the fabric of our soul’s intention. The spiritual vigour that holds us even in the depths of our winter dreaming, the gestating darkness of ice. The evergreen of a sleeping guardian that is fluid in the changes it initiates, yet solid in its rootedness and great age. Life is affirmed by the Yew, the cycle and its experience, not just the bones stories and songs but the whisper of what can be a murmur of a thread of the future patterns that flow from past experience or knowing.

The Yew tree is uncompromising in whatever guise you find her tapping upon your soul. Commanding respect, we can reach out just as uncompromising to the smooth muscular branches and the blood red weeping trunk, and just witness, just flow and be a part of the cycle of life’s journey, the dreaming of ancestral memory, the songs of the bones, of land and love and life and its dying.

Rob Wilson

April 2008