Last month, working on two book launches, I would go on sunny mornings to a corner of a nearby field and sit at its edge, to remind myself there was life beyond the desk. Behind me was an ancient hawthorn hedge and before me several branched beings with spiky capsules who had lost most of their leaves, their bare golden arms raised to the sky. An alien invader plant, an arable ‘weed’, a poison and hallucinogen, and one of the most loved and beautiful flowers of our plant enquiry: datura.
For many years, the chapter I wrote about this flower felt too esoteric, too underworld, to publish anywhere. But this evening, as I sat by the fire and watched the half moon rising among the oak branches, it came back to me. Still mysterious, still edgy, like the plant itself.
When you are not sure how to proceed, you leave a space and wait for what appears. This fourth wind, third alchemical stage that began The Red Tent, the rubedo, can reveal the well-tempered result of your work but sometimes you need to remember how you got to this point: the challenging traverse of the nigredo.
Sometimes, though you are hesitant, you have to tell the dream.
The flowers are what I remember best of the Underworld years, working with Mark, heads bent together beneath a mesquite trees, under a Welsh hill, learning to decipher their marvellous alphabet. The journey would have been impossible without the flowers. They gave us welcome, they infused our bodies; their high vibrations balanced and tuned us for the dark. They taught us to see, to be still, to be awake, alert, to be here, in time, in place. And most of all, allowed us to touch, in our night dreams, the sparkling hem of this planet’s multi-dimensional intelligence.
So, as we move towards winter solstice, I wanted to share one of the more unseen ‘dark flower’ encounters, that underpinned our sunnier, more light-hearted plant work. The underground ‘kiva’ aspect if you like, the dreaming, of an otherwise visible ‘ceilidh’ practice.
It starts with a compilation of the plants I dreamed with in those Earth Dreaming Bank years, as Mark and I began our plant practice in Oxford and then went to Arizona, where the flower blooms at night along the highways and around the cities’ vacant lots.
Dreaming with Flowers
from The Earth Dreaming Bank
In Oxford when I begin the task, I place a sprig of flowers and leaves by my bedside, a pack of seeds under my pillow. I dream of mistletoe,, heather, St. John’s wort, juniper, stinking hellebore, dandelion leaves, burdock roots, belladonna flowers. I merge with alder trees, with yew. A mullein stem shoots through my dreams, like the axis between the worlds. I find rose petals in my father’s desk and their fragrance fills a dark room. I dream that eucalyptus trees are being stripped, that carrots are falling asleep. I smoke a huge cigar wrapped in a tobacco leaf on a London underground train and clear the air of ghosts. I dream that potato fields hoard our unwritten history, that a chestnut tree in Hyde Park shelters all beings who stand beneath its generous canopy.
In Arizona, I dream the stems of ocotillo and agave run through my spine and fill me with energy. Black cohosh appears like a beacon at inter-dimensional points, arms of filaree embrace me, inmortal spikes my head. I am shown how the amaranth feeds the flowers, how salt bushes feed the earth. A daisy chain links us; wild grass seeds reveal our destiny.
I witness medicine people from Mexico, Peru and Siberia cure people with certain leaves and roots. I walk through vast Russian forests where huge arelias wait silently. Outside in the English garden the apple tree is on fire, inside the house the nuclear force of sunflower seeds make dimensional shifts within my being. In London an angelica plant bursts its golden head and the seeds fly everywhere. We plant them in the Chiltern meadows; and giant hogweeds, as big as suns, line the canal corridors of Cambridge and Oxford as we sail by.
The flowers appear as themselves, inviolate, sometimes as people, uttering prophetic words, as directions or abstract shapes. They act as beacons and signposts, as guides. They show me their movements, their energy fields, their structure and how they relate to my own. When I place morning glory seeds under my pillow, a group of beings lead me to the top of a precipice and show me time in the universe. I see it stretched into infinity, compressed like a mussel shell. When I place betony in a glass, four dragons of different colours assist me to make an alphabet of plants, when I sleep beside flowering mugwort gathered at full moon, a young naked woman appears inside a cell where Mark and I are kept prisoner. “I have beautiful breasts,” she says, and when we behold her beauty, we suddenly find ourselves outside the prison walls.
Always the plants speak of liberation, of breaking out from a small stuck space into a place of movement and feeling, out of the closed city of the mind into the open air.
Sometimes in dreams I bring these flowers to people. I give an old large woman some datura leaves to smoke as she is wheezing. She is many people’s mother. She is the mother of Charles, of Andrew, of Mimi. She is not my mother however. “You know a lot of things, dear,” she says when I tell her about datura, as she sits underneath the elder tree at the bottom of my English garden.
Dreaming of Datura. Oxford 1999
I had bought a datura the week before. It appeared out of nowhere in the market. “Beautiful isn’t it. I have one in my garden,” said a tall thin man as we gazed at the dark green-leaved plant with long white flowers in a pot. I put it on the ledge outside my bedroom where it grows huge and sets seed in spiky capsules - a Datura stramonium, sometimes known as Angel’s Trumpet. Some visitors to the house thought it was very beautiful and others fled horrified from the room. One night I put some seeds under my pillow and had this dream.
I am in 17th century London in the “stews”. It is a place like the Inns of Court or Shepherds Market, narrow, paved, dark, with houses crammed together. I go into the door and see a young prostitute insist to her client that he wash himself before lying with her. When he protests she tells him it’s how things are done here and so he complies. I follow them upstairs. When I go into her small room however she is alone, there are only the two of us. I am aware I am a double messenger and wearing a cloak.
“The king has need of you!” I tell her. “Then I have no choice” she says quietly and sits down on a narrow bed. I am aware I am from the king and my “double” is with him. I do not insist she comes but sit down beside her. “You want me because I am bald,” she says and turns to face straight ahead. It is then I notice that she has no ear. She is naked, bald, womanly, but also androgynous. I am aware I am being tested in some way and must not be revolted by her physical appearance. I do not say anything but make it clear this move is of her own free will. Finally she elects to come with me and her ear and her hair return.
(14th July 1999)
I awake with the feeling that everything needed to be embraced, even war. When I tell Mark the dream I realise this is the Angel strumpet, the spirit of the plant, appearing on a historic date: the storming of the Bastille.
I will dream of this flower more than any other during the years I work with plants and dreams. It will appear as itself by the roadside, pulsating with energy as I put my head into its trumpet head, or as the seeds I carry in my heart to a cave in the Himalayas, where I am shown how it connects the divided hemispheres of the brain.
But mostly datura appears as a London prostitute.
There are some plants that can connect you with female power - the elder tree, the coral bean bush, belladonna flowers. All of them have a demanding and liberating presence. But it is one thing thinking you have female power and another being female power. Some women like the idea of it so they can dominate their bosses or their boyfriends, in reparation. But the datura is independent of this power struggle. She is alluring, but she is also bald and has a repellent aspect. She doesn’t have a husband. Sex is her job, not herself. She is female and also androgynous. She is not a “woman” which is to say she does not belong to the domesticated world.
The 17th century stews
In Europe in the 17th century the relationship between king and mistress was particular. She was not the official consort, the Queen, she was the courtesan who, though subject to the male king, had a kind of freedom the wives and official females did not. She could be a free-thinker, independent, intelligent, gifted and witty and was allowed in “men’s places” as an equal, where other women, whose business was care of husband and children and her position, were forbidden. So this dream is showing an affair of the heart and mind here, not of society or genetic duty. An alchemical relationship directed by Venus, rather than the domain of Hera. This is not to give attention to history, mythology or even to prostitution, it is saying something about relationship, the kind of woman the king is looking for.
Who is the king? This is mysterious. I am being tested by the plant. Some plants, especially those to do with female power, test the human dreamers to see if they are up to the job. I am a messenger but can I deliver the message, and can I take one back?
You could say, as we did in the practice, the invisible king is the sun and the datura prostitute is the Earth, and the dreamer, the human being, is the go-between. I am a double messenger in the dream. Part of me is with the sun, with spirit, and part of me is physically here on the Earth. The sun is sending me to say it needs the Earth, or this aspect of the Earth. When I sit by the datura and wait for her reply her ear begins to restore itself. And then her hair. She is listening, with her trumpet flowers, for something that is beyond my sight.
I am sitting down beside the woman
We had learned to sit beside flowers in the same way we had learned to sit inside dreams and let them speak in their own language, to let meaning and coherence emerge. I deliver the message but I don’t get the answer until I sit down beside the datura and we get a feeling for each other and our positions. The feeling I have is that I cannot be repulsed by her appearance, and her feeling is that, though it is the king’s command she come, it has to be of her own free will which is only hers to make.
Datura is a power plant which means it operates in the energetic realm of intent. I knew almost nothing about the plant a when I worked with the greenhouse datura in Oxford. I learned more when I went to live in America, where it grows wild on the Western highways as Datura innoxia and wrightii. It is called sacred datura there because its strong visionary properties are highly valued by medicine men and women.
Not that many modern people have treated it as such. It is famous in history for driving soldiers crazy. Some of the Mexican workers in the desert town destroyed the plants that grew by the parking lots, calling it the devil’s plant. Other people coveted its beauty for their gardens. Seed catalogues called it “bewitching”. Young herbalists I met sought its attention-shifting power, but found themselves confused, lost, unable to comprehend its workings. But I didn’t feel any of those things in the dream. I felt that you can’t “get” the power of something that is intact.
Although she is beautiful, the datura, with her big white trumpets, picadie-edged with violet, or rose pink, hanging like lanterns, in the trees of California gardens and the slopes of the Andes, her real allure is not in her looks.
She is a night plant, her power is invisible.
Highway 80, Arizona, 1st September 2001
As the light fades Mimi, Mark and I wait in silence by the great horned devil’s claw plants. We have turned the truck off the road and gone down by a hollow before the San Pedro river where the cottonwoods grow. The rains have been coming for a month now and already the tracks are full of green amaranth, and dogbane flowers that gleam underneath the mesquite scrub like little white wheels. But we are not here to see these plants: we are here to watch the grand opening of the sacred datura.
Like other night flowers of the desert the datura summons her pollinator, the ghostly hummingbird moth, known as the Sphinx, with her powerful impelling scent.
As the crimson sky deepens to indigo, we watch these moon-dusty visitors arrive and dance about the white trumpets that are now unfurling. The moths disappear into the flowers, then reappear staggering. Some spend the whole night there.
The sacred datura raises her thirty heads to the stars that appearing in the vast Arizona sky. It is so clear you can see the heavenly doorways of the constellations circling above our heads, each trumpet raised to a different star, calling out its name in silence.
As you wait crouched by the flowers that’s when you see the dance, a love dance between the plant and the pollinator. You can see this dance in all flowers that attract the nectar-loving flying creatures towards themselves: hummingbirds, bats, butterflies, bees. The flowers with their colours, scent, shape and beauty hold a certain kind of frequency that is intensified by the visitors. You can feel this vibratory exchange when you sit by a buddleia covered in butterflies, or by a sage bush attracted by hummingbirds. It’s a frequency in which only beauty and co-operation with all living beings exists.
Raised in a materialistic, scientific world it is hard to see this exchange. We think if we pay for things or experiences with money it is enough. We cast the datura, the female allure, as a prostitute, something we can buy or sell. In our world this is sufficient, but on the Earth this exchange does not count. Because we are not giving anything of ourselves. We want to possess people on whom we can project our lonely fantasies for a night or for a whole lifetime. This is called relationship but has nothing to do with relationship. Relationship is a dance with another being, who is complete and autonmous, who comes to you of their own free will, as you go to them.
In the dream I am coming from the King, who has need of a female presence that is independent, that keeps a clean house, even though it is in the city brothel, tarnished by history. He doesn’t want to fuck the prostitute, he needs her for something else. It’s important I do not despise her, that she comes of her own free will. So I wait. Just as we wait to see how the sacred datura allured the moths and the stars towards herself, towards the Earth.
Female power is uncharted territory. It’s intact, just like Mimi said of the young girls who reminded her of the flower, just before men sniffed them out, fucked them and turn them into servants. So this is where the love begins, with the power of the immaculate. There has to be a different relationship between us. “She wants something for it,” said the young male apprentice, hungry for the plant’s power, but not prepared to meet the flower on its own grounds.
Too right she does. But not what you think she wants. The datura calls the moth but she doesn’t need the moth. She can self-pollinate. Something else is going on when the visitors arrive. The prostitute desires to be seen into wholeness, intact, beautiful, mysterious as she is, no matter how many times she has been used. The exchange between the moth and the flower is joyful and mysterious. Something you can feel with your heart, with Mark and Mimi, in the dark on a starry night. Something you wait for, the moment when a door opens and life turns around. The datura was always about love right from the start. Only love can look at female power and tell her she is free.
Who am I in the dream? I am the Sphinx moth, the messenger, and I am also the datura. I am a being who though she has been used becomes whole in her decision to go with spirit. She is showing me how to look at myself, at the female being, how when she is asked she will go to the King of her own free will. It is her destiny. The moment of revelation.
Thanks for reading everyone. You can read other pieces about power plants in the book I wrote with Mark about our plant practice, 52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth. There are also several unpublished flowers from the book in my archive blog, including Hemp, on the breaking of illusion, and Agave, on the endarkening of the American dream.
Very much look forward to this but wanted to share that we planted our first Datura/Hell’s Bells/Moonflower/Devil’s Trumpet this year. We didn’t expect it to flower in its first year but it did anyway. We started an evening routine of sitting out back, watching as the flowers opened. The first night that many blooms opened all at once you could smell them in the air and right at dusk a giant hummingbird moth came to visit them.
Lovely photo by Mark
I so enjoyed this. I'm now going to try placing some of the dried rowan berries I've been stitching into an embroidery under my pillow and see how my dreams fare. They are vivid on a nightly basis.