Nimue Brown's Blog, page 351

Stepping into ritual space

How do we enter ritual space, let go of the cares of daily life and become open to magic, divinity and that which is sacred to us? When I wrote about Glamour in Paganism a few days ago, one person in the comments picked up on the issue that kit and setting are important in how people transition into ritual space. It’s a valid point, and one that stands looking at. How do we enter ritual space?

Dedicated clothes and objects can help create a sense of specialness, of time out of time. Many people find this really helps them, and I don’t want to invalidate that experience, but I think there’s an alternative that is worth exploring. The trouble with depending on ritual kit is that you can only respond in a Pagan way when you’ve set out to do so, and it makes it that bit harder to express your spirituality in the heat of the moment. Without robes, cloak, wand, crystal, or whatever else you normally need, how are you going to handle it if you get an unexpected experience, or have a sudden personal crisis where a bit of Druidry in self defence would not go amiss?

For me the key thing is spirits of place. Other traditions call them land wights, genius loci, faeries, elementals, and a host of other things. However you understand the idea of that which is spirit and present in the land, is what you need to work with here. Atheist pagans can just take this literally and work with whatever is present – trees, rocks, grass, soil, it’s all good.

For me, the transition into ritual is a transition into awareness of the spirits of place. I do this primarily by taking the time to go in and be with the place. Sitting, strolling, standing as the weather and ground conditions dictate. I look and listen. I feel the air on my skin and I taste it. I think about who and what came here before me, and I open myself to the place. I listen to the songs of its birds, or if it’s what I’ve got, to the hum of the traffic. I look at the sky, because no matter where you are there is sky. If you insist on doing ritual in a cave or a cellar, there’s still sky outside before you enter that space. Sun or moon, rain or shine, the sky brings nature to the most urban of spaces. It can permeate into our indoor rituals, even.

I breathe slowly. I notice what it’s like to be in my body, in this place. I feel out my body reactions to the space. I look for beauty and inspiration, for hope, but I do not ignore anything that is tough for me – the cutting down of trees, the dead things, the absences and the silences. Often at this point I become aware of the absence of great hooves, and recognise that I will not see aurochs.

This kind of transition can be developed by working with a single object, holding it, meditating on it and connecting with it. Improvised altars made from found objects, including human detritus, can be part of the engagement process. Making mandalas, or sculptures out of found items, or just gathering twigs for the fire all help us to be present and part of the place. In recognising the sacredness of the smallest things, the magic of the living, breathing world, we transition. We step out of the ordinary mindset that sees nature as something to use and place as backdrop, and we step into the world of life and detail, and from there, ritual is a lot easier and flows more readily.

The naming of nature

There are reasons to be careful about naming. Names confer power and suggest ownership, and the naming of things in line with the dominant thought form of the day is something to watch for. As an example, names made up to sound like Latin by people who self identify as scientists are considered to be the proper names, while names used by ordinary people interacting with that same thing for hundreds of years and more, are given no authority at all.

However, naming does not have to be an act of conquest. When we have a name for something, it’s easier to keep track of our relationship with it. We can piece together stories of different encounters and interactions. Knowledge gained can be easily attached to that name, and the thing itself is more readily discussed for being able to identify it to other people.

Names themselves often reveal fragments of story, history or relics of older languages. Place names especially so, where ghosts of former names can be present in new descriptions. Much older naming was descriptive – one of the interesting problems this causes in flower names is that pink and orange are much more recent ideas, so a great many folk names for plants designate as red things which, to the modern eye, just plain aren’t. And if the name and the colour are interchangeable – as with the violet, a sub species that doesn’t conform causes all kinds of trouble, and thus we get white violets.

Folk naming outside of Europe gets even more interesting, because often things are named based on resemblance to other things in the country of origin. Or, more accurately, the memory of those things. American robins are a mostly brown bird with a red (orange really) chest like their British counterparts, only in all other ways look a lot more like a thrush, including their size, and have a migratory habit that the old world robin does not.

To have a name, is to have the beginnings of a story and the means for a relationship. Otherwise it all gets confusing. In a far country, there was a piece of land where the plants only grew a foot or so in height because grazing creatures liked to eat them. And amongst those foot high plants of the distant country, there was one which was darker coloured than all the rest, and while it wasn’t the only one to have little pointy bits on its middle, it was the only one popular with a brown and red night flying creature that liked to feed on it. And while that might sound entertaining and exotic for a while, you at present have no idea if you know what either the plant or the creature are, or whether I made them up, which is no great aid to communication!

Of Glamour and Paganism

I have no doubt that part of the attraction for many people is how gorgeous and glamorous Paganism seems. The cloaks, the dresses, the jewellery, the goblets and knives and carved staffs and all the altar gear, the robes and the velvet. It’s not an aesthetic that depends on being young and skinny, which is a plus, although it has to be said that if you are beautiful and dressed the part, it’s got a power to it. But then, that’s what ‘glamour’ used to mean – a kind of magic that is all about alluring surfaces.

Fairy glamour is gold that at first light turns out to be dead leaves. It’s dirty hovels transformed by illusion into grand palaces, dresses made of spiderwebs and elaborate feasts that turn out to mostly have been mice. Glamour is a mixed bag – wonderful, exciting, enchanting, but also potentially misleading and resulting in bits of mouse stuck between your teeth.

I’m not good about the glamour. I probably have a bit of a chip on my shoulder in this regard. Some of it is to do with money, and I think this is an issue to raise. For the right money you can have the most exquisite kit. Floor length ankle length cloaks are not cheap, and trust me, trying to make one out of a second hand curtain is time consuming, and they do not come out the same. Some of us have the skills and time to make beautiful clothes and items many, do not. For most of my Pagan life I’ve not had the spare cash for kit that has little use most of the time. It’s easy to shift bags of gear when you have a car, but getting to gatherings on public transport, or walking, creates challenges. These can also be economic issues. Further, a poor person living in a small space may be short of storage space. I don’t have room in my small wardrobe for a cloak I seldom wear.

The desire to be beautiful and to be seen as beautiful, to wear beautiful things and be respected for that is all very human. However, beauty is all too often constructed in terms of ability to pay. So much of what the mainstream understands as beauty is to do with products, affluence, and the kinds of lifestyles available to the moneyed. If I walk to a ritual because I don’t have a car, I’m not going to make it in delicate slippers, or the delicate slippers won’t make it. I need good boots or shoes. Much of women’s clothing depends on the idea that you aren’t going to walk very far in it. Smart, delicate, beautiful, ornate… these things do not fare well if you wear them outside in all weathers, and if they aren’t warm, waterproof etc, the wearer does not fare well either.

I’m a big fan of crafts and creativity, of making lovely things and enriching life with beauty. At the same time, I cannot buy the beautiful things that glamorous Paganism suggests. I can’t work with them, often they do not do what I need. I’m not suggesting that we should all show up to rituals in potato sacks (although that could be funny) but it’s worth thinking about what we infer when we see certain kinds of clothes, how we look at, or look through glamour, and how we avoid excluding people for economic reasons.

BOOK REVIEW: PAGAN DREAMING

Nimue Brown:

it’s always nerve wracking when books go out for first reviews. Doubly so when the reviewer is someone I really like and respect. Happily, this one came out well…

Originally posted on contemplativeinquiry:

Highly recommended. Pagan Dreaming: The Magic of Altered Consciousness, to give it its full title, is an informed and thought provoking introduction to dreams and dream work. Although tailored specifically to a Pagan-oriented audience, it will be of interest to many other people as well.

Author Nimue Brown follows her familiar path of avoiding hackneyed or formulaic approaches to the subject. Instead, she draws on a rich variety of sources including her own experience of dreaming and working with dreams to ask fruitfully open questions and invite dreamers to explore this territory for themselves. She says of herself: “I am not a scientist or psychologist. I have not trained as a counsellor or psychoanalyst. … I am simply a Druid who has always worked with dreams, and I am sharing what I have. There is no dogma here, just ideas”. Whilst being clear that she is not writing as…

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Strange dreaming

There’s a lot going on in my head right now that isn’t consciously available to me. I can tell because last night I dreamed about competitive neo-nazi rabbits and marmalade, and on waking it is impossible to articulate what the connection between rabbits and orange jam was. This isn’t a one off. All of my dreaming lately has been vivid, colourful, complex, and rabidly incoherent. My normal dreaming tends towards more narrative, so I know from the change that something entirely different is happening in my head.

I’ve studied dreams and sleeping since my teens. Most of that has been an informal working with my dream experiences and attention to how dreaming relates to my life. I’ve poked around a bit in the psychology of dreams, and the science of sleep. Alongside that I’ve had exposure to dream interpretation books. I’m not a big fan of dream interpretation books – I think they’re reductive, and that personal symbolism is a far more complicated thing. I think there’s a lot more to dreaming than pulling ‘meanings’ out of it, as well, and that most dreams are not in the least bit prophetic.

So, why the neo-nazi rabbits and the marmalade? I suspect the rabbits are Nazis because of what I was reading last night. The rest of the features, if teased out and examined to see what they might represent, offer me nothing. No stories emerge, no powerful emotional associations, no coherence whatsoever. Nothing about this dream even suggests to me that it needs interpreting. I don’t think I’m trying to tell myself anything important right now, I’m chewing. I’m breaking down old concepts and investigating new ones, and the side effects are random because I clearly don’t have a symbolic language for this as yet, much less words I can use consciously.

How do we make radical changes to ourselves and our thoughts? If you’ve always felt or believed something, then changing it by a process of deciding to believe something else is very hard work. Beliefs send out roots and suckers into our minds, they connect to other things, and grow stories that keep them in place in our lives. You don’t just uproot and discard something like that in one go. Equally you don’t grow new concepts easily when you have no language for them, you don’t rework the stories you have without some upheaval. Possibly you do become able to change your thinking overnight. Or over many nights, more accurately.

One of the things that dreams can do is allow us to think what is otherwise, quite literally, unthinkable. By chewing on something in our dreams we can create new symbols and narratives that can gradually become available to the waking mind.

If this sounds like your sort of thing, I have a book out this summer, full of such approaches to dreaming.

Minoan Tarot

I’m no great expert on things Minoan, but having read Laura Perry’s fascinating book – Ariadne’s Thread – I’m aware that this is a really interesting culture. I don’t really buy into the idea of any kind of coherent matriarchal society that was later crushed by patriarchy – it just seems too simple a story to me which is part of why I liked Laura’s book – it offers something more complicated.

I gather that the further back you go into Minoan history, the more equality there is. This is a culture that, go back far enough, had a totally different gender balance to a lot of the ancient world, and was much less violent as well. This isn’t a coincidence. Patriarchal societies tend to treat most of their men as expendable resources that can be used to secure more physical resources – part of a bigger project in which ownership is considered more valuable than life itself. I understand that the transition to settled agrarian life brought a culture of ownership, and led to violence in many places, fuelled by new metal technology. For me, capitalism and patriarchy, are unpleasant aspects of a project that has been going on for quite some time now. I’m very keen on anything that shows us that alternatives exist.

At the moment, Laura has a kickstarter on the go for a Minoan Tarot set. Frankly, what I know about tarot is negligible. However, what Laura has done is gorgeous and innovative. She’s hand drawn each card image based on imagery from the ancient frescoes of Crete. The images are striking and colourful, full of vitality and sensuality. I’ve borrowed an image to illustrate this blog and to give a sense of what an attractive project this is.

If you’d like to know more, or want a copy of the tarot for yourself, hop over to the kickstarter – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1777224428/the-minoan-tarot-by-laura-perry?ref=video

Grace

Authentic, stumbling

More graceful yet

Than smooth certainty.

 

Ungainly ache and yearning

Scar tissue evidence

Of old breaking.

 

Ready to reshatter, move

Be moved, awed, lost.

 

Uncertainty a kindness

Wondering a gift.

 

Stood between earth and sky

Howl, rejoice (both)

Untamed and beautiful

 

(This has come out of reflections in recent days about what I love in other people and a recognition that those who are reaching, questing, trying, to engage with mystery, or beauty or wonder or whatever it is, have far more grace, (to my eye) no matter how ungainly the effort, than those who are focused on trying to look graceful)

Magic words and their deployment

Spells and spelling, grammar and Grammarie… magic is often formed of words. It’s not all about high ceremony or Latin. The magical use of language does not of itself have to be that esoteric or arcane, it is simply about how you put your will into the world.

“Oops” is a powerful magical word because of the possibilities it creates and the changes it allows. Being able to say “oops” allows a person to own a mistake. The mistakes we cannot admit to are ones we cannot do anything about. If we have to protect our wrongness, we cannot learn, grow or change. We cannot fix what went wrong. “Oops” allows us to do all those things.

It can be frightening to have to admit failure, ignorance or other shortcomings. “Oops” is a gentle, non-judgemental sort of word. It enables acknowledgement without bringing with it too much in the way of guilt, shame or awkwardness. This is important because guilt, shame and awkwardness tend to get in the way of learning and transformation, and are often barriers to it. “Oops” releases the problem gently, and allows the person saying it to recognise the problem without beating themselves up. This in turn is liberating, and for the person who suffers shame and guilt, or has been shamed repeatedly, the gentleness of an “oops” can itself be a healing experience.

Offering “oops” to anyone else affected by what went wrong is also transformative. This can work in a number of ways. With the problem recognised, it becomes possible to ask for help or information, or whatever else was lacking in the first place. A mistake made in ignorance can be soothed away by the simple recognition that it was not intended to hurt, but it did hurt. The former without the latter is worthless. It is one of the important limits of will working – your will does not define reality, only contributes to it. Therefore if the result is not in line with your will, the result is not wrong, it is the sum of all the factors of which your will was only one. You cannot make reality follow your will by refusing to accept when that’s not happened. If an error has an unintended effect, “oops” allows you to find out what the other variables were, and that gives you better scope for getting what you want next time.

With “oops” in the mix, the way is opened to ask what we do now. What would help? What would get us to where we want to be? What do we need to know? What do other people need to know? “Oops” becomes a gateway, a transition point, an opening up of options.

We need to take our words seriously. Careful use of language gets things done. Careless communication can be self defeating. Small words can have huge implications.

Complicity

When things keep going wrong in the same sorts of ways, the reason can be personal complicity. This is a really painful concept to explore, so if you take it up, I recommend finding all the reasons you can to cut yourself some slack over why you have been complicit, because this one hurts, but only in dealing with it can the patterns be broken.

How are we complicit? We might be so busy playing out a story we entirely believe, that we don’t notice the story isn’t true, and that only our maintenance of it keeps it going. I believe there is no place for me, so I keep a distance, so there is no place for me, for example. We might be playing out ideas others have taught us, stories from our family about who we are and what we do – we might be not doing the things that call us becomes someone else told us we were useless. Can’t sing, can’t dance, acts a little… We might also be complicit because we are afraid of change or failure, or hurting someone else.

Complicity tends not to be a conscious thing. Even when it comes from self hatred, it’s easy not to know you are doing it. The self hatred makes it so obvious that you deserve everything to go wrong and so you don’t do anything to protect yourself when it does. It takes some work to make that unconscious complicity conscious, but when you’ve hauled it out and can see what it is, change becomes possible. The old story can be dismantled, other ways start to exist. Yes, it is hard and it hurts and it can raise a host of other things that hurt – because complicity has reasons, and serves a purpose and to get out of it, you have to face that down, too.

Here’s one of mine, by way of an example. When someone hurts me, my knee jerk reaction is to explain it: Why I deserved that, why it was a reasonable thing to do to me. I justify and excuse the hurt. On a really bad day I won’t mention it in case saying ‘ouch’ makes the other person cross, or resentful and justifies them hurting me even more. I tell myself that I would be an awful, unreasonable person for mentioning that I’ve been hurt. It’s tantamount to emotional blackmail. It would be abusive of me, to mention being hurt and risk upsetting them, because me being hurt does not matter and them being hurt would be terrible.

And so if someone lands in my life who hurts me – for their own gain or amusement, or out of a lack of care and attention, I’ve just let them get on with it. I don’t resist, or fight back, or even walk away, and this held true up until a couple of years ago when I started to tentatively question my assumptions. I’m still not handling it very well, and struggling to recognise my own complicity and how I add to this.

I suffer from depression – and this is not unrelated. In my head are all the reasons it has been ok to hurt me. All the reasons it is perfectly reasonable not to expect anyone to care about anything in my life. Years of internalising other people’s lies and excuses have left me with very little emotional resilience, no means to fight back when things are going wrong for me, and no way of being gentle with myself in face of my own pain. Because obviously if I’m hurting it’s because I did something wrong, I deserve it, have brought it upon myself or am making a fuss about nothing. Thanks to my complicity, falling into depression means falling deeper into self hatred and self-destructive lines of thought. As I try to break that, the mechanics become more visible.

I could not have got out of this on my own – not least because I did not get here all by myself. I’ve had ‘help’, which allowed me to develop complicity as a survival method. And more recently, I’ve had help to see that I do not have to be complicit when people hurt me. There are other people in my life who do not cause me pain or leave me feeling worthless. All I have to do is allocate my time based on the company I am happy in, and stop believing the story that the people who hurt me are entitled to opportunities to keep doing that. Starting to walk this path was painful and traumatic and forced me to recognise things I did not want to recognise. But, seeing all of that allows change, and I think it gets better from here.

The needs of the many

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few… or the one.” Mr Spok, dying heroically in a Star Trek film and reducing my child self to tears.

It’s a powerful thought, this. How do we measure the importance of our own needs, even our own lives, against the needs of the many? For the rich and the powerful, it is pretty much taken for granted that the needs of the few (ie them) outweigh the needs of everyone else. The poor are statistics, collateral damage, their deaths and suffering an unfortunate cost that history will soon forget. Western culture tends not to give a shit about the needs of the many, and the quality of life experienced by the many. The needs of the few, or the one are only an issue if you are the right one, part of the important few. As ethical approaches go… it isn’t one.

The needs of the many can be a great silencer. I wonder how many people turned a blind eye to child abuse in the Catholic church, and amongst the powerful in other places because preserving the reputation of church, government, institution seemed more important than the needs of the few. How often are the needs of the few the needs of minorities, victims, outsiders? How often are the few vulnerable and lacking in power and not making the choice that they are expendable because the grand plan is more important than them?

But of course what underlies all this is the importance of who gets to choose. When the state decides that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and leaves some of its people to die in hunger and misery (as in modern austerity Britain) this is very different from one person deciding that the bigger picture is more important than them. It’s still worth being wary. Most of us are not Mr Spok facing the melt down of a ship and the imminent deaths of everyone on it. Mostly the needs of the many are not as immediate or powerful. Mostly there is more room for negotiation. The many are all individuals too, and if we can only value people as a block vote, anyone may find themselves on the outside of that, othered and irrelevant.

Better on the whole to live in a culture where everyone matters and you start from that premise to do the best you can with whatever you’ve got.