CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

[Cheerful theme music begins]

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Today we are excited to announce that we are returning to a weekly episode release schedule, so please make sure to subscribe and look for a new release from us each week starting with the next one featuring a conversation with Rae Johnson on embodied activism on April 30th!

Sharon Blackie is an award-winning writer and internationally recognized teacher whose work sits at the intersection of psychology, mythology, and ecology. Her best-selling book, If Women Rose Rooted is an inspiring exploration of femininity and relationship with landscape, and her latest, Hagitude, unearths the stories of elder women in European myth and folklore to highlight the different ways women can flourish throughout all stages of life. Her renowned writings invite us to explore how developing a relationship with myth and the land we live on can both enchant our lives and lead to a greater sense of meaning and belonging in the world.  

In this episode, Sharon is joined by CIIS Integral Counseling Psychology Associate Professor Rachael Vaughan for a transformative conversation on the importance of myth and land in our lives. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on June 28th, 2023. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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Dr. Rachel Vaughan: Hello Sharon, it's delightful to see you over there in Britain.

Dr. Sharon Blackie: Hi Rachel, lovely to see you too.

Dr. Vaughan: So Sharon, you're a psychologist, a mythologist, a feminist, and you write about the crossover of women, myth, and land. And I'm wondering if you could start by explaining how those areas come together for you and why they're important.

Dr. Blackie: Well, they began to come together for me, I suppose, when a couple of decades ago in the midst of about my third midlife crisis, I began to research my own native mythical traditions to find out really what they said about women, because, you know, the religion that I had grown up in, Christianity, was very patriarchal and I couldn't seem to find a place for women in it. And as part of that midlife crisis, I was trying to figure out what it was to be a woman anymore in this world. And I felt that I needed to go back to my own native traditions of Britain and Ireland to find that out, and found that particularly in the Irish tradition, women were presented, divine women particularly, were presented as, in a sense, the embodied land. They were imminent in the land. They represented the land and the spirit of the land and the other world that was entangled with it. So all of these myths showed women as kind of guardians and protectors of the land. And that really resonated with me in my early 40s, seeing it as something that was incredibly important in a world where we are facing so many environmental and ecological catastrophes. It gave me a kind of anchor point for what a woman might be able to be. Ever since then, I've seen women, the land, or ecology and mythology is all very much tied up together in the traditions of this part of Europe. And the reason why I think they are important is that they, again, they give us an anchor for how our ancestors used to see women's place in the world. And they kind of teach us what it's possible for us to become, I think.

Dr. Vaughan: That's very interesting. So you're talking about the ways of being a woman that have happened through time, but essentially in the British Isles, drawing on the mythic traditions of the British Isles. I wonder if you'd clarify what woman means in this context, because that definition is shifting in our own time. So who does the term woman include for you?

Dr. Blackie: Well, back in the old days, when these myths, particularly when the myths were written down, I guess they were pretty essentialists. So they would have been, as far as we can tell anyway, they would have been talking about biological women at the time. Now I don't think, to be honest, I don't think it really matters. I think that these myths and these ways of representing what we might call feminine qualities, if you like, are as relevant to anybody. So they're relevant to biological women, they're relevant to trans women, they're relevant to anybody who identifies as a woman. I think the things that they are teaching us about how we can be in the world generally are open to everybody. I don't see myths as exclusive. I don't see our myths, for example, as being race focused, even though they clearly were from a time in the British Isles where there probably would have been—and Ireland—where there probably would have been predominantly white people. If the myths come from the land and they speak about the relationship between women and the land, then they're relevant to anybody who is on this land. Myths are not in the business of excluding. So to me, they're open to everybody to take what they need from them.

Dr. Vaughan: Beautiful. So we're going to use a whole bunch of Jungian terminology, I would think, and you've already mentioned some terms. Let's clarify a little bit just for people who haven't read all of your books and all the supporting material. First of all, can you explain a little about archetypes? What are archetypes and why are they important to modern life?

Dr. Blackie: Well, the word archetype was coined predominantly by Carl Jung, but he didn't originate the idea. The idea originated really all the way back in ancient Greece from Plato, and Plato didn't use the word archetype. He used the word ideas or forms. And to Plato, these were kind of essential ideas or characters or things, if I can put it that way, that couldn't be reduced anymore. So just to give you an example, sometimes it's easier to see it in terms of ideas. To Plato, beauty was an idea or an archetype. And the reason for that is that we all know what it is. Now we might have a different vision of what beauty might look like, but we all understand if somebody says, oh, that's beautiful, we know what they mean, even if we don't agree personally that that's beautiful. So these to Jung, if we move on to Jung, these were kind of essential aspects, particularly of the human psyche, kind of like they were bits of the structure of the human psyche. They were all of the kind of experiences that we could have, the things that we could become. And because of that, because they are seen as the fundamental aspects of the human psyche, then clearly they're fundamentally important. So we have an archetype, for example, if I can give you a kind of more Jungian example, Plato for beauty, Jung, let's take the wise old woman archetype. We all know, if you say the word wise old woman, we all know what that means, but it looks different in different cultures. So in Scotland and Ireland, the Cailleach is the wise old woman. She's the old woman in that native tradition who created and shaped the land. For some American peoples, it might be grandmother spider, for in the Slavic traditions, it could be Baba Yaga, but they're all elements or aspects of this wise old woman archetype. And again, I think the different clothes that archetypes wear in different cultures gives us an idea of what we might become at various stages in our lives.

Dr. Vaughan: You mentioned the Cailleach. Actually I first met you when I took your course many years ago for Celtic women rediscovering their roots, which is where I read about the Cailleach. Would you like to say a little bit more about her? She's such an important figure, particularly in your latest book.

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, I would always love to say more about the Cailleach. She is very much a character in the Gallic tradition, so Scotland and Ireland and to a lesser extent, the Isle of Man. And in these old traditions of these islands, we do not have any myths that tell us about the creation of the universe, but we do have these wonderful set of myths and folklore that tell us about this old woman who created and shaped the land. And she is presented as this gigantic rocky figure who is the oldest of the old. So she says in some of the stories about her, when I was a young lass, the ocean was a forest full of trees. So she has lived through all these geological ages. And she is also presented in many stories as a very, very fierce guardian and protector of the wild things and of the natural world. So again, when I discovered these old stories, and there are many, many old stories about her, you know, in Scotland and Ireland, there are so many place names named after the Cailleach. So she's very much a living figure. She's not some dusty old relic. But I thought that this was such an inspiring figure that in our lineage, there is this old woman who kind of stands firm and endures all of the ravages of time and tries to stop humans from taking too much from the land. 

Dr. Vaughan: I think your answer is already touching on my next question, which is, what's important about myth? What's important about us knowing these old stories? And why do they matter?

Dr. Blackie: Well, you know, we are storytelling animals. I mean, it sounds a bit cliché to say that. But as a psychologist and back in the day a neuroscientist, you know, our brains are structured to recognise narrative. And you know, humans have clearly told stories ever since the beginning of time and passed them down through the centuries and the millennia. And as kids, one of the first things we do is to start to make up stories about toys or friends or imaginary friends or whatever. So it's kind of built into us. Now myths and fairy tales are a little bit different in what they do. So myths generally have an explanatory quality. So they're important because they tell us something about the nature of the world we live in, or the way that our culture sees the world we live in, which is a whole different question and the part that we can play in it. So they kind of tell us how things come to be, where the moral compasses are and so on. And of course, that's an important thing. We are living today by myths, whether we recognise it or not, because our culture tells us a story about who we can be in the world and what restrictions we face. Fairy tales are important, arguably, you know, I would hesitate to say it, but arguably even more important because at the heart of fairy tales is transformation. You know, at the beginning of the fairy tale, the hero or the heroine is facing a seemingly impossible situation and the whole of that story is to tell them, is to show us that you can win through seemingly impossible situations and you almost always have to do it with the help of kindly mice or a wise old woman in the woods or some other being that is going to help you never ever in a fairy tale get to do it alone. It's always a community effort. So these are really important values and ideas, I think. 

Dr. Vaughan: That's very interesting. And talking about the hero, you and I have both written about the importance of us moving on from the hero archetype, the sort of go get it, smash it, be victorious. And the importance now in, at least in the West anyway, where we've very much adopted that archetype for a very long time, the importance of us finding a post-heroic archetype. I wonder if this would be the moment to talk a little bit about your thoughts about that. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, I mean, this was an idea that I began working with probably about a decade ago when I first began writing my first nonfiction book, If Women Rose Rooted, which was really trying to look at the mythology of these islands of Britain and Ireland and what they might have to tell us about being a woman, some of the things that we have been talking about. And as a psychologist and someone who'd worked with myth and story for a long time, clearly I had come across Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. And I have to say before I go criticizing Campbell that I think he had many, many wonderful traits. I think he was a great scholar in many, many ways, but I think the hero's journey was a thing for its time. And he was writing about the hero's journey in 1949 onwards. You know, we've changed a lot in those times. And I think that this heroic archetype, it seemed to me when I was writing If Women Rose Rooted, that not only did that very heroic individualistic kind of swashbuckling action oriented linear archetype have anything to say about, you know, other ways of being in the world, like women's ways of being in the world and other people's ways of being in the world, but also it had well, well past its time because I think it is potentially damaging. I think it puts us right into a very individualistic frame of mind, a frame of mind in which we are focused on dominating the world rather than kind of becoming a part of it in which, you know, the hero is exceptional rather than just your average Joe or anyone like us. And all of these ways of kind of privileging certain ways of being in the world seem to me to be very, very outdated. So I started to work with what I at the time came to call the post heroic journey after scholar Alan Chinan, I think, had used that phrase first and really looking back at some of the old myths and fairy tales, including some of those that Campbell had categorized as heroic, but which I know from my own scholarship in the myths of these islands were not at all heroic, but looking back at those old stories and actually seeing in them values that actually weren't heroic at all. You know, it wasn't about individualism. It was about community. It wasn't about taking more, more, more. It was knowing when to stop and when just to take enough. And all of these ideas, I think, are in the old stories. And what we've done is we've kind of, you know, we've kind of only seen them in one particular light, because that's the cultural mythology we live in. We live in a world that tells us to be a hero is the greatest thing. Back in the day, it wasn't actually. It was just one way of being in the world. So I think it's not that I don't think the hero's journey has value. I think there are times in our lives probably where we are living a hero's journey, women included, you know, early adulthood when we're out there, we're trying to build something we're trying, we're externally focused. But I think it has its day as we move into elderhood. And I think it has its day as our culture tries to move into a different stage of life. 

Dr. Vaughan: Thank you. So something you write a lot about, which you just touched on is the other world and the imaginal world. And I wonder if you can say something about those, perhaps especially in terms of the culture of the British Isles and Ireland, where they're not just in the realm of the imagination, they sort of live in a, like a parallel reality. I wonder if you could say a little bit about that.

Dr. Blackie: Yeah. So all of our stories and in fact, throughout Europe, stories are all threaded through with concepts of the other world. But the ones that I know best are, again, stories from Britain and from Ireland. And the other world is critically important in those stories, because it is kind of presented as the place where the life and the nourishment of this world, this physical world comes from. So you couldn't have a physical world without the other world. It would be dead. The other world is what animates it, if you like, and also provides it with a kind of moral compass. And in these traditions, the other world is not a place that you go to. It's kind of, you can see it as the other side of a coin. You can see it as slipping through a veil. You can see it as switching a mode of perception so that you can catch glimpses of the other world, which is completely untangled with this one. For example, in what we call in our traditions thin places, which tend to be boundary places, edge lands, you know, the side of a riverbank, the seashore, that kind of thing. Or at certain times of the year, which are believed to be more porous, like Samhain, which we now call Halloween, the old Celtic festival, which runs generally at the end of October. And there is a lovely old story, just to illustrate what I mean by this, is a lovely old story from Ireland about a guy called Bran, who, to cut a very long story short, hops into a little round boat called a coracle and sets off across the sea to find the Isle of Women, because he's been invited there by a beautiful otherworldly woman that he saw once upon a time. And as he's crossing the sea in this coracle, out of the waves rises up this Manannan Mac Lear, who is the Irish, well, he's often called the God of the Sea, let's just keep it simple and say that's what he is, Manannan Mac Lear, comes out of the waves and says to Bran effectively, hey, you think you're in a boat, don't you? You think you're sailing across the sea, when I can tell you that from my perspective, you're riding a chariot pulled by golden horses across the beautiful flower-filled plains of Margmel. You know, and so it's just, but they were in the same place, but Manannan Mac Lear, who was one of the deities, was seeing one thing, Bran was seeing another, Bran was riding through the otherworld, even though he was on a coracle on the sea, so there is this sense literally of the worlds overlapping. But the power and the moral force of the otherworld was always associated with women. There was always women who came out of the otherworld and told the heroes basically what to do, you know, to fix whatever problem there was in the world, and they were the ones who represented the land and insisted on balance between people and the land, and therefore the otherworld that was entangled with it. 

Dr. Vaughan: There's a little hint of danger there, isn't there, also, like the fairy folk were not to be messed with, they were to be respected because they were forced to be reckoned with. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, indeed, and you know, in this tradition, the otherworld is not like the Greek underworld, it's not a place of the dead, it's a place of the everliving, and the inhabitants of the otherworld were, you know, characters that we would think of as deities or other supernatural beings, animals and so on. And they, although it was a place, it was characterized as a place of beauty and a place, you know, which was very rich and full of harmony, it also had its monstrous side. So in lots of Irish stories, there are all kinds of monsters that come out of the otherworld and generally speaking, you know, create havoc and lay waste to the countryside. So it had a bit of everything and you had to treat everything with respect. Yeah, absolutely. 

Dr. Vaughan: A pre-Christian morality, in fact, where you don't have that split between good and evil. 

Dr. Blackie: Indeed. 

Dr. Vaughan: So I'd love to ask you to tell us a story that's working in you at the moment, a story that's inspiring you at the moment, and explain a little about what it is about that story that you think is guiding you right now. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, that's a difficult one, because I work with a lot of stories all the time, that's kind of my job, both in writing and in teaching. At the moment, the next book I'm working on with a colleague is called Wise Women, and it's going to be published by Virago Press next year in the UK, and hopefully at some point shortly afterwards in America. And what it is, it's kind of a follow on from my book, Hagitude, which was looking at the archetypes of old women in European myths and fairy tales. And what we're doing is we're collecting all of the myths and fairy tales that we can find, which have powerful old women characters in it. And there is one story in there particularly which has stayed with me since we identified It. It's actually probably a story that relates more to kind of midlife and the midlife transition than it is to elderhood. But it is, in brief, it is a Siberian story about a woman and a man who've been married a long time, and it's not going well. And one day she looks at him and she sees somebody that she doesn't know, somebody who's almost monstrous. And so she thinks, okay, I'm off. And she leaves him kind of just like that. She just sees something that she hadn't seen before, and that was her cue to leave. So again, to cut a long story short, at some point as she's leaving the village, this great big giant comes up to her and carries her off to his cave at the top of a mountain and just kind of dumps her there and leaves her there. And of course she's distraught. She doesn't know where she is. She doesn't know what to do. And she hears a voice saying, look up, look up. And she looks up and she finds a shelf and on the shelf is a bird skin. And she tries the bird skin on, but it doesn't fit. So she starts crying again. And then she hears the voice say, look up, look up. And she looks up and this time she finds on another shelf a fox skin. So she puts the fox skin around her and it fits. And she thinks, well, this is very fine. You know, I'm going to be warm now. And somehow the fact that it fits her and she's warm gives her the courage to escape. So she finds her way out of the cave, goes back down the mountain. And as she's going down the mountain, she keeps imagining that she can see something behind her. And by the time she gets to the bottom of the mountain, she realizes that what she can see behind her is a fox tail and that she is turning into a fox. She goes home, you know, she goes back to her own village. She gets her instinct and she sees her father's tent, this is Siberia. And she tries to go into the tent to say to her father, you know, here I am, I'm safe, everything's fine. And she can't. Every time she tries to go through the tent, it's as if there's a force field there and she's pushed back. And so she turns around, she looks at her fox tail and she wanders off into the sunset. And you know, I've told it very quickly here, not in the beautiful language that you'll find hopefully in our retelling in the book, which is very, very much longer, we wouldn't have time for it today. But I love that story because I think it tells us something about the nature of what happens to us in midlife, particularly in the run up to the menopause or during the period of the menopause. That sense that a new story has to begin, that we've ended one story and a new story has to begin. And once that story, that new story has begun, if we've kind of done the story properly, you know, if we've let the story do its magic on us, we can't go back to what we were before. We've changed fundamentally. And the other, the particular thing that I love about the woman's transformation in this story is that she's transformed into a wild creature. So it is showing us that one of the things I believe, anyway, this is my interpretation of it, one of the things we need to do in midlife is really to connect with that wild nature to become fox or to become wolf or to become crow or whatever it is that draws us and that seems to provide what we need at the time. And you know, there are many, many things that I could say about that story, but I think something about it is very poignant, that sense of, that sense of passing through a kind of barrier, which although it enables us to conceive of a wonderful transformed new story ahead and all kinds of new things to be, nevertheless, there's that poignancy for what we've left behind and a little bit of grief as well. You know, and I think a lot of people who talk about transitions from the first half of life to the second half of life presented as like, it's all great, you know, I know there's a little bit of pain through menopause, but it's all going to be great. And you know, ultimately it is going to be great if we give ourselves over to it, but there's also, there needs to be time for grieving and for loss and for that transition to really, to really work its magic. So yeah, that's a story as I've been thinking about midlife, particularly in doing some writing about it, that really has, has resonated with me. 

Dr. Vaughan: That's a fantastic story, especially for me, the piece about the wildness really resonates, makes me wonder how many people also have a little bit of wildness that they've, they've tried to get rid of. They tried to domesticate themselves. And I'm just thinking that wildness often manifests in things we've done that we feel ashamed about or bad about, that we were made wrong for, that kind of follow us like the tail that we have to sort of integrate and replay. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah. I mean, I think again, it's the cultural narrative, the cultural mythology tells us that wild women are bad girls, you know, that that's not, that we have to be nice, that we have to be good, that we have to be quiet, that we have to be seen, but not heard ideally. And that's still out there today. You know, it was like that when I was young and it's still, it's, it's still like that for young, young women and others today. And I think, I think that sense of the difficulty that a lot of women had, and I had a hugely difficult time of it, you know, trying to, to come to terms with that wild nature and to see it as a benefit, not as a loss of control, you know, but just to see it as an ability to slip in, to kind of slip under the skin of the world in a different way and to, to find genuine kinship with other than humans, to find a sense of belonging in the world that isn't dependent on human company. You know, that's a very great gift. You know, you're never alone with a crow. There's always somebody to talk to out there in some way of being out there. And yeah, we've lost it. And, and stories like this, I think, you know, leave a kind of trail of breadcrumbs so that we can find our way back to some of those ways of being that we've been forced to repress. 

Dr. Vaughan: Yeah. I mean, as a clinician, I work with people of all genders, but a lot of people have that kind of dissonance with their own body now, especially, especially women and girls or women identified people where there's a difficulty in inhabiting your own skin because it does feel too wild, too uncontrolled, too, too furry, too hairy, too smelly, too fat, too thin. So it's very, very poignant story, I think. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah. You know, it's typical of many European stories which are about shape shifters and particularly shape shifting women. So I took in one of my recent fiction books, Foxfire, Wolfskin and other stories of shape shifting women. I took some of those stories and kind of, you know, put a bit of a contemporary spin on them, but, but really staying to the heart of the story, which tell us, tell us that again, the plethora of stories out there, the number of stories out there all throughout Europe. I mean, for clarity, I only work in my own kind of native traditions, tell us that there was a time when women and there are men, stories of male shape shifters too, but you know, my work is predominantly with, with women. These stories of women who are profoundly connected to the natural world in a way that is beneficial. You know, there isn't a sin or there isn't a curse. And an interesting thing that in the stories that we have in Europe where it's the man, the male character that has been turned into an animal, it's always a curse, always, always a curse. Whereas for women in these stories, it's kind of part of their natural way of being. They naturally are half fox. They naturally are selkies, you know, half seal. And it's not seen as a curse. It's just seen as the way the feminine kind of manifest itself in the world, which is interesting, isn't it? 

Dr. Vaughan: That's very interesting. That's fascinating. So let's shift to the culture now. And I wonder if you could explain a little bit about how we connecting with these old stories can help us as a culture to restore some of what we've lost in terms of that wildness and that connection with land, probably since the enlightenment and certainly since the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism.

Dr. Blackie: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, to go back to the post heroic issue again, because they teach us old values to live by, which are just as relevant today. So for example, just rather than witter on, I'll just give you a couple of examples from the stories. There's a wonderful old story in Ireland about the glass gavelin, which is translated, which is basically the cow of plenty. And there are lots of stories throughout Britain which are similar to this story, variants of this story. And basically it's about a magical cow, an otherworldly cow who has milk for anybody who wants it. And she wanders around the land. And if anybody's in need of a pail of milk, then she'll fill their pail or whatever vessel they bring to her. That's what she does until one day a wicked person comes along with a whole bunch of buckets and a single sieve and milks the cow through the sieve into bucket after bucket after bucket. And because the cow can't feel the bucket getting full, she doesn't of course know that the buckets are filled, that somebody has taken more than one. But when she turns around because she's tired all of a sudden and she sees this, she just vanishes, says, you know, that's it. I'm off not doing this anymore. She vanishes and she's never seen again in the world. So this is typical of a kind of story that tells us not to take too much. You know, this cultural mythology of progress, of more, we must, every generation must have more than the generation before, otherwise we're failing, is what's causing the world effectively, you know, to run out of nourishment, to run out of stuff. And the old stories kind of knew that way back, way before it really happened, that we must live in balance and harmony. The other kind of story that always interests me, you know, a lot of people put forward the grail, the old grail legends as heroic myths. There's this wonderful swashbuckling knight who battles his way to the grail, you know, and achieves the grail. And if you look at the stories, the old stories properly and you understand the context that they are set in, that's not what's happening at all. Parseval, for example, in Wolfram von Eschenberg's version of the grail story, Parseval does not attain the grail because he's chopped a bunch of heads off or slain dragons or done any of the kind of heroic knightley things. He attains the grail because finally, after failing it the first time, finally he meets the wounded Fisher King and simply says to him, “What ails thee?” That compassionate question is what wins Parseval the grail. It's nothing to do with bravery and individualism and heroism. Absolutely not. He has a lot of battles, but they're kind of by the by. And the old stories were post-heroic, except they were pre-heroic, I suppose. And the reason why I think that it's so important to go back to them is we find a sense of not just a sense of how to be in the world, but a sense of lineage, a sense that we were like that once and therefore we can be it again. We haven't lost it for very long. I think for most of human history, we've lived pretty much in balance and in harmony with the natural world. And it's only the past couple of centuries really that we've began to completely ruin it and to messed up. 

Dr. Vaughan: Yes, and of course, the we there is the global north really, isn't it? It's not everybody that we.

Dr. Blackie: Yes. But increasingly, unfortunately, you know, our values are spreading throughout throughout the world. It's kind of a contamination. So it isn't just the global north anymore doing this. But of course, we are the ones that that set those that set those new values loose in the world, a bit like Pandora's box. So, yeah, the old stories, I think, give us just give us confidence that we weren't always like that. There's a there's a very negative narrative about humanity out there in the world. And yet we are capable of absolute atrocities, clearly. You know, there is no question about it. We are capable of very bad things. But if we continue to paint ourselves as wholly negative, then that's what we're going to become. And I like to go back to these old stories where we see a lot of beauty, where we see a richness, but we see different values and different ways of living. That tells us again, that this is just an aberration. This is just now. This isn't who we we have been for most of our history. I don't believe so anyway. 

Dr. Vaughan: That's super inspiring. So your earlier books are you have a lot of you have a lot of stories, you have women's stories, but your your last book, Hagitude, is specifically about women aging. And I wonder if you'd say something about elderhood, aging, facing mortality and how that is something we sorely need as a culture. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, well, we don't do it, do we really? I don't think we do face it very well. I don't think really in most places we're comfortable talking about it. I mean, certainly in the UK up until recently, nobody really talked about menopause. In some parts of America, as far as I can tell, you still don't. You know, it's just one of those taboo subjects. It's a bit grubby. It's just something that you know, nice people don't talk about. And death is another conversation that we can't have. You know, we act as if we're never going to die. Other people might be, but but but not us. And I think the death thing is important as well as the aging thing, because if we can't accept the inevitability of death and if we can't find a way to befriend it, then we're always going to want to cling to youth and we're never going to do aging properly. We're never going to allow ourselves to go through the entirety of the human journey to grow old and to encounter the gifts that we find as we grow older. And for me, you know, in spite of many, many difficulties like everybody has, menopause was an utterly transformative period. It was really terrible in lots of ways. But what it ushered in was just a kind of wonderful freedom and a way of being in the world that really suited me. And we're not taught to see menopause as the beginning of a possibility. We're taught to see menopause as the beginning of the end. You know, it's ushering in a period of decline. And I don't think that's true at all. And so I wanted in, in Hagitude, what I did was to go back, you know, as I've mentioned previously to go back to the old stories again, because I do believe that they're a great source of wisdom, and to see what kind of old women were in those stories. Now we don't hear a lot about them, you know, because old women are very rarely protagonists of the stories. They appear in the stories and in actual fact, in many of the stories, they are the ones who are pulling the strings and running the show and setting the hero or the heroine off in the right direction with the right gifts, you know, playing critically important roles, but they're rarely the protagonists. And so the research project that I did actually found that there were lots of old women in European folklore and mythology. They all played a lot of they played very different roles. They weren't there wasn't just like one kind of old women. There were all kinds of different archetypes that were represented by old women. So we have we have the old women who are mentors of the young fairy godmother, you know, is kind of the classic one, but there are many, many more don't have time to go into all of them. We have old women who are tricksters and truth tellers who disrupt the culture when it needs disrupting, who tell the truth about what's happening when no one else can. We have old women who are initiators and testers of the young. We have old women, you know, think the fates and the norms who are literally weaving the cosmos into being. We have old women who are other kinds of creative-trickses so we have a whole plethora that that's only some of them, not all of them. We have a whole plethora of different ways of being an elder, which are important gifts to bring. And just because they're in myths and folklore, I think doesn't mean that they're not relevant to us. And so what I tried to do in the book is give some kind of more contemporary examples of what this might look like. But it's only really by finding inspiration for what we want to become as we grow older, that we're going to be able to become it and therefore give the many gifts that elder women have to the world. 

Dr. Vaughan: That's beautiful. As an old woman myself, I appreciate that message. So where are men in all of this? How can these stories also inspire them? 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, you know, as I said earlier on, I feel this real compulsion to stick to my own stories. So I don't work with the stories of other cultures because, you know, just as people have misinterpreted Celtic mythology, I might misinterpret their mythology. I wouldn't know the context. I wouldn't be part of it. I wouldn't know the language. And so I stick to my own lands. And you know, I am a woman. I'm not a man. I don't know what it is to live as a man. And therefore, I don't really feel that I have the right to tell men's stories or to tell men how they should be. I get very, very cross when men tell women's stories and tell me how I should be, you know, because they haven't got the lived experience. And I think lived embodied experience is everything, you know, when it comes to the stories that work for us. So it is interesting that, you know, a lot of men do actually follow my work, even though it's not exclusively women's stories that I'm interested in. You know, things like the poster oak journey, as I've said, are absolutely relevant to everybody. But a lot of men do follow the work and they are interested nevertheless to know, you know, what women see their roles being because they haven't done a particularly good job of carving it out for themselves, they tell me. And I think there are things that women can offer that perhaps men wouldn't necessarily see as relevant stories. In the context of the hero's journey, for example, I would always point men to different archetypes like the hero is not the only archetype that there is for men to be. What about the Smith, who's a wonderful, magical character in all of the old stories? You know, Smiths are mythic. They're magical. What about the magician? Warriors that are not heroes can be very interesting characters. You know, there are all kinds of really interesting masculine archetypes out there. And the only thing that I ever say is go and find the ones that nobody is, you know, really kind of writing about and make them, inhabit them, make them your own. And I'd long one day for someone to write the equivalent of Hagitude for men, because I think there are so many interesting archetypes out there, but it's not going to be me because, you know, I don't know what it is to live that experience. 

Dr. Vaughan: I read recently that the UN Human Rights Commission has announced that over 1.2% of the world's population has been forced to leave their homes, which is a staggering number. And it includes over 32.5 million refugees. And I raised that point because I think it's important to acknowledge that a lot of people are no longer on their ancestral land, either because it was taken from them by settler colonizers or because they were forced off their land. And of course, with global warming, we have a lot of people on the move. And I'm wondering how this work about the land can be relevant to people who are not on the land in which the bones of their ancestors are buried, to quote Martin Shaw. So can myths migrate or can we inhabit new land and the myths of new land? 

Dr. Blackie: I think it's a bit of a mishmash. This is a really big subject and one that I've written about quite a lot, but I'll try to keep it short. I believe that knowing our ancestral stories teaches us ways of finding new stories or different stories or related stories in the lands where we live now. And you know, a lot of people who follow my work are Americans and I've lived myself in America so I come across this question all the time. There are two kinds of stories of the land. So if you can think, just bear with me and think of it this way alongside me. There are the existing stories of the land, stories that have already been told about the land. In America, it's kind of tricky if you come from kind of white settler stock, if I can put it that way, because the existing stories of the land belong to a completely different culture. They're not yours. And so you can't inhabit them. You can respect them. You can learn them. You can want to know them. But they're not yours. But then there are the stories of the land that we make, that we create as we inhabit the land. And these are ongoing forever. And it's really important, I believe, to understand that the stories of the land, the stories of the relationship between people and the land don't stop with anybody at any time. They're constantly ongoing. And I also think that it's a responsibility that we have in any land that we inhabit that we find a way to create a relationship with it. And creating relationships means creating stories. So for example, Cailleach is a creature of Ireland and Scotland. Wild, windy, cold, wet, you know, lashing weather, rocks. You're not going to find the Cailleach in the Californian desert, but you'll find an old woman archetype there for sure. And knowing the stories of the Cailleach might perhaps help you find it. If I can just tell you a little story, which if anybody has followed my work before, they'll have heard me speak about it, in which case I apologize. But it's a really, it is quite a good one, I think, to illustrate this. So years ago, I lived on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, and the whole land was steeped in stories of the Cailleach, pre-existing, absolutely there. Place names, folklore, she was in that land. She made and shaped that land. And also, those are a series of kind of reclining, kind of, sorry, rocks and mountain tops that seemed to have the shape of reclining woman. You know, so woman lying on her back, you could see the mound of the breast, you could see a slight swell of the belly, you could sometimes see an arm and some hair. Outer Scotland, named after the Cailleach, obviously, it looked like an old woman in the landscape. We had one outside our house. And it was a place that was very wild and very remote, and not many people lived there. And I didn't have anybody to talk to except the dogs and my husband, and that wasn't enough. And so I would walk out on the land, and I would talk to that rock, I would talk to that old Cailleach. And I would tell her all of my problems, and I kind of felt that I was really part of that mythology and part of that folklore. It mattered to me. It informed who I was, then we moved to probably the only part of Ireland that did not have any stories of the Cailleach in the northwest of Ireland in Donegal. And there were no Cailleach stories there. There were no place names named after the Cailleach, there were no Cailleach rocks. I didn't know what to do with myself. I had become so attached and embedded in that mythology that I really did feel curiously cast adrift. Again, to cut a long story short, we lived by a river, at the back of our house was a heronry. Every morning at dawn, I'd walk with the dogs. One morning, we startled a heron in the middle of a river, and she flew off and she shrieked, and I thought to myself, goodness me, that sounds for all the world like an old hag. And then I had it. The old stories of Ireland represent heron as old women, a shape shift into old women. And all of a sudden, I went out into the bogs, I went on my walk. By the time I got back, I had been completely overtaken by this character that I called old crane woman, who was half woman and half heron. And she shape shifted somewhere between the two. And sometimes at night, she would look like an old woman with kind of gangly legs and arms and sometimes she would look like a heron. And she had a very distinctive voice. And by the time I got back, I had started to write stories about old crane woman. She was the archetypal old woman in that land, heron, in an act of kind of co-creation between me and the land. Anyone can do that. Anyone can do that. You don't have to go out making it up. You just have to be in the land and open yourself. And these archetypes happen to you. That's, I think, how archetypes work. They're not inside our heads. We don't make them up. Like the Sufis did, I believe that there is an imaginal world, our other world, where the archetypes live, the stories live, out of which synchronicities come. And if we are lucky and open and receptive, they happen to us. And so I think that anybody in any lands can find stories, can find archetypes to engage with, can build relationship. And sometimes as the stories of the Cailleach did for me, the ancestral stories can help you find a way into that because you already own those stories. You know, they're already a part of you. 

Dr. Vaughan: That's lovely. And it segues to my next question, which is you wrote a whole book called Re-Enchantment. And I wonder if you would talk a little bit about the approach that you call re-enchantment. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, that was The Enchanted Life. And 

Dr. Vaughan: oh, sorry. Yes. No, no, no. 

Dr. Blackie: That's fine. But it was a project of re-enchantment for sure. And I suppose I was a bit irritated by people kind of dissing the word enchantment, magical thinking, you know, it's just ridiculous. We need to grow up and stop talking about these ridiculous terms and ideas. And I didn't see enchantment as magical thinking. I saw enchantment as relationship. And I wonder, could I just read you a paragraph from the book that explains exactly what I meant by enchantment, which would be easier than me. 

Dr. Vaughan: Yeah. 

Dr. Blackie: Waffle away here. 

Dr. Vaughan: That would be great. 

Dr. Blackie: So this is from the introduction. “I believe that enchantment is an attitude of mind which can be cultivated, a way of approaching the world which anyone can learn to adopt. The enchanted life is possible for everybody because enchantment by my definition has nothing to do with fantasy or escapism or magical thinking. It's founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many layered world, a profound and wholehearted participation in the adventure of life. The enchanted life is one which is intuitive, embraces wonder and fully engages the creative imagination, but it is also deeply embodied, ecological, grounded in place and community. It flourishes on work that has heart and meaning. It respects the instinctive knowledge and playfulness of children. It understands the myths we live by, thrives on poetry, song and dance. It loves the folkloric, the handcrafted, the practice of traditional skills. It respects wild things, recognizes the wisdom of the crow, seeks out the medicine of plants. It rummages and roots on the wild edges, but comes home to an enchanted home and garden. It is engaged with the small, the local, the ethical. Enchanted living is slow living. Ultimately, to live an enchanted life is to pick up the pieces of our bruised and battered psyches and to offer them the nourishment they long for. It is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary. Above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again.” That's kind of, you know, it's pretty all encompassing, but that's what enchantment means to me. 

Dr. Vaughan: I'm just thinking that kind of attitude can be so dismissed, and you alluded to that before, as sort of the lacy overlay of life, but in fact it's really fundamental. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, it is. I think to be enchanted is really to have your imagination engaged. One of the reasons why stories work is because they capture our imagination. As a psychologist, I've used all kinds of different therapies. Cognitive behavioral therapy is very wonderful for certain particular disorders, but nobody's going to be excited by it. Nobody's going to want to do it. They're just desperate to get over it, whereas if you can tell somebody a story and show them their place in the story and help them to reimagine how that character in that story might find a way out of the mess that they're in, you've got them. Always, always, always without fail. So that sense of having the imagination captured so that you can see possibility in the face of the world's many challenges, I think to me is at the heart of enchantment. That really is what it is about. It's all about the imagination. 

Dr. Vaughan: I bet you're putting me in mind of Rob Hopkins, who started the Transition Town movement and his latest book is all about the fact that we've lost our capacity to imagine. People actually find it easier to imagine the end of the world due to ecological disaster than they do to imagine a world that they would prefer to live in and a life that they would prefer to have. So his book has become about trying to facilitate that kind of imagining. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Dr. Vaughan: So putting all this together, what are some ways that we can practice radically tuning into the land, the other world, the imaginal to re-enchant our lives, perhaps for wisdom or guidance?

Dr. Blackie: Well, that's a big question. A couple of ways that I can suggest. Mad as it sounds, talk to everything. If you act as if the world is alive and animate and capable of being in relationship with you, then it will be. That sounds a bit like magical thinking, I suppose, but it isn't. It is the case. I talk to everything out there and in here, everything. It's not an affectation. It's just a way of being in the world that I learned when I didn't have anybody else to talk to. I talk to crows all the time and sometimes they look at me and I think, you know, I know what a crow is in my mythology, but what am I in the mythology of a crow? There's a reciprocity that develops and a sense of a mysterious, remarkable being, you know, that ubiquitous, tricksterish black bird that I don't understand and probably doesn't understand me, although certainly better than I understand him, but is looking at me and we're kind of in this space together and imagining things about each other. I do believe that animals have imagination. The idea that it's just human is ridiculous. Just like the idea that only humans have emotion. I mean, goodness me. Anyway, that's another story. So I think to talk to things as if they were  live and listening to you and chances are you find that they are in some way. I talk to trees and it's not just manmade things. It's not just what we think of as natural things. It's what we could describe as manmade things, which, you know, the most fundamental atomic level are not manmade at all. There was a wonderful book written by a Canadian professor of literature called Sean Kane at the University of Trent University in Toronto. I think he is still there. He wrote a book many moons ago called The Wisdom of the Myth-tellers and he talks about an Australian architect whose name escapes me walking through the streets of downtown Sydney in Australia with an Aboriginal elder and bemoaning the fact that there's all this dead concrete in the city and the Aboriginal elder looks at him and says, look, you know, to my people, even concrete has a dreaming. Even concrete has a dream of becoming because just because it's constructed of different bits of this and that doesn't mean that those bits of this and that aren't actually alive and that something isn't alive in the concrete. And I thought to myself, gosh, if we could just see, you know, the big buildings and our cities in that way, wouldn't it be a different world? Wouldn't it be a different thing to live in a city? So treating everything with respect as if it's alive and wants to be in relationship with you, I think is absolutely the most fundamental life changing thing that anybody can do. 

Dr. Vaughan: So really what you're talking about is a sort of contemporary animism. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, yeah, I guess so. And you know, clearly our ancestors were animists, Indigenous people around the world and traditional cultures today are animist and for very good reason. Not just because they're mad or foolish, but because the world wants to be in relationship with us. And you know, I have a feeling, a belief, if you like, that we have a responsibility to be in relationship with the world. The old Greek, briefly, the old Greek idea of the world soul, the anima mundi, which fills everything, everything is imbued with the anima mundi in the old Greek tradition that Plato wrote about. The sense that if you don't engage with it, it's almost as if it fades, you know, that we're kind of keeping the spirit of the soul of the world alive by engaging with it, by being in relationship with it, by acknowledging it, just as we keep people alive and engaged and then spirited by being in relationship with them and talking to them and making them feel as if they belong. And I do think that it's a responsibility that we have to be out there and to see the world as alive. And that really is the most radical shift, I think. And I think you get that shift by acting as if it were true and then it becomes true because it reveals itself to you. The world reveals itself to you. 

Dr. Vaughan: This is a very poignant conversation given that right now the water off Florida is 100 degrees Fahrenheit and we're having unprecedented heat waves everywhere. Crops are failing. People are on the move to actually tune into the aliveness of the world where in some ways it feels like the biosphere is dying is a strong medicine. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah. And again, I think a lot of the old traditions would have it that the soul of the world never dies. It doesn't die. It might have fadings or it might have times where it struggles. But life is always in a process of becoming. And I'm not saying that in any way to comfort us for the mess that we have made of the world, but it will become something else. And the part that we play in that or how we relate to it or whether it makes us comfortable is a different thing entirely. I don't think that the Anima Mundi itself ever really dies. And I think we have to keep a hold on that and to feel that sense of responsibility whilst recognizing that the world isn't a child that we can shape to our will. The world has its own process of becoming and not that we shouldn't feel responsibility for the mess that we make, but life does go on. And I think it's important that we feel that that is okay and that we witness the dying of the things that are dying, but that we act as if we have hope for anything that might come in the future. Sorry, I don't know whether that was very lucid in the end. 

Dr. Vaughan: No, I think it was. And you're making me think that a lot of the stories that you've described do involve going into a space, a liminal space, a space between worlds where you don't know what's going to happen and you have to keep your wits about you, tune into the other beings around you and listen to what they're saying because there is no linear path. And so they're a good guide in these times. 

Dr. Blackie: Yeah, absolutely. 

Dr. Vaughan: Well, Sharon, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been really wonderful to have it with you.

Dr. Blackie: It has. I've really, really enjoyed it. And thank you so much for hosting it.

Dr. Vaughan: You're very welcome. Well, we'll say goodbye to you. You can finally go to bed because I know it's late for you. Thank you for staying up so late to talk to us.

Dr. Blackie: It's my pleasure. Thank you.

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

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