Almanac of the Dead

Here's a book I recently read by Leslie Marmon Silko, 'Almanac of the Dead'. Silko is part Native American, and was excluded from ceremonies by the natives when she was younger because she was a half-breed, and that always gives you an interesting take if you can rise to it. Not fitting in, and what that can show you, is something I know quite well because of my own temperament.

Silko's first novel 'Ceremony' contained the message that native ways need to adapt to modern times and modern experiences, and how can you argue with that, unless you are some kind of romantic fundamentalist?

This later novel is a hell of a tome, and I'm not sure what to make of it. It's long and sprawling, and it's entertaining, full of interesting and quite dark characters who generally have some native blood in them. The central theme is the gathering of native peoples to re-take North America from the white people, based on an ancient prophecy that two part-indigenous sisters - one a drug dealer, the other a medium who helps the police find dead bodies - spend their later years translating. Of course its bonkers, and there are some characters who can see it is bonkers, but nevertheless there is no shortage of people who are prepared to believe it once it has some charismatic proponents. There is a magical realist flavour to this enterprise, and at 750 pages it takes a bit of reading, and though I was left hanging by the end, I'm glad I read it. It is enjoyable, and it is about real people, as well as being bizarre - but that just adds to the entertainment.

Shaman's Crossing

Well here's a ramble after a bottle of wine and some 3rd time around Game of Thrones.. I finished my Medicine Wheel book a couple of weeks ago, and while there is still tweaking to do, the horizon has opened out again. Waiting on a bit of feedback and maybe one or two endorsements, then try some publishers. In the process I feel I've incarnated something, given birth to myself, spoken a whole book's worth of something that has been growing over four decades. This path is like an oak tree, it takes a long time and it's slow and I'm probably still at least 10 years shy of the serious wisdom. If I get there.

I feel closer to death these days, what I do or don't do doesn't matter so much, it's all a dream anyway, a small part of a vastly bigger design. But it would be meaningful to have put something into that dream in the form of a book that might last for a year or two before the tide of human life moves on to something else. And built those connections with people and rocks and trees, and maybe cats and dogs and polar bears also, that will rock on with me after death.

And being one of these late middle-aged guys, I have what some might call my anima in the room with me, and she's not going anywhere. From another point of view she is an old spirit who is pretty much inseparably with me, and she has no shortage of wisdom and power that comes straight from the earth - what Jungians call the Sophia archetype. I'm not too keen on 'archetypes', they can seem a bit abstract, and she is anything but. She has been in my dreams for years. There is a radical new phase opening up in which she will play a central part, and I don't know what that is yet, all I have is the sense of a ship setting out onto the open sea to god knows where, and that prospect is radical enough and thrilling enough to get me on board. I think that what is possible can open out, rather than narrow down, as we age.

So with Sophia making herself unmistakeably felt, but not knowing her very well yet, I can get into a bit of a funk about who am I and what am I, and could I ever be with anyone again, would I even want to, is there an electrifying new synergy to be around, or have I been there and done that? Spirit takes care of these things. If for whatever reason you have had a long-term relationship come to an end, you will find your Soul has something big to say about it, and did so for some years beforehand: there is a new you to encounter, a new way of being with just you, even if it didn't seem to be your choice. Such is Fate.

Big as all that is for me, I think I just need to let it take care of itself, sort of, and meanwhile start dreaming up more of those things I like doing, like Medicine Wheel Zoom groups and astrology and tarot readings and walking with the guys on Dartmoor. And maybe getting myself a slightly ramshackle place with annexes and an acre of land that people can come to. But maybe that is all beside the point. It all feels very unknown right now, and that's one of the best places to be, because it's going to be like that all the time once I've shuffled off this mortal coil. Which may not be for 20 or 30 years yet, who knows? As Rabindranath Tagore said, "And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well."

Meanwhile sleep has left me, I am awake till 6am at the moment, so just as well I have Robin Hobb's 'Shaman's Crossing' trilogy to get on with. The title kind of suggests where I am, though I'd rather not call myself anything.

INITIATION

I'm supposedly at the stage of editing my book on the Medicine Wheel. But all I seem to be doing is adding more. I never knew I had so many opinions :) Anyway, here is a piece from the 2nd Chapter (The East) on the subject of initiation:

There are certain major changes that correspond to the biological stages of life, but which also reflect inner changes. And there are other major changes which are less biologically determined. In a traditional society, these more regular changes are marked by ceremony and by initiation. Any new phase, where something new enters our consciousness is an initiation. Birth and death are initiations, in which you cannot know what is coming next. Puberty is a time of initiation, in which we begin to make the transition from child to adult.

A traditional puberty rite usually contains an element of ordeal, and spirit vision/induction into the tribal myths, and acceptance as an adult by the community. For the Sioux in North America, for example, the boy is firstly put through a Sweatlodge (which is characterised by intense heat) and then immediately brought to a hilltop where he is placed in a cramped vision pit (Patrick Harpur, The Philosopher's Secret Fire pp91-7) for days without food and water. At the end of this time he will, hopefully, have been granted a vision and been turned from a boy to a man.

We do not, uniquely, have such rites of passage in our culture, nor do we (again, uniquely) have a prevailing mythology that provides meaning. It may well mean as a result that many boys and girls take a lot longer reaching adulthood, if at all.

However, it is not my purpose to bemoan this situation. We have what we have, and let is not compare ourselves unfavourably, it doesn't usually help. Young people DO attempt to initiate themselves, albeit with necessarily realising it. It is a natural thing. Life has a way of initiating us anyway.

As Patrick Harpur says: “During a special sacred time of about two weeks in summer, young European initiates fly to the Otherworld where they inhabit a liminal zone between land and sea. By day they are ‘cooked’ by a process of frying under a scorching sun, and periodically plunged into cold water; by night they undergo an elaborate Dionysian ritual involving an orgy of wine, dancing and sex. They call this a ‘Mediterranean holiday’.” I would add the drug ‘Ecstasy’ to Harpur’s account, the illegality of which adds an initiatory edge, taking one outside permitted norms.

Criminal behaviour, dangerous driving, risk-taking (I still shudder at the blind corner on which I impatiently overtook someone when I was 20) are often also driven by this craving for initiation.

So it is worth looking back and seeing where your own need for initiation took you as a teenager and young adult, and the new elements that may have entered your consciousness, and their implications for your future.