On faith, and not losing it

Monthly newsletter, April 2024

Read on for book and event news, a 70% audiobook discount and this month’s reading recommendations. This message will certainly be truncated by your email provider, so please think of clicking through to Substack and reading it in your browser. And while you’re there, do join the conversation and leave a comment!

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Dear friends,

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been in email conversation with an overseas friend. It began when she asked me, ‘Do you ever lose faith?’ She wasn’t talking about religious faith: she was talking about faith in the world. In life. In humanity. Do I ever lose faith in what I do, as well, and do I sometimes just want to lock all the doors and tell everyone to bugger off?

Of course I do. Who doesn’t, these days? Sometimes it can feel that whatever you do, it isn’t enough. That there’s always someone wanting more. A psychic I met by chance once said to me, two decades ago, ‘Sometimes you feel like your brain’s a plate of spaghetti, don’t you, and everyone wants a piece of you?’ And there’s always more to do, in a profoundly challenged and challenging world – if you care about it, and of course, I do.

It was interesting timing, because another friend asked me recently, ‘Do you ever just get tired of it all?’ By which she meant war, terror, killing, intolerance, apathy, identity, hate – and the general sense that the whole country (world) has gone absolutely, stark-staring mad and that there’s no way forward but over the cliff-edge.

Of course I do. Who doesn’t these days? You might not know it, though, because I do for sure refuse to spill out my rage and grief on social media or Substack, to add my shrieking voice to the madness that’s taken hold of us, to make you all feel it too, not only your own but mine, again and again and again. That’s not sharing, it’s inflicting. There’s enough anger and grief out there; I’m keeping mine to myself, and to my friends and my family. You all don’t need to feel my pain as well as your own. We are not built to feel the whole world’s pain: it would break us.

But I’m digressing and besides, many of you will disagree. Here’s the thing I meant to write about. Every time I listen to or read the news, I lose faith. I get tired of it all. But although I lose faith and get tired of it all and my rage and grief can feel unbearable, it never lasts – even though, to be quite honest with you, in my darker moments I would like it to. That my rage and grief doesn’t last isn’t a moral failing: it’s because at the heart of me, in spite of all the evidence that should argue against it, I believe wholeheartedly in this world. And even in humans. We are here for something; I do believe that. Giving up on our species just isn’t an option. If we give up on humanity, we give up on ourselves, and the world that shelters us, and the other-than-humans that share that world with us. We give up on everything, and that’s just not a good place to live from. I don’t flinch from the news: I believe it’s important to know what is happening in the world. To see it. To try to see the truth of it. But I will not let it kill my faith, because by killing my faith it would kill me.

I’m going to write about this briefly again, because it taught me every lesson I’ve ever needed to know, and I’m still finding more. Most of you will know that, three years ago in the middle of the pandemic, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma, with maybe six months to live without treatment (I’d already struggled for a diagnosis for six months, so that frankly pissed me off. Happily the treatment for such ills, once you eventually get it, usually works and so here I am for now, in remission). The process of dealing with that, the brutal treatment and the months-long walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, changed me profoundly. Because in the years leading up to that diagnosis, I’d begun to lose faith. I was tired of it all. I’d grown jaded. I felt that I wasn’t enough, that I would never be able to be, or to do, enough. I felt that if I died, I wouldn’t really mind, because it was all so exhausting. I felt as if the weight of the world was on my shoulders. Which was foolish, but then we so often are. I certainly am.

And then I almost died, but didn’t. I will of course, some day, and I have no problem with that; I spent a good few months there befriending Death. But what I feel now is that every day I am alive is an unexpectedly unexpected thing, and if at all possible is to be lived fully and used wisely for all the time that is left. I don’t, of course, even remotely always live each day fully or use each day wisely, because we are all foolish creatures and also because other foolish creatures often make it impossible for us to do so – but I do very often try.

My point here is that one of the ways in which I changed (I changed in a lot of ways …) was a way I’ve written about a little in other places, and spoken about sometimes too. I realised how very, very profoundly I believe in that old Platonic mythology of souls who choose to be physically incarnated, in particular circumstances, to express a particular, unique way of being human in this world. And who bring with them an accompanying ‘daemon’, as the Greeks named it, or what has gloriously been called a ‘necessary angel’: in other words, a sense of a particular, unique calling. That makes perfect sense to me and it also fits with my experience. What it tells us, in a nutshell, is that we chose to come here and we chose to come here for something. We can’t give up on each other, because we all came here for something. And it’s hard, that something. For all of us. We can’t give up on the world, either, which has its own process of becoming: we have a responsibility to it, to each other, to ourselves. And walking away is not an option. Walking away is a failure. Of imagination, and of faith. We don’t know even know what the story we’re in is called, or the shape of it, and we certainly don’t know how it will end. So all we can do is live fully in the part of the story that we are in.

And that is what I try to do, every day, in the midst of all the rage and the grief. That sense of necessity takes me on through it. (Necessity is another ancient Greek concept, tied up profoundly with fate and with calling, because Necessity – Ananke – was the mother of the three Fates, and the one who helped each soul determine its necessity, or calling, before its physical incarnation.)

Nevertheless, whatever our beliefs – and I am certainly not trying to impress mine on you, just perhaps to explain why I don’t ever properly lose faith – we can all agree that we have as a species profoundly lost our way. And I fear that something is going to have to break before we can mend it, and it isn’t going to be pretty, and I am very glad that I am 62 and not 22. And that I am not a mother.

But at the heart of me, my daemon, my ‘calling’, my necessity, has no truck with loss of faith. It just has no truck with it. It will not have it. I didn’t come here to sit around being angry and grieving all the time (although I’m quite sure that anger and grief is a normal part of the human condition) or to shout at everyone else for not being angry and grieving in precisely the same way I am and then for not shouting about it too. That would have been a very foolish thing to come here for. A weak, dark thing without hope, without joy, without heart. I believe that, among other things, I came here to do my work of capturing people’s imagination to help them find a way back to who they really are. Who they really are behind all the anger and the grief. The soul who believes in joy and hope, and in laughing in the face of all the bullshit and madness. Who believes in going on anyway. Who says, like Samuel Beckett in The Unnamable, ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ And then who smiles.

I believe in that work wholeheartedly, because the only thing that will ever change the world is individuals, from the bottom up. I wholeheartedly believe in (some) individuals, even if I often temporarily lose faith in the collective. That belief, that faith in what it can be to be human, is what makes me write. I don’t write just for art’s sake, though art matters to me; I wouldn’t want to write if I thought no one would ever read it. I’m trying to create beauty for the sake of the world and for the sake of a species whose actions make me angry and make me grieve. And you know, I think that’s what we’re for. We’re here to live in the heart of that paradox. To risk everything for faith and beauty. And also to allow ourselves – and each other – sometimes to fail, when we do. Because you can bet your life on the fact that we all do.

Many thanks to those of you who thoughtfully commented on last week’s aberrative post about men’s stories. Today, I’m returning to more usual form. On the train to London last week, for a series of meetings with my agent and publishers, I read an issue of the London Review of Books that I hadn’t yet got around to. In there was a long article masquerading as a review of a book called Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author, by Sophus Helle, a writer, translator and cultural historian. The article began with the sentence, ‘The earliest known author was married to the moon’, and of course, I was instantly hooked.

In the 1920s, amidst the ruins of the ancient city of Ur in present-day Iraq, evidence was unearthed of the life and poetry of a Sumerian priestess named Enheduana. She ruled over the temple in Ur which was dedicated to the moon god, Nanna, to whom she was ritually married, and she subsequently acted as the human embodiment of his wife Ningal. She wrote poems, including a collection of temple hymns. She is known as the world’s first author (though of course she is the world’s first author for whom we have records – nevertheless, in her own poetry Enheduana seems to claim to have invented the concept of authorship) and she was a woman. A woman who was married to the moon.

‘What would the history of Western literature look like,’ Helle writes, ‘if it began not with Homer and his war-hungry heroes but with a woman from ancient Iraq?’

Her poems are, in a sense, early nature poems; Helle states that they are especially attuned to the terrifying devastation that nature can unleash on humans, overflowing with images of storms, flash floods, hurricanes and wild animals. Her best-known poems were The Exaltation of Inanna and Hymn to Inanna; Inanna (who might be known to many of you because of the story of her descent to the Underworld to see her sister Erishkigal) was the Sumerian goddess of sex, war, change, chaos, and conflict. She was the daughter of Nanna; she went on to be known as Ishtar, and then aspects of her character were incorporated into the goddesses Aphrodite and Venus.

Here’s a sample of the Hymn to Inanna, interpreted by Jane Hirschfield:

Lady of all powers,
In whom light appears,
Radiant one
Beloved of Heaven and Earth,
Tiara-crowned
Priestess of the Highest God,
My Lady, you are the guardian
Of all greatness.
Your hand holds the seven powers:
You lift the powers of being,
You have hung them over your finger,
You have gathered the many powers,
You have clasped them now
Like necklaces onto your breast. 

According to Helle, there’s another interesting feature of Enheduana’s poetry: a passage in the Hymn to Inanna describes the creation of several figures, including the pilipili, the kur-ĝara and the saĝ-ursaĝ, who deviated from conventional gender norms and are described in some texts as having transitioned from male to female or vice versa. These figures performed rituals in which they reversed or subverted gender signifiers, such as weapons and weaving instruments or male and female clothing.*

Well, that’s more than enough for today. As always, I wish you all the blessings of whichever season you find yourself in.

Sharon

* See this article

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What’s new at The Art of Enchantment

If you are low-wage or no-wage and genuinely unable to afford a subscription but can’t bear not to be part of this community, we can offer you a complimentary subscription. Please email us at sharon@sharonblackie.org; no questions asked.

As well as the usual weekly offerings for paid subscribers, we’ve begun a midweek thread on The Heroine’s Journey as conceived through fairy tales. We’re slowly and thoroughly working our way through it, and along the way we’ll be contemplating wider ideas about women’s archetypes, personal mythmaking and other narrative processes. In responding to the prompts at the end of each post, we’re exploring the ways in which these ideas illuminate our own ways of being in the world and our own journey through life.

In our monthly Fairy Tale Salon on Saturday 27 April, we’ll be delving deeply into the beautiful old English Fens folk tale, ‘The Buried Moon’, and talking about the mythic moon and the Wise Woman archetype, among others.

The Long Delirious Burning Blue

‘‘It is that rarity, a first novel that smacks of not merely confidence, but authority … The ending is powerful, filmic, reminiscent of The English Patient, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but rarely reach.’ – The Scotsman

Almost there! My first novel, The Long Delirious Burning Blue, is being reissued by September Publishing in a beautiful new format and design next Thursday, April 11. There is also, for the first time, an audiobook. It doesn’t seem to be showing up on Audible yet (it will – I’m told they have the files but are slow!) but you can find it via other audiobook suppliers. Please be aware that I was unable to narrate this book; fiction is usually narrated by actors and besides I’m hopeless at accents. There are several in this novel.)

I wrote about how this came to be, and about re-reading that novel for the first time, 17 years on, in this post. Please find out more at this webpage, including order links, a short video of me talking about it, audio and print extracts and a reader’s guide.

Paid subscribers: I’ll be writing about some of the themes in this book (mother-daughter relationships, midlife initiations, earth-sky relationships ...) and sharing some old photographs in next weekend’s exclusive post, along with an ‘ask me anything’ opportunity.

70% discount on the If Women Rose Rooted audiobook

The narrator of the original audiobook of If Women Rose Rooted, which was produced somewhere around 2017, wasn’t much loved, but those were the days when it was very unusual for non-celebrity authors to read their own books. Well, things changed, and Tantor Media, the audiobook publisher, responded to requests from readers for me to record it. I did so, and it came out last year. To celebrate a year since its publication, Tantor are offering a whopping 70% discount on the title. You can purchase it, and listen to a sample first, by heading over to the link below; you can also receive two free additional audiobooks with this offer. Please note that the offer ends on April 30.

Upcoming events

Greening the Self, London, April 20 – also available online

I’m delighted to be keynote speaker at this one-day Jungian conference in London on Saturday April 20, organised by Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Warwick. Places are limited, so if you’d like to come, do book now. There is a two-tickets-for-one deal if you’d like to come with a friend, and if you can’t make it live you can also choose to join the event online and receive the recording afterwards. Here’s the event description:

‘Join us for a transformative and thought-provoking day of ideas surrounding our relationship with nature and to consider how we might navigate growth through turbulent times; exploring perspectives on mental health, personal development and individual responsibility to help us deepen our connections with the natural environment in the face of climate change.’

Mind Body Spirit Festival, London Olympia, May 27, 12.30–14.00

I’d love to see you at this Bank Holiday Monday workshop around reclaiming the second half of life. You can also come and find me at the Hay House exhibition stand after the workshop, signing The Rooted Woman Oracle Deck. Sign up here.

Reading recommendations

Wayfarers by Phoebe Smith

I was delighted to receive an advance copy, from HarperNorth, of Phoebe Smith’s beautiful book Wayfarer: Love, loss and life on Britain’s ancient paths; it’s much recommended. Here’s the description:

On an assignment to walk the most famous pilgrimage in the world – the Camino de Santiago, in northern Spain – Phoebe Smith somehow lost her way. Having spent a lifetime exploring unfamiliar places, she quit her dream job, ended her long-term relationship and headed home to North Wales to discover the point to … everything. In her search for answers she found herself – quite by accident – walking some of Britain’s oldest pilgrim paths. And by following these old ways, she ended up confronting past traumas that she thought she had laid to rest.

But while it follows holy trails, this is not a book about religion. From losing her mother as a teenager to surviving toxic relationships, Phoebe offers an unflinchingly honest look at her battle with an eating disorder, depression, and the pitfalls of newfound singledom. Skilfully weaving together Phoebe’s own story with those of countless travellers past and present, Wayfarer reveals how nature and place can heal past wounds, offering a pathway to salvation she’d never thought existed.

Morgan Is My Name, by Sophie Keetch

Ever since I was a child I’ve been a sucker for an Arthurian tale, and I devoured this in one sitting, one Sunday afternoon in front of the fire. The good news is that it’s the first of a trilogy and I can’t wait for the next instalment.

An atmospheric, feminist retelling of the early life of famed villainess Morgan le Fay, set against the colourful chivalric backdrop of Arthurian legend.

'The start of what will be a classic trilogy.' The Times

When King Uther Pendragon murders her father and tricks her mother into marriage, Morgan refuses to be crushed. Trapped amid the machinations of men in a world of isolated castles and gossiping courts, she discovers secret powers. Vengeful and brilliant, it's not long before Morgan becomes a worthy adversary to Merlin, influential sorcerer to the king. But fighting for her freedom, she risks losing everything – her reputation, her loved ones and her life.

After the Forest, by Kell Woods

Although I felt it got a bit chaotic at the end, this is another fairy-tale retelling that I downed in one go.

A Sunday Times bestselling lush fantasy retelling of Hansel and Gretel set in seventeenth-century Germany.

Fifteen years after the witch in the gingerbread house, Greta and Hans are struggling to get by. Their father and stepmother are long dead, Hans is deeply in debt from gambling, and the countryside lies in ruin, its people starving in the aftermath of a brutal war.

Greta has a secret, though: the witch’s grimoire, secreted away and whispering in Greta’s ear for the past two decades, and the recipe inside that makes the best gingerbread you’ve ever tasted. As long as she can bake, Greta can keep her small family afloat. But in a village full of superstition, Greta and her mysteriously addictive gingerbread, not to mention the rumours about her childhood misadventures, are a source of gossip and suspicion.

And now, dark magic is returning to the woods and Greta’s magic – magic she is still trying to understand – may be the only thing that can save her. If it doesn’t kill her first.

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