I've been learning poetry recently. It's a wonderful thing to do. It gets deep into you, entwines itself in your being, and gives a wonderful vehicle for expression. It occurred to me that it is also about the ancestors: absorbing the best of the past, standing on the shoulders of those who came before. (That's me in the video, just in case you're wondering 😂)
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'Core' Shamanism complicates the Otherworld. It is simple: stuff works through you. That is our gift, and that is all you need to feel. Thinking you have to know what it is, and what it is that you have done, can make you doubt your experience. It can take you away from the Great Mystery that lies at the heart of everything, from which we draw whatever powers we may have. Those gifts are not ours, they belong to the universe and are there for everyone. There is not even an Otherworld, for the Spirits are always with us.
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where a Frost Wand found me
At Crazywell Pool today
where the Ice King had left his crown on the bank of the leat
TALKING TO TREES
Plants, and particularly trees, are the life-form that stays in one place, that has physical roots. They are at home to themselves. If you are feeling out of sorts, talk to a tree and you will come back to yourself. That within you which has yet to unfold will be given the attention it needs.
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!
It goes this
way. The Great Spirit is everywhere in nature. All is sacred. This is the
universal experience of early peoples. It is how things are, and far older than God, the new kid on the block. The Jews, a slave
race, flee the Pharoah, and spend years wandering in the desert wilderness:
this is the book of Exodus. They have fled a tyrant, but tyranny is what is
familiar to them. And so, in the absence of a tyrannical worldly ruler, they
create a tyrannical Otherworldly ruler. It is the psychology by which adults
replicate painful family situations from childhood, because that is what they
know.
This tyrannical God is abstracted from the natural world, he dominates it from above. The Jews were living in a harsh, unforgiving reality in which the people's survival was at stake if they did not follow strict codes of behaviour. So there was a practical as well as a psychological reason for an authoritarian God. He is for the same reason jealous of the pagan god Baal. What eventually arose were the monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all of which treat the Old Testament as a holy book.
There is, of course, the New Testament, which has a less authoritarian flavour. But even there, right at the start, you have Jesus saying you can only reach God through him. So it is there also. Christianity hit the big time when the Roman Empire, which needed an authoritarian religion to unite it, adopted it. And the rest is history: crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings and so on.
It has been
said that monotheisms are desert religions, because their context is just one reality:
the desert and the sky. In a jungle, by contrast, there are many realities,
which therefore lends itself to polytheisms. Lots of spirit animals! It is why
you got saints as Christianity spread beyond the desert.
So good riddance to God and his authoritarian ways. It has left the western world floundering in a sea of uncertainties. Politics has taken its place. Extreme right and left wing politics are a substitute for religion: they give the sense of certainty and belonging, and the prospect of redemption, that religion once provided. We see it too in the causes that young people take up - it is natural to them to do so - but with a religious dogmatism that brooks no disagreement. You are, for example, quickly labelled a 'climate denier' or a 'transphobe' if you question the mainstream narratives around climate and gender. People get 'cancelled'.
Into this brew walks Shamanism, which represents a return to that which was universally true before the corruption of the monotheisms. Shamanism is not true in a rigid sense: it has no holy books or founders. It is nevertheless perfectly possible to become authoritarian about it: you see that on the internet, where some people are quick to correct others about what shamanism is and isn’t. That is just a power thing, that is people wanting to stand above others, and there will always be people like that. You can learn a lot by watching them.
Shamanism, in a way, begins and ends with the experience of the natural world. In that is everything you will ever need to know, but you have to find it for yourself. We are a part of nature, neither above it (as God would have us believe) nor below it, a kind of plague (as many environmentalists would have us believe). The latter is an example of what Jung called enantiodroma, in which one switches to the psychological opposite: from above nature to below nature.
For the Chippewa Cree, we do indeed have a special place: the new-born ones, because we are the only animal that does not know who it is. And so we can learn to know who we are by observing nature – as part of it, not as separate to it – for animals and plants and rocks and streams all know who and what they are, and get on with it.
The loss of our traditional religion has been a mixed thing, and its influence persists: in, for example the scientific quest for truth, with its unspoken implication that the truth will redeem us. It is this passion that drives research scientists. It will indeed redeem us, but not very much if we are using the narrow scientific definition of truth alone. I think the hatred of humanity often found within environmentalism has reverberations of Original Sin, in this case our sin against the Mother, the Earth, for which we must pay by dismantling our whole way of life. I think it is important to look at the mythological roots of what drives us.
The collective needs a new mythology to live by, or it will continue to treat politics as religion, as a philosophy that can set us free. We saw how disastrous that was with Communism. (The far right is as nothing compared to the far left when it comes to mass murder.) We can only ever free ourselves individually. Trying to change the world is usually an avoidance of the responsibility we have for our own souls.
Whether our huge modern collectives of people can have a mythology that is not to some degree authoritarian and crazed is something to which I do not know the answer. When there are fewer people, a tribe can govern itself more through relationships than rules. And that keeps things human, and keeps the mythologies softer. Most people will always want a simple belief of some sort about the universe and how it came to be; you need people who are listened to who can dance around that, in the knowledge that really we know nothing about how the universe came to be, and never will. The healers and medicine people, if you like. Or, in our context, the poets.
I think Shamanism does provide the necessary basis for any society to be healthy. The modern world needs Shamanism. We have a big mission on our hands, we have a whole world to convert! But I don’t mean that evangelically. It is more like a spirit we can convey in a natural kind of way, without actually trying to, simply by being ourselves, and letting people come our way rather than seeking them out.
We do nevertheless have some ideas to convey: for example, that the whole world is alive, inspirited, and why would it not be? That we belong intimately to the natural world, there is nothing in us that is outside of that. And the simple, but world-transforming, idea of regularly expressing gratitude to the earth for her bounty.
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Elfina in her turn has a larger destiny to fulfil: reconciling the forces of science, led by the diabolical Roger Bacon, and resurgent religion, led by the charismatic Zeus Messiah. She has the ancient elemental powers of the Earth at her disposal, along with the help of the Shapeshifters, but will that be enough to pacify these old enemies?
A page-turning drama that addresses a central mythological theme of our times, Shapeshifters is also a real-world exploration of the larger humanity that emerges from embodying animal spirits."
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