Interview with Michael Dames, author of Spirits of Severn
About the Author
Born in 1938, Michael Dames was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School and Birmingham University. He worked in education for much of his career, teaching both Art and History of Art. Between 1976 and 1981 he was Rochdale's Town Artist.
He has had one-man exhibitions of his art works in Rochdale, Hull, Manchester, Oxford, Droitwich, Northwich, and London. In 1976, he began a long-term investigation of the mythography of the West of England, Wales and Ireland with The Silbury Treasure (Thames and Hudson, 1976; reprinted 2004) and The Avebury Cycle the following year (Thames and Hudson, 1977; 2nd edition 1992). Both books are now regarded as classics of the genre. Since 1990, he has dedicated himself to writing full-time. His books include: Mythic Ireland (Thames and Hudson, 1992); Ireland, a Sacred Journey (Element Books, 2000); Merlin and Wales (Thames and Hudson, 2002); Taliesin's Travels (Heart of Albion Press, 2006); Silbury, Resolving the Enigma (The History Press, 2010); Pagans Progress (Strange Attractor Press, 2017).
Can you tell us a little about yourself and your career studying mythology?
I was born on the Nile delta, but as an infant carried to a village below the Chiltern Hills in Bucks, where I remained throughout my youth. I worked on a local farm in my spare time, haymaking, cleaning cow stalls, and became aware of the daily and seasonal changes. I was earthed.
I first became involved in mythology in 1969. In that year professor R. Atkinson failed in his attempt to find Bronze Age treasure beneath Silbury Hill in Wiltshire. Instead, to his dismay he discovered that the hill had been constructed by Neolithic people, a fact that reduced him to silence. So I wondered ‘what is wrong with the Neolithic?’ I realised that it marked the start of farming in Britain, and that the ‘treasure’ which Atkinson had sought was the soil and mud carefully set under the chalk hill, which could be interpreted as the full womb of a Mother Earth image, the rest of whose body was defined by the carefully shaped surrounding moat, whose water as provided by the clay layer, shared by the nearby Swallowhead spring, birthplace of the river Kennet, previously known as the Cunnit. Thus the monument was inspired by the topography creating a double connection to the land. Subsequently I extended this insight across the entire set of Neolithic monuments around Avebury. In The Avebury Cycle, 1997, I related the reclining goddess image within the nearby West Kennet long barrow, to the mother as the Hag of death , renewed to new life at the Sanctuary, before processing along the West Kennet stone avenue to marriage within Avebury’s henge, prior to returning to Silbury again. Thus the shape of the ever present deity changed with the farming seasons and with phases in the human life cycle.
What interests you about mythology in the British Isles specifically?
In my book, mythic Ireland, published by Thames and Hudson in 1992, I wrote about the river Shannon, Ireland’s longest waterway. In belief it runs to an undersea well named Connle’s, regarded as the store of supernatural wisdom, and overhung by a tree yielding nuts , similarly endowed. Some of these nuts were swallowed by a salmon which carried them to the river’s source at Shannon Pot, where Siannon, the maiden who was the river, enjoyed them, prior to drowning herself in the Pot, where she integrated the worldly with supernatural realms. In the British Isles many rivers have a female embodiment; e.g the Dee, a name that means ‘goddess’, and the Ribble(with her Jenny Green teeth), to name but two.
Tell us a little about the premise of your new book, Spirits of Severn. Can you tell us about some of the British Isle myths that inspired the book? Including the similarities with the myths around Sabrina and other myths from around the world?
The name Sabrina was the name of the Severn to our Celtic inhabitants, and was recognised and adopted by the Romans. Sabrina as a name derives from a Sanskrit word containing sab , meaning ‘milk’, and from Sabana, the Indian’ magic cow of plenty’. So we should not be surprised to see two white rocks that stand over her source, named in Welsh as Y’r Fuch Wen ar Llo, ‘the White Cow and Calf stones. Here the Cow smiles at her offspring. Likewise Ireland’s river Boyne is named after a White cow goddess named Bou –Vinda.
Today, at the Severn’s source two posts name the river in Welsh and English. Its waters are shared between two nations. A second source of the same river is named the Clywedog from Welsh clywedd meaning ‘audible , loud, sonerous’. Her Indian equivalent is Vak a goddess ’of speech’ who was identified with the ‘wish cow’, equivalent to the entire cosmos. On a hill overlooking the Clywedog traditional May Day gatherings took place, during which people leapt from the summits of two round barrows placed on the flat summit of that hill, in order to include the ancestors in their joyful celebrations.
Pumlumon is the name of the tallest mountain in this area. Welsh pum means five. It suggests a four plus one pattern, displaying the four cardinal points, marked by a lumon a ‘beacon ‘ fire, with an observer at the centre of this array. Thus Pumlumon invites humanity into the holy cow’s territory.
The upper Severn gains extra mythic charge because it originally fed the headwaters of the river Dee, until compelled to change course by an ice sheet. On Lake Bala, near the Dee’s source, the goddess Ceridwen , gathered herbs, that she stewed in a cauldron to extract their magic essence, A farm boy named Taliesin watched over the cauldron and he was accidentally splashed by its contents. Fearing Ceridwen, he ran off, and changed himself into a variety of animal shapes in his attempt to escape. But as a grain of wheat she, as a hen, swallowed him, before eventually giving birth to him again. Whereupon as a fish, he swam around Wales, and was hauled ashore on May morning by a prince, near Aberystwyth, and treated as the returning sun god. This concise tale is truly mythic in that it links a humble boy to the entire chain of creation both of plants and animals, and to the sun. One can rightly claim it as part of the Severn’s inheritance.
But on its modern route the Severn passes into post-mythic times. It meets Darwin’s childhood home at Shrewsbury before cutting through a ridge at Ironbridge, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, where technology took over, and produced the first nuclear power stations to be built on the Severn’s shore below Gloucester. Yet wild boar still rampage in the Forest of Dean, and the mythic boar swims the length of the estuary to deliver the first grain. Technology has not had the last word, and the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge produced some of their best work on its shores.
Tell us about some of your other works.
If Avebury provides a uniquely complete mythic scenario in Britain, the scattered partial remains of mythic cycles are still present elsewhere. I have attempted to trace them in my book Pagans Progress of 2017, in which I also provide a summary of the nature of myth.
Spirits of Severn by Michael Dames is published by Austin Macauley Publishers and is available on Austinmacauley.com and Amazon and all good booksellers.