FOR HE ON HONEY-DEW HATH FED…

FOR HE ON HONEY-DEW HATH FED…

The Shamanic Illness Part 3

 

The Shamanic Illness is an archetypal event, which has come to us from the Shamanic cultures of the Far East. The young Shaman or Shamanka – a traditional term for a female shaman - gets ill and doesn't recover, unless they accept their vocation as a healer, or at least as a person whose life is fundamentally guided by the Spirits.

 

It's what lives through you. It gives you your life force: that's a good way of putting it. It's a powerful thing, and it's quite different to how most people live. So if you have that in you, don't expect to find community, don't expect people to understand you. If you're lucky you'll have one or two friends that you can talk to about this stuff, so just cherish them.

 

If you've been through this kind of dismemberment, and people do sometimes have these like turning points in their lives, they can be really difficult, and in our society we don't have anyone to sort of necessarily to guide us through, to tell us what's happening. It’s often part of my job as an astrologer.

 

It's just like life is no longer making sense, it's a classic midlife crisis if you want, except in the shamanic cultures they seem to have it when they're teenagers! In a way I had it when I was 20, I went through this kind of revolution. It was happening anyway, but three months of magic mushrooms and my metaphysical quest, as I call it, became central. I became really much more serious about that, but I'd also had an initiation into the shadow, into the demons in me as well, and that was really difficult. That's what a bad trip is: it's an initiation into the shadow side, and that's a good thing. It's not like something's gone wrong. We need that initiation, we need to be able to live with it, be friends with it.

 

So the proto-Shaman may well die. That's how serious the Spirits are about us accepting our vocation, accepting what is deeply within us. That mysterious thing around which we cannot plan our life very much, we don't know where it's going to take us. Month by month sometimes, we just have to be open to where the Spirit is pulling us, how it needs us to live. It doesn't work 9 to 5, we may not do an awful lot with it, and we may therefore feel we're failing, we're not properly living it. But no, Spirit has certain things for us to do and they are often deep things. Spirit will send the right people our way, if we don't go chasing and advertising too much for people that we can help. And then maybe we just fiddle around and do other things much of the rest of the time, who knows.

 

We don't have those kinds of worldly judgments of ourselves anymore about being ‘busy’, because fundamentally it's about the calling. It can happen in less dramatic ways, where you maybe just quietly get on with something that has always been calling you, and it doesn’t disrupt your life. Or it happens in bigger life-changing ways, that can be initially very disruptive and difficult, where you no longer live from the values of the people around you, you live from something else that you've had to find for yourself.

 

You see artists living in this kind of way. Ask them what their next painting is going to be, they probably won’t know. It doesn’t work to order. Nick Cave the rock musician works 9 to 5 at his art, but he’s an exception. You may do nothing for ages while something brews below the surface, and then you may do nothing but work for weeks. That is Spirit for you, and the less successful artists – and only a very small minority have major success – will often get judged for not being regular people and regular workers.

 

Here are a couple of lines at the end of The Holy Longing, a poem by Goethe:

 

“So long as you have not experienced this, to die and so to grow, you remain but a troubled guest on this dark earth.”

 

That's where this thing takes you. You will remain troubled, your life will never be quite working. It might not bring you to the point of death, but you will feel something is wrong, there is something in you unlived. You remain a troubled guest in your life, because there is this other thing, and you need to taste that dark earth, bring Spirit into matter.

 

There is also The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge, a long poem that opens with:

 

“It is an Ancient Mariner and he stoppeth one of three

‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye

Now wherefore stops thou me.’ ”

 

The Ancient Mariner had a tale to tell, he had this look in his eye, he'd been to this other place, which is what we're talking about. The Illness takes you to this other place, you've seen this other world, you've seen this other thing, you've seen how things really are behind the usual parameters within which we live and think and value.

 

The Ancient Mariner had shot an albatross, he knew he shouldn't, but he did, and it brought this terrible luck. Everyone died on board the ship, except him. He was surrounded by ghosts and skeletons, the wind died, he was in this dead sea. So he’d been on a terrible journey, and it changed him forever. When he came back, if he saw someone who he knew could listen, he'd grab them and he would tell them. He saw the wedding guest, this guy on his way to a wedding and he stopped him. And the guy was getting later and later for the wedding, but he knew he couldn't but listen to this Ancient Mariner: the look in his eyes, and the compelling tale he had to tell. Eventually he missed the whole wedding, because he had no choice but to hear it. It was an initiation, if you like, the wedding guest was being initiated by the Ancient Mariner.

 

Maybe that's something we do as well. We've been to that place and we've taken back something of it. Here are a few more lines, from the end of Kubla Khan, again by Coleridge:

 

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

 

We have that, and if people come close to us, they will experience that taste, that will help awaken that thing in them. In a way we never know that we're having that effect. We're just being normal when speaking of this thing that is real to us, but to them it's something else, it's like you've got this quality, you've got this something about you, and it speaks to something in them. They may just say you are authentic, and you are, but it can be a deceptively deep and magical and otherworldly thing too. So don't underestimate the effect you may have on other people just by being what for you is ordinary and honest.

Back to the Illness. It's not just that we want to stay in our comfort zone. We also want to be like everyone else, we want their acceptance, we want that belonging. These are deep human drives, and we're being taken out of that in a fundamental kind of way. Of course, we still feel ourselves to be part of humanity, in fact more than ever, but we are also like God’s Fifth Column, we are agents of a foreign power. That gap in ordinary belonging can be difficult. But it also forges us, forces to stand on our own two feet existentially, with roots as deep as the universe.

 

We are often also held back by self-doubt. With these callings, there’s something to do, there's a gift that comes with them. It may, archetypally, mean being a healer of some kind, and the Spirits through you help people heal, become whole, for that is the meaning of heal. But the calling can be all sorts of things : storyteller, astrologer, artist, animal whisperer, whatever. What it is for an individual you never know, it's a mystery - what draws us, what the Spirit tells us this is what you have to do. We don't have a choice, we're drawn towards these things, it's what we have to do. As Jung put it, “Freedom of will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.” It is a nice way of tying up fate and free will, because life is both fated and free, and they are not contradictory.

 

So self-doubt is often what stops us accepting the shamanic calling. We don't think we can do it, who am I to do something like that? I get this in little ways reguIarly. In 2022 I was writing a fantasy novel that a Wolf had suggested I write. I hadn't written fiction before, and sometimes I'd stop for a month at a time, and I would start crashing. I'd stop because I didn't think it was any good. If I’m honest, I do think it is quite good, the style's a bit maybe undeveloped, a bit rough, but there's a rawness to the tale, there's a nugget in there, and I can write in a way that keeps the reader interested. But I didn't believe in it - I still don’t in some ways! - and so I would crash and I would drink too much, and I'd feel depressed. Nothing was working anymore, I'd try this, try that, everything except that one thing I had to do. As Mary Oliver says, “One day you finally knew what you had to do you, and began.” I'd begin again, and as soon as I'd sit down and start writing, I’d feel ok again.

 

So the self-doubt is part of the initiatory fire. We all go through it, we have to earn our confidence. In the end you just have to do it anyway. Singing, that's another one, no one wants to sing because they're no good at it! Yeah, we're all no good at it, and we're worried about what other people will think, all of that sort of thing. But there's this calling in you, you need to do it, it requires grit, it requires courage. But there's also joy in there, and you feel that you've got your life when you do it. So claim that calling when it comes knocking at your door. Or rather, let it claim you. And it might come knocking very hard!