Spun Full Of Fire

hooking berries to a thread

This year’s rowan berry charm hung in the kitchen with those from the past three years.

Hello and welcome, lovely Between The Moons friends.

This time, I wanted to write about a tree that always catches my eye, making its presence felt along the lanes at the moment - the rowan.

Now, I am sure that I have written about the lore of the rowan before and there are lots of other places both on the internet and in books where you can read about the old ways of protecting livestock and home alike with the making of rowan crosses or by tying whole branches over portal points. The much-quoted spoken charm runs: ‘Rowan berries and red thread, put all evil to its speed’ (or, ‘put the witches to their speed’ if you happen not to be one yourself).

But still I wanted to write about rowan.

One of the candles in my cycle of story candles for the eight festivals in the Wheel of the Year was called Rowan Dance. Rather than setting rowan’s tale at Lammas or the autumn equinox when the orange-red berries send points of flame racing through the hedgerows, I chose it for May’s Eve when rowan’s froth of flower umbels burst upwards from the tips of its branches, almost like stubby candles themselves. That candle vessel was glazed in white, for the rowan blossom, with little undercurrents of rusty red to bring to mind the fox which was one of the seasonal totems I had chosen for my accompanying stories.

With ‘the hill’ as its mythical location, the other major motif was the dragon, as rowan roots look like nothing so much as silvery dragons writhing around each other, and there are plenty of tales of rowans on hills being guarded by dragons, or is it the other way around? One explanation of ley lines is that they mark the course of earth dragons snaking across the land from power-place to power-place, and a lone rowan tree, especially when aflame with berry, is certainly a potent marker.