The Twelve Wild Swans

by Starhawk

  Some people visualize quite easily; others have to practice. Visualizing the outcome we desire, in the greatest detail possible, is the first step in any spell. We sometimes refer to this as “setting an intent.”

  At the great Reclaiming Halloween celebration in San Francisco every year, we set the intent for our year’s work by singing together, “May all the forms of life be saved, may all the colors of our skin be praised, may all the buried streams run free, and the salmon return each year from the sea…” These are only a few details of the specific, concrete picture we create for ourselves of the world in which we want to live. The chanting, dancing, and visualizing go on for hours.

  For now, let’s concentrate on setting an intent for the outcome of the work of the Elements Path. Can you imagine developing a spiritual practice that is both fun and fulfilling? Can you imagine finding a perspective where you are the hero of your own life story, supported by divine power and by the powers of nature? Can you imagine yourself both relaxed and energetic, taking excellent care of yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually?

  Can you imagine yourself filled with purpose, a skillful gardener in Mother Nature’s garden, whether that garden is an organic farm, an inner-city soup kitchen, or your own kitchen table? Choose one specific image of yourself involved in a fulfilling spiritual practice, and concentrate on it. Close your eyes, and imagine the scenario in as much concrete detail as you can. Look down at your feet. Where are you? What are you wearing (if anything)? What sounds do you hear? What is the quality of movement in your body? Are you alone or with others? Look around you and above you. What is the weather, the season, the time of day?

  If you can clearly imagine a fulfilling spiritual practice for yourself, you have stepped onto the path, like Rose. Maybe something subtle has been amiss in your life as you have been leading it. Maybe you are ready to ask the right questions and take determined action on your own behalf. When Rose knew something important was wrong in her life, she persisted in her questioning until she found out what it was, and then she fearlessly walked away from her life as she had known it.

  Like Rose, we have asked hard questions and found out that our lives are out of balance. Not only our twelve brothers, but all our relations, the rocks, the rabbits, the little springs, and the midnight sky, we’ve lost them all in a culture that has forgotten Mother Nature and our right place in the circle of life. Like Rose, in the Elements Path we have walked away from everything we have known and stepped between the worlds. We’ve learned to create sacred space for ourselves and begun a right relation with the element of air. In the chapters to follow, we will continue to search together for our lost brothers, building the basics of a spiritual practice based on Mother Nature.

  The Inner Path

  Rose grew up in a home where something was deeply wrong. A terrible injustice and a terrible loss had happened in this home before she was even born. Those events cast a long shadow over her life. As she grew up, she could feel that something was wrong, although she did not know what it was. She followed her intuition and asked persistent questions until she eventually asked the right person the right question at the right time. Finally she found out what had happened to her brothers; her intuition had been right all along. Now she could take action.

  Many women and men today begin to seek a spiritual practice because, like Rose, they find themselves in need of personal healing. Many of us suffer or have suffered from disordered family lives. Sometimes the actions and choices others made before we were even born have affected us deeply. We may find ourselves trained to a way of life based on painful and habitual fears and resentments. Our families may be burdened by secrets of past generations: infidelities, suicides, alcoholism, incest. We may be trying to comfort ourselves in ways that don’t work: with food, overwork, unhealthy relationships, money, drugs, or alcohol. We may be dealing with chronic or intractable physical or emotional pain. Or we may simply be failing to thrive, a little sad or bored or hopeless in a life that may seem slightly unreal or trivial.

  Even those of us who are lucky enough to have had good health and supportive family relationships may be troubled by the disorder in our larger human family. We may have had to overcome obstacles and work extra hard for our self-esteem because our gender, our skin color and hair, or our class background was disrespected by media, schools, and society. We may feel deeply unsettled as we walk past a homeless woman and her baby, knowing something is deeply wrong with how privilege and responsibility are doled out in our culture. Or we may feel justifiably fearful when we open the newspaper in the morning to read of some insanely violent event between people or nations. These feelings are disturbing and alienating whether or not we think of ourselves as politically involved. The alienation and insecurity of an unhealthy culture affect each of us. We’ve all grown up in a disturbed extended human family. We all need ongoing healing.

  For us, healing means more than seeking relief for a symptom or illness or family problem, although it may include all of these. Healing means becoming whole, a unique, powerful, aware, fulfilled person. Healing means becoming the main characters in our own life stories—heras and heroes. It means living passionately, creatively, and joyfully.

  Healing also means becoming part of a whole, comfortable, connected, and intimate with other people and with nature. We are each a thread in the web of life. For the whole design to prosper, each of us must shine our colors brightly, and the thread that is our personal life story must be both strong and flexible, since it helps to hold the whole pattern.

  When Rose finds out the truth about her family history, she walks away from her old life. Like Rose, as we work through the story of the Twelve Wild Swans, we will have an opportunity to walk away from old patterns of thinking and feeling about ourselves. In the Inner Path we will learn some alternatives. We will practice some of the magical tools that Witches in the Reclaiming tradition use regularly for the development and maintenance of their own inner health, wholeness, intuition, and power. Some of these techniques may be useful to you as we work through this story, layering a spell together for personal healing. And some of these techniques may be ones you choose to adopt or adapt as part of your own spiritual practice for a lifetime.

  The exercises in the Inner Path assume that you already know how to create sacred space, keep an altar, move into and out of trance states, that you have some practical experience with your own energy body, and that you have a relationship with the Goddess and the natural world that can support your work. If you feel you’re not quite ready, by all means go ahead and read the Inner Path, but please start working with the exercises in the Elements Path first.

  Why Do We Work with Fairy Stories?

  In Reclaiming, when we seek healing we often work with fairy stories. These stories promise, over and over, that if we set off on the path with nothing but courage, determination, and a kind heart, we will reach our goals no matter how impossible they may seem. The stories promise that in return for our greatheartedness, the universe will provide miraculous assistance that can bring about huge, impossible changes for the better. They are full of hope.

  In our darkest hour, we will receive mysterious supernatural guidance or sometimes help and advice from plants and animals. We will be sorely tested, but even if we end up working in a filthy pigsty, we may look up at the castle window and see the princess looking down at us with love and longing. Although we may be the lowest scullery maid, we are also perhaps the only one who can bring back the water of life to heal the sick king. There are a million stories, just as there are a million souls searching for fulfillment. But each and every story promises that we can become the main character in our own triumphant life story.

  These stories, though, are more than just encouraging and inspiring. They are also templates for soul healing from Europe’s ancestral wise women and healers. When the ancient earth-based cultures of Europe were destroyed, these stories remained.

  The fairy stories are told from a c
ompletely different cultural and psychological perspective than our modern one. In these stories women and men and even little children each have their own powers, cleverness, and magical abilities. The natural world is a great resource that helps those who respect and care for it and punishes the selfish and exploitative. The spirit world of dreams, visions, and magic is walking invisibly beside each character, just a prayer and a breath away, ready to assist those whose hearts are pure. The stories don’t recommend a spiritual way of life; instead, they assume a spiritual way of life. There is much we modern people have to learn from the assumptions of these ancient tales.

  As we work through Rose’s story, we will follow her as a guide into a way of life based on the assumptions of an ancient, earth-based wisdom. She will show us how to walk away from our unhealthy castle, how to trust ourselves to a little stream through the wildwood. She will show us how to face the bitterness and desire for revenge that comes from past injustices. She will set us an example of daring and courage, by stepping into a homemade basket to be lifted into the sky and flown over the sea to the Otherworld. She will show us how to rely on the green world of nature for our strength, and she will show us how to keep to our life purpose through love and loss and attack. Finally, she will be our example as she faces death. Through all her courage, vision, and endurance, the transformation she seeks comes about, miraculously, at the last moment. And here is an opportunity for us.

  Because if we learn to live our lives like Rose, we may find that we are able to solve problems that before seemed impossible. With a little practice, we can learn to access and rely on the power of the natural world. We can learn to find guidance in dreams and visions, and we can learn to find inner strength in unexpected places. With these tools we learn from Rose, we can try again to heal a difficulty that has been intractable for years, whether it is an addiction, a difficult relationship with a family member, a physical ailment, or simply an inner pattern of unhappiness. We can try to become the heras and heroes of our own tales and live joyfully and passionately, no matter how distant that goal may seem at the moment. Even if what you long for seems almost impossible, achieving it can hardly be more difficult than turning twelve swans into brothers.

  There is a saying in Witchcraft that “a healthy priestess makes all things whole.” Just as we cannot be completely happy in an unjust and disordered family or community, so a family or community cannot remain as unjust and disordered if one member heals. We can learn to call on the power of the Goddess and her ancient cultures to change ourselves. And we will inevitably change our surroundings, making our personal worlds and the people we love healthier, happier, and more whole.

  The fairy stories are time capsules sent to us from the ancestors of the ancient European earth-based cultures. Their magic can be unlocked today to release the magic and the deep knowing of a culture more compassionate than ours to the true hearts and lives of women and men.

  How Younger Self Can Help

  As Witches, when we work with a fairy story, we are not trying to analyze or “understand” it. Remember, for us healing comes from Deep Self, and Deep Self communicates through Younger Self. The symbols in the stories are the language of Younger Self, who communicates through sensuality, art, dream, and vivid images; through jokes, “irrational” impulses, and physical sensation. Younger Self lives behind the veil and knows the smells and shapes of all the lost parts of the self. As we follow Rose, searching for her lost brothers, we can find the lost parts of ourselves if we engage playfully and creatively with Younger Self, and if we refrain from trying to force Talking Self’s logic into this sensitive communication.

  We have lost parts of ourselves because in order to function in a culture that is hostile or indifferent to the whole lives of our human souls, we have learned to hide our true natures: harlequin, mischievous, fierce, tender, animal, changeable, wild, inspired. It simply won’t do on the bus, in the office, at the grocery store. And the pieces of ourselves that we mustn’t use or show gradually fade behind the veil until we ourselves don’t know where to look for them. Then, like Rose, we feel that something is wrong, something is missing, and we don’t even know what it is. So we must ask a million questions and finally walk out of the wall of that old castle, with no map, only a fierce determination to restore what was lost and our courage to face the unknown as we seek our true natures.

  Every emotion, every vision and dream, every sensation, every desire plays its own part in the ecology of the self. The lost parts of the self are sometimes those that are taboo in our culture and that we each guard carefully in shadow, revealing them to no one and sometimes not even to ourselves. But even these are part of our soul ecology. Just as the worldview of the Witches embraces the thorn and rose, the honey and the bee sting, so as we seek to understand and care for ourselves, we must not divide ourselves into “bad” and “good.”

  Witches do not seek to control, to repress, to rise above, or to detach from our human desires and our human nature. For us, the Goddess is immanent in the natural world; all beings are holy in all their parts, and this includes our selves. So we seek to know, love, and understand ourselves, all of ourselves, to develop patience and compassion, and skill and a sense of humor about ourselves. We seek to learn how to take excellent care of ourselves, as we would of a beloved child, as the Goddess would of us. “For behold, I am the Mother of all things, and my love is poured out upon the earth.” (The Charge of the Goddess, Spiral Dance, p. 90)

  Younger Self will act as our guide as we pass beyond the veil, searching for the lost parts of ourselves. But we must refrain from “analyzing” Younger Self’s language of concrete images and powerful sensuality.

  Have you ever woken up from a strong or disturbing dream feeling as though the tectonic plates under the house of your spirit have shifted as you slept? Younger Self has spoken in a powerful, sensual voice. And even if you can’t remember the dream at all, the feeling on awakening can be as though a powerful force had stirred your pot or thrown open all the doors and windows inside your head.

  Then sometimes, if you are of an analytical mind, you might look up the symbols in a book and find out that the hairy spider from the dream is a symbol of the wicked mother. The flowering tree is a symbol of the Goddess. The heaving ocean is a symbol of the unconscious mind. Suddenly the experience that was mysterious and powerful on awakening seems like something that could be decoded with a spy ring from a box of Cracker Jack. All the steam goes out of it like a popped balloon.

  By “breaking the code” of the dream, the power of the dream can also be broken. This happens because the power of the dream comes from its appeal to Younger Self. Younger Self can, in turn, bring the infinite power of Deep Self to bear on the problem the dream presents. Deep Self is the part of each of us that is connected to, or even part of, the Goddess. Deep Self speaks to us through Younger Self, and we experience the nearness of Deep Self as a feeling of mystery, of nameless power, even of disorientation. When we “break” the dream’s appeal to Younger Self by explaining it logically, we also break the invisible cord to Deep Self, and the sense of power and mystery vanishes.

  As Witches, we work with dream and story symbols in a different way. We don’t take them apart and analyze them for the benefit of Talking Self, any more than we would cut up a favorite pet to see how it worked. Just as with a beloved animal friend, we want to interact with a story or dream as a living whole, with its own humor, compassion, offer of friendship, and unpredictable energy.

  Instead of breaking down the symbols in a story, we try to let the symbols build and become even more detailed and mysterious. We engage Younger Self in sacred space and let our own most personal memories and associations crystallize onto the template of the story. We encourage the fairy story to apply more and more intimately to our own story, until it casts a new light on our old troubles, like sunrise through stained glass.

  This is not to say that analyzing dreams and learning about the history of symbols in the We
stern mystery traditions aren’t valuable, important, and even fun. Priestesses do all these things in Reclaiming and sometimes gain priceless insights from intellectual and analytical work.

  But we do not expect the deep healing and transformation from analytic modes of consciousness that we do when we are willing to engage Younger Self and enter the wild forest of our own underworlds. Then we can count on help from the power that turns the stars, and we never emerge from such an adventure unchanged. So if you are ready, let’s allow ourselves to be Rose for a while. Let’s build a Rose altar, do Rose trances and Rose dances, create Rose spells and meditations, get together with our friends and do Rose rituals. Let’s live her adventure together, binding our own life stories with hers, learning from her and from the ancestors who told her tale, and letting her transformation bring change into our own lives.

  Friends Can Help

  Many Witches choose to work on their psychic development in circle with like-minded friends. This is the basic practice of Witchcraft: to meet at the moon’s phases, with an intimate circle of no more than thirteen, and make magic together. Just as women have always gotten together for “girls’ night out” or sewing circle, or tea or cards or jogging, so we find ourselves benefiting from the support and motivation of like-minded friends as we try to bring the deepening and exercise of our soul-life forward, off the back burner. Spiritual practices in the Goddess tradition can be pursued solitary, but even more momentum for change and healing can be developed by working with others. There are some exercises in the Healing Path that require help from other people or the energy of a group. Our relationships with others, how we work in a group, our abilities to share and care for one another, are sometimes the most important part of healing work. So if it’s possible, you may wish to follow the exercises in the Inner Path with a group of friends.