Sudden insight into Lavondyss "Bone Forest" story

[silvermaple]

(from my continuing mental wanderings before writing something)  So  Nin (ogam, first group, fifth letter) has the sense is related to a couple of different things in the Irish paradigm.  A spear, from the second battle of Moytura, that killed Ruadan, son of Brighid (from the Tuath de) and Bres (a Fomorian).  And a weaver's beam - a forked stick at its simplest, like a traditional stang (see Sacred Mask, Sacred Dance - Chas Clifton). And associated with the first keening - Brighid on losing Ruadan.  And the ash tree from folklore.

Which brings me to the three or 4 page story in Lavondyss called "The Bone Forest.."  A small black hole in a novel, it is, from a novel that at times seems more of an instruction manual on the British magical tradition than a novel.  The story outline is simple

• Lame hunter can't hunt
• Meets up with a traveling outcast woman who he calls Ash
• Ash casts 2 twigs to find the forest and one piece of bone to find the animal and instructs the hunter where to go
• Hunter is successful.  He give Ash a piece of the meat and feeds the village
• The hunter rejuvenates
• The cycle repeats until Ash draws a forest and animal that she says will kill him. (the bone is from her dead child which echoes the story of Tallis in the main part of the novel)
• He goes anyway and is killed
• She packs up saying that it is always this way, as the animal which is actually a rejected part of the hunter at some level prepares to destroy the village.  The hunter only took and did not give back and thus sealed his doom.

On one level, this follows the man-separated-from-nature-takes-and-is-destroyed narrative.  On an esoteric level, it is about failing to be in connection with the spiritual world and thus falling into the trap of ego-inflation.  It was not enough to share a piece of meat with Ash for there was no acknowledgement, respect or honor.  And so, it was uncontrolled fear - the ogam huath- that killed him in the end.