Belle Park Cattails 3: The Dragon Rises
Susie Osler amongst the cattails during the Redwing Blackbird Parade in Maberly, Ontario
Verona, a town just north of Kingston, used to have a Cattail Festival. This “joyful expression of our community” was replaced in 2016 by the Verona Car Show. The move may have been symptomatic of the dire general trend to pave over our Southern Ontario waterscape. At the same time, I find myself imagining the dark laughter of the Sky Gods. Inspired by the Belle Park Project blog editor, Laura Murray, who promoted my last blog post on Facebook with the prompt “Check out Part Two of LJ Cameron's Cattail Trilogy (will the movie be far behind?),” I now present to you Zeus and the rest of the Pantheon, who are spoiling for a fight. And lest you have forgotten the first episode of my trilogy, I offer the gentle reminder that the Greek name for the genus cattail is Typha.
FADE IN
INT: MT. OLYMPUS – PALACE OF ZEUS – COUNCIL CHAMBER – AFTERNOON
Camera pans from the golden Council Chamber to an expansive view of the world far below, and back to the Chamber where ZEUS, King of the Gods and his PANTHEON OF SKY GODS do BATTLE with the TITANS and fling them out of Mt. Olympus.
JUMP CUT TO EXT: MORTAL REALM – MARSH – DAWN
Chorus of FROGS shifting to BIRDS as night becomes dawn. Wetland beings come into focus: a RED-WING BLACKBIRD clasped to TYPHA (AKA CATTAIL) gently bending in the wind. Sound of WIND increasing. Camera zooms to a muddy cleft in the RIVERBANK. In rhythm with deep rumbling snores of the dreaming TYPHON (AKA DRAGON), wafts of smoke emerge from the cleft entrance.
NARRATOR (VELVETY VOICE) (O.S.)
For millenia, mortals have associated Typha with sacred power. With tribute due to the ancient proto-Indo-European Gods of extreme weather and volcanoes, Typha’s linguistic siblings are some of the Earth’s most supreme natural and supernatural forces: Typhoon, the storm, Typhoid, the scourge, and Typhon, father of all monstrous beings.
TRANSITION TO ANIME ACTION SEQUENCE
NARRATOR (O.S.)
After Zeus drove the Titans from heaven, Typhon was born of Gaia, the Earth, and the passion of Tartarus, with the aid of Aphrodite, goddess of love. Typhon, the serpent-dragon, with one hundred heads each breathing flames, became Zeus’s supreme enemy.
Typhon (ChatGPT4 / DALL-E from prompts by M Rogalsky)
If Zeus is the clarity of the sun, Typhon is the insight of dreams. Typhon is associated with water; he is the creator of springs and bringer of rain.
Typhon’s power is matched by the power of his wife Echidna, and embodied in their many monstrous children including their daughter Chimera, with a lion’s body and a serpent’s tail, breathing fire from her goat-head.
TRANSITION BACK TO EXT: MORTAL REALM – MARSH – DAWN
Camera pans TYPHA with its flower head going to seed. A breeze sends a seed aloft and the camera tracks it as it floats towards TYPHON’S lair.
NARRATOR (O.S.)
Typha is bound to Typhon. Steeped in life’s origins, dwelling at the edge of the underworld, Typha’s deep affinity with Typhon gives Typha the power to calm the storm and placate the deep. Typhon is stirring and Typha will be ready when he wakes.
CROSS FADE TO: EXT: EARTH – TURTLE ISLAND – MARSH – LATE AFTERNOON
Golden light. Camera tracks a WATER-SERPENT swimming towards the CATTAILS.
AND SO ON
OK, enough already, you may be thinking. But sometimes a joke is worth taking seriously. And no doubt, one could make an epic case for cattails to feature in their own movie. The source for this proto-script is a 30-page ethnobotany research paper by Daniel F. Austin which lays out worldwide connections between cattails (Typha spp.), dragons, and water-serpents. It turns out the Greeks weren’t the only ones making links between cattails and supernatural forces. For thousands of years and for people dwelling all over planet Earth, “Typha has been involved in not only secular life… but played prominent roles in people’s sacred lives.” The connection with dragons partly has to do with the Greek word “typhein” which means “to smoke,” and that association with smoke weaves its way through the most potent of ancient myths. Stories from many traditions involve Typhon-like dragons — fierce and terrifying in Greece, Babylonia, India and Persia, but more typically benevolent for cultures of East Asia. In China, the dragon’s qualities include strength, energy and outspokenness. One of the many telling examples of deep cattail-dragon entanglement is that Typha leaves in Mandarin are lung sou, meaning “dragon’s beard.”
In other parts of the world, such as Turtle Island and places in the southern hemisphere, the analogous dragon-being is a water serpent (a long list of examples given in the paper includes Sisiutl (Kwak’wala), Onyare (Kanienké:ha), Kinepikwa (Anishinaabemowin), Tieholtsodi (Diné Bizaad)). These beings are not at all the same, but Austin argues the general point that many linguistic groups in these areas understand the deities in the underworld and in the world above to be in constant negotiation. He suggests too that Typha plays a pivotal role by paying homage to the underworld and placating its powers with the ceremonial use of its flowers, leaves, stalks and pollen. Takelma Elder, Frances Johnson, told visitor Edward Sapir in the early twentieth century that, to end a heavy rain, her people would sing “How long is it before thou wilt cease? So long hast thou been raining! [To people in house]. Do you burn cat-tails toward the west?” As Typha reigns in the transition zone between the realm of the sacred and profane everyday life, it has been woven into ways of dying (such as burying the dead in cattail fluff), but also ways of living: “The name of the Toltecs who gave rise to the Aztecs is based on tollin (cat-tail) and teca (to exist, to be with).”
Wicken Sedge Fen in stained-glass, Church of St. Mary, the Virgin, Swaffham Prior, England. Photograph by LJC
To exist, to be with. Sacred uses are just that, sacred, and rarely for sharing. There is violence in over-generalization and histories of annihilation in anthropological footnotes: In 1856 the Takelma were forcibly relocated by the U.S. government from their lands protected by mountains to a wet and rainy coastal reserve in northwest Oregon. As I conclude my final blog post on cattails, I also want to recognize and try to eschew the ethnographical tone that tends to consign living culture to the past and, to do so, I will stick with some small examples of “living” with which I have some experiential or personal connection.
Yes, Verona cancelled its Cattail Festival, but just yesterday I was in the sauna at the local pool and talked with a philosopher from Verona who recalled attending the Festival with his family. He also was delighted to tell me that cattails were re-establishing themselves in the wetland near his home. In the drained Fens of England where I studied for several years, a typically heaven-worshipping Christian congregation has seen fit to feature cattails in the stained-glass windows of its church, along with a prayer: “GRASS WITH REEDS & RUSHES ALLELUIA.” As I’ve been writing about cattails, I have been alerted to cattail honouring festivals like the annual Redwing Blackbird Parade in Maberly, Ontario, as well as Wild Basketry groups. Colleagues and friends have been contacting me to share their own fascination: “I have always loved cattails and so I was very excited to see them prominently featured in this week’s department newsletter! I actually know very little about cattails. But I do know that I get excited whenever I see them….in Little Cataraqui Creek conversation area, we always stop to admire the cattails. It is often a highlight of our treks – especially if they are accompanied by ducks!”
In the midst of the sixth mass extinction, it is high time for us to pay homage to wetlands, portals to the underworld in our very neighborhoods, if we are so fortunate. On the knife edge of death, creativity springs to life. Donna Haraway, who finds hopeful possibility in the chthonic (elemental entities that dwell in the depths) augurs that: “The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere, despite the civilizing efforts of the agents of the sky gods to astralize them….”
Here in Ka’taroh: kwi – the place of clay and mud – the eye of Zeus is about to be completely obscured for the first time in 700 years. Typha still is amongst us. It is the Year of the Dragon, and the Epoch of the Cattail has begun. Gung Hei Fat Choy!
With thanks to editor Laura Murray, the Belle Park and Watershed research groups, Sebastian De Line, Trevor Felix, Maxx Hartt, Jon Miller, Susie Osler, Jingheng Yan, Christi York; and to Andy Fisher, who introduced me to hip waders.
Movie Soundtrack and/or Festival Playlist
Ansley Simpson, The Burnt Lands
The Halluci Nation, The Eater of Worlds Ft. Northern Cree
Haley Sarfeld – The Lindworm’s Cabaret, Born Crawling
Poplar – Daydream
Time Twins – Wabooba
Swamp Ward Orchestra – Guy in the Red Thong
Savannah Shea – Winter Magnolia
The Gertrudes – Blackbird and the Cedar
Piner – Floodplains
Princess Towers – Deep Sea Roller
Red Fox – Hey Mister
Other musical suggestions are welcome here.
References
Austin, Daniel F. (2007) “Sacred Connections with Cat-tail (Typha, Typhaceae) - Dragons, water-serpents and reed-maces.” Ethnobotany Research & Applications 5:273-303.
Brennan, Terri-Lynn (2023) The History of Ka’taroh:kwi and Kingston. https://www.visitkingston.ca/katarokwi/
Haraway, Donna (2016) “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene" e-flux, Issue 75.