Even as a very small child I loved to curl up with picture books and daydream my way into adventures and the magic of those pictures and words together, the images created by those able to see life through the eyes of a child. A jumping-off place for magic…
This is from The best books for the youngest readers, Sarah Garson’s The Grump, published by Anderson Press.
Today may or may not be my birthday. It is a complicated story, all about dysfunctional family and political vagaries. I was born in the closing years of a colonial dispensation entitled the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland. My parents didn’t register my birth and we were living out on a remote forest reserve in what was then Southern Rhodesia. So I am either in my late 40s or early 50s. The records kept under the Federation were often transferred to Lusaka or Lilongwe or Ndola and my parents moved around a great deal. My schooling was peripatetic. I have no factual historical records relating to my early life.
This oversight on my parents’ part has caused lifelong administrative chaos for me. But how pagan to have one’s origins obscured by the mists of time, to have them written on water! This is a changeling’s story, perhaps.
And I am not sure if I am Libran, born on 28 September. It was a date given to me almost arbitrarily. I am a most unlikely Libran. There is a passion for justice but almost no personal vanity or love of baubles and glitter. My aesthetics has to do with the deep beauty of right relationship, of justice, of natural law.
The darker side of the Libran personality for me has less to do with the famous indecisiveness and more to do with that governing Venus, the passion and intensity of romantic feelings and a fondness for unwise love affairs. Life can get a little overwhelming at times. So often I shiver with slight apprehension at the approach of Neptune, the tidal surges and watery depths.
And this too: the iron fist in a velvet glove. Taurus the bull roaring in the arena, an unexpected force that pushes through to resolution, who knows where the scales are dipping. And as a Libra I am the cerebral air sign, a lover of fireworks and rainbows who needs to ground and root herself in earth’s gravitas. Light and fire and a certain fear of drowning — something elusive, waiting to pounce.
An impossible sign –but whether or not I am Libra and whether or not it is my birthday, I shall be up with the dawn in a few hours, picking roses for the house and do a ritual to greet another year of richly lived life. And then I shall make a luxurious homemade ice cream of dark chocolate and orange before summoning friends and ex-lovers and former enemies and estranged family and fellow pagani to come and celebrate with me. Revelling in brief glamour and whimsy…
Image found here.
From the wonderful poet and earth-lover Wendell Berry:
“I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into the earth like leaves in the autumn.”
Image from the eloquent Richard Barnes, found here.
A poem by Robin Robertson that is in my mind as I steam young artichokes for an al fresco lunch under the olive trees. The erotic as power, the power of the erotic to keep us open, vulnerable, aching.
ARTICHOKE
The nubbed leaves
come away
in a tease of green, thinning
down to the membrane:
the quick, purpled,
beginnings of the male.
Then the slow hairs of the heart:
the choke that guards its trophy,
its vegetable goblet.
The meat of it lies, displayed,
up-ended, al dente,
the stub-root aching in its oil.
That lovely alcoholic poet and queer genealogist of the San Francisco Remaissance, Jack Spicer.
by Jack Spicer
A cold chill spring in Africa, thinking of my friends in the northern hemisphere waiting for Mabon. Laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful.
by Louise Glück
Let’s talk about jouissance, that unboundaried fluid limitless ecstacy that signifies enjoyment, sensual bliss, intense pleasure. Ovid writes somewhere in Metamorphoses about the god Jupiter asking Juno if women enjoy more pleasure in lovemaking than men. Juno acts coy, but then wise transgendered Tiresias, who has lived as both a man and a woman, says that it is quite true. A woman’s orgasmic ecstacy is the greater pleasure. For this he is blinded by an envious Jupiter.
Nothing is more transgressive, says Luce Irigaray, than the playful unbounded pleasure a woman may take in her own body. Helene Cixous talks about how women have been driven away from their own bodies and nature as well as from writing. Women need to write from the body, in milk and blood and juiciness. Taking back the power of pleasure, rejoicing, ecstacy. The passion and sexuality of women is not essentialist, not bounded by taboo, not dependent on the phallus. It is multiple, oceanic, inexhaustible.
The desire of women has been misrepresented and repressed for too long. When we take pleasure in our bodies, in what is cyclical, recurring, wet, luscious and irreducible, we reclaim the power of the erotic, the liberation of jouissance. We hear the laugh of the Medusa, that wicked, raucous, insatiable nature of the witch at her most creative and disruptive.
There is a connection between woundedness and power that I will never fully understand. The more we are able to connect with, acknowledge and stay with brokennness and loss, the close we come to transformation.
My first shamanic trance journey took me by surprise. It was unsought but I was receptive and able to surrender to the experience. Right from the beginning, I understood that when it comes to the liminal places and crossing over and entering into ecstacy and Otherness, it is not about control. It is about surrender.
That first time. It was a hot evening and I was rocking in an old unravelling raffia and wicker chair while sitting at an open window staring up at the moon. I began to sing a song I had known as a child, a song to which I did not know the words so I was humming and making up words. I was sleepy and the evening seemed to grow full and heavy, the moon hung above me luscious as a golden melon.
And then the scene changed and I was standing in a road that ran down the fence of my childhood home in Zimbabwe, a dusty untarred road lined with flamboyant and jacaranda trees with delapidated bungalows set back in shady if unkempt gardens. It was a hot afternoon and filled with glare and black shadows. Ahead of me on the road a group of people were standing around an animal and throwing stones at it. I walked towards them with a racing pulse, moved by some irresistable compulsion. It seemed to me that I was limping and shaken by fever, but I kept moving. A man in a djellaba called to me: ‘Don’t go any closer, the dog has rabies.’ I moved closer and saw that the dog was wild, resembling a wolfish hyena. It was frothing at the mouth and bleeding from raw places on its hide. It was growling ferociously. My heart seemed to convulse with pity and I put out my arms and went right up to where it crouched. The wild dog looked up at me and I looked back. Then it leapt at me and sunk its fangs deep into my left arm, crunching through bone and tissue, a terrible sound of wrenching, cracking, dismemberment. Everything went very still and the light changed, went dark but clear. To my amazement the wild dog had eyes blue as cobalt, a gaze that pierced right through me and I felt overwhelmed with love, consumed with a radiant joyous sensation of love I had never known before. ‘So this is death,’ I thought, and the wild dog became mysteriously whole and beautiful even as I bloomed like an unfolding rose.
Then I was back in my rocking chair, with nothing to show that the world had just split open. I sat and trembled with awe and terror. Nothing so strange had ever happened before. Rabies is a terrifying reality for anyone living in tropical Africa. Since early childhood, living in remote parts of Kenya and Zimbabwe, I had been warned about not going near dogs or fruit bats that might be infected with rabies. Even today, if I see a stray dog acting oddly in the street, that old terror comes back to me.
And that road running down the side of the family home was the road I took whenever life became so unbearable and I wanted to run away from home. But it was a road that led nowhere: I dared not go to the police or knock on a neighbour’s door. I don’t think I heard the word ‘incest’ spoken aloud by an adult until I was 12 or 13 years old and there was no language for family violence in that small town in a landlocked country. But that road represented escape for me, a path that might suddenly open up into the unknown, leading to a place where I could not be hunted down and brought back to punishment.
That first shamanic journey right into the heart of terror and woundedness transformed me in ways I am still only beginning to understand. It was a journey from fear into wonder, from estrangement into connectedness. A journey from the familiar and mundane into complete dazzling amazement.
For a long while I tried simply to recreate the experience leading to that first trance journey: each evening I sat and gazed at the full moon and then closed by eyes but went on gazing at the moon. I rocked back and forth or drummed to my own heartbeat, sang and chanted, tried to stay open to possibility. I begged and implored and hoped for another such door opening, for guides, to be shown how to get back into that Other place. The hunger in myself for more Presence was my initial clue. Where there is no desire, nothing happens — there can be no magick. And the journey, the dream, the trance are pure gift. I may be receptive to the gift but I cannot make it happen. The authentic cannot be coerced. Power is ultimately about power-in-freedom, the freedom of the Goddess to come and go as She pleases, the freedom of the questing spirit within. And those life experiences closest to the bone, those raw and bleeding places are where magick is most potent.
Little by little I have learned how ritual and attentiveness and receptivity make vision possible, how we open to the Goddess in grief and agony and joy. My own shamanic journeys have informed my political activism, my choices in relationship, my refusal of abuses of power, my own healing. The journey that leads each of us into empowerment and mystery.
Power
by Adrienne Rich
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
a backhoe
divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate..
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
I’m thinking about Hecate’s post asking on how we raise power in our rituals, how we find ourselves transformed by magick and ritual. And I find myself reaching back to the memory of Otherly power I first encountered in an indigenous pagan context among the Shona people of Zimbabwe almost 40 years ago. One of my first experiences of Goddess and courageous womanhood and somebody who took her calling seriously: the oracle spirit Mbuya Nehanda.
She is somebody I think of often, but only when I am thinking in RuwaShona. I don’t know any figure so hard to explain or interpret even to myself across the cultural barrier of the West and the English language. An oracle spirit, coming through incest, a revolutionary. And so much more, her history so obscured by contradictory stories, the demonising of racism, her multiple lives and incarnations. I grew up speaking with people whose great-grandparents had known her and whose children knew her. She was and remains Nehanda.
Where do I begin?
Once upon a time, as you might say, there was a glorious and beautiful kingdom called Monomatapa right in the heart of Africa. Niyamhika Nehanda was the beloved daughter of the first ruler Mutota, who was then living in the escarpment north of Sipolilo (now Guruwe) in about 1430 Western time. She had a brother named Matope and the father ordered the daughter to sleep with her brother. This incest ritual created great power for the ruler of the kingdom and Nehanda was given a portion of that kingdom as a thank-you gift. Her power as an oracle spirit grew over the years, transforming into mhondoro or lion spirit, and her spirit lived on in her daughter and in her daughter’s daughter, and so on for 500 years. She entered each in turn, became herself within each, and remained Nehanda of the Monomatapa.
In the Mazoe area of Zimbabwe there is a village named Chidembe and this is where Charwe Nyakisikana Nehanda was born in 1862. She worked as an oracle spirit, rain-bringer, medium, herbalist and farmer. Although she was young, she was called Mbuya which translates as ‘Grandmother’ but refers to wisdom and cunning and a wild far-seeing vision often found in the aged. As white settlers began to enter the lands of the Shona people with their guns and Bibles, many local people came to Nehanda for counsel. Her advice was at first conciliatory. ‘Don’t be afraid of them, they are only traders, but take a black cow to them and say this is the meat with which we greet you.’
Then came the forced labour, the hut taxes, the theft of cattle, the illegal occupation under colonialism. In 1896 Nehanda began to call for war. She spoke now as the great oracle spirit and queen of Monomatapa, calling on the Shona to rise up and drive the white settlers out. She promised that the power of the great land spirit Mwari would turn bullets to water. And this was the beginning of the First Chimurenga or war of liberation. Here is writer Yvonne Vera’s rendition of Nehanda’s call to war:
‘Spread yourselves through the forest and fight till the stranger decides to leave. Let us fight till the battle is decided. Is death not better than submission? There is no future till we have regained our lands and our birth. There is only this moment and we have to fight till we have redeemed ourselves. What is today’s work on this land if tomorrow we have to move to a new land? Perhaps we should no longer bury our dead…
Who are these strangers …these gold hunters? Our men helped them hunt for gold and we thought they would leave. Now they have discovered that our land is the gold they sought?
Raise your spears. Move into the mountains, I say. Worship your ancestors. Your ancestors shall protect you when you begin to release yourselves from his bondage.’
Nehanda herself fled into hiding and managed to evade capture for a year, but was arrested at the end of 1897 and put on trial for her part in events leading to the death of a native commissioner who had thrashed and humiliated a black chief.
She was sentenced to death by hanging but the first two attempts to hang her failed. A bystander suggested that a tobacco pouch of muti (medicine) be removed from her pocket. This was done and she was hanged. Dying at the age of 35, she cried out a final prophecy in Shona: ‘My bones shall rise again’.
On 27 April 1898, to counter rumours that Nehanda had been seen walking the fields and roads of Mazoe, the district surgeon of Salisbury wrote: ‘I certify that I have examined the body of Nianda, upon whom sentence of death has been executed, and that life is extinct.’
But seven decades later, in 1972, the spirit of Nyamhika Nehanda spoke out again from a widely respected medium and healer, an elderly woman in Dande near the Zambezi valley. She guided fighters through the shoulder-high grasses and spindly grey fever trees of the borderlands. As Nehanda, she was consulted on military decisions and her prophecies provided valuable assistance to the revolutionary struggle against the racist forces of white Rhodesia. She died in 1973 in exile in Mozambique, but by then the call to the second Chimurenga or war of independence had been heard. All who knew her, realised they were in the presence of Nehanda, the queen of Monomatapa, the ancestral spirit of Zimbabwe. She was buried like a chief on a wooden platform sunk into the earth and surrounded by a hut built and thatched in a single day. As the enduring and undying Nehanda it is said of her in this region: Vaititungamira muhondo yerusununguko [she led us through the long grass in the war of liberation].
And Nehanda is there still among the people, suffering with them, inspiring them, calling them to a renewed vision amidst drought and plague and poverty. As Yvonne Vera wrote before her own untimely death from Aids, Nehanda is ‘the wind that covers the earth with joyful celebration’. She is Mbuya the grandmother. No matter how many times and no matter with what cruelty she is put to death, her bones will rise again. She is deathless, the mhondoro lion spirit, the oracle, the raingiver, the grandmother, Nehanda.
Where is our freedom Nehanda?
Won’t you come down to help us?
Our elderly are treated like children
in the land you gave us
Won’t you come down to help us?
The Pisces full moon on September 4/5 evokes a flickering, ambivalent response within me. I am highly receptive to the water signs but feel conflicted by aspects of them. There is also an astrological stand-off or opposition between Uranus and Saturn.
Looking more closely, I can see where the trouble lies. Pisces is represented by two fish swimming in different directions, bound by a cord. It is a dualistic symbol, complex and sensitive and vacillating. I always feel as if I am dabbling or wading in spiritual waters when I work with Piscean metaphors: I lack decisiveness and direction. Staying with the indeterminate takes more patience than with other more robust and extrovert signs.
And yet I love to play with Pisces, a fin flicking back and forth in those shallow warm waters. I feel as if I am in a tropical lagoon — as a child we were taken out in glass-bottomed boats at Sofala in Mozambique to see the schools of brilliant fish swimming in the reef. When I am in Pisces, there is a supple, impressionable mood to which I surrender. And few moons are lovelier than those which glide through clouds and cast down broken reflections into ponds or inland lakes. Pisces has this uncanny power of being able to break up the solidity of the moon so that all becomes liquid and trembling and mirrored, not unlike a woman’s beautiful face distorted by tears.
Moving with the moon in Pisces, we reflect others to themselves: their sadness is returned in mimicry, they see their smiles in our faces, they have a doubling of emotion as we match expressions and moods. In Pisces, we are almost too sympathetic, fluttering a hovering and echoing: empathy is all.
And too, this is a dreaming time, fertile and boundless, oceans stirring the imagination. I always feel as though I am spawning ideas like black seed pearls at these times, giving birth to multiplicity. The way frogs trail streamers of jellied commas, tadpole progeny, new beginnings. But nebulous — that moon filling me with cloudy emotions, bringing up the spectre of old hurts, flickering with bioluminescent shivers, so lovely, so unearthly. My rituals for the Moon Mistress in Pisces always digress: there is spilled water on the rustic altar, scattered essences and fleeting enthusiasms — the incense is overpowering, flowers crumple, the gestures and invocations spark on and off like a poorly wired lamp.
So I just let go — surrender, roll over onto my back and float among the stars, compassless, lost in wonder and absorbing impressions that shower down like sparkling dust particles, drifting along my own moon river, going nowhere and feeling everything — next week Mercury goes retrograde and that will wake all of us up to struggle.
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