intuition
learning through seeing into the dark
Hello dear friends,
I’ve been re-reading Alberto Villoldo’s book The Wisdom Wheel, a journey through the medicine wheel, a map of the Soul’s journey through life that is similar in many shamanic cultures. Villoldo has been invited to share the Pachacuti mesa tradition of Andean shamans in order to share the wisdom and skills needed to transform and engage with these challenging and critical times on the planet. One of the tradition’s main premises is that we need to repair our relationship with the Sacred Feminine in order to rebalance the destructive overvaluing of masculine goals and drives.
Shamanic medicine, respected and appropriately applied, is one of the most transformative healing paths I know. But I’m not writing to convince you to dabble in shamanism. Rather, I’d like to discuss how the way of inner knowing is deeply healing. Villoldo encourages us to work our way through the wisdom wheel in order to heal and develop towards our true destiny as homo luminous, or beings of light. This way of illumination, or enlightenment, is found through an inner journey, starting in our deepest darkness, and facing into our hidden truths - not just the shadow material of things we don’t like about ourselves, but the great illuminating truth of who we really are when we clear ourselves of burdens and debris from the past - personal, cultural, collective, intergenerational.
Reading Villoldo’s invitation to enter the dark womb of the Great Mother, the deep inner territory of Mother Earth, I contemplated the ancient idea that we are a reflection of the cosmos in miniature. The dark womb of the Great Mother is hidden deep within the earth, reached in those chthonic passages of caves, canyons, and clefts. We can also engage with her through our inner vision in the dark realms of our own matter, the form of our bodies that parallels the Sacred Feminine body of this earth. Within these deep recesses, both in nature and in ourselves lie our primordial knowings and our most transformative creative potentials. Deep within the earth are the microbes, minerals and pre-plant life that fertilise the oceans with new life and erupt with life potential through geysers and volcanos. Within ourselves, images, the stirrings of unseen archetypes deep within, can be channeled into creative and tangible acts and vital life. The word matter evolved from the latin word mater, which means mother. The relationship between mother and matter (and I would argue -mattering) are deeply rooted.
My musings led me to reflect inward, into an inner dark that seemed fathomless and blinding. How could I find my way, here? As I opened to not knowing, I saw/felt/sensed out of the darkness the image of a wet trickle of water flowing over the blackest densest rock. I knew with all my senses that this image indicated the return and flow of life from the deepest source. It nourished all my longings and wonderings instantly with a vital knowing that all is well deep inside. The way I experience images has developed over time into a kind of synaesthesia. Where we usually begin experiencing images with our most developed sense, either sight, hearing or body sensation, developing my inner vision has lead to this experiencing of multiple senses simultaneously. This suggests to me a development and integration of the true dark art of intuition. However, in case you’re expecting fireworks when you try it for yourself, the experience is subtle, and detectable mainly in stillness.
I’m reprinting here the poem that concludes my book Haunted, and that gives its title to this newsletter. It’s a map of the Soul, and a map of a healing journey. It illuminates the path of in-sight - which means to see into, and refers to inner vision or the mind’s eye. All of this relates to the deep value of imagination and image, which are related to the word root of magic. Here it is:
Conversations in the dark – Violet Sherwood
Darkness is our first home
Our first memory
Our first resting place.
We return to it in the night
Homage to our original landscape.
Darkness is not empty.
It surrounded us in the beginning
And we were life, fruit, seed
Following the hidden path
Toward ourselves.
Darkness reveals what we hide
From ourselves in the daylight.
It has invisible eyes attuned to
The obscured, the outcast, the imprisoned,
The discounted, the forgotten.
Demons, lusts, terrors rise up
To haunt us.
Darkness is our own foul treachery,
Our horror, our blindness
That leads to fury
When we fight the great formlessness
That longs to give us solace.
It is a torture pit of broken minds
And limbs and animals
Snarling, vicious
Afraid.
Darkness is our nightmare of history.
What was done we perpetuate while we forget.
We reject while we remember
Saying
I am not this.
But I am.
I am this too,
And this, and this.
Darkness is the embrace
The deepest compassion
The greatest mother
Of our needs and hurts.
In our terror we threaten
To annihilate her and then wait
For her to eclipse us.
She is the resting place
Nurturer of dreams
Keeper of the mystery
Weaver of all that longs to
Know itself and therefore grows,
Lives, is recognised
And dies into her love.
Darkness is the abyss
Of our true freedom.
Stepping into the secret
Dark of ourselves
We embrace the lost kingdom.
We restore the banished ones to their light,
Singing praise for the return
Of the holy within the body.
Tenderly we hold hands with those
Lost and found in the dark,
Hands with eyes that see truth, and therefore,
The way.
Hands that in holding truth
With love
Build stone by stone
A cathedral of living light
In the wellspring of the heart
That pours its river of love
Unceasingly
Through the dark valleys,
A secret song, not hidden,
Though sometimes not seen.
The well nourishes us
In the sanctity of freeing
The chained ones
We banished and forgot.
They have laboured in deep mines
Weaving the wound into rivers of stone,
Of gold, and finally,
Through a myriad of chasms, into
Liquid rivers of diamond.
Pure living light that
Sings in the darkness
The joy of knowing
I am here
I am here with myself
I am here with myself and
The blessed angel
Who waits for me to turn inwards.
The ‘dark arts’ and the ‘occult’ originally referred to the hidden or mysterious powers of the female imagination. Occult simply means hidden, and the Sacred Feminine is traditionally the inner, hidden, dark, and mysterious energy. Imagination, the realm of images, is a realm of inner vision, the visionary aspect of using our mind's eye to see inward, to see into the dark and to become intimate with what cannot be seen with the exterior focus. Intuition is therefore the teaching or guidance that comes from within.
Likewise, the so called hidden path to the divine, or via negativa, is a way of becoming intimate with what we cannot see or know.
Images come from within, from the inner dark. In Greek mythology images are the language of the realm of the dead. The myths speak to us of the hidden and formless aspects of the image, which too easily floats by if we are not attuned with our inner vision. The power of the image is in its blueprint for manifestation. Seed-like, it germinates quietly in the dark and has enormous potential for growth if nourished and nurtured. We can only know the power of the image/seed when it emerges out of the dark. We can learn to tend and nurture our image gardens and discover the tremendous creative power of the image raised to life. This is dark wisdom and the dark art of working with what is underground in us so it can be nurtured into life. The most obvious and profound dark art is the growing of a child in the dark space within and birthing that child into being.
I hope it is evident from these musings, that there is a profound relationship in the feminine energies between what is hidden and emergent and what is alive in form. Think of the relationship between Persephone and Demeter as an emerging of imagined potentials into form and actuality. This partnership is the art of creative abundance.
Imagination is our creative potential. Images unnoticed or unvalued are still working their magic within us and influencing our daily lives without our awareness. Developing your intuitive, or visionary capacity, and mindful awareness, are dark arts that help us harness the horses, so to speak, so we can see and guide, as well as be guided, by our images. We can respect and learn from the images of our dreams, and we can witness the collective images of a culture through the images in art, novels, trends, and patterns. Tending our inner garden and growing our body of light we can contribute to seeding the images needed for our personal and collective healing, our dreaming into being of a new story for our world.
Alchemical journalling
Write about, or draw, an image that arises when you close your eyes and rest in darkness. Breathe slowly in stillness as you would in the presence of a wild animal. Don’t try to see, relax and allow the image to find you. If you’re not used to seeing images in your mind’s eye this may take a little practice. You may also like to write about the images that drift to the surface in the liminal time between waking and sleeping. When you are visited by an image, ask what it wants to teach you, or how it wants to guide you. Write about this. Refer back to your image in your journal or reverie and see how it works on you over time.
Alberto Villoldo, The Wisdom Wheel: A mythic journey through the four directions. (Hay House 2022).
Violet Sherwood, Haunted: The Death Mother archetype (Chiron Publications, 2021)