Dancing with the blood mother.

March 2024

Dear Friends

I lie curled under a thin cotton sheet in the past-midnight hours. A layer of molten lava — alive in the darkness — sits hissing beneath the surface of my skin. Anything that touches me — the fabric that surrounds me, even my legs brushing together — and the boiling, bubbling mass reaches out, an inevitable slouch toward meeting that point of contact, examining the transgression from the inside. It flows slow and snake-like, tongue flicking, through my subcutaneous tissue and into the dermis, until it licks the very underside of my flesh, rasping, like a streak of fire. It ignites my skin and sends a prickling, probing heat rash over the contours of my body like some great river of flames.

In the summer of 2018, I spent a weekend sitting with acacia, the DMT-containing tree indigenous to Australia. It was a familiar environment, the bush retreat not far from where I had played as a child at my grandparents house. I knew the plants and the red-coloured dirt — the smells — and they seemed to know me back.

On the second evening, I was lying on the floor of a rustic old hall with about a dozen people, a handful of whom I knew, most I didn’t. The rituals had taken place, I had received my cup.

I felt a presence infinitely far away, but moving —gliding?—ever closer. It was black and formless, like a starless night, but distinctly masculine. It filled me with dread.

I remained silent, but my ears began to ring — soon they were screaming like there was some great hurricane ripping at my soul. The presence was immense and was now right beside me.

In something akin to osmosis, it suddenly seemed inside my body, completely occupying my interiority. It then took shape and I immediately felt my terror shift to a calm curiosity. I was in the presence of an ancient one — or his presence was in me.

An old indigenous man, his crow-eyes black as coal, long white hair and beard, his face ash-daubed. He held my gaze, fierce yet steady and kind. A dull ache began in my bones, distant at first but then quickly intensifying, and before long I was writhing on the ground, crying out.

I looked down at my hands and forearms, mesmerised by the pulsating veins that now radiated a fiery orange and red, like the front lines of a wildfire viewed from a great height. My entire vascular system was soon glowing with an incandescence before separating from my flesh and rising into the air in a swirling spectacle that crackled with the energy of an electrical tornado. The threads intertwined, assuming a tangible form, leaving me in awe of a surreal metamorphosis that was unfolding before me.

I found myself kneeling before the most magnificent being I have ever witnessed. She towered above me in the flames. Beautiful, terrifying, wrathful, loving. An ineffable moment that will always stay with me, etched into my very being.

My attention was pulled back to the old man. His palms were open, his head slightly bowed. He said nothing, but I perceived something like:

“This is what I wanted you to see. Your pain was necessary. I had to wake her.”

Then he was gone.

While the rest of the vision is fragmented, I will forever retain the feeling of being in her presence that first time — of loving and being loved with such pure intensity. We danced together at some point, that I know, and I recall her final words: “I love you, but I must kill you.”

My next image is sitting back on the floor, exhausted, and dimly aware of the others around me.

It’s clear to me now that my journey with blood cancer is not a fight, as such things are so often portrayed. No #fuckcancer, not that at all, it is a relationship, and like all relationships — even the most uncomfortable ones — it is based on a foundation of love.

Is it not our highest task to love what is most difficult to love?

This is surely the most effective form of healing, of making whole. Conversely, once we make an opponent of anything — addictions, cravings, even cancer — once we set up enemy lines and declare a battlefield, we only give it strength.

After my meeting with the Blood Mother, as I have named her, I like to call this relationship a dance. In many ways, though, it is simply a practice — a practice of surrender, acceptance, self-compassion, death and dying — and she is my teacher.

You can call her Kali, Baba Yaga or a thousand other names. She is death serving life, the apocalyptic Mother revealing all that is hidden and destroying what has become obsolete. She revivifies everything that has turned to stone.

To quote the late Jungian analyst and storyteller, Marion Woodman:

“Kali is the goddess who wears a necklace of skulls that can instantaneously change into blooming flowers and then back to skulls again. Kali brings love, ecstasy and life, but she also brings darkness, terror and death. She is the natural cycle of life and death.

“In the European tradition, this energy is best represented by the Baba Yaga of Russian fairy stories. The Baba Yaga's hut lies deep in the forest, and her door is always open to the darkest part of that forest. Her hut turns on chicken legs, dizzying our normal perception.

“Traditionally, the Baba Yaga asks the ‘difficult’ questions. She eats naive people who think life should bring them only happiness. She gobbles up the uninitiated, to whom suffering is unacceptable. She devours those who see life in terms of dualistic categories such as white or black, good or evil, life or death.”

This is a no-bullshit arrangement I’ve entered into here, make no mistake. Pray for a harsh teacher, said Rumi. Indeed.

Woodman (who also danced with cancer) once described an initiatory dream she had in which she was trapped in a long drain pipe with two blood-red lobsters attacking each other. There was a black door in the wall of the drain, and she was trying to escape but couldn’t open the door.

As she understood it, the drain symbolised her blood vessels and the lobsters her blood. Instead of supporting her life, she felt her blood was taking her towards death.

“On waking, I knew that had I opened that door and walked through it, I would have died,” she said.

That the Blood Mother must kill me is an initiatory understanding. It is not necessarily a physical death (although, of course, it will be at some point) as there are plenty of other small ‘d’ deaths that happen along the road which can ultimately serve to deepen us and take us directly into the centre of our own lives.

Woodman goes on to say that the dream served as a catalyst for her to begin training as a Jungian analyst, shattering her concretised view of the world and revealing her true calling:

“There is only one path, and it takes you by a circuitous route to the centre. In cancer, in the deepest, darkest recess of Death Mother's domain, was the ultimate gift of trust and joy. I was finally able to surrender to life, because at long last I KNEW there was a centre and that if I kept listening, opening, and walking forward, my path would lead me to that centre. Life had a different quality after that — there was no more fear. It fell off me like dirty rags.”

This month I too begin a new chapter, undertaking studies in clinical psychedelic-assisted therapy, a program made possible by last year’s rescheduling of psilocybin and MDMA in Australia, which allows the use of these medicines for people who meet certain criteria.

Weaving psychedelic facilitation together with my work as a depth mentor and storyteller has long been announcing itself to me. Hearing this call and now finally embarking on the path is borne of my eternal dance with the Blood Mother, and for that I am truly grateful.

I finally fall into a fitful sleep and when I awake, I am bone-tired but somehow re-membered. The sun is peaking just above the horizon, and it lights up the green fields over the road through a misty haze. In a few moments, my young son will climb into my bed with his messed blonde locks hanging over his soft, sleepy eyes. He’ll tell me about his dreams.

The world flirts with me in all her beauty. Shall we dance?

Oceans of love.

Asher

References:
‘Confronting Death Mother: An Interview With Marion Woodman’ by Daniela Sieff (2009)

Notes:
Wendy Haynes joins me this month at The Fifth Direction for ‘Deeper Well: Conversations on Death’, an opportunity to see death in a different light as we drink from the well of poetry and storytelling.

Wendy is an award-winning celebrant with nearly three decades of experience at funerals, memorials, weddings, namings and more. She is the author of many related books and resources and is a teacher to celebrants around the world.