“A fairytale is an imaginary garden with real toads in it.”

I don’t know the source of this quotation, but I take it as my starting point for this account, because the opposite definition applies to my novels about the Celtic Mary Magdalen. Maeve is an imaginary character, with no claim to historicity, but she lives in this world, and I want my depiction of it to be as vivid and accurate as possible -- a real garden, or brothel, temple, sacred grove, city. For each of the three novels, I have done onsite research, as well as extensive reading, and in every case my encounter with the land itself has helped to inform the story.

For The Passion of Mary Magdalen, I made trips to Italy and to Israel. In Rome I wandered around the Forum, finding the places I had read about, the site of the College of Vestal Virgins, the corner where Maeve might have been sold as a slave, Sacra Via where devotees to various gods or civic causes made ritual processions. One guidebook, (later stolen so I can’t cite it), even told me how to find a shrine to Cloacina, the goddess of the sewer -- a particularly Roman deity, given their genius for plumbing. I climbed Palatine hill and walked down to Circus Maximus, site of all chariot races and gladiatorial games, for in Maeve’s time the Coliseum had yet to be built. And I walked along the Tiber absorbing the sight and sound of the river, visiting the place where Maeve’s stolen boat would be overturned.

Rome is a modern city, and The Forum is a ruin. It was exploring Pompeii that gave me the strongest sense of what it might have felt like to Maeve to live in Rome. The free British Celts lived in small clusters of round wattle and daub huts. They had a very sophisticated oral tradition and system of law -- preserved and taught by druids whose classrooms were sacred groves. If you look at Celtic art, you will see no straight lines, only circles, spirals, complex knot work. Even their crops were planted in curving rows. They lived very much outdoors, herding (and raiding) cattle, roving in warrior bands, traveling in tribal groups to different festival gatherings.

Pompeii, by contrast, is enclosed. Oddly enough, it made me think of a shopping mall. Inside it you could be completely oblivious of the world outside -- in Pompeii’s case the sea and a huge, smoking volcano that would bury the town in 79AD. I sensed that the Romans wanted it that way. Everything scaled down to human size, including nature, depicted in pastoral frescos in the houses of the wealthy. These people liked framing things, containing things. To someone from a land without cities, where everything is round, first century Roman life would have felt claustrophobic and suffocating.

Of course I visited Pompeii’s brothel, which was so small it was hard to imagine it even while I was right there -- a narrow room with stone beds built into the wall. There was some graffiti about a whore named Succula, source for the name of one Maeve’s sister-whores. The Vine and the Fig Tree is not as cramped, because Domitia Tertia comes from the aristocracy. But even the wealthy inhabited smaller spaces than we might imagine, and frescoes were used, I believe, to make the rooms seem larger, the way we might use mirrors.

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