An Ode to Embodied Magic
For a moment, let’s imagine we roam through history as if it was a wild land. Let’s imagine we had traveled days and nights backwards into these lands. Deeper and deeper into that ancient wilderness behind us.
Let’s imagine further, we eventually reach a steep cliff. A place from which the land breaks off into apparent nothingness. Here we stand now, facing forward into our future, our backs towards an abyss of distant past.
And so we take a jump. A leap of faith. And let ourselves fall backwards. Tumbling and spinning, we plunge into the depth. Before we hit the gushing surface of a nameless river of blood.
Here we awaken into a strange kind of consciousness. No longer is it our consciousness, but something archaic and unconstrained. More sensing than seeing. A state of being permeated, of being immersed into a river of presences, as our body floats in the red waters all around us. – From here we drift back into a shared past...
It is a shared past because in the floods of this river, we are no longer one person but each of us is all people at the same time. We float in the blood of ancestors, of all ancestors, that is.
In the rushing waves and strong currents, our skin changes its colours, our bodies their shapes, our voices their words, our guts their cravings, our hands their wounds... Here we are all one, a million moments and nothing at all.
Through this river, then we reach a shore where all genuinely magical thoughts have ever been written down. There lie palm leaves on which we write with fingers of ashes, there are hides we paint with the sap of crushed flowers, and there are barks we draw with ground minerals and honey. Now we are on the shore of humanness. A place that cannot be pinned down and neither be entered twice; yet a sanctuary that is always open to us. If we cross the river of blood, we can learn to use it as a refuge, as a memory treasure and as call for our own future.
Here we burn fears. And with the remaining sharp bones, we carve symbols of birth into our skins. Here we lie in the warm sand, backwards, breathing slowly, without a mirror, without a face anywhere near to us. Here we take shape, in forms we know from dreams and for which we have waited a lifetime. Here some of us turn into books – pages with words and signs – hoping one day to be read by future selves, and to lead us back to remembering.
Those of us who want to travel out into this magical wilderness – over that steep cliff, into the river of blood and out onto its shores – must be willing to sacrifice much of their humanness. And those of us who want to learn from printed books instead, would do well in reading, and writing, and erasing their own bodies as a blank page first.
Here is a moment of pause for all the oral traditions of lived magic. Those invisible, vibrant lines from mouth to ear, through time and space, through generations and across continents. These invisible lines that know books not as objects born by printers and binders, but as vessels, waiting in the earth, in the coils of this world, at the shore of the river of blood. There they lie. There we lie. Waiting for the open hand, the undiscriminating ear, the lowered eyelid, and the all-permeable heart.
Further Reading
For further detail and practical advise on the visionary work behind these short reflections, please see: Josephine McCarthy, The Magical Knowledge Trilogy, Vol.2 The Initiate, Exter: TaDehent Books, 2021. Specific guidance as to how best to work with the ancestral blood stream can be found in Chapter 12: Working with ancestors, p. 211-230.
