Creatrix

Collaboration? Channeling? or CoCreation?

I recently gave a paper at an online conference on Creatrix Studies. The themes, scholarly research, knowledge and experience shared was incredible.

I attended presentations on - Sauna, Matrilineal Mosuo Families, Gatekeeping, Cosmology, Danu, Feminine Fertilising, Hidden Cosmologies of Goddess, Planetary Myth and the Shaping of Human Consciousness, Balkan Rituals Dragon Consciousness, and was a ‘Responder’ to one of the panels - and I only attended one and a half days of the four day conference!

The conference was largely organised by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang who is the ‘Mistress-mind’ behind the Mago Academy

Mago Academy offers graduate and non-degree certification online programs in Creatrix Studies. Creatrix Studies established by Dr. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang draws extensively from her research on Ceto-Magoism (the Whale-guided Way of Mago, the Creatrix).

It was a chance for me to share how I write within a sympathetic group. For the first time since defending my thesis, I was able to explain how I midwifed my first novel.

This has given me the confidence to be more open and so I reproduce here a version of that talk; it gives an insight into my research, such as it was…

Being a writer aka, storyteller, I see tales everywhere and this is how I combined my experiences as midwife, Druid, and writer to co-create a novel.

I knew I wanted to write a fantasy novel. In March 2010 I had a dream which contained the seeds of the story I wanted to tell – a tale of women and birth and spirituality. Lockdown was the key to turning this dream into reality, when it became possible to study online. An MLitt (Mistress of Literature) allowed me to begin the story of my ‘tales of birth’ – what has become a trilogy and I began with a mother’s tale.

However, I realised that I should begin at the beginning; before the mother comes the maiden, and so I embarked on a doctorate with the specified aim of completing the first novel in the trilogy – The Maiden’s Tale: Ròn.

To facilitate this, I needed to formulate how my research for such a novel might manifest.

My thesis literally became a story – of the how (in the practice), the what (from the inspiration), the when (in the story), and the why (the insights discovered) the novel was birthed into the world. Effectively, the thesis was a record of how I midwifed the book.

(Druid-scholar artwork by Arthur Billington)

The prevalent methodology in the Arts I discovered was ‘Practice as research’ and I realised that ‘stories’ were key.

As a midwife, women’s birth stories provided the wisdom that [had] informed me and allowed me to grow as a practitioner. It was held in their own words, their own lives…

I decided to centre my research on my own story as a researcher by using …

…tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both process and product.

Through a series of happenings, some might say coincidences I would call them synchronicities, I was led throughout the experience.

I was able to conduct subjective, but valuable research encompassing identities, working with spiritual tools and practice to illicit experience.

(At Camas nan Geall)

I began with the simplest question - where do writers find their stories? This starting point was a direct result of a decision to enter a university competition called the 3 Minute Thesis (aka 3MT).

There’s a strong element to the novel; the spiritual, the ways people in the ancient world engaged with ‘Otherworlds’ [and Deity] - much like I do as a Druid. …[I wondered] Why am I not asking them to help me in the creation of my novel? … As a Druid I have a ‘practice’. Why not engage with this practice in a direct way to find inspiration, find my story?

You can get a flavour of that Practice I embarked on, from this picture; I would sometimes have to go out in sleet or snow, and sub zero temperatures in my wellingtons all wrapped up, to get to my ‘temple’ in the garden where I meditate and journey – we live in a wood in the Highlands. But…

... I’m fiercely private when it comes to my Spiritual space and Practice and the idea of sharing such an innermost part of myself for my research was a challenge - I find it easier to talk about sex, fallout from a career as a midwife…

This is where I headed each morning for my practice as research… literally another world, but one that for me is no less real than this place I call Earth, Scotland, home…

I became acutely aware of my personal identities during the research process.

‘I am’ many things – a woman, a mother, a grandmother, a Druidess, a Priestess, but for the purposes of my research, I found 3 ego-driven identities dominated – ‘I am’ a writer, ‘I am’ a Druidess, ‘I am’ a midwife.

But without the attached ego-identity, ‘I am’ put simply is ‘presence’ – it is the recognition of being alive and what that means in the moment. It is this stripped bare, egoless state, that is my connection to divinity, an inner divine essence that I experience as feminine in my personal consciousness and beyond – it is Goddess.

(Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot - 3 of Pentacles)

I had been deepening my relationship and practice working with the Tarot, investigating Jungian interpretations, readings for creative expression and particularly relational practices of working with the energies of the cards themselves. Initially -

…the card as a portal. …

… through visualisations and meditations on the imagery on the cards, [I] interacted with the scene and characters portrayed…

There’s no doubt that tarot can facilitate creativity on different levels – as a prompt visually, as inspiration for a storyline or plot, or as a portal, but what I was aiming at, was something beyond this. Once through the portal, I wanted to meet with spirit/Goddess and ask for direct help with the narrative for my book, not simply use my imagination to find answers. I had already been given the key: The 3 of pentacles you see above is from the Rider/Waite/Smith (RWS) Tarot and is often noted as the card of creativity.

And here it is again on the left, from my favoured deck The Greenwood Tarot (illustrated by Chesca Potter) – the 3 of Stones - my source of inspiration?

The card I describe as ‘my creativity card’ came about …through a series of synchronicities. I was engaged in a Jungian Tarot course and the first exercise we were given involved the drawing of a card to represent where we were at now. This was just after I had been involved in the 3MT where we had been allowed only one slide to demonstrate our research [you can see it above] and I’d selected a card based on its resemblance to a photograph of me in full Druid regalia at Stonehenge. The card the Tarot gave me on the course was this 3 Pentacles [from the RWS deck] and throughout my research it arose time and time again. It is the card of collaboration in creativity which perfectly describes the relationship I have with the Spirit of the Tarot…

Put simply, it is CoCreation.

Awen is a word found in Welsh mythology and most Druids would use the phrase flowing inspiration to describe the experience of Awen itself, that feeling of being in the zone. Awen is most often symbolised as 3 concentric circles containing 3 dots that have 3 lines flowing from them.

It was not lost on me that the number 3 is key again – 3 of pentacles in the tarot as cocreation very much a representation of the creative act of male and female in this world producing a child.

Barbara Tedlock Ph.D is an initiated shaman and scholar. … She argues that evidence is clear within the archaeological record even beyond patriarchal societies that women were the original shaman. It is the female shaman who takes the soul flights, and the male partner who along with her interprets the journey. The bringing together of the sex binary in this world I see as a very Druidic feature, the recognition of wholeness in uniting energetic polarities essential to creation.

A strong theme of my novel is woman as portal as this quote [from Frankel] demonstrates well.

Women’s power to create life, apparently out of their own substance, and to respond with fearful and mystical blood cycles to the phases of the moon, made them creatures of magic in the eyes of primitive men, who knew themselves unable to match such powers. Thus women took on the roles of intermediaries between humanity and spiritual powers. They became seers, priestesses, healers, oracles, lawmakers, judges, and agents of the Great Mother Goddess who gave birth to the universe. (From Girl to Goddess - Valerie Estelle Frankel 2010: 317)

As a midwife I watched women’s journeys to become mothers. Whilst writing my novel and investigating specifically the ‘hero’s journey’, I saw my character’s journey as maiden into mother did not reflect the classic trope of ‘hero’ [as described by Joseph Campbell]. A journey as mother is innate - it is a ‘heroine’s journey’. This difference goes some way to explain why women have been best placed to facilitate and create spiritual journeys, as the heroine’s trajectory, though similar to the hero’s, is not about conquering a challenge single-handedly, but about forming bonds [or networking] - for example, ‘Harry Potter' is a heroine’s journey.

(The Seer - The Greenwood Tarot - illustrated by Chesca Potter)

One morning I was given The Seer (equivalent to The High Priestess in a standard Tarot deck) and the first ‘download’ appeared:

The Seer. She is a storyteller! She exhorted me to go to a place and find my story – I went to Camas nan Geall (The Bay of the Promise - a local site) – and wondered – ‘what is [my protagonist] Ròn’s promise’? The scene that I witnessed, a fast-forward video before my inner eyes, came so fast I struggled to take in the racing images. As soon as it was done, I reached for my journal to recount the storyline beats, even as they faded from my shocked mind. …

What I initially termed ‘downloads’ owing to their rapid materialization, would not come often in future meditations…

During this time a headline caught my eye - hyperphantasia … it meant nothing to me but this is the phenomenon of having such a vivid mind’s eye … [it is as the headline said] “like a film in my mind”.

This was what I’ve been experiencing in my practice as research when I journeyed… it named what I was experiencing but without spirituality. It was important to me that I keep my own specification as separate as being received by spirit/Goddess – a visual gift, not traditional channelling; I do not consider myself psychic. I needed to define and name my experience.

(The definition)

For me, Sha-awen represents the result of collaboration with Tarot in devotional practice to Goddess. The naming appeared when my research practice and the novel converged – the day I drew the Moon card.

…what I got was instant …

Another download, a scene came to me fully formed…

It was in the writing up of the scene that the narrative in the text named what I was experiencing. Literally my character said:

I will call this ‘Sha-awen’ ...

Goddess had gifted me this new term as my source of inspiration – ShaAwen – and synchronicities as ever, continued to affirm my intuition.

Whilst researching …I came across a website that led to an author whose methodology was very close to my own for the seeking of inspiration.

An article, ‘Marija Gimbutas as Muse’ by Mary Mackey. … here was an academic creative writer talking about her experience of being inspired by Gimbutas’ work … I looked into Mary Mackey, her website, and found an interview where Mackey is asked about ‘what inspires writers’.

Mackey is an author, who is also an academic, who had investigated her personal experience and method of seeking, not just finding, inspiration when writing. What was remarkable about this synchronicity… was finding that she had written a trilogy about a neolithic woman who was a spiritual leader of her people, a character who resembled my own protagonist. Her trilogy is named The Earthsong Trilogy - my own is Tales of B-Earth and the first novel is The Maiden’s Tale: Ròn. Mackey has written a prequel to her trilogy …Sabalah’s Tale.

Like me, Mackey employs a technique that alters her consciousness in a deliberate effort to find scenes for her novels or inspire her poetry. Unlike me however, there is no spiritual element; she does not attribute her results to any exterior force.

(See Jill Smith here.)

There were countless synchronicities, and I would like to share one in particular. It concerns my Druid mentor Laurence Main, the University of Glasgow, one woman’s ritual journeys and the narrative of my novel. When I moved to the west coast of Scotland in 2014, Laurence recommended that I read Mother of the Isles written by a friend of his (Jill Smith 2003) about her journey specifically on Lewis where she made her home. I did … in 2014. Then during my studies, quite fortuitously … I attended a presentation at the University of Glasgow about Jill’s latest Zodiac Journey … Jill Smith is an extraordinary woman, she ‘…first came to public attention in the 1960s and 70s as a pioneering performance artist. She subsequently embarked on an ambitious series of ritual journeys in which she sought to - become one with the Sacred Landscape of Britain’. Jill’s presentation was another autobiographical ritual journey. Laurence had implored me to contact her ten years ago. This time, seeing Jill talk about her journeys whilst I was writing about my character’s journey, I felt that I was being given a strong message from Goddess that I should finally make contact. I told her all about my writing, the trilogy Tales of B-Earth – and she sent me a photo of a piece of artwork she did many years ago - its title…

B-Earth!

I couldn’t resist asking the question, and Jill most generously agreed; her beautiful artwork B-Earth is the cover of my novel.

In another synchronicity I came across the perfect quote to encapsulate the Spirit of my research. I read a recent essay by Celia Gunn (whom I met in 2012), and she had this to say,

It is important to understand that in the shamanic worldview, nothing happens by chance. This is an absolute. There is no such thing as ‘shit happens’; every problematical event has an underlying cause, the knowledge of which lies with the spirits.’ (Gunn 2020: 103)

It is a perfect explanation of synchronicity and how I experience it. The inspiration for my novel didn’t ‘just happen’, it was a collaboration between myself as Druid, midwife and writer in devotion to Goddess, during a Quest to the Otherworld working with the Spirit of Tarot as a portal. The gift I received on my journeying and brought into this world, this co-creation I had named Sha-awen, and my gratitude for this continues in my Practice as a Druidess… and as a writer.

Tales of B-Earth book I, The Maiden’s Tale: Ròn is published (available on Amazon) – book II The Mother’s Tale: MerLina is complete with publication expected by the end of this year, and book III The Matriarch’s Tale: MerDreda is in draft with a view to publication in 2027.

Amazon