GENDER and THE SACRED

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GENDER and THE SACRED

 

If something occurs that is unusual, then for indigenous people it is sacred, because it takes us out of the ordinary and the everyday. So lightning is sacred, dangerous animals and poisonous plants are sacred. And so are the Two Spirits, those unusual people who feel themselves to be both genders, though being of one biological sex. For Native Americans, it has always been accepted that some men want to live as women, and vice-versa. These people are looked to as leaders and healers, because they have both gender perspectives, each to a high degree.

 

It seems to me like such a mess. We have taken a gift from Spirit and turned it into a curse, and an epidemic amongst teenagers who do not yet know who they are. And we have also reduced it to sexual orientation, when it is about something much broader: 'gay' is a wholly inadequate term for what I am talking about.

 

There is maybe a lesson here in what happens if you try to make the sacred ordinary. There is a difference between a man living as a woman, and a man claiming he has become a woman. The former has an element of the sacred, the latter is a violation of nature, of what is possible, and people are not necessarily prejudiced to feel repelled by it.

 

The quest for the other gender is natural in both men and women in the second half of life, if not earlier. I deal with it regularly in the astrology readings I do. Men are seeking Venus: learning to listen, to themselves and to others. And women are seeking Mars: no more people-pleasing. It is a sterotype because it is so commonly the case. And it is not just about adding on new pieces to the personality. It is a soul journey to the divine feminine or masculine. Mars in a woman does not look the same as in a man, it is not about becoming like a man, it is about something different and bigger: there is an archetypal, sacred dimension to it. And the same for Venus in a man. It is a compelling journey of the Spirit. We find these opposites on the East-West of the Medicine Wheel, the Blue Road, the road of Spirit, that is not under our control. It is about gifts of Spirit that become our inner path.

 

People for the most part need simple categories with which to understand the world. The sacred moves us out of this black-and-whiteness, but it needs to be approached with caution, or you'll frighten the horses. With our transgenderism, we are trying to make the sacred normal, and it has resulted in dogmatism on one side, and revulsion on the other.

 

I am thinking out loud here, because I don't think there are any easy answers. But I think there is a case for doing away with surgical transitioning, which I think is the literalising of a spirit gift. And for people who want to live as the opposite gender to be seen as part of a sacred calling, as monks and nuns are. We have, by and large, done away with the sacred, and that is perhaps a big part of the problem.

 

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ON SATURN NOT BEING THE BOSS PLANET

Saturn is still getting used to not being the boss planet, since the advent of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. He keeps his job of providing form and boundaries and making stuff happen, while the outer planets get on with deeper alchemies. But Saturn frequently messes up by not yielding, creating madness, addiction and terror respectively, or variants thereof.

I am thinking of the current transit of Saturn through Pisces. This sign is ruled by Neptune, and the transit involves giving form to the formless. That is not easy, because Pisces is not tangible. If you can open yourself to channelling the whole universe - not my Will but Thine - then you are in with a chance. More than a chance: this is as powerful as it gets. But it probably takes many years to be an adequate vehicle for this kind of energy, and not attempt to appropriate it as one's own. It is great for divinatory astrology, and it is interesting that I changed the name of this group under this transit.

Boris Johnson is a good example of natal Saturn in Pisces. He could win elections, because he could communicate a collective vision, whether or not you agreed with it. But on a personal level, he had little in the way of discipline, and that was his downfall. With his second Saturn return underway, he is experiencing the consequences of his actions, via censure from Parliament. I think this illustrates quite well the 2 ways this placement can go.

 

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Men need to yield to Venus; women need to claim Mars. This can be catalysed through relationship. It is the anima/animus journey that Jung writes about.

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As astrologers, we are essentially helping people find their genius. And to see Fate as a living, guiding thing, that enchants the universe by showing us that it knows us: through the chart, all those gods with their callings on us. And the difficult process of incarnating them: Saturn.

 

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There is nowhere that can give you a certificate in your own genius: etymology - spirit attendant from birth. What you were born to do. It gradually reveals itself, as long as you keep doing the next thing. Don't worry about the long-term plan, that is taken care of: Fate, a living principle for the ancient Greeks. And Nordic peoples. 

 

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Astrology shows us that we belong to the universe, not to ourselves. As such it is a remedy for modern individualism. Politically, it would tend to lean us towards responsibilities (transpersonal) over rights (personal).

SHAMANISM and MY NORTH NODE

The North Node I interpret as the place of greatest potential growth in the chart. It is where life will tend to lead you. I guess it shows us what we are here to learn. It is not generally an easy place, because otherwise we probably wouldn't learn anything.

Mine is in Scorpio. Jupiter is my only personal water planet, and even he, with his generosity and connection to meaning, is edging towards the transpersonal.

So my Node pushes me towards learning about personal emotion (water) through the death and rebirth processes that are basic to the Scorpio paradigm. Pluto is the ruler of Scorpio, and I have natal Sun opposite Pluto. The death and rebirth processes have been activated for me when my Sun-Pluto is transited by outer planets. 

Scorpio, being ruled by a transpersonal planet (Pluto) is a transpersonal sign: you need something bigger and wider going on in your life if you are a Scorpio, that maybe involves helping others go to their dark places, or you will end up frozen, like the Medusa, mired in self-hatred. A similar principle applies to Aquarius and Pisces, ruled by Uranus and Neptune respectively. Aquarians can end up seriously cranky if they are not transmitting their progressive ideas, while Pisceans will tend to self-medicate if they do not create an outlet for their compassion and imagination.

My Scorpio North Node is conjunct Jupiter and Neptune in the 3rd House. So there is a load going on around it that is transpersonal.

Neptune particularly askes me to surrender to the spirit in doing the transformational work with others, and Jupiter adds growth and meaning. Being 3rd House, it can be through my writing, as I am doing right now. When I write, I follow my spirit, I don't plan it out in advance.

But it is also through the Shamanic work that I do.

 

Photo © Jesse Wild

 

When I journey, I am taken over physically (that's me in the photo). I call it Shapeshifting, and it seems to be allied to the way Shamans work in the Far East. It is a lovely place to be. The spirits, or whatever you want to call them, move through me. I surrender to them. I move as they want, I use my voice as they want. It is a deep and nourishing experience, and it may take some hours to arrive fully back in this world.

 I came to this way of working through trance dance: the deep, rhythmic beat that gets into your body and takes you places. In medieval times, they had dancing in churches. It was banned, because it gave people their own connection to the Spirit. The connection between Body and Spirit has been returning in recent times. Nowadays I don’t need music or drumming: the connection is always there, over my shoulder. And it seems to be effective in helping move energies along for other people.

I have been bringing the writing and shapeshifting together over the last 18 months in the fantasy trilogy that I am writing. I am currently on the 3rd volume. It is partly an exploration of Shapeshifting, and partly an attempt to bridge the old cultural divide between Spirit and Reason, God and Lucifer.

As an astrologer, my spirits are in the sky. But they still move through me, just as when I am doing my shamanic work. Which makes them the same kind of thing, a Neptunian thing. Also, Astrology divides the chart into the 4 elements of Fire, Earth, Air and Water, which are more fundamental than the signs. They are used in a very similar way in the Medicine Wheel, which I wrote a book about 2 years ago. So there is the more rational, 3rd House connection between those 2 callings of mine.

The astrology reading offer remains open indefinitely on my Medicine Wheel book and my Astrology book, Surfing the Galactic Highways: buy either of them and leave a genuine rating on Amazon, and I will give you a free (and thorough) astrological consultation.

SATURN-PLUTO, AUTHORITY and THE STOPPING OF THE WORLD

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AUTHORITY
The Saturn-Pluto conjunction isn't obviously descriptive of the Coronavirus pandemic - that is more Neptune's realm - but the unprecedented state control that has come in as a response is perfectly described by that conjunction, especially in the sign of Capricorn.

You generally need a bit of hindsight to get a sense of these challenging aspects between outer planets, as their themes gradually unfold over a period of years, and re-define the character of the world we live in. But I don't think that state control will necessarily be an enduring theme of this conjunction: after all, the current control is just a measure to contain the pandemic, and will end when it ends - if you live in a democracy, that is, where any government that tried to maintain the controls would not find that going down well at the polls. But it will now be there in the background as a possibility. 

We no longer knew, and maybe governments no longer knew, just how powerful they can be when they choose. That can of course be abused, but it is also a security for us, it means that governments can protect us, and it is easy to overlook this because collectively we are quite paranoid and thankless in relation to authority. We are childish in this respect. The danger in this is that while we concentrate on our dark fantasies, a government could sneak something in while we are looking elsewhere. Balance, not paranoia, is the best way to keep an eye on governments.

Having experienced the benign side of government control, attitudes may shift. And particularly in the UK, where the government exercises a light touch - be thankful for that! Appreciate that aspect of being British! So this would be a great outcome of Saturn-Pluto in Capricorn: the collective ability to give authority trust where trust is due.

I think the presence of Jupiter alongside Saturn and Pluto points to an over-reaction on the part of governments. The numbers of dead can seem striking on their own, but in the larger scheme of things - in the UK, for example, about 600,000  people die every year - it is quite marginal. We don't know all the reasons yet as to why the governments have acted as they have done. But as I say, because of Jupiter, I think it will with hindsight be seen to have been an over-reaction.

I think the deeper meaning of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction will start to become clearer through the nature of the aftermath of the pandemic, and how it will change the way we live.

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STOPPING THE WORLD
Coincidentally, I am re-reading the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. (I highly recommend the trilogy this book belongs to). It is set at that particular intersection where traditional tribal life was still being lived, but the modern world was starting to impinge. D’Arcy McNickle’s novel Wind from an Enemy Sky is similar, but set in North America rather than Africa.

I say coincidentally because of course Things Fall Apart is exactly what this coronavirus is doing to the world. In the book, there is a period of the year between the harvesting of the yams and the planting of the next crop where there is not much to do. Life in its usual busy sense comes to a halt. For them, this is normal. For us, our world is built in such a way, it is so busy, so extraverted, so fragile for all its economic power, that a major recession is being brought about, that will probably take years to recover from, by what is still just a few weeks of stoppage. Major Pluto aspects usually produce recessions, Pluto being a god of wealth. So I was kind of expecting one, but couldn't see why there should be. Now we know!

“What is this world, if full of care, we have no time to stop and stare,” sang the Welsh hobo William Henry Davies. 

WH DAVIES

To stop and stare, amidst the anxiety of which there is no shortage, is I think what we are being asked to do.  It is in this sense a natural balancing that is occurring. But because we are so out of balance, the remedy is extreme. And it is a remedy that we are collectively choosing, it is not just happening ‘to’ us. No-one is forcing the governments to shut everything down. We could have just carried on as normal, but with a higher death count. The governments have chosen not to. The governments are, ultimately, ourselves, they are a function of the collective, as Tolstoy was at pains to point out in War and Peace. Is this shutdown out of care for the older and more vulnerable people, or because the body count would look bad when it comes to re-election, or out of an exaggerated fear of death and of the unknown? Who knows. Probably all of those reasons and more.

What we do know is that collectively we have chosen this time to STOP, and therefore to align ourselves with what is within. An extreme of extraversion has produced its opposite, and I think this has an inevitability to it. Just as the boom times produce regular recessions, where we are forced to examine the imbalances of what has gone before. This seems to me to be the deepest reason that the world is stopping, and it has been our collective choice, as I am taking pains to point out! Somewhere, some deep part of our collective wants this. Hallelujah!

And this is Saturn in his role as guardian, instead of the denier, of the inner life. Saturn is usually the worldly taskmaster who is fond of telling us that only that which is observable and measurable has value. In this extraverted world of ours, it can be a lifelong struggle for introverts to feel the value of who they are. Remarkably, we are having a rare collective moment where slowing down and re-assessing is required. And maybe this will point to an enduring meaning of Saturn-Pluto in Capricorn: a time of proportion, of living more according to our means and our needs instead of  according to demented fantasies of unlimited growth and consumption. Jupiter, the planet that describes where we find meaning, has appropriately come up alongside Saturn and Pluto.

Now for a Shamanic interpretation, read no further if that is not your interest!

This is where, on the Medicine Wheel, healing begins: through the East, with an intervention from Spirit that we cannot directly cause, only prepare the ground for. That has been the coronavirus. We then have the choice whether to try and ignore that intervention, or to turn towards it. 

 

With that inward turning, which we have chosen through the lockdown, we can begin to move round the Wheel: firstly to the South, to the place in us that is wounded, in avoidance of which life has become so frenetic. So this will be the next stage of the coronavirus stoppage (perhaps): a sense of the inner lack that has been driving our thoughtless, thankless, taking attitude to our Mother, the Earth, and therefore to ourselves, for we are part of her, we are nothing but her.

And that will lead to the West, the Earth: incarnating those inner realisations. It is already clear that many more people will work from home in the future: this is slower, more reflective, and puts less pressure on the environment through travel requirements. And then to the North, the gradual integration of these new ways of living into our philosophies, into the ways we understand the world.

Modern vs Traditional Shamanism: Ponderings from the Front-line

I've been blogging about this Shamanic thing since January this year. 3 days after my Dad died, to be exact. A few weeks before, in my last conversation with him, he said twice that I must be thinking of retiring now. Well I'm some years off that yet, I hope, and he was in a morphine-muddle. But it was interesting in that for him, material achievement, and the social status that comes with that, was all. And it was as if, in my last conversation with him, he was releasing me from that shadow that has always hung over my life. Because for me, it is the soul-making that has always mattered.

And then after he died, I had dreams, and in one there was a young polar bear. And then a few weeks ago, I spent 5 days on my own own in a yurt in Wales, and the polar bear was there the whole time, adult now, protecting me. And I was reading about the Medicine Wheel, and as I left the site, I was shown by the owner how the whole place was dedicated to medicine wheels, one for each element. I hadn't known!

And when I got home, I built a wheel of stones, about 18ft wide, outside my caravan, and then I painted the stones. And I am with that wheel a lot, it represents a dream for the future, but for now that dream is taking care of itself. I just sit and wonder.

Some people say I shouldn't be saying this personal stuff, that I shouldn't talk about the polar bear. They are right, but only up to a point. I love that she is there, and I want people to know about these things, because they can happen, maybe already do, in their own lives.

And I feel like I'm at an interface, trying to work out what this shamanic thing is about, for myself at any rate. In the 90s I did lots of the things many of us have done - shamanic journeying, healing work, sweat lodges, trance dance, pipe ceremonies, being buried, medicine wheel, vision quest, ayahuasca in the jungle.... and I loved all of it. And it was with westerners. And I ended up teaching some of it.

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And then in the noughties I began having a Canadian Indian come to stay with me, and I began learning (informally, around the breakfast table) in quite a different way. Unfortunately, he was also quite dismissive of all that 'New Age' stuff (as he called it) that we do over here, and it faded from my life. And I was also teaching myself to write and to practise as an astrologer, which was a great adventure in itself. And I was also slowly sorting stuff in myself that would, eventually, give a bit more depth to what I had to offer.

But now all that 'New Age' stuff is coming back at me. I love it. And I also have in me something of the more traditional spirit. Something, not all, by a long chalk. I'm not being modest. And I want to put those 2 things together. That is the interface I am at. I am trying to work it all out, and I'm using this blog to do so, so it needs to be treated as work in progress. In fact, I hope to always be work in progress.

And there are certain things I think as I try put together what I learned from the Canadian guy (and another Indian who more recently came my way) and modern shamanism.

1/ This thing is essentially about becoming a balanced human being. It is not about becoming a healer or a teacher or about being able to talk to spirits or about getting 'qualifications'. We may or may not end up doing stuff that helps people in various ways, but I think it gets diluted, and creates a superficial attitude, by being presented in course-form that most people can attend, as an 'add-on'. And it's not the main thing, either.

2/ Change takes a long time, and it's not under our direction. It takes a whole lifetime. Traditionally, it is the guys in their 80s and 90s who are the elders, who are seen as really having something to say. In our culture we want quick change, and we want something to show for it, an identity, perhaps. So this can be very hard for us to understand. As well as being more real, this perspective takes the pressure off us to 'achieve' or to try and 'be' someone.

3/ Shamanism requires an engagement with nature that we have forgotten. Everything is grounded in our relationship to the natural world. That is what we pray to, what we are grateful to, what we feel to be sacred, what we are part of. If we approach nature in this way, she will respond. Her messages may be symbolic, like when an unusual event occurs. But not everything that occurs is symbolic. And we will feel cared for.

We started to lose this being in nature thousands of years ago, and I think in our short lifetimes we can only ever get part of the way back. I recommend The Dream of the Cosmos by Anne Baring, who traces, through the gods and goddesses we have worshipped, our gradual distancing from nature, and evokes very well what that closer relationship would have felt like.

4/ A good teacher does not make claims. Nowadays it seems very common for shamanic healers/teachers to present themselves in terms of their connections to spirit guides or their childhood experiences, as if they are 'born' seers, or as visionaries, or as having experienced the shamanic illness, the closer to insanity the better.

It is an authoritarian way of functioning. The teacher becomes the one with the special vision, and everyone is meant to look to that. This way of presenting oneself has become embedded, but I also think it is untraditional and egotistical. My Canadian Indian friend never presented himself like this, as having 'special' experiences that qualified him. No, he used reason and experience. One of the guys I learned off in the 90s, Leo Rutherford, also declined to operate in this way. But he was an exception, it is that common.

Maybe it is because our religious history in the west is authoritarian. It is the priest who has the hotline to God. It seems to me that is what we are replicating. Like a bunch of Old Testament prophets mouthing off what 'the spirits' have told them. Even with their hotline, Christian priests don't do this, why do we?

If the spirits tell you something, and you want to persuade others of it, you need to use reason, not the 'authority' of where it came from: if you say 'the spirits told me', many people will then take what you say on board, but for the wrong reasons.

A good teacher presents themselves as an ordinary person who has some worthwhile things to say. He/she will, if they are the real thing, be substantial within themselves, have their own inner knowing. But that is for the pupil to spot, not for the teacher to boast about. 

Of course, we may well have unusual or profound experiences that we'll want to talk about, and there will be times when it is important to do so. But I think that needs to that occur in the context of relationship, not in the context of presenting your services to people you don't know.


5/ A bit of contact with indigenous people doesn't make you an authority. A little knowledge is dangerous. This is the other side of the interface. On the New Age side, we want quick results, we treat shamanism as an add-on, and do not understand the profound relationship with the natural world we need to build. On the Indigenous side, we can think that a few weeks in Peru with some 'elders', or inviting a few over to run some events, counts as an initiation on our teachers CV, and gives us an authority to speak on what shamanism is and isn't. It becomes another 'claim'.

Real teaching, or learning, is being-to-being, it is about developing an inner attitude towards oneself and towards the world, that one gradually absorbs from someone else. And this takes personal relationship, and it takes years. And one may learn something of the traditional attitude through that. But even that does not make one an authority. It can become yet another identity. You may not be a born seer, you may not have had the shamanic illness or the prophecies from spirits. But you have had a bit of contact with the 'real thing'. And that is also another trap that I have observed - another way of becoming stuck.

6/ Let us get away from the emphasis on talking with spirit guides or other forms of non-ordinary awareness, as though that is what shamanism is about. I don't at all want to undermine those of us who do, it can be profound.

It's probably got to do with origins: the shaman is originally a guy from somewhere in Siberia who can talk with the spirits and do healing work and offer counsel on that basis. That, I think, is why we have that emphasis in shamanism in the west, even though it has come to mean something much broader: the whole western attempt to engage with, and be inspired by, indigenous ways.

Many of us our drawn to this project. Only a minority will have that natural leaning/ability to talk with spirits. I certainly don't, and I spent years feeling inadequate on that account! I'm good with words in this reality, crap in non-ordinary reality. When called on, something takes me over and I seem able to do some good work from that place, or rather what comes into me is able to. I guess that is shamanic in the formal sense.

But it's not the main thing. The main thing for me is becoming a balanced human being, and having a strong relationship with the 'spirit' side of existence is central to that quest. And we all have that relationship, and it is very important to find and develop our own particular relationship with that spirit side.

If you're going to run courses in shamanism - and why not, if it doesn't include a qualification - then I think they need to be grounded in this very broad approach to spirit.

That is why I like the Medicine Wheel - it is an approach to the whole human being.

7/ Rationality and discernment are needed as to what is and is not 'spirit'. When I learned shamanic journeying, we were told over and again that the spirits know you perfectly, and that we need to learn to trust what we get told or shown in our shamanic journeys.

I don't think it's quite like that. Shamanism came in on the counter-cultural wave of reaction to western one-sided rationality. And I think that rationality can need reclaiming. What is needed is a sense of attunement to Spirit, and if you're having a bad day, what you see in your shamanic journey may well be bilge. Just like someone who functions psychically, if they haven't trained themselves well, personal stuff and moods will get in the way.

So far from blindly trusting 'the spirits', we first need to develop self-awareness, and that takes time. It is ridiculous to ask someone to trust everything they get shown in a shamanic journey. What they need to find out is what they can trust and what they can't.

And it's the same with prayers and calling on Spirit for help. I read someone the other day saying you need to 'know' you will be answered. Again, that is blind faith. It is our Christian heritage. If you are wanting 2 plus 2 to equal 5, that ain't going to happen. You need to ask and to pray from a sense of attunement to Spirit: then you will be answered, but quite possibly not in the way you intended!

There is This World and there is the Other World. A solid grounding in This World is needed as a basis for navigating the Other World. Practices in self-awareness are, I think, needed alongside practices such as shamanic journeying. The dis-identification of the North of the Medicine Wheel, the bodily awareness of the West, the awareness of the emotion of the South are all needed to encounter the Spirit presence of the East.

8/ I think that shamanism needs to find ways of integrating some of the understanding of ourselves that western psychology, particularly perhaps the transpersonal forms, has developed. Many western Buddhists have found that Buddhism is not necessarily very good at addressing the particular psychological issues that we in the west have. And I think the same can be said for many indigenous ways, acute as their psychological understanding can be. At the same time, we can bring to psychology some of the transformational methods that it does not have so much: energy work, putting back bits of soul, ceremonial work. This is a big subject.

9/ How long are we going to keep looking over our shoulders to the indigenous people for authority and for authenticity? Especially when the great majority of us have no direct experience of them, certainly in the matter of what counts, which is personal relationship.

What we DO have is our own inner knowings, and that is what any tradition worth its salt promotes. Religion goes in the opposite direction, encouraging reliance on the teacher, which as I have said is what many teachers are doing when they advertise their 'special' experiences.

And I think if we do look to indigenous people - and remember some of them can be dodgy too - then it is the spirit and attitude we need to look to, and if we encounter that, it is a great gift.

But quite possibly not the letter. I will never the learn the letter of a pipe ceremony done traditionally. But I have been around them enough to get at least some of the basic attitude, and it is a beautiful and helpful and connecting ceremony, and currently I do them on my own and kind of make it up as I go along.

So I think absorb the indigenous attitudes where you can, if you have the chance, but ultimately it is our own inner knowing that matters, and that will go on to create a distinctively modern shamanism, which I think is the thing that the world needs more than anything.