A bit of essential housekeeping before you read on: if you’re surprised to find this monthly email from me in your inbox, it’s probably because, although you were subscribed to The Art of Enchantment, you read my work in the Substack app instead of receiving emails. In which case you wouldn’t have received last Thursday’s email, which I sent out via the Substack platform for the last time, or read it in the app yet. However, as I explained there (you can read it in full here: https://sharonblackie.substack.com/p/the-art-of-enchantment-has-moved) The Art of Enchantment, a longstanding publication and newsletter of mine which has had a couple of different homes over the last decade, has moved off Substack due to ... let’s call them both practical/ functional as well as moral/ philosophical differences with the owners of the platform. We’re now fully independent again, operating on a platform powered by beehiiv. Please note that nothing about your subscription has changed except the web address at which you can browse my archives and access all newsletters and other material. Do read the post for the full story and more information, as well as for a 20% discount if you’d like to take this opportunity to upgrade your subscription to premium (and make the most of our new community feature, too) – just in time for our forthcoming short course on the Grail mythology, which begins for paid subscribers next Saturday 11 September. See below for more info.

I’d encourage you all to have a look around the new website and find out what else is going on. As indicated in last week’s post, if you’re already a free or paid subscriber via Substack, you don’t need to subscribe again. You’re still subscribed to The Art of Enchantment, just as you always were. Simply click ‘sign in’ on the top menu bar of the new website using this email address of yours and you’ll have access.

Dear friends

When I’m interviewed these days, I’m often asked how and when myth first claimed me. When did I begin to believe that it was all more than just an entertaining collection of stories, or the last fragmented scraps of a fascinating but long-dead worldview? When did I begin to believe that myth actually matters still, today? (And why does it still matter, anyway?)

I always find those questions quite difficult to answer, which is curious when you think that I’ve been working with myth and fairy tales academically and professionally for around 25 years now, and studying them intensely ever since I learned to read and was given a set of Ladybird books from their ‘Well-loved Tales’ fairy-tale collection in the mid-1960s, along with Phyllis Briggs’ children’s classic King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and Roger Lancelyn Green’s Book of Myths and Tales of the Greek Heroes. Maybe that’s precisely why I find those questions difficult to answer, though: myth has been part of my life for almost all of it, and it’s hard now to step outside of that mythic sensibility and look at it objectively. So I thought I’d try to think it all through here, to celebrate ‘The Coming of September’, which is my own personal annual festival. Its celebration involves the necessary rituals of The Making of Jam and Jelly, The Return of the Big Sloppy Sweater, The Arrival of Multiple Plates of Hot Buttered Toast and The Retirement of the Life-saving Fly-Swatter.

(I really, really am an autumn person. Look what I have hanging on my walls all year round. Spells to conjure up The Coming of September.)

Anyway. Myths and fairy tales were always there, then, from the moment I could read (and I learned very early, thanks to a mother who believed that reading was the answer to all of life’s vicissitudes). I was a voracious consumer of words, and books were always the main gifts that were given to me. I loved fairy tales because they were always set in worlds that were inherently dangerous as well as beautiful, and I lived in a precarious world too. Those worlds were rarely inhabited by ‘nuclear families’, and neither was mine. They didn’t seem strange to me. I knew perfectly well that birds could talk and were very wise (especially crows), and I knew that wolves were always waiting in the dark woods. I knew that home wasn’t always a safe place, and that fairy-tale heroines had to acquire a good few skills, resources and qualities of character to survive and maybe even thrive. Especially since that prince you were allegedly waiting for was very much more likely to need rescuing by you than he was to rescue you.

I was also fascinated by the Greek myths I was given, but unlike the northern European stories of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, the culture and landscape of Greece seemed like another world. (Especially from the frozen north-east of England.) So, although of course it all became more familiar once I’d started studying Latin and Classical literature at school, I never really felt like those stories belonged to me. There weren’t very many glamorous, flimsily clad, olive grove-dwelling goddesses wafting around hardiest Hartlepool. King Arthur and all his shenanigans though – that was very much more like it, though that particular body of stories was never really presented in a way that led you to think of it as an actual mythology. It was all just some weird old collection of fiction.

I originally came to a sense of participation in a mythology that was ‘mine’ through the Irish bits of our family, and originally through reading the poems of W. B. Yeats, which I was allowed to take out of the library at a ridiculously young age. I wanted to know who all these glorious, magical characters were. Who were Caoilte and Niamh, and why were they always calling us humans to ‘come away’? Who were the people of the sidhe, what was the ‘mortal dream’ they wanted humans to empty our hearts of, and why was their dream better? I was eventually given Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men, to shut me up and help me figure it all out for myself. (NB: for the uninitiated, this isn’t an especially accurate translation of old Irish mythology, but is nevertheless a clever synthesis of many medieval manuscripts. It was an incredibly influential text in Ireland’s Celtic Revival.)

Then, because I went to a brilliant all-girls grammar school which force-fed us a series of glorious medieval texts (you can read about some of that here: https://theartofenchantment.org/p/why-im-escaping-to-the-middle-ages) I soon became utterly obsessed with the Arthurian tradition again, and especially with the Grail quests which brought the Camelot era to an end. I’ve written before about how I would spend days, weeks, making copious lists attempting to compare the names of the Knights of the Round Table in Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur to their ‘equivalents’ in the wider British, French and German Arthurian literature. Why was the knight who achieved the Grail sometimes Perceval and sometimes Galahad? Yes, I really was that myth-obsessed little girl. And we didn’t have a television to distract me from my reading, so this went on and on throughout my teenage years (and beyond).

I knew very early on, then, that we had our own mythology too – even here in England. And even though we didn’t then call it a mythology, because the Greeks apparently were allowed to have a mythology, but we were only allowed to have ‘old stories’ or mere ‘romances’. Even when I began to study our own native mythology in earnest again, back around the turn of the millennium, I mostly had to forge my own path through it all, though eventually completing a Master’s degree in Celtic Studies to give my research a very necessary rigour. When I published If Women Rose Rooted in 2016, having spent a full two years writing the book, it was very rare indeed to find anyone who was seriously and credibly looking to the women in our oldest British and Irish myths and folklore for inspiration on how we might live today. Even people who loved the stories didn’t often stop to wonder what they might all mean: what kind of cosmology or worldview underpinned them, and whether that worldview was something we could usefully learn from today.

This was a pity, because the worldview that underpins these old stories is absolutely something that we can usefully learn from today – which is why I’ve written several books about them. These old myths matter because – among many other fine things – they teach us what I’ve come to call the three Rs of the mythic educational syllabus: relationship, reciprocity and respect. And maybe a fourth, too: responsibility. They teach us that we belong to our places, to the ground beneath our feet. That we have a duty to protect the land. That we have a responsibility to be in right relationship with the Otherworld that all our old stories tell us is entangled with the land. And above all, they teach us that women matter, too. That we wield the moral authority of that Otherworld, and that we are the bearers of its life-giving gifts.

But my own unique approach to working with our native myth and folklore was also developed from my background in psychology: both narrative psychology and depth psychology. Not some forms of Jungian psychology, by the way; you’ll never hear me say ‘inside you is a king and a princess and a dragon’. The king in a fairy tale is a king; he doesn’t spring fully formed from the inside of my psyche, and nor is he an aspect of my ‘animus’. And, as I wrote recently in Ripening:

The psychology I believe in, and practice, isn’t all about us. As Jung and James Hillman famously said, psyche isn’t in us: we’re in psyche. Myth wasn’t born inside our heads. Myth is a force that acts on us and in us. Understanding this, and allowing myth to come into our lives and have its wild and wonderful way with us, teaches us very powerfully how to participate in and serve something much greater than ourselves. Because bringing a depth psychological approach to the study of myth rather by definition uncovers the multiplicity of layers which are hiding beneath the surface of those deceptively simple stories. Layers which reveal to us the depth of human experience, of the human psyche, of our participation in a world which is larger than us, wilder than us, more intelligent than us: a world in which we’re fully enmeshed, which is on its own journey of becoming, and which is wholly and vigorously alive.

Myth, then, teaches us to perceive the patterns that ripple beneath the world as we think we know it, and cultivating the mythic imagination – the focus of my work for a couple of decades now – is one of the primary means through which we can come to understand those hidden patterns. Because cultivating the mythic imagination is a weaving together of worlds: both the physical world of our senses, and the world of soul – the imaginal world. A world full of images, stories, archetypal characters and Otherworldly beings that have haunted the human psyche for millennia. Cultivating the mythic imagination wakes us up to the intelligence of a fully embodied life, as well as to the subterranean currents of the unconscious, of the dreamworld. It opens us up to ways of perceiving and interacting with those deeper orders of meaning which move around and within the material world which we all too often imagine is the only world that is ‘real’. And all this is why cultivating the mythic imagination is still the primary focus of my teaching and writing here at The Art of Enchantment.

Working with and focusing on women’s myths in particular has been utterly revelatory for me all through my adult life – and especially as I passed through menopause and on into elderhood. The battle in Scottish folklore between Brigid – the green and peaceful, life-giving spring maiden – and her alter ego, the gnarly, chaotic, winter-bringing Cailleach – all too precisely reflected the battle inside me between the forces of growing and flourishing, and the forces of rage-filled destruction. Those of you who’ve gone through the fires of menopause will know exactly what I mean. Those two mythic women walked with me on the storm-ridden shores of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides for four full years, one on either side, rehearsing all their old arguments while I desperately flailed around looking for the balance of energies I lacked. I didn’t emerge remotely unscathed. Myth rarely permits you to emerge unscathed. Its purpose is to transform you from the inside out – and myth always changes the people who encounter it.

What I realised then and know more than ever now is that the same themes which underlie these old stories, and which take hold of the women which inhabit them, are exactly the same themes that preoccupy women today. The grief-stricken wild woman Mis, unable to tolerate the ravages of so-called ‘civilisation’, and the flower-maiden Blodeuwedd, created by men for the use of men, may well be characters from ancient British and Irish myth – but the psychological challenges they grapple with are utterly familiar to me. Hestia and Persephone may be goddesses from Greek myth, but we all have something to learn about the nature of home and hearth, about abduction and falling into the underworld. We know this territory, and myth teaches us how to navigate it.

And so myth matters; it matters a great deal. And no matter how long I work with these stories and the characters in them, they always have something new to reveal. Myth is the wellspring that never runs dry.

Talking about the Arthurian tradition and Grail mythology: my short course on this subject begins next Saturday for premium subscribers. These are the stories that lie at the heart of so much of our rich native mythology. We’ll be looking at what the stories reveal about the nature of the archetypal masculine (the Grail Hero and the Grail King/ Fisher King). We’ll also, you can be very sure, be talking about what these tales might tell us about the archetypal feminine (with the gloriously feisty Grail messengers, Grail bearers and beyond). And we’ll be exploring what the Grail symbolises, and the nature of the Grail quest. Here’s the schedule we’ll follow. The dates given below are for our live Zoom gatherings; in all cases, members will receive a video lecture/ commentary the Saturday before:

September 19: the Arthurian background: who was Arthur, and how did the Grail quest happen?
October 17: the nature of the stories; the wider body of Grail literature
November 28: the Celtic origins of the Grail; what does the Grail symbolise?
January 9 (please note that we always take a break from our monthly live sessions in busy December): the archetypal feminine and the Grail (the Grail Heroine; the Grail Messengers; the Grail Bearers)
February 13: the archetypal masculine and the Grail (the Grail Hero; the Grail/ Fisher King)
March 20: what does the Grail quest mean for us today?

If you’re a free subscriber, you can upgrade now to join us.

Next year, amidst all the usual offerings, I’ll be continuing the British mythology theme, and introducing paid subscribers to some other little-known stories that form part of our rich and remarkable mythic and folkloric inheritance. (There’s also a good archive of such stories over at the ‘Reclaiming Women’s Stories’ section of The Art of Enchantment home page.) So please do stick around, and I look forward to sharing it all with you.

And if you’d like to work with me in person to cultivate your mythic imagination, there are still a few places available on my forthcoming Nostos retreat at Broughton Sanctuary, which will take place from 15 – 20 November. (Broughton is a beautiful rewilded estate in North Yorkshire, not too far from the lovely little town of Skipton.)

My vision for this unique retreat is to reveal a practical, deeply embodied wisdom to live by: a mythopoetic, mystical wisdom, rooted in nature and the wild but wonderfully structured beauty of the cosmos. For four days and five nights, we’ll work together within an open, spacious and reflective framework, exploring a diverse range of ideas and practices to help us cultivate our mythic imagination. We’ll focus in on the art of soul-making, uncovering and making sense of our own unique journey through this life. We'll work above all with story, exploring the power of myth and cosmology. We’ll work with creative practices to appreciate the transformative beauty of sacred geometry. Ultimately, the aim is to guide participants along a path of awakening and transformation through a unique, creative and alchemical blend of philosophy and psychology – deeply rooted in the old wisdom traditions of the West.

I’ll be joined by psychotherapist and philosopher Mark Vernon, and by artist and spiritual director Vanessa Chamberlin. Find the full details here:

September 26, 12.30pm. Brontë Women’s Writing Festival, Brontë Parsonage, Haworth. Tickets here.
September 28, 7pm. Topping & Co, Edinburgh. Tickets here.
September 29, 7pm, Topping & Co, St Andrews. Tickets here.
October 10, 1.15pm. Ilkley Book Festival. Tickets here.
October 19, 6.45pm. With the redoubtable Marina Warner at the Redgrave Theatre, Clifton, Bristol. Tickets here.

There’s plenty coming up next year, too: for starters, watch out for events in Newcastle in February, Durham in March, Glasgow in April and London in May. Details of these and other offerings will be coming soon.