December 29, 2015 | Uncategorized | 0 comments | Author: Animal
Gardening with the elementals and devas is practical shamanism. It is a way of working with the elementals and devas in your garden, (or window box, or farm). It works with organic gardening and bio-dynamic processes. The process was brought out of work that’s been carried on in Ireland and other places for probably thousands of years.
There are the four elements in gardening [Earth] [Water] [Air] [Fire] as there are in all Life, and each element contains the two poles from which life springs. These are often called “masculine & feminine” or “positive & negative”.
The Gnomes are guardians of the soil. They care for it and all the creatures that live in it. They also guard the minerals within the soil, many faerie stories tell of this in that gnomes are also smiths. Through this they have a connection to Brighid but there is much more to it than just smith-craft.
The Gnomes very much enjoy an alchemical preparation made of cow shit – and no, bullshit won’t do! It’s prepared from a small amount of cows’ shit, organic at least but preferably bio-dynamic. This is placed within a hollow cow’s horn and buried at about the time of the Autumn Equinox full moon. It is left within the earth/Earth until about the following Spring Equinox full moon when you can dig it up and it will be ready. The gnomes themselves and the Earth-devas have transformed it into an energy carrying and transformative preparation.
If you can get the shit from cows that have grazed your land and bury it in a suitable place and do it all yourself this is even better. Of course, not too many of us have land that can be grazed any more but even if it was from cows in the fields near by this would help. Non-organically raised cows do give problems though. There has been so much interference with their diet and life, antibiotics, growth hormones, stress, taken from their mother too early, etc., that it’s not advised to use their shit. The Earth wouldn’t be able to deal with all the out of place things in it in just six months. But you can buy the preparation for not very many pennies with the guarantee it has been bio-dynamically prepared from the Bio-dynamic Association.
The cow’s horn preparation increases the vitality of the soil, aligns it’s energies and feeds the gnomes! We used this for over five years in our London garden and the soil, which was heavy clay, improved very quickly. Our most obvious change was when we dug up the lawn which left two inches of top soil on top of a foot or two of clay. We used the preparation and, after six months, you could put the fork in and find reasonable top soil for the depth of the fork. We did nothing else to the ground – but the Gnomes did! They got it all working, got the worms busy, moved minerals around – we tested the pH regularly and watched it gradually coming closer and closer to neutral. Try it yourself!
The Ondines (sometimes spelt undines) are the Water guardians. Popular artists in the 19th century tended to draw them as female and water is often felt to have feminine qualities.
However, there is another side to this. Consider a raging torrent, the sea, a cold mountain spring – these have qualities that can feel masculine as well as feminine too. Within the British tradition some of the Beings associated with water are definitely masculine, such as Manawyddan, Barinthos. Some of the guardians of water in the British stories are male too, for instance Nechtan. This picture is a detail from one of Arthur Rackham’s paintings “Jewels from the Deep”.
Water has qualities that contain both feminine and masculine energy and this is a very important thing to remember in both gardening and life. A good garden, and a good life, is made up of both polarities so it’s helpful to think about water in this way and not stay with whatever “norms” you may have got habituated with. If water was masculine for you then feel into it’s feminine qualities. if water was feminine for you then work your way into its masculine qualities. Include them both.
Water is about the flow of life between different forms, between the soil and the plant, between the roots and the stem, leaves, flowers, fruits. In transpiration and photosynthesis it helps the exchange of energy between the plant, the air and the sun.
The picture is of a “flow form”. It’s like a waterfall but the basins are so designed that they make the water swirl in figure-of-8 movements which simulate the natural flowing motion in a good stream. Large scale versions of these are used in some water treatment plants in Britain and abroad. You can find out more at Iris Water – Flowforms and sculptured water features.
As well as simulating natural water movement the lemniscate motion also follows the pattern of “energy” movement in all living things. This is the bi-polar motion which is the movement of the masculine and feminine energy around the system. By having this movement in your garden – and you can even buy very small ones for indoor use too – you invite the Ondines to come into a very congenial environment and you also stimulate the energy flow in the whole garden (or house). It has the “blueprint” of cosmic energy pattern to follow and will align itself with this.
Just to give you an idea of how it looks in the cosmos how about this? It’s the pattern of a galaxy, and the “eye” at the centre is a part of the natural photograph not a “graphic implant”.
Don’t Nature do it well!
And doesn’t it also make you think perhaps nature has a reason for using this shape, maybe we should go along with it and try to learn more about it. Think about where else this double spiral pattern is used – most of us can think of DNA. Perhaps this really is one of the basic patterns of Life???
Sylphs the Air guardians. They take care of the flowers, of the reproductive cycle of the plant.
In their “desire” to exchange genes with other plants they provide food for many insects, which in turn provide food for other birds and animals. Their abundance nourishes others.
Salamanders guard the potential for new life, the fruit and seeds.
Again these potential new plants provide nourishment for birds and animals, including humans.