What Ails Thee: The Fisher King, Beltaine, and the Question We Are Afraid to Ask
I came to this essay through a rabbit hole that began when I stumbled back across a T.S. Eliot poem The Waste Land.
A favorite of mine since 9th grade when I encountered snippets of it in a Stephen King book. Only later did I learn about it’s connection to the Fisher King story from Arthurian legend, and from there to the mythic underpinnings of Beltaine and how the emotional core of these things can help us get our footing and thrive in a spiraling world.
On the Dark Underbelly of Spring
I can still see the crispy grey-brown corpses of last year's blooms litter the hillside, an open cemetery to the latest harvest. Underground, the daffodils have been feasting on the bodies of the dead for months and, having burst from the soil, lifted their bright faces to the sun, already wilt. And an army of microbes stand ready to eat their bodies. The roots of the periwinkle wrench what they need from the microbes to carpet the ground with their soft lavender-blue flowers. Seeds burst their husks while the microbes wake and begin consuming, an ouroboros, the hillside devouring itself to grow.
Isn't the sweet smell of lilacs really the scent of decay?
They look soft and pastel-pretty but they are violent thugs. Tearing what they need from last year's resting dead. I inhale that scent deeply and welcome those soft blooms and all that marvelous green. Like most of us, I find it easy to enjoy the flowers and look away from the grisly business that makes them possible.
That perky daisy is the mask of death. Last year's rot made visible. April truly is the cruelest month.
When we wrap spring up in pastel dreams and the soft down of chicks, we only see half the picture, and might that error be at the core of so many problems? What happens when a culture only wishes to see the flowers? What does that enable? What do we refuse to grieve when we paint our springs in cloying pastels? What do we lose by averting our gaze?
Beltaine's Broken Roots
These are the images of a world that has lost its give and take relationship with nature, understanding of their history, and meaning in their lives. Eliot knew what broken looked like. Our ancestors tended their Beltaine fires to avoid that fate.
Beltaine, the beginning of summer in the ancient Celtic world, is a threshold. The end of the dark half of the year, and the start of the light half. In the mythology underlying modern Paganism, two kings govern the turning year in perpetual contest. The Oak King rises at the winter solstice, his power growing with the lengthening days, green and vital, reaching full strength at Midsummer. Think of that particular quality of early June light, almost aggressive in its insistence, the way the green seems to push against your eyes. That is his kingdom.
The Holly King rises in turn as the light fails, sovereign through the dark months, his evergreen crown the stubborn fact of life refusing to quit when everything else has gone to ground. He presides over the long dark of our rest as we turn inward and the land composts down the dead of last season for the snowdrops and daffodils to make their feast and flower.
Each yields when the time comes, accepts his own diminishment as the cost of the cycle continuing. This is the covenant written into the turning year itself: you take your season fully, and then you let it go. The abundance depends on the willingness to release to nourish the next cycle.
At Beltaine, the Oak King is at full strength, his green kingdom feeding on the composted remains of the Holly King's wintery reign. All that green should seem a relief after the long cold and short days of winter in our ancestral past, but is instead fraught with its own anxieties. Here the entire village stood at the edge of the growing season that would determine whether they lived or starved when the wheel turned and the earth grew cold again.
Two fires were lit, and the cattle were driven between them to purify and protect them. People, too, would pass between the fires for their own fertility.
Other rituals, however, asked much more of the community, and likely had a darker past. One built on the understanding that to reap the bounty of the season, the earth demanded something from the village in return.
One ritual for which we have some evidence comes from the Scottish Highlands and continued as late as the 18th century. At Beltaine, special oatcakes called bannocks were baked for the celebration and cut into as many pieces as there were community members. One piece of the cake was colored black with charcoal, then the bits were wrapped and placed into a bonnet which was passed around. Every community member from leaders to the poorest farmer drew a lot.
Whoever drew the black bannock became the cailleach beal-tine, the Beltaine carl, the one designated for the fire. The community grabs them, drags them toward the flame, ritually mourns them, and lays them out. In most versions, they simply reintegrated back into the community, but in others they make sacrifices for the season similar to the Christian marking of Lent.
Some scholars make a further leap that this much gentler ritual may have grown from a much more dramatic practice.
The contents of his stomach were intact enough to be analyzed. By all appearances, this man was ritually sacrificed, and tucked away in his stomach was a fragment of burnt grain, what appeared to be a scorched oatcake.
More than 2,000 years passed from the Lindow Man's time to the 18th century Scottish Beltaine celebrations. There is no way to know for certain that this was a regular practice or was in fact tied to the Beltaine ritual itself. Many writers make this equivalence, but it is less important than the ritual logic itself.
Everyone in the village from king to criminal took part in the bannock ceremony. The bonnet full of oatcake is passed around the fire, every single member of the community had an equal chance of drawing the black bannock. Everyone was equally vulnerable, all shared the cost because all stood around the same fire, reached into the same hat, and knew it could have been them. The shared nature of the burden is the point. The community bears the cost and the harvest together.
This exchange of sacrificing something to the earth, a sort of death, is the very thing that brings forth the fruiting of nature. But what happens when this give-and-take between the community and the land is broken?
The Fisher Kings
These lines could just as easily describe the Wasteland of the Fisher King, or destroyed tracts of rainforest, or any number of places used and cast aside in our present day.
The Fisher King was once a strong and just ruler. Under his reign the land flourished, farm animals were fecund, the village prospered. One day the King was wounded, a festering gash near his groin that refused to heal or to kill him. He cannot die, but he cannot really live either. He passes his days on a small boat fishing on a still lake near his castle, though
Outside his castle walls, the crops refuse to grow, the animals do not breed or produce milk, and his people live a hollowed existence, joylessly going about their usual days in a kind of fog. The wounded King rules over the Wasteland.
One of King Arthur's Knights, Parzival, arrives at the castle and observes a strange procession where a maiden carries a luminous cup, a lance dripping blood, candlesticks, and silver plates. Witnessing the ailing king and the suffering earth, the proper response would be to ask the Fisher King what ails him. But young Parzival, ever the stoic knight, simply retires to his room to sleep. He wakes at dawn to find the castle empty and himself in the middle of the wilderness. The question that would re-wild the Wasteland goes unasked.
It's only through years of quests that bring Parzival much suffering and subsequent spiritual growth that he returns to the castle of the Fisher King. Compassion finally blossoming in his heart, Parzival asks the King "What ails thee, Uncle?"
When he does, the Fisher King is healed, the land blossoms, and the people return to their joyful state.
The mythic logic of this story stems from ancient Celtic ideas about the relationship between the King and the land. In Celtic sovereignty myth, the King's body is the land's body. His wholeness and his right relationship to the sacred feminine literally determines the health of the earth and the harvest that keeps the community alive.
A wound in the High King creates a mirroring wound in the land. When that covenant is broken, the earth refuses its yield, not as punishment, but as consequence. The fact that the Fisher King is wounded precisely in his groin, the generative area of his body, adds another layer to the desolation of his kingdom. Each year the wounded King prevents the cycle of life-death-rebirth. Each turn of the wheel the crops are fewer, life more grey, the community's state reflected back to them in the failing land.
Unlike the Oak King and the Holly King, who yield when their time ends, the Fisher King cannot complete the exchange. He is stuck, too wounded to rule, not dead enough to release the land into its next season. Cost has been incurred but the cycle cannot turn. The harvest withholds itself. The oatcake never gets passed.
When it's in balance, with leaders in right relationship with the land and every member of the community reaching into the same bonnet at Beltaine, there is abundance. But what happens when our kings are wounded, not always physically but spiritually, and the covenant with the land is consciously broken?
We here in America are living in the land of a thousand Fisher Kings. Some we elect, others rule without any official crown.
Our Wasteland Kings
The warmth of that invitation seems like a comfort. But what the Wasteland actually delivers is fear. The terror that comes from what crumbles around you.
Let's be honest: like their ancient ancestors, these Wasteland Kings make their sacrifices to ensure a season of growth. In the warm pastel language of commercialized spring, there are "workforce reductions," "right-sizing," "restructuring," all fuzzy gentler words so that we do not grieve, and do not think too hard about the nature of the systems we inhabit. To be "right-sized" is harm both to the worker and those depending on them. To draw the black bannock of restructuring is real violence.
But the violence does not end with the workforce. Our Fisher Kings, worshipping at the altar of unending growth, also force the entire planet to draw the black bannock. Species extinction, ecological unraveling, poisoned commons, exhausted soils, acidifying oceans, and the slow dismantling of the earth's generative power are all called externalities, as though naming them that makes them someone else's problem. The ruling class takes the spring and calls it progress, and externalizes every cost to everything and everyone else.
Spring still comes to our Fisher Kings. The benefits of growth are real. Something genuinely burns and something actually flowers. Even in corporate America the ritual logic hums in the background. The problem is that the hat never gets passed around. These kings do not reach into the bonnet. They pass out the cake and watch the people and the biome draw the blackened oatcake.
They have arranged, very carefully, never to draw the charred bit, to have no winters, only four seasons of growth. The stock market allows for nothing to lie fallow. And predictably, the Wasteland creeps in, visible in the climate data, in the affordability crisis, in the species counts declining year on year.
Watch them long enough and you see the wound. Not a physical one, but a wound of spirit, a fundamental inability to register the cost of what they take. The man who hollows out a company and calls it efficiency, who extracts from an ecosystem and calls it resource management, who accepts adulation and gives nothing genuine back: he is not cunning. He is numb. Denying the reciprocity that the cycle demands, refusing the empathy that would let him feel what his decisions cost, incapable, finally, of the generativity that alone makes power worth having.
Like the Fisher King, he presides over consequences he cannot feel as consequences at all. He too sits in his boat on a still lake, casting his line into waters he has fished to emptiness, waiting for something he can't fully see.
Employees who draw the corporate black bannock do not have their unwilling sacrifice mourned by a community. There is no acknowledgment that something needed was taken. The grief gets wrapped in non-disparagement clauses. Our Fisher Kings take great pains that no one asks the healing question.
But here is the part that is harder to say. We have brought the broken kingdom inside ourselves. The outer wasteland and our inner one are not separate problems. They share a root.
The Fisher Kings have not only extracted from us directly. They have successfully exported their wound into culture and minds alike. Think of the last time you bought something you didn't need to salve a nebulous unease. Think of the cart you filled at midnight, the subscription you forgot you had, the thing that arrived at your door and didn't fix anything. That is the wound in action, the Fisher King's incapacity for genuine exchange imprinted onto millions of ordinary lives.
We have been so thoroughly schooled in the logic of taking without returning, of consuming without feeling cost, of measuring worth in accumulation, that we carry the wound ourselves now. We shop our way through the wasteland they created. And a culture that cannot feel the cost of things will keep electing Fisher Kings, keep buying from them, keep fishing in their waters without noticing the catch declining.
Bringing the Wasteland Inside
The endless seeking that yields nothing life-giving. Sound familiar?
It's all too easy to bring the consumerist wound to the Beltaine fire with us. We perform the ceremony and return to the same disconnection, because the wound runs deeper than the ritual reaches.
The algorithm is our empty lake. Over and over we cast our lines into that tiny glowing screen that yields less and less.
Performing connection with platforms designed to extract our attention rather than nourish us, lonely in ways so deep we can barely articulate them. Platforms are not community. Engagement is not exchange. The like is not a real witness. It's a ceremony without the fire.
Ritually following the Wheel of the Year, kindling the Beltaine fire, marking the explosion of spring, feeds a real hunger. The longing to feel ourselves in relationship with the biome and with each other is genuine, and I love Beltaine celebrations. But for a long while I have come away from them missing something. Like we've reclaimed something, but it's still rooted shallow.
We welcome in the abundance of spring without going deep into the sacrifice of the Holly King, or our brethren who drew the black bannock and had to “die“ to make it all possible. We pay homage to the cycle of life-death-rebirth, but fall back asleep under the hypnotic sway of our Fisher Kings. We love the abundance half of spring, but leave grieving its costs on the table. And so for many it is still too easy to feel no deep connection to the living world once the ritual is over.
If we are not careful we can enact a Beltaine ritual that mirrors the wounded logic we are trying to escape, that dodges Parzival's question for both the world and ourselves.
What the Thunder Said
Even the Fisher King, at the last, asks himself this. It is the smallest possible version of the healing question. Yet it's a beginning.
I long to stoke my Beltaine fire, ringed by my community, and truly step into the old logic of the ritual. Not the bloodshed, but the underlying truth: what would it mean to stand around the flames passing a hat full of bannocks where anyone could draw the black piece, even you? What would you be willing to give up, examine, change, or honestly reckon with?
To re-indigenize ourselves and our world, to live lives embedded within the biome as one species among many, is not merely a ceremony on a particular day. It demands a total restructuring of ordinary life. It means asking what you take and what you return. What systems you participate in, what they truly cost, and who actually pays.
The cycles encoded in the Oak and Holly Kings, in the fire and the bannock, carry a deep truth: the entire community shares the cost. Shared vulnerability is what makes a Beltaine fire work. A ritual that costs nothing, demands nothing, and changes nothing is not a ritual. It's a rehearsal for one.
I look out to my hillside in the days I wrote this and the daffodils are completely spent, resembling more the dead twigs and husks they fed on to grow than the sunny blooms of the past week. They're still beautiful in their veiny, desiccated state. They will be nutrients for the bee balm that will soon shoot up and bloom beside them. For them, the transaction between life and death is complete for this turn of the wheel.
Elsewhere the Wasteland deepens. And we keep fishing in shallow waters with no answers.
To what ails the Wasteland, Eliot's describes the thunder's booming answer:
Not a spell or a remedy, but three words spoken to three kinds of brokenness, drawn from the Sanskrit Upanishads and a tradition that shares its deepest roots with the Celtic world. Proto-Indo-European culture is the common ancestor of both, the ancient stock from which our ideas about sovereignty, sacred kingship, and the exchange between the human and the living world first grew. The thunder has always said the same thing across both traditions. We have always found it difficult to hear.
In the Upanishad's telling, three groups make pilgrimage to Prajapati, the creator god, each seeking resolution to what ails them. To each he speaks one syllable: Da.
The gods, prone to excess and self-indulgence, hear Datta: give.
The demons, prone to violence, hear Damyata: control yourselves.
The humans, prone to cruelty and selfishness, hear Dayadhvam: sympathize, step outside the locked prison of the self and feel what another carries.
Our Fisher Kings fail at all three. They reap without giving back. They cannot feel through the walls of their accumulation into the lives of those drawing the black bannock. They cannot govern themselves, cannot let the growth season end, cannot put down the fishing rod even as the lake empties around them.
And we, who have inherited their wound through the culture they built, struggle with the same three failures in our own smaller daily ways. We do not return what we take from the biome. We scroll past the suffering of those the system has consumed. We cannot quite control our need for more, hypnotized by the endless cast into the algorithm's shallow water.
The thunder's single syllable contains all three instructions at once. Those of us who draw the black bannock, which is eventually all of us, hear what we most need to hear. Da. Give. Sympathize. Control ourselves. The living world has always known what it needs from us. Our rituals, past and present, have encoded it. We have simply allowed the shouting of Wasteland Kings to drown out the voice of the thunder.
Can we look around at our struggling land, at our own inner landscapes, and ask the healing question? And be willing to act on the answer?
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These entires arise from the background research I do for the Last Battle of Moytura urban fantasy book series you can find in the Catalog.
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