The Way of the Eel is a cross-disciplinary project spanning photography, film, installation, writing and performance. The work stems from two pieces of folk tradition from the Isles of Scilly, that offer highly localised and ethically ambiguous attitudes towards island survival.
The first is the myth of Santa Warna, a Celtic saint who drifted to Scilly in a coracle from Ireland to become the patron saint of shipwrecks. The islands are situated twenty-eight miles from the west coast of Cornwall and the many treacherous rocks surrounding them meant shipwrecks were commonplace. Sustaining life on the islands was often hard, and Scillonians would look to the supernatural for support. Making offerings at the saint’s holy well, they would pray for ships to be wrecked so that they could benefit from the wealth created by the salvage and pilotage of the stricken vessels.
The second inspiration is the practice of using eels for drinking water purification. There are no springs or rivers on the islands, so the fresh water supply is very precarious. There was a tradition – still practiced in some households – of placing a live sargasso eel inside the well or water tank to keep the drinking water fresh. When in captivity, these eels go into a kind of fugue state where they can live for up to eighty years, surviving only by eating any bugs or contaminants that make their way into the water supply. This keeps the water safe for human consumption… but does mean you have to be okay with drinking water that an eel has been living in. Gross.
Scilly has also traditionally been a site of early and varied religious activity. In addition to the many Christian and pre-Christian saints affiliated with the islands, there are the remains of an eighth century hermitage, a Romano-British goddess cult, and countless bronze age relics.
So, mimicking these examples of remote and isolated religious activity, in The Way of the Eel I used these two stories as a basis to conceive a new cult. Because cults - like eels and shipwrecks – also have a sinister reputation that, under normal circumstances, we would typically avoid.
In exploring this cult via many avenues, extrapolating and imagining material based from Santa Warna and the eels, I played with the question of what it means to make up a mode of living for oneself, based on the land we come from and the mythic material held in that land.
The cultist’s coracle: created by 3D scanning a rock pool on the clifftop formed by thousands of years of water erosion, and casting a coracle in it’s shape from fibreglass. In this coracle the cultist can be held by the land of their origin while they undertake their pilgrimage over the sea.
Cult Origins
The Way of the Eel has its origins in a portal that orbits the very deepest tracts of the Sargasso Sea.
This sea, bordered not by land but by ever moving ocean currents, is uncannily calm and clear. Drifts of weed mottle the slick surface, and below these weeds, clearly visible on the ocean floor fathoms below, lie the heaped skeletons of sunk ships.
Supernatural things leak through the portal that spins within these clear calm waters: often eels and, sometimes, gods.
Santa Warna ~ sacred colour ~ is one such deity who seeped through from this portal. Though she moves with sublime fragility ~ drifting in a paper-thin carapace, dappled pink and gentle as the breaking dawn ~ she came forth with the wrecking power to break ships. And grant wishes.
Guided by a bind of eels, Santa Warna was the first acolyte to follow The Eel Way. A unearthly prophet, she curled herself in a shell made of glass (or some say it was a boat made of skin) and trusted herself to the mystery and to the eels who beat their fins beneath her, leading her onward on their course.
As the eels wended their way across the open ocean, they transformed. The reconstructed their bodies and learned how to breathe fresh water. They modelled transformation so unwaveringly that Santa Warna also leaned to embrace change and become metamorphic. Her coracle became her cocoon and she learned to dissolve her old form and take on new shapes.
After thousands of leagues Santa Warna washed ashore on this Scillonian island. A wisp of stability easily missed in the unending sea. Where she disembarked, there pooled a holy well: miraculous on this salt-scoured island where fresh water is precious and precarious. Early cultists would drop reverent offerings into this well and ask the godling for their wishes to be granted.
But Santa Warna is not an omnipotent spirit. Her mastery is specialised: she has the power to raise storms to break boats. So, the islanders prayed for the bounty and security that can be brought about by the pilotage and salvage of shipwrecks.
And in return for their wishes granted, when Santa Warna breezed aboard to warp the sails or list the tiller and so take hold of a vessel’s ill-starred destiny, the island folk would put to sea to save the luckless crew. In their need they hoped for wrecks, but when the wrecks came, they did all the could to save the lives of those aboard and were often drowned in the attempt.
On this same island, eels were flushed from their burrows and caught in buckets on the beach. They were sunk into wells and water tanks where their supernatural abilities meant they could survive for many decades, consuming any aquatic contaminants and so keeping the water fresh for human consumption. The eels’ sacrifice enabled the cultist’s survival, so their growing sect could thrive.
A vibrant doctrine sprang up around Santa Warna and the eels. The pillars of this were transformation and water purification, interconnectivity with the ecology, and trusting that - if you were in alignment with your soul’s purpose and unafraid of change - the sea would bring you all you needed.
This cult was known as The Way of the Eel and you - if you choose - are its newest and most venerated neophyte.
The Way of the Eel Film
(39 second trailer for 8 minute short film)
A cultist who lives at the edge of the world, prepares for a pilgrimage in a mottled pink coracle. This small, round boat, resembling a shell, cocoon or alien space craft acts as a sacred vessel for their transformative voyage. Mimicking the journey of Santa Warna and the migration patterns of eels, the cultist trusts their future to the tide, surrendering to the transformation present in the mystery beyond the horizon of what is known, certain, safe and small.
The Way of the Eel has been screened at the Prince Charles Cinema in London’s Leicester Square as part of the RCA Contemporary Art Practice Short Film Takeover, July 2003, and as part of the Official Selection for Cornwall Film Festival’s Experimental Shorts, November 2023.
A Salty Pilgrim’s Prayer
Originally published in June 2023 in Glimpse Publication to coincide with RCA2023
I have lain with my cheek pressed to the granite, listening to energy lines singing along seams of quarts. I have rested my ear against the ground to hear the fruiting bodies exhaling from their hyphal lattice. I have read the cyphers inscribed over moss by patterns of light.
Clinging unrelentingly to this remote and isolated place, occupied by eels and shrews and salt, when I grew quiet enough to hear the answers, I heard the island’s lessons everywhere. And from these fragmented liturgies, I have conceived my own cult at the edge of the world.
The island taught me sacred rites: How to trace the tunnels cut through granite by fallen rain and captured spray. How to baptise myself in the tide. How to make offerings of bent pins in prayer for shipwrecks. How to catch an eel – lithesome and dreadful – to drop in the well and keep the waters fresh. How to rouse from my bed in time to see the storm-flung vessel flounder on the rocks.
How to bury myself in the holes sliced through granite by the elements and feel the mass of the island, tethered to the planet’s mantle, holding me fast while gales roar all around. How to clamber over rocky shores to wrest the salvage from the breaking waves and drag home this benefaction, salty and panting. How to feed the silver eels before their night-sea journey back to source. How to lay out all night under falling skies and interpret the superlunary dreams brought down to earth on meteors. How to see the outer world as a mirror pointing inwards, a reflection of my inner state, and how then to reach inside myself to change outer world reality. As within so where-else?
I have listened until there was nothing left for the island to tell me, except to whisper: it is time to go.
But where is there to go now, from the edge of the world, except over the edge and into the abyss?
Where else!
I have watched a moth drag itself from a yellowing papery cocoon, exhausted, its crumpled wings drenched in pupal milk. To stagger and waver, gaining strength from the sun on its back and the nectar of the new/old world. Quivering, clumsy with its unfamiliar proboscis, weary but triumphant, strengthening and stiffening until it can take flight to dance on the sky!
And have I not seen life persist - despite all odds - on salty islands with no springs or rivers and full of buried dead?
I cannot shy from the miraculous for I have been held by mystery every day of my life. As I depart, I know that I go with faith in miracles.
Shaped in the image of a hollow in the granite, I have cast myself a coracle from whips of spun glass. Woven from the calcium of iridescent shells and granite powdered down to sand by the relentless forces of the elements, it is made from the island and the sea and the sky, who will hold me even as I leave them behind. A small, round vessel, large enough for one, this will be the container for my transformation, hatching hopes and emergent possibilities. I have woven into it my moulted doubts. My calcified fears. My crystalline aragonite protections. I have performed rituals for buoyancy. I have cast seafaring charms. I have made oblations to the ancient deity, dropping bent pins into fresh pools.
This coracle - where I lay furled and robed with swaying air - is built for crossing edges. For voyaging alone.
By my own will or the pull and race of currents, winds and unseen influences. I entrust myself to the protection of these atmospheric forces as I begin my pilgrim’s voyage over many leagues.
Within the coracle, my chrysalis, I shall let go of my juvenile hormones, relinquish my larval form and begin a process of self-digestion, dissolving completely into cellular sludge and imaginal potential. I will melt myself and in this portal I will be made anew.
As the shape of the crystal exists latent in its liquid solution. And the archetype waits in readiness below collective consciousness. I trust my inner wisdom to know what shape I will take beyond the brink.
I do not know my depth or direction. Will I retain my memories once I have transformed?
Will I reach another shore to be moored on yielding sand? Will I be swamped and return gasping to this same cold beach, hopes defeated? Will the witch god and her tides turn against me? Will my knowledge of the rocks and wrecks betray me and smash my spray-thin vessel to matchwood and shattered glass?
I have watched glass eels - thin as vapour - completing a journey of thousands of miles to arrive at the brackish openings into land, only to be guzzled down the bills of herons at the threshold. I know that when I go there are no guarantees. A storm may come (avert avert) a wind may rise (avert avert) a great swell may swamp me, drag me down and drench my lungs. A shrieking eel may rise from the deep to devour me: I may be eaten at my threshold too. Yet my soul leads me out to open water.
When the moon is a sliver cut into the night and the ripples gleam phosphorescent, I know it is time to go.
The island puts up no fight at all to keep me. There are no cresting waves to push beyond. The waters part for the coracle’s passage as gently as a hushed in-breath, and close behind it, wakeless, with the world-turning finality of the sun dragged under the horizon.
I will be borne along (alone) by currents and by the fin-beats of hatched fears. Eels slice serpentine shadows through bioluminescent clouds below, bright constellations blossoming in the celestial algal bloom. Galaxies shimmer at our passage. As above, so beneath.
On I drift. Who knows where I go? To reach deliverance between water and air, over the wine-dark, moon-tugged sea.
RCA2023 : The Way of the Eel Exhibition Installation
The Way of the Eel exhibition install shots from Royal College of Art Degree Show 2023. Including: the cultists coracle refilled with water to form a font or holy well, with lichenised vessels cast from smaller rock pools floating on the surface; coracle sails made from hand dyed cloth and sewn with cowrie shells collected on the Isles of Scilly; splintered driftwood collected from the Scilly coast; The Way of the Eel cult pamphlet, containing the doctrine of the cult; three large format digital c-type photographic prints; “eel cult initiate” pin-badges, and a screening of ~ The Way of the Eel ~ short film.
For more information on this project in RCA2023 follow this link : https://2023.rca.ac.uk/students/tean-roberts/
In the Beginning there were Eels…
In the beginning there were eels.
Equipped with the supernatural capacity for transformation, they set out to bring their gifts to the word. They transformed from willow leaf to elver to glass eel to sentient aquatic serpentine coil, lithe, black eyed and wriggling.
They wove themselves though all the world’s rivers and its seas. They infiltrated the deepest sea caves and the highest mountain streams.
And then they crawled onto the earth, where they continued to transform into trees and shrews and birds and people, each according to their gifts.
Some of the eels had a talent for wriggling in mud and these became worms and shrews and rabbits who make their burrows in the soil.
Some had talent for swift movement and for singing and these singing eels became the birds.
Some eels had a talent for rooting their stomachs into the ground and mingling with the connective energy that trills between the earth and the sky and these became the trees.
Some of the eels had talent for tending the land and watching the seas and thinking, and these eels became people.
Some eels had the talent for weaving back and forth through time in and amongst the other eels and forging lines of relatedness between them, like bulging strings of eel-slime. These became the storytellers. Who are different from the other people.
When they had made enough species and were happy with the scope and variety they had created, the eels dropped back into the waters. But if the need arises, they will crawl back out again to re-enact their transformation upon the land. This land that many of us foolishly believe to be our unchallenged and unchangeable domain.
The eels remind us of this latent power of theirs from time to time. Spilling over the ground in long columns of twisting bodies, writing purposefully and resolutely forwards under the shadow of the new moon.
They do this so that we might remember where we came from, and to teach us to respect the mysteries of the earth and the sea, and the transformation that is always occurring, visibly and invisibly, as we follow along behind them on The Eel’s Way.
Bring Me Your Hands
Bring Me Your Hands was an interactive performance that took place as part of Fleshy Wisdoms performance night at The Steamship Project Space in June 2023. In this piece, the Eel Way Cultist invites the audience to perform ablutions in an intimate initiation rite for The Way of the Eel. The cultist washed the audience member’s hands for them in a pink shell vessel filled with holy lichenised water (below), while the audio track (above) played.
Psalm 331 : For the Eelish
In times of plenty I will be like the eel, flinging myself forward into streams and gullies in wriggling ecstasy, jaw to jaw with my slithering companions.
In times of perceived scarcity I will not name it scarcity, I will slow my metabolism and, like the eel, I will exist on the abundance of meagre specks that drift in my direction.
When I am predicted to behave one way, I will be like the eel and slide out of the way of any expectations. No projections will stick to my slime-moistened scales. I will coil and writhe and hide and be unknowable. Neither one thing or another, I will shift my shape and change my form and move in unexpected directions, to maintain my sovereignty and independence, like the eel.
I will embrace the tricky qualities of the eel.
I will not concern myself with being good or bad - such things are inconsequential to the eels.
In my movements I will be like the eel. I will travel in uncanny ways, gliding through tight gaps and tunnels and into curious spaces. I will be unpredictably disquieting, like eels squirming miles over wet ground at night.
When I meet a crossroads I will be like the eel. I will follow my whims deliberately, making choices that only I understand, and I will see no need to explain myself.
I will traverse thresholds. I will travel unseen. Like the eel, I will move between the worlds of the living and the dead. My entirely black eyes will convey nothing of my hidden meaning.
When I am cornered or captured I will be like the eel. I will root down into the strength of my own spirit, enliven my inner resources and cling on to life doggedly, with tenacity and resilience, as determined and unflinching as the bite of a fang-filled jaw.
In times of attack I will be like the eel, fighting tooth and scale for my life, and for the validity of my own existence. I may be an insolent, night-crawling, slime drenched serpent, but I have as much right to life as any other being.
I will burrow my way out of any stomach that attempts to digest me.
Like the eel, it will be difficult to catch me, to hold me down, or trap me, and those who attempt to do so will likely regret their spent effort and their missing fingers.
Eleven Commandments of the Eel Cult :
The Edgelander’s Prayer
Out of nothing something comes.
Out of the ocean in the Spring come the elvers and the pilchard shoals.
Out of the darkness of the leats and the pools come the eels.
Unseen, but their presence felt under the darkness.
Out of the quiet of the sea comes the storm.
Out of the night comes the wreck.
Something comes from nothing and we can be stupefied by wonder.
It is astounding how fast and how entirely a life can change.
Do not loose faith, here on the lip of the world, fearing you are powerless and forgotten.
Make your offerings, grasp the wheel of the universe and turn it towards you to bring down the blessings and the troubles in order that you are delivered your desires.
Grasp life and wrench it forwards.
Dive into its freezing waters.
Risk from your safe hearth in the ways that you can.
Trust that you will be answered.
We are already brewing miracles.
Join Us!
The Way of the Eel is an art project by original cultist Teän Roberts, created as part of their MA degree in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art.
If you would like to learn more about their work, or would like to enquire about cult initiation opportunities into The Way of the Eel, then please visit the Royal College of Art online showcase at : https://2023.rca.ac.uk/students/tean-roberts/ or be in touch via eel-mail at tean@teanroberts.com