No-ah-tah, Medicine Woman
Harris and Ewing, 1913
Medicine Woman
when we are the spirit doll : The Wild Men of Europe by Charles Freger
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Photograph by Charles Fréger
AUSTRIA
Every five years the men of Telfs collect lichen to create Wilder Mann, or Wild Man, costumes for the town’s Carnival festival. Tradition dictates that they nibble on a piece of this lichen before the festivities. |
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Photograph by Charles Fréger
PORTUGAL
During Carnival in Lazarim characters called “caretos” parade through the village in hand-carved masks to a bonfire where effigies known as thecomadre and compadre are burned. |
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Photograph by Charles Fréger
BULGARIA
On New Year’s Day men cover themselves with goatskins to impersonate the Kukeri, who both embody and chase away evil spirits. In the past they’d brush against women to bestow fertility. |
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Photograph by Charles Fréger
SCOTLAND
Thousands of burrs adorn the Burryman. The man who plays the role at the Ferry Fair in Queensferry must collect all the burrs himself. Once dressed, he walks the town, accepting offers of money and whiskey and bestowing good luck. |
Plant Medicine Doll Workshop - Magic in the Making
Today I am preparing for our Swan Blessing Plant Medicine Doll workshop this Sunday by creating a new Spirit Sister medicine doll for a beautiful woman in Colorado who is making a journey back to her spirit after the passing through the tumultuous gateway of Saturn Return. Into her doll I am placing many sacred herbs including the stunning Passion Flower. This beloved plant teacher, Passiflora, can help us to connect to a sense of serenity and calm and reawaken passion, creativity and love. I also feel that Passion Flower encourages us to accept our own wild and strange beauty. We simply have to look at the flower itself to see how magical and strangely beautiful nature can be. Whenever I look at a Passion Flower I often feel that I see one or two beings dancing in the centre.
As I create this new doll, I am drinking Passion Flower tea to move into a dreaming state to receive messages and insight for the doll's spirit sister. This ability to receive helpful messages is very natural to us and comes through the process of art-making itself. As the doll is born and begins to form, in this meditative state, I am consciously connecting to the spirit of the one I am making her for as well as turning into the symbols and messages that appear during creation. Sacred Art is Magic in the Making - I observe every part of the doll-making process and how the doll reacts to it to understand what will help. After the doll is completed I take her outside into nature to sit on the earth and weave together the whole story of the doll. When Her story is known to me, she is ready to travel to her new home and Sister.
We have engaged in the ancient shamanic art of doll-making for thousands of years. We have a deep ancestral memory of this medicine. This Sunday we will sit in circle in Melbourne and hold a Swan Blessing ceremony to clear any ties from the past that bind our ancestral memory of plant lore and medicine and the ability to create sacred art. This gentle workshop will begin with a passion flower tea ceremony to help us feel again our own true and natural state of serenity before we open our hearts to the Dreamer and her magic to create a Medicine Doll filled with spirit, love and intention.
Singing up the Earth
Do you love the Earth: Gaian Entelechy by Jake Kobrin
Gaian Entelechy by Jake Kobrin
I just discovered this today and I love everything about it - thank you Jake Kobrin for your artistry and eloquence.
Do you love the Earth?
Over the millennia our species has developed a complex symbiosis with our environment. Earth is our home. Everyone you have ever loved, every experience you have ever cherished, and every possession you have ever coveted, is a product and aspect of the Earth. At this point and time we stand at the precipice of a new and important era. As our society rapidly develops, our planet is being devastated and our precious resources are being depleted. We all know and fear what could be on one side of this situation. We fear natural devastation, nuclear wars and genocide, endless impoverishment, starvation, war, disease, and death.
But a new vision is emerging. All throughout the globe, people are coming together to celebrate our precious planet and to envision new ways to live in harmony with the Earth. Communities and alliances are forming that respect the Gaian entelechy, and seek to follow the natural wisdom of the Earth, rather than nihilistically ravishing the very source of our being and destroying the prospects of our future generations.
This artwork GAIAN ENTELECHY is a tribute to this emerging visionary culture. It is a representation of the Earth spirit, of a noble consciousness that exists within the natural world. The Earth is alive. And we are a part of it.
We all have access to the Gaian entelechy, in so much as we are all an integral part of the Earth. The idea of us existing as separate entities upon the Earth is a falsehood. The truth is that we are only one Earth. The Earth is a living organism, in the same way that billions of individual cells comprise a human being. And so a person who lives in an urban setting is in no way less in touch with the Gaian entelechy, because cities and their inhabitants are products and aspects of the Earth as well.
Terence McKenna held the belief that the Gaian entelechy was accessed through entheogenic trance, that when you take of the Earth in the form of Ayahuasca, cacti, or mushrooms, you are actually allowing yourself to be shown the wisdom of the Earth through direct experience. He believed that you experience a form of communication that exists within the plant kingdom at a molecular level and that the plants (and nature in general, as a whole) are teaching human beings how to live with insights wrought from the entheogenic trance. Whether or not this is the case, I believe the Gaian entelechy is, essentially, intuition.
The Earth knows what it’s doing, and as manifestations of the Earth we need only to look within and trust in our intuition to act in accordance with the natural world. The problem is that most people haves strayed so far from listening to their own hearts and intuitive senses that the human race has strayed away from the Gaian entelechy and began to ravish the natural world. I believe the solution to this is to strip away the mental noise that clouds intuition, whether it be through meditation, entheogens, or whatever have you.
- Jake Kobrin, April 2013
Return to Yourself
'If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now. And when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.'
Masaru Emoto
I have been placing Blue Lotus petals inside a newly birthed medicine doll created for someone who is finding her way back to herself again. The sacred essence of this ancient flower so beloved to the Ancient Egyptians is palpable. The Egyptian Blue Lotus 'Nymphaea Caerulea' plant medicine assists us in relieving pain, increasing a sense of well-being and creating new pathways to ecstasy and euphoria.
Love to all of the People of Medicine returning to themselves today xx
Frog Medicine
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| Tippi Degri |
Last night I received messages on how we can help the healing to flow when we hold our Spring collective Swan Blessing ritual at the site of the Magdalene Laundries. This message came through the element of Water, so beloved to me and through the voice of Frog who sings from the creek at dusk near our home every night. Ever since I was a child I have adored frogs. They were one of the animals that called us to live in the forest again.
Beautiful Frog, creature of the threshold of land and water, sacred voice and cleansing song - thank you! I am yet to see the dear frog who calls every night but I will keep looking. This is how my heart feels today, I hope this beautiful image of Tippi and her toad fills your heart with all you need to keep birthing your own dreams from the watery edge of the Well of Memory.
my tides will turn no more...
Here's a virtual movie of a second version of this entrancing 10th century Irish Poem..This version is a translation by the German Celtic language scholar Kuno Meyer (20 December 1858 -- 11 October 1919).
In this version from Ancient Irish Poetry Kuno Meyer has left out twelve quatrains. "The reason why she was called the Old Woman of Beare was that she had fifty foster-children in Beare. She, had seven periods of youth one after the other, so that every man who had lived with her came to die of old age, and her grandsons and great-grandsons were tribes and races. For a hundred years she wore the veil which Cumine had blessed upon her head. Thereupon old age and infirmity came to her."
EBB TIDE to me as of the sea!
Old age causes me reproach.
Though I may grieve thereat --
Happiness comes out of fat.
I am the Old Woman of Beare,
An ever-new smock I used to wear:
Today -- such is my mean estate --
I wear not even a cast-off shift.
It is riches
Ye love, it is not men:
In the time when we lived
It was men.
Swift chariots,
And steeds that carried off the prize,--
Their day of plenty has been,
A blessing on the King who lent them!
My body with bitterness has dropt
Towards the abode we know:
When the Son of God deems it time
Let Him come to deliver His behest.
My arms when they are seen
Now are bony and thin:
Once they would fondle and caress
The bodies of glorious kings.
When my arms are seen,
And they bony and thin,
They are not fit, I declare,
To be raised over comely men.
The maidens rejoice
When May-day comes to them:
For me, sorrow the share;
I am wretched, I am an old hag.
I hold no sweet converse.
No wethers are killed for my wedding-feast,
My hair is all but grey,
The mean veil over it is no pity.
I do not deem it ill
That a white veil be on my head;
Time was when cloths of every hue
Bedecked my head as we drank good ale.
The Stone of the Kings on Femen,
The Chair of Ronan in Bregon,
Long since storms have reached them:
The slabs of their tombs are old and decayed.
The wave of the great sea talks aloud,
Winter has arisen:
Fermuid the son of Mugh today
I do not expect on a visit.
I know what they are doing:
They row and row across
The reeds of the Ford of Alma --
Cold is the place where they sleep.
'Tis "O my God!''
To me today, whatever will come of it.
I must cover myself even in the sun:
The time is at hand that shall renew me.
Youth's summer in which we were
I have spent with its autumn:
Winter-age which overwhelms all men,
To me has come its beginning.
Amen! Woe is me!
Every acorn has to drop
After feasting by shining candles
To be in the gloom of a prayer-house!
I had my day with kings
Drinking mead and wine:
To-day I drink whey-water
Among shrivelled old hags.
I see upon my cloak the hair of old age,
My reason has beguiled me:
Grey is the hair that grows through my skin --
'Tis thus! I am an old woman.
The flood-wave And the second ebb tide --
They have reached me,
I know them well.
The flood wave
Will not reach the silence of my kitchen:
Though many are my company in darkness,
A hand has been laid upon them all.
O happy the isle of the great sea
Which the flood reaches after the ebb!
As for me, I do not expect
Flood after ebb to come to me.
There is scarce a little place today
That I can recognise:
What was on flood
Is all on ebb.
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2012
Plant Medicine - Aboriginal Knowledge
Burial Rites - Clearing the Names of Ancestor Spirits
There are many Ancestor stories moving through the ether into our consciousness right now. I believe we are healing a collective shadow from the past. And I feel it requires us sometimes to re-write history. A good friend of mine told me recently that 'history books were only written by the victors'. The part that we can play is to listen to the voices of the past, of our Ancestors ... listen very carefully.
Someone who listened so beautifully and for such a long time, is first time Australian novelist, Hannah Kent. Her novel, Burial Rites, about the murderess, Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman executed in Iceland has created an international bidding war. I only discovered this story in the last few days when I chanced upon Australian Story's interview with Hannah for the piece No More Than a Ghost. I was absolutely enthralled by the story of Hannah's quest to uncover the truth, the deeper story of the real woman. Hannah began to receive information about Agnes' life through her intuition and dreaming and later had these facts confirmed. The personal and emotional link between the women is astounding.
The whole story is incredibly moving and you can still watch it online here: No More Than a Ghost. And there is a wonderful interview with Hannah in The Guardian here.
I wonder at the many hundreds of stories that are awaiting a truthful retelling, especially in Australia. For us to create healing we must first acknowledge the truth. What stories are you hearing in the whispers of the wind? Are the Ancestors speaking to you? Are there outcast stories from your own past that you have 're-written' or edited? Let yourself be still and quiet... trust your feelings even when you feel what you are doing is crazy. You might be one who is called to speak for the past and tell the stories of those who were not 'the victors'. It's time for us to know our own whole story and to embrace the outcast spirits, the abandoned ancestors of the past.
I believe that Shame was created by man. It is such a harmful and useless emotion. If we created the spell of Shame with our own words and thinking, I believe we can break this binding spell with the power of love. Not a superficial or judging kind of love but Real Love - a love that encompasses the whole story and leaves no voice in the darkness.