Origins
What calls you to a place? A path? A sacred text? What is the source of that invisible bell tolling a tone only you can hear? We speak of callings. Being called to a profession, a city, a tree. People come to my work more often than not, because I speak within the textured landscape of honeybees. They share a feeling of being called by the bees. I too had a similar call, but it didn’t start with bees. I’m not exactly sure where or when it started, but a I recall a similar bell tolling through my being on a school trip to England at the age of 17. I was part of a high school band visiting and performing in Cornwall. We were on a bus with the usual chaos of a bunch of kids who couldn’t care less about the landscape we were passing through. But I knew. I was aware of just how many sacred sites piled atop one another. I put my headphones on, leaned against the window, and transported myself outside, galloping on a horse along the green road. I merged. I journeyed. Without framework, or definitions, I intuitively traveled the inner pathways of my imaginal self and experience a different state of being, where I got to weave through the standing stones no one spared a second glance for. Where I was wild, and free, and alive in a brightly living ancient landscape. The Celtic soul of the land was ringing its fairy bells, and I was following.
The bees brought me back to England for many years after, as I found myself drawn to an obscure spiritual pathway that somehow combined the taste of my many years of Celtic studies with something ineffable and yet utterly housing me in my own body, in the midst of modernity. It was the first time I no longer needed to cast a lonely gaze back to antiquity, because in these practices I found a way to be a woman, here in a broken America, able to function in the modern world, with the mysteries alive all around her.
Colonialism and Christianity, the old buddies that they are, didn’t just steal the heart, land, and culture of other continents. It did it right in the great backyard of Europe first.
Women’s spirituality, folk traditions, and indigenous, local practices and ways of life were oppressed, suppressed, overwritten, or destroyed in the name of one male god.
Ways of thinking and ways of life were dramatically altered. This part is important, because the world view that supports the vibrate, living, animate Earth was replaced with what we have now. The modern West lives in a Christocentric, scientifically-based society, built within a framework of Patriarchy and colonialism that values certain types of peoples, behavior, and knowledge above and to the detriment of others.
This thinking permeates all of our systems. It affects our ways of relating, parenting, and working. While I adore the intellect, and love love love some good science, we are out of balance. The one truth, one god, one explanation, singular deduction model leaves little room for hunches, intuitive tugs, nuance, and a little everyday witchery. Ironic then, that so many of our greatest discoveries have come from hunches.
Even within spiritual pathways of non-Christian origin, we still seek that which is pure, proven, and backed by empirical evidence. I see it all the time in my work. I see it in myself - a desire to find “THE” origin.
Could it be that part of our desire to find and practice something of pure origins is ingrained in our psyche due to one book being referenced as an ultimate truth for centuries? Could this drumming of “only one God” into our collective psyche have affected our ability to hold nuance? Is this, in part, where we get the eternal damnation of cancel culture? Although at this point, the rise in cancel culture does serve to hold accountable the damage done by the power structures of colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, and in this there is absolutely a place for the collective call out.
Other schools of thought and animistic ways of being or world views were never pure in origin, because there was no one ultimate supreme being. There are thousands of variations of spirit, alive and well, all around us, available to us, and part of the fabric of who and what we are.
There are cultural origins. There are place-based origins. But for any tradition to survive into the modern era (without the peoples being relatively isolated), the peoples will have met other peoples from other regions, and swapped, shared, integrated, and adapted spiritual and folk practices based on that exposure, whether that exposure is seen as positive or negative. It’s just like myths and stories. You can find them again and again, wearing different clothes and different faces, if you look. There will never be a pure origin, because that’s not how folk traditions or animism works.
Animism works in direct relationship to a vibrant, living, ensouled world. A world we can cultivate relationship with on a daily basis.
One of the affirming and beautiful things about animistic and spiritual traditions, is that you can often find mirrors and similar practices across the globe and through time. Spiritual truths having been reached by various cultures, individuals, and groups that are echoed in other practices, such as the common symbol of a great tree of life between the earth and the cosmos.
We also often see an attitude of exclusivity and originality that permeates spiritual pathways. Really, what we’re looking at in differing traditions is a particular hue in a wide color pallet of experiences. One hue might speak more to your particular relationship with the world than another. The flavor and spirits of the desert might resonate with you, while the teachings that emerged from the jungle or a snowy mountainous region might resonate with another. It’s the same with particular animals, elements, or plants functioning as spirit guides and motifs for spiritual insight or growth. What one learns from the bee might be quite specific to the bees themselves, and that very beeness is what opens up pathways of insight and epiphany within particular individuals. The language of fire, or the calling of a god of gateways might be the basis for another tradition that speaks more directly to a different individual.
This does not mean it’s acceptable to blatantly appropriate indigenous cultural practices and rebrand them in a glossy western package. But it does mean that when looking at, for instance, spiritual traditions emerging out of Europe, where women’s spirituality and indigenous wisdom was systematically destroyed? We find it in the remnants, layers upon layers of beliefs and practices borrowed from many cultures echoing each other.
The point I’m making is that every animistic or folk tradition that inspires you has no definitive origins, but did at some point emerge from people who were living in a way that was informed by very specific spirits of the land and the ancestors associated with that land, plant, animal, weather pattern, etc. Some of these, in turn, met with other peoples from other lands. Other peoples who also had direct experiences with spirit, the gods, place. These traditions, practices, ceremonies, beliefs, were woven together to form an ever expanding tapestry of relationship to that which we call the divine.
Folk traditions and spiritual traditions kept going. Kept evolving. Kept being added to. Kept borrowing from other places, other peoples. Nothing is stagnant. Nothing sits only in ancient origins. Everything is always being added to and created. Feels sticky and confusing doesn’t it? How do we hold this ever evolving form of spirituality as true, but also stand against the appropriation of indigenous traditions?
In the bee tradition I practice, some pieces were brought in from Wales, others from Lithuania, others, it is said, came from Ancient Greece. During my studies of bee shamanism, my teacher, Naomi Lewis brought in the Meisner-based work of Kate Maravan. My other teacher, Kate Shela, brought in her incredible dance and embodiment work, adding this to what was passed down. The “tradition" evolved before my eyes, and brought me ever-closer to myself.
If you are part of the global west that has been severed from its animistic origins, then you’ve also most likely been heavily influence by a dominant world view that is Christocentric, monotheistic, and based on rational thinking.
The Christocentric view of a single truth, written down for all time as the Word, is false even in its own making. We know there were many gospels, many accounts, of the teachings of Jesus and his disciples. But nonetheless this pervasive idea of one origin, one truth, influences even our thinking around finding the one truth or one origin of folk traditions or modern spiritual practice.
When I was studying at University in Ireland, I focused my final paper on the conversion from Paganism to Christianity in Europe from the 5-9th century. What I was struck by was how there wasn’t just one “pagan” religion in old Europe as I had naively perceived (influenced by a Christocentric telling of history). There were many local flavors and variations centered around a worldview that supported interaction with the living spirits of the land, and later Gods/Goddesses, who were eventually vilified or became Saints.
Furthermore, these Pagans of various beliefs and practice were constantly borrowing and adopting from each other, both from invading and conquering groups, as well as through trade. What then counts as authentic origin? What if some of these practices and beliefs survived into the modern era by hiding in plain sight? By adopting Christianity, and molding pre-Christian beliefs and practice into their version of Christianity? Who gets to claim rights to such things as the Easter egg, Halloween costume, or Christmas tree?
Some bells that ring through us will never be backed by proof of their truth, singular origin, or even come with enough material to satisfy your thirst for more. Sometimes, all we get is a tattered fragment of an ancient poem to spark something so deep, we must pursue it. In doing so, we find that ultimately, the only way to spiritual truth is through your own relationship to the gods, plentiful in their numbers.