Initiations and the Fae part 3
A detour in and out of christianity, revolutions and the heroines journey of becoming
Initiations are strange creatures. Long ago, there were fewer paths to initiation, depending on your religion, tribe, cosmology. In organized religion, an initiation, initio from in Latin (beginning) was a path to becoming a member of that particular religious community. Initiation also occurred in the pre-christian times, in which participants prepared themselves and/or embarked on pilgrimages or sacred journeys and/or rites and rituals to immerse in the mysteries, to experience direct contact with the Divine and to make sense of Life/Death/Life.
When I think back on my initiations into Christianity, I don’t contemplate them as something I sought, but rather, something that was done to me, from when I was 8 until I was 13. I was not originally baptized by the Catholic Church. My mother had rejected Catholicism and churches in the late 60’s early 70’s, but to appease her parents, chose to baptize me according to her Mother’s denomination, which was Lutheran. When my mom moved back to her upper Michigan roots, she enrolled me in the same Catholic school that she and my grandfather attended —St. Sebastian, and I was again baptized, at age 8 in order to be ‘saved’ since I hadn’t properly been baptized, and my last name was Jewish. It didn’t much make sense to me -any of it -and I didn’t much care for it. First Communion was an uncomfortable affair with a starchy white dress and lace head piece (worst nightmare for a self-proclaimed Tomboy) and the little communion wafers did not put me in touch with Jesus the way that the Priest said they would.
Later, when I was confirmed, I had the realization that becoming a member of the church as a woman was not the greatest thing, since my church let me know in a thousand and more ways that boys/men were closer to God somehow (which made no sense to me either given the power that women have to birth babies) and that girls were going to become women, and that was bad in the eyes of the church because women were temptresses and caused all of humanity to fall from its grace, and that I had Original Sin because of one beautiful naked woman long ago. I tried to pick a male name for my confirmation name, as a way to possibly trick God or Whatever into seeing that I was part of his club, and there fore, might be bestowed with less sin or something, but the Priest would have nothing to do with it. Instead of the wonderful name Xavier (after my favorite Saint Francis Xavier) I settled on the stupid name Monica, because a mean girl from the public school was getting confirmed too, and I thought if I picked her sister’s name for my confirmation name, she might hate me less.
Less than a year later, my mom broke up with our school because the Priest shamed her during a Sunday Mass. My mom had been the director of the play Agnes of God (a play about a nun who gets pregnant most likely by a priest, despite her claims that she was divinely impregnted) and our St. Sebastian Priest declared to the congregation that anyone who went to the play was sinning and must have a Confession for their sins before coming to Communion. My mother would have none of it, and when she went up for Communion, the priest stopped serving, stared at her in the procession and said, “This is your sin not mine.”
I was grateful that we left the stupid church school with all of its holier than thou demands and rules and expectations and girl shaming.
But I was somewhat adrift, into the world of becoming, without a proper guide/education or mentor to help me make sense of what I really was or could become and what this crazy mess of a world was really deeply and truly all about at its deepest essence.
Fast Forward to college, and an unexpected detour into Russian Studies and one living human being (aka highly intelligent Russian Studies professor who spoke 14 languages) who understood this thing called Soul in a foreign language (Dusha) and pointed me to it through poetry, history, literature, culture and this thing called Russian Soul specifically. To know it would be to live inside of it, year abroad, 1992 - 1993, Moscow, Russia, during the transition from Communism to Democracy. Initiation. Sometimes we do not have religious or cultural traditions that make sense, real sense to what it means to become, (especially if you are a girl and a woman) and you have to journey sideways into the mouth of a wolf in order to come to understand something of becoming through unbecoming and direct contact with Soul.
Image: Forest of Teeth: Hazel Terry
Joseph Campbell helped the world understand initiations in the language of the Heroes Journey, with three distinct parts: Call, Ordeal, Return. More specifically, the Heroes Journey is comprised of 17 parts, and the map is a fascinating compass for finding oneself on the map of becoming in relation to the mythic, to fate, to destiny and this Story with a capital S of Becoming with a capital B. More specifically, the Heroes Journey is a map made by and for Men, on their path of understanding wholeness.
Maureen Murdock is regarded as the first to chart an alternative to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey narrative paradigm that she believed more appropriate for women’s life journeys of becoming. Murdock did not feel that Campbell’s adequately addressed the psycho-spiritual journey of women. Women needed a Heroine’s Journey. She apparently showed her map to Campbell who reportedly said, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” In a patriarchal society, the search for wholeness would lead men to reclaiming their wholeness in so-called feminine qualities and values. But what about women? Even if we come to realize that our wholeness is inherent in our beingness as women, how have patriarchal constructs fooled us into believing that we are not whole, as in the case of my experience as a girl in the Catholic Church. I was anything but whole in their eyes. In fact, in their eyes, I and my wholeness was the reason for sin.
After Murdock spoke to Campbell, she realized that women needed a feminine model and psycho-spiritual journey or quest all the more, to support them in reclaiming their wholeness.
I was twenty when I navigated the crisis and wonder of living overseas during a ho hum civil war in Moscow, but a civil war nonetheless that turned society, rules and civilization upside on their head and in what Yeltsin later admitted as a government imposed “Shock Therapy” to the financial system. Not everyone in Moscow or Russia and former Soviet Union was on board with the flood of capitalism that began to rush over society. I witnessed the death of the ‘folk soul’ (which was barely holding on anyway thanks to Iron bars and Iron curtains and communistic cement on every surface, penetrating into every depth). I witnessed the rise of Freedom, as a word, as a democratic declaration through materialism and consumerism, in the form of Freedom to buy and Freedom to sell and Freedom to explore, as well as new masks of customer service and more. Sure, there was more than this blossoming in consciousness of the people in all its possible myriads, this Freedom was full of interpretation and a cosmic spectrum of possibility. but lots of weedy things also grew in the spaces of this larger than life transition. It was the second of the three most difficult transitions I have experienced in my lifetime. The first being the death of my father when I was 10, and the surprise discovery that he was not who I thought he was (he died in prison for insurance fraud). That transition put me in contact with what Death and afterlife meant to the Catholic Church if you were not saved, and what that meant for my Dad and me as his daughter as a girl sinner in the eyes of the Catholic Church. It’s another detour story, but super relevant to my adventure of becoming/unbecoming/becoming as it relates to life/death/life.
Being inside of a society that is coming apart at the seems is a good soup for questioning (or just blindly following) truths. For me, as an adolescent living abroad and who was questioning everything and everything, the Russian Soul, through literature and poetry seemed to point to deeper insight about Becoming, Hero and Heroine Journeys, ordeals and Revolutions/Evolutions. The novel Dr. Zhivago goes directly inside of Religion and Spirituality and helped me tease out that there is a MASSIVE difference between the two, and that one can find the roots of one inside of the other, but that one can often distort the other.
Al this to say, that novel put me on a quest of greater self-discovery amidst Societal Breakdown and supposed regeneration, which has been going on since I was a 19 year old small town American girl living in Moscow amidst a revolution.
Image: Agata Jusak: The Visitation with the Wolf
How does all of this relate to the Initiations and the Fairy kingdom in my last two substack writings? What a strange detour within a series of strange detours on the path to becoming.
Well, I’ll tell you this: On the path of becoming, there are often strange detours and roadblocks, off the beaten paths and difficult ascents. Sometimes you fall off a cliff or find yourself inside of a dark and twisty cave. At times you cannot see the forest from the trees. Or perhaps you have been staring too long at a finger pointing to the Moon.
Initiations may come in strange forms. Red pills, blue pills, rites of passage and crisis’ leading to separations from that which is known and into that which is not known; crisis’ leading to descent journeys to face fears and unconscious parts of the psyche. In the last 50 years we have seen more and more Rejection of former paths, former stories, former belief systems and lies to what lies at the heart and soul of what we are as girls and women. And yet, there still have not been many clear paths for girls or women to follow to have step by step instructions on this non-linear path of realization (that we are whole by our very birthright). Our wholeness is shattered through confrontation with the patriarchal blasphemies that scream inside of the institutionalized patterns of so much of our current modern lifestyles and systems. It’s bogus and full of boogeymen who lie to us through history, distortions of church Fathers and false image-based commercials for consumer tricks and social media entrapments. The patriarchal constructs are the basis of lies embedded in the systemic way of becoming.
The map of becoming then as women, is full of Unbecoming from all that hogwash that tells us lies about our bodies, our souls and our minds and their true nature and interbeingness with all of the cosmos. As girls and women we are extra-terrestrial by nature in that we are connected to the very wiring of the universe in our bodies and minds and souls. Our uterus are full of extraterrestrial seeds of life. To create new worlds within and without, as they connect us to the secrets of the ebb and flow of nature, terrestrial nature and its relationship to the extra terrestrial nature of the universe.
Sometimes you need harsh lessons in order to unbecome and then become. That ecstasy trip I wrote about in my last Substack catalyzed a massive healing crisis (the third of my most difficult transitions on this path of becoming. Thank you. Because what it did, was it led me on a path to understand my human nature through my emotions, which had been suppressed and neglected, misunderstood and feared, and through my body, (which I had been dissociated from through the numbing down of my own educational journeys growing up) and through my relationship and Rewilding with nature (was initially the only way I could ground from the havoc the ecstasy pill catalyzed in my sensitive system on a chemical and hormonal level. Rewilding in nature led me to understand through direct experience, direct contact, that absolutely awesome truth: nature is living and extends beyond what ‘they say’ into a multidimensional possibility of life. The elemental world is alive. It is magical. It is dangerous but also life-giving. And when we connect to it, our worlds inside and out will begin to change.
It’s like stepping into relationship with the plant medicines. Take Comfrey for example. It has the capacity to knit the bones back together after a break. The elemental world wants to reknit our relationship and communion with the wilds back into the living breathing wholeness that it once was, but through the consciousness of our striving whole beingness. To unlearn the domesticity of our brains and thinking and the ancestral and epigenetic trauma wound within brain/body soul/body split that occurred on this planet in Western Civilization in the mid 800’s when Church split body from soul.
Image: Liz Darling
All this to say, the process of initiation is long and windy when we lose the ancient and modern religious and spiritual maps and begin repatterining them in our own choose your adventure becoming guidebooks. Homecoming is not a one-size fits all gown.
To be continued.