Hello.

I am a Shaman.

I’m not from Siberia, I did not grow up in a tribe, or on a reservation or in the wild. I grew up in a now gentrified village on the edge of the inner city in Dublin, with parents who actually resented their Irishness as a locus of their own traumas.
I was not taken aside at a young age by an Elder who knew it was time to teach me the ways of our Celtic ancestors and the spirits of the land. I did learn from my parents and their interest in esoterics, yet not formally, simply through osmosis. My father is Buddhist and I spent a lot of time around Irish Buddhists and visiting Rinpoches and Lamas. I received the empowerment of Tara at a young age, yet I myself, am not a Buddhist. There was no Elders in my family who had not already gone mad, succumbed to schizophrenia or crumbled into full dementia by the time I was old enough to ask them anything. Regardless few of them ever seized their gifts fully.

I am a Shaman.

In Ireland there’s the term Beanfeasa, which directly translates as wise woman, which I’ve been called a good bit by folk who’ve known my work. I am honoured to be called as such, yet… I was not called by spirits to be a Beanfeasa.
I was called to be a Shaman.
Those were their words, not mine. Shaman is the word that woke me up, not Beanfeasa. So for me to take that word, even though it’s pre-patrick serpentine curve trickles from my native tongue; is stealing.
It was not given me by my teachers (who are the spirits I work with) so it’s not mine to hold. I allow others to know me by that capacity, but it’s a title that I realise I, myself, ought not invoke.
I was given a role by the spirits, and I don’t claim the word as mine, but honour it as a blessing. A complex and fascinatingly fertile blessing, and if I am blessed with a new role, I’ll speak to that role. Yet this is not something I have taken, and therefore it’s not something I can give away either. It’s in my bones.


I am also a witch, which is something people seem to also call me often, and that power comes from my mother’s lineage, and manifests in both her and my sister in their own ways.
Yet that is different also.

I am a Shaman.
Whether I like it or not, whether it seemed likely or not and certainly whether I am liked for it or not.
It was not a decision I made, or a course I took and it is very definitely beyond my control. It has been since before I was born.

In my childhood I was initiated through sickness and shock to reunite me with the spirit world.
I experienced accidents and illnesses that were near fatal with each element. During these tears in my bond with my body I would be taken either to other realms or to observe myself and life.

My first memory of out of body experience was when my soul was above me as I fell down the stairs at three years old and fractured my skull on concrete. My sister saved my life as she walked in the door from school and tried to catch me, she cries still at this memory.
All I remember is being lifted from my body as I fell by spirits with white feathers and laughing with glee at the feeling.

At 5 years old I lay in my mother’s bed with a fever as the duvet writhed with snakes, the widest one had one eye. The walls turned to trees with blinking eyes for leaves, and spirits came to dismember my little body and take me away. I felt my insides being tuned like a piano and heard the whispering of beings and the whiplash roar of a jaguar. My fever broke after a few days.

Around the same age I came up under a waterslide in a holiday resort in Cork and banged my head on the slide which preceded nearly drowning. I remember watching my mother hold me after the lifeguard gave me to her and feeling much older, like I was an old lady, watching myself as a child, when I was still someone’s daughter.

I could continue, yet needless to say, I fell and fractured my skull, which was my meeting with Earth, I nearly drowned, which was my meeting with Water, I had a fever and met Fire, I choked and knew Air by his absence. All before puberty I met the power of the elements and their synergy with life and death, and I met them with a familiarity.

I met Ether while being dismembered by spirits in toxic shock and at 13 I was hospitalized with a dangerous condition which brought me to the Creator. At 21 I was urgently hospitalized for an ectopic pregnancy which brought me to the Creatrix.
   
In each experience I was threaded into the otherworld with a dismemberment or encounter with a spirit or time glitch, except the one where I encountered the Creator, where I felt totally alone, and I met not the void, but the absence of creation.

I did not weave these experiences into my reality until many years later. As they happened I was too young and alienated from ancestral wisdom to identify them as linked or meaningful. They remained vivid and truer than life to me as I drew them in the margins of school books for years. These friendly energies that a brief portal of mortality had lent me the familiar shiver of their embrace were beings I visited in art and writing long after.
I have had so many different forms of this embrace since that my initiatory experiences of a certain kind have only recently ended.

So now it is time
It is the time now.

It’s time to write about the process of initiation, specifically the one I experienced, as a compass to those who may need to map their own journey. To situate themselves along a path rather than trapped in the thicket of confusion and doubt.
I have avoided writing in first person about that which cannot be known by anyone really, barely even me, yet there is a crisis of Elders and I am here to teach and to teach I need to, as always, get over ‘me’.
I teach only from first hand experience, but I can illuminate this with a palette in many different shades of the spectrum of human and non human wisdom. I have studied widely. Yet you’ll know what is mine and what is not as I’ll tell you. I won’t reference too much because I’m not writing this as an academic introduction to anything at all, but I will give honorable mention whenever it occurs to. In this piece I believe Mircea Eliade coined the term Ordeal Shamanism, but I might be wrong.


So.
We begin.
I have been initiated through initiatory sickness since before birth (I had a head start due to in utero jaundice and being born with chickenpox).
Since then I have been moving through what’s known by anthropologists as ‘Ordeal Shamanism’.
Ordeal Shamanism is typified by trials of endurance, faith, resilience, morality, justice, physical fortitude, truth, honour, humility and really anything hard you can think of having to do or you would consider an ordeal.

My awakening to the reality of this work came during a massive upsurging in realisation that rumbled in my body as a painful tremor for a decade until a volcanic emergence in 2016 spewed all the mantle of my reality into the air all around me.
This was the dawn of 8 years of consciously surrendering, and often totally obliviously wandering into, ordeal after ordeal.

I’ll make the offering of rememberings over what might be a geological age, so allow me to meander as an old river around the bigger boulders that I’ve had to shoulder until I’m feeling a bit more flow. My intention is still to offer the path I walked to see where it might merge and make tributary with your own, especially if you feel like you’ve gone mad or you are totally alone, and so I wish to make this deep and fertile for you in case there’s something you need to know.

So these childhood hiccups were not the end, but in fact the beginning of a long term journey that we’ll embark on soon.

But first the problem of the word…

Shaman.

After around 6 years of working consciously with spirits, elementals (after a lifetime of doing so unconsciously) and people I graduated from a flaccid apologetic word like ‘practitioner’ to Shaman in how I introduce myself.
I never liked practitioner it’s clinical for a wholly unclinical path. Alas with the loss of elders comes the loss of words and we did our best.
Other magick folk had called me Shaman for years at this point, but I wasn’t satisfied with the holding I had to invoke it.

I knew that I was still apprenticed to the unseen and to my own karma, the karma of my family, the land and her people and a greater divinity that I must have denied for lifetimes, at least.
And I know this word is an invitation to a game I knew I was born into and wanted to play wisely and well. A game that I wanted to play wide awake and not be played by. A responsibility I needed to embody rather than have the role run through me into all sorts of tricks of the light and traps of the righteous and ego snares and golden prisons.

You don’t speak certain syllables without knowing what you invoke, and these syllables are ones that by their very nature make you invoke what is unknown, and so I kept my tongue in most conversations.
And when I spoke it, I spoke tentatively, reverent of the vibration of awe that soothes from soft consonants in the shhhhh and mmmm. The ah and maa calling gently to reverence and infinite regenesis. Humbled and worried by the gypsying of their journey from India, through Siberia, to a Romanian Anthropologist into the clutches of the raiding cultures of empirical museums and making their way to some random white Irish woman like me. While temporaneously being stolen from all those who held it as right to hold ancestrally by religion and regime.

One word can do so many things, and this word made me tremble with both fear and ecstasy, not born of human folk, but of the power of the unveiling of reality.

And I spoke it with shame at first, aware of the mockery that is made of the magickal due to the disbelief of modernity and a collective denial of how much we’ve forgotten or discarded, and how much we are stealing. Fearful of having to justify some special affinity or lack of permission from a person, or having to deny an appropriation, flight of fancy or an identity crisis.

I honour the Siberian Shamans who have been and are and those to come. You may have experienced that once you have truly embarked on this path you realise we are not bound by what we believe ourselves to be bound by, geography, history, language or religion. We are so intertwined that once we are in ecology we have access to the collective soul of humanity and all our memory, not only our epigenetic and ancestral, and that love, honour, respect and healing is beyond all seperation. Once the ritual is opened, and we help one another, because we are all connected and we are happy to be.

In the past I’ve apologised for, and therefore disrespected the medicine that this path has unfolded because a cardinal sin of being a self-aware post-ironic cosmopolitan human is to take yourself seriously, at least in Ireland. I’ve apolgised for my lack of a better word than probably the one most disrespected in it’s meaning by marketing westerners using it as shorthand for everything. Yet it was entirely taken in it’s essence for me.

It was never myself I was taking seriously.
It’s my responsibility, and what I have given up to be able to receive that responsibility.
And what I have given up repeatedly to do that is in fact my ‘self’.
So there’s nothing left of the self to take seriously.

I’ll explain more deeply in future about how there are different paths in the initiation process and that certain ones have a word in Irish, like Druid is very similar to the role of a vegetalista or a priest, rather than a Shaman, and that Beanfeasa is closer to healer or medicine, that many people calling themselves shamans are in fact acting as animist priests and priestesses and that the general dillution of meaning of the magickal in the west has confused many people about the roles that they are undertaking.

My initiations have ended with the knowledge from my guides that I no longer have to travel the world to clear karma and learn, that I can be here, at home in Ireland.

So as I finish my Ordeals, I sit with the power of the word still.
In my heart I know this word was an Ember that I was gifted from my guides on this path to spark my own ancestral fire.
And between the hills and crags and cliffs and cairns. Under the haw and over the hedge and by the bluebells the breathy undulation of shaman is different to the landscape, and with dignity stands apart, still of the tundra, still of a Siberian Summer, still of the throats of the singers and the breathing in the shadows of the gur.

And I know I must tend the flames of a name with the wood I can gather here.
For now in life’s I journey the word I know in my native tongue that I can sense being called to me in resonance with what I initiated into, yet dormant in it’s power, is Fáthlia.
I had to earn Shaman to be gifted ‘Fáthlia’.
And this is the greatest blessing.
To have made it home and to remember all the pieces that were scattered and become one with the island that grew me and be given a word by her.
A resonance to honour in the land of my ancestors and an echo to call to the elemental spirits of this emerald pebble of earth.
Fáthlia.
A word to seduce the water, to tickle the fire, to whip up the wind and to soften the soil. A word to echo the ether and call the creator, a cadence to dance the creatrix.
A word of our making, and the remaking of me.
And I am so grateful to be.

For many of us the final fear, the final ordeal, is the open throated naming of who we are and who we have no choice to be, and to name ourselves among the great ecology of being.

So allow me to invite you to my naming ceremony so you feel comfortable to have your own eventually.

So I am Katie, I am a Fáthlia.

And I am humbled by our meeting, thank you for your interest in these writings.
My wish for you in writing this is that you learn to be you by reading about how I learned to be me.

May all wishes made in earnest and synergy with creation and love come to be!

until next time

in kindredness and kindness,

beannachtaí,

katie x