The Lyke Wake Dirge

Many years ago, my brother lent me a copy of Julian Jaynes “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. This truly is an amazing book, even if the main thesis is probably completely wrong. 

One of the core ideas in the book is that consciousness is essentially constructed of metaphors. In particular, we use the metaphor of physical space, of landscape, to construct our minds. We need language to express these metaphors, so Jaynes’ hypothesis is that consciousness developed *after* language. 

But I’m more interested in this idea of internal mental landscapes. We model our minds on the external landscape and we perceive the external as a reflection of our internal landscapes. 

This idea has fascinated me ever since I first read the book. 

Robert McFarlane discusses similar ideas in his wonderful book on walking, “The Old Ways”. By walking through a landscape, our minds spread out and takes on the shape of the landscape. We allow our minds to settle in to the landscapes around us. Sacred, ritual landscapes, such as Kilmartin, allow our minds to experience the sacred. 

The geography of the mind. Internal landscapes, external landscapes.


So, last weekend I was listening to Pentangle’s “Basket Of Light” again. I’ve listened to this album loads over the years, but this time, one song really stood out: The Lyke Wake Dirge. It’s an a capella song, with a beautiful melody and stunning harmonies. 

I had a dig on Spotify, and found this version by The Young Tradition. It’s even rawer, and more powerful.

But the lyrics... The lyrics...

It’s a song from Yorkshire that was sung at funerals. A “lyke” is a corpse, and this song was sung at the wake. It’s ostensibly a Christian song, but has clear pre-Christian imagery. In particular, the Brig o Dread is probably a reference to either the Norse Bifröst or Gjallarbrú. 

The song lays out the journey that the soul takes as it leaves our world, out onto the bleak high moor, then across the Brig o Dread, which spans a chasm over Hell, and into Purgatory. A mythic, eternal landscape. 

We struggle to cope with the idea that our minds might be just an emergent property of our brains, and that we will simply cease to exist when we die. That is almost unimaginable. So we construct an external landscape for our minds to live on in when we die. 

Eternal unchanging life in an eternal unchanging landscape. 

The geography of death. 

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