The Lake of the Goddess

Following my magical fortnight in Poland, I lingered in Slovakia for a couple of days and then flew to Switzerland for a week with my buddy Slaven. Lausanne was hideous. Just hideous.

And the only thing worse than the weather was the company. Obviously we had no fun together.

 None whatsoever.

From Switzerland I bussed down into Italy. My friend Cesar married two days later in San Gimignano, a picturesque Tuscan jewel of towers and stone. On the same day that marriage equality was legalised in the United States, I found myself in a Catholic cathedral watching my friend marry the woman of his dreams. I don't think this is irony, but Alanis Morisette confused me for the rest of my life, so it may or it may not be.

As the sun went down in the Tuscan sky, we drank and danced and I had a great deal of fun… too much fun. At some point my memory goes blank.

The next day, with barely 24 hours left in Italy to complete a holy pilgrimage, I hitched a ride to sultry Florence and then dragged my hungover body onto a train for Rome. South east of Rome is a lake called Nemi di Lago – Lake Nemi, or ‘Diana’s mirror’. The ancients believed this lake to be divine, and dedicated the waters to the Triple Goddess, Diana Nemorensis (one of the triplicate deities from whom the Christian church appropriated the Trinity doctrine, not to mention from which the cult of Mary worship evolved). Her sacred grove on the lakeshore was tended by a warrior-priest called Rex Nemorensis (King of the Grove). Rex Nemorensis lived by his wits and his savagery, knowing that a contender for his position might appear any day. The priesthood could only pass to a runaway slave who had nothing left to lose, for whom the prospect of a temporary respite before a violent death was still preferable to returning and being killed. He was required to break a bough from the sacred oak tree in the grove if he could, and then kill the current priest in a fight to the death. Rex Nemorensis was one of the earlier examples of the historically recurrent Messiah motif – the divine king who must die and be reborn.

If you cannot imagine why I desperately needed to visit this place then you do not know me. I arrived in Rome at 6pm – much later than desired – and narrowly made a regional train connection with only three minutes to spare. After an hour I reached Albano Laziale and failed spectacularly at finding a taxi to take me the remaining 9km to my destination. My hope began to fade and I imagined myself dejectedly giving up on my mission. But a kind Romanian woman named Maria took me under her wing and escorted me on a public bus to the village Genzano, walking distance from Lake Nemi.  

As I arrived at the Lake, the sun was receding from the top of the hills with an evanescent ruby glow. I descended to the shore with mounting excitement, already basking in the success of my mission. Dragonflies hovered above and swallows danced. The sky darkened into navy hues, turning the moon into a dazzling cosmic pearl that cast a spell upon my brain.

When I finally left the water and put on fresh clothes, fireflies had come out to dance in the night air. Like guardian spirits of the Lake, these haunting will-o-wisps pulsed golden light to the rhythm of a human heartbeat and filled the air with a sparkling magic effect. I walked alongside the Lake, flooding the space around with me with love and appreciation, even when I reached the dark grove that had lurked ominously in the twilight on the way in. Here the darkness solidified and took on foreboding forms. I could feel the resentment of the dead for the living. How many priests of Diana died violently in that place? The echo of their brutal deaths still remained and I could feel their menace and hostility pressing against my mind. So I opened my arms wide in surrender and let them do their worst, knowing that I offered something more appealing to them than revenge.

“You are loved!” I said over and over to the malignant shadows, “you are loved!” 

The fireflies surrounded me all the way up to the top of encircling hills and I both laughed and cried for joy, energised and vitalised as though from a night of deep rest.

“From the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia’s trees
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain”

Witches in the Woods

Kashubia is an area in the north of Poland where the Goths landed 2000 years ago and mingled their blood with the resident Slavs, thus giving birth to the Kashubian people. In Gdynia on the north coast, I stayed with a friend who designed a five day adventure through the Kashubian countryside; the first day brought our dusty feet to the cemeteries of Uniradze.

A day of hiking then took us to the small town of Stężyca, after which we witnessed a religious festival that effectively shuts the country down for half a day.

We went kayaking on the lake for a while before hiking onward to the stone circles of Węsiory.

This site is considered by many to be evil and haunted, which is the most enticing invitation imaginable.

The second great site is the Guardian circle - this has been in place for thousands of years, and yet no moss grows. Other such circles have accumulated dirt and moss, growing over to create the appearance of a mound. However inside the core of the Guardian circle, the stones are clean.

Night fell, transforming the forest into an inky, deceptive morass. We left with quickened steps as the juniper bushes moved in the corners of our eyes, shifting between the pine trunks like shadows of the dead. Beneath a blushing, sleepy sky, under the vigil of Venus and Mars, we walked into the village with the company of bats and a serenading chorus of frogs.

After another day of hitch-hiking and walking through countrysides scattered with giant stork nests, we encountered the neolithic circles at Odry. It is uncertain whether the stones were placed to mark locations of strong natural energy and then used as burial grounds by later generations, or if burial of the dead was synonymous with the creation of astronomically aligned stone momuments. 

On two separate days, we spent hours at the beach hunting for pieces of amber. It is not the time of year when violent winter storms dredge up the debris of prehistoric forests from the floor of the Baltic ocean, but there is still treasure to be found.