Ad-Jaar: The Dragon in the Hedge

28 Sept

An encounter with a powerful feminine presence in the Cornish landscape

Some experiences seem to begin before you realise they are happening.

This one began on Bodmin Moor.

I had been working with my friend and fellow dowser Stuart Dow on his presentation about King Arthur’s Hall, exploring some of the fascinating ideas around the site. We had been looking at the Cosmic Bear, at water within the landscape, and at the relationship between land and sky, including the possibility of the cosmos being reflected within the landscape and the landscape, in some way, reflecting back.

It was the sort of conversation that leaves something moving around quietly inside you afterwards.

Later, I was driving home across Bodmin Moor in the dark. As I crossed the moor I began to notice a very particular change in myself. My mind was becoming extraordinarily clear and quiet, while at the same time I could feel an energy rising.

The further I drove, the stronger it became.

There was none of the usual internal chatter or effort to work out what was going on. If anything, thought seemed to be dropping away as the sense of power increased.

I was heading away from the open, ancient landscape of the moor and towards home, into the softer folds of south-east Cornwall around Duloe and Trefanny Hill, where wooded valleys, fields and old lanes gradually fall away towards the sea at Talland Bay.

By the time I was almost home, the energy was becoming difficult to ignore.

A place in the hedge

As I came down a hollow lane, I suddenly sensed very strongly that I needed to stop.

On my right was a Cornish hedge. Stone, earth, roots and vegetation, the sort of boundary that is so much part of this landscape that most of the time we barely notice it.

But this particular place did not feel ordinary.

I had the distinct sense of a portal within the hedge.

And with that came a name.

Ad-Jaar.

I hadn't been searching for a name and I hadn't constructed one. It seemed simply to arrive with the experience.

Then I found myself saying it aloud.

Aaaad-jaaaarrrrr.

It wasn't spoken in an ordinary voice. There was breath behind it, pressure and a tremendous sense of force. Drawing out the sound seemed to amplify what I was already feeling, almost as though voice, breath and energy had become part of the same movement.

What struck me very strongly was that the presence felt female.

Not gentle in the way we sometimes use the word feminine. This felt ancient, immense and almost all-powerful. There was strength in it that I found difficult to describe afterwards, except to say that I was completely in awe.

I reached for my phone and began recording what I was experiencing while it was still happening.

Recording from inside the experience

Listening to that recording afterwards is quite different from telling the story now. It isn't orderly. There are half-sentences, pauses and words tumbling over one another because I was trying to capture something while I was still inside it.

I said:

Beyond words. Feeling clear, feeling no thought, all across Bodmin Moor. Feeling powerful, and more powerful, and clearer and clearer.
Saying the words, feeling a dragon energy flow through... energy moving my right hand and light-language shapes.
Stopping, pausing on the hill down towards home, looking into the portal, knitting the energy with my eyes, moving left, right, up to the hedge wall around.
Seeing the dragon's eye come through from the hedge, looking straight at me. Coming into me, going through me.
Feeling the energy galvanised, feeling it strengthening, feeling it flowing, feeling it in all of my being.
Just being the dragon energy.

That final phrase still captures it better than anything I could write afterwards.

Just being the dragon energy.

It didn't feel as though I was standing on one side of an encounter while a dragon stood on the other. For those moments the distinction seemed to disappear.

The dragon's eye

As I looked towards the place in the hedge where I sensed the portal, I perceived something that felt unmistakably like a dragon's eye looking directly back at me.

I use the word perceived deliberately. Experiences like this don't always fit easily into categories such as physical sight, imagination, inner vision or energetic sensing. I don't need to decide exactly which it was.

What I do remember is how vivid it felt.

The eye had presence. At the same time, the energy seemed to come towards me, into me and through me. Rather than diminishing me, it felt galvanising, as though I were being strengthened from within.

My right hand started moving spontaneously, tracing shapes that felt to me like light language or energetic forms. My eyes were moving too. I described it on the recording as "knitting the energy with my eyes", looking left, right and upwards around the hedge as though I were connecting or tracing something.

Written down afterwards, that sounds extraordinary.

At the time it felt completely natural.

From the moor into the softer land

Only afterwards did I really notice the movement within the experience itself.

It had begun on Bodmin Moor, in the open landscape of granite, water, ancient sites and huge sky, not long after Stuart and I had been immersed in King Arthur's Hall and ideas of land mirroring cosmos.

But Ad-Jaar didn't appear to me there.

The energy travelled with me.

It grew as I came home and eventually seemed to gather itself at a very particular point in a very different landscape, amongst the green lanes, Cornish hedges and softer hills around Trefanny.

There is something about that transition that still interests me.

From open moor to enclosed lane.

From granite and sky to earth, roots and hedge.

From the vastness of the landscape to one small threshold.

And there, the energy that had been building seemed to become intensely focused.

It also made me think differently about sacred landscape. We naturally gravitate towards recognised ancient places, stone circles, wells, tors and prehistoric monuments, and perhaps rightly so. But the experiences that have affected me most haven't always waited politely for me to arrive at a designated sacred site.

Sometimes they have happened while walking the dogs.

Sometimes beside an ordinary lane.

And this time, in a Cornish hedge.

Who, or what, is Ad-Jaar?

I became curious about the name afterwards.

I had heard it inwardly as Ad-Jaar, with that long second syllable, and with the sound itself carrying an enormous amount of breath and force.

Searching for words that sounded similar led me somewhere I wasn't expecting.

In Sanskrit, ajara, अजर, can mean not subject to old age, ageless, undecaying or imperishable.

Then another name caught my attention even more strongly: Ajatar, also written Ajattara or Aijotar, from Finnish folklore.

Traditional descriptions of Ajatar are darker than the presence I experienced. She is described as a powerful female forest spirit, often dangerous, and has a longstanding association with serpents. The explicitly dragon-like imagery seems to be more prominent in later depictions, rather than something I would want to project backwards onto all of the older folklore.

I stopped when I read it.

Female.

Forest.

Serpent.

And, in more recent imagery, dragon.

I don't know whether this has anything whatsoever to do with the name that came to me. Ad-Jaar, Sanskrit ajara and Finnish Ajatar are not evidence of an etymological connection, and I don't want to create one simply because the similarities are intriguing.

But discovering them afterwards certainly made me pause.

Perhaps sometimes a synchronicity is most interesting when we resist the urge to turn it into an answer.

Different from the dragons I had sensed before

This wasn't my first experience of what I understood as dragon energy.

After visiting The Sanctuary at Avebury, I had twice become very aware of dragon presence while walking with the dogs. Those experiences felt expansive, luminous and intimately woven into the landscape.

Words came then such as:

We are the landscape. We are the light.

And:

Know the whispers on the wind. Know the furrows in the land. Feel us. Integrate us. Fly with us. We burn bright.

Those experiences had given me the sense of dragon energy as something dispersed throughout land, light and life. There was a feeling of oneness and vastness, but not particularly of an individual being.

Ad-Jaar was different.

This felt concentrated and intensely embodied. The presence felt female, powerful and specific. There was still oneness, but instead of simply sensing dragon energy woven through the landscape, I experienced it moving through my own body.

The voice.

The breath.

The hand movements.

The eye.

For those few moments, I wasn't contemplating dragon energy from outside it.

I was experiencing what it felt like simply to be it.

A threshold in an ordinary place

I rather love the fact that the perceived portal was in a Cornish hedge.

These old boundaries are easy to take for granted. Yet they are substantial things, built from stone and earth and then gradually inhabited by roots, trees, mosses, ferns and countless generations of living things.

They are boundaries, but they are also ecosystems.

And the idea of the boundary is interesting in itself.

Myths and folklore across many cultures repeatedly place unusual encounters at thresholds: woodland edges, crossroads, cave mouths, shorelines, doorways and places where one kind of landscape becomes another.

I don't know whether that has any bearing on what happened to me.

But on that particular night, one section of hedge certainly felt like a threshold.

A place where the ordinary landscape suddenly seemed much larger than its physical appearance.

Leaving some things unexplained

I have become increasingly comfortable with not knowing exactly what experiences like this are.

Was I channelling something?

Was I experiencing an archetypal energy?

Had the work around King Arthur's Hall and the earlier encounters at Avebury opened my awareness in a particular direction?

Was the name emerging through some deep layer of memory or imagination?

Or was I sensing something within the landscape that I don't yet have a language for?

I don't know.

And, increasingly, I don't think I need to rush to know.

Dowsing and intuitive work have taught me that there can be a difference between curiosity and certainty. Curiosity lets the next piece arrive. Certainty can sometimes close the door too early.

So Ad-Jaar remains, for me, an encounter rather than a conclusion.

I remember the energy beginning to rise as I drove across Bodmin Moor. I remember the extraordinary clarity and absence of thought. I remember reaching the softer landscape close to home and knowing I needed to stop.

I remember the hedge.

The name.

The force of the breath behind it.

The dragon's eye looking directly at me.

And above all, I remember the overwhelming sensation of that energy flowing into me and through every part of me, immense, feminine, strengthening and alive.

I was not frightened.

I was in awe.

And for those moments there was nothing to analyse, label or understand.

There was simply the experience I had recorded at the time: