The Kingdom Is Asleep: Stories & Spells (Part IV)
The Kingdom Is Asleep
Of course, all of this lifts up more questions. What makes us prone to being caught in the web of spells surrounding us? How do we know that we are under the influence of a spell vs. a story? Can spells hide themselves in stories? What are the particular and dominant spells of the times and places in which we find ourselves? What do spells cost us? How do we become more skilled in story? How might we become free?
The questions matter because this world doesn’t need fewer humans. It needs more. It needs more of us two-leggeds, deeply steeped in culture willing to learn the world as it is. With the oncomingness of ubiquitous technology in every facet of our society and every crevice of our bodies the need to preserve the indigenous of the world — the people, the languages, the cultures, the stories, the lifeways, the foods, the stories, the ceremonies and the understandings — has never been more urgent.
Spells are a form of power. But the world is not lacking powerful or power hungry humans.
“Stepping into your power is not hardest thing. The hardest thing is to step in and remain grounded, humble and generous. Much of mundane training would have us believe we are inferior. If you begin a dedicated dance with Spirit you will start to see and feel your own power. It comes in brief slices in the beginning. Like shafts of light beaming down into the shady forest. We get a glimpse of who we are and what it feels like to be powerful. If we continue our dance with dedication a glimpse becomes a knowing. Along the path come opportunities to heal. In a perfect world our awareness would grow equally as our healing grows. But that is not always the case. It is possible to be powerful and broken. And that is a challenging combination. Don’t rush to power. Rush to healing. Rush to love. Rush to generosity. And a humble power capable of transforming the world will follow.” — Naraya Preservation Council
The world is needing humans who are, in a word: awake.
May it be that we all are woken gently (but soon) from the spells we are under. Might spells be broken without breaking us or our breaking the world.
And, if spells must be cast — and perhaps sometimes they must, might it always be with the proviso, “May this or something better happen and only if it is in the highest good for all involved”. May we only cast spells of which we would be happy recipients. May whatever spells we cast be temporary shelters that give back to the Earth when we must move on and not leave too big a scar when we go. May it be that stories are told of the spells that must be cast — and all their consequences — so that even those spells are woven back in to the bigger tapestry of it all.
How do we become free of the spells we are under?
Caitlin Matthews gives us a one possibility in this story of Merlin and Taliesin. Merlin, traumatized and untrusting asks the odd question, “Why do we have weather?” There he is, a man whose horrors have, no doubt, been soothed by his time in the wild.
“How can the soul or the world be re-enchanted once it is lost the enchantment? Only by returning to the story of the soul and retelling it up to the point of fracture; only by placing our story within the context of the greater song… “Why do we have weather?” — This seemingly trivial query is all that Taliesin needs to help his friend. He begins to recite the creation of the world. At the end of Taliesin’s recital, Merlin is restored as the sacred context of his story is given back to him.”
Merlin is reminded that there is a place for humans in this world and a reason why we are here. He is reminded that there is a sacred beauty in the world and that humans are a part of it. Perhaps he came to see that he was needed in restoring his fellow humans to this sacred role.
I don’t know.
But I do know this.
I wish for us all to hear good and true stories that restore our sacred context and carry them on to the next generations. Might we become the storehouse of memories long forgotten. Might our minds, once again, become the supple, deer skin tents filled with diverse voices and heated by that small fire in the center that can protect us from the cold nights and strong winds without buckling.
Might we once again learn to see the world in a storied way.
Might we become humans worthy of the name.
Might stories be told by those to come about our ragged attempts to do so.
Ah. I suppose I should also speak to Briar Rose and how the kingdom was woken up from their hundred years of spellbound slumber but… that is another story for another time.
This is a beautiful series, Tad – thank you.
About power… I watched a lecture by Keith Wrightson about witchcraft and magic in early modern England. He used a phrase that stuck with me: “spells were the weapons of the weak”.
He was referring to the role of spells in disputes between neighbours. People who’d been unfairly treated and didn’t have the physical or social power to fight back (often older, women, solitary) sometimes looked to spells as a way of evening the playing field. I think we still see that kind of justification for spellcasting when things are unequal or unjust (“This is just what I need to do to even things up…”).
But using your framing, we could see a different kind of spell, and a different kind of weakness in those early modern cases.
Many revolved around loss or misfortune following an argument – your horse died; your crop failed. Painful, costly, often difficult to determine a cause, but with a grievance all lined up. So, if grief or mystery couldn’t be borne (weakness), you could accuse your least powerful neighbour of something they could never disprove. That seems like the perfect spell to simplify the unknowable into causality and blame. And it still seems a popular form, even if the details have changed.
I wasn’t sure about posting this, as I wondered if it was too much of a tangent from what you’re saying. But I think you inspired me to dig a bit more story out of the history, so it all circles back round :)
Thank you for this beautiful series on Stories & Spells. I found this lens, the framework you explored, richly insightful and useful to my thinking.
I noticed in the very first essay you wrote
"The binary notion that the world divides into two opposing sides may be one of the greatest spells of our time."
And then:
"And so on the one hand we have: tool, hand, culture and grief.
On the other hand we have: machine, will, civilization and grievance."
Much of the rest of the exploration divides up all things that are of story nature vs those of spell nature. You do clarify that spell is not the "opposite" of story, they happen within stories; however in this series they represent one way of living and being in the world that appears opposed to the story way of being. The "greatest spell of our time" seems to be the foundational one that has led us to forget where spells sit in the web, and thus get lost in them. Is civilization in all forms doomed no matter what because it arises only from spell? What comes next in the story after we realize that the way we are doing civilization, make and use machines, and assert our will is coming from spells that are inherently unsustainable for ourselves and the entire web of life? Do all these things have to be composted on the heap of history and us to pass as a species as a giant spellbound extinction because we did not wake up in time, did not learn what we needed to learn?
As I was reading I asked myself, what am I being invited to do about or with spells in my life, now that I'm reflecting onthem? Are they inherently always sickening or even deadly? Or only if we get stuck in them beyond the point at which our learning requires us to stop fighting, face the truth, and break the spell? Are spells an inextricable part of being human, and needed in our stories? Can they be great gifts if we use story to help us go through them for our growth? It doesn't seem like our elder brother and sister species experience spells - but maybe they do, what if the first mass extinction of life was a spell of those one celled creatures that produced oxygen as their waste product that then killed them off... and the story continued when life that lives on that oxygen arose to use it? Perhaps that is too much of a stretch.
Most of the great stories that teach seem to have spells within them that are at the crux of the pain, the transformation, the letting go and welcoming something new. And sometimes they kill some beings, or some beings perish from not emerging from a spell, and sometimes there is enormous growth in the process instead (or as well). Like demons in Tibetan Buddhist thought, are they reflections of some inner nature we are struggling with and need in order to learn, there being no guarantee we'll survive the encounter individually? Like viruses and bacteria, which are sometimes our symbiotic partners or even parts of ourselves, sometimes overwhelming and other times build our immune system beautifully, and without which we cannot live. One of the most interesting things I learned recently is that it's likely an ancient virus that changed the DNA of our egg-laying ancestors and gave rise to the evolutionary pathway of wombs and internal embryo development. Are all or most of the characters and beings in story sometimes spellcasters, sometimes spellbound by others, sometimes both or different things in relation to different other beings?
In your story/spell framework, and in the world, clearly, our species is caught up deeply in a number of spells, seemingly of our own making but also probably arising from many long long long ago (and some more recent) un-processed, un-transformed, and un-healed mass traumas. And if we do not resolve, learn from and transform through these in order to move forward in our story as the next iterations of ourselves, may lead to our own mass extinction (along with many of our elder species, some of whom are already gone from the planet because we remained spellbound). But the overarching story of life on Earth will continue. That is not an argument to remain in spell, nor to attempt to forcibly break it at some large scale. Nor that we should or should not become hunter gatherers again, nor that we should or should not see or act on sickness and death in any specific way, or interact with bacteria and viruses in any specific way "all the time". It's just the ponderings that reading this series of writings brought me to.
Thank you.