Blackthorn

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PART TWO - BLACKTHORN, THE DARK MOTHER OF THE WOODS

The miracle of the Blackthorn winter

Blackthorn has a habit of covering its bare branches with clouds of snowy white, little fairy flowers before it has even started to push out its leaves This can happen any time from February to April, depending on local conditions. In rural areas, this time of the year is till known as the 'Blackthorn Winter'.
Just as the warmest months of the year usually occur after Midsummer day, so the coldest months of the year can be expected after Midwinter. This is due to the fact that earth and water store heat and cold and release it gradually to the air that surrounds us.
More often than not we find therefore, that in the early months of the year, when the cold North East Winds may still be with us, most of Nature is cautiously holding back its growth, save a few brave heralds of stirring life, such as Hazel catkins dreamily hanging from their trees and dapper little snowdrops breaking through the chilly earth. All the crowns of the trees are still empty, gloomy and leafless. And then the magic happens: The Blackthorn bursts out in an abundance of blossoms. It defies the tyranny of low temperature in a breath-taking spectacle of a myriad of white tender flowers. Life has come back from the death of winter once more.

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Tree of Black Magic

In the Christian folklore of the last few centuries the Blackthorn is, however, not looked upon with favour. In contrast, the snowdrop was perceived as a symbol of hope and consolation. It was said that an angel transformed a snowflake into this lovely little flower to comfort Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden. But the heartwarming spring display of the Blackthorn received no such endorsement by the monks, ministers and priests.
There is a reason for this, as we shall explore in greater depth in this essay, but briefly stated it is simply, because Blackthorn was closely associated with the community healers, seers and wise people of the old Nature religions and therefore with Black Magic.
The study of Blackthorn lore is one of the best examples I know to prove that 'spin-doctoring' is by no means a modern invention.
Sadly, the advance of the Christian era encouraged an increasing alienation of Nature. Gradually people began to see themselves as the crown of Creation (by a male God just a few millennia ago) rather than as one of endless miraculous manifestations of Nature's great web in which all beings and energies continually and mutually create each other in continual cyclic patterns and all are Divine. In the old world view everything is connected and we are all related.
In the new worldview, the world was seen as an hierarchical system of separate species, in which we have to abide by the theological set of laws of the Church. These were mostly formulated by the Churches patriarchs, who in their writings, and translations of the Bible diminished the concept of 'God' and 'Divinity' to a mere super-projection of themselves: God as the ultimate Patriarch or Top-Dog.
In this huge change of cultural and spiritual perspective the Blackthorn suffered a great amount of vilification. It was said that its wood was extremely unlucky and filled with evil vibrations. People were warned that a Blackthorn wand, pointed at a pregnant woman, had the power of miscarriage. This was of course spin-doctering designed to wean people away from the old community healers, many of whom were midwives. 
Some said that the crown of thorns which was put on the head of Jesus at his crucifixion was made of Blackthorn. And the poor tree's reputation was smeared by it and superstitions connected with the tree multiplied, as the heart-to-heart connection of people with the living tree was severed.
It was said that the devil pricked those who had given their souls to him in the finger with a Blackthorn as a sign of initiation. This may seem a mere curiosa to us now, but it was a matter of life and death to so called witches and heretics, many of whom were actually burned alive, because the inquisition found a mark on their fingers! To add insult to injury, the Blackthorn was often used as the wood to build these horrific fires, because it is a superior firewood.
Of course there was some memory left of a different way of looking at the tree. "In a Baltic tale from what is now Poland, one night God showered the Blackthorn with white flowers  as a sign of its innocense." (Hageneder "The Spirit of Trees")
The Blackthorn's image was not helped by the fact that accidental injuries caused by its sharp thorns have a reputation for going septic, although I have to add that after 30 years of working with Blackthorn and being pricked many a time, this has never happened to me personally.
Apart from its useful and widespread former use as an awl (a tool for pricking holes, for example in leather), the spines were also used for many negative purposes, such as making it a deadly weapon by tipping it with poison, using it in voodoo-like spell-craft to stick in images of 'enemies', and even putting it under the saddle of a horse, so that the horse would bolt, as soon as a person would mount the poor animal and throw off its rider. This was an early version of the nasty practice of cutting the brakes cables of a car, which we have seen countless times in films.

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Blackthorn tries to reclaim the felled tree-less places

Even now, when the many superstitions connected with the tree have slowly been forgotten, The Blackthorn is still not loved much better. From the short-term, money-making perspective this is not a lucky tree either. It is too small to be used commercially for timber and consequently often looked upon as a 'weed tree'. Its fruit is tart and relatively unpalatable. It is not an attractive tree to handle without protective gloves because of these formidable thorny spines.
Blackthorn is used as a hedging tree, but it can be difficult to control. It grows long spreading roots, which send up 'suckers' or baby trees. This 'creeping habit' has the result that the tidy cultivated field enclosed by a thorn hedge is continually in danger of colonisation by the trees. When 'Nature' is left to its own devices, it will ultimately almost always aim to create a situation of the highest possible ecological variety and richness. A 3-dimensional woodland is richer and more diverse than a 2-dimensional field. It is interesting to remember again that the word 'field' comes from 'felled', i.e. a place where the trees have been felled. The thorny trees and bushes appear to have evolved as one of Nature's main strategies to reclaim any felled or waste place and allow it to return to forest.
From a mono-culture-farmer's point of view, the removal of miles of hedges (and millions of Blackthorns in this process) was a great improvement: It increased available acreage for cash crops. It was easier to move the big modern farm machinery, such as combine harvesters, in these larger fields. There was less maintenance and worry to keep the ever-proliferating hedges under control.
However, to balance this view point we also have to add , that the disadvantages of removing hedges are many: A greater danger of erosion. Lack of windbreak.  Loss of habitat for plants and wild life alike.  Loss of diversity of species. Loss of visual beauty. Unsightly and expensive artificial wire fences (which require mining, industry and transport) sometimes take its place. Loss of a 'permaculture' area, which provides us with berries, rosehips, herbs and medicinal barks, firewood, etc.

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The tree with a belligerent, struggling spirit

Robert Graves notes that the ancient Celtic (and Breton) name for Blackthorn "Straiff" is related to words such as 'strive' and 'strife'. Sloe (the fruit of the Blackthorn) and 'slay' may also be closely connected in early English (although Hageneder connects it to the old Germanic name 'sleha', meaning bluish).
The reasons for this connection may be many.
Blackthorn in the traditional wood to make fighting sticks, because, like other woods in the Rosaceae family, it is tough and hard. The traditional Irish shillelagh or cudgel is one example of a weapon made with this wood.
In the cultivated Rose, the symbolism often focuses on the voluptuous flowers. In the Blackthorn, it focuses more on the thorny side of life. There is an element in the ancient Celtic naming of this 'Strive Tree' that acknowledges the belligerent, struggling spirit of this species: its colonising habit, its defensive thorns, its ability to bloom in harsh weather, etc.

Roses frequently have huge thorns, yet it is not seen as an unlucky plant. Countless plants have invasive habits, yet we do not regard them as evil. Blackthorn hedges do create a lot of work on a cultivated plot, but is that enough to put a malevolent label unto them? Lettuces and carrots create a lot of work too, but we don't think of them as being evil and unlucky. So we must explore a bit further to try to touch the 'Blackthorn Spirit'.

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Blackthorn thickets as Forest Nurseries

I have lived for over 30 years on marginal and neglected farmland, where there wasn't the labour or the expensive machinery to keep the hedges under control. I have seen the Blackthorns gradually forming dense, impenetrable tickets, often fortified all around with brambles and the smaller Blackthorn suckers, forming tiny trees. The combination of these baby Blackthorns and the Brambles made it virtually impossible to crawl into the thicket, unless you are a mouse or a beetle
These thickets become really wild places. Little havens of wilderness, extremely difficult to enter for human beings and larger grazing animals, but wonderful nesting and sheltering places for birds and smaller animals. And the, as time goes by, seedlings of other, larger, trees find shelter there too. Maybe their seeds came traveling on the wind, from bird droppings, from the food store of a field mouse or a vole. Hazel, Ash, Oak, Sycamore and many others grow slowly in this safe nursery, protected from grazing animals, trampling feet and so on, until eventually they become larger than the Blackthorn itself. Their thickening canopy begins to starve the Blackthorn of light and so, just at the point where these large trees are not so vulnerable any longer to attack from grazing deer and any other hungry munchers, the nanny-Blackthorns start to die. Their protective thorny bodies eventually rot down into a mulch and leaves the young forest trees a last feed.
The business of creating a safe space and nurturing a community of other species into relative maturity is the black magic of the Blackthorn!

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Black and white

Our ancient ancestors, who lived in and with Nature observed this and, unlike many of us today, understood the true nature of Black Magic.
in view of all the negative associations we have accumulated with the colour black, it is of major importance that we are willing to give a little further thought about the properties of 'black' and 'white'. 
Black tends to be associated with evil, badness, greediness, nastiness, undeveloped states, ignorance, and so on. White tends to be associated with purity, light, glory, insight, enlightenment, cleanliness, and so on.
When we are in a foul mood, we call it often 'a black mood'. When tragedy strikes, we may call it 'a black day'. When we experience unpleasant vibrations, we may speak of 'dark forces' at work.
The consequences of this use of language are rather devastating. They have no doubt contributed in major ways to reinforcing racial prejudice. The daily words we use weave powerful spells on us.
We have learned consistently to associate the colour 'black' with lack of light, lack of insight, ignorance, dodgy going's on, etc. This will inevitably affect our conscious or unconscious attitude to people we call 'black'. Black people have been treated for centuries by most lighter skinned races as inferior. Indescribable suffering an humiliation has been caused. So this is not just a point of purely academic or philosophical interest!

Black can be defined as the colour that has the greatest receptive capacity. It absorbs all the visible rays of light and reflects none.
White, on the other end of the scale, absorbs none and reflects all colour-rays back.
There are so many things we do not yet know about light. We don't know exactly what it is: Waves? Energy? Consciousness? Light particles, called photons? All of these things at the same time? In spite of this lack of knowledge, it is possible to observe some of its effects.
In the teachings we receive from Mother Nature herself black and white are the two different faces of the vortex (as in DNA, Galaxies, everything) of life.
The centre (the inner face) is black, the hearth, the womb-space.
It does not judge, it is open, receptive to all and everything. Just like the colour black in Nature.
White reflects ALL light back and black lets it all in, as you can test out by sitting with a bare bum on a black stone and on a white stone after sunset on a nice warm day.
You find that the black stone is much warmer than the white stone, because it has taken all the rays unto itself.
Because the black stone has been absorbing all the light and rejecting none, something starts happening in the 'fullness' of black: it starts radiating its warmth (collected through receptivity) back.
To me this is a wonderful metaphore for "the Goddess giving birth".
I feel that Black Magic originally was this sort of magic: The Magic of being open and receptive. Nurturing what has been received without interference or judging! And then, when whatever it was, has grown sufficiently within the dark womb, it will emerge ready to face the light.
So I guess that black magic must have started off as woman's magic (which is not to say that our men can't do it !!!) somewhere long ago, deep down in our human history on this beautiful planet.

Black Magic was originally the magic of putting seeds in the dark earth and nurturing them till they are ready to radiate their life force outwards and reach out to the light. In spite of what most people think, this is my belief: Black Magic is non interfering magic, it is being open and holding something in your heart for as long as it wants to be there. Nothing to do with manipulation or power trips. Just the inevitable result of 'true' black magic is, that it is a power-store.
I guess that, because it was women's magic, it got a bad press, when the great Yin and Yang switch happened from matriarchy to patriarchy.
Yet, there are still a few clues to show that black magic was once held in great regard. One of them is the ancient colour-belt hierarchy in martial arts, such as Karate, where a black belt is the highest grade you can achieve. It means you are beginning to get in touch with your centre, your source.

White magic is the complement. It reflects energies back.
So originally a white magician would be a sort of mirror, for all the energies around him or her. Except the witch or wizard might give the energy a tweak by putting on some spin to get results.
A good metaphor to understand these principles is maybe: A small person can get the better of a large strong person in a fight, if the small one uses the energy with which the big one comes at him and then directs it to his advantage.
Another excellent example can be found in ball games, such as cricket: A good batsman uses the force and the 'spin' in the ball that is thrown to him to direct it to where he likes it to go.

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Blackthorn reminds us of the need to reclaim the true Black Magic

Once we become aware again, with the help of teachers such as the Blackthorn tree, what the art of Black magic originally meant, it seems important to reclaim this term for its proper use.
It does not help the general confusion that many learned scholars and even influential occult books describe black magic as a false school and a perversion of real magic. Is it a perversion that seeds grow in the lap of the dark earth before they reach out to the light? Is it a false school of life which causes human beings to start off in the dark womb of their Mothers?
Of course it is not!
Black magic is the magic of tuning in and growing in harmony and balance between ourselves and the world we are a part of. It is internalised magic, nurturing magic, slow magic, dreaming magic, earth magic. It was the magic, which all females practiced when they were growing a child.
Using more modern terms, we can call it ecological and organic magic.
I suspect that its association with females and its earth-centered orientation were two of the main reasons for its vilification. At some time in the history of our 'civilisation' we were 'converted' to the worship of a male God in heaven and encouraged to live out the doctrine that man(!)kind was put in dominion over all the Earth's creatures. We were only responsible to God, but not any longer to our fellow creatures.
I am sometimes suspected of wanting 'to turn the clock back' when I try to describe the beauty of some ancient belief systems. I have absolutely no desire to do that! Ancient societies had plenty of imperfections too. Like many of my contempories, I realise that our world is in a deep crisis. If we can find helpful, inspirational practices deep in our roots, then these should be pointed out, for they are our common heritage.
My love and loyalty as a 21st century person lies in the present. And I know that this moment in the now is woven of millions of years of evolution and infinite strands of interactions with countless beings, creatures, energies and substances, whose names I do not even know. My existence and that of you, who reads this, is made possible by this web of inter connections.
I take the trouble to write here (as well as in other places: See for example "Nurturing Magic" in the Groovy Grove), because I believe that we need to reclaim the concept of "Black Magic" for the greater good of all at this particular critical moment in time.

The Blackthorn was experienced by our ancestors as a teacher of Black Magic by creating its dense impenetrable thickets, which were receptive to the seeds of more vulnerable trees than itself. The Blackthorn was called "The Mother of the Woods", because it reclaims waste lands and creates safe nurseries, which in time grow up into a new forest. This was seen as powerful magic for the good of the greater whole.
Therefore it makes sense that witches, shamans and other wise people in ancient communities, traditionally used a Blackthorn wand as their staff of office. These people were concerned with serving their community through healing as well as any other way they were able, to help make it prosper.
The traditional use of Blackthorn as a fighting stick in Ireland, always a land steeped in magic, may also be related to the defensive, impenetrable habit of the Blackthorn, and so be regarded as the best wood to defend one's community in times of need.

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Trust in the natural wild forces that made us and will re-cycle us again

One of the greatest difficulties in appreciating the value of black magic has always been the fact that it involves letting go, giving up exclusive cerebral control and making room for intuition and allowing the power to rise from deep within us.
It requires trust in the fact that the intangible wild forces, which wove the threads of the world we live in, can be depended upon to do what is right under the circumstances. It requires faith that natural wild forces, which include the recently rediscovered 'chaos principle' in physics, will restore balance.
Moreover, we are frightened of death and we intuit that somehow the mystery of death belongs to the realms of the receptive black forces, just as conception is. When we cannot be restored and re-energised any longer, we will be recycled.
We know very well that we owe our life to the death of the countless plants and animals, which we use as food every day. Recycling their life-force to build our own seems a natural, healthy thing to us. We certainly do not perceive our daily meals as 'dabbling with evil forces'.  However, when it comes to our own death, the philosophy changes......

To some extend that it perfectly understandable. It's the way we are made. All creatures need the will to live and survive and procreate, otherwise the whole system would not work.
The trouble is, that when our time comes to die, as it inevitably will some day, we are hardly ever ready for it. We haven't yet learned to love the Earth of which we are a part as much as we love ourselves. We haven't yet learned to love the air we breathe as much as we love ourselves.
So when the flesh returns to the Earth it lived on and the breath return to the air it lived on, we feel a sense of loss, rather than a sense of uniting with the greater whole, that will continue to feed endless amazing manifestations of life.
It we could accept that all life is related, that we are not only an individual drop in the great ocean, but that WE ARE the ocean, maybe we could sense better that death is a transition, not the end.
Add to that our truly tremendous ignorance of how this amazing world is put together! We don't really know what 'time' is. We don't really know exactly how matter and spirit interrelate and create each other. We suspect there are many dimensions beyond those we are able to experience, just as there are many different light and sound-waves beyond those we can hear and see.
When we study nature, we see how nothing is ever wasted. Species and individuals may appear to compete for dominance and control, but when you look beyond superficial appearance, you learn that everything is working together. Everything creates each other. Everything is part of greater ecological networks. Everything is recycled sooner or later.
Nothing is left out, forgotten about. Everything is allowed to contribute. There is no reason to believe that these universal principles should only apply to matter and not extend into the realms of energy and consciousness.
Just as our consciousness and our bodies were not static during life, but continually grow and change in interaction with the rest of the world (air, water, food, experiences, etc.) so it will most likely continue after the great transition of death. The adventure will go on and we shall always be part of it, though how this exactly happens, remains an area for much speculation.
Meditative practices, organic nurturing and allowing the intuitive forces of 'the dark' to teach, transform and guide us, is one way to experience the validity of many of the above statements.

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Thorn hedges and thickets

Once we understand the true nature of Black Magic, we are in a better position to appreciate the deeper meaning in myths, legend and fairy tales of thickets, briars and hedges of thorn.
All prickly trees and plants are important initiators of regeneration.
Common examples in our temperate environment are Gorse, Brambles, Wild Rose, Thistles, Nettles, Blackthorn and Hawthorn. Each has its own special abilities and talents. The Thistle is excellently equipped to invade monotonous fields of mono-culture. The bramble and Rose cover waste places and bare banks, preventing erosion. The Gorse is a specialist on poor, relatively dry soil and sprinkles the soil every year with a generous helping of needle-like leaves to add to humus content. The Nettle flourishes on disturbed soil, compost heaps and undigested piles of organic matter, helping it to grow into beautifully crumbly earth, etc.
Most of the prickly plants have impressive root systems which help to bring up minerals from the subsoil. whenever the topsoil is depleted.
So wherever we find a thicket or a thorny hedge in an old story, we can be sure that some form of balancing or regeneration is going on.
Regeneration becomes rather necessary in particular circumstances

• When there is an imbalance, e.g. mono-culture

• When trauma or injury have occurred.

• When one stage of development is completed and we need to make new beginnings and grow further.

Look around for examples in Nature, as well as in your social and personal life.
Here we will confine ourselves to one further example, that of the famous fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty or Briar Rose.

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The 13th Fairy as the Chaos Principle

The tale of Sleeping Beauty starts off with the birth of a princess. There is to be a feast to celebrate the happy event
Only 12 of the 13 fairies in the realm are invited to this grand occasion by the King, because he has only twelve golden plates for them to eat off. The number "12" stands for order and completion in numerology (the science of the quality rather than the quantity of numbers), such as is symbolised also in the 12 signs of the Zodiac.

The 13th fairy, the principle of chaos and transformation, the factor we always ignore, is not invited. Yet she is an irrepressible principle, for life does not tolerate stagnancy.
Eleven of the fairies had bestowed their gifts on the infant princess: Virtue, beauty, riches, gentleness, intelligence and everything that is to be desired in this world. Just then the 13th fairy gate-crashes the party and announces that the princes will die, after pricking herself on a spindle on her 15th birthday.

The 12th fairy (=the energy of order and completion) had not yet given her gift to the baby. She does not have the power to override the chaos principle. All she can do is to ease it and so she says: "The princess will not die, but fall into a sleep of a hundred years duration.

There is great wisdom in this tale.
Wholeness (the 12th fairy) is the energy that unites us with the rest of the world. And when we are truly at one with it, we can never really die, all we can do is take part in the adventure of transformation.
In spite of all efforts to prevent it, the prophecy came about. The whole palace and all its inhabitants fell asleep with the princess. A thick hedge of thorns started growing until the whole castle was hidden from view. (Whenever we find a thicket or a thorny hedge in an old story, we may be sure that some form of regeneration or balancing is going on, as all thorny and prickly plants in Nature have the job of repairing injury and trauma to the land, or addressing monoculture, etc).

From time to time a Prince came and endeavored to penetrate through the hedge, but it was impossible. The thorns held them prisoner and they perished. However when a hundred years had gone by and Prince Charming approached, the thorns turned into fine large flowers and of their own accord made a way for him to pass through. When the prince found the princess, he could not help but kiss her.  Just then she woke up and greeted him with smiles. The whole palace woke up as well and in due time their wedding was celebrated and they lived to the end of their lives happy and contented.
Like all good fairy tales, there are many levels of meaning in this story.

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The theory of the 13th fairy:
"12 parts stability and 1 part of change"

We all start off in life at birth with many gifts, but also with a curse. The curse is that nothing can ever stay exactly the same and that one day we will all die. That can be very scary and yet it is the principle that brings life truly 'alive'.
Order and stability may be enormously attractive, but it leads to stagnancy. Transformation, in its many different guises, such as the seasons of the year, the way our body changes during our life, the way our consciousness grows. the way our relationships change, all involve a dying of the old and a blossoming of something new.
The endless transformations and the chaos principle are responsible for the thousands of variations on familiar themes and the boundless riches we experience in our life.
We need the 13th fairy, for she is the regenerating chaos principle that upsets the established order and injects it with new life. In this story the 'injection' happens almost literally, as the princes pricks herself on the spindle. Spinning and weaving is a theme we come across a lot in myths and tales. There are the three Norns or 'Fates': The first one spins the thread, the second weaves it, the third cuts it. The third Norn is like the grandmother of the  13th fairy.
The numerology is interesting: 12 parts of order and stability and 1 part of transformation. That feels to me as if it could be a formula for the ratio of order and change we need in our life.

It is fascinating to note in this context, that our music, which is the art of harmonies, changes octaves after 12 notes (7 regular notes and 5 so called half-notes). The Zodiac has 12 signs. Our year is divided into 12 months, although it has 13 moons.
Jungian psychologists would say that the transformation, which the princess undergoes in the story, is the balancing of her male and female sides, the 'anima' and 'animus', the Yin and Yang we are all composed of. It is difficult to hurry this process and much of it occurs on an unconscious level. Many of us are a bit lopsided: either too introvert or too extravert, too much of a dreamer or too much a doer, too much into the body or too much into the spirit.
If we want to be able to reach our true potential, we need to balance these forces to live happily and contented thereafter. Fairy tales always have many levels of meanings......
This is important to remember, so that we do not dismiss "the happily ever after bit" as just a nice sweet way to end the story, that we can make fun of when our lives with the Princes of our Dreams or Prince Charming are often full of frustrations.
The deeper meaning of "living happily ever after" is finding your own true self: connecting your Yin and Yang, connecting with the infinite cycles of life and knowing that we are ultimately: "All One"!

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Thorn hedges signify the underlying web of life

The thorn hedge or thicket can mean many things and sometimes all of them together. They are the web of life, the weaving of which introduces time. They are the unconscious forces, containing all the treasure of our long evolution, including the wild dark forces, which always aim towards balance. They symbolise a period of retreat and integration or of withdrawal and integration. They are the enchanted woods in which we sleep, until the flowers on the trees start blossoming and we wake up to a new exciting start. Spring has arrived once more..... or some kind of Prince Charming!
As well as being attributes to the Norns or Fates (The Triple Goddess or the Divine Trinity), the thorns and spindles are also phallic symbols, representing in this case the unawakened side of us, Prince Charming, the significant other in our life (or on a deeper level "The other side of Life"), grown up mature relationships. Note that some earlier Princess become entangled in the hedge. They tried to force the pace of initiation and perish sadly on their own masculine symbol, the spine because of their immaturity. They were not yet ready to truly unite their Yin and Yang, because they tried to have 'power over' the initiation by slashing through the boundary, rather than allowing the power to rise within them at the right time.
On the surface Sleeping Beauty is a simple romantic tale with a few pinches of magic here and there.
On the deepest level, Sleeping Beauty is the story of life itself. A spark of the life-force -usually represented as a female- is born. She is every single one of us (male and female), but to show that we are also talking about big archetypal forces, she is a 'Princess'. She enjoys a period of simple innocent enjoyment of her individuality, a pure virgin, innocent and self-sufficient within her own being as many children are.
The one day, when she is about the age that she is entering puberty and physical adulthood, she begins to explore the world around her, reach out and she looks in all the rooms and chambers of the castle. She finds an old woman spinning the threads of life and she want to have a go herself. She is enchanted by the 'touch' of life (the prick of the sharp spindle). Her spiritual virginity is broken....
She is the individual connecting again with all the rest of the world she is part of: The hundred year trance journey within the protection of the magical thorn hedge signifies this. She is growing a forest inside herself and balancing her ecology.
The thorn hedge also reminds us that this is not merely a cerebral, conscious process, but a result of the fact that the power of black magic has been set in motion.
Thus sleeping beauty can be considered as a tale on the theme of transformation. Its happy end shows us that the curse may have been a blessing in disguise. The 13th Fairy, no matter how unwelcome she may have been, has helped to enrich her life.
There are many such sleepers in myth and folklore: Brunhilde, Snowwhite, Merlin, Arthur, Wodan, Zeus Dictynus, Quetzalcoat, Vishnu, Owen Glendower, etc.). The story often tells that these sleepers will wake up one day when we need them most and bring renewal.

It is essential to remember that these same forces sleep within our own being as well. The time has come that we need to wake them up to help us to transform our life and to create a more ecologically, sustainable society.
The Catch-22 seems to be here, that we can't wake these forces up until we are balanced. If we do this prematurely, we are likely to perish on the thorns. The world all around us shows countless examples of this.
One of the solutions to this catch-22 is to learn intuitively from our "Tree-friends", such as the Blackthorn, and allow the web of life within us to blossom. Only then will the impenetrable hedge open and form a path for us.

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Blackthorn, a much needed teacher and transformer of waste land

I hope to have made the case that the Blackthorn was a tree, which was held in high esteem in ancient times. Maybe this view is confirmed by the fact that in "Calder's hearing of the scholars", an ancient Celtic catechism, it was classified as a chieftan tree, in spite of its relatively small size.
It is not included in the ancient Irish Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet (the O'Flaherty version), said to be a relic of the Druidic tradition, although Graves reckons it should share the 5th month of the tree calendar with Willow, from the 15th of April till the 12th of May and he assigned Blackthorn the letter SS or Z.
I have included Blackthorn in my own revised version of the Tree Calendar, where it represents the 11th moon of the year from 30 September to 27 October.

Little Blackthorn tree, Mother of the Woods, even though we, the humans, try to defend our cultivated field against you, you are much needed, both as a teacher and a transformer of our waste lands.
Your wonderful pure-white blossoms in the spring, when most things are still bare and the weather can still be so cold, has struck me as the blossoming of the unconscious, dark forces itself.