Church of the Poisoned Mind
These last weeks have been serious - and one I have contemplated deeply. Going to bed reading Harold Johnson's last work The Power of Story as well as Lech's All the Drowned Sailors concerning the USS Indianapolis sinking - I've gotten lost in the words and events these authors discuss. In part, to numb, in part to escape, but in truth, to learn. You see, I practice bibliomancy - you'll see it depicted on American Horror Story: Coven as Zoe looks for the correct book for spirit banishment. At first, I practiced this with my Bible - and not any Bible, dear Reader, but the one my Aunt gave me, the same Aunt who was the Labor and Delivery Nurse who brought me into this plane, and the one who exited at the end of July of this year. Because her passing was so close to Yeye Luisah Teish's course on "Good Grief Rituals", I passed on taking the workshop. I felt I would just be a mess, and stayed away - I regret that decision - however - I do NOT regret the glass of whisky I poured for her and the dance to an Ibiza style remix of Whitney Houston's " I Wanna Dance With Somebody." I did dance with somebody, I danced with her that August afternoon in which I entered this world - she deserved no less upon her exit of this plane. The gratitude that she said yes to incarnating here when she did and saying yes to being a nurse and further to saying yes to specializing in labor and delivery. The celebratory nature of gratitude in her saying yes to all this and more moved so much within my own Innsaei - a concept that Betsy Bergstrom introduced me to earlier this month in a psychopomp workshop.
Innsaei, Icelandic for the Sea Within, seems to bear a spiritual significance for me that I cannot express enough gratitude to Betsy, her teachers (including Michael Harner), ancestors, and all those who brought forth this incredible notion. I've never been to Iceland, but I do connect deeply to the Volcanic nature of Hawaii and Italy - where the magma seas roar and heave deep within our Earth Mother - molten like the Sun itself. Perhaps that's the secret that indigenous wisdom attempted to give us all - Father Sun planted deep seeds of fire within Mother Earth whereas Mother Moon controls the very waters of creation upon her.
In the old Northern tradition the Moon is masculine and the Sun feminine, it was not so dissimilar in Ancient Egypt - all things possess duality - harm and heal, curse and blessing, light and dark, poison and medicine.
I chose the cover photo for this piece for many reasons. First, I grew up near Fort Dobbs in North Carolina — a French and Indian War outpost where British colonists clashed with the Cherokee. By 1761 the Cherokee were defeated. This was long before Jackson and the Trail of Tears, and yet the soil was already soaked with unnecessary tears, lives lost to the machinery of colonization. As Harold Johnson reminds us, post–Black Plague Europe, it was a continent gutted: population decimated, food rotting (hence the hunger for spice), bodies unwashed except at birth and death (hence the lust for perfume). It was a perfect storm of desperation, fueling the Crusades, the witch-burnings, and the colonial expansion that followed. That there is even a Europe left is, in its own way, miraculous.
And yet I count it a miracle I’m grateful for — I know how that may sound. Without it, I would never have ventured to Château Frandeux, never communed with an ancient Celtic terrip who taught me her song through honey. That journey pressed the grief of colonization into me even more deeply: the destruction and exploitation of Indigenous culture, of enslaved culture, of indentured culture. The lies and deceits braided through it all. So the question becomes: how does one find the medicine in so much poison?
Perhaps the answer comes in fire. In The Last of the Mohicans, Duncan Heyward — the very emblem of colonial entitlement — chooses to sacrifice himself for Cora, even though she loves another. His body is hoisted to burn, not as punishment alone but as offering. And it is Hawkeye, Daniel Day-Lewis, who ends Duncan’s agony from a distance, sparing him the drawn-out cruelty of the pyre. In that moment, Duncan ceases to be colonizer and becomes a bridge: his death allows the Mohicans to live, his surrender unwittingly decolonizing the story. Poison becomes medicine, arrogance becomes offering, death becomes release. It is not redemption so much as transmutation. And maybe this is where the medicine hides — not in denying the poison, but in burning it down, in watching it crackle to ash, and in carrying forward only what clears space for life to continue.
Perhaps as the second new moon in Virgo looms (21 September), the fires should crackle to ash the colonized parts of our minds - in fact arrogance is one of the tenets visited in the darker half of the year per the Celtic tradition along with vanity. How may your arrogance be made an offering? How does your ego death become release? Considering that you are a love letter written by your ancestors to the Universe may assist in this endeavor. I think about that a lot - the sharecroppers in my family who learned later in life to read and write (not via the education system) and what all I have accomplished in my life. A Master's in Chemistry - a dream within a dream for any of them- much less all the adventure, travel, and experiences I've managed to neatly pack in my suitcase of courage of 51 years.
How can we light the fires again of our connection to the land below and the stars above? If you are in North America and are not indigenous, how can you begin to honor the land you live upon? How can you begin to understand the immense cruelty inflicted upon those brought here in slavery? Poison begins to become medicine in these spaces. I am not a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan; however - Ingredit vos qui scienses querites is most accurate. Enter all Ye who Seek Knowledge, even the darkest amongst us - for they too will find what it is they seek.
I leave you with A Poison tree by William Blake
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
