Below is the transcript of a speech made by Stratford Caldecott, son of Moyra Caldecott, at the event to launch her book, Multi-dimensional Life, at Gothic Image in Glastonbury on June 9, 2007.
Strat’s speech at Moyra’s 80th birthday party/ booklaunch at Gothic Image bookshop, Glastonbury on 9 June 2007
On behalf of Moyra, I want to thank Jamie George for his hospitality tonight, Martyn Folkes of Mushroom Publishing for his immense hard work to get the books out on time, and all of you for coming, many of you from so far away. She invited you, but I don’t think she actually expected you to come! I am Stratford, her eldest son, speaking to you because she is not able to speak as confidently as she once did. But over a lifetime she has been more coherent, more eloquent, than the rest of us. I really doubt if any of us will have heard of anyone else who could have a launch party for NINE books in their 81st year of life. It is probably a record. I know that the Pope, who is the same age as Moyra, sells more copies of his, but even he doesn’t write so many!
Moyra has always been a poet, and was a leading figure in the London poetry groups of the 1960s as some of you may know, but her first big success as a novelist came late, with the mystically inspired trilogy, Guardians of the Tall Stones, now in print continuously with various publishers for 30 years. Another of her perennial best sellers is Women in Celtic Myth. She has published 30 different titles altogether, averaging no less than one a year, and many of them have been translated into other languages. One or two have even teetered on the brink of becoming a Hollywood movie. As you will read in her long-awaited autobiography, Multi-dimensional Life, available here, her own life has often resembled a movie too — a kind of cross between Brigit Jones and Indiana Jones, or Miss Marple meets the Scorpion King. She travelled up the Nile and into the Pyramids with rock star Tina Turner, in order to discover the present whereabouts of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, and the result is another of the books on sale tonight. Her adventures both in and out of the body are a phenomenon that I have lived with most of my life.
I really hope that if you love Moyra as I know you do, you will buy as many of her books as you can tonight, and make this event a success for everyone. Apart from the classic titles, and the new editions of several of them, she has several brand new books tonight. Multi-dimensional Life reveals the amazing experiences of a writer exploring other worlds and the deeper reaches of this one. (She writes: “I did not realize it at the time, but during the writing of my books I was on a Quest. By mapping it now I hope I might make others aware of the complexity of every given moment, and encourage them to look out for signs and wonders in their own lives.”) The Breathless Pause reveals the charm of her personality through a selection of her poems and wise meditations. Adventures by Leaf Light and other stories contains some children’s stories that have appeared before along with a series of new ones that were never previously published.
I think my late father, Oliver, would have been very proud of what Moyra has achieved as a writer in the last few years. She has produced a body of work that has inspired the devotion of thousands of fans around the world. These books have made the world a better place; they have opened doors on to other levels of reality; they will live on and inspire others in the future. I have personally witnessed the amount of scholarly research that went into each of the historical novels, as well as some of the psychic experiences that helped to make them more than they appear on the surface. I speak on behalf of the whole family when I say that Moyra’s intense appreciation of life and of the natural world has opened our eyes to the beauty of the cosmos, and her books can do the same for her readers.
In “On Myths and Legends of Africa: Part 1″ and “On Myths and Legends of Africa: Part 2″ Moyra has been talking about the universal meaning of some traditional African legends. This time she explores the meaning of the story of The Young Man, The Lion, and the Yellow-flowered Zwart-Storm Tree…
In this story a lion finds a young man sleeping by a water hole. He takes hold of him and lifts him up onto the branches of a yellow-flowered zwart-storm tree. There he wedges him in between the branches while he goes back to the waterhole to drink. The young man wakes and tries to move but finds that he is held fast. The lion returns and pushes his head more firmly between the braches. Noticing that there are tears running down the cheeks of his prey, the lion licks them away and then returns to the water hole for a drink, for he is very thirsty.
While he is drinking the young man manages to escape and ran away. He makes sure not to run directly to his home but disguises his spoor by running this way, then that. When he reaches his home he tells everyone what has happened to him, and the whole village works to disguise his scent by wrapping him around with hartebeest skins, for they know it is in the nature of the lion not to let its prey go.
The lion appears near the village. The people shoot at him again and again, but he will not die. They throw children at him, but he ignores them and will not eat. They throw women at him, but again he ignores them. Arrows and spears leave him unhurt. He keeps sniffing for the young man. The lion wants the young man, for it had licked his tears. It wants no one else but that young man.
The lion attacks the houses and knocks them down. The people plead with the young man’s mother to give him her son. At last she agrees, if the lion will die too. “Let the lion die and lie upon my son,” she says. So the people gave the young man to the lion, and the lion kills him. Now when the people shot at the lion, the lion says, “Now I am ready to die. For I have the young man that I put in the yellow-flowered zwart-storm tree, the young man whose tears I licked, the young man that I have all this time been seeking. Now I have hold of him; for I am his.” And so the lion dies and the people laid his body on the body of the young man.
What are we to make of this story? The young man is sleeping by the water hole. That is, he is in a state of non-awareness right beside a life-giving source of spiritual nourishment. The lion (his spiritual guide, his god, his destiny) sees him and puts him in the tree (the cosmic tree of life). He is off the ground (the mundane world) and is waiting for his entrance into the higher world – the world of the higher consciousness.
The lion delays, knowing that the young man cannot be rushed but must go through certain phases. The lion sees the first stirrings of awareness in the man. The young man’s first reaction to his awakening in the tree is despair, sorrow, fear. He weeps. The lion licks away his tears. He tries to comfort him and goes away again, giving him more time to come to terms with his situation. The man does not want the fearful agony of awakening to the higher self. He runs back to his old ways, cunning enough to do everything in his power to avoid pursuit. But he cannot escape his destiny. The lion will not take a substitute. It is that particular young man who is marked, and only he will the lion take.
In the lion’s final words we find the key to the whole story. The lion and the young man are one. The flight and the chase are within the one soul. Have we not all feared the awakening in the yellow-flowered zwart-storm tree, knowing that our lives will never be the same again, and there is no way out except complete death to the world?
Some years ago I wrote a poem about the fearsomeness of the spiritual call that has helped me to understand this story.
The Christ
He will not come
As you expect,
Swinging incense
And a Bible…
He will come
Like a tiger from a field of daisies…
Suddenly leaping
From the familiar
To the divine.
Incidentally, I’m not at all sure what a yellow-flowered zwart-storm tree looks like, or even whether it exists in Africa, but the name works very well symbolically in this story. The yellow flowers suggest the golden brilliance of light – the fertile flowering of spiritual experience. “Zwart” is the Dutch word for “black”, and “zwart-storm” conjures for me images of those fearsome black storms that terrified me when I was a child in Africa. Those storms cleared the air after days and weeks, sometimes months, of sultry brooding weather that made it hard to breathe and dried the veld so thoroughly that it appeared parched and dead, only to spring alive again as soon as the storm broke.
This tree is a combination of light and dark – of gentle flowers and fierce and driving storm. The tree is life.
More soon…
On Myths and Legends of Africa: Part 1
On Myths and Legends of Africa: Part 2
On Myths and Legends of Africa: Part 3
On Myths and Legends of Africa: Part 4
On Myths and Legends of Africa: Part 5
On Myths and Legends of Africa: Part 6
