Mythago Wood - 1 by Robert Holdstock Read Free Book Online

each other,
created by the Saxon peasants during their time of repression by the Norman
invader.'
    'I don't comprehend this at all, Chris - but what's a "ley matrix"?
What's an "oak vortex"? Does it mean anything?'
    As we sipped scotch and water in the sitting-room, watching the dusk draw
closer, the yard beyond the window greying into a place of featureless shapes,
Christian explained how a man called Alfred Watkins had visited our father on
several occasions and shown him on a map of the country how straight lines
connected places of spiritual or ancient power - the barrows, stones and
churches of three different cultures. These lines he called leys, and believed
that they existed as a form of earth energy running below the ground, but
influencing that which stood upon it.
    My father had thought about leys, and apparently tried to measure the energy
in the ground below the forest, but without success. And yet he had measured something in the oakwoods - an energy associated with all the life that grew there. He
had found a spiral vortex around each tree, a sort of aura, and those spirals
bounded not just trees, but whole stands of trees, and glades.
    Over the years he had mapped the forest. Christian brought out that map of
the woodland area, and I looked at it again, but from a different point of view,
beginning to understand the marks made upon it by the man who had spent so much
time within the territories it depicted. Circles within circles were marked,
crossed and skirted by straight lines, some of which were associated with the
two pathways we called south and deep track. The letters HB in the middle of the
vast acreage of forest were clearly meant to refer to the 'hogback' glade that
existed there, a clearing that neither Christian nor I had ever been able to
find. There were zones marked out as 'spiral oak', 'dead ash zone' and
'oscillating traverse'.
    The old man believed that all life is surrounded by an energetic aura - you
can see the human aura as a faint glow in certain light. In these ancient
woodlands, primary woodlands, the combined aura forms something far more
powerful, a sort of creative field that can interact with our unconscious. And
it's in the unconscious that we carry what he calls the pre-mythago - that's
unconscious that we carry what he calls the pre-mythago - that's myth imago, the
image of the idealized form of a myth creature. The image takes on substance in
a natural environment, solid flesh, blood, clothing, and - as you saw -
weaponry. The form of the idealized myth, the hero figure, alters .with cultural
changes, assuming the identity and technology of the time. When one culture
invades another - according to father's theory - the heroes are made manifest,
and not just in one location! Historians and legend-seekers argue about where
Arthur of the Britons, and Robin Hood really lived and fought, and don't
realize that they lived in many sites. And another important fact to
remember is that when the mind image of the mythago forms it forms in the whole population . . .and when it is no longer needed, it remains in our
collective unconscious, and is transmitted through the generations.'
    'And the changing form of the mythago,' I said, to see if I had understood my
sketchy reading of father's notes, 'is based on an archetype, an archaic primary
image which father called the Urscumug, and from which all later forms come. And
he tried to raise the Urscumug from his own unconscious mind . . .'
    'And failed to do so,' said Christian, 'although not for want of trying. The
effort killed him. It weakened him so much that his body couldn't take the pace.
But he certainly seems to have created several of the more recent adaptations of
the Urscumug.'
    There were so many questions, so many areas that begged for clarification.
One above all: 'But a thousand years ago, if I understand the notes correctly,
there was a country-wide need of the hero, the legendary figure, acting
for the side of Right. How can