NOT A TALKING HEAD

I've recently created a video course for Watkins Books, as a companion to my book The Medicine Wheel. There are 11 sessions, and I had a fun time doing it: it brings something out in me that writing alone cannot. I think you'll find my style engaging: it's more enthusiastic fireside chat than polished talking head 🤣

 The intro is free and you can find it here

 The course itself can be found here.

 

While you are about it, I did a talk with Aquarius Severn Astrology group in early October, and you can find that here.

 

Happy Watching!

ARE WE FATED?

NB Please note the free email subscribe box at the top right of the page 

 You know how sometimes Spirit intervenes, the dream you thought you were living gets superseded by something bigger that comes in from behind, that had always been there, that had always been the real dream, the blueprint that Spirit had for us. And we'd put all that time and effort into creating what we thought were our our dreams, we'd even paid good money to go to workshops where we wrote down what we were going to achieve over the next year. And it's all vanity, how could we with our tiny slice of consciousness have any idea what that infinite, open dimension of consciousness had in mind for us? 

All we can do is create the conditions for that bigger dream to become conscious: we can do the purification work on the Red Road of the Medicine Wheel, balancing our thoughts, dealing with the shadow. But Spirit intervenes at a time and place of its choosing along the Blue Road of Spirit and Incarnation. 

So this can seem like Fate, a hand we are dealt that we did not choose. I think life teaches us to surrender our personal desires and ambitions - through a kind of war of attrition! - and that gives space to sense the deeper intentions of Spirit. To sense our Fate. Which does not deny Free Will. We just need a big enough space to contain both of them, and to give the servant reason its proper place, so it knows when to keep quiet. Fate is indeed a denial of the will of the narrow self, because it is an opening to the power and awesomeness of Spirit. 

The ultimate intention of Spirit is that we should die, and that we should be happy to do so; that we have learned to trust life enough to know that whatever major stage comes next is life-promoting, even death. In his novel Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe describes traditional tribal life in Nigeria life as a series of transitions that bring us ever closer to the ancestors. 

Anyway, some years ago I wrote a piece for my astrology blog on this theme, but looked at from an astrological, rather than a shamanic, perspective. Here it is 😊 

The idea of Fate can seem like an affront to our self-respect as human beings, to the idea that we have Free Will, that we make our own choices in life. It can seem like a throw-back to primitive superstition.

And this polarity is understandable when you look at our religious background with its all-powerful, all-determining God. We want none of that, and rightly so.

Our destiny is no longer controlled by God but by ourselves, we have Free Will, and we are guided by reason.

It’s said that we become that which we oppose, and in our flight away from God and towards reason and science, we have created a determinism just as rigid: a universe governed by immutable physical laws, with human beings as just one more expression of those laws. And without even the divine element that God, for all his faults, brought.

But that determinism tends to be hidden because, at least in the West,  in our day-to-day lives we do have the freedom to choose (up to a point) and to have opinions. We don’t have to be on our guard, whatever people say about government snooping. Of course, we CAN be brainwashed by all sorts of factors, and many of us are in different ways, it seems to be part of how large societies work. But the point is we don’t have to be, we have the option of thinking and acting independently without being sent to prison or burnt or beheaded.

These sorts of contradictions fascinate me. And I think they often arise because we think in rigid, literal, black-and-white terms. Life, hopefully, teaches us not to think like that. Education should also teach us not to, but I don’t think it does, generally speaking, because it has its own agenda.

And so Fate and Free Will can appear as irreconcilable opposites. I don’t think I need to argue for Free Will, because it is self-evident. Or is it? In one sense it is self-evident, in that from moment to moment we choose our actions. The devil is in the word 'choose', and how much of ‘us’ is involved in that choice. We can truly and genuinely and sincerely think we are acting out of Free Will, and then one day we realise we’ve been living out a programme we were brought up to live, or reacting against it, which is sort of the same thing. And the programming may have been making the choices to a greater extent than the little bit of consciousness we called our own.

And that is Fate, a certain kind of Fate, masquerading as Free Will.

So it’s complicated.

                                                                            -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

                                                                                            -------------------------------------------------

And often we wake up to Free Will through crises, which are Fate in a rather different sense. As an astrologer, one sees this kind of Fate all the time through the transits of the outer planets to the natal chart. A god enters the scene. He is wild and bad-mannered and can’t be locked in his room, and a few years down the line you find you are a different person, maybe aware of the real reasons you’ve been like you are all these years.

And these crises are, to a certain extent, predictable. They are writ, they are Fate. It’s part of the astrologer’s box of magic tricks: so what happened to you around 1992, what major life change did you go through? And out it all comes, usually. Not always, because astrology isn’t mechanical and people aren’t mechanical.

Or take the financial crisis, the mother of all meltdowns, that began in 2008. Any half-way literate astrologer could see that with Uranus coming up to square Pluto at a degree that significantly impacted the charts of all the major powers, some sort of big crisis was on the way. And astrologers were in fact talking about it years in advance.

We’d have probably all had different ideas as to the nature of this crisis, although Uranus-Pluto has a way of being economics, so that would have been a reasonable guess.

So you can see that the future was both writ and not writ on a collective scale.

It’s mysterious. What is the chart if not our Fate? But it is not set in stone. It is more like a set of stories that have their own flavours and lessons and turning points, and that can even to a great degree be predicted in advance. And these pre-writ stories are not a denial of our Free Will, but rather contain points at which events seem to have guided us to the possibility of an accession of Free Will.

The chart is not literal, it is a divinatory lens. It is objective, in that many astrologers would accurately see the same sort of meaning in a chart. It is not just a lens for the astrologer’s personal dialogue with the gods, though it is that as well, making every reading unique and particular.

Through feeling and reading the relationship between the earth and the sky, astrology has over the millennia built a divinatory sea that anyone can tap into, a sea that points to our origins, in fact to the origins of everything, as lying behind the apparent material universe. For how else could we possibly know these things about people and world events from the chart? Certainly not from any physical cause.

As Wordsworth says in Intimations of Immortality:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparell'd in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream...

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar

So I think this is the sort of context in which the Fate element in astrology needs to be seen. Astrology gives us glimpses of the deeper stories behind our life, the intentions of the gods, if you like, the bigger cosmic picture behind who we think we are, that Aries has forgotten and that Pisces is privilege to, and that all the other signs are a progression towards.

Fate in this sense is not something that can easily be put in rational, logical terms. Even Free Will cannot very easily be expressed in those terms, not when you view it as the urge to enlarge consciousness.

We may not be able to explain Fate, but we ignore it at our peril. The ancient Greeks understood this well, though human rationality was given more power as time went on.

The ancient Greeks acknowledged the role of Fate as a reality outside the individual that shaped and determined human life. In modern times, the concept of Fate has developed the misty halo of romantic destiny, but for the ancient Greeks, Fate represented a terrifying, unstoppable force.

And they were right. Cataclysmic natural events apart (which nowadays we are largely shielded from, we forget the raw power of nature), you see the suffering people go through because they don’t know how to listen to themselves, the self being much larger than everyday consciousness and often how we have been taught to be. Life exacts its revenge, or tries to pressure us into submission. You get cancer, your wife leaves you, your kids disown you, you get fired, you lose your home, anything you try goes wrong, maybe you even die.

Sometimes a crow is just a crow, and sometimes it means something. Sometimes these things just happen. It is a basic mistake to think that outer events always mirror inner events. No, the whole point is that reading signs is an art, and knowing when a sign is a sign and when it isn’t, is part of that art, and part of astrology’s subtlety.

That larger self is just one way of putting it. It is the gods knocking at the door. It is life itself and its need to move on. It is the Unconscious trying to further the process of individuation.

Whatever it is, it is not necessarily ‘nice’. Astrology in this auguristic sense disrupts our domestic sanitisations, the habitual and the safe, by revealing the intentions of the gods.

So the ancient Greeks understood Fate to be a dark god when resisted. Even, at times, when not resisted. The concept of Fate brings us closer not to that which is ‘nice’ but to that which is real.

As science and its ordered universe has progressed and tightened over the last 200 years, so have the outer planets, reality as uncontrollable Fate, emerged.

Bernadette Brady, in her book Cosmos, Chaosmos and Astrology advances the notions of Cosmos and Chaosmos. Cosmos is the ordered universe. Chaosmos is that aspect of the universe – eg weather systems – that do not obey the laws of predictable cause and effect and that science has had to find other ways of describing. Hence Chaos theory, and the Chaosmos, to which she proposes that astrology essentially belongs.

You could say that Free Will belongs to Cosmos and Fate to Chaosmos. Not that it is a rigid distinction. And Chaos theory seems to me to contain an inherent contradiction, in that is attempting to describe in rational terms that which defeats rationality. But at least it constitutes some kind of acknowledgement by science that there are aspects to reality that will forever be beyond its grasp. Quantum reality has similar implications. Chaosmos, however, is not merely the special case that science can't reduce to an equation: it is the larger reality within which the very specialised methods of modern science take their place.

But people aren’t always interested in philosophy, and why should they be, so these kinds of implications don’t always filter through. All the same, Fate as that larger reality beyond human control that needs respecting seems to be implied by both Chaos Theory and Quantum Theory. And Chaosmos seems a very evocative term for it, that also has a measure of scientific respectability.

Free Will can to some extent be explained in rational terms. Scientists can do brain studies on how we make decisions, for example. Free Will is an idea. But Fate in its deeper sense of the gods barging through our front door cannot be explained, merely described and evoked.

In 1996 I encountered the Norns in a book called ‘The Wisdom of the Wyrd’. They are 3 women who live in a hall by a well at the foot of Yggdrassil, the World Tree of Norse Myth. They take care of Yggdrassil with water from the well and sand from around it. They and other Norns determine the destiny of new-born children.

The author, Professor Brian Bates, called the Norns ‘Daughters of the Night’. I knew nothing about these figures, yet the imagery stunned me. For weeks afterwards it was like I was left reeling whenever I thought of these Norns. Even now I sort of go weak at the knees :)

I responded so strongly partly because Germanic/Norse myth is in me and probably in all northern Europeans. That is the strange thing about myths: we may not have heard them, but we recognise them all the same. The Lord of the Rings has that sort of quality, and it would, for Tolkien was deeply versed in European mythology.

And my response was to an image of Fate. But also more than an image. These ‘images’ (which is what nowadays we reduce them to, like one more defined thing to have ideas about) are also beings, they are presences that we can experience. I have that with Pluto. I often feel his presence when I am writing.

Norns

And I don’t think that is just a ‘subjective’ thing. These beings are real, they can be met and talked to. Yet they are also elusive, they do not just come at our bidding. And that is how I feel about the Norns. They belong to what Patrick Harpur calls Daimonic Reality.

And if I were southern European I might well feel the same way about the Moirai, the Fates, the 3 women who in ancient Greece allotted the Fate of everyone at birth. They each have a different function: one spins the thread of life onto her spindle, the other measures it, and the other cuts it: Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos.

Moirai

The Norns and the Moirai suggest to me that in ancient times Fate was understood and even feared as utterly real, yet it was not taken in the literal way that we think nowadays. For us, something is only real if it is literal, if it is ‘out there’ in a solid way and can be measured. From that point of view, Fate can seem like a product of primitive ignorance. The modern perspective can seem to be above and beyond all that has come before, but I think it is an anomaly, a peculiarity that will right itself - maybe not for a while yet - because human nature will inevitably also right itself.

 So I think the Norns and the Moirai, understood in a non-literal way, bring us a long way from Fate as a sort of primitive determinism, that we moderns with our understanding of the way the universe ‘really’ works can afford to look down on.

I don’t think the relationship between Fate and Free Will can ever be pinned down. It is a dichotomy that is there for us to reflect on, to muse on, and in so doing to reach down below the surface of life and observe consciousness in its mystery and elusiveness.

WHAT TYPE OF SHAMAN ARE YOU?

I have done astrology readings for years – I do them by skype, if any of you are interested – and you can tell a lot about someone just from their Sun and Moon signs (you can look up your Moon sign at 'astrocal'.) Astrology often treats the Sun as the most important planet. But from a Shamanic point of view, with its aim of balancing the masculine and the feminine, the Sun and the Moon are of equal importance. The masculine, you could say, gets things done, and the feminine makes sure they are done in the right way. And we are all both, and hopefully more both as we get older. This process of union is spirit-driven, and produces a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It gives us the broad perspective needed to be any kind of elder or teacher.

Anyway, my purpose here is to go through the signs of the zodiac with suggestions as to what type of shaman they make you! Don’t forget to look at both your Sun and your Moon signs, and then maybe imagine a synthesis. Here goes:

ARIES You are the warrior shaman. The important principle is ‘Not my will but thine’. That has been a difficult aspect of the path for you. You are excellent at what you do, and you will stand up for shamanic principles. But you need to let others have their viewpoint, and to be in service to spirit, just as the warrior needs to be in service to the king. The shadow doesn’t come so easily to you, you would rather dwell in the light and in straightforward action: you cut through the nonsense. Allow yourself 4 days before you make a decision. Life is a quest for you, a quest to find the gold in your soul, that makes you a magnificent human being. You are notable for your courage and determination: if anyone has spent a month naked in the wilderness, with nothing but a blanket and a knife, it is you. There is a heroic dimension to becoming a Shaman, and you embody it.

TAURUS You enjoy the beauty of the natural world, and your delight in her is infectious. This is your gift to others. Where else is the sacred but all around you? You understand that Shamanism is an earth path. You make beautiful medicine objects that connect you to Spirit, and you are steady and loyal in your Spirit connections. You can show people where the fairies live. You don’t find change comfortable, and your task is to direct your gaze towards inner truth as well as towards outer beauty.

                                                   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

                          -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

GEMINI You are the storyteller shaman, you can tell people exactly how the world was made, because you were of course told it by the Creator himself. And then 5 minutes later you will tell them another story of how the world came about. So you are also the trickster shaman. You stand in both worlds, and communication between them is easy for you, for you see no difference. Words are just words, they are not realities, you move smoothly around them with your quicksilver tongue. There is such a thing as factual truth, however prosaic that may sound, and you will lose your audience if you pass off your invented memoirs as fact. You dance between the polarities, light and shadow, good and evil, male and female. Keep your eye on the meaning of things.

CANCER You are Mother Nature herself. Her suffering at human hands is your suffering, and you know that we are nothing but mother earth: all the healing that any of us may need lies within her. We are her dream. You are so tender-hearted, and you are psychically attuned to all the people and animals and plants that you care for. You have a strong sense

of tribe and people and ancestry. Take care of yourself first, so that your love of others is not also your own neediness, or you will unknowingly smother them.

LEO You embody the regal quality of the Shaman. You have the dignity and poise that come from being deeply rooted in who you are, your own unique connection to the universal Spirit. You do not need to do anything for others, you just need to be who you are. Others will pick up on that and drop all the ‘shoulds’ they often live by, their anxieties about measuring up to other people’s standards. This is your gift to others, this is the deeper way in which you are the life and soul of the party. You understand that all healing ultimately comes from being true to the Spirit within, and you help people become their own guides, to trust in their own wisdom.

VIRGO You are the earth goddess, attuned to the cycles of nature. And you are deeply moved by a sense of service – this is what gives meaning to your life. Under the cool surface you are deeply emotional. And you are a healer. You were born under the sign of purity, of impeccability, and a particular gift you have to offer is how to live, how to lead, without the ego sneaking in. Shamans are a notoriously mixed bunch, with great gifts often living alongside behaviour that is damaging to others. As a Virgo, you have the integrity and inner and outer discernment to know your mess, but not be ruled by it. And this makes you trustworthy. Your learning is to let go of your ability to live in an orderly way, and to trust the chaos.

LIBRA You have the wisdom that sees both sides of any question, and understands the truth to be complex and never finally to be pinned down. Human beings are by nature one-sided, perhaps nowhere more so than in politics. You are a diplomat, and can move the way people see matters without appearing to contradict them. You are a sign of balance, and have been on the long and often painful journey of seeking inner balance outside of yourself, through relationship. People are inclined to ignore Spirit in seeking relationship, and this makes them foolish. You have found the balance that allows for ‘spaces in your togetherness’, because you understand that fundamentally you are alone, it is just you and Spirit, and you would not want it any other way, now that you have finally arrived there.

SCORPIO You have the quality of emotional depth and honesty. You understand the archetype of the ‘Shaman’s Illness’, the deep turning about that is required in those who hear the call: that unless they shift their loyalties away from the demands of everyday life and the expectations of others, and towards the call of the Spirit, they will never be well. The Shaman’s gaze is turned elsewhere, like the ancient mariner and his glittering eye. You understand the journey into the depths, the struggle and the wasteland, and the deep renewal at the end of that journey. It is the ability to live through this dismemberment and come out renewed and not destroyed, that is the real qualification to be any kind of shaman or healer. You can be alongside people in this journey, you can reassure them they are not going mad. And you have the ability to get to the bottom of things and heal from that knowledge. You are deeply instinctive and intuitive, and you have learnt to trust that in yourself, even without apparent reason. You are not phased by anything, and you will survive anything. Just lighten up sometimes and enjoy this beautiful world.

SAGITTARIUS What you bring to the table is trust and faith. Faith in yourself and optimism, and also a wider trust in the workings of Spirit. You are a seeker after knowledge, and you have a cosmic perspective. You know many things, and you know enough to be aware that ultimately there is nothing to be known, that it is all the Great Mystery; that really our puny human theories of big bangs and evolution and atoms and so on all amount to nothing, for this is the Great Dreaming, which could just as well be some other Dreaming, it is not a static thing. Human beings are fragile, and they want a sense of certainty to reassure themselves and to delude themselves. You are a teacher, you tell people how the universe really works, often through stories; and you embody that sense of trust in things working out, of when to tether your camel, and when to trust in the strange workings of Spirit, and when to do both.

CAPRICORN This is truly a Shamanic sign, for you are Spirit impaled on the cross of matter, you are that difficult interplay between the two, the alchemy of it. You are that primal urge we all have to INCARNATE: it is much easier to either ignore the spirit and identify with matter; or to over-identify with the spirit and withdraw from being fully a part of life. Capricorn is the sign of squaring up to the difficulty of engaging spirit with matter, and the magic and knowledge that comes with that. You are the archetypal Elder, who has earned their place in the community through many years of hard-won experience; who has mastered the ways of the people, and has earned the right to break and re-shape the traditions.

AQUARIUS People want to know where they stand: what to believe, what to think, what is right and what is wrong. And many people need these limiting factors for their psychological stability. The Aquarian Shaman recognises this, yet subverts these tramlines nonetheless. He/she is the trickster, the clown, who brings insight through the unexpected. And like all the signs when they have got a bit further down the road to wholeness, it is not a wilful thing, it is Spirit working through them. If you go to see him/her, they will bring some new insight into your life, or maybe shock you in some way, such that you will awaken to yourself. As an Aquarian, you may have had to tread the path of not just trusting the brilliant insights that come to you, and that can be so helpful for others, but also learning to trust your own animal nature, so that you embody your insights, and do not become ill through the neglect of that animal nature. You may therefore have an animal spirit helper who helped you heal yourself before you moved on to healing others.

Human?

PISCES The Pisces Shaman will love you unconditionally, and yet it is impersonal, in the sense that it is the ocean of Spirit that is loving you. Spirit wants what is best for you, that which will bring you more into balance, and it is ruthless in this quest – yet you will feel held by this Piscean healer nonetheless. This Shaman is not present in a personal sense: they are the complete hollow bone, the complete embodiment of Spirit. And they can draw whatever is needed from that ocean, whether it is information or energy work. When you look at them, you are not looking at a human. As a Pisces, you will have had little problem being a channel for the Spirit world: the journey for you will have involved grounding yourself, arriving properly on the planet, incarnating. You may therefore have had a long apprenticeship in ordinary life before Spirit decided you were ready to use those gifts.

Meanwhile you may want to look up the sign of your North Node. This is the point of our greatest growth, and my theory is that we therefore become that sign, over and above any other, as we age. It makes me a Scorpio 😈

ON NOT BEING VALIDATED BY YOUR WORK

If we do some kind of teaching/healing work, I think it is natural to feel validated by that when it goes well - and similarly to feel dispirited when it doesn't go well, or when it seems not to be happening at all! I think these responses need rooting out, and that is a big ask. Because the real validation is our sense of connection to Spirit, and if work comes our way, so be it, and if it doesn't, so be it. Spirit decides.

If we need this validation from our work (and thinking of ourselves as 'professional' only encourages this worldly mindset) then it becomes a shield from our shadow side - a need to be loved, perhaps, or to 'achieve' or whatever it is that is lacking or messy. The Protestant work ethic, which goes so deep in our culture - hard workers go to heaven - plays its part here.

And of course we all have a shadow side. The work as a teacher or healer is to keep that separate. The shadow is coyote, it will sneak in through this very natural response of feeling validated when the work goes well - and discouraged or even distressed when it doesn't.

For myself, I do shamanic/counselling/astrological 'work'. And nearly always if I have advertised it, nothing happens. This has gone on for years and years. And it has led me through a roller-coaster of self-doubt. I see all these other people with their healing practices or the courses they run, and they do a lot of good work. And Spirit has never let me do that. And the penny is slowly, ever so slowly, dropping. It is taking me to a deep place where I just trust in what is or is not happening, where I feel happy with who I am regardless of what I am doing. What I do know is that if I follow my nose and put up posts on FB as I feel inspired to do so, and interact with whoever comes my way, good stuff happens. And maybe this attitude contains a particular gift I have to offer.

I have my reservations about teaching/healing work as a day job, because I think it needs a lot of space around it in order for it not to become too much of a means of self-validation - I say 'too much' because it is bound to creep in, and we need to forgive ourselves that. And then what we do has that much more depth, both in what we say and in the kind of presence behind it, which is transformative in ways we shall never know, even in this virtual world

The Depth Psychology of Shamanism

In 1997, I was organising some shamanic journeying at a small festival in the UK, and the space was packed for each session, like 70-80 people. The word shamanism had a buzz to it, and I think it still does, even though it can also be a cliché.

But the buzz was genuine, and I think it was about people wanting a taste of the Otherworld, something which has almost become a race memory, because it has been so squeezed out by religion and then science. But it is still there in us, this desire for an untrammelled experience of Spirit, that feels ancient, and that is not hedged around by dogmas of what is and is not possible.

It is Spirit that ultimately teaches us about Reality, not humans and their books. Shamanism – a recent, western phenomenon – is about that return to a direct experience of Spirit, that connects us to a universe that is so much more than the literal, material universe of modern science.

That taste of the Otherworld is, for some, enough as an accompaniment to their regular existence. For others, it is not enough. Or we may think it is enough, but the spirits have other ideas!

And this is where the idea of the 'shaman' comes in. A slightly problematic word, as it carries connotations of spiritual stature, which ain't a good thing to claim. And a shaman is technically also a healer and diviner, a spirit consultant.

But the spirits can drag us kicking through that initiatory journey without the end result being a healer. You may end up as a counsellor, or an artist, or a stand-up comic - or as Mozart: what was it that spoke through him if it wasn't the Otherworld? Or you may be nothing in particular that you can put a name to! You just have that look in your eye that says I've been somewhere else.

As Leonardo da Vinci said: “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

Or as the Ancient Mariner said:

 

"I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech;

That moment that his face I see,

I know the man that must hear me:

To him my tale I teach."

The Ancient Mariner

The archetypal event has become, for us, the shaman's illness, which will often bring him or her to the gates of death or madness, and once she has accepted the wishes of the spirits to be a vehicle for them, he recovers.

And I think this illness, this trial, this ordeal, needs to be interpreted broadly within our shamanism, even though the original definition was quite specific. And I think we need to be quite broad too about 'the spirits'. Yes, some of us will have guys upstairs that tell us stuff, or who work through us. For others, it may just be this other place in us, and when we speak or act from it, there is some kind of deeper wisdom or insight there, that may not even make sense to us at the time, but we learn to trust it. The so-called 'mid-life crisis' (which can go on and on - see The Middle Passage by James Hollis) has a resonance of this type of ordeal.

--------------------

I offer skype/FB video astrology readings, by donation. Contact: BWGoddard1 (at)aol.co.uk

---------------------

As an astrologer, I encounter these trials in the form of Neptune and Pluto acting on people's charts. I had my own experience of Pluto for much of the 90s: after 10 years running Buddhist institutions, I was unable to do anything for several years. Anything I tried to do wouldn't work. And it was like the plug on my life-force had been pulled. I realised that it is not 'I' who lives, it is something from deeper within that calls the shots, and it was saying we're not going to let you carry on in that wilful way, we're going to fuck with you until you listen to us. And there was this deep, magical pull towards that other voice. 

Abdominal Surgery

At the same time, I felt like I’d had major abdominal surgery, and that I’d been brought about as low as I could be, to this faraway place. And after a few years I had a dream telling me to pursue shamanism - as well as something else, which was a trick dream that catapulted me out of my old life.

And since then there has always been this place within me that is a kind of dark wisdom, that I can forget about sometimes, but when I'm coming from there I am aligned with my life. It is the glittering eye of the ancient mariner. And in the last few years it's been happening all over again, but under Neptune's rule, and I'm still in the thick of it, so I can't say too much. But it's been like this overwhelming call that I haven't quite known what to do with.

Pluto with his hellhound

The classic story behind Pluto, who is Lord of the Underworld, is that one day he abducted Persephone, daughter of the nature goddess Ceres, who went into mourning and the earth went into permanent winter. Eventually it got sorted, but Persephone was by now Pluto's wife, and spent half her time in the underworld.

So this is a good way of understanding the shaman's illness. There is another side to life, beyond what is presented to us by society, and you can be taken there forcibly by the demands of the spirit, which has no regard for conventional niceties and sanities. And in a deeper kind of way, you grow up, move on to the next stage - as did Persephone, in becoming Pluto's wife.

A traditional society understands this ruthless dimension to Spirit. As Holger Kalweit writes in Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men: 

“The suffering and exhaustion that accompany a vision quest do not correspond to the mild and gentle style of modern psychotherapy. Westerners do not want to have to exert themselves to solve their problems.” (p102)

And Goethe understood what happens if you resist the call:

“And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”

So this initiatory journey that the shaman undergoes isn't just about acquiring magical powers under duress. I don't think it is like that. The main emphasis is on the development of psychological depth, in the sense of moving beyond the narrow, conventional self that tells us how to live, and whose rules are shared by the other members of society. That kind of living is 'normal', it gives a kind of psychological security to many people, and it is necessary for the stability of society.

But that ain't what the shaman lives by. No, he/she has another loyalty, a deeper loyalty, that is not to the rules and 'shoulds' of the tribe, but to the spirits, to the daimon, to the Otherworld, to the Jungian Self. And that other place to which we have our loyalty is more real, for it recognises that the world isn't what it seems, it is not to be taken at face value, for it is only one pole of existence, the other being the spirit world, and these 2 poles are profoundly interconnected. The world is not an absolute, it is fluid.

So it is this loyalty to the Otherworld that is the real qualification to be a healer - or whatever. It is the shaman's wholehearted response to the imperatives of the Otherworld and its values that make him/her a shaman. Once you have that new basis to your life - that look in your eye - then the spirits will allow you to be a healer, or require you to be.

Of course, this is a kind of ideal scenario, because we are human, and we fuck up, and sometimes people have real healing abilities who seem in other respects to be such messes.

But the principle remains, and it is the 'depth psychology' of shamanism referred to in the title. It involves a radical turning about, so that the guiding principle of our lives becomes not what society expects, nor is it based on our personal desires, but on a commitment to something beyond us, that also is us, and that is more real than a purely conventional notion of existence ever can be.

It is a completely different basis for living, and that is why the shaman's illness can take him/her to death's door: the conventional, which is so deep-rooted, has to die. It can almost be like I cannot continue to live like I have been, so how can I live? And the answer is there within, and always has been.
 NB Please note the Free Email Subscribe button, top right of the page 😼