Mistress of the Wild Hunt

This piece was inspired by traditional tales of the Wilde Jagd (German for "Wild Hunt") gleaned from various sources, and specifically by a particular entry describing Frau Goden as the main huntress of this spectral procession in German folklore. "Goden" is likely a morphing of the name of the God Woden/Odin who was also said to lead the Wild Hunt in Teutonic lore, and She is likely His female counterpart. Frau Holda in some cases also takes this role.

The Wild Hunt in various forms existed across many European cultures as a group of hounds and riders spilling out from the Otherworld in a fevered search for quarry. In Scotland the Wild Hunt was expressed in the form of the Sluagh or the Host and was composed of the restless spirits of the Unforgiven Dead. In other cases, the daimons which ravenged the countryside could be composed of the souls of the unbaptized, fallen angels, and/or the fay Themselves.

The faery hounds accompanying the Hunt are often said to be either black or white with red-tipped ears, and they have also accumulated their own share of names depending upon the locality including: Gabriel Hounds, sky yelpers, Gabriel Ratchets, Yell-Hounds, Yeth-Hounds, Wish Hounds (these former three terms are said to refer to a headless variety), Devil's Dandy Dogs, Cwn Annwn, hell hounds, etc.

In my depiction of this fey mistress she carries a horn inscribed with Norse knotwork, and woven through her fingers she balances a stone-tipped arrow. In the past, the discovery of Neolithic arrowheads was often attributed to faery craftsmen. The fey were said to use such arrowheads in the infliction of the "elf-shot" or "elf-blow" which could cause immediate paralysis and indicated that the soul of the person or animal wounded had been carried off by Them, leaving only a physical shell behind.

If you are interested in learning more about the Wild Hunt in folklore, and especially in the context of Germanic culture, I would highly recommend Penance, Power, and Pursuit: On the Trail of the Wild Hunt.

Size: 4.5" x 6"
Media: Prismacolor colored pencils, acrylic, ink, and watercolor on wood panel (the actual panel has semi-circular shapes which are cut out of each corner)

All Underneath the Eildon Tree

I was contacted a sort while ago by Aranea/Drema of If... Journal with the prospect of illustrating the cover image for the July 2007 issue on the potent topic of Spiritual Transformation. She presented me with three visually evocative ideas:

"Either:
the face of a person, the face appearing worn, slightly off-color or
sickly, peeling away (like an apple peeling, reminiscent of the
Escher sketch?) to reveal the same face beneath, but clean, shining,
healthy and glowing
Or
a face peeling away to reveal the same face beneath, but the face
that is peeling away is all black and white, while the face being
revealed is all full color
Or
a person's face with their hand reaching up to pull away the outer
face as if it were a mask (same with coloration and imagery above,
but pulling away a "mask" instead of peeling it away)."

She also suggested perhaps a background of butterflies. The imagery in all of the options was definitely appealing and I intended to stick to those ideas fairly closely. I was a bit strapped for time, so I had decided to take a straight forward approach and depict exactly what was suggested in my own style. Actually, I chose to accept the commission in the first place due to the tight deadline. It had been too long since I had the luxury to make a piece like this, and I knew the time constraints would prove a great impetus to complete such a work.

Somehow along the way though the image became much more personal. The idea of the removal of a mask or the shedding of a worn skin morphed into the semblance of dry and crackling leaves being torn away by the wind. The leaves necessitated a tree, and that tree became one with thorns (representing the fact that spiritual transformation rarely comes without pain and/or sacrifice). "It should be a hawthorn tree," I thought to myself.

I was determined from the beginning that the figure would be male. Again it was another challenge I presented for myself on top of the short time period I had to complete the piece. As the face progressed layer by layer it appropriately went through a similar transformation. The golden yellow of the paper made him initially sallow and wan, and early in the process he had very deep crevices along his nose and mouth which made him appear almost sinister. Along the way the background illuminating the transformed face glowed a vibrant green.

Although at first unbeknownst to me, it later became clear that this was my vision of Thomas the Rhymer. True Thomas (another of his well-known epithets) has featured very strongly in my own personal spirituality over the past year or so, corresponding with my immersion in traditional faerylore. I have been in the process of writing a very pivotal essay (pivotal to me, anyways; that essay is actually in hiding until completion in this very journal) revolving around both the themes of the Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer and the Romance of Thomas the Rhymer since last October. In brief, Thomas Rhymer was a medieval bard who was taken by the Faery Queen to Elphame where he remained for seven years. There his eyes were opened and he was given the gift of a tongue that cannot lie - in other words, he was transformed. At the end of his seven year service, he returned from the realm of Faerie with the abilities to prophecy and write inspired poetry and songs.

When Thomas first meets the Faery Queen she is wearing a "shirt o' the grass-green silk." Upon his return to the mortal world, he was given "a coat of even cloth / and a pair of shoes of velvet green" which were a tokens of his transformation. Clearly in the ballad and the romance, green represents Faery and its gifts, therefore it only makes sense that the verdant glow in my image is associated with the transformed portion of the face.

The title of this piece is a verse taken directly from the ballad. Thomas meets the Faery Queen after awakening from a nap which he has taken beneath the boughs of the Eildon tree, a particular hawthorn which once grew in the Eildon Hills of Scotland.

Media: Prismacolor colored pencils, watercolor, acrylic, sumi-e ink, pen & ink
Size: approximately 8.5" x 11"
copyright Desirée Isphording 2007 - all rights reserved -

Dearly Beloved

Lest you think I have been in complete hibernation . . .

These two pen & ink drawings are for a project I am working on which will hopefully come to light in the not-too-distant future. They are inspired by a great deal of Art Nouveau illustration and book design. The thorny vines are intended to be stylized wild rasberries while the plants at their feet are bloodroot.

Some brief musings on the Otherworld

Otherworldy should not necessarily be taken to mean supernatural or extraterrestrial. Otherworldly simply and literally means "of another world", and "world" is a thoroughly human idea: a globe criss-crossed with imaginary tracery segregating political, social, cultural realms of influence. "World" is an abstract created by humans for human use. The Earth, on the other hand, existed long before humanity and will continue to do so regardless of regime changes, revolutions, and the redrawing of boundaries.

Faeries belong to another world, one not defined by humans and our social conventions and mores but irrevocably tied to our own nonetheless. Like the worlds of animals, plants, fungi, and the elements themselves, we perpetually live beside - even within - the Otherworld, yet just as with the animal and plant kingdoms (again, note more political terminology applied by humans to non-human Nature) these realms are generally inscrutable to us. They can certainly seem alien to us at times, but flora, fauna, and faery are certainly not alien to this planet.

"Fairyland is a state or condition, realm of place, very much like, if not the same as, that wherein civilized and uncivilized men alike place the souls of the dead, in company with other invisible beings such as gods, daemons, and all sorts of good and bad spirits. Not only do both educated and uneducated Celtic seers so conceive Fairyland, but they go much further, and say that Fairyland actually exists as an invisible world within which the visible world is immersed like an island in an unexplored ocean, and that it is peopled by more species of living beings than this world, because incomparably more vast and varied in its possibilities."
- W.Y. Evans-Wentz in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries

"The Underworld is not just under the ground; it is under/within the surface of every leaf, under the surface of every human thought, under the surface of every pool or water, and deep in the infinite heart of even a tiny pebble."
- Robin Artisson in The Witching Way of the Hollow Hill

"The Otherworld begins where this world ends. Tradtionally it is imagined as a parallel society of daimons or animals or the Dead. It can even be adjacent to us, in the forest or wilderness outside the sacred enclosure of the village. It can be underground, or in the sky, or in the west - or even, like the land of the Sidhe, in all of these places. Indeed, 'it may not be far from any of us'. [...] The Otherworld lies, as it were, all around us, at the points where our world ceases. It lies beyond the edge of the maps where 'there be dragons', or below the threshold of consciousness where there be archetypes.[...] The boundaries where this world ends and the Otherworld begins are always shifting - but Nature contains them both."
- Patrick Harpur in The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination

"Sometimes Faerie is not a country but a shifting light upon the land, a wistful song, a moment in between other moments. Some people have a greater facility for feeling its presence than others. Children see it easily and often. So do the mad. Shamans and visionaries can travel there and back again. So can the artist who humbly gives his life over to mystery."
- Ari Berk in the foreword to Brian Froud's World of Faerie

Sallow Mushroom Elder

Sallow Mushroom Elder

Like many of my finished pieces, this one began as a doodle using the supplies I had available at the time. Initially I did not have a subject matter in mind and was simply laying down some interesting forms and lines with the highlighter marker. The central portion of those forms became a wizened face, and the swirling area surrounding it was first a shroud, then hair, and finally an equally wizened tree. Due to the worn nature of the face and hands, the fungi, as well as the yellow tone of the marker, I tentatively titled this piece "Sallow Mushroom Elder." At that point in time it was still incomplete and I wasn't sure who this imposing figure was, I also had no idea if this figure was male or female.

Around the same time period I really began trying to investigate Teutonic faerylore. Resources on Celtic faerylore abound (there are some that seem to believe that the Celts have a sort of cultural monopoly on faeries, but this is definitely not the case), but I am also interested in learning about the creatures my ancestors may have recognized and honored. The Irish have been known to reroute new highways around trees and hedges sacred to the fae, Icelanders have been known to do likewise with stones sacred to the fae. The religions of the Germanic ruling classes have come down to us more preserved in the form of Eddas and Sagas than the beliefs and practices of commoners, but even in those we find the Light Elves residing in Alfheim and Dark Elves who reside in Svartálfaheim. Beyond the more "official" mythology, there is also strong faery presence in Teutonic folklore.

One faery of folklore that caught my attention was the Hylde-Moer ("Elder Mother") or Hylde-Vinde ("Elder Queen"), who is the guardian spirit of a certain tree, the Sambucus nigra. It was customary to request permission from this spirit before taking any of her wood. She required a compact of sorts before someone took the task of cutting her tree: "Ourd gal, give me of thy wood / An Oi will give some of moine / when Oi grows inter a tree" and "Lady Elder, give me some of thy wood; then I will give thee, also, some of mine when it grows in the forest" are variations on that promise. In some cases, this tree was regarded as a witch in plant form.

Size: 5.5" by 6.75"
Media: black ballpoint pen, highlighter marker

EverGreen: Baby and the Faerie Queene

EverGreen: Baby and the Faerie Queene is a piece dedicated to my late cat Baby, who my mother and I found deceased on the side of the road in front of my home on Friday, October 13th of 2006, presumably the victim of a passing car. I have lost pets before, but not in such an untimely manner. Our other pets were old and obviously suffering, for them death was a quiet release. For Baby it seemed too soon and we were not there to ease his transition. We discovered him already stiff and cold. We had adopted him as an adult cat from one of my mother's coworkers who was moving and could not bring him with her, but he fit in perfectly with our already multiple-pet household. He was there to greet me when I went to school or work and he was there to welcome me back when I returned.

I was not angry at Death for taking him, I was just deeply sad and it was almost incomprehensible to me to realize that the only contact I would have with him from that point on would be relegated to dreams, visions, and memories.

This piece is such a vision - my vision of Baby's transition to the Otherworld. He is welcomed by the Mistress of the Wild Hunt for souls Herself, the Faerie Queene. They share milk from an earthenware chalice. The milk is significant in two main aspects: firstly, Baby was a stereotypical feline in that he adored drinking milk, and secondly, milk and/or cream are traditional offerings left for the fae, especially as payment for the household spirits who often perform domestic chores on the property. Baby performed his share of domestic duties by being a diligent mouse- and mole-catcher. The chalice itself is directly inspired by the goblet in Victorian faery artist Richard Dadd's 1862 painting Bacchanalian Scene. In Dadd's piece it also is adorned with a Death's head motif, but there is also a verse in Latin inscribed upon it. On the reverse of his painting is a legible version of the same phrase which translated means "Each man then has his own unlucky fate both here and beyond - like must be added to like and one's due paid to the appointed spirit." The winged Death's head in my version though is drawn from American gravestone art.

The Faerie Queene is Herself a blending of the western and northern European traditions from which She hails and physical features which link her to the soil in which Baby was actually laid to rest. I believe that Faery is deeply tied to the Land, it may perhaps be regarded as the Land's dreaming heart. I also believe that the spiritual creatures, much like their material counterparts in plants and animals, endemic to a certain landscape reflect its uniqueness. Therefore, I don't necessarily think that the Faerie Queene in the south-eastern woodlands of Pennsylvania may appear exactly as She does in the forests of Germany or in the English countryside.

In traditional fairylore the realm of the dead and the ancestors was associated and in some cases perceived to by synonymous with the Faery world. Early accounts even go so far as to link the Faery Queen and King with the rulers of the classical Underworld, Proserpina and Pluto. The faeries themselves were said to especially haunt ancient barrows and tombs, and human visitors to Elfhame often reported seeing their deceased friends and relatives among the inhabitants of the Otherworld.

The title "EverGreen" is both a hopeful metaphor for the life beyond this life and a reference to the main sylvan component in this piece, Taxus baccata otherwise known as the Yew tree. Since it produces small, red, cup-like fruits known as arils and does not yield resin, it is technically not a coniferous tree, but it is evergreen and possesses needles rather than leaves. Yews are among the longest-lived trees on earth, yet they also grow at a very slow rate. The Norse commemorated the Yew as the 13th rune in the Elder Futhark, "eiwaz" and regarded it as a symbol of of the related nature of death and rebirth. Due to such associations, Yews are to be found planted at gravesites. While Christian churches often sit beside these cemeteries, the Yews themselves often greatly predate the construction of those buildings.

Size: approximately 11" in width x 12" in height
Media: Prismacolor colored pencils, watercolor, acrylic, sumi-e ink

My Art is being featured at the Endicott Studio blog!

I am thrilled beyond belief!
I commented on an entry at the Endicott Studio blog yesterday regarding a poem about a DeerWoman and included links to two of my DeerWoman-based pieces. To my immense delight delight and honor, Terri Windling chose to highlight both of those images and my artwork in general in today's blog entry! You can read the entry yourself if you like: November 13, 2006.

If there ever was an occasion that warranted a "Squeakers of joy!" this is certainly it!