Fennel and The Listening-Returning Gods
Fennel is a plant of between, of translation. To translate is to listen and makeshift, substitute, rearrange, improvise. To translate is to listen with the next listener in mind. Fennel is beloved by gods who go between, who have been to otherworlds and return to tell the tale.
Fennel befriends god-thieves who steal cattle, steal fire, steal into the nooks and crannies of the world. Fennel loves torchbearers in the dark. Fennel allies with the gods who fetch powers, gifts, and other god-people from unreachable places.
Prometheus, Hermes, Dionysus. Gods of substitutes, gods who transmute, translate, take-across. Prometheus who descended from Olympus to Earth with sacred fire. Dionysus who descended from Earth into Hades and fetched Ariadne and Semele.
And always, ever Hermes.
As I write this, Mercury the psychopomp-planet is leaving the heart of the Sun in Scorpio and I’m thinking about the bottomless, swampy springs and lakes of Lerna. Lake Lerna is a watery road to the underworld. The dreaded Hydra was its gatekeeper. Sacred to Demeter, pathway of Dionysus. Waters of healing and of peril.
Pausanias wrote, “The water of the lake is, to all appearance, calm and quiet but, although it is such to look at, every swimmer who ventures to cross it is dragged down, sucked into the depths, and swept away.”
But what would it be like to allow oneself to be dragged into those depths? What would lead you there? Dionysus went into Lerna to retrieve his mother Semele and his love Ariadne from the underworld. He gave Hades a sprig of myrtle, a plant of Venus, in exchange for his beloved dead. His request was granted. (The answer is always Venus.)
Myrtle and Dionysus’s beloved fennel, out of which his staff is made, were added to wine fermentations. Fennel is also sacred to Mercury, another god who can travel between worlds and return to tell the tale.
We learn a lot about fennel by tracking its attachments. Fennel tells stories that trespass, transmute, retrieve, and otherwise otherworld-travel. When Mercury is in Scorpio, we are at Lerna. Speech that goes in and comes out as a kind of fetching.
Questions I’m asking: in how many languages, verbal and nonverbal, do I listen? What trans-species translations are possible? What connections could I retrieve — to the beings around me and in otherworlds — if I improvised ways to listen I haven't tried before?
Could I steal across the boundary of my own body and into the ecosystem of which I am a part, and make my body an ear? Sipping fennel, I wonder how I can be a lake-gate, a reflection and door for more translations to slip through. How is my very breath a translation, every inhale listening to the stories of the flora who exhaled, every exhale another story I am telling them?
Listening to the myths that plants tell and what they can teach us about the astral is what I offer in my Plant & Planet Devotion work. If you’d like a guide to help you build relationships with the planet-gods and the plants who love them, let’s talk. That offering shares the heart of my practice with you. It’s too much to cover in one hour so it takes place over two sessions. Payment plans are always an option and common. Email me to talk payment plans.
