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I wish you blessings on your new path, wodr.

It is not one to be taken lightly, as I'm sure you know.

The poet is a co-creator god. He can sing material things into manifestation, just like the Sirens were said to sing sailors to their doom. I have experienced spirits singing me into a magical realm. Perhaps that's what those old stories about sailors and sirens were really about.

Poetry – unlike post Enlightenment thinking – is beyond reason. But it’s not unreasonable. It just reaches further into a more holistic construct that satisfies the heart as well as the head.

The ancients used to orally record and transmit their knowledge in verse, through a priestly class that kept it secret. They hid their truths in metaphor and allegory, and created beautiful stories over the top of their deeper truths.

As Thomas Hardy once said:

“If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have left him alone.”

In earlier days, the words themselves (and not just their meaning) were believed to contain power. Sound is vibration and as material creation is made up of atoms vibrating at different rates, you only have to change the vibration with a word of power to get it to vibrate differently. That’s why the witches’ books of magic – the Grimoires - contained what are known as ‘spells’. If you knew how to spell the word of power, you could use it. These grimoires go back the demotic spells of the Greek magical papyri, c. 200 CE, which were recovered from the destroyed Library of Alexandria.

WB Yeats says that the poets or bards of ancient Ireland were so feared because of this:

“The bards were the most powerful influence in the land, and all manner of superstitious reverence environed them round. No gift they demanded might be refused them. ... A poem and an incantation were almost the same. A satire could fill a whole countryside with famine. Something of the same feeling still survives, perhaps, in the extreme dread of being ‘rhymed up’ by some local maker of unkindly verses....”

When Zoroaster wanted to introduce his new religion in Babylonia, he had to do a deal with the most powerful power brokers in the land. Who were they? They weren’t the politicians. They weren’t the monarchy or aristocracy. They were the Kavis, the ancient lineage of Vedic poets who carried all the lore – from maths and astronomy to astrology and botany – in their orally transmitted verses of beautiful metaphor and allegory.

And so that’s why we have hundreds of wonderful ancient stories or myths from all over the world that take us into a beautiful realm of rhyme and meter to describe how the stars slowly travelled across the sky, from one age to another. And instead of giving us a cold mathematical formula, they talk of great heroes, like Ilmarinen who has to fix a peg into the roof of the universe to stop it spinning off its axis; or of Atlas who, in classical art, is not supporting on his shoulders the world, but the whole celestial sphere.



Nowadays, we only have fragments of these great poems and because we are trained in post-Enlightenment thinking and reasoning, we hungrily scour them for historical facts or scientific models or mathematical formulae. We live in an Age where poetry is considered to be a superficial frippery, relegated to the dustbin of St Valentine’s Day. In any case, we’re not trained in how to appreciate it, especially as the sound vibration of the words can be lost in translation.

But a poet in tune with the spirits to teach him can actually change the world.