THE KINGDOM OF WOMEN

The Mosuo, who live in a remote part of western China, have a matrilineal social structure. Their ways are being rapidly superseded as modern China moves in: they have become a tourist attraction. The author has lived with the Mosuo part-time for some years. She grew up in the Chinese patriarchal system, which is much more extreme than anything we have in the West. So the Mosuo have been a deeply welcome arrival in her life.

The head of the family is always a woman, usually a grandmother, and with her live her brothers, sons, daughters and the grandchildren by her daughters. Any children her sons may have live with their mothers' families. It can take a bit of getting your head around. People do not get married. Women have lovers, and there may be a number of them - they are called 'walking marriages'. But they do not usually live with their lovers. Any children that result are raised by the mother, and the father does not play a part. It is the uncles, the woman's brothers, who live in the family home, who play the father role.

There is a chapter called 'How the Mosuo Women Rock' that shows just how confident these women are. It is a natural confidence, it is not about being combative. They live very simply, they are not sophisticated in the modern sense, yet taken to the big city, they are noticeably more confident and at ease with who they are than most women. They will, for example, go up to a group of men in a bar, in a way that could be seen as 'forward', and engage with them in a natural and lively way.

There is also a chapter called 'The Men Rock Too'. The men put a lot into looking and behaving in a way that will attract the women, they are 'peacocks'. Good looks and brawn are highly rated by the women. It is a simple and straightforward mating game. The men also hunt and play and hang out together.

None of this is perhaps easily translatable into the ways our society works. The key virtue, it seems to me, is that both men and women are confident in who and what they are, and there is no sense of either putting the other down. There is a centrality to the women's place, as the bearers of life, in the scheme of things. Men do the heavy physical work, and will represent the family in its public affairs. But at the home, around which all else revolves, it is the women who have the say.

You do not get the sense of couples who are hugely caught up with each other, in the way that we encourage with our ideas of romantic love and marriage. So nor does there seem to be the devastation and mess you get when a relationship comes to an end. For them, your relationships with your lovers are only a part, and certainly not a central part, of who you are. This feels like freedom and sanity to me.

I think that what is structurally key to this system is that men and women have their own worlds and parts to play, that are clearly defined, and which reflect their different natures and biological roles.

This is a difficult issue for us. Any suggestion that men and women are different can be felt by women as an attempt to put them back into their old, low-status roles, which they rightly rebel against. We often find ourselves in places of confrontation, alongside an ideological commitment to sameness. In our society, men and women no longer know who they are. There is a big adjustment going on, particularly as women have joined the workplace, which was traditionally the men's world. It is not easy for either gender. But here, maybe uniquely, and fast disappearing, is a traditional arrangement under which both men and women can know who they are and hold their heads high.

CALLING ALL SHAPESHIFTERS

So here is something. I've just written a book on the Medicine Wheel, and I'm in the middle of writing a book on Astrology. They are both things I've thought about and written about for years, though as books they have come as a surprise to me in the last few months. It has all seemed to be there, waiting to be written. But it is fresh, I am writing as if for the first time.

And then there is this other thing. This animal presence within me, she is visceral, she snarls, she has wolf form at the moment. She has natural and spontaneous vitality. She can do magic. And she is not in either of those books. She has been around for over 20 years, usually as a Bear, and was good at doing healing work, soul retrievals and all the rest, could really shunt the energy around. She takes no prisoners, is ruthless in the service of healing, and her ferocity got dogs in the vicinity barking at her.

But then she didn't want to do that any more, and that was 15 years ago. This enormous, vital presence in me, this protector that you hold outside of your regular interactions with people, that would probably get you medicated if you displayed it in the street. Yet which is entirely natural.

We fear that which is natural, in exactly the same way that the medieval Church proscribed dancing within its precincts. That which is truly of nature cannot be controlled, the certainties we like to live by are not respected. Have you ever gone out of control in a trance dance? It is like that, yet having that fierce presence always with you. I love it.

So what am I to do with her? All these years? She does not want to be a 'shamanic healer', not very much anyway. Why should there be anything to 'do' with her, that is just our way of thinking? Certainly she does not want to be talked about too much, but I feel I can do so here. I am feeling she wants to be written into a fantasy novel, to give expression to her vitality and fierceness that way.That will be a challenge for me, it is not 'all there' to be written down. Maybe I will do this, maybe I won't. There are fairy tales to be imbibed first, and I will have to teach myself to write fiction. I hope she will forgive the image above :)

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.