It feels like the first day. Of Spring. I have been patiently waiting for this day.
Three times today I have taken the time to sit and fill the temple of my head with birdsong. Once, in my car as I rested before travelling back home. Once at the railway crossing when for a short while I was the only car, and with my engine off the birds took over, windows down. And once back home, in the sunshine, on a wooden banana bench at the front of our house.
And the birds are in couples, collecting material for their nests, in a cycle that has lasted for millenia.
It has been a day of seeking quiet, from early morning coffee and a new book stash in my favourite bookshop (I like to be among the first to arrive at 9 am) I walked along the shore this morning towards the sun, by contrast to my habitual Northerly meanderings, in order to avoid the large loose dogs that were chasing after sticks in the waves (note: dogs very often run up to me at the beach in the UK and some run up barking, which terrifies me and I wish to avoid it) and I therefore noticed that the fragments of earth we call pebbles, tumbled into smoothness by the sea were gleaming like jewels and the foam was advancing and caressing them before shifting them and inviting them back in. These gems exist in what I experience as a magical zone between land and ocean…a zone of flux and transformation.
It’s a zone, ‘the edge’, where I also feel totally at home.
And now inside the house in our library, and my office, silent but for the low mechanical hum of the hard drive, I desire to make the link between magic, the ‘Religion’ of the Minoans, new leadership , psychoanalysis and Yoga Nidra. For this, my friend, is what my book stash revealed.
Can I do this in one article? A tall order, perhaps. But it’s a calling that persists and that I must follow.
Magic, Chris Gosden (1) defines as humans taking part in the universe while it simultaneously ‘influences and shapes’ us. Following Claude Levi Strauss, magic he states is a ‘humanisation of the universe’ a way that the universe ENTERS US and we share in this mutual participation. Astrology is a form of transcendent participation. Alchemy and shamanic shapeshifting are transformative ones and divination a transactional one - both of these forms of magic are MUTUAL and involve a kind of moral relationship of respect and care of and with the world. Some examples of the latter include leaving offerings for the spirits of place, or the oracles revealing the thoughts of the gods at Delphi.
Magic is where humans feel kinship with other beings, the land and the cosmos. A central belief is that we are JOINED.
Side bar - I feel very keenly that when I interact with members of the medical profession today I am regarded as very much a living, breathing, walking collection of biochemical reactions. This, to them, is what life is. This is what is true in the mechanistic scientific worldview in which they have been steeped. And I find it existentially terrifying. I feel separated from my kin like an abandoned orphan. What terrifies me is that I am of no interest to them as a person. I am just a big petri dish.
‘Magic’ by contrast to Science ‘knits us into a dense skein of connections with all other things, living or inorganic’ writes Gosden. I love this image of the skein, the winding of thread, to represent interrelatedness.
Magic immerses us in the world, and places us in direct relationship with it. Science separates us from it and places us in a state of alienation.
Magic is a much older form of knowledge than both rational, mechanistic Science and inherently hierarchical Religion. She is indeed their Mother but they are problematical children which have together given rise to Modernity. Historically, Gosden shows, where magical practices existed human connections were strong and there was no distinction between culture and nature, mind and body…in practice they were interwoven. Thus…craft production would have been a sacred act.
Gosden reminds us that sociologist and philosopher Max Weber pointed out that a process of disenchantment had to take place for Modernity to be born and with this came a sense of loss. I have today felt the grief that is the loss of enchantment.
It is time once more to be enchanted. Everything is animate, sentient, conscious and in relationship when we return to the enchanted garden.
I have been feeling for some time that it is time to return to this garden, the true Eden, not the later version where woman was demonised and diminished. And the people who nineteenth century archaeologist Arthur Evans misleadingly called ‘The Minoans’ have a message for us.
James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis tells us that the whole Earth is a dynamic system for supporting life, which I believe that my ancestors in ancient Crete already knew. They lived a settled life with stored food, communities, multi-functional buildings, trade, scripts and travel.
Oliver Dickinson (2 ) shares a diagramatic representation of ‘Minoan religion as ritual action’. Here, we see that the entire life of the people was in essence an offering and invocation. Since in the Minoan cosmos everything was sacred, life was constant co-creation with the universe through objects and substances both useful and beautiful (clothes, figurines, bowls, vases, cups, plants, food and drink) being used in processions and ceremonies as well as communion with stones and trees in caves and using shrines (in temples and houses as well as in the open air) through dance, music and song as worship. There was no separation between material and divine. In fact it makes no sense as I write this to have these twin aspects of reality as separate concepts.
Much of course remains unknown, in our current understandings of knowledge. There are no written texts (at least not yet discovered) and we are left with various interpretations and theories prone to cultural overlay - some of which I am going to be highlighting in the coming weeks.
But certain forms of knowledge, like magic, are far older than those accessed through alphabetic writing. Indeed some. like Leonard Shlain, argue that the birth of alphabets and linear writing (in lines from left to right or right to left - strikingly the ‘Phaistos Disc’ is both pictorial and spiral) signaled the beginning of separation from Gaia our Great Mother, and the unity and wholeness felt by my ancestors - and the beginnings of war.
‘Relaxation means to be blissfully happy’ - Swami Satyananda Saraswati. (3)
Yoga Nidra teaches us that when the mind is in control, no peace can be found. We know through the original Tantric teachings upon which this ‘relaxation technique’ (in its most reductive form) is based that RECEPTIVITY is enhanced when we enter into a deeper state of consciousness beyond the logical analytical mind giving us a keener intuition and access to the ‘true self’ and creativity. This I believe is the natural magical state. It is interesting that Yoga Nidra arose as a technique designed to return us to what was once a natural state of ‘pure undivided consciousness’ aka UNITY.
We have been long deluded, distracted, separated and as a result grieving, lost and fearful. We have been handed a poisoned package - a story of scarcity and insufficiency that haunts us like a ghost. It is in the whispers of the traumatised and abusers who took it upon themselves to destroy the enchanted garden.
On page 21 of Yoga Nidra on the page about the SANKALPA or resolution of Yoga Nidra I discover a written message on yellow paper with the address ‘Out of Eden’
It goes as follows:
‘Love you
Love your warmth, your smile
The softness of your skin and your warm and gentle heart.
I love you
I love your smile
I love the warm feelings you give me inside when we are together.
I love you for being you X’
It seems to speak to me now, to say to me, to remind me that we are love.
A sankalpa is like a seed of change planted in the mind.
Let ‘I am love’ be my sankalpa.
‘Milk is what we desired first’ writes Terry Tempest Williams in her foreword (4) and ‘blood is what drives the human heart’.
She reminds us that we are elemental by nature and authentic leadership will be born from the bodies of women. This is why I have chosen to work closely with women in this phase of my career. Williams reminds us that the new way will come from ‘a different way of being in the world through presence and instinct and the courage which comes from falling in love with the earth’.
She asks the question:
‘Could it be that the ‘genius of women’ is our capacity to transform the world through creation?’
Which leads us back to magic, to enchantment, and the role of our whole bodied response to life - no longer in separation, longing for union, no longer being a character in a play that is our life outside of our animal body of this earth which leads us away from unity and into transference and projection - and ultimately fascism. (5).
We have a choice now.
The books that chose me to be woven into this piece:
‘The History of Magic’ Chris Gosden, Penguin 2020 (1)
‘The Aegean Bronze Age’ Oliver Dickinson, Cambridge University Press 1994 (2)
‘Yoga Nidra’ Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Bihar School of Yoga 1998 (3)
‘Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart’ Ed. Nina Simons, Park Street Press 2010 (4)
‘Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience’ Christopher Bollas, Routledge 1997
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I would love to know what thoughts if any this has evoked for you. Let’s make it a conversation to be continued.
I truly appreciate your writing. And wish I could respond more fully to it in words. But when I touch on one thing it leads rapidly to so many other things. So I just appreciate the pauses in between as I appreciate how incredible all life is. Thank you.
Well I'm certainly feeling Spring. Today I woke up very early, had a shower and sat outside at 5.45 just to be in/out with nature. I felt such stillness whilst delighting in the sound and movement of birds and their songs. Later I felt myself jumping for joy (whilst standing still, as I watched lambs gamboling. I certainly felt the warmth of the internal smile from externally. Such a fresh and joyous day in so many more ways than I can comment on in this comment box.