Threshold of Spring: Blackthorn. A Fierce protector of Wholeness. Tree-types series. Enneagram 458

Exploring correspondences and openings for an inner journey with this tree's archetypal pattern.

Moon: Egg moon (also the Pink moon)

Tree: Blackthorn

Archetype: Enneagram 458- Protector of wholeness, also ‘the scholar’ (Katherine Fauvre). Also 485, 584, 548, 845, 854

Virtues: equanimity (4) non-attachment (5) innocence (8)

Essential qualities: depth, insight, power

Holy ideas: holy origin, holy transparency, holy truth

Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

-from ‘Anthem’ by Leonard Cohen

Longing for a tree and an archetypal space that can be a big enough placeholder to hold the extremes of the waves of human suffering and destruction crossing the world in these times, has taken me to the Blackthorn. It has been shouting to me through its blossom, prolific where I live on the urban outskirts of the farmlands of Hampshire, England. I took a while to be willing to step up to this challenge, which is to encounter the scope of three highly individualised energies on the enneagram combining; the 4, 5 and 8, by spending a month walking with them in nature.

In three different ways, these three archetypal energies have capacity to hold space for darkness as well as light. The 4 through emotion: by embracing their own inner darkness, the 5 through reason: a capacity for experiencing detachment by applying objective reasoning, and the 8 through aggression: an instinctally connected capacity to confront and fight as life requires.

In naming this archetypal space ‘Protector of wholeness’ I want to highlight its capacity to recognise the value of light as well as shadow, and its intuitive understanding that spiritual truth is found by walking through rings of fire. The human condition is fully known, observed and confronted in this space, in its extents of suffering, dissociation and brutality as well as its grace, wisdom and innocence.

“I was the rod with a barb at its end,

The witch who trapped winter in her bones.

The cold star of my blossoming

Lit the edges of solitary lanes.

After those first frosts, a quickening

In the hedgerows, something bitter

Grew ripe in the dark….”

from ‘I always knew I was a Blackthorn’ by Victoria Gatehouse.

If these archetypal energies combine to influence a human personality, you will meet a person who is very likely to combine them together in such a way as to have a very protected survival strategy, combining an individualistic view of life, shaped by their own deep inner world, their directness and capacity for living with truth even when it is difficult, or against the social grain, and directed by a will to impact the world with what they have discovered. Their life journey is likely to take them to inner and outer places and spaces of extreme. They are people who might choose to go ‘where angels fear to tread’ in all areas of their life.

Blackthorn blossom

Going to the Blackthorn tree offers me a grounded place to consider the immense spiritual possibilities of this archetypal space. Which of course contains the potential for this exact same measure of light as it does shadow. The mature lichen-coated blackthorn tree I love most, living in the centre of Bentley station butterfly reserve, just across the Hampshire border into Surrey, is NOT blossoming yet. Just budding. But over this lunar cycle of the egg moon, also known as the pink moon, it will, and I will keep visiting her as I wrestle with the enormity of the moral questions being asked of us as the world is changing in ways that would have seemed fictional only a few years ago. What is mine to do? is a question being asked of all of us willing to ask it. What is my small, yet human-sized part to play, in the larger human story unfolding as the trouble happens all around?

How the Blackthorn tree might supports us archetypally in these times, is a question worth asking.

‘Blackthorn reminds us that we all go through negative cycles …Once the bad shows up, Straif offers us clues about the best ways to navigate. ‘ - Sharlyn Hildago. The Healing Power of Trees.

Blackthorn tree poised to bloom

Trees are here to help humans remain strong, rooted, generative and creative. And humans who witness this spiritual support, have by this reciprocal arrangement, the responsibility to be the custodians and protectors of the trees in their square mile of belonging. This becomes important work, since there live other humans, caught in a place that sees very different things as important, would take down these wisdom keepers for economic gain, before realising that without the trees, we die too, whether that be spiritually, or literally. I say this as a signposter, offering a threshold of awareness, knowing that the intimate connection between trees and humans only becomes true and real when we humans begin to receive guidance from the trees. Trees offer the possibility of entering into a personal correspondence with them. Like all significant relationships, it is personal and must be tended to with the heart to be alive and sustaining.

And so, to the Blackthorn. Straif is the fourteenth letter of the Ogham tree alphabet, an ancient Celtic way of communicating. representing the letter Z and meaning ‘blackthorn’. In divination, which is one of the ways this alphabet was used, the

Straif

Blackthorn tree is a sign of bad luck. Blackthorn rules the dark half of the year, and I offer it today at the time of the first new moon of Spring, as a way of bringing light to darkness. Straif is an indication that things are happening that you cannot control, and this Gaelic word is connected to the English word ‘strife.’ The Blackthorn tree has been a place to take this kind of human experience for a very long time. A place to protect us from all that is experienced as evil coming from the outside. Lenses of mythology and psychology show us that dark impulses also come from within us. Indeed the corresponding 458 character can even take a kind of stoic pleasure in the suffering, not shrinking from darkness but recognising it is one of the human ways of feeling most fully alive.

Ripening sloes on a Blackthorn branch

Noticing the qualities of the Blackthorn tree is one way to begin to connect with the ways that she can hold space for all that feels too big and overbearing to be manageable. Blackthorn can grow in very inhospitable places, often alone, on heath and moorland, and on coastal terrain as well as in woodland. Her wood is hard. Walking sticks and broomsticks are traditionally made from Blackthorn. The thorns of Straif are inches long. This tree can also grow low as hedge and thicket, and has been planted in hedgerows to contain livestock and protect crop bearing fields from their incursion. It can do damage to any who fall into it. Like bad luck and difficult times, it does not discriminate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

Blackthorn is named after its sloes which are deep bitter purple-black fruits used to make sloe gin. And yet, at the other turning end of the year, that we are in now, the blossoming branches strike their flashing white spears across the sky, since the greening leaves only come afterwards. This distinguishes Blackthorn from her later blooming sister tree, the Hawthorn, who leafs before she blossoms later in Spring. Another difference between the two plants is that Hawthorn produces buds at the base of the spines, whereas Blackthorn has buds along the spines as well as on the stems, creating the impression of streaks of blackthorn lightening. Each five-petalled blackthorn flower has both male and female reproductive parts and they appear on the black stems singly or in pairs. This tree is truly one of spring brightness and Autumn darkness!

Now, look at the life around the Blackthorn closely. Flowering in early Spring makes this tree habitat and food source for bees and 200 species of insects all told, and then when her leaves arrive, they are food for the caterpillars of many moths and butterflies, notably being the only food of the rare black hairstreak butterfly. Birds will nest securely in her branches too, especially song thrush, yellowhammers and whitethroats.

Blackthorn is indigenous to Europe and western Asia. It can also be found in New Zealand and eastern North America. Similar trees, of the Rosaceae family, can be found in other parts of the world and I invite you to find a tree that can speak to these things in your own square mile.

Black-streak butterfly on blackthorn by Charles J Sharp.

Do you know a 458? I will share what I have witnessed. This capacity for intimate knowledge of darkness and density, means that when they undergo a healing journey, it will be truly truly authentic and expansive, meaning they can become a deep source of inspiration to others. This is unlikely to be their initial motivation to open and relax their survival strategies however, since these three archetypal points on the enneagram are the ones least influenced by others, in each centre. The survival strategies they have learnt to protect the sovereignty of the self, make them one of the most self-contained personality systems. This can open into a capacity for fierce, protective, pure and generative love of self, other and beyond, even towards the planet, and yet this will only ever happen on their own timeline, and their own terms.

When this personality is in their dark phase, they can feel from the outside to be fully defended and unreachable. Very much like a thorny thicket. It is as though the conditions for their blossoming must be perfect. The person they can love wholeheartedly must arrive. They must be seen through the eyes of true love. Their unique life purpose must reveal itself. The darkness will need powerful reasons to fall away. And the likelihood is this will happen suddenly and profoundly, as their energy eventually finds a place to settle enough to receive something different from the outside, and heart and mind finds into concert.

This type likely has inner journeying to do before this at what has been described as the abyss at the bottom of the enneagram, between 4 and 5, head and heart points. It is those with both 4 and 5 within their pattern who can speak authentically about this experience, and I will not attempt to say more here than to signpost it. It is my belief that it is love from an outside human source that will see the potential in this human and become a catalysing fork in the road in the life of a 458. Those humans that love 458 humans will undoubtedly be transformed too in this relationship as they come to know the scale of the challenge life asks of the healing 458, since there are thorny and shadowy parts of the psyche that this human knows, that don’t even want to heal or see light, since it makes no sense to them. Perhaps they never even believed in polarity anyway.

Sharlyn Hildago wrote the insightful book ‘The healing power of trees’ and I love her words in her chapter on Blackthorn, which can speak to us more generally of the healing available from corresponding with this tree:

Blackthorn’s message is that we are a species that learns from its difficulties and its challenges. We do not tend to change or do important reflective work except through our suffering. Nor do we tend to demonstrate compassion without a grain of sand (a minor, external influence) that causes us to cultivate the beautiful pearl of empathy. In our dark times, we tend to believe we’re alone and often wallow in our negativity. Most of us are stubborn, refusing to ask for help except when suffering has finally brought us to our knees. This is true for me, and im guessing it is true for you too. The important thing is to remember that we open to the universe when we have no more answers to our suffering. Blackthorn promises that the universe has been waiting for the invitation and the opening all along. We are promised a life at a new level after the chaos has passed, and it will.

Book cover

Have you known a Blackthorn human? Or have you had a Blackthorn chapter in your life? How did you come back from it? Did you have to cross an abyss? What part did love and grace play in this part of your journey. These are questions to journal with, if you are so moved.

Are we living in Blackthorn times? That is how it seems to me. Full of the full human range of the excesses of hate and dissociation and aggression, and yet also full of depth of seeking, love of learning, moving powerfully towards a revelation of truth and deeper valuing of humanity and the planet, to show us new ways forward. These times are full of celebrations and even glorifications of base instincts, and yet perhaps there are also the beginnings of awakenings to knowledge that we are capable of so much, and that we rarely fully appreciate our impact.

Defined 458 Blackthorn-like humans, fully aligned in their own found conclusions to life’s questions, and with a lack of need for external validation, are often projected upon. In a similar way, the Blackthorn tree has been a place holder for our human fears, and a imaginal resource of spiritual protection for humans for centuries. Sitting under a Blackthorn tree, and especially now, in Spring as she blossoms, can be a re-sourcing place to take your fear or inner darkness, so that you can come to know it for what it is. What part of your shadow is fear of your own courage? Power? Uniqueness? Capacity to stand up and act on what you know in your heart is true?

Owning our own fully human capacities for the 458 places within us, both constricted and opening, could do a lot for our collective growing up as a species.

While many expressions of humanity are being set on fire and burning down around us, the 458 place, who never set stock in other people or places or things, is a place we can look to within for spiritual courage. The Blackthorn tree can be an arboreal guide to correspond with in these times. Please do feel welcomed to share your own thoughts and reflections about all of this, in the comments.

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References:

Tri-type® name ‘The Scholar’ comes from Katherine Fauvre’s research. see katherinefauvre.com
Almaas on holy ideas comes from his book, ‘Facets of Unity’. 1998. Shambala
Virtues come from Riso and Hudsons ‘levels of development’ in ‘Understanding the Enneagram’. 2000. Houghton Mifflin
The essential qualities come from ‘The Instinctual drives and the Enneagram’ by John Luckovich.2021. Enneagrammer Imprints

I always knew I was a Blackthorn by Victoria Gatehouse published online in The poetry Society

The Healing Power of trees, Sharlyn Hildago. Llewellyn Publications.2018