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.

SHAMANISM: AN UNSAFE SPACE

From my book-in-progress

Shamanic practices are not ‘tame’ or ‘safe’. They are not an add-on to a respectable urban life, where you become a ‘shamanic practitioner’ alongside being a well-boundaried therapist and respectable member of the parish council. No, they take you somewhere raw, primal, beyond the normal controlling ego.

This is on the one hand threatening, and most people will not want to go there. But it has a delicious, ambrosiacal, irresistible call too, for it is what we are here to do: to transform, and to transform deeply, and unless we can relish that call from the Otherworld, and abandon ourselves to it over many years, that deep transformation cannot occur.

It takes courage, and it takes persistence, and you may not have much obviously to show for it, and we have to learn to live with that, because it is not about that. We may appear to be some kind of ‘loser’ on the world’s terms. But really that does not matter. It is about who you are, and continually being with that on a deep level, together with its occasional periods of crisis – with or without the Sweatlodges and Vision Quests - and other people will pick up on that, they will sense that there is something about you that is deeply alluring, but they may not quite know what it is. They will recognise, however, that you are simply being yourself, you have found the courage to claim that freedom, and this is what they want too, though they may not fully know it. That is what they find appealing. By who you are, you give others the implicit permission that it is OK for them also to be who they are. This is the best kind of teaching, and it is unspoken.

EGREGORE and THE MEDICINE WHEEL

(another short extract from my book)

There is a mysterious way in which symbols and ceremonies acquire power over time. The word ‘egregore’ describes this phenomenon. You may sometimes feel this with stone circles, that tend to be located at spots that have a certain power anyway, but the combination of ancient and modern ceremony at those places adds another layer of power that one can feel.

For myself, this also works with astrology and tarot. They are both symbolic systems that are used for divination, to help unpack who we are. And their ability to do that lies not just in the divinatory ability of the reader, but in the fact that these symbols have been used for centuries or more in the same way. Reality is not just the visible, tangible material world. It is not even fundamentally that.

Consciousness is primary, matter secondary, as quantum physics also reveals. And it is as if when we sit with say the planet Mars, we are also sitting with all those thousands of astrologers from the past and present who have also directed attention to that planet and allowed it to speak through them, it has grown as a gateway to meaning over time. And you find yourself being able to say something to the person having the reading that is true about them, without the prior knowledge one would normally require. And this is magical, it is like the universe already knows you. It enlarges and enchants the spirit of the other person.

And it is the same with the Medicine Wheel. It is also a tool of self-knowledge that has a divinatory aspect. When we use the Wheel to understand ourselves better, we are plugging in to the power it has developed over time, through all the people who have used it in this way. The Wheel has its own power, it needs to be approached with that kind of respect, and any contributions we might make to that tradition need to be done advisedly.

The Simple and Radical Foundation of the Medicine Wheel

A couple of weeks ago I woke up in the morning and thought dammit, stop thinking vaguely about writing a book, start writing it now and see what happens. So I did. I had run 2 long zoom courses on the Medicine Wheel last year, and found I had quite a lot to say once I started ad libbing. So 2 weeks ago I started ad libbing on paper, so to speak, and 25000 words later I'm still going strong. This is really wonderful😎😊 And about time too! Here is a short excerpt:

This Wheel, this Mandala, is so simple, and yet it contains the whole universe, with you at its centre. And it does not describe the universe in the abstract concepts that we are used to in the West – think atoms and dark matter, for example, neither of which anyone has directly seen, but which are fundamental to the modern understanding of the universe. No, think Sun and Rain and Soil and Wind: Fire, Water, Earth and Air. The Wheel brings us back to an understanding of the universe that is immediate to our experience.

This is radical, because for the last 1000 years knowledge of things-as-they-are has been in the hands of specialists, first the priests and then the scientists. And we have become used to there being just one story, that becomes ‘the truth’. This makes our minds disempowered and rigid, and it is one way that these vast collectives that we are all part of nowadays keep the illusion that everything is under control. It produces a certain kind of psychological stability for many people.

But in reality, no-one is in control, and we need to re-learn to hold in our minds contradictory stories about how the universe is “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” as the poet Keats put it, using the term ‘negative capability’ to describe this state of mind.

PLUTO IN CAPRICORN: THE LIMITS OF GOVERNMENT

We are coming to the end of Pluto in Capricorn. What has it been about? Many things, I am sure. Its immediate effect was a reality check (Capricorn) in 2008 for the wild-west of the deregulated financial system. This resulted in western governments borrowing huge amounts to prop up the banks and avoid a second Great Depression, which occurred in the 1930s because the banks had been allowed to fail.

Now as Pluto inches towards Aquarius, and intensified by the conjunction with Capricorn's ruler Saturn, we find governments again borrowing huge amounts to keep the economy going, because of the Covid lockdowns. Now this is something none of us could have easily foreseen, although most astrologers probably knew something big was on its way at the start of 2020.

One way (amongst many) of looking at Pluto in Capricorn is that Capricorn is a sign of structures and responsible governance. Its weakness is that it thinks it can come to control everything. Pluto at both ends of the sign has given us crises of government, in which all the stops have been pulled out to bring things back under control. And left us with huge amounts of debt.

Maybe Pluto is showing us the limits of the power (Pluto) of government (Capricorn). The reason governments try to keep things under control is not just for the survival and thriving of the people; the people also feel psychologically insecure if there seems to be no-one sufficiently in control and there is not enough certainty.

This was part of the function of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages: the enforcement of collective certainties. And interestingly, the Church began to be shaken at its foundations in 1517, at the last conjunction of Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn, when Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation. The collective certainties began to crumble, and people were thrown back on their own relationship with God.

A rise in Conspiracy theory has marked the Covid lockdowns of the current Saturn-Pluto conjunction: the "wake up sheeple" people. (Such theories also marked the aftermath of 9/11.) These theories arise more intensely when government is no longer seen to be in control, and does not provide the certainties that we normally expect. (NB I see government as the expression of the collective psyche: it is ours, rather than something imposed.)

Conspiracy theory re-asserts a sense of certainty by attributing events to a dark agency that is 'really' controlling events. Mere facts do not play much part in these fantasies (nor did they in the religious fantasies of the medieval church).

Conspiracy theory helps us understand the psychological impact of the Covid lockdowns. And points us to one of the meanings of Pluto's passage through Capricorn, exemplified at the start and the end: that governments can only control events to a certain degree, and beyond that they are, in a big way, not in control. That we are responsible individually, that we are free, and do not need to orient ourselves through our subscription to collective values, whether ‘official’ or those of conspiracy.

Capricorn is a sign that is grounded in earthy, ‘mundane’ realities. The Native American who said “Don’t tell me about your visions unless they grow corn,” was probably a Capricorn. But the deeper meaning of Capricorn lies in the freedom to be found once we can hang loose to the structures, and not treat them as ultimate realities. This is how Capricorn grows into its adjacent sign of Aquarius. Capricorn sees through the dream of this earthly reality and into the spirit behind it. This is the power of Capricorn that Pluto is showing us: once you do not take material reality as ultimate, you are free to use it and even control it. Capricorn is a sign of the Magician.

Meanwhile western governments are left staggering under huge piles of debt. Who knows what the outcome of this will be. But it is hard to be fully in control of events in these circumstances. That seems to be where Pluto in Capricorn is leaving us: without the steady certainties that both re-assure and trap us. But hopefully with an insight into the inherent limitations of government and collectives generally, and our freedom to know who we are outside of that.